The Partridge Kite (13 page)

Within the last fortnight he had finished his final draft of the policy he would introduce as Minister on the control of all organs of public information throughout the British Isles. Every aspect of public statement would be under the direct control of his Ministry, right down to consumer advertising. There would not be a pamphlet, broadsheet or billposter stuck on the wall of an underground station or shop front that would not first be vetted by someone under his control.

He had quoted, in the introduction to his policy statement, a paragraph from Shirer’s
Rise Fall of the Third Reich
on the Nazis’ control of the Press.

‘Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers . . . gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day.’

Mostyn added that the Nazi model was not one that he personally had much time for but the mechanics of control they used must certainly be accorded some respect. Outside the Soviets he could not find another system of censorship that had been so successful.

Goebbels had written in 1933 after the 4 October Reich Press Law that: ‘We must keep out of newspapers anything misleading, which mixes selfish with community aims, weakens the Common Will or offends the Nation’s Culture, Honour or Dignity. Journalism is a public vocation to be regulated by Law.’ Mostyn thought it sensible to follow that Nazi logic to its proper end.

In the conclusion to his policy statement, now in the hands of the Chairman for his final approval, Mostyn had written: ‘If the control of public information is not total, THERE IS
NO
CONTROL whatever. The entire dissemination of news by Press, Radio and Television must be controlled and co-ordinated by a single source. Individual bias, whether it be prompted by commercial, intellectual or political motives, or the whims of editorial mavericks, cannot be tolerated. Our scan must be the widest and our control absolute if the reasons for our new Government are to be accepted and our aims applauded. Even the eventual relaxation of our censorship laws must be carefully regulated, based upon the most expert and cautious advice from our Department of Mass Psychology.’

He, Anthony, Robert, Longville, Mostyn, Darling of the Right, would be final censor. He was certain of success. He had never known any other sensation.

He held Tom’s hand longer than Tom thought necessary. Mostyn’s were large fleshy hands; the fat between the stubby fingers gave them a webbed effect. They moved constantly, touching his collar, waistcoat, tie. They stroked his large stomach. He had offered Tom an outstretched obese pink star.

Tom sat down as invited on a straight-backed wicker chair. Mostyn sank into the deep cushions of the dark blue velvet-covered sofa. The room was small but superbly designed. A feature in
House and Garden
made much of a David Hicks’ protégé who had done it for a £17,000 fee.

‘If the Press is a conspiracy,’ Tom said, ‘then you must be one of our most successful conspirators.’

Mostyn shook on the sofa and showed his small white teeth. Nothing came out except the pull of fresh air in and the push of stale air out. Tom took it to be laughter.

‘I’ve never been given to idolising,’ Mostyn finally said. ‘At least not since I left Ampleforth. But I’ll admit to one hero.’

‘Sir Winston Churchill?’ Tom asked.

‘Good Lord! How on earth did you know that? What a guesser you are!’

‘Churchill was a great conspirator,’ Tom replied, trying to sound as jovial as he could.

Mostyn was the most physically repulsive man he’d ever met. Tom remembered the background details Kellick had given him. Looking at him now, spread wide on the sofa, Tom felt a loathing.

‘Sir Winston,’ said the pouting red lips ‘was the greatest conspirator of our century. He would have outmanoeuvred Machiavelli or Richelieu. But I’ve always believed,’ he went on, ‘that Sir Winston had very little regard for the Press despite his own conspiratorial excesses. Privately, I believe, he thought that the Press should be more involved with the Government in the conspiracy instead of constantly trying to unharness itself. In war I personally believe that the Press’s role of passive co-operation with Government sometimes amounts to treason. I envy the way the Germans once and the Russians now manage to muzzle people like me. Masochism, I suppose you’d call that, Mr McCullin?’

‘I’d always thought,’ said Tom, ‘that Churchill was a great believer in truth.’

‘But truth is fragile - it has to be coddled. To survive it has to be well looked after. Sir Winston once wrote: “Truth is so valuable it has to be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.” That has since become something of a religion with me. Does that amuse you?’

