The Kings of Eternity (27 page)

“Then put it into your novels, Jonathon,” Vaughan advised. “Guilt is always a good device for generating emotional conflict.”

I suspect his suggestion was meant only half-seriously, but I decided to take his advice. My next few books featured protagonists bowed down with guilty secrets, and for a time the process of writing such novels seemed to work as a catharsis.

It was during one of our weekend walks, while passing through Fairweather Cranley, that I noticed a cottage for sale just off the main street, and decided there and then to buy it. One month later I sold my father’s house in London, which I’d moved into shortly after his death, and for the next few years lived the quiet writer’s life in the country.

The situation was perfect; the countryside was idyllic, Cranley Grange and Charles were nearby, and I could make my weekly pilgrimage to the clearing in Hopton Wood, to which I felt obscurely drawn.

I enjoyed those few years in the village, away from the crowds of London: it seemed appropriate that I should spend my life in the area where my existence had been so radically and inexorably altered.

Then the war came and altered everything. I suppose it seems petty and small-minded to complain of one’s safe and cosy existence being affected by something so cataclysmic as a world war, which devastated the lives of so many. Yet, if I am honest, that was my reaction to the outbreak of hostilities and the realisation that my life would not go on in the simple and satisfying fashion that it had been. I had lived a life of such solitude, untouched by the petty events of the outside world, that news of the war came, first, as a surprise, and then as an inconvenience.

As a supposed intellectual, I was dragooned into the War Office and set to work in the information department. I spent my war years writing propaganda pamphlets for overseas consumption, scripting cheap films with life-enhancing or patriotic content, and editing other writers’ work, all of which I found relatively easy and often interesting. The only disadvantage was that I had by necessity to live in London. I rented a small place in Mayfair, commuted daily to the War Office, and spent my evenings and weekends working on my own novels and short stories: I sequestered myself in a world of my own manufacture, away from the good-time crowds and the greater mass of suffering humanity, which filled me with a disquieting sense of alienation and, if Vaughan was right, also guilt.

Our weekends at Cranley Grange were a thing of the past, put on hold until the safe old pre-war days could be resumed. I saw Vaughan perhaps twice a month; he too was working in London, in some hush-hush department involved in ‘Intelligence’ - a strange description which never really seemed to describe anything. We often met for a drink after office hours in the White Lion in Holborn, and it was there he arranged to meet me one Wednesday evening in the summer of ‘42. He told me that he had just that afternoon heard from Charles.

My immediate thought was that Jasper had established contact again via the blue egg, and I said as much as we sat down with our drinks.

Vaughan shook his head. “If only that were so,” he said. “I would dearly love to know how our friend is faring.”

Vaughan cut a distinguished and patrician figure; although forever fifty, but technically seven years older now, he had the kind of face, well-lined and with a mass of silver hair, that could pass for anything between fifty and seventy. He would be able to play the part for many years to come, without arousing the slightest suspicion.

“You might find this hard to believe, Jonathon, but Charles is being parachuted into Crete at some point in the not too distant future.”

I said something along the lines that he had to be joking - but Vaughan was serious. “He came over to the office today and told me, but it’s supposed to be top secret and all that, so mum’s the word.”

“Just a minute. Charles? Parachuted into Crete?”

The juxtaposed image of Charles the country doctor dangling from the end of a parachute was as surreal as it was absurd.

“Well, why not?” Vaughan said, smiling at my expression. “His Greek is fluent and the resistance movement is in need of medics. He volunteered a year or so ago, passed the medical with flying colours, of course, and will soon be seeing active service.”

“I wonder...” I began.

Vaughan nodded, filling his pipe. “I was wondering the same thing.” He looked around to ensure that we were not being overheard. “Last year I gave myself a nasty gash with the pruning shears, nearly cut off my finger.” He held up the digit in question. “Two days later it was as right as rain.”

“But how well will Charles’ body repair itself if it’s ripped apart by a hail of German bullets?” I said.

We were to find out the answer to this question the following year.

