The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

‘Yes, I’m sure they were. Lindsay had a lot of friends out there at the time. They were very kind …’ She let the sentence die away, seeming to remember that time indecisively, warily almost.

  I had one further and, in the circumstances now, most difficult point to try and raise with Susan: Rachel’s vision of her and Lindsay in the boat that afternoon, ten years after the tragedy in Zagreb. In the light of what Susan had just told me, it seemed more than ever an unlikely view.

  ‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘I wanted to ask you – she’s told me of feeling some sort of terrible unease as a child in Glenalyth, during and just after the war. Well, you were often there then, you remember – you came over to look after us sometimes. I wondered why. Why you did this, feeling about Lindsay as you did?’

  ‘I helped out because I was – still part of the family,’ she said firmly, shades of Aunt Susan beginning to move over her face again.

  ‘Even after all you’d been through – with Eleanor and Lindsay?’

  ‘With Lindsay? No. It was the family. As I say. Not Lindsay.’ She spoke abruptly now, her words reflecting some uncontrolled staccato in her thoughts. ‘It was you. And Patrick. And Rachel.’

  ‘Yes, it was Rachel who felt this unease. She told me yesterday. She suddenly thought she knew why: a sense of antagonism between you and Lindsay –’

  ‘Well, there was that.’

  ‘But then she says – and it may be nonsense – she says she saw you in the boat one afternoon together – she was hiding on the shore somewhere. And – there didn’t seem to be any antagonism at all.’

  Susan stood up and went over to the mantelpiece where she took a pair of spectacles out of a case and put them on, before turning back to me. And now she seemed the image of her former self, the rather bitter schoolmarm that I remembered. But when she spoke her voice was quite calm.

  ‘Poor Rachel. She was so insecure then.’

  ‘Yes, but why?’

  ‘Because of Patrick. Have you found out – something in the attics? I can’t think –’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘Patrick was our son. Lindsay’s and mine, not Eleanor’s,’ she said quite simply. ‘That’s why I was at Glenalyth, looking after you all quite a lot.’ She moved over to the open window where the bees were loudly sampling a cotoneaster bush just outside. ‘No one knew. Except Eleanor – and then she died. And no one knows now. And he’s dead, too.’

  ‘I’m … sorry.’

  Susan turned from the window. ‘It wasn’t the done thing, you see, in those days. And now it’s all so irrelevant, with none of them left.’

  ‘All the same – I’m terribly …’ But there was nothing more I could say. The chasm was too deep, had no bottom to it.

  ‘It doesn’t square at all, does it, with what I’ve told you – about being sensible. Well, it never has to me either.’ She walked over to the mantelpiece again and now I recognised one of the water-colours above it as the loch at Glenalyth. Susan glanced at it. ‘Oh, yes, Rachel probably did see us in the boat that afternoon.’ She stopped, before continuing forcefully. ‘I hate the expression “love – hate”. It seems so pat and unreal. But it wasn’t.’

  She turned and said, ‘Where is Lindsay, do you think?’ – a minute hope, I thought, in her voice. A few hours before she had been so calm, a woman untouched by human aberration. But now her expression was that of someone who has suffered every horror in the book.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to find out.’

  The indecisive dog started to scratch outside at the door now, and I got up once more to let him in.

  4

  June and Marianne arrived the following day from London – in clothes as unsuited to the country as their husbands’ had been. And their mood was awkward too – as strangers in an already well-developed house party who had perhaps missed more than half the fun. Marianne drank too much whisky the first evening while Julia kept to her room until lunchtime on the Saturday. The house was uneasy that weekend.

  With Madeleine and Rachel at breakfast, I’d described my visit to Susan in no more than social terms, avoiding any depths and denying that she’d helped in any real way over Lindsay – a deception which wasn’t difficult, since neither showed any great interest in my meeting the previous day. I was surprised by this. It was as if, for some reason, the matter of Lindsay and all his doings had ceased to interest the household that day. Or perhaps, I thought, it had simply come to obsess me.

