by Graham Swift
Success rested on the reported laxity of the guards, and a good measure of luck. These were urgent days, when there was no time for delay or finesse. We could no longer rely on the R A F to ease our work – they were now reluctant to concentrate raids in Normandy for fear of giving away future invasion sites. Every opportunity we failed to take through too much caution might take its toll on the effectiveness of that future invasion.
The night we chose was that of May 2nd. A warm night; patchy clouds; a faint moon. I parted from my comrades and slipped, some minutes later, into the narrow streets which led to my roof-top route. I carried the rope, coiled tightly round my waist, a plan of the factory in my head, and a knife. I remember that as I made my way I had the strange sensation of being no more than an ordinary burglar. My forebodings about what lay ahead were curiously like those of a civilian lawbreaker – as if I feared discovery by the police rather than the enemy. I have sometimes wondered whether this was a feeling peculiar to the undercover agent – without his absolving uniform – the feeling of being less a spy than a criminal. In his role, war and peace-time get confused. Do civilized instincts persist in war, or does civilized life veil the instincts of war? I cannot say. On that May night I had little time for philosophizing.…
And it’s that last passage, along with barely a handful of others like it, which, lately, I’ve been reading and rereading and which I’ve marked already, in both copies, in pencil. Those rare betrayals of feeling; those rare moments of self-scrutiny, of speculation. All so quickly dismissed. ‘I cannot say.’ I stare at the page. I read the words as though, if I read hard enough, other words will appear: Dad will begin to speak.
I glance at my watch. Five to three. People strolling along the river path at Richmond. The first decent Saturday of the year. Marian; and the kids. On the river, passing pleasure boats and launches. A swan, with a bevy of fraught cygnets, riding the wash.
… things had gone so well up to this point that I almost anticipated trouble in the later stages. I descended the rear fire-escape stairs from the corridor adjoining the patron’s office. This brought me out into a cobbled passage-way, between two office blocks, one end blind and the other opening out on to the part of the yard I had to cross – or rather skirt, keeping to whatever shadow I could find. My position was now essentially that of the escaper from a walled prison. I had transferred my coil of rope to my shoulder, in readiness in case things came to a quick dash.
I started forward along the passage-way. I had gone a few paces and was a short distance from the yard when a sentry appeared in the opening, halted, in a stooping, unsoldierly fashion and stood with his back towards me. How he failed to see me, I don’t know. As he turned, he must have looked, even if inadvertently, down the passage-way, and I would not have said that, at that range, the shadows were enough to hide me. I could only freeze, my heart pounding, against the wall. The sentry tugged at his rifle sling, easing it on his shoulder, and then his hands seemed to be busy at his pockets: the unmistakable actions of a man preparing to light a cigarette. It was likely he would choose the concealment of the passage-way in which to smoke: five minutes on tenterhooks.
Experience had taught me that where there is a choice between several possibilities which cannot be calculated exactly, and cold steel, then cold steel is the better choice. At all events, decision is better than hesitation. The sentry might smoke his cigarette and move on, and I might wait for him – though I would still have his presence to contend with. On the other hand, he might turn his head at any moment. If I silenced him, and even if I eventually got out of the factory successfully, our break-in would naturally be discovered, and the Germans, if they had any sense, would switch the schedules of their shipments. But then again, since everything in the office had been left as I found it, there was just a chance they would take the death of the sentry to mean a sabotage attempt on the factory itself, search the premises for explosives, and overlook the information in the patron’s office. Better this chance than my capture and outright failure.
All this must have passed through my brain in seconds. But a simple fact tipped the scales in favour of cold steel. The German was standing, reaching for his cigarette, not inside the passage-way, but just beyond its entrance, in view of the yard. This meant that he must himself be unobserved and that he was presumably confident he would remain so for the length of time it took him to enjoy his illicit cigarette. If I acted at once I could take advantage of the safety he himself had indicated to me.
The stiletto I had acquired at Tarbes was in its sheath inside my trousers against my hip. It could be drawn almost noiselessly, but I took the precaution of waiting for a masking sound – the German striking his match. The match flared. I drew the stiletto. The German’s head bent into his cupped hands, the flame lighting up his helmet and a thin strip of neck above his collar. I moved a step or two forward along the wall. I knew that if the Germans found a dead guard they would take reprisals, and, for want of anyone else, they might shoot one or two of the innocent factory workers. But I could already hear Jules’ and Émile’s laconic response. ‘N’importe’ – my friends would spit – ‘they shouldn’t make parts for the Bodies.’
