The Age of Treachery (3 page)

Forrester saw Clark glance up as Lyall spoke and shot him a look that warned him to stay out of this dispute, but Norton was in full spate. “The Americans were pursuing their own interests when they finally deigned to come into the war, and that’s what they’ll go on doing,” he said. “Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive.”

“Naivety,” said Lyall, as if savouring the word. “It’s a wonderful word for clubbing your opponents over the head, Alan. Much used in Party circles, I believe?”

“I’m not a member of the party,” snapped Norton, “as you very well know.”

“You might give that impression, though, to our guests,” said Lyall, like a picador enraging a bull. There had been plenty of speculation that Norton was a communist fellow traveller.

At which point Gordon Clark could no longer resist. “I’m sure our guests don’t expect to hear fellows quizzing each other about their political affiliations, Lyall,” he said. “After all, this is a bastion of learning, not an inquisitorial chamber.” It was a splendid stroke: Clark had neatly defined Lyall’s baiting of Norton as boorish and crass. For a moment the younger man was at a loss. Then he smiled warmly at Clark.

“I’m so sorry, Gordon,” he said. “I’d forgotten how delicate your sensibilities are.” He looked around the table. “Dr. Clark is Senior Tutor,” he said as if in explanation. “I think dealing with undergraduates takes a great toll on his nervous system.” He looked again at Clark with apparent solicitude. “I promise to keep the conversation innocuous from now on,” he said, and turned back to Dorfmann.

Clark was silent for a moment; Forrester could see that his friend was boiling with fury at Lyall’s revenge, which, true to form, neatly combined truth with slander. Clark was indeed highly strung not because of the demands of being Senior Tutor but due to the toll his war work had taken on him. It was impossible to establish the distinction, but Forrester knew Clark was too angry to let the gibe pass.

“It’s not blandness one seeks at High Table, Lyall,” he said. “It’s – how shall I put it? –
incisiveness
. Something I have to constantly remind my undergraduates: there’s no point in speaking for the sake of being heard, however amusing one finds the sound of one’s own voice.”

The Master intervened before Lyall could hit back. “I’d be very grateful for your opinion of the claret, Roland,” he said to Bitteridge. “We’ve just opened a new bin and I’m wondering if we left it too long.” Winters turned to ensure everyone else was part of this new conversation. “Roland is not just a great English scholar,” he said, “but he also has one of the great noses.”

There was general laughter and Bitteridge looked enormously pleased at the compliment. “Well,” he said, considering the claret judiciously, “I think, Master, you are to be congratulated.”

And the conversation moved onto safer ground. Forrester felt himself start to breathe again. He’d been afraid, for a moment, that his friend would throw himself across the table and knock Lyall backwards out of his chair. God knows, he’d been tempted to do it himself, and it wasn’t
his
wife that Lyall was making love to.

* * *

By the time those who had agreed to attend the Icelandic reading crunched through the snow across the inner quadrangle to the Master’s Lodge, clouds were scudding across the moon. As well as Haraldson, Calthrop and Dorfmann there was a mix of Barnard Fellows, and wives and dons from other colleges. David Lyall, Forrester noted with relief, had decided to absent himself.

Inside the Lodge, a minstrels’ gallery ran around the upper part of the large drawing room and carved beams like those in the Hall ran across the high ceiling. There were gently worn Turkish rugs on the floor and a crackling fire in the grate. Lady Hilary, the Master’s wife, was supervising two tall young men as they shifted furniture for the new arrivals. Lady Hilary was a tall, slightly awkward woman who Forrester suspected was not quite comfortable in her skin. He liked her, but he was not sure she liked herself.

“I want you to meet Hakon and Oskar,” said Lady Hilary, introducing her two assistants. “The Master specially asked them to join us this evening because they’re from Iceland.”

“And children in Iceland learn the sagas at their mother’s knee,” said the Master genially. “In the absence of Professor Tolkien they will gently correct us if we get our Old Norse pronunciation wrong.”

