by Sean O'Brien
Mr Feldberg took a notebook from his briefcase and laid his coat on the daybed. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘Captain Carson kept a catalogue of his library.’
‘That sounds entirely in character.’
‘And as it also happens, he sent me a copy of it some months ago with a view to having a valuation made, but for some reason he didn’t follow the matter up. I assumed he’d changed his mind or that his attention was taken up with work. So the best thing I can do now is examine the material. Perhaps you might leave me here for a little while, if you like. To be here is a sort of leavetaking for me. He and I talked a good deal over the years about books and history and David’s education. Would that be all right?’
‘I’ll be around if you need anything,’ I said.
I went up to the next floor.
‘I’m in here,’ said Maggie. She was in the box room at the front, overlooking the park. ‘Your little man’s here, is he?’
‘Mr Feldberg.’
‘That’s the one.’ She perched on the low window sill. ‘Funny how we keep meeting in rooms like this, like a pair of hole-and-corner merchants.’
‘Is that how you think of it?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes. What will you do with this place?’
‘I haven’t had chance to think about it. It’s not all settled yet, anyway. It’s not really mine.’
‘The position’s wonderful. I must say I could do with a view like this.’
‘Buy it, then,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘It would depend what one had in mind for the longer term. Before anything else, it needs thoroughly cleaning and then redecorating. And most of those dreary pictures will have to go. But someone should live in it properly. It would be a shame to let it go to flats and those sort of people.’
‘I’m those sort of people,’ I said.
She rolled her eyes. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’
‘You got out of the wrong side of bed, didn’t you?’
‘As a matter of fact, yes, Maggie. And as I say, I’ve not had chance to think about the house.’
‘Well, there’s certainly room for a tribe of miniature Maxwells.’
‘In that case I’d have to find the girl first, wouldn’t I?’
‘There is that. Early days, Stephen. I wouldn’t go rushing in.’
She lit a cigarette. I was going to object but her gaze warned me off. She opened the window. Faint traffic noise drifted up, and children’s voices from the playground. The grass was with thick with leaves under the black-branched chestnut trees. A few couples strolled around the pond with prams. I couldn’t imagine owning that view.
‘It smells of old man in this place,’ she said. ‘The caged male beast.’
‘I hadn’t noticed that.’
‘Of course not. You’re just a younger specimen, after all. Give it time, eh? Anyway, Carson clearly didn’t do much with it apart from occupy it, after a fashion. The bedroom’s like a mausoleum.’
‘What would you expect?’ But the house did feel to me as if no woman had ever lived in it. It was simply a space to occupy. You would not call it home. I wanted to be out of there. If I did inherit it I would not live in it. Let the flat-dwellers, ‘those sort of people’, have it, in the teeth of Maggie’s snobbery.
Maggie grew more impatient. She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette, threw it down into the garden and closed the window. ‘Is your chap all right?’ she asked. ‘He won’t have gone off with anything, will he?’
‘For God’s sake. He’s the father of one of our boys.’
‘Well, that’s something, I suppose. You’ve got to be careful with them, though.’ It was as if she wasn’t saying these things, as if suddenly she’d shown me a place where they were self-evident and required no repetition. I turned away, unable to find a reply. I wondered why she’d bothered to turn up. What had she been expecting?
We stood there in silence until I heard Feldberg calling from downstairs.
‘We’d have been better off taking the boat,’ she said. ‘It’s deadly dull here.’
‘You didn’t have to come.’
‘I thought I might help. But obviously not.’
Help do what? I thought.
‘I certainly don’t want to be in the way.’
‘You’re not,’ I said, without conviction.
We went grimly downstairs. If Feldberg was surprised to see Maggie he didn’t show it.
‘This is Mr Feldberg,’ I said. ‘Father of David.’ Maggie nodded as though not properly taking him in. ‘Mrs Rowan has offered to help.’
