The Summer Isles (37 page)

“Will you tell us one of your funny stories?”

“You mean about the past?” I ask.

They both nod gravely. But I’m lost here. The starlight barely makes it through the glass to my eyes.

“Why don’t you both tell
me
a story instead?” I suggest. “Tell me what you know about John Arthur.”

“John Arthur,” Barbara intones, “died a hero’s death as we as a Nation celebrated Trafalgar Day. Bad people who wanted to—” But at this point, Christine begins to tickle her. They collapse into a squealing heap.

When they’re almost still again, I do my best to tell them about Saladin and the capture of Jerusalem, but my choice of subject is a poor one and Christine starts to draw matchstick men on the frosted glass whilst Barbara does handstands: they’re plainly not in the mood. After a while, I half-close my eyes, feigning sleep in my wicker chair, and they put their fingers to their lips and creep out, leaving me to my old man’s dreams, these stars, this empty night.

The chair creaks. The snow that covers the Cumbernalds’ wide back garden is barred with the light of many windows. Will they stay in this house on Raglan Street, I wonder, in the wake of Eric’s promotion and the knighthood that will almost certainly follow, or will they move upwards to some semi-stately home? With the billiard room and this conservatory, the hugely expensive kitchen I got a glimpse of, they’ve clearly got things exactly as they want them. But they will move, of course. They’ll continue to swim through these warm currents until age and frailty finally catch up with them. They’ll probably even accept death with good grace—after all, they’ll know that they’ve have had a few good innings. Just like me, they’ll have no cause to complain.

I really am a full Professor now. An MA, Modern History, from my own college, too. As Cumbernald has carefully explained, my Master’s can be seen as either honourary or de-facto depending upon the angle from which you choose to view it. The thing often switches back and forth even in my own befuddled mind—a strange state of existence which I suspect that the scientists Walter Bracken refused to join in Australia would recognise from their studies of the hints and glimmers that apparently make up our universe. We’re barely there, it seems, if you look closely enough; just energies and particles that don’t belong in a particular time or place. Stare at the world too hard, breathe at it from the wrong direction, and it falls apart.

Christlow was found drowned on a muddy bank of the Thames down by the Isle of Dogs the morning after the Cottage Spring. A presumed suicide, there were whispers on the Oxford grapevine of evidence found in his rooms of preferences that should never be entertained by a man who did volunteer work with children.

I don’t doubt, in fact, that he was following me. Where and how it began, and whether he always knew of my sexual dalliances, or whether his suspicions of me were more recent, I will never know. But I’m sure that he found the pistol in the suitcase beneath my bed. No doubt he imagined he was doing no more than his patriotic duty by reporting my movements. But here the picture grows fuzzy, unscientific, unhistoric…

My thoughts always come back to the man who has most plainly benefited from John Arthur’s death. More than ever now, it’s clear that we all underestimated William Arkwright. He’s a consummate survivor, a dealer and a fixer, a betrayer, a maker and an unmaker of men: a
politician
in the sense that John Arthur—who lived, for all his faults, by the gut, by the heart, by the flame and the fire—never was. It must have been plain to Arkwright long before it was to the rest of us that Modernism was in crisis, seduced by its own myth and in danger of launching itself into economic catastrophe and a disastrous European war. So perhaps Arkwright finally persuaded the generals, the old guard—the relics of an establishment that we all presumed had died off but now, resurgent, is so supportive of him—that enough was enough. As even the arrest of Jim Toller and his senior KSG colleagues acknowledges, John Arthur’s death was executed too professionally to be the work of mere fanatics.

