Sing Like You Know the Words (51 page)

Europe looks to Britain to see
its future; not for the useless cars or the dying industries, but
for ideas, music and language. There’s no linguistic insulation to
keep American culture at bay, and it has killed off the continental
tradition of looking at society as a collective enterprise. In
Europe religion has died, but there are established institutions
and habits of thought that enforce at least lip service to the idea
of living together for mutual benefit. Americans despise collective
society. They worship god and the individual, sincerely. But they
have so much of everything that no-one starves, and their god
recognizes philanthropy as the supreme egoism The American
businessmen will swindle and cheat widows and orphans for the glory
of being able to give the proceeds away to good causes. Englishmen
will do the same but put the money in a vault.

England is unique in taking on
the American notion of a society that is all against all, but
without the mitigating idealism of religion. In the future, the
American god will die like all the others, and the American denial
of society will infect Europe, which does not have the energy to
resist; and so we end the same. The English are the laboratory
mice, crammed so closely together that they have started to bite
each other

That was only part of what he’d
said. How to summarize it for Matthew? David sighed. He wasn’t sure
it mattered anyway.

-It was as complicated as you’d
expect, he said. He saw the future of the developed world here. He
believed we were the proof that once ordinary people felt secure
enough not to rely on their neighbour for help, they no longer
cared about their neighbour. Once that happens, things start to
fall apart. It’s a vicious circle, he said; once you feel you
personally don’t need the collective resources, you stop valuing
them and start to resent contributing to them. You come to view the
people who do depend on them with increasing levels of contempt.
Those people are a challenge to your value system as well as a
cost. He had a lot to say like that.

-Did he convince you?

-I don’t know. It’s been a long
night. I can’t think clearly about it now. Give me the Spanish
guy’s details and let’s just stop for now.

-I told you I can’t say now
whether I am prepared to do that. I’ll call you in the morning. I
have to go home now, anyway. I’ve had too much to drink, and I
can’t think straight either. I feel like one of Albert’s
Englishmen, doomed by the laws of natural selection, and general
incompetence and lack of faith.

***

Two days later, Mitchell Walcott
decided he couldn´t stand his situation any longer. He had to take
some kind of action. Matthew James had told him to stay put, had
even given him some money for the room. James had said that he
would be back in touch again soon: but since then, nothing.
Meanwhile Walcott could not step on the street. The glance of each
stranger he passed seemed to carry a hidden significance, and the
meaning was always sinister.

After breakfast that morning,
Mitchell checked out of the hotel and asked the owner to get him a
cab. He paid the bill in cash, reminding him that his own funds
were not going to last forever.

The taxi driver held the door
open for him, and closed it behind, taking Mitchell’s pathetic
remnant of a case with exaggerated care and moving to the back of
the vehicle to drop it in the opened trunk. The boot was slammed
and the driver got in. The cab moved away from the kerb. Except
that it was not his driver at the wheel. Mitchell looked back to
see the taxi driver standing in the road, gravely watching his cab
disappearing. So who was in the driver’s seat?

-Hello again Mitchell, good to
see the face of another Englishman in this country. I’ve been a bit
lonely here.

Ray Hawkins turned round and
grinned at him, shark-like as ever.

-Lovely day for a drive, don’t
you think. Where shall we go?

***

David could not shake off the
memory of his last conversation with Hawkins. He poured himself
another drink and sat, brooding. It was late evening. The house was
silent. He was alone.

Hawkins had expressed no
surprise on hearing from him, though they had not spoken for so
long. It was only by chance, David thought, that he had kept the
number, after that time in Switzerland. Hawkins had told him that
he was in the area and some things were best not dealt with on the
telephone. He’d called round to the house as soon as David could be
sure of being alone, but David hadn’t needed to explain very much.
Hawkins simply said that he saw the problem and would deal with it.
They both understood that David did not want to know the details of
what dealing with the problem might mean.

