The Age of Treachery (2 page)

“You’re busy,” said a voice. Forrester looked up to see Gordon Clark looking round his door. For a moment he was tempted to tell the Senior Tutor “I
am
a bit busy, actually, old chap,” and turn back to the tablets, but when he saw Clark’s white, strained face he hadn’t the heart.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “Come in and have some sherry.”

“Thank you,” said Clark, and closed the door. He entered the room nervously, glancing into the shadows as though expecting a hidden observer.

Forrester, pouring the sherry, realised the bottle was almost empty. He thought of dividing the liquid between both glasses and decided against it. With his back to Clark he filled his own glass with cold tea before he handed the full one to his friend.

“Your health,” he said, and Clark nodded and sank back into a chair on one side of the fire. Forrester reached in with the poker and stirred it into life.

“Any progress?” said Clark, nodding towards the photographs spread out on Forrester’s desk.

“I’m not at the progress stage yet,” said Forrester. “I have to dig myself in much deeper before I can start digging my way out.” He sipped his glass of cold tea with every appearance of appreciation. “I saw Margaret in Broad Street this afternoon. I think she’d just given up queuing for powdered eggs.”

He waited for Clark to tell him that it was he, her husband, she’d been running across the road to see, but the Senior Tutor just nodded and looked into the fire. Finally he said, “Have you ever understood them, Forrester?” When Forrester did not reply, Clark said, “Women, I mean.”

“Good Lord, no,” said Forrester. It was not what he felt, it was not what he believed; but it was what Clark needed to hear. “But surely a married man has a better chance than most?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Clark sipped the sherry, but Forrester knew he could have given him the cold tea and the Senior Tutor wouldn’t have noticed. Suddenly his friend looked up, his eyes hot with pain. “She used to love me, you know.”

“I’m sure she still does,” said Forrester, with a strange sinking feeling in his stomach.

“No,” said Clark. “She’s found someone else.”

Again, Forrester decided silence was the best response. His own feelings for Margaret Clark made it almost impossible to make the right comforting remarks.

“And you know the worst part of it?” said Clark. “I feel… slighted—”

“Well, of course—”

“—by the man she’s chosen.” Forrester held his breath. “Do you know who it is?” Forrester shook his head. “David bloody Lyall.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Forrester, automatically, quick to cover his own swift stab of jealousy, but in truth he was not in the least surprised at Margaret Clark’s choice. David Lyall was handsome, self-confident and stylish. He was ambitious and successful; he’d leapt ahead of several other abler candidates for the Priestley Latin Fellowship and was a serious contender for the Rotherfield Lectureship, but Forrester understood why Clark felt slighted: Lyall was also shallow, meretricious and glib; a showy scholar without real insight. But scholarship, of course, was not what Margaret had been looking for.

“I always used to look down on Italians, you know,” said Clark. “All that passion and jealousy. It seemed so self-indulgent. But I tell you, Forrester, I could cheerfully strangle that little swine.”

“Do him good,” said Forrester, and despite himself, Clark laughed.

“Unfortunately they didn’t teach us much about unarmed combat at Bletchley,” said Clark. Forrester nodded. He knew enough about what had gone on at Bletchley to understand the intense intellectual strain Clark had been under for the last four years, his nerves strung out like a taut wire.

“As someone who was taught unarmed combat,” said Forrester, “I can tell you I don’t recommend its use in polite society.”

“Not even in special circumstances?” asked Clark.

“This Lyall thing’s an infatuation,” said Forrester. “It’ll pass.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Lyall is a complete second-rater; you are a man of real worth and Margaret is an intelligent woman,” replied Forrester decisively. “She’ll see through him before long.”

“And I should just hang about until she does?”

“I don’t know,” said Forrester. “I can’t advise you there. All I’m saying is don’t do anything precipitate.”

“Like sticking a knife in his heart?”

“I think that would qualify as precipitate.”

“I’ve got to sit at High Table with the swine.”

“Ignore him. Sit at the other end. If you catch his eye regard him with cold contempt.”

Clark grinned ruefully. “Cold contempt, eh?”

“Buckets of it. I’ll do the same. He’ll have cold contempt everywhere he turns.”

Clark finished his glass and stood up. “Thank you, old chap,” he said. “I had to tell somebody; I was going out of my bloody head.”

