‘Pray, do tell.’ Jacot smiled. He was enjoying his talk with this striking and intelligent young girl.
‘Well, as you know Scott experienced some strange weather on his way to the pole. Lots of people have put this down to whingeing but we now know that he was unlucky – March 1912 really was the coldest March. It was a big breakthrough when an American scientist called Susan Solomon, whose main interest was the ozone layer or rather the hole in it over the poles, explained all this in her 2001 book of that name. She used the temperatures gathered by both Amundsen and Scott and modern automatically gathered readings to show that Amundsen experienced comparatively warm temperatures. Of course he makes it to the pole six weeks before Scott which helped, but it’s clear that the temperatures experienced by Amundsen are at the warm edge of the mean whereas Scott’s are closer to the mean itself or slightly below. When you add it all up most of what Amundsen had to put up with was between minus ten and minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Scott’s party was fending off between minus twenty and minus thirty.’
‘But so what? If the two explorers experienced radically different temperatures surely it was just the luck of the draw.’
She smiled and looked up at him under her eyelashes. ‘It was warmer for Amundsen. Made it easier for him but also made it different in many other possibly significant ways. We have concentrated very much on what it must have felt like for the men and dogs and in Scott’s case the ponies. What effect it had on their discomfort, energy levels and above all with Scott on their intake of food. The colder it gets the more calories you need to walk and haul equipment. In the end Scott and his companions just ran out of calories. Rotten luck really – they were just a few square meals short. A bit more food and a bit more paraffin and they would have been home and dry – even with the ghastly weather they had to put up with. Remember they were only 11 miles from One Ton Depot. Eleven miles. Or in Cambridge terms a walk through Grantchester to Byron’s Pool and back twice. It must have been hard.’
In her account the expedition had come to life again. Jacot continued ‘To think it’s the centenary of Scott’s last expedition this year and here we are talking about some of the men involved as if it were current affairs. But back to Verney.’
She tilted her head back and took a long sip of the ice-cold Manzanilla. She uncrossed her legs and leant forward. ‘More Manzanilla please colonel.’
He took her glass and turned for the bottle.
‘Are you sure Scott was second to the Pole?’
It was an extraordinary thing to say and he nearly spilt the refilled glass of Manzanilla. Jacot laughed. ‘I bet you say that to all the boys – it’s a good chat-up line. But…’
‘All right. All right. Just messing about but I hope you will read our paper on Scott when it’s ready. I keep a copy close to hand on a little memory stick tucked away in a private place.’ She pointed coquettishly to her bra and laughed. ‘Back to Verney. He was an interesting man too.’
‘In what way?’ Jacot was alert now.
‘He was incredibly indiscreet about his intelligence work. I think he sensed I didn’t like him that much and certainly wasn’t interested in him in any other way. I think he told me stuff to jolly me along. It was a rarified form of flirting.’
‘Did you know anything about his family?’
‘Yes a bit. He was married and there are some grown up children. I think a boy and two girls. But he was a cold fish. He spoke of them with affection in the usual way but not with any great passion. He appeared neither uxorious nor over-interested in his children. What really fired him up was his career. I always thought making general was pretty good but he seemed determined to become an even bigger sort of general. In a way it was all-consuming for him with a little time off every now and again for some Antarctic studies.’
Her mobile pinged with a text message. She finished her sherry and stood up.
‘Listen, Colonel Jacot.’
‘Dan is easier.’
‘Listen Dan. I have an urgent appointment to go to. Academic stuff. Why don’t we reconvene another time? I was horrified by General Verney’s death. I hope I haven’t been rude about him. We got along OK. It’s just that he wasn’t very inspiring. Unlike you I don’t think there was anything untoward about it but I still want to help you get to the bottom of the whole thing.’
And with that she was gone. Jacot heard her light steps on the staircase and watched through the window as she crossed the court with long-legged strides. A young woman at the peak of her powers and attraction. She was perfect of her type. As ever it was a cause of joy – for a moment or two you felt close to the driving life force of humanity – hope, the future, the fun in the present – all the good things. Some of those who saw Nureyev at his peak told of a weird sense that at the top of some of his famous balletic leaps he seemed to almost hang in mid air defying gravity. Of course it was a trick of the eye or the senses. In the same way the beautiful and clever young seemed just for a moment exempt, free, not subject to mortality. In part it was their own obliviousness. In part an exhilarated wishful thinking by the observer. But as with Nureyev’s leaps there was a quick falling away that only multiplied the underlying melancholy.
‘Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.’
She was a golden girl for sure. At least she wasn’t thinking about coming to dust just now.
Jacot decided on more Manzanilla, lots more and some Mozart. Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice came through his iPod speakers. It was as if she was in the room. ‘Ruhe sanft, meine holdes Leben’. Sleep soundly my beloved. Zaida’s ravishing lullaby for grown ups lifted his melancholy and soothed the long buried guilt re-awakened by his earlier interview with Jones.
My, young Charlotte Pirbright was a head-turner. It was still not late. Time for a little more sherry. His mobile pinged with a text message. Lady Nevinson’s driver would pick him up at King’s Cross at 2230 – she was working late.
