The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  ‘No. He just decided I didn’t know who I was – and was never likely to learn. A bit German of him. But that wasn’t his fault. Conductors are interpreters – and Klaus kept annoying himself by thinking I wasn’t playing myself properly, wasn’t hitting the right notes in my psyche.’

  ‘So why did you start with Klaus then?’

  She let out a small shout of joy. ‘I wanted what I hadn’t got, of course. And saw it in him. And you must know what that is by now – don’t you?’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Order, security, straight-forwardness, literalness, seriousness …’ Rachel tolled each word lugubriously. ‘All that mousy bag of tricks.’ She was excited now, staring at me, her lips open, intent on some invisible fascination that had risen up and was there in the air, suspended between us, held by our gaze at each other.

  ‘Yes, but why, Rachel? No one’s life could have been more secure or loving than yours as a child. How did you come by all this insecurity, this craving for order?’

  ‘Well, I can’t understand that either. It’s as if my early life hadn’t in fact been all loving and wonderful at all.’

  ‘I see.’ But I didn’t.

  We looked at each other intently, mystified by what might have been, by what might have happened years before.

  We walked out into the evening sun a few minutes afterwards, the bar too smoky and crowded now. But outside the rush hour had cleared and the streets were nearly empty, the tall office blocks, catching the late sun high up like white cliff tops, had all drained away – the people gone home or settled in the many pubs along the route we took, just wandering, with nothing particular in mind, towards Marylebone High Street.

  And then, crossing over the main road here, we lost ourselves in a string of narrow lanes and passageways beyond. Rachel was a little ahead of me on the narrow broken pavement, swinging her leather shoulder bag in her hand like a sling, head down, thinking of something. She turned back at the entrance to a short street that led to a car park. ‘What shall we do? Pick up the bikes at the Hall? Or have another drink?’

  There was a pub, I saw, on the other side of the road, a little way up, between a row of garages and small offices: a workers’ bar in peeling brown paint and smudged windows, a simple boozer hidden away behind the smart streets of Marylebone like an old cloth-cap relative in a posh wedding photograph.

  Rachel had stopped now right in the middle of the narrow street, and just then a car had turned the corner and come up behind her, quite fast, and she’d had to move quickly out of the way. She stared after it malevolently as it disappeared up towards Marylebone Road, still swinging her bag as if about to unleash it after it.

  ‘That man was in the pub with us,’ she said.

  ‘Which man?’

  ‘The man in that car, next to the driver.’

  ‘Well, his friend must have come and picked him up. Or do you think he’s following us?’ I added.

  ‘You should know. You’re the spy, aren’t you?’ Rachel walked up to me, cocked her head, slinging the bag over her shoulder. I shrugged.

  ‘Well, that’s the other problem, isn’t it? Let’s have a drink and talk about it.’

  The lounge bar was a long, tatty room done in the same yellowing paint with several pin-tables and a bad girlie calendar on one wall and some of last year’s Christmas decorations still above the bar. A man sat in a wheelchair at one end, drinking a pint, leaning his hunched back up towards the counter, feeding himself carefully with his twisted fingers. A boy, who seemed under age, sat on a bench next him, sipping Coke from a tin. The crowd were in the public bar across the way from us, men in shirtsleeves and overalls playing darts, shouting between the concentrated silences and then moving in and out of the shafts of smoky evening sunlight.

  ‘Just the place for a suspicious assignation,’ Rachel said, gazing at a half nude girl fingering her boobs, as a man wiping his hands in a drying-up cloth came up to us. We had beer this time. The sherry had gone to my head, though Rachel showed no effects of it at all.

  ‘You are a fool,’ she said when the man had gone. ‘For a spy: that man in the car – that’s the third time I’ve seen him today. He was following us this morning, in the same car, when we left Hyde Park Square.’

  ‘Well?’ She was possibly right, I thought, remembering Marcus’s warnings. He was probably keeping an eye on me. I wasn’t very surprised. And I felt irresponsible just then, uncaring almost, with the heat and the sherry.

