Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (62 page)

'So how did you escape?' I asked, just to please him.

'I was lucky. Like your father. Like any survivor of any war. They took me in a launch to the Hotel Atlantico in the port of Vigo, and there I was interrogated by two SS officers.'—'It's always hotels they choose to convert into police stations or prisons,' I thought, 'like the one in Alcala de Henares where they tortured Nin and possibly flayed him alive.'—'In 1935, I had spent part of the summer in Bavaria, at a Hitler Youth camp, for, shall we say, biographical reasons that are irrelevant here. When they found out and checked that I was telling the truth, they invited me out to supper with them. That saved my life. They consulted the Nationalist headquarters in Burgos and, as I understand it, Franco himself gave the order not to have me killed but simply to expel me. After a few minor hitches getting hold of an exit permit, I was taken to the international bridge at Tui where I crossed into Portugal. That was the slowest stretch of my journey, I mean the longest walk of my life, on foot and carrying a suitcase full of books. Two German machine-gunners had their guns trained on my back so that I didn't deviate from the path and ahead of me stood some armed Portuguese guards. And beneath me lay the River Mino. It seemed very wide, and perhaps it was. So, as you see, however disastrous Franco proved to be for the history of your country and for many, many people, he played a crucial role in my personal history. A paradox, eh?

And rather an unfortunate one for me, I must admit. Owing one's life to the clemency of someone who showed clemency to almost no one else is oddly unflattering. Being an ignorant provincial, he was, I suppose, impressed by educated foreigners like me.' He laughed briefly at his own mildly malicious remark, and I laughed too out of politeness. Then he went on. 'As I told you before, I merely passed through your War: I still use words precisely. I didn't stay there long on either occasion, and there would be no reason for either of my names to appear in the index of any of the books written about the conflict. What I did there is hardly worth telling and seems almost ridiculous now. As would my subsequent activities during our War, although some of the things I did were more spectacular or more damaging and, objectively speaking, more important. Toby was quite right when he told you years ago that in times of relative peace, wartime events seem puerile and, inevitably, resemble lies, conceits and fabulations. As I think I've mentioned before, even things I've experienced myself seem fictitious or almost fanciful. I find it hard to believe, for example, that I acted as custodian, companion, escort and even sword of Damocles to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the summer of 1940. That was one of my first "special employments" to adapt the term used in my
Who's Who
entry, if you remember. It seems like a dream now. And the fact that it happened abroad doubtless contributes to that feeling.'

I remembered the expression clearly, as I did every word I had read, urged on by Wheeler, in his entry in
Who's Who.
And I understood that dream-like feeling too: 'But that was in another country . . .'

'The Duke and Duchess of Windsor?' I asked. 'Do you mean the former King, Edward VIII, and the divorced woman he abdicated the throne for, that ugly American, Wallis Simpson?' Like almost everyone else, I had read about the couple who were, supposedly, deeply in love, and seen photos of both of them in magazines and books. She, if I remember rightly, was extremely thin, had a hairstyle like that of the housekeeper in Hitchcock's
Rebecca
and very thin red lips, like a scar. The exact opposite of Jayne Mansfield. 'And what do you mean: sword of Damocles?'

'Oh, she wasn't that ugly' Wheeler said. 'Well, she was, but there was something troubling about her too.' He hesitated for an instant. 'I suppose I can tell you about it; it was a very harmless mission.' The word he used in English—'harmless'—means literally '
sin
perjuicio'
or
'sin daño'
'without harm or hurt.' 'Although it, too, sounds like a lie. I was charged with escorting them from Madrid to Lisbon, and, once there, to make sure that they embarked for the Bahamas. You may remember that he spent the War years there, as Governor of those islands—-it was a way of keeping them far from the conflict, as far away as decorum allowed. Both of them had been through an embarrassing, shall we say, Germanophile stage, and had, it was rumored, visited Hitler incognito, before 1939 of course. There was no basis to the rumor, but the government feared like the plague the possibility that they might fall into the hands of the Nazis, that the Gestapo might kidnap them and take them to Germany, of course, but also that they might desert. That they might, in a word, go over to the other side. Churchill didn't trust them at all, and didn't dismiss the idea that if, one day, the Germans invaded us as they had the rest of Europe, the Germans would reinstate the former Edward VIII as a puppet king. Anyway, I and a naval officer from the NID (a very small escort, when I think about it, unimaginable now)'—I knew those initials, the Naval Intelligence Division—'were given a pistol each and told, albeit not in so many words, that we should make use of them if there was the slightest risk of losing the Duke and Duchess in unfortunate circumstances, and regardless of the couple's own wishes.'

'Use them against the Duke and Duchess?' I asked, interrupting him. Against an ex-King? Or against the Gestapo?' The whole business really did sound like a lie, although it obviously wasn't.

'It went without saying that we should use them against the Gestapo, although I don't think we would have stood much of a chance. No, we understood that we should use those pistols against the Duke and Duchess. Better dead than in Hitler's hands.'

'We understood? Not in so many words?' I was surprised by such expressions. 'Do you mean that they didn't give you clear orders?'

'MI6 was obsessed with never saying quite what it meant. But you soon learned to decode their orders, especially if you'd been at Oxford. I don't know if they still keep up the custom now. What they said to us, more or less, was: "Under no circumstances must they fall into enemy hands. It would be preferable to have to mourn them." The truth is that I would have interpreted this exactly as did he and the officer from the NID with whom he had shared responsibilities. And he went on to speak about the latter in an amused, almost jocular, gossipy tone: 'I bet you can't guess the name of the naval commander accompanying me.'

'No, I can't,' I said. 'How could I?'

