Be Shot For Six Pence (3 page)

“Studd-Thompson. Yes.”

“Did he come here with it himself?”

“Yes, he did.” Mr. Satterley looked at me over his glasses and added, “I knew Mr. Studd-Thompson very well, of course.”

I nodded. I was aware of Colin’s connection with
The Times
. One of his uncles, or maybe great uncles, had been a distinguished foreign editor.

“He instructed me that if anyone came to inquire about the advertisement, claiming to be the Philip to whom it was addressed, I was to ask him a question.”

“Ask away.”

“I was to ask who Henry was.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “Henry is a woman. A charming and accomplished person of uncertain age who was at one time governess to Colin and his brother. Later on she was a governess in our family. We called her Henry because she was the eighth.”

“The psychology of young children is a fascinating study,” said Mr. Satterley.

He took off his glasses, polished them with little, darting, movements, replaced them securely on his nose and said: “How can I help you?”

“I’m not too sure. To start with, it was news to me that Colin had been in England lately.”

“I’m afraid that does not follow. This announcement was delivered to us – let me see – more than two months ago. Nearer three.”

“Then how did it come to be put in on this particular date?”

“Our instructions were, that if we did
not
hear from Mr. Studd-Thompson by the last day of any week, we were to insert the announcement during the whole of the week following.”

In silence I tried to think this out. Silence so absolute that I could suddenly hear a woman speaking quite clearly two rooms away. She was accepting an announcement for the Births Column and seemed to be making heavy going of it.

“I take it, then,” I said at last, “that when he failed to get through to you—”

“We heard from him regularly for nine weeks.”

“So you know where he is – or was?”

“I’m afraid not. The messages were sent through our foreign correspondents. The last three came from Rome – but that does not mean that Mr. Studd-Thompson was necessarily in Italy.”

“I see. And last Friday – or Saturday – you got no message at all—”

“That is correct.”

“It may have been delayed.”

“Possibly. Our messages are not often delayed. And in any event our instructions were categoric. If we had not heard by midnight on Saturday, the announcement had to be inserted on Monday – and for the five days following.”

“G-o-t-t—” said the shrill voice.

“It is really rather a remarkable circumstance,” went on Mr. Satterley. “Owing to the peculiar way in which this matter has been arranged you are probably the only person in England who is in a position to find out exactly what has happened to Mr. Studd-Thompson.”

“—f-r-i-e-d. That’s right. As in fried bread.”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, I’m very much obliged to you.”

I walked back slowly, and rather blindly, along the Embankment. My feet took me into the little garden by Temple Station. I don’t know its name. It’s an austere place, full of office sandwich eaters at lunch time but deserted for the rest of the day; guarded at one end by John Stuart Mill and at the other by William Edward Forster.

I settled my body carefully down on a seat facing the Embankment and allowed my mind to drift backwards for ten, for twenty, for thirty years . . .

Myself as a new boy at a preparatory school on the South Coast. Serials in the
Boy’s Own Paper
had prepared me for the worst. I see now, looking back, that everyone was enormously kind and considerate, but to go from home, at the age of eight, and into exile, for the eternity of three months in a strange world; it must always be such a parting as will make the other partings of life seem unimportant.

Colin had been the first person to speak to me. He had spoken with the patronage demanded by his superior position (for he had already been at the school for a whole term) but he had spoken kindly. The train was passing Three Bridges. He waved at a grassy knoll behind the town and said, without preamble: “Did you know they had a battle there during the Civil War, in 1640?” I said that I had not known. As the train thundered south (if such an expression can be applied to the progress of the old London Brighton and South Coast Railway) Colin told me a number of other surprising things. Soon we were friends. I cannot remember how soon, for no doubt Colin had his dignity to consider and I was remarkably unsociable, even as a boy; but friends we became.

It proved to be almost the only genuine, lasting friendship of my life and I have no doubt that psychologists would have given themselves headaches trying to explain it. There wasn’t an ounce of sentiment in it; or, if a little of this necessary lubricant must be present, then no more than the barest drop. I think the truth is that we suited each other, like two old club men who enjoy each other’s company on the basis that they will respect each other’s foibles and listen charitably to each other’s reminiscences.

