The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  ‘There isn’t – except the motorway.’

  Another corner hid us and again we picked up speed, imperceptibly almost, as thought Pottinger were anxious not to alarm us. But we were alarmed.

  Then, to our left, in a clearing in the plantation, we saw the entrance to the old motorway. It was neatly walled up. Yet we made for it, fast.

  I hadn’t seen the gap at one side of the wall – a break between the last two rows of trees – an old contractor’s path that sloped down through the woods. Pottinger swerved onto it expertly, the car suddenly thudding on the hard, sun-beaten earth. He swung the wheel round, following the curve in the trees like a rally driver late for a checkpoint. Half a minute later we were out in the sunlight again, bumping over stony ground, along one side of a V which merged with the shoulder of the motorway rising ahead of us. We hit it at fifty miles an hour and suddenly it was wonderfully smooth as the thumping stopped and the wheels bit sharply into the asphalt. ‘Jesus!’ Pottinger said. He was excited, like a small boy.

  The motorway was divided down the middle by a rusty central barrier and we were travelling up it now on the wrong side, which made our speed all the more unnerving. The surface was broken here and there with great frost-scars, so that Pottinger swerved quite often, though he hit some of them since he was keeping an eye on the rear mirror too. All in all, it was a fairly hair-raising journey. Then we saw the other car again. There it was suddenly, a black speck in the rear mirror, gaining on us steadily. But it wasn’t exactly behind us, we soon saw. It was travelling on the right-hand carriageway, separated from us by the steel barrier. And then I saw that it was a British car, a Rover or an Austin Princess, with its lines raked up towards the back.

  Pottinger remarked on this too. ‘It’s not the police. Stupid fools. They’ve got themselves on the wrong track.’

  ‘Surely we’re on the wrong side,’ I said.

  ‘Yes – intentionally. That side doesn’t lead anywhere – except space. We come off the motorway down another builder’s track, on our side about a mile ahead. But he can’t get off it. There’s no hard shoulder. The road just ends, a hundred feet above the ground.’

  The other car was racing us now, coming level almost – and I saw a man waving from our near window, pointing at someone or something in our car, then gesturing us to stop. I didn’t recognise him for a moment, he was so low down in the seat. Then I saw who it was; of course, it was Huxley, the minute little conspirator from the Embassy in Brussels.

  I opened my own window and waved back furiously, pointing ahead of their car, trying to warn them. ‘Slow down,’ I turned, shouting at Pottinger. But it was just then that we pulled sharply to the left onto the hard shoulder before dipping away very quickly on a steep track running down the embankment, so that we were hidden from the other car.

  The supporting pillars of the motorway ran along to our right now for about a hundred yards before they stopped abruptly at the edge of a small valley. And it was into this valley that we saw the bottom of the Rover, high above our heads now, curving gracefully, in a gentle arc at first before the car lost momentum in the air and plummeted nose-first into the ground. And for the second time that day I was faced with a world of fire as the car crumpled, turned on its side and the petrol tank exploded in a great sheath of flame.

  ‘Jesus!’ Pottinger said again, but no longer in the tones of some happy schoolboy. We stopped and got out and walked towards the flames. But there was nothing we could do. Madeleine was appalled. ‘We must get the police,’ she shouted.

  Pottinger wiped his face. He was sweating badly. But his nerve was far from gone. ‘The police? It’s too late for them. Come on. They’ll be here soon enough anyway.’ He looked up at the pall of dirty smoke rising into the clear summer sky. Then he shepherded us all back into the car hurriedly and we hit the track through the edge of the farm then and within five minutes we were out on some minor road – in Germany.

  Huxley: what the hell had he been up to, I wondered? – a thought which Rachel, identifying him, echoed then in the back.

  ‘One of your Embassy men, was he?’ Pottinger asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder what he wanted to say to you.’

  ‘I wonder how he managed to follow us.’

  ‘He must have been hanging around outside the Amigo all the time.’

  ‘Yes – he must.’

