by Joseph Hone
‘Oh,’ was all I could say. It was my turn then to forget my lines.
10
By the time I got back home to Oxfordshire the following afternoon I realised there was nothing to be done about George’s unexpected friendship with Basil. In the pub, the night before, I’d not even bothered to advise him against renewing it: if he did this, Basil presumably – since he wished to maintain such secrecy in the whole matter – would not mention my involvement with him and would simply stall with George, play the great bear along.
In the end, as I drove home from the station, I was left only with a feeling of discomfort about the two of them in my mind – an additional mystery in a business already confused: these two together didn’t fit into any plot that I could conceive. They were extra luggage; awkward, unwanted, a dramatic oversight; characters who, denied a proper part in the proceedings, might start to write their own dangerous lines.
I had a bath when I got in, and at last some fresh clothes, and then I poured a large sherry, Garvey’s San Patricio, lightly iced from the bottom of the fridge. I still had a few bottles of it left, kept for special occasions or emergencies. It was six o’clock, my old rural cocktail hour, and I was happy to be alone again, leaning once more on the deep window-sill looking out on the side of the church where the evening sun fell on it, warming all the old ochre stone, and beyond that the empty evening hills, rolling away to the west beyond the village.
I would have dug out my unfinished Egyptian typescript or got ready for a walk, if the phone hadn’t gone just then – Madeleine, from London, telling me she had finally managed to contact John Wellcome and that I should call him at his home outside Oxford for an appointment to see him. She gave me his number.
‘You will be coming up with us to Glenalyth next week, won’t you?’ she said as an afterthought before putting the phone down – and I remember looking at the weathercock on top of the old tithe barn down the road just then and seeing it swing suddenly so that I delayed a moment before saying, ‘Yes, of course I’ll be coming.’
But she noticed the pause in my voice and taking it for a doubt said, with just a touch of pique: ‘You don’t have to, of course. You know that.’
‘No, no. Of course I want to. I was just looking at the weathercock on a barn opposite the cottage here. It suddenly changed direction.’
‘Well – why not?’
‘There isn’t any wind, that’s why. Or there wasn’t when I came in.’
We said goodbye and then I opened the window and put my head out into the warm evening: and there wasn’t any wind, none at all, not a murmur. But the weathercock had definitely swung round by about 180 degrees.
It was nerves, I suppose; the tensions of the last three days. But it suddenly struck me that Marcus, with the connivance of the mad old Major in the Manor, had put someone to watch over me in the tithe barn. An irrational thought, but it was enough to make me decide to call John Wellcome from outside my cottage, since if they had decided on such physical surveillance they would certainly have put a tap on my phone as well.
So I left the cottage and was half-way down the village street to the call-box by the post office when I had the further thought: if they’d gone to the trouble of tapping my own private phone they would surely have done the same with the village call-box. I knew I was losing my head then and I went back home and made the call from there – scowling forcefully all the same up at the arrow-slit windows of the barn as I passed it.
John Wellcome’s voice was very unlike his name, excessively cold and business-like. Without enthusiasm he told me he’d be watching cricket at the Oxford Parks the following day – the University XI against Surrey – and I could meet him on the far side of the ground, opposite the pavilion, by the sightscreen, at one o’clock.
‘I’m sure I can’t help you,’ he added. ‘But of course, since Madeleine has asked me, I’ll … do what I can.’
‘I’m sure I can’t help you.’ How often they say that, I thought, especially the ones who can.
*
John Wellcome sat watching the cricket in a deck chair by the sightscreen as I walked round the boundary line towards him, a minute fellow in a round tweed hat pulled down over his head like a pastry casing, and a jacket in the same rough greenish material, though the day was hot again, a hard blue sky running away over the playing fields to where the city murmured beyond the chestnut trees on the Parks Road. A girl sat next to him, his daughter I supposed, a thin girl in a long shapeless Indian print skirt, unkempt sun-bleached hair and bare feet. A baby crawled in front of them, almost naked, gurgling and eating bits of grass as it made its way out towards the middle of the field.
