The Ka of Gifford Hillary (2 page)

It was three weeks ago last Wednesday that I had my interview with the Minister of Defence, and it was not until after it that I understood his reason for wishing to keep our meeting secret.

The appointment was made with the usual unobtrusive skill that one associates with high-ups in our Government. Martin Emsworth had rung up on the previous Friday night to say that he was staying with friends near Lymington; so might he look me up sometime during the week-end? He was an old friend, or perhaps I should say an acquaintance of very long standing, for, although we had been up together at Cambridge and were members of the same Club, we had never been really intimate. All I actually knew about him was that he was still a bachelor and had done very well in the Civil Service. I had an idea that he held a fairly important post in the Treasury; although I wasn’t even certain about that. But, naturally, I said I’d be delighted and we fixed up for him to come over for a drink before lunch on Sunday.

Sunday proved to be a lovely day, of the belated summer type that we sometimes do get in England in September. Normally over every week-end at that time of year the house would have been full of people, but four weeks earlier my wife had had a bad fall from her horse. Its worst effect had been to twist a muscle in her thigh, and the nerves there had given her the most awful jip; so, greatly as she loved company, she felt that until the bouts of pain, which sometimes caught her unawares, had ceased, she really could not cope with visitors. In consequence we had no one staying and I spent most of the morning on my own, swimming and pottering about our half mile of private beach; then I settled down in the beach-house to wait for Martin.

I should, perhaps, explain that Longshot Hall stands on a slight rise several hundred yards from the shore, and that what we call the beach-house is really a charming Georgian pavilion consisting of three rooms and a wide veranda. When we have bathing parties we use the two side rooms for changing, and the larger, central, one is furnished as a lounge; in it we keep all the usual facilities for picnic teas and drinks. Soon after twelve o’clock my man, Silvers, brought Martin out there to me.

He duly admired our view, which was at its best on such a day with dozens of little yachts out of Cowes tacking up and down the Solent, and for a time we talked of mutual acquaintances; then, after a brief silence had fallen, he disclosed that his visit was not really a casual one by saying:

‘Look, Gifford; the Minister of Defence is anxious to have a chat with you on a highly confidential matter, and he’s asked me to arrange it.’

‘Really!’ I replied with some surprise. ‘What on earth does Sir Charles want with me? I’ve met him only two or three times at public functions, so I hardly know him.’

‘That’s neither here nor there,’ Martin shrugged, ‘and I’m afraid it is outside my terms of reference to tell you what he wants to see you about. But he would like it to be this week, and for reasons which you will appreciate in due course the meeting must be a strictly private one. Naturally, like all these chaps, his book is full to overflowing but he is keeping Wednesday evening open, and said he would be particularly grateful if you could arrange to be in London that night.’

I had nothing particular on, so said that I could; and Martin beamed at me:

‘That’s fine. Then I think the best plan would be for you to meet in my flat at Whitehall Court. I’d like to give you dinner somewhere first; but we don’t want to put ideas into people’s heads and it might do just that if you were seen dining tête-á-tête with anyone in my sort of job; so you must forgive me if I don’t. Just come along to my flat at, say, nine o’clock on Wednesday evening; and I shouldn’t make any arrangements for later as it may prove quite a long session. I need hardly add that Sir Charles counts on you not to mention this meeting either before or after it has taken place.’

Considerably mystified, I agreed, and a few minutes later
Ankaret suddenly appeared round the corner of the beach-house. She was still using an ebony stick, but her leg had given her much less pain recently, and evidently she had decided that to walk down from the house to join us would not put too much strain upon it.

Martin had never met her, and as she came up the steps on to the veranda I saw him catch his breath. I was not surprised and only mildly amused, because I had seen dozens of men react in the same way on first coming face to face with Ankaret.