‘No! I don’t find it amusing. Frightening, yes!’

The alternative is even more frightening,’ Mostyn said. His voice became suddenly loud as if he were talking to a thousand Toms. ‘I believe we are close to losing truths we have held dear in this country for over a thousand years. Truths we fought the Church for, executed a King for, sacrificed two generations of men in two frightful World Wars for.’ Mostyn paused. The muscles in his jaw tensed. He looked at Tom as if he expected an answer.

Tom said nothing: there seemed nothing to answer to.

‘My dear boy,’ Mostyn said eventually, ‘I prattle. I talk incessantly. I find it so delightful listening to what I have to say.’ His joke amused him. Again he tried to laugh. It looked painful.

‘But believe me, Mr McCullin, the truths we hold dear to us are under attack, now more than ever before. A programme of infiltration and subversion launched in this country fifteen years ago or more is coming to its climax. It has been relentless and, to my dismay, extraordinarily successful. They have been attacking us with lies, arguing on the shopfloor with lies, persuading on the public platform with lies, governing with lies. Their lies have been told so often and so well that they have become absolute truths to the preachers and the preached.’

‘A bodyguard of lies?’

‘No! Outriders of Communism!’ He smacked the arm of the sofa with his left hand. ‘But, thank God, enough sensible people in this country have come to their senses just in time. Remember the saying that for evil to triumph it takes only good to do nothing? Well, the good men have realised just in time. We are going to do something.’

‘We? Mr Mostyn. . . who are we?’

There was just the slightest flush in the fat man’s cheeks, the dull purple veins in his broad nose touching magenta.

‘The Good Men, of course, Mr McCullin. Faced with Communist domination, wouldn’t you become one of them?’

‘You make it all sound like a plot for a political novel. . . the Good Men against the Wicked Reds.’

‘I’ll not make a convert of you, I think. But maybe you’ll join the ranks when the day arrives.’

‘And when will that be? The day of the full frontal attack, I mean?’

Mostyn didn’t reply immediately. He sat there looking at Tom in an amused sort of way, like a bored hospital visitor sitting at the side of a sick bed smiling long and sweetly at the patient.

‘When is your article to be published, Mr McCullin, and what will you title it? You said something to my secretary about the threat of revolution. Does your editor subscribe to my theory of a Communist takeover?’

‘No, Mr Mostyn. Revolution is certainly what we are writing about, but not from the Left. We shall be examining the possibility in this country of a coup from the Right. And as you’ve been so prompt in replying to my request for an interview and assuming I can get the translation away tonight, it should appear in
Stern
next Monday - the last edition before Christmas.’

The effect was extraordinary. It pleased Tom. The colour drained from Mostyn’s cherub lips, his nose went grey, the noisy gasping for air became a whisper and the hands became still on his lap.

He looked at the tape recorder that Tom had balanced on his right knee throughout the interview, the directional microphone aimed straight at the enormous stomach.

‘I think,’ he said finally, ‘I think you can turn that thing off now. If you please. You must have more than enough of me to write the thousand words for your adoring German public.’

He had stopped being chummy and amusing. His voice had the hard, crisp, tone of his class. He took a gold full- hunter from his waistcoat pocket.

‘It’s four fifteen,’ he said. ‘We’ve been talking exactly one hour. You must not think me ungenerous but I am probably one of the busiest men you’ll ever meet.’ He pressed a small white button on the wall behind his head.

Tom turned off the small Sony and stood up. Mostyn made no move from the sofa. His secretary came in behind Tom and kept the door open. Still Mostyn made no effort to move. The fat pink star remained with the other, lightly clasped on the vast expanse of stomach.

He looked again at his watch. ‘Good day, Mr McCullin,’ he said.

Tom got back to his flat within twenty minutes despite the beginnings of the rush-hour jams along the Strand.

He could have made it much sooner had he not ignored the first five taxis that passed him as he stood outside Mostyn’s Fleet Street office block where the
Express
had once lived. He casually bought both evening newspapers from the stand nearby and scanned them briefly. He then telephoned from the coin box on Shoe Lane and then hailed the next taxi he saw, the sixth. He stayed in his flat for about fifteen minutes only and then walked in the direction of Tottenham Court Road.

