The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  He must have been in his sixties but he waved his arms and danced about just then like a young clown in a bad circus, giving directions to a porter over the luggage – and to another man who then quite unexpectedly took over the wheel of the car, so that I thought we were about to lose it.

  ‘No! No! He’s only taking it downstairs for you. There’s an underground park. Leads directly up into the hotel. Very convenient, what?’ He glanced at me with a touch of roguishness I didn’t understand. ‘Now, come along in, all of you. I’ve arranged everything with the manager – an old friend. I perched here myself – it seemed like years – when we were trying to get into the Market. Now come on in.’

  The day’s heat still danced up from the concrete and my pockets were so sticky after the drive I couldn’t reach for any small change to tip the men. We’d been travelling for ten hours and I was glad of Willis Parker.

  ‘You look all in,’ he said, holding the door open for me, while I was still reaching for coins, my passport and a damp hanky in the other hand. ‘Now don’t you worry about any of that – it’s all seen to. Come straight in – a shower, change of togs, you’ll be a new man. And I’ve one or two things fixed up for this evening I think you’ll enjoy.’ Again the slightly risqué look, some mild conspiracy among the men, before the big glass doors closed behind me.

  We were in a large, cool, flagstoned hall, sparsely but richly furnished in the Empire style – high-backed, flock-covered armchairs grouped in twos and threes for subtle conversation around the dressed stone walls, which were hung with expensively imitated Gobelin tapestries, and what might have been a genuine Aubusson that led like an exotic Royal train to the lift banks. The rooms, I noted, were close on £50 a night. But it was not this which really worried me; I had a chunk of Basil’s money with me (or rather, as it now seemed, the KGB’s) and was using that, though Madeleine had tried to insist that she pay all the expenses. No, it had suddenly struck me that this wasn’t my world at all – which already lay years back, it seemed, in a cloudy, country past: a world of sparse dry sherries and a small cottage lost in the wolds. I had taken on a cause not beyond my competence, perhaps, but certainly far from my ease now, in this frigid, air-conditioned hotel, sealed from the real world. So far I had moved among familiar places in my search for Lindsay, places where he had lived himself. But now I felt the enormity – the stupidity even – of the task I had proposed: Lindsay, in one way, had been everywhere at Glenalyth, in the country hats and coats and the damp smell of old mackintoshes in the back hall, in his books and bees. But here, I felt: how could he be anywhere here? In this antiseptic room or in any anonymous continuation of it throughout the continent? His fingerprints – all the previous clues to his whereabouts – had been erased once he’d crossed the channel. I had lost faith in Lindsay somehow.

  And then, after I’d turned the shower off, I heard through the bathroom wall Rachel playing the flute in the room next to mine – faintly heard, a flurry of high notes followed by a repeated diminuendo, something from Gluck’s Orpheus I thought – but certainly a tune remembered from our days together twenty years before in Notting Hill. And I saw then that I had some sort of a past – however failed and tenuous – yet which I could remember, which I could return to, which was nearby – right there, in fact, in the next room to mine. What of a man like Lindsay, so richly endowed with wife and family, friends and memories, who could not return to this wealth because he was dead? Suddenly that seemed the worse loss: the cessation not of life but of memory. And I felt for Lindsay once more then, in that arid room, and hoped he was alive somewhere, still attached to his reminiscences.

  When I got some clothes on I went in to see Rachel. She was playing near the open window, half-dressed, a huge bowl of late June roses on a table in front of her.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d brought the flute. That was nice,’ I said when she’d finished.

  ‘Yes.’ She stood up before putting it away. ‘It’s work. Apart from all the other things. All you really need: “Work and love.”’ She snapped the flute case shut. ‘As Freud said.’

  She touched the crimson roses now, re-arranging them in the glass, so that their disturbed scent came to me across the warm room where she’d turned the air-conditioning off and opened the windows. Already she had unpacked everything and strewn all her things about the place – hankies and tennis shoes, fine summer cottons, a bikini and all the other balms of travel: she had made the place her own as though she’d lived in it a week.

