The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [59]
He said this so seriously that I laughed. Mrs Erdleigh, on the other hand, accepted the question gravely.
‘I saw a crown not far away,’ she said. ‘Her fate lies along a strange road but not a royal one – whatever incident the crown revealed was very brief – but still it is the road of power.’
She picked up her black box again.
‘You’re going back to your room?’
‘As I said before, no danger threatens tonight, but I thoughtlessly allowed myself to run out of a little remedy I have long used against sleeplessness.’
She held out her hand. I took it. Mention of ‘little remedies’ called to mind Dr Trelawney. I asked if she ever saw him. She made a mysterious sign with her hand.
‘He passed over not long after your uncle. Being well instructed in such enlightenments, he knew his own time was appointed – in war conditions some of his innermost needs had become hard to satisfy – so he was ready. Quite ready.’
‘Where did he die?’
‘There is no death in Nature’ – she looked at me with her great misty eyes and I remembered Dr Trelawney himself using much the same words – ‘only transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. He has re-entered the Vortex of Becoming.’
‘I see.’
‘But to answer your question in merely terrestrial terms, he re-embarked on his new journey from the little hotel where we last met.’
‘And Albert – does he still manage the Bellevue?’
‘He too has gone forth in his cerements. His wife, so I bear, married again – a Pole invalided from the army. They keep a boarding-house together in Weston-super-Mare.’
‘Any last words of advice, Mrs Erdleigh?’ asked Stevens.
He treated her as if he were consulting the Oracle at Delphi.
‘Let the palimpsest of your mind absorb the words of Eliphas Levi – to know, to will, to dare, to be silent.’
‘Me, too?’ I asked.
‘Everyone.’
‘The last most of all?’
‘Some think so.’
She glided away towards the lift, which seemed hardly needed, with its earthly and mechanical paraphernalia, to bear her up to the higher levels.
‘I’m going to kip too,’ said Stevens. ‘No good wandering all over London on a night like this looking for Pam. She might be anywhere. She usually comes back all right after a tiff like this. Cheers her up. Well, I may or may not see you again, Nicholas. Never know when one may croak at this game.’
‘Good luck – and to Szymanski too, if you see him.’
The raid went on, but I managed to get some sleep before morning. When I woke up, it still continued, though in a more desultory manner. This was, indeed, the advent of the Secret Weapon, the inauguration of the V.1’s – the so-called ‘flying bombs’. They came over at intervals of about twenty minutes or half an hour, all that day and the following night. This attack continued until Monday, a weekend that happened to be my fortnightly leave; spent, as it turned out, on their direct line of route across the Channel on the way to London.
‘You see, my friend, I was right,’ said Clanwaert.
One of the consequences of the Normandy landings was that the Free French forces became, in due course, merged into their nation’s regular army. The British mission formerly in liaison with them was disbanded, a French military attaché in direct contact with Finn’s Section coming into being. Accordingly, an additional major was allotted to our establishment, a rank to which I was now promoted, sustaining (with a couple of captains to help) French, Belgians, Czechs and Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. As the course of the war improved, work on the whole increased rather than diminished, so much so that I was unwillingly forced to refuse the offer of two Italian officers, sent over to make certain arrangements, whose problems, among others, included one set of regulations that forbade them in Great Britain to wear uniform; another that forbade them to wear civilian clothes. All routine work with the French was transacted with Kernével, first seen laughing with Masham about les votes hiérarchiques, just before my initial interview with Finn.
‘They’re sending a général de brigade from North Africa to take charge,’ said Finn. ‘A cavalryman