  Pottinger said, ‘I don’t understand. You tell me your official friends aren’t being any use to you. They’re being unhelpful. Yet here they are keeping tabs on you all the time.’

  ‘They don’t want Lindsay found,’ Rachel said. ‘We told you.’

  ‘It doesn’t follow, though – does it? Risking their lives like that just to stop you finding your father.’

  ‘It does follow,’ I said. ‘If the game is big enough.’

  Pottinger looked at me in surprise. ‘What game?’ he asked.

  ‘I wish I knew,’ I said. But I was lying. For I thought for a second that I did know what was going on just then. The puzzle became clear for an instant – and was then entirely lost to me. I had somehow touched the answer and then it had slipped from my grasp, like a fish, back into the cloudy streams of consciousness: an answer that had to do with two groups of people looking for the same thing – but for different reasons. Looking for Lindsay …? But the thought was gone, lost in the furore somewhere of that bright summer afternoon – burnt in the blazing heat of a dead car.

  We got to the Cologne-Frankfurt autobahn an hour later, and by six o’clock we were half-way to Heidelberg.

  4

  The castle at Heidelberg reared up high above us on the other bank of the river as we drove through the narrow streets of the old town – a rose dream of gothic towers and broken battlements, floodlit already, streaked in golden light against a velvet evening sky, for we were late. It was after eight o’clock and Klaus’s concert must have started already. It was impossible to park near the castle itself and so we’d walked up the steeply winding road in the shadowy twilight, past little baroque town houses perched on the slopes with vine tendrils streaming down from iron terraces which were set sheer above the city in places, the old medieval bridge 500 feet below us now, lights winking on the stream and pale stars coming down over the wooded valley which ran away out of the town into the darkening night.

  The air was still and warm with trails of faint perfume from the crowds of expensive people who had walked this way ten or fifteen minutes before. Then the music emerged in the distance – hundreds of strings trembling faintly somewhere up ahead of us, with a sudden introduction of brass bursting on the night, a sweet fanfare, which died and then came again, more loudly this time.

  ‘Strauss,’ Rachel said, her face excited now, alive in the shadows – a different woman who was about to forget the recent past and go back into her own, her real life.

  ‘Johann?’

  ‘No. Richard.’ She strode away from us, like an addict sniffing opium on the wind. ‘I hope he’s left the tickets for us,’ she called over her shoulder.

  Pottinger had his ticket in his hand – that at least was real, I thought; he’d booked it in Brussels. And he was once more the academic now, not the cattle-rustler, his face set with pleasure, full of intelligent purpose. We were all of us free then, as if the violent events of the day had happened in some afternoon movie we’d seen before leaving Brussels. Our journey down had passed entirely without incident. We were ordinary people once more – because we so much wanted to be that. We’d pressed our luck and won and now it was time to retreat into anonymity.

  The music drifted towards us now from beyond a moat bridge, a kind of spectacular ruined causeway which led out from the side of the valley onto a buttressed hill where the remains of the great castle stood. But the concert was still hidden from us, somewhere down in the centre of the ruins, the audience and musicians as yet invisible. Only the music was clear, almost fully formed now – the sweeping arpeggios of piano, woodwind and soundi
ng brass rising in clusters which exploded high up in the night sky, the sound falling outwards, cascading into the sweet air like a firework display.

  Our tickets had been left for us and we found our seats half way down the courtyard, with Pottinger somewhere behind us by himself. There was nothing to do then but sit back and enjoy Richard Strauss. But he wasn’t a composer I liked and my attention soon drifted away from the music. Though Rachel was so close, sitting next to me on the small chairs, I had lost her again. She had been polite, almost formally distant towards me since the evening before and she had gone back now entirely into her music, into that world where for so long she had lived alone, like a child, and which she could return to now and happily spend a second lifetime growing up in. And the sounds that I heard then, despite all their artistry, were once more like the music in Notting Hill, when Rachel had played the flute behind the bathroom door – a prelude to loss and departure, when she’d run back to her father from the scum and the dirty bathwater. Perhaps Klaus might take her on again, I thought – the big man with his back to us now. He was extremely broad-shouldered with long strands of flourishing jet-black hair flying about his ears as he took the orchestra through the complex score: big-boned yet with delicate movements; Italianate, almost gypsy features when he turned: a face like a solid, handsome watch that would never go wrong. Surely that was what Rachel needed, not my kind of truth, my time-telling, which would always be at variance with hers? And yet I didn’t want to lose her.

