These are all theories — there may be other reasons which even I know nothing of: only the horror remains fact.
Yet perhaps it wasn’t all horror. Susan, after all, had gained a sister, risen from the dead, and for Madeleine Lindsay’s disovery was an almost sweet release: her husband, whom she had so loved, had been returned to her. The pain was over, the mystery solved, the vessel of her joy had come home. I remembered Basil Fielding — ‘People have an enormous need to tidy things up in that way.’ And now Madeleine could do this — and she did so with a relieved calm, offering him, in his emblematic return, all that she had given him in his life — the gifts of total faith, loyalty and affection.
‘You know,’ she said to me that same evening in the big hall, the logs piled up now about the great fireplace ready for the winter, ‘I wonder if there’s anything really strange in the way he went. What was strange was the complete content and trust we had in each other — all along. I know that more now. It’s a lifetime’s warmth that — for me. The rest — the last few weeks, poor Eleanor — that’s all nonsense by comparison. Oh, all she said may be true! But that’s irrelevant.’
I nodded. Her unquestioning love had, in the end, unbolted the dark: Lindsay’s dark — where my persistent enquiries had led only to pain. And the ‘truth’, I saw now, could well be irrelevant — the search we make for it so vehemently steps which take us away from it.
David Marcus, of course, managed to cast a real gloom over the proceedings — arriving hot-foot from London the next day, busy yet temporising as ever, a man with obvious lies in his heart, who would never, unfortunately, kill himself.
I said, ‘Well, you have your man at last.’ We were in the morning-room. He was fingering the books on the shelves again, ever the sly investigator — just as he fingered people’s lives, wondering how much they were worth or what you could borrow on them.
‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘A tragedy.’
But I could see he was really immensely relieved. Lindsay would never embarrass him now, turning up at a press conference in Moscow a few months hence.
‘A brave man — which makes it all the more inexplicable,’ he went on — as though suicide was an act of cowardice.
‘You know damn well, Marcus, it can’t be all that inexplicable.’
‘You’d so like to know,’ he murmured secretly under his breath.
I was about to tell him that I now knew the real secret about Lindsay — from Eleanor — already. But I changed my mind. ‘You tried to get me,’ I went on. ‘You succeeded with Willis Parker. You didn’t want Lindsay found for some reason — only dead, as he is now.’
‘What nonsense you speak,’ he said gravely, turning to me, very formally in his dark pinstripe, like a crooked headmaster with a rascal — a man usurping genuine old decencies, in language and dress, thus to give weight to his deceit.
But I didn’t press my luck with him — and thought no more of telling him that I knew the truth anyway about Lindsay’s intelligence operations. He would learn the uselessness of that whole long elaborate business in due course, perhaps, when the matter in Eleanor’s trial in Yugoslavia came to light. Until then he could pretend that Lindsay’s work for British Intelligence had been the one, at least, shining success in that deeply flawed organisation. Though even there, I don’t know how they can ever establish a true profit and loss account in such cloudy matters as this Trojan horse ploy — but let them at it: suitable work for their narrow souls.
They buried Lindsay later that week: in the family plot to the side of the little granite church, high on the moors — the Laird come home at last. The whole neighbourhood attended, the real people of the estate and locality, less real friends, pillars of the county society — and a few far worse men from Whitehall, pretending loss, though more intent, I think, on making sure Lindsay didn’t jump from the box and escape them a second time.
It was a perfect afternoon, high on the blue land, looking over a wild expanse, the clouds funnelled into strange white spirals and pillars, like rocks in the Grand Canyon, miles tall, very high up and far away in the distance. It wasn’t a formal or military funeral — there would be a memorial service for all that nonsense later on in some Wren church off the Strand. But a local bagpiper played him out, after all the numbing obsequies: the last expected musical homage for a Scots officer and gentleman: ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ — a funeral dirge which I have always found awkward and atonal, though thus certainly all the more effective in creating a chilly mood: enough to say that it’s a kind of music I’ve never been able to understand or connect with — and thus it may be an appropriate reflection of my failure to really understand the man they were burying. Or is it the other way round perhaps — that this lonely, harsh and unmelodic line reflects the true lack of any melody at the heart of the world, a dark which Lindsay always felt and which in the end he could not bear?
By Joseph Hone in Faber Finds
The Private Sector
The Sixth Directorate
The Flowers of the Forest
The Valley of the Fox
The Paris Trap