That was the punch-line. Surprising how popular that sketch was. They would laugh to see this maiming process night after night. Slater knew – somehow, from somewhere – that a certain kind of subversiveness can improve morale, make for unity as well as laughter. The man who did it was very good but it was Slater who directed him, went through every move, every intonation, rehearsed it over and over until the timing was right.

  He did the same with us, with Walters and me. He chose the song, he drilled us in every movement. That stage was as big as the Beachhead to me at first. Slater took us across it. He taught us how to move about. He chalked the stage into sections for us, nine sections. He made us learn them. Move down left two steps … Cross to up right. We were scared of displeasing him, scared of making a mistake. It was Slater that taught me the rule of six feet: never come closer than six feet except for love or battle. Only for a fight or a fuck. Interpreting those terms broadly, Benson. Yes, sir. Don’t bother about the ‘sir’ down here. Just concentrate on getting it right, okay? We would have done anything for him.

  The first time we did it I was scared but I knew from the start it was going all right. We moved about the stage in the movements we had rehearsed. We were borne along, taken through the steps, lifted and sustained by the music and the words and that great breath of excited interest, varying with our movements but never ceasing, falling as I turned towards it, rising as I turned away and the dress lifted in that swirl of movement. At the end we went forward hand in hand to bow – first to finish the chorus, then take the bow. We stood facing them with the piano thumping away.

  “When alone no words they utter

  but their hearts begin to flutter

  and every little movement tells a tale.”

  Then we ran off, Velma first, blowing a kiss, then Bertie in that randy, loping style he had developed, bum sticking out, straw hat raised at a jaunty angle. Crescendo of cheers, wolf howls, whistles. In the passage behind the stage we paused to listen. We were exhilarated by our success, by the applause. We faced each other smiling. We were standing close together in the narrow passage, listening to the sounds we had left behind, feeling relief after the tension of nerves. His face was moist under the greasepaint. Impossible now to remember which of us moved first.

  A cargo boat with a rusty hull and a name in Cyrillic letters passed slowly downstream with three figures standing side by side at the stern rail. Benson began to walk along beside the water in the direction of the city. The back-ache which had troubled him the night before had returned; his feet felt hot and swollen inside his shoes. At intervals along the promenade there were small square shelters facing towards the water. The sun was low now, it laid a gleaming band across the river. Most of the shelters were empty but one or two had a solitary man in them, sitting with face raised to the warmth.

  Quite impossible now, he thought. He could remember how they had faced each other in the passage, listening to the hubbub they had left behind; and he could remember that they had smiled at each other broadly, in congratulation. Walters had spoken first. “Well, we did it,” he said and whether he moved first or I did I can’t be sure but we lurched forward into an embrace, a bear-hug, in immediate, delighted celebration of success and I felt his body against mine, like my own body, yet mine realised at that moment as intensely different, smaller, lighter, lissom in the flimsy material of the dress. We held each other and let each other go and we were still standing close together but not touching. I felt that something in me had changed and I saw that the quality of his smile was different, it had become mixed with a kind of half-painful, speculative expression, apprehensive almost, though his eyes still looked directly into mine …

  As he walked along he wanted to keep this face before him, hold it in his mind longer, but it was replaced almost at once by others: the drawn, exhausted face in the underground chamber where they had crouched together in that charmed immunity of childhood and Walters had mimicked in whispers the officer whose crass enthusiasm was all that remained in memory, name and face long forgotten. We’re-getting-the-whiphand-over-the-Jerries. Then that face of the dying man, almost indistinguishable, blacked with boot-polish in the darkness of the gully.

  He came out near the Garden Centre, its pavilions and cafés and amusement arcades mute and deserted, one more of Liverpool’s abandoned tourist dreams. The vast car parks stretched below him, acres of asphalt completely empty, spaces for a thousand cars marked out in neat white lines, symbol of the city’s perennial optimism and constant, desperately comic disappointment.

  Back on Aigburth Road he found a phone box. He had half expected that Slater’s number would not be listed but the operator found it for him without difficulty. The house was in Warburton, barely twenty miles from where he was standing. Over the water. Thompson too must have enquired, must have checked up somehow.

  A woman answered in the impersonal tones of an employee. He gave his name and asked for Mr Slater. There were some moments of delay and then the voice came, well-modulated, brisk without curtness: “Yes, this is Hugo Slater.”

  Benson gave his name again. “I saw an article about your house in the Observer Magazine,” he said.

  “That wretched article. Yes?”

  “Yes. We were at Anzio together, at least I think so. I was in your platoon.”

  “Anzio?” There was a pause, then without appreciable warmth the voice said, “That is a very long time ago.”