VII
National Security Adviser’s Office,
10 Downing Street, Whitehall, London SW1
The car drove at top speed from the station and Jacot arrived in Lady Nevinson’s Number 10 office a few minutes before 11 o’clock. He expected her to quiz him urgently about Cambridge. Instead she kicked off with ‘Do you remember in the 1970s those vigilante films starring Charles Bronson?’ Lady Nevinson seemed to be in a beneficent and chatty mood and the whisky would follow soon thought Jacot.
He replied, ‘Yes, of course. They were a huge hit at school. Michael Winner directed. Bronson was also in those other staples of preparatory school life in the 1960s and 1970s The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen.’
She picked up the decanter, poured two glasses of whisky and slid one across her desk to Jacot. ‘Winner is mainly known as a restaurant critic these days. People forget how powerful his films were in their day. You are younger than me Jacot and so you probably can’t remember the sense of breakdown that the adult, or recently become adult, world experienced in the early and mid 1970s. Bit like today really. People had little faith in the system and so vigilante films of all kinds touched a chord. Shame he never got round to directing a Bond film. It might have been fun.’
Jacot had known and worked for Lady Nevinson for nearly two years. They shared many attitudes and got on well. But they were not intimates or even friends. Curiously, since the start of the General Verney affair they had grown closer. They were both in on the same secret. Indeed, if in truth she wasn’t sharing Jacot’s findings with anyone else or rather she wasn’t keeping the prime minister in the loop, they were co-conspirators of a sort. He realised that he didn’t know much about her beyond her entry in Who’s Who.
‘I don’t know how they went down at your dingy prep school but they went down a storm in diplomatic circles even in far-off lands. I read French at Newnham and spent a year at the Sorbonne as part of my degree and so I spoke and speak it fluently. I passed the Foreign Office exam rather well.’ She look
ed up at him. ‘As you would expect.’
Jacot smiled. He wasn’t at all sure that she had been making a joke. Getting to know someone was one thing, understanding their sense of humour quite another. Like many senior civil servants he had met she was proud of academic achievements long ago. The first class honours degree and the high place in the civil service exam still mattered to her in her early 60s.
Lady Nevinson continued, ‘I spent a few months in London and was looking forward to my first posting which I assumed would be Paris. I had it all worked out. But my first posting was, inevitably looking back, Viet Nam. In the Seventies I spent much of my time in Indo-China. We watched Winner’s films at the embassy. Oh those old film nights with a slightly cranky projector and intervals when the reels were changed. The embassy servants would bring drinks and the most wonderful cocktail eats – small chow we called them. Every time I see Michael Winner on TV or advertising something the films and the memories come right back.
‘I was posted as a young Third Secretary in Saigon in 1972 just after Cambridge. Had a great time. Most of it in the famous Continental Hotel, where all the journalists and senior American officers congregated. ‘Hung out’ they called it. Some young officers too. The most glamorous were not the soldiers but the US Marines. They had an impressive swagger and nice manners to boot. They were also fighting a different style of war to the US Army, much more the sort of thing our troops had tried in Malaya some years before. Anyway, they seemed to have thought about war a little whereas many of the army officers seemed obsessed with ‘free fire zones’ and Agent Orange. It really was like something out of Graham Greene. I was young and clever and not bad looking. Things were great.
‘And then the Americans began to withdraw and the whole thing fell apart rather quickly in April 1975. I had been dispatched up country to see what was happening and got back too late to be evacuated. I was lucky to get back to Saigon at all in fact. I had been in Da Nang which fell pretty easily and had then got caught up in the hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring south. There was panic and despair. I got swept along to a small town called Xuan Loc where the South Vietnamese army made an extraordinary last stand. The South Vietnamese infantry division that held the town for eleven days was despised by the Americans for its poor discipline and cowboy attitude. In the end it fought with astonishing energy to the end. Few others did. They were charming too and made sure I got out well before the town fell and was transported safely to Saigon. I shall remember till the day I die saying good-bye to them. They didn’t know where their families were. They weren’t especially enamoured of the South Vietnamese regime. Many of them were personally disreputable, black marketeers and so forth. But they loathed communism and would rather go down fighting than live under it. Some of them got away in the end but not many.’
She looked wistfully out of the window overlooking Downing Street. ‘By the time I tipped back up at the embassy our ambassador had already left for the airport. Famously, he travelled in a silver Jaguar and the pictures were broadcast across the world. The British Ambassador leaving was felt to be a key moment. It was my fault. I wasn’t frightened but I felt on my own and wondered what would become of me. A young French diplomat, Gilles Navarre, who was a close friend, came up trumps. To be fair the Americans would have got me out. They are good like that. But I certainly felt safe once I had reached the French Embassy.
‘I always felt a little sorry for the Yanks. They had a rough time of it – 58,000 of their young men were killed – they got little thanks for trying. Many were from poor backgrounds. Needless to say urban blacks were ‘over-represented’ as the modern politically correct jargon would have it. Basically, the poor blacks and poor whites did most of the fighting. Some were volunteers, others conscripted. Most tried to do their duty. Some were extraordinarily brave. There were a few shirkers no doubt but they were rare in the front line. Until the late 1960s the army and the marines were impressive fighting forces – well led, reasonably motivated. I liked the GIs and their young officers up to a certain rank were good and cared about their men. Or at least the ones I met.
