by Joseph Hone
*
That evening Fielding met the Prime Minister in Downing Street. After a few minutes he said, ‘I have an idea – I think: a way to test Marcus’s loyalties. If you agree …’
The Prime Minister nodded – and then, overcome with some pent-up frustration, he said: ‘You know, it’s inconceivable, surely, that Marcus should have warned Phillips that Sunday. If he did, it can only point to one thing – that he’s tied up with the Soviets in some way. But I can’t believe that.’
Fielding raised his eyebrows, looking distantly into the shadows of the room, a wise face full of hard and secret responsibilities now. ‘Well, somebody warned Phillips,’ he said gently, as though he was anxious, above all things, to be fair to Marcus. ‘They must have done. But may I suggest what we might do?’
‘Yes, tell me.’ The Prime Minister lit his pipe again.
‘Well, to start with, if I may – to go back to the beginning: has Marcus confirmed to you that Phillips never had any left-wing connections, as a student, for example?’
‘Yes. At our meeting this morning. “None – as far as we know,” he said.’
Fielding smiled gingerly, licking his slightly purple lips. ‘Well, he couldn’t have looked too hard. I have the evidence here.’ Fielding produced photocopies of several old sheets of badly type-written paper and handed them to the PM. ‘The minutes,’ he said, ‘of the Oxford University Labour Club: October 1932. I dug them out of the Bodleian Library.’
The PM glanced through them, but seeing nothing of import, looked up at Fielding.
‘At the end, sir: the faint handwriting at the end.’
‘Ah, yes, these names, I can hardly read them – Barton, McGinness, Phillips. Yes, “Phillips – Merton”. And then some others – all with the letter “R” bracketed after them.’
‘It either means “Resignation” or “Re-election”,’ Fielding said. ‘It’s the start of the academic year and the minutes are about voting in the new officers of the Club.’
‘“Phillips: R.”’ The PM looked at the document closely again. ‘Yes, I suppose it must. What do the earlier minutes say?’
‘They’re not in the Bodleian file, sir. Removed, possibly. I’m trying to get hold of other copies. But meanwhile we have that. It seems perfectly clear that Phillips was involved with the Socialists then. And if someone did remove the other minutes which mentioned him by name, they overlooked that one – the handwriting is so faint at the end there.’
‘So?’ the PM looked eagerly at Fielding.
‘Well, either Marcus is lying; or else he’s made no real effort to check into Phillips’s past at all. Now here’s what I have in mind – as a test …’
‘Yes?’ The PM took up his pipe once more.
9
I never expected to spend that evening drinking with Rachel – the long pub crawl we embarked on, shortly after they opened at 5.30, when she’d finished her music session with George and Max in a rehearsal room at the Wigmore Hall, and she’d asked me to meet her again – alone – in The Dover Castle, a pub round the corner in a mews near Wigmore Street.
Rachel had never used drink in the old days. If her music had been going badly she took it out on other people, not herself – through straightforward bitchiness or nearly malicious jokes: her excesses of wilful energy in any case, diverted from her flute, never led her to the drinks cupboard. Yet she took to it that night like long-lost sex, straightaway, when she came in out of the evening sun in the mews and joined me on a stool in the corner of the bar where I’d been sipping a sherry.
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘A large one.’
‘Difficult day?’ It was like living with her again.
‘No. Not very. But a nonsense day. A nonsense life I’m beginning to think too.’
She unbuttoned the loose-fitting cord safari jacket with huge pockets she had on now and took a silk scarf from her throat, rustling a hand through her short hair. She put the scarf on the edge of the counter where it began to slide off before I caught it. The fine silk was wafer-thin in my hands, like a magician’s prop that could be rolled up the size of a marble. It smelt of something too, as I held it for a moment. And then I recognised it – a faint perfume, like warm plums. When I’d slept with her years before she had smelt of just the same thing; that slight fruit smell, almost gone by morning when we woke, but still just there, overlaid by other warmths that had bloomed during the night. No, Rachel hadn’t drunk much then – and I had yet to find any real taste for sherry.
