Last Writes (13 page)

‘Wendy, is that you? Henry here. Can you hear me all right? It’s rather a bad line. Look, would it be all right if I came down to Berebury next Friday for the weekend? To see the children and so forth.’

‘Of course, dear,’ responded Henry Tyler’s sister immediately. ‘The children will be so pleased to see you again and all that’s happening here is that Tim will be playing cricket on the Saturday afternoon.’

‘Nothing changes, does it?’ said Henry affectionately. Tim Witherington was Wendy’s husband and village cricket on a Saturday afternoon was part of the very fabric of English society – an English society that Henry Tyler was labouring at his desk at the Foreign Office to preserve. That certain other forces were striving at this moment with equal determination to destroy it he left unsaid even though Herr Adolf Hitler’s intentions in this respect were becoming clearer and clearer as time went by.

‘I’ll be coming down on the Friday afternoon,’ he said to Wendy. ‘That’s if the plane from Cartainia gets back to London in time on Thursday evening for me to write my report before I catch the train.’

‘Cartainia?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Henry, I don’t like your flying to all these funny places – especially just now.’

‘Don’t worry, Wendy. Cartainia isn’t the other side of the world. It’s still in Europe, remember.’

‘Only just and anyway that’s really not a lot of consolation these days, is it?’ she said dryly. ‘It seems that it’s Europe where all the trouble happens to be at the moment.’

‘I agree Cartainia might properly be described as being on the very fringes of Continental Europe,’ he conceded. This, although he did not tell his sister, was one of the emollient phrases he had briefed his minister to use when he accompanied him on his visit to its capital that week.

The trip there was ostensibly to lay a wreath on the Cartainia war memorial recording those lost in 1918 in one of the last battles of the Great War when a battalion from the Scottish Fearnshire Regiment had joined forces with the tiny Cartainian Army to fight off an invader. The Fearnshires had been thrown into the battle so commemorated at the last minute and thus sustained casualties too.

The fact that there were therefore many of their names on the memorial as well as Cartainian ones was the ostensible reason for Henry’s Minster being there. In reality the visit was for the British government to garner as much information as possible about the future intentions of the Cartainian government and its people should a new war come.

Military historians, inured to bigger engagements, were inclined to describe the battle as a minor skirmish but to the Cartainians it had been a glorious victory and an occasion when they and the British had stood together side by side against a common enemy.

And won.

The situation was quite different now. Cartainia’s delicate position on the extreme edge of Eastern Europe was less assured – but much more strategic. Certain hostile powers were eyeing its undefended little borders with the interest of a raptor, whilst Britain had more than a passing concern that it remained as neutral as possible for as long as possible at this important juncture in world history.

It was the current international detente that had led to Henry Tyler as well as his minister laying a wreath on the cenotaph commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the battle. The soldier who should have been doing so – the Colonel-in-Chief of the Fearnshire Regiment – was presently with his regiment and heavily engaged in training activities somewhere unspecified in Scotland and not available for any ceremonial duties farther afield than Edinburgh Castle. So Henry was standing in for him.

The Prime Minister of Cartainia was the first to place his wreath. This had been ceremonially handed to him by his Foreign Secretary, Stephan Kiste, a big fellow with prominent duelling scars on his cheeks, and a man said to be the prime minister’s rival for power in the country.

Henry’s minister had duly laid his wreath next to that already placed at the foot of the war memorial by the prime minister, an enigmatic politician sitting firmly – if warily – on the fence, watching and seemingly waiting to
see which of the great powers would annexe Cartainia first and prepared to respond in the way which suited his own position best.

Henry’s own minister had his wreath – a tasteful ring of Flanders poppies set in a base of laurel leaves – equally ceremonially handed to him by His Excellency the British Ambassador. Henry didn’t need telling that ‘Our Man in Cartainia’ was a wily diplomat of great experience. The ambassador had already made the Foreign Office well aware that his every movement in Cartainia was being watched, his post intercepted, his conversations overheard by microphone and his telephone calls monitored. Not unnaturally, this absence of good communications was making getting reliable information out of the country and back to Whitehall extremely difficult.