‘Do take him off, Caroline. He’ll get hurt.’
Wellcome spoke with pedantic care as I came up behind them and the girl called the child like a dog. ‘Here, Bonzo, come back, come on. Back, back!’ She had an American accent – a pretty face, but worn, with hollow cheeks and the slightly bluish skin of an old woman. The Guardian book page lay open beneath her chair and the baby’s feeding-bottle had been discarded on top of it, along with some soiled paper nappies.
‘Don’t get up, please,’ I said, introducing myself. They didn’t.
‘Ah, Mr Marlow. Here already,’ the man said rather glumly, and I felt a dull student come with a duller essay for my weekly tutorial. ‘My wife, Caroline.’ He gestured sharply towards the girl like a conductor bringing in a distant and unimportant instrument, and she looked up, gazing right through me with her tired eyes for an instant.
‘Hi,’ she said before turning back to deal with her son, who had now crawled quite far out into the field.
‘Goddammit! That child!’ She got up and dragged him back over the boundary. The child started to cry and then, seeing me and believing I must be the cause of its restraint, it howled even louder.
‘I’m sorry – to disturb you like this.’ There was nowhere for me to sit and I stood above them uncertainly, the child bellowing so loudly now that one of the umpires turned towards us in distant surprise.
‘You’ll have to take him away, Caroline.’ Wellcome spoke like a judge passing a death sentence. His wife got up and left us, carrying the protesting baby. But she chose a path right across the front of the sightscreen, half-way through the bowler’s run, so that the batsman at the far end held his arm up and the game came to a halt. The umpire turned again and now he gestured at us angrily.
‘I did tell you, Caroline, not to do that when the bowler is running up. They can’t see the ball if you do.’
‘They must be blind then. I don’t play this game, you know.’ She left us, flapping away in her Indian skirt, the child perched like a water-jug on her shoulder, and I took her seat next the coldly irascible don.
‘Well now …’ But Wellcome paused, taking up a pair of binoculars from his lap and looking out over the game which had re-started. The batsman played and missed a ball. ‘There! That’s Edrich all over – dabbing outside the off stump again. Lost him his England place. Only real fault, but you’d think he’d have learnt to control it by now.’
‘Edrich?’ I looked out at the distant batsman, playing the stroke he’d missed again, studiously prodding the air. ‘Of Compton and Edrich? He must be getting on.’
‘No, of course not. This is John Edrich. Used to open for England.’
‘Oh. I’m not really very much in touch …’
Wellcome nodded without taking his eyes off the game. ‘So, you used to be with the old firm,’ he said.
‘Well, nothing serious. I was in Information and Library – the old Mid East Section. In Holborn.’
‘Oh yes. The Wogs and the Wops.’ Wellcome had small, rather piggy blue eyes, and he shaded them now against the sun.
‘Italians? I don’t remember …’
‘All from the same neck of the woods.’ He took out a packet of cheap whiffs and lit one. ‘You don’t smoke, do you?’ he said, putting them away almost at once. ‘Oh, now this is interesting.’ He stu
died the game intently once more. There was a change of bowling. ‘Thought they’d bring him back for a spell before lunch. This is Ambler, our new opener: very lively, though he’s getting almost nothing from the wicket, playing like an old carpet this year.’
He blew the smoke from his cheap whiff and it trailed back into my eyes, making them smart, and the lanky student called Ambler made a slow and thoughtful progress back to his mark quite near the boundary.
‘He takes an awful long run,’ I said. The game seemed to have died in the heat, the sun right above us, the fielders and batsmen all waiting on some great revelation which would materialise at the end of Ambler’s stately walk.
‘Yes. But he’s very pacey,’ Wellcome said.
And so he was, so far as I could judge from his run, arms flailing round at a clamorous rate as he came into the crease before whipping the ball down – a bouncer that rose sharply over Edrich’s head so that he nearly ducked into it.
