Shuttlecock (12 page)

And if my correspondents at the Home Office don’t fail me, if they don’t hesitate to give information they must already have imparted once, then I shall have it both ways. I shall know, a little at least, of what is in File E, without having to challenge Quinn for it. And if I discover something he is trying to hide – then, I shall be able to challenge him.

‘Martin wants to know’ (it’s two days later, a Thursday: Marian and I are in bed) ‘why you went to work at a different time today.’

‘Oh? What’s that to him?’

‘You had breakfast by yourself and went in early, and then you were home about five.’

‘I know.’

‘Martin thinks you’re avoiding him.’

So – he was waiting again for me on the common – but I was early.

‘Look, has Martin said anything about coming to meet me at the station?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Nothing. I thought I saw him a couple of times, coming home.’

‘You flatter yourself. Coming to meet
you
at the station.’

Marian is lying with her back towards me. Her voice comes to me as if from behind a wall.

‘I don’t see why he shouldn’t from time to time.’

‘Come to think of it, why
did
you go into work early?’

Marian turns to face me. As she turns, her small breasts turn with her, like another pair of fleshy eyes. We are naked – just for the heat. We haven’t made love for some time now. We seem to have put away our sexual play-kit.

‘I had some extra work to do. I’ve gone in early before, haven’t I?’

‘But you’ve always told me. I didn’t know you weren’t going to have breakfast.’

Marian’s eyes suddenly become limpid and soulful (is that such a dreadful thing – missing breakfast?).

‘You don’t tell me anything these days.’

I thought: Now is the time I could tell her. Marian, I am going to be promoted.

‘It was only for today. I’ll go in at the usual time tomorrow.’

‘You might have told me.’ She frowns. ‘What was this extra work anyway?’

‘Look – enough of all these questions.’ My voice goes up a pitch. For a moment there’s almost a danger of it cracking guiltily. Why should she ask that?

‘Sorry. I only thought –’

She bites her lip. Her eyes are still wide and dreamily fixed on me, but as she looks it is as though she is drifting away. Some anaesthetic is clouding her vision and she can no longer recognize me. I think of Martin turning his back, on the common.

I move towards her and put my hand over her navel. She sighs audibly and goes passive and limp, though, in a way, this is just the same as her body going hard and impenetrable. I run my hand over her as if over some unfamiliar object. Things will go no further; but then I’m not moved by desire so much as by some sense of dreadful loneliness. My wife is afraid of me, she does not know me. I draw closer and put my mouth to her breast (unresisting, unprotected) and very gently peck her nipples.

‘It was only for today. You can tell Martin that if you like … Marian?’

And sure enough, I saw him, tonight (Friday), under the trees, the other side of the bowling green, as I passed. What does he want? All right, so he has seen me, that first time, for what I really am. And he knows that this figure who walks manfully by, for his benefit, and the benefit of who knows what other hidden observers, is no more than a puppet. And he knows that I know he knows that. What more does he want? All right, so he is nearly eleven years old and finding his strength, and I am three times his age and wondering where I mislaid mine; hoping to be propped up by some promotion. All right, I am the one to blame. Does he want me to confess as much to his face? To get down on my knees?

Tonight I stepped off the pavement and walked towards him over the grass. He had already turned and moved off as he saw me change course. He quickened his pace, intuitively, without looking back, as I quickened mine. This was like one of those dreams in which you try to reach the ones you love but you can’t. They’d cut the grass on that part of the common, and hanging in the air was the sweet, sappy smell that makes you know it’s summer. ‘Martin!’ I called. And I wanted to add: ‘Don’t go. Please. I’m sorry.’ Then, when my longer stride began to tell on him, he broke into a run. He ran towards the zebra-crossing on the South Circular Road. The South Circular Road divides one part of the common from the other; on the far side is the duck pond. I remembered the time when the boys were younger but just old enough to go out by themselves, and we lived in dread of their little bodies being smashed by cars. I started to run too but stopped almost at once, suddenly aware of appearing foolish. I wasn’t going to go chasing after my own son.

Subject: Z, Arthur Leonard.

Born, June 12th, 1921; Hemfield, Nr East Grinstead, Sussex. Only son of Hon. Sir Geoffrey Robert,
D.S.O.
,
M.B.E.
, formerly Captain, Royal Hampshire Regt (born, Jan. 25th, 1894) and Katherine Elizabeth (née Phillips, born, Oct. 2nd, 1897).

