The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  Eleanor could see now the numbing effects her words were having on the two women: this old storyteller, a myth herself describing another myth, deep in the woods, holding us all in thrall, giving us the true version, it seemed, of a man we had all of us entirely misunderstood.

  ‘You’re a lying, malicious old woman,’ Rachel said suddenly in a high voice, still with her arms tightly wrapped about her, like the precocious child again, at the foot of a soothsayer, intent on exposing the fairy tale.

  Eleanor looked at her kindly. ‘We shouldn’t deny the truth, you know – it’s the one thing that can’t finally hurt us.’

  As Eleanor spoke there was a strange, faint thundering in the distance, the noise approaching from somewhere deep in the woods beyond the lodge. I thought the weather was changing again. But the afternoon out on the meadow was still brilliantly fine.

  ‘It’s only the train,’ Eleanor explained. ‘The limestone waggons. There’s a small railway down there – taking the stone out from the hill beyond the lake.’ The invisible waggons rumbled away from us then, a faint threat in the air. We were not so far away from real life after all.

  ‘You talk of the truth,’ I said, trying to take the two women’s part. ‘That it won’t hurt us. Yet you’ve gone to such lengths in you life to hide it: working for Moscow – and the elaborate ploy of that diary you wrote, in German, under an assumed name. It seems a lot of lies, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes – which is why I tell you all this: it can’t “finally” hurt us, I said. I think I’ve lied for too long –’

  ‘A convenient confession – before execution?’

  ‘No – I don’t expect necessarily to avoid the consequences of what I’ve told you. I meant – that the truth is worth having anyway. Better late than never.’

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I can’t really see you as a communist – least of all as a communist agent. You’ve got too much fun in you – and sense. I wonder if you’re lying – even about that.’

  I had this image of double creativity about Eleanor: of a woman partly of such broad sense among earthly things – fine hams, bronzed salamis and chunky glasses of purple wine: and yet someone of crystal-sharp vitality in the mind as well – of literary conceits, a sweet imagination. And none of these happy gifts sat easily – they didn’t sit at all – with the criminal bureaucracies of Moscow.

  ‘No, it’s the truth,’ she said. ‘Or it was. It’s not any more – which is another reason for my telling you all this. It’s an old bible now.’

  ‘But how was it ever fresh for you? The horror was there almost from the start – Stalin, long before Hungary and Czechoslovakia?’

  ‘Almost? You weren’t there in the thirties. It was all very fresh for me. So fresh – even the memory makes it so, all over again.’

  ‘What? All that privileged socialism? Earnest, pimply youths in sandals, running through Daddy’s money in East-End soup kitchens for a month or two – before they became Lloyds underwriters and said what a fine chap Chamberlain was? You said that’s what happened yourself.’

  She smiled. ‘There were others – lots of them. Who weren’t like that, who didn’t change. If you’d been in Vienna in 1934, it would have marked you for ever. Not in Hampstead running through Daddy’s money. But in Floridsdorf or Ottakring – you’d never have forgotten.’

  I could see the faith renewed in her eyes then – the dream of all the fair people in the thirties. Eleanor ceased to be myth then, and I saw the white puffs of smoke from so many righteous guns of the times going off again in her mind: the workers behind the barricades at Floridsdorf, or in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid – or storming Franco’s garrison on the heights of Teruel: the whole dirty decade made bright again for a moment in the old woman’s vision.

  ‘And now?’ I said, cruelly perhaps. ‘You’re just one more person who’s seen the dreams go sour: a liberal without a belief in progress – common as clay. We have to do better than that, don’t we? Even if it’s nice to know the “truth” in the end Maybe it’d have been better if we stuck with Lindsay’s world – cultivating his own garden, even if it was five thousand acres. The traditional virtues – a little grouse-shooting, apples for the tenants at Halloween, and God always very much at home on Sundays.’

