Operation Pax (14 page)

But he saw that her eyes were anxious and questioning, and he sat down heavily. ‘I do not know that I shall keep the
Stellung
. It may be that I shall seek employment elsewhere.’

‘Elsewhere?’

‘With
them
.’

She sprang up. ‘Kurt! What can you mean?’

‘It may be the only way.’

‘But you know nothing of them.’

He laughed wearily. ‘That is the point, is it not?’

Tante Lise was silent for some moments. Taking the
salami
to the large cupboard in the eaves that served as her kitchen, she began to cut it into slices paper thin. Kolmak rose, cleared a table of its litter of music, laid out mats and dishes. His aunt reappeared.

‘But are you not dining with the
Professoren
?’

He put a hand to his forehead. ‘I forgot.’

‘You must go. It is advantageous to become more familiarly acquainted with the other
Professoren
. Moreover it is an intellectual stimulus such as I cannot afford you. Do not hurry home.’

Kolmak nodded obediently and went out to wash. It was something to have a bathroom. When he came back Tante Lise was standing before the empty fireplace – and so placidly posed that he suspected she had been weeping.

‘Kurt, there are always the police.’

‘No! Certainly not!’ And he made a violent gesture. ‘A hundred times no!’

‘This man who came today. He was not courteous merely. He was kindly – understanding. He would not take a brutal view…’

‘You do not understand. There is nothing personal in these things. It is all a machine. Your kindly and understanding man would do what some regulation commanded him.’

She sighed. ‘But if there is real danger for…’

‘We do not know. We cannot yet tell. Give me a little time.’

‘And today? You hoped much of it.’

‘I will tell you when I return. Perhaps I have taken too gloomy a view of its failure. Certainly there is one little thing that I have learnt. Yes, I will tell you what will surprise you!’

He was boasting – almost meaninglessly, as when he was a child. ‘And I must go. They will be expecting me.’

‘Of course they will.’ Tante Lise was practised in providing reassurance at this moment. ‘They looked forward – your colleagues – to your contributions to the discussions. They recognize your great authority in your own field. Remember to smoke a cigar. Whatever your ill success today, you have striven hard, I know; and have deserved it. Shall you be speaking to Mr Bultitude?’

Kolmak looked at his aunt in surprise. ‘To Bultitude? I suppose I may – though he is not always very approachable.’

‘Then tell him about Uncle Nikolaus.’

‘About Uncle Nikolaus! But why…’

‘It is something that I observed about Mr Bultitude when we spoke together at your Provost’s party. Remember I am a judge of men.’

Kolmak was uncomprehending. But again he nodded obediently. Then he turned to go.

‘Kurt – you are forgetting your robe.’

‘My gown,
Tantchen
.’

He smiled, kissed her on the brow, picked up the black MA gown from a chair and went out of the room, closing the door behind him. The aeolian harp was still murmuring. He shut the landing window, for the breeze was now chill from the advancing autumn night. The music died away. He peered out, and could just distinguish the tirelessly turning anemometer on the Observatory. But the optical illusion would not work in the dusk.

Kolmak tiptoed downstairs. A door opened below. One Miss Tinker or the other would be there – perhaps, Kolmak thought, she would be remembering her brother, a young don with a gown over his arm, going out to dine with Walter Pater in Brasenose long ago.

Routh did not know where his new pursuer had picked him up.

He had thought of Oxford as a collection of colleges and a row or two of shops, and as a place where everybody went about in a sort of uniform, so that one might be awkwardly conspicuous in ordinary clothes. And he had somewhere read that there were officials of the University who might stop you in the street and ask your business, and who had the power to turn you out of the place if they didn’t like you. He wished he had got to Reading, which was the sort of town he earned his living in and understood.

But the bus station reassured and comforted him. There was the sort of crowd in which no one could look at him twice. All the same, London would be better. He might get a long-distance bus from this very spot. He could get off as soon as it reached the network of the Metropolitan Railway – at Edgware, say, or Hendon. After that, and barring extreme ill luck, his safety would be absolute. There were half a dozen places where he could confidently go to earth.

