The Mission Song Read Online Free PDF Page A

evening preceding the fatal Friday in question, at the Trattoria Bella Vista in Battersea Park Road, our local greasy spoon, where I was not enjoying a solitary meal of recycled cannelloni and Giancarlo’s weapons-grade Chianti. For self-improvement I had brought along with me a paperback copy of Antonia Fraser’s
Cromwell, Our Chief of Men
, English history being a weak spot in my armoury, which I was endeavouring to repair under the gracious guidance of Mr Anderson, himself a keen student of our island story. The trattoria was empty but for two other tables: the big one in the bay which was occupied by a vocal party of out-of-towners, plus a small one earmarked for lonely-hearts and this evening occupied by a dapper professional gentleman, perhaps retired, and diminutive in stature. I noted his shoes which were highly polished. Ever since the Sanctuary I have set store by polished shoes.
    I had not intended to be eating recycled cannelloni. The day being the fifth anniversary of my marriage to Penelope, I had returned home early to prepare her favourite dinner, a
coq au vin
accompanied by a bottle of finest burgundy, plus a ripe Brie cut to size at our local deli. I should by now have become accustomed to the vagaries of the journalistic world, but when she called me
in flagrante
—it was me who was
in flagrante
, I had just flambé’d the chicken joints—to inform me that a crisis had arisen in the private life of a football star and she would not be home before midnight, I behaved in a manner that afterwards shocked me.
    I did not scream, I am not the screaming kind. I’m a cool, assimilated, mid-brown Briton. I have reserve, often in greater measure than those with whom I have assimilated. I put the phone down gently. I then without further thought or premeditation consigned chicken, Brie and peeled potatoes to the waste-disposal unit, and put my finger on the GO button and kept it there, for how long I can’t say, but for considerably longer than was technically necessary, given that it was a young chicken offering little resistance. I woke again, as it were, to find myself striding briskly westwards down Prince of Wales Drive with
Cromwell
stuffed into my jacket pocket.
    There were six diners at the oval table of the Bella Vista, three stalwart men in blazers and their equally heavy wives, all clearly accustomed to life’s good things. They hailed from Rickmansworth, I quickly learned, whether I wished to or not, and they called it Ricky. They had been attending an open-air matinée of
The Mikado
in Battersea Park. The dominant voice, a wife’s, disapproved of the production. She had never cared for the Japanese—had she, darling?—and giving them songs to sing did not, in her view, make them any nicer. Her monologue did not separate the topics but rolled on at the same level. Sometimes, pausing for what passed for thought, she would haw before resuming, but she need not have bothered because nobody had the temerity to interrupt her. From
The Mikado
she advanced without a breath or change of tone to her recent medical operation. The gynaecologist had made a total balls, but never mind, he was a personal friend and she had decided not to sue. From there she passed seamlessly to her daughter’s unsatisfactory artist husband, a layabout if ever she knew one. She had other opinions, all strong, all peculiarly familiar to me, and she was expressing them at full volume when the little gentleman of the polished shoes punched together the two halves of his
Daily Telegraph
and, having folded the result lengthways, hammered his table with it: slap, bang,
slap
, and one more for luck.
    ‘I
will
speak,’ he announced defiantly into the middle air. ‘I owe it to myself. Therefore I shall’—a statement of personal principle, addressed to himself and no one else.
    After which he set course for the largest of the three stalwart men. The Bella Vista, being Italian, has a terrazzo floor and no curtains. The plastered