said, in a dull voice, ‘Chillcott-Oakes, Phillip Chillcott-Oakes.’
‘Yes, a charming chap, absolute charmer – that’s him.’ He smiled for the first time and leaned across to me in a conspiratorial gesture. ‘At school with my youngest!’ he said.
The pub across the road had just opened. I downed a couple of Dubonnet and bitter lemons. What chance did I stand between the Communists on the one side and the Establishment on the other – they were both out-thinking me at every move.
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Let your head rule your heart. Steer well clear of controversy both at home and at work.]
Tuesday was a big echoing summer’s day. I could hear the neighbour’s black Airedale dog, and they could hear my FM. I sorted the letters from the mat; Times magazine subscription dept said I was missing the chance of a lifetime. My mother’s eldest sister wished I was in Geneva; so did I, except that my aunt was there. A War Office letter confirmed my discharge from the Army and told me that I was not subject to reserve training commitments, but was subject to the Official Secrets Act in respect of information and documents. The dairy said to order cream early for the holiday and had I tried Chokko, the new chocolate drink that everyone was raving about.
At the office I started going through the documents in my locked ‘In tray’. Some stuff about chemical warfare documents on microfilm. The US Defense Dept seemed pretty sure that a BOAC engineer was handling them. I marked it for Special Branch LAP. The Public Information Officer at Scotland Yard was being very nice about the house business but said the press was getting a line on it. Alice said he’d been on the phone twice, what should she say. ‘Tell him to tell the newspapers that a high court judge, a Cabinet Minister and two press barons were watching a blue film, but that if they play their cards right we won’t give the story to ITN.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Alice.
The FSO sent a report on the house. I read quickly through: ‘Road dust, stains on floorboard; could be blood, very old; possibly from wartime bombing.’
Finger-prints – there were a lot, mostly mine, and unidentified; they were going through the single print collection and ‘scenes of crime’ (where other unidentified prints were filed under the place in which they were found).
I had to see Ross at three. Now that I had taken over from Dalby it was one of my weekly ordeals. I sent out for sandwiches – cream cheese with pineapple, and ham with mango chutney. The delicatessen sent them with rye bread. I spent ten minutes throwing caraway seeds into the ashtray until Chico appeared, then I downed the last round, seeds and all. He put a reel of 16mm film on the desk and hung around to make conversation. I gave him the rich-man-with-ulcers-type grunt and nod, and he finally went away.
I sat for a long time staring into my Nescafé, but no particular line of action occurred. The opposition may have fumbled the pass but I hadn’t detected a gap in the defence, unless any of the documents in front of me now meant anything. It didn’t seem much to me. There was nothing to make me sure it was a matter for us to deal with even, let alone to connect it with Jay. It’s only writers who expect every lead the hero meddles in to turn out to be threads of the same case. Here in the office were about 600 file numbers; if all the villains were brought to justice simultaneously it would make Auschwitz look like the last scene of Hamlet.
Should I continue to fool with the leads in the house business? What leads? I decided to sound out Ross. I’d see whether his department were going on with it. I took a cab down to a sleazy drinking club off Jermyn Street. It was a couple of rooms on the first floor. Red plush everywhere, and not a chink of daylight. Beyond the highly polished baby grand piano, and a vast basket of too perfect flowers, sat a balding man with spectacles and a regimental tie. It was Ross. He was at least half an hour early. I sat down next to him. Our weekly meetings usually took about ten minutes and consisted of agreeing to the Army Intelligence Memoranda sheet for the Cabinet, and an inter-change of certain financing arrangements for which our two departments overlapped. The waiter brought me a Tio Pepe and Ross ordered another pink gin. He looked like he’d had a few already. His big domed frontal area was wrinkled and pale. Why did he like this place?
He asked me for a cigarette. This wasn’t like Ross, but I flicked him a couple of inches of Gauloise. I ignited it. The match lit the interior like a magnesium flare. Sammy Davis sang, ‘Love in Bloom’ and a gentle firm Parker-like sax vibrato made the plastic flowers quiver. The barman – a tall ex-pug with a tan out of a bottle, and a tie-knot the size of a large garden pea, was rubbing an old duster around spotless unused ashtrays and taking sly sips at a half-pint of Guinness. Ross began to talk.
‘To be frank, the memorandum isn’t quite ready yet; my girl is typing it this afternoon.’
I was determined not to say ‘That’s OK.’ The odd couple of times I had been late with my data Ross had ‘hurumped’ for half an hour. Ross looked at me for a minute and tugged his battered black pipe out of his pocket. He still had my Gauloise only half-finished. Ross was in a nervous state today. I wanted to know if he intended to have his people continue to work on the ‘haunted house’ as someone had christened it. I also knew that with Ross the direct approach was fatal.
‘You’ve never been down to my little place, have you?’ It was pretty rhetorical. The idea of Ross and I having an overlapping social life was hilarious. ‘It’s quite pretty now; at the bottom of the garden there are three lovely old chestnut trees. Laid out between them Anna Olivier, Caroline Testout and Mrs John Laing. When the yellow catkins are on the trees in June, with Gustave Nabonnand and Dorothy Perkins, why you could be in the heart of the countryside. Except for the house next door of course. Those chestnuts when I bought the place in 1935, no, tell a lie, end of ’34, the builders would have cleared the site bald. It was country then, not a house for miles – behind us, I mean; next door was there. Didn’t have a bus service, nothing. Mind you, didn’t affect me much. I was in Aden by the summer of ’35. My wife, you’re not married, but my wife, a wonderful woman, at that time the garden – well, it was nothing. Hard work, that’s all. I was only a lieutenant then.’
‘Ross,’ I said, ‘Mrs Laing and Dorothy Perkins are roses, aren’t they?’
‘Of course they are,’ said Ross. ‘What did you think they are?’
I tilted my forehead at the inquiring look of the barman, and a Tio Pepe and pink gin arrived very promptly. He paused long enough to give our ashtray a rebore. Ross had paused in his house agent but he soon went into it again.
‘I was at the SCRUBS in ’39,* gave me a chance to get the garden going. That’s when I put the acacias in. It’s a picture now. A three-bedroom one only seven doors away, not a patch on ours, not a patch, went for six-and-a-half thousand. I said to the wife at the time, “Then ours must be worth eight.” And we’d get it too. It’s fantastic the prices detached ones go for.’ Ross swallowed a gulp of pink gin and said, ‘But the truth is –’
I wondered what the truth was and how long it would take to get round to it.
‘The truth is with the boy at school, and at a critical time – couldn’t possibly cut back on the boy now, he’ll be at university in eighteen months; well, truth is it’s been a frightful expense. You’ve always been a bit of a, well I might almost say a protégé of mine. Last year when you first started hinting about a transfer, well, I can’t tell you the hoo-ha there was in the C5 subcommittee.