  “I was in your show,” Benson said. “The Beachhead Buddies.” He felt a fool, replying to this neutral voice, trying to establish an identity forty years old. He had hoped somehow for an invitation, comrades in arms and so on; but of course people who lived in manors did not respond so easily to claims of acquaintance made from a public telephone. “I was Velma,” he said. “When I saw the picture, you know, it reminded me. I wondered how—”

  “Velma the Vamp,” he heard the other voice say. “Yes, I remember her. Good Lord. How is she getting on these days? Life treating her well, is it?”

  “Quite well, thanks. Bearing up, you know.”

  “That’s the spirit. Well, it was nice of you to ring.”

  “I thought, you know, we might have a drink on it some time.”

  “I’m rather tied up at present,” Slater said after a brief pause. “I’ll tell you what, let me have your phone number and I’ll give you a ring.”

  “Right. As a matter of fact, I’ve got an idea for an article I’d like to write. About the show. But I’d need to talk to you.”

  “Are you a journalist?”

  “Yes,” Benson said. “Yes, I am.”

  “What paper do you work for?”

  “I’m a freelance. I’ve done things for the Sunday Times. I’ve done things for most of the national papers at one time or another.”

  “I see.”

  There was a pause, then he heard Slater say, “Little Benson, little Benson,” in a thoughtful, considering way. “Yes,” he said, “that’s right, Benson, it was you and I together who went to ask the major about it, you remember, you asked me to go with you. His name was Burroughs. There was a moon that night. They were shelling the German lines. You came to see me in hospital after the break-out.”

  “My dear chap,” Slater said, “of course I remember you. It would be nice to have that drink after all. Tomorrow would be a good day if you could manage it. We are rehearsing in the afternoon. Why don’t you come for lunch? Have you a car? No? There’s a train gets into Warburton Station at a few minutes past eleven. I’ll arrange to have you met.”

  “That would be fine,” Benson said.

  “Until tomorrow then.”

  The phone clicked. Benson emerged on to an Aigburth Road that seemed in some curious way transmuted by this conversation, by the subterfuge he had practised, not quite a lie – he had done things for papers. He wouldn’t have asked me otherwise, he thought. Then by the time I phoned again the woman would have had instructions, Slater would have been occupied or at a meeting or away on a business trip picking up a little something to add to his collection …

  He had gone some way before it occurred to him to wonder what Slater could possibly have meant by the reference to rehearsing. It didn’t seem to fit in with anything else in the conversation.

  3

  “A writer?” the chauffeur said. He had stopped the car in the middle of the drive. “A book writer?”

  “Yes,” Benson said. “You know the kind of thing. Hard covers, pages bound together in consecutive order.” The flippancy concealed a certain nervousness: he had not much liked this showy halt. Hitherto, he felt, although he had been too talkative, they had both played their parts well: the chauffeur competent and reliable in his dark blue livery; he himself the urbane guest, dressed for the occasion in his old but well-cut grey flannel suit and pale green tie. But on this, the very last leg of the journey from the station, having passed from the main road on to a quiet lane then through imposing stone portals on to this smooth, bush-bordered drive, the chauffeur had suddenly put the brakes on, turned massive shoulders, presented, below the peak of his cap, a broad pale face with excitable eyes.

  “I been wanting to meet one,” he said.

  “Well, I hope you’re not going to make me get out and walk?”

  But the chauffeur was too much in earnest for sallies of this kind. His stare had taken on a quality of strained significance. “For years,” he said. “We could do each other a bit of good.”

  “How do you mean?”

  My own fault, he thought. Entirely. Blabbermouth Benson. I should have known better. If one is being conducted to see a wartime associate after forty years and if that associate has prospered in the interval to the extent of sending a Rolls with a chauffeur called Meredith to meet one, then one behaves in a way appropriate, one does not get confidential, especially since one is not a book writer at all actually, nor any other kind, but more of a stationary mollusc, a silence-encrusted barnacle …

  “I’ve had an interesting life,” Meredith said. “I’ve had a fascinating life. I don’t tell this to everyone but I was John Lennon’s bodyguard. I went everywhere with him.”

  In the capacious, light-filtered, leather-redolent interior of the car the two of them regarded each other at a distance of six feet or so. “We grew up together,” Meredith said tenderly. “We lived on the same street. We went to the same school. That’s when it started. I used to protect him in the playground. People used to pick on him. Well, anybody could see he was different.”

  Bordering them on either side was the dense green of shrubbery. Deeper in he glimpsed a dark red mist of rhododendron flowers. Through the open window there came a brief, desultory cadence of birdsong from somewhere in the grounds. Curving away from them the smooth, sunlit drive led to where the house would be, concealed from sight still by laurel bushes and close-growing trees.

  “I been in some rough places since, but that was the roughest place you’d want to see. I seen blood flow in the toilets of that school. I was with him the night he was killed.” Meredith was thick-necked and heavy and in his present position, half-turned towards Benson, the tunic of his uniform visibly constricted him. His face had taken on a staring, congested look, as if swollen with drama. “I tried to interpose myself,” he said, “but I was too late. Eyewitness, see what I mean? I haven’t had much of an education. Except in the school of life. That’s where you could come in, Mr Benson.”

