The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Now watch!’ Wellcome said. ‘The night sequences.’

  The lights in the room began to dim slowly and the minute table lamps in the yellow Pullman carriages came on and now the trains sped through a soft darkness growing over all the land. In the towns and villages pub windows lit up and cinema signs came on, and model cars shone weak beams on level-crossing gates; signals fell from red to green as boat-train expresses fled into the furthest corners of the room, while a small rail car came to a halt at a country junction, the platform lit by weak oil light, waiting for the night mail to pass. Wellcome lurked in the shadows, some distance away, hunched over the switchboard now, ministering to his toys with the concentration of the obsessed.

  It was then that a wagon he was shunting back, over a set of points in front of Rachel, came off the rails.

  ‘Can you pick it up?’ he asked her. ‘Just put it back on – it won’t bite.’ Rachel leant over the barrier and set the truck to rights again – and Wellcome brought up the little shunting engine to it once more, pushing it over the points and onto a separate track which led up to where I was standing.

  ‘Watch this!’ Wellcome said, now altogether the totally absorbed child. ‘There’s a small down gradient here, together with a wagon vice: it’s a way of marshalling goods traffic. There’s a brake on either side of the rails – just there – which holds each truck as it runs off the incoming feed train. Then, when you release the vice blocks, the truck free-wheels down the slope and onto those points where you can turn it off into any one of those three lines, making up a new combination of goods traffic.’

  He released the little metal coal truck then and it came gently down the slope towards me. But again, when it met the points which were supposed to divert it, it came off the rails, just in front of me.

  ‘Damn. Something must be wrong with the wagon wheels. Try it once more. Put it back on again, will you?’ Wellcome called across to me. I put my hand over the barrier and picked up the truck and when I set it back on the rails the dark room was filled with a terrible scream – which after a second I realised came from me.

  My height may have saved me – since, unlike Rachel, in leaning over the barrier, I had not needed to take my rubber-soled boots off the floor. Nonetheless I was badly stunned, my whole arm throbbing with pinpricks all along the skin, while inside it felt as if someone had just rammed a huge needle right up my arteries, from wrist to shoulder-blade. I held myself fiercely with my good arm, rubbing my elbow, clamping it to my side in a sort of cold agony. My head seemed to have come off my shoulders and was a separate thing now, floating around above me.

  Wellcome fussed abominably, muttering about a short circuit, while Rachel said in amazement, ‘But why didn’t it happen when I picked the damn thing up?’ I knew enough to realise that the layout entailed probably half a dozen quite separate tracks, each with its own electrical circuit – any one of which could have been isolated from the others and charged with a far higher voltage at the drop of a switch. On the other hand, I didn’t know enough to prove there and then that Wellcome had intentionally activated such a charge. In so complex a layout, it might have been a genuine fault. But it was easy to doubt this.

  ‘I am so fearfully sorry,’ Wellcome said. ‘I really am. Come downstairs. I’ll get you a brandy.’

  In the circumstances, I declined the offer. The Italian plonk had been bad enough and this might have been a genuinely poisoned chalice. I looked once more over the suddenly stilled landscape – the little carriages and engines all marooned at inappropriate places, an express stalled at a level crossing, the Night Mail half-way into a tunnel. A sleep had come over all the game; some evil genius had gripped this magic world and made the boyish sport malign. Tears before bedtime, I thought – and all the delicious canary-coloured carriages and boot-black engines struck me as an emblem of childhood betrayed just then. Or was Lindsay himself somewhere here, I wondered? – rising up out of the old trains he had played with so long ago – forbidding me, across all the years, access to some vital secret somewhere there in the layout in front of me, a truth with I had nearly touched, before another hand in the ether had stretched out to protect his innocence – or guilt?

  BOOK THREE

  The Search

  1

  We met in my London club once more. But this time privately in the gilt-blue library upstairs, Marcus pretending an interest in some recent literary donations from members on a table by the window, though it was mid-morning and the gracious, sunlit room was empty.

  Marcus had seen the Yugoslav letter and spoken to Madeleine too, which was why I had craved an appointment with the clever little man, for he had been unable to offer her any real help.

