Second Violin (47 page)

But Herr Rosen finished for him, ‘No, Herr Troy, there will be no dissenters. Not this morning.’

Rod almost blushed with pride.

Kornfeld, standing at Rod’s side, hands behind his back, the way they’d seen Jenkins stand when playing the subordinate, whispered, ‘And those who stand in line with
Jews.’

Rod suggested they wait for Billy and Siebert.

Kornfeld said, ‘
Carpe diem.
’

So they did.

Jenkins was first on the scene.

‘Oh bugger! What are you chaps up to?’

And the chant drowned out every last syllable.

‘
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!’

Ninety-odd voices – a single word.

‘
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!
Jude
!’

Jenkins dashed back inside.

They took a breather.

Schwitters appeared, carrying a large roll of paper nailed to two sticks. He gave one end to Spinetti and then walked away from him unrolling the paper until it was about ten feet long and its
text clearly visible:

‘We Are the Stinking Jews !’. . . in letters a foot high.

‘Such a telling phrase. I had originally intended to do it in German,’ Schwitters said, ‘but then I thought of your intended audience.’

‘Fine,’ said Rod, ‘Fine,’ thinking all the while ‘bloody hell!’

They took up the chant once more.

‘
Jude, Jude, Jude
!’

Trench appeared in the doorway, hatless and red-faced. He turned and shouted at Jenkins. Rod wished they’d paused in the chant long enough for him to hear what Trench was saying.

Jenkins came over, shy and almost embarrassed to be cast as the errand-boy. He and Rod found themselves conducting their conversation at shouting pitch.

‘The Major says whatever it is you think you’ll achieve by this, you won’t!’

‘We want a doctor for Drax! That’s all!’

‘I’d sort of worked that out for myself. Not entirely a thicko, y’know! Is that what you want me to tell Major Trench?’

‘Yes.’

‘And if . . .’

‘If he says no we’ll stay here till he does.’

‘Really Till dark? Past dinner time?’

Rod had not thought that far ahead, but ‘yes’ was the only answer.

Jenkins went back inside. Five minutes later he was back.

‘Message from the Major. You can stay here till you freeze or starve. He isn’t even going to turn out the guard.’

Rod’s heart sank, silently. He waved an arm in the air, the chant of ‘
Jude
!’ slowly fizzled out.

‘Bugger,’ he said softly to Jenkins.

‘Bugger indeed.’

‘I’d sort of counted on a reaction. If not immediate acquiescence, at least something that tied up lots of soldiers all doing nothing when they should be doing something.’

‘Can’t help you there, old man. If I turn out the guard I could be on a fizzer.’

‘Jenkins!’

They both turned, Trench was in the doorway bellowing.

Jenkins said, ‘Start your chaps up again,’ and dashed across.

Rod saw the confrontation as mime, drowned out once more by the chant, Trench all arms in the air, the comic face of British bluster, Jenkins doing what he did worst, trying to stand to
attention.

Then Trench was gone, and Jenkins was running across the lawn to them waving madly. The chant stopped, this time almost as one.

‘He said yes. He’s sending for a physician, for a doctor from one of the villages!’

‘Why?’ Rod said.

‘Does it matter? He’s agreed! God knows why, but he has. You can call it off now!’

Rod looked at Kornfeld, Kornfeld looked at Rod. Shook his head. Looked at the ground.

Rod looked at Jenkins. ‘When we see the doctor arrive, then we’ll stop.’

He turned to the crowd to be certain they’d heard him, and saw the nods of assent.

‘We’ll stop chanting, but we stay here until the doctor arrives. If he doesn’t arrive in an hour, we might find our voice again.’

‘Fine by me,’ said Jenkins. ‘Absolutely fine.’

As Jenkins left, Jacks and Siebert ambled out. Late and shameless.

‘Missed the show ’ave we?’

