A hint of belated satisfaction re-animated the boy’s face. ‘So, of course, you weren’t, either – were you? So I’ve been slow – slow as usual!’
It was exactly as the Brigadier had said: there was always a danger in making pictures from inadequate evidence and misinterpreted facts. So this boy, although he was no fool, was doing that now. But there was nothing he could do about it yet.
‘My shaving water will be getting cold, David.’ He steeled himself against the boy’s enmity with the promise of a future explanation – one day, if not today.
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And also, hadn’t Audley himself been playing games, with his story of those fly-blown nightmares? ‘And I’d also like my breakfast.’
‘Yes.’ Audley was himself again as he started to turn towards the door. ‘Well, I can recommend the breakfast here: it’s quite outrageously Old English, with mounds of bacon-and-eggs, and fried bread and bangers. And tomatoes and mushrooms too, if Otto’s obeyed the Alligator’s orders.’ He almost left, but then leaned back through the gap in the door. ‘But you’ll pardon me if I hope your shaving-water is stone-cold, eh?’
Fred stared at the finally closed door, in further agreement with the Brigadier: the boy had something about him, in spite of all his defects – in spite of his mixture of arrogance and uncertainty . . . the mixture which so outrageously loosened his tongue, leading him always to say too much. But what was it, exactly
– ?
He reached into his valise for the scuffed and worn toilet-bag which was the only thing he had left of those original gifts from his mother on the eve-of-the-war, so long ago, to reach this final eve-of-peace which was dawning amidst Japanese ruin far away: the writing-case had long gone, and those three slim volumes of Plato’s Apology, and Crito, and Phaedo with it –
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somewhere in Italy they were, with the Bible he’d always meant to read, but somehow never had –
What was it – ?
‘ Audley?’ the Brigadier had said. ‘ Yes, he is an exception, and not just in the matter of loyalty . . .
Because all the others were hand-picked by me. Just as you yourself have been hand-picked finally, major. And if you and I fail now . . . then it will be back to the beginning again. But much less confidently – ’
But, as he lifted the bag, he didn’t want to think about that now: he had thought of that long enough already, across the candlelight of those same plundered silver candle-sticks of the first night, which had reappeared on the table last night. And he had continued to think about it during the night, while sleep eluded him, and then again on waking, before Otto Schild had sung his song – ‘ Yet, in the Teutoburg Forest, cold blew the wind’ –
A cold wind also blew in the Brigadier’s list –
Colbourne,
de Souza,
The Crocodile,
The Alligator,
Carver-Hart,
Kenworthy –
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He didn’t want to think of any of them now, but they wouldn’t let him go – ‘ All the others have been eliminated. And, the very devil of it is, that I can’t believe that any of those men would betray me either.
But that only means that I’m making a mistake: that I’m making pictures which I want to see, Fattorini –
Fred . . . So now we have to play for high stakes.
Because I need all these men for the future, when the stakes may become even higher — because all of them are marked for promotion – ’
But not Audley, of course!
The bathroom was huge, and its plumbing was antediluvian as well as foreign: this wasn’t the servants’ floor, but it was obviously for the less important guests. (Although he wasn’t a less important guest in Schwartzenburg Castle; he was just a late-comer – later than Colbourne, de Souza, The Crocodile, The Alligator, Johnnie Carver-Hart, Professor Kenworthy and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, right the way down to Lieutenant (temporary Captain) David Audley – )
Audley had been wrong about the water: Trooper Leighton had done his best with it, so that the shaving-water in its antique silver bucket was more than warm, and even the bath-water was tepid.
Audley —
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He stopped there, staring at himself in the mirror with the lather on his face and a new blade in his razor, as a new thought occurred to him –
‘But. . . Audley, yes: I took him on last year, in France.
And only temporarily, to repay a debt and because there was no one else I could get who spoke fluent French at short notice . . . which he does do, although with a perfectly execrable accent . . . It was his godfather who gave him to me, to save him getting killed, like all the other subalterns in his regiment were doing, in the bocage there . . . And I nearly got killed myself, actually — in a quite different operation from this, mark you . . . out of which I picked up several other useful men who are now obligated to me –
Sergeant Devenish and Driver Hewitt among them, as it happens. But that’s another story – the irony now is that Audley is the only one we can trust . . . because I didn’t pick him!’
He saw another story in the mirror suddenly, in his own eyes – ‘ Of course, afterwards I checked him all the way back – as I have checked you . . . And the others, so I thought. . . But no matter! He did well in France. So . . . I kept him on. Because he’s also going to be a useful man one day, when he matures – because inside that great hulking overgrown subaltern’s body there just may be that extra thing that we need, and which is going to be in short supply in our business dummy4
after the war, I fear – ’
There was also another story there, Fred saw much too late, but which Audley had seen before him, albeit only just: of two officers on a Greek hillside, the English one (or the Anglo-Scottish-Italian one!) innocently and accidentally, but the Greek-Cypriot bravely and deliberately in the execution of his duty – was that it?
And, if there was . . . then was there more than that, with no blind chance dictating events, all the way back to Frederick Clinton and Uncle Luke long ago? Was that it – ? Had Kyriakos deliberately tested him under stress, to bring him to Osios Konstandinos at Clinton’s bidding?
He rasped the razor across his cheek, suddenly certain that he was hungry for more than his Old English breakfast. But he wouldn’t think of that now: he would think of David Audley –
‘But he’s too young for this: it’s always a mistake to give a man’s work to boys – even lucky ones, like our young David. Because he lost several of his nine lives in Normandy, before I ever caught up with him. And then I took several more of them, through my own stupidity, I’m sorry to say. So, although you can use him now – and trust him . . . I’d be obliged if you could return him to me intact if you can, major!’