The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  I said to Madeleine, thinking of this, ‘How much did you really know about Lindsay’s work?’

  ‘Oh, enough. Quite a lot, in some things,’ she replied at once. ‘I wasn’t one of those golf widows in the Intelligence service, numskulls who have to be made to believe their husbands work in the Coal Board. I knew from the very beginning what he was doing, and latterly that it was important work.’

  ‘But the details, I mean?’

  ‘Well, not all of them, obviously. But again, some details, though perhaps not all the important ones. I knew the moment he became deputy chief of the old Soviet Section, Section Nine, after the Philby fracas – that was in the mid-fifties – and that ten years later, when Stevenson retired, he took over from him as head of it.’

  ‘He told you all these things?’

  ‘Of course. And other things, too: office politics mostly: personalities – who was trying to push who, that sort of thing. But he didn’t chatter about any of his actual intelligence plans, if that’s what you mean, naturally.’

  Madeleine, over by the fireplace, replacing some ornaments on the mantelpiece from the party two nights before, turned and looked at me, a touch of anger suddenly running through her face.

  ‘Are you trying to say that he kept something important back from me?’

  ‘No,’ I stalled.

  ‘Well, he very probably did. A lot of important things.’ Madeleine ran on now, not looking for a precise answer to her original point. ‘And why not? I was never to be officially informed about his work. He told me what he thought he could, or what might be of joint interest, or about something, as I say, in the way of office politics that was frustrating him. You know the sort of things. But I didn’t have all his plans.’

  ‘Yes. I see that. It was perfectly natural.’

  ‘Then what are you getting at?’ She walked across the first-floor drawing-room and looked out into the square, the big plane tree right opposite the house already come into sharp green leaf, its branches trailing over the portico against the deep blue sky.

  ‘Simply, if I’m to help any, I’m going to have to go back through a lot of his life, I think.’

  She turned decisively, smiling as if regretting her earlier anger and as though she had never suggested that Lindsay had ever kept one particular thing back from her. ‘Yes, I see that. I’ve been doing that myself too – and I’m very on to help you. The people from his office were doing the same thing with me, talking to me, going through some of his papers. But we didn’t really get anywhere: we dragged through his papers just as we dragged through the loch.’ Madeleine sighed and looked back into the square. ‘I’ve gone through our life together, too, by myself: you know, trying to think of something in the past that might have led to this.’ she paused.

  ‘And?’ I said after along moment.

  ‘Well – and nothing,’ she said simply. ‘We were very happy. We, that is.’

  ‘Yes. Of course there was Eleanor.’

  Madeleine faced me again. ‘Yes, there was, and I thought of that. And certainly he talked a lot about her after it all happened, before we married, naturally: it was a frightful business – married to someone, seeing her disintegrate in front of you, getting madder day by day, poor woman, and then killing herself in Zagreb that day – well, that nearly killed him afterwards. But that was forty years ago, I keep telling myself.’

  Madeleine looked through me now, her focus lost, quite caught up in those terrible events in Lindsay’s life so long before, which I knew barely anything about. ‘Then there was Patrick, too,’ she said with an effort. ‘I’ve thought about that as well – thirty years ago. That was as bad – to have a wife and then a son go. And I’ve wondered if Lindsay might have suffered some sort of delayed reaction to these things: some kind of – of, oh I don’t quite know: some kind of brainstorm. I spoke to Hunter – Gavin Hunter – the service analyst about this and he thought, well, he thought it might just be possible. But very unlikely.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Lindsay might have killed himself – a long-delayed reaction: some guilt about these deaths that he’d repressed. Though God knows I don’t think there was anything, possibly, he could have done about either of them Eleanor was that way, in any case. And Patrick went so quickly. It’s true, it was just at the end of the war, early in 1945, and we couldn’t get in touch with him – he was somewhere in Austria rounding up a lot of fascist Yugoslavs, and he didn’t find out about Patrick’s death till a week after it had happened. But that wasn’t his fault: I was the one who felt the guilt: I was responsible for Patrick after all. I was looking after him.’

  She didn’t turn back from the window and I knew she must be feeling quite awful at that moment. I went to her and put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t turn; she was crying, I thought.

  ‘Yes,’ said. ‘I understand. But it isn’t all a vale of tears. Believe me.’ I didn’t believe that myself just then, but I had to say it. Lindsay’s life at that moment – and Madeleine’s too – suddenly seemed like one of the saddest stories ever told.

  ‘You see, the trouble for me,’ I said, ‘is where do I begin – with Lindsay’s life? I only came to know him in any adult way in the mid-fifties. Before that he was just a distant, miraculous uncle to me, that I saw now and then during the war – in a smart uniform at Perth Station, or skating on the loch that Christmas morning it iced over, and reading the lesson later like God, and giving us half-crowns wrapped up in silver paper afterwards – then disappearing the next day with Henty in a pony and trap back to the war again. There’s a whole huge life about him which I never touched. I only really knew a child’s version of him.’