About three-quarters of an hour passed, then the main gate opened and Rod saw a Bullnose Morris, not unlike the one his brother drove, pull up to the house. A doctor – with a homburg and a
gladstone bag he could be no other – stepped out, glanced momentarily at the crowd of protestors and vanished into the house.

Billy Jacks was standing facing Rod and Kornfeld. His yellow-star armband dangling at the elbow, hands in pockets flicking out the fabric of his trousers for all the world to see, like a
schoolboy playing with his private parts. Like the cat that got at the cream.

‘Can we have breakfast now?’ he said. ‘I’m starvin’. I’d never thought I’d see the day I yearned for porridge, but yearn is what I do. If I don’t
get some oats in me in the next five minutes, I’ll eat one of Schwitters’ obbjydarses.’

Trench sent for Rod. Rod would have been surprised if Trench had not sent for him.

‘That was quite a show you put on out there.’

Rod said nothing to this. If Trench was going to play the headmaster, fine. They stood in his office, barely adapted from the headmistress’s study. Several generations of hockey First XIs
still askew on the walls, a glass-fronted bookshelf stuffed with pocket-sized Loeb dual-language classics – Horace, Cicero, Polybius. It was at least a fitting venue.

‘Don’t think it swayed me.’

‘Something did.’

‘I gather Professor Drax does have pneumonia?’

‘That’s what the doctor’s treating him for. It’s not as if there’s a pill one can take.’

‘Quite.’

They’d reached an impasse. Whatever ‘It’ was Trench had to say he wasn’t saying it.

‘I know . . . I realise . . . when you first got here . . .’

Rod declined to prompt him.

‘You put me down as . . . as a particular type . . . a particular type of chap. I think you made the mistake of confusing my opinions . . . my behaviour with that of my brother. It’s
obvious you know who he is. If one or two of the others read newspapers more often they’d all know who he is.’

‘Of course I know who Geoffrey Trench is. My father was present when Mungo Carfax threw him out of the House with a boot up his arse. You’re lucky that didn’t make the
newspapers.’

‘Quite. However, it remains, yours was a rush to judgement. I’m no kind of fascist, and my politics are my own business. In denying your request for a civilian doctor I was merely
following guidelines.’

‘Then why did you change your mind?’

‘I changed my mind because they are only guidelines and not regulations. It was a matter entirely for my discretion. And I did that to convince you that I am a man who acts independently.
I am my brother’s twin not his carbon copy.’

Rod had one thought.

‘I don’t believe you.’

He kept it to himself.

Rod told Billy Jacks and Oskar Siebert what Trench had said to him.

‘Of course he’s kidding himself. I think the sound of us chanting was a huge embarrassment to him. Made him look as though he wasn’t in control. In front of Jenkins and the
men, I mean. No officer could stand that sort of thing.’

Jacks was doing that fiddling thing in his trouser pockets again – it struck Rod as faintly obscene. But one hand emerged, clutching a folded sheet of paper.

‘There is one other thing,’ he said. ‘We let him get a gander at what you lot was up to out in the yard, and then we gave him this.’

Billy handed Rod a folded sheet of thin white paper. At first glance it seemed to Rod to be a child’s scrawl, awful handwriting, perfect spelling – then it dawned on him Jacks had
done a word for word, comma for comma copy of a letter that had originated on headed notepaper.

‘Where did you get this?’

‘Oskar an’ me turned over his office night before last. Idiot kept it in his desk drawer. Didn’t know enough to burn the bleedin’ evidence.’

‘You burgled Trench’s office!’

‘No,’ Siebert said. ‘Not burgled. I had a key made. Young Jenkins gave me an impression of the original in a bar of soap.’

Rod waved the letter at them.

‘And where’s the original of this?’

‘We sent it out by the patisserie run yesterday. My missis should get it in a day or two now. Trench don’t play ball one copy goes to my MP, and another copy goes to Scotland Yard.
My missis’ll hang on to the original.’

‘And that’s what you told Trench?’

‘Straight up.’

Rod did not know what he felt. Elated, deflated, victorious, defeated.

