Any Human Heart (33 page)

The Duke did not like de Marigny — this was common knowledge — but he was fond of Sir Harry. The quick gossipy consensus on the island was that de Marigny was the likeliest suspect. This would have been very clear to the Miami detectives early in their investigations — hence de Marigny’s swift summoning to Westbourne.

At some stage (probably through Christie, who kept the Duke informed of developments) the Duke was told that there was a way that the crime could effectively be pinned on de Marigny beyond reasonable doubt. All the detectives required was a trustworthy person who could supply them with clean fingerprints from de Marigny. The Duke may well not have known why they wanted this person: all he was asked to provide was someone unimpeachable. How about a commander in the Royal Navy? And so the detectives came to meet me and made their request. I refused and so they did the job themselves, as they had no doubt done many times before in Miami. The tossed cigarette pack trick has the air of a familiar ploy about it.

However, once they had the clear print, they had to let the Duke know the case against de Marigny was now convincingly made. They had motive, means and could now ‘place’ him in the murder room. When the Duke came to Westbourne on the Friday afternoon this must have been the substance of his conversation with Barker. I am sure the language employed would have been highly euphemistic but the implication would have been clear. He only needed the Duke’s nod — his tacit permission — to go ahead. And the Duke must have given it. He was doubtless highly relieved and would have put his own proper gloss on proceedings: ‘Well, Captain Barker, if you’re sure of your facts I see no point in lingering further.’ And so de Marigny was arrested.

The Duke would not know the details and therefore could place all blame on the detectives. The less he actually knew the better. This was why he was so furious with my refusal and why he cut me off in a rage when I tried to tell him what Barker and Melchen had asked me. He didn’t want to know. He could not know.

But the Duke of Windsor is not a guileless fool. He would have been aware that some sort of set-up was underway, however vaguely he was conscious of it, a set-up that was humiliatingly exposed during the trial (the Duke and Duchess were conveniently out of the Bahamas in the USA while the trial took place).

At the very least you have to accept that the Duke colluded in the implication of de Marigny. At the very least, the Duke of Windsor, the Governor of the Bahamas, the ex-King of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, was guilty of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. At the very least. This, as I say, is the kindest interpretation one can make. Many other, darker questions arise. McStay told me de Marigny’s version: all to do with money, Mexico and Wenner-Gren, but the allegations are completely unverifiable. For the moment these are the facts behind the arrest and the trial of Alfred de Marigny.

But I still keep thinking about the Duchess’s parting word — ‘Judas’. Why did she call me Judas? I hadn’t betrayed anyone. I was acting honourably and assumed a similar honour on the Duke’s part. The more I think about it the more I sense that ‘Judas’ was a reference to
a future
betrayal. I now knew a secret about the Duke of Windsor — a dangerous and damaging secret about his tangential involvement in the placing of false evidence. The Duke and Duchess — consumed with paranoia, anyway — assumed I would reveal it, or threaten to reveal it one day. Now I was another enemy to add to the growing list: I could cause them harm — and that was why I had to be so resolutely spurned.]

Cable from NID. I am to be recalled immediately. I fly to Miami tomorrow. Someone has moved very fast.

[LMS was back in England by the end of July. He was granted a month’s leave before resuming his normal duties at NID. Interestingly enough, he was not officially asked to write up the account of his eight and a half months’ association with the Duke and Duchess or express his doubts about the handling of the Harry Oakes murder. The Duke and Duchess remained in the Bahamas for the duration of the war.]

On the train to Birmingham, a sleety rain smearing the windows. A small boy sitting opposite asks me if I’m an officer and I say, yes. Are you in the navy? Yes. Well, where’s your ship, then? Good question. His mother shushes him up: stop bothering the gentleman. He would be amused to learn that this RNVR officer is off to an RAF base to learn how to jump out of aeroplanes.

It was Vanderpoel who announced last week that I was to go on this course. ‘May I ask why?’ I said. ‘We think it might be useful,’ was all he would say. I asked Ian if anything special was afoot but he said he knew nothing. Perhaps in preparation for the invasion? He’s not nearly so
au fait
with the department’s secrets since Godfrey left.
¹⁸
Anyway, it’s a change and I’m glad to get out of the office.

