The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  ‘Where is she?’ I said violently.

  Stolačka rubbed his chin doubtfully, speaking to his men. He shook his head. ‘Well, we came through the wood between the lodge and here very carefully,’ he said. ‘All the same, perhaps when he let her go she went back to the lodge. If not – well, she could not have gone up there.’ He looked across, up at the almost sheer rise on the other side of the cutting. ‘She must have gone that way – towards the quarries.’

  I ran along the track through the cutting then, as fast as breath would take me, Stolačka behind – only to be faced with a tunnel round the next bend. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No – up! Up there!’ And we climbed then, round the tunnel opening, up a path over the rock face, and a few minutes later we were standing on top of the hill looking over an utterly changed landscape.

  The woods had all gone, eaten away by the great white gash in the earth, a mile or more square, bounded all round on one side by a huge cliff of limestone on which we stood, with old workings and flooded quarries some hundreds of feet immediately beneath us. A mile away, in the distance, were the newer cuttings, a jumble of cranes, great tongs and scoops and mechanical diggers all grinding away with a faint roar, the air about them dust-white.

  But where we were, high up on the rim of land, the air was pure and cool and there was silence – a pleasant silence, where you could hear birds about again after the heat of the day.

  ‘Beyond here she could not have gone,’ Stolačka said. ‘So – she must have gone back to the lodge.’ But both of us looked down at the watery pits beneath us, without saying anything. The sun slanted over the huge valley from the west, piercing a few thin clouds on the horizon like beams of the apocalypse, a fiery orange ball which turned the whole harsh place beneath us into sheets of blazing communion-white.

  ‘Rachel?’ I called, looking round me. But there was nowhere she could have hidden. I came to the rim of the crater again. ‘Goddam you – what have you done now,’ I said under my breath, my stomach falling about inside me. ‘Maybe she went along the cutting the other way,’ I said. ‘Or into the tunnel.’

  ‘I hope not – for the train was coming in that direction. She is sure to be back at the lodge.’ Stolačka put his arm on my shoulder. ‘Come.’

  *

  But Rachel was nowhere about the lodge when we returned, or further back along the track, or in the tunnel when they went through it later – or in the woods, which half a local army brigade dragged through high and low for a week afterwards. She’d disappeared just as Lindsay had, in the midst of life, another great hand that had come out of the sky and scooped her up. And they couldn’t find her in the watery quarry pits either, with frogmen and all sorts of elaborate mechanical drags. But there were so many old pits and nooks and crevices which she might have fallen into. There wasn’t a lot of hope that way. Many others, we learnt during the week we stayed on at the tourist lodge, had disappeared before into this quarry without trace. It had been one of several convenient mass graveyards at the end of the war – thousands in Pavelič’s Croatian army had been consigned by the partisans – the men, like Ivo Kovačič and his family that the British had sent back from Bleiburg a hundred miles or so to the north-west: the British, of course, so ably staffed there by officers like Lindsay, packing them back into the cattle-waggons, across the border to their execution.

  It was all the saddest, dirtiest business – that week and these memories. Eleanor was taken away, of course – though her children and grandchildren were spared. And my God, George’s sudden arrival didn’t help – George Willoughby-Hughes who tracked Madeleine and me down to the Palace Hotel in Zagreb when we got back there. Marcus had had to release him in London and he’d managed to contact Klaus who had told him where we all were. He stood in the lobby of the hotel, sweating horribly in his old linen tropicals, and made a scene – British officials from the consulate and the embassy in Belgrade all round us, shouting fearful old-fashioned abuse at me: ‘You … louse!’ and such-like, mad with grief, his huge body twitching round on his little feet, like a monstrous clockwork toy – a masterwork of mourning now. As though he’d been the only one to love Rachel, I thought.

  He left straight away, up to Trakǒsćan, to continue the search for Rachel himself. But even George’s great skill – in which, like a water diviner, he had so often before successfully unearthed his love – would meet with no reward this time, I thought.

