Through Streets Broad and Narrow (46 page)

They entered the Club with a flourish and John ordered another double brandy and ginger ale each from Bartlett. They drank these on one of the black leather settees at the foot of the Club staircase facing the steady fire before which old Harrison
and Lord Tyrrelstown were discussing life in Monte Carlo before the Great War.

The stone balustrade of the massive staircase rose behind them, flowing up three sides of the great hall to the colonnaded gallery above. The old men on the fender, black and white in their dinner dress, their faces infant-pink in the firelight, rambled on; a member or two came in or went out while John and Groarke drank as they had so often done in the past awaiting the critical moments of ideas which were bound to come. At six o'clock they heard faintly the B.B.C. time pips from the club wireless, the muffled tones of the announcer reading the headlines of the war bulletin and watched the two old men heading across the hall for the reading room. They heard the clock ticking in the porter's office, the sound of servants in the coffee room laying the tables for dinner, the angry distant hum of the traffic in Ranelagh Street and College Road.

Suddenly the main doors swung open and Geoffrey Galpin, Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch and another man clattered into the hall talking hard. Colonel Galpin's red little face was wet with rain, his shoes spattered with country mud. He was wearing his green billycock hat and carrying the swordstick given him by his father in 1914. His good eye swivelled instantly across at John, his glass one followed it a moment later and less completely. He came racing up as he always did.

“Blaydon, by God, and who's it with you? What are you having to drink? Wait now while I have a Jimmy Riddle. Here, young Ffynch, you've the bladder of a mare; tell Bartlett I'm in and that we'll all be dining in an hour and get some drinks in for these young devils. By God, with this mud and wet they'll all be running themselves into the ground. Thank God for the town but thank God I don't have to live in it.”

He disappeared in the direction of the cloakroom still talking hard and Palgrave introduced the stranger, a square-jawed middle-aged Pole of about fifty named Jedrez Giertych. He turned out to be a pilot who had ferried a plane over from Prestwick to Londonderry the previous day and had crossed the border in his mufti to see Galpin, whom he had apparently first met in some Services club in London.

Palgrave said, “We had a most fascinating time at Geoffrey's stables, didn't we, Giertych?”

“It was good,” said the Pole.

“I really think I could become quite attached to horses, after all,” went on Palgrave. “Geoffrey's are quite fantastic. We watched them in the school, he can make them do absolutely anything.”

“Of course I can. I know what a horse
is
,” said the Colonel, hurrying back to join them. “I know how big it is. You'll never do anything with a horse unless you can make it put on a hand and a half just by looking at it.”

“Good!” said the Pole. “That is very good. In my country, too, we understand horses. The man on the horse is a very small part of it. He must master the animal by humility.”

“You're right, Jedrez, they never really had the touch in England, that's why they can't train for the sticks. Not any fool can set 'em up, even for the flat; but for the furze and the fences, the gates and water, you need to let the horse train you to his own capacity.”

“In my country that also is true, Geoffrey. This afternoon I was reminded of my uncle's stable outside Lublin. He was almost as fine a trainer as you are. He did not love his horses either, he respected them only.”

“Damned stinking sentiment.
Love
'em indeed! Think they'd thank you for it? Leave that to unmarried girls. By God, if ever you hear me say I love my horses just get out the gun.” The Colonel drank. “Your uncle, you say? Where is he now?”

“Although he was over-age he was with the cavalry at Hitler's invasion by the tanks. He was killed in the first week.”

“Jerries! Killed your uncle, a trainer, did they? Tanks against horses. That's the cost of living over here, blast it! What can I do except bring on a bit of bloodstock for the ‘chasing when we've knocked the bastards down again. Bloody glass eye from the last affair; lost one of my balls too. Tried to get the doctors here to pad me out a bit before I went across to London for the medical. Even dyed my hair;
all
of it! but what happens? The board only laughs at me! Old O'Driscoll at the Millbank depot, only two years younger than myself and with swords up
now in the R.A.M.C. tells me, ‘Geoffrey, old man, you get back to the Curragh and keep your horses on the move so that we'll have something worth watching in the National when we've licked the bastards a second time!'”

