Authors: Stephen Benatar
In place of which, we crossed the road.
“Listen, my love. Say at the worst we have to be apart for a couple of years. At the very worst. Well, then. By the time we’re celebrating our golden wedding—or even just our silver—a mere two years won’t seem like anything at all. I promise you that.”
“Oh dear. So young and yet so wise.”
“I know.”
“But just don’t go and die on me in the meantime!”
“Nor you on me.”
“Well, I won’t if you won’t. Pact?”
“Done!”
We stopped for a further kiss with which to seal it. A poster over our heads advertised a series of lunchtime concerts featuring such soloists as Myra Hess and Harriet Cohen. Somehow, when we drew apart and happened to look up at it, our resolve was further strengthened by this juxtaposition of a Blitz-damaged art gallery with the call to come to listen to enduring music out of all the nations—with Germany most definitely not excluded, and with at least one Jewish pianist lovingly interpreting the splendour that transcended every barrier.
35
Poor old Bill
.
I now asked more directly about this man who had died young before taking up his appointment in the Royal Marines. Sybella’s claim, that she had been given information far exceeding the actual requirements of her job, was soon shown to be true.
She told me that one of the biggest problems facing Ewen Montagu and his team (I had by now discovered that the surname lacked an ‘e’) had been to do with locating a corpse. This might have seemed surprising during a war—or even during peacetime—but their needs had been specific; and of course they had not been able to advertise.
But at last their unflagging persistence had paid off: a Service doctor had known about a man who’d just died of pneumonia. And after pneumonia the lungs tended to contain liquid—which would also have been the case, most probably, if death had resulted from the struggle to survive in a rough sea.
The bereaved parents of this man had appeared not only trustworthy but taciturn. In addition, they had been willing, for the sake of their country, to renounce all rights in the body of their son—even though Montagu couldn’t so much as hint at his plans for it. He could say only that it would be used to fulfil some potentially war-shortening function approved of at the very highest level, and that he could guarantee the young man a Christian burial, albeit not under his own name.
But the one thing, in fact, the parents had asked for—besides a photograph of the grave—was that the real name of their son should never be disclosed.
“Though talking of photographs,” Sybella said, “don’t you think this is interesting? The parents had no idea of the whereabouts of their son’s identity card and couldn’t provide anything that might have been suitable. So Ewen tried to take a photograph of the corpse. ‘Well,’ he asked me, ‘have
you
ever tried to photograph a corpse?’ I had to confess that, no, actually I hadn’t, although I knew this was neglectful. ‘Then I’d advise you never to try,’ was all he said, ‘not if you want to come up with anything showing even the smallest spark of life!’ So what had happened, he told me, was that they’d had to conduct a search almost worthy of David O. Selznick; not only through all the government offices but also in the streets, in the shops, everywhere. Even in the parks. Yet even in the parks, apparently,
doppelgangers
don’t grow on trees—it was nearly as hard to find someone resembling the body as it had been to find the body itself. Which I now pass on to you,” she repeated, “because it’s an interesting little detail that would probably never have occurred to most of us, don’t you agree?”
But then she returned to the point about the parents not wishing their son’s real name to be disclosed. She considered this bizarre.
“Wouldn’t you suppose they’d want to see it firmly enshrined in the history books … if only as a footnote?”
“Yet this way,” I answered, “perhaps it places him almost in the same category as the Unknown Soldier. He becomes a symbol of patriotism—heroism—self-sacrifice!”
She squeezed my hand. “Well, no one would ever set
you
down as a romantic.”
We had now turned into Leicester Square.
“No, of course not. Why should they? For one thing, if I was, I’d never have been found at the Ritz Theatre in Aldershot last night exposing myself to a film so grittily hard-hitting and uniformly pessimistic as
Random Harvest
.”
She laughed. I gave her a smile which was supposed to be satanic.
“Oh and by the way, my darling, just cast your eyes to the right and you will see before you yet another picture house—you could almost call it the
parent
picture house—but not one in which I believe you ever experienced that same starkly harrowing catharsis.”
