SS-GB (41 page)

‘The fog’s getting thicker,’ said Harry. ‘It could hang on for days.’

‘Are you quite sure you haven’t got the name of the people at Barnet?’

‘I’m sure,’ said Harry.

Douglas got in the ambulance and looked at the King. He was sitting up in the stretcher, a thin grey blanket pulled round his shoulders, his face blank. ‘Are you all right, Your Majesty?’ said Douglas.

The King looked at him but did not answer.

‘It must have been that bomb that hit the palace
just before the end,’ said Harry in a whisper. ‘There were rumours that the King had been badly injured, do you remember?’

‘You think he’s been like this all that time?’

‘I’ve seen plenty such cases,’ said Harry. ‘It’s the concussion – the blast effect can kill without leaving a mark on the corpse. Or it can just numb the mind and shake a man’s brain loose.’ Douglas looked round anxiously but the King had not heard.

‘Do you think he’ll recover?’

‘God knows, Douglas. But can you imagine what effect he’d have in his present state, if he was in Washington?’

‘I’ve been thinking of little else,’ said Douglas sadly.

‘Can you really get this damned thing as far as Pall Mall?’

‘I’ll try,’ said Douglas, and as if in encouragement the engine fired at the first attempt, and laboriously they trundled on up the Strand. For a few minutes the engine ran smoothly, but before either of the two men voiced the hope that they’d get as far as their original destination in Barnet the engine died once again. They were outside the Adelphi Theatre when the ambulance finally stammered to a stop. Now it did not answer to the starter. In the toolbox on the running board there was only a greasy cloth and a starting handle. Harry took it and turned the engine by hand, not once but many times. There was no response to his exertions and, red-faced and breathless, he threw the starting handle back into the toolbox. He cursed as he wiped his hands on a rag.

‘What are we going to do?’ said Harry, holding a hand to his chest and breathing deeply.

‘There’s a folding wheelchair in the back,’ said Douglas. ‘I’d prefer to take him along with us.’

‘Christ!’

‘No one will recognize him in the street. London is teeming with the sick and crippled.’

Harry had no alternative to offer, or breath to argue. They got the King into the wheelchair with some difficulty. Some passing pedestrians looked at the three men with interest but then they noticed the stage door of the nearby theatre and gave no more thought to it.

They wheeled him through the fog, cutting through Trafalgar Square and to the huge forbidding edifice of the Reform Club. ‘Wait here with him,’ Douglas told Harry. The fog was getting into the King’s lungs, and now he gave a body-racking cough.

Douglas had been in the Club before. He asked the porter for Sir Robert and then caught sight of him, standing in the middle of the strange indoor courtyard that is a feature of this odd building.

The porter walked over to Sir Robert and announced the visitor. He turned away from his companion. ‘Archer. How nice.’ His voice was soft and low, somewhere between a growl and a whisper.

It was typical of Sir Robert; a greeting from which it was impossible to detect pleasure or lack of it, surprise or polite acceptance of a punctual arrival, intimate friendship or distant acquaintance.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Sir Robert.’

‘Not at all. You know Webster. He’s to be the new Under-Secretary.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Douglas. Webster was a frail-looking man with tired eyes and a wispy smile. Hard to believe that he had the sort of determination that a man must have to cross that hurdle. Under-Secretary was for a civil servant what his first star billing is to an actor.

‘You were at New College, Archer?’ said Sir Robert.

‘Christ Church,’ said Douglas.

‘Webster was at New,’ said Sir Robert.

They smiled. There was a widely held belief that all the top civil service jobs went to men from New College, Oxford.

‘Can I offer you a glass of sherry?’ said Webster.

Douglas was burning with impatience – he was anxious about Harry standing outside on the pavement with the King – but with Webster celebrating his promotion, Douglas could see no way of declining. A club servant was ready to take the order. ‘Three dry sherries,’ said Webster.

‘This is rather urgent, Sir Robert.’

‘There is always enough time for a glass of sherry,’ said Sir Robert. He turned to Webster. ‘Archer has helped me with PQs from time to time.’ Douglas had only once been asked to draft some material for the answer to a Parliamentary question but it was enough to explain his unexpected arrival.

Politely Webster offered them a chance to talk privately. ‘Then let me have a brief word with the Club Secretary while you talk. It would save me time after lunch.’

