The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  ‘He said he’d been in St Petersburg?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Madeleine smiled shortly. ‘As a tutor with some of the decadent nobility there, before the revolution. He’s really a walking history of twentieth-century Russia. He even met Lenin: they had a glass of tea together in some station waiting-room.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to him again.’

  Madeleine looked doubtful. ‘He’s an awful old fusspot, you know. He’ll probably just try and bite your head off again.’

  ‘All the same.’

  ‘Well, I’ll phone him.’

  Madeleine took her gloves off decisively and moved to a kitchen extension, looking up his number on a big card above the handset. She let the phone ring and ring but there was no reply.

  ‘Funny,’ she said. ‘He’s always there first thing in the morning. And there’s an Irish woman who does for him who comes in then as well.’ Madeleine looked fairly surprised.

  ‘I’ll go round and see him,’ I said.

  Madeleine gave the number of a house beyond Russell Square, off Great Ormond Street on the southern edge of Bloomsbury. ‘The ground floor flat,’ she said. ‘Only door on the right. You can’t miss it: it smells of cat rather.’

  I got a cab luckily – straightaway – on the corner of Edgware Road.

  The house was in Rugby Street, the middle of a rather decayed, genteel, mid-Victorian terrace, opposite a pub a few yards away on the other corner. A woman opened the door very soon after I’d rung the bell – a doughty, red-faced Irishwoman with an old scarf turbanned round the back of her head, coming to a rough knot in the front, as if there was still a war on, St Paul’s was in smoke up the road and she had been halfway through listening to ‘Workers’ Playtime’ inside.

  ‘Come on in,’ she said, the easy brogue still thick after probably thirty years in London. ‘The Professor’s expecting you, said for you to go on in if you came. He’s just down the road at the library. Be back any minute.’

  Before I had time to reply to any of this she had led me into a small drawing-room on the ground floor looking over the street, very cluttered and rather dark and smelling of cat, the sun streaming through the windows and hitting a recent explosion of dust motes like a searchlight.

  ‘Just finished in here,’ the woman shouted happily, bending double in a corner and unplugging a Hoover. ‘Sit down. Sit down. He’ll be back any minute.’ She seemed to want to reassure me and indeed I must have seemed surprised at my welcome.

  So I sat down and she left me. The room was an Aladdin’s cave filled with the treasure trove of many journeys, it seemed, to Russia and eastern Europe: a grave, thin-faced icon of the Christ-king with a silver halo stared at me from above an upright piano against one wall, a sheet of music by some unpronounceable Slav composer open on the stand; a line of crude but colourful Dalmatian pottery ran along a top shelf above five other shelves packed with Slavonic academic and cultural volumes; a rough, peasant-weave blanket in a deep scarlet covered an easy chair – and next to it, a little round table, a Bosnian coffee stand, with a fine circular brass top with some strict advice from the Prophet beautifully engraved in classical Arabic round the edge.

  On this lay a fat typescript – a doctoral thesis, it seemed, when I glanced at it, already open at the title page: ‘The Years of Hope. Part One: The Soviet Union 1917 – 1923.’ It was nearly 700 pages long, with footnotes as copious as the text. A heavy business, with a name and address on the bottom: ‘Arthur C. Pottinger, School of Soviet Studies, Columbia University, N.Y.’

  The doorbell went and I jumped, involuntarily. The Irish woman appeared from the kitchen and hurried through the room before I could explain myself. ‘He must have forgotten his key,’ she shouted back at me from the front door. But when she opened it, it wasn’t the Professor but another younger man who stood on the threshold: a big, easy-looking fellow in moccasin loafers and a crumpled candy-striped summer suit. He stood there for a moment, surprised, cut out sharply in the sunlight from the street. An American, I thought, and certainly the Professor’s properly expected guest: big-boned, strong-featured, in his mid-forties, with deep eyes behind glasses and a lot of five-o’clock shadow rimming his jowls.

