‘Finn’s good nature makes him vulnerable,’ Pennistone said. ‘But he can always fall back on his deafness and his VC.’
Finn was certainly prepared to use either or both these attributes to their fullest advantage when occasion required, but he had other weapons too, and took a lot of bypassing when it came to conflict. Quite why he had changed his mind about accepting promotion, no one knew. If, until that moment, he had preferred to avoid at his age (what that age was remained one of his secrets) too heavy responsibilities, too complex duties, he now found himself assailed by work as various as it was demanding. There was perhaps a parallel with Lance-Corporal Gittins, storeman in my former Battalion, a man of similarly marked character, who, no doubt to the end, preferred a job he liked and knew thoroughly to the uncertainty of rising higher. Possibly a surface picturesqueness about the duties, the people with whom he was now brought in contact, had tempted Finn more than he would have admitted. That would be easy, for Finn admitted to nothing but the deafness and the VC; not even the ‘L’ of his own initial, though he would smile if the latter question arose, as if he looked forward one day to revealing his first name at the most effective possible moment.
‘Finn’s extraordinary French is quite famous in Paris,’ said Pennistone. ‘He has turned it to great advantage.’
Pennistone, capable, even brilliant, at explaining philosophic niceties or the minutiae of official dialectic, was entirely unable to present a clear narrative of his own daily life, past or present, so that it was never discoverable how he and Finn had met in Paris in the first instance. Probably it had been in the days before Pennistone had abandoned commerce for writing a book about Descartes — or possibly Gassendi — and there had been some question of furnishing Finn’s office with Pennistone’s textiles. In peace or war, Finn was obviously shrewd enough, so he might have ferreted out Pennistone as assistant even had he not been already one of the Section’s officers, but, on the contrary, concealed in the innermost recesses of the military machine. He enjoyed a decided prominence in Finn’s councils, not by any means only because he spoke several languages with complete fluency.
‘Why did Finn leave the City for the cosmetics business?’
‘Didn’t he inherit some family interest? I don’t know. His daughter is married to a Frenchman serving with the British army — as a few are on account of political disinclinations regarding de Gaulle — but Finn keeps his wife and family hidden away.’
‘Why is that?’
Pennistone laughed.
‘My theory is because presence of relations, whatever they were like, would prejudice Finn’s own operation as a completely uncommitted individual, a kind of ideal figure — anyway to himself in his own particular genre — one to whom such appendages as wives and children could only be an encumbrance. Narcissism, perhaps the best sort of narcissism. I’m not sure he isn’t right to do so.’
I saw what Pennistone meant, also why he and Finn got on so well together, at first sight surprising, since Finn had probably never heard of Descartes, still less Gassendi. He was not a great reader, he used to say. Such panache as he felt required by his own chosen persona had immense finish of style, to which even the most critical could hardly take offence. Possibly Mrs Finn had proved the exception in that respect, lack of harmony in domestic life resulting. Heroes are notoriously hard to live with. When Finn conversed about matters other than official ones, he tended on the whole to offer anecdotal experiences of the earlier war, told favourites like the occasion when, during a halt on the line of march, he had persuaded the Medical Officer to pull a troublesome molar. Copious draughts of rum were followed by convulsions as of earthquake. Finn would make appropriate gestures and mimings during the recital, quite horrifying in their way, and undeniably confirming latent abilities as an actor. The climax came almost in a whisper.
‘The MO made a balls of it. The tooth was the wrong one.’
Had Finn, in fact, chosen the stage as career, rather than war and commerce, his personal appearance would have restricted him to ‘character’ parts. Superficial good looks were entirely absent. Short, square, cleanshaven, his head seemed carved out of an elephant’s tusk, the whole massive cone of ivory left more or less complete in its original shape, eyes hollowed out deep in the roots, the rest of the protuberance accommodating his other features, terminating in a perfectly colossal nose that stretched directly forward from the totally bald cranium. The nose was preposterous, grotesque, slapstick, a mask from a Goldoni comedy. He had summoned me a day or two before the teleprinter news of the Polish evacuation.
‘As David’s still in Scotland,’ he said. ‘I want you to attend a Cabinet Office meeting. Explain to them how one Polish general can be a very different cup of tea to another.’
The Poles were by far the largest of the Allied contingents in the United Kingdom, running to a Corps of some twenty thousand men, stationed in Scotland, where Pennistone was doing a week’s tour of duty to see the army on the ground and make contact with the British Liaison Headquarters attached to it. The other Allies in this country mustered only two or three thousand bodies apiece, though some of them held cards just as useful as soldiers, if not more so: the Belgians, for example, still controlling the Congo, the Norwegians a large and serviceable merchant fleet. However, the size of the Polish Corps, and the fact that the Poles who had reached this country showed a high proportion of officers to that of ‘other ranks’, inclined to emphasize complexities of Polish political opinion. Some of our own official elements were not too well versed in appreciating the importance of this tricky aspect of all Allied relationships. At misunderstanding’s worst, most disastrous, the Poles were thought of as a race not unlike the Russians; indeed, by some, scarcely to be distinguished apart. Even branches more at home in this respect than the Censorship — to whom it always came as a complete and chaotic surprise that Poles wrote letters to each other expressing feelings towards the USSR that were less than friendly — were sometimes puzzled by internal Allied conflicts alien to our own, in many respects unusual, ideas about running an army.
‘The Poles themselves have a joke about their generals being either social or socialist,’ said Finn. ‘Only wish it was as easy as that. I expect you’ve got the necessary stuff, Nicholas. If you feel you want to strengthen it, apply to the Country Section or our ambassador to them. This is one of Widmerpool’s committees. Have you heard of Widmerpool?’
‘Yes, sir, I —’
‘Had dealings with him?’
‘Quite often, I —’
‘Some people find him …’
Finn paused and looked grave. He must have decided to remain imprecise, because he did not finish the sentence.
‘Very active is Widmerpool,’ he went on. ‘Not everyone likes him — I mean where he is. If you’ve come across him already, you’ll know how to handle things. Have all the information at your finger tips. Plenty of notes to fall back on. We want to deliver the goods. Possibly Farebrother will be there. He has certain dealings with the Poles in these secret games that take place. Farebrother’s got great charm, I know, but you must resist it, Nicholas. Don’t let him entangle us in any of his people’s goings-on.’