Fellow Passenger (2 page)

When my father’s funeral was over, I obeyed him and sailed for England. The financial disaster was just as great as he had feared, though not in the eyes of the public. That was because the concessions which he and his companies held were so enormous that they could be valued at any sum which the Government agreed; and agreement was easy since the politicians were heavily involved. Nor was the hushing-up wholly a question of money. My father was a much loved man, and nobody wanted to take revenge on his memory.

I was partly educated in England, for my father wanted it to become my country. Though he himself could never be bothered to return, he profoundly enjoyed all the secondhand impressions which I could give him. I used to record for him any incidents and characters with the sort of richness he appreciated. After his death it seemed to me that there were few to record, though whether it was I or the nation which had changed I could not tell. I had not been out of Latin America since 1939.

The after-war years I spent in idle movement for the sake of sport or exploration or wild-cat mining. I had some excuse for relaxation since, during the six years of war, I had been employed as a clerk, ostensibly Ecuadorian, at various airports, and as a guitarist in the Callao cafe which was the favourite of the German colony. My cover was never broken, and the less I talk about it, the better for me. Anyway, service to the State will not get you out of the Tower. It never did. The most it could ensure was that you would be beheaded instead of hanged - a doubtful advantage if you happened to meet the headsman on a day when he was off his drive and trusting to short approaches.

By the time I had settled into a small furnished flat in London I found myself with about five hundred pounds in the bank which vanished at the devil of a pace. I was not being at all prodigal, but it takes time for anyone with Latin tastes to adjust himself to contemporary England. Merely to eat and drink as well as a prosperous peasant is a shocking extravagance. So it was not long before I went down to Moreton Intrinseca.

There was no kindly retired colonel with whom I could make friends; no daughter to tell me how different I was from the average Englishman. The manor had become a damned hostel for scientists. I had lunch at the local pub and discovered that the house, for as long as anyone remembered, had belonged to two old maiden ladies, and that after they died it had remained empty for three or four years until it was requisitioned by the War Office. The War Office had passed it on to the Ministry of Supply, who used it to house a sort of upper middle class of experts from the atomic plant some five miles to the west. The real upper class were at the universities or where they pleased. A lower class was, I gathered, confined in the huts of the plant itself. But the chaps who really administered the plant were entertained in the ancestral mansion of the Howard-Wolferstans.

Back in London, I went to work to find an introduction into this specialized monastic world. I was, of course, under the impression that a man of standing and good education could still go more or less where he pleased. Before the war, if I had wanted, for example, to have a look at our latest tank, I feel sure that I could have found someone at my club to show me round the factory. One’s loyalty was taken for granted. Security applied only to foreigners.

I could not get in touch. That upper middle class of cyclotronic monks seemed to have no background. Its world nowhere overlapped my own, which was social and commercial rather than scientific. However, I had academic contacts, too, and I looked up old friends and tutors. My innocent enquiries must have been a bit too frank. I was gently warned - so gently that I might only have been questioning a point of Greek grammar which had been settled for ever in 1892 - that perhaps I was drawing too much attention to myself. It is sometimes a handicap that in looks I take after my mother. The English will never assume reliability in a too bronzed complexion.

I gave it up. After all, I had no idea what was in the attic chimney. My father had not told me, and, as the whole matter seemed faintly distasteful to him, I had not asked questions. I made a note of his directions, but very reluctantly and only because he insisted that I should.

A satisfactory job was difficult to find. For one thing, I was thirty-seven and had been too many years away from the conventional ladder; for another, I found it hard to say what I had done in the war. Unofficial, unpaid service in South America. I myself would distrust anyone who came to me with that yarn and no proof of it.

At last I got on to a really sound business proposition. I was offered a partnership in a firm to be founded by men of my own sort who knew the Latin American markets, the politicians and their exchange difficulties. We were out to persuade manufacturers to entrust their export business to us, very much as they would give their advertising to professional advertisers. It was a job after my own heart, allowing me to live and prosper with one foot on each side of the Atlantic. But it needed capital, and that, if existing at all, was at Moreton Intrinseca.

There was an excellent country hotel within two miles of the village, and there I stayed for a week. The earnest young scientists from the manor would occasionally drop in and become noisy in the bar. It wasn’t drink. They were competing for the attention of an athletic and over-painted young barmaid-secretary, and behaving like a visiting rugger team. They did not seem to know how to set about seduction quietly. It was easy enough to make acquaintances among them, but none asked me to visit him at the manor.

Towards the end of the week I found that two genial strangers were paying me drinks. I was accustomed to that. Police employed on security duties are all the same - German, Spanish or English. Their job must be far easier in American countries, north or south, than in England, where they are always up against the convention that one stranger does not normally ask questions of another.

So that was that, and I returned promptly to London to think out some new method of approach. It was all very well for my father to tell me to avoid burglary. He did not know that I had had a good eye for entries and exits ever since I was nearly caught with the archbishop’s god-daughter at the age of thirteen, and had to pretend tearfully that I was only looking for my mummy. The outer ring of security, protecting the Ministry’s secrets and stretching all over England, was evidently efficient; but the inner, more material ring around the manor was derisory. There were merely a twelve-foot brick wall, topped with barbed wire, and a gate with a doorkeeper on it day and night. After all, there was no reason for more. Burglars do not raid the simple bedrooms of scientists; and spies, I imagine, prefer to contact them on more neutral ground.

