3

“A writer?” the chauffeur said. He had stopped the car in the middle of the drive. “A book writer?”

“Yes,” Benson said. “You know the kind of thing. Hard covers, pages bound together in consecutive order.” The flippancy concealed a certain nervousness: he had not much liked this showy halt. Hitherto, he felt, although he had been too talkative, they had both played their parts well: the chauffeur competent and reliable in his dark blue livery; he himself the urbane guest, dressed for the occasion in his old but well-cut grey flannel suit and pale green tie. But on this, the very last leg of the journey from the station, having passed from the main road on to a quiet lane then through imposing stone portals on to this smooth, bush-bordered drive, the chauffeur had suddenly put the brakes on, turned massive shoulders, presented, below the peak of his cap, a broad pale face with excitable eyes.

“I been wanting to meet one,” he said.

“Well, I hope you’re not going to make me get out and walk?”

But the chauffeur was too much in earnest for sallies of this kind. His stare had taken on a quality of strained significance. “For years,” he said. “We could do each other a bit of good.”

“How do you mean?”

My own fault, he thought. Entirely. Blabbermouth Benson. I should have known better. If one is being conducted to see a wartime associate after forty years and if that associate has prospered in the interval to the extent of sending a Rolls with a chauffeur called Meredith to meet one, then one behaves in a way appropriate, one does not get confidential, especially since one is not a book writer at all actually, nor any other kind, but more of a stationary mollusc, a silence-encrusted barnacle …

“I’ve had an interesting life,” Meredith said. “I’ve had a fascinating life. I don’t tell this to everyone but I was John Lennon’s bodyguard. I went everywhere with him.”

In the capacious, light-filtered, leather-redolent interior of the car the two of them regarded each other at a distance of six feet or so. “We grew up together,” Meredith said tenderly. “We lived on the same street. We went to the same school. That’s when it started. I used to protect him in the playground. People used to pick on him. Well, anybody could see he was different.”

Bordering them on either side was the dense green of shrubbery. Deeper in he glimpsed a dark red mist of rhododendron flowers. Through the open window there came a brief, desultory cadence of birdsong from somewhere in the grounds. Curving away from them the smooth, sunlit drive led to where the house would be, concealed from sight still by laurel bushes and close-growing trees.

“I been in some rough places since, but that was the roughest place you’d want to see. I seen blood flow in the toilets of that school. I was with him the night he was killed.” Meredith was thick-necked and heavy and in his present position, half-turned towards Benson, the tunic of his uniform visibly constricted him. His face had taken on a staring, congested look, as if swollen with drama. “I tried to interpose myself,” he said, “but I was too late. Eyewitness, see what I mean? I haven’t had much of an education. Except in the school of life. That’s where you could come in, Mr Benson.”

“I really think we should be pressing on,” Benson said. “They are expecting me, you know.”

“I was with him when he went to see Malcolm X.” Meredith spoke with increased intensity, as if Benson had expressed some disbelief. “I know the inside story. We could make a bomb.”

“Perhaps we can discuss this matter later, on the way back?”

“You got yourself a deal.”

Meredith slowly turned to face his front again. To Benson’s relief the car started to move forward. “I met them all,” Meredith said, looking at Benson in his driving mirror. “All the stars.”

The car swept round a long curve in the drive, came into view of the house, above them on a slight eminence, parkland sloping before it, fields behind rising to a wooded skyline. As they approached Benson took in the long façade, the elegant symmetry of the inward-curving wings, the graceful proportions of the windows. It was the house in the photograph but instead of Hugo Slater, Officer I/C Entertainments, Merchant Banker, standing smiling on the wide terrace at the top of the steps, two women, one in sunglasses, were sitting at a white table with cups and saucers before them.

It was a very public arrival. The car drew up at the foot of the steps. Meredith went through his series of chauffeur’s actions with impeccable style, moving round sedately to open his passenger’s door, even actually saluting, overplaying the liveried retainer – or so it seemed to Benson, who now started mounting to the terrace, injecting as much spring into his step as possible. “Clive Benson,” he said, advancing to shake hands.

The woman in the sunglasses made a vague, rather feverish gesture before holding out her hand to him. The white sleeve of her dress fell away from a frail wrist. “I’m Sylvia Slater,” she said. “Hugo is about somewhere.”

“How do you do?” Benson had a sense of large, languid eyes behind the sunglasses. This was the woman in the photograph, but strangely different, seeming now in disguise somehow, the dark glasses and the screen of hair over the brow making it difficult to get any general sense of her face. With another febrile movement of the arm she indicated the other woman, who was fair-haired and much younger and very good looking. “This is Erika Belmont,” she said. “Athelstan’s consort.”

Some faint edge of antagonism in this caught Benson’s attention but he was too much baffled by the reference to think much about it. Could that be her husband’s name? She had a Scandinavian look about her. No wedding ring … “Oh, yes?” he said, playing for time.

“Do sit down,” Mrs Slater said. “Perhaps you’d like some coffee? Mr Benson is a journalist,” she said to the younger woman. “He is going to write all about us. If you want some good publicity, darling, you’d better be nice to him.”

Erika displayed splendid teeth in a laughing look up at him but said nothing. Still further confused, Benson took the offered place at the table and accepted a cup of coffee, which turned out to be only lukewarm. He was sitting with his back to the long slope of the grounds. Before him was an open french window, a section of carved balustrade and then the central pediment of the house, the points of the triangle marked out with stone balls. Present bewilderment, the unnerving effect of his conversation with Meredith, his sense of being there to some extent on false pretences, all combined now to make Benson feel distinctly uneasy; and uneasiness, as usual, set him talking. “You have a beautiful house here,” he said. “Late eighteenth-century, isn’t it? That was a good period for domestic architecture, almost everything they built then seems to have this quality of, I don’t know, grace I suppose, nothing showy about it, nothing florid. Built on the proceeds of the slave trade of course, like all the big houses of that time round here.”

“The present house was built in the 1770s,” Mrs Slater said after a short pause, “for a Liverpool merchant named Biggs, Sir William Biggs.”

“That’s what I mean,” Benson said. “A hundred to one he made his money out of the African trade.”

There was another, more prolonged pause. Then Mrs Slater said, “Parts of it are Tudor. I don’t quite get the connection, Mr Benson. Perhaps you don’t intend one. Your mind seems to be running along a track of its own, if I may say so. I’m glad you like the house, but it doesn’t seem to me to have anything much to do with the slave trade. The people who designed and built it weren’t slavers. I think myself it’s better there should be big houses and small ones rather than everyone living in the same type of house and having the same type of mind, which is what some people would want for us, I hope not you. I’m sure I’d feel the same if I lived in a two-up, two-down. And if we waited for untainted money before building we’d all be living in caves.”

