by MARY HOCKING
‘You never mentioned the incident to him afterwards?’
‘No. I never talked to him about his work.’
‘And did he talk to you about your work? Which is also of a confidential nature?’
‘Never!’ She was stung by the suggestion that he would have used her and responded more vehemently than might have been thought necessary by people concerned with facts rather than emotions.
‘But you talked generally, no doubt, about politics and public figures who might be known to you both?’
Panic was rising up her digestive system in little bubbles which exploded at the back of her throat. She was having to do a lot of swallowing. ‘Not really. I try to avoid that. And Angus wasn’t given to expressing his opinions.’
‘But people give their sympathies away in small things. Most of us have some idea of our friends’ political affiliations.’
‘We talked about music mostly. It was what we had in common.’ She had said this so often, to protect herself from the curiosity of friends who wondered how far things had gone between them. Now, it seemed, it was the simple truth, a brief meeting of the minds, desolate of emotion. Or perhaps not even that. A congenial companion with whom to attend a concert! She would have preferred this rakish policeman to suspect her of being a high-class tart with more intimate matters to relate than tone variations in Mozart.
In all this time, because she knew where the questions must be leading, she had answered them as though it was natural that they should be put to her. This was a mistake. She realised this, but, threatened as she was by the volatility of her digestive processes, she could not trust herself to challenge the policeman.
He said, ‘The disappearance of a man engaged in intelligence work is a serious matter, as you will understand, and inevitably gives rise to certain conjectures. What would you say to the idea that Mr Drummond might for some time past have been in the pay of a foreign power?’
‘He couldn’t have been!’ Even as she said it, she knew it sounded more like a wish than a statement of belief. What could one believe about Angus? Elusive, self-doubting as he was, he had little prepared his friends to protest his innocence. She said, ‘He wasn’t positive enough about anything to do that.’
‘I find that a rather strange statement. Miss Kimberley. A man who is not positive may be open to conviction, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I didn’t mean positive in the sense of not being certain. I meant that he was rather negative in some ways.’
‘So, in your judgement, there would be nothing he would hold to – for want of a better phrase?’
The phrase was in fact so close to what she thought that she was dismayed and could not think how to answer.
‘I get the impression. Miss Kimberley, that although you are very upset, you are not surprised.’
‘I can’t take it in. Secret equipment and people in the pay of foreign powers! How can I be surprised? These things don’t happen – not to ordinary people.’
He rubbed his hands together and then held them up in front of him, examining the palms. ‘Your father is at the Home Office, I believe?’
‘My father!’ She sat up even straighter, suddenly quite imperious. ‘You are surely not suggesting. . . .’
‘No, Miss Kimberley, I am not suggesting anything.’ He noted with amusement the difference in tone when she referred to her father. Here was a person about whom Miss Kimberley entertained no doubts. ‘I merely wondered if Mr Drummond often came here and chatted to your father.’
‘He didn’t, as a matter of fact.’
‘Did your father not like him?’
‘It had nothing to do with my father. Angus never . . . I think perhaps he didn’t want to be involved with my parents.’ Imperiousness petered away. ‘We weren’t engaged. We had certain interests in common . . . music and . . . well, mostly music’ I had so little, she thought, and now I am having to tell them how little I had. She clenched her hands and wished that she was a whore.
They asked a few more questions. When they left, he said, ‘We shall have to see you again, Miss Kimberley. In the meantime, if you remember anything which may be of help to us, I would be grateful if you would telephone me. Remember that he may be ill and it is important to find him before he comes to any harm.’ He handed her a card with a name and telephone number written on it. ‘I appreciate that Mr Drummond may not have seen your parents very often but, nevertheless, we shall wish to talk to them.’
Her mother, when informed of what had taken place, had been incredulous, distressed, and then angry. But it was her father’s response that Irene remembered. He had stood stiff and straight as a soldier, so unlike his usual stance; then he had stretched out his arms – he who made so few gestures – and said, ‘Oh, my precious child!’ When she looked into his face it seemed, even then, that some internal spasm had frozen the features leaving only the eyes to speak his pain and bewilderment. Her mother talked about it, endlessly starting sentences which she never finished, as was her habit. But her father had not given himself time to come gradually to full realisation, he had absorbed it in one instant before the defence mechanism of brain and body could be summoned to his aid.
And the worst thing of all, she thought as she walked towards the Imminghams’ house, is that none of us believed in Angus enough to doubt it.
They gathered round her in the sitting-room, Louise, Guy and Alice, and Ben, who was staying the night. She blurted out, ‘Angus has disappeared. They think he’s on the way to Russia.’
They were incredulous. Louise said, ‘I wouldn’t have believed he had it in him,’ which seemed to suggest that she had rapidly convinced herself.
Ben said, ‘We don’t know that he has done anything of the sort. He may have gone for a walk and fallen down a well, or over a cliff. Or simply had a breakdown. I would think him quite a likely candidate for a breakdown.’
‘You must have been with him just before he disappeared,’ Louise said. ‘How did he seem to you?’
