Jago heard the pleas and screams of the battered men and the cries of pleasure from their tormentors. He felt Grogan’s hands holding him, professionally turning him and raising one of his arms up behind his back.
‘Please. Don’t hurt me. I’m with you. One of you,’ he said pathetically.
It was the wrong thing to say. Grogan laughed. ‘Bollocks. I don’t know you.’
Jago’s arm was twisted further up his back.
‘No more wanking with this hand,’ Grogan said.
Jago was helpless. The pain excruciating. He couldn’t talk through the agony.
Grogan slowly, inch by inch, pushed Jago’s arm up. He whispered like a lover in Jago’s ear. ‘I’m going to break this arm, bum-boy. Then I’m going to drag you up the hill by it.’
‘Let him go. He’s with me.’
Jago heard Blakey’s voice. He felt a gush of gratitude. The odious little man was saving him.
Grogan released his hold. Jago fell to his knees on the grass. Instead of relief, the pain momentarily increased. The life flowing back into his bent arm bringing too much feeling. Blakey and Grogan spoke over him. On the ground, Jago felt a shame. He knew for certain now that he would never be able to endure torture.
‘Why didn’t the silly sod say something?’ Grogan said.
‘You probably didn’t give him much chance, Billy. Come on, let’s get him up.’
Jago was lifted to his feet. He tried to straighten himself.
‘He’ll be alright with a drink in him,’ Blakey said.
In the Ballot Box pub, amid the celebrating queer-bashers, Jago listened to them re-enacting their best moments on the hill. All Jago could think of was what if it had happened to someone he loved? Supposing they had got their hands on Nicky? Rounds were brought, glasses clinked. Jago was in the bosom of his enemy. He speculated as to what they might do to him if they discovered he was not Major Chamberlain of the King’s African Rifles. Jago wondered if any of his team on Obersalzberg was at this moment in the same position. Drinking with the Gestapo. Holding back the terror behind false smiles.
Lavender had come into the bar alone; that was enough to raise speculation on her status as a tom. Lavender had confirmed those suspicions when she picked up Jago on his way back from the toilets. She led him off, to cries of obscene encouragement. In the car park, she smartly stepped away from him and they joined Austen in the car and drove back into London. From Austen’s seething silence, he knew they’d witnessed the events on the hill.
Jago knew he’d been damaged by the experience. He felt fear like a wound. Action was for unmarried men and, in the middle of the endless war of an invert with the rest of the world, he had weakened himself with love. He couldn’t afford to care. War had made him a refugee with no safe place for his head. He was hiding out in Albany and praying that the Link believed they’d killed him in Scotland. He wanted to stay inside, safe with Nicky. Up the iron staircase in the valet’s old room, under the covers in the saggy bed that tipped them into each other in the middle. But life and duty still required that he get out of that bed each day, out of Nicky’s arms and onto the streets where he was vulnerable. He avoided his old haunts and SOE and instead spoke on the phone to Mrs Cambridge, when she brought him up to date. ‘As you ordered; we informed MI6 of the intelligence we received from Foxley regarding Watch on the Rhine.’
‘I don’t suppose they were grateful,’ he said.
A snort down the phone told him he’d been correct. ‘They dismissed it out of hand as a deception operation. Something us amateurs in SOE were bound to swallow whole.’
Jago sighed; the competition between the two agencies just provided aid and succour to the enemy. ‘We had to try,’ he said.
‘But that’s not all – some type from 6 turned up at the door at Baker Street and demanded to know all about the assets who had provided us with the supposed intelligence on Watch on the Rhine. He wanted to know if the agents were based on Obersalzberg.’
Jago could hear his own breathing, seemingly coming from the phone he was holding to his ear. The intelligence brief they had sent 6 had ended up on the desk of someone in the Link. ‘I assume you didn’t hand anything over?’ he said.
‘Certainly not. I gave him a flea in the ear about just turning up. Pointed out that if 6 wished to take over and inherit our operation, then his boss, Menzies, needed to forward a formal request to my boss, Gubbins. The toe-rag didn’t like that. It made me suspicious, that and the fact he was officially a policeman. I know 6 has its fingers in the pies of both the military and Scotland Yard, and uses minions to run its errands, but there was something about this Metropolitan Police inspector I didn’t like. Something of the dark.’
‘Do you have his name?’
‘Of course. Grogan, William Grogan. He had a low centre of gravity. Led with his shoulder, shouldn’t wonder if he boxed. Sort of chap I might appoint to act as bouncer in one of my houses.’