Hardly had I said it, however, than I forgot all thoughts of being either satanic or satiric. I remembered only how I’d needed to stand at the kerbside that morning, under the sardonically indulgent eye of airman John Wayne, believing, first, that I was about to throw up; second, that dozens would be disgusted witnesses to such an act; and third, that I should never again feel anything but hopeless.
Only five hours ago?
Now there were lengthy lines outside the Empire, a price-stand at the head of each, and a Groucho lookalike who wore a fez (with kettledrum, cymbals and other musical instruments attached to his back) performing a soft-shoe shuffle on the sprinkled sand.
Indeed, there was at least one busker entertaining the queues at every cinema that flanked the square. We were walking along its southern side. We stopped for a moment to listen to an organ-grinder whose cap was being passed round, not only to picture-goers but to the loitering world at large—passed round by a monkey in brown trousers and a maroon jumper. Sybella and I each put a sixpence in the chequered cap, but the monkey, although he smiled broadly, skittered away before either of us could stroke him.
“Well, anyway, I’d like you to know that I’ve seen
other
films there!” exclaimed Sybella, righteously, after we’d moved on again. She sounded like a woman who’d once been harshly judged in Puritan New England—but whose present testimony erased the scarlet letter from her brow and placed her back amongst the pure. I gave a whistle and professed surprise.
“You mean … in the company of Major Bill Martin?”
“No, I do
not
mean in the company of Major Bill Martin! Nor even—before you ask it—in the company of his drily humorous father, whom I think in time I might have grown quite fond of!”
But by now we had arrived at the theatre. In the distance the organ-grinder was still playing
Roses of Picardy
. We went inside to watch Sid Field striking a new note.
Field was a music-hall entertainer whose first West End show this was and for whom a starry future was foretold. We had, of course, missed several of his sketches but everything we did see was wonderful. We were indeed in the right mood—and so, it seemed, was the rest of the audience. Probably his best sketch (for us) was the one in which he impersonated a brash US Air Force officer: a type, Sybella told me, from whom everybody had suffered at some time or other during the past year; she said he hit it off just right; the satire wasn’t that far-fetched. As it happened, there were many Americans around us in the stalls—maybe because Rainbow Corner was straight across from the theatre—but certainly the applause the skit received, and the applause which shortly afterwards rewarded the whole performance, betrayed not the slightest hint of umbrage. (When at one point someone had come on to the stage holding up a placard announcing that an air raid was in progress, nobody had appeared to take heed of the warning, preferring instead to delight in the stream of first-class jokes.) I was thankful we had been a part of the experience. Thankful I’d resisted the impulse to book for something else.
Thankful, above all, we’d been a part of
any
theatrical experience.
But at the end of the evening, in the taxi on our way to Knightsbridge, I returned to what we’d been discussing earlier. (At least over our meal in a pleasant Regent Street restaurant—a meal for which, true to her word, Sybella had tried her hardest to snatch the bill from my hand—I’d had the grace to speak only about personal, mainly peacetime things.) I asked whether the woman who had written Sybella’s letters had also written Mr Martin’s.
“Oh, good heavens, no. Ewen said that
those
seemed so redolent of Edwardian pomposity that they were practically beyond invention—no one but a father of the old school could possibly have written them.
Then
he told me that the officer who had in fact done so was only in his twenties!”
I spoke with some unwillingness.
“Well, Uncle E must be very talented at finding the right people. Between them they certainly transformed a corpse into a living individual.”
I remembered the bills and the bus tickets and the pencil stub. I remembered the letter from Lloyds Bank: “I am given to understand that in spite of repeated application your overdraft amounting to £79.19s.2d. still outstands”; and even the envelope in which this letter had been sent, erroneously addressed (or so it had seemed) to the Army and Navy Club, Pall Mall, where the hall porter had written on it, “Not known at this address, try Naval and Military Club, 94 Piccadilly.”
And yet! And yet! All the minutiae on the periphery—so carefully and even lovingly thought out—along with so much inattention to detail nearer the centre!
