Authors: Robert Goddard
It was not, however, destined to be as long as it was lucrative. A telegram from Francesco's mistress-cum-secretary whose charms I had myself on one occasion failed to resist reached me in Istanbul at the end of April, warning me that Francesco had been arrested in Rome, after selling a scabbard supposedly worn by Emperor Andronicus Comnenus to a personal friend of Mussolini; I was on no account to return to Venice.
But where was I to go instead? Drifting up through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia with money in my pocket but no destination in mind, I stopped for a few days in Sarajevo, serene and preposterously pretty in a bowl of green hills filled with plum blossom and spring sunshine. I visited the reception room at the Town Hall where Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife had been entertained to lunch on Sunday the twenty-eighth of June, 1914. I walked along the Appelkai to the exact spot where they had been shot dead that afternoon with their lunches still undigested: the wrong turning which had become Fabian Charnwood's apotheosis. And I met an old man in a cafe who recalled for me the events of that day with greater acuteness than he could have known. "Nothing was said. Nobody was told. But we knew he was going to die. There were more assassins than guards waiting for him in Sarajevo." Yes. And behind the assassins the Concentric Alliance had also been waiting, to count the ripples as they radiated from one precipitated event into an ever wider future, as far as May 1932 and well beyond.
A few days later, on the train from Belgrade to Vienna, I found myself involved in a poker game with several well-heeled passengers, one of whom so resembled Faraday in manner and appearance that I could not resist cheating him out of most of his winnings in a single hand of red dog. It was a petty act of vicarious vengeance, but it yielded an unexpected result. A hearty but watchful Australian who had just about broken even during the game caught up with me at the Sud-Bahnhof in Vienna and insisted I dine with him and his wife at their hotel that evening. There he revealed himself as Donald Beaumont, millionaire bookmaker and owner of a chain of betting shops reaching from Perth to Parramatta. He was about to diversify into the casino business and needed staff who knew the tricks of the trade. Who better to keep an eye on the customers than a debonair Englishman with a flair for dealing from a stacked deck? He was, in short, offering me a job. And the salary sounded distinctly attractive. He gave me twenty-four hours to think it over.
That night, I tried to retrace the route followed by Duggan and Colonel Brosch after their rendezvous by the Danube Canal on the twentieth of July, 1914. But it was hopeless. Their footsteps had faded along with their secrets. It was easier and safer to pretend they had never spoken, to each other or to me. The time had come to abandon the trail in spirit as well as deed, to start again in a country where I knew nobody and nobody knew me. Next morning, I accepted Beaumont's offer.
And so, in circumstances I could never have envisaged, I returned to England. I was booked aboard the S.S. Orama, sailing for Brisbane from London on Saturday the twenty-fifth of June. I reached London on Thursday the sixteenth, with barely a week in which to bid my family an overdue farewell. A Christmas card from Venice with no address to write back to represented the total of my efforts to keep in touch since abandoning Maggie at the Letch worth Hall Hotel seven months before. As ever, my explanations promised to be no more acceptable than my apologies. Perhaps that was why I decided to visit Felix first. He at least would be pleased to see me.
But, to my astonishment, when I took the train up to Napsbury the following day, I found he was no longer in residence at the hospital.
"He was discharged in January," the matron informed me.
"Discharged?"
"Well, transferred, actually, to the Brabazon Clinic."
"The what?"
"It's a private hospital in London. Very highly thought of. They do excellent work there. Of course, if we could give the patients here as much attention as they'd receive at the Brabazon, then I'm sure '
"The Brabazon is private, you say?"
"Certainly. And extremely expensive. The fees are astronomic. But worth every penny, I should think. If you can afford it."
But neither my father nor my sister could afford it. There was the mystery. I took a taxi to Hatfield and caught the next train to Letchworth. It was nearly half past three when I arrived, so I headed across the common towards Norton School, preferring to meet Maggie at the gate rather than face my father alone at Gladsome Glade. The afternoon was hot and Letchworth at its most stultifyingly placid, the Garden City in full and earnest leaf.
Some of its infant citizens were already streaming out, serge-shorted and summer-frocked, when I reached the school. Spotting Maggie's car in the yard, I propped myself against the bonnet, lit a cigarette and waited for her to emerge. Which she did, ten minutes later, weighed down by an armful of exercise books and a week's load of pedagogic cares. But of surprise at seeing me there was curiously little sign.
"I saw you from the staff-room, Guy," she explained, giving me a sisterly peck on the cheek. "Since you only ever turn up unannounced, it didn't take me long to recover from the shock. The deputy head took you for my beau."
"And do you have a beau ... for me to be mistaken for?"
She wagged her finger at me censoriously. "Don't think you can distract me like that. Where have you been all these months?"
"Didn't you get my card from Venice?"
