Last Writes Read online

  ‘Ecstatic would be a better way of describing his state of mind,’ said Edward’s mother frankly, ‘even though at this very moment he might well be on his knees pulling out dandelions.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Henry Tyler. ‘Aeroplanes are going to be the only way to travel one day and it’s good for small boys to begin to learn that while they’re young.’

  Wendy Witherington shivered. ‘There’s a war coming, isn’t there, Henry?’

  ‘Edward’ll be too young for it,’ he replied obliquely. Obliqueness had been raised to a high art at the Foreign Office. ‘Much too young.’

  ‘Even so I still don’t like the idea of him – or you, for that matter – going to a Flying Circus,’ frowned Wendy. ‘It doesn’t sound very safe.’

  ‘I don’t think Alan Cobham wants it to sound safe,’ said Henry Tyler who, by virtue of working where he did, knew all about the difference between what something sounded and what it actually was. ‘He wants it to sound exciting even though it may be – will be – safe.’

  Wendy shivered again. ‘All I want is for everything to be safe,’ she said.

  ‘It isn’t going to be “Peace for ever” old thing, or even “Peace for long”,’ he said, giving her a sideways glance, ‘but I think you know that anyway, don’t you?’

  Wendy Witherington sighed. ‘I do, and so does Tim.’ She essayed a smile. ‘At least Jennifer doesn’t want to go up in an aeroplane. She says the noise keeps her dolls awake.’

  ‘Good for Jennifer,’ said her doting uncle warmly, as Wendy slowed the car down for a pedestrian crossing. ‘I say, not yet another Belisha beacon in Berebury, surely?’

  ‘We shan’t be able to move for them soon,’ forecast Wendy. ‘I don’t know if Mr Hore-Belisha knows what he’s started with his crossings for making pedestrians safe.’

  ‘Probably not. Politicians seldom do realise what they’ve started and they’ve moved on before anyone finds out. There’s just one thing though, Wendy,’ Henry said, his mind still back at his office desk. ‘I must warn you that if the Abyssinian Crisis gets any worse, I may have to go back to London in a hurry – or even to France.’ He grimaced. ‘I’m afraid the League of Nations isn’t quite as resolute as the League of Gentlemen.’

  ‘Henry, I beg of you not to mention Abyssinia while you’re here.’

  He looked up, puzzled. ‘But Haile Selassie …’

  ‘It’s not him,’ she said. ‘It’s Edward and his friend Frobisher.’

  ‘Edward and Frobisher?’

  ‘Edward and Frobisher and all the other boys in their class at school. They’ve started to say “Abyssinia” instead of “I’ll be seeing you”, and I just won’t have it.’ She turned her head. ‘And it’s no use your laughing, Henry. It’s no laughing matter.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed soberly. ‘Abyssinia is no laughing matter. The Lion of Judah is having a very hard time just now.’

  ‘Poor little man,’ she said compassionately. ‘I felt so sorry for him when he walked out of that meeting.’

  ‘He may be short in stature,’ said Henry, ‘but he’s a great fellow all the same.’

  ‘There’s something else Edward and his friends are chanting all the time these days,’ went on Wendy Witherington, the wife and mother in her triumphing over current affairs, ‘so I’m warning you now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said and meant it. If only his political masters would give the Foreign Office more warning of what they were about to do and say before they did either life would be so much simpler for all concerned.

  ‘You know that expression, Henry, “If pigs could fly …”’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘They finish it with “you’d have to shoot your bacon”.’

  ‘So you would,’ he said solemnly. Saving bacon – other people’s bacon, that is – was what he had to do in his line of work. All the time.

  ‘There’s something else you should be prepared for,’ she said lightly. ‘Edward has decided he wants to work in the Foreign Office like you. He’s going to ask you what he should study.’

  ‘History and human nature,’ grinned Henry, ‘and a few dirty tricks on the side.’

  ‘I’m not so sure that I like …’

  ‘I know, tell him to start by learning to read upside down,’ said Henry. ‘That always comes in handy when you’re sitting opposite a chap who’s got his guidance notes on his desk in front of him.’

  Wendy took a left turn and waved her hand in the direction of a big field on their right. ‘That’s Berebury aerodrome over there.’

