by Joseph Hone
‘Where was this?’
‘Hampstead, by the pond there, last Sunday, pretending to look at the model boats.’
‘You followed the other man too, of course.’
‘Yes. But we lost him. We think he must have been with the Soviets, though – up the road from the Highgate compound.’
‘Well, all it simply means is that you don’t want Lindsay found – but the KGB do. Ergo: he’s one of theirs, probably has been all along. And that would embarrass you, Marcus – which is why you’re shutting the shop up tight on Lindsay Phillips and pretending he never existed, or better still – praying he’s at the bottom of the loch down there and won’t turn up in a month or so in the Moscow Press Club, telling how he pulled the wool over all your eyes for forty years. That’s what all this amounts to. After Philby and the others you’d do anything to stop another really big scandal. And this would be one, no doubt. They’d really have your head on a plate then, Marcus.’
‘They would; if it were true. But it isn’t.’ Marcus fingered his pearly tie. ‘It’s more complicated than that.’
‘It always is.’
‘You’re no longer a member of the service. I can’t give you all the details. I warned you, simply –’
‘Good God, Marcus, I told you in London: these people are my friends. That’s why I’m looking for Lindsay. I don’t give a tinker’s curse for the rest of it – whether he was left, right or centre. So tell me, what have you really come to see me about?’
‘About Fielding, as I said. Did he say anything else ever to you, when he briefed you about Lindsay, that might have made you think he was with Moscow, for instance?’
‘That won’t wash, Marcus. You don’t really want to know that. Your men in London could get all that sort of information for you. You’ve come all the way up here for something else. And I can’t for the life of me think what it is.’
There was silence then, a neat impasse. Marcus looked across at me with a kind of amused confidence – a quiz-master who’d come in with a stunner on the last vital round. ‘No?’ he said. ‘Well don’t worry. You go on looking for him, if you must.’
Marcus and I parted amicably enough in the hall. Madeleine had offered him tea but he’d declined, pleading urgent affairs elsewhere.
‘What’s up with George?’ I asked. He was still closeted in the morning-room. Marcus shifted about uneasily by the dead fireplace before going to see what had happened to them all.
Marianne was with us, shades of unhappy worry everywhere about her face. ‘What can they be up to? George knows nothing about that fool.’
The morning-room door opened at last and we heard the heavy tramp of feet like a small army coming towards us, and George’s voice protesting about something, the rather high-pitched undergraduate tones arguing the toss in the college debating society, but now with a really serious edge to it: ‘It’s ridiculous,’ we heard him say as the group came along the back corridor. ‘There’s no question! You can’t possibly …’
They all came into the hall. George stopped by the door, surrounded now by the three men, like a huge forward in a rugby line-out waiting to be pounced upon by some minuscule but crafty opponents.
‘They’re arresting me,’ he said, loudly, incredulously – addressing all of us, his great face shining, expanding with anger and amazement.
‘Not arresting, sir,’ the special branch man put in. ‘Further questioning, that’s all.’
George took no notice of him. ‘They’re taking me down to London!’ he declaimed, like some great nationalist orator betrayed. Then he looked at me, walking towards me. ‘You. You must know what’s going on!’
‘Yes! He does!’ Marianne almost shrieked, rushing over to George, taking him by the arm, then turning so that they both confronted me. But George took no notice of her. ‘You set this up,’ he said to me vehemently. I thought he was going to hit me as he took another step nearer. I retreated.
‘What –’
And he would have hit me if Carse and the others hadn’t held on to him just then like a tug-of-war team. ‘You – you set it up: all of it. To get me out of the way,’ he added, slithering over the floor towards me.
I couldn’t think what he was getting at. And then I saw him looking at Rachel bitterly and I knew. It was pure farce and I couldn’t prevent a smile – which, of course, infuriated George still more. He made another lunge at me, struggling like a great bear caught in a frail trap.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said retreating once more. ‘Marcus! What is going on?’
But none of them replied. George was told to pack a case, and Marianne went upstairs with him. Fifteen minutes later the two of them were bundled into the car and they all disappeared down the drive. We stood on the porch watching them go. Max and Julia had arrived from somewhere during the fracas.
