No Comebacks

by Frederick Forsyth

  Bernadette was lying quiet but I knew she was awake. And what she was thinking. The same as me. Of that bright spring of 1916 when on Easter Sunday a group of men dedicated to the then unpopular notion that Ireland should be independent of Britain had stormed the Post Office and several other large buildings.

  Of the hundreds of troops being brought in to flush them out with rifle and artillery fire — but not Private Price in his boring Islandbridge barracks, or he would have mentioned the occasion. Of the smoke and the noise, the rubble in the streets, the dead and the dying, Irish and British. And of the rebels being finally led out of the Post Office defeated and disowned. Of the strange green-orange-white tricolour they had hoisted atop the building being contemptuously hauled down to be replaced again by the Union Jack of Britain.

  They do not teach it now in schools of course, for it forms no part of the necessary myths, but it is a fact for all that; when the rebels were marched in chains to Dublin docks en route to jail in Liverpool across the water, the Dubliners, and most among them the Catholic poor, threw refuse and curses at them for bringing so much trouble upon Dublin's head.

  It would probably have ended there but for the stupid, crazy decision of the British authorities to execute the sixteen leaders of the rising between 3 and 12 May at Kilmainham Jail. Within a year the whole mood had changed; in the election of 1918 the independence party swept the country. After two years of guerrilla war, independence was finally granted.

  Bernadette stirred beside me. She was rigid, in the grip of her thoughts. I knew what they would be. They would be of those chill May mornings when the nail-studded boots of the firing parties rang out as they marched from the barracks to the j ail in the darkness before dawn. Of the soldiers waiting patiently in the great courtyard of the jail until the prisoner was led out to the post up against the far wall.

  And of her uncle. She would be thinking of him in the warm night. Her father's elder brother, worshipped but dead before she was born, refusing to speak English to the jailers, talking only in Irish to the court martial, head high, chin up, staring down the barrels as the sun tipped the horizon. And of the others ... O'Connell, Clarke, MacDonough, and Padraig Pearse. Of course, Pearse.

  I grunted with exasperation at my own foolishness. All this was nonsense. There were others, rapists, looters, murderers, deserters from the British Army, also shot after court martial. It was like that in those days. There was a whole range of crimes for which the death penalty was mandatory. And there was a war on, making more death penalties.

  'In the summer,' Price had said. That was a long period. From May to late September. Those were great events in the history of a small nation, those of the spring of 1916. Dumb privates have no part to play in great events. I banished the thoughts and went to sleep.

  Our waking was early, for the sun streamed through the window shortly after dawn and the farmyard fowl made enough noise to rouse the dead. We both washed, and I shaved as best I could, in the water from the ewer, and threw the residue out of the window into the yard. It would ease the parched earth. We dressed in our clothes of yesterday and descended.

  Madame Price had bowls of steaming milky coffee on the kitchen table for each of us, with bread and white butter, which went down very well. Of her husband there was no sign. I had hardly finished my coffee when Madame Price beckoned me through to the front of the farmhouse. There in the cow-patted front yard off the road stood my Triumph and a man who turned out to be the garage owner. I thought Mr Price might help me with the translations, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  The mechanic was voluble in his explanations, of which I understood not a word but one; 'carburateur' he kept repeating, then blew as through a tube to remove a particle of muck. So that was it; so simple. I vowed to take a course in basic motor mechanics. He asked a thousand francs, which in those days before de Gaulle invented the new franc was about a pound sterling. He handed me the car keys and bade me goodbye.

  I settled up with Madame Price, another thousand francs (you really could take a holiday abroad for little money in those days) and summoned Bernadette. We stowed the grip and climbed aboard. The engine started at once.

  With a final wave Madame disappeared inside her house. I backed the car once and turned for the highway running past the entrance.

  I had just reached the road when I was stopped by a roaring shout. Through the open window of the driver's side I saw Mr Price running towards us across the yard, twirling his great axe around his head like a toothpick.

