Men in secret conclave treat you like the woman they’re saving from the flames, she thought. Whatever they’ve done to you, they expect you to think they’re perfect. I should be standing on the doorstep of their croft. I should be wearing a long white dress and clutching their babies to my bosom as I wave them off to war. I should be saying: hullo, I’m Fran, I’m the first prize when you come home victorious. Men in secret conclave have a waxy guilt imparted by low white lighting and a weird grey steel cabinet on Meccano legs that hums like a tuneless house-painter up a ladder in order to protect our words from prying ears. Men in secret conclave give off a different smell. They are men on heat.
And Fran was as excited as they were, though her excitement made her sceptical, whereas the men’s excitement made them erect and pointed them towards a fiercer god, even if the god of the moment was bearded little Mr Mellors who perched like a nervous lonely diner at the far end of the table from her and kept calling the meeting ‘juntiemun’ in a ripe Scottish brogue – as if, for tonight only, Fran had been upgraded to man’s estate. He could not believe, juntlemun, he said, that he hadn’t closed his eyes for twenty hours! Yet he swore he was game for twenty more.
‘I cannot sufficiently emphasise, juntlemun, the immense national and dare I say geopolitical importance that is being accorded to this operation by the highest echelons of Her Majesty’s Government,’ he kept assuring them, between discussions of such divers matters as whether the rainforests of the Darién would provide an appropriate hideaway for a couple of thousand semi-automatic rifles, or should we be thinking of something a little more central for the home and office? And the men drinking it in. Swallowing it whole because it is monstrous but secret, therefore not monstrous at all. Shave off his stupid little Scottish beard, she advises them. Take him outside. De-bag him. Make him say it all again on the bus to Paitilla. Then see if you agree with a word of it.
But they didn’t take him outside and they didn’t de-bag him. They believed him. Admired him. Doted on him. Just look at Maltby, for instance! Her Maltby! – her louche, funny, pedantic, clever, married, unhappy Ambass, not safe in taxis, not safe in corridors, a sceptic to end all sceptics, he would have her think, yet he had yelled Christ, she’s beautiful! when she dived into his pool: Maltby, sitting like an obedient schoolboy at Mellors’ right hand, smirking unctuous encouragement, bucking his long crooked head back and forth like those pub birds that drink water out of dirty plastic mugs and urging a sulky Nigel Stormont to agree with him.
‘You’d go along with that, wouldn’t you, Nigel?’ Maltby cried. ‘Yes, he would. Done, Mellors.’
Or: ‘We give ’em the gold, they buy the guns through Gully. Far simpler than supplying them direct. And more deniable – agreed, Nigel? – yes, Gully? – done, Mellors.’
Or: ‘No, no, Mr Mellors, thank you, no need for an extra body at all. Nigel and I are perfectly equal to a little skulduggery, aren’t we, Nigel? And Gully here knows the ropes of old. What’s a few hundred anti-personnel mines between friends, eh Gully? Made in Birmingham. You can’t beat ’em.’
And Gully simpering and hammering his moustache with his handkerchief and jotting greedily in his order book while Mellors pushes what looks like a shopping list across the table at him, turning his eyes to Heaven so that he doesn’t see himself do it.
‘With the Minister’s most enthusiastic approval,’ he breathes, meaning: don’t blame me.
‘Our only problem here, Mellors, is keeping the circle of knowledge to an absolute minimum,’ Maltby is saying keenly. ‘That means corralling everybody who’s likely to find out by mistake, like young Simon here’ – a leer at Simon Pitt, who sits in a state of shellshock at Gully’s side – ‘and threatening them with penal servitude in the galleys for life if they blabber one indiscreet word. Right, Simon? Right? Right?’