The Flowers of the Forest Read online

  The Flowers of the Forest

  JOSEPH HONE

  For

  Julia and Dick

  ‘Every man has a creed, but in his soul he knows that that creed has another side.’

  John Buchan: A Lucid Interval (1910)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  Prologue

  BOOK ONE The Puzzle

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  BOOK TWO The Evidence

  1

  2

  3

  4

  BOOK THREE The Search

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Epilogue

  By Joseph Hone in Faber Finds

  Copyright

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  First published in 1980, The Flowers of the Forest is the third in Joseph Hone’s series of spy novels featuring British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. In the last few decades Hone’s standing in the field has been somewhat eclipsed by the likes of John le Carré and Len Deighton, but in his day he was widely seen as their equal. In 1972, Newsweek called the first novel in the series, The Private Sector, the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin, while Isabel Quigly wrote of The Flowers of the Forest in the Financial Times:

  This is the best thriller I’ve found in years, perhaps the best I remember – too serious and rich for the world thriller and what it implies, though sticking closely to the thriller genre – a novel about the mysteriousness of human beings rather than the mysteries of intelligence and diplomacy. The weaving of the story is so close, so tight, that no image, no hint, is ever wasted: everything links up with something else pages or chapters ahead … It all works without pretentiousness, going far beyond the limitations of its genre.

  The idiosyncrasies of public taste are often unfathomable, but I sometimes wonder if more people don’t know of Hone’s work simply because it was neither fish nor fowl in the genre – rather, a less easily marketed combination. Spy fiction can be divided, very roughly, into two camps: ‘Field’ and ‘Desk’. James Bond is a field agent – we follow his adventures, not those of his superior M. In John le Carré’s novels, on the other hand, the focus tends to be on those back at headquarters – George Smiley is a senior officer at the Circus (he later, briefly, becomes head of it).

  I enjoy both genres, but sometimes find myself wishing that the Field book I’m reading were as deft at characterisation and prose style as it is at the suspense. Similarly, I often find myself reading a Desk book and desperately hoping that something will happen. It’s all beautifully drawn, but is everyone going to be searching their filing cabinets for that manila folder for ever? In my own work, I’ve tried to have my cake and eat it: my character Paul Dark is a Desk man sent unwillingly back into the Field. In this I was partly influenced by Hone, who combined both camps in a way that leaves me breathless – and sick with envy.

  Before I was a published novelist I interviewed Mr Hone about his work, and afterwards he sent me a very charming and touching letter, and enclosed copies of many of his reviews. While it was reassuring to see that others had also highly valued his work, I found the reviews depressing reading. When I see a quote from a newspaper on the back of a novel, I’m conscious that it may have been taken wildly out of context. But here were long reviews of Hone’s work from Time, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post and other august publications, comparing him favourably with le Carré, Deighton, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. Better still, the books live up to the praise.

  Hone’s protagonist – ‘a man with almost no heroic qualities’, as he describes himself – is British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. He is repeatedly being taken out of his grubby office in the Mid-East Section in Holborn and dragged into the line of fire. The plots come thick and fast, and feature ingenious twists, femmes fatales, high-octane action, Machiavellian villains – all the great spy stuff you’d want. But it’s wrapped up in prose so elegant, and characterisation so subtle and pervasive, that you put the books down feeling you’ve just read a great work of literature.

  Marlow himself is a wonderful character, and I think deserves to be as well known as Smiley. He’s the constant outsider, peering in at others’ lives, meddling where he shouldn’t, and usually being set up by everyone around him. He’s a kind and intelligent man, and terribly misused, but he’s also a cynic – he sees betrayal as inevitable, and tries to prepare for it.

  We first meet him in The Private Sector, where he is an English teacher in Cairo who is gradually drawn into a spy ring. In The Sixth Directorate, Marlow becomes just a little wiser, getting mixed up with a beautiful African princess in New York. Hone then wrote a standalone spy thriller, The Paris Trap, before returning to Marlow with this novel, which was published in the US under the title The Oxford Gambit.

  The plot centres around questions of professional and personal betrayal. Lindsay Phillips, a senior MI6 officer, has suddenly disappeared while tending his bees: has he been kidnapped, murdered – or was he perhaps, as some are now starting to fear, a Soviet double agent? Marlow is sent in to investigate, and starts prying around the family: how much did Phillips’ wife and daughter know of his secret life?

  The basic set-up is familiar from several spy novels of the era, and would be put to great effect by John le Carré in A Perfect Spy six years later, but Hone handles it very differently. The narrative is a mix of first and third person, and features murders at funerals, chases across Europe, faked deaths and hidden affairs.

  Hone wrote one more Marlow novel, The Valley of the Fox, before hanging up his spy writer boots. All of these novels have now been reissued in Faber Finds. I find it hard to pick a favourite, as all of them are packed with beautiful writing, astute psychological insight and pace: Hone never forgot he was writing thrillers. It’s the melding of the prose style with the twists and turns of the plots that makes Hone so special – makes him, I think, one of the greats.