‘A large one,’ I said to the barmaid when she came. ‘Well?’ I turned to Rachel, putting the scarf back on her knees, where she smoothed it out with her hands and started to stroke it sadly, pondering the fine material.
‘You look tired,’ I said, continuing the role of pillow to lay her woes on – a familiar part for me, Rachel in the old days entering one of her “unworthy” moods before recovering dramatically and biting my head off. Had Rachel not changed at all, I wondered, just grown older? Was everything intact, as it had been – all the imbalances of her temperament, the rage she brought to bear on life’s dissatisfactions, the heart-stopping sorrows she found then, unable to beat the system – meditating numbly like a penitent on the bed for hours afterwards. Had she sorted out nothing in that rag-bag mind of hers? I hoped she had. And yet I feared this hope. One comes to love people for their flaws, which they truly possess, mistrusting their virtues as something assumed, or forced upon them by circumstances.
‘Tired?’ She quaffed half the schooner of sherry. ‘Yes. Of George. And Max for that matter. What a pair of geniuses they are – oh, I know that. But somehow I can’t feel them any more – or their musical on Dottie Parker.’
‘Musical on who?’
‘Dorothy Parker. You know – the Catholic wit, the witty soak. It’s called Dottie. We were working on it all this afternoon – and next week up in Scotland. They want some flute arrangements. It’s a lovely idea – but I’m bored with it. Or them, rather. And George is so kind as well. And that’s worse.’
‘George?’ I queried. ‘Is he …?’
‘Yes. Or he was. I was foolish enough to sleep with him once. He’s never forgiven me. You should never sleep with your manager, did you know that?’
She looked at me, narrowing her eyes – a twinkle in them, just a hint of the ‘Come hither’ look.
‘Well –’
‘Not if they’re in love with you, I mean. That’s the problem.’
‘Because you’re not?’
‘No.’ She pulled a thread from the seam of her cord jacket. ‘I loved George, the busy child. But with me he soon lost that – grew up and became terribly serious and responsible. Marriage was the next thing on his mind: dumping poor Marianne – and a Manor for us in the shires playing Schubert duets by candlelight. It was sad. Of course, I couldn’t.’
‘My God,’ I said, ‘whenever I made a joke you used to think I was getting at you. You wanted me serious –’
‘Yes – because you are serious, essentially. And George is really a child. What’s wrong is when people try and change what they are.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I see …’ I smiled. Sometimes they have to do that: the old person becomes a bore. You just said it yourself. A “nonsense life” you said you had.’
‘Oh, I have to change,’ she said briskly. ‘But I don’t see why you people should. You haven’t. People change worst of all “in love” of course. With George – it was dreadful, took all the stuffing out of him. Became bad opera. He ceased to be able to see himself – went all airy-fairy, like a hippo dancing.’
Rachel hadn’t lost her little cruelties. No love was good enough for Rachel: she treated every version offered her as suspect since anyone who could love her must be a fool. Only one love did she believe in – her father’s, the one she could not properly have, which would therefore never threaten the armour of her self-disgust.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘About George.’
‘Yes – he’s really
extremely annoyed about you.’ She raised her glass again.
‘He’s no reason to be.’
‘The past. He’s jealous of that. And the future! Thinks he knows what’s best for me,’ Rachel added slowly.
I must have had an air of Puritan shock at that moment, for she started to laugh, a poopy, spluttering childish laugh, air filling her cheeks and changing her face – which took me right back, past the woman I’d known, to the girl she’d been in our childhood. Rachel’s childish nature still flew too readily to the surface. And yet it was an exciting quality for all that, a master-stroke against time – for one saw her then just as she had been when young, in which all her years were thrown off and she lived again, for seconds on end, as an 8-year-old once more, squabbling on the climbing frame or refusing to share a toy. There were times with Rachel when she could lay her whole life out for you, like a long panoramic folding-plate in a book, and you could see all the main incidents in it at once, like widely separated spires and domes pricking into the sky above a city – times when, through a mannerism, a change of expression or a sudden new tone in her voice, she unlocked and released her past, destroying all the traditional processes of time, leaving one with a momentary vision of the complete life; no longer part of herself focused on one moment, but the whole spread over all the years from the beginning.
