The snow had made the cemetery featureless, and an unmarked grave the norm. The unshriven ground of suicides’ corner was further drained of outline by the rule that there be flat tombstones only; the angels and crosses reserved for the respectable dead. Nicky, freshly planted, had not settled yet. A small hillock under the snow, a fold on the earth Jago had been directed to. It was as if Nicky had one last breath to expel before he could be compressed into eternity. He’d taken the honourable way out but Nicky’s father still hadn’t made a shelf available in the family crypt. Possibly, Jago thought bitterly, that space at the Godwin necropolis was at a premium and none could be found for a useless mouth.
Austen, too, had gone alone into eternity. He’d been buried without ceremony in an unmarked grave behind the walls of Wormwood Scrubs Prison. As a murderer and suicide, his body had not been released to his family. Lavender had grieved where she could; in all the familiar places their lives had touched together. She had survived the loneliness of being an orphan because she had the love of one other person. On a visit to Jago, the pragmatic Mrs Cambridge had declared that the lost brother must be replaced by a new man. War had stripped Lavender naked and left her like a raw nerve. A bandage had to be found. Jago knew that Austen’s name would never find its way onto a war memorial. No poppy would be worn to honour his sacrifice, but he knew that Austen had kept Churchill’s maxim: Take one with you. Billy Grogan, the British fascist, was dead.
A tree on the edge of the cemetery shuddered in the cold and shed frost like silver leaves. Jago came back to where he was. He stood and looked down at the snow and the snow wasn’t Nicky. The situation failed to work. He grieved every day, woke up to grief and lived through it every minute, but near to Nicky, near his last resting place, Jago felt nothing. The bleak acres, bereft of mature trees and bleached of detail, defied any spirituality. It was a place to challenge the faith of a pope, a car park of the dead. The place just knew there was no hereafter. It was a municipal dead end.
Nicky was gone, just as Jago’s footprints in the snow would be gone in a thaw. If Nicky was anywhere, he was in Jago’s head – the memories he would hoard like a miser, the time they’d shared growing smaller in proportion to the time Jago would exist without him. An oasis of brief happiness in the desert of what was to come. A love affair at a time the world went mad. Nicky had been Jago’s first love and Jago had decided he would also be his last love. Love was a jealous god, only for those who gave without reserve, without other priorities, who didn’t try to segregate their emotions into separate locked cells.
Love, he knew, demanded the truth, even at the expense of status, ambition, and even anonymity. To be openly himself, even if it made him available for love, would mean he would become known for what he was and not what he might do. He would become the property of lesser men, the butt of their jokes. It was not possible for him to say out loud what he was; he knew he therefore lacked the moral fibre for love. He could not do his bit. He must stay on the lonely airfield by himself.
Jago consoled himself; he knew he had gifts and that, as he was a good man, they might benefit society. His industry would enrich mankind rather than loot it. Therefore it was almost a public duty for him to serve this silence. He could not ask of himself that which he’d plotted for Germany. He couldn’t be ground into dust, destroyed, just for the opportunity to begin again. His ambition ticked too strong and loud in his head. Besides, he was to be given another chance and he hadn’t the sort of courage needed to waste it.
Jago felt he should go and not come back. Nicky was dead and, in his way, so was Jago. But he found he couldn’t move, not yet, not this way. He stood and his mind meandered. It was a bitter time in Europe. SOE’s intelligence of Hitler’s planned assault in the west had gone unheeded. The Armageddon that followed was being called the Battle of the Bulge. The Americans had triumphed eventually but suffered terribly in the process. Jago knew that if the Yanks ever had knowledge that the British had had warnings of the attack and failed to pass that on to their allies, then, the man from MI6 said, the fat would be in the fire.
After Austen’s sacrifice, Jago had been taken into custody and locked up. Mrs Cambridge and the grieving Lavender had been released under the excuse that they were only obeying orders. Uncharged, Jago was kept caged while the police waited to find out what the secret world wanted them to do to him. Hitler’s winter mayhem changed everything.
Jago’s silence had been bought. The Link had vanished with the American victory and the crossing of the Rhine. Now the result was inevitable, nobody was Germany’s friend. Everyone was seeking the final reduction of her forces and the destruction of her society with bomb, shell and bullet. German civilisation was being razed into rubble, its daughters raped into submission, its fathers humiliated into an undead that could no longer protest or protect their families, and still the bombs fell. But Jago, who had helped make this possible, was not being dragged down into hell but offered a new job.
