The Military Philosophers

FIVE

During the period between the Potsdam Conference and the dropping of the first atomic bomb, I read in the paper one morning that Widmerpool was engaged to Pamela Flitton. This piece of news was undramatically announced in the column dedicated to such items. It was not even top of the list. Pamela was described as daughter of Captain Cosmo Flitton and Mrs Flavia Wisebite; an address in Montana (suggesting a ranch) showed her father was still alive and living in America. Her mother, whose style indicated divorce from Harrison Wisebite (sunk, so far as I knew, without a trace), had come to rest in the country round Glimber, possibly a cottage on the estate. Widmerpool — ‘Colonel K. G. Widmerpool, OBE’ — was based on a block of flats in Victoria Street. Apart from stories already vaguely propagated by Farebrother and Duport, there was no clue to how this engagement had come about. Surprising as it was, the immediate implications seemed no more than that a piece of colossal folly on both their parts would soon be readjusted by another announcement saying the marriage was ‘off’. The world was in such a state of flux that such inanities were only to be expected in one quarter or another. Only later, considered in cold blood, did the arrangement appear credible; even then for less than obvious reasons.

‘Drove for the Section, did she?’ said Pennistone. ‘I never remember those girls’ faces. I haven’t heard anything of Widmerpool for some time. I suppose he’s now passed into a world beyond good and evil.’

I had not set eyes on Widmerpool myself since the day Farebrother had recoiled from saluting him in Whitehall.

Although, as an archetypal figure, one of those fabulous monsters that haunt the recesses of the individual imagination, he held an immutable place in my own private mythology, with the passing of Stringham and Templer, I no longer knew anyone to whom he might present quite the same absorbing spectacle, accordingly with whom the present conjunction could be at all adequately discussed. By this time, in any case, changes both inside and outside the Section were so many it was hard to keep pace with them. Allied relationships had become more complex with the defeat of the enemy, especially in the comportment of new political regimes that had emerged in formerly occupied countries — Poland’s, for example- some of which were making difficulties about such matters as the ‘Victory march’; in general the manner in which Peace was to be celebrated in London. In other merely administrative respects the Section’s position was becoming less pivotal than formerly, some of the Allies — France, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia — sending over special military missions. These were naturally less familiar with the routines of liaison than colleagues long worked with, while the new entities, unlike the old ones, were sometimes authorized to deal directly with whatever branch of the Services specially concerned them.

‘Not all the fruits of Victory are appetising to the palate,’ said Pennistone. ‘An issue of gall and wormwood has been laid on.’

By that time he was himself on the point of demobilization. He had dealt with the Poles up to the end. Dempster and others had gone already. The Old Guard, like the soldiers in the song, were fading away, leaving me as final residue, Finn’s second-in-command. In a month or two I should also enter that intermediate state of grace, technically ‘on leave’, through which in due course civilian life was once more attained. Finn, for reasons best known to himself — he could certainly have claimed early release had he so wished — remained on in his old appointment, where there was still plenty of work to do. Other branches round about were, of course, dwindling in the same manner. All sorts of unexpected individuals, barely remembered, or at best remembered only for acrimonious interchanges in the course of doing business with them, would from time to time turn up in our room to say goodbye, hearty or sheepish, according to temperament. Quite often they behaved as if these farewells were addressed to the only friends they had ever known.

‘My Dad’s taking me away from this school,’ said Borrit, when he shook my hand. ‘I’m going into his office. He’s got some jolly pretty typists.’

‘Wish mine would buck up and remove me too.’

‘He says the boys don’t learn anything here, just get up to nasty tricks,’ said Borrit. ‘I’m going to have a room to myself, he says. What do you think of that? Hope my secretary looks like that AT with black hair and a white face who once drove us for a week or two, can’t remember her name.’

‘Going back to the same job?’

‘You bet — the old oranges and lemons/bells of St Clement’s.’

As always, after making a joke, Borrit began to look sad again.

‘We’ll have to meet.’

‘Course we will.’

‘When I want to buy a banana.’

‘Anything up to twenty-thousand bunches, say the word and I’ll fix a discount.’

‘Will Sydney Stebbings be one of your customers now?’

About eighteen months before, Stebbings, suffering another nervous breakdown, had been invalided out of the army. He was presumed to have returned to the retail side of the fruit business. Borrit shook his head.

‘Didn’t you hear about poor old Syd? Gassed himself. Felt as browned off out of the army as in it. I used to think it was those Latin-Americans got him down, but it was just Syd’s moody nature.’

Borrit and I never did manage to meet again. Some years after the war I ran into Slade in Jermyn Street, by the hat shop with the stuffed cat in the window smoking a cigarette. He had a brown paper bag in his hand and said he had been buying cheese. We had a word together. He was teaching languages at a school in the Midlands and by then a headmastership in the offing. I asked if he had any news, among others, of Borrit.

‘Borrit died a few months ago,’ said Slade. ‘Sad. Bad luck too, because he was going to marry a widow with a little money. She’d been the wife of a man in his business.’

I wondered whether on this final confrontation Borrit had brought off the never realized ‘free poke’, before the grave claimed him. The war drawing to a close must have something to do with this readiness for marriage on the part of those like Borrit, Widmerpool, Farebrother, no longer in their first youth. These were only a few of them among the dozens who had never tried it before, or tried it without much success. Norah Tolland spoke with great disapproval of Pamela Flitton’s engagement

‘Pam must need a Father-Figure,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a tragic mistake. Like Titania and Bottom.’

Not long before the Victory Service, announced to take place at St Paul’s, Prasad’s Embassy gave a party on their National Day. It was a bigger affair than usual on account of the advent of Peace, primarily a civilian gathering, though a strong military element was included among the guests. The huge saloons, built at the turn of the century, were done up in sage green, the style of decoration displaying a nostalgic leaning towards Art Nouveau, a period always sympathetic to Asian taste. Gauthier de Graef, ethnically confused, had been anxious to know whether there were eunuchs in the ladies’ apartments above the rooms where we were being entertained. Accordingly, to settle the point, on which he was very insistent, Madame Philidor and Isobel arranged to be conducted to their hostess in purdah, promising to report on this matter, though without much hope of returning with an affirmative answer. They had just set out on this visit of exploration, when I saw Farebrother moving purposefully through the crowd. I went over to congratulate him on his marriage. He was immensely cordial.

‘I hear Geraldine’s an old friend of yours, Nicholas. You knew her in her “Tuffy” days.’

I said I did not think I had ever quite had the courage to address her by that nickname when she had still been Miss Weedon.

‘I mean when she was Mrs Foxe’s secretary,’ said Farebrother. ‘Then you knew the old General too. Splendid old fellow, he must have been. Wish I’d met him. Both he and Mrs Foxe opened up a lot of very useful contacts for Geraldine, which she’s never lost sight of. They’re going to stand me in good stead too. A wonderful woman. Couldn’t believe my ears when she said she’d be mine.’

He seemed very pleased about it all.

‘She’s not here tonight.’

‘Too busy.’

‘Catching spies?’

‘Ah, so you know where she’s working? We try to keep that a secret. No, Geraldine’s getting our new flat straight. We’ve actually found somewhere to live. Not too easy these days. Quite a reasonable rent for the neighbourhood, which is a good one. Now I must go and have a word with old Lord Perkins over there. He married poor Peter Templer’s elder sister, Babs, as I expect you know.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘One of the creations of the first Labour Government. Of course he’s getting on now — but, with Labour in again, we all need friends at court.’

‘Did anything more ever come out as to what happened to Peter?’

‘Nothing, so far as I know. He was absolutely set on doing that job. As soon as he heard I was going to work with those people he got on to me to try and get him something of the sort. You ought to meet Lord Perkins. I think Babs found him a change for the better after that rather dreadful fellow Stripling. I ran into Stripling in Aldershot about eighteen months ago. He was lecturing to the troops. Just come from the Glasshouse, where he’d given a talk on the early days of motor-racing. Someone told me Babs had been a great help to her present husband when he was writing his last book on industrial relations.’

He smiled and moved off. Widmerpool arrived in the room at that moment. He stood looking round, evidently deciding where best to launch an attack. Farebrother must have seen him, because he suddenly swerved into a new direction to avoid contact. This seemed a good opportunity to congratulate Widmerpool too. I went over to him. He seemed very pleased with himself.

‘Thank you very much, Nicholas. Some people have expressed the opinion, without much delicacy, that Pamela is too young for me. That is not my own view at all. A man is as young as he feels. I had quite a scene with my mother, I’m afraid. My mother is getting an old lady now, of course, and does not always know what she is talking about. As a matter of fact I am making arrangements for her to live, anyway temporarily, with some distant relations of ours in the Lowlands. It’s not too far from Glasgow. I think she will be happier with them than on her own, after I am married. She is in touch with one or two nice families on the Borders.’

