‘Poor old Heck,’ said the Jorgmanns.
‘Another Bourbon?’ said Mrs Jungfleisch.
‘Thank you. On the rocks.’
Sir Harald asked, ‘And how does he set about curing a Pull to the East?’
‘In my case, of course, I have already undergone the most efficacious cure, which is a long sojourn there. But we must prevent any recurrence of the disease. Well, the doc’s treatment is this. I lie on his couch and I shut my eyes and I force myself to see New York Harbour, the Empire State building, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller. Then very, very slowly I swivel my mental gaze until it alights on the Statue of Liberty. All this time Dr Jore and I, very, very softly, in unison, recite the Gettysburg Address. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers –”’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Sir Harald, almost rudely, I thought, breaking in on Mr Dexter’s fervent interpretation. ‘Very fine, but we all know it. It’s in the Oxford Book of Quotations.’
Mr Dexter looked hurt; there was a little silence. Philip said, ‘Did you see anything of Guy and Donald?’
‘When Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean first arrived we all shared a dacha. I cannot say it was a very happy association. They did not behave as courteously to me as they ought to have. The looked-for Anglo-Saxon solidarity was not in evidence. They hardly listened to the analysis of the situation, as noted and recounted by me, in Socialist Soviet Russia; they laughed where no laughter was called for; they even seemed to shun my company. Now I am not very conversant with the circumstances of their departure from the Western camp, but I am inclined to think it was motivated by pure treachery. I am not overfond of traitors.’
‘And how did you get away?’
‘In the end very easily. After nine or eight years in the U.S.S.R., the Presidium having acquired a perfect confidence in my integrity, I was able to induce them to send me on a fact-finding mission. On arrival here, as I explained to them, the accompaniment of wife and son lending a permanent appearance to my reintegration in the Western Camp, I would easily persuade my compatriots that I had abandoned all tendency to communism. When their trust in me was completely re-established, I would be in a position to send back a great deal of information, of the kind I knew they wanted, to the Kremlin.’
‘Nom de nom!’ said Valhubert.
Bouche-Bontemps shook with laughter: ‘C’est excellent!’
Alfred and Philip exchanged looks.
The Jorgmanns exclaimed, ‘That was smart of you, Heck!’ Mrs Jungfleisch said, ‘And now don’t you want to go and dine?’
We all stood up and, like so many geese, stretched our necks. That hour on the pouf had been absolute agony.
The day after Sir Harald’s lecture, Alfred had to communicate a very stiff note indeed to the Quai d’Orsay on the subject of the Îles Minquiers. The French were invited immediately to abandon their claim to these islands which, said the Note, was quite untenable, against their own interests, and was undermining the Western Alliance. Simultaneously an anti-French campaign of unprecedented violence was launched in London. Bludgeon and pin were brought into play. Dr Niam duly paid his official visit which was reported in a manner calculated to infuriate the French. Bouche-Bontemps was rudely taken to task in Parliament and the newspapers for the criminal obstinacy with which he was refusing to make a united Europe. At U.N.O. the English voted against the French on an important issue. After these bludgeonings came the pinpricks. The newspapers said that Spanish champagne was better than the real sort. Tourists were advised to go to Germany or Greece and to miss out expensive France. Women were urged to buy their clothes in Dublin or Rome. Several leading critics discovered that Françoise Sagan had less talent than one had thought.
When some softening up on these lines had been delivered the campaign settled down to its real objective, the Îles Minquiers. Facts and figures were trotted out, heads were shaken over them and judgement severely passed. It transpired that after a thousand years of French administration, the islands had no roads, no post office, no public services. They sent no representative to Paris; there was no insurance against old age; the children were not given vitamins or immunized against diphtheria; there was no cultural life. The fact that there were no inhabitants either was, of course, never stated. The kind-hearted English public was distressed by all these disclosures. As a gesture of solidarity with the islands, an expedition was organized to go and build a health centre on the Île Maîtresse (Grandad cashed in on this). The Ambulating Raiments were immediately dispatched there. These baleful bales are full of ghastly old clothes collected at the time of the Dutch floods. Since then they have been round the world over and over again, bringing comfort to the tornadoed, the scorched, the shaken, the stateless, the volcanoed, the interned, the famished, the parched, the tidal-waved; any communities suffering from extreme bad luck or bad management are eligible for the Raiments, which are so excellently organized that they arrive on the scene almost before the disaster has occurred. There is a tacit understanding that they are never to be undone, indeed nobody, however great their want, would dare to risk the vermin and disease which must fly out from them as from Pandora’s Box. The recipients take their presence as a sort of lucky sign or sympathetic visiting card. (It is only fair to say that in cases of great distress the Raiments are often followed up by a gift of money.) There was just time to have the bundles photographed, at low tide, on the rocks of
