Noose (23 page)

‘L-J. – Lorna-Jane Underhill – wanted to give the tale to Sefton Delmer on the
Express
, but we stopped that,' Bain said. ‘It seemed so right for you. Charlie backed us.'

‘It's good of you all,' Ian said.

‘Make a start with Dill and his friends,' Bain said. He returned the file to its briefcase and re-locked the chain to his wrist.

‘You'd be helping us, Ian,' Emily said, ‘and doing yourself some good as a brilliantly vigilant and constructive reporter, wouldn't you?'

Maybe. Not if their scenario of future events proved to be only that – a scenario, prompted by a half-baked, half-daft urge to see the crisis of 1956 as a repeat of something allegedly – very allegedly – similar twenty years ago. He was fond of Emily and Bain, and did owe them something. But that must not mean he had to shut down his mind, ditch all sensible judgement. And his judgement said that no editor would buy their idea. If a paper did show a morsel of interest and the whole business then turned out to be eyewash and impossible to verify, the blame would stick for months, or for ever, to Ian. A colourful account of his stupidity would get around Fleet Street to every national paper via bar talk at the Press Club. Future work would get to be very scarce. Credibility in his byline would be terminated.

Bain's car and driver were waiting when they left Mooney's. ‘We'll take you home,' Emily said. ‘I want to see that mauve front door.'

‘I'm going to think about things,' he'd told them. As he felt then, he meant he would think a little more about things, and then forget their scheme. It was too woolly, too basically unlikely, too damned imaginative. He'd try to find a more polite way to put it, of course. It would still be a refusal. They'd be hurt and probably angered. He was sorry, but this looked to him like the only reasonable decision.

A couple of days later, though, he had to back off from that supposedly rational decision and think again. He had a call at home from a work acquaintance, the Labour politician and former
Daily Express
writer Tom Driberg: Delmer now, Driberg then. In the 1930s his articles under the pen name William Hickey, after the eighteenth-century diarist, had revolutionized gossip column journalism. Driberg had often featured ordinary people as well as royalty, the aristocracy and show-business stars. He must be into his fifties, half a step or less from decrepitude on London newspapers, unless you actually
owned
a title or two, of course.

‘Could we meet, Ian?' he said. Driberg was an ardent and questing homosexual but didn't take offence if you let him know you preferred something else. Rumour said he was writing an autobiography to be called
Ruling Passions.
It would be withheld from publication until after his death. People assumed the
Passions
were politics and fellatio. He would probably describe it as such himself. He named a pub in the Strand, walkable from Fleet Street, though not a journalists' spot and reasonably private.

Did Driberg feel he must struggle to stay in the game? Fleet Street crawled with one-time greats trying to sell exclusives to the papers, and so resurrect their names for a day. Not long ago,
The Morning Sentinel
had asked Ian to look at a political tip from Driberg, and Ian met him a couple of times then. This potential tale had never got off the ground, though. Ian had the notion that Driberg felt guilty about the failure and wanted to compensate somehow. It was the lesson he'd got from that kind of flop that had made Ian plan to sidestep the Emily-Bain project.

‘It's re the Suez situation,' Driberg said near the end of the phone conversation.

This had almost made Ian back off again. That same old topic. Well, not so old, perhaps, but ever-present these days. ‘What about it?' he said.

‘Not for phone talk,' Driberg said. He fixed a time and ended the call.

Oh, God, more semi-secrecy. But Ian had some sympathy for this former journalistic big wheel, some fellow-feeling. Who'd be next to tumble, next for the tumbril? National newspaper offices and staffs could be very rough, and also very sentimental, could be unscrupulously competitive, yet sometimes mildly considerate to those once mighty in the trade and now shrunken. ‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls.'

It was a sedate, panelled pub, with comfortable, discreet booths. Driberg possibly approved of booths. He looked a booth person, somehow: suave, plaid shirted, bulky, dew-lapped, pondering. He'd put on some pounds since Ian last saw him. He uttered a big, comic groan. ‘I've been in newspapers for – oh, Lord, who's counting? I've seen all sorts.' He appeared eager to drop into reminiscence. It was natural. It was enforced. He had excelled in the past. He needed to boost himself and impress Ian with prestige bygones. But did he have anything for now? Now was the Press's favourite period. For the sake of Driberg's ego, Ian would let him get recollective for a while, though. He wanted to be kindly.