“That is certainly true.” Benson looked at her with respect. He had seldom heard the argument for privilege put better. “I wasn’t really intending any connection,” he said. He smiled at her, putting as much into it as he could. “Age has made me uncouth.”

“You were with my husband in the war, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Benson said. “During the Italian campaign, in the spring of ’44. He was our platoon commander.”

“And now,” Erika said, “after all these years, you battle-scarred veterans meet at another battle. I think it is so romantic.” She turned her brilliant smile to Benson. “Old soldiers never die,” she said.

Not knowing for the moment what to say to this Benson merely smiled back. There was a curious headlessness about Erika, as if she felt she could say anything. Or perhaps it was simply youth and health. “Young ones quite frequently do,” he said.

Mrs Slater allowed another rather long pause to elapse, during which she regarded Erika steadily through her dark glasses. The effect was belittling – it seemed to Benson intentionally so – but Erika looked quite unabashed. He wished now that he had asked for whisky.

“Erika is very romantic,” Mrs Slater said at last. “Aren’t you, love? Next Sunday is the big day, of course,” she added, turning to Benson. “A week tomorrow. Hugo has a hundred and one things to see to. That is why he isn’t here to greet you.”

“No, don’t you remember?” Erika said. “The children are here. He is rehearsing with the children.”

“I quite understand,” said Benson, who didn’t at all.

“It would be a pity to distract him,” Erika said. “We should not distract a man from work that is dear to his heart.” She raised her head and threw back her long blonde hair with both hands in an exuberant gesture that raised her vigorous breasts and made prominent her forearms, thickish but shapely, with glinting golden hairs. It came to Benson that she probably took quite a bit of exercise. From somewhere behind the house he heard a series of sharp, mewing cries, like a gull’s or hawk’s.

“A man has his work,” Erika said. “I can’t think anything of a man who does not take his work seriously, can you, Mr Benson?”

“Er, no.” Benson felt Mrs Slater’s eyes on him. “Well, perhaps a tax inspector,” he said. “The same thing applies to women, doesn’t it?”

“I can’t think even that much of him.” Erika snapped her fingers scornfully.

“You don’t want Hugo to be distracted at this point,” Mrs Slater said. “You don’t want to distract a man who is preparing the stage for you. That’s only common sense, darling.”

The words, though spoken with no particular emphasis, brought the shadow of wrong and recrimination to this sunlit terrace. Erika raised a mirthful face, as if the other woman had made a joke, but she said nothing. After a moment or two Mrs Slater stood up rather abruptly. “I think I’ll go and rest for a while before lunch,” she said. She looked at Benson. “We have lunch rather late at the weekend,” she said. “Around two. I hope that suits you?”

“That’s fine.”

“I’m sure Hugo will be along soon. Perhaps you’d like a drink now?”

“I’d like a Scotch,” Benson said. The alacrity of this reply brought a slight smile to her face, the first he had seen since his arrival.

“Very wise,” she said. “Exactly what is needed for dealing with Hugo in the production phase. Or any other phase for that matter. Soda? Ice?”

“Nothing, thank you.”

“I’ll have it brought out to you here.” She smiled again, without glancing at Erika, then walked slowly across the terrace to the open french window and disappeared into the house.

“It must have been great fun, having Hugo as your officer,” Erika said, after a moment. “He is so inspiring, so dynamic.”

Briefly into Benson’s mind there came the picture of Slater as he had last seen him, cap, stick, summer-issue shirt neatly pressed, clean white pips on the epaulettes; vision of neatness and correctness in that long room of bandaged shapes, distraught cries of dreamers, smells of disinfectant and suppuration. “Yes,” he said, “enormous fun.”

“And to think,” Erika said dreamily, “that your paths have crossed again after all these years.”

A middle-aged woman in a dark dress came on to the terrace with a tray bearing Benson’s drink. It was a very large Scotch indeed. As she set it before him there came a sudden blast of choral music from some upper room of the house.

Erika grimaced. “That Verdi man again,” she said. “She never gets tired of him.”

Listening, Benson thought he recognised the Dies irae chorus from the Requiem. “Well, cheers,” he said. He took a long drink from his glass.

“Hugo drinks very little,” Erika said. “He is a dedicated man. Look at him now, how he makes himself responsible for everything. And yet just like a little boy in some ways.”

She was looking beyond Benson as she spoke, towards the open parkland below the house. For a moment or two, as she raised her head, smiling with the womanly indulgence of her twenty years or so, Benson allowed his gaze to linger on her smooth throat, in which the words seemed to throb for a while after she had stopped talking. Then the import of the words themselves came to him: Slater must be down there, somewhere in sight. He shifted his chair round sharply. It was the first time he had been able to look out over the grounds; there had been the flurry of arrival, the introductions, the accident of his place at the table …

“Where is he?” he said rather wildly, dazed for a moment by the extensiveness of the view. “Is that him? Is that a marquee?”

Beyond the balustrade and the steps and the gravelled forecourt where Meredith had deposited him, lawns sloped away, shading barely perceptibly into meadowland, rising again in the distance to low hills. The downward slope was cunningly landscaped, dotted at intervals with small coppices of oak. Where the ground levelled, a gleaming lake, nakedly artificial, lay like a blade on a green cloth. Beyond this, half-hidden among the trees, was a summerhouse painted in red and gilt, with a roof like a Chinese pagoda. The whole vista was a dream of ordered and controlled rurality; but to the right of the lake, shattering the illusion, was a very large blue marquee, with the figures of three men standing in a group close to it.

“Is one of those men Hugo?” he said.

“Can’t you pick him out?” Erika seemed surprised and somewhat offended.

Benson was visited suddenly by a feeling of dislike for the young woman beside him and a corresponding wave of sympathy for the older one, the wife, who for all her acerbity had been obliged to yield the ground. “How should I pick him out?” he said. “By his air of natural command?” He finished the whisky in a single draught. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, controlling the effects of this, “I think I’ll walk over and see him. I know a man should not be distracted and so on, but time is passing.”

Going down the steps he felt dizzy and it occurred to him that his haste with the whisky might have been injudicious – he had had no time for breakfast that morning; but he made his way at a steady pace over the lawns and as he proceeded he felt better again. He saw the little group break up: one man went round the side of the marquee and Benson saw him a few minutes later near the lake with a wheelbarrow; it seemed unlikely that he would be Slater. The two others had not noticed his approach; they talked for some moments longer, then passed inside the marquee through a square opening in the front.

Approaching the entrance he was in time to hear a childish clamour suddenly cease as a man’s voice was raised commandingly. He passed into the cavernous interior and stopped at once, looking towards the far end where on a raised platform some thirty children stood facing him in two ranks, boys and girls, identically dressed in white shirts, blue ties, grey shorts. They were quite silent, standing with their arms by their sides in a position of attention. Benson was not good with children’s ages, but he thought these were around nine or ten. One of the men, presumably the one who had called out, was holding up his arms to the children. The other, taller and grey-haired, stood further back, looking towards the stage.