This was a very different tone from that Widmerpool was in the habit of using about his mother in the old days. It seemed likely the engagement represented one of his conscious decisions to put life on a new footing. He embarked on these from time to time, with consequent rearrangements all round. It looked as if sending Mrs Widmerpool into exile was going to be one such. It was hard to feel wholly condemnatory. I enquired about the circumstances in which he had met Pamela, a matter about which I was curious.

‘In Cairo. An extraordinary chance. As you know, my work throughout the war has never given me a second for social life. Even tonight I am here only because Pamela herself wanted to come — she is arriving at any moment — and I shall leave as soon as I have introduced her. I requested the Ambassador as a personal favour that I might bring my fiancée. He was charming about it. To tell the truth, I have to dine with the Minister tonight. A lot to talk about. Questions of policy. Adjustment to new régimes. But I was telling you how Pamela and I met. In Cairo there was trouble about my returning plane. One had been shot down, resulting in my having to kick my heels in the place for twenty-four hours. You know how vexatious that sort of situation is to me. I was taken to a place called Groppi’s. Someone introduced us. Before I knew where I was, we were dining together and on our way to a night-club. I had not been to a place of that sort for years. Had, indeed, quite forgotten what they were like. The fact was we had a most enjoyable evening.’

He laughed quite hysterically.

‘Then, as luck would have it, Pam was posted back to England. I should have added that she was working as secretary in one of the secret organizations there. I was glad about her return, because I don’t think she moved in a very good set in Cairo. When she arrived in London, she sent me a postcard — and what a postcard.’

Widmerpool giggled violently, then recovered himself.

‘It arrived one morning in that basement where I work night and day,’ he said. ‘You can imagine how pleased I was. It seems extraordinary that we hardly knew each other then, and now I’ve got a great big photograph of her on my desk.’

He was almost gasping. The words vividly conjured up his subterranean life. Photographs on a desk were never without interest. People who placed them there belonged to a special category in their human relationships. There was, for example, that peculiarly tortured-looking midshipman in a leather-and-talc frame in the room of a Section with which ours was often in contact. Some lines of John Davidson suddenly came into my head:

And so they wait, while empires sprung

Of hatred thunder past above,

Deep in the earth for ever young

Tannhauser and the Queen of Love.*

On reflection, the situation was not a very close parallel, because it was most unlikely Pamela had ever visited Widmerpool’s underground office. On the other hand, she herself could easily be envisaged as one of the myriad incarnations of Venus, even if Widmerpool were not much of a Tannhauser. At least he seemed in a similar way to have stumbled on the secret entrance to the court of the Paphian goddess in the Hollow Hill where his own duties were diurnally enacted. That was some qualification.

‘You know she’s Charles Stringham’s niece?’

‘Naturally I am aware of that.’

The question had not pleased him.

‘No news of Stringham, I suppose?* ‘There has been, as a matter of fact.’ Widmerpool seemed half angry, half desirous of making some statement about this.

‘He was captured,’ he said. ‘He didn’t survive.’

Scarcely anything was known still about individual prisoners in Japanese POW camps, except that the lives of many of them had certainly been saved by the Bomb. News came through slowly from the Far East. I asked how Widmerpool could speak so definitely.

‘At the end of last year the Americans sank a Jap transport on the way from Singapore. They rescued some British prisoners on board. They had been in the same camp. One of them got in touch with Stringham’s mother when repatriated. It was only just in time, because Mrs Foxe herself died soon after that, as you probably saw.’

‘I hadn’t.’

He seemed to want to make some further confession.

‘As I expect you know, Mrs Foxe was a very extravagant woman. At the end, she found it not only impossible to live in anything like the way she used, but was even quite short of money.’

‘Stringham himself said something about that when I last saw him.’

‘The irony of the situation is that his mother’s South African money was tied up on Stringham,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Owing to bad management, she never got much out of those securities herself, but a lot of South African stock has recently made a very good recovery.’

‘I suppose Flavia will benefit.’

‘No, she doesn’t, as it turns out,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Rather an odd thing happened. Stringham left a will bequeathing all he had to Pam. He’d always been fond of her as a child. He obviously thought it would be just a few personal odds and ends. As it turns out, there could be a good deal more than that. With the right attention, Stringham’s estate in due course might be nursed into something quite respectable.’

He looked rather guilty, not without reason. We abandoned the subject of Stringham.

‘I don’t pretend Pamela’s an easy girl,’ he said. ‘We fairly often have rows — in fact are not on speaking terms for twenty-four hours or more. Never mind. Rows often clear the air. We shall see it through, whatever my position when I leave the army.’

‘You’ll go back to the City, I suppose?’

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Other plans?’

‘I have come to the conclusion that I enjoy power,’ said Widmerpool. ‘That is something the war has taught me. In this connexion, it has more than once occurred to me that I might like governing…’

He brought his lips together, then parted them. This contortion formed a phrase, but, the words inaudible, its sense escaped me.

‘Governing whom?’

Leaning forward and smiling, Widmerpool repeated the movement of his lips. This time, although he spoke only in a whisper, the two words were intelligible.

‘Black men …’

‘Abroad?’

‘Naturally.’

‘That’s feasible?’

‘My reputation among those who matter could scarcely be higher.’

‘You mean you could easily get an appointment of that sort?’

‘Nothing in life is ever easy, my boy. Not in the sense you use the term. It is one of the mistakes you always make. The point is, we are going to see great changes. As you know, my leanings have always been leftwards. From what I see round me, I have no reason to suppose such sympathies were mistaken. Men like myself will be needed.’

‘If they are to be found.’

He clapped me on the back.

‘No flattery,’ he said. ‘No flattery, but I sometimes wonder whether you’re not right.’

He looked at his watch and sighed.

‘Being engaged accustoms one to unpunctuality,’ he went on in rather another tone, a less exuberant one. ‘I think I’ll have a word with that old stalwart, Lord Perkins, whom I see over there.’

‘I didn’t know till a moment ago that Perkins was married to Peter Templer’s sister.’

‘Oh, yes. So I believe. I don’t see them as having much in common as brothers-in-law, but one never knows. Unfortunate Templer getting killed like that. He was too old for that sort of business, of course. Stringham, too. I fear the war has taken a sad toll of our friends. I notice Donners over there talking to the Portuguese Ambassador. I must say a word to him too.’

In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being. He now resembled an animated tailor’s dummy, one designed to recommend second-hand, though immensely discreet, clothes (if the suit he was wearing could be regarded as a sample) adapted to the taste of distinguished men no longer young. Jerky movements, like those of a marionette — perhaps indicating all was not absolutely well with his physical system — added to the impression of an outsize puppet that had somehow escaped from its box and begun to mix with real people, who were momentarily taken in by the extraordinary conviction of its mechanism. The set of Sir Magnus’s mouth, always a trifle uncomfortable to contemplate, had become very slightly less under control, increasing the vaguely warning note the rest of his appearance implied. On the whole he had lost that former air of desperately seeking to seem more ordinary than everyone else round him; or, if he still hoped for that, its consolations had certainly escaped him. A lifetime of weighty negotiation in the worlds of politics and business had left their mark. One would now guess at once he was an unusual person, who, even within his own terms of reference, had lived an unusual life. He looked less parsonic than in the days when he had suggested a clerical headmaster. Perhaps that was because he had not, so to speak, inwardly progressed to the archiepiscopal level in that calling; at least his face had not developed the fleshy, theatrical accentuations so often attendant on the features of the higher grades of the clergy. At some moment, conscious or not, he had probably branched off from this interior priestly strain in his make-up. That would be the logical explanation. Matilda, looking decidedly smart in a dress of blue and black stripes, was standing beside her husband, talking with the Portuguese Ambassador. I had not seen her since their marriage. She caught sight of me and waved, then separated herself from the others and made her way through the ever thickening crowd.

‘Nick.’

‘How are you, Matty?’

‘Don’t you admire my frock? An unsolicited gift from New York.’

‘Too smart for words. I couldn’t imagine where it had come from.’

To be rather older suited her; that or being married to a member of the Cabinet. She had dyed her hair a reddish tint that suited her, too, set off the large green eyes, which were always her most striking feature.

‘Do you ever see anything of Hugh the Drover?’

She used sometimes to call Moreland that while they had been married, usually when not best pleased with him. I told her we had not met since the night of the bomb on the Café de Madrid: that, so far as I knew, Moreland was still touring the country, putting on musical performances of one sort or another, under more or less official control; whatever happened in the war to make mounting such entertainments possible.

‘What’s his health been like?’

‘I don’t know at all.’

‘Extraordinary about Audrey Maclintick. Are they married?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘Does she look after him all right?’

‘I think she does.’

