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Howard looked straight ahead of them at the carpet of flowers. “Got a nasty feeling he might be playing both sides, or…”
Lucas waited, and Howard continued walking slowly, watching where he trod to avoid the flowers.
“Or what?” Lucas asked. There was too much uncertainty. The slow tide of fear was rising inside him, and he could feel it like the chill breath of a wind that heralded rain.
Was Howard running from shadows? Military Intelligence was a war of ideas as much as of armaments or factory sabotage, explosions, and derailments. It was the fear of an enemy you could not see, of betrayal by those you had thought your friends.
Toby, off the lead, ran around in happy circles, chasing the scent of something, startling birds far out of his reach. They sat high in the branches, calling out alarms to one another. It was so beautiful, so sane, Lucas looked at it with something close to pain. It should always be here, and he knew it would not be. The flowers would only last like this for a few weeks, then begin to fade, go back into the earth until next spring. Other flowers would come, and leaves, but not like this.
Of course, there would soon be hawthorn blossoms thick in the hedges, almost like snow. It was already beginning. And in June the wild dog roses would tangle these paths with pink and red.
Poetry crowded his mind, the love of the land from the minds of young men who would not see it again. Too many of them. They had called it “the Poets’ War” not without reason. He could understand people who would pay any price to never have another like it. He could not walk these woods without thinking of Mike. But then, he could not listen to good music, watch a decent game of cricket on a village green with all the young men in whites, or share a joke without memory intruding. There were times when he could allow Charles any latitude at all because he understood the grief he hardly ever spoke of. Some feelings were too intense to share in anything but a glance, and silence.
“Are you sure about Cordell?” he asked.
“No,” Howard replied quietly. “But I fear it. Usually by the time you’re sure, it’s too late. It’s only small things. The things not said, rather than the ones said.”
Lucas knew exactly what he meant. He had felt it himself: a silence where he would have expected a response, a disagreement, a reaction other than the one he saw. Sometimes it was simply carefulness, or even an anger one did not express because one knew it would do no good, only hurt pointlessly.
They walked in silence for another hundred yards or so. Toby returned, eager for attention. Lucas bent and picked up a stick. He threw it as far as he could, and Toby went charging after it, sending startled birds off in a sweep of movement through the branches.
A small copse of silver birches stood in the sunlight, like a charcoal sketch on white paper, motionless in the lack of breeze. Both men stopped and gazed at it, perhaps moved by the same impulse.
“I can’t afford to let it go,” Howard said at last. “I don’t expect you to do anything.” Was that an edge of disappointment? Several times he had said how much Lucas was missed. Sometimes it was direct, at others oblique. “I just let you know in case you trusted him,” he went on. “Every report I get from Berlin is worse than the one before. I knew the Weimar Republic couldn’t last. It was built on hope and dreams, and damn all else. But this new order scares the hell out of me. There’s a cruelty in it that’s growing like some fungus on a wet wall. If we rip the paper off I think we’re going to find the rot is all over the place.”
“People are afraid,” Lucas replied, although he knew Howard was as aware of that as he was. “The peace treaty was much too hard. We sowed the seeds of another war then, we were just too blind, too deeply hurt to see it. God knows how many Germans have died since then of hunger or despair. Hitler’s giving them self-respect again, and most people will do almost anything for that.”
Howard pushed his hands deeper into his pockets. “I know. And I suppose if they’d won and we had been subjected to humiliation and the slow death of who we used to be, I’d hate, too. None of that is solved by the sort of internal violence the Nazis are preaching, and I think you know that as well as I do. It isn’t the Germans who believe in it that scare me, Lucas, it’s the Englishmen! I worry about any support for appeasement.”
“Yes, so do I. Peace at any price,” Lucas said. “A lot of us who’ve seen war, the real thing, the blood and the pain, the death, the utter drenching loss of it, think that nothing on earth could be worse. I understand them. Especially Charles’s generation, who were part of the reality of it. He thinks I don’t know what it’s like to send men who trust you to their deaths. They know what you are ordering them to do, and they do it anyway.”
“And can anything be worse than that?” Howard looked at him, the bright sunlight showing every line and angle of his face. For that moment he looked infinitely vulnerable. Then a shred of cloud passed over the sun, softening the probing harshness, and it was gone. “We st
ill need the right men to give the orders, Lucas. You were one of the best. Come back. Help us to do it right.”
“I can’t,” Lucas replied. “I’m too old. You’ve got new people—”
“Who haven’t fought a real war,” Howard interrupted him. “They don’t know when to cling to the impossible, and when to let it go.”
“And they certainly won’t ask me to tell them. They have new ideas,” Lucas said.
“The basics are as old as mankind,” Howard said with a sideways glance at him. “Queen Elizabeth had master spies who could teach us a thing or two.”
Lucas did not answer.
They walked fifty yards or so, reached the cherry tree they often passed. Its blossoms were already overblown and beginning to drop, but it was still a glory. It always reminded Lucas of sadness, beauty that could not last, young love lost. Then he remembered why, in the lines of Housman:
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room…
Composed by the speaker, with the imagination of a long life. Who, when twenty, believes they have only another year to live?
He was aware that Howard was watching him. Did he have the same lines in mind: To see the cherry hung with snow? Or were his thoughts somewhere else entirely? He turned a little and met Howard’s eyes. He was certain his thoughts were the same.
“Wishing doesn’t make it so,” Howard said. “I have to know about Cordell. Just don’t trust him in the meantime.” There was a gentleness in him, even a kind of pity, and Lucas realized that for all the ways he knew Peter, he did not know who he had lost in the last war. He was married. Lucas had met his wife, a cool, fair-haired woman whom Howard hardly ever mentioned. They were polite to each other, but there seemed to be no laughter between them. They had no children. Was that another wound?
In Lucas’s mind, Peter was the son he wished Charles could be. Lucas understood him so much better. There was a kind of comfort, never intrusive, a sense of what mattered and did not need to be explained. And yet Lucas was aware that those silences also held some kind of pain.
