The Lively Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “Oh dear. All that effort wasted. I printed his obituary notice for the Livonian, er, Consulate. They live on the top two floors of my house. I’m their landlady, and I’m the only person who seems able to manage their duplicating machine. In fact there’s a bloke baby-sitting for me at the moment who probably told my son a bed-time story about Aakisen.”

  “What a coincidence that I should mention him! How do you reconcile your views on authority with your giving shelter to a so-called Government in exile?”

  “Oh, they were there when I bought the house. Anyway, I don’t think much of any governments, but at least I prefer ones which have been chosen by the people they govern. I rather like the Livs—they’re a lot of harmless old dreamers, kind and sad.”

  “Their dreams are nightmares, Lady Timms. The so-called Balkan Republics have had a difficult history, but it is a mistake to treat them all as one. I personally admire and respect the Estonians, for instance, even the ones who have come into exile. But I do not care for the Livs. Listen, you have three old men in your house, I think. Busch, Linden and … I’ve forgotten his name.”

  “Mr Obb.”

  “Obb. A quiet man, I believe, a survivor. He would be living in Livonia still if he had not collaborated a little too freely with the Nazis, but otherwise I know nothing against him. Busch and Linden, though … During the war of 1919-20 (which, by the way, is still the root cause of Russian suspicion of the motives of the European powers) Busch led a cavalry regiment. There was a period when our Revolutionary Army was in retreat, under attack from the so-called White Russians, together with French and British troops and units from the Balkan States. Where Busch’s regiment came, they killed every Russian they found, man woman and child. Some they tortured first. This was on his personal orders.”

  “But …”

  “Let me finish. There has always been a strong German influence in the Baltic States. Most of the great landowners were Germans by origin and allegiance. For instance, Linden’s family owned larger estates than many of your English dukes, in a country one tenth of the size. The people who lived on his land were worse protected even than our Russian serfs. His grandfather had powers of life and death—not legal powers, but he exercised them. That is the Livonia Linden fought for … no, he wasn’t a soldier, but during the Nazi invasion he was a very active collaborator. He took charge of a programme to export all Livonian Jews to Germany, to the extermination camps. He also organised a squad of internal terrorists, on the Nazi side, to eliminate difficult citizens—they had many little techniques. It was quite noticeable, for instance, that a number of Linden’s political opponents died very suddenly from what appeared to be heart stoppages. He was extremely zealous. Even if all the stories you read in your British papers were true, Lady Timms, we Russians have done nothing to the Jews remotely comparable to the actions of this man you now have living under your roof.”

  Somebody had put a many-coloured hill of ice-cream in front of Lydia. Nuggets of scented chocolate were buried in its slopes. She took a vague spoonful and licked at it. It seemed to have no taste at all. She suddenly remembered Count Linden leaning from the back of her own house, staring down at the patch of fresh-dug earth. In her memory, for a moment, he became visibly a monster—almost fanged, almost bat-winged—before she shook herself and asserted that it had been a pretty March morning and Linden no more than a grey old man leaning out of a window. The ice-cream acquired flavour.

  “You mustn’t think I’m just making propaganda,” said Mr Diarghi. “You’ll find an account of Busch’s activities in a report by Colonel Tallents, in volume three of the British Foreign Policy Documents, 1919–39, First Series. And several times shortly after the war there were questions about Linden in your House of Commons. I can send you the Hansard references if you want to look them up.”

  Still Lydia said nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mr Diarghi, smiling. “This isn’t really dinner-party conversation.”

  “It’s all right,” said Lydia. “I meant I’d much rather talk about things like this than the weather. OK, send me those references—though I wouldn’t accept them as proof. There’s always a bunch of MPs who’ll ask any kind of question at all if they think it’ll embarrass the government—they don’t have to be in your pay for that”

  “You’ll be hard to convince of anything you don’t want to believe.”

  “So’s everyone, and quite right too,” snapped Lydia. “Sorry—don’t let’s get onto that—it’s just another of my hobby-horses—I mean, you have to trust your emotions a bit about anything that matters—where were we? Oh, yes, it doesn’t make any difference to me if everything you say about my Livs is true. The only possible way to behave is to take people as they are now—they’re part of your life and you’re part of theirs, and you’ve got to accept that. It doesn’t matter what they were or what they’ve done. Obviously, there are a few people who’ve got to be restrained, prevented from repeating anti-social sorts of behaviour, but they’re far fewer than any of our societies makes out. And … well, for instance, what Israel did to Eichmann was by any standards vile. It didn’t matter by then what he’d done. That had been vile too, but it was over, finished, unalterable.”

  Mr Diarghi shook his head.

  “You are what I was taught at school to call a Utopian,” he said. “Pragmatically I can’t see that it would be possible to organise anything but a small group of like-minded people on your beliefs. We are all prisoners of what has happened and what has been done, by ourselves, by our enemies, by our friends. For instance, your late Foreign Secretary maintained a very consistent line for over thirty years about the Baltic States. He invested a great deal of face in their independence. While he was in office it was technically impossible for us to come to any kind of agreement about our de jure sovereignty over the areas. Even now there are difficulties. For instance, the Americans pay these Consulates interest on the gold reserves which they hold for them, and this contributes marginally to the British balance of payments. It seems to us that the British Government, thirty years ago, contrived a bribe to itself, and is now trapped by having taken it so long. And so on. You could trace through six hundred years the causes that have brought your old men to live in your two top floors.”