“Second and third verses again, please, Mr Pringle,” this man called.

There was a moment or two of charged silence. Then the first man made a sweeping gesture with his arms, throwing them apart and bringing them violently together again. At once, in perfect unison, the children broke into song:

“And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my—”

“Stop, stop!” It was the taller man who had shouted. Abruptly the singing ceased. He walked a few paces forward towards the children. “They must mark the change of mood between the verses,” he said to the conductor. He turned and began to speak emphatically to the silent children. “In verse two we are questioning things, the movement is slow, rather sad. What has happened to this dear England of ours? What has happened to the dream? That’s what we are asking. Then at the beginning of verse three there is an abrupt change. Now we are arming for battle, we are calling for our weapons, we are going to restore Jerusalem, the scent of victory is in our nostrils. You sound at the moment as if you were asking mummy to get you a lollypop.”

The children listened impassively. If they had seen Benson they gave no sign. Neither of the men had seen him yet. Standing here in the blueish light amidst the summer smells of sun-warmed canvas and crushed grass, he felt oppressed. The docility of the children, their identity of dress, made them seem like victims in a rite of some kind, initiatory, sacrificial – he could not decide. They seemed burdened; creatures performing, who did not know their own purposes. It was a collective poignancy rendered more acute by individual lapses, the flushed little girl with hair escaping from her headband, a boy whose woollen stockings had wrinkled down towards his ankles.

“You must give all the force you can to the ‘bring’ at the beginning of each line,” the tall man said. “Really sound it out. A clarion call. Then, when you are naming the weapons, just the briefest of pauses before the word, then boom! Open your mouths and belt it out. Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire …” He struck his palm with his fist on the beat of the words. Then he turned back to the conductor. “Let’s try it again, Mr Pringle, shall we?” he said. “From the beginning.”

This was Slater then, revealed by elementary deduction. But I would have known it anyway, Benson thought, hearing and remembering after forty years the patient encouragement of the words: “Let’s try it again, shall we?”

The conductor had raised his arms. Benson was about to leave the marquee with the intention of waiting outside when the man he knew to be Slater turned as if to move back to his former position and saw him. An immediate frown came to his face. Benson walked towards him. As he did so the children broke into song again:

“And did those feet in ancient times

Walk upon England’s mountains green?”

“Clive Benson,” he said quietly, holding out his hand, raising his eyes to Slater’s face: the other was a good six inches taller, something he had not remembered particularly, probably because he was used to being the shorter one.

The frown was immediately replaced by a smile of great charm, crinkling the corners of the eyes and giving the whole face an expression of friendliness and warmth. He felt his hand taken in a firm grip. “Let’s go outside,” Slater said. “We can’t talk in here.”

To the continuing strains of the choir he led the way out of the marquee. The day seemed almost painfully bright to Benson after the filtered light inside; he blinked at a world that seemed more spacious than before. “I hope I’m not interrupting?” he said.

“No, not at all. Pringle will take them through it. He is their teacher, you know. They’ve been practising a long time, but this is the first dress rehearsal – it’s mainly to make sure they’ve all got the right turn-out.” He gave a brief bark of laughter. “We don’t want the boys coming in Hawaiian shirts or the girls in sequins. And then, you know, they’ve got to get the drill right. At the end of the song they’ve got to form up and walk down the central aisle two by two, straight out – I don’t want them milling around in there, space is limited.”

Slater’s face was heavier now, the mouth had loosened and the skin below the eyes was pouchy; but the eyes were the same, unfaded blue, level and alert under their straight brows. It was a handsome, well-nourished, confident face, authority unmistakable in it, like an element of complexion. His figure had thickened but there was no stoop and he moved lightly. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Little Benson. Over here would be a good place to have a chat.”

They bordered the slightly rippled platter of the lake, passed through into a copse of silver birches. Before them now was the summerhouse with the pagoda roof, painted in gold and red, vivid against the pale silver of the birch trees and the water.

“I come in here sometimes when I want to do a bit of thinking,” Slater said.

Inside there was a faint, agreeable smell of paint and earth mould. A square window looked out over the lake and a long narrow bench of wood ran along the wall below it. They sat down on this and Slater began speaking at once. “I’ll just give you a run-down of what it is I’m trying to do here,” he said, “to clear up any misconceptions you may be labouring under. Then perhaps after lunch you could see some of the rehearsals and that will lighten up whatever corners are still dark.”

“That sounds like a good plan.” Benson felt clear-headed despite the whisky, almost pretematurally alert, watching Slater’s face in the clear light from the window, a face so changed, so carnalised as it were, full-cheeked and sanguine, yet with that same intensity of purpose it had worn on the night of the shelling when he had waited through the thunder of the guns to explain his idea. The faintly derogatory tone of his words just now, the imputation of ignorance, had been quite good-humoured – probably habitual, Benson thought, a way of establishing ascendancy. He did not need it with us then, he had his rank. Or perhaps it is simply distrust of the press. In any case quite justified at present – Benson had no idea what he was talking about.

“First of all,” Slater said, “to get the terminology right, it is a spectacle rather than a play, a series of tableaus really, with various interludes – like the children’s choir for example, which you have just seen in action. I want to make it as nearly as possible like those popular shows they used to take touring round the inns and courtyards and village greens of England. I suppose you know what I mean. Don’t you use a notebook?”

“No, no,” Benson said, “I have a very good faculty of recall. Training, you know.” Since he had only succeeded by subterfuge in getting this audience at all, he was resolved to carry it off with what panache he could muster. The question had sounded suspicious; or perhaps merely impatient – he had probably not given sufficient appearance of attention. In fact, a sort of amazement had been slowly growing in him: he and Slater had never been friends of course; but the other had been his platoon officer, they had lived together through circumstances of hardship and danger, Slater had directed him as Velma, had seen him last quite badly wounded in the clearance ward of a military hospital; yet there had been no word of the past, no word of enquiry, no reference at all – Slater had gone straight to the matter in hand. I suppose that is the mark of the high achiever, Benson thought. “No,” he repeated, “I dispensed with notebooks long ago.” He glanced briefly through the window, saw a flotilla of ducklings in arrowhead formation on the lake, mother in front. “I bumped into Thompson the other day,” he said.

“Thompson?” The frowning expression had returned to Slater’s face. It was not a look of incomprehension or puzzlement, but rather as if he had found something in his path, something obtrusive, not envisaged.

“He was in your platoon. The one they called Killer Thompson.”

“Oh, him. Yes, I remember him. First-rate fighting man. Invaluable chap to have in your platoon. Inspiring example to the others. Worth his weight in gold, a chap like that.”

