The Man in the Wardrobe

Catherine Eisner

Our ends are in our beginnings,
our first breath is the beginning of death.
– English proverb.

‘Collar ’im! Collar ’im!’
The young man continued to shout commands as his brindled white boxer leapt on to the narrow track and ran towards me where I advanced, hemmed in by thickets of gorse and bracken.

So confined was the path from the common that I did not marvel at my own agility when, in a split-second impulse, I seized the mastiff’s trailing leash and led it half breathless to its master.

‘ You took me quite by surprise,’ I protested.
‘ Good call!’ he grinned. ‘Who dares wins!’

He was wearing faded blue running shorts and his long sinewy legs were blotched with midge bites.

‘ Your faith in me was entirely misplaced,’ I said not altogether approvingly. ‘It was simply that a voice as loud as yours was almost impossible to ignore.’

‘ Lungpower,’ he boasted, pumping out his chest and thumping his ribcage. ‘Rule Number One. Basic training. You gotta hear an order above gunfire.’

I noticed his gingery hair was cropped in a military cut. He plucked at the neck of his camouflaged fatigue shirt to reveal an army dogtag engraved with a winged dagger.
‘ You gotta hear more’n the flashbangs, see!’

He then made the classic error of intimating he was a member of the SAS.
‘ Remember the storming of the Iran embassy? That was our mob.’

‘ Well, that’s as may be,’ I said, brushing the hem of my skirt. The clinging thorns had made me itchy and irritable. ‘But on balance, I feel, I’d have rather they had taught you to catch your own dog first.’

***

That my irritability had a far from superficial cause was confirmed by his arrest three weeks later. The dog-tagged young man had run off with a Royal Crown Derby tea service from the home of a young widow seduced by an identical ploy.

Clearly, his was a slick chat-up routine with ‘a well-rehearsed canine accomplice’, according to the newspaper item. By a stroke of good fortune I’d suspected he was shooting a line so it was a vulnerable younger woman who’d taken the bait.

That encounter, I reflected, was like the well known problem in logic in which a princess visits an island inhabited by a tribe of truth-tellers and a tribe of liars and she can distinguish between them only by posing a question of mind-tangling subtlety. In my own paradoxical case, however, surely anyone who declares to a complete stranger that he’s a member of the SAS is – quod erat demonstrandum – automatically discounted as a fraud.

But let me confide something to you... my having no delusions on this score owes less to feminine instinct and more to my intimate acquaintanceship with members of the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge and, in particular, to my on-off love affair with a British intelligence officer whose outwardly bluff manner hid a nature as dissembling as any conman’s.

Yet that heartache I was to know to my cost only much, much later.

***

Truth to tell, the strange part of our first meeting was that my life at that time was nothing but hopeless, never-ceasing, pallid fatigue whilst his life was that of a restless, loud-speaking, quick-actioned man full of fight, more used to a world of backwooding, sun-helmets and surviving on dried elephant meat.

‘ I’ve held a place for you!’ Those were Vivian’s first words.

He was piloting his own gaff-rigged ketch between flooded houses, a self-appointed relief worker among the marooned families of our little Sussex
market town. The young first lieutenant had spied me waving from my
dormitory window, a student nurse stranded by swift-rising waters.

I’d awoken from three hours’ sleep after night duty to find water lapping at my window-sill; the record floods across England that year rivalled the worst of this century.

When he reached up to hand me into the dinghy I was aware of the strong fragrance of first-class cigars and an odour of sodden belt webbing. (His first memory of me, he told me long afterwards, was of my fingers smelling of Jeyes Fluid and of a deceptive fragility he had thought to construe from the shadows under my eyes and from my tousled exhaustion.)

On the stern of the dinghy was painted Tender to Vivian; it was evidently a landing craft appended to the larger vessel, his namesake, to which we then sculled. The wind buffeted my face as we turned into the teeth of a fine,
driving rain.

‘ Something tells me,’ I said with an awkward laugh, ‘you’ve dispensed with sailing for pleasure!’
‘ That depends.’ He looked at me searchingly. ‘The worst of it all is I shall have to be off pretty soon – no excuses – though I would not mind so very much being called away if...’

He paused and steered neatly through a half-submerged gate.
‘ If what?’
‘ If ... before I go I could see you again.’

There was something refreshingly direct and simple about Vivian in those days. He was so hearty, eager, full of life.

‘ Hungry?’
‘ Decidedly so,’ I said.

He produced from his parka some Kendall mint cake covered in fluff.
Above us the ketch’s sail, the colour of ox blood, bowed before the gale and we were drenched in a cleansing torrent.

It was as though Fate had brought us together only to tear us apart for an especially cruel reason.

A gull flew overhead with a singular cry as if it were laughing to itself; and so I was borne on a floodtide to my fated lover.
Tender to Vivian.

***

It was to be a feast of bitter herbs.

Within a week we’d become lovers for how could I have seen then that I was never to know a surfeit of happiness but would forever brood on what might have been?
‘ There is no resisting you,’ I whispered.

There was a certain open-air manliness about him which was, indeed, irresistible and, when I take account of his white knuckle exploits afterwards, I think I must have known him then at his nicest.

Too soon the day came when Vivian announced with a semi-indifferent shrug: ‘It’s as I feared. They’re sending me to be a grey man.’

So he was posted to Intelligence Corps HQ on an interrogator’s course deep in the heart of a Sussex wood, where SAS thugs hanged trainees in chains or half-drowned them in oil drums ‘to crack their cover’.

Vivian’s given name had provoked merciless ragging, for on his face was the stamp of that long-drawn pride found in dynastic army men that I have no doubt his tormentors profoundly resented. Both his father and grandfather had been brigadiers, and both bore the name Vivian.

(As a callow subaltern, his grandfather had once had to reprimand a young hussar named Winston S. Churchill for ‘inexcusable cocksureness’ while executing an order when their troop was reviewed one hot summer noonday parade by Queen Victoria in her widow’s weeds. ‘She stank like a she-goat,’ he’d recalled with a shudder.)

Curiously, by contrast, that ambivalence of an androgynous given name for boys reminds me of my friend, Jocelyn, who from our earliest infancy has been as much like a lad as a daisy.

Even when Josey was less than seven years old, my mother had confided to me she considered him, ‘Comme une fée.’ And, beyond question, fairy-like he was.
Later, as a wispy young textile student, Jocelyn had cultivated a style resembling the fluent sensual lines of René Gruar’s sketches for Dior, but with his own pronounced preference for depicting androgynes.

I still cherish one of his drawings from childhood. Poignantly, Josey’s
pierrot-eyed Petrouchka is drawn with an impressionistic stroke on a scrap torn from a typewritten Bill of Quantities prepared by his formidable father, a quantity surveyor whose forlorn hope was to raise a son worthy to succeed him. On the reverse is a fragment from a Schedule of Works in the arid language of the destiny to which Josey refused to submit:

Lay bricks on a full bed of mortar. Bring both leaves of cavity walls to the same level at every third tie course when embedding double-triangle butterfly ties.

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