  My jaw dropped, for I thought he was about to attack us. He could have chopped the car in bits, had he a mind to. Then I saw his face was alight with elation. The shout and the waving axe were to attract our attention before we drove off.

  Panting, he arrived at the window and his great moon face appeared in the aperture.

  'I've remembered,' he said, 'I've remembered.'

  I was taken aback. He was beaming like a child who has done something very special to please his parents.

  'Remembered?' I asked.

  He nodded. 'Remembered,' he repeated. 'Who it was I shot that morning. It was a poet called Pearse.'

  Bernadette and I sat stunned, immobile, expressionless, staring at him without reaction. The elation drained from his face. He tried so hard to please, and had failed. He had taken my question very seriously, and had wracked his poor brain all night for some piece of information that was for him utterly meaningless anyway. Ten seconds earlier it had finally come to him after so much effort. He had caught us just in time and we were staring at him with neither expression nor words.

  His shoulders slumped. He stood upright, turned and went back to his billets of firewood behind the shed. Soon I heard the cadence of thuds resume.

  Bernadette sat staring out through the front windscreen. She was sheet-white, Bps tight. I had a mental image of a big, lumbering boy from the Rhondda Valley drawing one rifle and a single round of live ball from the quartermaster in a barracks at Islandbridge all those years ago.

  Bernadette spoke. 'A monster,' she said.

  I glanced across the yard to where the axe rose and fell, held by a man who with a single shot had started a war and a nation on its road to independence.

  'No, girl,' I said, 'no monster. Just a soldier doing his duty.'

  I let in the clutch and we started down the road to Bergerac.

  A CAREFUL MAN

  TIMOTHY HANSON WAS A MAN who approached the problems of life with a calm and measured tread. He prided himself that this habitual approach, of calm analysis followed by the selection of the most favourable option and finally the determined pursuit of that choice, had brought him in the prime of middle age to the wealth and standing that he now enjoyed.

  That crisp April morning he stood on the top step of the house in Devonshire Street, heartland of London's medical elite, and considered himself as the gleaming black door closed deferentially behind him.

  The consultant physician, an old friend who had been his personal doctor for years, would have been a model of concern and regret even with a stranger. With a friend it had been even harder for him. His anguish had evidently been greater than that of his patient.

  'Timothy, only three times in my career have I had to impart news like this,' he had said, his flattened hands resting on the folder of X-rays and reports before him. 'I ask you to believe me when I say it is the most dreadful experience in any medical man's life.'

  Hanson had indicated that he did indeed believe him.

  'Had you been a man different from that which I know you to be, I might have been tempted to lie to you,' said the doctor.

  Hanson had thanked him for the compliment and the candour.

  The consultant had escorted him personally to the threshold of the consulting room. 'If there is anything ... I know it sounds banal... but you know what I mean ... anything...'

  Hanson had gripped the doctor's upper arm and given his friend a smile. It had been enough and all that was needed.


  The white-coated receptionist had brought him to the door and ushered him through it. Hanson now stood there and drew a deep breath. It was cold, clean air. The northeast wind had scoured the city during the night. From the top steps he looked down at the street of discreet and elegant houses, now mostly the offices of financial consultants, chambers of expensive lawyers and surgeries of private practitioners.

  Along the pavement a young woman in high heels walked briskly towards Marylebone High Street. She looked pretty and fresh, eyes alight, a pink flush on her chilled cheeks. Hanson caught her eye and on an impulse gave her a smile and an inclination of grey head. She looked surprised, then realized she did not know him, nor he her. It was a flirt she had received, not a greeting. She flashed a smile back and trotted on, swinging her hips a mite more. Richards, the chauffeur, pretended not to notice, but he had seen it all and looked approving. He was standing by the rear of the Rolls, waiting.

  Hanson descended the steps and Richards pulled open the door. Hanson climbed in and relaxed in the interior warmth. He removed his coat, folded it carefully, placed it on the seat beside him and put his black hat on top. Richards took his place behind the wheel.