David had thought that would be
the end of the conversation, but Hawkins had something more to tell
him; about Albert.

It was a shock to hear that
news, but not exactly a surprise. David had never asked his
ex-partner about his other business interests, but he had long
assumed they involved some element of danger.

-Did you know Albert well? He´d
asked Hawkins.

-In the way that our paths kept
crossing; I suppose, was the reply. He spoke to me about you once
or twice. He was quite proud of you. Said that you were a man of
principle, always keeping your eye on the greater good. He was
always going on about abstract things like that. It´s beyond me,
mostly. I think he saw you as a little bit innocent. Quite amusing
given our current transaction. You could say Albert was a business
associate of mine.

- Tell me, what kind of business
was it? Did it ever involve Cromwell in any way?

Hawkins laughed.

-You still don’t get it at all
do you? Your business was all about arms dealing; pure and simple;
right from the off.

-You´re mistaken. We were an
export company; precision engineering mostly. We made some
caterpillar treads for tracked vehicles; some of them were classed
as military. But that´s all. And we had licences for all those
jobs

-Is that what you really
believe? You must have wondered what was in some of your shipping
crates besides the official contents. And didn´t you ever get
curious about any of the invoices?

-Are you saying that Cromwell
was a front?

-Partly that, but as well most
of what you made and exported was military too, even if it wasn´t
obvious. If you´re clever enough you can make what you call your
precision parts look harmless enough. When they get where they are
wanted, maybe with a bit of simple modification, they turn out to
be just the thing to upgrade your helicopter gunship or whatever
toy it might be.

-Albert wouldn´t have known how
to do that. He was no kind of engineer.

-Of course not and in any case
the officials looking at these things are not stupid, but they can
turn a blind eye if the thing doesn´t look too obvious. Albert used
to use a phrase, plausible deniability. And he had help of course,
from his bosses in British Intelligence.

-Now you’re telling me he was a
spy?

Hawkins sighed as if he was
explaining a simple matter to a not very bright child.

-Albert was an arms dealer, in a
big way. Think about it. I do small time business, but even I go to
places and speak to people that the spooks want to hear about. And
they know all about me of course. I have to be careful; keeping
them happy but not giving them anything that will come back to me.
The way it works is that I help them with these bits and pieces,
and my existence is tolerated.

-You and Albert, on the other
hand, well the volumes and the sort of stuff that you shipped, I
wouldn’t call it arms dealing. Foreign policy more like. Albert was
on their payroll more or less from the start. Maybe he started as a
simple trader, like me, but you know he did actually believe in
what he was doing. He thought that underneath all the dirt, he was
part of trying to make things better; pushing a government in the
right direction, toppling a dictator here, supporting a democracy
there.

-Did it ever make things
better?

-You´re asking the wrong person.
I was a soldier Mr Thomas, before I was anything else. You don´t
get to see a master plan in the poor bloody infantry: just a
succession of fuckups and one damn thing after another. The only
principle I´ve found that was worth remembering was the one about
my enemy’s enemy being my friend. But the bastards keep swapping
places. I never saw any pattern or greater scheme in it. Albert
used to say that you could only deal with your own part of the
puzzle and trust that whoever was directing operations had the
right motives – keeping the greater good in mind, so to speak.

-But you know, in the end, he
couldn’t believe even in that any more. That was what finished
him.

-What you’ve just finished
telling me is that I have been living a lie for half my life.

-No need to sound so glum about
it. You’re alive, you’re well off. I was reading about you in the
paper. Wealthy businessman turned politician, tipped for future
high office. That’s all bollocks of course, you must know. If you
got close to office you´d have to be vetted more closely, and then
someone would pass a quiet word about your past to the right ear,
in a discreet sort of way.

-On the bright side you are
protected. Nothing will ever come of this Spanish thing whatever
happens, but as for being a minister of state, forget it.

