Rory walked briskly, struggling to put himself in a better frame of mind. A year ago who would have thought he’d be here: single, and doing his bit for the war in a relatively junior position.
He’d never agreed with much of the thinking so prevalent after the Great War. Since then, too many people who should have known better chose to view men as cogs in a machine, with little control over their lives. It was worse in the new violent ideologies in Germany and Russia; fascism and communism stripped men of their free will. In those creeds the destruction of individuality had become a philosophical foundation stone. He pulled his collar higher up around him. As long as he was alive, he couldn’t go along with that kind of thinking. It was no accident that both fascism and communism held the view that individuals were impelled by an inevitable mass destiny. History sucked people along like so much debris caught in the undercurrent of a river. It was a kind of fatalism that bred disaster on a colossal scale with massive social turmoil and unending repression and bloodshed.
He pulled his hat lower to keep the wind off his face. Perhaps that kind of tyranny and misery was inevitable for less fortunate nations. Even in stable countries, he had to admit, the range of individual choice for those trapped at the bottom of society’s pyramid was pretty much restricted. But there was still choice.
Then again, he might have looked at things differently at the end of the Great War had he been carried off a troopship in a wicker stretcher, missing limbs and permanently shell-shocked. No, he was fortunate. He was lucky enough to have survived and he lived in a decent country. Stable democracies gave people security. Although democracies weren’t perfect, they provided a greater range of choices – not an equal range, but certainly at all levels there was less repression and more opportunity. On an intellectual level, he certainly believed in what he was doing; but in his more despondent moments, like this one, he wondered if that lofty thinking was what really lay behind his volunteering to come over here.
Was there something else to it, something that he hadn’t admitted or even worked out? Despite people asking him every time he turned around, he’d avoided thinking too deeply about his motivation for coming here. He wasn’t certain why. As a police officer, he’d spent much of his professional life examining the motives of others; and here, in his own case, where he had so much to lose and so little to gain, he found himself evading the subject. If Ruth hadn’t died, would he have stepped forward so readily? He wasn’t certain what her death had to do with volunteering. In his most private moments, he suspected there was a connection with which he hadn’t come to grips. Maddeningly, he wasn’t certain what it was. It hovered at the edge of his subconscious like an elusive fragment of a dimly remembered dream.
Maybe it was a sense of obligation. Life had been good to him. He’d never wanted for much. Pre-war life in an exclusive Montreal suburb had been a sheltered existence – maids, gardeners, private schools, summers in Germany, travelling back and forth across the Atlantic in first-class berths, spring and autumn weekends at the cottage by Lac Saint-Pierre in the Laurentians. School had never been difficult, and university had come just as easily. And then came his time in the trenches, his wounding, his recruitment in England, and his period as a spy in Germany.
He had come back from the war more disoriented than angry. His father became exasperated and told him he was one of those men who couldn’t settle down after the war. But that hadn’t been the case. The war had unquestionably been a turning point in his life. God, how could it have been anything else? But he hadn’t spent a lot of time drifting afterwards. He tried working for his father for a few weeks. One sunny morning late in May of 1919 he left the business’s ledgers and order books and went off impulsively on a canoe trip to northern Quebec.
In the North, he’d met a retired Mountie who ran a fishing lodge. Despite their difference in age, they had a lot in common. The ageing pensioner seemed to understand what he had been through, and the pensioner’s descriptions of police work appealed to Rory. It was a thinking man’s life, with a healthy balance between activity and deliberation. That was almost two decades ago. It seemed like last week. He smiled. Had he become a cliché? Not likely. He knew his life had hardly been routine and he never regretted his time in the Mounted Police.
He walked quickly for forty minutes, and with the exercise, the rain, and the fresh air, his mood shifted. A few blocks from Charing Cross he called a cab. With the exception of a dull pain in the socket of his missing eye, a pain that he always got in damp weather, by the time he got to the Crossleys’ he was feeling more like somebody whose company he might enjoy.
Ewen Crossley met him effusively at the door of their large brick house. “Rory, so good to have you here at last. Sandra and I have been meaning to have you over for so long now, but this damn war, it’s always been getting in the way.” Crossley laughed good-naturedly.
His wife was attractive, probably at least a decade younger than her husband. Slender, wearing a tight-fitting blue cashmere sweater and a tweed skirt, she had her dark hair pulled back dramatically in a bun. She smoked a cigarette in a long tortoise-shell cigarette holder. Sandra Crossley could have stepped out of a Noël Coward play. Everything about her was a fashionable cliché, but she was genuinely friendly and more than attractive enough to get away with it.
When Rory first saw them together he was surprised that Crossley’s wife was so pretty and chic. From outward appearances there was a huge difference between the two. Ewen had matured into a pleasant, unassuming, and nondescript sort of man – the perfect individual for an intelligence officer. He was shrewd and personable, but entirely forgettable, while Sandra wasn’t the sort of woman one forgot easily. Despite these differences, Rory knew that they were both astute judges of character. They were a good match. Crossley was a solid type; Rory had known him on and off for twenty-odd years. He was a decent man, likeable with a strong character and a perceptive and alert mind. Rory had met Sandra on at least two other occasions. He enjoyed her company but couldn’t say he knew her well. They were one of those couples you instinctively like. They were completely relaxed in one another’s presence.
The evening at the Crossleys’ turned out to be more enjoyable than Rory expected. Ewen had invited some old friends he had known since his army days, and several other couples who cheerfully presented themselves with vague introductions of “… actually Ewen and I have worked together for years.” It was evident that in this line of work it was a forbidden conversational gambit to pry into anyone’s background. As for himself, he responded equally as imprecisely, “I’m in police work. I’ve spent years in northern Canada and I’m just here doing the odd job for the war effort.” It was a successful ploy. Nobody asked about his present employment, but he soon had a small circle of jolly looking faces quizzing him about his past exploits, and questioning him at length about his experiences in northern Manitoba.
“Did you ever have to go long distances by dog team?”
“Well, yes. Most of the major outposts are accessible by ski plane in the winter, but to get to the more remote locations we generally took dog teams up the frozen rivers.” This response earned him a cheer, an energetic round of “well dones,” and a flurry of questions on life in the North. It seemed that few in this small and friendly crowd seemed interested in anything but Rory’s life in the depths of winter, and he found himself fending off questions as to how often he had managed with frostbite and did he ever have to arrest mad trappers or whisky runners.
It wasn’t until later in the evening that Ewen joined him in one of these animated circles. “You seem to have made a big hit, Rory,” he said.
“No, not me. It’s a great party, Ewen.”
Ewen abruptly changed the subject and turned so his back was to the group, allowing a degree of privacy. He changed his tone. “I know that you’ve been sidelined since you’ve been here, and I want you to know that I’m aware that you are seriously underemployed. I’m sorry.”