First, though, he must get something to eat. He had been through more than any man could sustain on a couple of sausage rolls. If he had had something solid inside him he would never have let his fancy run away with him over those two nuns. Routh looked about him and felt that, except for his empty stomach, he was master of himself. He went over to an inquiry office and learnt that there was a coach to London in an hour. At the corner of the bus station he found a pub that was just right for him – unpretentious but putting on a square meal. He forced himself to eat slowly, and he drank no more than half a pint of bitter. Nothing had ever tasted so good, and as its warmth coursed through him his mind found release from its late tensions in pleasing fantasies. One of these was particularly satisfying; it presented a vision of Routh rubbing Squire’s face savagely and repeatedly in gravel. But presently Squire’s head turned into a lion’s, and Routh was constrained to believe that he had been dreaming. For a moment of panic he thought he might even have missed his bus. His watch, however, reassured him that it could have been no more than a five minutes’ nap. He paid his bill and went out.

He was still sleepy. The evening air had turned chill, so that he shivered. But it quite failed to wake him up. He looked around him, heavy-eyed. The broad expanse of Gloucester Green was now much less crowded, and his glance fell on a man standing near the middle of it and looked towards him. Routh had seen the man before; had seen him just as he got off the bus from Abingdon. There could be no mistake. The man was foreign-looking and noticeable. But of course it might be pure chance that he was still hanging about. Perhaps he too happened to be waiting for the London coach.

At least he could put the thing to test at once. He walked off and turned a corner. The façade of a cinema, islanded between two streets, was now before him. He rounded this, as if to stare idly at the posters with which the farther side of the building was plastered. And out of the corner of his eye he saw the foreign-looking man, now affecting to peer into the window of a confectioner’s shop across the street.

Routh turned, and this time walked away as rapidly as he could. When he had gone fifty yards he looked over his shoulder. The man was just behind him.

Routh knew very well what he ought to do. He was still on the fringe of the bus station, which showed no sign of becoming denuded of drivers, conductors, policemen and substantial numbers of the public. He ought to stand his ground, get on his bus when it came in, and travel on it, as he had planned, to London. There, still moving with a crowd, he would get himself a taxi and vanish. But Routh, as all this revolved itself in his head, walked on. He knew he was being a fool. He knew that he was allowing himself to be driven off his own best line of retreat. But he was powerless to stop and stand. And suddenly the truth of his own position came to him. He was on the run.

They had got him on the run. The battle, essentially, was a battle of nerves – and he was losing. His mind flashed back over the afternoon and he saw the shocking significance of the clean break he had managed to make in the prefab, and in the bus blindly boarded for an unknown destination. If they pick-up so swiftly after a check like that, if they could be on top of him like this the moment he set foot down in Oxford, his defeat seemed fated. They were invincible.

And once more the symptoms of fear began to operate upon Routh’s body. The last enemy, he knew, would be sheer fatalism; would be a disposition to turn flat round and walk limply into his enemies’ hands. Gloucester Green was now a nightmare to him, and he turned sharp out of it through the first means offering – a lane that narrowed before him and turned into a mere footpath between commercial buildings. From in front came a hum of traffic on what he guessed must be a principal street of the city. If he could dash out there and swing himself upon a moving bus…

He broke into a run, swerved between two women who were approaching each other with perambulators, and was on the street. There was only one bus. It was stationary. But the last of what had been a line of passengers were boarding it, and in a moment it would be moving. Routh glanced behind him. His pursuer was hard upon him, but seemed to be momentarily entangled with the prams. Routh ran for the bus and jumped on. As it moved off the foreign-looking man emerged and jumped for it too, but missed and fell. For a moment Routh had the happiness of looking down at him malignantly in the dust. Then the conductress pushed him off the platform and he tumbled into a seat just in inside. For the second time within a couple of hours he was trundled off for an unknown destination.

