Soldier No More Page 11

  Charlie’s features twitched with the effort of thinking.

  “Well, Clarke?” Roche jogged him mercilessly. “Speak up!”

  Charlie stiffened out of his stoop. “No, sir.”

  Roche braced himself. “Is Major Audley home, then?” This time he hardly dared to watch Charlie’s face, the thoughts behind it were unguessable and didn’t bear thinking about.

  “No, sir,” said Charlie. “Haven’t seen him today, sir.” God, it was true! One end of this interrogation stood in 1957, but the other was trapped in 1940, with no years in-between! And, what was worse—Roche’s flesh crawled at the possibility—was Haven’t seen him today, sir…. How many times did Charlie catch sight of his Mr Nigel, and the other ghosts of Mr Nigel’s time, drifting round The Old House? But he had work to do now, in 1957.

  “Hmmmm …” Captain Roche’s simulated annoyance almost choked him. “I was hoping to catch one of them, damn it!” He frowned at Charlie, whose face had settled into blank immobility. What business Captain Roche had with Mr Nigel and Master David was none of Fusilier Clarke’s business.

  And yet it was in that private area that the work had to be done. “Hmmm … Seems to me, Clarke, that the Major doesn’t hit it off very well with his son—am I right?” he said briskly.

  Charlie started twitching again. “Sir?” The gravel reduced the word to a croak.

  “Mr Nigel and Master David—why don’t they get on? Speak up, man! Don’t pretend you don’t know!”

  Charlie’s mouth opened and shut, and his head jerked from side to side, and his eyes rolled and ended up staring past Roche, over Roche’s shoulder to the line of ancestral photographs running up the staircase as though he was pleading with them to come to his assistance.

  “Come on, Clarke—you can tell me. I’m a friend of the family, you know.”

  “And so you are!” The voice came from the doorway on Roche’s right, just out of his vision, and it was Wimpy’s.

  “So you are, my dear fellow—a good friend of the family!” said Wimpy genially. “Afternoon, Fusilier Clarke.” The geniality remained, but there was iron beneath the velvet. “You cut along back to your billet now and have your tea, and I’ll talk to you later—right? Oh … and there’s a bit of a mess on the road, you’d better clear that up smartly or sar-major will see it, and then there’ll be hell to pay, I shouldn’t wonder. Right?”

  “Sir!” Charlie’s hobnails cracked to attention on the flagstones. “Sir!”

  Wimpy nodded. “Off you go then, Clarke.”

  Only after Charlie had departed did Wimpy move again, and then he circled Roche, ignoring him and breathing in The Old House’s damp smell half-critically and half as though it was doing him a power of good.

  “Well, old boy …” Wimpy didn’t look at him “… you took a bit of a risk there, didn’t you!”

  “I did?” Ignorance was never an excuse, but it was all he had to offer.

  Wimpy nodded at the line of photographs. “Big chap, Charlie Clarke… Seen him lift a five-hundredweight truck to save his mates popping the jack under the rear wheel, to change it—Charlie’s only party trick, you might say … We had two like him in the battalion, with too few brains and too much brawn—never should have been recruited, except maybe into the Pioneers … I had one of them in my company, ‘Batty’ they called him, because of the way he’d run amok. But he was killed in France in ‘40.”

  Roche watched Wimpy sigh, and was grateful for the past tense: at least both of them were together in 1957 now, however uncomfortable the next few minutes might be!

  “The other one was Charlie, in Jerry Johnson’s company—General Sir Gerald Johnson as he is now—and Fusilier Charlie Clarke as he is still… they were both lucky, after a fashion, anyway.” He looked at Roche at last, but bleakly. “They both survived, that is—Jerry to prosper in his chosen profession, and Charlie … after Dunkirk … to be Charlie, only less so at intervals—to be Charlie in 1940, before Dunkirk, as you have discovered, Captain Roche, eh?”

  Oddly enough he didn’t seem angry now. He seemed almost relieved by Captain Roche’s abortive discovery.

  “And you have been lucky too, I suppose one might say, Captain Roche,” said Wimpy.

  Ignorance and silence were still safest, especially when the latter might purge the former.

