‘How did you cover your tracks?’ I asked as Clark finished his story sometime in the early afternoon of the next day.
He smiled. ‘I have tried to do that ever since,’ he said with a weary, enigmatic air, ‘and I should have succeeded, but for your book and the fallibilities of age. For most of life one tries to forget and one is very largely able to do so. But old age brings unwanted things back unsummoned; the memory plays tricks, the past seems so close you can hear it breathing. Every night I hear the pistol shots I fired as I executed all those men. Judge, jury and hangman…
‘Your generation has counselling, though what good it does, I have no idea. My generation simply remembers…’ He fell silent for a moment, and I was left thinking over what he had said until he rallied. ‘Oh, you asked how I kept the secret, didn’t you? Well, the master of the tanker was a very decent fellow. “I’ll have to report that I’ve picked you up,” he said, and I said, “Can’t you wait until we get to Scapa, or wherever you’re going?” and he said he couldn’t really, so I said that I wasn’t in PQ17. That’s when he told me what had happened and that the convoy had been scattered and then the merchant ships sunk piecemeal. I found it difficult to believe after all I had gone through, but the Admiralty weren’t to know we had succeeded in our mission, and it was clear then, as it is clear to me now, that Pound had acted on the assumption that we had failed.
‘Anyway, I told the oiler’s master that I had been involved in a secret weather mission connected with covering PQ17 and that our ship had been lost in the ice. I said that I was the only survivor and had been first lieutenant. I said I had a code word to transmit if we had problems and was anxious to send it as it should have been transmitted before we lost the ship, but the circumstances didn’t allow it. He was sympathetic, as a seaman is when another has lost his ship. Even though I think he nursed a suspicion that I was a spy, it was harmless enough. Perhaps if he’d been a regular naval officer, he might not have been so relaxed, I don’t know.’ Clark shrugged. After a little, he went on. ‘Anyway, I sent the Admiralty the single word Forbearance. It was far too late, of course, but someone picked it up and, in due course, it must have been passed to Gifford, for an armed guard was waiting for the tanker when she returned to Loch Ewe and I was taken in conditions of considerable secrecy to London.
‘I met Gifford once more and told him what had happened. He looked tired, overworked and disappointed. He told me not to make a formal Report of Proceedings and that he would pass on the information to Sir Dudley Pound. I asked if I could report to the First Sea Lord and he said, rather curtly I thought, “Certainly not!” Then he said that I was in line for promotion to commander and that I would be sent for a refresher course in anti-submarine warfare. He reminded me that the source of the intelligence that had started my wild goose chase into the Arctic remained valuable to the Allied cause and that I was to observe secrecy for the rest of my life.
‘I remember telling him, a little curtly myself by now, that he had no need to concern himself. I understood the importance of an official secret.
‘A month later I was in command of a corvette, and six months later I received a brass hat and moved into a new frigate, where I found myself senior officer of an ocean escort group. I saw the war out in the Atlantic; a grey war fought by grey men in grey ships; a desperate business.
‘D’you know I didn’t really care about things after PQ17… But you know all about the aftermath of that affair… It’s in your book.’
He sat back in his chair and dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. The story seemed to be over and I was scribbling what I thought was to be the last of my notes. It grew silent and I thought he had dozed off when suddenly he said, ‘I forgot to tell you the cause of the diarrhoea.’ I looked up. ‘It was trichinosis, caused by a parasite called trichina spiralis. It is found in polar bears and pigs, and some seals too, I learned later. Thank God we cooked those we ate…’
‘And what brought you here?’ I asked.
‘What?’
I repeated my question, adding, ‘What happened to you and Magda, and Jenny…?’
‘Oh, I told you all that, did I?’ He sighed, then went on: ‘I sold up the big house on the Wirral after my father died in 1951…’ He sat for a moment and stared out of the window. Charlotte was pruning roses in the overgrown garden. He gave a short, dry and bitter laugh. ‘Dead roses,’ he said, ‘for a dead man talking.’
