The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  They went on down the hill, stopping just before Admiral’s Walk, where Kudashkin, posing as a visiting American academic on sabbatical, had rented a basement apartment in a handsome Georgian house. ‘I’ll leave you here, then,’ he said. ‘Use the ordinary post if anything fresh turns up on your side.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  They didn’t shake hands, just drifted apart, immediately becoming strangers in the leafy street. The Resident watched Kudashkin go – the academic in old spectacles, hands in pockets, the casual stride, a big-boned easy figure with an air of savoir vivre – the thin fair hair and deep-cut features giving him the look of an old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon: a man in a crumpled linen suit, from Australia or South Africa perhaps, like thousands of other similar colonial visitors in London that hot summer.

  His cover was fine, the Resident thought. But he was curious once more, seeing him disappear among the chestnut trees along the Walk, why Centre had sent over such an obviously senior officer, as simply a hit man it seemed, or at least to do a job which, given time, he could easily have handled himself. Finding out what had happened to Lindsay Phillips was simply a matter of time and routine, the Resident thought, and he resented this critical interference from on high.

  *

  The flowers bloomed heavily in the long tents, their perfume exhausted in the moist air, saturated now with a smell of trampled grass and bleached canvas. People shoved their way in from the stark glare outside, already sweating at ten o’clock, before struggling around the exhibits with vehement mania.

  I had come inside to pass the time, since neither of the two women had been at the ‘Glenalyth Heather’ stand on the central thoroughfare half an hour before. But now that I wanted to get out again I could hardly move.

  A woman trod on my foot. ‘Excuse me!’ she said, outraged. A Japanese couple, the little man focusing a Nikon carefully on a Begonia Grandiflora, were quietly toppled over the ropes into the Belgian house plants stand.

  Someone started to jab my shoulder vigorously. I’d had enough. ‘Excuse me!’ I said, turning.

  It was Rachel, her mother pressed in behind her, almost lost in the crowd.

  ‘Hello! It is you, I was sure –’ she shouted before the surge of people took her away from me like a tide. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she asked when she was pushed back again. ‘Are you with someone? Come on out – it’s impossible here.’

  Rachel’s face was caught before me, close to me, held still in the vice of the crowd for a moment, set like a dark cameo against the splash of scarlet colour in a bank of flowers behind her. Pinpricks of moisture glittered on her skin. A faint rose lipstick exactly filled her bow-shaped lips. Nothing moved. The sounds in the tent were turned off. Then the film started again. She was pushed away from me and I moved towards the exit behind her. But that instant was enough to set the intimate shapes of her face against my memory of her and re-create the whole person afresh: the marks in her skin, the deep-set eyes on either side of the too-straight nose, the flurry of thin curls round her brow. I saw these for less than a moment, against the crowded confusion of flowers and people all about her, yet they had the same effect on me as if I’d gazed on her, sitting still in front of me in a deserted room, for an hour. A second can give one a deeper insight into someone than an hour’s steady gaze – for there, in the unexpected cast, the surprised moment, the half-open lips, the real person speaks. With language and time we can all pretend otherwise.

  I greeted Madeleine outside, before we found ourselves caught in a queue for the conveniences and moved away once more.

  ‘Peter!’

  There was surprise and enthusiasm in her voice and yet a sharpness in it too that I’d not remembered, and her smile was a thing produced, set up on fragile supports, a play that would not run long. Her eyes had not the natural depth of Rachel’s – yet with the strain, and the tears I suppose, of her loss, and the disguise of mascara, they looked deeper now.

  Where Rachel tended to run amok in her life, Madeleine, I remembered, favoured restraints. Yet lacking Rachel’s profligate outlets, she had a greater hoard of emotion than her daughter. Like her husband’s bees, she stored up rich feelings: a familial honey which she offered to those closest to her in small samples. Sometimes in the past I thought she craved a wider market for these gifts. Yet, if she was frustrated, this never appeared in her manner in which, most of all, she proved how much she was herself. Madeleine possessed herself – not professionally, though she helped with the business management of their honey farm – but in matters of her real temperament, the course of life, the fate of her soul. And in these things one felt she had rarely denied either her will or her spirit. There had been, I remembered, something of a bright crusader in Madeleine – a crusader in some visionary cause which she wished to recruit you to, her face suddenly turned young and gold and sharp as frost under her ash coloured hair.