Obviously Matilda still took quite a keen interest in Moreland and his condition. That was natural enough. All the same, one felt instinctively that she had entirely given up Moreland’s world, everything to do with it. She had taken on Sir Magnus, lock, stock and barrel. The metaphor made one think of his alleged sexual oddities. Presumably she had taken them on too, though as a former mistress they would be relatively familiar. Perhaps she guessed the train of thought, because she smiled.

‘Donners has to be looked after too,’ she said. ‘I’m rather worried about him at the moment as a matter of fact.’

‘His job must be a great strain.’

Matilda brushed such a banal comment aside.

‘Will you come and see me?’ she said. ‘We’re going to Washington next week — but when we’re back.’

‘My Release Group comes up reasonably soon. We’ll probably go away for a bit when I get out of the army.’

‘Later then. Is Isobel here?’

‘Last seen on her way to the harem upstairs.’

Sir Magnus had now begun to make signs indicating that he wanted Matilda to return to him and be introduced to someone. She left me, repeating that we must meet when they came back from America. I had always liked Matilda and felt glad to see her again and hear that her life seemed endurable. Widmerpool reappeared at my side. He seemed agitated.

‘I wish Pamela would turn up,’ he said. ‘I shall be late if she doesn’t arrive soon. I can’t very well leave until she comes — ah, thank God, there she is.’

Pamela Flitton came towards us. Unlike the night at The Bartered Bride, she had this evening taken no trouble whatever about her clothes. Perhaps that was untrue, and she had gone out of her way to find the oldest, most filthy garments she possessed. She was almost in rags. By this time the party had advanced too far for it to be obvious to a newcomer whom to greet as host. She had in any case obviously not bothered about any such formalities.

‘Hullo, my dear,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I didn’t guess you’d be so late.’

He spoke in a conciliatory voice, making as if to kiss her.

She allowed the merest peck.

‘I’ll just introduce you to His Excellency,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll have to fly.’

Pamela, who was looking very pretty in spite of her disarray, was having none of that.

‘I don’t want to be introduced,’ she said. ‘I just came to have a look round.’

She gave me a nod. I made some conventional remark about their engagement. She listened to this rather more graciously than usual.

‘I think you ought to meet the Ambassador, dearest.’

‘Stuff the Ambassador.’

The phrase recalled Duport. Widmerpool laughed nervously.

‘You really oughtn’t to say things like that, darling,’ he said. ‘Not when you’re at a party like this. Nicholas and I think it very amusing, but someone else might overhear and not understand. If you really don’t feel like being introduced at the moment, I shall have to leave you. Nicholas or someone can do the honours, if you decide you want to meet your host later. Personally, I think you should. If you do, make my apologies. I shall have to go now. I am late already.’

‘Late for what?’

‘I told you — I’m dining with the Minister.’

‘You’re giving me dinner.’

‘I only wish I was. Much as I’d love to, I can’t. I did explain all this before. You said you’d like to come to the party, even though we couldn’t have dinner together after. Besides, I’m sure you told me you were dining with Lady McReith.’

‘I’m going to dine with you.’

I was about to move away and leave them to it, feeling an engaged couple should settle such matters so far as possible in private, but Widmerpool, either believing himself safer with a witness, or because he foresaw some method of disposing of Pamela in which I might play a part, took me by the arm, while he continued to speak persuasively to her.

‘Be reasonable, darling,’ he said. ‘I can’t cut a dinner I’ve gone out of my way to arrange — least of all with the Minister.’

‘Stand him up. I couldn’t care less. That’s what you’d do if you really wanted to dine with me.’

She was in a sudden rage. Her usually dead white face now had some colour in it. Widmerpool must have thought that a change of subject would cool her down, also give him a chance of escape.

‘I’m going to leave you with Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you first, what you probably don’t know, that Nicholas used to be a friend of your uncle, Charles Stringham, whom you were so fond of.’

If he hoped that information would calm her, Widmerpool made a big mistake. She went absolutely rigid.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and Charles isn’t the only one he knew. He knew Peter Templer too — the man you murdered.’

Widmerpool, not surprisingly, was apparently stupefied by this onslaught; myself scarcely less so. She spoke the words in a quiet voice. We were in a corner of the room behind some pillars, a little away from the rest of the party. Even so, plenty of people were close enough. It was no place to allow a scene to develop. Pamela turned to me.

‘Do you know what happened?’

‘About what?’

‘About Peter Templer. This man persuaded them to leave Peter to die. The nicest man I ever knew. He just had him killed.’

Tears appeared in her eyes. She was in a state of near hysteria. It was clearly an occasion when rational argument was going to do no good. The only thing would be to get her away quietly on any terms. Widmerpool did not grasp that. He could perhaps not be blamed for being unable to consider matters coolly. He had now recovered sufficiently from his earlier astonishment to rebut the charges made against him and was even showing signs of himself losing his temper.

‘How could you utter such rubbish?’ he said. ‘I see now that I ought never to have mentioned to you I had any hand at all in that affair, even at long range. It was a breach of security for which I deserve to be punished. Please stop talking in such an absurd way.’

Pamela was not in the least calmed by this remonstrance. Quite the contrary. She did not raise her voice, but spoke if possible with more intensity. Now it was me she addressed.

‘He put up a paper. That was the word he used — put up a paper. He wanted them to stop supporting the people Peter was with. We didn’t send them any more arms. We didn’t even bother to get Peter out. Why should we? We didn’t want his side to win any more.’

Widmerpool was himself pretty angry by now.

‘Because my duties happen to include the promulgation of matters appropriate for general consideration by our committee — perhaps ultimately by the Chiefs of Staff, perhaps even the Cabinet — because, as I say, this happens to be my function, that does not mean the decisions are mine, nor, for that matter, even the recommendations. Matters are discussed as fully as possible at every level. The paper is finalized. The decision is made. I may tell you this particular decision was taken at the highest level. As for not getting Templer out, as you call it, how could I possibly have anything to do with the action, right or wrong, for which the Operational people on the spot are responsible? These are just the sort of disgraceful stories that get disseminated, probably at the direct instance of the enemy.’

‘You were in favour of withdrawing support You said so. You told me.’

‘Perhaps I was. Anyway, I was a fool to say so to you.’

His own rage made him able to stand up to her.

‘Therefore you represented Peter’s people in as bad a light as possible. No doubt you carried the meeting.’

She had absorbed the jargon of Widmerpool’s employment in a remarkable manner. I remembered noticing, on I occasions when Matilda differed with Moreland about some musical matter, how dexterously women can take in the ideas of a man with whom they are connected, then outmanoeuvre him with his own arguments. Widmerpool made a despairing gesture, but spoke now with less violence.

‘I am only a member of the Secretariat, darling. I am the servant, very humble servant, of whatever committees it is my duty to attend.’

‘You said yourself it was a rare meeting when you didn’t get what you wanted into the finalized version.’

This roused Widmerpool again.

‘So it is,’ he said. ‘So it is. And, as it happens, what I thought went into the paper you’re talking about. I admit it. That doesn’t mean I was in the smallest degree responsible for Templer’s death. We don’t know for certain even if he is dead.’

‘Yes, we do.’

‘All right I concede that.’

‘You’re a murderer,’ she said.

There was a pause. They glared at each other. Then Widmerpool looked down at his watch.

‘Good God,’ he said. ‘What will the Minister think?’

Without another word, he pushed his way through the crowd towards the door. He disappeared hurriedly through it. I was wondering what on earth to say to Pamela, when she too turned away, and began to stroll through the party in the opposite direction. I saw her smile at the Swiss military attaché, who had rather a reputation as a lady-killer, then she too was lost to sight. Isobel and Madame Philidor reappeared from their visit to our hostess in purdah.

‘The first wife looked kind, did you not think?’ said Madame Philidor. ‘The other perhaps not so kind.’

After this extraordinary incident, it seemed more certain than ever that an announcement would be made stating the engagement had been broken off. However, there were other things to think about, chiefly one’s own demobilization; more immediately, arrangements regarding the Victory Day Service, which took place some weeks later at St Paul’s. I was to be on duty there with Finn, superintending the foreign military attachés invited. Among these were many gaps in the ranks of those known earlier. The several new Allied missions were not accommodated in the Cathedral under the Section’s arrangements, nor were the dispossessed — Bobrowski and Kielkiewicz, for example — individuals amongst our Allies who had played a relatively prominent part in the war, but now found themselves deprived of their birthright for no reason except an unlucky turn of the wheel of international politics manipulated by the inexorable hand of Fate.