  Marianne alone, perhaps due to that careless euphoria and impertinence that comes with a hangover, appeared interested in the problem which had brought me to Glenalyth. Before she burst in on me, I was in the study at the back of the house where most of the books were kept, looking for some detailed map of the home counties which might have the old Oxford-Cambridge railway lines on it, when something else caught my eye – a German book that had fallen behind a bottom shelf where the pre-war Ordnance Survey maps were, with a vaguely familiar name on the spine: ‘Maria von Karlinberg’. Maria? And then I remembered her – could it have been the same person? Maria had been a name in Lindsay’s youthful address book which I’d brought down from the attic – an aristocratic old Viennese lady, as I had imagined her, living on a pittance in some decrepit Hapsburg palazzo. But she must have been someone rather younger, I thought now, a contemporary of Lindsay’s almost, for the book – so far as I could judge from my rusty German – issued without a printer’s or publisher’s name and therefore perhaps clandestinely, was an account, in the form of a ‘Comrade’s Diary’, of all the bloody events which had led up to the demise of Austrian democracy, beginning with Dollfuss’s massacre of the workers in their model estates in February, 1934 – the same violent events which Lindsay had witnessed when he had first been posted to Vienna and which he had written home about in such a two-faced manner.

  There was a printed dedication in German: ‘To the Fat Man in the Blue Bar at Sacher’s’, I thought it said, a message which intrigued me, since this rich Viennese hotel seemed an unlikely place for any ‘comrade’ to drink, then or now. The book, apart from the dust and cobwebs, was in mint condition, seemingly unopened. I put it aside for later reading, as a possible pointer to something – I’d no idea what.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ Marianne said, when she came in on me, looking haggard but purposeful, in a pair of sky-blue nylon ski pants and fashionable knee-length Cossack boots, unlikely accessories given the weather outside – the sun beating down as usual on a tinder-dry world. I’d just found what I wanted, an old ordnance survey map with a host of others on a bottom shelf – and I didn’t stop what I was doing, trying to identify and trace the branch line between Oxford and Cambridge. She came up to my shoulder.

  ‘Going on a journey?’

  It was impossible to be even vaguely rude to Marianne. Her brashness was so assumed and she herself so essentially vulnerable. ‘Yes. I mean, no. I was looking for an old railway line.’ And then I spotted it, quite clearly: a little, laddered course that wound east to west between the two universities, across Buckinghamshire, through Bedford and Bletchley, with the station at Bow Brickhill just about midway between the two academies.

  ‘There, there it is,’ I said involuntarily.

  ‘Just what is going on – will you tell me?’ Marianne was abruptly rude. ‘George tells me nothing. What games are you all playing?’

  ‘I – we, we were looking for Lindsay –’

  ‘Down that old railway line?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I’m not quite such a fool, you know.’ I looked up. Her rather unruly thick fair hair had been crimped back against the sides of her skull with tortoiseshell combs; her cheeks were flushed and the whites of her eyes tainted with crimson lines. I could see the neat malt the previous night had taken her badly.

  ‘Of course you’re not.’ And she wasn’t a fool, I realised again, except in one way: in allowing herself to be so consistently hurt in her long and hopeless loving with George. ‘I didn’t know – you wanted
to know: about Lindsay.’

  She sighed, rather dramatically. ‘I want to know about George – what the hell he’s up to. He never says.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I don’t see why he should get mixed up in all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense?’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Yes. Phoning and seeing people all last week – before he came up here. He’s a musician, not a private eye,’ she added abruptly.

  ‘Who –’

  ‘I went to see the man, I was so annoyed.’ She was almost stamping round the study now – or would have been, in anything harder than her suede boots. ‘His bloody friend Fielding,’ she went on. ‘Well, I know Basil from the old days at College: just a soak – a dangerous soak. And George shouldn’t be involved.’

  I didn’t look up too quickly from my map. Indeed something had just struck me about it that seemed of possibly even more interest than what Marianne had just said. But I forgot it in this new and unexpected intelligence.