  ‘Airfield,’ he corrected her. ‘They don’t call them aerodromes any more.’

  ‘What about the sausage?’ she pointed to something red waving in the breeze. ‘Are they calling that something else now, too?’

  ‘Windsock,’ he said.

  Young Edward used the right word for it, too, the next day when he and Henry reported to the little office at Berebury Airfield. ‘And the wind’s right for take-off, Uncle Henry,’ he said jubilantly.

  ‘Good.’ Henry pointed to a plane on the runway, its propeller already turning. ‘Is that ours?’

  ‘No. That’s a Heracles,’ said Edward knowledgeably. ‘She goes to Le Touquet. Regular run every morning by the Calleshire Aviation Company.’

  As the doors of the airport waiting room opened and a little clutch of travellers emerged, Henry realised that they were indeed genuine passengers not mere seekers of flying experience.

  ‘Not many of them, though,’ observed Henry. ‘The plane’ll be half empty.’

  ‘I know. Frobisher’s father says they won’t be able to keep up the service much longer at this rate and he’s very worried because he’s got a lot of money invested in it.’

  ‘Then what’ll happen?’ asked Henry. Thinking about what would happen in a given set of circumstances was something he did all the time – and only wished his political masters would do the same.

  ‘Frobisher’s father says if it goes on losing money it would have to close down,’ said Edward. ‘And then he’ll be bankrupt.’

  ‘I can see that it might have to shut up shop,’ said Henry, a man who prized realism in others. ‘And if he put all his eggs in one basket …’

  Edward gulped. ‘Frobisher says that would mean that they have to sell their house and move away. Frobisher wouldn’t like that and neither would I.’

  ‘Then what’ll happen?’ said Henry automatically. In the privacy of his own office in Whitehall he called his usual sequence of questions ‘Consequences’.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Edward. ‘Not after that. I’d miss him, though. A lot.’

  ‘Edward,’ asked Henry, ‘do you and your friend Frobisher ever play the game of Consequences?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Edward. ‘When we’re bored.’ Suddenly he tugged at Henry’s sleeve. ‘Look, Uncle, there’s our plane. Over there.’

  First, Henry watched as the Heracles took to the air, executed an elegant turn and set off over Calleshire towards the French coast, and then looked at where Edward was pointing. ‘And is ours named after a Greek hero, too?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Edward uncertainly. ‘We haven’t started to do Greek yet. It’s just an old biplane, anyway.’

  ‘Don’t tell your mother that, will you?’ begged Henry. ‘She’s worried about us enough.’

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ said the boy confidently, ‘though I wish we were going up in that DH 84 over there. Lovely, isn’t she?’

  Henry looked across the airfield at yet another aeroplane.

  ‘A De Havilland,’ Edward informed him. ‘They use those for the London–Paris run, too.’

  ‘But you can’t fly to Paris from here,’ said Henry. His secretary had already ascertained in advance that if Henry were wanted in France he would have to fly from Berebury to Le Touquet where he would be met by a car and driver and hastened away to a conference at an unspecified location. To go back to Croydon, let alone Hendon, from Berebury and fly f
rom there, would take much longer. Too long for his masters, anyway.

  ‘No,’ said Edward. ‘That one goes to Le Touquet, too.’

  ‘Why are there two services going to the same place?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said the boy. ‘Frobisher’s father thinks it’s strange, too. But I can tell you one thing, Uncle Henry …’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘People seem to prefer the De Havilland plane. Frobisher’s father says that the Berebury Flying Company is doing very well and he can’t understand why when the Calleshire Aviation Company isn’t.’

  ‘I wonder why, too,’ said Henry idly, before putting the thought out of his mind as they were called to the departure lounge on the tannoy system. What exercised his thought processes after that was the exact position in the stratosphere of the Seventh Heaven. Wherever it was, Edward at least reached it that morning.

  He, himself, was brought heavily down to earth as soon as they got back to his sister’s house.

  ‘It’s just too bad, Henry,’ said Wendy, ‘because you’ve really only just come, but you’ve got to go now …’

  ‘London calling?’