  After a few days I took Madeleine home to Glenalyth.

  Epilogue

  Later that summer, in September, when the weather had cooled at last, I went up again to Glenalyth, to see how Madeleine was and offer what help I could. I can’t say that even she had borne things well. She was a bright crusader, certainly; but a crusader fights for a special, saintly hope – and that cause was lost to her now. Her quality of fervent simplicity and the deep fund of expectation which was her real capital – these had died in her and she was like many other women now who seek only to survive the day.

  I had suggested that I help them with the honey crop just coming in then, for things had not stopped on the estate. Indeed such activity, from Madeleine’s point of view, was very much part of any cure she was likely to make.

  And so she and I and Billy, the farm manager, and a few other local hands donned veils and gloves during those fine September days, out each morning about the gardens extracting frames, or going further afield on a lorry to bring back the outlying colonies from the purple heather moors beyond the house.

  The hives on the Oak Walk beside the house were the last we tended to. I was out there with Billy one afternoon, beneath the dry leafed trees, taking the heavily laden frames out and putting them on a trolley. And it was then that we found one of the hives, half-way along the line, practically empty – the hive that Lindsay had been working on just before he disappeared. There seemed no explanation but that half the colony had subsequently left and swarmed somewhere – some time during the long summer, without anyone’s noticing.

  I was standing on the edge of the croquet courts, immediately beneath the walls of the house, later that afternoon, when I saw where they might have gone. The day was so still you could hear sounds a long way off, right down to the plum-blue mirror of the loch where someone was cutting trees over the far side – a day with a fine, almost crisp silence in it, autumn falling imperceptibly all round, leaves offering their bronzed and yellowed sides to the golden light. And it was in this silence that I heard the faint but persistent murmur of bees somewhere above me – and looking up I saw the insects hovering in the bright air, against the blue, high above me, just beneath the eaves of the house, where the guttering divided, giving way to a leaded gully in the middle of the roof.

  I told Billy about it and we went up together, with a torch and a bee skip and a smoker, to take a look – up through the little lime-washed servants’ rooms and into the bone-dry attics beyond, where Lindsay’s clutter of old papers still rested in so many boxes; a huge memorial library that I never wanted to read again. I put my foot on a twisted rail, a remnant from his old collection of model trains, and it snapped up at me like an animal. A butterfly, a fine Red Admiral, fluttered blindly against the small grimy window which gave out on to the lawn. But there were no bees. Billy managed to open the window and look out a fraction.

  ‘They’re further along,’ he said. ‘To the left. In the roof somewhere.’

  ‘The attics don’t go that far, though.’

  ‘No. We’d have to take the slates off.’

  ‘Not worth it.’

  I had moved my hands carefully along the plaster work to one side and up to the rough ceiling overhead. But everything was solid. There was no access. It was Billy who found the space – behind the great iron Victorian water tanks right at the end of the attics – an opening a few feet square where all the pipes ran from the tank to the bathrooms below.

  He squeezed through it first and I followed, having pushed the bee equipment across to him. There was only a little lig
ht in the place, a gloomy nook set right up directly beneath the roof. But there was just enough to see vaguely with: dusty beams fell from one or two cracks in the slates and there was another angle of light coming from a small circular opening, a stone gutter of some sort, down by the end of the joists. The air was breathlessly warm and dry and there was a very sweet smell, deeply sweet. And we could hear the bees now, buzzing about somewhere ahead of us, and see them coming in and out of the stone aperture. I trod on something – another model rail it felt like, crunching beneath my feet.

  Billy shone the torch about then, and I saw that it had been another rail I’d stepped on, but part of a whole layout this time, raised up carefully on the joists and running about the space in circles. It was Lindsay’s old model railway, I saw at once, complete with all the missing rolling stock – the pre-war canary-coloured carriages and boot-black engines; Lindsay’s clockwork masterpieces that I had been unable to find and had thought done away with earlier that summer. But here they all were, spread out lovingly, a branch-line train just arriving at a country station with a long banner Virol advertisement running down all one side of the platform: “Growing children need it.”

