The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  What more to say than that it was perfect? A critic, perhaps, might explain the perfection – to what purpose I don’t know – while for any real truth he would have to explain the whole woman, and how difficult that would be, even for her friends. Her music took her light-years away from us, as it did that evening, on the small stage, a woman lost to us, in a long green tartan skirt and white silk blouse, travelling deep into a world without words.

  In one way her behaviour after that evening was an attempt to be counted among ordinary mortals at last – and her release from the secrecies of music was, she felt, a necessary step in that direction. She told me later that she had come to live on too rarefied a plane, lost to the concerns of ordinary existence. Wrongly, as it turned out, she believed that her father had lived in just such an ordinary world and that to find him she must descend from her many pedestals and seek him in the undergrowth of mundane existence.

  There were kisses and congratulations backstage afterwards, which I stood back from in the doorway of the small Green Room, crushed next the end of a big grand piano in the corridor, as people rattled to and fro, George trundling about like a sack of potatoes, flapping his arms and organising flowers, beads of sweat pouring down his joyous face.

  ‘Darling … dear … how wonderful …’

  A lot of wonderful dears and darlings floated on the warm, over-scented air. I saw Rachel, catching her eye for an instant, between the insistent pushing figures. I lifted my hand to her, like an uncertain traffic policeman. And she, too, paused a second in her other greetings, to return an equally unfinished smile before her face disappeared again in the crush: a smile which to me, at least, spoke of tired failure and not success.

  I turned and nearly walked straight into a huge beard: Sir Brian Allcock had been standing right behind me looking over my shoulder, equally on the edge of things.

  ‘What a birthday present – for us!’ he said. ‘What inspiration, elegance.’ His tiny, pale blue eyes glittered deep within his whiskers. He clapped now, involuntarily, banging his long fingers together several times as if overcome retrospectively. He perched behind me, owlishly, looking down on these exaggerated joys with incredulous wonder, as if at the mating antics of some obscure species. ‘A colleague of Lindsay’s,’ Madeleine had told me. I was curious. Certainly he could have been no ordinary field agent, I thought. He was much older than Lindsay, too, in his seventies at least: a frail yet clamorous wraith on the outskirts of the feast.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smiling up at him with some sense of fellow feeling.

  ‘The Drigo piece,’ he went on gazing enthusiastically into the Green Room. ‘She played that incomparably. Better than he did himself. I heard him once – just before he left St Petersburg.’

  ‘Indeed?’ I answered.

  I had no idea who this musician Drigo was. But St Petersburg gave a date to the old man’s reminiscence – a date and a place, too, in pre-Revolutionary Russia. A colleague of Lindsay’s: could he be that? I decided to risk a mild interrogation.

  ‘You worked with Lindsay then, did you?’ I asked easily.

  ‘Uh!’ the old man snorted, shreds of his beard bristling for an instant round his mouth. ‘No, I never worked with him. I was his tutor, at the School of Slavonic Studies here.’

  ‘In the thirties?’

  ‘Yes – about then. When he came down from Oxford, doing the Foreign Office exams.’ He stopped then, seeming to run off into some old cubby hole of his mind, searching for something Finding it, but without wishing to explain it, he said vehemently, ‘Such a pity about him, such a stupid, dreadful thing.’ Then he seemed to dream again, casting his mind back to some dark pool in the past.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I was hoping to help the family: to find him.’

  Sir Brian woke up and looked at me closely now. ‘You’re one of his Intelligence people, are you?’ – and he ran on in a great hurry before I could contradict him – ‘Well, what a damn silly business that was. I warned him about it – oh, yes, back at the time. Told him not to get mixed up with it; told him he’d be a prime choice, with his background, his gift for language, his sympathies. Yes, it was all a very foolish thing, you see. And now look.’ The old man’s eyes lit up and he raised his long, bony fingers like a prophet about to explain everything. But he didn’t continue. His hands fell limply and he started to munch his lips, as if he had said too much.

  ‘Look – at what?’