He stopped at the windows of a typewriter repair shop, another specialising in Persian carpets, another which sold pre-transistor age radio valves, and the last, selling expensive handmade men’s clothes which, judging by the display in the window, specialised, Tom thought, in thin eunuch dwarfs. He drank whisky in a pub advertising ‘Beer As It Used To Taste’.

He got back to Russell Street an hour and ten minutes later and went straight to the bedroom. On the unmade bed was his Sony, almost hidden by the evening newspapers. He rewound a little of the tape of Mostyn’s interview, and pushed the Play button. There was nothing. He went back on the fast re-wind five minutes into the interview, then pressed the Play again. Still there was nothing. Only the low hiss as the motor turned the two reels.

The Mostyn interview had been erased. It was exactly what Tom had hoped for.

The man turned right into St Martin’s Lane, walking in the direction of Trafalgar Square. It had begun to snow again but he, like so many other Londoners now, had already taken the Christmas card scenes for granted. He walked briskly and could easily have been mistaken for a military man, tall in his neat overcoat and trilby. He was pleased with his evening’s work, happy at the timing that got him away from Tom’s flat in time to make the Christmas carol service at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

His pace quickened, his umbrella dug hard into the caked snow, keeping time with his stride.

In the snowbound house, in the subzero temperatures of the forest, the Chairman walked slowly back to his armchair and the warmth of the open fire. Other than the spot illuminating the symbol of CORDON, the flames gave the only light in the room. Cold drew a fire, he remembered. He leant forward and with a brass poker pushed a burning log deeper into the iron basket.

Three names now ringed in red in the folder. He looked into the fire, into the jumping red and gold mass, and began coughing very softly.

He looked into the flames and saw Berlin. He watched the pine bark crumbling, turning white with the heat, and saw his own Pathfinder Lancaster wheeling in the sky. He watched the sparks from the burning pine spiral up the chimney and saw the tracers and the searchlights seeking out the doomed bombers.

Every night the Lancasters had flown over Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, and a dozen other cities of Nazi Germany.

He had called his own Pathfinder Lancaster the Tied Piper’. It led so many bomber crews to their deaths, just as surely as the Hamelin rats.

He had always been just ahead of the formation until that instant the searchlights found them. Then the Pied Piper would drop its target flares, bank and quickly climb away from the flak that suddenly surrounded the bombers below. They would jump in the sky as their bomb loads were released or disintegrate in explosions of reds and golds and blues.

He would circle above them. Safe and watching. A bird’s-eye view of the destruction business, his sergeant tail gunner had said.

He had kept a log during those years, writing the names of all those who had died. And on the day the war ended he’d totalled them up: 1,438 men had followed the Pied Piper to their death in the night skies over Germany.

Since then he had felt under sentence of death, accessory to so many murders. And he had carried that carefully written logbook with him ever since. As witness.

His reprieve came unexpectedly and in a way that made it, most certainly in his mind, an Act of God.

Eight years ago he had, without any warning, been visited by friends. Friends he had known for more than two generations, from the Royal Air Force, Army, Industry and Politics. And, sipping port, they had urged him out of retirement to lead again: not young airmen to their death, but a nation, as they explained, to salvation.

And in that moment the guilt he had felt as the Pied Piper’s pilot left him. He suddenly realised that the crime was not in leading them but in helping them die for nothing. They had flown their bombers, those nineteen-and twenty- year-old boys, to win a war. The brave new world would have no chance otherwise.

But afterwards he had seen no new, no brave, no better world. The enemies he’d fought became allies, and allies, foes. And he saw the country so many had died to protect begin slowly and systematically to destroy itself.

On that Christmas Eve, exactly eight years ago, the offer had been made and he had accepted. There had been really no choice. And the caucus of CORDON was formed with him as its Chairman.

It had been in front of a fire just like this. He remembered in a moment of exultation how he had held up the logbook and sworn aloud a promise to those names written inside.