But now I honestly tried to shed the last of my irritation.
“They must really have enjoyed their work; must really have gone at it with a will!”
“Yes, I think so, too. Like writers collaborating on a play,” she said. “Apparently the method they used to build up Bill’s personality was to keep on discussing him, rather as if he were a friend they were pulling to pieces each time he stepped out of the office. And in fact Ewen said they talked about him so much they really did come to see him as a friend. They even felt a strong sense of loss when they had to let him go. Some part of them was truly missing him.”
“Like sending off your son into the big wide world or seeing off your favourite brother. Incidentally—how
did
he go? By submarine?”
“And one of the toughest parts of the entire enterprise,” she said, “was preparing him for his journey. Getting him into his uniform.”
“Of course—yes, it must have been!” I hadn’t thought of it before. “Because up till then, I suppose, the body had been kept on ice?”
She nodded. “And imagine trying to put on boots, where the feet were all frozen and inflexible! Imagine trying to coil those stiffened fingers around the handle of a briefcase!”
I did imagine it. “But presumably they only had to wait until the poor fellow had warmed up a bit?” I hadn’t intended this to sound flip or disrespectful.
“It wasn’t that easy. They couldn’t just defrost the whole body meaning to refreeze it once they’d got him dressed.”
“Why not?”
“Well, it seems it would have done something disastrous to the rate of decomposition, after he’d thawed out a second time. And he had to be kept cold right up to the last possible moment. Even in the submarine.”
“Right.”
“Therefore, you see, he was put into a specially designed canister, in which loads of dry ice were packed all about him.”
She shuddered; though not only, I guessed, because her thoughts had been centred on refrigeration.
But in any case I pulled her close. We were by now at the further end of Piccadilly. If I had been really considerate I would have changed the subject, yet in the end—despite her shudder—curiosity won out over kindness.
“So what
did
they do, then, with his feet and his fingers?”
“They had to thaw them out in sections, using a small electric fire.” As she said this, Sybella intensified her grip on my hand; probably pulled a face, as well. “It makes me think of
Grand Guignol
! And, even when they’d eventually got his fingers wrapped around the handle, there was still a worry that the briefcase would simply float away … which is why they attached it to that chain, hoping to heaven that you lot wouldn’t think this strange.”
“What chain?” I asked at once.
“Why, the one looped through the belt of his trench coat!”
“
Really
? We never heard anything about a chain.”
“Well, unless I’ve got it wrong, you most certainly should have.”
“Then I suppose it must have been an oversight on the part of the Spaniards. I’m not sure if we’d have thought it strange or not. The only thing we did think strange was the non-existence of a rubber dinghy.”
“Oh, but there
was
a dinghy! I know there was: Ewen told me they wanted to give the impression of accident and haste, and therefore it was suggested the dinghy should be launched upside down, with only one of its oars inside it. The oars are collapsible and made of aluminium and I’m so impressively knowledgeable about all this because he said he’d held on to the second oar himself, as a keepsake. And that’s when he took the trouble to describe it to me.”
Because of my innate hankering after tidiness I found this particularly satisfying: her confirmation that there actually had been a dinghy.
“I’d definitely believed that there
should
have been one—I couldn’t understand why the drift hadn’t washed it into shore, together with the body. But now it occurs to me that a body wouldn’t have been of much value to a Spanish trawler man, whereas a rubber dinghy, of course…”
“Oh, but that’s so cynical,” she said, reprovingly.
Yet, cynical or not, my customary dislike of loose ends was for the present taken care of—and now, indeed, the subject
could
be changed. In fact, needed to be … we were driving towards the Albert Hall, were already passing the boarded-up Albert Memorial—with its thriving allotments alongside—and I wasn’t sure how much longer our journey might take.
(Added to which, I guessed that on arrival she wouldn’t feel too easy if I were to hang around, not even if we remained only on the pavement. So I’d decided to do no more than see her into the building and then have the cabbie drive me back to Abbey Road—it was now too late to think about returning to Paradise Street.)