The British minister, immaculately dressed in black jacket and spongebag trousers, had stepped forward, placed the wreath in exactly the right place, stood back, bowed his head in silent tribute for exactly the right length of time and even more cleverly managed to walk backwards to his allotted place beside the Prime Minister of Cartainia without looking round.

Next to come forward with his wreath paying tribute to the fallen soldiery of yesteryear was a much-bemedalled and grey-whiskered field marshal representing the Cartainian army, his wreath of entwined ivy leaves being handed to him by a uniformed cadet.

The last wreath of all – the one that had originally been intended to be laid by the Colonel-in-Chief of the Fearnshire Regiment – was handed to Henry by an anonymous young man who emerged out of the little crowd round the
cenotaph and pressed it into Henry’s hand. The young man wasn’t in uniform – something which seemed to surprise the field marshal who peered at him myopically. Indeed, the man looked rather as if he had got his best suit on and a somewhat crumpled one at that.

Henry himself did not recognise the man as coming from the Embassy and shot an enquiring glance at the ambassador. His Excellency, though, had had a rigorous education on the playing fields of Eton and his face betrayed no sign of a response whatsoever.

Henry took the wreath – a totally unexpected circlet of unusually colourful flowers – and proceeded towards the memorial with it. It crossed his mind that it might have been wired as a bomb to blow them all to perdition but nothing untoward happened when he propped it against the granite of the memorial. He, too, bowed, waited and then returned to his position while the prime minister stepped onto a podium, adjusted the microphone and began to deliver his speech.

Since this was delivered mainly in Cartainian, a language with which Henry was not familiar, and was almost certainly self-serving to a high degree, he turned his mind back to the curious wreath he himself had been given to place at the foot of the memorial. It stood out from the others, being a great mixture of flowers rather than leaves. It certainly didn’t accord with Milton’s poem ‘Lycidas’ and its famous lines ‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more / Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere’.

He continued to consider the wreath’s curious composition while the prime minister droned on. It was comprised of a strange medley of flowers – some wild,
some cultivated. He recognised a Guelder rose and next to it a harebell and then a shaft of goldenrod – not considered mourning plants any of them in his book. Perhaps such things were different in Cartainia. He would ask the ambassador, always supposing he got the opportunity to talk to him.

Henry stared down at the wreath for a long time, well aware that some of its flowers were far removed from those usually ordered by embassies the world over as suitable for a solemn occasion. Idly he started to list them in his mind, playing a sort of Kim’s Game to himself as the prime minister spoke on. Some, he noted, must have been especially procured for the occasion since they were out of season and he would have thought not native to Cartainia anyway.

A civil servant to his fingertips, what crossed Henry’s mind first of all about the wreath was the cost. He hoped there wouldn’t be a Parliamentary Question on his return about what some Member of Parliament would be bound to describe as outrageous extravagance in these hard times. On second thoughts he decided that the expense of the wreath must have been sanctioned by the ambassador – or at the very least by one of his underlings – and nobody at the British Embassy in Cartainia was likely to make mistakes. Indeed, the staff on station there had been hand-picked for demanding duties at a difficult time in an uncertain posting.

His thoughts were briefly interrupted by an outburst of cheering from some of the crowd. Henry decided that the prime minister must have said something particularly martial – the British Ambassador’s expression was too
inscrutable to decode – and went back to thinking about the wreath and memorising what it contained.

Just as he did get a chance at the reception after the ceremony to start to ask the ambassador about the wreath, that most accomplished of diplomats appeared to spot someone else at the far side of the room with whom he positively must have a word. He politely excused himself before speeding off, saying softly over his shoulder as he went, ‘There’s rosemary, there’s rue’. Henry, nobody’s fool, did not repeat the question, merely placing the quotation as coming from
Hamlet
.

The incongruities of the wreath were still on his mind the next day when he got down to his sister’s house in the little market town of Berebury in the county of Calleshire. After supper was over and the children had been packed off to bed Henry sat down with his sister and brother-in-law in their comfortable sitting room. Tim Witherington set about lighting his pipe, while Wendy got out a pile of mending.