Routh closed his eyes, the better to take stock of his situation. That he had once more shaken off his relentless pursuers seemed too good to be true. Nevertheless it was a fact. The foreign-looking man could hardly have had a car in waiting; otherwise he would surely have taken up the chase in it instead of jumping for the bus. So at the worst Routh had five or ten minutes start. It was not much, but if he used it cleverly it would yet save him. And suddenly he knew what he would do. He would make no attempt to get back into the centre of Oxford. Rather he would keep a lookout for a suburban garage – the kind that is almost certain to have a car or two for hire. He would go in, take care to keep out of observation from the road, and ask for a car to take him straight out of Oxford. Hiring a car would be expensive, but he had the money and a bit over in his pocket, and it would be worth it. With his eyes still closed, Routh put his hand to his breast pocket to feel the wallet in which he kept all his cash.

He seemed to go dead cold all over. The wallet was gone. He must have left it behind him when he emerged so sleepily from the pub where he had fed. There was nothing left in the pocket except the thin fold of paper that was Formula Ten. He had not even the twopence that would buy him a ticket on this bus.

Routh opened his eyes again. Planted opposite to him was Squire.

The double shock was too great. Routh gave a strangled cry. The effect of this was unexpected. Somebody sitting next to him took his hand and shook it warmly. And from out of a great darkness he heard himself addressed in a high and quavering voice. ‘My dear Carrington-Crawley, how delightful of you to recognize me!’

The momentary blackout cleared, and Routh saw Squire leaning forward to listen, and at the same time gazing at him stonily. His hand was still being shaken – with surprising vigour in view of the fact that the person concerned had all the appearance of a centenarian. A second before, Routh had felt that he would never be capable of intelligent utterance again. But now words came to him from nowhere. ‘But of course I recognized you, sir! In fact I was keeping a look out for you.’

The centenarian gave a crow of delight. He had a spreading white beard, and his only other distinguishable feature was a pair of bright eyes twinkling behind steel-rimmed glasses. ‘Splendid – splendid, my dear Carrington-Crawley! Perhaps you even might have time to pay a call?’

Routh took a deep breath. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That is just what I was on my way to do.’

At this the centenarian crowed again, dived into a pocket, and produced a shilling which he flourished in the air before him. ‘My man,’ he cried to the conductress, ‘two fares, if you please, to Rawlinson Road.’

Routh took a sidelong glance at the centenarian, who was now counting his change. Presumably he was a professor, and in that case Carrington-Crawley had perhaps been one of his students. Anyway, that would be the best guess upon which to proceed. But Routh had the wit to realize that it was little use his calculating and planning the right things to say. He knew far too little about the ways of this place for that. He must simply proceed on impulse, and trust to the result’s being as happy as his first two utterances had been. And impulse now prompted him to take the lead. ‘By jove, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s a great many years since we met.’

The centenarian nodded vigorously. ‘My dear boy,’ he chirruped, ‘I think I am enjoying my years of retirement. I think I know how to use them – to use them, I say, my dear boy – to use them!’

‘I’m quite certain that you do.’

‘But I look back on my final few years of teaching with particular pleasure, particular pleasure, particular pleasure. I look back on them with particular pleasure, I say.’

Routh wondered how much the old man was really off his rocker. His voice was shrill and commanding, so that several people turned round to glance at him. But none of them appeared to think him anything out of the way. Even the conductress, on being addressed as ‘my man’, had not shown any surprise. Perhaps he was a well-known character about the place. Or perhaps it was just that his sort were the regular thing here.

‘And your own year, now – your own year, your own year. Some remarkable men – remarkable men, I say. Todhunter, for example. A most distinguished career – yes, a most distinguished career.’

‘Ah,’ said Routh, ‘Todhunter – we all expected it of him.’

‘Expected it, you say – expected it, expected it?’ And the repetitive old person turned sideways upon Routh and stared so hard into his face that it appeared inevitable that all must be lost. ‘Expected it?’ The old person’s voice expressed extreme indignation. ‘Expected it of that shocking little drunk?’