  “Charlie was the gentle one, you see.” Wimpy nodded. “Batty actually liked killing things—rabbits, Germans … fortunately he never had a proper chance with regimental policemen, but it was all the same to him. Charlie was different, he was always gentle … or almost always gentle—he meant to be as gentle as he could be, if people let him alone. That was all they had to do—just let him alone.” He gazed at Roche almost sorrowfully. “But you didn’t let him alone … and in this house too—he’s very protective about this house. God help the burglar he ever catches here!”

  Roche felt the air cold against his cheeks: he could testify to the truth of that, the memory of Charlie’s protectiveness was in that air still.

  “But you were lucky, as I say. I turned up just in time, before he took you apart,” said Wimpy simply. “Very lucky for all concerned … Though, of course, I blame myself too, old boy.”

  There, at last, was the opening he had been waiting for, thought Roche, hot inside against the cold on his face from the memory of Charlie.

  “So you damn well should!” he exclaimed. “You wouldn’t answer the question. Every time I asked it, damn it!”

  Wimpy shook his head. “Not ‘wouldn’t’, old boy. I promised, but there’s a time and place for the right answer, that’s all.” He pointed towards the staircase. “David put them up himself, but… typical David, putting them up … he did it when he came back from Normandy, the first time, on the last day of his leave … but Charlie carried the hammer and the nails … typical David—“ he shook his head at Roche, as blank-faced as Charlie had been “—took them all out of the study, plus the extra one Nigel had buried in his bottom drawer … and that was typical Nigel too—putting it away, when he could have torn it up, and burnt it, and it would have been dead and buried … But no—he just put it in the bottom drawer for David to find; and he knew David would find it, because David finds everything sooner or later—just put it in the bottom drawer for David to find, and David found it of course…. So out they all come from the study, plus the extra one—with never a word to Clarkie and me—and Charlie holds the nails—and bang, bang, bang, there they are in public, for everyone to see on the stairs—the one place everyone has to see, with never a word to me, not ever … not even now—not now, not ever …”

  Roche looked at the photographic gallery on the stairway, and then at Wimpy, and then at the gallery again. There were more bloody pictures there than was comfortable, if there was one extra picture which he was expected to home in on at first glance, to tell him what he ought to know.

  “Go and see for yourself, my dear man— don’t let me stand in your way, just go and see for yourself, eh?”

  Roche went quickly, before the schoolmaster could confuse him further, either deliberately or accidentally.

  The line was not so much a line, as a double zig-zag over half a century— more than half a century—of the history of Oxford-and-Cambridge and photography both.

  Indeed … it went back to Great-Grandfather Audley, looking faintly like Prince Albert, in the smartly-cut but unpressed suiting of the time, blotched and faded by age, at the bottom of the staircase, gracing the Hoplites Society of Balliol College, to David Audley himself, vintage 1949, scowling from his college rugger XV, which had been added at the very top as a Cambridge afterthought—almost an act of defiance amongst a collection of otherwise exclusively Balliol College, Oxford: pictures of Father Nigel, Grandfather and Great-Grandfather, who had all been oarsmen in their college VIIIs, or ornaments of that same Hoplites Society … which, at a guess, from its name, and the stylish fashion of their evening dress, and the nonchalant don’t-give-a-damn slightly drunken expressio
ns they affected, must be an exclusive club for the young Classical gentlemen of their time.

  God! What would Genghis Khan make of this collection? Here, to the life, were the young bloods of the Tsar’s Imperial Guard, lazing it at ease among the empty Champagne bottles through the 1905 revolt, past the 1914 armageddon to the 1917 reckoning!

  Roche concentrated his wits and his memory. Wimpy had said (or was it Sir Eustace, or Colonel Clinton, or Stocker? Or had it been in the records, merely?) that Mr Nigel’s father had been killed in 1917—

  It had been Wimpy: My father was at Oxford with his father—the one that was killed in 1917—take away the right number of years and that was where to look—was it?

  But why should that be worth looking at?