‘What on earth’s that?’ asked Henry as she produced from her work basket something wooden resembling a large toadstool.

‘It’s called a mushroom and it’s for darning,’ she said placidly, slipping it inside one of Tim’s socks and picking up a long darning needle. ‘I’m always mending the heels. I don’t know what he does with his socks but they wear out in no time. Now tell me, Henry, how did your visit to Cartainia go?’

‘That’s if he’s allowed to talk about it, dear,’ her husband reminded her. ‘The poor chap may be silenced by the Official Secrets Act or something.’

‘Nothing like that, I promise you,’ Henry assured her. ‘In fact I would have said the entire Cartainia press was there, together with at least one reporter from a Scottish newspaper.’

‘Ah, yes, the Fearnshires,’ said Henry’s brother-in-law knowledgeably. He had been wounded in 1918 in the March Retreat and had a slight limp to prove it.

‘The Flowers of the Forest,’ murmured Wendy absently, selecting a skein of wool and holding it against the sock to match the colour.

‘Indeed they “are a’wede awae”’, said her husband, the old soldier, completing the melancholy quotation about the casualties of the Battle of Flodden Field.

‘The Fearnshires lost a lot of men in the Cartainian action,’ said Henry, coming back to the present, ‘and I had to place their wreath for them.’ He explained about the odd blooms of which it had been composed.

‘Perhaps one of them was a regimental flower,’ suggested Wendy. ‘Something Scottish.’

Tim Witherington, a gunner in his day, shook his head. ‘No, the regimental emblem of the Fearnshires is a bird – a capercaillie, I think. The one they call “the horse of the forest” or something like that, anyway.’

‘This wreath,’ said his sister. ‘Tell me more.’

‘There were all sorts of strange flowers in it. Amaranthus for starters …’

‘That’s “Love Lies Bleeding”,’ said Wendy promptly. ‘What else?’

‘Rudbeckia – oh, and a snowdrop – heaven only knows where they got that from in the summertime. High up somewhere, I expect,’ said Henry. ‘And I spotted veronica,
too, but that’s almost an any time of the year flower, isn’t it?’

Wendy’s lips twitched into a little smile as she threw a sly glance in her husband’s direction. ‘You haven’t forgotten veronica and what it means, have you, Tim?’

‘No.’ Tim Witherington shook his head affectionately. ‘Fidelity.’

‘You won’t remember, Henry,’ Wendy explained, ‘but I had it in my wedding bouquet.’

Actually, all Henry remembered about his sister’s wedding was the agony of being Best Man and having to make a speech.

She gave a reminiscent sigh. ‘And there was apple blossom in it, too – that was for good fortune – and arbutus. That meant “Thee only do I love”.’

Her husband, with an unblemished record in this respect, stirred uneasily in his chair and began to tamp his pipe down while Henry started to recount the names of the other flowers he’d spotted in the wreath. ‘There was something I’m pretty sure was helenium …’

Wendy put down her darning needle and said seriously, ‘I was warned against putting any of those in my bouquet. They stand for tears.’

A thought was beginning to burgeon in Henry’s mind. ‘Wen, what does goldenrod stand for?’

She frowned. ‘Precaution, I think. Yes, I’m sure. I used to know all the language of flowers when I was a girl.’

‘And a yellow carnation?’ said Henry, suddenly sitting up straight and taking notice.

‘Ah, now that was something I was definitely told not to have on my wedding day which was a pity because
my bridesmaids wore such pretty yellow dresses. Daphne looked lovely in hers – that reminds me, I must ring her for a chat. She’s married now. To one of the ushers,’ she added inconsequently.

‘Why not yellow?’ persisted Henry.

‘Didn’t you know, dear? It means rejection,’ said his sister promptly. ‘I know that because when one of my girl friends wanted to break off her engagement …’

‘Monkshood?’ he said rather quickly.

‘I don’t know about monkshood,’ she replied with dignity. ‘I only remember the nice flowers. I’d have to go and get my book and look it up.’

‘Please do,’ he said with some urgency. ‘This could be rather important.’ As she got to her feet, he said, ‘What about
Achillea millefolia
?’ but she had gone before she could hear him.