‘Well, there goes Dottie Parker,’ Max said before turning and looking at me with distaste. ‘“Gangway, girls – I’ll show you trouble”,’ he added. I scowled back at him in return. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘It was nothing to do with me.’ Then I noticed both Rachel and Madeleine looking at me questioningly. I shook my head in disbelief.
‘You don’t really want him found, do you?’
‘Well …’ Madeleine paused. ‘If it leads to all this trouble.’
And then I thought – yes, that’s exactly why they’ve taken George: to cause that trouble, so that I would be forced, or at least asked to stop looking for Lindsay. And what would happen when I told them, as I felt I must now, that Lindsay had probably been a traitor most of his life? No doubt they would see that as simply another piece of mischief on my part.
We were in the hall after supper. Julia and Max had left the three of us alone. Indeed, they were upstairs packing just then, having decided to return to London the next morning. The house party had rather collapsed.
‘You asked me to help,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how we can possibly stop now.’
Madeleine sat in one corner of the sofa, perfectly still, looking into some middle distance, while Rachel fidgeted on the edge of a chair opposite. Our coffees were getting cold. They said nothing.
‘How can you?’ I asked almost roughly.
‘I begin to feel somehow that he’s not to be found,’ Madeleine said eventually.
‘David Marcus doesn’t want him found, that’s all, because he thinks Lindsay was with the Russians. It would be an embarrassment for him, if he turned up. But we can’t do nothing.’
‘What can we do?’ Rachel asked briskly. ‘If what you say is true, then he must have gone over there. Are you suggesting a trip to Moscow?’
‘Do you think he’s been with them all this time?’ Madeleine asked.
‘I think it’s quite possible, yes, that he was with Moscow.’ I looked at her firmly. Then she laughed, unnaturally, leaning forward suddenly with the spasm before flicking her ash gold hair out of her eyes and rolling back again. ‘It doesn’t sound like him, Peter. It really doesn’t.’
‘In his world it’s perfectly possible.’
‘His world was mine too.’ I remembered Susan’s bitter comments on Lindsay’s earlier betrayals with Eleanor.
‘He wouldn’t have told you,’ was all I could say.
‘But I knew him – for nearly forty years. I knew him. He wouldn’t have done that.’ Madeleine looked at me with an absolute certainty in her eyes: the glowing, clear look of the totally innocent, and thus possibly the most deceived. ‘I knew him,’ she said again, repeating that great confidence in knowledge that comes of a long love. But Susan had ‘known’ him in this way, too, I thought – earlier on in his life; Susan who had grown up with him and loved him as well – and borne his child into the bargain. Yet she had been proved wrong and been deceived in the end. I feared for Madeleine. She ‘knew’ him too – but had never known that Patrick wasn’t Eleanor’s child and had thus been equally ignorant of the real reasons for all that pain in Zagreb forty years before. Madele
ine, it seemed, knew quite a different man.
‘If he’s worked for the Russians all his life – I’ll eat my hat,’ Rachel said, using the old slang, a schoolgirl again herself, as full of belief as her mother in a man they had lived with and loved most of their lives. As I had suspected, it was I whom they viewed now as a presumptuous interloper come to disrupt and deny their familial affections, a messenger of darkness here to put out the light. I think at that moment they wished they’d never set eyes on me at the Chelsea Show. Yet the fact remained, which they could not deny, that Lindsay was not there, and that he’d upped and disappeared one fine spring afternoon without leaving a word for them. If not to Moscow, then where? They might deny he was a traitor and be right in that. But if so they were left then with a deeper mystery. For what husband and father, unblemished thus politically, would impose such a cruelty on his family – and for what reason? If not for Moscow, then it could have only been because of some darker flaw that he had so dispensed with them.
As it turned out, to their unbelievable joy, the postman on Monday morning seemed to prove them right, in their initial belief at least.
