Yet I didn’t blame them — the old men in their severe suits, some tailored for one arm, the crimson of many decorations and orders peeping over breast pockets and round lapels. Theirs had been a better fight than ours had ever been in the glass tower half a mile away. That was obvious and I felt an interloper, a spy in a glittering council chamber, suddenly seeing for the first time the whole map of the Grand Design.
I don’t suppose that more than a quarter of the congregation knew the words or the music of the first hymn, ‘To Be A Pilgrim’. But the voice of the whole church, like the rising frenzy of a victory parade, hit the vaulted roof by the start of the second verse, when people had found their stride, miming the words where they didn’t know them.
Then the choir sang an anthem, accompanied by trumpeters from the Central RAF Band — the sweet-harsh sounds piercing the silence in a long voluntary when the voices had died: ‘Per Ardua ad Astra’.
An Air Marshal read the first lesson: ‘“I have lifted up mine eyes unto the Lord and seen my salvation …”’
The second hymn had not such a sprightly tune and there was a more ragged response to it. The words, too, were less easy and many among the foreign congregation dipped into their hymn sheets in confusion. Perhaps because of their failure to do the hymn justice in the end, a restlessness fell over the church just after the start of the address, given by an old comrade-in-arms of Sir George’s.
‘Nobody can be all things to all men. And there are people — some of you here indeed — who will have had your disagreements with the Dragon. He was never a man to beat about the bush. But that you are here, however many bones you picked with him in the past, is a measure of his — and your — constancy and success.’
Now the restlessness seemed to have congealed and isolated itself some three or four pews ahead of me: there was a strange movement of heads and flurry of broad backs. Then I saw what it was: a middle-aged man in a white Burberry had slumped across the pew in front of him, and friends or colleagues to either side were trying to revive him, pulling his head back and opening his collar. I couldn’t see the man’s face. But his thin hair was tossed about and his head lolled on a shoulder next him, falling sideways, right down on the pew behind, like a confident lover in the back row of a cinema.
They got him out, sliding him along the bench and onto the side aisle, just ahead of me to my left. His two friends held him, linking round his back, the man’s arms stretched about their shoulders. Then they came past me, holding him up like a hooker going into a tight scrum, except that his legs trailed along over the flagstones like a marionette’s. I have never seen anyone so dead.
But few people in the congregation had noticed. The address went on unabated. ‘… Sir George had many enemies. But at the end only one was undefeated: the Last Enemy …’
Life was imitating death, I thought, as I glanced at Basil beside me, a query in my expression, for he had been watching this little drama intently, as if he knew the man.
‘What? Who?’ I whispered.
But Basil dodged the question, by moving out of his seat as quickly as a cat, and following the grisly trio down the side aisle. I heard one of the small side doors open and the man’s feet scraping over a grating — and when I turned I saw Basil for an instant in his dark suit, framed in the doorway, standing like an expectant undertaker outside in the sun.
2
I remember thinking it was too soon for corpses — that Basil, for all his devious skills, could hardly have laid this on for me. Yet even so, that was surely the moment to have bailed out — away from that victorious church, celebrating death all too effectively — and found myself a back table at L’Escargot.
Instead I hung around after the service. I suppose I was curious: that dull passion of our trade which, though buried for years in Oxfordshire, could not have quite died in me and had come again that day, into the air, warmed by drink and memory and by the vision of a Burberry with a body inside being humped out of a Wren church.
Basil was shifting about uneasily on the pavement like a bookie’s runner when we came out. An ambulance had picked up the man some moments before, the siren trailing away down towards the Strand.
‘Who was it?’ Jameson asked. The Beaune had crusted up on Basil’s lips in the heat and he licked them now, curling his tongue about like a fly-catcher, as though trying to re-activate the taste.
‘Jock. Jock McKnight. He was in Nine with me — just after the war.’
‘Nine?’ Darley asked innocently.
‘Slavs and Soviets.’
‘Heart?’ Jameson inquired anxiously, straightening his tie, sobering up. This untimely death had cast a gloom over the whole proceedings.
‘I should think so,’ Basil said. ‘He must have been getting on.’
Basil peered round him, gazing inquisitively at the congregation as they left the church. Despite his medical verdict, he might have been looking for a murderer, I thought.
‘Yes,’ he went on, continuing his inspection over Darley’s shoulder. ‘We both worked on an inter-departmental committee years ago: set up to deal with Tito after he broke with Moscow. Jock was very good on the Slavs and Soviets. Pity. Ticker must have packed in.’
Basil moved towards the main doorway of the church to speak to someone and we vaguely followed. There was a tub of laurel just inside the railings by the side entrance and I put my foot up on the rim of the barrel to do up one of my laces while I waited.
Just as I put my shoe up a drop of blood fell on the toe cap. Blood? Yes, it was certainly blood. The bright sunlight showed its colour clearly now — dripping down over the shiny green leaves from somewhere deep inside the bush. Then I saw where it must come from: there was a hymn sheet pressed into the middle of the leaves, about half way up. I could just see the deeply embossed print on the cover: ‘In Memoriam: George Alkert —’ But when I went to pull it out half the thick cartridge paper came away in my hand. The back of the sheet was sodden with fresh blood and my thumb and index finger was soaked with it now, as if I’d just pressed my hand deep into a still bleeding wound.
And there was another moment to run. And yet by then one wanted to know: had Basil lied about the man’s death or was he genuinely ignorant? And what of the man’s two friends who had helped him out? Were they friends or enemies? And what of the man himself, who had obviously put the hymn sheet away into an inside pocket after the memorial address had started. Had he been shot with a silencer? And if so, by whom and why?
Cowardice, I sometimes think, is not so common as we like to imagine. We are more often rash to the point of bravery. And if not that, pride will usually prevent a retreat — even in some unimportant matter like doing the dishes before we allow ourselves to sit down for coffee. We set up borders and checkpoints for ourselves every day, small trials of strength, confirmations of nerve or integrity in a hundred small measures taken. So too, in larger issues, we will set ignorance, curiosity or even superstition up against our better judgement — determined to prove that what is purely wilful in our nature has more value than our sanity. The Greeks defied the fates in myth: but we sometimes do it in fact — sudden spendthrifts, goaded beyond endurance by the prosaic in our lives. And that was true of me, no doubt, as I followed the others down along the Strand, unwillingly yet impatient, pushing through the lunchtime crowds.
The sun lay directly overhead now like a hot plate. Girls in thin dresses floated in the light, shrieking with sudden inane enthusiasms, turning quickly, stopping, getting in our way, exchanging brash and knowing looks with boys in bother boots, their faces happily cleaned out of thought or care. They had the nature of plant life unique to the city: miraculous fruit, erupting overnight, that bloomed on tarmac and oil fumes: diaphanous-skinned girls, ready to drop at a touch now into some lap on a bench down by the river.