“It’s like this,” he continued, “consciousness prompts you to hypothesize that the story you’re creating from a given set of memories is a consistent history, justified by a consistent narrative voice...”
I half-expected Edgar Lustgarten to appear out of the throng outside, airily drift up to the window, and press his gaunt face to the grimy glass. After a minute or two of this unsolicited advice, I no longer heard a word he said.
What must Sinclair Vane — complete stranger, retired physiotherapist and formerly of 7th (Queen’s Own) Hussars — and indeed his wife, have thought when he returned to Frognal Walk Hampstead one night in 1973 to find his parlor window broken open and me, right there in his sitting room, talking to myself and clutching what I had decided was a lethal weapon — in reality a wholly amateur attempt at an imitation firearm, fashioned from a branch I’d found outside? I can only surmise he received the shock of his life. My black bomber jacket was draped across my shoulders as I shivered and menacingly narrowed my eyes. I think I might have giggled a little, in what I thought was a sinister fashion.
“I’m the most feared terrorist in Ireland,” I said. “You’re going to pay for the sins of your country. I’m sorry to have to tell you but that’s the way it is. I’m a soldier, you’re a soldier. You’re going to die, Mr. Vane.”
If I wanted to describe him, I would say he was a young version of Edgar Lustgarten — still retaining most of his hair, complete with touches of distinguished gray.
I encountered him once — a number of years after my discharge from Brixton. The snow had passed and the gutters of Soho had been recently rinsed clean by a deluge of rain, twists of steam all about me rising up into the easeful autumn sky.
He was sitting by the window of a new European-style coffee bar, surrounded by chatting white-T-shirted youths and looking so out of place. It was hard for me to do it but I was glad afterwards that I had made the effort. At first he didn’t recognize me when I said his name: Sinclair Vane.
As might have been expected, he formally stood to attention and extended his hand to shake mine.
We didn’t talk much about that night. His soul was still saddened by the recent passing of his wife.
“She was an angel, you know. She really was.”
I thought of her, his angel, as she’d encountered me that ridiculous night — weeping hysterically in the doorway by the stairs. Before Sinclair had expertly calmed her down. I recalled him in that photo on their mantelpiece — battalion commander S. Vane, in complete battledress, authoritatively squinting in the Egreb sun.
I don’t know why I thought it, but it was as clear as day as I sat in the Sir Richard Steele one still and uneventful afternoon — this image of myself and Sinclair sitting so comfortably in a London black cab, gliding along before coming to a halt just outside a dancehall whose entrance was lit by a string of warm and inviting multicolored lightbulbs.
“It was in Brighton all along,” I heard him say, as the door swung open and he reached in his pocket for the fare.
Which I knew, of course, it wasn’t — and, all of a sudden, hands of accusation seemed to reach out to grab me as I sat there in the corner of the Sir Richard Steele gloom.
I hadn’t been allowed out of Brixton for the funeral of my mother, but after my father went into the home, his papers and effects were all passed to me. You can imagine my reaction when I discovered the old photograph — creased and faded but instantly recognizable. I didn’t know what to think when I smoothed it out and, having examined it quite exhaustively, came to accept that the image I was looking at — and had been obsessed by — was that of two complete strangers, the inscription on the back reading: Dublin 1953. Neither of my parents had been to Dublin in their lives.
It was hard not to weep as I looked at it again, slowly beginning to accept that it definitely was THE PALAIS, and that the two lovers in it, well, they could have been almost anyone. For in those box-pleated suits and stiff-collared shirts, not to mention those fearful faces and averted eyes which seemed so grateful for even the tiniest morsel of hope, they could have been any pair of thrown-together souls, adrift in the black and washed-out gray of the lightless, shrinking sad Irish ’50s.
The London Assignment had been an extremely effective operation — from the British establishment’s point of view, not from mine. Or from Sinclair’s, I hasten to add. I don’t think he wanted me charged at all. My demise and subsequent incarceration hastened due to the fact that the day before the trial had been due to begin, three cleaning ladies, a hotel porter, and two foreign tourists had been blown to pieces in a restaurant in Piccadilly.
In these, the latter days of the ’90s, I largely subsist by means of the dole and a couple of hours a night gathering glasses in a pub. I suppose you could say I’m well-known around Aldgate. No one is aware of my murky past. I live in a tower block, not far from the station, which gets lonely sometimes and sees me perhaps in The Hoop & Grapes, nursing a tepid lager, or back in Trinity Square Gardens again, feeding the pigeons and surrounded by clamorous, insatiable, supremacist youth. Whose faith in the future I need to be near. Walkman stereos were just coming in ’74. I was bundled into a van, not to see the light of day until mid-’95. I still derive a childish innocence from wearing mine, fancying myself a lone knight of the streets, immersed in shaky ’30s-style strings and mellow muted jazz trumpets as I drift, a shadow figure, along the golden streets of Soho.
Among the personal effects forwarded to me after my father’s death was a letter to her, written in 1949. I know it so well I can quote it verbatim.
Dear Maggie,
I hope this finds you as well as it leaves me. Well, since we last met things have not been so bad as you can imagine things are busy here on the farm. I hope to be back up your way in about three or four months time. DV and I was wondering would you make an appointment with me I would be very grateful. My mother is a bit under the weather these times but Daddy is good thank God for that. I am doing a lot of reading at nighttime mostly because it is so busy. I like the Reader’s Digest you will find a lot of articles about London in there it looks like a beautiful city although we shouldn’t say it maybe but I would dearly love maybe to go there one day even if just for a little while. Anyhow Maggie I will sign off now and as I say I hope you are in the best of health since I seen you.
Yours truly, your fond friend,
One of the chapters in my forthcoming book is called The Hampstead Conclusion. With a walk-on part by Edgar Lustgarten.
I’d wrecked the house that night, of course. And made a speech for the benefit of the Vanes. So that they might clearly comprehend my motivation — the reasons which led to The London Assignment.
“Then and only then let my epitaph be written!” — a segment from my Republican firebrand namesake Robert Emmet’s famous courtroom speech — I remember bawling as I tipped a small glass table over. “Do you hear me, Vane, you imperious, self-regarding, cold-blooded Englishman?” I’d snapped, before delivering a lengthy soliloquy regarding the inadvisability of antagonizing a “nation who were educating Europe when others were painting themselves with woad,” along with any number of references to a certain “Mahoney” whose underground army was by now primed and about to launch a full-scale assault on “Her Majesty’s government of despots and butchers, as well as...”