I took another step forward. If the sentry should turn round now to throw his match into the passage-way, better he should come face to face with me with my drawn stiletto than catch me at a distance. But he tossed the match casually to his right, scarcely moving his head. As his right hand was engaged, returning the match-box to his pocket, I struck – my left hand covering his mouth, fingers pinching the nose, the blade entering left of the spine: a text-book application of my close combat training. The only thing I had forgotten was the cigarette. My hand rammed most of it into the sentry’s mouth, but I was left with an angry burn in the centre of my palm.…
My Dad. Cold steel. A man’s back.
Marian and the kids are walking through the gardens, opposite the ice rink; round the bend where the river stretches away upstream in a long, straight, tree-fringed view; on, along the towpath by Petersham meadows, where there are always some cows or a pony or two; the boys will walk along the top of the little concrete wall by the towpath, as they always do, and Marian will walk below. Then to the ferry point at River Lane, where the trees begin – the tall chestnuts behind the towpath, in new leaf, and, by the river, alders and willows, dipping and stooping over the water, the wash heaving over the branches, scooting mallards … I can see all this almost more vividly than if I were there myself. And suddenly I clutch Dad’s book closer, protectively, to me, as if Marian, likewise, can see me with it, sitting by the french windows, like a man with a secret no one else must see, with a possession no one else must share.
… Reprisals did take place. We heard that two men from the factory were questioned then arbitrarily shot. But the shipment times were not changed. One shipment – the next scheduled that month – was successfully sabotaged, not by our group but by Lucien’s. Following this, we heard that the factory manager was being ‘investigated’ by the Gestapo.
But it was now time for me to bid adieu to Jules and Émile. My period in the Caen region was coming to an end.…
So Dad slips away (end of Chapter 12), terse and brisk as ever, to his next assignment; to be picked up, in a moonlit field, by an R A F Lysander; to be dropped, four weeks later, into France again. And so he slips away from me; into the realms of action and iron nerves; into the silence of a man on a hospital bench. That one moment of reflection, of perplexity. What was it like, Dad? What was it like to be brave and strong?
At the end of River Lane there are usually parked cars; an ice-cream van. Marian will stop here. Will Martin pay? I am saying these things as if somehow the statement of them is something more than the reality. Like Dad’s book – like these jottings of mine, which are fast turning into a book too. The smell of the river: a mixture of mud, oil and sodden timber. Why aren’t I there? Martin and Peter lick their ice-creams. Marian licks hers. Or perhaps she doesn’t have on
e. She has this thing about keeping her figure – I approve of it – though she isn’t in the least overweight. The kids go down to the river’s edge, where the water laps at the slipway. Some dinghies are pulled up. Marian stays up on the bank, watching them. But she isn’t really thinking of them, I know. As she stands on the bank, her eyes dim and a half-guilty, half-mystified look crosses her face. She is thinking of me.
On, further; along the towpath, bushes and trees now on either side. The sun flickering through the willow stems. The boys walking ahead, looking for large sticks to brandish, Marian walking behind, a little abstractedly. Into the grounds of Ham House. Across the trim lawns; tulips and gravel walks (now there is a similarity I have never thought of – the grounds of Ham House and the grounds of Dad’s mental hospital). They say the first occupant of Ham House – a cabinet minister of Charles II – was half mad. Once we took the boys to look round the inside of the house; they were bored, and afterwards I lectured them on the importance of a sense of history (you see, I am not only cowardly, but pompous too)…. Into the gardens at the back of the house where the tea shop is. And there, while she watches the sparrows peck at crumbs, the same anxious look will cross her face.
All of this touches me more than if I were really there to see it happen.
Four-fifteen. Dad leaps from a Halifax bomber into the Haute-Saône.