  I thought of Huxley instead, the music beginning to crash distantly in my ears, visions of the ruined motorway that afternoon taking its place – and the bottom of a car which had circled over our heads, soundlessly, like a great silver bullet in a surreal dream, before it touched the earth and rose again in flames. What had he been trying to signal to us – so vehemently, so desperately – as he raced along beside us? He’d been pointing, jabbing his finger at us repeatedly. But pointing at who? It had been at Pottinger and me in the front seat, not the women behind us. And since he knew, presumably, all about me at that point–from Marcus in London – he could only have been trying to tell me something about Pottinger.

  Then it dawned on me – or rather, dawned again: I’d been avoiding the evidence for the sake of a convenient escape from Brussels. Of course, as I’d felt ever since that morning in Bloomsbury, Pottinger wasn’t just an academic – if he was that at all. He was with the Intelligence, with the Americans, or possibly with Moscow. One of Huxley’s minions, keeping tabs on us, had spotted him with us in the hotel perhaps, and identified him, and Huxley had then followed us, assuming we’d been taken in some kidnap. Of course, I thought, we’d gone eastwards: they must have thought we were headed for East Germany and Moscow. That was it. Pottinger was in that camp. But why on earth had he run the risk of openly attaching himself to us if he was with the KGB? Why, because of course he wanted to know as badly as we did what had become of Lindsay – Lindsay, one of his men, who hadn’t come back home to Mummy. And we’d told him now what had happened to him – that the Croatians had taken him. Thus, if my theories were right, he would have no more use for us now.

  I turned round. I could see Pottinger’s seat ten rows back on the aisle. It was empty. And then way behind, at the entrance where we’d come in, I saw a figure in a candy-striped jacket pushing quickly past the little tent which housed the box office.

  I was just next to the aisle myself and was up after him in a second, running back down the courtyard and out past the attendants onto the floodlit causeway. But there was no one there, down its whole long length. It was deserted, the broken battlements casting a huge jagged shadow all down one side. I went over to the wall. There was a drop, a good hundred feet: no one could have made it – and no one could have run so fast as to have disappeared at the far end of the causeway in the few seconds which had elapsed. Pottinger had found himself some great hand once more to scoop him out of thin air. But this time I was determined to find him.

  Turning round towards the little box-office tent again I saw there were only two ways he could have gone – to the right or left of this entrance tent, crawling along part of the broken battlements before dropping back into the castle forecourt a little further on along either side. I chose the right path, leaping up onto the battlement and making my way along it for a few yards without looking down into the moat far beneath me. I was soon able to drop down onto the far side – behind another tent this time, which hid me from the audience. There was a flap and pulling it aside I found myself facing an old woman, knitting by a small card table. I was in one of the women’s cloakrooms.

  ‘Keinen Herren!’ she shouted at me. She pointed further along in the direction I’d been taking. I backed out and moved on round the edge of the courtyard, the music getting louder as I circled slowly towards the podium. There was another tent now and again I was behind it, wedged between it and the castle wall. I could hear someone peeing almost straight in front of me, a foot or so beyond the canvas. It must have been the gents. But there was no flap I could open this time to get inside.

  ‘Pottinger?’ I said, shouting into the canvas without much hope. The peeing stopped abruptly and a German voice, greatly shocked, said suddenly, ‘Ja? Mein Gott – Was ist das?’

  I was trapped behind the latrine now. Pottinger, I supposed, must have taken the other direction round the castle battlements. He was gone anyway. The music came to a rowdy climax beyond me and there was a great cannonade of applause – applause for Pottinger, it seemed, as I fought my way out from behind the guy ropes and folds of canvas back into the forecourt.

