Unconditional surrender (6 page)

THE
processes of army postings were not yet adapted to the speed of the Electronic Personnel Selector. It was a week before Guy received any notification that his services might be needed by anyone for any purpose. Then a letter appeared in his ‘In’ tray addressed to him by name. It contained a summons to present himself for an interview with an officer who described himself as ‘GI Liberation of Italy’. He was not surprised to learn that this man inhabited the same building as himself, and when he presented himself he met a nondescript lieutenant-colonel whom he had seen off and on in the corridors of the building; with whom indeed he had on occasions exchanged words at the bar of the canteen.

The Liberator gave no sign of recognition. Instead he said: ‘Entrate e s’accomode.’

The noises thus issuing from him were so strange that Guy stood momentarily disconcerted, not knowing in what tongue he was being addressed.

‘Come in and sit down,’ said the colonel in English. ‘I thought you were supposed to speak Italian.’

‘I do.’

Looks as though you needed a refresher. Say something in Italian.’

Guy said rapidly and with slightly exaggerated accent: ‘Sono  più abituato al dialetto genovese, ma di solito posso capire e capire dapertutto in Italia fuori Sicilia.’

The colonel caught only the last word and asked desperately and fatuously: ‘Siciliano lei?’

‘Ah, no, no, no.’ Guy gave a lively impersonation of an Italian gesture of dissent. ‘Ho visitato Sicilia, poi ho abitato per un bel pezzo sulla costa ligure. Ho viaggiato in quasi ogni parte d’ltalia.’

The colonel resumed his native tongue. ‘That sounds all right. You wouldn’t be much use to us if you only talked Sicilian. You’ll be working the north, in Venetia probably.’

‘Li per me tutto andrà liscio,’ said Guy.

‘Yes,’ said the colonel, ‘yes, I see. Well let’s talk English. The work we have in mind is, of course, secret. As you probably know the advance in Italy is bogged down at the moment. We can’t expect much movement there till the spring. The Germans have taken over in force. Some of the wops seem to be on our side. Call themselves “partisani”, pretty left wing by the sound of them. Nothing wrong with that of course. Ask Sir Ralph Brompton. We shall be putting in various small parties to keep GHQ informed about what they’re up to and if possible arrange for drops of equipment in suitable areas. An intelligence officer and a signalman are the essentials of each group. You’ve done Commando training, I see. Did that include parachuting?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, you’d better take a course. No objection I suppose?

‘None whatever.’

‘You’re a bit old but you’ll be surprised at the ages of some of our chaps. You may not have to jump. We have various methods of getting our men in. Any experience of small boats?’

Guy thought of the little sailing-craft he had once kept at Santa Dulcina, of his gay excursion to Dakar and the phantasmagoric crossing from Crete, and answered truthfully, ‘Yes sir.’

‘Good. That may come in useful. You will be hearing from us in due course. Meanwhile the whole thing is on the secret list. You belong at Bellamy’s, don’t you? A lot of loose talk gets reported from there. Keep quiet.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘A rivederci, eh?’

Guy saluted and left the office.

When he returned to the Transit Camp he found a telegram from his sister, Angela, announcing that his father had died suddenly and peacefully at Matchet.

ALL
the railway stations in the kingdom displayed the challenge:
IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY?

Guy and his brother-in-law caught the early, crowded train from Paddington on the morning of the funeral.

Guy had a black arm band attached to his tunic. Box-Bender wore a black tie with a subfusc suit of clothes and a bowler.

‘As you see, I’m not wearing a top hat,’ said Box-Bender. ‘Seems out of place these days. I don’t suppose there’ll be many people there. Peregrine went down the day before yesterday. He’ll have fixed everything up. Have you brought sandwiches?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t know where we’ll get lunch. Can’t expect the convent to do anything about us. I hope Peregrine and Angela have arranged something at the pub.’