  ‘Oh, it’s quite genuine, I think,’ he said, thumbing through a new large quarto edition of The Water Babies – vilely illustrated by one of our younger members. ‘Rackham would have done it so much better,’ Marcus added.

  ‘He has, Marcus. He has. The letter –’

  ‘Yes, genuine I’d say.’ He looked up brightly, the pearl tie-pin in place, the confident jeweller’s smile swelling out gently from the fatty jowls. ‘They always put their logo on the top. It’s King Tomislav’s sword – did you know that? Tenth century. First King of an independent Croatia. And that’s what they want again, of course; to get out of Tito’s mob –’

  ‘I gathered that –’

  ‘“Hrvatska Slobodna”, Marlow.’ Marcus pronounced the phrase with relish and in probably the right accents. He had obviously been well briefed by experts in the last few days. ‘“Free Croatia”,’ he continued. ‘That’s the name of the game from now on.’ He said this with pleasure, as though he had at last learnt that Lindsay had simply been picked up by some old friends who were half-way through an elaborate practical joke with him. Something had happened to Lindsay which Marcus, at least, viewed with relief.

  ‘The letter: what did your people –’

  ‘Oh, yes, our handwriting fellow says it’s almost certainly Lindsay’s signature. But not fluent. So he may have damaged his arm somewhere along the way. That, and the personal contents, of course: I see no reason to doubt it. The trouble is, as I told Mrs Phillips, we can’t release this Croat terrorist. The PM is adamant. Hi-jacked one of our planes last year. But more than that, it would queer our pitch with the Marshal entirely. So that’s out, I’m afraid.’

  Marcus closed The Water Babies and opened a heavy volume entitled Psychology in Industrial Relationships by a clever, psychiatrist member.

  ‘Look at this!’ he exclaimed, finding a passage in the preface. ‘“Management and Work Force in dispute may be regarded essentially as one would a mental breakdown in an individual: as a form of schizophrenia –”’

  ‘Marcus, now you know who has him, where Lindsay is, you’re going to have to make every effort to get him back in any case, aren’t you – whatever Tito thinks.’

  ‘Money for old rope, isn’t it? What will these shrinks get up to next?’ Marcus closed the book and paid me attention. ‘Yes, Marlow. But I don’t think you know very much about these exiled Croat extremists, do you? That’s the whole point, you see: we don’t know where Lindsay is. Could be anywhere in Europe. These fellows live all over the place. Particularly in Munich and Brussels. But also in Paris, Zurich, Vienna. And there are at least two separate front-line terrorist groups involved: the “Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood” as well as “Free Croatia”, with several splinter groups such as “Matika” thrown in. Needle in the haystack department, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Yes, but this group: it’s the one we know.’ Marcus was trying to blind me with science. ‘Where do they operate?’

  ‘Anywhere. They’ve worked out of both Brussels and Munich before. But that doesn’t mean they have in Lindsay’s case.’

  ‘Even with a Munich postmark?’

  ‘Almost certainly a blind.’

  ‘You could try Brussels then.’

  ‘We could. We will. Through Interpol, though, and the loc
al chaps. So it’ll take time. What will you do, Marlow?’

  ‘We could start with Brussels too, I think. And maybe it won’t take us so long.’

  Marcus clasped his hands together, lowering his head and frowning meekly like a penitent come to his vengeful god at last. ‘You really don’t know these Croat nationalists, do you Marlow?” He leant forward, the sunlight touching his silken-smooth, grey-flecked hair.

  ‘How should I?’

  ‘They put the IRA provos in the shade.’ Marcus warmed to his bad news. ‘They’ve had forty years experience – starting with the assassination of King Alexander in Marseilles in ’34 – and successfully gun-thugging their way round Europe ever since. And nasty with it: even the resident SS men in Yugoslavia couldn’t stomach their methods during the war, ran home to Adolph. I don’t think you want to get involved.’