This day of General Thanksgiving had been fixed on a Sunday in the second half of August. Its weather seemed designed to emphasize complexities and low temperatures of Allied relationships. Summer, like one of the new regimes abroad, offered no warmth, but chilly, draughty, unwelcoming perspectives, under a grey and threatening sky. The London streets by this time were, in any case, far from cheerful: windows broken: paint peeling: jagged, ruined brickwork enclosing the shells of roofless houses. Acres of desolated buildings, the burnt and battered City lay about St Paul’s on all sides. Finn and I arrived early, entering by the south door. Within the vast cool interior, traces of war were as evident as outside, though on a less wholesale, less utterly ruthless scale. The Allied military attachés, as such, were to be segregated in the south transept, in a recess lined with huge marble monuments in pseudo-classical style. I had been put in charge of the Allied group, because Finn decided the Neutrals, some of whom could be unreliable in matters of discipline and procedure, required his undivided attention. The Neutrals were to occupy a block of seats nearer the choir, the wooden carving of its stalls still showing signs of bomb damage.

‘I’m glad to say no difficulties have been made about Theodoric,’ said Finn. ‘He’s been asked to the Service in a perfectly correct manner. It’s not a large return for a life-time of being pro-British — and accepting exile — but that’s all they can do, I suppose. He’d be even worse off if he’d plumped for the other side. By the way, an ambulance party has been provided in the crypt, should any of your boys come over faint. I shall probably need medical attention myself before the day is over.’

I checked the Allied military attachés as they arrived. They were punctual, on the whole well behaved, whispering together with the air of children at a village Sunday school, a little overawed at the promised visit of the bishop of the diocese, glancing uneasily at the enigmatic sculptural scenes looming above them on the tombs. Among them, as I have said, were many absences and new faces. One regretted Van der Voort. A churchly background would have enhanced his pristine Netherlandish countenance. Colonel Hlava had returned to Prague. ‘Russia is our Big Brother,’ (the phrase had not yet developed Orwellian overtones) he had remarked to me some weeks before he left; even so, when the moment came to shake hands for the last time, he said: ‘We can only hope.’ Hlava was promoted major-general when he got home. Then, a year or two later, he was put under house arrest. He was still under house arrest when he died of heart failure; a flying ace and man one greatly liked.

Kucherman had gone back to a ministerial portfolio in the Belgian Government, his place taken by Bruylant, a quiet professional soldier, with musical leanings, though less marked than Hlava’s and not of the sort to be expressed actively by playing duets with Dempster, had Dempster still been with the Section, not returned to his Norwegian timber. In place of Marinko — out of a job like the rest of his countrymen who had supported Mihailovich’s Resistance Movement, rather than Tito’s — was a newly arrived, long haired, jack-booted young ‘Partisan’ colonel, who talked a little French and, although possessing a Polish-sounding name, designated himself as ‘Macedoin’. Macedonia was perhaps where Szymanski had come from too. One wondered what had happened to him.

Examining the neighbouring monuments more closely, I was delighted to find among them more than one of those celebrated in The Ingoldsby Legends, a favourite book of mine about the time when we lived at Stonehurst. There, for example, only a few feet away from where the military attachés sat, several figures far larger than life were enacting a battle scene in which a general had been struck from the saddle by a cannon ball, as his charger bore him at a furious gallop across the path of a kilted private from some Highland regiment. There could be no doubt whatever this was:

‘… Sir Ralph Abercrombie going to tumble

With a thump that alone were enough to dispatch him

If the Scotchman in front shouldn’t happen to catch him.’

Stendhal had seen these monuments when he visited London.

‘Style lourd,’ he noted. ‘Celui d’Abercromby bien ridicule.’

Nevertheless, one felt glad it remained there. It put on record what was then officially felt about death in battle, begging all that large question of why the depiction of action in the graphic arts had fallen in our own day almost entirely into the hands of the Surrealists.

‘La jolie figure de Moore rend son tombeau meilleur,’ Stendhal thought.

This was against the wall by the side door through which we had entered the Cathedral, at right angles to the Abercrombie memorial. Less enormously vehement, this group too had its own exuberance of style, though in quite another mood. Here a sinister charade was being enacted by several figures not so gigantic in size. What they were doing was not immediately clear, until Barham’s lines threw light on them too:

‘Where the man and the Angel have got Sir John Moore,

And are quietly letting him down through the floor.

I looked about for ‘that queer-looking horse that is rolling on Ponsonby’, but disappointingly failed to identify either man or beast in the immediate vicinity of the recess. The field of vision was too limited, only a short length of the nave to be viewed, where it joined the more or less circular area under the dome. However, recognition of these other episodes, so often pictured imaginatively in the past when the book had been read aloud by my mother — yet never for some reason appraised by a deliberate visit to St Paul’s to verify the facts — mitigated an atmosphere in other respects oddly frigid, even downright depressing. With a fashionably egalitarian ideal in view, those responsible for such things had decided no mere skimming of the cream from the top echelons, civil and military, should be assembled together to give symbolic thanks for Victory. Everyone was to be represented. The congregation — except for those who had a job to do — had been handpicked from the highest official levels to the lowest.

For some reason this principle, fair enough in theory, had in practice resulted in an extension of that atmosphere of restraint, uneasy nervous tension, common enough in a larger or smaller degree to all such ceremonies. The sense of being present at a Great Occasion — for, if this was not a Great Occasion, then what was? — had somehow failed to take adequate shape, to catch on the wing those inner perceptions of a more exalted sort, evasive by their very nature, at best transient enough, but not altogether unknown. They were, in fact, so it seemed to me — unlike that morning in Normandy — entirely absent. Perhaps that was because everyone was by now so tired. The country, there could be no doubt, was absolutely worn out. That was the truth of the matter. One felt it in St Paul’s. It was interesting to speculate who, among the less obvious, had been invited to the Service. Vavassor, for example? If so, was he wearing his blue frockcoat and gold-banded top hat? One of the ordinary security guards could look after the front-door for an hour or two. Had Blackhead been torn from his files to attend this Thanksgiving? If so, it was hard to believe he would not bring a file or two with him to mull over during the prayers. Q. (Ops.) Colonel? Mime? Widmerpool?

Meanwhile, the band of the Welsh Guards strummed away at Hoist, Elgar, Grieg, finally Handel’s ‘Water Music’. Bruylant almost imperceptibly beat time with his forefinger, while he listened to these diversions, of which I felt Moreland would have only partially approved. The Jugoslav Colonel, rather a morose young man, did not seem altogether at ease in these surroundings. Possibly to reassure himself, he produced a pocket-comb and began to smooth his hair. General Cobb, contemplating the verdict on life’s court-martial, was frowning darkly. I had all my charges in their seats by now, with a place to spare at the end of the row on which the Partisan could leave his cap. Someone might have failed to turn up because he was ill; possibly Colonel Ramos indisposed again. Then I saw Ramos in the back row, anxiously studying the service paper. I checked the list. They all seemed to be there. The Neutrals, in their position further east of the transept, had some of them shown inferior mastery of the drill; at least, not all were in their places in such good time as the Allies. Finn had rightly estimated them a more tricky crowd to manipulate.

He appeared to be finding difficulty in fitting his party into the available seats. It was too far to see for certain, but looked as if some flaw had been revealed in the organization. Finn came across the transept.

‘Look here, Nicholas. I seem to have a South American too many.’

He clenched his teeth as if some appalling consequence were likely to overtake us as a result of that

‘Which one, sir?’

‘Colonel Flores.’

‘Can’t place his country for the moment, sir.*

‘You probably haven’t heard of him. His predecessor, Hernandez, was recalled in a hurry for political reasons. It was thought Flores would not be in London in time for this show. There was a misunderstanding. The fact is things have never been the same with Latin America since we lost Borrit. You haven’t a spare place?’

‘As a matter of fact, I have, sir. I don’t know why, because I’ve checked the list and no one seems ill or late.’

‘They must have allowed for the Grand Duchy, whose military representative is in the Diplomatic block. The situation’s saved. I’ll bring Flores across.’

He returned a moment later with an officer wearing a heavy gold aiguilette, though without the sword that had survived the war in some South American ceremonial turnouts. Finn, evidently suffering stress at this last minute rearrangement, had taken Colonel Flores firmly by the arm — rather in the manner of General Conyers, with whom perhaps he had, after all, something in common — as if he were making an arrest and a dangerous customer at that. Flores, obviously appreciating the humour of this manhandling, was smiling. Dark, blue-chinned, with regular features, rather a handsome Mediterranean type, his age was hard to assess. He gave a quick heel-click and handshake on introduction.

‘Major Jenkins will look after you, Colonel,’ said Finn.

‘Must leave you now or your colleagues will get out of hand.’

Flores laughed, and turned to me.

‘I’m really frightfully sorry to be the cause of all this muddle,’ he said. ‘Especially as a bloody Neutral. Can you indeed accommodate me with your boys over here?’