It was barely light when they steamed out of the shuttered and patched station. The corridor was full of standing sailors travelling to Plymouth. The little bulbs over the seats had been disconnected. It was difficult to read the flimsy newspapers they carried.

‘I always had a great respect for your father,’ said Box-Bender. Then he fell asleep. Guy remained open-eyed throughout the three-hour journey to the junction at Taunton.

Uncle Peregrine had arranged for a special tram-like coach to be attached to the local train. Here were assembled Miss Vavasour, the priest from Matchet and the headmaster of the school of Our Lady of Victory. There were many others wearing mourning of various degrees of depth, whom Guy knew he should recognize, but could not. They greeted him with murmured words of condolence, and seeing it was necessary, reminded him of their names – Tresham, Bigod, Englefield, Arundell, Hornyold, Plessington, Jerningham, and Dacre – a muster of recusant names – all nearly or remotely cousins of his. Their journey was really necessary.

Out of his hearing Miss Vavasour said of Guy, sighing: ‘
Fin de ligne
.’

Noon was the hour appointed for the beginning of the Requiem Mass. The local train was due at Broome at half-past eleven and arrived almost on time.

There is no scarcity of places of worship in this small village.

In penal times Mass had been said regularly in the house and a succession of chaplains employed there in the guise of tutors. This little chapel is preserved as a place of occasional pilgrimage in honour of the Blessed Gervase Crouchback.

The Catholic parish church is visible from the little station yard; a Puginesque structure erected by Guy’s great-grand-father in the early 1860’s at the nearer extremity of the village street. At the further end stands the medieval church of which the nave and chancel are in Anglican use while the north aisle and adjoining burying ground are the property of the lord of the manor. It was in this plot that Mr Crouchback’s grave had been dug and in this aisle that his memorial would later stand among the clustered effigies and brasses of his forebears.

After the Act of Emancipation a wall had been built to divide the aisle from the rest of the church and for a generation it had served the Catholic parish. But the monuments left little room for worshippers. It was for this reason that Guy’s great-grandfather had built the church (which in the old style the Crouchbacks spoke of as ‘the chapel’) and the presbytery and had endowed the parish with what was then an adequate stipend. Most of the village of Broome is Catholic, an isolated community of the kind that is found in many parts of Lancashire and the outer islands of Scotland, but is very rare in the west of England. The Anglican benefice has long been united with two of its neighbours. It is served by a clergyman who rides over on his bicycle once a month and reads the service if he finds a quorum assembled. The former vicarage has been partitioned and let off as cottages.

Broome Hall stands behind iron gates, its drive a continuation of the village street. Mr Crouchback used often, and not quite accurately, to assert that every ‘good house’, by which he meant one of medieval foundation, stood on a road, a river, or a rock. Broome Hall had been on the main road to Exeter until the eighteenth century when a neighbour who sat for the county in the House of Commons obtained authority to divert it through his own property and establish a profitable toll pike. The old right of way still runs under the walls of the Hall but it carries little traffic. It is a lane which almost invisibly branches off the motor-road, swells into the village street, runs for half a mile as a gravelled carriage-drive and then narrows once more amid embowering hedge-rows which, despite a rough annual cutting, encroach more and more on the little frequented track.

When the convent came to Broome they brought their own chaplain and converted one of the long, panelled galleries into their chapel. Neither they nor their girls appeared in the parish church except on special occasions. Mr Crouchback’s funeral was such a one. They had met the body when it arrived from Matchet on the previous evening, had dressed the catafalque and that morning had sung the dirge. Their chaplain would assist at the Requiem.

Angela Box-Bender was on the platform to meet the train. She had an air of gravity and sorrow.

‘I say, Angie,’ her husband asked, ‘how long is this business going to take?’

‘Not more than an hour. Father Geoghegan wanted to preach a panegyric but Uncle Peregrine stopped him.’

‘Any chance of anything to eat? I left the flat at six this morning.’