Have I mentioned yet how Marian and the kids behave on the subject of Dad? They are quite heartless about him. They forget about him. Marian once skipped half-heartedly through Dad’s book; but the kids have never read it. They don’t visit him; they don’t think of him as my father so much as a peculiar object I go and see on certain Wednesdays and Sundays. (I took the boys to visit Dad once: I said, ‘Martin and Peter, Dad, your grandsons,’ but Dad didn’t move an eyelid and the boys giggled, and afterwards they started to talk about ‘Grandpa Loony’ – as opposed to Grandpa Lenny, who is Marian’s father, and, of course, perfectly compos mentis.) When I come back from visiting Dad, Marian never says, ‘How is he?’ or ‘Any better?’ She blames me for going in the first place. She blames me for repeatedly going on these pointless trips. She blames Dad for being a liability and she blames me for Dad’s being blameworthy. And she communicates this blame to the kids. I have even noticed that she sometimes fails to upbraid them when they talk about ‘Grandpa Loony’. I know what they are all thinking when I go off to see Dad every Wednesday or Sunday: they are thinking I go there just to get away from them.
Four-fifteen. I don’t have much time. I return Dad’s book to the shelf. I disconnect the television, carry it out to our car, and drive to the rental shop.
[10]
It was about three months after Dad’s breakdown that I first began to suspect that something strange was happening at work. I remember I had been to the hospital one Sunday afternoon. The doctor was there – Doctor Townsend, a tall, angular man with a breezy manner and glasses – and after my ‘chat’ with Dad he wanted to see me. He walked with me down the hospital drive to the gates, his tie flapping out of his white coat. ‘It’s been nearly two months, Mr Prentis … I have to be frank with you … We’ve made virtually no progress.…’ He held out a hand, as though to clasp my shoulder, but merely held it poised in the air. ‘There’s always a possibility – a remote one – that something you may say may succeed … Don’t give up, Mr Prentis,’ – he twisted the corner of his mouth into a smile – ‘the key might lie with you.’
And then, on the Monday morning, Quinn handed me the first of those inquiry dossiers, which he has been handing me from time to time ever since, in which the items have scarcely anything in common and seem to lead nowhere.
You may well ask, as this was the very first instance, why didn’t I simply take the matter up with Quinn? That is not such a simple question, and it begs the further one of my relations with Quinn. They had taken some odd turns in the weeks after Dad’s breakdown. I have said already that the first time I have known Quinn to be pleasant to me was last Monday when he mentioned my promotion. That was something of an exaggeration, I admit – though that’s not to say that pleasantness from Quinn isn’t a rarity. However, there was one brief occasion when Quinn was not only pleasant but positively sympathetic – and that was over the business of Dad.
It’s true, I never meant to ask for compassionate leave. I meant to soldier on and not even mention at the office that my Dad, a vigorous, active man in his fifties, had become a silent wreck. I meant to bear it nobly. I thought of how Dad himself had soldiered on, after Mum’s death.… But then – how do I begin to describe the shock of Dad’s breakdown? The misery of that evening when Marian and I rushed to the hospital and were shown this stranger lying drugged in a bed. No more scorn for my ‘police work’; no more cold-shouldering of Marian. An empty stare. That night I lay awake (Marian went fast to sleep – she dropped off, just like that, with her father-in-law lying in hospital). I got up and smoked a packet of cigarettes. I thought to myself: now it is your turn to be strong. But all the time the question kept repeating itself, like a little wave inside my skull: Why? Why?
