‘Marlow! — the last person. How are you? Haunting the old places?’
How apt Basil could be, like a fortune-teller who, ten years before, had divined my return here to the very hour and had come now to confirm his prediction.
‘Saw you as I came in,’ he went on. ‘Hiding over there in the shadows. You’re not meeting anyone, are you?’ He gestured to the seat beside me.
‘No — of course not. Let me get a drink.’ I stood up.
‘I’ve brought you one.’
‘You knew I was coming here?’
‘No!’ he said, drawing the word out in mock horror, as though my thought was quite outlandish. ‘No, my goodness. Just a restorative. In for a whizzer,’ he said brightly, as if trying to jolly himself along with the phrase. And again I had the impression of some unnatural elation in Basil, some disorder in his day which had brought forth such fluent slang. ‘Darley’s here,’ he went on. ‘And Jameson.’ He looked back towards the bar. ‘You remember.’
I did, vaguely. They had been tyros in my day: new field men making a mess of an old circle in Damascus.
‘We’re all going to church round the corner. The RAF place — St Clement Danes,’ Basil went on, licking his dry lips and looking mischievously at me over the rim of his glass before taking a long quaff from it.
‘Church?’ I looked at my watch, I remember, the thought so surprised me — as though Basil, an unbeliever of all sorts in the old days, had taken now to some new faith that worshipped on an hourly basis.
‘Memorial service. Alkerton. Sir George. Deputy head of SOE during the war, of course. Old fellow died a month ago. You didn’t see it?’ he asked, as thought I might have been an essential witness in a street accident.
‘No. I don’t have much interest in that sort of thing now.’
‘No,’ Basil agreed and drank deeply again. If not drunk to begin with, as I had thought, he seemed intent on reaching that state as quickly as possible now.
‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘We’re all going. Everyone’s coming.’ His tone was that of a child anticipating a treat. ‘Drink up and have one at the bar with us. They’d love to see you again. Darley and Jameson, I mean. You’re still quite a hero in the department, you know — though what is it? It must be ten years —’
‘I’d rather not, Basil, really —’
‘Come on, old man. They’ve seen you. It won’t do any harm.’
The silly phrase rang out with nothing but innocent temptation then: a day in town, some fine weather, a drink with old colleagues — what could have been more natural? And hadn’t I been thinking of just such things all morning, and for a month before? — the lure of the odd good parts of the past. And here it all was, come timely, in the shape of Basil and Jameson and Darley — if not Henry. All the same, though not close friends, these three had never harmed me, were innocent cogs in another part of a stupid machine: and their names, like those on some old colonial war memorial, suggested only simple comradeship that morning as the corks began to pop and the bishop took another half of Veuve de Vernay, the perfume of many freshly opened bottles beginning to invade the room and warm the stupid chatter all around me.
I got up with Basil after a mild argument and went with him to the bar.
‘Ah,’ Darley said carefully, holding out his hand, inspecting me like a masterpiece that yet might just possibly prove to be a fake. ‘“Home is the hero …”’
‘“And the hunter home from the hill,”’ Jameson added in a deep sotto voce, before turning away and belching a fraction. They were drinking champagne, the bottle between them already badly depleted.
‘Coming back into the ranks?’ Darley asked.
‘No,’ I told him. ‘I–I was just up in town. I’m not staying.’
I felt like one of the tweedy men around me, awkward and guileless in this knowing, cosmopolitan atmosphere, anxious for Paddington at 5.10 and a first-class corner seat to Kemble Junction. I didn’t have the right words with me; I didn’t fit.
‘My goodness,’ Darley said vigorously, the drink beginning to talk in him, ‘But you’ll have to come to the service. Everyone’s coming. Church is just round the corner.’
A week before I should have refused: the idea would have seemed preposterous. But a week before I hadn’t started to dream of the old Residency on the Nile over an empty sherry bottle.
I didn’t reply one way or the other. But I could feel the drink seeping into me, laying a firm foundation of acquiescence.
‘And lunch,’ Basil said in his humble way, eyes downcast, looking at me through his eyelashes like a virgin. ‘There’s a fork lunch at the Special Forces Club in Mayfair afterwards.’
‘Ah yes, ‘Jameson said comfortably, ordering the other half of champagne. ‘What a day. What — a — day!’ He smiled beatifically, dragging the phrase out, then raising his glass and savouring the frosty bubbles. He was like Mole too, I thought, released from the underground into the sunshine that first day of spring. ‘We’ve taken the day off, you see,’ he went on. ‘All of us.’
I suddenly saw the telegrams from Cairo and Beirut — the ‘extras’ and the ‘ordinaries’ — piling up all over our building: unheeded, blowing along the corridors in that lavender wind, with only Quinlan, in his smart uniform and old campaign ribbons, left to chase hopelessly after them; the whole of the Middle East — Arafat and Sadat and Gaddafi — who would do nothing untoward that day, who would go into purdah for twenty-four hours or lie prostrate tending their soul, and all because Sir George (the ‘Dragon’ as he’d been known) had passed on and was to be handsomely commemorated with a few hymns, a quantity of drink and international truce among the intelligence community.
A clock chimed twelve from some church nearby. We left the bar and fell out into the sun, dizzy with goodwill, as children released for the day on a king’s funeral.
Sir George — we knew now, at last, in a spate of memoirs and histories released by the thirty-year official papers ruling — had been a hero during the war, channelling Allied support through Special Operations Executive to any number of resistance groups on the continent — though much of his effort, it had since been confirmed by the war historians, had unfortunately taken the form of saturation bombing: one agent placed on the continent at the expense of ten caught and executed.
Certainly I didn’t see many women or civilians in the church when we got there: widows or children from that war, bereft by Sir George’s elaborate ploys. No doubt they preferred to keep their own private counsels that morning, sharing informal griefs, far from that loud and self-congratulatory church.
The congregation, then, was official and extensive, filling every pew right to the back where we sat, spilling over to the very doors of the church.
We had heard the babble of many tongues as we came in: hard-faced, white-haired old men — French, Dutch, Belgian, Scandinavian, Slav. They’d come in chartered planes, Basil told me, from all over Europe. And here they were, triumphant, as all survivors are, but now with more triumph still, that here, in an old Wren church, rebuilt over the wild flowers and dead masonry of the blitz, they had come to celebrate a final victory: they had outlived their patron and master: the Dragon had been put away. They had at last succeeded him and though it was too late to rule, for this one day they would be kings; memories could be deeply stirred, all sorts of derring-do evoked — now, in the rich history of the church, where even the dirtiest wars became part of the Good Fight, and later, more informally, over a fork lunch in Mayfair.