‘You’re expected at the presbytery. I think you’ll find something there.’

‘They don’t expect me to take any part, do they? I mean carry anything? I don’t know the drill.’

‘No,’ said Angela. ‘This is one of the times when no one expects anything of you.’

The little parlour of the presbytery was much crowded. Besides their host, Uncle Peregrine and the chaplain from the convent, there were four other priests, one with the crimson of a monsignore.

‘His lordship the Bishop was unable to come. He sent me to represent him and convey his condolences.’

There was also a layman whom Guy recognized as his father’s solicitor from Taunton.

Father Geoghegan was fasting, but he dispensed hospitality in the form of whisky and cake. Uncle Peregrine edged Guy into a corner. His fatuous old face expressed a kind of bland decorum.

‘The hatchment,’ he said. There was some difficulty about the hatchment. One can’t get anything done nowadays. No heraldic painters available anywhere. There are quite a collection of old hatchments in the sacristy, none in very good condition. There was your grandfather’s, but of course that was impaling Wrothman so it would hardly have done. Then I had a bit of luck and turned up what must have been made for Ivo. Rather rough work, local I should think. I was abroad at the time of his death, poor boy. Anyway, it is the simple blazon without quarterings. It is the best we can do in the circumstances. You don’t think I did wrong to put it up?’

‘No, Uncle Peregrine, I am sure you did quite right.’

‘I think I’d better be going across. People are beginning to arrive. Someone will have to show them where to sit.’

The priest from Matchet said: ‘I don’t think your father has got long for purgatory.’

The solicitor said: ‘We ought to have a word together afterwards.’

‘No reading of the will?’

‘No, that only happens in Victorian novels. But there are things we shall have to discuss some time and it’s difficult to meet these days.’

Arthur Box-Bender was seeking to make himself agreeable to the domestic prelate ‘… not a member of your persuasion myself but I’m bound to say your Cardinal Hinsley did a wonderful job of work on the wireless. You could see he was an Englishman first and a Christian second; that is more than you can say of one or two of
our
bishops.’

Angela said: ‘I’ve been dealing with letters as best I can. I’ve had hundreds.’

‘So have I.’

‘Extraordinary the number of people one’s never heard of who were close friends of papa. I slept at the convent last night and shall go home tonight. The nuns are being awfully decent. Reverend Mother wants anyone to come back and have coffee afterwards. There’s so many people we’ll have to talk to. I had no idea so many people would get here.’

They were arriving on foot, by motor car and in pony traps. From the presbytery window Guy and Angela watched them. Angela said: ‘I’m taking Felix home with me. They’re keeping him at the inn at the moment.’ Then the clergy withdrew to vest and Uncle Peregrine came to fetch the chief mourners.

‘Prie-dieus,’ he said, ‘on the right in front.’

They crossed the narrow strip of garden and entered under the diamond-shaped panel cut by the house carpenter for poor mad Ivo. The sable and argent cross of Crouchback had not greatly taxed his powers of draughtsmanship. It was no ornament designed by the heralds to embellish a carriage door but something rare in English armoury – a device that had been carried into battle. They walked up the aisle with their eyes on the catafalque and the tall unbleached candles which burned beside it. The smell of beeswax and chrysanthemums, later to be permeated by incense, was heavy on the brumous air.

The church had been planned on a large scale when the Crouchback family were at the height of prosperity and the conversion of England seemed something more than a remote, pious aspiration. Gervase and Hermione had built it; they who acquired the property of Santa Dulcina. It was as crowded for Mr Crouchback’s funeral as for midnight Mass at Christmas. When the estate was bit by bit dispersed in the lean agricultural years, the farms had been sold on easy terms to the tenants. Some had changed hands since, but there were three pews full of farmers in black broadcloth. The village were there in force; many neighbours; the Lord Lieutenant of the county was in the front pew on the left next to a representative of the Knights of Malta. Lieutenant Padfield sat with the Anglican vicar, the family solicitor, and the headmaster of Our Lady of Victory. The nun’s choir was in the organ loft. The priests, other than the three who officiated, lined the walls of the chancel. Uncle Peregrine had seen that everyone was in his proper place.