‘Did you marry Jenny?’ The question was an impertinence, blurted out before I could stop myself, but I wanted to know the end of the story – his end, not that of the official secret.
He did not seem to mind and merely shook his head. ‘No. She married an American seaman. I married Magda.’ He paused a moment after that admission and I was left to imagine how their reconciliation had come about. It would have been an impropriety to pry further. ‘We adopted the little girl; the American didn’t…’ He failed to finish the sentence and I could see no point in pursuing the detail; it was not important.
‘Magda had found this house when she had been having a fling with a Yank herself. He was an airforce colonel, East Anglia was stiff with them then. He abandoned her, of course, when he went back to his young wife and child in Connecticut. We were happy for a few years, then Magda decided to emigrate to Israel. She died of cancer about twelve years later. When my daughter lost her husband she came and joined me. She loves the house…’
He fell silent and I sensed the story had ground to its end. I remember looking down at my notes. For some reason, Storheill had fascinated me, perhaps because Clark seemed fond of him.
‘I have told you a great deal,’ Clark said, as though deciding himself that the matter had now reached its conclusion.
‘What did Storheill mean about his reputation?’ I asked.
Clark frowned. ‘Oh, yes, I told you that too, did I? His last words were something about God saving Norway and that I should remember his reputation.’
‘I wondered what he meant by it?’
Clark rubbed his forehead. ‘Out on the ice he had said to me, “Do you know what the old Norsemen said of a man’s life?” I admitted I didn’t and he said, “All men, their kinsmen and their cattle die; but a noble name, praise and reputation are immortal.” It was a curious fancy, don’t you think?’
I nodded and jotted Storheill’s words down. And I remember thinking how difficult it must have been for a man to bury such a reputation as Clark had acquired in life. But then I had not shot a dozen helpless, unarmed men.
I stared at him for a moment and, catching my eye, he said, ‘Perhaps you can save Storheill’s name for him, eh? I should like you to do that.’
‘Of course.’
Then there was just one other question.
‘What about Kurt?’ I probed, anxious not to leave a strand untucked in the last splice he was making of his life.
But Clark shrugged. ‘We never found out. Did the Gestapo get to him before the Russians? Was he implicated in the Stauffenburg Plot alongside Admiral Canaris?’ Clark shrugged again. ‘Who knows? I am inclined to think he was executed in the aftermath of the Rastenburg explosion. We shall never know. Perhaps he escaped then died in the awful mess Hitler left the Germans in…
‘In the end we were unimportant. We were all killed long, long ago. I have been dead ever since I left that beach, but –’ and here he smiled with a quiet haunted certainty that I cannot get out of my mind’s eye – ‘dead men never know when to stop talking.’
As I left him, I sought out his daughter to let her know I was going. She was still in the garden, where a chill had set in under the shadow of the high holly hedge.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said simply, removing her leather gardener’s gloves. ‘It is good of you to take the trouble.’
‘It was no trouble,’ I said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
‘He told you everything, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, looking straight at her so there could be no misunderstanding. ‘Everything.’
She coloured slightly and lifted a strand of hair from her face. ‘Did he tell you about the poppies?’
‘That he picked them, yes.’
‘Come, I’ll show you…’
We walked to a small area where a few stones were piled. A small plant of a pale green, with tiny brown seed pods trembled in the chilly breeze.
‘Arctic poppy,’ she said, ‘Papaver dahlianum.’
I tried to equate the tiny plants with the ring of shots echoing about that remote Arctic beach and found that it was beyond the power of my imagination. And then it occurred to me that the act of picking the delicate and frail things had been the last act of an innocent man.
Charlotte walked me to my car, where we shook hands. She was still a handsome woman and her smile was open and attractive. I tried to see her mother in her face but she seemed to bear her father’s features. I wanted to ask her about Magda as a stepmother, whether she had children of her own and how long she had been widowed, but I felt I knew more of her life than I had a right to.
She stood watching me as I got into the car and backed out of the drive. I had the curious sensation that she did not want to lose sight of me, that I bore off something precious to her. Ever since she told me of her father’s death I have wondered how she copes in that remote old house.