by A. N. Wilson
‘Sinclo, my dear boy.’
Sinclo found himself face to face with Brigadier Courtenay, unseen since army days. He was a tall, bald, roseate figure, his slightly toothless face producing child-like dimples when he smiled. He was approximately sixty, in Sinclo’s judgement, and therefore belonged to that generation in the British Army which had no experience of large-scale warfare. After his own regiment, the Rifle Brigade, was amalgamated with the Green Jackets in one of the everlasting army reforms of recent times, he had served in Ireland, and was said to have a formidable record in dealing with the terrorist cells – a fact which Sinclo and the younger officers found hard to reconcile with his gentle mannerisms and uncompromisingly Etonian voice. He had served for many years in Germany, and a little in the Far East. He had been with Sinclo in Zinariya when they formed part of the peacekeeping force during the outbreak of fighting some eight years ago.
‘How very nice to see you, sir!’
‘Very sad, very sad,’ Courtenay said quietly.
‘Kitty was …’
‘A lovely girl.’
Sinclo wondered what the Brigadier was doing there. Then he recollected a conversation which he had had with him years before, in which it emerged that the old boy (whose mother had been some kind of cousin) was distantly related to Lord Longmore. Perhaps he was the sort of man who enjoyed attending funerals. He had not been a guest at Kitty’s wedding, and Sinclo did not remember seeing him at any previous family gatherings.
Still with his eyes fixed on Rachel Pearl, Sinclo tried to frame in his head a polite way of asking the Brigadier whether he was retired. Luckily the question was answered for him.
‘I’ve been more or less bowler-hatted,’ he said, ‘working for the MOD on various’ – he smiled his dimple-baby smile as he selected le mot juste – ‘administrative problems, so to say.’
Sinclo had never known him well, certainly not well enough to expect any recollection on Brigadier Courtenay’s part of his own activities. It was a surprise, then, when Courtenay came out with:
‘Still working for that paper?’
Sinclo assented. The Brigadier pushed out a lower lip and shook his head sorrowfully. This wordless gesture made Sinclo feel infinitely ashamed.
He looked across the room. Rachel and Father Chell had been joined by Lord Longmore, who was circulating the party and having a few words with everyone. Seeing the peer beside his cousin Vivyan Chell was to be struck by a paradox which he had noted before at family gatherings: namely that Lord Longmore looked, with his halo of silver hair round a bald tonsure, like a holy old monk, and Father Chell, in spite of the monastic habit, still looked every inch a soldier, with his smarmed-back hair and his face so closely shaven and scrubbed that it shone.
‘I tell you what, Sinclo,’ said the Brigadier. ‘There’s something about which I should value your advice.’
‘Really?’
‘Do you ever eat lunch?’
‘On a daily basis.’
‘Good. Good.’
The Brigadier’s mouth set firmly. It was as if he had been making some very long-term plan which would have been completely upset if Sinclo had confessed to not eating luncheon. Then he reached in his pocket for a small diary.
‘Next Monday any good? Lancers’ Club? One?’
Sinclo was mildly puzzled by this request and only mildly more surprised by the fact that the Brigadier, who still wore his mac in the house, left at once having made the lunch date. It was almost as if he had only attended the funeral in order to buttonhole Sinclo himself, but the younger man did not think much of these things. His chief preoccupation was now to cross the party and link up with Rachel. He had formed a plan in his head. They would travel back together to London, and, having drunk wine at the party, they would have whisky on the train. The journey time was an hour and forty minutes, and in this time he would uncompromisingly lay his cards on the table. He would tell her that he loved her, and knew that he could only love her, Rachel, and no other woman. He knew that she did not love him, but he knew that she would be happier with him than she was at the moment. He would say he knew about L.P., but that he begged her to consider, if only for an experiment, to allow him to woo her. He did not even demand, at first, that they should so much as kiss or hold hands, he only wanted it to be acknowledged that he was in love with her.
When he reached her side, she was on her own.
‘You seemed very deep in chat with the Mad Monk,’ he said with a frivolous air he neither felt nor meant. Everyone in the family called Vivyan the Mad Monk, but Rachel’s appalled expression revealed she supposed him to be mocking.