  “Yes, but most of the causes don’t matter any more. And what you told me about Busch and Linden would only matter if there was any chance of their going back to Livonia to form a Government. Then it would at least matter that the voters knew about it.”

  “It’s already well-known in Livonia.”

  “I bet it isn’t known to be true. I’ve got a friend who went on a lecture tour in Poland, talking to senior schools about the economics of developing countries. One of his lectures had a bit to do with Vietnam—this was before the Americans pulled out—and he gave a fairly factual account of how the war was fought—napalm on villages, defoliation, all that—and he noticed that the kids always smiled at that point. One day he managed to get alone with some of them and ask why. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘we know you’ve got to tell a few lies like that or they wouldn’t let you in.’”

  “Poles,” said Mr Diarghi. “Even when you deal straight with them they still manage to cheat themselves.”

  “Tell me about Aakisen,” said Lydia. “What’s the truth? Richard says he was probably caught or killed just after the war, and my friends kept him alive for propaganda purposes. I don’t know why I should care, but I’ve got an obsessive sort of feeling that it matters.”

  Mr Diarghi hesitated.

  “I was only quoting the Livonian propaganda as an example,” he said. “It may be true, and if it is that would be possible to ascertain from labour camp records. But if Aakisen died, or disappeared—which he may have chosen to do deliberately—then I don’t see how anybody can ever be sure. Lady Timms, I have been a little indiscreet in some of the things I have said. I’d prefer not to be quoted, especially to
your Livs. This is not my subject, not my area of responsibility. I’m most grateful to you for your help about nursery education, though, and I may well be in touch with you again.”

  Poor sod, thought Lydia. As soon as he lets his hair down he gets frightened. What a system!

  “OK,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed this do a lot more than I expected. Except … oh, God, not another one!”

  The plates had been cleared again and an English diplomat rose to make a speech of skilled elegance and emptiness. George was woken from his snooze by the applause, and seemed to be at least half sober now. In fact he became attentive and amusing, while Mr Diarghi talked to the woman on his far side. At one moment Richard caught Lydia’s eye with a glance of despair; he had the blonde to himself; she laughed, smiled, leaned forward as if offering him some object for inspection on the jutting ledge of her décolletage, reached with smooth bare arms for grapes … poor Richard. The act made him almost comically jumpy. He kept raising his right hand to run it through his thinning gingery hair, then failing to complete the movement.

  “George,” whispered Lydia. “Be a dear and rescue my husband.”

  George glanced to his right like an anarchist conspirator in a cartoon. His face became immensely serious. He picked up a napkin, folded it into a big triangle, and with a movement of great deftness draped it across the blonde’s upper slopes and tied the points behind her neck. She looked at him in momentary astonishment. He put on a parson’s face and said something in heavily nasalised Russian. She pealed with laughter like a harlot in a bar near closing-time, a false, hysteric whoop. Richard’s relief was so obvious that Lydia and a couple on the far side of the table laughed too. Stirred by this instant of real pleasure amid the desert hours a middle European rose and proposed a toast whose gist seemed to be that cultural exchanges should consist mainly of nudes, which he called nekkid vimmin. He was drunk, and presumably not on the official list of speakers, but several Englishmen were sufficiently far gone to start shouting “Hear, hear,” in plummy voices, which George and other irresponsible foreigners parodied with gusto. Lydia tingled with delight at the way, even here, at an event which had been deliberately sealed and sterilised to prevent any such thing happening, life somehow thrust its green blade through.

  Mr Diarghi drove them home at nearly two in the morning, but (thank heavens) refused to come in for a night-cap. Paul Vaklins was sitting at the kitchen table soldering a join in a hairy-looking bit of apparatus.

  “Welcome to the Resistance Group,” he said. “Dickie and I have been building a secret transmitter.”

  He pressed a key and produced a quick burst of morse.

  “It’s quite a short-range,” he said. “I’ve fitted suppressors so that it won’t interfere with anyone’s TV. I’ll fix a tape-recorder my end, so that he can get answers to his messages.”

  “Will he be able to cope with Morse?” said Richard. “He’s not really reading yet.”

  “He might, though,” said Lydia. “His reading problem seems to be mainly a visual block.”

  “He made a damn good start this evening,” said Paul. “He’s as keen as mustard.”

  “I think it’s a marvellous idea,” said Lydia. “It might be a real way round his problem, especially if I’ve got to learn Morse along with him.”

  “The spy sat on the mat,” said Richard.

  They all laughed, said good-night and went to bed.

  Chapter 16

  “A very curious beano,” said Richard meditatively. “A very rum occasion indeed.”

  When you are used, as the Timmses were, to going to bed well before midnight your metabolism seems to slow down when it recognises the time, even though you are still wide awake. Then your bed, when you at last slide into it, seems extra cold. The Timmses did not own an electric blanket and Richard hated hot-water bottles, so now they lay extra close, for warmth. Lydia could feel the tension all along his limbs, though she herself felt happy and relaxed.

