The Final Cut (17 page)

He nodded gently. 'My mother particularly enjoyed the toasted teacakes. Couldn't stand the Earl Grey, though. Said she was going to bring her own tea bags with her next time.' Watling experienced a sudden twinge of anxiety - 'next time'. Had the baron-to-be let slip a confidence by appearing to assume too much? Would the Prime Minister's wife know about New Year? But surely the invitation to tea and the terrace was simply a means of easing him into The System?

'And your father?'

'No longer with us, I'm afraid. Indeed, to my enduring regret I never knew him, nor he me.'

'How very sad.' Once more she was ill at ease, flushed, seeming incapable of finding the right topic, distressed by her clumsiness. She took a deep breath. 'Look, all my nonsense about oil, please don't think I was implying that it might affect the opinion of the French judge. I respect the French, they're a nation of brave and independent spirits. Don't you agree?'

Watling all but choked on his champagne. She took his arm, fussing with concern. His eyes bulged red, his complexion bucolic. She began to wonder about the revival equipment.

'My apologies,' he coughed, 'but I'm afraid I don't entirely share your opinion about the French. A little personal prejudice.'

'So, you're a Yorkshire-pudding-and-don't-spare-the-cabbage man, are you?'

'Not quite, Mrs Urquhart. You see, my father died in France. In 1943.'

'During the war . . . ?' Her face had become a picture of wretchedness but this was not a subject from which, once engaged, he was to be easily diverted.

'Yes. He was an SOE agent, parachuted behind the lines. Betrayed to the Gestapo by the local French mayor who was a quiet collaborator. Most of them were, you know. Until D-Day. The French got back their country, and in return my mother got a small pension. Not much on which to bring up four children in an isolated Yorkshire village. So you will understand and forgive, I hope, my little personal prejudice.' There was no mistaking the restrained hurt.

But there was more. The oil. The French. The Breton bastard. Now Watling knew why Rodin was being so stubborn. Suddenly it was all a mess. How could he impugn the integrity of a fellow judge? He had no proof, nothing but suspicions which some would call prejudice. In any event, the smallest reference to oil would throw the proceedings into chaos. No, he would have to resign, wash his hands of it, his own judgement undermined by gossip and private doubt. But that would also cause chaos. Inordinate delay. Endanger the peace, perhaps. And he could kiss the barony of Cold Kirby-by-the-edge-of-the-Moors goodbye.

'But I know your reputation for impartiality, Professor Watling,' he heard the silly woman protesting. 'I feel certain none of this will affect your views
..
.'

There was one other way. He could stay quiet. Pretend he hadn't heard. Get the job done, as everyone was begging him to do. Dispense justice, in spite of the French.

'And your father - I'm so sorry,' she continued. 'I had absolutely no idea.'

At least, no more idea than had been supplied by
Who's Who
and a
few minutes spent perusing Wat
ling's press cuttings.

He crossed himself in the laborious manner of the Orthodox and knelt in the new-cropped grass beside his wife's grave, positioning his bones like a man older than his years.
'Eonia mnimi - may her memory live forever,' he
muttered, running his hand along the lines in the marble, ignoring the complaints of his splayed leg. At his elbow, Maria replaced the fading flowers with fresh, and together they reached back with silent thoughts and memories.

'This is important,' he said, 'to do honour to the dead.'

Greek legend is built around the Underworld, and for a man such as Passolides who knew he must himself soon face the journey across, the dignities and salutations of death were matters of the highest significance. Throughout the history of the Hellenes, life has been so freely cast aside and the dark ferryman of the Styx so frequently paid that elaborate rituals of passage have been required in order to reflect a measure of civilization in a world that was all too often uncivilized and barbaric. Yet for George and Eurypides there had been no ritual, no honour, no dignity.

Since their metaphorical stumble across the brothers' graves an appetite for his own life seemed to have been conjured within Passolides. He had gained a new fixity of purpose, and if for Maria it seemed at times to be excessively fixed, at least it was a purpose, a mission, a renewed meaning, which had produced within him a degree of animation she had not witnessed since the happier times before her mother had passed away. Even his leg seemed to have improved. During the day he had begun to leave the shadows of his shrine, taking frequent walks at the hobble through Regent's Park, often muttering to himself, relishing the open green spaces once again, the arguments of sparrows along the hawthorn paths, the rattle of limes beside the lake. It was as close as he could get in the centre of London to the memories of a mountainside.

As Maria polished the cool marble headstone she examined her father carefully, sensing how much he had changed. His small round face was like a fruit taken too long from the tree, wizened, leathered by age and ancestry, his hair sapped steel white, cheeks hollowed by the pain of his clumsy and uncomfortable body. Yet the eyes glowed once more with a renewal of purpose, like an old lion woken from sleep, hungry.

'What was the point,
Baba?
What were the British hiding?'

'Guilt.'

He knew his subject well. Guilt had filled his own life to exclusion, the feeling that somehow he had failed them all, comrades and kin. He had failed as the eldest son to protect his younger brothers, failed again as a cripple to pick up the banner of resistance dropped by them. He would never admit it to anyone and only rarely to himself, but secretly he resented his martyr brothers, even as he loved them, for George and Eurypides were the honoured dead while Evanghelos was inadequate and miserably alive. He struggled in their shadow, unable to live up to his brothers' memory, uncertain whether he could have found the same courage as they had, and deprived of any chance to try. He would never be a hero. He'd spent a lifetime trying to prove to the world that his dedication was the equal of his brothers', even while in his cups blaming them. He blamed them and in turn blamed himself for the worm of envy and unreason that turned inside him. Yet now, it seemed, and at last, there was hope of relief, somebody else to blame.