‘I know him,’ said Jago. He felt an invisible hand tightening on one of his arms and pulling it relentlessly up behind his back.
‘I gave him the bum’s rush and got rid of him.’
Jago sighed. He’d be back. ‘Mrs Cambridge…’
‘Yes, dear… I mean, sir?’
‘It might be a good idea to destroy the Foxley file. MI6 mustn’t have the names of our team on Obersalzberg; it would be their death warrants. We have to make this a NOPO.’
A Nothing on Paper Operation.
There was a silence from Mrs Cambridge. She was a meticulous note-taker and a suggestion to destroy records was akin to asking the Conqueror to torch the Domesday Book.
‘There’s something else, Major…’
‘Yes?’
‘Remember Foxley wanted a briefing on Bridgend? Well now there’s an urgent request for a book to be sent. It either has to be exclusively on that town, or failing that, have a detailed chapter.’
Jago was puzzled. ‘They don’t just want further information?’
‘No, Foxley was quite precise, they need a physical book to plant as evidence.’
To what end, Jago wondered. But he also knew you didn’t hold radio operators on air asking reams of questions. You had to trust the agent on the ground to know what they were doing. ‘Didn’t we glean the original briefing from a volume on British hamlets?’
‘The Primrose Book of Quaint Market Towns. We sent Nightingale to the Charing Cross Road to pick it up and he was gone the best part of the day. Came back reeking of rum and the wrong change.’ It still rankled.
‘Send them that ASAP via Switzerland. Plus, they need the information I’m about to give you,’ said Jago.
‘I’m listening, Major.’
‘The sniper employed by the Three Graces has a sight defect, a cast in the retina of his right eye. British fascists are making a special rifle sight and dispatching it via Sweden to Obersalzberg. Tell them they should try to check the medical records of the Old Hares and find out which of them has defective vision.’
‘Will do. Oh, and your wife rang. Wants to know where you are.’
Christine, he’d forgotten about her. Why on earth was she interested in his whereabouts? When he called her he found, to his relief, not the great sulk on the other end of the line but someone who almost seemed pleased to hear his voice. She needed to see him face to face, she said. They arranged to meet near her school for lunch.
The Mercury Café in Notting Hill Gate had a table set aside in the corner for dancers from the Rambert. Most of them were impossibly thin girls, but amongst them were young men, boys who still looked too young for the call-up. Both sexes wore coats and long cardigans wrapped around leotards and tights. They were a noisy group and Jago, as he always did, found himself disapproving of the level of campery. The boys were being outrageous and blatantly drew attention to their own perversity. Jago wondered again at the arrogance of extroverts. The influence of Aunt Esme, who abhorred show-offs, seeped into his anger and fed it.
The noisy effeminacy made Jago anxious. Supposing some workmen came in? There might be a scene. Couldn’t they just shut up like him and curl into a cup of tea? His nerves made him irritated that Christine was late. The clock on the wall ticked slowly. He saw the hands jointly holding his mug were shaking. He knew he was terrified. Frightened all the time, his surface serenity a facade. He knew he wasn’t brave; his service record showed that he was a coward. He felt himself crumbling from the inside. He smelled again the thick smoke that had choked him in his burning flat. Saw once more the black pit of the barrel of the gun pointed at his heart. He wanted it to stop; the war, his part in it, the shrieking at the other table. He wanted to go away, go to Chichester, see Bishop Bell, and throw himself on his mercy. Claim sanctuary. Give up. Cave in. But he banished this panic with a slow sip of tea. He remembered he’d given in once before; he’d let fear win on the airfield – and peace hadn’t followed that decision.
Jago’s eye caught one of the young male dancers, who cheekily winked at him, and he surprised himself with a brief smile back. He hadn’t asked to play this hand in life, but this was the one he’d been dealt. He’d do his best.
‘Sorry, couldn’t get away. Grazed knee. Disinfectant job.’ Christine taught at a primary school and the playground accident, its normality, even the smell of Dettol on her hands, soothed him.
‘What can I get you?’ he said.
They had mugs of tea and luncheon meat sandwiches.
Christine was in a good mood; she smiled at Jago. There was even concern in her eyes. ‘Where have you been? You haven’t been home for days.’
‘I told Veronica I wouldn’t be around for a while.’
Christine pursed her lips, almost coquettishly Jago thought. ‘But Jago, I’m your wife, not Veronica.’
