The Light and the Dark (41 page)

From the black avised, he switched to Willy’s own adventures. Here we became inextricably entangled for a long time: it was difficult to pick out exactly where he was lying. His first, as it were official, story was this: he had been called up in the summer of 1939, had gone with an infantry division into Poland, had spent the winter with the army of occupation, had been transferred to the western front in the spring of 1940. His division had been sitting opposite Verdun, and had done no fighting; in the winter, they were moved across Europe again to the eastern front. It was then that Willy “got tired of it”. He had deserted, on the way through Germany, and smuggled himself over the Swiss frontier. Since then he had been living in Basel. “How are you keeping alive?” asked Roy.

“Thanks to friends,” said Willy, turning his eyes aside modestly – but added in a hurry: “I am poor. Will you please help me, Roy?”

Most of those statements were lies. That was quite clear. It was also quite clear that, if he wanted to make a proposition to Roy, he would have to admit they were lies. So we examined him, tripped him up on inconsistencies, just to give him a chance to come down to the real business. Meanwhile I was hoping, in the exchange, to collect a few useful facts.

I ought to say in passing that the results were disappointing. Willy was sharp, quick-witted, acquisitive, but he did not know enough. All he could have told us, even if he had had the will, was the day-to-day gossip of Berlin and the personal facts he had observed. Roy made some deductions from the gossip which proved more right than wrong: I missed the significance of something Willy let fall. He said that the draughtsman at No. 32 had not been able to find a job for months. I ought to have pounced on that remark, but I was just obtuse: it seemed incredible then that their administration should be fundamentally, for all its streamlined finish, less sensible, less directed, less businesslike than ours.

We drank a good deal before and during dinner. We hoped to get him drunk, for we were both, of course, accustomed to wine. But he turned out to have, despite his youth, an abnormally strong head. Roy said to me in English, over dinner: “We shall be dished, old boy – if he sees us under the table.”

However, after dinner Willy made some pointed hints that I should leave him and Roy alone. I did not budge. Willy pouted. He might be acquiring great gentility, I thought, but he still had some way to go. His patience was not lasting – all of a sudden he began commiserating with Roy on the dangers of life in England. “You too will be destroyed. It is stupid to stay in England. Why do you not come to Germany? It can be arranged. We will have everything nice for you.”

So that was it. I glanced at Roy. It was certain now that he would get more from Willy if I went away. He nodded. I made an excuse. “Don’t be too late,” said Roy. “He won’t have gone when you come back.” Willy regarded me with an absence of warmth.

I sat at a café in the Petergraben, not far away. The night was warm enough for all the windows to be open; lusty young men and girls went by on the narrow pavement. It was all cosy, cheerful, jolly with bodily life. It was different from anything we should know for long enough.

I bought a paper, ordered a large glass of beer, and thought about this affair of Willy Romantowski. It was grotesque. I was not worrying; I had faith that Roy would behave like the rest of us. Yet it was grotesque. Who had suggested it? What lay behind it? Maybe the motives were quite commonplace. In the middle of bizarre events, it was hard to remember that they might be simply explained. Yet I doubted whether we should ever know the complete truth behind Willy’s invitation.

I was sure of one minor point – that Willy himself was a singularly unheroic character. He was terrified of the war and determined to avoid it. It seemed to me distinctly possible that he had volunteered to fetch Roy in order to establish a claim on a good safe job back in Berlin. I remembered Roy’s judgment on how gallant these epicene young men would be: this was a joke against him.

I returned to the Spalenbrunnen. From outside, I could see Roy and Willy still sitting at the dinner-table. When I joined them, I noticed with a shock that Willy was in tears.

“Nearly finished, Lewis,” said Roy to me. “I’ve been telling Willy that I can’t go back with him. I’ve asked him to tell my friends that I love them. And that I love Germany.”

“I only came for your good,” said Willy, full of resentment, plaintiveness and guilt.

“You must not pretend, Willy,” said Roy gently. “It is not so.”