‘I was asking him about his work. It sounds fascinating, this open house of his. He has refugees, tramps, the homeless, all living there, hugger-mugger.’
‘You should see it,’ said Sinclo.
‘I’m going to,’ she said with such intense seriousness and determination that her words sounded defiant: the tone implied that Sinclo had been trying to dissuade her from any such course.
‘I was wondering,’ he said wildly, ‘which train we were thinking of getting. There’s one which leaves Troon at four seventeen and then nothing until five seventeen.’
‘Oh, I’m not going by train,’ she said.
There had been no prior arrangement that Rachel and he should travel together and until she came and joined him on the train down he had not even known she would be at the funeral. He now experienced, however, the most abject, swooping disappointment.
‘Couldn’t you …’
‘I’ve said I’ll take a lift from Giles and Palmer – do you know them?’
‘I know who you mean,’ said Sinclo, and not liking the prospect of travelling back with this pair of art-loving bachelors, one of whom was an Oxford friend of Rachel’s and Kitty’s.
‘No, no,’ he said, when she said she thought there might be room to squeeze Sinclo into the back of Palmer’s car with Giles and another friend called something like Spence. ‘I’ve got my ticket, I may as well use it.’
They did not say goodbye to one another, and by the time he returned to his solitary bed that night, Sinclo had made himself very drunk.
DRUG GIRL’S FUNERAL: THERE IS NO GOD, SAYS RED PRIEST was the headline on page eight of next morning’s Legion.
FIVE
Later that day, Worledge sat in his office with his feet on the desk. Two of his thuggish deputies were there, as was Peg Montgomery. Sinclo had been excluded.
‘Again?’ asked Worledge. The eyes were dead bullets behind the horn-rimmed specs, but the teeth were displayed, the row of yellow tombstones, as he fiddled with the cassette-player. A stubby index finger forced the machine into life again.
An adolescent boy’s voice was heard. ‘I’ll take my pants down, but I’m not gonna crap into this thing, you know … I’m not a queer.’
‘Tuli – Peter …’ said Father Vivyan Chell. ‘We could take some coffee up to my room … We can talk in here … I feel that I want to say something to you … If I have done something to you … something which hurt you … I am deeply, deeply sorry. Sometimes our passions are so strong that they are quite literally uncontrollable. Sex makes us into lunatics. But I abused my position of trust.’
‘I’m not a queer,’ said the boy. ‘I’m not a queer.’
It was Peg who broke the silence with her perhaps inevitable ‘Fuck-a-duck’.
Worledge’s fingers caressed the cassette-player.
‘Isn’t it magic?’ Then his gravelly question turned into that cement-mixer laugh. ‘This has gotta be dynamite. Dynamite.’
SIX
All over central London, luncheon was beginning. In sandwich bars and cafés, people had been satisfying hunger for hours. But for the more leisured, with time to spend in a restaurant or a club, the ceremony was only just beginning. In Westminster, Chelsea, Mayfair and the West End, waiters and waitresses gazed at empty tables, the folded napkins, the polished glasses, knowing that within minutes, their clients woul
d be seated at their regular tables, and all the transactions of gossip, business, lust and commerce would recommence. Lunch was the meal, not dinner, over which business was contracted. It was for lunch, not for dinner, that couples tentatively met, to see whether they wished to commit adultery with one another. It was at lunch that secrets were disclosed, for whereas Londoners tended to congregate in fours or sixes in the evening, they naturally formed pairs for the midday meal. Lunch was a conspiracy.
It had always been so for Mary and Martina, who sat at their accustomed window table at Diana’s, watching the rain fall on the street, as they had done hundreds of times before. They were lunching very slightly early, since the installation was to be initiated at Burlington House at two thirty, and it was essential not to be late.
