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By Root 2881 0

with whom the present conjunction could be at all adequately discussed. By this time, in any case, changes both inside and outside the Section were so many it was hard to keep pace with them. Allied relationships had become more complex with the defeat of the enemy, especially in the comportment of new political regimes that had emerged in formerly occupied countries – Poland’s, for example- some of which were making difficulties about such matters as the ‘Victory march’; in general the manner in which Peace was to be celebrated in London. In other merely administrative respects the Section’s position was becoming less pivotal than formerly, some of the Allies – France, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia – sending over special military missions. These were naturally less familiar with the routines of liaison than colleagues long worked with, while the new entities, unlike the old ones, were sometimes authorized to deal directly with whatever branch of the Services specially concerned them.

‘Not all the fruits of Victory are appetising to the palate,’ said Pennistone. ‘An issue of gall and wormwood has been laid on.’

By that time he was himself on the point of demobilization. He had dealt with the Poles up to the end. Dempster and others had gone already. The Old Guard, like the soldiers in the song, were fading away, leaving me as final residue, Finn’s second-in-command. In a month or two I should also enter that intermediate state of grace, technically ‘on leave’, through which in due course civilian life was once more attained. Finn, for reasons best known to himself – he could certainly have claimed early release had he so wished – remained on in his old appointment, where there was still plenty of work to do. Other branches round about were, of course, dwindling in the same manner. All sorts of unexpected individuals, barely remembered, or at best remembered only for acrimonious interchanges in the course of doing business with them, would from time to time turn up in our room to say goodbye, hearty or sheepish, according to temperament. Quite often they behaved as if these farewells were addressed to the only friends they had ever known.

‘My Dad’s taking me away from this school,’ said Borrit, when he shook my hand. ‘I’m going into his office. He’s got some jolly pretty typists.’

‘Wish mine would buck up and remove me too.’

‘He says the boys don’t learn anything here, just get up to nasty tricks,’ said Borrit. ‘I’m going to have a room to myself, he says. What do you think of that? Hope my secretary looks like that AT with black hair and a white face who once drove us for a week or two, can’t remember her name.’

‘Going back to the same job?’

‘You bet – the old oranges and lemons/bells of St Clement’s.’

As always, after making a joke, Borrit began to look sad again.

‘We’ll have to meet.’

‘Course we will.’

‘When I want to buy a banana.’

‘Anything up to twenty-thousand bunches, say the word and I’ll fix a discount.’

‘Will Sydney Stebbings be one of your customers now?’

About eighteen months before, Stebbings, suffering another nervous breakdown, had been invalided out of the army. He was presumed to have returned to the retail side of the fruit business. Borrit shook his head.

‘Didn’t you hear about poor old Syd? Gassed himself. Felt as browned off out of the army as in it. I used to think it was those Latin-Americans got him down, but it was just Syd’s moody nature.’

Borrit and I never did manage to meet again. Some years after the war I ran into Slade in Jermyn Street, by the hat shop with the stuffed cat in the window smoking a cigarette. He had a brown paper bag in his hand and said he had been buying cheese. We had a word together. He was teaching languages at a school in the Midlands and by then a headmastership in the offing. I asked if he had any news, among others, of Borrit.

‘Borrit died a few months ago,’ said Slade. ‘Sad. Bad luck too, because he was going to marry a widow with a little money. She’d been the wife of a man in his business.’

I wondered whether on this final confrontation Borrit