  “I enjoyed myself after all,” she said. “Apart from those ghastly speeches. That Diarghi bloke—well, I suppose anyone who listens to me and takes me seriously seems brainy to me—he told me rather a nasty thing about the Government, though.”

  “Which Government?”

  “Ours. I mean our own. I mean this one here. I mean the Livonians.”

  She explained about the Livonian atrocities.

  “Umm,” he said. “That’s curious too. Hell, suppose it’s true, does it bother you? You’re the one who has to cope with them.”

  “We argued about that, too. I told him it didn’t, but it does. I know it oughtn’t to, but I can’t help it.”

  “Umm. How did you get onto the subject?”

  “I can’t remember. We started talking about nursery education, because he’s writing a report on that, and then—oh, yes, it was after that actor’s speech, we got onto personal freedom and how long people who got sent to Siberia lived, and he produced Aakisen as an example. He knew quite a bit about the Livs, too.”

  “Umm.”

  “Don’t keep saying ‘Umm’ like that, as though it all meant something. Tell me about George’s blonde. She looked a toughie, I thought.”

  “Bang on. That’s what she is, if I’ve got the right girl. Do you remember Jake Seidlitz?”

  “Darling, she can’t be that girl.”

  “I don’t know. I saw the photographs, and she’s just like.”

  “You never showed me the photographs.”

  “They were part of a secret film some ass made to warn British businessmen what to expect in Moscow. They’d blacked out Jake’s face, but everybody knew. And I saw an FO dossier on her a bit later, when she’d got promoted and was running her own show in East Berlin—same line of business, but with some other girls and a couple of lads to cater for different tastes—so what the hell’s she doing as a cultural attaché in London?”

  “And throwing her charms around so freely in front of you? Perhaps she was simply keeping in practice. I thought she was just George’s girl and he’d got us asked to show her what nobby friends he had. I was pretty disgusted with him at one point.”

  “Turn but a stone and start a snob. George … now there’s another thing … how sloshed was he?”

  “About half-gone to begin with, and three-quarters by the fish. Only about a quarter at the end—those speeches were pretty sobering.”

  “Umm. You know he’s supposed to be in Damascus, training Syrians in tank tactics? I got it out of him. He’d only been there a couple of months, too. And at a kulturfest! George! How much did your chap actually know about nursery education?”

  “I did the talking. He kept his end up.”

  “More than that? Sensible questions?”

  “Yes, but not many. Why?”

  “Umm. Look, it’s probably only glands, or the Law of Real Property maddening me with dullness … but when that woman kept brandishing her bust at me … and George goes to sleep and wakes up at just the right moments … and you’re sat next to a chap who starts by triggering you off on one of your hobby-horses …”

  “Mixed metaphor.”

  “No, you start hobby-horse races with a popgun. On your sticks, get set, pop … and then he drags Aakisen in and he knows all about Livs and he tells you horror stories…Diarghi’s a Georgian name, I think …”

  “At least he pretty well admitted Aakisen did die in Siberia.”

  “Come off it, darling. You never really believed in FCPs, even when we lived in that world.”

  (Most of the Tinunses diplomatic stint had been done at a time when the Foreign Office had been riddled with red scares, and junior staffs had explained all crises—shortage of tonic-water, the Ambassador’s daughter’s pony going down with equine flu, and so on—as Fiendish Communist Plots.)

  “You get trapped by your past, don’t you? Now it’s impossible for us to be
lieve that anything that happens could conceivably be engineered by the Russians, even though we’ve got an anti-communist government run from our house. My notion was it might be a bit of a probing operation, George brought over from Syria to get us to the party at all, bloke told off to get you going on schools and then slip in a few horror stories about the Livs, girl imported to see whether there’s any leverage to be got from me … she’ll have to put in a nil return, poor thing.”

  “You’ve just got more refined tastes than she’s usually asked to cater for. Kiss me?”

  “Not just now, thanks.”

  “I feel all soft and gooey.”

  “Well I feel like an overwound alarm-clock in a badly assembled time bomb.”

  “I could kill that woman.”

  “Oh, it isn’t her. I mean, if it is, that’s all happening in cupboards I never open. I just feel that we’ve got about as much on our plate as we can cope with, you in particular, and if somebody starts mucking you up just now I shall go round the bend again.”

  “But why should they? Why us? Why now?”

  “When does the Government’s lease run out?”

  “First of October, this year.”

  “I wonder if they know … they might. Suppose they either blackmailed me or horrified you into deciding not to renew the lease, that’d mean that the Government would have to try and set up elsewhere, and that might mean the FO had to reconsider the whole question of their diplomatic status. Now old Alec’s no longer Foreign Secretary, it’d be a good time for the Russians to put a bit of pressure on. They might even try to show that the Government’s been up to some sort of dirty work … currency fiddling or something … I expect they’re working on that already …”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. No. It’s probably only my imagination. I wish I hadn’t got those bloody exams coming up—I never used to have exam nerves …”

  “But you know it all, darling. You can do it easily.”