  Eleanor had leant forward as I spoke and now she was intent once more, over some vital matter, on her way with another truth which we could never have guessed. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘the strange thing is – I often wondered if Lindsay really believed in all those Tory virtues at all. There were so many times – when I lived with him – when I was sure, so sure, that at heart he really believed in everything I did.’

  ‘Of course, being a Trojan horse, it wouldn’t have been very difficult – would it? – to pretend he believed in the workers and so on.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that. He really did believe …’ She shook her head in the certainty of memory. ‘I could feel it. He was like me – but really more so. In Vienna then, in ’34 – especially then. It marked him too. He believed entirely. And I suspect he never entirely lost the faith either.’

  ‘He served his two masters, you mean – both genuinely?’

  ‘Yes – I think he did. I think he must have done.’

  Here was a glimpse of the sensitive, civilised, so fair-minded Lindsay that I remembered. In what Eleanor had just said I saw him again in that way: as a man of real justice deep down, involved in some agonised search for the truth. And yet, if the other things she’d said about him were only half true, there must have been another quality in him, at a deeper level still – some horrific flaw, which had betrayed his good sense and with which he had so betrayed others. Eleanor had spoken of his true feelings just then, of his life at ‘heart’. Yet for all her insight this heart of his remained as ambiguous as ever – at least for me, if not for Rachel, who came to bitter life then.

  ‘Now I’ve come all this way,’ she said, loosening her arms at last, relaxing like a defence counsel about to make a killing, ‘and I’ve listened to you, Eleanor – and it’s all so stupid.’ She shook her head derisively, gazing down her long straight nose with patrician disdain – as she’d looked at me in the old days, before our collapse in Notting Hill: a dismissive glance of ageless, inherited power – a look which attracted and repelled in equal measure, beauty in a heartless beast. ‘So stupid,’ she went on. ‘Talking about Lindsay’s politics – and his family’s, and all the dirty deeds of the thirties. What does that matter?’ she nearly shouted. ‘Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. I know him now, a person – not part of any manifesto or crusade or stupid theory about the rights of man. Someone who was such fun –’

  ‘I knew him that way too, Rachel. We had an old blow-telephone in our house in Zagreb, from the bedroom to the kitchen. We sang arias up and down it all one evening.’

  Eleanor left this one incident from the past – which so well summed up their lives together, in pre-war Vienna and Zagreb, with all its youth and dazzle – she left it hanging on the air, like a few chords in music so richly evocative that they bring the whole symphony to mind without another note being struck.

  This remark hit home, I think. But Rachel only swayed her head again – slowly, dismissively, a canny puritan critic who would not join the dance.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘You had a few years with him. I’ve had nearly forty –’

  ‘The length of time doesn’t matter – if it did, everyone would love Christ by now. A day or a year can give you someone equally well. It’s just that you and I have different Lindsays, that’s all.’

  Rachel leant forward intently, just as Eleanor had done. ‘Exactly – but your Lindsay is always in shadow. And Peter’s too.’ She turned to me. ‘I see him quite clearly, in the light. And there’s no need to doubt what I see. None at all. But you – you two – for the sake of your wretched political dreams and failures, you’ve tried to blame Lindsay, and fit him into your failure, into your whole shoddy scheme of things: about his being a
double agent and all that nonsense – and having a child wth Susan and trying to kill you. But all that is just your hurt, Eleanor. Don’t you see? Because he didn’t get on with you – or something.’ She glared at both of us, uncertain for a second. ‘You two can’t see goodness when it stares you in the face – nor ordinary tact nor decency. You see only corruption – because you are corrupt. You look for deceit in Lindsay, when it’s your deceit. And you pass on the evil, people like you – like an illness. Soiling your own nest, you have to soil others’, too. You carry the plague, not Lindsay.’

  ‘My dear, I haven’t questioned your love for your father. Why do you try to rub out mine for him – once?’

