A Messiah of the Last Days

by C. J. Driver

  Prices went up and up; unemployment went up and up; rents went up and up; wages went up and up; and Alison and I could have sold the house which had cost her parents £5,000 eleven years before for upwards of £35,000 if we had wanted to. One of the Donaldsons’ friends, the man who dealt in property, tried to buy the bottom of our garden from us—for £10,000. When we refused, he increased his offer to first £13,000, then to £16,000; and he was not only puzzled but positively upset that we refused. The government bolstered building societies with long-term loans; and prices went up proportionately. The trade unions fought for higher wages; by the time they got them, after first unofficial and then official strikes, prices had gone up faster than the wage-claims had catered for. The government said, hang on and prices will stabilise: look at what’s happening in our European neighbours. We hung on and prices went up. The Prime Minister shuffled his Cabinet and prices went up. The Cabinet shuffled its Prime Minister and prices went up. And all the while the Labour Party watched and waited and squabbled, its left-wing crying ‘Nationalise housing, nationalise land, nationalise building societies, nationalise grocers, butchers, chemists, supermarkets, nationalise, nationalise’, its rightwing saying, ‘Thank God we aren’t in power at the moment’, and men like Matthew Wynstanley looking more and more weary and hopeless as the months piled up.

  *

  In the end, because I had to tell someone, I told Bob Henderson who the police informer in the Free People was. I expected shock or at least surprise from him, but there was none.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” I said.

  He didn’t look at me, but fiddled absent-mindedly with the knives and forks on the table of the restaurant we were lunching in. After a moment or two he shook his head.

  There was something in his demeanour which puzzled me.

  “Did you know already?” I asked quietly.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Is Caister a patient of yours?” I was suddenly sure he was.

  “I can’t say, Tom.”

  “You mean ‘yes’, don’t you.”

  “You’re not being fair, Tom.”

  “I don’t think Caister’s being very fair either.”

  “It’s unfair to ask me about this.”

  “I’m asking you professionally,” I said. “As if I were a patient of yours asking for advice.”

  Bob looked up and smiled. “I’m expensive,” he said.

  “I can afford it. Assume Caister is the informer. Assume John doesn’t know about it”—because it was of course possible John did know and had told Bob himself—“then tell me what to do about it.”

  “You’ve told me; isn’t that enough?”

  “But if he is your patient, you can’t do anything. Should I do something? What would you do, if you were me?”

  “I’d talk to Caister. Tell him to pack it in—to leave the Free People and go away. Go abroad, move away from London. Or else to tell Buckleson and work it out with him.”

  “Is that what you told him?”

  “Don’t come the lawyer on me, Tom.”

  “Assume he is your patient, or has been, and you gave him that advice, and he refused it. Why did he come to you in the first place?”

  “For the same reason you told me what you thought. If he had come to me, it would have been because he needed to unload his guilt on to someone. We’re like priests used to be; people confess to us. That’s why we aren’t very popular really; ‘head-shrinkers’, you know. We’re no more that than witch-doctors used to be able to call up rain.”

  “And you aren’t shocked?”

  But he was not going to be trapped. “No, if I knew Caister were an informer, I wouldn’t be shocked.”

  “Worried?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. I like John; I like some of the others. I wouldn’t want anyone to hurt them. I wouldn’t want someone like Caister to hurt himself.”

  I decided to play Bob’s own hypothetical game.

  “If someone like Caister were the informer, would he be worried?”

  “Of course; it would be a foul life for anyone. You’d be leading the kind of life a schizophrenic leads, living one way and thinking another; if an informer came to me for professional advice, I’d expect it to be because he had discovered he was beginning to believe in the ideas he was meant to be informing on. You can imagine how that would foul someone up.”

  “And so the best thing would be for them to bring life and thought together again—go back to being a policeman in uniform if that is what you were.”

  “Yes, or to say in public what you were.”

  “Wouldn’t that be dangerous? For someone like Caister, say.”

  “Maybe if it was found out; and some of the others, that chap Lester for instance, they might rough an informer up. But if he were to tell them himself, they’d be quite understanding, I think; they might even treat it as a joke.”

  “I think John’s harder than you realise.”

  “Do you? Otherwise you’d tell him yourself.”

  “No,” I said. “In my way I have a professional code as strong as any doctor’s. I make my living by the law, after all.”

  “And I’ve been very unprofessional, hypothetically unprofessional.”

  “That’s because I needed advice. Who do you tell your secrets to, Bob?”

  “Some to Muriel,” he smiled. “Before her I used to tell my wife; I think sometimes that’s why she ran away—an overload of secrets. And I give her one third of my income now, which is a lot more than I pay my own analyst.”

  “What did he say when you told him about Caister?”

  “I never mention names; he just listens.”

  “And you think I shouldn’t do anything?”

  “Talk to Caister, perhaps,” he said. I shook my head. “Tell Alison, then.”

  “I don’t tell Alison those kind of secrets.”

  “At least you’ll avoid alimony that way,” he laughed.

  So I did nothing about Caister, and soon it was too late anyway.