‘I hated you,’ she said. ‘And I can see why –’
‘Yes, you had to live with me, not just imagine it all, like Lindsay. I was real –’
‘Don’t interrupt! If I didn’t have much confidence about myself – you never helped.’
‘I wasn’t your father.’
‘Fathead!’
‘At twenty – one’s looking for a little adult equality: not just nursery tea and sympathy. Well – he’s gone. You’ll have to grow up now.’
There was a silence then. She picked up my hand then, quite suddenly, and put it for an instant to her cheek.
The silence continued. Her scarf fell again, this time to the floor, so that I had to bend right down to get it, and when I stood up to hand it back to her she was looking at me.
‘Do you know what I think?’ I said, suddenly tired of so many words and years talking to Rachel about her father. ‘I think it’s all a lot of weak nonsense on your part. You should have sorted yourself out years ago about Lindsay; not now when it’s a little late – and he’s gone, and you feel like a widow. Is that what you wanted me here alone for – to hear this, to have it confirmed?’
‘No.’ She was indecisive, looking at me closely.
‘I mean, at twenty – maybe young girls still have the sort of crush for their handsome daddies in the Foreign Office. But twenty years on, still mooning round his coat-tails, and it’s like some bad old Scandinavian play.’
I said my piece and lifted my glass like a satisfied bully. I suppose I still believed in shock therapy – as I had in the old days. It hadn’t got me anywhere then but one retains an awful fidelity to one’s weaknesses: and that, after all, was exactly what Rachel was doing with Lindsay.
‘You can’t lose him – until you find yourself: is that all there is?’ I asked, hammering a last nail in.
‘No,’ she said gently.
She reached into her shoulder bag. ‘Here, I’ll get the next one.’ She called the barmaid. ‘Two large sherries,’ she said to the girl.
‘And I never saw you drink so much, Rachel.’
She turned to me, looking pleased with herself. ‘You could never accept that I loved Lindsay pretty easily.’
The girl came with the sherry. The evening clatter was rising all around us, the happiness of drinkers embarking on a whole hot summer of beer. Only one man seemed alone in the whole bar, a bad-tempered looking fellow reading the sports page of the Express in the far corner.
‘You put a good front on it,’ I said, above the din.
‘What?’ She leant forward, undoing the last button on her cord jacket.
‘Nothing, really – except that with a few large sherries everything looks better – especially the past. But remember, I’ve seen you weep your eyes out about your father.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled hugely. ‘That’s what’s so nice: you remember everything – and you’re still annoyed.’
I did remember, but I just sat there listening to her now, for she had suddenly found her stride, a perfect mix of alcohol and natural enthusiasm which might not last. ‘You see,’ she flew on, ‘my problem isn’t that I was stupidly in love with Lindsay: it’s just that I’ve suddenly come to remember almost everything I ever did with him. I see it so clearly now, as if things we’d shared had happened absolutely yesterday – like photographs you take out of an old drawer which become so intense that you can step into them and pick up your life at that point and start living it again. That’s what I feel. Do you see? I can just step back into all this other life, whole chunks of it, absolutely real: like climbing that big copper beech one afternoon, the one by the back drive, and watching Lindsay come down the hall steps with the rowlocks and going down to the lake through the rhododendrons. Well, I remembered that to start with – and next I knew I was following him down the path – and this was a quite new memory. I mean, I seemed to be doing it for the first time – I was standing by the boat-house, actually looking at him out on the lake rowing. Seeing the ripples, as though I could just walk over the water to him, and the water lilies all out by the island, so it was summer and I must have been about ten. And he waved at me – he wasn’t too far out because I could see the leather patches on his jacket. And I wasn’t dreaming. Well, it’s eerie–that all this comes back to me, as something I’m actually experiencing now and not then. Just as if everything that ever happened to me had lost all its natural sequence and my whole life had become a simultaneous experience, like people are supposed to feel when they’re dying. So you see that’s why I can’t think Lindsay’s gone. I can see him so completely, absolutely …’
‘Do other people come back to you in this way – your mother, for example?’