She was certainly something very special in young women; although I doubt if Hollywood would have found a use for her, as she was poles apart from the curvaceous blondes that box-office receipts prove to have the maximum appeal to the primitive emotions of the masses. Ankaret’s beauty was of another age; her lure a more intimate one and very difficult to define. It did not lie only in her tall willowy figure, the Titian hair with rich gold lights in it that she always wore framing her pale face and curling down on to her shoulders, her firm well-modelled features, or even in her big grey eyes. It was something in the way they were set, wide apart between her high cheek-bones and tapering eyebrows, and in their expression. At first glance they looked as clear, wondering and innocent as those of a young girl about to go to her first Communion; but a second later, when her classically-curved mouth broke into a smile, one caught something very different in their depths. They seemed to be full of secrets, and to see right through you with faintly cynical amusement at what she saw going on in the deepest recesses of your mind. Eve’s eyes must have had that quality after she had eaten the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge; and that appraising look that Ankaret gave to every new male she met was almost as if she had said out loud: ‘I know you would like to sleep with me, and I’d let you if I thought it would give me a thrill; but very few men have a strong enough personality to do that.’ They were the eyes of a Fallen Angel—as old and as wicked as sin, but oh how beautiful.

According to
Debrett
, she was British to the backbone; but privately I have always held the theory that one of her ancestors in the long line of Ladies Le Strange, that goes
back to the days of the Conqueror, must have had an affair with an Italian—perhaps a music-master, or someone of that sort—and fathered the result of her liaison on her Lord, and that Ankaret was a throw-back. If painted with the technique of an old master, her picture could easily have been passed off as a portrait of a Medici, Colonna, Sforza, or lady of some other noble Italian house of the
cinque cento
; and her swift subtle mind added to the plausibility of such a theory.

Ankaret was much younger than myself—twenty-six against my forty-two—and we had been married for five years. During that time many men had openly envied me my luck in having her for my wife, quite a number had endeavoured to take her from me and a few had succeeded. But only for brief periods and, as far as I knew, all her lapses had occurred while she was on holiday abroad without me. There had been occasions when I was tempted to wring her slender neck, or would have given her away with, or without, a packet of tea, and been—temporarily at least—heartily glad to be rid of her. Yet it had never come to that.

The first time I found her out I was frantic with rage, jealousy and grief. But she did not express the least contrition and even laughed about it. She told me then that I was a long way from having been the first with her and certainly would not be the last. Unless I could reconcile myself to that I had better take steps to divorce her; but she hoped that I wouldn’t because she loved me and didn’t give a button for the other fellow—he had meant no more to her than trying out a new car.

I was still desperately in love with her; so, of course, I forgave her, and tried to regard as nervous braggadocio what she had said about being unfaithful to me again in the future. But a few months later, when I joined her in the south of France for a short spell before bringing her home after she had spent six weeks there, I found good reason to suppose that she had been. When I charged her with it she adopted the same attitude as before, and, moreover, flatly refused to give up going abroad for holidays for much longer than I could take time off to accompany her; so I could no longer shirk the issue.

Had I been younger I don’t think I could possibly have brought myself to go on with her under those conditions;
but age teaches one to control anger, the repetition of an offence dulls resentment of it, and the longer one lives the more tolerant one becomes of the faults of others. On a third occasion when I remonstrated with her she said that she was driven to her lapses by an insatiable curiosity to know whether other men who interested her could fulfil their apparent promise as lovers; but I incline to the belief that some maladjustment of her glands made her by nature almost a nymphomaniac, and that only her sense of values restrained her from becoming a real tramp.

However that may be, she handled her illicit affairs with great discretion, and never gave me the least cause to reproach her during the greater part of each year while we were living together. That she never ceased to love me, after her own fashion, I am convinced, as time and again she could have left me for some much richer or more distinguished man, but never even hinted at any desire to do so. Her physical attractions apart, she had many very lovable qualities, and I have never met a woman who was capable of giving more in the way of intelligent and charming companionship.

