The Ka of Gifford Hillary (25 page)

There was something most commendable about his acceptance with enthusiasm of this extraordinarily arduous job, which debarred him for two years from the flying that he loved and might easily make a hash of his service career if he failed to handle it competently; of his entire lack of bitterness that his wealthy grandfather should not even have mentioned him in his will, and of the unfailing good humour with
which from his lazy blue eyes he regarded the doings of others. I don’t think he was quite brilliant enough ever to get right to the top, but he had brains, a pleasant wit and, above all, integrity. Just to be with him gave one a sense of well-being and security. I would to God that he had been my son.

At about half past twelve Johnny left the reading room, went to his own office, collected from his desk a typescript which he locked into a brief-case, then descended to the ground floor in the old-fashioned lift. I accompanied him, and together we crossed Horse Guards Parade, passed beneath the arch of the ancient palace, and a few minutes later reached the Air Ministry in Whitehall Gardens. There we ascended in a swift modern elevator to the second floor and entered a room the door of which was labelled: ‘Air Commodore Benthorpe, C.B.E., D.S.O., Director of Plans.’

A girl there greeted Johnny with a friendly smile, lifted one of the telephones on her desk and said: ‘Wing Commander Norton to see you, Sir,’ then laid it down and told Johnny: ‘Master will see you; go right in, Wing Commander.’

In the adjacent room a small, thick-set, almost bald Air Commodore was sitting at a desk loaded with stacks of papers. Giving a swift nod he motioned Johnny to a chair and asked: ‘Well, what’s cooking over the way, Norton?’

‘Nothing much, Sir,’ Johnny replied. ‘The Yugoslavian situation is not developing too well for us, and President Nehru is letting down the side again by encouraging the Afghans to accept neutrality. I came over only to give you this paper on atomic bases in the Arctic, and to ask for forty-eight hours’ special leave from tomorrow morning owing to the death of my uncle, Sir Gifford Hillary. It is not only to attend his funeral but I may have quite a bit to do as one of his executors.’

The D of Plans nodded. ‘Yes, I saw about his death in this morning’s paper. I’m sorry, Norton. I gather that he was in the R.A.F. during the war, and a good chap. It’s a sad business that his private affairs should have got into such a tangle. Fill in a form and I’ll see to it that your leave is all right. There is one thing, though. We can’t let that paper on air support for S.E.A.T.O. stand over for another week, and I understand that the G. Ones have not yet had your draft of it.’

‘I have a luncheon date, Sir, which will go on for most of the afternoon,’ Johnny replied, ‘but I thought I would come in and finish it off this evening, if that’s all right by you?’

‘Certainly; by all means do that,’ the Air Commodore nodded again. ‘As long as it’s in the hands of the G. Ones by tomorrow morning; then they should be able to let me have it by Tuesday. I’m sorry about your uncle. If you need an extra few days to get on with sorting out his affairs I don’t doubt we shall be able to manage for that long without you.’

Having thanked him, Johnny left the Air Ministry, walked back to Whitehall, turned down it and halted at the bus stop on the corner of Parliament Square. My hour in his familiar company had done a lot to cheer me up; but now that he was evidently going to his luncheon appointment I felt that watching people eat, drink, and talk without being able to join in might bring about a return of my depression; so I decided against accompanying him. Yet, when he had jumped on to a bus, I was inclined to regret my decision, as I was at a complete loss what to do with myself.

That very fact suddenly struck me as interesting. The previous evening I had been taken all unsuspecting to see my family and early that morning impelled to witness the horrors of the slums. Since then my movements had been governed more and more by my own free will, and now I no longer had an urge to go anywhere. Was it possible that I had passed through two stages; the first to compel me to realise the evils that my selfishness had contributed to bringing about, and the second to show me the futility of interesting myself further in the doings of the still living? If so, I was now presumably in the clear and ready to leave earth.

The trouble was, though, that I still had not the faintest idea how to set about it and, apart from having no physical body, I felt as much one of the living as ever.