  10

  There was a dream of water. I had gone to visit an old stone church which had been converted into a restaurant, and had discovered it was being run by someone from Brenton, someone I hadn’t thought of in years; she showed me the kitchens and the long passages which ran round the central dining-room, but when I wanted to go inside to sit at a table, she told me I couldn’t since I was dressed wrong. Angry, I left her, and started to walk along the passages. On one side, the old church looked out over a wide field of newly cut grass; on the other, there was the estuary of a river, where the great sheet of high tide spread across from the houses on the farther bank right to the walls of the church. It was late afternoon, warm and sun-stretched, and there were people sailing on the river and people fishing, and on the far bank there were people I knew …

  Alison was shaking me awake, but I did not want to leave my dream. If I waited long enough, the water might lead me to the City. But she would not leave off, and she was telling me to wake up.

  “Tom, wake up. Tom, wake up. The phone’s ringing downstairs.”

  I dragged myself away from the dream, out of bed, into a dressing gown, and downstairs; the phone was still ringing, though I kept hoping whoever it was would stop before I got there.

  It was Tella.

  “Tom, is that you? Oh thank God; I thought you’d never answer.”

  I told her what the time was.

  “Tom, the police have raided the commune; they’ve put a cordon round and they’re arresting dozens of people. They’re digging up all round the place.”

  “Were you there?”

  “No; but John was. He managed to get through the police cordon and he phoned me.”

  “Have the police been to you too?”

  “No; John thought they might be here, but they aren’t. But he made me look out of the window and, Tom, I think there’s a police car outside. John said they must be waiting there for him, in case he came to me, you see.”


  “How did he get out of the warehouse? They must have been looking for him especially.”

  “John said there was a lot of confusion there; the children were crying and everything, and John turned off the electricity at the mains when the police came, and then no one knew where the mains were. And then the police said they would let mothers with small children through the cordon; and John wrapped a blanket round him, and he took someone’s baby and a couple more kids hanging on to him, and he walked through the cordon. He said one policeman actually shone a torch in his face, but he screwed up his face and pretended to be crying—the children were howling their heads off, he said, and everyone was shouting and screaming at the police—and he got through. Then he phoned me.”

  “Did he say where he was?”

  “No, he was afraid the police might be listening to my phone.”

  I hadn’t even considered that possibility myself; in my kind of England the police do not listen to the telephone conversations of private people. But I knew I should be careful now, even more careful than otherwise.

  “Did he say what the police were looking for?”

  “No, he wouldn’t. I thought it was pot or something; but John said it wasn’t. Oh, Tom,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Where are the children?”

  “Some of them are here; there are about eight in my bed. Listen,” and she held the phone away from her so I could hear the confused murmur of children’s crying and mothers’ comforting in the background.

  “And some of them went off with their mothers to a police-station; there were policewomen there. But lots of them said they wouldn’t go with the police, and some of them came here. There’s some more just come. Just wait,” she put the phone down and I could hear her calling. “You’ll have to go into the kitchen; there’s no room anywhere else.” Then she picked up the phone again.

  “Tom, what are we going to do? Should I go to the commune?”

  “No, don’t. Did you say they’ve arrested some of them?”

  “John said they’d taken Lester away, and O’Brien, and some others. They took Bowland too; John said he went beserk when they tried to arrest him. But John didn’t know how many, because he was dodging around keeping out of sight. He said it was the first time he was glad he’d been born small; and he said long hair helped when you were pretending to be a woman.”

  “He doesn’t sound as if he was frightened.”

  “No, he wasn’t; he kept telling me to calm down, he was going to be all right, nothing would happen to him. He sounded … just excited, I suppose. But, Tom, I’m frightened.”

  “Can you cope your end? I mean, with all the kids and mums and so on.”

  “I think so; they’re all so used to chaos. I wish Andy Caister was here; he’d know what to do with twenty-five kids and their mothers.”

  “What happened to Caister?”

  “I asked John; but he had to ring off then. I think the police must have arrested Andy too. You know what he’s like.”

  I said nothing. Had Caister brought the police in to the warehouse? If he hadn’t, why had they come? The knowledge was sitting at the back of my mind like an angry crow, picking and clawing at the ugliness. You can’t eat words, he had said; you can’t fire them from guns. Had he, and Lester, and the others, been fools enough to get guns from somewhere? Or to make bombs? Had the police been looking for arms? Or for bodies? For one man’s dead body? But that was unbearable, and I pulled the ugliness away, and the crow flapped off.

  I told Tella what to do then; how to get Peale, to get him to those arrested as soon as he could, to keep those not arrested from doing anything foolish like demonstrating outside the police-station, and to phone me back when she had talked to Peale.

  “Forget about John,” I said. “Just get Peale to the others.”

  I put the phone down; Alison had come downstairs and was standing quietly behind me.

  “What’s wrong, Tom?” she asked. “Is it your sister?”

  “No,” I said. “It was Tella. John and that crowd of his are in trouble again.”

  “Can’t it wait until morning, when you’re back in chambers?”