  ‘Well – is it me, or you they’re following?’ Rachel repeated herself very precisely. The boy said something to the cripple at the end of the counter, about football. The barman joined them, a cockney with yellow, tobacco-stained hair. They started to argue and for some reason I couldn’t stop listening to them, following obsessively their conflicting post-mortems.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Who are they following?’ Rachel said again.

  ‘I don’t know who the hell is following us, or which of us,’ I said abruptly. ‘Maybe they’re keeping an eye on you, as his daughter. Or maybe me, because I worked for them once. Or maybe you’re quite wrong and it’s no one following anyone.’

  ‘I’m as tired as you are of policemen.’ Rachel read my thoughts. ‘But –’

  ‘Fine. I told Madeleine I’d help. I’ll come up with you next week to Glenalyth. Start from there, from the beginning, lay out all the evidence, clues, papers, dates: a master plan – and see what turns up.’

  ‘The beginning?’

  ‘It’s there, isn’t it? It must be – somewhere in his past, the things he did, the friends he knew, it’s somewhere there.’ I felt angry then – angry at some long blindness I thought I detected in the two women which had allowed Lindsay finally to slip through their fingers. ‘For example, you thought it was perfectly natural for Lindsay to have married Eleanor. I’m not so sure.’

  Rachel put her glass down and now she did look for a moment as if the drink had suddenly taken her.

  ‘And then again, and more importantly maybe, why did Lindsay join British Intelligence in the first place? Wasn’t like him at all, not the man I remember – shading round back alleys and so on. He was just the opposite. So why?’

  ‘He was – patriotic,’ Rachel said after a moment.

  ‘Yes, exactly. Very upright and public spirited. Very open. That’s why it doesn’t add up.’

  ‘I don’t see –’

  ‘You don’t see the contradictions?’

  ‘No, really. Not at all.’

  ‘Well, I do. And that’s where I’d start looking for him: in his contradictions.’

  I could see that Rachel didn’t either like or understand this line. But I pursued it.

  ‘Well, he joined Intelligence because a close friend of his at Oxford did, in the early thirties. That’s what I always heard. It was perfectly straightforward.’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘Yes. He’s a don there still, I think. At Merton, Daddy’s old College. John Wellcome – that’s his name. He used to come and see us sometimes in London.’

  ‘He’s left Intelligence then?’

  ‘He must have, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s exactly the sort of person I’d like to see.’

  ‘He’ll hardly talk. It’s all Official Secrets, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe. But if I got your mother to speak to him, I don’t see why not. I’m trying to find out what happened to Lindsay, after all, not subvert the government.’

  Rachel did not look too happy about this. I said, ‘Don’t you want him found, if he is to be found?’

  ‘Of course.’ But she was half-hearted somehow. ‘If you talk to John Wellcome – why not all the others? All the other people he’s had to do with over the years.’

  ‘Who, for example?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know exactly. But there’s MacAulay who was his CO during the war, in the Argyll and Sutherland –’

  ‘Not the whisky MacAulays?’

  ‘Yes – the big hou
se, The Hall. They used to have juvenile dances.’

  ‘I remember. The wife always on the bottle. I didn’t know he was Lindsay’s CO, though.’

  ‘And there’s Parker. Willis Parker, a very old friend – went through the FO with Daddy before the war. He’s in Brussels now. With the British delegation to the EEC. And there must be dozens of others. But what can they say?’

  ‘We could find out,’ I said.

  Later, when it got dark and we’d walked back towards Wigmore Street to collect our bikes, we ended up in a third bar, just off Marylebone High Street, an old-fashioned local this time, with gas lamps all gone electric, but with real aspidistras in the window. A few uncertain men from the service apartments nearby were listening to a fair-haired sailor boy playing an upright piano, glancing at him covertly.

  ‘Hadn’t we better eat?’ I’d said.

  ‘No. Later. I like this.’