This speech showed a rather surprising mastery of the English language, not to say unexpected psychological grasp of the British approach in such matters. One never knew what to expect from the South Americans. Sometimes they would speak perfect English like Colonel Flores, were sophisticated to a degree; alternatively, they would know not a word of any language but their own, seemed to find any ways but their own incomprehensible. Neutral military attachés were required to give notification of journeys made further than a given distance from London. The Latin Americans did not always observe this regulation. We would receive official reports from MI5 chronicling jaunts with tarts to Maidenhead and elsewhere. Colonel Flores, one saw in a moment, was much too spry to be caught out in anything like that. He had only the smallest trace of an accent, that hard Spanish drawl that can be so attractive on the lips of a woman. The Flores manner was not unlike Theodoric’s, short of Theodoric’s ever present sense of his own royalty. In fact, anglicization was if anything almost too perfect, suggesting a smoothness comparable almost with Farebrother’s. All the same, I immediately liked him. I caused the Jugoslav to take his cap from the spare seat and put it under his own chair, fitting in Flores next to him. If the Jugoslav came from Macedonia, he must be used to rubbing shoulders with all sorts of merging races, ought to have learnt early in life to be a good mixer. Perhaps in Macedonia things did not work that way. If he had not acquired the art, he would have to do so pretty soon, or give up hope of getting the best out of his London appointment. Flores, smiling and apologizing, edged his way along the row, like a member of the audience arriving late for his stall at the opera. He safely reached the place at the end only a minute or two before the fanfare from Household Cavalry trumpets announced the arrival of the Royal Party on the steps of the Cathedral.

There was an impression of copes and mitres, vestments of cream and gold, streaks of ruby-coloured velvet, the Lord Mayor bearing the City Sword point upward, khaki uniforms and blue, a train of royal personages — the phrase always recalled Mr Deacon speaking of Mrs Andriadis’s past — the King and Queen, the Princesses, King of the Hellenes, Regent of Iraq, King and Queen of Jugoslavia, Prince Theodoric. Colonel Budd, as it happened, was in attendance. The years seemed to have made no impression on him. White-moustached, spruce, very upright, he glanced about him with an air of total informality, as if prepared for any eventuality from assassination to imperfect acoustics. When the Royal Party reached their seats, all knelt. Prayers followed. We rose for a hymn.

‘Angels in the height, adore him;

Ye behold him face to face;

Saints triumphant, bow before him,

Gather’d in from every race.’

Under the great dome, saints or not, they were undoubtedly gathered in from every race. Colonel Flores and the Partisan Colonel were sharing a service paper. General Asbjornsen, legitimately proud of his powerful baritone, sang out with full lungs. Hymns always made me think of Stringham, addicted to quoting their imagery within the context of his own life.

‘Hymns describe people and places so well,’ he used to say. ‘Nothing else quite like them. What could be better, for example, on the subject of one’s friends and relations than:

Some are sick and some are sad,

And some have never loved one well,

And some have lost the love they had.

The explicitness of the categories is marvellous. Then that wonderful statement: “fading is the world’s best pleasure”. One sees very clearly which particular pleasure its writer considered the best.’

Thoughts about Singapore: the conditions of a Japanese POW camp. Cheesman must have been there too, the middle-aged subaltern in charge of the Mobile Laundry Unit, that bespectacled accountant who had a waistcoat made to fit under his army tunic, and renounced the Pay Corps because he wanted to ‘command men’. Had he survived? In any case there were no limits to the sheer improbability of individual fate. Templer, for instance, even as a boy innately opposed to the romantic approach, dying in the service of what he himself would certainly regard as a Musical Comedy country, on account of a Musical Comedy love affair. On the subject of dead), it looked as if George Tolland was not going to pull through. An ecclesiastic began to read from Isaiah.

‘The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose … Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees … And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein …’

The habitation of dragons. Looking back on the V.1’s flying through the night, one thought of dragons as, physically speaking, less remote than formerly. Probably they lived in caves and came down from time to time to the banks of a river or lake to drink. The ground ‘where each lay’ would, of course, be scorched by fiery breath, their tails too, no doubt, giving out fire that made the water hiss and steam, the sedge become charred. Not all the later promises of the prophecy were easily comprehensible. An intense, mysterious beauty pervaded the obscurity of the text, its assurances all the more magical for being enigmatic. Who, for example, were the wayfaring men? Were they themselves all fools, or only some of them? Perhaps, on the contrary, the wayfaring men were contrasted with the fools, as persons of entirely different sort. One thing was fairly clear, the fools, whoever they were, must keep off the highway; ‘absolutely verboten’, as Biggs, Staff Officer Physical Training, used to say. Brief thoughts of Biggs, hanging by the neck until he was dead in that poky little cricket pavilion; another war casualty, so far as it went. The problem of biblical exegesis remained. Perhaps it was merely a warning: wayfaring men should not make fools of themselves. Taking the war period, limiting the field to the army, one had met quite a few wayfaring men. Biggs himself was essentially not of that category: Bithel, perhaps: Odo Stevens, certainly. Borrit? It was fascinating that Borrit should have remembered Pamela Flitton’s face after three years or more.

‘I’ve been in Spain on business sometimes,’ Borrit said. ‘A honeymoon couple would arrive at the hotel. Be shown up to their bedroom. Last you’d see of them. They wouldn’t leave that room for a fortnight — not for three weeks. You’d just get an occasional sight of a brassed-off chambermaid once in a way lugging off a slop-pail. They’ve got their own ways, the Spaniards. “With a beard, St Joseph; without, the Virgin Mary.” That’s a Spanish proverb. Never quite know what it means, but it makes you see what the Spaniards are like somehow.’

There were more prayers. A psalm. The Archbishop unenthrallingly preached. We rose to sing Jerusalem.

‘Bring me my Bow of burning gold;

Bring me my Arrows of desire;

Bring me my spear; O Clouds unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire!’

Was all that about sex too? If so, why were we singing it at the Victory Service? Blake was as impenetrable as Isaiah; in his way, more so. It was not quite such wonderful stuff as the Prophet rendered into Elizabethan English, yet wonderful enough. At the same time, so I always felt, never quite for me. Blake was a genius, but not one for the classical taste. He was too cranky. No doubt that was being ungrateful for undoubted marvels offered and accepted. One often felt ungrateful in literary matters, as in so many others. It would be interesting to know what the military attachés made of the poem. General Asbjornsen certainly enjoyed singing the words. He was quite flushed in the face, like a suddenly converted Viking, joining in with the monks instead of massacring them.

Reflections about poetry, its changes in form and fashion, persisted throughout further prayers. ‘Arrows of desire’, for example, made one think of Cowley. Cowley had been an outstanding success in his own time. He had been buried in Westminster Abbey. That was something which would never have happened to Blake. However, it was Blake who had come out on top in the end. Pope was characteristically direct on the subject

‘Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,

His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;

Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art,

But still I love the language of his heart’

But, admitting nobody read the Pindarique Odes, surely the pointed wit was just what did survive? In Cowley’s quite peculiar grasp of the contrasted tenderness and brutality of love, wit was just the quality he brought to bear with such remarkable effect:

‘Thou with strange adultery

Doest in each breast a brothel keep;

Awake, all men do lust for thee,

And some enjoy thee when they sleep.’

No poet deserved to be forgotten who could face facts like that, the blending of conscious and unconscious, Love’s free-for-all in dreams. You only had to compare the dream situation with that adumbrated by poor old Edgar Allan Poe — for whom, for some reason, I always had a weakness — when he trafficked in a similar vein:

‘Now all my days are trances

And all my nightly dreams

Are where thy grey eye glances,

And where thy footstep gleams –

In what ethereal dances

By what eternal streams.’

Ethereal dances would have been no good to Cowley, by eternal streams or anywhere else. He wanted substance. That verse used to run in my head when in love with Jean Duport — her grey eyes — though she laid no claims to being a dancer, and Poe’s open-air interpretive choreography sounded unimpressive. However, there were no limits when one was in that state. We rose once more for another hymn, ‘Now thank we all our God’, which was, I felt pretty sure, of German origin. Whoever was responsible for choosing had either forgotten that, or judged it peculiarly apposite for this reason. We had just prayed for the ‘United Nations’ and ‘our enemies in defeat’. In the same mood, deliberate selection of a German hymn might be intended to indicate public forgiveness and reconciliation. Quite soon, of course, people would, in any case, begin to say the war was pointless, particularly those, and their associates, moral and actual, who had chalked on walls, ‘Strike now in the West’ or ‘Bomb Rome’. Political activities of that kind might by now have brought together Mrs Andriadis and Gypsy Jones. The Te Deum. Then the National Anthem, all three verses:

‘God save our gracious King!

Long live our noble King!

God save the King!

Send him victorious,

Happy and glorious

Long to reign over us;

God save the King!

O Lord our God arise

Scatter his enemies,

And make them fall.

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On thee our hopes we fix;

God save us all.

