Chapter 23 Just Desserts
Just Desserts
“Herodotus,” Lydia supplied. “He said it’s never the same river, but he also said that it’s also never the same man—more profound, don’t you think?”
Flynn shrugged. He might accept profundity from someone else—Evans, say—but not from Lydia. She had no right to philosophy.
The “incident” (as it was now referred to) in the Farmhouse Kitchen was fading fast from public consciousness.
People were still trying to erase their memories of an entire six years of war, so one unfortunate afternoon was rapidly becoming a footnote in the annals of the Festival.
The name Mitzi Blinkhorn was suffering the same fate.
The second casualty found in the ruins of the Kitchen had not been Archie. It was Dangerfield, Lydia told Flynn. She seemed so adept at swapping bodies around that he had to wonder if this was yet another falsehood.
“Was he the real target?”
“No one was a target. Nothing was engineered. No one ‘arranged’ any explosion. I swear it was a bona fide accident, Flynn. How often do I have to say that? It is just possible that not everything that happens in the universe is contrived by the Security Service. Accidents happen.”
And Delphine? Lydia was vague about her ultimate resting place. “Buried quietly in some municipal necropolis somewhere, I’m told.” And those photographs? “Oh, in a deep, dark vault along with all our other secrets. You should be careful that you don’t end up there with them.”
“So should you.”
“In retrospect,” she said, swirling the gin around in her glass, “although I am not given to dwelling on mistakes, the whole thing with Dangerfield does now seem like an unnecessarily convoluted plot on our part. ‘Tangled web’ and all that. It would have been so much simpler just to kill him. I mean, that did the trick in the end, didn’t it?
Once he was dead, it turned out that no one cared about him or his politics very much.
The voters are done with his far-right politics and they’re sick to death of Labour now, so it’s looking like the Tories will get back in after the snap election.
Dangerfield and his kind will be consigned to the outer darkness and the country will return to the path of moderation. ”
“He was the ‘coming man.’ And now he’s gone.”
“For ever. Although I’m sorry that he was buried with his reputation intact, when he should have been held to public account for his sins during the war. It almost makes me want to believe in a vengeful God.”
As for Archie, no one knew where he was. “Gone abroad, probably,” Lydia said. “We’re not looking for him. There’s no point. Don’t have the budget anyway.” Cynthia, too, had disappeared—along with Archie, presumably.
Flynn lit a cigarette for her and she mused, “Perhaps they should just have quietly sent Dangerfield abroad again. Canada or somewhere. Australia, perhaps. Badger could have gone out to keep an eye on him for a bit. Do you want another drink?” (No sexual alternative offered this time, he noticed.)
“I thought Badger was persona non grata.”
She gave him a long, level look.
“He still works for the Service?” Flynn was genuinely shocked.
“No better cover than everyone thinking that you’re disgraced and kicked out on your ear.”
“Did he volunteer for that humiliating role or was he coerced into it? I imagine the Service isn’t above blackmailing its own.”
“Badger would rather die than betray his country.”
“So he was in on the Delphine thing from the beginning?”
“I told you he was a good actor.”
The three of them. The unholy triumvirate of Lydia, Maud and Badger, together weaving the fate of themselves and others.
They lied about what they knew, they lied about what they didn’t know.
Pretending innocence, pretending ignorance.
As thick as thieves, obfuscating and dissembling, playing at spies.
They were good actors, though, all three of them. He would give them that.
“Where is Badger now? He didn’t even say goodbye.”
“Berlin. Turning a Russki for us. Compromising positions and so on. Don’t ask. And just a reminder again, Flynn, that you swore to uphold the Official Secrets Act.”
“I never swore to anything.”
“Doesn’t mean I won’t have you prosecuted for treachery if you breathe a word of our pillow talk.”
“I think you have to be in bed for it to constitute pillow talk.”
“Do you want to be? In bed with me?”
“No.”
“Shame. You were rather good. I hear you’re seeing someone.”
“None of your business.”
“Everything’s my business. Especially you.
Have to make sure you don’t go rogue in some way.
Let me see. Margot Carter-Inch—” she reeled off on her fingers, “grandmother was a lady-in-waiting to the Princess Royal, father’s a KC, held a ministerial position in the wartime coalition.
Fond of the gee-gees. Margot thinks she’s a bit of a rebel, but I imagine it’s just a phase.
