“Nice work.”
“Didn’t actually get round to unarmed combat at that point, but I sort of felt she was ready and willing. You know how it was on the island. Full magazine on and nothing to shoot at.”
“Rather.”
He flexed his arm, caressed the back of his hair. “Right. I trotted off back to the school. Tender farewell. Invitation to dinner the next weekend. Week passes, I present myself over there in my number ones. Other necessary equipment. Drinks for dinner, girls looking smashing. But then.” He gave me a taut, suspenseful look. “Well as a matter of fact the other girl, not June, got stinkers.”
“Christ.”
“I’d got her number the week before. One of these bloody intellectual girls. Pretend to be as tough as nuts, but a couple of gins put ‘em out stone cold. Well, it got pretty bloody dicey during dinner. Damned embarrassing. This Julie girl took against me. Didn’t take much notice at first. I thought, well, the girl’s a bit squiffy. Time of the month or something. But… actually she began, well she began to make fun of me in a damn silly sort of way.”
“How?”
“Oh… you know, copied my voice. Way I say things. I suppose she was quite good at it. Damned offensive, all the same.”
“But what was she saying?”
“Oh a load of stupid cock about pacifism and the bomb. You know the type. And I just wasn’t having any.”
“Didn’t the others join in?”
“Hardly said a word. Too damn embarrassed. Well anyway suddenly wham this Julie girl shouted a whole string of really bloody nasty insults. Lost her temper completely. And then all hell broke loose. This other June girl got up and went for her. The old man flapped his hands like a wounded crow. Then the Julie one rushed away. Then her sister. I was left sitting there with the old man. He started talking about them being orphans. Load of guff. Sort of apology.”
“What were these insults she shouted?”
“Old boy, I can’t remember now. The girl was pissed.” He dredged his memory. “Called me a Nazi, actually.”
“A Nazi!”
“One of the things we were rowing about was Mosley.”
“You’re not a—”
“Of course not, old boy. Good God.” He laughed, then flicked a look at me. “But let’s face it, not all Mosley says is rot. If you ask me this country has got bloody sloppy.” He stretched his neck. “Bit more discipline. National pride…”
“Maybe, but Mosley?”
“Old man, don’t get me wrong. Who the hell do you think I was fighting against in the war? It’s just that… well, take your Spain. Look what Franco’s done for Spain.”
“I thought all he’d done was build a lot of dungeons in Barcelona.”
“Ever been to Spain, old man?”
“No, I haven’t, as a matter of fact.”
“Well, till you have I’d keep quiet about what Franco has and hasn’t done.”
I silently counted five, and shrugged.
“Sorry. Forget it. Do go on.”
“As it happens I’ve read some of Mosley’s stuff, and a lot of it makes sense.” He articulated the words with curt clarity. “Quite a lot of sense.”
“I’m sure.”
He metaphorically preened his ruffled feathers and went on.
“My twin came back, old boy left us for a few minutes and actually she was, seemed, damn sweet. Course I played up the hurt line and sort of indicated that a little stroll in the moonlight later would help me get back to normal. And then, she said wham—Stroll? How about a swim? And believe me, old boy, you only had to hear her say it to see swimming might lead to very interesting other activities. Midnight on the dot, at the gate. Okay, we go to bed at eleven, I sit round waiting for zero hour. Slip out of the house. No problems. Get to the gate. Five minutes later, along she comes. And old man, I can tell you, I’ve been in some clinches in my time, but that girl lit up like a bomb. Lit me up like a bomb, too. Began to think Operation Midnight Swim was going to be canceled for a more important exercise. But she said she wanted to cool off for a while.”
“I’m glad you didn’t tell me about this before I went. The disappointment would have killed me.”
He grinned condescendingly. “We get down to the beach. She says, I haven’t got a costume, do you mind going in first. I think, well maybe she’s shy, maybe she wants to do the necessary. Fine. Operation undress. She retires into the trees. Charley does exactly what he’s told, swims out fifty yards, treads water, waits two minutes, three, four, actually in the end about ten, begins to feel damn cold. Still no girl.”
“And your clothes had gone.”