  Jeremy Duns

  Jeremy Duns is the author of the Paul Dark novels Free Agent (2009), Free Country (a.k.a. Song of Treason, 2010) and The Moscow Option (2012), and also the non-fiction Dead Drop (2013).

  Prologue

  ‘Lindsay!’

  She called from the drawing-room window, half open on the warm spring afternoon, looking over the dry moat and the croquet court towards the Oak Walk, a line of old trees that led away from the house towards the forests that circled it. He kept his bees there, in hives between each tree, where they faced a long slope of rough meadow that fell away to the loch and backed onto the vegetable and pleasure gardens that lay behind the house.

  ‘Lindsay?’

  She called again, more loudly.

  ‘Tea-time.’

  She could see the bee smoker on top of the first hive by the nearest oak tree 50 yards away, a wisp of grey trailing up into the still air. And she had seen her husband there too, ten minutes before, at an open hive using the bellows, shrouded in a black veil and a battered straw hat, tending his bees for the first time that year after the winter.

  She went back to the little rosewood desk by the piano and tidied away her papers, glancing quickly through the letter she had almost finished to her daughter in London.

  Glenalyth House

  Bridge of Alyth

  Perthshire

  Scotland

  Sunday,
March 21

  Dearest Rachel,

  It was such fun having you up for the long weekend and we were both so pleased about the concert.

  L has started on his bees this afternoon, it’s so fine and warm, like summer, tho’ the daffodils aren’t completely out yet and the trees are hardly in bud at all – but everything curiously still and balmy so that you can hear voices sometimes (it must be the forestry men who are here again) way across the loch on Kintyre hill. He didn’t think he’d get down to his bees before he went back to London. And now he’s been so happy getting them organised that he’ll hate to leave – and I’ll hate to see him go. I wish these bees would keep him here. Still, they will – soon. And thank goodness he doesn’t see it as ‘retiring’ – but as a start, a new start. His bees have always mattered to him as much as us, I think, though he would never admit it. And I don’t mind that at all. We have to have other things besides people in our lives. And I think perhaps L has found this more with his bees than with his real work in London. So it’s nice to think that the honey this autumn, for the first time, will be the real thing for him, a business and not just a retired old gentleman’s hobby. I’ll be down, of course, for the flower show and your birthday concert and will see you then …

  She looked out on the croquet court again through the tall windows, but there was still no sign of her husband. She turned and glanced at the tea tray – oatcakes which Rosie from the village had made that morning and a brown earthenware kitchen teapot which had been brewing on the mahogany drum table for nearly ten minutes. She picked up her pen and finished the letter.

  Must stop now. Tea’s getting cold and I’ll have to call him again – he’s so tied up out there puffing away with his old bellows he can’t have heard me the first time.

  All love, Madeleine.

  She sealed the envelope and moved to the windows once more. Still he had not come, so she went out into the big hall where she was surprised to see the front doors shut and to hear their terrier, Ratty, scratching furiously outside.

  She opened half the large door and the dog looked up at her with bruised curiosity. ‘He’s not in the house, silly. He’s somewhere with his bees. Come, we’ll go and find him.’ But the dog seemed unwilling to follow her. ‘Come on, Ratty!’

  She walked out onto the columned porch and round to the side of the big square fort house and stood on the croquet court.

  ‘Lindsay – tea-time!’

  She sang the words out, shading her eyes against the afternoon sun which sloped down on her from above the rim of fir trees on a long hill away to the west of the house. The dog stood expectantly by her feet, its nose shivering minutely, smelling the air, head pointed doubtfully towards the woods.

  ‘Where are you?’ Madeleine called, moving on across the lawn towards the line of oak trees.

  A small wind sighed, running down from the wooded hills, through the oak buds, rustling the evergreens and the dead winter grass in the meadow. A bee swung past her head, droning away towards the forest. The bellows smoked on top of the first hive and the breeze caught the smoke and spiralled it gently round her face – a long-remembered smell of corrugated paper slowly burning.

  ‘Lindsay?’

  She moved down the row of trees and came to a hive with its roof off. She touched the felt covers and lifted one corner gently. In the new honey frames beneath she saw the bees for an instant, a furry mass, busily crushed together, starting to replenish their stores with a loud murmur. Two pigeons flapped violently out of the branches above her; a pheasant squawked somewhere in the woods nearby and the little dog whimpered at the end of the walk. It had not followed her and it fidgeted now, chasing its tail, wary of the bees and lost without its master.

  She called once more. But nothing answered; no voice but hers in the loud spring.

  BOOK ONE

  The Puzzle

  1

  I tried to work again this afternoon, going upstairs to the attic in the cottage which I have made into a study. But from my window I could see the sky, quite blue, almost balmy, for the first time this year, after months of damp and grey – light fluffy clouds sailing over the small hills of this part of Oxfordshire where I have come to live.