“He almost was for a while,” Benson said.

Slater did not take him up on this. It was clear that he wanted to get back to his project but felt constrained still by these wartime associations. “Getting on all right, is he?”

“Not really.” He wondered briefly if he should tell Slater that Thompson might be on his way here too. Better not. “He had the copy of the Colour Supplement with the article about your house,” he said.

“That confounded article,” Slater said, the frown persisting. “Sylvia making one of those positively last appearances. I wish I had never agreed to it now. Where were we?”

“The children.”

“Oh, yes. Traditional songs expressing the unity of England and our great heritage. That is the theme of the whole show – unity. You don’t mind a history lesson, do you? Just come over here.”

He rose and moved towards the door and Benson followed. They stood together looking out towards the rising parkland, the long grey façade of the house, the rougher, steeper ground beyond, the dark line of woods on the horizon. Benson felt the other man’s hand lightly gripping his elbow. “The house faces south,” Slater said. “So you are looking due north at this moment. If you struck directly through those woods beyond the house and kept going for about ten miles you would come to the lower reaches of the River Mersey. Somewhere between here and the river is the site of the Battle of Brunanburh. That mean anything to you?”

“Not a great deal, I’m afraid.”

“It was fought in the year 937. In that year a coalition of Vikings from Ireland, Scots under their king Constantine and a rabble of Strathclyders came sailing up the Mersey. The Vikings wanted to regain the Kingdom of York to which their leader, Anlaf, had a claim. At least, that was the ostensible purpose – the main thing they were all after was loot. They moored their ships on the southern shore of the Mersey and struck across country, pillaging as they went. They were met by a combined force of West Saxons and Mercians under King Athelstan. They were completely routed and driven back to their ships with great slaughter.”

He paused for a moment and Benson glanced sideways. Slater’s face was absorbed with the interest of what he was saying; his eyes were fixed on the dark line of the horizon. It was no more possible now to doubt his sincerity than it had been forty years ago, in that cellar below the rubble of Anzio. What had weakened in memory and came back with force to Benson now, as he felt the touch on his arm, was the attractive power of personality the other possessed, the effortless way in which he enlisted you in his purposes.

“Just over there,” Slater said, nodding towards the horizon. “Perhaps where those woods are now, perhaps even nearer. The location is disputed but I have gone carefully into it and I am convinced it was on our side of the river. There is a poem commemorating the battle in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The pursuit lasted all day. The fields around were darkened with blood, they say. Five Viking princes died in the battle. Constantine lost a son. People were fighting all the time in those days of course, it was a violent age. But this wasn’t just any battle. It was one of the great battles of our history. Athelstan was the first Saxon King to have effective rule over the whole of England. The army he was commanding was an English army – not Mercian, not West Saxon, not Northumbrian. English. North and South burying their differences, fighting as one nation to repel the foreign invader.”

Slater took some steps forward out into the sunshine and stood waiting for Benson to follow. “I’ve had the poem translated into modern English,” he said. “It will be recited during the performance. My idea, you see, is to celebrate this step in the forging of the English state and nation by dramatising scenes from the life of King Athelstan, very loosely constructed, with interludes and entertainments.”

The singing of the choir carried to them from the marquee, a different song now:

“On Richmond Hill there lives a lass

More bright than May-day morn,

Whose charms all other maids’ surpass,

A rose without a thorn.

This maid so neat

With smile so sweet

Hath won my right good will …”

“They are not getting it right yet,” Slater said. “They must give more force to those monosyllables. ‘This-maid-so-neat-with-smile-so-sweet.’ They are supposed to be singing the praises of an English rose, not reciting their multiplication tables. You may be wondering why I take so much trouble?”

“Well, as a matter—”

“The success of the whole depends on getting all the details right. That was true in the days of the Beachhead Buddies and it’s just as true now.”

Benson nodded. It was the first unsolicited reference that Slater had made to the past. “The Beachhead Buddies, yes,” he said.

“Shall we go up to the house? We could have a drink before lunch.”

He continued to talk as they made their way up the gently sloping ground towards the house. “I don’t know what your politics are,” he said. “That’s your business. But you fought to defend this country. Men who have been through that know what unity means. You mentioned the Sunday Times. That’s a fine newspaper. Increasing its sales hand over fist, I understand, now that they have solved their labour problems.”

Despite the express allowance for his own opinions, Benson felt that the pause Slater made here was deliberately interrogative. However, he said nothing. They were crossing the forecourt now, approaching the steps up to the terrace.

“I don’t mind telling you,” Slater said, “that I’ve taken a bit of a chance on you, asking you here to my home, agreeing to cooperate in the matter of this newspaper article. But we were in the war together and that means a lot to me. What I am saying is that I’m assuming a basic patriotism on your part. We hear a lot about division these days from the gloom and doom merchants. The North-South divide, all this stuff about two nations. England is one nation, Clive, can’t help but be, considering our history. Chains forged like that are not broken by local discontents, or local malcontents either. They are forged in steel.”

“Chained to history.” Benson was struck by this turn of phrase. It was true – you couldn’t open a newspaper without hearing them clank. “You feel that quite strongly in Liverpool,” he said.

Slater appeared not to have heard this. He stopped at the foot of the steps, looking back over the grounds towards the lake. “I’m semi-retired now, you know,” he said. “I’m sixty-six. I still go to board meetings, of course. I still take care of most of the bank’s commodity business and do some investment consultancy work. Most of that I can do from my office here. Meredith drives me down to the City a couple of times a week on average. But I don’t take the same interest in the bank’s affairs that I used to. There’s a time to get out, Clive.” He turned and looked directly into Benson’s face and said with a sort of smiling frankness that was extremely engaging, “I’ve got some good years ahead of me yet. I want to get more involved in local matters now. I want to put this place on the map.”

The terrace was empty now. They went through the french windows directly into a long, rectangular drawingroom, furnished in Regency style, with walls and ceiling elaborately decorated in moulded plaster, pale grey lined with gilt.

“What can I get you?”

“I’d like a Scotch. No ice, please. Just as it is.”

“Just as God made it, eh? My other passion is this house. You won’t have seen much of it yet?”

“No,” Benson said. “I came directly down from the terrace.”

“This room we are in is what the first owners would have called the Saloon. Pity that word has gone out, I always think. It is now only associated with public houses, isn’t it? The stucco was done by Pietro Francini. That’s the same man who was commissioned by the first Duke of Northumberland to do the Long Gallery in Northumberland House.”

“It’s very fine,” Benson said. This was no more than the truth. The plaster mouldings were the great feature of the room, wrought in graceful, playful patterns of foliation, clustered fruits, curlicues, rosettes, loops, swags, garlands, cornucopias. Winged women with gentle faces and the exuberantly bounding hindquarters of deer decorated the corners of the ceiling. Benson took a drink from his glass and felt an immediate benefit. “Very fine indeed,” he said. “There is an attractive incongruity between the rather severe rectilinear form of the room itself and this extravagance of the decoration. I wonder if the designers intended that.”