People have told me that I have a natural leaning towards lawlessness. I do not think that is true. I did consider at great length what a really English Englishman would do. He would undoubtedly write to the Ministry of Supply, giving every possible reference for his respectability, and ask permission to search for and recover his family property. I was instinctively unwilling to take this step. My father’s conception of property, while never dishonest, had a certain originality, and - since all my enquiries had led nowhere -I found it hard to prove what the connection of the Howard-Wolferstans with Moreton Intrinseca really was.

A chestnut tree, growing in the manor garden, appeared to me less futile than correspondence with the Ministry. It extended a noble branch into an open field, passing a clear ten feet above the wire-topped wall. I bought a length of good, light rope and attached a heavy hook to the end of it. With this and other simple necessaries in a small rucksack, and myself attired as a hiker out for serious exercise, I departed from London in a motor coach and got off it at a cross-roads some eight miles from Moreton Intrinseca.

It was a hot evening in early May, when a temperature of seventy feels like ninety. The hawthorn was out; the hay was growing; and the scent of the countryside was as deliciously overpowering as anything I have known in the tropics. This island remains inhabited, I think, merely for the sake of that week in May; another, probably, in June; and a third, reasonably certain, in September. I walked across country to the edge of the downs above Moreton Intrinseca, and waited for darkness.

When the night was velvet black I circled round the village and found - after a couple of bad shots - the manor field and the chestnut tree. My first swing at the branch failed to catch and made a noise much more alarming than it really was. However, a wood-pigeon obligingly flew out, and under cover of her clatter, as she swerved towards the house through the little plantation inside the wall, I made a second swing at the branch and the hook caught.

I climbed the rope, pulled it up after me and stayed quiet for several minutes. Everything else was quiet - wood-pigeons, dogs, scientists and the village itself. The thick, smooth trunk of the chestnut looked as if it would be impossible to climb on my way out; so I shifted the hook to a firm hold on the garden side, curled up the rope in a fork and left hanging from it a piece of string by which it could be pulled down. When I had dropped to the ground, I attached the end of the string to a twig above my head. I reckoned that it would never be noticed even in daylight.

Once in the garden, I undid my pack and changed into pyjamas, dressing-gown and bedroom slippers. I did not know how many people lived permanently in the manor, but it stood to reason that there must be occasional distinguished visitors staying the night. A figure glimpsed on his way to the bathroom, with his face partly obscured by towel and dressing-gown collar, was most unlikely to be questioned even if he could not be immediately identified.

The luck, to start with, was all with me. On so warm a night the french windows to the lawn were open, and two men were strolling on the paved and very weedy terrace - one of them in sweater and trousers, the other, like me, in dressing-gown and pyjamas. Though it was after midnight there were faint lights in several windows, as if the cloistered scientists were reading or writing in bed.

I could not be sure what eyes might be looking out of the darkened house, so I moved from cover to cover slowly and meditatively, with the air of one seeking new experiments with which to tickle up a bored universe. When the two strollers had their backs to me, I nipped in through the french windows.

The room turned out to be the dining hall. I escaped from its uncompromising bareness into a lounge or common room, from which a fine oak staircase rose into the darkness. The lights were all off except for a single naked bulb at the foot of the stairs. The Government had certainly put the interest of the taxpayer before the comfort of its servants.

There was no object in hesitation or reconnaissance, so I ran silently up two flights with dressing-gown flying. On the second floor, at the end of the landing, I saw a small, mean staircase which had to be that leading to the attics; but to reach it I had to pass an open door, flooding a strip of passage with light. I locked myself in a bathroom, peeping out at intervals, until the occupant of the room returned and went to bed.

Keeping my feet close against the wall to avoid the abominable creaking of the stairs, I went up to the attics. So far all had been so easy that I began to feel light-heartedly sure of success. I turned right and opened the third door to the right and found myself in just such a room as my father had described. Below the little dormer window was a parapet.

There were no bulbs in any of the lighting fixtures on the attic floor. My torch showed that the room was packed with junk - all the utterly valueless debris of a home which the old ladies had stowed away and no one, after death and auction, had ever bothered to clear out. The fireplace was there, but covered by a ruinous old dresser in front of which were piled fenders, fire-irons and decayed basket chairs from the garden.

I could only go slowly and hope that there was a heavy sleeper underneath. I managed to clear all the odd lots to the other side of the room in reasonable silence, but then came the dresser. The sole practical method of shifting that was to lift one end out and drop it, and then the other end out and drop it. The lifting and dropping, six inches at a time, made no noise, but the squeaking and scratching of the legs on the opposite side were intolerable.

I rushed the last of the job before anyone could come and investigate, and shoved my arm up the chimney. Nothing. Not even any soot. I looked up it and shone my torch up it. Still nothing. I was bitterly, desperately disappointed, but had, as it were, no time to be. Steps were climbing the stairs. I took refuge under the pile of basketwork.

Two men, one young and one younger, came straight to my attic and dropped something which they were carrying on the floor.

‘It’s not usually in this room,’ said a positive voice.

‘The furniture has been moved,’ answered the other in an excited half-whisper.

Well, it had. I did not see why he should make such a point of it.

‘Peter was up here looking for owls or rats or something,’ explained the younger.

‘There aren’t any. The War Office gassed ‘em. And since the Ministry took this place over, the food has been too bloody awful to tempt ‘em back. Now, we do not want to inhibit the phenomena, so we’ll leave this and clear out. It will record the temperature readings for the next two hours. Meanwhile we can sit in my room and note the times of any audible disturbances.’

That was the elder man, and, though an enthusiast, he sounded responsible. The other had the infallibility of youth.

‘Note my backside!’ he said. ‘If you can prove
(a)
that there are poltergeists, (
b
) that their action is accompanied by a drop in temperature, bang goes the second law of thermodynamics! ‘