by John Gardner
They settled with coffee.
“George, forgive me. Your parents—apart from your mother being French—she’s in the files, of course. There’s not much about your parents.”
George gave a laugh, head thrown back, the noise coming from his throat. His dreadful secret, he said. Nowadays it was nothing. In the thirties, with his kind of ambition, you kept your parentage quiet.
“Herbie, I was the son of a railway engine driver and a French whore. It’s as simple as that. She was ahead of her time. A dropout. Good family. Came from near Paris. Good education. Big bust-up with her parents when she was about seventeen. Came to England. Went on the game. The old man met her on some beano—he worked for the Great Western Railway, lived in Didcot. Met her and married her. We lived in a little terrace on the wrong side of the tracks, as the Americans say, and I was brought up to be bilingual. That’s how I got into the local grammar school. Scholarship. I don’t suppose many sons of railway engine drivers got scholarships to good grammar schools in the 1930s, but I did it on my French. Maman did it for me.”
He made a joke about her being the original tarte avec le coeur. “Though I reckon her poor old coeur cracked a bit when the old man died through driving his four-six-four into the back of a slow goods just outside Swindon.”
That was in 1937 and the little terraced house—Lockhill Terrace—was only just down the line. But by then George had won another scholarship: the one to Oxford, to the university.
“Maman had great ambition for me.” George blew out a cloud of smoke and looked through it, his eyes softening, far away, thinking of the past. “And I denied her so much. Very touchy, Herbie, the good old English class system. Nowadays it’s very fashionable to have come from my kind of background. Then? Well, I ran a mile from it.”
“Deep cover.” Herbie poured more coffee.
George agreed. Adding, that was what Ramilies had said of him. He’d spent most of his life in deep cover.
“At the university?”
George gave his throaty laugh again. “Especially at the university. Within a week of going up, I’d established a fictitious background. Maman was a French aristo and the old man was something mysterious in steel—which, when you consider the circumstances of his death, wasn’t stretching it so far.”
Herbie growled and made a comment about George doing well at Oxford. Brilliant. A first in history with sixteenth-century France as his special subject. “And old Ramilies was your tutor?”
George nodded.
“And later, Ramilies recruited you. Can you tell me about that, George? Tell me how they yanked you into the Nostradamus thing. If I read the files correctly, they pulled you for that purpose alone.”
George asked if Herbie had talked to the Deputy Director about it—“He was fiddling about at the Abbey when they finally got me there”—as though dodging the question.
Herbie said that he needed it from George. “I want to scour your mind, not dear old Willis’s devious brain. You been to see him, George?” As head of Forward Planning (Europe), George was privy to the basics of Herbie’s assignment. It would be natural for him to run to the Director or his Deputy.
There was a long silence during which George crushed his little cigar into the big glass ashtray in front of him. Yes, he had been to Willis. What did Herbie expect? Nobody liked to be told someone was raking through his restricted past without knowing exactly why. Particularly someone of George’s seniority.
“He told you—not to worry, eh?”
Willis Maitland-Wood had said something like that, and George had been blunt with him: asked if he was being vetted for sinister reasons.
“You got something on your conscience, George?”
No, but a lot of strange things went on during that time—then, and later. He wasn’t worried. Curious though.
Like hell he wasn’t worried. Herbie refilled the coffee cups. Anyone who had spent time in the field was a fool if he wasn’t worried about the past. If was something none of them could outlive. There were shadows on all their shoulders. Big Herbie sometimes had nightmares about them—the double deals, the promises never kept, the devious workings within the labyrinth, the deaths. Bosch’s paintings of hell were nothing compared with the souls of those who had worked among the secret alleys of Europe over the last four decades.
There was no suspicion—nothing on George: Herbie used his most gentle voice. Just a link. Nothing to fear.
George nodded again and shrugged. It wasn’t personal, going to the DD. Herbie must understand that. No lack of trust. Herbie understood and asked again about his recruitment.