  Seeing my glance over the confusion she said, ‘Yes, I couldn’t bear it otherwise, the emptiness, without me in it. Oh, I don’t mean me the body – or the suitcases or skirts or these flowers Willis sent up. I mean something really mine, made by me, so I played a tune. And then I belong here – suddenly.’ She smiled, yawned hugely and then lifted both her arms straight up in the air, as though stretching from a trapeze, the muscles in her stomach curving inwards, hips rising free of the rim of her thin pants for a moment. ‘The work you can depend on,’ she said at last. ‘The other – rarely. It’s usually “either/or”, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. You told me: all your real feelings go into your work. You’ll be back to your concerts soon.’

  ‘No. I’m just going to play for myself, if all this comes right.’

  ‘If Lindsay turns up?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked calmly at me, yet with a kind of tired intensity. ‘You’ve put too many feelings into your life,’ she said. ‘I’ve put too few. I’ve seen most things in terms of being alone on a platform. Just the music – with my father as the only really needed emotion.’ She stood up, started to undress, moving towards the bathroom. ‘You were right, I suppose,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘About Lindsay. I always said you weren’t. But only because I resented your resenting my dependency on him.’

  ‘A lot of what we think is love is just weakness,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t free of that either.’

  She turned, holding her pants in her hand. ‘I could be a great concert flautist, I think – but then the music would simply go on saying all the things I didn’t dare tell my father – as it used to be. I was really loving him through my music. Maybe that’s why he disappeared – he couldn’t take the emotion. And that’s what I mean: feelings like that, expressed in that way, are all too charged, too manic. If we find him then I’ll love him in an ordinary way. And if I do that my music won’t be so extraordinary any more, just a pleasant thing, a hobby. I’d have a life then and not just a career. Don’t you think I’m right?’

  It all seemed so reasonable I had to say yes, especially since she came over and kissed me just then. But I realised that her change of heart had been dictated by her father’s letter, her renewed faith in his life somewhere. What if, in the end, he failed her with his presence? Her arms would slip away from me then, just as they held me now, only through her belief in his existence.

  Several bells started to chime outside the window, somewhere in the Grand Place – thin, melodious bells, the sort accompanied by archaic figures emerging from a hole before circling a clock face. I looked over Rachel’s ear, out into the yellow evening, a great streak of sun, like a spotlight, dying dramatically on some pink gargoyles at the back of the Town Hall. The day had a softness to it now, a calm before the trumpets of the evening, for there was an invitation in the air, some hint of drama there as well.

  It seemed like the moment before curtain-up, so that I said suddenly, ‘You can’t give up your music like that – twenty-five years work.’

  ‘We have to be able to change. To take on other lives.’

  She held me lightly in her arms, then stepped away from me, holding my shoulders instead, rocking them gently for emphasis.

  ‘If – we – didn’t – fight,’ she said. Then she paused.

  ‘We could take on each other again?’ I asked.

  ‘I love you, if that’s what you mean,’ she said.

  ‘Me, too, if that’s what you want.’

  We smiled. I
t all seemed too easy just then. But it was simply the great difficulties between us that had gone before, I felt, that made me uneasy. We were gingerly trying the ice again, that was all; a few first footsteps, and it hadn’t broken.

  ‘You can’t spend the rest of your life – just us, without your music,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to face the public again.’

  ‘An audience of one is more important.’

  She turned away and started to run the shower in the bathroom, the water hissing briskly. Then she came out for a moment to look for some shampoo, dabbling among her crowded things on the bed – that familiar bronzed body of hers, stretching easily as she searched: the crinkles changing in her skin, small breasts wavering, the bell of dark curls ringing round her face. This was all her, her essential being – a nakedness that had survived through many years, from a room in Notting Hill and hotel beds in Paris in those days: we had come through an age apart and found something vital in each other again, in another foreign bedroom, full of the impermanent knick-knacks of travel. But now the lotions and travel-sickness pills had a future; the sun cream and paper handkerchiefs were things held in common once more. This was what love was like.