They drank several more rounds and became slowly more excited. Giertych, though initially somewhat morose, told them stories about his successive captures and of his ultimately successful attempt to escape from Colditz. He seemed to have been in half a dozen different political prisons. He explained to Galpin that his idea of the Germans as bitter but honourable enemies was now out of date and recounted bestial stories of the Nazi extermination policy in Warsaw. Groarke began to rattle off his concentration camp statistics and Palgrave thought he would go back to bed as he felt too sick to eat any dinner.

Galpin rounded on him at this. “Sick! By God, if William were here, he'd bring-up, my boy, to hear his son talking like that. What the devil are you wearing your colours for if blood and beastliness doesn't fetch your manhood out?”

Palgrave fingered the blue and black of his Old Harrovian tie and said, “Well, actually, Geoffrey, it isn't that I'd mind fighting or anything, it's only that I don't like talking about it.”

“Well, why the hell aren't you? Been meaning to ask you that a long time but gave you the benefit of the doubt. Young Stafford's gone, Freddie Tyrrelstown's boy's in the Navy. Even that little wet Sebastian de Savigny's got himself a soft job as a war correspondent which seems to consist in time-serving at White's Club with the page-boys and politicians. I'd like to know what William is thinking of, letting you frig around like a love-sick jennet in Ffynchfort with your model trains and your jazz band.”

Palgrave said, “That's damned insulting.”

And Giertych, glaring at everyone, said, “He is of the decadence, yes? We had such in my country too. When we had time and ammunition to spare we shot them—in the back.”

But the Colonel was brooding as was his custom after a few drinks on an empty stomach. John remembered previous evenings on which he had invited him to dine and as suddenly leaped from the fender as though he had been burned, saying,
“Sorry, my boy, can't wait after all. Haven't seen what you'd call a woman for weeks. Just tell Bartlett to put your meal on the I.O.U., will you?” But on this occasion he sat quite silent, only putting a detaining hand on Palgrave's elbow and forcing him to sit down again. Groarke and Giertych were enraging one another about Nazi methods of torture; and John, addressing nobody in particular, but hoping to be taken up by somebody, was giving an account of Caroline Smythe-Thomas' party and Luthmann's introduction of the Wehrmacht song. Eventually Giertych, breaking off in the middle of a sentence, asked increduously, “Excuse me! I hear you say that you have been drinking with a Nazi?”

“And singing,” John said.

“Singing?” Giertych bit down hard on his false teeth.

“Palgrave played the piano and we sang ‘
Wir Fahren gegen Englandt
' and ‘
The Horst Wessel
' song. That was so, wasn't it, Mike?”

“It was a party in aid of neutrality,” Groarke explained carefully. “Luthmann, the German press attaché, was invited.”

“Invited? Drinking and singing with a Nazi?” The Pole ran a broad hand over his grey hair. “Where is this man who goes about singing his gutter songs in the middle of the city in which I am a guest? What are we making here talking when tomorrow I must return to Londonderry to ferry one plane to England for my squadron to fly against twenty of Goering's Messerschmitts?”

Colonel Galpin said, “Jedrez, sit down!”

“Sit down?” The Pole stood over the Colonel's chair. “It is for old men to sit down in such circumstances. It is for younger men to stand up, to fight; to kill.”

“Sit down you old fool! By God it's no wonder you went arse over tit against that little bastard Hitler's fellows. You Poles never
think
. It's that damned Roman Catholicism! Always the same, always imagine the Almighty's on their side and what happens? They get themselves stuck through the guts. There isn't a frontier in Europe's changed so often as the Polish. Thank God we're an island; even with the six counties, the old Pope can't—”

But Giertych interrupted him with a long account of the history of Poland between the wars; he discussed the Christianization of Poland by early missionaries, the battles with Russia, the disarmament fiasco, the rise of Prussia, the unification of Germany, Our Lady of Czestochowa, the Treaty of Versailles, the role of England in the balance of power, the Polish Corridor and Gdynia. After ten minutes of it he was cut short by the Colonel who said, “Same damn thing over again, worse than the Sinn Feiners for remembering everything that never happened. Now if you'll only sit down and stop wandering about all over the place, I've got a plan.”