  But I was impatient again for something I couldn’t touch, something that was surely happening somewhere out there in the world at that very moment, as I sat at my desk thumbing the typescript of the book on the British in Egypt which I’d been working on for the past few years. I had started to read again my chapter on the Suez debacle and its aftermath, a period I’d lived through in Cairo 20 years before. But the writing seemed cold and irrelevant on the page, so far removed from the blazing heat and anger – and yet, for me, the love – of those years: the smell of lime dust and urine and burnt newspapers sweeping up from the back streets of the city: the rumour of sour bread and burnt kebabs that they cooked on a barrow at the corner of my street by the Nile, rising up in the baking air past our open bedroom window, where I lay with Bridget through the hot afternoons, doing the one thing we did so willingly and well then …

  I was impatient for that, perhaps – something like that again – some dangerous reality and not this studied history in a calm world: the Cotswolds, where it seemed I’d been asleep for many years. I had felt like Mole all that day: Mole waking on the riverbank that first real day of spring, coming out into the light on the water after the bad dreams of winter, getting his house in order before setting out on his long adventure.

  I was not yet tired of country life last Christmas. But now that spring had come and some nameless cure took place in me, boredom had begun, nibbling away at my days, making each of them several hours too long.

  The mornings were all right when I worked, and most afternoons when I journeyed over the small hills. But the evenings were difficult. There was no pub in my village, while the one three miles away was empty on weekdays and full of television playwrights and producers at weekends. Sometimes I watched their work on the box at home in the evenings, and that was worse.

  The village, quite lost in the folds of high sheep pasture ten miles or so beyond Woodstock, was more than attractive; that quality alone would have ruined it years before. It was inviolate: a manorial hamlet, almost all of it still owned by an eccentric army officer, the last of his line, and rich beyond the dreams of avarice, so that he had no need of weekenders in his village or modern bungalows – and more, before I came, had once taken a shotgun to some intrepid London house hunters he had found admiring a ruined cottage on the edge of his estate.

  Nearly all the tied cottages on the single small street had their doors and gable ends painted the same shade of very sombre blue – except for mine, a neo-Gothic, red-brick cottage behind the church, not part of the Major’s empire, but which had belonged to the local sexton and I had bought from the Church Commissioners.

  There was a unique fourteenth-century Tithe Barn by the Manor Farm with arrow-slit windows, while the small church, with its dumpy Anglo-Norman tower and ochre-coloured stone was a wonder in slanting sunlight, and considered perfect of its kind.

  But I am no rural chronicler: the Bartons, a colonial family, came to live in the old rectory shortly after me; I fell out with them one evening over sanctions in Rhodesia and have barely seen them since. The Major and I have never met at all. But I am not alone in that. He is not a social man. The Vicar, a persistent and over-social Welshman, now from another village, bearded me several times early on, believing me to be a television dramatist, and suggesting I compose a Christmas Masque based on the career of a local seventeenth-century divine whose voluminous and uncollected papers, he told me, were available somewhere deep within the Bodleian Library.

  I disappointed him, I’m afraid. Though I still sometimes go to church. The place has a very simple white-washed nave, with the original brick showing through on the window corners, and old pine-box pews that smell of candle wax.

  I chose this village specially, nearly four years ago, for its isolation – when
they ‘retired’ me, after the fracas with the KGB in Cheltenham. McCoy had seen it differently, though, and had offered to recommend me for an MBE on the Foreign Office List, since for him, needless to say, the whole business had ended in vast success. Instead I took the £15,000 gratuity they had offered and told McCoy I hoped never to see or hear from him again.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Marlow,’ he’d said, in his ugly Belfast voice, words and tones no real Foreign Office man would have used, for of course we had both worked for a far less intelligible government department: the – and I find it hard even to write the words – the Service: DI6 as they call it now. British Intelligence: the Middle East Section in that terrible glass tower in Holborn.

  It was accepted by the small farming community that I was an academic of some sort, a suggestion I planted soon after I first came, when I told the Postmistress, Mrs Bentley, I was researching the story of one of the English Crusades, a sort of medieval Regimental History, as I put it, of their campaigns in the Near East. Subsequently, neither she nor the other villagers enquired further about my work, doing no more than to wish me well at it from time to time.

  I was not, I should say, entirely a recluse. Once a girl friend I’d known in Paris years before came and stayed with me, arriving with her husband, an over-educated young man who held a position in the Banque de France, in a large silver Citröen which blocked half the village street for a weekend, while they spoke to me at length and in French of their recent journey among the Danakil tribe in the lowlands of Ethiopia. After I’d seen them off in Oxford I happened to spot a second-hand abridgement of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples and read it for a week.

  Better friends came too: at fairly long intervals and yet repetitively, for I have never been part of any wide circles. It was the walking I enjoyed most after my leg wound healed. The physiotherapist had recommended it. But I soon found it pure pleasure and took to the hills like an alcoholic, strolling the old Roman roads and empty lanes in every weather.