A fact they both usually strove to forget. The disastrous marriage. Such a good idea when proposed by Veronica, so awful when the lie had to be lived out. In fact, it had not survived the wedding itself. The weight of shame that had to be smiled through. The celebration of romance when there was none. Thankfully, both Jago’s mother and Aunt Esme were dead by then, but Christine’s parents were still alive. He remembered the claustrophobic reception in their semi. The awkwardness of her parents around him as they recognised he was half a class above them. The unctuous mother. Jago trying too hard not to stand on ceremony, but he always did. Of course it hadn’t worked. The blessed relief as they drove away, spoiled as Christine broke down and sobbed at the grief of the trap they’d built themselves. The hired honeymoon cottage in Oxfordshire where Veronica waited and Jago drove on to a cheerless B and B. The long, lonely week before he picked her up again and drove her back to London, to her home in Pimlico, where again Veronica waited, and Jago moved into the basement.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I should have told you. My work means I can’t get home much at the present.’
Christine reached for his hand. ‘Work or someone?’
His instinct was to deny, but he fought it. ‘Both really. I’ve met someone.’
‘Bravo Jago.’
They basked in the unusual warmth of enjoying being together. Christine worked her way through a bite of sandwich and when it was gone, spoke again. ‘I hope this means you’ve dropped your ghastly plan to go to Switzerland after the war and get cured? I’ve always hated your denial, the puritan in you.’
Jago still didn’t know about that. He changed the subject. ‘Do you still go to their allotment?’ He meant her parents’.
‘I keep it up.’
A sacred duty thought Jago. Christine’s parents had been gardeners before all else. Their little plot of land, with its shed, had been their true home, more so than the house in Streatham.
‘I go there sometimes after school, it’s a sort of refuge.’
Avoiding Pimlico and the phoney marriage. He had the Rockingham; she had the allotment.
‘Sometimes, when I’m sheltering from the rain in the shed, I think I can hear them working the plot. Calling to each other, laughing. I even hear them talking to me, as if I’m out there, picking or planting, and the weirdest thing of all is I hear myself talking back and I’m a child. I can hear it in my voice. And then it occurs to me that the little girl I can’t see, the one on the other side of the door, is the real Christine. I’m the ghost. If I hadn’t married you, I would have been in the house when it was bombed. That was my true destiny, not this lie. Somewhere in eternity I should be helping Mum and Dad on the allotment. Do you think that somewhere you’ve been truly happy carries the memory of it? That it can be played again and again like a gramophone record?’
Jago decided he hadn’t yet been that happy. ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘It was everything to them, growing things, wasn’t it? What was that outfit they belonged to that wanted to green up the country again, reverse the Industrial Revolution? – the English Mistery.’
He saw the thought behind her eyes and the quick sip of tea she took. ‘They were good people,’ she said, ‘but not worldly. They meant no harm but there were elements in the Mistery that were quite sinister.’
Jago let it go, pleased Christine knew of the dark side of her folks’ gardening club and was not persuaded.
‘So where are you staying?’ she asked.
‘In Albany, off Piccadilly.’
‘Good heavens, that’s grand.’
‘It’s Nicky’s set…’
‘Nicky the sailor boy?’
‘Yes, he’s my…’
He couldn’t explain his feelings. Then he didn’t have to; the young dancer was standing over their table. The performance was gone. The boy was gauche, a little nervous. He was holding something in a napkin, his hands together as in prayer. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but a friend of mine in the merchant navy has just come home on leave and he gave me two oranges. My landlady has kids so I gave one to her of course.’
Of course.
‘And I’m sharing the other with my friends. Well there’s more than enough and I wondered if you’d like a segment each?’
He stood there, with the peeled orange nestling on the napkin in his hands. The very colour of it wasn’t wartime, the aroma everything that brick dust wasn’t.
‘Oh, that’s so wonderful,’ Christine said, reaching to remove her segment. ‘I haven’t had an orange in years. Thank you.’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to share, haven’t you? Sir?’
The orange was offered to Jago, who could barely trust himself to speak as he peeled off his segment. ‘Thank you. This is so generous.’
The boy blushed and smiled and then went on to the next table with his orange. Jago and Christine slowly chewed the wonderful fruit in their mouths, releasing a flavour they’d almost forgotten. When he had finished, Jago spoke. ‘We have to remember this. This is what we need to take into peace. We must remember how we were, how we shared, this time when greed just wasn’t English.’