“A plan for what?”

“A little joke on this fellow Luthmann. I've been watching him for a long time. Every Thursday afternoon, I'm told, he drives through my part of the country to see some woman he's got in Offaly where young Ffynch lives. He spends the night with her and drives back early on Friday morning.”

“Today is Wednesday and tomorrow while this Nazi swine is driving to his woman I shall be flying the Irish Sea,” said Giertych. “I do not think this is a very interesting plan.”

“Wait a minute!” With a silk handkerchief the Colonel removed a tear from his glass eye. “Eight weeks ago I made a bomb, a damned good one. I won't tell you what I've got in it apart from carbide, but I will tell you that it will make a bloody good explosion whether I chuck it over a hedge in front of his car next week or plant it under his backside tonight.”

Giertych asked. “Will it kill him?”

“Scarcely that, I think; but—”

“Then it is no good.”

“My dear fellow, you've got to remember this is a neutral country. Much as one would like it, one can't go about slaughtering people. This bomb of mine will make the devil of a row and should bust up nicely. It's a two-gallon ginger beer flagon and I've got the cork lashed down with wire and solder. With luck he'll get a slab or two up his crutch and we'll bust a few windows; depends where we plant it and what circuit we use for the time fuse.”

“It's no good,” the Pole repeated flatly.

“Well, anyway, who's for it, a raid on the jerry consulate after dinner? I'll tell you what, Jedrez, we'll capture the consulate Prussian eagle for you—it hangs outside—and you can present it to your squadron in England as a trophy.”

“No good.”

Groarke said, “He wants a scalp, nothing less.”

The Pole stood up. “How big is this eagle?”

“It's a good size, two or three feet high. They've got it on the front of the house between the first and second floors. By God, it would be a good gesture to send it to England and leave my bomb in that Nazi bastard's car with the fuse attached to the ignition. What d'you all think?”

“I'm with you,” Groarke said.

“So am I,” said John.

“I too will come; I will bring with me my knife.”

“No knives, Jedrez, they're out,” the Colonel warned. He turned to Palgrave. “And you, my boy, will do the recce. We'll send you up the drive ahead of us to report on the lay of the land.”

“I'd really rather not, sir.”

“By God, you will, by force if necessary,” said Galpin.

The Pole moved over to Palgrave's chair and put one strong hand on his shoulder. “A decadent, yes? One of those traitors who prefers to fraternize with the enemy rather than lose his estates. I have here my knife; if you do not obey the Colonel I will use it on you. I will make sure that you do not breed more traitors—”

Groarke managed, “Impossible!”

“What is this? Why do you laugh at me? I am very serious.”

John said, “The question does not arise, does it, Palgrave? You see—”

“Nevertheless,” Giertych insisted, “I will cut off—”

Colonel Galpin intervened. “It's time we dined. We must plan this damned carefully. Someone'll have to get one of those rods of Bartlett's, those hooked affairs he uses for closing the upper windows in the coffee room. We're going to need something like that to fetch down the eagle. Then there's the question of transport; we'd better use my car. I'll brief Seamus, he's a reliable
fellow, he can wait down the road for us with his engine running, ready for a quick getaway. While we're discussing the details he can run out to the Curragh and pick up my bomb.…”

John and Groarke had been up and down the road as far as the canal half a dozen times when at last they saw the Colonel approaching, nursing his bomb like an outsize baby. They crossed the road at once and he followed them. They slowed up and waited for him under a tree beside the weir.

“What's happened?” John asked.

“It's tricky,” said the Colonel, putting his bomb beside the parapet. “We had a bit of trouble with him but eventually we got him moving. Jedrez watched him up the drive with that damned knife of his and saw him turn the corner, but he's simply disappeared. Should have been back half an hour ago.”

“He'll have to run for it,” Groarke said, stamping his feet on the frosted paving.

“Out of the question. No way out unless he went round the back, and since the first floor lights were on at the time I don't think he'd have risked the back garden. No. Either he's been nobbled or he's got cold feet—should have with his shoes off—and is sitting it out in the laurel bushes at the far end of the drive.”