  Madeleine turned from the window. I had moved away and given her time to recover, I think, with these memories of Lindsay, for her face had cleared again now.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see that. But why – to find him – must you know all that life? I don’t quite see. I’m willing to help, but I don’t –’

  ‘I don’t quite know either, now I think about it. Except what else is there that the police and the others haven’t tried? One has to take some new approach.’

  ‘I see that, but Peter, if you think his disappearance was to do with his work, why bother so much with his personal affairs? Why not talk to his colleagues?’

  ‘Because they wouldn’t talk to me. For most of them I’m no more than a traitor, never properly cleared for that Egyptian business ten years ago. But the other point was this: I think he may have had some “brainstorm” as you put it, that Hunter might be right – and that’s why he suddenly went: a breakdown, not necessarily for personal reasons, though these may have helped. The pressures of this kind of clandestine work over, how many? – thirty, forty years – impose tremendous strains, which you have to keep on and on and on bottling up. Well, one day the whole thing can just break wide open.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that –’

  ‘Especially if you have no other outlet.’

  ‘But that’s the whole point,’ Madeleine broke in. ‘Lindsay had an outlet: his bees. He was with them whenever he got the slightest chance. Oh, I know what you mean, in his world, stuck in London, away from me, people can often take to drink or women, I realise that. But Lindsay didn’t: he had his bees,’ she said vehemently, coming towards me, wringing her hands for emphasis. ‘They were everything to him – that, and the honey farm generally.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, opening the lid of the little gold-plated music box without thinking, so that a military tune – ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’, I think – suddenly sprang up into the warm room, startling us both.

  ‘Yes, his bees,’ I said, closing the lid after a moment, and we paused and I thought about Lindsay’s bees – the many annual rituals I’d seen him go through with them as a child: stalking round the hives to begin with, in the spring, with Billy, his bee manager, the two of them dressed like sinister divers, I’d thought then, dressed in thick overalls and black veils, as I watched them out o
n the Oak Walk from the safety of the morning room window. And Lindsay, at the end of some other summer, in September just before I was packed back to the school I went to in North Wales – Lindsay, in a honey-smeared white apron, out in the dark bee rooms at the end of the yard that had been converted from the old coach house and stables, supervising the honey extraction, the precious pure heather honey that had to be squeezed out laboriously in a wax press, slowly turning down a large corkscrew at the top, while the thick white juice oozed out like toothpaste from the bottom.

  Madeleine was right: Lindsay did indeed have his bees. And I was reminded then that it had been in the middle of tending them that he had disappeared. I mentioned this to Madeleine.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve wondered about that too – why he went just then.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I mean about the personal things in his life. His bees, for example, that’s not something the police would have looked into.’

  Suddenly I was faced with the enormity of Lindsay’s disappearance right under his wife’s nose, on a fine day in spring, in the middle of what he was happiest at. It seemed, if he knew what he was doing, that he had done something extraordinarily cruel towards his wife by choosing just that moment to get out of her life. Yet this idea was so out of character with the man that I was forced to think of other reasons – that he had indeed been kidnapped or lost his memory. But here too I was confronted by the entirely unlikely when I remembered him – the last person to suffer any mental vagaries, and the circumstances at Glenalyth the least propitious in which to kidnap him.

  But why, in any case, the bees? Did they have any special relevance? Why choose that moment, so intimate, so domestic, to disappear from life? The more I thought about it all, the fewer answers occurred to me. And yet, there was an answer, I knew, some definite reason for it all, and Madeleine must have been having rather the same kind of thought at just that moment for she said to me: ‘You know, on a quite objective level – as if all this had happened to somebody else – I’m quite appalled by the hideous lack of any logic to any of it. If he’d disappeared overseas or in London or at a hundred and one other moments in his life I could have understood it: he worked in that kind of world after all, where – where such things happen to people. But at Glenalyth, at home, on his own doorstep …’ She shook her head. ‘It’s as if some huge hand had come down from the sky and picked him up while my back was turned.’

  I thought how just the same thing seemed to have happened to Pottinger opposite the British Museum. Yet there must be reasons there again, I reminded myself: some trick of light, perhaps, in Pottinger’s case, or the fact that he’d run for a taxi while I wasn’t looking. ‘You have a great need to know, don’t you?’ Fielding had said to me in the hotel.

  But suddenly I felt now that I didn’t want to know about Lindsay at all: that my re-creation of his soul was surely not my business – that it was a matter inviolate and private to him or lay in the hands of some God. I saw my attempts at omniscience as a dangerous impertinence, for what should I know of a world where people were scooped up by huge hands? It lay outside my normal competence, surely, to arrive at any fair bill about his life. And why should I expect any inspired luck in re-creating the whole of him? If there was a reason for everything there was, too, a reason why some things were better left unsaid. And perhaps this was so in Lindsay’s case. For as Madelaine had pointed out, his disappearance was so inexplicable that it suggested the agency of some malign power which we might do better not to bring to light.

  On the other hand, it was clear – if such thoughts even crossed her mind – that Madeleine was determined on the journey. It was her nature to think the best of people and she had obviously never thought a fraction less than this of her husband. She looked at me now, with one of her forceful, bright crusader looks: ‘You know, Peter, I think if he is to be found you’re the person who’ll do it. I feel that and I think you’re probably right: the reasons are in his past somewhere, if we can only put our hands on them. And I think you may do that – you who knew him, liked him, had a special sympathy with him: I think you can.’