  All the same, he looked—frowned, rather—at the Hoplites of the generation before Passchendaele: a double row of languid young men, none of whom could have imagined himself as a rotting corpse in thick mud, and none of whom he recognised … although the list of names underneath indicated that there was a D. N. D. Audley (hon. secretary) in it somewhere, next to The Hon. W. de V. Pownell-Lloyd (president) …

  Wimpy’s own father ought to be here somewhere, though hardly among the rich young Hoplites, because he had been clever but poor, and that ruled him out of their company.

  Maybe he would be among the oarsmen in the next picture—a crew comic not only for their close-fitting but elongated rowing uniforms, but also for their deadly-serious expressions, as though it had been the battle of Salamis in which they’d distinguished themselves, not Oxford in eighteen-ninety-something. But at least he could instantly identify the Audley in this crew—the familiar face stared at him out of the photograph—the Audley face, minus the broken nose, plus the rowing cap and the frail undergraduate moustache!

  And there was a Willis in this crew, too—another plain plebeian W. Willis (another Wimpy?), but Captain of Boats no less, and in a victorious Eights Week, judging by the list of defeated colleges beneath the names of the oarsmen. So both families had something to be proud of in this particular photograph, clearly—

  He studied the picture for a moment, and then shifted to the Hoplites Society group just below it, and then returned to the oarsmen. They bore the same date, and the same photographer’s name, but the oarsmen were clearer—much clearer, much less faded—

  Buried in the bottom drawer!

  It was here, in this picture, on the wall for everyone to see—it was here, somewhere among J.R. Selwyn (No.4) and D. N. L.Audley (stroke) and N. B-R. Poole (cox) … and W. Willis (bow, Captain of Boats), but he couldn’t see it.

  He looked at Wimpy again, and knew for certain that it was there in front of him—it was in Wimpy’s face, by God!

  He stared at the oarsmen again, and then at the Hoplites, and then at the oarsmen.

  And saw at last, what had been there all the time—what had been there half the afternoon, but not in Wimpy’s face.

  Literally, not in Wimpy’s face.

  He checked the names underneath to make doubly sure.

  The chickens had come home to roost, and W. Willis (bow, Captain of Boats) had rowed them all the way from the eighteen-nineties: he was the spit-and-image twin, minus the broken nose, of David Audley.

  ADVANCE TO CONTACT

  Madame Peyrony’s young ladies

  VII

  THE FRENCHMAN HAD been swimming strongly in the river current in the same place for all of ten minutes.

  Molières, Beaumont, Roquépine, Monpazier… they had all belonged to the English …

  The sight of the man battling to no purpose, together with the hot sun not long past its zenith and the warm stones under the rug, and the truffle omelette and the trout, all conspired to undermine Roche’s concentration.

  Villeréal, Montflanquin, Villeneuve, Neuville, Villefranche-du-Périgord … they were the French ones … but there were other Villeneuves and Neuvilles and Villefranches to be distinguished from them, which had been just as new and free, but also English, on this embattled frontier seven hundred years ago.

  And Domme—French—high and golden above the river, which had betrayed him into over-eating when he needed a clear head—

  Maybe that was how it had happened—God! How I love this fat, fertile, self-indulgent country, so ripe for plundering but also so cruel and dangerous and ready to betray its enemies—had that been the last Anglo-Saxon insight, the last clear English thought old John Talbot had had as the French cannon opened up on his archers at Castillon down the river five hundred years before—that it had always been too good to be true, the English Empire in France, from Bordeaux to Calais—too rich and too tempting and too strong for cold-blooded islanders?

  He mustn’t go to sleep! He wasn’t even tired, he had slept five dreamless hours in the couchette from Paris-Austerlitz, lulled by the train sounds even through dawn halts at Limoges and Perigueux to be woken gently by the well-tipped attendant in time for Les Eyzies (expense no object—that was heady and frightening at the same time, and it had already been his undoing in the restaurant at Domme), and with Raymond Galles meeting him at the station in his own battered old Volkswagen, which had been driven down from Paris yesterday by some poor nameless bastard.

