Brond (21 page)

His face was shiny with sweat and he looked unwell.

‘Not ordinary policemen, Briody said that to you. By Christ, he was right!’

I took courage from the sound of my own voice and his silence.

‘I don’t think Brond’s a policeman. I don’t think anybody knows what he really is. Has he been pretending to the IRA that he’s one of them?’

‘Damn the IRA,’ Primo said in a slurred voice like drink, so that I could hardly make out the words. ‘What country do you think you’re in?’

Then I saw among the papers scattered across the table an old newspaper clipping. There had been rumours of Scottish republican movements, secret societies, but no one took them seriously. There
had been a trial though. I remembered the headline. The government had set it up as a propaganda exercise and the papers were ready to play along; but it had crumbled under their fingers in court
into a farce of blundering amateurs and comic opera robbery. Only the sentences had been serious. I held up the scrap of newsprint towards Primo.

‘Something new,’ he said. ‘Not like anything before.’

‘And Brond is part of it – a government spy.’

Primo lifted his clenched fist quivering above my face.

‘Because of him,’ he said, ‘this time things will be different.’

Beyond his arm, I saw Brond appear in the doorway. At the same instant, Primo felt his presence. His arm fell to his side.

‘Our friend next door is sleeping,’ Brond said. ‘Would you make sure that he is comfortable?’

When Primo went out, Brond closed the door.

‘Like the cavalry again,’ he said.

Appearing over the hill to rescue me; and like before I was glad that he had come.

‘You shouldn’t upset him,’ he said looking towards the closed door. ‘He’s like a soldier. A good soldier.’

‘I know. Kilts and trumpets at dawn. You told me before.’

‘It’s quite true,’ Brond said, sounding serious, even indignant, until he spoiled it by beginning to laugh. ‘He went off to fight in Malaya – a mere schoolboy
furious with the Communists for trying to subvert the British Empire. The first time he tried to volunteer his father chased after him and fetched him home because he was under-age. He got there
though, and did
splendidly
well.’

Some confused perception of the finality of his contempt – for Primo, for me, for everyone; maybe even for himself? – gave me the courage of anger.

‘If I get out of here—’ Why had I said that? I would get out of there. They weren’t going to kill me. ‘When I get out of here, I’ll talk. Even if you take me
back to the police, I’ll tell them.’

Somebody would listen.

‘Tell them what?’ Brond asked. He watched me expectantly, and that puzzling anticipation chilled my anger.

‘About Muldoon,’ I said hesitantly. ‘You can’t do – what you did to him – not in this country.’

‘Nothing else?’ Brond wondered. ‘Isn’t there something else you want to tell them?’ I shook my head in denial. ‘Muldoon’s not really very
interesting,’ he went on. ‘We knew about him, of course. His whole family is up to its unwashed neck in Irish Republicanism of one stripe or another. His father was interned during the
war and has spent most of the last fifteen years enjoying Her Majesty’s same brand of hospitality. We suspected there might be a bigger fish, but never got near to thinking it was Kennedy.
Michael Dart!’ He tasted the name appreciatively. ‘Oh, he was good. He knew that hiding wasn’t a matter of putting on a false moustache. You have to put on a false life. He lied
to the world. If he was a sleeper, he was one of the best. There’s a price, though, for living in ambush behind your eyes. That little wife didn’t know who he was. But who
is
he?
He’s her husband Kennedy night and day, and Michael Dart for an hour a month – perhaps not so much. Or he’s not Kennedy at all except as an actor – not even when he’s
holding her in his arms. Michael Dart all the time and always pretending. I think that would be hard to do. In the end, who was he? . . . I find that interesting.’

Suddenly, as he finished, he came round the desk towards me. Despite his limp, he moved very rapidly and I shrank away from him in my seat. Bending above me, however, he slid open the file
drawer and began to rummage inside. ‘That, yes, interesting,’ he said, as if to himself, groping at the back of the drawer. ‘Muldoon, no. Muldoon now is a dead letter.
You’ll have to do better if you want to tell a tale. Isn’t there something else you want to tell?’

I saw a bridge in bright sunlight and a boy scrabbling to draw himself up to the parapet.

‘Eh?’ Brond said, touching me on the shoulder. ‘Something else?’

‘No!’ I cried too emphatically. ‘Just Muldoon. There wasn’t anything else.’