He paused, aware that he had fallen somehow into the role of courtier, aware too that this would be customary with those surrounding Slater, elicited, demanded almost, by the very charm and expansiveness of his manner. He thought he could detect now on Slater’s face a shared knowledge of this, a look of faintly derisive alertness, as if his host had noted his malaise, discerned a sensitive spot; not an unfriendly look exactly, but somehow predatory, as if weaknesses emitted a sort of scent, as if within the caverns of personality vanities, follies, exploitable matter, could decay, giving off a whiff for those who had a nose for it.

This impression was confirmed when Slater, instead of helping him with civil assent, merely said drily, “Yes, Francini is generally considered to be rather good,” and then began immediately to draw his guest’s attention to various of the objects in the room. “The relief over the chimney-piece is a copy of Schiavoni’s ‘Apollo and Midas’,” he said. “The original, of course, is at Hampton Court. The chimney-piece itself has been attributed to Henry Cheers. The painting on the wall over there is a portrait of Sir William Biggs, painted by Reynolds in 1768. He was the first owner, you know. I won’t tell you how much it cost me to get it from the family. The commodes by the wall over there are French, of the Regency period.”

Benson looked at the portrait, saw a thick-necked slave-dealer in a wig and black tricorn hat. Reynolds should have had better things to do.

“I’ve tried to keep the general tone of an eighteenth-century interior,” Slater said. “The gilt table is Italian, around 1750. Do you see the clock on it, in the walnut case? I’m particularly fond of that piece. It once belonged to Lord Macaulay. The sofa-table is English too, a bit later, turn of the century. It’s in rosewood. The wine cistern over by the door is a very rare type, famille rose, with dolphin feet, ah, there you are, Sylvia.”

Mrs Slater had entered by the double door at the far end of the room. She was dressed in a pale green blouse and cream pleated skirt and no longer wore the sunglasses. Benson was sure now he could remember the face from innocently romantic English films of many years ago. The pale, ethereal prettiness was lined and faded but the large blue eyes were the same as had looked trustfully up at tall hussars and highwaymen. They were slow-moving, the eyes, he suddenly noticed, perhaps myopic, she had to narrow them slightly to keep him in focus.

“You’ve met Clive already, I gather.”

There was a note of genial warning in this, or so it seemed to Benson. He saw her pass her tongue cautiously, like a child, over her lower lip. He realised that after an hour or so of listening to Verdi in her boudoir she was slightly drunk.

“Yes,” she said, “we met earlier. Mr Benson had coffee with us on the terrace.”

“Did he indeed? You would have done better to send him straight down to me in view of the time at our disposal.” The voice was genial still. “I thought that is what I told you to do.”

“I don’t remember. He had just arrived, Hugo. I thought, after the journey …”

Something in the tone of this rather than the words made Benson look quickly at her. It came to him in that moment that she was frightened of her husband. Fortified as she was, mild as Slater’s tone had been. “The coffee was extremely welcome,” he said, looking at Slater. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he felt the stirring of a revolt perhaps forty years belated. “In fact,” he said, “I don’t know what I would have done without it, I don’t know how I could have coped with the news that awaited me in your pagoda, Hugo.”

“News?”

“That England is essentially one nation and that we owe it all to Athelstan.”

Slater looked steadily at him for perhaps five seconds. His face was quite expressionless. “Perhaps you’d like another drink?” he said at last. He had himself drunk nothing yet.

“Another Scotch please.”

Slater took his glass and went to the sideboard with it. While he was pouring out the drink Erika and another, older woman entered the room and joined him there.

“That’s Erika’s mother,” Sylvia said. “You can’t have one without the other, as Hugo has discovered to his cost. I don’t think you’re a journalist at all, Mr Benson, or at least not a proper one. You don’t behave like one somehow. I mean, don’t ask me how they behave but you are just not right. You intrude your own opinions. You make quite uncalled-for remarks about the slave trade. You’ve just offended Hugo, which is a very unwise thing to do, believe me. He didn’t show it, but I know him. I don’t think he believes you’re a real journalist either. He has his reasons for doing things, Hugo always has his reasons, but they are not always what you think. You’re not the Clive Benson who wrote Fool’s Canopy by any chance?”

“Do you mean to say you’ve read it?”

“I’ve got a copy. If you really are the author, I’d like you to sign it sometime. It’s one of the best historical novels I’ve ever read. I’ve always thought it would make a marvellous film.”

Benson was so moved by this that he felt the prick of tears in his eyes. “You have just made a friend,” he said. There was no time to say more. Slater came back with his drink. He was introduced to Erika’s mother, a plump, quick-eyed woman with a vibrant voice. They were joined by a man with a soft face and hard eyes, whose name was Robinson; Sylvia explained in an aside that he was the senior partner in a firm of accountants and chairman of the Constituency Conservative Party. Two more men arrived together just before lunch was announced, one tall and black-haired, the other rather fat, with a full beard. They had driven over from Chester. Benson failed to catch either of their names but Sylvia told him that the tall man was playing Athelstan and the bearded one St Columba, so he thought of them in that way.

The dining-room contained one or two more portraits of wigged worthies and their gowned wives. There was a silver basket on the table, filled with white roses. Benson found himself seated near one end of the table with Erika’s mother, Mrs Belmont, on one side of him, Sylvia on the other and Athelstan opposite. He had some soup without much noticing the flavour; then there was rainbow trout and stuffed artichokes – refined and expensive sorts of things such as he almost never ate these days. There was white wine on the table and he had some. He was beginning to feel a certain sense of occasion. He glanced with renewed feelings of friendship at Sylvia Slater sitting to his left at the head of the table. She too was drinking the wine. She sat looking before her with a slight smile on her pale, rather crumpled-looking face. That magazine article had given quite the wrong impression of her, he thought. She was clearly a woman of discerning taste. What was it Slater had said? Positively her last performance. Something like that. Rather an ill-natured remark. She had dressed up for it. She had put on her gold bracelets and her white pyjama suit and tried to make a brave show, tried to do the old-time star, scattering ‘darlings’ and talking about boudoirs. The only true thing about her in all that rigmarole was that she liked listening to Verdi.

He looked across at Erika, who was laughing at something Robinson had said. She looked radiant, glowing with health. She had dressed her hair on top of her head, leaving unobscured the strong, beautiful column of her neck. She was wearing a white, short-sleeved dress of thin wool, which clung to the lines of her figure. Slater, he saw, was looking at her too.