And then in the Tube the next morning – you see the effect the Tube has – I gave in. My fellow passengers would have had their satisfaction that day – they’d have seen a man with his defences down. The first thing I did when I got into work was to go and see Quinn. And he was all understanding. ‘My dear chap – I’m so sorry. Yes, have the rest of the week off – take as much time as you like.’ He made me sit down. He sat opposite me in his leather chair. And I couldn’t help thinking that Dad had been found, the day before in his office, in his leather chair, which was bigger even than Quinn’s. There was a moment – just as I began to explain things – when Quinn’s eyes seemed to sharpen and brighten a little, like a doctor’s, who while he is listening to you describe your symptoms, suddenly becomes interested in your appearance, in the way you are talking. But his manner, like a good doctor’s too, was considerate and patient. I actually felt grateful for his concern (what sympathy could I get from Marian, who had never had any for Dad?). And, to tell you the truth, all that ‘dear chapping’ and ‘dear fellowing’, which in its old-fashioned way, might have been just glib lip-service, that comforted me more than anything. It made me think of the suave, chummy talk I used to hear outside the club-house when Dad and his friends came in from their golf for their drinks.…
But what happened after this? I took the rest of that week off. After my return to work, Quinn inquired every so often, in a perfectly friendly manner, after Dad. The ice was breaking; I seemed to have found favour. But then – after several weeks – his attitude began suddenly to harden. It was not just that he returned to his old self again; he became more severe, more tyrannical than ever before. The subject of Dad got dropped altogether; it became a sort of taboo. It was during this time that I began positively to feel that there was an evil streak in Quinn and it was directed specifically at me. Was all this a delusion brought about by my own unsettled state of mind? Or was it a consequence I ought to have foreseen? Had I made a mistake in letting Quinn peep so far into my private life? Wasn’t this just the sort of thing a man like him would seize upon? Had I been taken in by all those words of consolation and that plump, dimpled face – like the face of some complacent abbot?
I only knew that something odd was going on, and when that first jumbled dossier arrived on my desk, my immediate instinct was one of caution. All right, call it cowardice if you like. What if Quinn were baiting me? What if he were trying to tempt me into some hasty assumption that would catch me out? I responded judiciously. I pretended to chase up the contents of the files – or rather I genuinely looked for some hidden meaning behind the unrelated items. I wrote at the end of a rather garbled report: ‘the evidence is fragmentary and justifies no significant conclusions’ (my pompous style again) and I returned it to Quinn. No comment. But when, after another three weeks or so, I received a second dossier of a similar kind, I knew this was not a matter of some chance error
or quirk. I began to think twice about the files I had already occasionally, but without leaping to any conclusions, found missing, but which now I felt must be obscurely connected with these strange dossiers. Quinn was up to something. Perhaps it involved the whole department. But why was Quinn, as it were, letting me know about it? Why was he daring me to enter in on it – or expose it? I looked around at my colleagues for any signs that their suspicions had also been aroused or that they had been given similar inquiries to work on. But the papers I sometimes surreptitiously leafed through on their desks, their unchanged, unconstrained chatter in the pub at lunch-times, made me sure that I was alone. I began to draw apart from them at this time – from Vic and Eric, with whom I used to discuss marital ups and downs, plans for summer holidays – and no doubt they noticed it. But they knew vaguely what had happened to Dad and they put my reserve down to that.
I handled the second dossier in the same way as the first. I spread the items out on my desk and pretended to be engrossed. But I remember that while I was ‘busy’ at it I looked up once, and there was Quinn, at his glass panel, staring down, not at our office at large, but directly at me. He was wearing a black pin-stripe, with a small flower – a little pale yellow rose – in his lapel. I’d never seen Quinn wear a flower before; he wasn’t the sort of man to wear flowers – though quite often, after this, I noticed he wore one. When I looked up he didn’t even turn his head away till some seconds had passed. He had a fascinated look on his face; and I’d swear he was simply relishing my perplexity.
And another thing. It was at this time too that the rumour got around – it was one of those rumours that come down slowly from high places; it wasn’t given out by Quinn himself, though he never denied it – that Quinn would be retiring the next summer but one, when, so we learnt, he would be sixty-four. This was a new retirement scheme to allow fresh staff into higher positions. Quinn still had the option of working on till sixty-five – or even longer – if he wished. Naturally, I had an interest in this. There was a chance – a very slim and remote one – that I might be offered Quinn’s job, but this would depend almost entirely on Quinn’s own recommendation. I was now in the quandary which I have described already. If I challenged Quinn over the mysterious goings-on in the office, would that instantly ruin my promotion chances? Should I hold my tongue and knuckle under? Or was it conceivable that those mysterious goings-on (one couldn’t deny how they coincided with the retirement rumours) were some elaborate test of my initiative: if I didn’t take some stand about them would I then wreck my chances? And yet again, didn’t my duty lie outside the whole self-interested field of my promotion prospects? If I suspected something untoward in the department, shouldn’t I act promptly to denounce it? You hear about corruption in official places – about mismanagement, leaks of information. You hear all sorts of stories.