He had taken a box from the drawer and now, turning away from me with a look of disappointment, plucked out a fat white chocolate which he popped into his mouth. Muscles in his plump jowls
writhed as he smacked upon it. ‘I almost forgot I’d left these on my last visit. Fresh cream, but it’s cold here and so they keep.’

If he had offered me one, I would have refused it. He didn’t offer. Instead, reaching with the hand that held the chocolate box, he caught up one of the papers scattered on the desk. As it
dangled, held between his third and little finger, I saw that it was the newspaper clipping about the trial of the Republicans or radicals or revolutionaries – whatever they were, Scottish
certainly.

‘What do you make of this then?’ he asked, flicking it at me. ‘You read it while you were waiting?’ I nodded warily. ‘Trust a student, of course. And?’

What country do you think you’re in? Primo had asked me.

‘Is he— is Primo one of them?’ I gestured at the clipping.

‘Primo,’ he savoured the name, amused again by it. ‘Yes . . . I don’t think he’d refuse that as a description. Modify it perhaps here and there. They always fall
into factions, these people.’

How much contempt he had in him; and I remembered that Professor Gracemount had been a spy and that Brond was his friend; and I wondered if a spy always despised his victims. It was an insight I
did not want, but the thoughts ran through my mind too fast for me to control. Because I was afraid he would read them in my face, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head: ‘But
you said he was a soldier. You said he ran away to be a soldier.’

‘All the way to Malaya,’ Brond said seriously, ‘and did splendidly. Most white men couldn’t stay in the jungle for more than a few weeks, but he had a platoon of blacks
– come from Africa to fight the Chinese. I expect they were keen on the Empire too, you see. With his platoon, he would stay in until he couldn’t get to sleep because his bones were
sticking into the ground. Then they would include rum in the parachute drops – and he drank that until he could sleep. He really was a hero.’

‘He’s a funny kind of hero now,’ I said, glancing towards the door and thinking of what he had done to Muldoon.

‘A good soldier is an instrument,’ Brond said solemnly. ‘I imagine then he tortured some little yellow men in pyjamas – it’s the kind of thing good soldiers have to
do. He is a good man, and he took no pleasure in what he had to do through there. I suppose it’s difficult for your generation to appreciate a sense of duty.’ He paused and I suddenly
reheard his last sentence as if it had been some kind of impersonation. Something must have shown in my face for his voice changed. The words were still serious but his voice was different.
‘He is a dedicated man. To lose your only son and in a stupid, pointless accident. That’s cruel.’

He widened his eyes compassionately, but the voice kept that altered, inappropriate note.

‘Tragic,’ he said. ‘And so unnecessary – that’s what is hard. The child was playing on a bridge. And he fell.’

FIFTEEN

‘Y
orkshire cock. 9 inches plus.’

I sat on the toilet seat reading the legend on the tiles. I could never remember what the sizes should be – and, of course, the average worrier about such things typically overlooked the
phenomenon of foreshortening. Anyway, now we were in Europe was it not time our graffiti went metric?

Below the legend there was a drawing of something that looked like a length of limp hosepipe. Tucked under it were two pendulous moons that to me resembled women’s breasts. I congratulated
myself on another proof of my heterosexuality – of such things as much evidence as possible is comforting.

On the hosepipe was printed, ‘Anybody want it?’ And there again – nine inches after all – while the answer might be yes, the practical problems would have to be faced:
supposing I did manage to cut it off him, how would I manage to attach it to myself?

The ambience of the occasion engendered reflection in those areas – philosophy, linguistics, symbolic logic, that kind of thing. Why I was there was a different matter and a speculation I
had suppressed along with so much else. From the moment Brond had come over the latest hill like the cavalry, I had surrendered myself into his hands. Now – despite flashes of terror like
lights thrown into a darkened room – I floated with events as if he were my protector, my best wishes safe at his heart. It was inexplicable, but I rested in my darkened room rather than
searching for doors to escape by or a window to see from – the survival instinct had ebbed low, or perhaps that was the way it served me.

We were at a party given to celebrate the last night of an Open University Summer School. The School was being held in a university near the city. After the mansion house and Muldoon’s
ordeal, we had got back into the car and driven away. Behind us in the house we must have left Muldoon – conscious I hoped. I told myself it was stupid to be afraid that he might not be
alive.

