Stephanie (12 page)

‘I'm going to this birthday party of Tony Maidment's – Sir Anthony Maidment – it's his twenty-first at his home at Sutton David. Sunday evening.'

‘How should I know? Are you taking her?'

‘Of course not.'

‘Then why aren't you taking me?'

‘Because I expect to
see
her there. That's when I intend to make the final break. I shall tell them that you have flu.'

‘Thank you very much.' She picked up the drink now and sipped it. It was all too familiar, this fluctuation in his moods. When she saw him coming across from his car his face had alerted her to the prospect of some catastrophe. When she came into the room he had been sharp-edged as a knife. Now he was pulling out the stops for some sort of reconciliation. She was not deceived. She refused to be deceived. Because she wanted to be reassured she wouldn't allow herself to be reassured.

She said: ‘Don't you care for her any more?'

‘It isn't as simple as that.'

‘It can't be.'

He met her look only for the second time since he came in. His eyes had their concentrated, attentive look, as if for the moment he was thinking only of her questions. Whether it was a trick or a trait it was difficult to resist. His sense of fun was even trying to break in, but failing – some darker bruising loomed too large in his mind. She folded the cheque. ‘And after this, if it does come to an end,

what next?'
‘Next what?'
‘Next woman. Girl. The next one you're going to fancy.'
He shook his head from side to side. ‘I don't know. Christ, each

time I tell myself … One lives and learns. It may be never.'
For the moment he believed it. After she had gone he stared at

the closed door and the sweat broke out on his forehead again.

He dabbed it away. Maybe it really would be never.

James Locke was on the Chelsea Flower Show Committee, and on the Monday of the following week he drove to a meeting of the organisers at the Royal Hospital. This year he had been invited to be one of the judges of the rhododendron exhibits. Since his own garden ran merely to twelve acres and had only been in existence twenty years, he felt this a signal honour. Among the other judges would be men and women who owned and tended some of the great gardens of England and whose ancestors had travelled to the Himalayas and Sikkim in search of new species. Some of these people still living had given their names to hybrids which had become known throughout the gardening world. James often thought that if you wanted immortality – at least the only kind in which he believed – you were much more likely to attain it by hybridising a particularly successful family of camellia than bothering to get your name in history books or have statues put up in Whitehall. Even a good rose had an extended life. Who, for instance, of her generation – though she was now defunct – had lasted longer than Frau Karl Drushki?

After the meeting he hobbled painfully to his car and drove to his club for a luncheon appointment with his old friend Colonel Henry Gaveston.

The hell with central London was that even with a disabled sticker it was almost impossible to get near enough to be within limping distance of the Hanover Club. In the end he parked on a double yellow line in Davies Street near a bus stop and hoped for the best.

Henry was waiting for him. A tall, ramshackle man, stooping, with a war-damaged shoulder and left hand, a lined and scarred face (scars coming from life and not from battle), yet handsome in an aquiline way with silver-grey hair that tended to fall across his forehead. They had been at school together and through some of the war, though Henry had been in the Irish Guards until the SAS came into being.

He had had a distinguished army career, serving after the war in Aden, Cyprus and Northern Ireland, but had retired early under a cloud, having proved too tough in Ulster to keep in line with government policy. Half-Irish himself – his mother had come from County Limerick – he had met terrorism with an iron fist of his own and was consequently now on the murder list of the IRA.

He was a Fellow of St Martin's and had been appointed Bursar five years ago. He lived near Thame a few miles east of Oxford, dressed untidily, almost scruffily, and new undergraduates were warned of his habit of inviting them out there for the weekend and then expecting them to spend most of it working in his garden. He had married late, had a son still at university and a wife as untidy as himself who wrote biographies and was at present in America on a tour to publicise her latest work.

They did not join one of the general tables but lunched alone at a window table overlooking the garden. To talk to, Henry did not seem a hard man, any more than you would have supposed James to have been a brave one. They were two elderly gentlemen, lifelong friends, benevolent, easy talkers, easy in each other's company, enjoying a meeting to reminisce, to swap confidences, to try out one of the better club clarets, to glance around the gracious Georgian dining room, to raise a hand in greeting to friends who came in and out.