  I thought how closely her words paralleled with Basil Fielding’s: how he had said she would come to me, of her own accord, asking my help, since I was an old friend, a dear friend: and one told things to friends that one didn’t tell policemen. Yet I was a policeman, too, of a sort, and she didn’t know that. Already I had betrayed her in a mild way – ways which are inevitable sickness in the world Lindsay and I had worked in, but which can become a general plague so that the truth dies everywhere before the game is finished. Yet Madeleine had made it impossible for me to back out: I was, indeed, close to her now and committed to her cause, an old friendship rekindled between us in the warmth of that early summer morning in the gracious drawing room: a friend with a shadow, though, which she couldn’t see and which I would not admit to her.

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure,’ she replied with feeling.

  We heard Rachel clattering down from upstairs just then.

  ‘Oh God – Oh Montreal,’ she said, bursting into the room. ‘It’s nearly eleven and I’m supposed to meet George and Max – My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me – where, oh where is my music case?’

  ‘In the hall – if it’s not upstairs.’

  ‘Yes, it must be. But it never is.’

  Then Rachel stopped charging round the room and said hello to me.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’re back again. Good. What’s been happening?’

  ‘Brian has upped and gone off on a holiday suddenly,’ Madeleine said.

  ‘So?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Well, you know he said to Peter about Lindsay’s going back to the Russians –’

  ‘But that’s just a nonsense,’ Rachel interrupted. ‘You know that. Brian is an old fool in his dotage. He’d tell you pigs could fly if he thought you’d like to hear it.’

  ‘Yes. But this wasn’t something we wanted to hear.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Rachel sighed with elaborate exaggeration. ‘What on earth would Daddy want to go back to the Russians for? Just because he was in Intelligence and because of what happened to Philby and all those other wretches, you think it must have happened to him, that he was a KGB man or something. But Good Christ,’ she said vehemently, ‘you must know that most of the people in British Intelligence – the vast majority – are not double agents or KGB men. And Daddy certainly wasn’t. Now – my music case.’ Then she stopped and looked at me. ‘Hey!’ she said, ‘Come with me – we’ve hardly said a word to each other: come and bike with me and meet the others?’

  ‘Bike?’

  ‘Yes, you can use Mummy’s – can’t he?’

  I’d not seen much of Rachel in the past 36 hours – she’d been upstairs a lot of the time – sleeping or recovering in some other way from her birthday evening. But now she seemed to be dancing into life again, in a neat pair of blue cotton trousers, and a long-collared white shirt. She looked summery fresh, while I felt like a decaying tailor’s dummy.

  ‘I should be getting back home,’ I said. ‘I need a change of clothes.’

  ‘Later, later,’ Rachel chanted. Then she paused in her skipping about and looked at me down her long straight nose. ‘You are still going to help us – are you? And come to Glenalyth next week – and not go on about old Brian Allcock?’

  Madeleine had opened the bottom of the long sash window and a breath of warm air fluttered into the high room. Pigeons warbled deep in the green-leafed plane trees and a mower hummed over the grass in the square. Both women looked at me now.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, not knowing where to begin helping them, or how.

  Madeleine broke the silence. ‘Peter said it was a matter of going back through Lindsay’s life, of looking through his papers.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Rachel said before adding impatiently, ‘Maybe. But we have to live, too – meanwhile.’

  I thought at the time that sh
e was trying to leave the thrall of her father behind her with these words, as she had been in her comments about the Professor. But now I see that she meant it was necessary, for her at least, to live towards the mysterious place where she believed he had hidden himself. Where I would have to go back in time to discover him, she, who knew him so well in all that past, was sure he could only lie ahead of her.

  ‘Come on,’ she said quickly. ‘The bikes are in the back hall – and I must have left my music there as well – in the carrier basket.’

  A great contentment broke through me as we started off on our bicycles: that ease with another person that rarely comes, when one is with them, without having to speak, and yet is perfectly joined to them, without words.

  I tried to think when I had last been happy in this way with Rachel as we rode out of the square in the sunshine. The end of our time together, before I’d gone to Egypt and married Bridget in the mid-fifties, had been largely acrimonious.

  It was more than 20 years, I decided, since anything remotely enjoyable had happened between us – and I was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that our real lives together, when we had been truly engaged with each other, had only existed in our childhood and adolescence, before we had set ourselves up alone outside our families.

  There was, in short, something deeply self-indulgent in both of us which had wrecked our adult relationship, but which had made our earlier years together at Glenalyth, where our securities were guaranteed by others, a great success. There in the Highlands we had played games – not tag or tennis, but more often a quite vicious sport of the mind, the sort of intentional mental anatagonisms that are so roundly condemned now in the arid new ‘interpersonal’ psychology, but which for us then were filled with perfect excitement: games truly defined since, with certainty, one of us would lose, the other win. We were filled with each other, for better – or, more often – worse.