‘It’s quite a job, this big old place,’ said Feldberg.
‘I’m sure you’ll manage your end – Mr Feldberg, was it? – and find your way around. Nevertheless, I seem to be surplus to requirements. Nothing for me here. Do excuse me.’ She went off downstairs. From the window I watched her drive away.
Feldberg produced his notebook and showed me a figure.
‘It’s a good collection,’ he said, ‘to fellow specialists. It would be a pity to have to break it up. Someone might make an offer for the whole thing. The university, perhaps. It would be too big and too particular for the school.’
I was finding it hard to concentrate.
‘So what do I owe you, Mr Feldberg?’ I asked.
‘All I would ask is that you let me take the collection in due course and handle it for you. Except the Hitler item.’ He smiled. ‘Why not let your friend Vlaminck deal with that, eh?’
‘I wouldn’t call him a friend.’
‘I should hope not, Stephen. And the Headmaster’s wife, is she a friend?’
‘A colleague. I’ve been helping with painting a stage set, so she returned the favour.’
‘Of course.’
‘I am very grateful for your assistance.’
‘It is my pleasure.’
TWENTY-TWO
There was a cafe at the entrance to the Victoria arcade, popular with students and other layabouts, as well as workers from the fruit and vegetable market. I had arranged to meet Smallbone here early the following Saturday morning. He arrived in bad humour, hungover, looming among the steam and cigarette smoke. Hazel the waitress approached. I waited for him to go into the routine. I knew that Hazel was thirty, divorced and rather athletic.
‘Bacon sandwich, please, darling,’ said Smallbone, brightening a little.
‘Right you are,’ said Hazel, wielding her biro. ‘Anything else, my lover?’
‘And a tea.’
‘Haven’t seen you for a while,’ said Hazel.
‘Busy, you know how it is,’ said Smallbone.
‘Aye, busy with all them mucky women.’
‘I’ve always got a soft spot for you, Hazel.’
‘Soft spot’s no use to me, is it? I’ll have to mek me own arrangements, Maurice.’
Smallbone inclined his head in a gesture of concession. He hated people using his first name, understandably. Hazel swayed off into the fog.
‘A hellcat,’ he said. ‘You’ve no idea. The problem is, her brother’s a docker, built like a brick shithouse. Very protective of his sister’s virtue, which he seems to think still exists. He said he’d chop me cock off if I went near her again.’
‘Yes, but what a way to go.’
We considered this until Hazel returned with his sandwich and a cup of pale grey tea. She sniffed as though her suspicions had been confirmed, then went away again.
‘I take it you’re aware that these are unlicensed premises,’ Bone said, finishing his bacon sandwich in two bites.
‘Have a bun.’
‘You cannot deflect me with buns,’ he said. ‘I do have other things to do besides carting your dirty books around.’
‘It’s really not a dirty book, Bone. I’m sorry to disappoint you.’
‘How do you know until you open it?’
‘Have you got it?’ I asked.
‘Have I got what? Syphilis?’
�
��The envelope.’
He passed it over.
‘Thanks, Bone.’
‘Is that it? Am I dismissed? Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure?’
‘For the moment. I’ll be in touch.’
‘Can’t I have a look? After all, I’ve been minding it for you. Go on, guvnor.’
‘I’ll have to see. I’ll let you know.’ I leaned closer. ‘Look, it could be serious. I think it has to do with Captain Carson’s death.’
‘Bloody long suicide note, given how thick it is.’
‘I don’t think that’s what it is, Bone.’
‘I don’t like the sound of that. You should pass it to the police.’
‘I’m not sure that would solve anything.’
‘No. Look, comrade,’ he said, with an anxious smile, ‘you don’t know what you’re doing, do you? And therefore neither do I.’
‘I may have a better idea when I’ve had a look at the stuff.’
Smallbone shook his head. ‘You could have dropped me in it and me none the wiser. Why can’t you stick to sex like a normal pervert? From now on don’t keep me in the fucking dark. If I end up at North Dock nick I at least need something I can confess to.’