‘The further away from Saigon you got the better the American soldiers were. It was in Saigon itself that I developed an abiding dislike of the senior American military, their State Department and above all the CIA. Everyone in air-conditioned offices and pressed uniforms or smart Brooks Brothers suits working out how to claim extra allowances and having a good time. All revelling in the fact that they were at war. Except they weren’t. They were enjoying the prestige and appurtenances of war without ever risking their own necks. Indeed they were sending young men into harm’s way and asking them to do stuff that they had never had to do. Obviously not the senior officers who had fought in the Second World War and Korea, but most of them hadn’t.’
‘So you don’t like staff officers either Lady Nevinson’, interjected Jacot with a smile. ‘The Blackadder effect you might call it. They are necessary you know. I am one technically. Most of the really big cock-ups in war are as a result of poor staff work. If Captain Nolan or Lord Cardigan had been to a proper staff college we wouldn’t have had the Charge of the Light Brigade.’
‘Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.’ She almost blushed. ‘And I loved all things French – including the men although some of them were a pain. Later I spent some time in Bonn and then Berlin. I found I liked and admired the Germans too. Our disagreements with them seem so strange now.’ She looked at Jacot ‘I had forgotten to English public school boys the Germans remain something out of a pantomime.’
‘Actually I am a great admirer and speak a little of the language after three years in the Rhine Army.’
She continued unperturbed. ‘All in all it meant I never fell under the American spell. You saw the television pictures.’
‘Yes I did as a teenager living in Hong Kong. And we realized all was not going well as our flights out from school took longer the further south the North Vietnamese penetrated. I can remember in the early days the BOAC pilots pointing out the site of Da Nang which is somewhere in the middle. By the end we were taking the long route round the South China Sea.’
She poured more whisky for them both, got up from her desk and walked to her office windows again. ‘I’ve seen what it looks like – leaving in a hurry and beaten or too exhausted to carry on. Saigon was a frightening place in the final days and hours. Weird things happen. The world gets turned upside down. For instance money became absolutely worthless – even dollars, or perhaps especially dollars. The only currency that was any use at buying a passage on a boat or an aircraft was gold. Krugerrands were popular. We Brits have done it ourselves time and time again. We got out of India just in time. Palestine. Too many places, culminating in our scuttle from Aden. As the helicopter carrying the last British governor of Aden out to a waiting warship lifted off from the grounds of government house the rebels burst in and began looting it. And yet we cannot help going back. It’s in the military, political and diplomatic DNA.’
She was in full philosophical flow. Jacot sipped his whisky. It had been a long day but he admired her and respected her judgment, mostly.
‘How do you extricate a lost army? Nobody really tried to get our people out of Singapore in late 1941. They were left to defeat and their fate. At least after that disaster we didn’t have the generals appearing on television every five minutes telling us how the battle for Singapore was a ‘journey’. I bet that’s the sort of thing the Roman generals, unworthy descendants of Caesar, were saying just before their game was up. “Emperor, the defence of Rome is a journey.” Colonel Jacot where do you get these people?’
‘To be fair, Lady Nevinson I think the man who talked about “a journey” was an Air Marshal.’
‘Well, the Romans were lucky that they didn’t have an air force.’
‘Lady Nevinson the government which we serve has decided that we are going to stay in Afghanistan until 2015. I understand it’s probably now going to be 2014. It’s a demo
cratic decision taken by parliament. “Period” as our American allies would say. It’s above my pay grade I know but whatever anyone might feel about the way the current government does its business no one can say that it’s not keen on getting us out of Afghanistan. It appears to come from the very top.’
She was certainly in a strange mood but he had some sympathy. If you were a cog in the machine as Jacot was you wrote your paper or gave your advice and went home for supper or out to a party. And when it was time to sleep, you slept well enough. But if you were at the top there was never any rest and the implications and ramifications of your advice must haunt your off duty hours. In a way it was not so bad for politicians. Huge egos and extraordinary drive are par for their course. But it was different for Mandarins. It must be particularly hard for the individuals at the pinnacle of the intelligence establishment. Worse for Lady Nevinson.
‘Everyone wants the troops out now. My God I am happy not to have sons.’
‘But we don’t have conscription.’
‘No, Colonel Jacot but I have some understanding of the male psyche. The thirst for glory is a powerful motivator. I saw it in Saigon. I know I have just been rude about the whole American military establishment and made fun of the legions of desk warriors in their air-conditioned portakabins. But many of the young officers I met wanted to go to war, fighting in the Mekong Delta was integral to their view of themselves and their masculinity. Every generation is the same and British or rather English youth is especially prone to this. My view is that it is a hangover from Empire lingering in the English public schools. Do you know Jacot I went up to your old school Harrow a few years back to give a talk on diplomacy? Nice dinner, nice boys, nice setting. But the room I spoke in appeared to be a mausoleum to the war dead of both wars but particularly the Great War.’
The Falklands Intercept Page 6