  *

  Willis was so full of babbling pleasure when he met us again that evening, and drove us out to a restaurant on the outskirts of the city bordering the great Forêt de Soignes, that it was hard to think of all the grim work ahead of us with Lindsay, and not give ourselves over completely to the sense of happiness together, of being four people well met on holiday, suddenly more than fond of each other.

  We sat at the Chalet de la Forêt over a crisp pink tablecloth, the colour warmed to gold by candles down the middle of the table, each one sunk in a cluster of fern leaves. We sat, raised up, on an open terrace – as if in some tree house, looking out over the dark woods on the other side of the forest road. Endless ranks of huge straight beech trees disappeared in front of us like an army into the night, their long alleys pierced by headlights now and then as cars rounded a corner somewhere in the distance, the beams creating great pillared cathedrals, arched by leaves, in the spaces down the rows between the trunks.

  ‘It’s not actually the best restaurant in Brussels,’ Willis said with pedantic care. ‘But I think it’s by far the nicest.’ He smiled now, shades of the young Lochinvar creeping over his tubby face, looking at Madeleine, seated exactly opposite him, with some ancient tenderness.

  Rachel finished a last spoonful of cold Vichyssoise – before she moved her face out of my vision and into the halo of candle flame which separated us. ‘It’s the nicest restaurant I’ve ever been to,’ she said decisively, leaning across to Willis. ‘Thank you,’ she added gently. Then she moved the little candelabra of ferns to one side, the more readily to see me, the slightest question in her glance, seeking some wordless confirmation of her mood in me. We stared at each other for a second – a time when all is well lost beyond two people – and then I raised my glass to Willis. ‘Thank you,’ I said again, drinking the wine. I wasn’t really thinking of him, though, but of how you could come to need someone, perhaps for a lifetime, while doing no more than look at them for an instant over a restaurant table. There is a moment in every affair when there is no turning back; it must have occurred once before between Rachel and me at some time, somewhere, in London or Glenalyth. Would I forget this moment too?

  It was Willis’s turn to offer a toast then. ‘To Lindsay – and to you, Madeleine,’ he said – generously enough, perhaps, in the circumstances. For Lindsay, I realised, was not just a silent fifth at our feast that night but a more constant shadow over all of us, wherever we went, whatever we thought, each hour of the day. And I hated this absent proviso he cast over our lives just then. I wanted our future settled – wanted him definitely dead or alive suddenly, so that I broke the gentle mood, taking advantage of Willis’s toast, and said, ‘What do you think, Willis? Where is he? Who should we talk to?’

  Willis was taken aback. He gulped at his wine, too eagerly, ‘I’m sure he’ll turn up,’ he said at last, a little unwillingly, I thought, as though Lindsay was a difficult dog we were well rid of, did we but know it.

  ‘Yes. But where should we begin? Do you have any ideas?’

  ‘Of course – I’m sorry.’ Willis paid attention now. Though I could see that he, like the others, had hoped to enjoy their dinner first, before broaching the topic. But it was too late now. I was tired of waiting endless attendance on this dictatorial wraith.

