Basil peered round the corner and caught a glimpse of a lean, military face and, as Susie had said, the sweetest little moustache. The Colonel caught a glimpse of Basil.
“Who the devil’s that?”
“I don’t know,” said Susie lightly. “He just followed me in.”
“Come here you,” said the Colonel. “Who are you and what d’you want in my office?”
“Well,” said Basil, “what the lance-corporal says is strictly true. I just followed her in. But since I’m here I can give you some valuable information.”
“If you can you’re unique in this outfit. What is it?”
Until now the word “Colonel” for Basil had connoted an elderly rock-gardener on Barbara’s G.P.O. list. This formidable man of his own age was another kettle of fish. Here was a second Todhunter. What could he possibly tell him which would pass for valuable information?
“Can I speak freely before the lance-corporal?” he asked, playing for time.
“Yes, of course. She doesn’t understand a word of any language.”
Inspiration came. “There’s a lunatic loose in the War Office,” Basil said.
“Of course there is. There are some hundreds of them. Is that all you came to tell me?”
“He’s got a suitcase full of bombs.”
“Well, I hope he finds his way to the Intelligence Branch. I don’t suppose you know his name? No; well, make out a card for him, Susie, with a serial number, and index him under SUSPECTS. If his bombs go off we shall know where he is; if they don’t it doesn’t matter. These fellows usually do more harm to themselves than to anyone else. Run along, Susie, and shut the door. I want to talk to Mr. Seal.”
Basil was shaken. When the door shut he said, “Have we met before?”
“You bet we have. Djibouti 1936, St. Jean de Luz 1937, Prague 1938. You wouldn’t remember me. I wasn’t dressed up like this then.”
“Were you a journalist?”
Vaguely at the back of Basil’s mind was the recollection of an unobtrusive, discreet face among a hundred unobtrusive, discreet faces that had passed in and out of his ken from time to time. During the past ten years he had usually managed to find himself, on one pretext or another, on the outer fringe of contemporary history in that half-world there were numerous slightly sinister figures whose orbits crossed and recrossed, ubiquitous men and women camp-followers of diplomacy and the press; among those shades he dimly remembered seeing Colonel Plum.
“Sometimes. We got drunk together once at the Basque-bar, the night you fought the United Press correspondent.”
“As far as I remember he won.”
“You bet he did. I took you back to your hotel. What are you doing now besides making passes at Susie?”
“I thought of doing counter-espionage.”
“Yes,” said Colonel Plum. “Most people who come here seem to have thought of that. Hallo ” he added as a dull detonation shook the room slightly “that sounds as if your man has had a success with his bombs. That was a straight tip, anyway. I daresay you’d be no worse in the job than anyone else.”
Here it was at last, the scene that Basil had so often rehearsed; the scene, very slightly adapted by a later hand, in order to bring it up to date, from the adventure stories of his youth. Here was the lean, masterful man, who had followed Basil’s career saying, “One day his country will have a use for him…”
“What are your contacts?”
What were his contacts? Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, Angela Lyne, Margot Metroland, Peter Pastmaster, Barbara, the bride of Grantley Green, Mr. Todhunter, Poppet Green Poppet Green; there was his chicken.
“I know some very dangerous Communists,” said Basil.
“I wonder if they’re on our files. We’ll look in a minute. We aren’t doing much about Communists at the moment. The politicians are shy of them for some reason. But we keep an eye on them, on the side, of course. I can’t pay you much for Communists.”
“As it happens,” said Basil with dignity, “I came here to serve my country. I don’t particularly want money.”
“The devil you don’t? Well, what do you want, then? You can’t have Susie. I had the hell of a fight to get her away from the old brute in charge of Pensions.”
“We can fight that out later. What I really want most at the moment is a uniform.”
“Good God! Why?”
“My mother is threatening to make me a platoon commander.”
Colonel Plum accepted this somewhat surprising statement with apparent understanding. “Yes,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said for a uniform. For one thing you’ll have to call me ‘sir’ and if there’s any funny stuff with the female staff I can take disciplinary action. For another thing it’s the best possible disguise for a man of intelligence. No one ever suspects a soldier of taking a serious interest in the war. I think I can fix that.”
“What’ll my rank be?”
“Second Lieutenant, Crosse and Blackwell’s regiment”
“Crosse and Blackwell?”
“General Service List.”
“I say, can’t you do anything better than that?”
“Not for watching Communists. Catch a fascist for me and I’ll think about making you a Captain of Marines.” At this moment the telephone bell rang. “Yes, ADDIS speaking…oh, yes, the bomb…yes, we know all about that…the Chaplain General? I say, that’s bad…oh, only the Deputy Assistant Chaplain General and you think he’ll recover. Well what’s all the fuss about?…Yes, we know all about the man in this branch. We’ve had him indexed a long time. He’s nuts yes, N for nuts, U for uncle, nuts, you’ve got it. No I don’t want to see him. Lock him up. There must be plenty of padded cells in this building, I should imagine.”
News of the attempt to assassinate the Chaplain General reached the Religious Department of the Ministry of Information late in the afternoon, just when they were preparing to pack up for the day. It threw them into a fever of activity.
“Really,” said Ambrose pettishly. “You fellows get all the fun. I shall be most embarrassed when I have to explain this to the editor of the Godless Sunday at Home.”
Lady Seal was greatly shocked.
“Poor man,” she said, “I understand that his eyebrows have completely gone. It must have been Russians.”
For the third time since his return to London, Basil tried to put a call through to Angela Lyne. He listened to the repeated buzz, five, six, seven times, then hung up the receiver. Still away, he thought; I should have liked to show her my uniform.
Angela counted the rings: five, six, seven; then there was silence in the flat; silence except for the radio which said “…dastardly attempt which has shocked the conscience of the civilized world. Messages of sympathy continue to pour into the Chaplain General’s office from the religious leaders of four continents…”
She switched over to Germany, where a rasping, contemptuous voice spoke of “Churchill’s attempt to make a second Athenia by bombing the military bishop.”
She switched on to France where a man of letters gave his impressions of a visit to the Maginot Line. Angela filled her glass from the bottle at her elbow. Her distrust of France was becoming an obsession with her now. It kept her awake at night and haunted her dreams by day long, tedious dreams born of barbituric; dreams which had no element of fantasy or surprise; utterly real, drab dreams which, like waking life, held no promise of delight. She often spoke aloud to herself nowadays living, as she did, so much alone; it was thus that lonely old women spoke, passing in the street with bags of rubbish in their hands, squatting, telling their rubbish. Angela was like an old woman squatting in a doorway picking over her day’s gleaning of rubbish, talking to herself while she sorted the scraps of garbage. She had seen and heard old women like that, often, at the end of the day, in the side streets near the theatres.