The war dragged on. My novels continued to sell. The reading public perhaps found my stories of small-town and country life, set in the halcyon pre-wars days, something of a comfort, though what the genteel patrons of the lending libraries made of my guilt-ridden protagonists I never found out. By ‘43 I had published twelve novels and a collection of stories, all from Hutchinson, and I was established as a safe, moderately popular author. Sometimes my books were even reviewed, but the praise always seemed to be faint and mildly damning. “Mr Langham paints the scene of village life with considerable skill, though perhaps his paint-box is becoming a little over-used.”

One Friday in September ‘43 I left the office at five and walked home, through a London disrupted by a bombing raid the night before. I had heard that the Curzon on Shaftesbury Avenue had suffered a direct hit, and as that theatre was ever associated in my mind with Carla, it was perhaps natural that I should think of her as I strolled south to Mayfair. I was still visited by guilt that I had never contacted her after my father’s death. Over the years I had meant to drop her a few lines, but like most good intentions this one too fell by the wayside. I sometimes saw her name on the billboards, and I often wondered how she might be faring.

Serendipity must have taken me by the shoulders then and steered me in the direction of the Odeon. I knew that she was starring in a recently released American film, but even so the sight of her, smiling out of a black and white still of the movie beside the cinema entrance, stopped me in my tracks.

I detected signs of ageing in the lines about her eyes, and something turned in my stomach. Carla was thirty-nine now, and wearing her beauty with a sophisticated air of mature glamour. Her dark hair was longer than when I knew her, but swept back to reveal the fine bones of her face.

I hurried on, wondering at the shallow fool I had been.

That evening, Edward Vaughan rang. “Jonathon, what are you doing tonight?”

“Nothing at all. Why?”

“I’ve just heard from Charles.”

My heart surged at the mention of his name, thinking that perhaps Jasper had been in touch. Then I remembered that Vaughan had taken custody of the blue egg and the receiver before Charles had left for Crete.

“He’s back in England?” I asked.

“Arrived last night. He wants to see us as soon as possible. The White Lion at eight.”

“I’ll be there.” I rang off, only then wondering at the ‘as soon as possible’. It sounded urgent.

I arrived fifteen minutes early, bought my usual pint of stout and secured the booth at the back of the bar, which Vaughan and I preferred for both comfort and security.

Vaughan arrived at seven on the dot and joined me with a double brandy. “Did Charles say why he wanted to see us?” I asked.

Vaughan began the ritual of slowly, contemplatively, filling his pipe. “He said no more than that he wanted to see us as soon as possible. But he did sound a little... perhaps agitated is the wrong word, but concerned.”

“Thank God he survived Crete, anyway.”

“Speak of the devil,” Vaughan said, rising and signalling to Charles across the crowded bar.

Our friend pushed through the press and I took his hand. “Good to have you back. You’re looking well.” As indeed he was. Gone was the rather diffident Charles I recalled from the pre-war years. He had even filled out, and his hair had grown back to cover the bald patch high on his forehead. He was tanned, and appeared every inch the part of how I imagined a Greek resistance fighter might look.

Vaughan bought him a pint of bitter and we slipped back into the booth. “You’re looking damned well,” Vaughan said.

Charles stared from one of us to the other. “Very well,” he said, “for a dead man.”

My smile faltered, for I knew what he meant.

“Out with it,” Vaughan said.

Charles was silent for a time, as if gathering his thoughts. “I’ll get to the heart of it,” he said. “There’s a lot I want to tell you, but that can wait. The situation out there, the experiences... What I have to tell you concerns the three of us.” He took a long drink of bitter.

I glanced at Vaughan, my pulse racing.

“I didn’t see much fighting,” Charles said. “I was mainly in the mountains, in a cave we’d set up to treat the wounded. The Germans had complete control of Crete, and all we could do was limit our action to the occasional sortie, sabotage. About three months ago, I was called out to treat a couple of our men too badly injured to be moved. It sometimes happened, and it was usually pretty safe as the fighting had moved on. For some reason, on this particular night we ran into trouble. A gun-carrier full of Germans found us and opened fire... I was hit in the chest.”