David had not taken in much of
the conversation after hearing those words. He was ashamed but
honest enough to admit that they had obliterated the sense of
repugnance he was feeling for what he was asking Hawkins to do, as
well as wiping away any feeling of sympathy for poor Albert.

It was true of course. He was
finished before he had even properly begun. No one would even know
why it should be so. He’d felt only relief when Hawkins left him
alone. Now he sipped a whisky that seemed to have no taste or fire
to it anymore, and struggled to think clearly.

What had it all been for? If
this was as far as the road went, how should he balance the scales:
the little good he’d managed to do against the dirty compromises
he’d agreed to or winked at? Could he be sure that he had ever had
the right motives to begin with? If so, why had he not told Hawkins
to leave that grubby little man in Madrid alone, now that it was
all for nothing? Not that Hawkins would have taken any notice. He
had his own reasons to get rid of Walcott.

For some reason, David started
to remember a trip that he and Patricia had taken the year before,
to a Spanish island. They had gone for a few days to enjoy some
winter sunshine. The whole island was a volcano, and he’d driven
the hired car from the coast to the top of it. As they drove across
the vast flat plain that lay inside the original caldera, he
wondered at the scale of an eruption that could have created this
landscape like the surface of a dead planet. They parked at the
foot of the slope of the present, active cone that stood in the
centre of the lava desert. From there you could take a cable car to
the very top, but they had decided to hike.

Coming up in the car, they had
gained height too quickly for David’s body to adjust to the thin
air, and every movement and breath cost him an effort of will.
Patricia seemed completely unaffected, so David had said nothing.
But when they started to walk, the slope seemed to be much steeper
than he had imagined. There was the smell of sulphur, and in places
yellow smoke emerging from little cracks in the rock: his insides
felt like water mixed with acid, and soon his face and fingers were
tingling. Eventually he could not continue, and sank to his
k
nees. Patricia, a little way ahead,
continued for a while then stopped and turned. He waved her away as
he began retching. His eyes were full of tears that clouded his
vision.

He’d imagined then how it would
feel if the volcano started to erupt at that moment. An image
formed in his mind of people in a town below; he was among them;
seeing the smoke and gas and ash fill the air. There were no reds
of molten lava, no colours whatsoever: just the grey of smoke and
the grey of ash that began to cover everything and bleed the colour
out of the world. He could hear choking coughing as people fought
for breath, as he was doing. And the world was becoming grey:
everywhere the taste and smell and colour of ash, that covered
everything like dirty snow which would never melt. In that moment
he could taste the imagined memory of ash in his mouth.

He could taste it still.

David went back into the office,
where the whisky was kept, to fetch another bottle. There were two
battered paperback books on the little table that Hawkins had
handed to him without much comment. The spines were broken and the
paper was stained but all the pages somehow clung together. David
began to leaf through some of the well thumbed pages. When he
looked up, Albert was waiting for him, seated in his favourite
wrecked armchair that David had never been able to bring himself to
throw out. David looked at him with mild surprise.

-They told me you were dead.

-That’s about right. Not exactly
the way I had planned things.

-Well, make yourself at home

-Thanks, I’ll have whatever
you’re having.

-Here. What’s it like, being
dead?

-I’m still learning. Not so very
different I suppose, but not much in the way of earthly
pleasures.

-I suppose not. I did finally
arrive at my own view of heaven you know.

-I’m not allowed to comment,
David.

-I understand. But you see the
problem for me was eternity. Just a long time sitting on a cloud,
waiting for something to happen. And now, I think that heaven is
just be the moment and it can only be a moment, when you have done
it all; become all that you can be. All the false starts and
mistakes that you made, and the others you didn’t; they all come
together and you live through all of them, everything that happened
and everything that might have or could have happened. You
understand all the narratives that could have been you, or were
you. Everything potential becomes actual. You live it backwards and
forwards and sideways, in a moment and in eternity, because at that
moment, time is meaningless.