From this, I soon find myself taking the kind of wild flights that, even when I was spinning though the most dangerously speculative pages of my long-projected book, I would never have considered undertaking. History—the only kind of history, anyway, that anyone ever cares about—is always reducible to solid facts that can be learnt by students in hour-long lessons and then regurgitated in exams, or used to add colour to television dramas, or as the embroidery in escapist novels. But it seems to me that my own plan to kill John Arthur, of which he himself clearly had no knowledge, was known about, indeed accepted and encouraged from its inception, by senior figures within the Government who already wished him dead. What could have been more convenient than to have some dying madman perform the deed? So my path was cleared, and perhaps even poor Walter Bracken was dispatched in a sham suicide once he had given me what I required of him. I still remained, though, just one of several options. An idea to be toyed with—or at least not discarded until the last appropriate moment. Even as I wandered the gardens of New Buckingham Palace two days before Trafalgar Day, it was still quite possible that I would be allowed access to John Arthur with my Humane Bullets and my Webley .45 Bulldog Revolver. After all, I had done well enough so far. There was no particular reason why I shouldn’t succeed, other than the question mark that hung over my own character. And whom should I meet there amid the terraced fountains, but none other than William Arkwright?

It was then, I think, that I was finally weighed in the balance and found lacking. I was dropped from the contingencies, and Arkwright ordered that I be arrested by his own officials, questioned, then shot whilst more reliable plans were put in hand. Only some chance enquiry from John Arthur’s office about my whereabouts—that midnight phone call echoing in that shaft between the buildings—saved my life.

Did John Arthur know that an assassination attempt was likely? Did he welcome it? Did he send that invitation to me half-expecting that I would be the final link in the chain that would break him? And was it I who led both John Arthur and his killers to the Cottage Spring? But no, no. All of this is too fantastic—worse than those dreadful Modernist books that I forced myself to read. Even now, I’m still swept on by the myth of John Arthur.

The fact is that I will never know. Perhaps in years to come when the truth is no longer potent, some hack or scholar will come up with a theory that questions the role of Jim Toller’s KSG in John Arthur’s death. They may even stumble across the strange fact that another figure, an obscure populist academic named Brook, was arrested in possession of a gun. Odder still, this Brook character was then released and was with John Arthur at the time of his death—survived, even, the explosion. I cannot imagine what threads they will draw out from these odd facts. By their nature, the true conspiracies are the ones that are least likely to be unearthed in the future. The truth, at the end of the day remains forever silent. We are only left with history.

“
There
you are, Brook!” Cumbernald looms out from the lights in the hallway and lays his hand on my shoulder. Everything else subsides. “Can’t just drift off like this, you know. There’s a phone call for you. A Miss Flood. She sounds pretty excited.”

“She’s my editor.”

“Ah!” He nods as if that explains it all. My knees pop and crack like tiny fireworks as he helps me up. His right arm supports me as he leads me down the corridor. “You can take it in here in my study,” he says, pushing open the door. He hands me the receiver from the top of his desk, then steps back, watching me for a few moments as I settle down on a chair that smells of new leather and swivels alarmingly.

I lift the telephone to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Geoffrey, there you are!” Miss Flood sounds excited, and I can hear merry voices behind her, the pop of a bottle. “I got your number here from that creepy chap who works for you at the college.”

“Christlow?”

“Whatever. I’ve marvellous news, Geoffrey. I really couldn’t wait to share it. The most amazing thing is that it’s come
quite
unsolicited. I mean, I really wouldn’t have the
nerve
to ask…”

I wait as Miss Flood burbles on, studying the ample bookshelves that cover these study walls (mostly do-it-yourselves and who-dunnits, a few biographies and thin histories; a small space where my own work will fit in easily), doing my best to banish the sense of gloomy premonition that still comes over me when people announce they have news. I have, of course, no recent sexual misdemeanours to worry about, but a sense of them is still with me; those ghostly hands and arms and mouths, the sigh and the glisten of flesh in those few moments when hot reality soars; and then afterwards when everything seems far off, encased in glassy guilt, passionless ice…

“…so Arkwright’s own Private Secretary asked if it wasn’t too much of a presumption to ask. I mean, as if we’d really
mind
. It’s perfect, isn’t it, Geoffrey? You’ve
met
—he
knows
you—he’s a link with the future, yet also with John Arthur and the past. It’s everything, Geoffrey, that we were talking about this lunchtime. Of course, we’ll have to re-do the dustjacket to give his name due prominence, but it really does cover just about every imaginable angle…”

“You mean Arkwright is—”

“—Yes, going to write a Foreword to your book! I know, I know. I still haven’t got over it either.”