He stopped, his eyes wide. His grip on his pint glass was so tight that his knuckles, despite his tan, were white. “I remember feeling the bullets thudding into my chest and thinking that this was it. My God, the fear...”

“But you volunteered,” I said. “You knew the danger.”

He was smiling. “In England, before I volunteered, I performed a few experiments.”

“You told us about the viruses,” I began.

“That was much earlier. These experiments were more... physical. I inflicted on myself increasingly severe injuries, attempting to assess the limit of the serum’s ability to resurrect its host.”

“And?” Vaughan asked.

“Before Crete, I never had the courage to go all the way. I came rather close, but I balked at slitting my wrists and seeing if the serum could heel the wound before I bled to death... However, I felt confident enough not to fear being badly injured when I volunteered. That did not lessen my fear when we were ambushed, and I received a round of bullets in the chest. One of our band of six survived and saw that I was dead, and left me where I was for burial later.”

He shook his head, staring into his glass. “The next thing I remember is opening my eyes and watching the sun rise over the mountains, what must have been six hours later. I felt a pain in my chest, and I couldn’t move, but I certainly didn’t feel like I’d taken an entire round... At noon, half a dozen villagers came to collect the bodies for burial. They were surprised to find me alive - they’d been told that five dead resistance fighters awaited burial, and that meant five dead - no more, no less. The
andartes
, as the resistance are known, always retreat with their injured. By this time, I can only assume that my internal injuries had healed themselves. I still had the entry wounds, but even they were beginning to scab over.”

“Just like Kathan’s injuries, all those years ago,” I said.

“Imagine Spiros’ reaction when he saw me a day later. He was overjoyed, but disbelieving. If he hadn’t been a true communist, he might have considered it a miracle. I kept my shirt fastened and feigned pain. He was never quite the same with me, after that.”

“Physician, heal thyself,” Vaughan murmured.

“So...” Charles concluded. “What happened is reassuring on one hand. We know we can survive usually fatal injuries. But that opens up a new risk I had never even considered.”

Vaughan was nodding. “The danger of discovery.”

Charles smiled, without much humour. “Can you imagine if the authorities got wind of what happened to us? They wouldn’t be happy trying to find out why we’re like this until they had us chopped up and stored in a hundred test tubes.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, to add a note of levity to proceedings, “I always intended to be careful how badly I’m injured.”

I bought another round, and the conversation turned to other topics. I asked my friends if they had any plans for what they might do after the war.

Vaughan took his pipe from his mouth. “I’ve been giving that question some thought,” he said. “It’s so easy to continue as one has been, but there is a whole world out there, boundless possibilities. I must in time give thought to moving on - it’s something that all three of us need to consider.”

Charles nodded. “I think I might survive another ten years in this guise,” he said. “Any longer would be to invite suspicion from one’s acquaintances. My plans for after the war... I don’t know, I might return to India and explore the subcontinent. As to what I might do after that, I haven’t given it much thought, I must admit. Nor exactly how I might go about effecting the change.”

Vaughan pointed at him with the stem of his pipe. “I made contacts in the department,” he said. “People who know people who can arrange these things. Passports, papers. That shouldn’t prove too much of a problem.”

“Have you considered when you might move on?” I asked Vaughan.

“The fortunate thing about being the age I was when I took the serum,” he said, “is that I might quite easily pass for someone in his sixties. It will be some while yet before I move on. I have a few more novels in me yet, ideas and themes I wish to explore.” He looked at me. “And yourself, Jonathon?”

“Immediately after the war, I intend to get out of London and return to Fairweather. Like you, I’ll continue writing for a few more years, and then I might travel. My books so far have all been set in London and the country, with one exception. There’s a lot more out there to write about. I want to experience the new.”

Vaughan smiled. “The universe is so vast,” he said, “and our understanding so small.”

Last orders were called, and we continued the meeting at Vaughan’s Holborn flat, our conversation fuelled by a bottle of excellent brandy. It was almost dawn when we said our farewells and parted, promising to meet regularly before Charles was posted abroad again.