The Parrot Cage, page 21
Shortly after eleven in the morning, when she really had got her mind under control again, her front door bell rang and, thinking that there would be a messenger with flowers or more presents from Jean-Pierre, she went to answer it. When she saw Peter Suvarov standing in the hall, her face was lit by a spontaneous smile of welcome.
‘May I come in, Flixe?’
‘Of course. How lovely! But aren’t you going to Etchingham?’
He followed her in to the flat, saying:
‘Yes, of course. But I thought I’d pop in to see how you were before I set off. And I thought I’d bring you this.’ He held out a flat package wrapped in ordinary brown paper. Flixe, who had never even thought of buying him anything, blushed as she took it from him.
‘Oh, Peter, you shouldn’t have,’ she said, untying the string.
‘I’m afraid it’s nothing compared to the kind of presents you get weekly from “that man”.’
She laughed, grateful that he was still able to joke about Jean-Pierre, and removed the brown paper to reveal the latest popular novel. When she thanked him, he told her that it was the merest trifle to show how grateful he was that she was tackling such a tricky and disagreeable job so well. Wishing that the present had been more personal and that he had said almost anything else, she turned away for a moment. Then, when she had got her face in order, she turned towards him again.
‘Peter, can I offer you a drink? Or a little early lunch? “That man” has sent me an embarrassingly lavish Christmas hamper full of foie gras and things. Won’t you help me eat some of them?’
He shook his head. ‘Flixe, my dear, I really can’t. I promised Diana I’d be down at the Dower House for lunch.’
‘Oh, of course,’ she said with artificial gaiety. ‘Well, you’d better not be late then. I’ll see you next week.’
‘Will you be all right?’ he asked with enough gentleness in his voice to reach right through all her defences. Even so, she answered in the same cheerful voice.
‘Why not? I’ve all this to eat and drink and a good book. What more could one want? Except a roaring fire, perhaps.’
He walked towards her and for a moment she thought that he might take her in his arms. She found that she was holding her breath and carefully releasing it. He reached out his right hand and briefly held it to her cheek.
‘Take the greatest care of yourself, Flixe,’ he said.
‘I will, Peter. And you. And thank you for the book. It was very sweet of you to bring it round yourself.’
‘How could I resist? Goodbye for now. And Happy Christmas.’
She saw him out and when she had shut the door behind him stood for a moment, leaning her back against it, fighting the sensations he had aroused in her yet again.
‘Bloody man!’ she said aloud at last and walked back into the sitting room. There, she deliberately flung back the lid of Jean-Pierre’s hamper, opened one of the half-bottles of Krug and poured herself a glass, warm though the wine was. Even so it tasted wonderful, and when she had finished the bottle, eaten an enormous slice of Strasbourg pie and four Carlsbad plums, she felt better. Then, telling herself that she thoroughly enjoyed being alone after all, and had pined for an evening to herself for months, she took up her book and curled up under her eiderdown for the rest of Christmas Day.
Four days later, Jean-Pierre was back in London and had to be suitably thanked for his hamper and for the gold bracelet he brought with him as what he called her ‘real Christmas present’. When she had said all she felt that she ought to have said, he put his arms lightly around her and kissed her.
‘Félicitée, you taste delicious,’ he murmured when he raised his head. Then he took his hands from her back and began to unbutton the white silk blouse she was wearing. At once, she brought up one of her hands to lay over his.
‘Jean-Pierre, my dear, no.’
‘But why not? I want it; you want it. Come on, mignonne. We have behaved with enormous circumspection for months. I think now is the time …’
Pushed to a last-ditch defence, Flixe heard herself saying:
‘Well, yes, my dear, except that just this week is not really the time. You see … oh, dear, how embarrassing this is.’
‘Ah,’ he said, doing the buttons up again. ‘Why be embarrassed? So, soon then. You will tell me?’
Flixe nodded, pleaded a terrible headache as well and eventually got rid of him to go to bed early and lie asking herself all the old questions, which she had always so despised when she came across them in novels or the chatter of her friends. If I don’t sleep with him will he disappear after some more willing woman? But if I succumb will he, having had all he wanted, disappear, despising me?
She turned over, burying her face in the pillow, wishing that she could have put the questions to Suvarov. Of course he would not have been able to tell her categorically which course to take, but simply talking to him would have helped her to make up her mind. But Peter Suvarov was the last person she could bear to consult on such a subject. Cherishing his friendship and wishing that it were something more, she had destroyed the ease of communication that she had felt with him at the beginning.
Sleep overtook her as she set herself to remember the best of the times she had spent with him, and she woke the next morning strangely relaxed.
The peaceful mood lasted for about five minutes, when it was shattered by the arrival of her father. Dressed only in her pink-and-green kimono, she opened her front door, let him in and stretched up to kiss his cheek, inhaling the familiar scent of the bay rum mixture he used on his hair and the Sobranie cigarettes he had always smoked. She felt him flinch as she touched him and looked curiously into his face.
‘You look years younger than before you went to the desert, Daddy,’ she said cheerfully, trying to ignore the cold severity of his expression. ‘Oh, yes, and congratulations on the new appointment. Where are they sending you this time?’