'In fact, almost no one knows about this, not even his biographers.' Then he called out: 'Estelle!'And he automatically corrected himself: there was, after all, a witness present, even though I was a trusted friend and had occasionally heard him call her by her first name before. 'Mrs. Berry!' Mrs. Berry appeared at once, she was always close by, ready to be of service to him. 'Could you please bring me the Chocolate Sailor's passport? You know where I keep it. I want to show it to Jacobo.' That was what he said—'Chocolate Sailor.' 'Now you'll see, it will amuse you no end.' And when, after a few minutes, Mrs. Berry reappeared and handed him a document (I heard her go up the stairs to the top floor and then come back down again), he showed it to me with an almost childlike expression of shy pride on his face: 'Look.'

It was a safe-conduct pass or Courier's Passport as it said at the top, issued by the British ambassador in the city where I was born and valid only for a journey to Gibraltar and back, dated February 16,1941, right in the middle of the Second World War, and then renewed ten days later and made valid for a journey to London via Lisbon. 'These are to request and require, in the Name of His Majesty,' it read, 'all those whom it may concern to allow Mr. Ian Lancaster Fleming
charged with despatches
to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford him every assistance and protection of which he may stand in need.'

'Oh, I see,' I said, unmoved. 'Ian Fleming.' Wheeler seemed a little disappointed by my lack of surprise. He didn't know that I had already stumbled on the dedications that the creator of James Bond had written in copies of his novels (
To
Peter Wheeler who may know better. Salud!),
which was why the fact that they were friends or acquaintances did not catch me entirely unawares. 'So they shared an adventure,' I thought, then said, in order to cheer him up: 'So the two of you shared an adventure in Spain, before he became a writer. How amazing.'

'This passport is from the following year. He gave it to me later on, when he was already famous, as a souvenir of our time in Portugal more than of our time in Spain. We were stuck there with that frivolous pair from June to August. Mrs. Simpson, I mean the Duchess, was not prepared to go into exile, which is how they saw it, without her wardrobe, her table linen, her royal bedlinen, her silver and her porcelain dinner service, all of which was supposed to arrive from Paris, via Madrid, in eight Hispano-Suizas hired by the multimillionaire Calouste Gulbenkian, a risky journey in those days. (Oddly enough, that was the same year in which Gulbenkian, who was Armenian in origin, was declared "Enemy under the Act" and thus lost his British nationality and became Persian instead; so when he helped the Duke and Duchess, I don't know if he was still a friend or an enemy.) Anyway, we had to wait in Estoril and accompany them each night to the casino, either Ian Fleming or myself or, more often, to be on the safe side, both of us. It's hardly surprising that there are so many casinos in the Bond novels: since the 1920s he had been a frequent visitor to the casinos in Deauville, Le Touquet, and later Biarritz; he loved to play, especially baccarat, which was a real stroke of luck because it meant the Duchess was kept entertained when he was around. (He never won very much and even lost, he was a fairly conservative player, placing low bets, not like the fictional character he created.) As for the Duke, at least he was a reasonable conversationalist. We had a somewhat bland but cordial relationship: he had studied here, at Magdalen, and so when I couldn't think how else to entertain him, I could always resort to telling him the latest Oxford gossip. He would listen in amazement, and with a touch of possibly feigned innocence, especially to news of any sexual shenanigans. But he didn't know how to laugh. A dull man and possibly not very bright, but worldly in a pleasant way and, of course, with impeccable manners: after all, there's no denying that he came from a good family.' And Peter laughed again at his little joke. 'Finally, we managed to send the royal couple off safe and sound, along with all the silver and porcelain and bedlinen, in a British destroyer that had been anchored in the Tagus, and it was with great relief that we saw them head off across the Atlantic, bound for the Bahamas. We parted company then, Ian Fleming and I, and didn't meet again until some time later. He was a personal assistant to Rear Admiral Godfrey and had a lot of contact with Hillgarth and with Sefton Delmer, I think he and the latter had been together in Moscow and they collaborated on the PWE's black game . . .'—'Black game,' he said. I had heard young Pérez Nuix use the term 'black gamblers' once, or was it 'wet gamblers'; it had made me think of cardsharps anyway. I didn't know what those initials, PWE, meant, but I didn't want to interrupt Wheeler.—'We lost track of each other, well, that was normal during the War, we were sent here, there and everywhere, wherever they chose to post us, and you always said goodbye to someone knowing full well that you probably wouldn't see them again. Not because it simply wouldn't happen, but because they or you or both of you might easily die. It happened every time I had to leave and say goodbye to Valerie . . . Every time . . .' His voice had been growing fainter and fainter until, when he spoke those last words, his voice was barely a murmur; he had probably worn himself out with speaking. He did not go on. He placed his two arms on the stick that lay across the arms of the chair, as if he had just engaged in some physical exertion and needed to rest. He looked tired, I thought, and his gaze was slightly abstracted. 'Yes, Sefton Delmer's black propaganda, that's what it was,' he added thoughtfully, then fell silent again. Perhaps he had remembered too much, mechanically at first and with great animation subsequently, but all memories lead to more memories and there is always a moment, sooner or later, when one comes upon a sad one, a loss, a nostalgia, an unhappiness that was not an invention. People then sit with eyes lowered or gaze abstracted and stop talking, fall silent.

'I don't know who Sefton Delmer was, Peter,' I said. 'Nor what PWE means.'

He raised his eyes and fixed them on me, wearily and with a certain bewilderment too. He said:

'Why are we talking about this? I don't know how it came up, I've forgotten.' The truth was I had forgotten too. 'Why don't
you
tell me something? You must have a reason for coming here today, without warning. I'm delighted to see you, but tell me, why
have
you come today?'