“Old Ramilies—the Rammer, we used to call him—was a keeper of secrets. As my tutor he knew where I’d come from, parents, everything. I kept up this veneer of coming from a better class; of having a moneyed past. Christ, the snobbery of those days. I really thought it was necessary.” He made a motion with his right hand, throwing the arm forward and twirling the hand from the wrist. Herbie thought it was meant to convey that he had already spoken about all that. Then the laugh, more hollow this time. “I had a real conscience in those days. Found the pretence a strain. Went to Ramilies about it. He was very kind and said he understood and that my secret was safe with him.”
Nothing wrong with trying to better yourself, he had told the young, raw Thomas. Don’t know if I approve of your view concerning parents though. Some’d be proud of that background. But if that’s the way you want to do it, who am I to pull the rug from under your feet.
Aloud, George said, “Christ, Herbie, what an insufferable little inverted snob I was in those days.”
Herbie gently pulled on the reins and brought him back to the business of recruitment.
George stared at the wall. It happened after Dunkirk, he said. Then he began a long, sometimes painfully nostalgic, journey back as far as 1939.
What did you do with a First Class degree in history and a specialised knowledge of sixteenth-century France? That had been his problem in ’39. A problem solved by the war. He had French and German as well—elementary German, maybe, but enough. He suspected that Ramilies had a hand in putting him up for a commission. The Army. France early 1940. Then the rout. Fallbacks. Retreat. In training they had been taught things like platoon in defence and attack. The manuals and exercises said nothing of platoon in rout. That was real warfare. May 1940, when General Guderian’s panzers began to segment Europe and divide it into neat parcels for the Third Reich.
This they did in a little over two weeks. Blitzkrieg. Lightning war. George and his men stayed a little ahead of them all the way.
He talked about the heat and the clogged roads; the eyes of the terrified, fleeing refugees heading for nowhere; the dust; boiling radiators; women pushing prams and dragging children; old men being pulled on handcarts, and the Stukas which came every day, blasting anything that moved as they played the war game of leapfrog with the tanks.
For George, it ended with a shoulder full of shrapnel and three broken ribs from mortar fire at a chalky crossroads some ten miles south of Dunkirk.
He did not remember the beach or how they got him off. He recalled only a view from the small ship.
“From the stern it looked as though all France was on fire. The oily smoke blotted out the sun. Next thing I knew was a hospital on the safe side of Guildford.”
They kept him there for a month and then sent him to convalesce near Oxford.
“We had to wear shapeless blue trousers and jackets to show that we were wounded. Let us go into the city. People stared at us without pity, as though we were freaks. I kept dreaming about Maman. She’d gone back to France in ’39 and married well. He was in scent. Rich. I saw her once on a three-day pass to Paris before Jerry started.”
They kept him on at the hospital for longer than necessary, and when he left it was with speed and in disgrace.
“My feet didn’t touch the ground.” George grinned. “A spot of trouble concerning the duty medical officer, myself, and a nur
se called Gwyneth. The duty MO walked into my room late one night—’nough said?”
Herbie chuckled, but George was gone again, out of chronology, thinking back to France and the retreat. “It was bloody awful. I’m one for tags, Herbie, and I remember thinking again and again about what Tacitus said—I was nearer to the schoolroom in those days.”
“What did Tacitus say?”
“They make a desert and call it peace.”
He expected some punishment posting. Instead, the orders were to report to Room 444 at the War Office. George got into London early one morning—into the debris of the previous night’s raid. The Blitz was in full swing.
“Ramilies was the last person I expected to see. Particularly Ramilies in battledress—a ranking brigadier peering out from behind a WD desk landscaped with books and papers as though it were a model of the New York skyline.”
Ah, young Thomas. Glad you could come. That was the greeting.
The recruitment had begun. Only George Thomas did not know what it was—or how, or why.
14
LONDON 1940
RAMILIES KEPT FUSSING. “ASKED for you especially, dear boy”—brushing back a lock of hair. “Sit down. Sit ye down.”