  If anything, Alison resents the intrusions of my work into our life at home more than I do; but this was more complicated, though she tried to make it as simple as always. This was not just work. The crow was back again, flapping its wings over the carrion; it would not go away. Where was Caister? Where was John? Why had he rung off when Tella asked about Caister? What were the police digging for? Oh you fool, Tom Grace, the crow cawed, you fool. Words are like bullets in the end; they destroy, they destroy.

  After a while I persuaded Alison to go back to bed, for the call was nearly half-an-hour in the waiting. I walked outside on to the cold terrace; it was a clear winter’s night, but the owls must have gone away hunting, and the vixen was keeping her long winter silence. You could not tell where the wood ended and the weald began. I had woken the other side of the dream, and the dream had gone. For good perhaps? I did not know.

  *

  Then the phone was ringing again, and it was Tella. She’d got Peale and he had unwillingly agreed to go down to the police-station in South Water Street to find out about the arrested Free People. She knew that not all the men had been arrested, and only a handful of the women; some of the men had turned up at her flat, but she had had to turn them away, because there was no room left. Most of the children were asleep. No, John hadn’t phoned again.

  She was much calmer now; someone had gone down to an all-night hot-dog stall and had brought them all something to eat, and the mothers had made coffee, and someone else had managed to raise some blankets from a friend in Chelsea.

  “It’s really quite exciting,” she said. “Or it would be if I wasn’t so worried about John.”

  “Have you any idea what the police are looking for yet?”

  “No, no one knows a thing. Apparently they are still there, in the commune, looking for something; they’ve kept some of the People there, and the others have been taken off to South Water Street; but they must have transferred others to other stations. They say there were hundreds of vans there.”

  She sounded very tired, but she was not panicky any more.

  We rang off then. I made some more tea and sat in the dark drawing-room to drink it. I must have fallen asleep there—I had been trying to think things out, but I was so tired my thoughts had fused and disconnected into a strange syntax of desire and failure. Alison came downstairs again at four and found me asleep in the armchair, and she woke me and took me upstairs again. She had stopped asking even simple questions.

  Deliberately I got into chambers early next morning; often I do not bother to go in there at all but go straight to the court. As I went through the door, Jamie called me from the clerk’s office. “There’s some policemen here to see you, Tom,” he said; I suppose it was only about the second time in twelve years he had called me that. He was no more used to that kind of dealing with the police than I was; but I had been expecting them, had indeed expected them the night before when I sat waiting in my armchair.

  “Where are they, Jamie? In my office?”

  “No, in Mr. Wynstanley’s.”

  “He’s early, isn’t he?”

  “I think they may have phoned him,” said Jamie carefully. “There’s a Deputy Commissioner here, Mr. Grace.”

  “Better and better,” I said, grinning at him to try to cheer him up. There was no feeling of panic or fear in me, just a sense of time passing very quickly.

  I dropped my case in the office where Toby joined the mournful chorus by saying, “I say, Tom, what have you been up to? There’s a couple of coppers here for you.” He was trying to joke.

  “Oh, it’s shop,” I said. “Do you know one of them is a Deputy Commissioner?”

  Toby is a social climber; if you are going to be questioned by the police, you must make it a top man to retain his respect.

  “Wow!” he
said. “It’s a Bank of England job then, is it?”

  “No. The Free People—you remember, you met Buckleson in here.”

  “Oh, him again.” He looked disappointed; the irrational Left is not in his class and John was no longer a star turn on the box. I smiled at Toby, and went to Wynstanley’s big office down the corridor.

  The policemen were sitting talking to Matthew; they both got up when I came in and, to my surprise, so did Matthew. As I expected, one of them was Williams, looking as cadaverously sallow as ever; I hadn’t seen him for months. The other was presumably the Deputy Commissioner, in his smart grey suit and smart grey military moustache.

  “Ah, Tom,” said Matthew. “We’ve been waiting for you. You know Williams, obviously.”

  I had already shaken hands with him.

  “This is Lambourn, Deputy Commissioner.”

  I shook hands, said how do you do, and Matthew gestured us to our chairs.

  “Well,” said Matthew, trying to be avuncular. “I must say this is a slightly odd procedure. It’s usually the other side, isn’t it?”

  Williams glanced at his chief presumably for approval, then spoke.

  “Mr. Grace,” he said, “I should tell you I asked Mr. Wynstanley if he would mind our talking to you in his presence since this is partly a professional matter.”

  I nodded; they were being very careful, which I was pleased about—and I was pleased at the formality of having Matthew there, because it reduced any possibility that I might be tempted to talk to Williams on any other level.

  “Mr. Grace,” Williams went on, “I am not sure if you are aware of this, but the police conducted a raid on the warehouses off Read Street occupied by the so-called Free People and made a number of arrests.”

  “Yes, I know. I should tell you that Miss Estella Raymond, who has some connection with the Free People, phoned me late last night; I have of course defended various of the Free People in the past. I advised her I was not the person approach and suggested she should get in touch with her solicitor.”