  The bees seemed to be concentrated among a pile of sacks up by the stone guttering. Billy shone the torch on them now, moving towards them carefully, bee smoker at the ready. But he stopped half-way along, crouching down beneath the rafters, frozen.

  The beam of light showed not sacking but what looked like an old suit laid out flat along the joists – a coat and trousers that some builder perhaps had thrown down there casually years before. It wasn’t until he moved the torch along that we saw the sudden angular profile rising from one end of the cloth: a dark, leathery thing, the vague colour and shape of an old rugby ball.

  It was a skull – but with the flesh all there, a chocolate veneer, sunk tight against the forehead and down over the nose and chin – tight as a bowstring – so that the features were easily recognisable. It was Lindsay. In six months heat up here he’d been mummified – dried out like a kipper under the burning slates and preserved now, an almost identical shadow of his former self. And here was where the missing swarm of bees had made their home, we saw now, as they buzzed to and fro – from the stone opening deep into his dry entrails. ‘Out of the strong comes forth sweetness,’ I thought – from a man shrunk like a child now, laid out amongst his dearest toys, in the darkest, hidden shadows of his house.

  The strong? Perhaps I’m wrong there. Though who can really say? I can’t be sure even now – after all that I’d learnt against him in the previous weeks – what horror had driven Lindsay to kill himself, for suicide it was: a vast overdose of Nembutal, as we learnt from the autopsy. He left no note. Nor am I any more sure what had driven him back into his youth in this singular manner – why he should have chosen this remote, eccentric, self-inflicted crucifixion among the joys of his childhood.

  It’s not enough to say that we are all childish men. Though I think with Lindsay this aching dichotomy, which he must certainly have thought of as a disability, may have predominated: as a result of a childhood barely expressed at the proper time, caught, as he had been, in the severe expectations of his father, the wicked old General – a childhood ever since repressed, finding irresponsible outlet only in his subsequent political lies and infidelities, and indeed in the nonsense of his secret work itself, which he had taken to so successfully in the first place, children being natural double agents.

  Cast out from the playrooms beneath years before, he had – in however so strange a manner – sought re-entry to it by way of this hidden space beneath the roofs of the family home – a sharp revenge in the chosen site, so close to home, so appropriately childish, too. He had succeeded in these aims, perhaps. Or so I see it – if I see anything, when I remember that calm, bronzed face, with the spiky chin and nose bone, as of some musky, golden emperor, miraculously preserved, unearthed after thousands of years from a fabulous tomb – filled here with the grave gifts of yellow carriages and little waggons and coal-dark engines – which he would travel happily through eternity with.

  It’s only theory, of course, such psychology. It’s equally possible that his lies and infidelities – and the memory of the men, like Ivo Kovačič, whom he’d sent to their deaths, may have caught up with him, become, with age, an intolerable burden. Yet he might well have argued that these were either peccadilloes, in the moral sphere – made additionally necessary by his secret work – or, in the case of the massacred Yugoslavs, a fault not his – a matter entirely within the evil fortune of war.

  Or the poison may have come as a result of the guilt he felt over his first wife’s death, as he believed it – a matter which even a patriotism such as his could not easily have justified. Or perhaps, at the last, as Eleanor had suggested – he had become disgusted with all the compromises in his life, the hopeless indecisiveness of his political faith, a lifetime in which he had vacillated between East and West, a genuine double agent, with a real dilemma, who could never really give his heart to either side; a man who saw too clearly the good and ill in either camp – and gave his death as evidence of the plague in both their houses.

  These are all theories – there may be other reasons which even I know nothing of: only the horror remains fact.