Box-Bender kept his eyes on Angela and Guy, anxious to avoid any liturgical solecism. He genuflected with them, sat, then, like them, knelt, sat again, and stood as the three priests vested in black emerged from the sacristy, knelt again but missed signing himself with the cross. He was no bigot. He had been to Mass before. He wanted to do whatever was required of him. Across the aisle the Lord Lieutenant was equally undrilled, equally well disposed.

Silence at first; the Confiteor was inaudible even in the front pew. Just in time Box-Bender saw his relations cross themselves at the absolution. He hadn’t been caught that time. Then the nuns sang the
Kyrie
.

Guy followed the familiar rite with his thoughts full of his father.

‘
In memoria aeterna erit justus: ab auditione mala non timebit.
’ The first phrase was apt. His father had been a ‘just man’; not particularly judicious, not at all judicial, but ‘just’ in the full sense of the psalmist – or at any rate in the sense attributed to him by later commentators. Not for the first time in his life Guy wondered what was the
auditio mala
that was not to be feared. His missal gave the meaningless rendering ‘evil hearing’. Did it mean simply that the ears of the dead were closed to the discords of life? Did it mean they were immune to malicious gossip? Few people, Guy thought, had ever spoken ill of his father. Perhaps it meant ‘bad news’. His father had suffered as much as most men – more perhaps – from bad news of one kind or another; never fearfully.

‘Not long for purgatory,’ his confessor had said of Mr Crouchback. As the nuns sang the
Dies Irae
with all its ancient deprecations of divine wrath, Guy knew that his father was joining his voice with theirs:

Ingemisco, tamquam reus:
Culpa rubet vultus meus
Supplicanti parce, Deus;

That would be his prayer, who saw, and had always seen, quite clearly the different in kind between the goodness of the most innocent of humans and the blinding, ineffable goodness of God. ‘Quantitative judgements don’t apply,’ his father had written. As a reasoning man Mr Crouchback had known that he was honourable, charitable and faithful; a man who by all the formularies of his faith should be confident of salvation; as a man of prayer he saw himself as totally unworthy of divine notice. To Guy his father was the best man, the only entirely good man, he had ever known.

Of all the people in the crowded church, Guy wondered how many had come as an act of courtesy, how many were there to pray that a perpetual light should shine upon Mr Crouchback? ‘Well,’ he reflected, ‘“The Grace of God is in courtesy”; in Arthur Box-Bender glancing sidelong to be sure he did the right thing, just as in the prelate who was holding his candle in the chancel, representing the bishop; in Lieutenant Padfield, too, exercising heaven knows what prodigy of ubiquity. “Quantitative judgements don’t apply.”’

The temptation for Guy, which he resisted as best he could, was to brood on his own bereavement and deplore the countless occasions of his life when he had failed his father. That was not what he was here for. There would be ample time in the years to come for these selfish considerations. Now,
praesente cadavere
, he was merely one of the guard who were escorting his father to judgement and to heaven.

The altar was censed. The celebrant sang: ‘
...Tuis enim fidelibus, Domine, via mutatur, non tollitur...
’ ‘Changed not ended,’ reflected Guy. It was a huge transition for the old man who had walked with Felix along the cliffs at Matchet – a huge transition, even, for the man who had knelt so rapt in prayer after his daily Communion – to the ‘everlasting mansion prepared for him in heaven’.

The celebrant turned the page of his missal from the Preface to the Canon. In the hush that followed the sacring bell Guy thanked God for his father and then his thoughts strayed to his own death, that had been so near in the crossing from Crete, that might now be near in the mission proposed for him by the nondescript colonel.