George moved some books and sat down, thinking about the trim ATS sergeant who’d announced him. When he’d entered the anteroom she’d been looking bored, dripping what looked like blood onto nails of unregulation length.
“You’ve got all the qualifications, you see.” Ramilies went on patting at his hair. “French like a native. Ruthless ambition—we know about that, don’t we? Probably got the killer instinct as well. Hear you copped it in France. Better now?” He did not wait for a reply.
“French like a native. How’s your mother, George?”
George said that she was fine when he’d last seen her in Paris. God knew, now.
Ramilies reminded him of a python, though he could never quite work out why. Maybe it was the smile, and that habit of licking his lips; or perhaps the belly bulging and out of place on his slim body, as though he had swallowed something live.
Ramilies went on. “Good actor, as well. Know about that too, George, don’t we? Good actor. Deep cover. Foxy.”
George felt disturbed. Foxy? Is that what his old tutor thought of him? He asked why he had been called to the War Office.
“Bit of research to start with.” Ramilies tipped his chair back and smiled again, setting it permanently, secretly, across the thin lips. “All in a good cause. Been having a spot of the naughties, I’m told. Think you were here for a wigging? Wartime, George. You don’t get gated or sent down these days. Don’t you want to be posted to me? I rather thought you would.”
“Depends.”
“Michel de Nostradame,” he replied cryptically. “You, being an expert on sixteenth-century France, should know all about Michel de Nostradame.”
George knew a little: that he had lived in Provence; was a good medical doctor, and had become astrologer to Catherine de’ Medici. That was about all, apart from the vague knowledge that his astrological prophecies were much quoted among the idiots who believed in that kind of thing.
“Ah.” Ramilies pushed back his chair again. “The strange prophecies of old Nostradamus are much in demand at the moment. I would like you to study them for me.”
“You can’t be serious. There’s a war on…”
“Yes, I know. This is war-effort stuff Method in madness, I do assure you. Here…” He plunged his hands into the litter on his desk and fished out two books. It reminded George of a man tickling trout.
One was a copy of Les Prophéties de Me. Michel Nostradamus, which looked as though it was possibly a rare collectors’ item. The other was a modern work. The flyleaf gave the date as 1939: published in Paris under some academic imprint and titled Le Prophète de Salon.
Nostradamus had lived in the town of Salon, so George did not have to be a genius to work out the nature of the book. Its author was a Michel Downay.
“Downay,” Ramilies spoke softly as though reading George’s thoughts. “He’s something at the Sorbonne.”
“Or was. They’ve had a spot of trouble in France.”
“Still at the Sorbonne, dear boy. We know about him. At the Institute de Psychologie We’ve been in touch.”
“Lately?” George thought he was being sarcastic, but Ramilies took it as a perfectly normal question and said, yes, in fact only last week.
“Interesting book,” he continued; rather diffident, like he was discussing some work by an enemy academic. “Want you to read it and go over the prophecies again. You have read them, I suppose?”
“Not avidly.” During his studies of sixteenth-century France, it had never struck George that it was par for the course to wade through the thousand-odd verses—quatrains as the pedants called them—which made up the prophetic work of Nostradamus. Like most people doing a specialist study of that period in France, he had taken the odd squint at them, but reckoned they were such a jumble you could make them say anything you wanted to hear.
“You’re an unbeliever. You don’t think he was an important influence on Catherine de’ Medici?” Ramilies’ tongue was licking away like mad.
“I don’t know enough about him. After all, he’s really only a footnote to history.”
“Good. I like that. Still we’ll have to turn you into a believer. Propaganda stuff, this. Old Goebbels has been using the prophecies—Nostradamus does mention Hitler by name, you know? Odd bit of accuracy. Out to fight fire with fire. That’s the job. Want you to read him; learn and inwardly digest him—and the Downay book as well. Probably some astrology. Your future in the stars.”