I expect she’ll ditch you and return to the fold—marry a banker in the City or a very minor aristocrat. ”
“Well, thanks for the fortune-telling, Lydia.” He finished his drink and stood up. “I’m meeting Veronica. Entertainment threatens. We’re going to Battersea.”
“To the Pleasure Gardens? I haven’t been yet. Have fun. And give Veronica my regards. Tell her to come and find me in a few years. We could do with more girls like her in the Service.”
“What kind of girl would that be?” Flynn asked.
“Girls like me, Flynn.”
“God help us all, then.”
She laughed and lifted her pale neck with its noose of pearls and blew a perfect smoke ring. For a moment he was tempted to lean in and kiss her. He resisted. “See you around, Lydia,” he said.
“Sure thing,” she said.
—
Battersea Park Pleasure Gardens had finally opened for business.
The crowds poured in and gaiety reigned.
There were terraces and walks and tubs and beds of blooming flowers.
There was the Riverside Theatre and the Music Pavilion.
There were speakers everywhere, playing cheerful tunes.
There was old-fashioned music-hall-style entertainment.
Dancing, lots of dancing. There was a children’s zoo, and a boating pond on which you could drive little motor boats.
There was a Tree Walk thirty feet up in the sky, the branches filled with fantastic creatures—dragons, owls, bats, caterpillars, even a rather egregious pterodactyl.
A Punch and Judy theatre sponsored by Sharp’s toffees and a crazy animated clock sponsored by Guinness.
Tea shops and restaurants, a “wine garden,” follies and grottoes, a ghost train, a dance floor, acrobats.
And that was apart from the acreage of amusement rides in the funfair.
“I can’t believe you haven’t been yet, Mr. Flynn,” the Boy said. “It knocks Ramsgate into a cocked hat.”
Every day of the Festival, fifty-one balloons were released, each with a little tag attached.
Anyone who found one of the balloons could use the tag to enter both Festival sites for free.
The Boy had somehow managed to acquire the task of writing these tags, having finally learnt the rudiments of reading and writing, not through Evans’s persistence but goaded into it by Veronica’s mockery.
She had undertaken the task of educating him herself, using Death Comes to Dawlish as her primer.
(“She reads some peculiar stuff, doesn’t she, Mr. Flynn? ”)
The Boy tied the tags to the balloons every morning before they were released, and one or two of them always seemed to find their way into his grubby pocket.
It hardly constituted stealing, he argued, because he gave so many away.
“So that makes it charity.” He had already taken his doughty mother, who had screamed her way round the Giant Dipper roller coaster at fifty-five miles an hour before dismounting at the finish and saying, “Didn’t think much of that.
” (“It’s the ride of your life, Mr. Flynn,” the Boy said.) All his sisters and their various beaux and offspring had also been for free, and even Evans, who had reportedly enjoyed himself, but that might have been because he had taken his daughters, who were visiting for the weekend.
Veronica, of course, had been several times already.
Maud Ogilvie had resisted. (“In my defence, I don’t like heights.
Or things that go too fast.”) The office was emptier now—both Badger and Denholm had left, Badger suddenly with no warning, filleted out by the Service, while Denholm had been offered the part of Polonius in a production of Hamlet at the Theatre Royal in Windsor.
He gave them free tickets. Evans, Maud Ogilvie, Flynn, Veronica and the Boy, as well as Margot and Hetty. They all travelled by train to Windsor together. “Quite the little expedition,” Maud Ogilvie said as they took their seats.
Veronica declared Hamlet a lesser work of art than And So To Bed, but the Boy was thrilled.
Ignorant of theatre etiquette, he cheered and whistled excitedly every time Polonius came on stage, finding it necessary to say to anyone who would listen, “That’s Mr. Denholm!
I know him!” Polonius’s famous aphorism in Act One, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” drew a delighted whoop of recognition from the Boy.
(“My ma says that!”) The tolerant audience were largely amused by the Boy’s antics and some even began to join in, much to Hamlet’s disgust. Denholm’s curtain call brought the house down.
—
After dark was the time to visit the Pleasure Gardens, the Boy informed Flynn when he solemnly handed over two tags. “ ’Cos of the lights. You’ve never seen anything like it. Even Veronica was bowled over.”
“Then it really must be something.” Flynn had intended to take Margot, but she had ducked out at the last minute, blaming the sudden onset of a summer cold.
Perhaps Lydia had been right, perhaps Margot was planning to ditch him.
(“I’m waiting in the wings, you know, Harry,” Hetty said. “More than happy to understudy.”)