  ‘London calling,’ she said, ‘but it’s France where you’re wanted. You’re booked on the four o’clock flight to Le Touquet.’

  ‘That’s the De Havilland,’ said Edward before Henry could ask. ‘Can Frobisher and me …’

  ‘I,’ his mother corrected him automatically. ‘Not me.’

  ‘Can both of us, then,’ said Edward impatiently, ‘come and see you off? Oh, please, Uncle Henry, please, Mummy.’

  ‘Your secretary,’ went on Wendy, ‘said she was sorry it was so late in the afternoon but the earlier flight was fully booked.’

  ‘Oh, please, Mummy,’ persisted Edward, ‘can we go to watch Uncle Henry take off?’

  ‘If he doesn’t mind,’ said Wendy Witherington, passing the buck with practised maternal ease.

  ‘The earlier one being the Calleshire Aviation Company’s and the later one the Berebury Flying Company’s?’ suggested Henry. ‘Well, well …’

  His sister frowned. ‘I think that’s what she said but it wasn’t a very good line. Anyway, your tickets will be ready for you when you get to the aerodrome.’

  ‘Airfield,’ chimed Henry and Edward in unison.

  ‘And,’ said Wendy Witherington, rising above the correction, ‘there will be a car waiting for you at Le Touquet.’ She glanced down at a piece of paper in her hand. ‘Your secretary thought you would like to know that your minister will be waiting at your destination.’

  Henry bit back his immediate retort in the interests of childcare.

  But he got back to the airfield early enough to drift into the offices of the Calleshire Aviation Company and enquire casually about a flight the next day.

  ‘Very sorry, sir, but tomorrow’s service to Le Touquet is fully booked,’ said the booking office clerk, consulting a chart on the desk in front of him at some length.

  ‘I really do need to get to France by tomorrow evening,’ lied Henry. ‘It’s quite urgent.’

  ‘I could only fit you in if there’s a last-minute cancellation,’ said the man. ‘And we can’t count on that. Very sorry, sir.’

  ‘Is there any other service?’ asked Henry.

  ‘You could try the Berebury Aviation Company,’ offered the man. ‘They may be able to help you.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Henry.

  In the event what he did was scribble a note, which he handed to Edward. ‘Give that to your friend Frobisher,’ he said.

  ‘Frobisher?

  ‘For his father,’ said Henry. ‘It might save him from going bankrupt.’

  ‘But, Uncle …’

  ‘For Frobisher’s father,’ said Henry Tyler. ‘So that he knows his booking clerk’s telling the customers that the planes are full when they aren’t.’

  Edward looked at him, wide-eyed. ‘He was lying?’

  ‘In his teeth,’ said Henry. ‘As I told your mother, learning to read upside down is very useful. That clerk wasn’t looking at a booking list at all when he said the flight was full. It was just his own off-duty roster. My guess is that he’s in league with the opposition.’ He picked up his bag. ‘There’s quite a lot of it about.’

  DEAF MAN TALKING

  ‘Come down to stay? Of course you may, Henry. It’ll be lovely to see you again.’

  ‘Sorry it’s such short notice, Wen,’ said Henry Tyler, who was telephoning from his office in Whitehall, ‘but needs must when the devil drives.’

  ‘Henry, dear, you can always come at any time,’ said his sister, Wendy Witherington, warmly. ‘You know that. Besides, the children will be so pleased to see their favourite uncle again. You don’t come back to Calleshire anything like often enough these days.’

  ‘Life at the office has been quite busy lately,’ he said mildly. It was the understatement of the year. The office at which Henry Tyler worked was the Foreign Office and his desk one of those situated in a room of its own with a large area of good carpet and it was very busy indeed.

  ‘Then it will do you good to get away for a few days,’ said his sister firmly.

  ‘Tim will be pleased to see you, too. It’s the Berebury Spring Meeting this week and it will be so nice to have you with us.’ Tim Witherington was his sister’s husband and a keen racegoer. ‘You can help Tim cheer the horses on.’

  ‘I’ve got to see a man about a dog as well, though,’ insisted Henry. ‘That’s why I’m coming down.’

  ‘You can do that, too,’ said his sister placidly. ‘All in good time.’