  ‘You went to see him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Marianne stopped walking about and made a petulantly dramatic pose, both hands on her hips, legs apart, like a stable girl about to lose patience with a nag.

  ‘Did you know Fielding was with the Russians?’ She spoke with the slurred confidence of an exceptional hangover.

  ‘The Russians? How do you know?’

  ‘Well, someone he shouldn’t be with. I didn’t phone him, you see. Just went round, rang the bell. He wasn’t in. But someone else opened the door.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Friday – yesterday. Anyway, it was the police you see, or the special branch or whoever they are. They were in the flat – the whole place was upside down and they more or less pounced on me: who was I? What was I doing – and I didn’t have many good answers as I’d not made an appointment and hadn’t seen Basil for years. They thought I was a contact of his. Anyway, they realised I wasn’t – eventually – and let me go. But it was quite obvious they were on to Basil in a bad way. So he must have done something pretty wrong. Defected or something,’ she added professionally.

  ‘Yes? What?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. But I don’t want George involved. It’s none of his business – looking for Lindsay Phillips,’ she added very tartly.

  ‘Did you tell George?’

  ‘Of course. He said it wasn’t important.’

  What was George up to? Why was none of all this suddenly important to anyone any more?

  ‘So Basil has decamped,’ Marianne went on with authority. ‘And you only do that if you’re working for the other side, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I was fairly stunned.

  ‘Well, can’t we do something?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because they’re coming up here, they said so: to talk to George about his phone calls and about seeing Basil just before he disappeared. You see, I had to tell them about why I was there – because George was up to something with him. And I suppose they’d been watching his flat and tapping the phone as well.’

  ‘Coming here? No one’s said anything.’

  ‘Well, they said they were. And I don’t like it. Basil is probably another Philby all over again – and now George is going to be involved in it all.’

  It was her mentioning Philby that brought me back to the map and the old railway line. Philby, Burgess and MacLean – of course: all Cambridge men, the same college then, same generation. And hadn’t we always wondered who had recruited them, how they’d managed their initial involvement with the Russians then in England? Someone already at Cambridge, some don there, it had often been thought. But why only at Cambridge? The undergraduates at Oxford must have offered the Soviets almost as rich a potential in recruits. Had the KGB tried and succeeded without anyone ever knowing? And how, I thought, as a Soviet intelligence recruiter, might you best minister to both the universities in this matter, at the same time giving the recruits from each equal cover in their early clandestine activities? Might you not situate yourself midway between the two Universities, on some easy access to each – an hour’s train ride either way to view prospective traitors? And might not those clients – apprentices now in the NKVD – put the process into reverse and under the guise of attending meetings of a model railway club, make their reports to this first link in the Soviet intelligence chain – either to the man who ran the ‘Oxford and Cambridge Model Railway Society’, or to someone from London, a member of it himself, who came up to engage his new recruits under the cover of this innocuous hobby – talking to them afterwards in the village pub or as they walked back to the real railway station? Was this how Lindsay had first become a part of Soviet Intelligence – through his model railway trains?

  It was a theory, at least, with only one obvious flaw: the clients of such a Soviet controller or contact could never have all visited Bow Brickhill at the same time – or actually used the place as a club together – since their identity as Soviet recruits would then have become known among themselves. On the other hand the place might have been used only individually by its members, one at a time, with instructions never to divulge their involvement with the club. Or again, it might simply have been used as a message-drop or as a contact only in emergencies. Finally, of course, my theories could have been pure fantasy – and the club had been entirely bona fide. Had been? Perhaps it still existed.

  ‘Well?’ Marianne said.

  ‘Wait and see. What else?’

  We didn’t have long. The phone went at midday for George, and the whole business emerged over lunch. I must say George handled it very well. ‘A matter of no importance,’ he’d said. ‘Pas de problème,’ he added – one of his favourite phrases. George was in a confident, garrulous mood: the impresario about to make a killing. And apparently his music with Rachel had gone well that morning – Dottie Parker was being shoved along at a gallop. The others seemed to agree with George’s diagnosis of the events in London.

