‘You seem very well informed.’
‘It was in the sale catalogue at the auction today.’
‘Bullen and Clore are not historians, Martin. They are scavengers, the rag and bone men of the sea. Let me tell you about the real Harry Spalding.’
My father wasn’t some tiresome autodidact. He was a scholarship boy who had shone very brightly, taught by the Jesuits at Ampleforth. But he had missed out on university and the consequent intellectual insecurity sometimes made him seem pompous when discussing academic subjects or in the cultural arena. He was inclined to be dogmatic, pious and pedantic. That said, Suzanne reckoned he possessed a first-rate mind and she had better credentials than anyone else I knew to be able to pass accurate judgement. But I had to wait for my lecture on the real Harry Spalding, because a waiter had stolen across the restaurant floor and stood at my father’s elbow ready to take our order.
We were dining at the Kundan in Horseferry Road. It is an Anglo-Indian, about as discreet and expensive as a restaurant can get. Its core customers are high-ranking civil servants, senior parliamentary backbenchers and legal staff on hefty Whitehall retainers. My father had been coming here for years. In all that time, I doubt the menu had changed at all. I was reminded again that, for a man who set such store by certainty, the sea voyage he planned seemed wildly cavalier, really out of character. I remembered his expression, then, earlier on in the day, as we’d passed the shrouded boat.
It transpired that Harry Spalding was a hero of the Great War. He had started out as a lieutenant, leading a platoon of the infantry ‘doughboys’ from the States through the latter stages of the fighting in France and Flanders. Woodrow Wilson was the peace-loving American president who finally committed his country to the conflict. And he really was ardent about peace, dreaming up the League of Nations after the armistice to try to ensure that nothing like the war he embroiled his nation in would ever be repeated.
But the American troops in the field were far more influenced by the philosophy and fighting ethos of Wilson’s less pacific predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had actually led a cavalry charge in the war against Cuba early in the century. He was belligerent, tough and unhesitating in his belief that, where American interests were concerned, might was always right. Teddy Roosevelt it was who established the huge forts where America’s fighting forces learned their tactics and became battle-hardened. It was he who saw to it that the soldiers were properly paid and equipped with the best boots and the warmest blankets and the latest weapons technology.
When the call came in 1917, the Americans had to face veteran German divisions who had held their trench lines through four years of assault and counter-assault. But they were fit and confident and well drilled. They fought with courage and distinction. Even in an army that generally excelled, however, Lieutenant Spalding’s exploits became the stuff of legend.
‘Eventually, he was promoted to major and asked to lead a hand-picked team of fellow assault fighters,’ my father said. ‘In many ways, this outfit was the precursor of what today we call Special Forces. Rank was not an issue among these men. Class was not an issue. Spalding’s own background was immensely privileged. He was the favoured son of one of the wealthiest families in American banking. But he was chosen on merit for his role in the field. All of them were. He led them.’
‘Did they have a name? Did this unit have a designation?’
My father sipped champagne. ‘They were called the Jericho Crew.’ He reached inside his suit coat, brought out his wallet and took from it a picture he put on the white linen of the table between us. I picked it up and studied it in the subdued lighting of the Kundan interior. There was a candelabra on our table and I pulled it closer. The print was new but the picture, I knew, was ninety years old. The men in it were posed like a football team, half standing in a line behind those kneeling in front of them. All wore their hair brutally shorn. All were white and young. They were a hollow-eyed, savage-looking bunch, armed to the teeth with knives and knuckledusters and revolvers and short-snouted, heavy calibre assault rifles. You could judge the weight of shot by the thickness of the rounds wedged into bandoliers wound across their bodies from the shoulder. They all wore the same weird, infected grin. They looked like men drunk on killing. But I did not think this a verdict on the men in the photograph it would be wise to share with my father. I nodded in what I hoped would pass as a gesture of appreciation. But to me the men assembled in the picture looked like the sort of soldiers who sawed battlefield trophies from the extremities of the dead.
‘Which one is Spalding?’
My father’s forefinger extended over the print and he tapped a figure.
I should have guessed. Spalding, the well-born hero, was half a head taller than the rest. In those days, prosperity almost always translated into physical height. He was very slender. He was loose-limbed, with long thighs and supple fingers. His grin showed a jaw full of white, perfectly even teeth. He was a startlingly handsome man, when you really scrutinised his features. In conventional terms, his facial appearance was almost flawless. But there was nothing attractive about him at all. He seemed dangerous. You wouldn’t want to meet him and, if you did, you wouldn’t want to turn your back on him. I rubbed my eyes. Perhaps it was just the wine, drunk after a swift beer, itself swallowed after a long day and a tense, fog-hampered drive. I looked again at Spalding. But the effect was the same. The one word his photograph brought to mind, more than any other, was feral.
‘Why the Jericho Crew?’
A shrug. ‘Haven’t been able to source an explanation for the name. Not a convincing one, at any rate. And the men in the picture have all been dead for far too long to provide it.’
Thank God, I thought.
‘Wondered if Suzanne might be able to find that out for me.’
‘If she can’t, nobody can,’ I said. ‘She’s in Dublin at the moment, digging up fresh revelations for a documentary film about Michael Collins.’
‘There’s no hurry,’ my father said, taking back his picture. ‘It’s hardly important.’
I studied the wine in my glass.
‘She’s wasting her time, of course.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The Irish are a loquacious people. There is nothing about Michael Collins that we don’t already know.’
Over our aromatic lamb and drily spiced chicken, he took me through the rest of Spalding’s short and energetic life. The first significant thing he did in the peace was to survive the Spanish flu epidemic that killed something over half of his comrades on the steamer returning them home from France. In the years after the armistice, he took two six-month-long sabbaticals from the bank to sail his bright new toy. In the autumn of 1922, he could stomach the bank no longer and, to his father’s apparent dismay, quit the commercial world altogether. Curiously, far from being cut off in the classic retaliatory manner, his already generous living allowance was increased to the point where he could afford to squander a literal fortune every month. He sailed his boat to Europe, a girlfriend crewing for him until she tired of life on the ocean and jumped ship, apparently jilting him for good, on the quay at Rimini. He gambled at the tables in Monaco, where he won. He berthed the boat for the winter and travelled to Paris, where he played tennis with Ezra Pound, and boxed a few inevitable rounds with Hemingway, and bought on a whim a polo pony he never rode and attended a séance conducted by the English black magician, Aleister Crowley. In the manner of all men quietly traumatised by the carnage of the trenches, he drank too much and spoke too recklessly and could discover no great hope or value or salvation in human life.