  Yet perhaps it wasn’t all horror. Susan, after all, had gained a sister, risen from the dead, and for Madeleine Lindsay’s disovery was an almost sweet release: her husband, whom she had so loved, had been returned to her. The pain was over, the mystery solved, the vessel of her joy had come home. I remembered Basil Fielding – ‘People have an enormous need to tidy things up in that way.’ And now Madeleine could do this – and she did so with a relieved calm, offering him, in his emblematic return, all that she had given him in his life – the gifts of total faith, loyalty and affection.

  ‘You know,’ she said to me that same evening in the big hall, the logs piled up now about the great fireplace ready for the winter, ‘I wonder if there’s anything really strange in the way he went. What was strange was the complete content and trust we had in each other – all along. I know that more now. It’s a lifetime’s warmth that – for me. The rest – the last few weeks, poor Eleanor – that’s all nonsense by comparison. Oh, all she said may be true! But that’s irrelevant.’

  I nodded. Her unquestioning love had, in the end, unbolted the dark: Lindsay’s dark – where my persistent enquiries had led only to pain. And the ‘truth’, I saw now, could well be irrelevant – the search we make for it so vehemently steps which take us away from it.

  David Marcus, of course, managed to cast a real gloom over the proceedings – arriving hot-foot from London the next day, busy yet temporising as ever, a man with obvious lies in his heart, who would never, unfortunately, kill himself.

  I said, ‘Well, you have your man at last.’ We were in the morning-room. He was fingering the books on the shelves again, ever the sly investigator – just as he fingered people’s lives, wondering how much they were worth or what you could borrow on them.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘A tragedy.’

  But I could see he was really immensely relieved. Lindsay would never embarrass him now, turning up at a press conference in Moscow a few months hence.

  ‘A brave man – which makes it all the more inexplicable,’ he went on – as though suicide was an act of cowardice.

  ‘You know damn well, Marcus, it can’t be all that inexplicable.’

  ‘You’d so like to know,’ he murmured secretly under his breath.

  I was about to tell him that I now knew the real secret about Lindsay – from Eleanor – already. But I changed my mind. ‘You tried to get me,’ I went on. ‘You succeeded with Willis Parker. You didn’t want Lindsay found for some reason – only dead, as he is now.’

  ‘What nonsense you speak,’ he said gravely, turning to me, very formally in his dark pinstripe, like a crooked headmaster with a rascal – a man usurping genuine old decencies, in language and d
ress, thus to give weight to his deceit.

  But I didn’t press my luck with him – and thought no more of telling him that I knew the truth anyway about Lindsay’s intelligence operations. He would learn the uselessness of that whole long elaborate business in due course, perhaps, when the matter in Eleanor’s trial in Yugoslavia came to light. Until then he could pretend that Lindsay’s work for British Intelligence had been the one, at least, shining success in that deeply flawed organisation. Though even there, I don’t know how they can ever establish a true profit and loss account in such cloudy matters as this Trojan horse ploy – but let them at it: suitable work for their narrow souls.

  They buried Lindsay later that week: in the family plot to the side of the little granite church, high on the moors – the Laird come home at last. The whole neighbourhood attended, the real people of the estate and locality, less real friends, pillars of the county society – and a few far worse men from Whitehall, pretending loss, though more intent, I think, on making sure Lindsay didn’t jump from the box and escape them a second time.

  It was a perfect afternoon, high on the blue land, looking over a wild expanse, the clouds funnelled into strange white spirals and pillars, like rocks in the Grand Canyon, miles tall, very high up and far away in the distance. It wasn’t a formal or military funeral – there would be a memorial service for all that nonsense later on in some Wren church off the Strand. But a local bagpiper played him out, after all the numbing obsequies: the last expected musical homage for a Scots officer and gentleman: ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ – a funeral dirge which I have always found awkward and atonal, though thus certainly all the more effective in creating a chilly mood: enough to say that it’s a kind of music I’ve never been able to understand or connect with – and thus it may be an appropriate reflection of my failure to really understand the man they were burying. Or is it the other way round perhaps – that this lonely, harsh and unmelodic line reflects the true lack of any melody at the heart of the world, a dark which Lindsay always felt and which in the end he could not bear?