  ‘Just a fellow I knew years ago,’ He started to round off the topic. ‘Thought he might be able to help over Lindsay. Of course I can’t tell them anything about him. Wonder they’re bothering to come up all this way.’ George was almost witty about it all now. ‘Old Basil – probably done a bunk to Moscow. Sly fellow he always was anyway. Little half-pint man.’ George quaffed at a larger pewter mug of beer – a refreshment he’d provided himself with each lunchtime since the start of the week – and cracked some unsuitable joke about life in a dacha in the Moscow woods.

  It didn’t really strike me as very funny at all. Almost everyone I’d come across in my enquiries about Lindsay had gone the same way – or worse: first McKnight in the Wren church and the lout on the train; then Pottinger and his American friend and now Basil. Even Professor Wellcome in Oxford had tried to run a mile from me when I’d taxed him in the matter. Lindsay’s friends appeared a remarkably unstable lot. As for Basil – who could tell? Had Marcus framed him – just as, I suspected, he’d tried to get rid of me? And what of Basil’s friend the Prime Minister? Perhaps he’d be the next to go.

  ‘When are they coming to see you?’ I asked George.

  George looked up from his tankard mischievously – a schoolboy, so like Basil I thought: the fat and the thin on opposite sides of the same coin. ‘This afternoon,’ he said. ‘On their way now. Flying up to Perth.’

  A rush job, I thought. But I was more surprised still when David Marcus got out of the car, with Inspector Carse and another man, after lunch.

  Marcus barely introduced himself and it was obvious that Carse had no idea who he really was. His colleague from London, a DI5 man by the heavy-footed look of him, took George to the morning-room, while Marcus led me off tactfully into the study.

  ‘Yes,’ I said at once, ‘I wanted to see you …’

  ‘I warned you, Marlow –’

  ‘Yes – that lout on the train was warning enough. But I’ve not taken it. Even him.’

&n
bsp; ‘He was nothing to do with me, that man.’

  ‘Of course not. “I got a job to do,” he told me. And certainly he wasn’t looking for my wrist-watch.’

  ‘You’re in the firing line, Marlow. But they’re not my guns.’

  ‘You’re lying. Or do you suppose the Russkis are after me? That they don’t want Lindsay found?’

  Marcus made a gesture of impatience. ‘Believe what you will. It’s no matter –’

  ‘Dead bodies never were to you. All right. You don’t want Lindsay found. But you won’t tell me why, will you? Not really why. Just a lot of cock about his being a right-winger on the make in your service, which is a pretty poor excuse for the mayhem you’re setting up –’

  ‘Believe what you will – I told you. You want to find Lindsay – well, go ahead. But don’t say you weren’t warned –’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m being warned all the time. Everyone’s doing it.’

  ‘You’re not progressing, then?’

  ‘Why should I tell you? Was that all you came all this way for – just a progress report?’

  ‘It interests me, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally. But you could have sent a junior up to talk to me. Whatever’s going on, you want to keep it entirely to yourself. So it’s bigger than some right-wing conspiracy, isn’t it, Marcus?’

  ‘I came to talk to you about Basil Fielding,’ Marcus said wearily.

  ‘What is there to say? Fielding – and the PM – wanted Lindsay found: you don’t. So I suppose you did for Basil, and the PM is next on your list. But you can’t do away with everyone, surely, who wants to see Lindsay again. Or can you?’

  ‘Do stop this fantasising, Marlow. Matters have changed. Fielding, it now seems clear, was with Moscow.’

  ‘Shouldn’t have been too difficult for you to fake things that way for him –’

  ‘Listen, for once, will you?’ Marcus said fiercely. ‘I faked nothing for him. A routine security check put us onto him. He was being followed, and he met a man who was nothing to do with us. We don’t know who he was –’