The Daily Legion lay between them on the marble-topped table. Mary had noticed that Martina carried the newspaper with her everywhere, like a passport or a meal ticket: in her case, it had been both. STOP THIS HYPOCRISY was the headline. Martina Fax had herself contributed a why-oh-why on the subject of Bleeding Hearts who wished to stop British arms companies exporting bombs, planes and heavy military hardware to West Africa. These know-nothing liberals, Martina had argued, were prepared to sacrifice tens of thousands of British jobs for the sake of their dubious ‘principles’. It was not often realized how many British jobs depended on armament manufacture. Martina had included in her statistics anyone who had manufactured a screw, a bolt or an engine which might at some stage of its life come near some weaponry. She had almost worked herself up into the position of believing that the entire economy of the Western world depended on giving to the West Africans the means to destroy themselves.
The second thing these liberals did not understand was that though General Bindiga distributed rough justice, it was justice. The Alkawari! party were anarchists. How would we feel if we had to have Professor Galwanga as our Prime Minister? The third point was a strange one for The Daily Legion to be peddling, since it had, in other areas of life, a rooted objection to ‘hand-outs’, sponging, indeed to anyone giving anything to anybody else who had not worked for it. Student grants, overseas aid, dole money – these all, in the usual philosophy of The Daily Legion, encouraged scrounging and the dependency culture. But in the case of Zinariya, things were a little different. The economic crisis there was not of General Bindiga’s making. Anarchists and enemies of the state had caused the uprisings in the cocoa farms, the outbreaks of civil war, and the explosions in the copper mines. It was vital, absolutely vital, that the international relief organizations continued to pour money into General Bindiga’s coffers. The policy of sanctions, advocated by the Bleeding Hearts, would hurt those who had most to lose.
This last phrase was a little odd, but Mary Much supposed it was a covert reference to the fact that their daily fare at Diana’s – half a lobster each, with a little green salad, and a bowl of aioli into which to dip their French fries, washed down with their delicious concoction of peach juice and champagne – had been paid for by Christian Aid and Oxfam. Certainly, without the General’s well-laundered cheques, siphoned from relief funds sent to Mararraba, the future for Lennie’s newspaper empire would be bleak.
Today, as was quite often the case, the two ‘best friends’ were cross with one another. They sat, a statuesque pair for any passer-by to see through the large glass window of Diana’s, Martina’s smile eternally frozen, her lips as crimson as her hair; Mary Much, whose ash blonde had lately become peroxide, her more mobile features more capable of demonstrating irritation. Of course, she would give her best friend no such satisfaction as to make a scene. They always scrapped over a new toy. Martina thought that Mary had borrowed Piet too often. Mary thought that he would have looked gorgeous in the opening exhibit. As it was, Hans was to open the show.
Martina had been so adamant about it that she had even enlisted Lennie’s support. Piet no poo-poo. Such spoilsports. Lennie said that he was determined to get the priest – the old bender. Said the priest had power. Was mobilizing public opinion against the General. Yawn-yawn – Mary believed that one Bongo-Bongo story was much like another in the eyes and ears of the British public; that they did not care a fig for the Bliks and their wars. But Lennie had a bee in his bonnet. Said they had collected so much stuff on the priest they could get him sent to prison. It would not look very good if the priest’s chief ‘victim’, and the chief witness in any future trial, was seen deliberately lowering his trousers in the courtyard of Burlington House.
‘We had the diet so right,’ drawled Mary, more to herself than to Martina. She dipped a potato chip in aioli and sucked its end. ‘Spanish omelettes for three days: plenty of potatoes, a few peppers, but something solid. Hans doesn’t want squits against the Perspex. Just a good jobby, long and firm, plopping down into the water.’
The taloned hand which was not holding a chip raised a cigarette to her lips.
‘Anyway,’ said Martina, ‘Lennie was right. While the Legion is running a campaign against the installation, it would not look very good if our butler was the first to sit on the john.’
‘He’s your butler now?’
Mary Much smiled as if at a private joke.
Martina said what she always said when she wished to draw a line under a conversation. She took a deep intake of breath and as she exhaled she said, ‘Any-way.’
That was the end of that conversation. They fell to discussion of The Sunday Legion.
‘Lennie’s going to fire Mr Blimby next week,’ said Martina decisively. ‘With all his staff. The two titles will then run together, only on Sunday the paper will be called The Sunday Legion.’
