‘He passed over not long after your uncle. Being well instructed in such enlightenments, he knew his own time was appointed — in war conditions some of his innermost needs had become hard to satisfy — so he was ready. Quite ready.’
‘Where did he die?’
‘There is no death in Nature’ — she looked at me with her great misty eyes and I remembered Dr Trelawney himself using much the same words — ‘only transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. He has re-entered the Vortex of Becoming.’
‘I see.’
‘But to answer your question in merely terrestrial terms, he re-embarked on his new journey from the little hotel where we last met.’
‘And Albert — does he still manage the Bellevue?’
‘He too has gone forth in his cerements. His wife, so I bear, married again — a Pole invalided from the army. They keep a boarding-house together in Weston-super-Mare.’
‘Any last words of advice, Mrs Erdleigh?’ asked Stevens.
He treated her as if he were consulting the Oracle at Delphi.
‘Let the palimpsest of your mind absorb the words of Eliphas Levi — to know, to will, to dare, to be silent.’
‘Me, too?’ I asked.
‘Everyone.’
‘The last most of all?’
‘Some think so.’
She glided away towards the lift, which seemed hardly needed, with its earthly and mechanical paraphernalia, to bear her up to the higher levels.
‘I’m going to kip too,’ said Stevens. ‘No good wandering all over London on a night like this looking for Pam. She might be anywhere. She usually comes back all right after a tiff like this. Cheers her up. Well, I may or may not see you again, Nicholas. Never know when one may croak at this game.’
‘Good luck — and to Szymanski too, if you see him.’
The raid went on, but I managed to get some sleep before morning. When I woke up, it still continued, though in a more desultory manner. This was, indeed, the advent of the Secret Weapon, the inauguration of the V.1’s — the so-called ‘flying bombs’. They came over at intervals of about twenty minutes or half an hour, all that day and the following night. This attack continued until Monday, a weekend that happened to be my fortnightly leave; spent, as it turned out, on their direct line of route across the Channel on the way to London.
‘You see, my friend, I was right,’ said Clanwaert.
One of the consequences of the Normandy landings was that the Free French forces became, in due course, merged into their nation’s regular army. The British mission formerly in liaison with them was disbanded, a French military attaché in direct contact with Finn’s Section coming into being. Accordingly, an additional major was allotted to our establishment, a rank to which I was now promoted, sustaining (with a couple of captains to help) French, Belgians, Czechs and Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. As the course of the war improved, work on the whole increased rather than diminished, so much so that I was unwillingly forced to refuse the offer of two Italian officers, sent over to make certain arrangements, whose problems, among others, included one set of regulations that forbade them in Great Britain to wear uniform; another that forbade them to wear civilian clothes. All routine work with the French was transacted with Kernével, first seen laughing with Masham about les votes hiérarchiques, just before my initial interview with Finn.
‘They’re sending a général de brigade from North Africa to take charge,’ said Finn. ‘A cavalryman called Philidor.’
Since time immemorial, Kernével, a Breton, like so many of the Free French, had worked at the military attaché’s office in London as chief clerk. By now he was a captain. At the moment of the fall of France, faced with the alternative of returning to his country or joining the Free French, he had at once decided to remain, his serial number in that organization — if not, like Abou Ben Adhem’s, leading all the rest — being very respectably high in order of acceptance. It was tempting to look for characteristics of my old Regiment in these specimens of Romano-Celtic stock emigrated to Gaul under pressure from Teutons, Scandinavians and non-Roman Celts.
‘I don’t think my mother could speak a word of French,’ said Kernével. ‘My father could — he spoke very good french — but I myself learnt the language as I learnt English.’
Under a severe, even priestly exterior, Kernével concealed a persuasive taste for conviviality — on the rare occasions when anything of the sort was to be enjoyed. From their earliest beginnings, the Free French possessed an advantage over the other Allies — and ourselves — of an issue of Algerian wine retailed at their canteens at a shilling a bottle. Everyone else, if lucky enough to find a bottle of Algerian, or any other wine, in a shop, had to pay nearly ten times that amount. So rare was wine, they were glad to give that, when available. This benefaction to the Free French, most acceptable to those in liaison with them, who sometimes lunched or dined at their messes, was no doubt owed to some figure in the higher echelons of our own army administration — almost certainly learned in an adventure story about the Foreign Legion — that French troops could only function on wine. In point of fact, so far as alcohol went, the Free French did not at all mind functioning on spirits, or drinks like Cap Corse, relatively exotic in England, of which they consumed a good deal. Their Headquarter mess in Pimlico was decorated with an enormous fresco, the subject of which I always forgot to enquire. Perhaps it was a Free French version of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, brought up to date and depicting themselves as survivors from the wreck of German invasion.
They did not reject, as we sometimes did ourselves, Marshal Lyautey’s doctrine, quoted by Dicky Umfraville, that gaiety was the first essential in an officer, that some sort of light relief was required to get an army through a war. Perhaps, indeed, they too liberally interpreted that doctrine. If so, the red-tape they had to endure must have driven them to it; those terrible bordereaux — the very name recalling the Dreyfus case whenever they arrived — labyrinthine and ambiguous enough to extort admiration from a Diplock or even a Blackhead.
‘All is fixed for General Philidor’s interview?’ asked Kernével.
‘I shall be on duty myself.’
General Philidor, soon after his arrival in London, had to see a personage of very considerable importance, only a degree or so below the CIGS himself. It had taken a lot of arranging. Philidor was a lively little man with a permanently extinguished cigarette-end attached to his lower lip, which, under the peak of his general’s khaki kepi, gave his face the fierce intensity of a Paris taxi-driver. His rank was that, in practice, held by the commander of a Division. As a former Giraud officer, he was not necessarily an enthusiastic ‘Gaullist’. At our first meeting he had asked me how I liked being in liaison with the French, and, after speaking of the purely military aspects of the work, I had mentioned Algerian wine.
‘Believe me, mon commandant, before the ’14-’18 war many Frenchmen had never tasted wine.’
‘You surprise me, sir.’
‘It was conscription, serving in the army, that gave them the habit.’
‘It is a good one, sir.’
‘My father was a vigneron.’
‘Burgundy or Bordeaux, sir?’
‘At Chinon. You have heard of Rabelais, mon commandant?’
‘And drunk Chinon, sir — a faint taste of raspberries and to be served cold.’
‘The vineyard was not far from our cavalry school at Saumur, convenient when I was on, as you say, a course there.’
I told him about staying at La Grenadière, how the Leroys had a son instructing at Saumur in those days, but General Philidor did not remember him. It would have been a long shot had he done so. All the same, contacts had been satisfactory, so that by the time he turned up for his interview with the important officer already mentioned, there was no sense of undue formality.