  Her face was flushed now. She took off her loose cord jacket and just stood there listening to the smooth piano for a minute, breathing deeply, embarking on some private performance of her own, as though she had joined an orchestra late and had just at that moment taken up her instrument but was already perfectly in tune with the others. She was fascinated, involved, like someone released from a long confinement or dull toil into a miraculous life. The sailor boy changed tempo – sliding into ‘Stranger in Paradise’, I think, playing in a cocktail-hour, starlight-room manner, trilling expertly, syncopating the notes. It was all rather unreal – but we’d had seven drinks and it sounded fine.

  ‘You see!’ Rachel turned to me vehemently. ‘This is what I want.’ Her eyes were glassy – with emotion or drink, I couldn’t say. ‘For years and years I was up on a pedestal being prim and musical – but never this music, this life!’

  She looked round at the wan old bachelors – and someone laughed raucously on the other side of the room, a fair-haired colonial rough, brandishing his arms, hammering some bad joke into the witless eyes of two young Englishwomen next to him.

  ‘This?’ I asked. ‘Is this the life?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I got the drinks. Rachel looked much younger now with the colour in her cheeks and the unaccustomed drink – which had brought out a great vivacity in her, not a flirtatious thing, but a surprise which she had not known she possessed and which she played with then as with some glittering new toy.

  ‘Didn’t you do plenty of this with George?’ I asked. ‘The “Hail fellow well met” stuff? I’d have thought that was very much his style: “Knees up Mother Brown and six pints of bitter”.’

  ‘Yes. We used to. Before he fell in love with me.’ Rachel spoke as if of some great life before a tragic death. ‘After that, all he wanted to do was take me to Glyndebourne.’

  ‘I don’t see –’

  ‘You won’t fall in love with me again, will you?’

  ‘No more cakes and ale?’

  ‘Oh, that. Well, that’s all right, isn’t it? But love is like having a puncture. You suddenly can’t go anywhere. You’re stopped.’

  What she meant, I thought then, was that – deprived of the real object of her love – she would now preserve that emotion carefully, against her father’s return. Rachel was a classic case of someone who must lie to maintain any foothold in dull reality; in love she was a Conquistador who could only feel that emotion in face of an unattainable El Dorado.

  ‘How shall we manage then?’ I asked lightly. ‘Less than lovers, more than friends.’

  ‘Any way at all,’ she said. ‘As long as we’re not what we were before. Anything, anything else,’ she went on earnestly, frowning now, looking at me in a way which years before I would have called passionate, yet which now was supposed to deny all such feelings.

  So we stood there, a big bowl of lilac and narcissi between us, getting quietly squiffy, melting into the warm room, ‘Begin the Beguine’ dripping from the piano: a feeling of sweet carelessness had crept up on me all unawares – that cloudless confidence with a woman that seems to make going to bed with her only a matter of time. And then I thought – yes, even that she might offer, siren-like, to deflect us from our purpose.

  So I said, ‘What if I find myself wanting to sleep with you?’

  She laughed and looked at me as though I was a dunderhead.

  ‘“Found wanting” indeed! I should hope –’

  And then, before she could properly reply, the velvet drapes across the door began to dance and shiver like a nursery ghost and George blundered into the bar, untimely to the dot, the water diviner in luck once more; the keen traveller, who would find Rachel over half the world, had made nothing of flushing her out of all the pubs in Marylebone.

  ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken us,’ Rachel said to him at once, mocking him, quite merry, offering him her beer glass.

  George really played the role of jealous lover too close to the bone that evening, so that the performance lacked objective style: it was full of ungoverned feeling, forceful yet painful, like a stage-struck amateur attempting Othello in a village hall.

  ‘So here you are,’ he said shortly, without looking at me. He dried then, rooted to the spot, swaying slightly, out of breath, without managing another word. He’d forgotten his lines. I offered him a drink to fill the pause, turning back towards the bar and calling the landlady, inserting some neat, impromptu stage business so that he might collect himself.

  ‘We thought you were coming back for dinner,’ I heard him say at last to Rachel, not bluntly aggrieved but in the tones of a sad ringmaster who had inexplicably lost a valuable animal.