“This is a beautiful house, isn’t it?” Athelstan said, leaning across the table in a stiff-shouldered, man-to-man way. He had very soft brown eyes, like a cow’s. “Full of beautiful things,” he said. “Mr Slater once let it fall that the creamware dinner service in the cabinet was the personal possession of Josiah Wedgwood. Then there is the chinoiserie. Of course, Mr Slater is a collector.”

“It’s nice to see her happy again,” Mrs Belmont said on his right. She had been following the direction of his gaze. “I’ve been very worried, you know. Erika is so trusting. She gets into some difficult situations simply because of this idealism of her nature. She has always been passionately interested in the stage, of course. Mr Slater recognised her talent at once.”

“I thought we’d begin with Athelstan’s dream immediately after lunch,” he heard Slater say to St Columba.

“I should say that this is one of the most desirable residences we’ve ever had on our books,” Athelstan said.

“Are you an estate agent?”

“Yes, I am, as a matter of fact.”

“There was this man Gerald,” Mrs Belmont said, “just to give you an example. I don’t think we ever knew his surname. He said he was an impresario and the silly girl promptly went and fell in love with him. Good address in Knightsbridge. Turned out he had nothing to do with the theatre at all, he was some kind of crook. He kept her more or less locked up in this flat, no furniture in it, just carpet, the floor and walls all covered with beige carpeting. She was very disillusioned. Well, he was mad, but she only found that out when she was in the situation. When she complained he bought her a twelve-foot rubber plant to keep her happy. He knew she loved rubber plants. Of course, it couldn’t go on.”

“It doesn’t sound very promising,” Benson said. “I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered so much if he had turned out to be a genuine impresario.”

“No, that’s right. She felt so betrayed, you see. That is what killed her love.”

Benson drank some more wine. With something of a shock he saw Meredith, massive in a white jacket, standing at the sideboard. “What was Athelstan’s dream?” he said. He had to raise his voice a little – the table was long and his host was at the far end of it. There was an immediate hush as Slater began to reply.

“On the eve of the battle,” he said, looking not very cordially at Benson, “St Columba appears to Athelstan in a dream and promises him victory over his enemies. He prophesies that the kingdom he rules over will develop into a great nation of seafarers and inventors and will be the mother of parliaments. He outlines to Athelstan some of the great achievements awaiting England in the future.”

“Agincourt,” St Columba said, “the Armada, Shakespeare, the Spinning Jenny, the Steam Engine, the spread of Empire.”

“You can’t possibly bring in the Industrial Revolution,” Benson said, “surely, without mentioning the accumulation of capital due to the Liverpool—”

“Liverpool played her part of course,” Robinson said. “No one would deny that.” He smiled stiffly at Benson. “You’re a Liverpudlian, I take it? I like a man who takes pride in his city.”

“It’s a very important scene,” St Columba said. “It’s the only scene I’m in, as a matter of fact.”

“It’s an absolutely crucial scene,” Robinson said. “Here you have all the themes summed up in a nutshell, unity through victory, the forging of the nation, the great contributions this small kingdom was destined to make to the civilisation of the Western world. And, seeing it, people will realise that these are not just dim events in history books but things that happened on their own soil, in the case of this battle on their own doorstep. It links people to their past. I should just like to add this, Hugo, while I’m about it, there won’t be another opportunity before the event itself and I know it expresses the feelings of us all…”

It was clear that Robinson, perhaps by force of habit, feeling he had the attention of the meeting, had settled down to make a speech. “I know that I speak for all of us,” he continued, “when I say how grateful I personally feel to you, not only for throwing your house and grounds open, but for the work you have put in, the dedication and the high sense of civic purpose. It’s not too much to say that you are continuing the work of Athelstan himself. He had a policy of settling people on the land, as I understand it. You are giving people a sense of having a stake in this country. And that means owning a piece of it, owning your own house, for example.”

“Hear, hear!” Athelstan said.

“It means having a stake in the future of this country by being able to buy shares in our great industries. That is what we mean by a property-owning democracy. That was Athelstan’s policy a thousand years ago and that is our policy today. Thank you, Hugo. I can assure you of one thing: it doesn’t go unnoticed.”

“You can see the continuity even in the names,” St Columba said. “I mean, my name is Dodsworth. That’s pure Saxon. It means the Homestead of Dod.”

“Hang on a minute.” When he thought of it afterwards Benson could not be sure just what led him to intervene at this point. Alcohol had something to do with it, his obsession even more; then there was Robinson’s overbearing manner, the way he assumed he could speak for them all; but it was Slater at the end of the table, dominant even in his modest impassivity, that made the silence of assent suddenly impossible. He felt the tremors of speech in his lower jaw.

“Not quite all of us,” he said rather loudly and met Robinson’s cold, fishlike stare. “I don’t disagree for a moment with what you say about Mr Slater’s talents as a presenter of entertainments. I know more about that than anybody here, I should think. No, it’s this business of property, of a property-owning democracy. The thing about the notion of a property-owning democracy is that it can come to seem like a definition – only the people that own the property have a share in the democracy, and the more they own the bigger their share. To see it in all its beauty you have to go back to the eighteenth century. As a matter of fact the Liverpool slave trade provides the best example of a property-owning democracy that I know. If you had a bit of extra cash you could buy into it quite easily. A lot of the ships they used were quite small, they could only pack in a hundred slaves or so. These were fitted out by small tradesmen – drapers, grocers, tallowchandlers, barbers, notaries, people like yourself, sir, or Athelstan here. What used to be called the shop-keeping class. Some had as little as a one-thirtieth share – say five slaves. Just a flutter really. Like buying a few shares in British Telecom. I suppose it was what you’d call a volatile market. But if your cargo didn’t die you could make a nice little profit.”

Benson paused. He was running out of steam. He could feel a slight, continuous quivering of the nerves somewhere within himself. “Enough to buy a bijou homestead for Dod,” he said, glancing at St Columba. “Enough to pay Francini for the stucco work and still have something left over for a Chippendale or two.”

A hush had fallen over the table. He saw that Erika was looking at him indignantly. Slater was not looking at him at all.

“I understand you are a journalist?” Robinson said coldly.

“Well, not exactly. I’ve written things for newspapers.”

“He is a writer, a novelist,” Sylvia said, speaking for the first time. “I’ve got one of his books.” She smiled brightly round the table. “It’s very good.” It came to Benson that Mrs Slater was enjoying the situation.

“Fiction?” The look of disapproval on Robinson’s face deepened.

“I hope you brought your costume,” Slater said to St Columba. He still had not looked at Benson. “I want to do a full-dress rehearsal today, you know.”