We went to different public schools and to different universities, and saw, of course, a good deal less of each other thereafter. But whenever we did meet we seemed to pick up matters exactly where we had laid them down. (Only a few months before, happening to be walking through the Middle Temple, I heard a bland voice behind me saying, “The building is eighteenth century, and shockingly proportioned, but the foundation is four centuries older,” and I knew, without looking round, that Colin was back in England.)

It had always been like that. The middle of the Long Vacation. A ring at the door bell, Colin’s gentle voice, so curiously at variance with his craggy face (in a dim light, not unlike the First Murderer in Ben Greet’s open-air production of Macbeth). “You must come along, Philip. Such an interesting little man. A Lithuanian. His mother was murdered by the White Russians and his father starved to death under the Red sort – I rode
all
round London yesterday with him on the top of a bus.”

It was all very well for Colin. He was reading modern languages – and already spoke half a dozen of them with alarming fluency. I should have been as tongue tied with his Lithuanian as his Lithuanian would have been bored with me.

Colin gravitated naturally to the diplomatic and I knew that he had served spells at Belgrade and Budapest, and had been in Germany so late in August 1939 that he had finally been forced to quit it, in the early hours of the morning, and on foot, at Singen.

During the War he had been withdrawn from regular work and I should have known, if I had not been too busy to spare it a thought, that he must have been with Intelligence. His background and proclivities made it a certainty.

I got to my feet and walked slowly down the garden. I needed the incentive of movement to get my brain working. Like an old car on a cold morning, it works quite well, but I have to start it off down a slope.

My strongest feeling, and I must confess it now, was a very marked disinclination to interfere. Colin had clearly got himself involved in some business inside the troubled perimeter of Europe, and it must be business with an Intelligence slant to it.

To the man in the street, who knows absolutely nothing about it, the notion of Intelligence is a not unpleasant one. I know very little more than the man in the street, but certain of my war-time experiences (which I will mention in their proper place) had made me wary. Though far from realising exactly what went on behind the discreet façade of those offices in Sloane Square and Buckingham Palace Road, I was past the honeymoon stage of my acquaintanceship with the Secret Service.

My other reason was a very slight distrust of Colin’s motives. He had a medieval love of craft-for-crafts-sake. If he had wanted to meet me during the school holidays his normal procedure was to ring up a friend and ask him to telephone me and tell me that if I went to an address in Pentonville I would find a note telling me what to do next. That was the way his mind worked. No doubt it earned him high marks in the diplomatic but it made everyday life a little complicated.

However, there was no need to commit myself yet. The first step was clearly marked. Since I alone knew who Henry was, I must go and see Henry. That would be a pleasure. I had been meaning to look her up for some time. When I had heard what she had to say would be the time to make my mind up about the next move.

That settled, I again got to my feet. A little man with a long nose got up from the seat next to me and moved off in the opposite direction.

I started out for Twickenham after lunch, and I went on foot. I enjoy walking and am not one of those who has to put on fancy dress and go all the way to Teviotdale or Exmoor before I can enjoy myself.

I remember once – it was after my break with Eileen – I started out from Curzon Street at two o’clock in the morning, in the clothes I happened to have on at the time, and walked to Inverness. My dancing pumps finally fell to pieces at Doncaster and I replaced them by a pair of gym shoes. (It’s a fallacy that you can’t walk in gym shoes. If your feet are in good condition they are excellent foot gear for made-up roads.)

I find that a fairly fast rate suits me. With a detour across the rough in Richmond Park I covered ten miles in well under two hours. Green Gables, Barkas Road, is on the outskirts of Twickenham. It is a nice little house, in a road of nice little houses. I know what it cost because six of us clubbed together to buy it for Henry when she retired. That was before the War. I would have cost us a great deal more now.

Henry opened the door. She was a neat, spare, fierce figure, with the uprightness which, in this decadent age, is attributed only to royalty.