When the dust finally choked the last German in Berlin, Jago would be plucked from the Forgetting School. Clive Roberts, the man from MI6 and the Perish Judea crew at Chichester Cathedral, had come to him, and, for his silence over the Battle of the Bulge, had promised him an opening in the Diplomatic Corps. Jago was going to be a diplomat, something both he and Aunt Esme had dreamed of for him.
He came back to himself in the cemetery, feeling guilty at his wandering mind. A low moan of wind pushed a line of soft flakes across the surface of the compacted snow, like the slow advance across a continent of an invading army. Blessed are the peacemakers, Aunt Esme had always added to any conversation on the Diplomatic Corps. He was to sit a board exam but he’d been assured the result was a foregone conclusion.
He cursed himself: his mind was like a balloon floating away, when he had come to say goodbye to Nicky. He knew the problem was that he couldn’t face the pain of his grief; that letting Nicky out of the grave would tear Jago apart. That last terrible time in the police cell had been Grogan’s final curse. He had come to apologise, to say sorry he didn’t damn the world and proclaim his love for Nicky. Nicky had died alone in more than one way and Jago took that on himself. He considered crying and falling full length in the snow, hugging the earth that was Nicky’s blanket, but he couldn’t. Trapped by the rules, even alone. He considered telling Nicky he loved him, but it was too late and the crows would laugh at him. He was alone on a square mile of snow.
The man came to him across the cemetery, inexpert in the slush, skidding and swearing. He came not to visit the dead but the only other living person. His dark overcoat had an Astrakhan collar which would have suited it if his head covering had been a Cossack hat of the same material. Instead his head was encased in a woolly balaclava that made his plump face resemble a schoolboy’s. His breath left his mouth as smoke that seemed to signal his dangerous intent.
The Don from the Isokon Building arrived beside Jago, removed a glove and offered a hand for shaking which, when ignored, was re-encased.
‘Can’t you leave me alone?’ said Jago.
‘You’re a hard man to speak to these days.’
Jago didn’t want any company, least of all his.
‘You’re to be offered a government job,’ said the Don.
‘None of your business.’
‘Excellent,’ he said, as if Jago had agreed with him.
Jago knew he should walk away, cross the white desert and go back to Lavender’s. ‘Why excellent?’ he asked instead.
The Don opened his gloved hands wide. ‘Because you can continue your work for us after the war.’
‘Fuck off,’ said quietly, said as low as the sound of falling snow. Said with a tiredness that ate at Jago’s bones.
The Don manoeuvred himself next to Jago and looked down, as if they were jointly mourning Nicky. ‘Nothing’s changed,’ he said, ‘just because this one took the coward’s way out. Let’s face it; you’re still a sodomite. A word in the wrong ear and you can kiss the Diplomatic Corps goodbye. You’ll be out on your arse. Do you have any choice? I said the same to Lavender the day her brother tried to fly.’
‘What?’
‘I mean the silly girl thought that little house of hers was – well, really hers. I told her the Party needed it.’
Jago remembered her anger, her harshness to Austen.
‘You needed it, you mean. Having to give up the flat in Hampstead, are you?’
The Don grunted angrily. ‘The damn man is coming back from the States now the war is all but over. Wants his place back he says. I told Lavender, but she wasn’t sympathetic. I explained to her property is theft and so, while Nicky might have given it to her, it belonged to the Party. My word, she was stubborn; give a woman a house and her vision diminishes. She sees no further than new curtains. I had to be quite blunt with her: she either had to make over the house to me, or I’d make sure her neighbours knew her brother had been kicked out of the navy as an effeminate.’
Jago understood. She thought she’d lost the house. ‘But now her brother’s dead?’ he said.
‘The little cow isn’t budging.’
‘Nicky wouldn’t have let you get away with it.’
‘Yes, well he’s brown bread, isn’t he? And the dead don’t get a vote. Now you’ll do as I say. You’ll work hard as a diplomat, climb the sticky pole to positions of responsibility. But all the time you’ll be our creature. I mean you don’t have any choice, do you?’