The conversation didn’t really pick up again after this – Benson had cast a blight. Quite soon Slater suggested coffee. They went for this into what Slater had called the Saloon. After some brief hesitation Benson sat near Mrs Belmont: obsessed as she seemed with the fortunes of her daughter, she might not have noticed so much how the tone had turned against him. “You didn’t finish telling me about Gerald,” he said. “You stopped at the point where he bought Erika the rubber plant.” Glancing up he met the gaze of Sir William Biggs on the wall; there seemed an extra shade of severity now in the merchant’s expression. “What happened?” he said.

He had been right. Mrs Belmont resumed at once, as if there had been no interval. “Oh, well, he behaved quite disgracefully of course. She told him she wanted to go away for a while to think about their love, she tried to be tactful you see, but he lost control of himself completely, he attacked the rubber plant, he began chopping it up with karate blows, knowing full well how much that would hurt her. There was an Alsatian in the apartment and it began to get terribly excited.”

But he was destined never to hear the end of the Erika-Gerald story. Slater approached at this point and asked him if he could spare a few minutes. “I thought we might use the study,” he said. “Why don’t you bring your coffee with you?”

The study was on the same floor, down a short passage. It was done out in mahogany and dark red leather. Slater seated himself at the desk and motioned Benson to a chair. There was no trace of a smile now. “I’m not going to beat about the bush,” he said. “I haven’t much time – I’ve got a lot to do this afternoon. The fact is I don’t want you at these rehearsals. I’ve changed my mind about you, Benson. You offended my guests. You practically called Robinson a shopkeeper. You haven’t shown the right spirit at all. I want you off the premises as soon as may be.”

“I see.” Benson looked at the straight-browed, heavy face before him. There was no particular expression there, no displeasure; the face was grave, dispassionate. So might Slater have looked in terminating the account of one of his bank’s less satisfactory clients. “I’m just supposed to march off, am I?”

“I thought you were a bona fide journalist.” Slater placed his hands together on the table, looked down at them a moment, then back at Benson. “You gave me a false impression,” he said.

“It was a confusion.” There was a little stack of printed sheets, blue in colour, near him on the desk and in the tension of his feelings he picked one up. “I was thinking of the other Show, the Beachhead Buddies,” he said. “You took it for this Athelstan business. That is because your own purposes are so important to you that what is in the forefront of your mind you assume must be in the forefront of everybody else’s. As a matter of fact, I don’t think you asked me here because you thought I was a bona fide journalist.”

“Don’t you?”

The voice was very cold now. Benson felt fear of the man before him, so much more powerful and richer than himself, here among the visible evidence of his success, the thick carpet, shining wood and dark leather, the array of books on the shelves. “No,” he said, making a conscious effort to control his breathing, keep his voice steady. “No, I think I was a portent for you, I think you took me for a good augury. It must have seemed like that, my phoning just then, after forty years, just when you were putting another show on. Little Benson again. Like a mascot. I was the one you asked to go with you to the Company Commander that night, the night you got the idea for the Beachhead Buddies. You remember, don’t you? We had just been relieved. They were shelling the German lines. Then of course, when I came today, you wanted the same loyalty again, because you have to have that, don’t you? But I was only a boy then.”

“You were a girl, as far as I remember. What do you think you are now?” Slater put his hand flat on the desk preliminary to hoisting himself up. “I’ve no time for any more of this,” he said. “I’ll see Meredith runs you back to the station.”

“I’m not going yet.”

“Not going?” The slight frown had returned to Slater’s face, as at something insignificant but obstinate lodged in his path.

“There are one or two things I must ask you about.”

“Do you really think I’m going to waste my time answering your questions? You’d better clear off while you can still do so with some dignity.”

“It would only take a few minutes.” Benson could feel his hands trembling slightly. He put them between his knees. “Supposing,” he said, “just for the sake of argument, supposing I did write the article after all, I mean an article about both the shows, how I have come back after forty years to find you doing the same thing, still dealing in the commodities market…” Nervousness made him lose the thread for a moment. “Sugar and rum, you know. People would make the connections.”

“Sugar and rum? What on earth are you talking about? You’d better get out.” For the first time a definite note of anger had come to Slater’s voice. “I don’t think you are in your right mind,” he said. “You seemed mad to me at the table just now, as well as offensive, making those pathetically over-simplified analogies.”

“Too complicated to understand, is it? Market forces. That’s what Hogan says too.”

“Who the devil is Hogan?”

“It doesn’t matter.” The trembling had ceased now. He felt shame at what he was going to say but no longer any fear. “I could say how you used us at Anzio, set us to work for your glory, how some of us were killed or wounded or so on and the gaps were filled with new acts, but you, alone of us – you managed to get out before the offensive, before the Beachhead Buddies were finally shot to pieces, and now I find you doing the same sort of thing. It wouldn’t look too good, would it?”

There was a short silence. Slater’s face had flushed dark red. His eyes were fixed in a look of furious contempt. “You little shit,” he said. “I’ve a good mind to bounce you off the wall. Do you really think you can threaten me like that, a man in my position? Do you think I’m afraid of that sort of scurrilous rubbish?”

Benson made no reply. He was aware that the threat was a weak one, as well as dishonourable. But he had wanted so much to know. He was about to get to his feet, when Slater said, “I don’t need to answer any of your questions, I hope you understand that.”

“Yes,” Benson said, “of course I understand.”

The first flush of rage had left Slater’s face now. Benson saw him look briefly away. Then his mouth loosened a little, settled into an expression of more amicable contempt. “Well, since you say it won’t take long …”

“It’s about a man called Walters. You remember him, don’t you?”

“Walters, Walters …”

“You must remember him. He was in the show too. I was Velma and he was Burlington Bertie. He was killed not long before the break-out. He told me that you had offered to get him a posting to Naples, as part of a new show. He was the only one. I’ve always wondered why.”

The lie agitated Benson, even though he knew there was no possible way that Slater could know it for one.

“Yes, I seem to remember that,” Slater said.

“Why Walters? It was a double act. Why not both of us?”

But even as he asked the question he realised that Slater had already answered it – the admission was all that had been needed. Slater had seen how close they were, how they were always together.

“I remember him as being very talented,” Slater said. “He was a gifted actor.”.

“There were others who were talented. Why not them?”

Slater’s face still wore the same half-amicable disdain. “I really don’t remember now.”

“It must have been because you wanted to break us up. You were alone there in your own way. You wanted to divide us.” Benson laughed suddenly in release of tension. A distant, destructive impulse, converse of his own jealousy — no more than that. His treacherous tendency to tears again threatened him. “The Beachhead Buddies,” he said. “And now your great theme is unity. You must admit there is irony there. Or was it just motiveless malignity, to coin a phrase?”

“You are talking hysterical rubbish.”

Slater had spoken coldly and abruptly but the dislike in his eyes was not for the present only and Benson knew in that moment that the other had never forgotten Walters, that the refusal still rankled. He got to his feet. “There’s just one other thing. What gave you the idea – in the first place I mean.”