‘I can’t possibly tell you that, Felicity,’ he said severely, following her into the flat. ‘You ought to know better than to ask.’
‘Oh, well, never mind. Can I make you some coffee?’
‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘I breakfasted some hours ago and what I have to say won’t take very long.’
Oh Lord, thought Flixe to herself. This can’t be going to be a repetition of the scene with Gerry. I can’t take all that again. What has he heard?
‘Well, you won’t mind if I make myself a cup, will you?’ she said aloud, going into the kitchen. She forced herself to make bright conversation as she boiled the kettle and made a small jugful of ersatz coffee. Then she carried her cup into the sitting room and stood, leaning against the chimneypiece, waiting for what he had come to say.
He followed her into the room and stood looking at her with an expression of such disdain that she had to look away.
‘Felicity, I want you to tell me—’ He broke off, brushed his stiff little moustache first in one direction and then in the other, and then tried again. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’ The question came out as a bark, and Flixe felt that he had already judged and condemned her, just as he always had in the old days.
‘My war work takes many forms, Father dear,’ she said in a deliberately languorous voice, smoothing her slippery silk kimono down over her thighs.
‘So I hear. Good God! How could you do such a thing? I would never have believed that a daughter of mine … Have you no feeling for your mother and Gerry at least?’
‘Who told you?’ she asked, picking a little lump of sticky mascara off her eyelashes with her painted fingernails and rolling it into a ball.
‘A man at the War Office. He thought I ought to know that you were going off the rails with a Frenchman so that I could put a stop to it. Good God, Felicity, you might as well be … entertaining one of the Germans.’
‘Did this busybody know – or tell you – why I was doing it?’ she asked, ignoring his characteristic xenophobia.
‘No. But they thought I should know. Good God, what father would not? He’s virtually an enemy.’
‘Of course he’s an enemy. Why d’you think I’d be doing it otherwise?’ She was going to add, you don’t think I’d do it for pleasure, do you? But then she decided that it was not her business to calm him down. Doubtless his beloved Gerry could do that later in the day. And so she just smiled again, the slow, louche smile she had learned for Jean-Pierre.
‘I don’t understand, Flixe. Flixe, what are you doing?’ The use of her nursery name, which he had hardly ever used even when she had been a little child, almost disarmed her, but not quite. There had been too many fights in the past and he had told her what he thought of her once too often.
‘They really didn’t tell you then. Perhaps they thought you weren’t reliable. Well, I know you are, particularly where something like this is concerned. I do it for the good intelligence I collect from it.’
Her father was silent, his freckled face reddening under her eyes and his hands balling into fists at his side. He seemed to be grinding his teeth, and she watched with interest to see what would happen next. After a while he seemed to regain command over his voice and, in a tone of absolute disgust, he said:
‘Then he’s not the only one? You mean you’re a … a whore?’
‘Oh, really, Father. What a ridiculous word! I don’t do it for money …’ Suddenly it wasn’t funny any more, and she wished that she had told him the truth, not tried to bait him as she had. The atmosphere was much too highly charged for her to have analysed there and then what it was she felt, but the hurt of it spurred her on to say:
‘What are you looking like that for? You’re killing for England, aren’t you? Well, I’m fucking for England. And of the two, I’d have said my activity was rather more moral than yours.’
General Alderbrook looked at her as he might have looked at a snake, or a scorpion he had found in his bedroom slippers, and turned to go without another word. As he was pulling the front door of her flat behind him, she found herself saying, ‘Daddy,’ but he paid no attention.
Left alone again, Flixe discovered that she was shaking and she started to prowl around the flat, trying to walk herself out of her mood. The three men who had come to her flat over the past few days represented such different things, and yet between them they had aroused feelings within her that boiled and seethed, and threatened more than simply her peace of mind.
She was so disturbed by her father’s visit, so angry yet needing to justify herself, that she almost wrote him a letter of explanation and apology mixed with accusation. Reason stopped her just in time and instead she telephoned Queen Anne’s Gate, on the private number that rang directly on Suvarov’s desk. She knew that Gerry had been trained never to answer it even when Suvarov was out and so there was no risk. As it rang, Flixe wondered if he would answer. It was a number to be used in emergency only. She almost put her receiver down, ashamed of the impulse to confide in him, but he did answer. His voice was cold.
‘Yes?’
‘Peter, it’s Flixe. Sorry to use this number.’ She waited for some encouraging word, but none came and she went on, trying not to stammer: ‘I wonder if I could see you today?’
‘Important?’
‘Yes. Not … not that it’s going to affect the war, but important to me.’
‘All right, feed the ducks in about twenty minutes. Can you get there?’
‘Of course,’ she said and put the telephone down. Flinging off the silk kimono, she dressed in an old pair of slacks and a shabby zipped corduroy jacket. A scarf would do instead of a hat, and help to disguise her in case anyone she knew should happen to be walking through Kensington Gardens in the middle of the morning. She let herself out of the flat and walked briskly along the High Street to the park.