Forrester stood up too. A bell began to toll. “Shall we go down?”

Clark hitched his gown around him. “Why not?” he said. “I’ve worked up quite an appetite.”

In the event, inevitably, the Master kept them hanging about in the Fellows’ Chamber before they could go through to High Table. A giant with a face like a Viking axe was standing in the centre of the room as they entered, his sherry glass like a thimble in his massive fingers, the timbre of his thickly accented Norwegian voice so deep Forrester could swear his glass was ringing as he spoke.

“In the year of Our Lord, 998,” the Norwegian was booming, “Sigrid the Strong-Minded was wooed by both Prince Weswolf and Harald Skull-Splitter, neither of whom pleased her. She took them to a beer hall, got them drunk and as they lay sleeping, set fire to the place, burning them both to death. After this only the boldest suitors approached her, which is what I think she intended.”

There was a murmur of appreciative laughter, led by Professor Michael Winters. The Master of Barnard College was a plump man with a fringe of white hair around his egg-shaped cranium and a face which looked slightly too small for the size of his head, like a child’s sketch painted on a balloon. He turned to Clark and Forrester, gesturing at the Norwegian. “This is Professor Arne Haraldson, from the University of Oslo,” he said. “My star turn at the reading tonight. I trust you’re coming?”

Forrester sighed inwardly. Winters’ evenings of readings from the Icelandic epics were, for those unenthused by Dark Ages poetry, famously painful. But he liked the Master too much to let him down. “Of course, Master,” he said. Clark had managed to edge away before he had to respond; Forrester knew that in Gordon’s present state of mind an evening listening to tales of Vikings hacking one another to pieces was more than he could bear.

“What are your views on the links between Norse mythology and Nazism, Professor Haraldson?” Forrester turned and saw that the speaker was David Lyall. The question was typical of the man: designed largely to draw attention to the questioner.

Forrester saw a curious expression on Haraldson’s face as he turned to Lyall – a flash of surprise that morphed swiftly into fury, as though someone he trusted was reneging, quite shamelessly, on a deal. For a moment Forrester expected the big man to reach out and grasp Lyall by the throat but instead, after a beat, he drew in a deep breath and smiled.

“There are no true links between Nazi fantasy and Norse mythology,” he said at last, “whatever Hitler might have imagined.”

“Adolf was pretty much convinced otherwise, though, wasn’t he?” Lyall persisted. “He had that mystic experience in a wood during the Great War, didn’t he?” Lyall had an athlete’s build, with a fine head and bright blue eyes. Forrester could see why Margaret Clark had been attracted to him.

“What ‘mystic experience’?” said someone. The smile remained on Haraldson’s face, but it was fixed now, his eyes hard.

“The future Führer described the scene very vividly,” Lyall went on, apparently oblivious to Haraldson’s anger. “It was on a hill above his line of trenches: a place he called Wotan’s Glade. Apparently it was very cold, snow everywhere, and he used his bayonet to carve certain runes on a fallen log. He claimed it was there that Odin revealed his destiny to him.”

“The future Führer was deluded,” said Haraldson, “as the events of April last year demonstrated.” It had been in the previous April, of course, that the Führer had shot himself in his Berlin bunker, and the Thousand Year Reich had come to a premature end.

“And those of us who study literature would very much prefer that those delusions should be forgotten,” said Roland Bitteridge. His voice was high-pitched and unattractive, like a triangle being played after a great bell had been struck. “These fantasies have nothing to do with serious study, Dr. Lyall, as you must know.”

“I couldn’t say,” replied Lyall. “It’s not my field.” He was speaking to Bitteridge, but Forrester felt, for some reason, that the remarks were still addressed to Haraldson. The Master intervened swiftly to set the conversation in another direction.

“I have one disappointment for you this evening, I’m afraid.” He paused and cleared his throat apologetically. “Professor Tolkien isn’t coming.” There were polite murmurs of regret from around the room. Tolkien had begun the tradition of readings from the sagas at Oxford, forming with C.S. Lewis a group known as the Coalbiters, after an Icelandic phrase referring to those who sat so close to the blazing hearth on winter evenings that they seemed to be eating the fire.