  Rachel was bright-eyed with dismissive woe and bruised faith – a grief-laden child without her father, dumbly snuffling late at night, long after he should have come upstairs and kissed her to sleep. She was living through the hour of the wolf now, where there is nothing and no one, rustling about desperately for something living to touch. And I thought she’d found it when she seemed to relax and said lightly. ‘We had music too, you know – he and I, ever since I can remember. Nursery rhymes and Scots ballads round the piano at Glenalyth – romantic nonsense about the Bonny Prince and the Road to the Isles. And polkas round the dining-room table on New Year’s Eve – and flute cadenzas in London later on. Even a barrel organ once, you won’t believe it, that I turned in the square – quite frosty one evening just after the war, going tinkety-tonk. That sudden frost in a city, after it’s been warm, in autumn,’ she went on in a chatty way. ‘You know – when you hear the clap of people’s boots a long way away, echoing clearly in the dark.’

  She looked up at us serenely. But she was lost to us. ‘You see, there was nothing I didn’t have with him – nothing.’

  And it seemed a truth. They may not have believed it – but I did. Rachel saw her father again with that perfect recall which she possessed – as when she remembered, a few weeks before, seeing him from the top of the copper beech at Glenalyth as a child – going down to the boat on the loch, to join Susan. But now they were purely happy incidents of her life with him which she rescued from time, stepping into once more, completely inhabiting an old holiday photograph – kissing to life all the marvellous things of the day.

  Rachel – possessed by her magic again, by a knack of mind, or a need so inspired, that with it, as in her music, she could reclaim vast landscapes of perfection, offering a world re-achieved – the dross turned to gold, where all misdemeanour and even tragedy are shut out.

  ‘You see, there was absolutely nothing – nothing I can’t remember. I had everything …’

  She had gone back onto one of her many pedestals now – where she would not be reached any longer, living in some hermetic place, that playground where for years, with her father, she had happily committed herself to a lifetime growing up. Her brief hurdle at maturity – where there are lies to overcome and other people’s inexplicable betrayals – this had failed. And she was bright now – certainly she was bright now – but in a way I could never share.

  It all happened very quickly then. Though I should have foreseen it – and would have done, I think, but for my concern with Rachel’s terrifying isolation. She’d left the table and gone inside the lodge; Madeleine had followed her, as a comfort. The three of us were left then at the table. The afternoon had begun to die a bit, the sun slanting on the waves of grass in the meadow in front of us. A minute breeze heralded the evening.

  ‘I’m sorry – about everything,’ I said rather limply to Eleanor, limply because I couldn’t see that anything that had happened was exactly my fault. But there was a need then, after the storms of revelation, for some polite inconsequential chatter. She didn’t oblige me, however.

  ‘Sorry? Perhaps it’s us. We should never have started it all. But then you don’t start a belief, do you? You catch it. That’s the infection Rachel talked of – not corruption, just the opposite: the blinding light department. We were all struck by it then, in the thirties. I was dazzled longer than most. I still am, in many ways. Though not Moscow’s way.’

  She sat back in her high wooden chair then, kneading the two arm-rests gently with her fingers, looking at me candidly. ‘Of course, we never expected to be found. It’s your fault there – from what I can gather – pursuing us so.’

  ‘We were looking for Lindsay; not you.’

  She smiled weakly. ‘Indeed – and after all this,’ she gestured round at the lodge, the meadow and the woods as things already lost to her, ‘you seem as far away from him as ever. The body, I mean.’

  It was a point I hadn’t considered until she mentioned it – and it was thinking of it that took my mind off events about me. I never noticed Zlatko leave the table. And when I saw him again it was too late: he was in the doorway of the lodge, holding Rachel, dazed and uncomplaining, round the neck with one hand, the other with a gun or a knife at her back. He was barely taller than her in his short pants and string shirt, and the two of them looked ridiculous, standing there for a moment, frozen in this act of violence. They were like children, undecided about some mischief.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Zlatko. Let her go.’ Eleanor spoke so casually, yet authoritatively, that I really believed it was a game then. But Zlatko didn’t reply – and he didn’t let her go. He shuffled away like a crab, holding Rachel in front of him, sideways down the back of the covered terrace, towards a small stone balustrade at the end where the barbecue was.