A recipe for commercial and journalistic disaster, thought Mary Much.
‘God, you’re brilliant,’ she said.
SEVEN
‘Potted shrimps – any good?’
Brigadier Courtenay was at his small table in the corner of the Coffee Room of the Lancers’ Club.
‘Excellent.’
The Brigadier held a pencil in his hand, very carefully sharpened. He wrote the words potted shrimps on the printed order-form provided. ‘Lamb cutlets?’
‘Excellent, sir.’
‘Tomatoes? Mushrooms? French beans? Boiled potatoes?’
To all these, Sinclo assented. The only surprise was that, instead of offering wine, the Brigadier said, ‘We’ll have the luncheon-cup: rather good here. A mixture of ginger beer and cider.’
The business of ordering the meal complete, and a waiter having come to collect the written slip, the two men began the predictable small-talk: the advantages and disadvantages of belonging to this particular club, the wisdom or otherwise of belonging to more than one club. Sinclo got the impression that the Brigadier more or less lived in the Lancers’. The Lancers’ Club occupied an old ducal house in a small courtyard not far from Albany, just off Piccadilly, between St James’s Church and Fortnum and Mason. It was a handsome, large dolls’ house, dating from the reign of George II, and the building had been occupied by the Lancers’ Club since the 1880s, when the dukes who owned it went bankrupt. A splendid equestrian portrait by Lawrence of the 4th Duke, an officer in the Hussars, commanded the hall, and other portraits of eighteenth-century and Victorian generals looked down from the cream-painted panelling of the Coffee Room. The waiters seemed like soldiers.
‘I’ve been toying with the idea of asking Father Chell to dine here,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Do you think he’d have a suit to wear? I can’t see the members taking very kindly to it if he turned up in his medieval garb!’
‘The Mad Monk?’ asked Sinclo lightly. ‘He must have come here a lot in his youth.’
‘Why do you call him mad?’
‘It’s his family nickname. He’s … a splendid fellow.’
‘He’s more than that, I think.’
With great deliberation, the Brigadier took a small triangle of toast and began to spread potted shrimps on to one corner of it. ‘I remember in India once,’ he said quietly, ‘bei
ng taken to see a holy man. I was quite young at the time. Didn’t know anything about religion or spirituality.’ He smiled, the toothless-seeming mouth shrinking into the appley cheeks. ‘Extraordinary.’
Sinclo, who was in the position of the Brigadier when young, having neither knowledge of nor interest in religion, did not know which was extraordinary: the ignorance, or the phenomenon about to be unfolded.
‘The villagers believed this man – he was about the age you are now – to be an avatar, an incarnation of the Divine. I don’t have Hindi – or not much. It wasn’t the words the man spoke to me which made such an impression. It was something you felt in his presence. Completely impossible to describe it, but it was real all right. You felt it, like an electric shock.’
Sinclo felt ill-equipped for this sort of conversation, so asked simply, ‘When were you in India, sir?’
The Brigadier could hardly have been more than a small child when India became independent.
‘I feel like that in Father Chell’s presence. You could feel it the other day at the funeral – what?’
‘It was a moving sermon.’
‘That’s not what I said. This man has power. Ever been down to Crickleden?’ The Brigadier was, as it happened, the second person to ask Sinclo this question during the last few days. Worledge had been telling him to check the place out. Worledge had something up his sleeve in relation to the Mad Monk. Of that Sinclo felt certain, though he did not know what it was. The cuttings files on CHELL had been ransacked. Snappers had been sent down to photograph Kelvedone, the Mad Monk’s monastery. Sinclo felt the vultures hovering in the sky for the kill, and by some instinct, he felt that the Brigadier was part of this gathering consummation. ‘It’s a rum set-up down there,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Absolute shambles. Caravans, tents even, refugees all over the shop. All sorts of odds and sods. But they’re all electrified by Chell. Just like that avatar I met when I spent my year with the Bengal Lancers. They have rather good military clubs in India, you know. An excellent one at Kanpur … Lucknow – Agra. I remember at the Cavalry Club in Agra, they make a point of only hiring Muslim barmen – no danger of them helping themselves to the booze!’