‘Oh, naughty,’ Wellcome expostulated. ‘Naughty!’
‘I wanted to ask you –’ I said. But Wellcome put his hand up, before taking his field glasses again.
‘Wait, don’t tell me, yes, he’s getting a warning.’
The umpire was speaking to Ambler now, the bowler pawing the return crease like a horse, before the two of them walked down the pitch to examine something closely on the earth.
‘Of course! He’s running onto the pitch again.’
‘Isn’t he allowed – doesn’t he have to?’ I pretended innocently.
Wellcome looked at me with annoyance. ‘Yes, but not after his delivery, you see.’
‘About Lindsay Phillips,’ I started again. ‘I wondered what you thought.’
Wellcome didn’t reply for a long moment, not until Ambler had turned once more and started his run. ‘Absolute tragedy, that’s what I think.’
Ambler was coming in again like fury now – a good-length ball this time which Edrich dabbed at again, missing it, as it flew close over the stumps.
‘My!’ Wellcome drew in his breath sharply. ‘That was a better one. On a pitch with any help, you know, this boy is quite unplayable.’ He licked his lips in appreciation.
‘You knew him well, didn’t you? Here at Oxford. You joined the service together, I understand?’ I decided not to waste any more time. But Wellcome was not so inclined.
‘No. We didn’t.’ There was silence again.
‘Rachel, his daughter –’
‘Oh, yes, I know her,’ Wellcome said at once, glad to suggest his willing co-operation over something, at least, in our conversation.
‘She thought it was because of you that Lindsay joined Intelligence in the first place.’
‘Did she indeed? I wonder what gave her that idea?’
‘No?’ We had to wait for another ball before he said anything more.
‘No, certainly not. That wasn’t so.’ Wellcome twirled and pinched the dying cheroot in his fingers. ‘I was already in the service – or about to be, rather.’
‘Yes, that’s what she meant, I think: that he took after you.’
Wellcome looked distressed suddenly, as if he’d just come across some stupid critical interpretation in my weekly paper. ‘“Took after” me?’ he said.
‘Well, you were older than him …’
Wellcome shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes. But not by much. I was in my last year at College when I met him – end of ’31, I think; he’d just come up. Or was it his second year? I forget. Yes, it may have been. I came back to College, you know; got a fellowship. I saw more of him then, I think.’
‘You didn’t stay in Intelligence then, after you left College?’
Wellcome had picked up his field glasses and was looking at the game closely again. Ambler’s last ball of the over. But I had the feeling he was listening to me carefully at last.
‘No, I got a fellowship, I told you: rather to my surprise. I didn’t take up Intelligence work again until the war started and I went to London. Worked with Dick Crossman in that black propaganda department. I didn’t see Lindsay again until after the war, when he was back from the Army, and I was back here in College. So I don’t know where Rachel got the idea that Lindsay “took after” me. Lindsay joined up on his own bat as far as I know – absolutely.’
‘You mean he was recruited by someone down here? One doesn’t just apply, surely, for a job like that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Wellcome was abrupt. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘But there must have been someone who approached –’
‘You know I really can’t go into all that. I simply can’t: there’s no thirty-year release clause as regards my Intelligence work, I’m afraid. It’s still entirely confidential. I thought in any case you wanted my opinion about what had happened to Lindsay, not how he got into the job.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. But I think the two things may well be connected.’
The players were coming off the field now, for the lunch interval. Wellcome stood up, wiping his brow with an old red hanky. I looked at him. He seemed flustered suddenly, as if he’d just undergone some sudden exertion, instead of being parked quietly on a deck chair for the last two hours. We started to walk round the boundary line towards the pavilion.
‘How do you mean, the two things “connected”?’ Wellcome asked, with grudging interest now: the College dunderhead had surprised him with a new angle on a difficult poet.
‘Someone must have specially encouraged Lindsay at the time to join Intelligence. After all, he wasn’t the sort, was he? Very formal, open kind of person, very direct. Not cloak-and-dagger at all.’