‘There! You see! He hasn’t gone to Moscow!’ were Madeleine’s first words to me, tears streaking her cheeks, after she had read the letter. It was typewritten, with a heading in capitals ‘HRVATSKA SLOBODNA!’, the words divided by a flaming sword, the envelope post-marked Munich on the Tuesday of the previous week.
‘My darling Tika, dearest Rachel,
I can’t describe the horrors of being out of touch with you these past three months and knowing how desperately you must have been worrying. Of course, as you will understand, it was none of my doing. I was taken and am being held (in considerable comfort, I may add) by the “Free Croatia” organisation who are allowing me this letter to you both – which I am dictating since my arm was injured (not badly – so please don’t worry). I am being held against demands which this group is now rightly making for the release of Croatian nationalists and liberators now imprisoned throughout Europe. I am sure that, in this respect, our government will now liberate Stephen Vlada, the Croat patriot, unjustly held by them in Durham prison. When they have done that, I will be freed.
After this political spiel the letter continued in an entirely personal vein.
‘I don’t know when this will be, but soon I hope, and I long for that. In the meantime you will be brave and happy as you can be, both of you, until I see you again. I know you will be. We have been through worse things, after all, and survived – you and I and Rachel. Patrick I’m thinking of and the war too. Wear the silver bracelet and be well till I see you again. And tell Billy I’m thinking of him and the honey. With this marvellous weather there should be a bumper yield this year. I’m sure I will be able to write again. My dearest love to you both,
Chokis.’
The mysterious signature alone was in ink: not in Lindsay’s usual hand but a close approximation of it, I thought. All the same I played the Devil’s advocate for a moment.
‘Could it be a forgery?’
‘How could it? He hardly ever called me “Tika”. It’s an old nickname – from before the war,’ Madeleine said.
‘And “Chokis”?’ I asked. ‘What’s that –’
‘Another reason it must be genuine,’ Madeleine raced on. ‘I sometimes called him “Chokis” – it means “Fatty” in Swedish. We all went there once: before the war. Lindsay apparently was rather plump when he was young and the name stuck among some of his intimates. But I didn’t like it. So I translated it – “Chokis” – a mixture of chocolate and kisses.’
‘And that silver bracelet,’ Rachel added. ‘You got that in Sweden too, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, it’s very special. I only wear it on special occasions. Who else could know all this and about Patrick and Billy? And it’s his style too. I can feel it. My God, he’s alive,’ she added, turning away, restraining other tears and patting the dog Ratty who jumped for joy at her feet.
‘He’s alive,’ Rachel repeated the words calmly, a fine light in her eyes, not looking at either of us though, but through the open hall door, her gaze fixed somewhere on the huge summer outside.
‘To the Fat Man in the Blue Bar at Sacher’s’ was all I could think of just then – the dedication in the book by Maria von Karlinberg. Who, then, was this author of the Comrade’s Diary?
*
The small village of Bow Brickhill in Buckinghamshire lay just a few miles off the M1 motorway, so it was an easy detour on our car journey to London two days later. The Rise, given as the address of ‘The Oxford and Cambridge Model Railway Society’, was no more than a narrow track leading steeply up from the single village street, soon to lose itself above us in the thick beech woods of the Woburn estate which covered all the top of the hill. Number 17 was a fairly large, pink-bricked, recently restored cottage halfway up, on a small plateau of land giving onto the woods at the back and looking down over the whole village, with a station and railway just beyond it – a line that was still operational, from Bedford to the new town of Milton Keynes, I presumed – for just as I got out of the Volvo a commuter train clattered along the valley in the bright sunlight towards us.
Number 17 was a natural bastion and vantage point, I thought; clear views all round for miles, except for the thick woods immediately behind it, which instead formed an ideal retreat or bolt-hole. There was no bell so I knocked on the handsome teak door with its inset of bottle-glass panes. A baby squealed bitterly from somewhere in a garden at the back.
I knocked again and a few moments later an elderly ruffle-haired man, half of a cheap cheroot burning in his mouth, in shorts and a floppy coloured shirt, opened the door. It was Professor John Wellcome.