Thy choicest gift in store

On him be pleased to pour;

Long may he reign!

May he defend our laws,

And ever give us cause

To sing with heart and voice,

God save the King I’

Repetitive, jerky, subjective in feeling, not much ornamented by imagination nor subtlety of thought and phraseology, the words possessed at the same time a kind of depth, an unpretentious expression of sentiments suited somehow to the moment. It would be interesting to know whether, at the period they were written, ‘reign’ had been considered an adequate rhyme to ‘king’; or whether the poet had simply not bothered to achieve identity of sound in the termination of the last verse. Language, pronunciation, sentiment, were always changing. There must have been advantages, moral and otherwise, in living at an outwardly less squeamish period, when the verbiage of high-thinking had not yet cloaked such petitions as those put forward in the second verse, incidentally much the best; when, in certain respects at least, hypocrisy had established less of a stranglehold on the public mind. Such a mental picture of the past was no doubt largely unhistorical, indeed totally illusory, freedom from one sort of humbug merely implying, with human beings of any epoch, thraldom to another. The past, just as the present, had to be accepted for what it thought and what it was.

The Royal Party withdrew. There was a long pause while photographs were taken outside on the steps. The Welsh Guards turned their attention to something in Moreland’s line, Walton’s ‘Grand March’. Orders had been issued that the congregation was to leave by the south portico, the door just behind us. It was now thrown open. Finn and I drove the military attachés like sheep before us in that direction. Once in the street, they would have to find their own cars. The last of them disappeared into the crowd. Finn drew a deep breath.

‘That appeared to go off all right*

‘I think so, sir.’

‘Might have been trouble when we couldn’t fit that fellow in.’

‘He was quite happy with my lot’

‘Nice chap.’

‘He seemed to be.’

‘Going back now?’

‘I was, sir. Shall I get the car?’

Something was troubling Finn.

‘Look here, Nicholas, will you operate under your own steam — leave me the car?’

‘Of course, sir.’

Finn paused again. He lowered his voice.

‘I’ll make a confession to you, Nicholas.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘A friend of mine has sent me a salmon from Scotland.’

That was certainly a matter for envy in the current food situation, though hardly basis for the sense of guilt that seemed to be troubling Finn. There was no obvious reason why he should make such a to-do about the gift His voice became a whisper.

‘I’ve got to collect the fish.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘At Euston Station.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m going to take the Section’s car,’ said Finn. ‘Risk court-martial if I’m caught. Be stripped of my VC. It’s the only way to get the salmon.’

‘I won’t betray you, sir.’

‘Good boy.’

Finn nodded his head several times, laughing to himself, looking even more than usual like a Punchinello.

‘After all, we’ve won the war,’ he said ‘We’ve just celebrated the fact.’

He thought for a moment.

‘Another thing about Flores,’ he said. ‘Just while I think of it. The Foreign Office are very anxious to keep in with his country. They want us to give him a decoration. He’s going to get a CBE.’

‘But he’s only just arrived.’

‘I know, I know. It’s just to improve relations between the two countries.’

‘But we were frightfully stingy in what we handed out to the Allies in the way of decorations after six years. Hlava told me he didn’t know how he was going to face his people when he reported what we offered. Foreigners expect something after they’ve worked with you for ages.’

‘The argument is that we like to make our decorations rare.’

‘And then we hand one out to a chap who’s just got off the plane.’

‘It’s all a shambles,’ said Finn. ‘You get somebody like myself who does something and gets a VC. Then my son- in-law’s dropped in France and killed, and no one ever hears about him at all, or what he’s done. It’s just a toss-up.’

‘I didn’t know about your son-in-law.’

‘Long time ago now,’ said Finn. ‘Anyway, Flores is going to get a CBE. Don’t breathe a word about the car.’

He turned away and stumped off towards the car park. It had evidently been a heavy decision for him to transgress in this manner; use a War Department vehicle for a private purpose, even over so short a distance. This was an unexpected piece of luck so far as I was concerned. Just what I wanted. There had seemed no avoiding going back with Finn to duty, when in fact some sort of a break was badly required. Now it would be possible to walk, achieve adjustment, after the loaded atmosphere of the Cathedral. One was more aware of this need outside in the open air than within, when the ceremony was just at an end. After all, one did not every day of the week attend a Thanksgiving Service in St Paul’s for Victory after six years of war. It was not unreasonable to experience a need to mull things over for half an hour or so. The ritual itself might not have been exactly moving, too impersonal for that, too well thought out, too forward-looking in the fashionable sense (except for the invocation to confound their politics and frustrate their knavish tricks), but I was aware of some sort of inner disturbance, though its form was hard to define. There were still large crowds round the Cathedral. I hung about for a while by the west door, waiting for them to disperse.

‘So you were lucky enough to be invited to the Service?’

It was Widmerpool.

‘I’ve been superintending the military attachés.’

‘Ah, I wondered how you got here — though of course I knew they selected at all levels.’

‘Including yours.’

‘I did not have much trouble in arranging matters. What a splendid ceremony. I was carried away. I should like to be buried in St Paul’s — would prefer it really to the Abbey.’

‘Make that clear in your will.’

Widmerpool laughed heartily.

‘Look, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we met. You were present at a rather silly incident when Pam and I had a tiff. At that embassy. I hope you did not attribute too much seriousness to the words that passed.’

‘It was no business of mine.’

‘Of course not — but people do not always understand her moods. I flatter myself I do. Pamela is undoubtedly difficile at times. I did not wish you to form a wrong impression.’

‘All’s made up?’

‘Perfectly. I am glad to have this opportunity of putting you right, if you ever supposed the contrary. The very reckless way she was talking about official matters was, of course, the sheerest nonsense. Perhaps you hardly took in how absurd she was being. One can forgive a lot to a little person who looks so decorative, however. Now I must hurry off.’

‘The Minister again?’

‘The Minister showed the utmost good humour about my lateness on that occasion. I knew he would, but I thought it was right for Pam to be apprised that official life must take precedence.’

He went off, infinitely pleased with himself, bringing back forcibly the opinion once expressed by General Conyers:

‘I can see that fellow has a touch of exaggerated narcissism.’

The scene with Pamela had been altogether dismissed from Widmerpool’s mind, as he had risen above failure with Mrs Haycock. Just then I had other things to ponder: Isaiah: Blake: Cowley: the wayfaring men: matters of that sort that seemed to claim attention.

A lot of people were still about the streets, making progress slow, so at the foot of Ludgate Hill I turned into New Bridge Street in the direction of the river. There was no need to hurry. A stroll along the Embankment might be what was required. Then my mind was suddenly recalled to duty. Colonel Flores was walking in front of me. Seeing a foreign military attaché, even a Neutral one, was at once to experience the conditioned reflex, by now second-nature, that is to say instant awareness that he must be looked after to the best of my ability, although not one of my own particular charges. I caught him up and saluted.

‘I think you’re going the wrong way for the official car park, Colonel, it’s —’

Flores seized my hand and smiled.

‘None of my arrangements have been official today,’ he said. ‘In fact none of them have been properly conducted at all. My car had another job to do after dropping me at the Cathedral, so I arranged to meet it, when all was over, in one of the turnings off the Embankment. I thought there would be no parking difficulties there, whatever happened elsewhere. Was not that a brilliant idea? You must admire my knowledge of London topography.’

‘I do, sir.’

‘Come with me. I’ll give you a lift to wherever you want to go.’

It was no use explaining that I only wanted to walk by the river for a while, to be left alone briefly, to think of other things for a time, before returning to our room to complete whatever remained to be done. There was a fair amount of that too.

‘You know London well, Colonel?*

‘Not really. It was all done with a map, this great plan for the car. Am I not a credit to our Staff College?’

‘It’s your first visit?’

‘I was here — what — fifteen years ago, it must be. With all my family, an absolute tribe of us. We stayed at the Ritz, I remember. Now we will cross the road and advance west along the line of the Thames.’

He led the way to a side turning.

‘The car should be somewhere near this spot. Ah, here they are. It had to go and pick up my wife and stepdaughter.’

An oldish Rolls, displaying a CD number plate, was drawn up by the pavement in one of the streets running north and south. It was a little way ahead. As we approached, two ladies stepped out and walked towards us. They both looked incredibly elegant. In fact their elegance appalled one. Nobody in England had been able to get hold of any smart clothes for a long time now — except for the occasional ‘unsolicited gift’ like Matilda’s — and the sight of these two gave the impression that they had walked off the stage, or from some display of exotic fashions, into the street. Colonel Flores shouted something in Spanish. We came up with them.

‘This is Major —’

‘Jenkins.’

‘Major Jenkins was incredibly kind to me in St Paul’s.’