  'The office, Mr Hanson?' he asked.

  'Kent,' said Hanson.

  The Silver Wraith had turned south into Great Portland Street, heading for the river, when Richards ventured a question.

  'Nothing wrong with the old ticker, sir?'

  'No,' said Hanson. 'Still pumping away.'

  There was indeed nothing wrong with his heart. In that sense he was as strong as an ox. But this was not the time or the place to discuss with his chauffeur the mad, insatiable cells eating away in his bowel. The Rolls swept past the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus and joined the traffic stream down the Hay market.

  Hanson leaned back and stared at the upholstery of the roof. Six months must seem an age, he mused, if you have just been sentenced to prison, or sent to hospital with two broken legs. But when that is all that is left to you it does not look so long. Not so long at all.

  There would have to be hospitalization during the last month, of course, the physician had told him. Of course; when things got very bad. And they would. But there were anodynes, new drugs, very powerful...

  The limousine pulled left into Westminster Bridge Road and then onto the bridge itself. Across the Thames Hanson watched the cream bulk of County Hall moving towards him.

  He was, he reminded himself, a man of no small substance despite the penal taxation levels introduced by the new socialist regime. There was his City dealership in rare and precious coins; well established, respected in the trade and owning the freehold on the building in which it was housed. And it was wholly owned by him, with no partners and no shares.

  The Rolls had passed the Elephant and Castle roundabout, heading for the Old Kent Road. The studied elegance of Marylebone was long past now, as also the mercantile wealth of Oxford Street and the twin seats of power in Whitehall and County Hall, straddling the river at Westminster Bridge. From the Elephant onwards the landscape was poorer, deprived, part of the swathe of inner-city problem areas between the wealth and the power of the centre and the trim complacency of the commuter suburbs.

  Hanson watched the tired old buildings pass, cocooned in a £50,000 motor on a £1,000,000-a-mile highway. He thought with fondness of the lovely Kentish manor house to which he was heading, set in twenty acres of clipped parkland beset with oaks, beeches and limes. He wondered what would happen to it. Then there was the large apartment in Mayfair where he occasionally spent weekday nights rather than face the drive to Kent, and where he could entertain foreign buyers in an atmosphere less formal than that of a hotel, and usually more conducive to relaxation and therefore to a beneficial business deal.

  Apart from the business and the two properties there was his private coin collection, built up with loving care over so many years; and the portfolio of stocks and shares, not to mention the deposit accounts in various banks, and even the car in which he now rode.

  The last-mentioned came to a sudden stop at a pedestrian crossing in one of the poorer sections of the Old Kent Road. Richards let out a clucking noise of exasperation. Hanson looked out of the window. A crocodile of small children was crossing the road under the guidance of four nuns. Two were in the lead, the others bringing up the rear. At the end of the queue a small boy had stopped in the middle of the crossing and was staring with undisguised interest at the Rolls Royce.

  He had a round and pugnacious face with a snub nose; his tousled hair was surmounted by a cap set askew with the initials 'St B' on it; one stocking was rumpled in creases around his ankle, its elastic garter no doubt performing a more important service somewhere else as a vital component of a catapult. He looked up and caught sight of the distinguished silver head staring at him from behind the tinted window. Without hesitation the urchin wrinkled his face into a grimace, placed the thumb of his right hand to his nose and waggled the remaining fingers in defiance.

  Without a change of expression, Timothy Hanson placed the thumb of his own right hand against the tip of his nose and made the identical gesture back at the boy. In the rear view mirror Richards probably caught sight of the gesture but after the flicker of one eyebrow stared straight ahead through the windscreen. The boy on the crossing looked stunned. He dropped his hand, then grinned from ear to ear. In a second he was whisked off the crossing by a flustered young nun. The crocodile had now reformed and was marching towards a large grey building set back from the road behind railings. Freed of its impertinent obstacle, the Rolls purred forward on the road to Kent.