Willy gulped with distress – perhaps through disappointment at not bringing off his coup, perhaps through a stab of feeling. He shook hands with Roy: then, though he hated me to perdition, he remembered his manners and shook hands with me. Without another word, he went out of the room.

“Very remarkable,” said Roy. He looked tired and pale.

I took him out of the smoky room, and we sauntered along the street. Roy had packed a black hat for the journey, and he pulled it down low over his forehead. The lights were uneven in the gothic lanes, and his face was shadowed, a little sinister. I laughed at him. “Special hat,” he said. Whatever else left him, the mockery stayed. “Suitable for spying. I chose it on purpose.”

He was now certain that the first move had come from Schäder, though Willy did not have much idea. Someone from the “government” (no doubt an official in Schäder’s ministry) had gone to the Knesebeckstrasse to discover whether anyone knew Roy. Willy had been there, and had been only too anxious to please.

That was intelligible. But why had he been despatched to Basel, long before they had the slightest indication that Roy would come? That was one of the puzzling features of the whole story. Roy brought out the theory that Willy was given other work to do in Switzerland. This was only one of his jobs. He was the kind of low-grade agent that the Germans used for their petty enquiries, and no doubt other governments as well. He had a nose for private facts, particularly when they were unpleasant. Probably he mixed pleasure with business, and put in a little blackmail on the side.

But Roy had not been able to make him confess. It was no more than a guess. About the connection with Schäder, however (whom Willy had hardly heard of, any more than a bright cockney of the same class would have heard of a junior cabinet minister), Roy was able to convince me. For Willy had produced, parrot-like, several messages which he could not possibly have invented. The most entertaining ran thus: a few days before the war began, the university had resolved that Roy’s work during his stay in Berlin “had been of such eminence as to justify the title of visiting professor, and this title could properly be bestowed upon him, if he did similar work at a later period.” That is, the opposition had stone-walled until they got a compromise which must have irritated everybody. It was a piece of stately academic mummery, and we stood by the gold-painted fountain at the corner roaring with laughter.

Why had Schäder taken this trouble to lure Roy? It was true that Roy knew things that would be of use – but how had they discovered that? was it in any case sufficient reason? I suggested that it might be, in part, friendly concern.

“They must be absolutely confident that they’ve got it won,” I said. “It must be easy to sit back and do a good turn for a friend.”

“I wonder if they are so confident,” said Roy. “I bet they still think sometimes of defeat and death.”

He knew them so much better than I did. He went on: “Reinhold Schäder is a bit like you, old boy. But he’s very different when it comes to the point. He’s a public man. He never forgets it. He might think of doing something disinterested. Such as fetching me out for the good of my health. But he wouldn’t do it. Unless he could see a move ahead. No, they must think I could be some use. It’s very nice of them, isn’t it?”

Then there was the final puzzle. Schäder, or his subordinates, must have thought it out. Roy said that there were complete arrangements for passing him into Germany. How likely had they reckoned the chance of getting him? Did Schäder really think that Roy would go over?

Roy shook his head.

“Too difficult,” he said.

Then he said simply: “Did you think I should go?”

I replied, just as directly: “Not this time.”

“You came to watch over me, of course,” said Roy, not as a question, but as a matter of fact.

“Yes.”

“You needn’t have done,” said Roy. His tone was casual, even, sad, as though he were speaking with great certainty from the depth of self-knowledge. It was a tone that I was used to hearing, more and more. Suddenly it was broken humour. “If I’d wanted to go, what would you have done, old boy? What could you have done? I wish you’d tell me. It interests me, you know.”

I would not play that game. We walked silently out by the old town gate, and Roy said, again in that even tone which seemed to hold all he had learned of life: “It wouldn’t be easy to be a traitor.”

He added: “One would need to believe in a cause – right to the end. If our country went to war with Russia – would our communist friends find it easy to be traitors?”

I considered for a second.

“Some of them,” I said, “would be terribly torn.”

“Just so,” said Roy. He went on: “I may be old-fashioned. But I couldn’t manage it.”