Educ.: Oakwood Preparatory School, East Grinstead; Tonbridge School; Wadham College, Oxford (Law: 1937/8).

University career curtailed by outbreak of war. Joined R.A.F., 1940. Trained as fighter-pilot. Sqdns 80, 225; N. Africa, 1941–2. Grounded after accident in training exercise in which one flying officer killed and subject injured. R.A.F. Intelligence, London, 1942–5. 2 applications for retraining as pilot refused. Air Ministry, 1945–6.

Left R.A.F., 1946. Did not resume law studies (apparent cause of family dissension). Applied unsuccessfully, Foreign Office (subject spoke good French), 1947. Entered Home Office, 1947. Subsequent career of distinction. Married Yvette Simone (née Debreuil, born, May 10th, 1922; family from Chambéry, France) July, 1947. Resident at 19, Clifford Terrace, Kensington till 1950, then at 8, Peele Gardens, Putney (till suicide of subject).

Sir Geoffrey appointed K.C. 1938. Assisted at Nuremberg War Trials, 1945–6. Judge of the High Court of Justice, 1948. Chaired/Adv. Cttees. of Inquiry (Legal Rights of Prisoners; Aspects of International Law) 1959, 1960–61, 1962–3. Retired, 1964. Published:
Sword and Pen
(memoirs of military and legal career), 1965;
Reasonable Doubt
(critique of English jurisprudence), 1967.

Katherine Elizabeth victim of long and complicated illness from 1964. Operations for cancer. Died 1967.

Sir Geoffrey died 1968.

Richard Geoffrey, son of subject, born, July 22nd, 1949. Educ.: Westminster School, London School of Economics. Present occupation, journalist.

Elaine Elizabeth, daughter of subject, born, March 14th, 1951. Educ.: The Lodge High School, Putney; Camberwell School of Art. Formed liaison with Karl Lageröf, Swedish commercial artist, 1970. At present resident in Stockholm.

Only the details on Z so far. The information on X ‘in preparation and to follow’. Impossible, therefore, to look for connexions. So why do I linger over these potted facts? Is it because I have obtained them by my own initiative and ingenuity, proved how easy it is for one person, with neither the right nor the authority, to secure for himself the private history of another? Or is it that there is really something arresting, something appealing about these bare bones of a life (how many such skeletons have I cursorily pieced together at the department?) when it is you yourself who have scooped them up with your net? Those little tokens of dignity and esteem. The father’s military and civil honours. ‘
Sword and Pen
’. ‘Career of distinction’. Z cursed by an accident. The daughter running off with a Swede. ‘Family dissension’. Those place-names of imperturbable gentility: East Grinstead, Tonbridge, Peele Gardens, Putney. Suicide; war-crimes; ‘long and complicated illness’.

Or does something particular strike a chord? Debreuil? Wasn’t that the name of the firm of engineers with which Dad worked before the war, building embankments on the Rhône and road tunnels in the Savoy Alps – and where he learnt the fluent French he would put to use in the years to come? And Z’s Christian
name: Arthur, Arthur … Why does that suddenly have an echo?

It is gone midnight. Marian is in bed. I sit in the living-room looking at these notes which I have smuggled home with me against all the rules, not even daring to look at them in the office. The window is open, an occasional breeze lifts the papers in front of me; and I remember Dad, sitting up late at Wimbledon, working on his book. Mother asleep in the big bedroom. Getting up once, in summer, to fetch a glass of water; pausing at the half-opened door, the desk lamp on inside, and seeing him suddenly start.

And now, when I turn to the other sheet – ‘Details of Subject’s Private Connexions outside the Home Office’ – which I have also requested, some last incidental entry makes the echo come loud and clear.

 … Hon. Sec., The Putney Rotary.

Clubs: Oxford and Cambridge; Civil Service. Sports and Recreations: Golf. The Glade Golf Club, Wimbledon.