Poised as I was at the bottom of Whitehall, I found my gaze fixed on Westminster Abbey. It occurred to me then that it might be the portal through which I could receive my release. Whether one believed in the rituals of the Church or not, one could not deny the goodness of Christ, and His original teachings upon which the Church had been founded. Again, such Temples erected in His name had long been hallowed by
the prayers of countless men and women of high principles and upright life. Surely if there were anywhere in which a lost soul like myself could hope to be rested it must be in such a place.

Crossing the square I passed into the twilight depths of the lofty building. As it was the lunch hour the morning services were over and comparatively few sightseers were doing the rounds of the famous monuments. Advancing to the front row of chairs before the high altar, I lowered myself to the level of a kneeling position and began to pray.

For a long time I prayed with all the earnestness I could muster, beseeching forgiveness for the ill that I had done to others, and begging for release. But nothing happened; not even the faintest whisper of counsel to me.

No doubt because I had been roused before four o’clock that morning by Christobel returning home, I felt a great weariness stealing over me. Then I fell into the equivalent of sleep.

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When I woke nothing had changed, except that there were more people making the tour of the ancient edifice. For a time I remained where I was contemplating, a little bitterly I fear, the complete failure of my latest experiment. Apparently, for me at all events, there was nothing to hope for from the Christian God. Later I modified that view a little as it seemed at least possible that He intended me to expiate my sins by remaining for a considerable while longer in Purgatory before He would accept my repentance as sincere.

On that assumption there was a chance that I might hasten matters if I faced the music; so I tried to think of people that I had sinned against with the idea of seeking them out and deliberately harrowing myself by contemplating the injury I had done them.

But in that I came up against a brick wall. Like most people, I had undoubtedly been guilty of many small unkindnesses but they had been of such a minor nature that they had passed out of my mind. I had committed no serious crime and had been cursed neither with a malicious nature nor violent
temper. I had, of course, indulged my natural appetites pretty freely, but I had never considered that to be a sin; as, regarded logically, if the Power that had created man had not intended that he should enjoy himself when he had the chance, by eating, drinking and making merry with the opposite sex, it would not have given him such desires. Search my conscience as I would, therefore, I could find nothing other than my neglect of my family, and having had more than my share of the good things of life while others were starving, with which to reproach myself.

More than ever puzzled at my state, and filled with angry frustration, I left the Abbey. Big Ben showed the time to be half-past five and it was a pleasant sunny afternoon with just a touch of approaching autumn in the air. Once more I was beset by an appalling loneliness, so I made up my mind to seek out a few old friends and see how they were faring.

My first choice was John and Alice Collier. He was my stock-broker, and they lived in a pleasant house up at Hampstead. Instinctively I made for the taxi-rank on the slope up to Westminster Bridge; but I had not covered a dozen yards before I realised that I was incapable of giving the driver directions; so, short of exhausting myself by moving for the best part of two hours at a walking pace, I must go by bus.

When one with the right number came along I impelled myself upwards, passed through a window, and settled on its upper deck. Having let it carry me up to Hampstead, I got off and drifted under my own steam the last half mile to the Colliers’ house.

It was set back a little way from the road in its own garden, and as I went up the path I was cheered quite a lot by the memory of the many jolly evenings I had spent there and the thought of seeing John and Alice again, even though I could not talk to them.

Passing through the front door I crossed the hall to the drawing-room at the back of the house, thinking that the most likely place to find them at this hour on a Sunday. They were not there. Instead a strange couple were in possession. The man, a seedy-looking individual with a walrus moustache and a large paunch, was lying on the sofa; he was in his shirt-sleeves
and wore no collar. The woman was seated close by in an arm-chair, knitting; she was somewhat cleaner, but her wispy grey hair looked as if it could do with a wash.

After my first surprise I realised that, the school term not having yet begun, John and Alice must still be down at Angmering with the children at the bungalow they had taken for the summer; and that these people were caretakers.

Much disappointed I made my way back to the main road and got on a bus that took me to Regent Street. At the last stop before Piccadilly Circus I left it and went up Vigo Street to the back entrance of Albany. It was there I meant to take my next call, and one Laurie Bullingdon, if at home, was to be the unwitting object of my attentions.