  ‘Hi!’ he said, suddenly breaking into action, his face creasing in a big smile, that smile of permanent good fellowship which is the badge of most old-fashioned Americans. The Irish woman looked curiously at him, then at me.

  ‘I’m sorry. There’s been a misunderstanding,’ I said explaining my position.

  ‘Well, that’s perfectly all right,’ the other man said with extreme good humour, coming forward, offering me his hand. ‘I’m Art Pottinger. Just came by to see the Professor about my –’ Then he saw his thesis open on the little table behind me. ‘Why, there it is. I asked him to take a look at it. We were just going to have a few words about it.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t keep you,’ I said, ‘I only wanted a quick word with him myself. It’ll keep – another time.’ I moved towards the door.

  ‘Well, please, now, not on account of me.’ Pottinger held his hands up deprecatingly. ‘Don’t worry about me. My work can wait too. Who did you say you were?’

  He had that nice American knack of asking a personal question and making it seem entirely appropriate and not at all impertinent.

  ‘Just a friend – of friends of his. Marlow. Peter Marlow. I was with the Professor last night, with these friends, at a concert. I just wanted to check something. It’s not important.’

  ‘Well, wait a minute now: why not, goddammit?’ Pottinger said expansively. ‘The Professor plays a lovely piano.’ He moved towards the upright in the corner. ‘Why not stay and ask him? Check it out with him and maybe he’d play us something. I guess he knows as much about music as he does about Russian history,’ Pottinger said like an admiring juvenile. ‘What concert did you get to? I’ve been trying to take some music in ever since I got over, just bin’ too busy, I guess. Was it good – the Festival Hall …?’

  Again, he asked this question with such natural enthusiasm that I replied at once, just as naturally.

  ‘No, the Wigmore Hall – a girl called Rachel Phillips. She plays the flute.’

  ‘Oh. Rachel Phillips?’ Pottinger said carefully, as if the name represented a piece of valuable china in his hands. ‘Phillips …’ he narrowed his eyes, lending a visual confirmation to his mental exercise. ‘Yes, now maybe I’ve heard of her. She’s good?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  At that moment a key grated in the door and the Professor walked in, carrying some books. He saw me at once and stopped dead, staring at me with considerable annoyance.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said.

  The Professor, carrying his load under one arm, sidled across the room, quite fast, like a crab. Then he dumped the books down on the little Bosnian table so that the brass top jumped and clattered.

  ‘I just dropped round,’ I said. ‘Madeleine called you earlier but you were out. We thought you might be able to help over something. But some other time: it’s the wrong moment.’

  ‘Indeed it is – to say the least,’ the Professor said, spitting through his whiskers. He was breathing heavily, clearly put out, glaring at me with his little blue eyes like a fighting cock. He had seemed so much a wraith-like, ineffective figure the previous night. But now there was a ragged, dangerous edge to him, as if some nasty alarm had gone off in his soul during the night.

  ‘I’ll give you another call, if I may. Or Madeleine will,’ I said, moving towards the door.

  ‘Yes, that would be more appropriate. Though I can’t think how –’ He was obviously going to finish this sentence with ‘– how I can help you.’ But he stopped half-way through, abandoning the thought ruthlessly, and it was just then I happened to look over at Pottinger, standing by the piano. His face was set, quite still, like an eavesdropper’s – as though he, more than I, had been anxious to hear the end of the Professor’s sentence. But at once he came back into vast good humour. ‘Well – no
w don’t mind me! I can wait – I can come back.’ He was so anxious to help I was sorry to disappoint him.

  ‘No, no – not at all. Nice to have met you and my apologies.’ I left the two men standing rather uneasily together, closing the door sharply. After I’d done so, I saw that the Professor had left his latchkey outside in the lock. So, without knocking, I opened the door again with the key, to give it back to him. Pottinger was standing much closer to the Professor now, one hand partly raised, half-way through some sentence. His easy charm had faded quickly and he seemed intent on something rather serious at that moment. I thought at the time that he had been about to embark on some abstruse historical point in his thesis.