  But now, always so young to me as a child (and she was, after all, a second wife to Lindsay, a dozen or more years junior to him), her face had aged in sadness, and given her an equality with her husband, as I’d remembered him. She had become, in losing him, his contemporary.

  We walked away from the crowded tents towards a display of garden furniture, the three of us chatting brokenly, exchanging odd notes of greeting.

  ‘I’m sorry about Lindsay,’ I said at last.

  Madeleine spotted a luxuriously upholstered garden swing seat and now she sat down on it suddenly, testing the cushions, pushing the bench to and fro delicately with her long legs. She didn’t reply and I thought I had been wrong to remind her of her loss. But then she looked up at me from beneath the wide brim of her crisp linen hat, patting the place beside her, and I sat down next her while Rachel stood in front of us playing with the tassels on the awning.

  ‘Peter, it’s so nice to see you! Such a surprise. I know, yes. We don’t know, we simply don’t know what’s happened. But thank you. And let’s not think about now. Let’s hear about you – what are you up to here? It’s years since we heard anything of you.’

  She narrowed her eyes, looking at me with concern. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I rather dropped out of life. I was in jail, you know …’

  ‘Yes. We learnt that.’ She paused and Rachel took up the running, bending down now on her haunches, confronting us both.

  ‘We thought you still were in jail,’ she said brightly, without the care of her mother’s voice, but with the fascinated curiosity that a child displays in hearing of some disaster. She looked at me closely, a smile waiting its cue all round her eyes. ‘A jailbird with arrows all over you – running the library, I suppose?’

  She’d lost no time in starting to tease – taking my seriousness up again and seeming to stamp it, this time, with the final punishment of prison. Yet I didn’t mind. Rachel’s great quality was her almost complete lack of indifference: she cared more with her rudeness than others do with sweet words and the only thing I’d ever come to fear in her was an expected response.

  ‘They let me out four years ago,’ I said. ‘I was…’ I hesitated. ‘I was framed.’

  The word was so far removed from my previous life with both of them that it seemed meaningless to me now, a hieroglyph in the language of some vicious world that I had been part of for many years but which now, like some time traveller, I had escaped from, returning successfully to an earlier, almost idyllic civilisation which surrounded me just then in the shape of two women: one pushing lightly on a garden swing, the other gazing at me; the first in a cool dress and fragile hat, softening the marks of pain, whom one wanted to help now from her retreat at any cost; and the other, cheeky and surprised, bent over the ground, swaying on her haunches, as if about to spring, haphazardly, on a world all round her full of tempting choice.

  I was surprised at Rachel’s air of happy fancy that morning. For it was her world, surely, as much as her mother’s, which had been brutally circumscribed by their loss. Rachel had loved her father unwisely and too well – and s
o had never been able to see me as more than a permanent lover, a temptation on the outskirts of her life, which had been my problem: legitimacy with her, I had thought then, would have been an easy substitute for maturity. Yet she may that morning, I suppose, since her relationship with her father was unrealistic, have decided to miss him in an equally inappropriate manner – with a touch of madness rather than conventional tears.

  ‘Come, let’s have some coffee,’ Madeleine said. She turned to me. ‘Peter? We’ve got a big thermos. You’re free?’

  I nodded. I was certainly free then, with no thought of Basil Fielding, not even a ghost now from that ugly world I had escaped from.