‘I've run into all sorts, you know, Ian.'

‘Well, I expect so.'

‘Statesmen. Actors, actresses. Kings. It's kings I wanted to talk to you about.'

‘Which?'

‘Or at least
a
king.'

‘Which?'

‘Edward.'

‘Which?'

‘Which? Which would I have been concerned with?'

‘Edward the eighth?' Ian tensed. Echoes of Mooney's.

‘Prince of Wales, then short-term king.'

‘What about him?'

Driberg didn't answer at once. He gazed at some of the panelling. When he spoke again it was as though his mind and its topics had drifted. Or had they? This was an accomplished storyteller. Perhaps he'd give a fragment – enough to tweak the listener's attention – then shelve that and switch temporarily to something else: tease tactics, salesman's tactics. ‘Who was it said history is doomed to repeat itself?' Driberg asked, sipping.

Of course, he was the sort who wouldn't put the question if he didn't know the answer. Best get in before the pretentious old plaid-garbed prick: ‘Marx quoting Hegel. Not quite those words, though.'

‘Well, yes,' Driberg said. ‘How splendid that reporters read books and have degrees these days.' He gave the panelling some more scrutiny. ‘Have you heard of a Lord Mivale?'

Yes, he had heard of a Lord Mivale, from Emily and Bain: someone who might be installed as head of a ruling clique, in their portrait of the future. He said: ‘Should I have?'

‘Yes, you should have.'

‘In what connection?' Ian asked.

‘A connection between 1936 and 1956.'

‘I don't follow,' Ian said, half-following and not liking it, half-longing to get out of this bar, away from this meeting, before he fell beaten unconscious by boredom.

‘When I was on the
Express
in 1936 I began to pick up rumours, whispers, hints, about a strange, organized, potentially insurgent force that was ready to step in if the king's abdication threw the country into chaos. I say strange because it was an alliance between Left and Right, even extreme Right.'

‘Yes?' Ian said.

Ageing, maybe, but Driberg remained quick, perceptive. ‘You've heard something of this already?'

‘Never.'

‘Why I referred to the tag about history doomed to repeat itself.'

‘You see something similar now?' Ian said.

‘Mivale is an Economics don at Oxford,' Driberg replied.

‘Yes?'

‘You note the parallels between 'thirty-six and 'fifty-six, do you?' Driberg said.

‘You want me to believe, and get an editor to believe, that Eden is comparable with Edward and that if he, Eden, goes the country will slide into revolution? You think Eden holds Britain together, and Eden only?' Hell, Ian realized he was more or less quoting himself from that session in the Irish pub. He felt knocked off balance to have this bit of nightmare thinking put to him from two different sources – different and distant. Had he been stupid to dismiss what Emily and Ray Bain said about the possible future?

‘You think Mivale has been lined up as likely Supremo?' Ian said.

‘Mivale or perhaps Mountbatten. This is the word that reaches me.'

‘From?'

‘Some sources still consider me worth contacting,' Driberg said, with a great chortle of self-pity.

‘Which?'

‘I think you ought to try and talk to Mivale. He's probably an easier target than the arrogant, posing Mountbatten.'

‘Why don't you? You're a newspaper man, an eminent newspaperman still.'

‘Still? Was. I wouldn't get near him. I'm a politician, a Left politician. This would be a Rightist conspiracy, one that made use of the disaffected masses, but allowed them no sniff of the leadership. He'd see me as dangerous, a kind of spy. He might talk to you. No form. Reasonably open, smiling face. An innocent.'

‘That's me,' Ian said. Was it? He longed to be considered as worldly, capable. How could this bloody has-been see into him like that? So, all right then. He wouldn't approach Mivale yet. But he'd upend his resolution to ignore Emily's and Ray Bain's suggestions. And so, the badger hunt.