‘Well, someone may have. But it wasn’t me.’
‘Could he have been forced into it in some way?’
‘Do you mean blackmailed? Never.’
‘No. I meant against his better judgement. You see, it doesn’t add up to me – either his disappearance or his joining in the first place. Both seem quite unlike him.’
We could see Caroline now, over by the tennis courts, watching two young men play, smashing the ball about with vigorous acrobatics. A shade of anxiety crossed Wellcome’s face. He had lost touch with me again.
‘You see, if I could find out how – and why – he joined Intelligence, I think I might get a line, at least, on why he disappeared.’
But Wellcome appeared absorbed in his young wife now, the child, Bonzo, scrabbling round the wire fence, rattling it, undoubtedly putting the players off their game.
‘She really shouldn’t …’ I heard him mutter; his helpless pained expression seemed a visible payment just then for this unlikely marriage of his. ‘I think Lindsay was recruited in a perfectly ordinary way,’ he said at last. ‘His disappearance, I grant you, remains a mystery. But you know, HQ must know why – and how – he joined them. All in the files. They must have gone into all that already.’
‘They won’t tell me.’
‘Don’t you trust them?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I don’t suppose you’ll find out on your own, and I can’t help you.’ Wellcome was almost sarcastic now. ‘It was all a long time ago, wasn’t it? It’s my view that he joined out of perfectly ordinary, patriotic reasons – because someone came down from London and asked him to, that’s all. Why should there be any mystery about it? And as for his disappearance, well, he’s not the first in that line of business, is he?’
‘No. That’s what struck me, of course: do you think he was a double, that he’s gone back to Moscow?’
‘Certainly not. Not in the least. Though I think it possible they may have killed him.’
‘And the body?’
‘Dumped it in that loch of his, at Glenalyth.’
‘Were you ever up there?’
Wellcome smiled for the first time, as if he had at last got the whole business in hand. ‘No, no, I wasn’t. You know, you make me out to be a much closer friend of Lindsay’s than I ever was. We were colleagues for a short while, after the war – and share
d the same staircase in Merton once, that’s really all.’
‘Oh yes? Which staircase was that?’ I asked with innocent interest. Wellcome had stalled with me ever since we’d met and I thought I’d try some shock tactics now before he dismissed me. The child had seen his possible father in any case – and seeing me as well, had started to cry again. I didn’t have long. But Wellcome halted in his walk now, alert once more. ‘Oh, were you at Merton?’
‘No. But I just thought I might go round there now. Maybe there’s someone still there who remembers Lindsay, an old porter perhaps, or one of the College Scouts. You see, if I could get some real impression of Lindsay in Oxford, that would help …’
I looked at Wellcome pointedly. He was blinking up at me, his small blue eyes startled in the sunlight. Then he laughed, an abrupt, grating laugh like a bad actor experimenting with a part. ‘I don’t follow. It’s forty-five years ago. The Scouts will all be dead. There won’t be anyone there. Complete waste of time.’
‘It’s worth a try. You see, someone, forty-five years ago, someone from London you suggest, must have come down one day, by train probably, and talked to Lindsay, recruited him. Now, if I could find –’
‘But that’s nonsense!’
‘Is it? You said that’s how it must have happened, that it wasn’t anyone in Oxford.’
‘Yes, but you don’t really expect anyone to remember that, do you, even if they were alive?’
‘No, possibly not. All the same …’ I paused, thinking out the next step in my role. ‘Perhaps they had a drink in the Mitre,’ I went on enthusiastically, ‘or the Eastgate. Or met at the Randolph for tea. I might go there and ask. Where would you meet a student in Oxford, if you wanted to recruit him for Intelligence, in the early thirties? They must have met somewhere.’
‘I find that an unbelievable approach. You must be out of your mind.’ Wellcome was worried now. I’d hit bottom at last and stumbled on something. I’d no idea what, but I felt Wellcome knew.
‘It’s just intuition,’ I said. ‘It’s all I have to go on.’