Hakon and Oskar shook their heads. “No, no, we are engineers,” said Hakon. “It is many years since we read the sagas. But as this is our last night in England, we offer to do our best.” Haraldson said a few words to the boys in Norwegian and they laughed. With Lyall gone, he seemed to have regained his good humour.

“You understand it is because of the ancestors of these young men that the Eddas and the sagas exist,” he said to the rest of the company. “The stories and poems were first created in Norway and other parts of Scandinavia, but they were not written down. When Norwegians went in search of new land—”

“Rather like the settlers in the American west,” said the Master.

“Very much like that,” said Haraldson. “They took the sagas with them to their new home in Iceland. When they became literate, they wrote them down, which is how the sagas survived.”

“In short,” said the Master to the Icelanders, “your ancestors preserved Viking culture when it would otherwise have been lost.” He turned to his wife. “And everything is perfectly arranged, my dear. Thank you.” As the audience settled itself, he addressed the room. “The work we’re going to read tonight, the ‘Völuspá’, is one of the most important poems in the canon. Hakon, Oskar, Professor Haraldson and I will take it in turns to do the reading from the minstrels’ gallery. The acoustics are splendid and when I’ve turned the lights down to help you, imagine you’re listening to genuine Norse bards declaiming from the depths of time.”

Then he ushered the readers through a small door that led to the stairs. Moments later tiny reading lights came on up there and they heard his voice again, speaking from the shadows of the gallery above. As he had promised, the acoustics were perfect, and it sounded to Forrester, as it always did, as if the readers were right beside him.

“In the passage you’re about to hear,” said Winters, “Odin, chief of the gods, bids a certain wise-woman to rise from the grave. She then tells him of the creation of the world, the beginning of years, the origin of the dwarfs. She describes the final destruction of the gods in which fire and flood overwhelm heaven and earth, using a phrase ‘
ragna rök
’, meaning ‘the fate of the gods’, which has become synonymous with the German word ‘
Götterdämmerung
’.”

“A subject about which we Germans know all too much,” said Dorfmann wryly. Calthrop frowned, and the reading began.

“I saw there wading through rivers wild,” declaimed Haraldson, sounding like a Viking chief booming down a fjord.

Treacherous men and murderers too,

And workers of ill with the wives of men;

There Nithhogg sucked the blood of the slain,

“The phrase ‘Would you know yet more?’ is uttered by the wise-woman,” said the Master. “She is asking Odin if he really wants to hear what is about to befall.”

The giantess old in Ironwood sat,

In the east, and bore the brood of Fenrir;

Among these one in monster’s guise

There was a rustle of pages as Haraldson handed the book on to the next reader.

There feeds he full on the flesh of the dead,

And the home of the gods he reddens with gore;

Dark grows the sun, and in summer soon

On a hill there sat, and smote on his harp,

Eggther the joyous, the giants’ warder;

Above him the cock in the bird-wood crowed,

Again the reader changed, but by then the audience was scarcely noticing: through the magic of the incantatory words, combined with the darkness and the firelight, they found themselves transported back to a world where gods roamed the earth and dwarves delved in its depths.

Involuntarily, Forrester’s thoughts went back to what Lyall had said about the Nazi obsession with Norse mythology, and the role the sinister, Nordic-obsessed Thule Society had played in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. But he knew all this was a perversion of the ancient beliefs: the product of warped minds, with no connection to reality. Except when you listened to a Viking saga being recited in the darkness.

Then to the gods crowed Gollinkambi,

He wakes the heroes in Othin’s hall;

And beneath the earth does another crow,

Now Garm howls loud before Gnipahellir,

The fetters will burst, and the wolf run free;

Much do I know, and more can see

A new reader began: one of the young Icelanders.

Brothers shall fight and fell each other,

And sisters’ sons shall kinship stain;

Hard is it on earth, with mighty whoredom;

Axe-time, sword-time, shields are sundered,

Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls;

He paused – and as he paused there was a sharp sound of glass breaking from somewhere outside the Lodge. Lady Hilary looked up, puzzled, then walked over to the window, pulled aside the curtain and peered out. Forrester heard her sharply indrawn breath.