It is to the last two chapters of
Shuttlecock
that I return most frequently. It is not just that, even to the casual and disinterested reader, they must form the most exciting, the most dramatic pages of the book: Dad’s capture by the
Gestapo; his imprisonment for eight days in the Château Martine, the Gestapo headquarters near the village of Combe-les-Dames; his escape; his flight through the forests of the Doubs valley; his awaking after a desperate night in hiding to discover, through the trees, not Germans, but advancing Americans, and his declaring himself (last, succinct scene of the book) to a Seventh Army lieutenant (‘a lawyer’s son from Connecticut, with impeccable politeness and a truck-load of canned meat’). No, it is not this air of grand denouement alone which compels me, but other qualities, more subtle, more tantalizing.…

For one thing, there are the gaps, the hazy areas in those eight days at the Château Martine. The Château is there all right, starting from the pages, its eighteenth-century elegance given over to twentieth-century brutality: the pitch-dark cells; the ornate staircases and passage-ways (on the way to interrogation sessions); the degrading musters in the courtyard; the smells, the rifleshots, the food (‘unspeakable swill’); the cries along corridors. Even the Château garden is there, for contrast (‘as unreal as some painting by Watteau or Claude’), glimpsed, again, through tall, casement windows, on those journeys to the interrogation room. But it is about the goings-on in that interrogation room, and other, sinister rooms, that Dad is silent, or circumspect. The picture clouds over: a few vague allusions, a hint of the inarticulable (‘Here description must be blurred’), a few chilly motifs.

All right, there are obvious reasons for this. The stress of circumstances which tested even Dad’s presence of mind, tenacity and powers of observation; which ten years later, late at night, in a room in Wimbledon, left gaping holes in the memory. Or the reverse? The memory
not in the least impaired, still vivid-sharp; but the memory of something so terrible that it cannot be repeated, cannot be spoken or written of.

Did they torture you, Dad? Did they stretch you to the limit? And yet you write of things terrible enough – things which occurred only days before they dragged you out of that water tank and hauled you off to the Château – with relative composure.

 … For with the German retreat through the eastern valleys the war entered a quite new, if, thankfully, brief-lived phase. Up to then we had lived in a world, superficially at least, at peace, disturbed and broken intermittently by incidents of violence, often savage it is true, but localized and in the majority of cases directly influenced by ourselves. With the waves of German troops, the tide of indiscriminate large-scale war, which had not been known for years, rolled into this corner of France. Not merely war on a large scale but war with all the desperation and last-reserve venom of an army in defeat. This was a period of burning villages, of corpses lining the streets and dangling from trees, of atrocities of all kinds. Whole areas of countryside which up till this time had seemed for us inviolable and friendly landmarks suddenly became ravaged, contaminated. Everywhere was the smell of blood, carnage, singed and rotting flesh.…

I have been trying to discover in these and other pages some clue to what happened in the Château Martine, some inkling of this experience beyond words. My own father tortured. Forced, perhaps, beyond the point of endurance. Why do I want to know this – like some interrogator myself? Because I will find out what Dad is really like?

But there is something else that draws me back to these last two chapters. Something harder to explain. These pages are more vivid, more real, more believable than
any other part of the book. And yet, strangely enough, this is because the style of Dad’s writing becomes – how shall I put it? – more imaginative, more literary, more speculative. In the main body of the book – so I’ve explained – only the occasional brief passage of reflection, of emotion, breaks the brisk, adventure-book flow of the narrative. But in these final chapters it is as though the philosophic note is always there (that theme of war-in-peace and peace-in-war, for instance); and Dad’s words seem ever ready to take on a quieter, sadder, even eloquent tone – not at all the tone of the man who, quickly sizing the situation, stuck the knife into the guard’s back at Caen. It is there even in the description of those destructive retreating armies:

 … All day long the columns poured through Dôle and Auxonne and on in the direction of Besançon and Vesoul. They left behind a wake of devastation. And yet it was impossible not to feel a degree of pity for these streams of weary, ill-kempt men who were no longer heroes or conquerors, ill-equipped and ill-transported, moving on, fleeing, like migrating animals obeying a mass instinct, up the river valleys, towards Mulhouse, the Rhine, and home.…

It is there in the very lines which follow those about the ‘contamination’ of the landscape:

 … I remember there was a wood, a mile or so outside Ligny, a small wood of no great distinction – oaks, sweet chestnuts and hazels – but in which pheasants cackled and the sun fell on drifts of dead leaves. We must have skirted it, on bicycle or on foot, several hundred times, and unconsciously come to regard it as an emblem of things that would continue unchanged, regardless of the war. One day a group of five Maquisards were pinned down in this wood, and the Germans, in order to make sure of despatching them, poured mortar shell after mortar shell into it. I passed it soon afterwards: a smouldering, twisted
array of stumps. Two of the five men I had known – and that week was to bring worse human tragedies; but I felt the loss of that wood like few human losses. The thing that most embodies the evil of war, is not, it seems to me, its human violence (for humans cause wars), but its wilful disregard for nature.…