Over the fish they talked of plants and gardens, of Evelyn Gaveston's travels in America, of young Charles Gaveston's preoccupation with the tenor saxophone. ‘ Of course at his present rate he'll be independent of government grants or subsidies from me. In the group he's formed he's already making more money than I am paid for being Bursar of an Oxford college! But Evelyn and I would have liked him to spend a few years in the Guards first, whatever his choice afterwards. Young men can't wait.'

‘We didn't,' said James. ‘But then there was a war on.'

They discussed a
sciadopitys verticillata
which Henry Gaveston had been growing for ten years but which had never got its roots down firmly enough to survive without a stake. ‘It needs guying,' said James.

‘Yes, but why
should
it?' demanded Henry. ‘It comes from a hilly district in Japan. It's perfectly hardy. I've got no lime. Yet it flops around in every gale like a drunken sailor on a Saturday night.'

‘Ground soft?' suggested James. ‘ So guy it. Get some of your conscripted young guests to do it one weekend. Otherwise you'll lose it.'

‘Hell,' said Henry. ‘ If you had to guy every pine tree my garden would look like a village fête.'

They discussed their old colleague Jock Armitage, who had announced his decision to resign his seat at the next general election.

‘Don't think I could ever have gone into politics,' said James. ‘ I always see both sides of things. I don't claim this as a virtue; it may well be a weakness; but whereas in a war I can very easily say, “ My country, right or wrong”, in a political crisis I couldn't always say, “ My party, right or wrong”.'

‘Both sides,' muttered Gaveston, as the pork chops were served. ‘That's what I could see in Ireland, for I love the Irish – most of 'em. But a few are dastardly, and them I would
stamp
on. World opinion be buggered.'

They talked of Scotland having won the Grand Slam and the game they had seen at Twickenham together earlier in the year. Only when the cheese was served did they come to the real purpose of the meeting.

‘Young Stephanie,' said Gaveston. ‘You really worried about her?'

‘Not exactly worried but concerned. She came home the weekend before last, and I thought her more wired up than I've ever known her. We had a very good weekend – everything went apple pie – but underneath she was a bag of nerves. I didn't fancy it at all.'

‘And you think it's to do with drugs?'

‘That or a broken love affair. Or both. I don't know how they interlock, or if at all. You saw her?'

‘I've seen her on and off for the last three years! A very nice gal, if I may say so, James, and you well know my susceptibilities. She's been kicking up her heels recently – got into rather an odd set, in my opinion … though I don't think there's much harm in 'em really. So long as
you
were able to pay the piper … I assumed you knew about it and were willing to let her go on a slack rein. She never got into any trouble in the college, and I didn't feel it was my business to interfere. Girls will be girls.'

‘But you saw her last week?'

‘Yes. After you telephoned I rang her and arranged for her to meet a woman called Sandra Woolton who's a social worker and knows as much about drugs as anyone in Oxford. I understand they met and Sandra took your girl to a squat that she knows of near the river. They'll let her into these places because for a while she was one of them. Then they went on to a pub Sandra knows of where dope is fairly freely traded in the back rooms, so that Stephanie could see how it all worked: needles and vomit and the rest; the place was raided after Christmas but it has all started up again. Now they've an elaborate system of warnings, with two Doberman pinschers to hold up the police for a few minutes while the dope is flushed away.'

James picked at a bit of cheese. ‘And when you saw her yourself?'

‘That was on Friday. She'd been with Sandra the night before. She was just coming out of hall so I walked partway back to her flat.'

‘And what did you think of her?'

‘As you say – wired up. Talked too much. But James …'

‘Yes?'

‘I don't know if you're worried about this, but I could certainly detect nothing in her manner to suggest that she was on anything herself.'

‘Well, no, not really –'

‘I also asked Sandra, who's far more up in these things than I am, and she's certain there's no sign of Stephanie being on anything at all.'