‘He was a little different.’
‘You are probably imagining that,’ Ben said.
‘No.’ She had thought something had kindled in him and had gone home excited and hopeful. ‘However major the work, Angus’s enjoyment was usually expressed in a minor key. But this time I felt his pleasure, as though the music went through him.’ She appealed to Louise. ‘You know the way it can?’
‘Dance up and down the spine? Yes.’
‘Yes. That was it, exactly.’
When she left, Alice walked with her as far as the main road. ‘Irene, he didn’t say anything when he left you?’
‘No. But when I turned into the house, he was still standing on the edge of the square, looking at me.’
Alice thought that most fellows would watch their girls safely into the house.
‘You think he’s gone, don’t you, Irene?’
‘Yes. He may not get away with it. They may have got on to him too quickly. In which case, I suppose he could still be somewhere in this country, hiding . . .’
‘But why should he do such a thing?’
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about that in the last few days. Although he was . . . is . . . so reserved, he’s not a strong personality. He’s not like Ben, who will battle his way through his difficulties. Angus tends to embrace his and sink down deeper and deeper. I believe he had a need of a structure which could hold him. It would have to be something fairly uncompromising. He couldn’t cope with complexity. I suppose Russia may have seemed to be the answer – much more tidy than democracy.’
‘He can’t have thought their system was better than ours!’
‘From the way he sometimes talked, I think now that he did believe that. The further you are away, the greener the grass, and the less you see the weeds.’ She looked down the lighted avenue towards the bright ring of lights where the trolley buses turned round at Shepherd’s Bush Green. ‘And yet . . . it could simply be that he felt he would break away from his father at last.’
Irene said, ‘Oh, Alice, whatever reason he had for doing it, he’s made the most awful mistake! More than anyone I know, Angus needs his anonymity. He’s sacrificed that now. He’ll be under the microscope for the rest of his life.’
‘Would you have gone with him, if he had asked you?’
‘And killed my parents?’ It was a choice she could not bear to contemplate. He had not asked it of her, but she would ask it of herself until time and other griefs blurred his memory.
Alice was used to demonstrating affection to her family, but not to her friends. Something, however, seemed to be called for now. So she pecked Irene’s wan cheek and said, ‘I am so terribly upset for you. I shall be thinking of you.’
Irene said, ‘Yes, I know you will,’ and turned away abruptly.
Alice watched her friend walking away with a feeling of guilt. Not for the first time she was aware of how unprepared the emotions so often seem for the big occasion, how they lag behind the mind. She wanted to experience an immediate and deep sympathy for Irene, but the truth was that at this moment she felt cheated of the opportunity to tell Irene in some detail about the mutual discoveries which she and Ben had made. As for the affair of Angus, she could not rid herself of a sense of importance at being involved, however peripherally, in a matter of national concern; and she was awed by the thought that she actually knew someone capable of such monstrous conduct. But not so awed as to prevent her from imagining how this material might one day be incorporated in a work of fiction. As she walked slowly back to the house, she indulged her curiosity about Angus – his past and future movements. She was, in fact, still very much in the world of John Buchan, and although she could see that Irene was suffering, she thought she would soon get over it and be herself again; and that it would all be for the best, because Angus could not have been good for her.
The others were still occupied with the matter when she joined them. Louise was scornful and said she had never thought much of Angus anyway, describing him as insipid and standoffish. Ben was irritable. Guy was silent.
On one matter they were all agreed; although none cared to voice a reaction so unworthy, they thought it a pity that they had had to find this out now, just when they had returned from a nice autumn break.
‘We’ll clear up in the morning,’ Louise said. ‘I can’t put my mind to anything.’
Supper was a tired meal with long silences interspersed with spasmodic exclamations of non-belief and speculation. As they were preparing to go to their rooms, Ben said, ‘She’ll lose her job, poor girl.’
‘Lose her job!’ Alice exclaimed.
‘She works in the Cabinet Office, doesn’t she? She can’t expect to stay there after becoming involved in this affair. The people at the top may escape punishment, but not those lower down the scale.’
‘But she isn’t involved.’
‘She’s involved by association. She was his girl friend – and since guilt of one kind is soon translated into general misbehaviour, a lot of people will believe there was more to the relationship than friendship. Even if they don’t believe it, they will have to allow for the possibility.’
‘So what?’ Louise flared up. ‘It’s not a crime to sleep together. They would hardly have been whispering national secrets into each other’s ears!’
‘But they didn’t sleep together,’ Alice protested. ‘I’m sure of that.’
‘How can you be sure? And what business is it of their employers?’
‘For goodness sake don’t go round talking to anyone like that, Louise,’ Ben said. ‘You won’t do Irene any good.’
‘I don’t need to be told how to behave by you, Ben Sherman.’
‘Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not making a moral issue of this. I don’t care how many people Irene has slept with. All I am saying is that it’s important Angus wasn’t one of them.’
‘Irene isn’t like that,’ Alice said.
‘I didn’t say . . .’
