Fellow Passenger (10 page)

In the morning I was tormented by my Latin conscience. It is entirely different from the English conscience. I have both; so I know. A pure Englishman, finding himself in my position through little or no fault of his own, would have bothered about Veronica as Veronica. That was as nothing compared to my remorse at having seduced, if one may call it so (and my Latinity did call it so), my host’s unmarried sister. It was a breach of hospitality of which I should never have suspected myself capable.

Veronica, very wisely, had said her farewells and did not appear at breakfast. I was left to face her brother’s eyes as best I could. They were still honest and untroubled. He helped me to kidneys and bacon, while I congratulated him on the excellence of his liquor which had left us with only the merest trace of headache. He discussed the morning’s news and offered me three different sorts of marmalade. I could only think of my appetite with shame.

Did I want a lift anywhere? No, I did not. I should walk gradually westwards, I told him, into Somerset. He saw me to the door, still with his fatherly expression, helped me on with my pack, lent me a map and said good-bye. And only then, as he relinquished my hand, did he say:

‘Be a good fellow, and write to her from time to time, will you?’

The perfect manners of him! The gentle depths of immoral, iniquitous hypocrisy! The basic English desire for peace in a comfortable home! I understand them, even admire them. But I cannot conceive why he should have been so sure that I was a person who, even after the deliberate undermining of his principles and that carefully arranged contiguity of bedrooms, would have permitted himself so to outrage all proprieties.

I wandered across Somerset in the character of Michael Bassoon. As I looked poor and my approach was cordial, I managed to get a few odd jobs. I spent a couple of days hoeing turnips, and the best part of a week replacing a stableman on holiday; but my appearance was so unconventional that no employer thought of offering me a permanency. In fact, Michael Bassoon was becoming a bore. Economically he was a mere parasite. He could not hope to exploit his genius for abstract art in the country, and he was incapable - though warmly encouraged - of painting an inn sign in return for drink and lodging. There was nothing to be said for him except that he was unhesitatingly accepted for what he wasn’t.

That was important, for the newspapers, after forgetting Howard-Wolferstan among the excitements of rape, murder and a millionaire who, cautiously avoiding both, had been divorced for the eleventh time, decided on a noble outburst of British indignation.

WHAT ARE M.I.5 ABOUT? Even I could have told the patronizing columnist what they were about - checking up on my past and leaving to the police the routine job of finding me. What does the foreign office know? Well, they bought that. It was extraordinarily silly of them to pretend that they knew anything. Then came the life of HOWARD-WOLFERSTAN on Sunday - a romantic bit of fiction which the public were exhorted not to miss. I had been a bullfighter. I had lived by my bow and arrows among the Indians up the Maranon. My main source of income had been the export of dried heads to Russia from secret airfields in the jungle. I could spot that the correspondent in Ecuador had been pulling his editor’s leg, and I was homesick for the party at which these joyous adventures had been concocted for me.

My English career was fairly accurate. It had been so simple. School. Oxford. Cricket. And two years in London as what they called a ‘clubman’. But then came the inevitable accusation. During the war, with Christopher Conrad Emmassin, I had been successful in Penetrating the Secrets of British Intelligence.

Hell! Chris and I were much too busy trying to preserve our own secrets. When he turned up in Russia, he could, I suppose, have given them some information about political security - such as it was - in the Andean Republics; but for his new employers that would be the least of his assets. All they got out of poor Chris’s desertion was prestige - and a thoroughly overworked and unbalanced brain which never had a chance to recover its quality.

All this nonsense was accompanied by the same old photograph, touched up with different lights to give it a bit of novelty, and some poorish snaps sent over from Ecuador. One showed me in wild country and wilder dress, but did capture my normal expression. I dared not abandon my disguise, slight though it was, and if I had to keep it, bald head and all, then there was no better man to back it up than Bassoon.

Meanwhile I had obeyed Robert Donolow’s modest and touching request - it was the least I could do - and written a discreet letter to Veronica into which, I trust, she could read as much affection as she required. She replied to me at the Post Office, Yeovil, in an overmanly style, ignoring the ephemeral accidents of life and enclosing a cutting from some art monthly which she had covered with indignant exclamation marks. She said that her brother had had a casual visit from a picture-dealer named Finster who claimed to know me well and wanted to get in touch with me. As they did not then know my address, they could only tell him I was somewhere in Somerset.

This was alarming. My first impression was that the enquiry must come from the police, and I cursed my folly in playing cricket and allowing a possible identification by my individual style of off-break. On second thoughts, however, I saw that this Finster had nothing to do with the law. If police wanted to talk to Bassoon, they had only to alert local stations and Bassoon would be picked up in ten minutes. Nor could anyone have been put on my trail through cricket, since the captain of the village eleven had claimed to know Howard-Wolferstan personally. Therefore I was not he.

No, the chances were that Cecil Reyvers had reported his adventure to higher authority. He knew that I was in the west country; he knew that I intended to paint, either for fun or for cover. The immediate impulse of Reyvers’ committee or cell would be to give information to the police. But that they dared not do. They had two very awkward hurdles to get over: that Reyvers had, however unwillingly, helped a spy to escape, and that I might be taking instructions from Olympian heights far above their ken. The Olympian heights themselves would be doubtful. They had to run me to earth and find out.

The more I thought of this explanation, the more likely it seemed. I was still a member of the party - which would startle them as much as it did me - and I had been caught prowling around an atomic monastery in the dead of night. What they would want to know very badly was from whom I had my instructions. It would never occur to them that I hadn’t any. It was inconceivable that a communist should act without instructions. I began to realize that, so far as the party was concerned, I was in a very strong position indeed.

