I had forgotten the vigorous arrogance of London summer lunchtimes, the mocking youth of secretaries and long-haired clerks. What would I do walking off into those crowds alone? There was no girl to pick up there who wouldn’t think me a middle-aged refugee from the mackintosh brigade; no bar to be easily propped up off Leicester Square with talk to strangers about prospects for the Derby; and to eat alone at L’Escargot would be to sit there wondering about the blood on my fingers. Then, too, there had been the shapes of death all morning in the summer air. An elephant will move away and die apart from its tribe. But humans are less considerate and tend to herd together in the face of mortality, so that when Basil hailed a cab near the Savoy and called me to hurry up, I quickened my step. It was too late to turn back then — even if I’d wanted to.
The Special Forces Club enjoyed a small leasehold at the back of a large Victorian town house at the end of a narrow cul-de-sac just off Park Lane. The front and grander part of this red brick pile was now a smart, but not exclusive gambling club, with a candy-striped awning reaching out over the front door. But that day it was the old tradesmen’s entrance, twenty yards away, which commanded attention, as cars clogged up the narrow approach and old, stiff-shouldered, white-haired men embraced each other on the pavements, not yet sure of their direction, so that the lane was filled with guttural continental queries.
‘C’est par là!’
‘Non — c’est tout droit. Et prenez garde!’
‘I’m not a member,’ I said to Basil as he pushed his way ahead through the crowd.
‘Be my guest,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder and looking at me, mischief flooding his eyes. Basil was considerably smaller than me, almost an overgrown schoolboy. And I saw him then as a sophisticated sixth-former abroad with a group of younger boys, pressing us forward towards the first forbidden delights of a brothel.
The heat and the crush inside the club was so great that my first thought was to try and rise above into some cooler airs. Another bar was open on the first floor, we were told, and we all made our way up to it, threading our way between old men already exhausted, sitting on the stairs, underneath photographs of their former glory, great moments from Europe’s clandestine past: Jean Moulin with a machine pistol among resistance comrades on some scrubby hilclass="underline" Randolph Churchill in a huge sheepskin coat playing chess over a bottle of rakia somewhere in Yugoslavia.
At the top of the stairs we came into a long gilded dining-room where a white-laid table, groaning with food and drink, ran along all one side, and three big bow windows, wide open, gave over a small courtyard at the back, a chestnut tree springing up from the middle of it, some of its mint-green spring leaves almost touching the windows. It was less crowded; there was a glimmer of a breeze coming in, mixing with the sharp, tart smell of lemon and gin and the sound of cracking ice as it drowned in tonic. Basil rubbed his hands judiciously and licked his lips once more. Then, after an interval in which he seemed to calculate the quantity of alcohol available and equate it satisfactorily with his future capacity, he moved off to do battle at the long white table.
And yet he must have drunk no more than tonic water most of that afternoon. Certainly an hour later he was totally sober when he introduced me to the man in the billiard-room: a different Basil, no longer the inane schoolboy, no longer deferentiaclass="underline" Basil in command.
I’d been talking to a middle-aged French woman about her experiences in the resistance, how in 1943 she had been put on top of the notorious lime quarry outside Meudon and faced by a German Wehrmacht major with a Lüger, anxious for information about her comrades.
‘I didn’t tell him, though,’ she said.
‘Why didn’t he shoot you then?’
‘I didn’t know — at that moment. I was taken back to Paris — then sent to an ordinary prison camp, and released eventually. The major “lost” my file — on purpose.’
‘Why?’
‘He fell in love with me — there, on top of that quarry. He’d been interrogating me for days before.’
I was astonished and not prepared to believe the story — and I said so.
‘No, it’s true,’ she said. ‘There are stories — some stories — from that war, that ended well.’
‘How do you know — did you meet him again?’
Basil had come up next me meanwhile and was pressing me for a word, but I persisted with the woman.
‘Yes,’ she said smiling. ‘I did. He survived the war. He traced me in Paris afterwards. I married him,’ she added simply. Then she turned and looked round the room, searching someone out. ‘There. He’s over there,’ she said.
I followed her glance and as I looked a man pressed through the crowd, coming towards us, glass in hand: quite an old man, upright, smiling, with the remnants of fair hair.
She introduced us. ‘My husband,’ she said.
We shook hands. Then Basil forced me away. I was glad I didn’t stay longer. I didn’t want to know anything more about it, yet I walked on air with Basil into the billiard-room, thinking how wrong I’d been about life: life only as defeat.
‘This is the Prime Minister,’ Basil said, as we pushed our way into a gloomy, panelled room with long clerestory windows high above the covered billiard-table: a room where the sun had never been and sad old men had played with sticks and balls for a hundred years. In the far corner a group of continentals — a French army officer in a pillbox hat and a one-armed man I hadn’t noticed before in a wheelchair — surrounded a figure brandishing a pipe.
‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘Was he in the resistance? I didn’t know.’
The wine I’d had, without much food, had begun to play in me some time before, and I felt I could see the afternoon out nicely now, with one or two more drinks and a few jokes, before dinner and early bed in a club I belonged to not far down the road.
Basil paused at one corner of the billiard-table, trying to negotiate a passage between two excitable old partisans who were playing a war game with matches on the greeen baize cover.
Basil said, ‘He wants to meet you.’
I thought he meant one of the men in front of us and I half held out my hand before Basil pulled me on towards the corner of the room.
And then I was face to face with the Prime Minister, his sage, plump head nodding rhythmically in answer to some elaborate explanation from the French officer about de Gaulle’s dissatisfactions in 1940 — a matter which the Prime Minister clearly felt uninterested in. Our arrival provided him with a thankful exit, and he turned to both of us, smiling at me hugely, shaking my hand with surprised bonhomie, as if I were a long lost relative come to praise him on ‘This is Your Life’.
‘Mr Marlow,’ he said, again with the hint of deeply considered joy in his voice — as if here at last was the only person in this gathering that he really wanted to meet. ‘How good of you to come.’ He turned to his companions. ‘Would you excuse me for a moment?’
The Prime Minister put an arm round my shoulder and led Basil and me some little distance along the wall of the room, to where there was a small raked stand of old cinema tip-up seats where members could watch the billiard games. We sat down in line abreast — the seats going ‘clank-clank-clank’ as they took our weight, like louts settling into the back row of a local Odeon, noisily and abruptly. And I thought no more conspicuous meeting with a Prime Minister, about something presumably confidential, could have been contrived. Yet perhaps I was wrong: here in this room crowded with the clandestine, in a building packed to the doors with old secrets now come to a fine and alcoholic bloom, who would have suspected the start of any new conspiracy?