Sir Robert smiled and seemed indifferent to Douglas’s impatience. The sherries arrived and the congratulations were delivered. When Webster had gone, Sir Robert led Douglas to one of the leather-covered benches by the wall.

Douglas looked round carefully to be sure they were not overheard. ‘It’s the King, Sir Robert,’ he whispered.

Sir Robert said nothing; he sipped his sherry. This calmness did nothing to reassure Douglas, rather it gave him a feeling that he was behaving badly, that he was intruding. ‘We are taking him from the Tower…as arranged,’ whispered Douglas apologetically. ‘But there’s engine trouble. We need another vehicle for him.’

‘And now?’ said Sir Robert calmly.

‘He’s here.’

‘In the Club?’ His hoarse voice rose a fraction above the customary whisper.

‘Outside on the pavement.’

Sir Robert knitted his bushy eyebrows and studied his sherry. Douglas noticed the way the liquid trembled in Sir Robert’s hand. Douglas turned his head away and looked at a group of men near the entrance. The effect of the light, coming through the glass roof so high above, made the men seem shadowless, as if in a dream.

‘He’s in a wheelchair,’ Douglas added. ‘One of my men is with him.’

‘How sick is he?’ He glanced round.

‘He’s virtually comatose, Sir Robert.’

They sat very still. From somewhere high above the fog there came the sound of an aeroplane. Its sound faded before he replied. ‘That explains a lot. The Germans have gone to a great deal of trouble to keep His Majesty incommunicado.’ Nervously the old man reached into the pocket of his black jacket and found his pipe. He toyed with it, reaming the bowl with his finger and tapping it against the back of his hand.

Douglas said, ‘I don’t know how we’ll get him to the house in Barnet. We’ve had to abandon the vehicle.’

Sir Robert looked at him and nodded, his mind already calculating every possible permutation of this new situation. ‘He’ll need medical attention,’ he said, and blew through the pipe. It made a sharp sound that was almost musical.

‘I think a doctor should look at him as soon as possible.’

‘A shrewd gambit,’ said Sir Robert. ‘They’ve given us what we most want, and yet dealt us a telling blow.’ Suddenly he felt in both pockets and found his tobacco
pouch. He unclipped the fastening and fingered the contents. Douglas could smell the strong odour of it. With that dexterous precision that comes only with unconscious action, he filled the pipe, cut the tobacco strands with his thumbnail, struck a match, lit up and inhaled. Then he blew smoke. ‘Astute fellows, these Germans, eh Archer?’

‘It seems so, Sir Robert.’ It was cold in the club and Douglas shivered.

‘And what do you do with him now, eh?’ He took the pipe from his mouth and looked at the burning tobacco, as if seeing it for the first time. Douglas sipped his sherry and waited. He was frightened, damned frightened, but there was no way of hurrying the old man.

‘A few weeks after the
boche
arrived I managed at long last to get decent servants,’ said Sir Robert, thoughtfully. ‘A man and wife – not young – total abstainers, both of them. The wife’s able to cook plain English food, and the husband had been a butler for an obscure Liberal peer. Awfully lucky, don’t you know, getting such hardworking servants, at the sort of wages I can afford to pay them.’ He put the pipe in his mouth and drew on it meditatively, while fixing Douglas with a piercing stare.

Over Sir Robert Benson’s shoulder Douglas saw General Georg von Ruff coming into the club. He gave the porter his silk-lined overcoat, and stood polishing his gold-rimmed spectacles, misted by the warm air. Behind him was a uniformed German soldier who looked round before going back to talk to the porter. Douglas looked away. What a damnable coincidence that of only a couple of dozen men in London who might recognize the King, one of them had to come to the Reform Club at this moment. But was there any coincidence? Undoubtedly this was where
General von Ruff and Sir Robert Benson had arranged the details of the King’s release from the Tower. Douglas looked at Sir Robert’s cold blue eyes – he seemed not to have noticed the General’s arrival – and wondered whether the King’s physical condition was really the surprise that Sir Robert implied that it was.

‘I’m not sure I understand,’ said Douglas. ‘About your servants; I’m not sure I understand.’ General von Ruff walked past Sir Robert without a glance and went upstairs. Of course it would be like that; discreet words in a private room.