Madame Flores took my hand. In spite of the sunlessness of the day, she was wearing spectacles with dark lenses. When I turned to the younger one, her charming figure immediately renewed those thoughts of Jean Duport the atmosphere of the Cathedral had somehow generated. This girl had the same leggy, coltish look, untaught, yet hinting at the same time of captivating sophistications and artifices. She was much tidier than Jean had been when I first set eyes on her, tennis racquet against her hip.

‘But why was it necessary to be so kind to Carlos?’ asked her mother.

She spoke English as well as her husband, the accent even less perceptible.

‘Major Jenkins allowed me to sit in his own special seats.’

‘How very grand of him to have special seats.’

‘Otherwise there would have been nowhere but the steps of the altar.’

‘A most unsuitable place for you, Carlos.’

‘We are going to take Major Jenkins as far as Whitehall.’

The tone of Colonel Flores with his wife was that of a man in complete control. She seemed to accept this. All the same, she began to laugh a lot.

‘Nick,’ she said. ‘You look so different in uniform.’

‘You know each other already?’ asked Flores.

‘Of course we do,’ said Jean.

‘But we haven’t met for a long time.’

‘This is perfectly splendid,’ said Colonel Flores. ‘Come along. Let’s jump into the car.’

It was not only the dark lenses and changed hair-do. Jean had altered her whole style. Even the first impression, that she had contracted the faint suggestion of a foreign accent, was not wholly imaginary. The accent was there, though whether result of years in foreign parts, or adopted as a small affectation on return to her own country as a wife of a foreigner, was uncertain. Oddly enough, the fact of having noticed at once that Polly Duport looked so like her mother when younger, made the presence of Jean herself less, rather than more, to be expected. It was as if the mother was someone different; the daughter, the remembered Jean. About seventeen or eighteen, Polly Duport was certainly a very pretty girl; prettier, so far as that went, than her mother at the same age. Jean’s attraction in those days had been something other than mere prettiness. Polly had a certain look of her father, said to be very devoted to her. She seemed quite at ease, obviously brought up in a rather old-fashioned tradition, Spanish or exported English, that made her seem older than her age. Relations with her step-father appeared cordial. The whole story began to come back. Duport himself had spoken of the South American army officer his wife had married after her affair with Brent.

‘He looks like Rudolph Valentino on an off day,’ Duport had said.

Colonel Flores did not fall short of that description; if anything, he rose above it. He seemed not at all surprised that his wife and I knew each other. I wondered what sort of a picture, if any, Jean had given him of her life before their marriage. Probably reminiscence played no part whatever in their relationship. It does with few people. For that matter, one did not know what the former life of Flores himself had been. We exchanged conversational banalities. Formal and smiling, Jean too was perfectly at ease. More so than myself. I suddenly remembered about Peter. She had always been fond of her brother, without anything at all obsessive about that affection. His death must have upset her.

‘Poor Peter, yes. I suppose you heard over here before we did. He didn’t write often. We were rather out of touch in a way. Babs was sent the official thing, being rather in with that sort of world, and as …’

She meant that, in the circumstances, her elder sister had been informed of Templer’s death, rather than his wife.

‘Used you to see anything of him?’ she asked.

‘Once or twice at the beginning of the war. Not after he went into that secret show.’

‘I don’t even know where it was.’

‘Nor me — for certain.’

One suddenly remembered that she was the wife of a Neutral military attaché, with whom secret matters must even now not be discussed.

‘It’s all too sad. Why did he do it?’

This was not really a question. In any case, to speak of Pamela Flitton would be too complicated. Bob Duport was better unmentioned too. The car was not an ideal place for conversations of that sort, especially with her husband present.

‘You must come and see us,’ she said. ‘We’re really not properly moved in yet. I expect you know we’ve only just arrived. The appointment was quite a surprise — due to a change of Government.’

She mentioned an address in Knightsbridge, as it happened not far from the flat at the back of Rutland Gate, where once, quite naked, she had opened the door when we were lovers. Like so many things that have actually taken place, the incident was now wholly unbelievable. How could this chic South American lady have shared with me embraces, passionate and polymorphous as those depicted on the tapestry of Luxuria that we had discussed together when we had met at Stourwater? Had she really used those words, those very unexpected expressions, she was accustomed to cry out aloud at the moment of achievement? Once I had thought life unthinkable without her. How could that have been, when she was now only just short of a perfect stranger? An absurd incident suddenly came into my head to put things in proportion. Representatives of the Section had to attend an official party the Greeks were giving at the Ritz. In the hall, a page-boy had said to another: ‘General de Gaulle’s in that room over there’. The second boy had been withering. He had simply replied: ‘Give me news, not history.’ Jean, I remembered, had become history. Perhaps not so much history as legend, the story true only in a symbolical sense; because, although its outlines might have general application to ourselves, or even to other people, Jean and I were no longer the persons we then had been.

‘Where would you like the chauffeur to drop you?” asked Colonel Flores.

‘Just on this corner would be perfect.’

There were a lot more assurances, endless ones, that we must meet again, in spite of difficulties about getting the flat straight in the midst of such shortage of labour, and the imminence of demobilization, which would be followed by absence from London. I got out. The car drove off. Jean turned and waved, making that particular gesture of the hand, the palm inwards, the movement rather hesitating, that I well remembered. Vavassor had not been at the Service. He was on duty in the hall when I came through the door. We had a word together.

‘Big crowd?’

‘Pretty big.’

‘Dull day for an affair like that.’

‘Very dull.’

‘How did the King look.’

‘I was too far away to sec.*

‘All your foreigners?’

‘Yes.’

Later in the afternoon I took some letters up to Finn for signature. He was sitting in his chair looking straight ahead of him.

‘I got that fish.’

‘You did, sir?’

‘Home and dry.’

‘A great relief?’

Finn nodded.

‘Did I tell you David Pennistone is going to join our Paris firm?’ he said.

Pennistone, though he would not reveal before he left what his post-war plans were, had said they would make me laugh when I heard them.

‘I think the work will appeal to him,’ said Finn. ‘He wants a change. Tired of all that…’

He paused, searching for the right word.

‘Liaison?’

‘No, no,’ said Finn. ‘I don’t mean his work here. All that… philosophy.’

He smiled at the absurdity of the concept.

‘Any idea what you’re going to do yourself when you get out of uniform, Nicholas?’

I outlined a few possibilities. Even on my own ears, they sounded grotesque figments of a fevered imagination. Finn accepted them apparently; anyway for what they were worth. I excused myself by adding that the whole idea of starting up all that sort of thing again after six years seemed strange enough.

‘Remember Borrit?’ asked Finn.

It already seemed a hundred years since Borrit had been with the Section, but I admitted his image faintly lingered on. Finn pushed back his chair. He spoke slowly.

‘Borrit told me when he was serving on the Gold Coast, one of the Africans said to him: “What is it white men write at their desks all day?” ’

Finn nodded his head several times.

‘It’s a question I’ve often asked myself,’ he said. ‘Ah, well. Let’s see those files, Nicholas.’

Just before my own release was due, I went to take formal leave of General Philidor, whose staff by this time lived in one of the streets off Grosvenor Square. I looked in on Kernével’s room on the way out, but he was not at home. Then, when I reached the pavement outside, someone shouted from a top storey window. It was Kernével himself.

‘Wait a moment — I’m coming down.’

I returned to the hall. Kernével came clattering down the stairs. Travelling at high speed, he was red in the face.

‘Some wine’s arrived from France. Come and have a glass. We’re in one of the upper rooms.’

We climbed the stairs. I told him this was probably the last time we should meet officially.

‘You know that French writer you spoke about? Something to do with a plage — in Normandie?’

‘Proust?’

‘That’s the one. I’ve been into it about him. He’s not taught in the schools.’

Kernével looked severe. He implied that the standards of literature must be kept high. We reached a room on the top floor with which I was not familiar. Borda, Kernével’s assistant — who came from Roussillon and afterwards married an English girl — was there, with a French captain called Montsaldy, who seemed responsible for the wine. There were several bottles. It was a red Bordeaux, soft and fruity after the Algerian years. We talked about demobilization.

‘It is true your army gives you a suit of clothes when you retire?’ asked Borda.

‘More than just a suit — shirt, tie, vest, pants, socks, shoes, hat, mackintosh.’

‘Some of the uniform I wore in North Africa will do for civilian life, I think,’ said Borda. ‘In the hot weather.’

‘I carried tropical uniform in the other war,’ said Montsaldy, who looked a grizzled fifty. ‘It wears out quickly.’

‘Me, too,’ said Kernével. ‘Tropical uniform always makes me think of Leprince. He was a big fellow in our platoon. Ah, Leprince, c’était un lapin. What a fellow. We used to call him le prince des cons. That man was what you call well provided. I remember we were being inspected one day by a new officer. As I say, we were in tropical uniform. The major came to the end of the line where Leprince stood. He pointed to Leprince. “A quoi, cet homme?’”