After each of our brief separations she invariably returned to me brimming over with happiness to be back, as if I were the only person in the world with whom she had ever wanted to be. So I can honestly say that, however much pain she caused me during the early years of our marriage, she brought me far more joy than sorrow in the long run; and I do not believe there is the least reason to suppose that our marriage would ever have broken up, had it not been for a terrible misunderstanding that bore its evil fruit the weekend following that on which Martin Emsworth came over to Longshot.

Mentioning his name brings home to me that I have made far too long a digression about Ankaret; but I shall have plenty more to say about her later. After another drink and some mildly amusing chit-chat Martin left us, and I have not seen him since; but I duly kept the secret appointment he had made for me.

Being by nature a methodical and punctual chap, it was nine o’clock precisely when I pressed the front door bell of Martin Emsworth’s flat on the Wednesday evening. A few blocks away Big Ben was still pounding out the hour as Sir Charles himself let me in.

Actually we are much of a height, but close up he seemed even taller than myself; probably because he holds his spare figure very upright. Undoubtedly that, and his invariably well-groomed appearance, are both legacies from the years he spent in the Army, although one is apt to forget that he reached the rank of Major before he went into politics. In spite of his prematurely-white hair he looks much younger than his age and remarkably fit for a man who can’t get much time to be out in the open air. His wide mouth broke into a friendly grin and he said:

‘Good of you to come, Hillary. Sorry about all this mystery, but you’ll see the point of it before you’re much older. Martin has got rid of his man for the evening and discreetly taken himself off to his Club, leaving me to play host to you. Come along inside.’

In the centre of the big sitting-room there stood a large table. On it were Sir Charles’s brief-case and a number of papers upon which he had evidently been working before I arrived. Along one side of the table a comfortable sofa faced the grate, in which a bright fire was burning. Motioning me to sit down, he walked over to a drink cabinet and asked me what I’d have. I chose brandy, so he poured two good rations into small balloon glasses, handed me one, gave me a cigar, and settled himself at the other end of the sofa. For a few minutes we talked about Martin, and a few other acquaintances we had in common, then he opened up as follows:

‘I don’t know if you saw the last White Paper on armaments,
but during the past two years I’m sure you must have read any number of articles in the press dealing with the same subject. I mean, of course, the fundamental change in methods of warfare which must be considered as a result of the introduction of nuclear weapons. It is that which I want to talk to you about.

‘One result has been extremely severe cuts in the Army Estimates, and the scrapping or conversion to new purposes of numerous formations. But such measures are really only begging the question; and the controversy is still raging. Some people maintain that we should bank entirely on the incredibly terrible devastation which could be wrought by H-bombs, and scrap practically everything else. Others hold the view that, whether thermo-nuclear weapons are used or not, we would still run an unacceptable risk of defeat unless we maintained our present strength in the types of weapon with which the last world war was waged. For simplification, when we are discussing armaments we now speak of these two schools of thought as the protagonists of either the New Look or the Old Look.

‘Our difficulty is, of course, that we cannot possibly afford to have it both ways. The colossal cost of producing nuclear weapons is known to everyone and since 1913 the cost per annum of maintaining our fighting services with their conventional weapons has increased from seventy-four millions to over one thousand three hundred millions. In relation to the increased cost of living that means that our bill for men and arms has more than quadrupled; so it is already a grievous burden on the people, and to create a New Look alongside the Old Look would break the nation’s financial back.

‘That, of course, is just what our enemies would like to see. Whether they will ever challenge the N.A.T.O. nations in an all-out hot war I have no more idea than the next man; but it is quite certain that any measure which tends to undermine our economy, and so cause depression, discontent and dissatisfaction with the Government, suits their book. By the devious means of which they are past masters they will bring influence to bear on all sorts of well-meaning people and bodies to press us to continue with a “middle of the road” policy, knowing that it must inevitably result in increased
taxation without either the New Look or the Old being developed to its maximum efficiency. But we—and in this instance I am speaking of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet—are determined not to fall into that trap. And the time has come when we must take a definite decision one way or the other.