As Ian and Driberg left the Strand pub, Driberg had said: ‘I sense a grand, powerful nothingness at the centre of you, Ian, a polished, powerful negation. I had some of that once. Guard it. This is the one essential for a great reporter. People observe the void in you, as they did in the former me, and subconsciously feel challenged to fill it. And so they talk all their secrets at us. I'm doing it myself, don't you see? Something compels me to chat away to you. All you have to do is listen. You're wonderfully null, inconstant, uncommitted, unstable, opportunist. Yes, negative capability. You'll excel in newspapers.'

Ian hated it when people who seemed so obsolete and discarded could suddenly produce such glistening, offensive, accurate insights. Walking back to Fleet Street alone he felt fierce resentment at Driberg's profile of him as a nothing.
Could
a nothing get profiled? Moneywise he was not a negation, was he? Oh, no! Ian – or, at least, the paper – paid for all the damn drinks, yet Driberg had called the meeting. He told Lucy about Driberg's civic chaos thesis, and about the character picture he'd drawn of Ian Charteris, reporter. She'd raged for a while about that last bit, called it ‘filthy backbiting and vilification'. This brought some comfort to him, but he recognized she might be biased. Ought to be.

T
he log extract read out in Mooney's by Bain mentioned a country pub where badger hunt lads went and Ian had been there one evening and did what Emily suggested: talked himself into bogus friendship with Dill and the others by showing a good, intelligent affection for their dogs, tethered outside in the pub yard. Ian's work seemed suddenly centred on pubs. He would go carefully. He'd let the hunters assume he might want to become one eventually, if he liked what he saw today.

Playing the eager learner he'd asked which sort of dog he should get and train and how the men shared costs for the equipment. He said badgers were certainly very handsome and interesting animals, but a menace to health. He'd been going to describe them as ‘fascinating' rather than ‘interesting' but decided this would be flowery, soft talk and censored himself in time.

Investigative reporters could get badly knocked about, or worse, if the people they meant to expose came to suspect the game. Ian had glanced around the country pub's customers, wondering if one of them had Dill under surveillance, and Ian, therefore, under surveillance now, too. He didn't see anyone who fitted, but could he really know how one of Emily's people might look? They didn't advertise. Could he have told from her looks what Emily excelled in, or from Ray Bain's now, either?

On the Saturday hunt, Ian could suddenly make out at the bottom of the hole the grey and off-white, blood-streaked pelt of a big badger, and Daisy with her teeth fixed into its neck. The badger's paws flailed, trying to knock Daisy away. Malcolm let this contest go on for half a minute then leaned down and pulled the badger out by the tail. He held it high for a few seconds. ‘Over twenty pounds,' he said. He was judging that by sight, not the weight on his arm, because Daisy still had her jaws clamped and was dangling. Malcolm dropped the badger. ‘A tough, ferocious sow,' he said. ‘She's pregnant. We'll let her go. Unsporting not to. Have to keep up the supply. And above all else, we're sportsmen.' They didn't unleash the Patterdales. Daisy released her bite and fell to the ground on spread paws. The dog had obviously done this often before and perfected the landing technique. Belle and Kate came out barking from the mouth of the sett and seemed to recognize the fight was over.

The sow stood dazed for a moment, then ambled off, no basic hurt. It had a kind of dumpy dignity, like someone playing a dowager in a theatre piece, and gave a sort of groan or sigh as it went out of sight in the undergrowth. Ian could guess what would have happened if they hadn't let her go. Most likely all the dogs would have been put on her. They'd be better able to subdue and kill her above ground. Malcolm said: ‘It's simply a chance for dogs to flash their skills and courage. That's their nature. They
need
the thrill. They
deserve
the thrill. It's what they're for, just as Frank Sinatra has to sing. A Saturday morning outing in the fields, like golf.'

‘E
nclosed please find classified documentation. Return registered to PO Box 17. No name of addressee needed or wanted. I've lifted this lot from the office safe. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. Ray's in hospital for routine check-ups etc lasting three days. Send back by time he returns. Repeat, send back by time he returns. There are no duplicates. Ray hot on security and redacting and a bit tight with information at Mooney's I thought. I shall hand deliver. Why I wanted to make sure there was an adequate letter flap in your mauve front door. Repeat: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. E.'