But the risks were unlimited. Rather than meet this Mr Finster, it was wiser to destroy Michael Bassoon - to drown him or let him disappear on a railway journey. I could make him into a filthy old-fashioned tramp with a week’s beard. That, however, probably meant that I should be caught in an unfamiliar world of welfare workers, labour exchanges and police, all so anxious to reform me that one of them, sooner or later, would hit on my identity.

As I could think of no safe or reasonable alternative to Bassoon, I decided to play out the comedy with Finster. It might be a risky gamble, but no worse than standing my trial for High Treason. And at least any enjoyment there was would be mine, whereas if I were compelled to listen to learned counsel trying to persuade himself and a jury that I was innocent, all the enjoyment would be his. The more I considered the comrades, the more I liked them. They might be only too glad to smuggle me on board a ship, and if I did not care for its destination - and I probably shouldn’t - a port had far wider possibilities than the fields of Somerset and that intolerable man, Bassoon.

After reading Veronica’s letter, I strolled out of Yeovil into the pleasant meadowland to the north of the town, giving plenty of time to any interested persons who wanted to catch up with me. My movements since leaving the Donolows had never been in the least suspicious or concealed, so I reckoned that I ought to have been spotted in Yeovil. But nobody followed me on foot or bicycle. Nobody examined me from a car.

Evidently Comrade Finster, picture-dealer, had managed to lose the scent. Perhaps he was plain inefficient, or more familiar with industrial districts than the west of England. And I suppose I was not easy to find without asking too many questions, which had to be avoided.

So I returned to Yeovil, stopped at a shop that sold artists’ colours, introduced myself as Michael Bassoon and bought a tube of white. I chattered away for half an hour as if I owned the place, and left the proprietor in no doubt at all that I was on my way by Ilchester to Glastonbury, and intended to paint the countryside as it had never been painted before.

Even after laying this trail it was a couple of days before the hunt got on to it, and if I had not spent hours idling by the roadside I should have passed well beyond Glastonbury. At last, while I was sitting on the bench outside a pleasant little pub and eating a lunch of bread and beer, a car drew up.

Two men got out. One was a sharp-looking, earnest rat of a man. At a quick glance you would have put him down as a disillusioned schoolmaster. The other was larger and smoother, with the air and dress of a minor civil servant. He might have been an income-tax collector or the municipal slaughterhouse manager. I don’t know which of them had passed himself off as a picture-dealer. Probably the schoolmaster. There was nothing of the glossy capitalist about him, but no doubt he could talk theory, whether of art or politics. It was he who opened the ball - briskly.

‘Mr Bassoon?’

‘I am.’

‘I am going to ask you to accompany me to the police station.’

‘What for?’

‘On suspicion of being Howard-Wolferstan.’

‘Cut it out, comrade!’I said. ‘You’ve been the hell of a time picking me up. Sorry, but I shall have to report that there was not the slightest difficulty whatever.’

This was the line I had intended all along to take, but the sincerity in my own voice surprised me. It had been raining off and on for thirty-six hours, and I was nearly out of money.

‘You - you are Howard-Wolferstan then?’ he asked.

‘Of course I’m Howard-Wolferstan, you fool. What have you arranged for me?’

The larger man then took a hand. He was pointedly neutral. I think he was not sorry - after some days of working with him - to hear his companion snubbed.

‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘that we are only concerned, so far, with your identity.’

‘Then get on back and be concerned with something more practical,’ I told him. ‘It’s the merest luck that I haven’t been suspected yet. Now, I’m going to stay at this pub until you return with proper orders for me. And you’d better give me some money.’

‘We have no—’ began the schoolmaster.

‘Of course you have no authority. Can’t you ever think for yourself, comrade?’

‘Is two quid any use?’ asked the other, impatiently.

‘It will do for the bar bill,’ I said. ‘You can pay the rest when you fetch me.’

‘We shall be back to-night,’ the schoolmaster declared, trying to be sinister.

‘No, you won’t. I shall be very lucky if this intolerable muddle is straightened out by to-morrow night. Now, get on back to London and report!’

I patted them on the back to show that there was no ill feeling and shoved them into their car. Then I picked up Michael Bassoon’s stage properties and managed to get a room at the pub just before closing-time.

The fact that all decisions would now be taken for me induced a sense of delicious relaxation. The merits of communism as a rest-cure have never been fully realized - except theoretically and by professional psychologists. It is not a thought which would occur to party members, like myself, who must pride themselves on their dynamism. I dined on bacon and eggs and whisky, slept till ten in the morning, bathed luxuriously, had a chicken killed for me and ate the whole of it. I will not say qualms were entirely absent, but the party peace was far better than continuing the safe and objectless life of that tramp Bassoon.

Another car turned up the following evening. This time the schoolmaster was not in it. The minor civil servant had as his companion an altogether more efficient type. He had a round, fair face; he never smiled as if he meant it; and he certainly was not English - though his trace of accent would not have been noticeable if one had not been waiting for it.

I took them up to my bedroom and ordered drinks. The new, alarmingly genuine comrade put his gin down in one gulp. I nearly told him that he should never do that in public if he wanted to be taken for an Englishman, but decided that bluff, when I used it, should be more subtle.

He went pretty straight to the point.

‘I am to give you this letter,’ he said. ‘We have been holding it for you for some time.’

The envelope was beautifully non-committal, addressed in a semi-educated hand and properly stamped and postmarked. When I opened it, I grinned.

‘You recognize the writing?’ asked my new comrade.

‘Chris Emmassin,’ I answered.

I have not the letter by me. It vanished with all the other papers of Bassoon. But the wording was very close to this.

My Dear Cousin

It’s of course obvious to me now that all the time we were working together your true loyalty was where mine now is. Your discretion astonishes all of us.