As she reached it, she noticed sadly that the flat, diamond-shaped remains of the railings were already rusting into the white stone of the wall’s coping and resented the absurd practice of removing all London’s ironwork. Unlike the innocent majority who believed everything they were told in newspapers, Flixe knew perfectly well that there had been no point in the sacrifice of the railings. Their scrap value was minimal and the iron they provided could not be used for any of the war industries and must be lying decomposing in some scrap yard. She had heard it said that the move had been designed to bring home to the civilian population the reality of the war. That, of course had been before the Blitz had so adequately done the job.
Trying to stop herself adding anger on to anger, she walked up towards the palace. As she passed the statue of William IV she decided petulantly that it was typically male – flauntingly arrogant, he looked, and just like the kind of man who … She stopped her thought, trying to laugh at herself for her silliness.
It was a relief to walk up the short, steep hill to the Round Pond, and to recognise her chief in the windswept man patrolling the brink, apparently absorbed in watching the few children miserably prodding their recalcitrant boats on the scummy water.
She fell into step beside him and said nothing. After they had walked almost half-way round, he said:
‘So, what’s happened?’
‘Someone at the War Office has told my father that I’m.… having an affair with a Frenchman,’ answered Flixe as calmly as she could.
‘Ah,’ he said, his voice carrying no overtones of any kind. ‘Then the question is whether they did it out of spite, “I thought you ought to know old chap”, or a genuine attempt to stymie your work. You were quite right to tell me.’
The relief his detached tone brought her, not to speak of his unemotional reference to her work, helped Flixe towards a more realistic sense of proportion.
‘I hadn’t really got as far as their motive,’ she said, managing to smile at him again. ‘I know it’s what I ought to have been thinking, but it wasn’t. He came to see me just now.’
‘And started to behave like a Shakespearean husband who’s just discovered he’s a cuckold,’ suggested Suvarov with such understanding warmth in his dark eyes that she almost hugged him.
‘A bit like that,’ she agreed, trying to sound lighthearted and not succeeding. She felt his hand on hers.
‘Poor Flixe. It is one of the hazards, of course, of a job like yours. But I know you’re too rational to crumple under that kind of stupidity.’
‘Do you?’
‘Flixe, come on. What’s happened to the beautiful, gay young warrior who told me – what was it? “It doesn’t matter what you do so long as you don’t compromise what you believe in.” You’re not really having doubts, are you?’
She did not answer and walked on beside him, trying to work out what she really did feel. His presence in itself removed a lot of the self-disgust, and his matter-of-fact, if elliptical, acknowledgment of the word her father had used about her helped too.
‘Well, never mind for the moment. Since I’m here, you might as well report now as tomorrow,’ he said, his dark eyes apparently watching two small boys quarrelling over whose turn it was to adjust the rigging of their sodden yacht.
‘All right,’ answered Flixe as the boys’nanny separated them, seized the boat and dragged them off towards the Dutch garden. ‘There’s definitely something going on, but whether it is what we thought or whether it’s just some desperate attempt to save one or other of his companies with nefarious import dealings, I’m not so certain.’
‘Do you seriously think someone like Jean-Pierre would mess about with black-marketeering?’ Suvarov turned away from the small domestic dramas being enacted all round the pond and looked at his agent. She faced him, shook her head and then took a deep breath.
‘No, I suppose not. That reminds me: you were right, though, he and Oldridge have met; I got that out of him the other day. But I really don’t think Oldridge is involved. He’s too wet for one thing, and kept out of the army by TB. He only got out of the sanatorium about a month before the war started.’
They walked on in silence, Flixe trying to make herself tell him something that had been on her mind. After a while he stopped in front of a pair of glossy dark-green mallards fighting over some mould-encrusted bread floating at the edge of the grey water.
‘Flixe, what is it? Whatever it is can’t be that bad. Tell me.’
She laughed a little at that. ‘It’s a good thing that I’ve never tried to lie to you since you can apparently read my mind. I’ve only not told you because I’m not certain. But I am horribly afraid that you may be right about Anna Kingsley. What put you on to her in the first place?’
‘Postal censorship turned up some peculiar letters she’s been writing to and getting from France, via Switzerland. There’ve been too many mentions of a particular town in France that crops up in Jean-Pierre’s affairs …’ He broke off, smiled down at Flixe’s concerned face, and then led the way to one of the dark-green benches that ringed the Round Pond.
She sat down, as obedient, she thought, as Ming would have been. He sat down beside her and put a hand on her wrist.
‘Miss Kingsley has a lot of friends in high places,’ he said. ‘Do you think she put one of them on to your father?’
‘It is possible. Oh, Peter,’ she burst out, using his Christian name for once, ‘it’s such a filthy business. She’s been so good to poor little Ming, and Gerry adores her; could she really do something like that?’
‘God knows, but it’s possible. And if she was afraid you might get too close to something they wanted to hide, then perhaps the easiest way would be to get your father to intervene.’
‘How much does Gerry know of all this?’ asked Flixe suddenly.
‘Nothing at all. I warned her in a general way about Oldridge when I discovered that they played chess together in the Blitz, but nothing more. Why?’