  “I really think we should be pressing on,” Benson said. “They are expecting me, you know.”

  “I was with him when he went to see Malcolm X.” Meredith spoke with increased intensity, as if Benson had expressed some disbelief. “I know the inside story. We could make a bomb.”

  “Perhaps we can discuss this matter later, on the way back?”

  “You got yourself a deal.”

  Meredith slowly turned to face his front again. To Benson’s relief the car started to move forward. “I met them all,” Meredith said, looking at Benson in his driving mirror. “All the stars.”

  The car swept round a long curve in the drive, came into view of the house, above them on a slight eminence, parkland sloping before it, fields behind rising to a wooded skyline. As they approached Benson took in the long façade, the elegant symmetry of the inward-curving wings, the graceful proportions of the windows. It was the house in the photograph but instead of Hugo Slater, Officer I/C Entertainments, Merchant Banker, standing smiling on the wide terrace at the top of the steps, two women, one in sunglasses, were sitting at a white table with cups and saucers before them.

  It was a very public arrival. The car drew up at the foot of the steps. Meredith went through his series of chauffeur’s actions with impeccable style, moving round sedately to open his passenger’s door, even actually saluting, overplaying the liveried retainer – or so it seemed to Benson, who now started mounting to the terrace, injecting as much spring into his step as possible. “Clive Benson,” he said, advancing to shake hands.

  The woman in the sunglasses made a vague, rather feverish gesture before holding out her hand to him. The white sleeve of her dress fell away from a frail wrist. “I’m Sylvia Slater,” she said. “Hugo is about somewhere.”

  “How do you do?” Benson had a sense of large, languid eyes behind the sunglasses. This was the woman in the photograph, but strangely different, seeming now in disguise somehow, the dark glasses and the screen of hair over the brow making it difficult to get any general sense of her face. With another febrile movement of the arm she indicated the other woman, who was fair-haired and much younger and very good looking. “This is Erika Belmont,” she said. “Athelstan’s consort.”

  Some faint edge of antagonism in this caught Benson’s attention but he was too much baffled by the reference to think much about it. Could that be her husband’s name? She had a Scandinavian look about her. No wedding ring … “Oh, yes?” he said, playing for time.

  “Do sit down,” Mrs Slater said. “Perhaps you’d like some coffee? Mr Benson is a journalist,” she said to the younger woman. “He is going to write all about us. If you want some good publicity, darling, you’d better be nice to him.”

  Erika displayed splendid teeth in a laughing look up at him but said nothing. Still further confused, Benson took the offered place at the table and accepted a cup of coffee, which turned out to be only lukewarm. He was sitting with his back to the long slope of the grounds. Before him was an open french window, a section of carved balustrade and then the central pediment of the house, the points of the triangle marked out with stone balls. Present bewilderment, the unnerving effect of his conversation with Meredith, his sense of being there to some extent on false pretences, all combined now to make Benson feel distinctly uneasy; and uneasiness, as usual, set him talking. “You have a beautiful house here,” he said. “Late eighteenth-century, isn’t it? That was a good period for domestic architecture, almost everything they built then seems to have this quality of, I don’t know, grace I suppose, nothing showy about it, nothing florid. Built on the proceeds of the slave trade of course, like all the big houses of that time round here.”

  “The present house was built in the 1770s,” Mrs Slater said after a short pause, “for a Liverpool merchant named Biggs, Sir William Biggs.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Benson said. “A hundred to one he made his money out of the African trade.”

  There was another, more prolonged pause. Then Mrs Slater said, “Parts of it are Tudor. I don’t quite get the connection, Mr Benson. Perhaps you don’t intend one. Your mind seems to be running along a track of its own, if I may say so. I’m glad you like the house, but it doesn’t seem to me to have anything much to do with the slave trade. The people who designed and built it weren’t slavers. I think myself it’s better there should be big houses and small ones rather than everyone living in the same type of house and having the same type of mind, which is what some people would want for us, I hope not you. I’m sure I’d feel the same if I lived in a two-up, two-down. And if we waited for untainted money before building we’d all be living in caves.”

  “That is certainly true.” Benson looked at her with respect. He had seldom heard the argument for privilege put better. “I wasn’t really intending any connection,” he said. He smiled at her, putting as much into it as he could. “Age has made me uncouth.”

  “You were with my husband in the war, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Benson said. “During the Italian campaign, in the spring of ’44. He was our platoon commander.”

  “And now,” Erika said, “after all these years, you battle-scarred veterans meet at another battle. I think it is so romantic.” She turned her brilliant smile to Benson. “Old soldiers never die,” she said.

  Not knowing for the moment what to say to this Benson merely smiled back. There was a curious headlessness about Erika, as if she felt she could say anything. Or perhaps it was simply youth and health. “Young ones quite frequently do,” he said.