  ‘I’m not going to start gunning for them – just dealing with them. Once they know you aren’t going to release their man, we can probably deal. The Phillipses aren’t poor. I’ve talked it over with Mrs Phillips. And these terrorists could probably use forty or fifty thousand. Well, you can’t put an offer like that to them, can you? Tito would be upset.’

  ‘True. It’s a possibility.’ But Marcus couldn’t keep a touch of doubt out of his voice.

  ‘You still don’t really want Lindsay back, do you?’ I said. ‘That’s why you took George.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Willoughby-Hughes. You remember.’ Marcus looked annoyed now, returning to unpleasant memory. ‘George and Basil and the Russians, Marcus,’ I went on. ‘There’s still all that. You seem to have forgotten about it.’

  ‘This Mr Wallaby-Hughes is simply helping us with our enquiries. A lot of what he said about himself and Fielding didn’t add up.’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong: Willoughby-Hughes – and George is simply a romantic old fool. Nothing to do with Moscow. He went to see Basil to try and help the family – just as I’m doing. And you don’t want that, so you took him to cause trouble. But it won’t work. When you told Mrs Phillips the position over this Croat over here, she agreed with me: that we should tactfully look out these “Free Croatia” people and offer them a deal. Are you going to try and stop us?’

  Marcus shook his head slowly, incredulously, the expression of a diamond merchant being offered paste.

  ‘Marlow, you’re a free agent. Our hands are tied, as I say. You must do as you think fit. But I’ve told you about these Croats. They bite – to say the least.’

  ‘What about Basil Fielding and the PM?’

  ‘An unfortunate case of misplaced trust – to say the least. The PM is being suitably advised now. So you have no authority whatsoever – from him or us – to concern yourself in this business any more.’ Marcus stood up, looking at me dismissively. Our meeting was over. It was clear that he was relieved at the course events had taken. These dangerous Croats would absolve him from much further work in the matter. His hands were comfortably tied. As far as he was concerned, Lindsay Phillips was out of harm’s way.

  Madeleine and Rachel, on the other hand, were filled with hope and anxious for all sorts of careful activity. The letter had transformed their lives. These words out of the blue had brought the man before them again, in a hundred familiar images: he existed somewhere; he slept and he woke and he thought of them so they could believe in him once more. And these reciprocal thoughts ran like a magic lifeline in the air between them, a line which they could now follow up materially across the continent, which must lead them to him eventually. Lindsay, in effect, had been dead for nearly three months. But now they shared in his miraculous resurrection. There but remained the journey to the hidden tomb where he waited for them.

  I spent the afternoon at Thomas Cook’s in Berkeley Street making the travel arrangements, while Madeleine telephoned Lindsay’s old friend in Brussels, Willis Parker, a senior diplomat now with the British EEC delegation there, who expected us on the morrow and had made arrangements for us to stay at the Amigo Hotel in the centre of the city.

  Early next morning I took the big black Volvo Estate southwards out of London, making for the Dover-Ostend car ferry: the beginning of things, I thought, surrounded by an air of happy confidence in the powerfully singing car, the windows open to the dazzling weather, the luggage well packed and all arrangements made. The journey started like a holiday, coming back from school to Scotland years before. Though now it was I, and not Henty in the old green Wolseley, who was going to meet Lindsay. A sense of family had come strongly among us once more. And in the bright clear light that morning all that we had lost seemed already very nearly made good.

  *

  Madeleine sat in the front seat next to me as we edged our way out of Ostend early that afternoon, the clamour of the quayside, the bustle of the holiday corniche dying behind us as the big green and yellow motorway signs loomed up ahead. She had, quite simply, become young again in the past few days, as if someone had just fallen in love with her. The nightmare had died in her eyes and she no longer had to be brave, so that for the first time since we’d met again her expression became as I remembered it from years before: a quite different face now, with different shapes and colours in it; a portrait not just restored but one where a whole new line and texture is revealed beneath, the original conception again brilliantly displayed. She was the bright crusader once more, struck by some visionary cause, moving towards it now with that huge happiness found in the renewal of a lost faith.