"Yes. For all the use it was. I wrote to the British Consulate, but they had no idea where you were."
"Why were you so anxious to contact me? Was it about Felix?"
"Oh!" Now she did look surprised. "You know about that, do you?"
"I've just come from Napsbury."
"Ah. I see."
"Well I don't. Care to explain?"
"Of course." She smiled. "Tell you what. Last time we met, for lunch at Letchworth Hall, you stood me up. Treat me to tea there and I'll tell you the whole story."
"Can't you just tell me now?"
"Oh no, Guy." Her smile acquired a mischievous edge. "I'm not going to risk you walking out on me a second time."
As we drove down through the town, past the Goddess factory and numberless other milestones of my discarded youth, Maggie sang the praises of the Brabazon Clinic and cheered me with her descriptions of the progress Felix had made there. But of the reasons for his transfer from Napsbury and of the means by which his fees were being paid she said nothing until we were seated in the lounge of the Letchworth Hall Hotel, with tea and scones safely ordered. There, amidst the white napery and antimacassared leather, where silver spoons tinkled demurely in fine china saucers and sunlight glimmered respectfully through thick lace curtains, I made my last and least expected discovery.
The reason we've been able to secure the best care for Felix money can buy is a simple one, Guy. You see, Felix is now a wealthy man. His money's held in trust, of course. I'm one of the trustees, along with his benefactor's solicitor and '
"I don't understand. What money? What benefactor?"
"Somebody he served under during the war, apparently. It seems he only found out about Felix's illness quite recently. As soon as he did, he put thirty thousand pounds into a trust to fund his treatment."
"Thirty thousand pounds?" It was the price of a peerage. I had that on no less an authority than "Who? Who is he?"
"We don't know. It was a condition of the gift that he remain anonymous. His solicitor, Mr. Grogan, was sworn to secrecy. I've tried questioning him, but he gives nothing away. I've even contacted Felix's old CO in the Hertfordshires. He can't recall any officer rich enough or fond enough of Felix to have done such a thing."
"When did you first hear about this?"
"Last November. A couple of weeks after you did your disappearing act. Mr. Grogan wrote to us from Dublin. Completely out of the blue."
"Dublin?"
"Yes. What of it?"
I stared past her towards the window. There had not seemed to be a breath of wind outside, but the curtain was moving, as if stirred by the faintest of breezes. What had Charnwood asked, when we lunched together at the Ambassador Club? And what had I replied?
"If you could change one thing, just one, that the past has placed beyond your reach, what would it be?"
"I would give my brother Felix back his sanity. He lost it in the war."
"Ah, the war. Always there is the war."
"Are you all right, Guy?" asked Maggie, reaching across to lay a concerned hand on my elbow. "You look as if somebody's just walked over your grave."
Maggie drove me down to the Brabazon Clinic in Roehampton the following afternoon. My father stayed in Letchworth, ostensibly because of a bowls fixture. And perhaps it was true. Over breakfast, he had remarked with evident relief that at least he did not have the Rector of Stiffkey for a son. Since, according to his newspaper, the good rector was shortly to stand trial in the Consistory Court for immoral behaviour with teen-age girls, it was not much of a compliment. None the less, I had the impression that news of my salaried employment in Australia when I finally announced it might win from him some grudging form of approval.
As for Felix, he was clearly less troubled if no saner than he had been for years, responding better than I had dared hope to the regime of the Brabazon, which was as restfully attentive -and as obviously expensive as Maggie had led me to expect. We took tea with him on the lawn, in an atmosphere more reminiscent of a five-star hotel than a lunatic asylum. And, though there were trees all around us, he never once mentioned glimpsing the enemy hiding among them.
"He really is coming along splendidly," Maggie remarked as we drove away afterwards through the sun-grained air of early evening. "The doctors are delighted with his progress."
"So they should be."
"It's funny about his benefactor, though." She had asked Felix if he could remember anybody he had served under during the war who might have felt indebted to him; naturally, he had not been able to. "Do you think we'll ever find out who he is?"
I shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. But, whoever he is, he's done more for Felix than we could. If anonymity's all he wants in return, perhaps we should let him have it."
"I suppose so. It's just... Well, you can't help being curious, can you?"
The setting sun flashed up at me from the river as we crossed
Putney Bridge. And the memory of a stroll along the Bishop's Walk with Diana came into my mind as if it were some half-recalled fragment of a life I had led in a previous incarnation. "Can't you?" I said. "I think I can." Then the bridge was behind us. And the memory was gone.
Preston,
Robert Goddard was born in Hampshire. He and his wife now live in Winchester. His previous novels arc Past Caring, In Pale Battalions, Painting the Darkness, Into the Blue, Take No Farewell and Hand in Glove. His most recent novel Hand in Glove was winner of the first W.H. Smith Thumping Good Read Award in 1992.