  ‘Well,’ he grunted, and then, sotto voce: ‘The Russians must have taken him back. He knew too much.’

  Sir Brian stalled again, looking down his nose at me triumphantly.

  ‘Taken him back? He knew something –’

  ‘Look here, young man,’ the old man interrupted me quickly, in a sharply professorial tone. ‘I’m not here to teach you your business. You must know what he knew far better than I.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t work for Intelligence,’ I said, realising the lie suddenly.

  ‘Goodness me,’ Sir Brian perked up in mock alarm. ‘I thought you said you did – and here am I giving away State secrets: every Tom, Dick and Harry. Dear me, I must curb my tongue.’

  Again he appeared to do just this, biting in on his lips, chewing wisps of his beard. ‘Ah! Madeleine – Rachel.’ His beady blue eyes had found an out cue and he moved away from me abruptly, into the Green Room, to make his own little entrances and congratulations, a great bearded beanpole, seemingly an ineffective old eccentric, but possibly something else altogether: a man who found easy cover in these assumed peculiarities – a vain old man, who knew something perhaps, and, if so, whose vanity might have betrayed him.

  I stood with the others on the pavement outside, waiting for our transport, breathing the warm spring evening air, a night with a different perfume in it now: London air, after a long hot day, a faintly warm smell of tarmac and petrol fumes dying out now as Findlater’s big gold clock down the street touched half past nine.

  Taken Lindsay back? – I thought: ‘He knew too much.’ A slip of the old man’s slippery tongue perhaps. But taken him back?

  Rachel came out of the hall just then and, though I was standing some distance away from her, at the edge of the pavement, she called across to me, beckoning to me with a smile, to go with her and her mother and Sir Brian in their car. I had just time to note a look of frustrated disapproval cross George’s features as he closed the door behind us, looking through the window into the dark interior, his big sad face like a moon about to disappear behind a cloud.

  *

  They still owned the big terrace house in Hyde Park Square – on the north side, looking over the tall bleached plane trees in the narrow gardens, the only side of the estate not bombed out in the war and rebuilt: a row of formidable mid-Victorian town houses rising up, tier upon tier, like the decks of an old Atlantic liner; white-stuccoed, with tall porticos and heavy doors, they stood imperiously among the clutter of modern bijou residences and apartment blocks which surrounded them on all sides: encircled by this concrete mess, but protected by the stockade of the small park and its graceful trees, these houses had resisted everything and continued to insult their attackers now, effortlessly, by their mere existence.

  Cumbersome and awkward to run, even in the days when I had stayed there just after the war, nearly all of them had been divided up into flats: all except the Phillips’s, which they had held onto through thick and thin and still possessed in an undivided state. It had been Madeleine’s family home. Her great-grandfather, who had bought the house after the Crimean War, was, like Lindsay’s, a military man; and her family, like his, had never given ground, nor lacked the money to maintain the grounds they held.

  None the less, an anachronism twenty years before, such a private way of life in central London today must have been practically unique. Lindsay, it’s true, had lived there most of the year for his work; Madeleine for part of the year – every winter at least – and Rachel had organised a self-contained flat for herself on the top floor. Patrick too,
I suppose, had he lived, might have made it his home – while after his death, and had I ever married Rachel, I suppose I could well have been living in part of it myself.

  But even with all this real or potential habitation there were still half a dozen large rooms left over: a formal dining-room, music room, library, study, spare bedrooms and a billiard saloon – mostly unused in my days there, heavily furnished in the original Victorian modes, with long, thick velvet drapes over the high sash windows: rooms ideally fitted for children’s hide-and-seek on winter weekends or half-terms when I had come down with Rachel to London to see the circus or the Palladium pantomime; heavy rooms, smelling of polished mahogany, with moustachioed portraits of Imperial gallants floating down like trapeze artists on long wires from brass rails on either side of the ceiling.