I was in favour because of the company I was keeping.

‘Professor Gracemount has been a good friend to the University,’ said a bald little man who had been introduced as a Professor of something. ‘He pulled strings for us in the
early days when we were establishing ourselves, worrying about buildings – we have to be guests in so many places – and how our courses would be judged by the conventional institutions.
It was our good fortune to have friends then. Now our units are purchased in colleges and universities in the United States,’ he gave what one of those units might have described as a
self-deprecatory laugh, ‘Canada, Australia, New Zealand, several of the new African states as well as here at home in England . . . I suppose I should say,’ another laugh, ‘
“here in Britain.” ’

‘North Britain,’ Brond said, with a wink at me as if to share the joke.

‘People don’t,’ Professor Gracemount said, sniffing impatiently – was there a hint of evil-smelling cheese in the air? – ‘sensible people don’t fuss
about that any more. If they ever did! I imagine sensible people must always have been concerned with substance rather than shadow. Problems of war and peace, economic problems, problems of social
organisation. Good God! when Carlyle defined the Condition of England Question, he wasn’t interrupted by some fools piping up, “Britain please, Condition of Britain, if you
please!” If he had been, I can imagine the short shrift they would have been given. Carlyle surpassed the parochial. I don’t think he would have tolerated his countrymen confining him
as a Question to the Condition of Ecclefechan. And how much less that narrowness of vision is tolerable now, when we’re in the midst of the last of the wars of religion – Communism and
Capitalism in conflict – and any smaller thought’s impossible.’

I was surprised by the energy he put into this, sounding at the end even poetic. I had thought he went in for languor rather than excitement, but then, apart from that one evening at his house,
I had only encountered him before as a lecturer.

‘You divide the world so neatly,’ Brond said, ‘it sounds dull. Boredom may become the main motive for committing treason.’

‘Betrayal,’ the bald little Professor said in a North of England twang, ‘won’t wash for the old reasons that moved Quisling or Pétain or even von Stauffenberg. The
only music we’ll pay attention to is that played by the “Rote Kapelle” – a tune that made us dance when it was Germans betraying Hitler – but that set our teeth on
edge when Nunn May, Maclean, Burgess, Philby and the rest, came under the baton of the Great Heresiarch . . . Karl Marx, you see,’ he added in an aside for my benefit, who visibly
hadn’t seen. ‘It’s possible to reject their actions without denying them idealism.’

‘We know where your sympathies lie,’ Brond said with a pale smile in the tone of someone indulging a child.

‘I am a Man of the Left,’ the little pedantic Professor said, turning his head towards a bray of horse-laughter from a group of students by the bar. ‘The Irish
contigent,’ he explained, ‘they’re with us this week.’

‘The land of Sir Roger Casement,’ Brond said, ‘speaking of traitors.’

‘He sinned against the British Empire,’ the little Professor said, mouthing the phrase with distaste, ‘another religion, mighty and immoveable – but it passed like a
dream between one night and the next morning’s awakening.’

‘Not entirely passed,’ Brond said cheerfully. ‘I had a friend who tortured little yellow men in Malaya for the Empire. And another who killed a child that had stumbled on some
dangerous information – sense of duty, you see.’

‘That’s not duty as they understood it in the heyday of the British Empire,’ the little Professor said. ‘It’s trumpets and brass blaring over a secret longing for
defeat. It’s wallowing in post-imperial vomit.’

I think he was trying to be rude, but he could not manage the effortless offensiveness better bred Britons brewed at preparatory school as a distillation of seven-year-old homesickness.

Distilled essences of Celtic sorrow, blended or malt, were equally hard to come by that evening – two litre bottles of Italian wine, beer, martini and unobtrusive sherries making up the
booze scene. There seemed, however, to be a general resolution to shift as much of it as was humanly possible.

‘Ever heard,’ I asked, ‘about the old Italian peasant who was dying? “Gather round my sons.” So they gather round. “All-a my life, I make the wine. I teach
you to make the wine. Now I am dying. We make a big-a fortune from the wine. Now I tell you my last-a secret. How to make-a the wine from grapes.” And all the boys fell back in astonishment
from the bed, and then the oldest son says, “Poppa. You mean you can make it from
that
as well?” ’