What country do you think you’re in? Primo had asked me.
‘Is he— is Primo one of them?’ I gestured at the clipping.
‘Primo,’ he savoured the name, amused again by it. ‘Yes . . . I don’t think he’d refuse that as a description. Modify it perhaps here and there. They always fall into factions, these people.’
How much contempt he had in him; and I remembered that Professor Gracemount had been a spy and that Brond was his friend; and I wondered if a spy always despised his victims. It was an insight I did not want, but the thoughts ran through my mind too fast for me to control. Because I was afraid he would read them in my face, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head: ‘But you said he was a soldier. You said he ran away to be a soldier.’
‘All the way to Malaya,’ Brond said seriously, ‘and did splendidly. Most white men couldn’t stay in the jungle for more than a few weeks, but he had a platoon of blacks – come from Africa to fight the Chinese. I expect they were keen on the Empire too, you see. With his platoon, he would stay in until he couldn’t get to sleep because his bones were sticking into the ground. Then they would include rum in the parachute drops – and he drank that until he could sleep. He really was a hero.’
‘He’s a funny kind of hero now,’ I said, glancing towards the door and thinking of what he had done to Muldoon.
‘A good soldier is an instrument,’ Brond said solemnly. ‘I imagine then he tortured some little yellow men in pyjamas – it’s the kind of thing good soldiers have to do. He is a good man, and he took no pleasure in what he had to do through there. I suppose it’s difficult for your generation to appreciate a sense of duty.’ He paused and I suddenly reheard his last sentence as if it had been some kind of impersonation. Something must have shown in my face for his voice changed. The words were still serious but his voice was different. ‘He is a dedicated man. To lose your only son and in a stupid, pointless accident. That’s cruel.’
He widened his eyes compassionately, but the voice kept that altered, inappropriate note.
‘Tragic,’ he said. ‘And so unnecessary – that’s what is hard. The child was playing on a bridge. And he fell.’
FIFTEEN
‘Yorkshire cock. 9 inches plus.’
I sat on the toilet seat reading the legend on the tiles. I could never remember what the sizes should be – and, of course, the average worrier about such things typically overlooked the phenomenon of foreshortening. Anyway, now we were in Europe was it not time our graffiti went metric?
Below the legend there was a drawing of something that looked like a length of limp hosepipe. Tucked under it were two pendulous moons that to me resembled women’s breasts. I congratulated myself on another proof of my heterosexuality – of such things as much evidence as possible is comforting.
On the hosepipe was printed, ‘Anybody want it?’ And there again – nine inches after all – while the answer might be yes, the practical problems would have to be faced: supposing I did manage to cut it off him, how would I manage to attach it to myself?
The ambience of the occasion engendered reflection in those areas – philosophy, linguistics, symbolic logic, that kind of thing. Why I was there was a different matter and a speculation I had suppressed along with so much else. From the moment Brond had come over the latest hill like the cavalry, I had surrendered myself into his hands. Now – despite flashes of terror like lights thrown into a darkened room – I floated with events as if he were my protector, my best wishes safe at his heart. It was inexplicable, but I rested in my darkened room rather than searching for doors to escape by or a window to see from – the survival instinct had ebbed low, or perhaps that was the way it served me.
We were at a party given to celebrate the last night of an Open University Summer School. The School was being held in a university near the city. After the mansion house and Muldoon’s ordeal, we had got back into the car and driven away. Behind us in the house we must have left Muldoon – conscious I hoped. I told myself it was stupid to be afraid that he might not be alive.
I was in favour because of the company I was keeping.
‘Professor Gracemount has been a good friend to the University,’ said a bald little man who had been introduced as a Professor of something. ‘He pulled strings for us in the early days when we were establishing ourselves, worrying about buildings – we have to be guests in so many places – and how our courses would be judged by the conventional institutions. It was our good fortune to have friends then. Now our units are purchased in colleges and universities in the United States,’ he gave what one of those units might have described as a self-deprecatory laugh, ‘Canada, Australia, New Zealand, several of the new African states as well as here at home in England . . . I suppose I should say,’ another laugh, ‘ “here in Britain.” ’
‘North Britain,’ Brond said, with a wink at me as if to share the joke.
‘People don’t,’ Professor Gracemount said, sniffing impatiently – was there a hint of evil-smelling cheese in the air? – ‘sensible people don’t fuss about that any more. If they ever did! I imagine sensible people must always have been concerned with substance rather than shadow. Problems of war and peace, economic problems, problems of social organisation. Good God! when Carlyle defined the Condition of England Question, he wasn’t interrupted by some fools piping up, “Britain please, Condition of Britain, if you please!” If he had been, I can imagine the short shrift they would have been given. Carlyle surpassed the parochial. I don’t think he would have tolerated his countrymen confining him as a Question to the Condition of Ecclefechan. And how much less that narrowness of vision is tolerable now, when we’re in the midst of the last of the wars of religion – Communism and Capitalism in conflict – and any smaller thought’s impossible.’
I was surprised by the energy he put into this, sounding at the end even poetic. I had thought he went in for languor rather than excitement, but then, apart from that one evening at his house, I had only encountered him before as a lecturer.
‘You divide the world so neatly,’ Brond said, ‘it sounds dull. Boredom may become the main motive for committing treason.’
‘Betrayal,’ the bald little Professor said in a North of England twang, ‘won’t wash for the old reasons that moved Quisling or Pétain or even von Stauffenberg. The only music we’ll pay attention to is that played by the “Rote Kapelle” – a tune that made us dance when it was Germans betraying Hitler – but that set our teeth on edge when Nunn May, Maclean, Burgess, Philby and the rest, came under the baton of the Great Heresiarch . . . Karl Marx, you see,’ he added in an aside for my benefit, who visibly hadn’t seen. ‘It’s possible to reject their actions without denying them idealism.’
‘We know where your sympathies lie,’ Brond said with a pale smile in the tone of someone indulging a child.
‘I am a Man of the Left,’ the little pedantic Professor said, turning his head towards a bray of horse-laughter from a group of students by the bar. ‘The Irish contigent,’ he explained, ‘they’re with us this week.’
‘The land of Sir Roger Casement,’ Brond said, ‘speaking of traitors.’
‘He sinned against the British Empire,’ the little Professor said, mouthing the phrase with distaste, ‘another religion, mighty and immoveable – but it passed like a dream between one night and the next morning’s awakening.’
‘Not entirely passed,’ Brond said cheerfully. ‘I had a friend who tortured little yellow men in Malaya for the Empire. And another who killed a child that had stumbled on some dangerous information – sense of duty, you see.’
‘That’s not duty as they understood it in the heyday of the British Empire,’ the little Professor said. ‘It’s trumpets and brass blaring over a secret longing for defeat. It’s wallowing in post-imperial vomit.’