  Billy, the manager of the honey farm, together with an assistant, dealt with enquiries in the front of the small exhibition stand while we three sipped coffee on stools among a mass of bee-keeping equipment at the back. I set my cup on a galvanised honey extractor, price £58, plus VAT, and brought the two women up to date on some of my life: Durham jail, the disasters of New York, the end of things with the KGB in Cheltenham five years previously and the subsequent sherry dreams of Egypt lost in the Cotswolds. It was not an encouraging story. And I realised then how, for Madeleine at least, it might have been a story something like her husband’s. Intelligence work, based as it is on the possible truth only through certain deceit, can never be really encouraging. And though Lindsay, of course, had always been ‘doing something in the Foreign Office’, now I knew better, and I wondered if Madeleine would confirm this for me. She did.

  ‘Did you know that was Lindsay’s work – the sort of thing you’ve been doing?’ she asked.

  And there was the first opportunity for lying. ‘I used to wonder,’ I said, still trying to keep a foothold on the truth with them.

  ‘Yes,’ she went on. ‘Which of course makes us think it was to do with that, his … his disappearance.’

  She took to the word hesitantly, with a kind of feigned surprise, as though he were a conjurer at a children’s party who had disappeared in the midst of an astonishing trick, but was there all the same, behind a curtain or mirror, and would show himself again any moment. Lindsay was for her, I could see – even in absence – an ever-present air which encapsulated her, a warm caul which she never wished to be expelled from. The almost childishly eager white-haired man with the half-smile I’d remembered was there next to Madeleine then, at that very moment – fully fledged in spirit, hovering on the brink of our discussion, a apt comment on the tip of his tongue – there, as a comfort to her, in everything except flesh and blood.

  ‘How did he disappear?’ I asked. ‘On intelligence business?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Madeleine dismissed the idea as if it had never happened. ‘I was never really part of his life in that way. A lot of people came up and talked to me – looked everywhere – but I couldn’t help them. He kept that side of his life mostly separate from me, except that I knew he was doing it.’

  ‘Naturally, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘But it wasn’t natural,’ Rachel interrupted scornfully. ‘That was the problem: living two lives like that. No wonder something happened one day …’ Her voice trailed off.

  Rachel looked at me, her blackberry eyes surprised and angry. Then her focus changed and she looked right through me, into a void. For her Lindsay had truly gone then and was not lurking behind the beehives at the edge of the stall.

  ‘Anyway, Mummy, you knew more than that about his work. Don’t be so dozy about it. You knew.’

  ‘Not exactly what he did in London. I didn’t.’ Madeleine changed tack now, became roused, the flash of the crusader that I remembered coming into her eyes again. I could see the two women had argued things in this way recently – and could equally see that nothing had been resolved. How could it? The deceits implicit in Lindsay’s game are often immeasurable, even to experts. What could a familial love, even so strong as theirs, bring to deciphering them? Yet the two women wouldn’t know this. Indeed just the opposite: they would have tried to use their love as a key, for they were part of a biblical tradition, a world of old fashioned virtues; in Rachel’s case a large house in Perthshire, a small moorland church, where she and her ancestors before her had learnt over many generations that it was exactly this quality of disinterested love, and not any aptitude for clinical investigation, which would answer the most awkward questions. Love alone unbolts the dark, they would both have thought – however dark and impenetrable. But probably not this dark, I thought just then: not Lindsay’s dark.

  ‘What do you think?’ Rachel suddenly confronted me, her coffee forgotten, and Madeleine looked carefully at me as well, a huge query in her face, and I could see Basil’s plan taking vague shape in both their expressions.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, trying to deter them. ‘What do your friends think?’

  ‘Like us – what can they think? You knew our friends – the Thompsons, the McAulays. What could they know about Intelligence, about agents and spies?’ Madeleine bit these last words out with a touch of sad derision, like a nanny reproving an older child, still playing with tin soldiers.

  I remembered these country neighbours at Glenalyth: the Thompsons (he was a solicitor in Perth) and the new rich McAulays who had to do with whisky and lived in the grand Hall near Glenalyth, where I’d gone to children’s dances with Rachel: dreamy, tippling, sad Mrs McAulay who had passed quite away in a daze from strong malt one evening. As Basil had hinted, such good people would know nothing of these clandestine matters – and more, would have scorned the whole business if they had.