“I’ve walked down to see you,” I said.

“You’ve walked! All the way from London?”

“It’s not very far.”

“You’re sure you haven’t walked yourself into a damp sweat.”

“I’m not sweating at all,” I said, indignantly.

“I could lend you a dressing gown.”

“No, really. I’m as dry as a bone. I hardly hurried at all.”

“You’re always in a hurry.” She laid her old hand inside my coat, over my heart. “I’ll let it go this time. Come in.”

We went into the back room, which looked through French windows onto a square of garden. It was as neat as any room could be which contained (I once counted them) forty eight framed and six unframed photographs. Most of them were boys and young men. Boys in shorts and sweaters and blazers and school caps and young men in blazers and sweaters and shorts – and in the dress and undress uniform of a dozen different Regiments of Foot Guards, Lancers and Hussars. Mostly they were private photographs, but there was one I had not seen before, cut from one of the glossy magazines.

“That’s Victor,” she said.

I remembered Victor, a thin, whitefaced boy.

“A bundle of nerves,” said Henry. “The time I had with him. Night after night. If I could get him to sleep by ten o’clock I was lucky.” The picture showed him on his way to the palace to receive his V.C.

“How did last winter go?” I asked, as I settled carefully down in one of her high backed chairs. (“Don’t slouch, Master Philip. It weakens the spine.”)

“Terrible,” said Henry. “France and Ireland were here. Neither of them good matches. No Calcutta Cup and no Welsh match. That’s the match I like. Right from the start. You should see the little men in cloth caps run out and tie the leeks on to the cross bars, and the policemen chase them.”

I agreed that the Welsh match was fun. “But still, you had the seven-a-sides.”

“I expect it was Colin you came to talk about,” said Henry, suddenly. “Rugger’s not really your game. You might have made a scrum half if you’d been a bit wider in the hips.”

“I expect that’s because I didn’t always sit up straight at table,” I said. “Yes, it was about Colin.”

“Have the advertisements started?”

“They started yesterday.”

Henry looked steadily at me, but said nothing. If I hadn’t been sure before, I knew now that Colin was her real favourite. Above Aubrey, who got so near to the top of Everest; above Victor, for all his V.C.; and a long way above me.

“Show it me,” she said.

I took the cutting out of my pocket and passed it across. She read it carefully. Her old eyes scorned spectacles.

“A pity,” was all she said.

“I expect you’d better tell me what he said.”

“It was four months ago. I’d just got back from watching the Harlequins play Oxford, and I found him waiting on my doorstep. He looked a little fatter than usual, but otherwise just the same. He never changes.”

I nodded. Colin’s craggy face settled into its adult mould when he was about fifteen and has remained practically unchanged since.

“Whilst I was boiling the kettle for tea he told me what he’d been up to. ‘You’re quite right, Henry,’ he said. ‘I
am
getting fat. It’s because I do nothing but sit still, in a fairy palace, waiting for something to happen. It’s quite exciting, but it doesn’t alter the fact that I have to do a lot of sitting still, and too much eating, and too much drinking.’

“Then, when we were having tea, he told me something else. I can’t remember it exactly – not word for word – but what he said was this. ‘It’s not my show. I’m only in it as a guest artist, I’ve got no standing at all. And it’s so secret that I don’t suppose there’s anything more secret in the world today. That’s why I’m telling you as little as I can.’”

Henry broke off and gave one of her dry laughs. “You know why he said that to me? Once when he was very small, he came along to me and said, ‘I know a tremendous secret. I’ll tell it you if you like,’ and I said: ‘Certainly not. If it’s a secret you mustn’t tell anyone.’ He was terribly deflated, but he hadn’t forgotten it. Have another crumpet?”

“I oughtn’t to,” I said, “but I will.”

“You take as much interest in your figure as a ballerina. Well, then he told me about the advertisement. ‘I’ve got to do it that way,’ he said, ‘Because that way doesn’t leave any possible line that anyone else in the world can follow up. I told you, it isn’t my secret. That’s why I’ve got to be so careful.’