For the Good of the State (7 page)

‘Why was I—?’ Now he was behaving like a
moujik
, damn it! ‘I was captivated by your beautiful house, actually—craning my neck like a tourist, when I should have been knocking on your door, Mrs Audley.’

‘I see.’ She waved his identification card briefly and very closely in front of her face, but then smiled at him, displaying fetching dimples. ‘It is rather beautiful, isn’t it? We’re terribly lucky to live in it, David and I.’

‘But I didn’t understand it.’ Tom knew when he was on a winner. With some women it would be their children—or their diamonds, or their dogs, or the expertise of their dress-maker. But with this one it was her home.

Nikolai Andrievich Panin, KGB and all the way back to the NKVD of the 1940s
, he thought:
that was as far back as he wanted to go. But, for this moment, Panin would have to wait!

‘The house—?’ She tried to take another look at his picture, but it didn’t seem to do her any good. ‘Or the barn?’ She abandoned his identification in favour of the barn. ‘David loves the barn—he says there’s nothing like it in the whole of Southern England.’ She favoured him with another loving smile. ‘You know about architecture, do you, Sir Thomas? But, of course, you must do, mustn’t you—in order not to understand it, I mean?’

He had to say something intelligent now, for God’s sake! ‘All that fine ashlar … better than the house itself!’ That was a fact, anyway: the porch in which Mrs Audley was standing had been added at a later date, but there was nothing unusual about that. But such stonework as he could see behind the wisteria which covered the house was far rougher than that of the barn. ‘But it’s that archway to the barn I really can’t understand, Mrs Audley.’

As he gestured towards the barn doors, one of them quivered, and then began to swing outwards towards them.

‘The archway—of course!’ Mrs Audley gave him another tick, quite oblivious of the opening doors. “That’s what all the experts notice first—the man from
Country Life
was very taken with it, last year—particularly with the defaced stones on each side, where the coats-of-arms have been cut away. He thought that might have been done not long after the battle of Bosworth Field, in 1485.‘ She blinked at him, with sudden embarrassment, as though aware just too late that she had insulted him by unnecessarily adding the date to the battle. ’Henry Tudor gave the Honour of Horley to the Wilmots, after the Stokeseys had been killed at Bosworth. And the Wilmots had always hated the Stokeseys—at least, since Barnet and Tewkesbury.‘ This time she didn’t supply the date, but offered him the names of another two battles from the Wars of the Roses with another blink, as though they were two recent parliamentary by-elections.

‘Is that so?’ Tom was torn between the barn doors, which were now just outside his range of vision, and the dates of Barnet and Tewkesbury, in a civil war which had never particularly interested him, because it had not been distinguished by any good sieges. But it wouldn’t do to disappoint her—

Damn
! he couldn’t resist those barn doors any more (which had to be not later than mid-fifteenth century now, and were even more inexplicable)—

The same small boy was poking his head out of the gap between the heavy doors, only now he could see that little face more clearly: enormous horn-rimmed spectacles, metal-braced teeth, and head encased in its baseball cap, which bore the legend ‘
Forget—Hell
’, superimposed on the red-white-and-blue starred flag of the Confederate States of America; and, as he observed the tiny apparition, it succeeded in squeezing itself through the gap only to trip on its own feet, to sprawl in the gravel.

Barnet
… and bloody
Tewkesbury —
?

‘What is it, darling?’ Mrs Audley addressed her son, at her feet, as he searched blindly for his spectacles, which had jumped off his little nose, to fall just short of Tom’s feet.

‘Here—’ Tom bent to retrieve the spectacles, but failed to complete his sentence as he observed the long blonde plait which had fallen out of the baseball cap. Instead, he thought
Christ! I’m slipping! I can’t tell the little girls from the little boys now
!

‘Thank you.’ Little Miss Audley pushed her spectacles back on to her face quickly, and gave Tom half-a-second’s half-blind acknowledgement before offering her mother another pair of spectacles, which she had been carrying in her hand. ‘Your glasses, Mummy.’

‘What, darling?’ Mrs Audley gazed vaguely at her daughter for another half-second, and then accepted what was being offered to her. ‘Oh—thank you, Cathy dear!’

Miss Audley turned back to Tom. ‘Thank you.’

‘Not at all.’ Tom searched for something to say. She might be anything from eleven to fourteen, but now that they were both wearing spectacles each was a dead ringer for the other, straight up-and-down and flat as a board, and blonde, yet wholly feminine with it:
how could he have failed to see
! ‘Miss Audley—?’