  Our car drove round the south side of the square to get to the house, and I could see it now – the first few storeys rising like a white cliff above the street lights, up into the darkness of Rachel’s top flat: Rachel’s few maids’ rooms which, even when we had lived together in Notting Hill, she had frequently returned to openly, by way of seeing her parents, but just as often surreptitiously, as I afterwards found out, to start converting these rooms. Already then, like a fifth columnist, in the midst of her life with me, she was planning her defection, organising her separate return over the border to her real home.

  This house, together with Glenalyth, was where her real life came from – and she a kite held to them on a string, let out to fly by her father. Of course, I had thought then to cut this string; instead, in her short time with me, I had only managed to bind her far more closely to this solid edifice and all the secure emotions it contained. What a fruitless quest I had made with her then, set on a shared life amidst the razed, post-war squalor of Ladbroke Grove: how could one set an Ascot gas heater and broken windows looking out on an already clamorous immigrant street against this heavy dreadnought of a house – which, together with its hard-headed crew, had forced its way successfully through a century of violent change, of war and social riot, familial deaths and entrances, individual dissents and strengths, unsuitable passions and alliances – which were all to be finally subservient to some stronger ghost, an intangible inheritance, which still lived in this great pile of brick and mortar.

  My association with Rachel seemed, in its shadow, to be nothing more than an illicit day trip, a foolish excursion round the bay, in which luckily, and quite without our deserving it, we had not been drowned. This house was my inanimate rival.

  Indeed, I think I am more than partly right: if Rachel and her family had a real failing – and it’s difficult to be objective about it since, as I say, I was its victim – it was that they hung onto their past, protected it – not with money which to them was simply an adjunct, as natural as air – but with an unenquiring acceptance. To them their position in life was an ancient fait accompli with which, without knowing it, they insulated themselves against all outsiders and newcomers.

  They were like tightrope walkers in their estimation of themselves: as though they knew in some secret, quite unspoken place that their kind of life was a rare thing, a glittering performance above the multitude – they knew too, quite simply like born professionals, that to maintain this style in drear times, among the new commonality, they must never look down. But now the man who had lived there, governed its directions, maintained and nurtured and filled it so appropriately, had disappeared, fallen inexplicably from the high wire, had broken all the rules at last and suddenly lost his balance.

  George, who had somehow managed to reach the house before us, was at the open doorway, his face alight with some secret anticipation, holding us in the hall to begin with while the other guests arrived before leading us all upstairs to the first floor drawing and music rooms. Here he fumbled with the handles of the double doors before finally managing to open them with a flourish.

  As he did so a cataract of music swept upon us – a clash of tympani, followed by a sweet rush of violins and cello, some wind instruments piping in strongly then, taking up and running vigorously along with the old Strauss melody. It was with some surprise that we gazed into the room, for at first we could see nothing but an empty floor and a long table laid out near the window for a buffet supper. But on entering the drawing-room and looking round to the right through the open curtains that led to the music room behind, the matter became clear: inside, on the heavy old dining-room chairs arranged in several semi-circles, was half a fair-sized orchestra, 20 or 30 people in evening dress rushing clamorously through the overture to Die Fledermaus.

  George smiled – quite taken up for a moment, justifiably, with his coup de théâtre. Rachel embraced him.

  ‘What on earth –?’ she said before disappearing into his bear-hug.

  ‘Your birthday present!’ George shouted above the music and the two of them stood there for a moment, arms linked, watching the performance. I thought of my own present for Rachel, something I’d seen in a Bond Street gallery that afternoon, a smooth, oval sea stone – a paperweight – with a contented cat painted on it, something solid and nice but quite without the demon grace of this gesture, a gift that wouldn’t endure byond the evening, but was so bright and unexpected a thing that it was far more than a gift: it was Rachel’s own life, a dazzling portrait, drawn from her, shown and confirmed to the world, and now returned to her keeping. George’s affection for Rachel, I saw now, was no lugubrious thing, but a deep care which he could yet offer to her lightly, in the seeping tones of half the London Philharmonia.

