Red Anger (10 page)

‘That brings us to what you really want to know. First of all a fake job was found for you and you were left quite free to live as you liked. They wanted to see who your contacts were, who
tried to contact you and if you would be any use as an agent. How long were you on your own?’

‘About five weeks.’

‘Well, that must have been enough to convince them that your life was exceptionally dull and that you were of no interest to anyone. But patience pays off. Other people were watching them
and you and waiting till they were sure you had no protection. When the lion has finished his meal, the jackals come around.’

‘Mrs. Hilliard thought I must have been a puzzle.’

‘Considering that
Nadezhda Krupskaya
is stuffed so full of aerials and electronics that she must blow out her fish through the bottom as soon as the trawl starts spilling them out
over the top, it’s not surprising. So we will try to follow Russian reasoning when they learn of your well-publicised landing. One. Nobody was missing from that or any other ship; therefore
this Ionel Petrescu was a British agent who somehow managed to hide on board till there was a chance of getting home with his information. Two. But their security makes this so unlikely that it can
be dismissed; therefore you were probably slung out of, say, a midget submarine and swam ashore. Three. But if that is so, why was your arrival publicised? Answer—a very weak one—to
persuade them that we know a lot more about their trawlers than we really do.’

He turned to the subject of Marghiloman, still speaking as if he was well accustomed to the concise summary of reports.

‘Marghiloman has found out, a, that apparently you are a genuine Romanian and not under orders to pretend to be one; b, that since you gave a false name there is something fishy about you
although your life in London has been an open book—perhaps too open; c, that you were prepared to do a very questionable job for another Romanian, so that you are or soon can be made wide
open to blackmail, and you will then confess the truth about yourself or else.’

‘But why tail me?’

‘I have several answers to that, Mr. Gurney, none of them sure. But I am glad to see you take care in lonely places.’

‘You think I may be in danger?’

‘Of kidnapping, very possibly. You are a refugee, known to be without protection and without family or intimate friends. Who is going to know if you disappear?’

That was unquestionably true. After all, I was counting on it myself that I could disappear. I said that he seemed to be very familiar with the ways of MI5 and asked him if he had ever known
Alwyn Rory.

‘Quite well.’

‘Round here no one can believe he was guilty. What do you think?’

‘He was guilty of folly, over-confidence and perhaps cowardice. But he was not a traitor.’

‘If only he had not defected one could believe it. I’d like to believe it.’

‘He did not defect.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I am Rory. The letter you brought to Eudora was a rather crude attempt to find out whether she believed I had escaped to Russia.’

I did not know what I ought to say. Absurdly the ‘ought’ seemed more important than anything I wanted to say. All the inexplicable behaviour of Mrs. Hilliard and the Penpoles,
prepared to defend their fugitive even to the extent of imprisoning a suspicious stranger till he talked, at once fell into place. It was hard to make a complete about-turn and accept all the blast
of newspaper indignation as mistaken. On the other hand, the only clear realities among all these drifting phantoms of cold war at sea were my trust in Eudora Hilliard, the waving bracken which was
so kindly a shelter both to this fugitive and myself, and his personality with its incisive intelligence and direct, well-calculated, take-it-or-leave-it attack. So I gave in to the shock and
simply carried on from his last remark.

‘But the Russians must know you are not in Moscow,’ I said.

‘Mr. Gurney, I have spent fifteen years trying to follow Russian reasoning, and I haven’t succeeded yet.’

‘Hadn’t you better call me Willie? Your aunt does.’

Consciously I only meant that if we were ever in the presence of a third party I’d like the name of Gurney to be avoided. But how much more the simple remark implied: that I had no
intention of giving him away and that there might even be some mutual activity.

‘You’re quite right. I will get used to Willie.’

‘Why on earth did you let people think you were in Moscow? And how did you do it?’

‘Never mind the how! Why? Well, for two reasons. One was to throw off the hunt until I had a chance of getting clear away to some country where I could not be extradited. I was almost
certain to be convicted and even if I got off, my career was over and my name would stink. The other reason was to find out who shopped me before I left.’

I asked him where he had been hiding. He would not tell me in case I ever found myself in a position where I might be forced to give it away.