‘All right. Drink your tea and piss off. I’ll see you in the Narwhal later on.’
From the pier I watched the ferry manoeuvre its way to its moorings. It was quite full, mainly with headscarved women who had come across for the shopping the city afforded. As they advanced up the ramp a few ancient men with bicycles could be seen in the crowd, which soon dispersed in near-silence.
Apart from a girl from the art college carrying a large portfolio, I was the only passenger boarding for the return trip. To begin with I went to the upper deck, but the wind was too cold and there was rain in it, so I retired to the bar, which was shuttered at this time of day. The big old paddle-steamer laboured back across the river. I wondered if, as often happened in those days, we would get stuck on a sandbank, but after twenty minutes or so we docked at Dutch Houses.
I considered going straight back again but made myself walk into the village. Dutch Houses, it seemed to me, was only in the most technical sense a place at all. A handful of tall, incongruously distinctive red-brick houses in the Dutch style lingered by the shore, as if still hoping against hope that the port expected to flourish here in the late eighteenth century might suddenly be manifested. But everyone knew that there was room for only one city on the river, and that was the one I had come from. Such inhabitants as lived in the few terraced streets of workmen’s houses and the postwar prefabs were occupied mostly, if at all, in the agricultural hinterland which drizzle and mist obscured from view.
It had been a rite of passage in the sixth form to come here on the ferry and get drunk in the Vermuyden Inn, named for the great Dutch hydraulic engineer, much celebrated on this side of the river. As I approached, the side door was opened and I slipped inside.
In the bar a fire had been lit. I ordered a pint from the landlord’s beautiful and bored daughter and took a seat near the hearth, at a table topped with red Formica. She went back to listlessly reading a copy of Honey. I renewed my acquaintance with half a dozen mediocre paintings, in the Dutch style, featureless rural settings enlivened by occasional drains and the odd cow. If I were seeking a place of exile I might have chosen Dutch Houses. I drank my pint slowly, procrastinating. So, then. This was neutral ground. The barmaid was called away into the interior of the pub, and I took out the envelope.
It contained two items. First was a typed copy of a version of Horace’s Ode i.4, ‘Solvitur acris hiems’ by Louis MacNeice, then somewhat out of fashion and not long dead. The version dated from the 1930s. I read it over, several times lingering on the concluding lines:
. . . and O my dear
The little sum of life forbids the ravelling of lengthy
Hopes. Night and the fabled dead are near
And the narrow house of nothing, past whose lintel
You will meet no wine like this, no boy to admire
Like Lycidas, who today makes all young men a furnace
And whom tomorrow girls will find a fire.
Was there a Lycidas for Carson, then? Surely not. But then why not?
I turned to the other item.
Carson had small, neat handwriting of the kind that used to be taught in the prep school at Blake’s, a lesson a week on Friday afternoons, when the master would carefully rule a stave of lines on the board and set out the florid alphabet with its reversed capital F and the impossible Q. There seemed to be no crossings-out.
He began with a letter addressed to me.
TWENTY-THREE
15th June 1968
Dear Stephen,
I know that you must come to despise the man who writes these words and performed these acts, but I hope you will try to understand who he was and why he behaved as he did. More than that, I hope you will see the necessity of preventing them from having terrible consequences in the here and now. You will quite reasonably ask why this responsibility should fall on you. I am a lonely man with few friends. It may surprise you to learn that I count you among them. I would quite understand if you felt unable to act in this matter, but, unless I am an even worse judge of character than I take myself to be, I suspect that you will do so.
I shall of course be dead when you read these pages.
James Carson
Next came more handwritten pages, which seemed to have been neatly removed from a larger journal.