“You’ve got it, old boy. Stark naked. Standing on that bloody beach hissing the damn girl’s name.” I laughed, but his smile was very thin. “So. Big joke. Message received. You can imagine how damned angry I was by then. I gave her half an hour to come back. Searched round. No go. So I marched off to the house. Didn’t do my feet much good. Tore a bit of pine branch off to cover the old privates if necessary.”
“Fantastic.” I was beginning to find it difficult not to grin all over my face; but I was clearly meant to share the outrage. “Through the gate, up the drive thing, towards the house. Go round the front. What do you think I see there?” I shook my head. “A man hanging.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, old boy. They were doing the joking. Actually it was a dummy. Like one of those things you use in bayonet practice, yes? Filled with straw. Strung up with a rope round its neck. And my clothes on. Head painted to look like Hitler.”
“Good God. What did you do?”
“What could I do? Pulled the bloody stupid thing down and got my clothes off it.”
“And then?”
“Nix. They’d gone. Hooked it.”
“Gone?”
“Caïque. Heard it down at Moutsa. Thought it was a fisherman. Left my bag out for me. Nothing pinched. Just that bloody four-mile walk back to the school.”
“You must have been furious.”
“Was slightly chokka. Yes.”
“But you didn’t let them get away with it.”
He smiled to himself.
“Right. Quite simple. I composed a little report. First about the thing during the war. Then a few little facts about where our friend Mr. Conchis’s present political sympathies lay. Sent it to the appropriate quarters.”
“Communist?” Since the civil war ended in 1950, Communists had been hounded relentlessly in Greece.
“Knew some in Crete. Just said I’d seen a couple on Phraxos and followed them to his house. That’s enough, that’s all they want. A little bit goes a long way. Now you know why you never had the pleasure.”
I fingered the stem of my glass.
“And so you had the last laugh.”
“Habit of mine, old boy. Suits my complexion.”
“Why on earth did they do it in the first place? I mean, all right, they didn’t like you… but they could have given you the brush-off from the beginning.”
“All that stuff about their being the old boy’s godchildren. All my eye. Course they weren’t. They were a pair of high-class tarts. Language the Julie one used gave the game away. Damn funny way of looking at you. Suggestive.” He glanced at me. “It was the sort of setup you run across in the Mediterranean—especially your Eastern Mediterranean. I’ve met it before.”
“You mean…”
“I mean, quite crudely, old boy, that the rich Mr. Conchis wasn’t quite up to the job, but he… shall we say… still got pleasure from seeing the job performed?”
Again I surreptitiously eyed him; knew myself lost in the interminable maze of echoes. Was he, or wasn’t he?
“But they didn’t actually suggest anything?”
“There were hints, old boy. I worked them out afterwards. There were hints.”
He went away and got two more gins.
“You might have warned me.”
“I did, old boy.”
“Not very clearly.”
“You know what Xan—Xan Fielding—used to do to any new chaps who were chuted in when we were up in the Levka Ore? Send ‘em wham straight out on a Job. No warnings, no sermons. Just—’Watch it.’ Okay?”
I disliked Mitford because he was crass and mean, but even more because he was a caricature, an extension, of certain qualities in myself; he had on his skin, visible, the carcinoma I nursed inside me. I had to suspect, the old paranoia, that he might be another ‘plant’—a test for me, a lesson; but yet there was something so ineffably impervious about the man that I could not believe he was so consummate an actor. I thought of Lily de Seitas; how to her I must seem as Mitford did to myself. A barbarian.
We moved out of the Mandrake onto the pavement.
“I’m off to Greece next month,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Firm’s going to start tours there next summer.”
“Oh God. No.”
“Do the place good. Shake their ideas up.”
I looked down the crowded Soho Street. “I hope Zeus strikes you with lightning the moment you get there.”
He took it as a joke.
“Age of the common man, old boy. Age of the common man.”
He held out his hand. I would have dearly loved to have known how to twist it and send him wham straight over my shoulder. The last I saw of him was of a dark blue back marching towards Shaftesbury Avenue; eternally the victor in a war where the losers win.