‘On the contrary,’ she shouted, ‘You’ve been doing all the saying.’ They made their peace, sitting on the stairs while Louise and Guy did the washing-up. But there was a cold area somewhere inside Alice which the glow of physical pleasure failed to reach. As she made her way up the stairs after she had parted from Ben, she was thinking of Irene. The stairs seemed steeper than she had remembered and the muscles she had ill-used on the Chilterns protested. Irene enjoyed her job, and her parents were so proud of her. She sat on her bed and listened to the noises in the house dwindling into silence, and she remembered that other time when she had sat alone while her parents tried to come to terms with the fact of Louise’s pregnancy. Her father, so proud of his daughters, had been broken by this discovery.
It is all going to happen again, she thought incredulously. This terrible breaking-up process, when will it end? Is nothing safe and secure? Not, it seemed, as long as one had beliefs of any kind. To believe in anything, or anyone, is to launch oneself onto a dark sea. As for love, that is the ultimate hazard. She lay thinking of Ben. Their love was so new, and, wonderful though that was in itself – the freshness, the never-to-be-recaptured excitement – they could not yet give each other that sustenance which comes after years of joy and troubles shared.
She could not sleep, and at one o’clock decided to make herself a cup of tea. As she went down the stairs she was surprised to see a light beneath the kitchen door. Her heart beat faster, hoping she would find Ben there. But it was Guy who greeted her when she entered the room, i couldn’t sleep. I have bad nights sometimes. Would you like tea?’
Alice sat at the kitchen table. She looked at Guy in the dressing-gown that Louise had made out of an old travelling rug, the material of which had not been sufficient to contain his long frame. His pyjamas had bunched up in the narrow sleeves so that his bare forearms protruded, freckled and fuzzed with golden hair. His toes insecurely gripped sandals which flip-flopped as he moved. She noted that his state of undress aroused in her no curiosity, only a sense of his defencelessness. She was touched by the care with which he observed the rites of tea-making in which Louise had instructed him, and which she, in turn, had learnt from her Cornish grandparents. She thought of Granny Tippet, alone now in the house in Falmouth looking out over the Carrick Roads.
Guy poured hot milk for himself and tea for Alice; then he, too, sat at the table. Alice said, ‘How could he? After all the risks he took for his country, how could he have betrayed it?’
Guy frowned down at his cup, waiting for the milk to cool. ‘You start fighting for something, knowing exactly where you are and what you believe, and you end up not so clear about things as you were when you started. At least, that’s my experience.’
Alice, who had not thought of Guy as having this kind of experience, was surprised. ‘I always thought you had a good war.’
The remark had something unintentionally dismissive about it which stung him. He said, ‘The war in the desert was fairly straightforward – or so it seemed to me. But the Italian campaign was another matter. Something happened there that I haven’t talked to anyone about before.’
Apparently there was to be no end to the revelations of the night. Alice composed herself to listen.
‘We had to hold a farmhouse. I was never quite sure why. A handful of us. While we were there two men turned up – Partisans. One of them said he had something he wanted to show us. He took me and two soldiers up into the hills, to a cave. The Germans had rounded up all the people in one of the villages – they were supposed to have harboured the Partisans; they took them up to this ca
ve and shot them all. The bodies were lying there, rotting. Men, women, and children.’
Alice had heard similar stories, but had not met anyone who had actually witnessed such a scene, it must have been awful,’ she said, although at the moment she could not take in this particular awfulness.
‘The odd thing was that I didn’t feel what . . . well, what one might expect.’
Alice, who was not sure what was to be expected, stirred her tea and tried to look wise.
‘I didn’t feel angry so much as . . . a sort of horror at myself for being there. I felt as if I was a part of it. Ever since then, I’ve had times when I have felt like those people who go to the police and confess to crimes they haven’t committed. I suppose none of us can be sure what we might do, given the circumstances . . .’
‘Never, Guy! Not you, of all people! Not children!’
‘No, it’s stupid, I know.’ He gave his familiar embarrassed laugh. But after a moment, he went on, ‘You can never be sure, though, can you? About yourself. At least, I can’t. There was that kid who used to come to the house with James. You must remember him – Harry Ince. One of those unpleasant, manipulative children, and a thoroughly bad influence.’ He sounded rather priggish as he talked of the child. ‘He was the kind of little perisher who goaded one into anger. Louise said she had to keep a strong grip on herself, or she would have clouted him. But, of course, we had the answer to that situation; if we had chosen to exercise our authority we could have refused to have him in the house. Only that seemed to be making rather too much of it . . .’ It seemed he might be going to explore the safer question of the rights and wrongs of such forbearance, but he stopped short. For a time he sat looking down at the wrinkled skin forming on the top of the milk. Then he said, ‘Those men were soldiers. The Italians had been their allies and then they turned against them. Perhaps some of their comrades had been killed by the Partisans. They were fighting a running battle in Italy, being driven back all the time. It was the end for them. I had heard some of them talk when they were taken prisoner. They didn’t regard the Italians as human, they thought they were vermin.’