  Rachel, in the back, had collapsed with the heat – her legs up along the whole width of the seat, one arm stretched out on top of it. I could just see the side of her face in the rear mirror, curls bobbing in the warm breeze from my window, a long wrist coming out of a flapping sheath of fine cotton, fingers drumming lightly on the leather.

  ‘Look!’ she said as we passed by a market garden on the outskirts. ‘Just look at those beautiful flowers in all those awful rows and rows.’

  ‘The Belgians grow them for money. Not for fun. We’re in Europe now,’ I said – and she put her other hand on my shoulder just then and squeezed it and said, ‘I’d prefer to be poor.’

  ‘Something of a rhetorical statement,’ I told her. But still she kept her hand where it was. We could tease each other once more, I realised; the little shafts of pleasurable enmity had grown up between us again in the last few days, that wordless connection we had possessed before, in her father’s time, when he was always there, a sure and certain presence at the edge of her vision, just beyond that part of her life which she gave me – and which, should I fail her, she could return to. And so it was again now, I recognised: mentally she could give herself to me again because he was once more there, somewhere just over the horizon, a placatory, advising, all-embracing spirit which supported our love – on which it depended, indeed. And though in the past I had hated this tie, this continual proviso to the success of our relationship, I accepted it now, not simply as the lesser of two evils but as one of the effective compromises which, if we’re lucky, time brings to love.

  Later, twenty feet up on the motorway, we glided across those flat lowlands of Flanders, laid out like a perfect exercise in agrarian geometry, with lines of polder dykes and ruled canals and arrow-sharp poplar trees dipping into a huge sky fluffed with cotton-wool clouds far away on the horizon: a vision that I had seen before only in dull geography books and smudgy lantern slides or on weary school trips through provincial art galleries as a child, so that this reality, seen for the first time, struck me now with the sudden, intense pleasure of great art.

  Madeleine gazed down a long perspective of trees and water away to our left, her profile like part of the picture as I glanced at her for an instant.

  ‘I’d better tell you about Willis,’ she said without turning.

  ‘Yes. I was going to ask you,’ I said. ‘Presumably he’ll have contacts – or know someone – who can get us onto these Croats?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure he will. But apart from that – well,
he’s always rather had a thing about me, in the nicest possible way. But I thought I’d tell you in case you wondered –’

  ‘In case you thought Maurice Chevalier had risen from the tomb,’ Rachel put in. ‘Willis is the Don Juan of the Diplomatic Corps. The biggest old roué you ever saw,’ she added lightly. ‘Sort of permanent Edwardian bachelor – chasing skirts all his life. That’s all Mummy wanted to tell you.’

  ‘Well, that’s a little harsh –’

  ‘But it’s true.’

  ‘He did want to marry me, though. I met Lindsay through him.’ Madeleine turned to me. ‘So don’t be surprised –’

  ‘No, indeed! He never gives up hope. He’s marvellous. But I suppose he’s sad.’

  He didn’t sound too sad to me and I said so.

  ‘It’s only sad because I think he really did want to marry me,’ Madeleine added thoughtfully. And we left it at that – determined to keep the sadness out of our lives from then on.

  The Amigo, a discreet luxury hotel, lay hidden on a quiet side street behind the rebuilt neo-Gothic excrescences of the Town Hall – which gave onto the Grand Place, a huge medieval market space, filled with spiritless tourists and great slabs of shadow from the high gilded buildings as we circled it late that afternoon, trying vainly to get out of an endless one-way system.

  At last, when we found the hotel, there on the steps, like the beginning of some happy children’s story, was Willis Parker – waving at us excitedly, a hungry-looking little Santa Claus of a man with a ring of white hair like a halo round a bald pate, dressed in immaculate linen tropicals and some kind of old boy’s tie. Even from the car window before we stopped I noticed his eyes – merry, dark blackberries in a cherubic face – and yes, dancing bedroom eyes, I thought, yet of someone unlikely ever to truly make it in that direction: a flawed Lothario. But it was his energetic joy that came across at once: an air of tremendous excitement and expectancy, as if he found the world really too much of a good thing altogether and could not restrain the kind of continual orgasm he made towards it.