Laurie was another very old friend of mine, and one of the finest people I had ever met. While still a young man he had come into a considerable fortune and apart from serving for a few years in the Guards—and of course rejoining for the period of the war—he had never done anything. But no one ever blamed him for that because he was always doing things for other people—including lending them money which he rarely got back.

Apart from the fact that he dressed extremely well, collected beautifully-bound books, and loved to give the friends who went to dine with him the finest wines obtainable, he was not extravagant personally. Those tastes were typical of the man; for he detested this hustling modern world and quite clearly ought to have lived a century and a half ago. It was therefore most fitting that he should live in Albany, that strange enchanting relic of Regency days—probably the first flats ever built in London but still lying hidden and unchanged between Vigo Street and Piccadilly—in which the Bucks and Bloods had held their bachelor revels.

His ‘set’ as the flats are called was a ground-floor one on the right near the Piccadilly end of the covered way. When I came to it I saw him through the filmy curtain of the sitting-room seated at his desk. Having no need to enter by way of the stone-flagged hall I went straight in through the broad window.

The two main rooms of each set are beautifully proportioned and much loftier than those of modern flats; so they lend themselves admirably to housing a collection of books.
There were shelves from floor to ceiling and when I had last been there, some six months before, each wall, with its serried rows of gilt-tooled morocco, vellum and calf bound volumes, had formed a warm, subdued background. Now, much to my surprise, more than half the shelves were empty.

Turning towards Laurie I saw that he was not writing at his desk but simply leaning forward staring with taut expressionless face at some sheets of foolscap that lay upon it. Looking over his shoulder, I took in the grim fact that they conveyed. He had got out a statement of his financial position, and he was insolvent to the tune of several thousand pounds.

One sheet showed his annual commitments. Had these been limited to his personal expenses he would still have been comfortably solvent, but they included many hundreds of pounds in allowances to relatives, and several hundreds more to charities which, presumably, he had been paying for years and had not been able to bring himself to reduce. Income Tax and Super Tax had caught up with him, and now formed a liability more than four times as great as all the others put together.

Poor Laurie. One may say that according to present-day standards he had been reprehensibly unbusiness-like in handling his affairs, that he had been a fool to keep on giving away money for the benefit of the poor when he contributed so much in taxes to their care by the Welfare State, and that when he went to Carey Street the law would undoubtedly call him to account for having piled up debts that he could not pay. Yet he had done the very thing that I had failed to do, and this was his reward.

Sadly I left this simple, kind and generous man to brood unhappily over the plight to which he had reduced himself. More at a loss than ever to comprehend the strange laws by which humans were, presumably, expected to conduct their lives, I went out through the courtyard entrance to Piccadilly.

By this time it was close on eight o’clock, so it seemed probable that by then Johnny would be finishing his paper and shortly be returning to his rooms in Earls Court. I knew that he went up and down from them to his office every day by Underground, so he would have to go out there to collect his suit-case and car if he meant to drive down to Longshot that
night; and I wanted to go with him in order to attend my own inquest in the morning. Accordingly I went to Piccadilly Tube Station, drifted down the moving stair, took a train to Earls Court, and propelled myself round the corner into Nevern Square, where Johnny had his rooms.

Apart from breakfast, which was provided for him by the comfortable body who owned the house, he fed out; so he had only two rooms and a bathroom on the second floor, but they were roomy and comfortable ones. I floated up to his sitting-room and, finding that he was not yet back, settled myself there.

It was past nine when he returned. Going straight to a cupboard he got out a full bottle of whisky and put it in his brief-case. I wondered why in the world he should feel it necessary to take his own drink to Longshot; but that was not his intention. Instead of starting to pack his suit-case he went downstairs out of the house and round the corner to the station. I kept beside him and we got into a west-bound tube. At Hammersmith he got out and I followed him through several streets until we reached an old-fashioned, rather dingy block of flats. There was no lift and he plodded up three flights of stone stairs, then rang a bell beside a door the upper half of which had hideous panels of coloured glass let into it.