“He’ll make you ridiculous, Georgi! He’ll slide you off over his tail and then go and sit in the president’s box!”
“But they want to see him.”
“Who told you that?”
“One of the patrons of the Bath and West, Peregrine.”
“Which of ‘em? I’ll get him handed such a rocket!”
“He didn’t tell me his name, now I come to think of it. A big, dark man. Not out of his forties, I’d say, but very gray and rides all of fourteen stone. He asked me if I was Mrs. von Dennim. God knows where he got the von! Charles has never used it since he settled in England, and my husband never did. Most delightful easy manners he had! I must have met him somewhere before.”
“Can you remember where?” I asked.
“Funny you should say that, Charles! I’ve been racking my brains. I’ve seen his face somewhere. Or a brother, perhaps.”
“Shopping? Or the riding school? Or in our street?”
“Somewhere like that. But it’s just a resemblance. I’m sure it wasn’t really him.”
“I think I know the chap you mean, Aunt Georgi,” I went on, for I had to. “He must have gone white. Didn’t he have dark hair and prominent eyebrows?”
“At home?” she replied, rather puzzled. “Yes. Perhaps. But you know how one person reminds you of another.”
“Where was it that he came up to you and started talking?”
“Up above Didmarton, Charles, when I was leading Nur Jehan.”
The admiral had put down his glass and was simmering in his chair. He had even fiercer eyebrows than the false ones worn on occasion by this delightful patron of the Bath and West. My aunt, who had gone a little pale, for once looked at him more in appeal than command.
“I won’t!” Cunobel shouted. “It’s obvious why the boy is asking questions. Damn silly this silence, I call it! Blast!”
“My dear Charles,” said my aunt, recovering her usual composure, “the Dennims have always had an exasperating habit of protecting their womenfolk, and we all know very well that when you choose to carry on like a lot of knight errants polishing their boots in a heavy silence there is nothing whatever we can do about it. I will leave it at that, merely saying that I have not for one moment believed in your squirrels.”
I pretended to misunderstand. I pointed out that my observations were generally held to be accurate and my theories interesting though debatable.
“All this beating about the bush!” the admiral thundered. “You let me deal with this in my own way, Georgi! Damn it, I’m the oldest friend the boy has got, and I could tell you all about his type when I was a snotty! Your aunt means that she knows the bomb was meant for you, and that’s why you went off to your Warren!”
Quite absurd, I said. If I had thought the bomb was meant for me, I should have stayed at home under police guard instead of exposing myself in the country. And anyway what earthly motive could there be?
“Both of us know the motive as well as you do.”
“Peregrine!” my aunt appealed.
“I will not shut up, Georgi. Never heard anything like it in my life! All this devotion to each other and never going near the facts! Sacred teeth, boy, I’ve had the girl in tears!”
Georgina in tears was unthinkable. But I still did not know where I was.
“I give you my word of honor, sir, that I do not know any reason for wanting to kill me,” I said. “And if either of you do, please tell me.”
“Obviously revenge — with a past like yours!”
Georgina took command.
“When you came out of hospital, Charles, I had a talk with your Colonel Parrow. I have never mentioned it to you. We both thought it best that you should forget.”
The unthinkable was true before my eyes. She was in tears.
“My fault, Georgi!” Cunobel assured her, his bellow much muted. “I should have left it alone! But, great blood and bones, a von Dennim in the Gestapo I Isn’t there a damn thing those cloak-and-dagger boys won’t do? I’d hang the lot of them as war criminals. I saw it all when I was at the Admiralty. Bastards! Take a clean, clever boy and torture him! Damn it, the other side will only shoot him if they catch him, and honor him too! Dirty, lousy tricks they call intelligence! You’ve a right to order a man to die, but you’ve no right to do that to him.”
The admiral’s storm of sincerity was effective. I cannot analyze what had been going on in my mind. I know that I had been on the point of walking out of that unbearable house which had exposed my shame. But this protest of an honorable fighting man that the damage you did to the enemy could never excuse the damage done to an individual soul was, though eccentric for these days, extraordinarily comforting.
Oddly enough, my first impulse was to defend my service. It was Hitler’s fault, not theirs, that I had landed in the Gestapo.
“There was a right,” I said. “Perhaps not in former wars, but in the last war when the whole of our Christian civilization was at stake there was no limit to what could be asked. We sold ourselves to the devil for the sake of the faith, and it depends on the God which is within us whether we have to keep the bargain forever. And no one can help.”
As soon as I had said that, I felt it was far too dramatic and in my case untrue. I apologized to Georgina.
“How much did Ian tell you?” I asked.
“Your precious Ian,” she answered indignantly, “told me as little as he possibly could. And he wouldn’t have said that much if I hadn’t made him tell me why you refused your decoration. I also spoke a year later to the Olga Coronel whom you rescued.”
“Did you manage to convince her that I wasn’t all I seemed?”
This question, which I may have put bitterly, at once restored dear Georgina to her proper form.
“Charles, you are extraordinarily stupid in all questions of women,” she declared. “Do you really suppose that after five minutes with you she, one of the most quick and intelligent creatures I have ever come across, did not know the difference between a selfless agent risking his life under British orders and a Gestapo officer corrupt enough to take a bribe?”
She told me all that Olga Coronel had said about me; it was certainly polite. Apparently she had come over from Belgium especially to find and thank me on behalf of Catherine Dessayes and herself. But Georgina and the psychiatrists thought we had better not meet. I can’t say whether they were right or wrong. I do not know — mercifully— how much trouble I had given them.
“The trouble with you, boy,” said Cunobel, “is that because you’re not friends with yourself you think nobody else can be.”
I admitted to myself that there was an inevitable element of truth in that. In the recent agitated days I had received astonishing kindness from people who had little means of judging me beyond my face. Charles Dennim couldn’t understand it; but I suppose the young Graf von Dennim of twenty years before would have taken it as a matter of course. Had he trust in his fellow men and women, or sheer conceit?
“Now what have you been up to since that poor postman was killed?” the admiral went on. “Georgi, you’d better have some more Madeira.”
I gave them the barest facts of the story, playing it as a straight, personal investigation with practically no risk. I noticed that Cunobel twice refilled Georgina’s glass and that she was quite unaware of it.
“I see,” he said at last, with a shadow of a wink to me. “Well, you’ve done very well, and we’ll just set the police on now to establish his identity. Georgi, this has all been a great shock to you. Would you like to he down a little before you go home?”