George knew he looked disgruntled. It was to be an academic chore.
“National importance, this,” piped Ramilies. “Young George Thomas, you’ll read him for king and country”—the last delivered like a coy slap on the wrist.
George sighed.
“Asked for you specially. You’re the man for the job. All the talents. I’m on a recruiting drive, George. What d’you think of that? From don to press gang in one move, eh?”
George felt more depressed, and asked where all this reading was to be done.
“You’re really supposed to call me ‘sir,’ you know.” Ramilies had become almost playful.
“Where do I do the reading, sir.”
“Got a nice little place all fitted out for you.” He flashed his teeth and rose to reveal the pot belly. “Take you there myself’—flicking a switch on the big wood and metal intercom on his desk. “Get the motor round, would you please, Cynthia.” He spoke into the instrument as though it might strike back.
15
LONDON 1978
“PAINLESS RECRUITING, GEORGE. MORE coffee?” Herbie moved to the pot as they came to a natural break in the narrative.
“You never met the old Rammer, did you?” George nodded for a refill. It was time to move on to the brandy, and Herbie was already lumbering across the room. Unfortunately he had never met Ramilies, who was a legend from an earlier time.
“Jocular, devious old queen. Had me hooked, as you say, without pain.”
Herbie asked when they finally gave him the bad news, and George said it took a long time. They put him in purdah; in what would now be called a safe house (“May still be on the books”) near the Aldwych. Work at those bloody quatrains all day; read Michel Downay’s book; phone calls from Ramilies, and occasional comfort visits from the ATS sergeant called Cynthia. At night the bombs.
Herbie asked if he became a believer in the prophecies.
No, but he took them more seriously. Downay’s book helped.
They talked for a long time about George’s period of study, in the heart of London, with the nightmare of the bombing going on until the small hours. Herbie listened carefully for he detected that this was a crucial period: the time when George Thomas was, unknown to himself, taking on the role of an academic occultist—learning his deep cover.
George e
xpanded on theories which he could still trot out thirty years after. He could even quote from the prophecies, and paraphrase Michel Downay’s book. Remarkable, Herbie thought.
Then the telephone rang. Schnabeln seeking an interview for Girren. Wouldn’t tomorrow do? Not in your interest, Schnabeln made it clear. Okay, Herbie told him. Give it one hour and check the main window. (One curtain would be pulled back if all was clear. It was a house sign they had already used during exercises. Herbie was a great one for putting his people through their paces.)
George cocked a querying eye.
“One of my recruits.” Herbie sat down again, heavily. “Making them work for a living and they don’t like it.”
“None of them ever do. Did you like your controller?”
“I didn’t take much notice of him. Correction—couldn’t stand him. Always a love-hate thing. When did they lay the news on you, George?”
“About Stellar and the operation? Not until January ’41.”
After the concentrated study in the flat, they took him out to the Abbey. (The Abbey: country seat of one of the great old English families, had been used, during the war, as both a training ground and think tank for Special Operations Executive. Herbie had to remind himself that the time George was talking about predated SOE proper by a few months.)
“I met Fenice, the Frenchman who had been giving the Foreign Office a lot of material from Paris before ’39 until the Fall of France. He knew Downay. Also old Sandy Leaderer, who was setting up a transmitter near Dover, all ready to beam phoney messages. They talked a lot about psychological warfare and confusing the enemy.”
George gave a wry smile “Should have known it wasn’t that easy when they sent me up to Scotland.” It was a toughening-up course at a Strength Through Joy camp. All the fun of the fair. Survival. Living off the land. Weapons. Maps.
“I’d been brought up tough in childhood. When you walked into Lockhill Terrace wearing the poncy grammar school uniform you learned to fight back. In Scotland we had a leathery little instructor who had pioneered death all over the Empire—judo, karate, and all their variants. I became teacher’s pet. Hear him now—You’re a dirty fighter, sir. Take note of him, gentlemen, he’s a dirty fighter. Just what we’re after.”