  George, among his friends and good offices in the musical world, had managed to hire part of the orchestra for this latter part of the evening – friends of Rachel’s too, among the players it was obvious, doing her the honour and favour, as some of them smiled at her, right in the middle of some elaborate passage, con brio. And they played in the heavily draped room for half an hour – the easier, celebratory music of Lehar and Strauss, Wiener Blut and such like, waltzes and polkas, but played them with an intense delicacy that gave the music a quite extraordinary, crystal sharp effect: like flame cutting through steel.

  Later we drank wine and some champagne and cut deeply into raised game pies and moist pâtés, the orchestra joining us. Of course it was a merry evening; it could hardly have been otherwise. And no doubt it had been intended as just such by George: a means of helping the two women to start again, to wipe out the pain of the past two months. In that, at least, he succeeded. Indeed, without his musical resuscitation that night it’s doubtful if Rachel – and Madeleine particularly – would ever have had the heart to embark with me on the journeys they did. George’s gift brought them back to life and made it possible for them to contemplate action once more: action which would fill the gap of absence – for once started on their search for Lindsay and for as long as they remained at it, they could believe in his existence somewhere, a life apart from theirs, which they would eventually discover, re-uniting it with their own in one happy family again. George it was, in his generosity and loving commitment to Rachel, who set the long fuse alight, and I the man who tended that flame so carefully. At the time who could have done otherwise?

  6

  ‘I don’t know what he could have meant – it must have been a mistake,’ Madeleine said to me purposefully, already dressed, over a late breakfast. I’d stayed the night, in a spare bedroom, with a pair of Lindsay’s pyjamas. Rachel was still sleeping upstairs in her flat.

  ‘Yes, it may have been. But that’s what he said: that the Russians had taken him back.’

  Madeleine had finished her coffee, taking the cups and plates over to the sink, where she paused a moment, hand on the tap, gazing out over the rooftops at the back of the house. The sky was a leaden blue again. Already, before ten o’clock, the day had a charge of heat in it which was beginning to leak out all over the city.

  ‘He meant – they may have kidnapped him,’ she said at last. ‘He must. But we went into all that in Scotland at the
time, with the police and the people from Lindsay’s office. We’re only sixty miles from Aberdeen. Russian trawlers often call there – and there was one there the day he disappeared. But it stayed for more than a week afterwards, for repairs, with the Special Branch people watching it all the time. There was no sign of Lindsay and we’ve never had the slightest evidence that they may have taken him.’

  ‘All the same, why don’t we speak to Allcock again? I tried to last night, but he –’

  ‘Oh, I have spoken to him, Peter,’ Madeleine interrupted. ‘And he said more or less what he said to you. He was very kind – he’s one of Lindsay’s oldest friends after all – but a little scornful. “The Russians have probably got him,” he told me in the end. Well, I thought that a little too melodramatic – and so did Lindsay’s colleagues when I spoke to them about it. But, it may be true, I suppose?’ She looked at me quizzically, one rubber glove half on, about to wash up.

  ‘Well, maybe. I don’t know. Just he seemed so certain about it. Who is Brian Allcock? What’s his background?’

  ‘Oh – eminent Slavonic scholar: taught for a while in Moscow, in the twenties, then at London University: books on the culture and heritage of all the Slavs, on endless committees: The British-Soviet Friendship Society now. All those sort of official things. And Lindsay consulted him a lot; travelled with him, too. They were friends.’

  ‘And his politics?’

  Madeleine shrugged her shoulders. ‘He’s not interested in politics as far as I know. He’s an academic – sort of caricature of a professor, as you saw yourself. I’ve always thought him a rather fussy, self-important old party. But I get on with him. I suppose I rather tend to pull his leg.’

  ‘Was Lindsay close to him?’

  ‘In a way – well, no: not close really.’ Madeleine considered my question, frowning. ‘Lindsay admired him: as the brilliant teacher he might have become himself. And Brian in his turn took great pride in Lindsay – initially at least – hoping he’d follow him in some academic line. Brian never married – and there was something of that, too, in the relationship to begin with, I think: the father-son business. Lindsay’s own father wasn’t easy, you know.’