whatever side I’m on… at least you know for sure whose side Panin is on, David?’
‘ Ah . ..’ Audley breathed satisfaction, real or simulated, in the soporific warmth of the car-heater. ‘Perhaps that is what I do mean.
Or… at least I mean that Nikolai Andrievich is a simple Russian—
KGB, but Russian always… “KGB” is merely a set of initials: Holy Mother Russia, all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin long ago, was his education. So after that, no crime is any problem for him. Whereas I am a simple Englishman—good, solid Anglo-Saxon, with only a small tincture of Norman blood… So I have complicated hang-ups about killing people, which he wouldn’t even begin to understand. Even killing Germans, during the war…
most of the ones I actually met seemed perfectly decent chaps—
there were one or two exceptions of course… But there were exceptions on our side too. Notable exceptions, in fact: better dead than alive, certainly. Only that worried me, because we English haven’t suffered the way others have—like Panin. So we English are not good haters. Except perhaps of the French… but that’s really a sort of love-hate, flavoured with admiration… And there are some foolish middle-class children who try to hate the Americans, out of ignorance and frustrated envy… Not that I blame them, mind you: it must be hard to be one of a post-imperial Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State generation—poor little things!’
God! The old man was rambling! ‘And you’re not… “post-imperial”, David?’
‘Lord no! My eighth birthday cake had a model of HMS Hood on the top of it: the biggest warship afloat, in the biggest navy of the greatest empire the world had ever seen—all pink, the map of the world was. And I saw Portsmouth in ’44, before we went across the Narrow Sea— the English Channel—that last time, ignorant as I was—
“Our King went forth to Normandy
With Grace and Power and Chivalry.
And there, for him, God wrought marvellously—”
‘Ignorant as I was… But I saw it all, the whole D-Day armada, from the crest of Portsdown Hill, on top of one of old Palmerston’s forts—the whole shebang, Tom: from Portsmouth to Gosport, with the barrage balloons overhead, in the same anchorage where:the Roman Classis Britannica rode off Portchester, and Henry V’s fleet before Agincourt, before he “went forth”—and Nelson’s, before Trafalgar, too. Though I can’t honestly say that God wrought marvellously for the West Sussex Dragoons in the Normandy bocage thereafter, because Jerry bloody massacred us…
However, that’s another story.’ He stopped suddenly. ‘And you are also another story. Or the Polish half of you is, anyway.’
Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State That took Tom aback. The Polish half?‘
‘Yes.’ Audley shook himself. ‘We had a Polish armoured regiment near us in Normandy… 1st Polish Armoured Division, attached to the 1st Canadian Army— mad buggers, they were! We were psyched up to fight Jerry all the way to Berlin, but they weren’t stopping there… One of them said to me—and he said it in broad Yorkshire, or maybe Lancashire… Because he’d been stationed there, and he’d married a Lancashire girl— or maybe she was a Yorkshire girl, I don’t know… But he had a Yorkshire/Lancashire accent anyway. And he said to me: “We fook the fooking Germans first. And then we fook the fooking Russians—okay, English!” ’
Audley sighed. ‘Poor bugger!’
‘Poor bugger?’ But it rang true, all the same: that was what Father had said about Mamusia’s countrymen, exactly: they were all mad buggers, the Poles.
‘Aye—“poor bugger”,’ agreed Audley. ‘Most of his lot were killed up beyond Caen, closing the Falaise gap… Killed a lot of Germans too, I shouldn’t wonder. But never got to kill any fooking Russians therefore, to their great and enduring sorrow.’ Pause. ‘But… but, anyway, that was how your dear mother felt about it, to come back to the point: “The only good Russian is a dead one”, is how she felt. The way General Sheridan felt about Red Indians.’ Pause. ‘So is that how you feel, Tom? About Nikolai Andrievich?’
Once again Tom rearranged his thoughts. Audley was speaking lightly again, but the inquiry beneath was heavyweight. And, by the same token, he hadn’t really been rambling on, like any old soldier: Panin was now for him, too. But how then should he reply?
Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State Well—
Somebody flashed him from behind suddenly—mercifully with no accompanying flashing-blue police-light, but just to overtake him in the overtaking lane even as he was himself shaking in the slipstream of an immense Euro-lorry going flat-out in the fast lane; so he could pretend for a moment to attend to the mundane matters of life-and-death on the road.
‘Just let me get out of the way of this other mad bugger behind us, David—’
Well… it was certainly true that Mamusia hated and despised all Russians and everything Russian with all the intensity of a natural-born hater-and-despiser; in fact, if she’d been a man she probably would have been one of Audley’s ‘mad buggers’; and it was small wonder that the old man still remembered that fierce passion, which would have burnt even more hotly in her youth, when Katyn and the great betrayal of the Warsaw Rising were still raw gaping wounds, not hideous old scars.
He pulled over to let the other mad bugger get ahead—not an English mad bugger, but a mad American bugger secure in his diplomatically-plated Cadillac immunity—
Well… with the way Mamusia felt, he had always had to conceal his own inadequacy in the matter, which (if Audley’s theory was correct) must be his paternal inheritance: Father’s amused tolerance of almost everything had been a sore trial to Mamusia, even though it also embraced her extravagance, her admirers and her never-explained absences.
Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State Father—
‘Well, Tom?’ Audley was a good passenger, oblivious to everything around him and only concerned with what was going on in his mind. But that was where his patience was exhausted new.
‘Well, Sir Thomas Arkenshaw?’
But Tom was momentarily inside his own thoughts, in the desolate grey country of wasted opportunities and lost might-have-beens, among the ghosts of all the things he had never shared with the one person he’d loved most and admired most in all the world, the memory of whom always made him a counterfeit, rather than an inheritor, of the Arkenshaw name.
‘Yes.’ He watched the brake-lights of the Cadillac brighten, already far ahead, as it was slowed-up by someone else who wasn’t breaking the speed limit sufficiently. What Mamusia always said about Father was that he hadn’t an enemy in the world: there were only his friends and the people who had never met him. But now he was neither his father’s nor his mother’s son, he was only himself. ‘I don’t give a damn what you do to Panin: you can kick him, or shake him by the hand, for all I care. My job is to see you safe home, that’s all.’ The trouble was that only himself was a liar.
‘That’s all, David.’
Audley digested the lie for a moment. ‘All right. Then, for a start, you’d better decide when to put me in my place, and not take bullshit from me.’
Tom held the wheel steady. ‘Such as?’
‘Panin is my problem, not yours. But that doesn’t mean you have Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State to let me patronize you. So… when you feel like it, you just tell me to go to hell—okay?’