  Henry didn’t attempt to explain to her that what he – or the Foreign Office, either – didn’t have was good time. World events were moving much too quickly for that, speeded by the activities of one Herr Joachim von Ribbentrop, presently German Ambassador to the Court of St James. Nobody there had yet decided whether the fact that the Prime Minister and Herr Adolf Hitler could only communicate through interpreters was a help or a hindrance. Henry, though, had written firmly in his latest precis that in his opinion ‘Only bishops gained by translation’.

  Actually, the man Henry had come to Berebury to see did have a dog but it wasn’t about a liver-and-white spaniel called Raffles that Henry had come to see him. Henry found himself standing beside the man and his dog, apparently by accident, when taking a walk in Berebury’s public gardens.

  Henry, armed with some pieces of bread, had been standing by the sailing pond there feeding the ducks when the other man, who had also been feeding the ducks but at a different point of the pond, casually drifted in his direction. He began speaking to Henry without looking at him, both looking out across the water, apparently unconnected.

  ‘Briggs,’ he said. ‘Charles Briggs.’

  ‘Thought so,’ said Henry without turning his head. ‘And our man?’

  ‘He’s the chap in the brown trilby over there,’ said Briggs.

  ‘Disguised as an Englishman, then,’ said Henry ironically. The man in the brown trilby was moving his hand in an odd way between his hat and his shoulder.

  ‘Sitting on the bench just to the left of that ghastly grotto,’ said Briggs, ignoring this last.

  ‘Very popular in eighteenth-century gardens, grottos,’ said Henry. ‘You used to keep a tame hermit in them to frighten the natives.’

  ‘And now you have something nasty in the woodshed instead, I suppose,’ growled Charles Briggs. ‘Only our nasty piece of work isn’t actually in the grotto. He’s sitting out there in the open air.’

  ‘Which you think he needs for his dirty work?’

  ‘Well,’ said Briggs frankly, ‘he’s signalling to someone but who or how we don’t know. Except,’ he added, ‘he needs his arms to do it. Look at the way he’s clenching his fists now.’

  ‘And it’s not by semaphore, you say.’

  ‘First thing that we thought it might be because he was moving his arms so much, but as any Boy Scout could tell you, it isn’t semap
hore.’

  ‘Or Morse?’

  ‘We thought about that, too – you know, waving one arm for a dot and the other for a dash, but the code-breakers couldn’t make anything of it. And before you ask, it’s not your usual sign language.’

  ‘Not a deaf man talking, then,’ murmured Henry absently. ‘But we do know that something is getting through to his masters, because we put some duff information in his way on purpose.’

  ‘A test run,’ agreed Briggs.

  ‘Our people put it about that there was a secret arms dump behind Kinnisport and blow me if a couple of his friends didn’t come noseying around four days later looking for it. It was the corporation tip, actually, so they couldn’t tell if there was anything under it or not.’

  ‘Doesn’t surprise me at all.’ Briggs tossed a handful of bread towards some noisy sheldrake. ‘You let them go, I take it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Henry. ‘We know all about them. But,’ he added grimly, ‘it won’t always be dummy messages that your fellow sends and we must find out how he does it. And soon.’

  Charles Briggs grunted. ‘We’ve known that someone is picking up his messages but I’m blessed if we can work out how.’

  ‘Pigeons?’ suggested Henry.

  ‘We checked that, too. Besides,’ said Charles Briggs, ‘we keep sparrowhawks on the strength, you know.’ What might have been a grin passed over his face. ‘Ever since the Duke of Wellington advised Queen Victoria to try sparrowhawks, ma’am, for a plague of sparrows.’

  ‘Great man, the Iron Duke,’ said Henry absently. That they could do with someone of his calibre in Downing Street today went without saying.

  ‘Moreover,’ said Briggs, tossing a handful of bread towards a flotilla of widgeon, ‘someone’s picking his messages up here, in this park.’

  ‘Have you spotted who?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Briggs under cover of the loud quacking of ducks struggling for the bread. ‘There are quite a few people who come here every day, walking dogs and so forth. Men and women,’ he added darkly. ‘Mata Hari didn’t know what she was starting.’