The Age of Treachery by Gavin Scott Read Free Book Online

she made him feel as if he had been in such places all his life. When they climbed to the folly and looked down the ride towards the house and she told him how she’d hidden there as a child and read
The Golden Age
, it almost seemed as if he had been there with her instead of playing among the broken fish crates beside the River Humber.
    Even when she persuaded him to tell her about his father’s life on the trawlers and the cleaning jobs his mother had taken on after her husband was drowned, there seemed to be no gap between them: it was as if he had been living the other half of her life for her, just as she had been living the other half of his. His love for his own parents did not prevent him falling for hers. He delighted in doing conversational battle with her father as much as her father enjoyed jousting with him. He felt no resentment at the generations of privilege that had given the Lyttons the life they led but he made no bones about his determination that after the war things would change, and what they enjoyed now would one day be available to the millions, not the few.
    Sir Phillip Lytton told him the millions were simply incapable of appreciating it, and Forrester told him he was talking through his hat. Lady Elspeth Lytton told him on the terrace one day that her husband looked forward to his debates with Forrester almost as much as Barbara looked forward to his visits. And she teased him for being so obsessed with social justice. Social justice was always something just out of reach, she said. Men got far too carried away trying to grasp it, as they got carried away with most things. All that really mattered in life was having a good seat on a horse. And some decent hounds. And a fox to chase, added Barbara. Of course, said her mother. Everybody needed a fox to chase. Shortly after that conversation Forrester had been parachuted into Sardinia.
    When he was posted ‘Missing Believed Dead’ Barbara had wangled her way into the SOE and been sent to France. By the time he returned safely to England, she’d been caught and shot by the Gestapo.
    A numbness had enveloped Forrester’s soul when he heard the news, and in the years since had lessened only enough to allow slightly unreal infatuations with other women, of whom Margaret Clark was one. In his soul he did not believe this state of being would ever change. So he concentrated on going to Crete, finding his cave again and losing himself in a world that had been gone for four thousand years.
    * * *
    At this same instant Arne Haraldson – still in his Oxford hospital bed – was finding that his head had cleared sufficiently to allow him to take note of the comings and goings of all the staff, so that he could begin to make plans for the moment when he could slip out without being observed.
    He had realised that the chances of him being able to do this were greatly increased by the fact that he was in some kind of administrative no-man’s land, with each shift convinced the other was responsible for him. Now all he had to decide was the optimum time for his move. As the short winter day began to wane, he knew that time was coming closer.
    * * *
    As Forrester reached Whitehall he saw that the sandbags had gone but many of the windows were still boarded up. He remembered the hurried night-time summonses to map-filled offices along this street during the war; the clipped orders about this or that mission; the hair-raising drives through the blackout to various military airfields on the outskirts of the city; the all-too-brief flights over occupied territory – followed by the “Mind how you go” from the drop-masters as he stepped into the void.
    “Mind how you go.”
    He was smiling at the absurd memory when he saw Calthrop emerge from the Foreign Office with Peter Dorfmann – and felt an odd prickle of unease. There was no reason why a Foreign Office official should not be speaking with a German academic on a visit to Britain. If Dorfmann was being