  ‘Oh, do relax George,’ she told him. ‘We were just talking about Lindsay.’

  I got George a pint of real ale, the beer frothing up over the edge of the glass – a generous pint, and I thought how strange it was that this gregarious schoolboy of a man should so isolate himself in the toils of an operatic hopeless love, an illness without relief: prostrating himself at her feet, as at some holy grail, pleading for Chamber Music in the shires and trips to view Chartres Cathedral on long weekends – with a half-crazed wife in the background, loneliness bleeding out of her like a wound: a music copyist, somewhere round the corner in a service flat, longing to join George’s orchestra.

  It all seemed an unpleasant business then, naive and cruel, something which only a schoolboy, indeed, could have contrived in his relationships. Or had it been Rachel’s fault initially in leading him on, as she had once done with me before throwing me over, repeating the trick afterwards with the German conductor – Rachel, who would punish every man for not being her father? That was as likely, I thought – and so much the more reason for her disbelief in love now that her father had gone, for I supposed she loved others only in Lindsay’s presence, as it were, as a way of wounding and taking revenge on her father, and without him found no pleasure in the exercise.

  ‘Yes, Lindsay,’ she repeated. ‘Trying to find him.’

  I heard George grunt in annoyance. ‘Him again.’ Like me, I think George was coming to see Lindsay as his real rival – a far greater shadow over his love than ever I could cast.

  The suddenly, handing George his beer, I wanted to throw it at him: the whole business was ridiculous. And I longed to turn on this big, willing bear-like man and clobber him for his abject, fruitless loving. But George pre-empted my anger, reversed it, by attacking me.

  ‘How,’ he said sarcastically, nursing his pint for a moment like a huge penguin in the crotch of one arm, ‘How do you expect to find Lindsay if no one else has, the Police, the Special Branch, in two months turning over every stone?’

  I’m sure George saw my interest in Lindsay as nothing more than an excuse – a convenient and direct access I’d discovered to Rachel which I would now patrol to his exclusion.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I thought I should try.’

  ‘Peter knew him well, after all,’ Rachel put in.

  ‘So did I. But does that help?’ George was sweating, his glasses clouded over,
so that he had to look over the gold rims at me.

  ‘A long time ago, though.’ Rachel was trying to help me again. ‘There might be something in the past –’

  ‘Oh, come on, Rachel; someone kidnapped him or bumped him off.’

  ‘Well, who then?’ She turned on George. ‘I want to know, who?’

  ‘All right, I don’t know. But I can’t see how Peter’s going to be any more help.’

  ‘Well, he did work once in the same organisation – British Intelligence,’ Rachel said carefully. ‘That might help.’

  This information came like an ace against George’s meagre hand. ‘Did you?’ he asked me. And I nodded, feeling the cruelty of it all once more. One can summon limitless pity for the unloved in such circumstances and I tried to soften the blow. ‘Not that my work had anything to do with his,’ I said. ‘I was very junior.’

  But George would not be placated. I think he had suddenly decided, just then, that finding Lindsay was the key which would release Rachel to him once more. George loved the dramatic gesture, I knew, the moment taken out of time and set up timelessly: half the London Philharmonia for Rachel’s birthday, or a trip with her over the moon, both were equally within his gift, he felt, and more besides, for he had such a flowing, uncluttered confidence in his love. Like the two women, he believed in Victory through love, against all the odds. Though I knew that in Lindsay’s world there were no such victories, and no room at all for such naively generous enquiries. All the same, at the time, his next words touched me.

  ‘Well, it may not be too difficult,’ he said with a sudden, kind authority.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Finding out what happened to Lindsay.’ George drank then, deeply, like a knight before battle.

  ‘How?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘I’ve a friend in Intelligence here. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t think –’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Chap called Basil Fielding. Quite high up now, I think. I was at College with him after the war, knew him well then. I could ask him about it all.’

  I looked at George, as at someone who had just performed an astonishing trick – as indeed he had.