‘I didn't think so. But thank you for the reassurance.'

Henry eyed his old friend. ‘I don't think I should worry, old boy. She's had this love affair you were telling me about which is in process of breaking up. She's been slacking in her work. And Schools are less than four weeks off. Believe me, she's not the first student to get het up. It would be a bit surprising if she were not!'

James nodded and sipped the last of his wine.

‘So I don't think there is much to be even concerned about,' Henry said. ‘If in Stephanie's case it were really what it seemed on the surface, just a wish to know more about drugs and to make judgments about them, then I'm glad you let me know so that I could counteract Peter Brune's heterodox influence.'

‘Heterodox influence?'

Gaveston pushed his boyish grey hair out of his eyes and laughed. ‘Oh, only in a manner of speaking. Peter's a dear man. I've known him for ever – which is almost as long as I've known you. But in spite of helping to finance this clinic he has wayward views about legalising drugs and so abolishing the rackets that exist. Well and good, it's a point of view. But all he ever sees, I'm sure, are his clean and carefully hospitalised patients in the Worsley Clinic. He is in some ways the typical liberal, working out the theory of a problem and coming to typically liberal conclusions. The world to such people is governed by theorems, and life must fit into these theorems, not be human and messy and contrary and individual and cross-grained and greedy and weak. So in their own minds they organise a perfect world, and if like Peter they are very rich, they can live in a way that pretends it exists. Ordinary people, alas, know different.'

They got up and moved to go downstairs for coffee. James waved away several offers of help, and proceeded from table to table until he got out to the landing and found the lift.

Downstairs they met a few friends, but presently these drifted off and James Locke and Henry Gaveston were left to themselves to talk of the old days. Last year James had gone to France, Mrs Aldershot driving, and had been to some of the old places he had been active in during the war. Most of the people he knew were gone, some dying instantly during the war, more having been taken off in the natural course of time. A number remained, some who had sheltered him at the risk of their own lives and that of their families, others who had been active in the
Maquis.
When the principals were no longer there the children remembered. It had been a fruitful reunion.

Only Henry probably knew the truth of James's last drop into France. To the world he said he had landed badly and damaged both ankles in a ditch, which was true enough. But as he crawled out of the ditch he had been arrested by the waiting Gestapo, beaten insensible and thrown into a hut for the night preparatory to being taken away to one of their ‘interrogation' centres. In the night his guard, seeing James unconscious on a trestle with blood dripping from his head, had thought it safe to doze off. Coming round just before dawn, James had strangled the guard with his left elbow and right thumb and crawled away from the camp leaving a trail of blood that he eventually staunched, and lying up all next day in a spinney within sight of the Gestapo huts. Then he had trekked for the next two days, mainly on hands and knees, through woods and fields until picked up and given food and shelter by some French villagers.

Over the years this all somehow became too heroic for James, who told his friends the abbreviated story. Not that many bothered to ask. It was: ‘ How are the ankles, old man? … Bad luck. I suppose nothing can be done surgically? … Oh, it has been done … Too bad! Well, I suppose, yes, hmm, it's good you are able to get about as much as you do in spite, isn't it.'

‘A funny thing about war,' Henry said, snipping the end off his cigar. ‘For professionals like me it's different. We volunteer to fight – or to be able to fight if the necessity arises. We're trained for that purpose. Our life is devoted to it. That's why a regrettable incident like our little adventure in the Falklands – which would never have happened if our Foreign Office had not given the Argentines the wrong impression – when it
had
to be launched it was a brilliant operation, daring, highly risky and magnificently executed, a notable achievement. So I regret the casualties less than in the World Wars. Of course I regret every single drop of blood that had to be shed – but every drop was volunteer blood, spilt by professionals in the fulfilment of their professional duty. To me one of the ultimate obscenities of war is the conscript army – invented by the French, you know – in which decent little men with no instincts to fight are virtually dragged from their houses and compelled to murder each other. That is civilisation in its grave.'