  Thirty minutes later the last of the sprawling suburbs were behind them and the great sweep of the M20 motorway opened up, the chalky North Downs dropped away and they entered the roiling hills and vales of the garden of England. Hanson's thoughts strayed back to his wife, now dead these ten years. It had been a happy marriage, indeed very happy, but there had been no children. Perhaps they should have adopted; they had thought about it enough. She had been an only child and her parents were also long dead. On his own side of the family there remained his sister, whom he heartily disliked, a sentiment only matched by that he bore towards her ghastly husband and their equally unpleasant son.

  Just south of Maidstone the motorway finally ran out and a few miles later, at Harrietsham, Richards pulled off the main road and cut south towards that box of unspoiled orchards, fields, woods and hop gardens that is called the Weald. It was in this tract of lovely countryside that Timothy Hanson had his country house.

  Then there was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, master of his country's finances. He would want his share, thought Hanson, and a substantial share it would be. For there was no doubt about it. One way and another, after years of delay, he was going to have to make a will.

  'Mr Pound will see you now, sir,' said the secretary.

  Timothy Hanson rose and entered the office of Martin Pound, senior partner in the law firm of Pound, Gogarty.

  The lawyer rose from behind his desk to greet him. 'My dear Timothy, how good to see you again.'

  Like many wealthy men in middle age, Hanson had long established a personal friendship with his four most valued advisers, lawyer, broker, accountant and doctor, and was on first-name terms with them all. Both men seated themselves.

  'What can I do for you?' asked Pound.

  'For some time now, Martin, you have been urging me to make a will,' said Hanson.

  'Certainly,' replied the lawyer, 'a very wise precaution, and one long overlooked.'

  Hanson reached into his attach^ case and brought out a bulky manilla envelope, sealed with a large blob of red wax. He handed it over the desk to the surprised solicitor.

  'There it is,' he said.

  Pound handled the package with a frown of perplexity on his usually smooth face. 'Timothy, I do hope ... in the case of an estate as large as yours ...'

  'Don't worry,' said Hanson. 'It was indeed prepared by a lawyer. Duly signed a
nd witnessed. There are no ambiguities; nothing to provide any ground to contest it.'

  'I see,' said Pound.

  'Don't be put out, old friend. I know you wonder why I did not ask you to prepare it, but went instead to a provincial firm. I had my reasons. Trust me, please.'

  'Of course,' said Pound hastily. 'No question of it. Do you wish me to put it in safekeeping?'

  'Yes, I do. There is one last thing. In it I have asked you to be the sole executor. I have no doubt you would prefer to have seen it. I give you my word there is nothing in the executor's duties that could possibly trouble your conscience, either professional or personal. Will you accept?'

  Pound weighed the heavy package in his hands.

  'Yes,' he said. 'You have my word on it. In any case, I've no doubt we are talking about many years to come. You're looking marvellous. Let's face it, you'll probably outlive me. Then what will you do?'

  Hanson accepted the banter in the spirit in which it was made. Ten minutes later he stepped out into the early May sunshine of Gray's Inn Road.

  Until the middle of September Timothy Hanson was as busy as he had been for many years. He travelled several times to the Continent and even more frequently to the City of London. Few men who die before their time have the opportunity to put their many and complex affairs in order, and Hanson had every intention of ensuring that his were exactly as he would wish them to be.

  On 15 September he asked Richards to come into the house and see him. The chauffeur-cum-handyman who, with his wife, had looked after Hanson for a dozen years found his employer in the library.

  'I have a piece of news for you,' said Hanson. 'At the end of the year I intend to retire.'

  Richards was surprised, but gave no sign of it. He reasoned there was more to come.

  'I also intend to emigrate,' said Hanson, 'and spend my retirement in a much smaller residence, somewhere in the sun.'

  So that was it, thought Richards. Still, it was good of the old boy to let him have over three months' forewarning. But the way the labour market was, he would still have to start looking at once. It was not just the job; it was also the handsome little cottage that went with it.