  ‘It’s so well – that you all talk the truth,’ he said as he went, glancing at us waspishly, an angry imp of a man again, peeping over Rachel’s shoulder. ‘But you have forgotten me, Eleanor.’

  I saw he had a gun in Rachel’s back then. ‘I still have commitments, you know – matters to keep silent about.’

  He clambered over the barbecue pit then, manhandling Rachel with him. And I don’t know – perhaps she thought he was going to roast her alive – but at any rate she started to resist and shout just then and a moment afterwards the fools started shooting from the woods to the front of the lodge – Stolačka’s men, some trigger-happy sniper, seeing Zlatko over the balustrade and out in the open now, and believing he could get him in one.

  But he failed – and Zlatko managed to wrench Rachel away with him, using her as a shield, pulling her across the twenty yards of open space before the thick wood and undergrowth to the side of the lodge gobbled them up.

  The trees in front of us, and the long grass in the meadow beyond, burst with their hidden store of soldiers then – bounding towards us, yelping with enthusiasm as they came, Stolačka in the vanguard, his Windsor check replaced now by a sort of floppy, ill-fitting commando’s outfit.

  ‘You have your little gun!’ he shouted when he got to me. ‘Why did you not use it?’ He was extremely excited, flourishing a heavy automatic like an officer leading his men over the top. It struck me that being in charge of these quite unaccustomed military manoeuvres had gone to his head. In fact, it was soon obvious that he and his platoon of dressed-up urban secret policemen had little or no experience of these jungle search-and-destroy operations – for they thrashed madly about in the bushes all round the lodge for a minute or two, going in opposite directions, before I was able to persuade them of the right path. As a result Zlatko got a good head start on us, which he should never have had at all.

  He’d gone into thick scrub to the side of the lodge and a tight fir plantation beyond that, an area of land that sloped down gently between long rows of trees, but with hillocks rising up here and there, so that it was impossible to get a clear line of vision for more than 20 or 30 yards ahead.

  And Zlatko obviously knew his way round this land – which we didn’t – a fact made very apparent by the nervousness of Stolačka’s storm-troops in this leafy wilderness, where the sun filtered through the layers of green and played strange tricks with the light, so that the men jumped at emerald shadows, stumbled into drains and generally behaved like city folk stampeding from a flash floo
d. One of them even managed to empty his machine pistol at a pheasant, jumping suddenly to our left. Thus our general progress was slow. And soon Stolacka and I, unencumbered and perhaps more adroit on our feet, found ourselves dangerously ahead of the gun-toting heavy infantry behind us.

  But then the land fell away sharply and we found ourselves on a steep slope – and as the plantation thinned out I heard the rumbling in the distance of a train. A deep cutting opened up immediately below us, a few hundred yards away, and we saw the quarry railway line then at the bottom of it, a broad-guage single track running straight in this section, with a train half-way along – a great diesel shunter ploughing heavily through it, with a snake of high-sided waggons behind. And there, running beside it half-way along, was Zlatko, a tiny figure trying to grasp the sides of one of the waggons.

  We were on our backsides suddenly, as the land slid away beneath us at 45 degrees – slithering down the hill through brambles and prickly gorse and little outcrops of stone, Stolacka yelling at the engine driver as he went. But the man couldn’t hear us.

  Zlatko was still running along the rough track beside the rails when I last saw him, before a boulder caught me, twisting me over, so that I lost sight of him for several moments. And when I had my wits about me again, he was gone – and the train had passed, the last waggon disappearing into another turn in the cutting.

  It wasn’t until we were standing on the track itself, and looked down a small incline the other side, that we saw Zlatko – or several parts of him. The heavy wagon wheels had cut him up like a twig.

  ‘Rachel?’ I shouted, looking wildly around. But she was nowhere. The train rumbled away in the distance and the slanting sun glinted on the high white escarpment ahead of us, at the end of the cutting – and Stolačka’s men joined us, slinging their machine pistols, well pleased.