‘My daughter, Sir Thomas,’ answered Mrs Audley. ‘Cathy.’ She nodded at the child. ‘Sir Thomas Arkenshaw, Cathy.’

Cathy Audley gave Tom a fearsomely precocious doubting frown, as baffled as any of her elders and betters, as she offered him her hand.

Smart girl
, thought Tom. ‘Miss Audley.’ But to hell with her. ‘Your husband is expecting me, Mrs Audley, I believe?’

After having re-examined his identification through her thick-lensed spectacles, Mrs Audley looked at him properly at last. ‘Yes, Sir Thomas … Cathy, go and tell your father that Sir Thomas has arrived.’

‘Yes, Mother.’ Cathy focused properly on him again also, but again registered doubt. ‘Sir Thomas … Ark-Arken-?’ She began to retreat backwards towards the gap in the barn doors. ‘Arken-what?’

‘
Shaw
,’ completed Tom. ‘Like in “certain”.’

She grinned at him as she slid into the gap. ‘Or “George Bernard”? Or “Tripoli”?’

Tom frowned.
Tripoli—
! But by then she had vanished again.

‘I’m sorry, Sir Thomas,’ said Mrs Audley, shaking her head. ‘Sometimes she’s grown up. But sometimes she says things no one but her father understands—I’m sorry!’

‘Don’t be.’
Tripoli
? wondered Tom. ‘She’s delightful, Mrs Audley—like your house.’
Tripoli
? he thought again. Exactly like the house! ‘But what did she mean by “Tripoli”?’

She shook her head again. ‘Heaven only knows! I certainly don’t!’ She laughed, half-regretfully, half-proudly. ‘But please—it’s “Faith”, not “Mrs Audley”, Sir Thomas.’ She gestured towards the porch. ‘Do come inside—David will be with us directly.’

‘Then it’s “Tom”.’ The thought of Audley—not
David
, and a world away from
Father—
dragged Tom back to harsh reality. And not
Tripoli
either—Tripoli was a damnably nasty Libyan memory: he had been scared stiff that one time he’d been in Tripoli, sailing under false colours on a dangerous coast—once in Tripoli was enough, and he was glad that he could never go back there. ‘Please lead the way … Faith.’

He followed her into what seemed for a moment like cool darkness, smelling of furniture polish and the old-house-damp which so often rose from deep cellars beneath. Then he was at the foot of an oak staircase, looking up towards a window ablaze with stained-glass sunlight.

And
Panin
, he thought—
Nikolai Andrievich Panin—
who was another world away from David Audley here and these two females-of-the-species, but also in the same world that he and Audley both inhabited outside it.

‘Tom—’ Faith Audley accepted the diminutive as of right, having been quite properly unimpressed with ‘Sir Thomas’ even before she’d had a clear view of him ’—we have to go through the kitchen because we’ve lost the key to the French windows in the dining room. David says he hung it up, for the winter … but heaven only knows what he actually did with it … It’ll turn up one day, of course … He’s down in the orchard making one of his bonfires—making a bonfire is one of the two jobs he’s good at … the other is making compost heaps—‘ She threw her domestic prattle over her shoulder as she led him down a short passage towards a stone-arched doorway ’—bonfires and compost heaps are major scientific operations, according to him, and I’m not allowed to touch either of them—‘ Beyond the door lay a huge kitchen, dominated by an equally huge table, scrubbed pale with time and elbow-grease ’—which is ludicrous really, because I’m the scientist in the family, and David doesn’t really know why one wire must go on one terminal—‘

She was already opening another door while Tom was still taking in the kitchen’s weird mixture of ancient-and-modern, between its smoke-darkened beams and stone-flagged floor, and the gleaming plastic gadgetry of electric cooker and microwave and dish-washer, via a middle-aged solid fuel Aga stove, with a museum-array of copper saucepans and a blackened fireplace furnished with an iron turning-spit which could have roasted a whole pig to celebrate the news of any battle of the Wars of the Roses, if this household had been on its winning side.

‘Tom—?’ Faith Audley’s voice issued from the half-light of another passage.

‘Coming!’
Damn the Wars of the Roses
! Tom shook his head.

Another short corridor, with a laundry room on one side and a larder on the other, and other doors—for the extremes of boiler and freezer, maybe—?