‘Or you?’ Rachel put in brightly.
‘Or me, yes.’
‘Yes, they do. Once I’ve found Lindsay again at some exact spot in the past – then I can usually place you all in relation to him: you and Billy and Henty, Anna and Sally in the kitchen, everyone.’
‘Him and you – then all of us?’
‘Yes. For example, that afternoon when he was out in the boat rowing – well, he was fishing too. I could see a line coming out from the back, trailing over the green stern. But something was wrong – he rarely went out on his own, always took one of us. And how can he fish and row at the same time? And then I saw what it was. Of course – Aunt Susan was with him! It was she who was fishing from the back, trolling for pike. And then the whole thing made sense: there she was – rather long and thin and brown – do you remember? Those brown cardigans and skirts she always wore? – and dark stockings – so that we called her the Tree. Anyway, there she was crouched in the back of the boat in that straw panama of hers. You remember? You must.’
‘Yes. Aunt Susan – you mean Eleanor’s elder sister. Is she still alive?’
‘Yes – in their old house outside Dunkeld. Remember, she used to look after us when the others were away in London for something? She’s about seventy. Mummy sees her now and then. But Susan never much liked Lindsay: thought he’d neglected Eleanor that time he was in Yugoslavia with her before the war and she killed herself.’
I nodded. Rachel’s tiredness had been washed away in these memories and she had the excitement about her now of someone – herself indeed – half-way through a performance of some brilliant music.
‘But if they didn’t like each other, what were they doing in the boat together?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. That was strange. But they were certainly in the boat together.’
‘Did he ever talk to you about Eleanor?’ We’d stopped drinking – our heads closer like old conspirators, the better to hear each other above
the chatter, both of us intent now on this past together.
‘He never didn’t speak to me about her – when I asked.’
‘What –’
‘Oh, kind of heart-breaking: how fond he’d been, which was his way of saying “in love with”. And I asked him what had been wrong with her, and he said, simply, that she’d gone dotty.’
‘In those words?’
‘Yes: “dotty”.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’ Rachel looked puzzled, and started to fiddle with her scarf again. ‘Well, he said she’d come rather to spy on him, thought he was having affairs, which of course was absolutely ridiculous. Anyway, she became intensely possessive, jealous apparently. To the point of dementia. That’s what he said.’
‘To the point of …?’
‘Well, of rushing out under that tram in Zagreb.’
‘It’s strange, given Lindsay’s background, that he should have taken up with someone so uncontrolled like that, isn’t it?’ I looked at Rachel for confirmation. But now, taking up her sherry again, she was totally at ease once more, anxious, it seemed, to minimise these unexpected contradictions in her father’s personality.
‘Oh, yes – but don’t forget, they were both hardly more than twenty when they married. And his background may have been stable. But it was ghastly as well: that domineering father of his, the wicked old General: anything to get away from him and out of the house, I can see that – and off with someone sympathetic, which Eleanor was by every account, to begin with: sympathetic – intelligent too.’
‘Yes. But if Eleanor was so intelligent –’
‘Well, she just didn’t like the diplomatic life, when it came to it. She was a country woman – like Mummy. Paris, Rome, Vienna – that wasn’t her style at all.’
‘No. I suppose not.’
‘Anyway,’ Rachel continued with even more conviction, changing the precise topic. ‘First marriages, too young, are often rather rotten. I know with Klaus and me.’
‘Did he love you too much?’ I asked with some mischief.