Freya and Stella came to Euston to see me off, which was sweet of them. Stella asked me if I would be brown when I came back and I reassured her I wouldn’t. She was hugely intrigued by my tan when I came home in July. And I must say when I pressed myself up against Freya’s pale freckled torso I did look like some dusky octoroon. After the long months away from each other it was as if our sex-drives had been renewed. Freya used to pull back the sheets and stare at me — as if my naked brown body obsessed her. We kept sneaking off for quick fierce passionate fucks at all hours of the day. Five-minute specials, we called them. ‘Fancy a five-minute special?’ Freya would say after lunch. Stella would beat on the locked door and shout, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Daddy’s a bit tired, darling,’ Freya would call as I humped away, a stupid grin on my face.

It seems strange to be heading back to Birmingham again, twenty years on: how I used to dread my end-of-term returns home. I’m to report to RAF Clerkhall for a two-week course in parachuting: a few days’ training, then a succession of five jumps in order to qualify. Something tells me this is not Vanderpoel’s idea — it seems more like something cooked up by Rushbrooke [the new head of NID] or some other brain. Ian said NID was trying to widen its
modus operandi.
‘We’re going to be on the continent of Europe soon,’ he said. ‘We can’t just sit on our laurels.’ Ian seems glum: he’s a moody so-and-so anyway, but since I returned he appears withdrawn, fretful.
Cherchez la femme?
¹⁹

I had a month’s leave when I came back from Nassau but I didn’t want to travel away from home: I wanted to stay in Melville Road and lead as ordinary and sedate a life as possible. I read, with pleasure — for the first time in months; I tended our vegetable garden; took Stella for walks. Freya and I would go out to a pub for a drink from time to time. I caught up with my friends and acquaintances.

Guilt
has been a huge success, critically and commercially:
²⁰
Peter Scabius is hailed as a new and important novelist. I still haven’t been able to read the book and when I met Peter just talked about it in the vaguest generalities. Peter didn’t notice, anyway: his head has been well and truly turned by all the money and acclaim. He has bought a large house on Wandsworth Common where he lives with Penny, his new wife (they married on publication day). He wears Tess’s death like a stigmata — a badge to demonstrate how much he has suffered. He said one truly revolting thing: ‘You know, Logan, since the news of Tess’s death, women seem to find me amazingly attractive.’ He’s probably cheating on Penny already.

And I had a strange blunt letter from Dick Hodge announcing he had his leg blown off at the thigh when he trod on a land mine in Italy. He’s back at home in Scotland, ‘learning to walk’, and he added, ‘Since I don’t ever intend to move from here again you’d better come and visit me.’ He signed himself off as, ‘Yours, Dick. Legless but not, in case you were wondering, dickless.’

I read in the papers that de Marigny has been acquitted at the trial. Some justice at least — but who did kill Sir Harry Oakes? The Bahamas, the Duke, the Duchess, seem like another world to me now.

RAF Clerkhall. This place is a base for training Bomber Command crews and is filled with aircrew. We have our first real jump tomorrow and I am actually quite looking forward to it. We — the non-aircrew — form an odd little group in the mess: six Englishmen, a Pole and two edgy Italians. None of us talks about why we are learning to parachute — perhaps, like me, none of us knows. I’m the only naval officer.

In the evening after dinner we’re free to go to local pubs or into Birmingham itself. I’ve been revisiting my old haunts, wandering around Edgbaston. Perhaps it is a post-Bahamas feeling, but I find I relish Birmingham’s stolid unpretentiousness. A big no-nonsense city. My schoolboy loathing of the place reflects badly on me. After the last six months everything about Birmingham seems reassuringly true and real — however grimy or knocked-about. One night I stood outside our old house and thought of Father, wondering what he would make of his son now, nearly twenty years having gone by. My two marriages, his two grandchildren, some sort of career and reputation as a writer cut short by the war. Would his ghost recognize this ageing naval officer?…

Actually, this train of thought has rather been dominating my mind since I set it running. At NID it’s an open secret that all our work is now beginning to focus on the forthcoming invasion of Europe — the ‘Second Front’. Conceivably this war could be over in a year — and a kind of panic sets my heart beating as I try to imagine ‘normal’ life again, with my forties approaching fast and the need to start up my old career once more. Can I do it? It’s funny: the war, much as I moan about it, has meant that all decisions have been held in limbo. And sometimes a limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.