Kernével jumped to attention and saluted, as if he were the platoon sergeant.

‘ “C’est son sexe, mon commandant.”

“C’est dégoûtant!” ’

Kernével made as if to march on, now acting the outraged major.

‘He was an old fellow,’ he said, ‘white haired and very religious.’

We all laughed.

‘Borda’s blushing,’ said Kernével. ‘He’s going to be married quite soon.’

That was the last time Kernével and I met in uniform, but we used to see each other occasionally afterwards, because he continued to work in London. Indeed, we shared a rather absurd incident together a few years after the war was over. Kernével had been awarded an MBE for his work with us, but for some reason, the delay probably due to French rather than British red tape, this decoration did not ‘come through’ for a long time. Kernével, at last told by his own authorities he could accept the order, was informed by ours that it would be presented by the CIGS; not, of course, the same one who had held the post during the war. Kernével, also notified that he might bring a friend to witness the ceremony, invited me to attend. We were taken to the Army Council Room — Vasassor, too, seemed by now to have faded away — where it turned out the investiture consisted of only half-a-dozen recipients, of whom Kernével was the only Frenchman. When the citations were read out, it appeared the rest had performed prodigies of bravery. There were two Poles, an American, an Australian and a New Zealander, perhaps one or two more, all equally distinguished operationally, but whose awards had for one reason or another been deferred. The Field-Marshal now CIGS — again not the one whose Tactical HQ we had visited — was a very distinguished officer, but without much small talk. Huge, impressive, serieux to a degree, he was not, so it appeared, greatly at ease in making the appropriate individual remark when the actual medal was handed out. Before this was done, an officer from the Military Secretary’s branch read aloud each individual citation:

‘In the face of heavy enemy fire … total disregard for danger … although already twice wounded … managed to reach the objective … got through with the message … brought up the relief in spite of … silenced the machine-gun nest…’

Kernével came last.

‘Captain Kernével,’ announced the MS officer.

He paused for a second, then slightly changed his tone of voice.

‘Citation withheld for security reasons.’

For a moment I was taken by surprise, almost immediately grasping that a technicality of procedure was involved. Liaison duties came under ‘Intelligence’, which included all sorts of secret activities; accordingly, ‘I’ awards were automatically conferred without citation. It was one of those characteristic regulations to which the routine of official life accustoms one. However, the CIGS heard the words with quite other reactions to these. Hitherto, as I have said, although perfectly correct and dignified in his demeanour, his cordiality had been essentially formal, erring if anything on emphasis of the doctrine that nothing short of unconditional courage is to be expected of a soldier. These chronicles of the brave had not galvanized him into being in the least garrulous. Now, at last, his face changed and softened. He was deeply moved. He took a step forward. A giant of a man, towering above Kernével, he put his hand round his shoulder.

‘You people were the real heroes of that war,’ he said.

Afterwards, when we walked back across the Horse Guards, Kernével insisted I had arranged the whole incident on purpose to rag him.

‘It was a good leg-pull,’ he said. ‘How did you manage it?’

‘I promise you.’

‘That’s just what you pretend.’

‘I suppose it would be true to say that there were moments when the Vichy people might have taken disagreeable measures if they had been able to lay their hands on you.’

‘You never know,’ said Kernével.

The final rites were performed the day after I took wine with the Frenchmen in Upper Grosvenor Street. Forms were signed, equipment handed in, the arcane processes of entering the army enacted, like one of Dr Trelawney’s Black Masses, in reverse continuity with an unbelievable symmetry of rhythm. I almost expected the greatcoat, six years before seeming to symbolize induction into this world through the Looking Glass, would be ceremonially lifted from my shoulders. That did not take place. Nevertheless, observances similarly sartorial in character were to close the chapter. This time the mise-en-scène was Olympia, rather than the theatrical costumier’s, a shop once more, yet at the same time not a shop.

Olympia, London’s equivalent of colosseum or bull-ring, had been metamorphosed into a vast emporium for men’s wear. Here, how often as a child had one watched the Royal Tournament, horse and rider deftly clearing the posts-and-rails, sweating ratings dragging screw-guns over dummy fortifications, marines and airmen executing inconceivably elaborate configurations of drill. Here, in the tan, these shows had ended in a grand finale of historical conflict, Ancient Britons and Romans, Saxons and Normans, the Spanish Armada, Malplaquet, Minden, Waterloo, the Light Brigade. Now all memory of such stirring moments had been swept away. Rank on rank, as far as the eye could scan, hung flannel trousers and tweed coats, drab macintoshes and grey suits with a white line running through the material. If this were not a shop, what was it? Perhaps the last scene of the play in which one had been performing, set in an outfitter’s, where you ‘acted’ buying the clothes, put them on, then left the theatre to give up the Stage and find something else to do. Or were those weird unnerving shapes on the coat-hangers anonymous cohorts of that ‘exceeding great army’, who would need no demob suits, but had come to watch the lucky ones?

‘Ropey togs,’ said a quartermaster-captain.

‘The hats are a bit outré,’ agreed a Coldstreamer with a limp. ‘But one of those sports jackets, as I believe they’re called, will come in useful in the country.’

Assistants round about were urbane and attentive. They too seemed to be acting the part with almost passionate dedication, recommending the garments available with the greatest enthusiasm. Was this promise of a better world? Perhaps one had reached that already and this was a celestial haberdasher’s. The place was not even at all crowded. Most of the customers, if that was what they ought to be called, looked about forty, demobilization groups taking precedence on points gained by age, length of service, period overseas and so on. We wandered round like men in a dream. As one moved from suits to shoes, shoes to socks, socks back again to suits, the face of a Gunner captain seemed familiar. In due course we found ourselves side by side examining ties.

‘This pink one with a criss-cross pattern might not look too bad for occasions,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘We used to meet sometimes, didn’t we?’

‘Aren’t you called Gilbert?’

‘At dances years ago.’

Archie Gilbert had been the ‘spare man’ par excellence for every hostess in need, perfectly dressed, invariably punctual, prepared to deal with mothers or daughters without prejudice regarding looks or age, quietly conversational, unthinkable as taking a glass too much or making unwelcome advances in a taxi. His work had been believed to be in a firm concerned with non-ferrous metals, whatever they might be, though it had never been easy to imagine him in day clothes doing an ordinary job. However, in spite of that outward appearance, he had somehow or other taken on a world war. His fair moustache was a shade thicker, he himself had filled out, indeed become almost portly. Otherwise, more closely examined, he had not greatly changed. His appearance, always discreetly military, had, as it were, camouflaged him from instant recognition at first sight. His uniform — he wore very neat battledress, of normal cloth, otherwise cut rather like the Field-Marshal’s — was as spick and span as his evening clothes had always been. We talked of our respective war careers. He had been in an anti-aircraft battery stationed in one of the northern suburbs of London. One pictured a lot of hard, rather dreary work, sometimes fairly dangerous, sometimes demanding endurance in unexciting circumstances. Perhaps experience in the London ballrooms had stood him in good stead in the latter respect. It was impossible to remain incurious about the question of marriage; which of the scores of girls with whom he used to dance he had finally chosen. Perhaps his bachelor gifts were still too overwhelming to be extinguished in matrimony. I crudely asked the question. Archie Gilbert nodded, smiling gently.

‘Used I to meet your wife in those days?’

He shook his head, smiling again.

‘We ran across each other when I was with the battery,’ he said. ‘Her family lived just over the road.’

There the matter rested. He divulged no more. We talked of some of the girls we had known in the past.

‘Haven’t seen any of them for ages,’ he said. ‘One hears their names occasionally. Usen’t you to know Barbara Goring, who married Johnny Pardoe? He was rather odd for a time — melancholia or something — then he went back to the army and did well in Burma, I believe. Rosie Manasch had a lot of ups-and-downs, they say, with Jock Udall. Of course, he was shot by the Germans after that mass attempt to escape from a POW camp. Rosie was a great character. I used to like her a lot’

He unfolded an evening paper.

‘If you were doing liaison work with the Poles, you may know the one who’s just married Margaret Budd. Do you remember her? What a beauty. I don’t know what happened to her husband, whether he was killed or whether it didn’t work. He was quite a bit older than her and distilled whisky.’

He held out the paper. Margaret Budd’s bridegroom was Horaczko; the marriage celebrated at a registry office. The paragraph below recorded another wedding at the same place. It was that of Widmerpool and Pamela Flitton. Archie Gilbert pointed a finger towards this additional item.

‘That name always sticks in my mind,’ he said. ‘Barbara Goring once poured sugar over his head at a ball of the Huntercombes’. It was really too bad. Made an awful mess too. Have you decided what you’re going to take from the stuff here? It might be much worse. I think everything myself.’

‘Except the underclothes.’