‘You shouldn’t be bothered,’Jacks said. ‘You’d done wonders waving the old school tie. You got us fed back in Manchester, you got the sick and the old uns taken in
at Douglas, you got this lot up an runnin’. You done good, you really have. But what you did today . . . OK it was moving . . . it was stirrin’ . . . an’ we are all Stinkin Jews
now . . . you was dead right . . . but it was never gonna work with a total tosser like Trench. All a sit-down was gonna get you was a row of cold arses.’

Rod folded the letter and passed it back to Jacks.

‘Of course,’ he said softly.

‘He’s right, Troy,’ Siebert said. ‘Gandhi-style civil disobedience was never going to work. As your English phrase has it, it was time to fight fire with fire.’

Rod looked at them. He could not see what they had in common. They were the same height and the same complexion – short, dark men – and that was about it. In peacetime, one would
surely have been having his collar felt by the other?

He said, ‘And to fight crime with crime? Do you know what an unholy team you two make? You should see yourselves, the East End wide boy and the career copper on the same side.’

‘War,’ Siebert said, ‘makes strange bedfellows of us all.’

Trench sent for Rod again the following day.

He too unfolded a letter and passed it across the desk to Rod.

‘Came from the War Office this morning.’

Rod took it in at a glance and then re-read it slowly word for word.

Trench said, ‘It’s an order for your release.’

‘I can see that.’

‘You should be delighted.’

‘And so should you.’

Trench declined the bait.

‘You want me gone. Supposing I won’t go?’

‘Your charges will be safe with me. You’ve played Snow White among the Seven Dwarfs too long even for your own amusement. You’ll go. Of course you’ll bloody well go. It
isn’t a request . . .’

Trench’s finger tapped down on the paper.

‘. . . It’s an order. RAF Cockfosters. Seventy-two hours from now. You’re in the forces now. Like it or lump it, Mr Troy just bugger off!’

Rod arrived at Cockfosters wearing an ill-fitting off-the-peg uniform. There had been just enough time to get issued with the uniform, to drop in on his wife, children and
parents and to ring his tailor and order a uniform tailored to his bulk. His father’s obsession with, as he still insisted on calling it nearly forty years after the Wright Brothers,
‘powered flight’, had led Rod at an early age to indulge his father’s hobby for him. The old man had bought an aeroplane in 1922 . . . Rod had flown it for him and with him. He
was a good amateur pilot, qualified longer than most professionals now in service and he had rarely lost a chance to fly. He’d kept up the hours in England, Ireland, France and, until the
Nazis had grown suspicious of him, Germany too. Hence, it was with no small pride that he pinned his wings to the baggy RAF blue blouse before reporting to Wing Commander Perkins.

‘I say, old man, you do realise wings are strictly for pilots?’

‘I’ve been flying since I was sixteen. More than fifteen years.’

If Rod had wanted to stay in Intelligence it was the
wrong remark to have made. Forty-eight hours later he found himself reporting to 56 Fighter Squadron, Fighter Group 10, in Boscombe Down, Wiltshire.

It seemed to Rod that it had been a glorious summer. He’d seen it in London, he’d seen it on the Isle of Man, he’d glimpsed it one day at Cockfosters and now
in rural Hampshire only twenty-five miles from the English Channel. He drove his HRG 1100 Sports two-seater down from London, his suitcase strapped to the back. Either side of the road out of
Winchester the farmers were taking in the harvest. Heavy horses plodding in front of the whirling blades of reapers. Steam engines bellowing, fly wheels flying, leather belts spinning, threshing
the corn. It was an odd combination of scents in the air. Steam and soot and the indescribable smell of mown wheat. He had no word to capture it in its ambiguity. It was the smell of summer –
but it presaged autumn. The heat of the day always held that first cool breath of autumn, ‘rotten before ’tis ripe’ as some fool in Shakespeare said of the medlar – but for
the life of him Rod couldn’t remember who.