“Yep. Been here about six weeks. Surprised you haven’t met him. He’s certainly made his presence felt.”
With hindsight George ought to have asked what Ted’s last remark meant.
Instead, later the same day, he went in search of Lieutenant Colonel Horsfield, out of nothing more than curiosity and a sense of fellow feeling.
He tapped on the open door. A big bloke with salt-and-pepper hair and a spiky little moustache looked up from his desk.
George beamed at him.
“Lieutenant Colonel. HG Horsfield? I’m Captain HG Horsfield.”
His alter ego got up and walked across to the door and, with a single utterance of “Fascinating,” swung it to in George’s face.
Later, Ted said, “I did try to warn you, old man. He’s got a fierce reputation.”
“As what?”
“He’s the sort of bloke who gets described as not suffering fools gladly”
“Are you saying I’m a fool?”
“Oh, the things only your best friend will tell. Like using the right brand of bath soap. No, I’m not saying that.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that to a highflyer like Hugh Horsfield, blokes like us who keep our boys in pots and pans and socks and blankets are merely the also-rans of the British Army. He deals with the big stuff. He’s Artillery after all.”
“Big stuff? What big stuff?”
“Well, we’re none of us supposed to say, are we? But here’s a hint: think back to August 1945 and those mushroom-shaped clouds over Japan.”
“Oh. I see. Bloody hell!”
“Bloody hell indeed.”
“Anything else?”
“I do hear that he’s more than a bit of a ladies’ man. In the first month alone he’s supposed to have shagged half the women on the fourth floor. And you know that blonde in the typing pool we all nicknamed the Jayne Mansfield of Muswell Hill?”
“Not her, too? I thought she didn’t look at anything below a full colonel.”
“Well, if the grapevine has it aright she dropped her knickers to half-mast for this half-colonel.”
What a bastard.
George hated his namesake.
George envied his namesake.
It was someone’s birthday. Some bloke on the floor below whom he didn’t know particularly well, but Ted did. A whole crowd of them, serving soldiers in civvies, literally and metaphorically letting their hair down, followed up cake and coffee in the office with a mob-handed invasion of a nightclub in Greek Street, Soho. Soho-a ten-minute walk from the War Office, the nearest thing London had to a red-light district, occupying a maze of narrow little streets east of the elegant Regent Street, south of the increasingly vulgar Oxford Street, north of the bright lights of Shaftesbury Avenue, and west of the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road. It was home to the Marquee music club, the Flamingo, also a music club, the private boozing club known as the Colony Room, the scurrilous magazine Private Eye, the Gay Hussar restaurant, the Coach and Horses pub (and too many other pubs ever to mention), a host of odd little shops where a nod and a wink might get you into the back room for purchase of a faintly pornographic film, a plethora of strip clubs, and the occasional and more-than-occasional prostitute.
He’d be late home. So what? They’d all be late home.
They moved rapidly on to Frith Street and street by street and club by club worked their way across toward Wardour Street. The intention, George was sure, was to end up in a strip joint. He hoped to slip away before they reached the Silver Tit or the Golden Arse and the embarrassing farce of watching a woman wearing only a G-string and pasties jiggle all that would jiggle in front of a bunch of pissed and paunchy middle-aged men who confused titillation with satisfaction.
He’d been aware of Lieutenant Colonel Horsfield’s presence from the first-the upper-class bray of a barroom bore could cut through any amount of noise. He knew HG’s type. Minor public school, too idle for university, but snapped up by Sandhurst because he cut a decent figure on the parade ground. Indeed, he rather thought the only reason the army had picked him for Eaton Hall was that he, too, looked the officer type at a handsome five feet eleven inches.
As they reached Dean Street, George stepped off the pavement meaning to head south and catch a bus to Waterloo, but Ted had him by one arm.
“Not so fast, old son. The night is yet young.”
“If it’s all the same to you, Ted, I’d just as soon go home. I can’t abide strippers, and HG is really beginning to get on my tits, if not on theirs.”
“Nonsense, you’re one of us. And we won’t be going to a titty bar for at least an hour. Come and have a drink with your mates and ignore HG. He’ll be off as soon as the first prozzie flashes a bit of cleavage at him.”
“He doesn’t?”
“He does. Sooner or later everybody does. Haven’t you?”
“Well… yes… out in Benghazi… before I was married… but not…”
“It’s okay, old son. Not compulsory. I’ll just be having a couple of jars myself, then I’ll be home to Mill Hill and the missus.”
It was a miserable half hour. He retreated to a booth on his own, nursing a pink gin he didn’t much want. He’d no idea how long she’d been sitting there. He just looked up from pink reflections and there she was. Petite, dark, twentyish, and looking uncannily like the dangerous woman of his dreams: the almost pencil-thin eyebrows, the swept-back chestnut hair, the almond eyes, the pout of slightly prominent front teeth, and the cheekbones from heaven or Hollywood.
“Buy a girl a drink?”
This was what hostesses did. Plonked themselves down, got you to buy them a drink, and then ordered house “champagne” at a price that dwarfed the national debt. George wasn’t falling for that.
“Have mine,” he said, pushing the pink gin across the table. “I haven’t touched it.”
“Thanks, love.”
He realized at once that she wasn’t a hostess. No hostess would have taken the drink.
“You’re not working here, are you?”
“Nah. But… “
“But what?”
“But I am… working.”
The penny dropped, clunking down inside him, rattling around in the rusty pinball machine of the soul.
“And you think I… “
“You look as though you could do with something. I could… make you happy… just for a while I could make you happy.”
George heard a voice very like his own say, “How much?”
“Not up front, love. That’s just vulgar.”
“I haven’t got a lot of cash on me.”
“S’okay. I take checks.”
She had a room three flights up in Bridle Lane. Clothed she was gorgeous, naked she was irresistible. If George died on the train home he would die happy.
She had one hand on his balls and was kissing him in one ear-he was priapic as Punch. He was on the edge, seconds away from entry, sheathed in a frenchie, when the door burst open, his head turned sharply, and a flashbulb went off in his eyes.
When the stars cleared, he found himself facing a big bloke in a dark suit clutching a Polaroid camera and smiling smugly at him.
“Get dressed, Mr. Horsfield. Meet me in the Stork Café in Berwick Street. You’re not there in fifteen minutes this goes to your wife.”
The square cardboard plate shot from the base of the camera and took form before his eyes.
He fell back on the pillow and groaned. He’d know a Russian accent anywhere. He’d been set up-trussed up like a turkey.
“Oh… shit.”
“Sorry, love. But, y’know. It’s a job. Gotta make a livin’ somehow.”
George’s wits were gathering slowly, cohering into a fuzzy knot of meaning.
“You mean they pay you to… frame blokes like me?”
“‘Fraid so. Prozzyin’ ain’t what it used to be.”
The knot pulled tight.
“You take money for this!?!”
“O’course. I’m no commie. It’s a job. I get paid. Up front.”