“He was supposed to be here,” the Master went on, “but he’s moving house and everything seems to have got into a tremendous muddle. Some manuscript he’s mislaid.”

“Another
Hobbit
?” Tolkien’s children’s book, written in the thirties, had just been republished and Forrester had seen its distinctive green and white dust jacket in Blackwell’s bookshop that afternoon.

“Oh, something much bigger,” said Bitteridge. “He’s been trying to finish it for years – but you know what he’s like. Jack Lewis will pip him at the post if he’s not careful.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Jack’s writing his own fairy stories. Dwarves and nymphs and fauns and that kind of thing. I suspect Tollers thinks it’s pretty meretricious stuff, and it probably is.”

“They’re both looting the sagas, aren’t they?” said Forrester.

“Of course,” said Bitteridge. “But C.S. is writing his stuff on behalf of the Christians, and Tolkien doesn’t approve of that. Can’t say I blame him.”

“At any rate,” said a voice somewhere behind them, “it’s better than writing on behalf of the Devil, isn’t it?” Forrester turned to see who had spoken, but the face was lost in the crowd.

* * *

At last they went through to the Hall, built when Henry VII was on the throne, and were seated at High Table, looking down at the undergraduates watching impatiently as the food approached. The silverware sparkled in the light of the candles and the shadows they cast flickered against the great hammer beams supporting the roof. Forrester hoped the sheer familiarity of the scene gave Gordon Clark the comfort it always gave him.

Bitteridge was placed next to Haraldson, and they were deep in conversation, Forrester noted, with the Norwegian nodding vigorously as he shovelled food into his mouth. He would have looked even more at home, Forrester thought, if he’d been chewing on a leg of wild boar. Bitteridge, by contrast, merely ferried fastidiously tiny forkfuls from the plate to his thin lips.

He looked down the table towards Gordon Clark and cursed under his breath as he saw that the Senior Tutor was sitting opposite David Lyall. But of course as no-one knew about Lyall’s affair with Clark’s wife, no-one had thought to separate them. Forrester forced himself to listen to the languid Foreign Office man seated beside him. His name was Charles Calthrop, he had attended the college in the early thirties, been recruited into the Foreign Office when it was dominated by the appeasers and was now speaking airily of the growing Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. “Oh yes,” he was saying. “Albania declared a People’s Republic two days ago. It’ll be the same in Hungary within the month. And then we should all look out for the Russian army marching towards us with snow on their boots.”

“Is that a serious possibility?” asked Forrester.

“Of course it is,” said Calthrop. “If they can’t get the local communist parties to do it for them. Italy could go red any day. Look at what’s happening in Greece. The fact is, if we want to keep the Russians from taking over, the Americans are our only hope.”

“I don’t see why you’re afraid of Russia,” said the man on the opposite side of the table. “Stalin saved this country during the war.” The remark came from Alan Norton, X-ray crystallographer and deputy bursar, responsible for repairs to damage done to the college fabric during the late hostilities. “Hitler would be living in Buckingham Palace today if it hadn’t been for the Soviets.”

Calthrop favoured him with a long, amused glance.

“I can’t say anything about hypothetical accommodation arrangements for the Führer,” he said, “but I have to tell you that Stalin is a truly bad man.”

“And you make that statement on what basis?” asked Norton.

“Meeting him,” said Calthrop, mildly. “I was close enough to him at Yalta to be aware of an aura of… how shall I put this? An aura of pure evil.”

Before Norton could rebut this shameless piece of one-upmanship, the balding, sandy-haired German beside him spoke up. “My own view is that the Russians have swallowed as much of Europe as their Slavic stomachs can digest.”

The German’s name was Peter Dorfmann, and it was rumoured that he was being groomed for power when the occupying forces set up the new, democratic Germany. Forrester wasn’t clear exactly how he’d managed to remain a respected academic in the Third Reich without either joining the party or falling foul of it, but apparently he had. “Besides,” said Dorfmann, “I do not believe the Russians have any desire to fight the Americans.”

“The Americans,” said Norton contemptuously, “are the occupying power in Europe these days. They’ve turned us into one big aircraft carrier.”

“You’re not suggesting we could have won the war without them, are you?” remarked Lyall from across the table. “I mean, were you out in the streets on D-Day saying ‘Yanks go home’?”