“Can’t we just say…”

“Say what?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“I haven’t even started to
think
what this’ll do to the print runs! Of course, it means that you, Geoffrey, can relax. You won’t have to write a
thing
more…”

Part of me drops away as I gaze down at the receiver. There are two ways, I decide, to gain a person’s silence and compliance. You either take away their lives and scrub out their identity. Or you give them everything.

“So that’s it, then?”

“That’s right, Geoffrey. I hope you’re not too upset about losing that new article. But we couldn’t possibly squeeze it in now if we’re to keep to the same pagination…”

“Right.”

“Marvellous! And Happy New Year.”

“You, too, Miss Flood.” I begin to put down the phone.

“Oh, Geoffrey…” Her voice is a buzzing lisp. “…not that it matters now as far as the book’s concerned, but I do have a number, a contact for that research you were talking about. Someone in the Government who’s co-ordinating the Jewish relief effort.”

“Yes?” I cradle the phone between my shoulder and chin, searching the leather and ash expanse of Eric Cumbernald’s desktop for something resembling a pen or a pencil, a scrap of paper. There are brass-framed family photographs. A gold-plated Modernist circle and cross paperweight. A few seashell boxes. Some kind of golfing trophy. I slide open the drawers until I find a note pad and begin to scrawl out the number and the name that Miss Flood dictates to me, left handed.

Then I put down the phone without wishing her goodbye.

“Everything okay in there?” Cumbernald asks. His eyes travel down to my bit of paper. “If you want to make another call, no matter where, you—”

“—It’s alright. I don’t think I’ll bother.”

“In that case,” Cumbernald says, sliding back a cabinet front to reveal a television screen surrounded by a complicated nest of equipment, “there’s something I’d very much like to show you. I think we’ve just time before midnight…”

Cumbernald twists dials and turns switches. As the comforting smell of warming valves slowly fills the room, I tear the top sheet of the note pad into tiny bits. The name Miss Flood’s given me of the Home Office official who’s overseeing of the operation to give food, medical treatment and shelter to the Jews is Hugh Reeve-Ellis.

The television screen snows. Then there are ghostly figures that make me think of my acquaintance and his family, huddled in their crude huts or blanketed in the hurricane wilderness on this and other wintry nights. Of course, the Government has come to their rescue now. The terrible situation has been proclaimed by Ministry of Information Press Release, and the newspapers have lapped it up unquestioningly. Soon, it will be dealt with, and—a little sadder, a little wiser, a little less trustful—we Britons will watch the results on the Nine O-Clock News and in the cinemas on Pathé, knowing that the camera cannot lie. This Jewish Scandal has come at just the right time. It shows Arkwright as a man of honesty who is prepared to deal with the aberrations that so blackened Modernism’s reputation in the rest of the world. It may even get us back into the League of Nations. In a few months—or years, perhaps—a similarly narrow spotlight will fall upon the treatment camps in the Isle of Man. But, even if my acquaintance and his family have survived, angel of death that I am, I realise I will never try to contact them.

Cumbernald produces a large black disk and places it on the spinning turntable of what appears to be a giant record player. “I had the cine-recording transcribed onto vinyl,” he explains as the television screen sparks and crackles and the needle wobbles up and down. “Of course, it’s not
cheap
at the moment, but, take my word for it, it’s the future of home entertainment…”

I watch the jumpy white outlines of Eileen, Christine, Barbara and myself as we sit outside the summer lodge in Penrhos Park. Eileen and I raise a glass and smile for the camera whilst the children bound and leap, then becoming swirling blurs, as if their life and energy is too much for any kind of technology to contain. Behind it all is a crackle and a rumble.
Eggs and bacon, Eggs and bacon. Apple and custard…

“Been thinking, by the way,” Cumberland says, leaning against a bookshelf as he admires his handiwork. “About who should replace me as principal at college. We need someone with
reputation
, don’t you think? Someone with a sound background. All the right connections.
Weight.
An agile mind… The post is, in honesty, a tough but rewarding one. And I don’t really think you’ll be surprised, Brook, when I tell you that your name was the first that came to mind.”