  Now I wonder if he wasn’t talking about something very much in the present – the journey which we learnt 24 hours later the Professor had taken, leaving London that same afternoon for the Continent.

  ‘He’s gone for a holiday,’ the solid Irishwoman told Madeleine on the phone the next morning – while I was listening on an extension. ‘Ah, an’ sure God love him, isn’t that the way with him? – never knowing what he’s doing from one minute to the next. Well, he just upped and packed his traps after lunch and took off for Heathrow.’

  ‘Where to?’ Madeleine had asked.

  ‘Amsterdam,’ the Irish woman said confidently, as if she knew that city intimately. ‘He said he was going to look at the flowers there. The tulips, he said.’

  ‘Did he say when he was coming back – or where he was staying?’

  ‘At the end of the week he thought – but he’d be moving around a bit, he said.’

  I’d looked at Madeleine afterwards. ‘Was he interested in flowers?’

  ‘No. Not that I knew of.’

  *

  But that was the following morning, when the bird had flown. Before then several other matters had cropped up. Immediately after I’d left the Professor’s flat something worried me – I couldn’t quite place it, but I was uneasy. So, having walked away from Rugby Street, I doubled back, first down to Theobald’s Road, then up John Street, turning left half-way and along to where I knew I’d hit the pub opposite the Professor’s house, The Rising Sun. I knew the area fairly well in any case – my old office in the glass house beyond Gray’s Inn was only a few minutes walk away. The pub was on a corner. The public bar entrance was hidden from the Professor’s view but the lounge windows, round the other side of the corner room, gave directly out onto his street and I could see his doorway even standing back at the bar with a weak beer in my hand.

  What was it about Pottinger? – or rather about his association with Allcock – an amalgam which had produced such an uneasy atmosphere. Was it simply my presence? I thought not. Singly, both men – the Professor the previous evening and Pottinger alone with me – had both rung true. But together they set off some alarm in me. They seemed to know each other rather better than they pretended, like adulterous lovers avoiding each other’s gaze in the presence of a spouse: that was what worried me. And I remembered Pottinger’s half-raised hand when I’d surprised them a second time – facing the Professor with a look close to the dictatorial, or at least not with the expected expression of a respectful student.

  Before I’d taken a second mouthful of the warm beer it struck me that Pottinger might be with the CIA – or at least hovering somewhere in that line of country – and there was one way, possibly, to find out: to follow him, rather clumsily, when he came out and see how successfully, if at all, he tried to break the trail.

  Well, the surprising thing was when he did emerge, more than half an hour later, and I followed him rather clumsily up Great Ormond Street, across Russell Square, and towards the British Museum, he didn’t try to break at all, though several times I’m sure he must have seen me, turning to look back at a zebra crossing or seeing my reflection in shop windows which he stopped and gazed into once or twice. He must have seen me, yet he ambled along like a lot of other tourists in the area enjoying the sun that morning.

  And then suddenly he disappeared – at a point where it seemed impossible for him to do so – as if some huge hand had scooped him up while my back was turned for a second. He’d been looking into the window of the joke and games shop just opposite the British Museum gates, while I’d been on the other side of the street, my head turned up towards a poster on the BM railings for a few seconds. But when I looked across the road again the candy-striped suit had vanished. He wasn’t in the joke shop, filled with half a dozen children making monkeys out of themselves with hideous papier mâché masks, and he wasn’t in the Museum Tavern next door, fairly empty at that time; he certainly hadn’t crossed the road towards the Museum gates and he was nowhere down the street opposite. There was nothing I could do then, except admire his skill – or his luck perhaps, for I supposed at the time that he might have escaped me purely by chance, a thought which I tended to dismiss next morning when I learnt of the Professor’s departure.

  It seemed just possible then that Pottinger had come to warn Allcock of something and that I had set them both out of joint by my unexpected appearance at their rendezvous. But to warn him of what? And then I saw that it could well have been me: that the warning had only begun with my arrival there, and my speaking to Pottinger – for hadn’t I told him that I’d come to ask the Professor something, to consult him over some point that had cropped up the previous night at a concert – a concert of Rachel Phillips’s, as I’d told him too. And my query? – what had the Professor meant by saying that Lindsay Phillips had gone back to Russia?