  After the concert we walked all the way down the hill again, to where we’d parked the car, half-way along an old street by the river. The space was empty. But there, placed neatly together on the pavement, stood Rachel’s hold-all and Madeleine’s overnight bag. Pottinger, considerate to the end, I thought. But then I realised that he’d want to help us; he was anxious for Lindsay as we were, I saw now. I looked around the dark street, into the shadowy archways. Pottinger had disappeared. But he, or his colleagues from Moscow, would be with us from now on, I felt, eavesdropping on us, following us, as Marcus I was sure had done, and would do, in ways we would never know. We were three Pied Pipers now, leading all the others on a dark dance. I opened Rachel’s hold-all. My things were still there – Maria von Karlinberg’s diary and the little silver revolver and matchbox of ammunition. I put the gun and matchbox in my pocket this time. I’d keep them with me from now on.

  *

  Klaus had borrowed an appallingly contemporary studio from some friend – a bijou apartment decorated in the most clinical modern style, set near the top of the hill with one long room full of mirror table-tops and chrome armchairs, which gave out over the whole valley, twinkling in the night beneath us.

  He had taken his tail-coat off and was in a starched shirt and false waistcoat now, busying himself first with a tray of drinks and then with the curtains at one end of the long picture window. He started to close them. Then he stopped half-way.

  ‘No,’ he said decisively, as though reconsidering a vital piece of stage management. ‘Let us look at the night – as well.’ He left the curtains as they were, then stood back, admiring his work briefly. He turned, rubbing his hands. ‘Quelle histoire,’ he said to himself. I presumed he was commenting on our story which we had all of us fed to him by degrees since the concert had finished. ‘No,’ he went on, picking up an earlier question. ‘They obviously got in touch with me because I was married to you.’ He went over to Rachel and put his arm round her for a second. ‘There is a syphon of soda in the kitchen,’ he told her, towering above her from a great height. ‘They might like it.’ She left willingly. They might have been still married, I thought, Rachel operating so meekly in his shadow, the compliant Hausfrau almost, who had never left him ten years before.

  Madeleine was perched on one of the sharp chrome chairs; I was over by the window looking vacantly out at the night. And he came up to me, l
ooking at me generously. It wasn’t that he was patronising, I felt, but rather that he was the famous conductor now, from whom precise directions over every aspect of life were to be expected. I felt extremely unnecessary and didn’t mind a bit. He offered me a large cut glass of expensive whisky.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Very good,’ he added, as I took a first taste of it.

  ‘Thank you. I think I’d like some soda.’

  ‘And you shall have some soda. Rachel?’ He turned and smiled as just then she came back into the room with a big coloured syphon. He took it from her and brought it over to me ceremoniously. ‘Say when.’ He squeezed the lever.

  ‘When.’ Klaus went on round the room, conducting an elaborate ritual with the drinks. I suppose he thought whisky and soda was something which every English person still required after ten o’clock at night.

  He sat down at last, taking off his watch first, then his cufflinks and finally rolling up his sleeves.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘First things first: this man who called me.’ He picked up a large engagement book from the mirror-topped table in front of him. ‘Here’s what he said –’

  ‘Did he speak German? Can we call him now?’ Madeleine interrupted eagerly.

  ‘Yes, German. But you can’t call him now. He didn’t leave any number – obviously. He’s going to call you, at the Schwarzenberg Palace Hotel in Vienna. Between 9 and 9.15 two nights from now, on Wednesday. I made the arrangements. You can stay at this hotel. I know the owners.’

  ‘But why Vienna?’ I asked.

  ‘Obviously they have Lindsay somewhere down there.’ Klaus took off his false waistcoat. He was disrobing gradually. ‘The man didn’t explain. But you must go there, to the hotel, and wait for him to call. See for yourself.’

  ‘Go there? But how?’ Madeleine was tired. ‘This foolish American … All our things are back in Brussels. Besides, we shouldn’t really be here at all. We left illegally – and they’re bound to be looking for us at the next frontier.’