  God! He mustn’t go to sleep: he must think of his bastides, Beaumont and Monpazir, Villereal and sun-baked Domme, and the rest of them on the list—all that Anglo-French history he had sweated and frozen over during his Manchester days, in those ghastly wind-swept, bomb-swept open spaces around the University and the History Faculty, which were dismal even when it was dry, like a piece of East Berlin authentically reproduced in England, no expense spared—

  Roche shivered at the memory, coldly wakened by it, and twisted sideways on to one elbow, blinking against the glare, the better to observe the lunatic swimming Frenchman.

  He was still there, breasting the current in the same yard of river, hauling himself forward and instantly being carried back by the force of the water, and then hauling himself forward again, only to be carried back again in a perfect display of useless determination.

  All that history …

  The afternoon sun rippled on the broken water rushing by the swimmer. Perhaps it wasn’t a useless exercise: maybe the man was stretching his sinews in preparation for some Marathon swim, across the Channel or the Hellespont, where tides and currents were hostile; and this way he could take his punishment at full stretch without ever losing sight of his little pile of clothes and belongings on the stony strand ten yards from him?

  All that history had seemed just as useless, just as much mental energy equally pointlessly expended on the past when it was the present which had lain waiting in ambush for him in Korea and Japan, and if he’d understood more about that then perhaps he wouldn’t be lying here now, not knowing any more whose side he was on.

  And yet now all that history had become a qualification for something at last, at least in part, though in a way neither he nor his teachers had ever envisaged—

  “That’s everything then, I think—,” said Clinton, pushing the buff-coloured envelope across the table. “Ticket to Paris, a little spending money … Raymond Galles will have more for you when he meets you at Les Eyzies on Thursday morning. And Galles will have fixed your transport too—he’s a good man, a born and bred Périgourdin, knows the country, knows the people. Been on our books since ‘41—would have been since ‘40, only it took him eight months to extricate himself from a PoW camp … Not used him much since ‘44, but you can trust him right down the line. A good man, he’ll look after you … Thompson’ll meet you in Paris, of course, with the cover material all written up—most of it you’ll know, some of it you must re-write in your own fist, to make it look authentic, just in case anyone gets nosey—and your train ticket. Gare Austerlitz, 2150, all the way, arrive just before breakfast—time to refresh your memory and get some kip. Very convenient. Any last questions?”

  “What historical material, sir?” He hadn’t expected to be finally brie
fed by Clinton himself.

  Shrug. “I honestly don’t know, Roche. Thompson’s choosing something appropriate to the area, naturally—something worth being there for. But he won’t give you any of Audley’s specialities, they’re too damn esoteric, so I gather.” Smile. “According to Master Oliver St.John Larimer, anyway.”

  A singularly obscure aspect of Byzantine religious history certainly rated as esoteric, thought Roche uneasily.

  “Don’t worry, man!” Clinton picked up the unease. “You’ll be able to hold your own.”

  “I didn’t get a First at Cambridge.”

  “Balls to Cambridge—and to Oxford.” Clinton’s jaw tightened. “There’s too much Oxbridge in the service. That’s one of its troubles.”

  So much for Oliver St. John Latimer— and Sir Eustace Avery!

  “But you want me to recruit Audley nevertheless, and he’s Cambridge sir.”

  “Audley’s a maverick.” Clinton shrugged off the inconsistency. “And there’s nothing wrong with the Manchester School of History.”

  “In which I got a shaky Second.”

  “Which should have been a First, according to your professor.” Clinton leaned forward, frowning. “And your flat in Paris is full of books—“

  “Yes, but—“

  “We chose you for this, Roche,” Clinton overbore him. “I told you before—we chose you very carefully—we chose you particularly—get that into your head, and don’t ever forget it. You, and no one else, Roche.”

  Roche opened his mouth, and then closed it quickly. After The Old House and its secret he was consumed with curiosity about Audley, so that he almost wanted the assignment for its own sake.

  “Because you can do the job, that’s why.” Clinton sat back. “When you learn more about David Audley—you may understand … but you ought to know one thing already, from what you heard in the Admiral’s Room—“

  Sir Eustace’s room, under the Sargent portrait, where the Admiral’s eyes had screwed into his soul, seeking out its innermost treachery: how could Clinton miss what the long-dead Admiral saw so clearly?