'Guilt,' he repeated, rubbing his leg to help the blood circulate. 'What else does a soldier hide? Not death, that's his business. Only guilt has to be buried away. Burnt.'

She plucked a few stray strands of grass from around the grave as she listened. He thought she knew nothing of his hidden shame but she had lived with it all her life and understood, even though she could do nothing about it. 'Go on,
Baba.'

'They had a right to kill my brothers, under the British law. George and Eurypides had guns, bombs; who but a few toothless Greeks would have complained? The British once hanged an eighteen-year-old boy, Pallikarides, because he was found carryi
ng a gun. It was their law. Man
datory.' He had trouble with the word, but not its meaning. 'No, it was not their death they tried to hide. It must have been the manner of their dying.'

'So that's why they burnt the bodies, because of what they had done to them. Torture?'

'It happened.' He stopped, his eyes focused on a land and a point in time far away. 'Maybe they weren't bodies when they burnt them. Maybe they were still alive. That happened too.' On both sides, although he didn't care to remember and it was something else he would never admit to his daughter. But even after all these years it had proved impossible to wipe his memory of the figures soaked in petrol and vengeance.
'Prodoti!'
Traitors, Greek convicted of informing on Greek, stumbling down the village street, still screaming their innocence through charred lips, eyes no longer sighted, burnt out, their bodies turned to bonfires that branded a terrible message of loyalty into all who saw. But George and Eurypides had betrayed no one, weren't
prodotes,
hadn't deserved to die like that.

'You know what this means,
Baba
⁷
.
There may be more hidden graves.'

For the Greeks of Cyprus, on long winter's nights when the womenfolk stoked the fires of remembrance and told stories of the life of old, no memory cut so deep as that of 'the missing ones'. In 1974 Greek extremists in Athens, frustrated at the lack of progress towards
Enosis,
union between island and mainland, had conspired to overthrow the Nicosia Government of Archbishop Makarios. It was a fit of madness from which Cyprus would never recover. Five days later the Turks had retaliated and invaded the island, dividing it and breaking up the ethnic jigsaw in a manner that ensured it could never be remade. During that time a thousand and more Greek Cypriot men had disappeared, swept up by the advancing Turkish Army and swept off the face of the known world. Their suspected fate had always been a source of unfeigned outrage to the Greeks and embarrassment to the Turks - such things happened in war, misfortunes, examples of isolated barbarity, even wholesale mistakes, but who the hell liked to admit it afterwards? Yet in the quest for peace the Turks
had
admitted, surrendered all they knew about 'the missing ones', which after nearly a quarter century was painfully little - a few scattered graves, old bones, fragmentary records, faded memories - but even a small light shining upon the island's darkest hour brought understanding and helped ease the suffering, had allowed families to mourn and do honour to the dead.
Myrol
oghia.
Yet now it seemed there were more graves. Dug even earlier, by the British.

For Maria, who had never known her uncles and could therefore not share fully in their loss, the issue was a matter of politics and of principle. Yet for her father it was so much more. A matter of honour and of retribution. Cypriot honour. Vangelis' retribution.

'We must find out what we can about these hidden graves,
Baba.'

'And about the crimes they tried to bury in them.' He heaved his bent body up straight, like a soldier on parade. 'And which bastard did the burying.'

At the south-facing entrance to the Chamber of the House of Commons stands an ornate and seemingly aged archway, the Churchill Arch. Its antiquity is exaggerated, the smoky pallor having been produced not by the passage of time but by its presence so close to one of Reichsmarshal Goring's bombs, which razed the Chamber to the ground on 10 May 1941. On either side of the archway stand bronze statues of the two great war leaders of modem times,

David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Lloyd George's pose is eloquent, Churchill's more aggressive, as though the old warrior were hurrying to deliver a booted blow to the backside of the enemy. A little further along is a plinth bearing no statue, perhaps left as an act of encouragement to all those who pass and who hope, by dint of endeavour and great achievement, to join the rank of revered statesmen.

Roger Garlick would not, in any passage of lifetimes, number amongst them. Of course, he had a high opinion of himself which fitted his role as a Junior Whip, one of those whose task it was to round up Government MPs and herd them through the voting lobbies. Garlick was a man of considerable girth but limited oratorical ability; he recognized that his chances of achieving high public acclaim were thereby limited and relished the opportunity to exercise his influence more privately, through the dark arts of whipping. He feasted on abuse, his favourite diet being new members and any woman.

'Roger!' The cry of recognition came from Booza-Pitt, making his way through the Members' Lobby where MPs gather to collect messages and exchange gossip and other materials necessary to their work. Booza-Pitt reached out and squeezed the Whip's arm in greeting but didn't stop. Garlick was a useful contact, a man who was willing in private and under pressure from a second bottle of claret to share many of the personal secrets he had unearthed about his colleagues, but the middle of the Members' Lobby was not the place. The Transport Secretary made off in search of other indiscretions.

The Lobby was crowded, as was always the case in the half-hour before Prime Minister's Question Time when Members assembled for the ritual spilling of blood - occasionally Urquhart's, more frequently that of the questioner and particularly that of Dick Clarence, the youthful and ineffectual Leader of the Opposition who had a tendency to appear as a schoolboy attempting to be gratuitously rude to his long-suffering headmaster. There had to be order in class, and it was Garlick's job as one of the form prefects to impose it. Thus, when he spotted Claire entering the Lobby, his eyes extended like the glass beads on the face of a child's bear.

'Missed you at the vote last night, my dear. I stood Up for you, of course, but the Chief Whip threw a terrible tantrum. Took me half a bottle of whisky to calm him down.' He pinned her up against the base of Lloyd George.