  How far Lindsay had removed himself, I fully realised now, from the consensus of his background, his family and his Scottish neighbours – for whom, as he had to me, he must always have appeared as the best and the brightest of the good soldiers: Marlborough and Merton Colleges, the Foreign Office in the thirties – Rome, Paris, Vienna – a Captain in the Argyll and Sutherland’s, leading part of their advance up through Italy from Monte Cassino into Austria at the end of the war, and finally Whitehall again – something suitable, the long run in, with suitably tactful honours every ten years: home-based with the Diplomatic Service, dealing with the Russkies, it was said by his intimates, no doubt. But never too loudly: Lindsay Phillips, faithful servant jaws of death and valley of the shadow, who had generously served his country long years but had come back at the last to Scotland and his honey, where his heart was…

  How could such a man have his heart in any darkness, they would have said? – as Madeleine and Rachel far more vehemently believed, and with better reason, for I could remember, over the years that I’d spent with them, so many incidents: evidence of his love for them; moments which were never exhibitions of affection but minute and continual evidence of it. He was, with his wife and daughter – and with Patrick his dead son too, whom I had been brought to live with as company during the war, nine years old and gone with typhoid fever one Christmas in my time there – a sure emblem of ease and kindness – for all of us then a comforting shadow, held in the damp, woody smell of his old country coats and hats and mackintoshes in the hall or in the dim tobacco-filled study at the back of the house, a spirit that laid hands on you at odd moments throughout those long Scottish country days, who yet might at any moment suddenly materialise down a telephone, calling from London, or come driving up the valley through the fir trees along the stony avenue, with Henty, his father’s old chauffeur, in the next seat of the big green Wolseley.

  In these many ways, I remembered, Lindsay was never absent. Yet now, with Basil’s information together with his inexplicable departure, the messages that came along the wire were incoherent notes of horror and distress – and Henty, I felt, would never fetch Lindsay again from another overnight train at Perth.

  ‘What exactly happened?’ I asked.

  The two women seemed to withdraw from the event – the need once more to confront the actuality of their loss. But Madeleine took up the burden gracefully – one which Rachel couldn’t face again, I th
ink, for she moved away to the counter.

  ‘I was in the small drawing-room. Lindsay was outside dealing with his bees. I’d seen him a few minutes before. I called him in for tea but he didn’t reply so I went out and looked for him but he wasn’t anywhere round the hives on the Oak Walk. So I looked over the garden – and then I got Billy and the others and we looked everywhere else all the afternoon: the loch, the forest – and before then, of course, all the rooms, the attics, the yard, the stables. He hadn’t taken the car or any of the bicycles and no one had seen him in the village. And no one had called by, or seen him on any of the roads. He’d just been out there on the Oak Walk one minute and then he was gone, totally. And we’ve not heard or seen anything of him since.’ She stopped abruptly, turning from me.

  Her face had become so wan in the telling of this story that I couldn’t bear it and I didn’t wait for any more of Basil’s predictions to take effect.

  ‘Could I help?’ I asked. ‘Help you to find out …?’

  She smiled in assent.

  ‘You might know more about it than the Thompsons. Or the McAulays,’ she added weakly.

  I might indeed, I thought.

  4

  I noticed the man at the bar of my club before lunch: chalk-striped suit, pearl tiepin, Jewish, an over-neat, small, silver-haired fellow, something of the air of a homosexual jeweller; meticulous in his responses, nodding his head repeatedly now, obviously marking time over gin and tonics with an elderly companion, a stooped figure who had all the lineaments of a Club Bore.

  He picked fastidiously at the bowls of olives and onions in front of him, saying ‘Um’ and ‘Ah!’ and ‘Yes’ many times against some endless tale he was being told. I was at the counter, studying a large sherry, back from the Flower Show with an invitation to the Wigmore Hall that evening and dinner afterwards with the Phillips and some of their London friends: Rachel was giving a concert. It was her birthday too: she was thirty-eight.