  If I was right, then Pottinger had some previous interest in Lindsay – while the Professor had some knowledge of him sufficiently damaging to warrant his immediate exit from the country, thus avoiding any more awkward questions about him, either from me or, more awkwardly still, from the Special Branch.

  In sum, the two men could, indeed, have some far more intimate connection than had originally been apparent and their subsequent purposes together had been such as to deny me some crucial knowledge of Lindsay.

  I had no proof of course. The Professor might have been no more than an old fantasist, with schoolboy dreams of derring-do, in his theories about Lindsay’s disappearance – while Pottinger could well be exactly what he said he was. And was there anything necessarily strange in the Professor’s taking a spring holiday at short notice? So I told Madeleine nothing of my suspicions after she’d finished talking to the Irishwoman.

  Nonetheless, for the first time, entirely through my eyes and efforts, without recourse to the curious and conflicting evidence on Lindsay’s past from Marcus and Fielding, I had stumbled on a much stranger glimpse of the man, quite different from their stark political antitheses, and light-years away from the loving and honourable vision which Madeleine and Rachel cherished of him: was Lindsay possibly a deep-cover KGB officer? A mole buried at the heart of British Intelligence for far longer than Philby or any of the others had been, with the Professor, given his long-standing Soviet connections, falling naturally into the role of confidant and possible recruiter while Pottinger, with equal ease, took on the part of Lindsay’s KGB control.

  I could have tried to check these ideas out there and then through Fielding and one of the counter-espionage sections. But I didn’t. If they were true I wanted to protect Madeleine and Rachel from their implications until I found out for myself, quite certainly, that they were true. For if they turned out to be false I should have set up a cloud over Lindsay’s reputation difficult ever to erase – since how, with absolute certainty, could one ever prove them false? One could only prove them true in this way, with the Professor cropping up in Moscow six months later, or by Pottinger’s own admissions at the hands of some brutal or skilful interrogator. So I let the matter lie.

  At the same time these suspicions subtly altered the previous bias of my search for Lindsay. From that morning on everything I remembered or found out about his life I had to put not only against my firm image of him as a totally honourable man, but also against thi
s seemingly impossible proposal that he was a traitor. I was looking for two men, I thought for a moment, before realising that only one had disappeared. But which one, then?

  7

  Every individual life is a marvellous excess of lyric and tragic information – while a family together creates an even more profligate history, a huge unrecorded folklore of ancient intimacies, passions, truths, lies, hatreds – which have all sunk in time, like the debris of a lost civilisation, buried layer upon layer in the years they have lived through. Even an old and close friend has little hope of properly gauging the real weight of their various previous associations, of sharing their visions, or finding reasons for their particular choices and antagonisms.

  He may, with luck or patience, clearly isolate certain special moments in those lives – colourful occasions, times of distress, or even a precise incident from an afternoon long ago which can be made to rise clear of time and live again like a song. Or he may stumble upon a great flaw in the puzzle, an appalling error in what seems at first to be a different jig-saw altogether, the shards of another and quite barbarous civilisation. He may, then, attempt to fit these conflicting pieces of life together, fragments of the mosaic. But who, without extreme intuition or some quite visionary effort, will ever uncover either the right picture or the whole picture?

  Even a man’s wife, I thought, looking across at Madeleine in the drawing room, who has specially loved him, may be the most deceived – a woman who has shared more than anybody else with him yet may be least privy to his secrets; for if we lie, and we will, it is to those we are closest to that we must lie most completely.

  It was clear to me then, as I looked at that kind and vulnerable face across the room, that my continued researches into Lindsay’s life might bring a renewed pain into it – and that unless, through some lucky inspiration, I could summon up the whole man, the unrelated, incidental details of his life which I might unearth could create a horror for her as deep as his loss had done.