Ever After

16

Qui quaerit, invenit. I wonder.

I received a letter from a Major Pilkington, whose exact function and status remain far from clear to me, but who appears to be the final clearing-house for any awkward but unignorable inquiry from the general public. I have tried to picture Major Pilkington, this man who (in a manner and language so different from Sam’s) has been the bearer of such significant if belated news. The name suggests some buffer of the old school. I see him therefore as a grey-moustached, reddish-cheeked, chubby-jowled figure, long since past his military zenith and thus edged into this dead-end, dead-letter job, which a sort of tendency to fat in his character enables him to perform with the appropriate cushioning tact. He looks (I imagine) more like a headmaster of the patient, understanding sort, or an inured but genial family doctor, than a major. “Now, what seems to be the trouble …?”

Then the image fades into that of some crisp, sharp-faced, still youngish high-flier. This, after all, is a responsible, if unspectacular, position: access to records, the handling of “sensitive” matters. And if it is a job in which our zealous career-maker has no wish to linger, then the best way to be shot of it and be picked for better and greater things is to carry it out with conspicuous diligence and the minimum of bureaucratic dither.

Dear Mr Unwin,

Your letter of 19th May has been passed on to me through various departments and it has been necessary to trace the relevant records. I apologise for the delay in this reply.

The records relating to your father’s death on 8th April 1946, and to his career from March 1945 until his death, are governed by the strictures regarding classified information. I am therefore not at liberty to enter into details. However, in view of the personal aspect of your inquiry and of the fact that, subsequent to your mother’s death, you yourself have received new information on the matter, I am authorized to make the observations below, while trusting in your absolute discretion.

Immediately following your father’s death, an internal inquiry was conducted into its circumstances. Your father was cleared of all suspicion of pressure brought to bear on him relating to a breach or endangering of security, and I must emphasise that his professional record remains that of an honourable man. However, it emerged from the evidence of colleagues and superiors that your father may have harboured, since the final months of the war, a growing aversion, on conscientious grounds, to the nature of his special duties, which, conflicting intolerably with his considerable dedication and ambition, may ultimately have contributed to his suicide.

The records show that your mother was interviewed during the inquiry and, beyond recognising that they involved secrecy, appeared to have had no knowledge of the sensitive aspects of your father’s duties. Indeed, she adduced the “personal reasons” for your father’s suicide, which I assume are those referred to in your letter and which I will not, therefore, comment upon further.

It was deemed necessary for the purpose of the inquiry to inform your mother, in the strictest confidence and in the barest terms only, of the nature of your father’s recent duties: that is, that from the spring of 1945 he was engaged in liaison activities with our wartime allies relating to the development of atomic weapons.

You will appreciate that it was essential that none of this should emerge at the public inquest. Your mother was charged to repeat nothing of what had been disclosed to her and it was agreed that she should adhere to the aforementioned personal factors, which, I hope you will forgive me for observing, served very fortuitously the interests of secrecy. It would appear from your letter that your mother kept her word, with commendable compliance, up until her death.

I regret that I am not empowered to enter into any further correspondence on this matter, and I must remind you that, although they date from over forty years ago, the records referred to herein remain subject to rules regarding public accessibility.

I trust, however, that the contents of this letter are sufficient to answer your inquiry, and I offer my sincere regrets for any distress caused by the necessity of withholding information.…

So, he was a spy then — of sorts — after all. A reluctant, a regretful, a squeamish spy.

And it seems that my letter must have been taken as in some way loaded, double-edged (“information has come into my possession …”). They thought I knew something. Ha! And it seems we have got our wires crossed. Hopelessly crossed.

And look how I obey Major Pilkington’s stringent admonitions. I copy out the text of his letter right here for everyone to see.

(Everyone?)

But none of it matters, does it? Because he wasn’t my— Was he? What does this phantom that Major Pilkington has conjured up out of his files matter to me?

The night mist swirls round the battlements of Elsinore. Shapes loom on the guard platform. “Who’s there?” Did ever a play so palpably and so troublingly sound its note?

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”

But even when he was alive, he was no more than the ghost of my father. “An honourable man” … “conflicting intolerably” … when you are out on an adventure …

So why should I—?

“Armed, say you?”—“Armed, my lord.”—“From top to toe?”—“My lord, from head to foot …”

And what good, in any case, is Hamlet’s long-deferred and juvenile revenge, now that its spur, its object — my dear old wicked uncle Claudius — is dead …?

For one thought that did not occur to me as Sam delivered his fateful message, here under the bean tree, was that I was looking at him for the last time. Barely six weeks later he would be dead, and news of his death — and of its nefarious circumstances — would reach me only days, in fact, before Major Pilkington’s dispatch came winging towards me out of the even more nefarious circumstances of an earlier death.

Death! Death! You think it is elsewhere, but it is suddenly all around you, like a mist, a tide. It springs up like overnight mushrooms, it descends like the ghostly parachutes of secret agents, slipping behind enemy lines.

Was that it, then? He somehow knew? Sam knew. I didn’t know, but he knew. Something some specialist had gently broken to him. The old ticker, it’s not what it was.… Or just some unquellable premonition. After Ruth, after Sylvie. Brother Ed’s old coral-boned tug at his sleeve … My turn is coming. My last chance, maybe. So — do I tell the kid or don’t I?

Except he didn’t know the half. And now I’ll never be able to face him with it, ask him (a reversal of his confiding visit to me — and a flagrant contravention of Major Pilkington’s orders): Sam, I’ve got to tell you.… Sam, did you ever know what my father — I mean my— I mean what he did …? Sam, will you take a look at this …?

Why is it that it is Sam’s features and not my father’s (my whose?) that float before me as I read and re-read Major Pilkington’s studied words? The clean, unfadingly tanned smoothness of his skin, which even at sixty-seven (the man really thought he didn’t have long?) looked so incongruously unlived-in. The doggish eyes.

“You have to tell the truth, don’t you, pal?”

We might have continued our discussions, resumed our topic. Further visits, further colloquies, here in this contemplative domain. Mr Plastic in the purlieus of knowledge. A subject worthy of philosophic debate: Do people kill themselves for love?

“Tis here!”—“Tis here!”—“Tis gone …”

That she did or didn’t know I was another man’s son.

That she would or wouldn’t have told me in the last days, hours, of her life.

(That Sam should have kept his mouth shut.)

That he killed himself because of my mother and Sam — i.e., for love. (And Major Pilkington never knew the half.)

That he killed himself because of his “conscientious aversion,” and she really knew it.

That she didn’t know it, and the explanation given by the inquiry must have seemed to her like the perfect gift. But she couldn’t use it, could she, because she had to keep quiet? (My mother — keep quiet?)

That she told him he wasn’t my father (a monumental row, the heat of the moment, out it all comes) never thinking the revelation might kill him.

That she told him he wasn’t my father, knowing that the man was primed, in any case, to commit suicide.

That she was a murderous bitch.

That he really was my father and she told him he wasn’t.

A lying, murderous bitch.

But then why should she have told Sam?

That she never told him he wasn’t my father, but she told Sam she had told him he wasn’t my father, to take upon herself the full blame for his suicide and spare Sam’s incipient guilt.

Not such a murderous, and only for benign motives a lying, bitch.

That Sam in all this was a complete innocent?

That he wasn’t my father but she never told him he wasn’t my father and invented the story of telling him he wasn’t because it was (a) a way of confessing a long-suppressed and burdensome truth, and (b) it effectively masked (Major Pilkington would have been proud) the real cause of his suicide.

That …

That …

Felix qui potuit … I doubt it.