“The idea for the Show? That’s easy. I always knew there was a need for it, of course. Then that day, that night when we spoke about it, I had been watching a rather ridiculous scene a bit earlier on, before we were relieved. Someone had brought back a German helmet for some reason and one of the men put it on and got dried blood in his hair. There was a Welsh chap whose nerve had given way the night before. I had come over for a runner to go back to Company HQ and I came upon this scene with this lout cursing and trying to wash the blood out and the Welshman gibbering away and that old woman – Baxter was his name – holding forth about how much blood you’d need to make so much powder …”

Slater paused. His face had softened with the reminiscence. “It was pure comedy,” he said. “I thought what a first-rate sketch it would make. That started me thinking.”

The smile faded. Slater looked at him with a sort of contemptuous impassivity. “Well, are you going?” he said. “If you try to write anything about me after this, I promise you I’ll make you suffer for it.”

Benson could think of nothing to say. He looked for a moment or two longer at the face of the man before him. Into his mind there came the memory of the day Slater had come to see him in the hospital. “It’s strange,” he said. “The last time I saw you was in the military hospital in Naples. You were on a routine visit to members of the unit – part of your job, wasn’t it, though I’m not quite sure how it fitted into the entertainments business. You were very neatly turned out, I remember. The ward was full of surgical cases, some of the men there were dying, some of them were off their heads. I remember all those bandaged, hardly recognisable shapes and you in the middle. I remember thinking, any moment now he’s going to start waving his cane about, directing us all.”

Do I really remember that? he wondered, going down the steps to where the car was waiting, or did I just invent it as a parting shot? From somewhere above him Verdi was issuing loudly, Aida urging Radames to flee with her.

“Là tra foreste vergini

Di flori profumati …”

*

“We got a deal then?” Meredith said.

“No, we haven’t got a deal. I just said we would talk about it.”

“I was present at his wedding. When he got married to Yoko. Keeping the press at bay. She was a one. No inhibitions, Mr Benson, know what I mean?”

Meredith’s pale, broad face was full of emotion. His eyes sought Benson’s eagerly. A tiny trickle of perspiration had run down from the brim of his cap and stopped at the temple. It was hot here on the station platform, full in the sunshine, and the chauffeur’s large body seemed uncomfortable and constricted in its livery. They had walked to the far end, away from the little knot of people waiting for the train.

“I got the facts, you got the gift of words,” Meredith said. “We could make a bomb. The title is there already, we wouldn’t need to lose any time over that. I Was John Lennon’s Bodyguard. What do you think of it?”

Benson glanced down the platform at the station clock: a good ten minutes yet before the train; Slater had packed him off early. “It’s a good title,” he said. “But the fact is, you know, I don’t do ghost writing. I wouldn’t be any good at it.”

It was the third time he had said this and each time Meredith came up with a new offering from his past.

“I was in the army before that,” he said now. “Five years in the Coldstream Guards.” He looked quickly up and down the platform. “After that I did three years in the SAS. I seen a lot of things, believe you me.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Benson said. “It’s just that I wouldn’t be the right—”

“Aden,” Meredith said, “the Yemen, Northern Ireland. You name it.” He had assumed again that congested look, combined result of the intensity of his feelings and the confinement of his tunic. “You’re not supposed to say, they make you take an oath. But what the fuck, Mr Benson, if you’ll pardon the language, what the fuck? It teaches you to keep your eyes open. I keep my eyes open on this job. A person learns a lot of things driving other people around. He hears things, he picks things up, he puts two and two together.”

“What sort of things?”

But Meredith had heard the eagerness in his voice. “We got a deal or not?” he said.

“Listen,” Benson said, “I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m not the man to do this particular job. I can’t even do my own stuff these days. To tell you the truth I haven’t been able to write anything for well over two years now. But I know a few people still and I promise you I’ll do my best to find someone – someone good – and put him in touch with you. Okay?”

Meredith held out a huge hand. “Shake on it,” he said. “I’m a judge of character, I always have been.”

“What did you mean just now?”

“She’s the only one worth anything. Mrs Slater. She’s got human feelings. If it was up to her, I could go into shirtsleeves. I get heat rash in this uniform. But he wouldn’t have it. Full livery at all times. Today is a Saturday but I had to put on full gear – just to come out for you. And look how he treats her. Bringing that woman into the house.”

“Erika, you mean?”

“Her, yes. Actress,” Meredith said with great disgust. “I bet the only acting she done is bum and tit poses for the porno mags. And that mother of hers, looking out for the highest bidder. You know what he’s after, don’t you?”

“Slater? I imagine he wants to get Erika into the sack.”

“Sure, but I don’t mean that. He’s a man that has never got just one thing in mind. I am friendly with Miss Parks.” In spite of the earnest confidentiality of his manner, Meredith managed a slight smirk. “That’s the secretary. She doesn’t do his accounts, but she does a lot of the correspondence. She once let fall that he’s been giving a lot of money to Conservative Central Office over the past five years. And I mean a lot,” she said. “Then there’s this show he’s putting on. He’s invited half the county, all the bigwigs. The Lord Lieutenant is coming, the Chief Constable is coming, the Master of the Hunt is coming. He’s got people coming up from London. He’s asked Sir Geoffrey Howe. ‘We’re going to put this place on the map, Meredith,’ he said to me once. You know what that means, don’t you?”

Benson saw the train approaching in the distance. “No,” he said. “What does it mean?”

“How many real locals will be there, tell me that? It’s by invitation only. It’s a society event, Mr Benson. There’ll be donations. There’ll be caviar and champagne. Why do you think Erika and her mum are so interested? He did more than the agent to get their candidate in last time. Spent a fortune on it. You know what it adds up to, don’t you?”

“The train’s coming in,” Benson said. “What does it add up to?”

“He’s after a knighthood. He wants to be Sir Hugo.”

Benson got on the train and stood at the window. He was immediately convinced that Meredith was right. That must be why Slater, after the first rage, had been so surprisingly amenable: he hadn’t wanted to risk the slightest malodour; preferable to talk for five minutes to this little shit …

“He’ll get it too,” Meredith said. “You won’t forget we got a deal, will you?”

“No, I won’t forget.”

Meredith remained standing still on the platform as the train pulled out. At a distance of some hundred yards or so he made a half-salute. Benson waved. He felt sad to be leaving Meredith alone, dark and bulky on the deserted platform. The train was like a receding tide, leaving him beached there, with his life that was so wonderful to him, in fantasy or fact or their complex blending. Benson wanted to repeat his promise, wanted to shout that he would find someone, but Meredith was too far away to hear him now.

On his way back he discovered in his pocket the printed sheet, much crumpled now, which he had picked up from Slater’s desk. It was a programme of events for ‘Brunanburh’, which was what Slater had called his forth-coming show.