He didn’t recognise me at first. ‘Yes?’ he asked abruptly. ‘I’m sorry, the scenic railway is by appointment only –’ It was Madeleine he saw then, behind me, just getting out of the car. And in the instant he recognised her, he remembered me – and his face became as still and canny as a retriever’s in front of hidden game before turning into a mask of welcome.
‘Goodness gracious, John! I never knew you lived out here,’ Madeleine said when our surprised greetings were over and we were all inside the low-beamed drawing-room. The dreadful baby Bonzo had come in from the garden now, and seeing us all as usurpers of his ground and likely to delay his lunch, he started to scream. The American girl Caroline, in a crochet wool bikini, took him away petulantly for his suck in the kitchen.
‘Oh yes,’ Wellcome clapped his hands in what struck me as an assumed joy, though the other two women were quite at ease. ‘Yes, indeed. This was my father’s old house. We use it as a country cottage now. How splendid to see you both. Let me get you all a sherry – or better: I have some cold wine in the fridge … this weather!’
‘We were just on our way down from Glenalyth. We’ve heard from Lindsay! Can you imagine – a letter yesterday. Some awful Yugoslavs are holding him somewhere …’
‘Good God!’ Wellcome drew the words out in genuine astonishment. ‘I’ll get the wine and then you must tell me all about it.’ But then something struck him – forcibly. ‘But how did you get here, Madeleine? We hardly ever use the place – it’s usually let. How did you know –’
‘Oh, Peter here. He found an old membership card in the attics at Glenalyth – “The Oxford and Cambridge Model Railway Society” or something. And it had Lindsay’s name on the bottom. Peter wanted to check and see if the Society was still here: thought it might have had something to do with his disappearance.’
Wellcome turned and looked at me before drawing heavily on his cheroot and humphing like a stage clubman. ‘Still playing the detective, are you?’ He spoke lightly, but the malice was there, just under the surface, I felt.
‘Well, it is rather surprising, isn’t it, John?’ Madeleine asked. ‘Finding you in this place – and Lindsay apparently involved as well. He must have often been out here in the old days. But he never mentioned it.’
/> ‘Oh, it was nothing. He’s probably forgotten it. Just an undergraduate hobby we had then. My father was a great model railway enthusiast – and you remember Lindsay’s interest in all that. We came out here once or twice in those days: my father had started a whole layout upstairs. Still there, in fact. People come by appointment sometimes – one of the best scenic model railways in England apparently. But let me get you some wine.’
He left us then and Bonzo screamed in the kitchen and Caroline shouted at him and it was very hot in the small room. ‘How strange,’ Madeleine said, leaning back in a rocking chair that for some reason didn’t rock. ‘Lindsay’s never mentioning that John had a place out here.’
‘Or John himself never telling us,’ Rachel added.
The child threw something violently on the floor in the next room.
‘We mustn’t stay long,’ Madeleine said, getting up from her awkward chair. But when the wine was done – an already opened flagon of supermarket Italian plonk – Wellcome insisted that we should all see the model railway before we left.
He led us upstairs and along into an extension of the cottage at the back – a large, dark, windowless room where, when he went to a corner and operated a switchboard, we were confronted with a sensational little miracle, a toy to end all toys.
The whole area, apart from slightly raised viewing duck-boards running down the middle of the room, was given over to the most elaborately realistic multi-track model railway layout, every item of station furnishing, rolling stock and incidental decor exactly in the period of some pre-war golden age of the railways – with half a dozen passenger and goods trains streaking along over viaducts and into tunnels, going in opposite directions, passing each other at small suburban stations with old Virol advertisements, before running off into an idealised English countryside past little halts and through fields with sheep and shepherds and tractors that actually moved.
All the trains eventually ended up at a large city terminus by the switchboard, complete with miniature passengers and a marshalling yard just outside it, where Wellcome would rearrange the travel patterns, setting off the whole magic circus once more. We watched, spellbound. The illusion was so complete and inviting that one wanted to climb over the barrier and enter the dream, certain that we, like the models, would become smaller than the smallest child then.