Tom blinked as the light streaming through the last door hit him, and stepped out of the house in Faith Audley’s wake, following her under another stone archway which had never started its life in a kitchen garden wall, its crudely defaced heraldic shields reminding him of the bigger arch above the barn doors.

Then the full sun hit him as he emerged from the archway into a little courtyard at the back of the house, with a stone well-head in the centre of it and a fine view of the high downland away across a coarse winter lawn in the foreground.

But no sign of Audley—? He frowned towards the man’s wife.

‘This is the first good day we’ve had, when it hasn’t rained much—’ She wasn’t looking at him, but at the grass ‘—but does he prune the roses?
Oh no!
’ She turned to him at last, sniffing the air as she did so. ‘
He
has to make a
bonfire
…
and if the wind stays in this direction …
we
shall get the benefit of it—’ She swung round to look at the house ‘—in fact, I’d better go and close all the windows before it’s too late—excuse me, Sir Thomas—
Tom
…
But I’ll put the kettle on for a cup of tea while I’m about it. David will be here directly.’ She indicated the nearest of a group of dirt-stained white ironwork chairs. ‘He knows I was bringing you here.’

Tom wondered what Research and Development had passed on to Audley about him, in preparation for this meeting. Whatever it was, it ought to be about him, not Panin, because Jaggard had indicated that the Russian had arrived unobtrusively, by agreement with the FCO. But R & D had ways of knowing things, Harvey had warned; and it would certainly know all about one Thomas Arkenshaw, Harvey had added nastily: ‘
He probably knows more about you than we know — and maybe more than you’ll find comfortable, old boy!
’

So what
? thought Tom. considering the grimy seat of the chair. It looked as though it hadn’t been sat on since last summer, and although he might have parked his castle-exploring denims of this morning on it he wasn’t about to mess up the good suit he had packed for tonight’s dinner-with-Willy that would never take place. Instead, he sauntered across the yard—it was more a terrace than a yard, separated from the lawn above it by a low stone wall—until he reached the well, which was completely equipped with a rusty winder and an antique wooden bucket on a chain. Idly, he picked up a small piece of flaked stone from the rim and dropped it in.

One, two—plop!

‘Hullo, there! Arkenshaw, I presume?’

Tom controlled his involuntary start of guilt at being caught throwing something into another man’s well: there were parts of the world where that rated a bullet in the back. Also, he had somehow expected Audley to come from the direction of the lawn, rather than from behind him.

A slow innocent turn was required, anyway.

‘Good afternoon, Dr Audley.’ “
Big, ugly old devil
‘, Harvey had said off-handedly, and all those adjectives filled David Audley’s bill exactly: in his gardening clothes, which had not seen better days for many years, he resembled nothing so much as an ageing Irish navvy who had done his share of fighting for pounds and pints on the old fairground circuit of his native land.
So that makes two of us
, thought Tom,
who don’t look like themselves
! ’Im sorry to descend on you like this.‘ That was what Jaggard had said to him; only this time it was no lie. ’But you’ve had a phone-call, I gather.‘

‘I have.’ Audley advanced across the terrace in his enormous navvy’s gumboots, which looked as though they had steel toe-caps, until he was able to look down on Tom from close quarters from his six-foot four. ‘But I won’t shake your hand.’

‘No?’ What confused Tom was that the big man’s intense scrutiny of him was nevertheless not in the least hostile—if anything his expression was as innocently friendly as his battered features allowed. ‘Well, you don’t have to—’ He stopped as Audley’s hands came up, palms upwards.

‘I’ve been making a bonfire.’ Audley presented two massive, dirt-encrusted paws. ‘So I’m not really fit for decent company—my wife won’t even let me in her kitchen. She says I’m like “Pig-pen” in
Peanuts
.’ He grinned a huge grin. ‘Charlie Brown—? She’s a Charlie Brown addict, is my wife.’ He chuckled. ‘I see myself rather as Schroeder, the intellectual one—with her as Lucy, because she packs a mean right hook. But she sees me as “Pig-pen”—we never see ourselves as others see us, do we?’

Tom struggled against an enveloping sense of unreality. The idea of the willowy, blue-blooded Mrs Audley, pale and fragile, packing any sort of punch … the idea of her in those huge hands, bear-hugged … was incongruous to the point of disbelief. And there was also the unlikely offspring of this unlikely union, and
Tripoli
too, in the back of his mind.