“Michael,” Lady Hilary called up to the gallery. “I’m so sorry to interrupt, but something strange has happened outside. I think you should come and look.” Her voice was oddly flat, as if she couldn’t quite put strong emotions into words. Moments later Forrester and the other guests were all crowded around the window, peering out into the quadrangle. The only light came from the moon, still partially obscured by clouds, but against the whiteness of the snow it was perfectly clear what Lady Hilary was looking at.

Below a broken window on the second floor a body lay spread-eagled in the snow.

They ran out across the untouched whiteness of the quadrangle, the light from the windows of the Lodge behind them – and stopped a few feet from the body of David Lyall, as he lay amidst a halo of broken glass in the otherwise untouched snow, staring sightlessly towards the Lodge.

“My God,” said Peter Dorfmann. “The poor fellow.”

Forrester came forward then, and as he knelt beside the body to check there was no pulse, he saw the puncture wound between the second and third ribs. He looked up at the window from which Lyall had fallen and knew, with a sinking feeling, exactly whose window it was.

“Isn’t that Clark’s set?” asked the Master, his gaze following Forrester’s. No-one replied. “Perhaps I’d better go and see if he’s there.” He began to walk towards the cloisters, then paused and turned to Forrester. “Would you mind calling the police?”

“I don’t think anybody should go up there yet—” said Forrester, but Winters had already disappeared.

“I suppose we’d all better move back,” said Calthrop. “We’re rather messing up the evidence.” It was all too true; half a dozen sets of footprints had trampled the snow into a slushy mass around the body.

“We can’t just leave him there,” said Lady Hilary.

“I’m afraid we have to,” said Forrester. “It’s too late to do anything to help him now.” Suddenly the Master’s wife was sobbing in his arms.

“That poor young man,” she said, again and again. “That poor young man.”

Bitteridge stared at the scene as if it had been designed to give him personal offence. “This is appalling,” he said. “Absolutely appalling.”

The two Icelanders stared, white-faced. Arne Haraldson was frowning, as if trying to solve a particularly difficult crossword puzzle. The remaining guests milled about, wondering what to do next.

The Master’s head appeared through the broken window of Gordon Clark’s room, and Forrester noted blood dripping from his hand where he had cut himself on the glass.

“There’s no sign of Clark,” he called down. “Does anyone know where he might be?”

“He’s probably at home,” said Forrester. “He only uses his set for tutoring.”

“Very well,” said the Master, and disappeared inside again.

“To think it should have happened now,” said Lady Hilary, “when we were all just sitting there, reading. It’s too horrible.” Forrester took her back into the Lodge and handed her over to the wife of a don from Magdalen. Then he went to the Master’s telephone and dialled 999. As he gave the details he felt the nausea return; but this time it was not a response to his own memories, but to the conviction that his friend Gordon Clark had committed an act for which he would eventually be tried, convicted and hanged.

* * *

Forrester heard the clanging bells of the police car from far away, which did not surprise him: he was familiar with the peculiar acoustics of snowy landscapes; there had been times when his life depended on it. The rest of the party, remaining in the Lodge on the Master’s instructions, were sitting around the drawing room in a state of shock; even those with drinks in their hands simply held them, not raising them to their lips. As Forrester watched them he was willing Clark to keep moving, to take a train, get to a Channel port and onto a ferry, to get out of the country as soon as he could.

It was while he was thinking this that he noted Arne Haraldson was no longer present and then, glancing out into the quad, saw him disappearing into a stairway.

Seconds later there was a flash of torchlight in the upper floor.

Almost without thought Forrester slipped out of the drawing room and opened the front door. Bells still clanging, the police car was turning into the driveway, its headlight illuminating the bushes. Forrester melted into the shrubbery even as the car pulled up outside the front door.