  ‘Yes – I’ve been talking to a friend in the Belgian Home Office here.’ Willis embarked on his progress report without enthusiasm, the evening’s pleasurable excitement draining from his face as he spoke. ‘The man you may need lives quite near here. Just the other side of the road, in fact – over there, in the suburb of Ucckle.’ Willis gestured behind him, towards the city. ‘Fellow called Radovič, an old Croat nationalist, been living here for years. But he was a Colonel in Pavelič’s puppet army during the war, friend of all the top Nazis in Yugoslavia at the time – which is why he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Partisan courts afterwards. And that’s the trouble. Tito’s police have been out to get him ever since, especially recently with this upsurge of Croat terrorism, so that he’s impossible to see. Lives in a barbed-wire villa surrounded by bodyguards: he sees no one, speaks to nobody, doesn’t reply to any letters – at least not about anything to do with Yugoslavia. He says, with some truth, that he’s a naturalised Belgian businessman now with absolutely no connections with his old country. In fact, he is certainly the money man and most likely the brains behind at least one of these exiled Croat extremist groups: “The Croat Revolutionary Brotherhood” – as well as perhaps the “Free Croatia” group, which is the one you want. I’m told the only way of meeting him is to be a member of the Cercle Sportif here. He rides with them. He and his cronies go out most mornings with their horses. Out there.’ Willis pointed into the deep woods.

  ‘On the other hand, even if you did get to meet him, I’m not certain it would do the least good. He’s never going to admit he has anything whatsoever to do with any of these exiled groups. And he’s certainly not going to be interested in money. He’s a very wealthy man in any case.’

  The waiter came then with our second course and we all looked at Willis, saying nothing. We had ordered a saddle of lamb, among four, and it smelt delicious, the big dish circled with mushrooms and covered in fresh herbs. But none of us felt like starting it now. Willis picked up the wine bottle and recharged our glasses – ever the attentive courtier. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘It’s not encouraging.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You see the difficulty,’ Willis went on. ‘You really need to get in touch with someone much further down the line in this organisation. The field commanders, the activists. And we don’t have their names – and the top dogs certainly won’t give them to you. Surely you’ll have to leave it to Interpol and the local police?’

  ‘We have,’ I interrupted. ‘But they’ll take a year. We can move far quicker.’

  ‘I don’t see how, without some initial contact.’

  ‘I wonder if your friend in the Home Office here has heard of a Yugoslav called Ivo Kovačič,’ I asked. ‘He was a friend of Lindsay’s before the war in Zagreb – something of a Croat nationalist. He taught at the University there and kept bees.’

  ‘He certainly didn’t mention him. But there are thousands of Croats in and about the city. Quite a few of them live down by the railway near here in St Job – rather a pinched little suburb.’

  ‘Why? Why do you ask about this man?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘The Brigadier told me about him – an unpleasant business between him and Lindsay, at the end of the war in Austria: Kovačič tried to kill himself – just as Lindsay was packing him onto a transport back into the hands of Tito’s partisans. Well, I thought he might have survived and ended up here.’

  ‘Yes. Lindsay did once tell me something about that. I’d forgotten. You think
this man may have had to do with kidnapping him?’

  ‘I wondered. It’s just possible.’

  ‘If he’s here,’ Willis said, ‘I could find out. He’d be on the alien’s registration files.’

  ‘You never came across any Croats with Lindsay when you worked with him?’

  ‘No. Don’t remember any. But I only really worked with Lindsay at the start of his career – in Vienna,’ Willis said. ‘And once, of course, when we crossed embassies in Paris for a few months. That was 1938, wasn’t it?’ He looked at Madeleine, who smiled at him, readily.

  ‘Yes, Willis – the summer of ’38, when you had your wallet pinched at the Brasserie Lipp and they refused to let us wash up. You were so furious over both setbacks.’ Madeleine turned to me, explaining: ‘That’s how I met Lindsay. The Parkers …’ She paused then, as if uncertain over something in that meeting. ‘The Parkers – they were great London friends of my family,’ she went on. But she didn’t add any more to the history – simply, I thought, because the story was so far from our present concerns.

  ‘How are things in Hyde Park Square?’ Willis asked her lightly, apropos of nothing it seemed. Yet I had the sudden sensation of eavesdropping just then – on the distant, muted chatterings of family skeletons, rattling at their cupboard doors, seeking release. There was a minute tension in the air.

  ‘How can you afford to keep the place on?’

  ‘We can’t. We’re going to sell it. As soon as Lindsay retires.’

  Lindsay, I noticed, was again firmly inhabiting a present tense.