Last night I went into a pub on Broad Street and ordered a pint of bitter. The place was quite busy and the thick blackout curtains made it feel unnaturally closed off from the world. I lit a cigarette and drank my beer and let my head empty of thoughts, only half aware of the chatter around me, entering a warm, particularly English type of trance, allowing time to stop for twenty minutes or so. When I tried to pay, the publican refused my money but his wife contradicted him. ‘He’s always doing that,’ she said crossly. ‘Anyone in uniform. I tell him: they all get well paid and we’ve got a living to make. No need for charity.’ The man shrugged his shoulders and looked sheepish. I said she was absolutely right, paid up and left a tip. Quite what the significance of this anecdote is, I don’t know. I rode the bus back to RAF Clerkhall in a calm mood. Very Birmingham, I thought, which is why I’ve grown so fond of the place all of a sudden.

After all the training, the gymnastics, the jumping off the tower in the harness, finally the real thing. About twenty of us filed into an old Stirling bomber specially fitted out. I sat next to one of the Italians, who looked very jittery as we hooked the clips of our ripcords on to the cable that ran the length of the fuselage roof.
‘Buoni auguri,’
I said, and he looked at me with pure panic in his eyes. Perhaps he knows where he’ll be jumping into. Who were we, the odd-bods, the non-aircrew? We seemed the most unlikely sort of secret agents.

The Stirling took off and we made a long slow series of ascending circles before we were at the correct height. As the drop zone approached a hatch was opened in the floor of the aircraft and the sergeant-instructor stood by it. ‘Whatever you do, don’t look down,’ he kept saying. ‘You look at my handsome face and when my hand falls, just step forward.’

Half a dozen dropped out of view before my turn came. I felt nothing: I had managed to shut down all emotions — and I had an absolute trust in the efficacy and strength of the webbing and equipment I was wearing; had no doubt at all that my parachute had been properly packed and that the ripcord, when tugged, would see its easy and flawless release. The sergeant-instructor dropped his hand and said, ‘Go, seven,’ and I stepped through the hatch.

There was a substantial physical blow from the rush of the slipstream and it seemed to me as if my parachute opened almost immediately. I looked up first into its dirty grey canopy and then looked down at the Staffordshire countryside. I saw that the first man to have left the plane was already on the ground, gathering the billowing folds of his parachute into his chest; the others who had preceded me were floating down in a rough line below me. I was savouring the feeling of suspension — not quite weightlessness (whatever that may be like: I didn’t feel like a piece of featherdown), more a sense of being dramatically out of your element, something I’d experienced once before in the Bahamas when I swam out beyond a reef and the ocean floor suddenly deepened beneath me, the water around me abruptly turning blue-black from pale blue — when I was aware of someone shouting at me from the ground: ‘Keep your feet together, number seven!’ I glanced down and saw another instructor called Townsend bellowing instructions at me through a megaphone. Christ, I thought, if I can recognize him as Townsend I must be bloody close to—

Thud. I hit the ground and rolled over, automatically rather than as instructed. It was exactly as we had been told it would be: the same effect as jumping off a twelve-foot wall — quite a height, actually, if you’ve ever tried it. I stood up, a proud grin on my face. ‘Not too bad, Mr Mountstuart,’ Townsend said, jogging up to me. ‘Only four more to go.’

I was covertly reading Plomer’s autobiography
²¹
— which has done aggravatingly well — and wondering if anyone would guess from its pages that its author was a promiscuous homosexual. Rhetorical question: the answer is no. Which then begged another — so what level of truth did this book contain? I was musing over this paradox when Vanderpoel came in and called me through to Rushbrooke’s office. Rushbrooke was waiting for me with another man whom I didn’t recognize but who was introduced as Colonel Marion (he was wearing civilian clothes). I felt a sudden pressure build in my body when I realized I was going to be given the assignment that my parachute course had prepared me for — and I wanted to say, ‘Before you go any further, Admiral Rushbrooke, I’d like to request a transfer to the Catering Corps’ — but said nothing, of course, and meekly sat down when Rushbrooke waved me to a chair. He smiled at me.