Tuesday 19th June 1945
Sergeant Risman reported to me in the Company office at Spa on the morning of Monday 18th June. At dawn he and his squad had intercepted three men trying to join a train carrying released Allied POWs when it halted on its way back to Antwerp. It seemed he had brought me some deserters to examine. I observed that this was more a concern for the Military Police than for us. He replied that he thought I might like to have a look at them for myself.
He explained that one of them claimed to be an officer and was clearly a gentleman. We went over to the glasshouse, where the three men were being held in solitary confinement. I recognized two of them from reports. The first of these was Private George Carr of the Royal Engineers, described as having been recruited for the Britisches Freikorps whilst a prisoner of war following capture during the Cretan debacle in 1941. The second was Harold Crossley, a deckhand on a merchant ship sunk off Ireland in 1943. The third man was known to me personally but neither he nor I gave any indication of this at first meeting.
Carr and Crossley were sad cases. Carr, the older man, from Tyneside, where the BUF presence was strong, had been a boxer. He had some history as an enforcer with Mosley’s lot. When war broke out he was mindful of Mosley’s instructions to BUF members to serve the Crown loyally in the conflict with Germany; but by the time the attempt was made to recruit him in a holding cage in Italy he was demoralized and far less interested in Hitler or politics than in better rations and conditions. He had never expected to see action on the German side and insisted that had this seemed likely he would have refused to fire on his own people, though he gave me to understand that he would not have objected to shooting Russians, had the opportunity arisen. I advised him that he should be glad that opportunity had passed him by, since the Russians numbered millions and would have had little interest in who he was and why he was there. He said he supposed he would hang. I did not feel able to disabuse him of this prospect.
Crossley was a grotesquely overgrown youth who seemed to be of limited intelligence. After a period among the British prisoners on the German tanker Altmark, he ended up in the Merchant Navy prison camp near Bremen, from which he was recruited. Thereafter he had first followed Carr’s lead, he said. I was inclined to believe this. He seemed baffled by his circumstances and asked if he would be sent home now, since his family would be worried. I was unable to offer reassurance to this pitiable boy.
At this point Carson had attached a later note, dated June 1968:
The original text resumed:
The pair claimed to know little of their companion, other than that he seemed to be an officer and that he had led their attempted escape to England. When they were challenged by Risman and his men, their companion had turned them in and might have got away with it if Risman had not instinctively felt he was a ‘wrong ’un’.
I told Sergeant Risman that as an officer the third prisoner might be in possession of material of particular sensitivity and that therefore I would speak with him in his cell alone.
When I arrived, Charles Rackham was lying on his bunk. Trying to show as little reaction as possible, I sat down opposite and produced my notebook. He greeted me fondly, as though nothing unusual had happened. He described our encounter as an unexpected pleasure and asked if I was not in turn glad to see him, and referred to my notebook, suggesting that it would be a good idea to record his ‘table talk’. When I asked what he had done to find himself imprisoned, he laughed and said it would take less time to set out what he had not done, since he had not been idle.
When I warned him that he would be viewed as, at the very least, a deserter, he said he did not think so. When I said that the likelihood was he would be tried as a traitor, he said, ‘Well that won’t happen, will it?’ He seemed amused by the whole situation. When I asked why he was so confident of saving his neck, he replied that he thought I knew the answer to that question and we must together make sure we did the right thing. When I indicated that my own freedom of action was limited, he said that in fact I had only one choice.
I told him that I refused to be blackmailed. He asked how I could prevent him. He wished me no harm but would expose me if I sought to obstruct him or prevent his safe return to Britain. He added that I had known what he was like when I first took him to bed, and that part of the attraction for someone as self-controlled as myself had been to lay hands on a bit of evil. I was not the only one so tempted; he had bigger fish to fry, and once back at home he would be looked after. I objected that I could arrange for him to be shot while attempting to escape. That sort of thing had been known to happen. He replied that I would not do this because when it came to it I would not in the end be able to, and that we should dispense with the melodrama and deal with the practicalities of the situation.