So we walked through the old streets of Basel, talking about political motives, the way our friends would act, the future so far as we could see it. Roy said that he had never quite been able to accept the Reich. It was a feeble simulacrum of his search for God. Yet he knew what it was like to believe in such a cause. “If they had been just a little different, they would have been the last hope.” I said that was unrealistic: by the nature of things, they could not have been different. But he turned on me: “It’s as realistic as what you hope for. Even if they lose, the future isn’t going the way you think. Lewis, this is where your imagination doesn’t seem to work. But you’ll live to see it. It will be dreadful.”

He spoke with extreme conviction, almost as though he had the gift of foresight. In all our lives together, it was the one subject on which we had deeply disagreed. Yet he spoke as though he were reading the future.

We turned back, each of us heavy with his thoughts. Then Roy said: “I used to be sorry that I hurt you. When I tried to fall in on the opposite side.”

Between the gabled houses, the shadows were dramatic; Roy’s face was pale, brilliantly lit on one cheek, the features unnaturally sharp.

“I was clutching at anything, of course,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It was my last grab.” He smiled. “It left me with nothing, didn’t it? Or with myself.”

The clocks struck from all round us. He said lightly: “I’m keeping you up. I mustn’t. High officials need to become respectable. It’s time you did, you know. Part of your duties.”

Shortly after we returned from Basel, Roy’s department was moved out of London, and I did not see him for some months. But I heard of him – just once, but in a whisper that one believes as soon as one hears, one seems to have known it before. I heard of him in a committee meeting: it was Houston Eggar who told me, in a moment’s pause between two items on the agenda.

We used to meet in the Old Treasury, in a room which overlooked Whitehall itself, just to the north of Downing Street. It was a committee at under-secretary level, which was set up to share out various kinds of supplies; there were several different claimants – Greece, when she was still in the war, partisan groups which were just springing up by the end of the summer of 1941, when this meeting took place, and neutrals such as Turkey.

The committee behaved (as I often thought, with frantic irritation or human pleasure, according to the news or my own inner weather) remarkably like a college meeting. Each of the members was representing a ministry, and so was speaking to instructions. Sometimes he was at one with his instructions, and so expressed them with energy and weight; Houston Eggar, for instance, could nearly always feel as the Foreign Office felt. Sometimes a member did not like them; sometimes a strong character was etching out a line for himself, and one saw policy shaped under one’s eyes by a series of small decisions. (In fact, it was rare for policy to be clearly thought out, though some romantics or worshippers of “great men” liked to think so. Usually it built itself from a thousand small arrangements, ideas, compromises, bits of give-and-take. There was not much which was decisively changed by a human will. Just as a plan for a military campaign does not spring fully-grown from some master general; it arises from a sort of Brownian movement of colonels and majors and captains, and the most the general can do is rationalise it afterwards.) Sometimes one of the committee was over-anxious to ingratiate himself or was completely distracted by some private grief.

As in a college meeting, the reasons given were not always close to the true reasons. As in a college meeting, there was a public language – much of which was common to both. That minatory phrase “in his own best interests” floated only too sonorously round Whitehall. The standard of competence and relevance was much higher than in a college meeting, the standard of luxurious untrammelled personality perceptibly lower. Like most visitors from outside, I had formed a marked respect for the administrative class of the civil service. I had lived among various kinds of able men, but I thought that, as a group, these were distinctly the ablest. And they loved their own kind of power.

Houston Eggar loved his own kind of power. He loved to think that a note signed by him affected thousands of people. He loved to speak in the name of the Foreign Office: “my department”, said Houston Eggar with possessive gusto. It was all inseparable as flesh and blood from his passion for getting on, his appetite for success – which, as it happened, still did not look certain to be gratified. It had become a race with the end of the war. He was forty-eight in 1941, and unless the war ended in five or six years he stood no chance of becoming an ambassador. However, he was a man who got much pleasure from small prizes; his CMG had come through in the last honours list, which encouraged him; he plunged into the committee that afternoon, put forward his argument with his usual earnestness and vigour, and thoroughly enjoyed himself.