‘No?’ said Sir Robert as if he found it difficult to believe, and studied Douglas with renewed interest. ‘Informers, of course. Reporting to the Germans everything I say, write or do. But I talked it over with my wife, and we decided that it was well worth the inconvenience…’ He worked his lips to remove a strand of tobacco from his teeth. ‘To tell you the truth, Archer, I am tempted to a few indiscretions from time to time, just to give the poor devil something to tell his masters. Don’t know how we’d manage without them now…and the wife irons my shirts better than any laundry.’

‘You mean we can’t take the King to your house,’ said Douglas.

Sir Robert Benson took the pipe from his mouth and used a pencil top to press the burning tobacco into the bowl. ‘It would be risky,’ he said, as if considering the idea for the first time. ‘Colonel Mayhew?’

‘Is waiting at Barnet, Sir Robert. I’ve no way of contacting him. And Bernard Staines is somewhere in South America.’

‘And His Majesty is outside in the street, sitting in a wheelchair you say?’

‘Yes, Sir Robert.’

He used the pipe to stroke the side of his nose. ‘It has an element of farce, Archer. Would you say that?’

‘No sir, I would not.’

He nodded mournfully. ‘Ummm, your position is devilish difficult, I see that.’

Now Douglas understood how Sir Robert Benson had risen to his high position in the civil service. He didn’t give orders and instructions; he simply put you in a situation where you had to do what he wanted. Sir Robert Benson wanted Douglas to wheel the King off into the fog, and solve the problem without involving Sir Robert, or any of his close friends and associates. And he was quite prepared to sit here drinking sherry and murmuring arid non sequiturs until Douglas got up and left. Douglas found this man’s cold indifference to his plight more frightening than the machinations of Huth and Kellerman. ‘Would it be all right if I used the phone?’ said Douglas.

‘You know where they are?’

‘But I wonder if you could let me have some pennies?’

‘Of course.’ Sir Robert found four pennies and gave them to Douglas. ‘By all means take him to my house, if you think it’s worth the risk,’ said Sir Robert.

Douglas nodded. The pennies were cold in his hand. Sir Robert would always come out smelling of roses. No one would be able to say Sir Robert Benson hadn’t offered his all, even at the risk of certain betrayal to the authorities. ‘I’ll make sure His Majesty learns of your offer, Sir Robert.’

As if reading Douglas’s mind, he smiled. ‘You know where the phones are,’ he said again. Douglas nodded, got to his feet and went to the phone.

‘Barbara, it’s Douglas.’

‘Darling.’ Her voice was no more than a whisper.

‘I must come and see you.’

‘Could you make it tomorrow, my love?’

‘I want to come now.’

‘Not now, darling. I’m just going out.’

‘Can you hear me, Barbara? Your voice is very faint.’

‘I’ve a car waiting and the fog is dreadful. Can you phone again tomorrow?’

Douglas tapped the earpiece of the phone in the hope that her voice would come louder. ‘Barbara. I must see you
now.’

‘Don’t be a bully, darling. Stay where you are until the fog clears.’

‘Barbara, I –’

‘It’s my work,’ she said. Her voice was louder now. ‘I have my work to attend to, just as everyone else does. Now will you stop being a bore!’ The earpiece purred as she slammed down the phone.

Douglas stood for a moment with the phone in his hand. He was totally unprepared for this rejection and he felt desolate.

‘Everything all right?’ said Sir Robert as Douglas walked past them towards the entrance.

‘Yes, indeed, Sir Robert,’ said Douglas. He nodded to Webster. When he got to the entrance hall, the porter had his overcoat all ready for him. The porter knew he wouldn’t be staying to lunch with Sir Robert. Over the years he’d learned to recognize men whose overcoats should be kept ready for an early departure.

‘No chance of a cab, I suppose?’ Douglas asked the doorman.

‘I haven’t seen one all day, sir, and that must be something of a record here like this at the door of the club.’

They stood together for a moment at the top of the steps of the grand entrance. ‘Look at those two,’ said the doorman nodding to where Harry Woods was standing with the wheelchair. ‘Poor devils. To think that I’ve fought through two world wars and I
end up watching British ex-servicemen begging in Pall Mall.’

‘Is that what they are doing?’

‘Ask yourself,’ said the doorman. ‘They’re discreet, of course, but I’ve already seen a bobby caution them, and move them on.’

‘What took you so long?’ said Harry when Douglas returned to them. ‘I’ve had a beat bobby reading me the Riot Act, and some bloody saucy kid shouting “penny for the guy”.’