‘But I’ll put you in the picture and you can pass it on to Eudora,’ he said. ‘Last night, after I had heard your story from her, I was making my way back to my health
resort—let’s say it was at the edge of a river—when I spotted two men on the opposite bank. They were nowhere near the right place of our rendezvous, and I satisfied myself that
they were just waiting, not searching. But obviously I was in danger. So I lay up during the day and when we met I was taking the deadly risk of visiting the house to tell her I had to clear
out.’

‘I hope it had nothing to do with me.’

‘I think now that it may have done.’

‘But what a coincidence that we ran into each other!’

‘Not altogether. Both of us had to move tonight, me to the house, you from it. Both in danger, possibly from the same quarter. And only one path which avoids the village.’

I wished him luck, expecting that he would be gone when I returned, and trotted back over the knoll down to the Penpoles’ cottage. When I was near the edge of the wood I heard the terriers
yapping. Then they stopped. There was no light behind the curtains. Like the trees around it, the cottage was alive but impassive. I did not want to break the silence, so I threw several handfuls
of gravel at the Penpoles’ bedroom window.

‘What are you doing here? I thought you had left.’

It was Tessa, standing stiffly a few yards behind me, wide eyes luminous in the dark. That was why the terriers had stopped barking.

My mind was running over and over the conversation with Alwyn Rory and tuned to straight English. Startled and with no time to think, I carried on with it, forgetting that the last time I saw
her I was the Portuguese servant.

‘I left something behind,’ I said.

‘You’re always coming back for something. What is it this time?’

‘My watch.’

‘Where would it be? In your room? I’ll get it.’

‘John might have it in his pocket. Where are they?’

‘At the Cricket Club dance, and so is my mother. Why are you pretending to be a Portuguese? Does she know what you are?’

She sounded ready to burst, and I could understand Mrs. Hilliard’s distrust. Judging by her voice the girl seemed a reckless liability, likely to be indiscreet; yet I was impressed by her
air of determination and her confident challenge to the stranger.

I said that Mrs. Hilliard did know, feeling that if I said she didn’t young Tessa might go screaming for the police or dash into that Cricket Club dance with the news of her discovery. Her
reaction was quite unexpected.

‘My mother tells me nothing!’ she exclaimed, and I heard a sob in her voice. ‘It isn’t fair! What are you doing? What had you got to say to John? Is it about
Alwyn?’

‘Rory? No, I have nothing to do with him.’

‘Of course you have! What are you up to? I took the trouble to ask the baker if he had picked anyone up this morning. That’s why I am here while they’re all out—to see
and listen and to hell with you!’

‘It paid off, Tessa,’ said Alwyn’s voice from the darkness.

She was in his arms in an instant, stroking his hair and crying her eyes out with the sudden relief. At first I thought they were lovers and moved tactfully away into night. But it was not that
at all. They considered themselves brother and sister rather than cousins, with perhaps a bit of father and daughter in it since he was seventeen when she was born. He had been around for Tessa to
worship ever since her cradle.

He came over to me with his arm round her shoulders.

‘I’m sorry, Willie,’ he said. ‘As soon as I was alone—well, you may learn how it is. One begins to distrust logic and instinct. So I followed you.’

I told him there was no need to apologise, that I would have done the same.

‘And you’d be right, and don’t forget it! But at my age I should be sure.’

When he gave Tessa the message for Eudora, she exclaimed that she couldn’t possibly talk to her mother without reproaching her for her unfair silence and having a row. Alwyn told her that
was silly. Eudora was forced to trust the Penpoles but had no right to compromise anyone else. He added:

‘There would never be any reason for rows, Tessa, if you remembered that she is you, only thirty years older. Eudora—I can see her as a girl carted off by a policeman and slapping
his face. She doesn’t mistrust you. She mistrusts herself in you, and you can tell her so with my love. Did anybody see you come here?’

‘No. I left by the garden and through the stables.’

He put on a pair of owlish, thick-rimmed glasses and patted his wavy, greying hair further down on his forehead, asking if she would recognise him. She peered closely into his face studying it
from all angles, partly to be sure of his safety and partly, I think, because she wanted to store his features away in memory.

‘I probably would if I was looking for you,’ she said, ‘but never if I wasn’t. And you have gone a little grey. Where have you been?’

He refused to tell her, giving the same reason he had given to me, and then asked her if she knew what had happened to Rachel Iwyrne.
^*

‘I still see her sometimes. She gave up the flat at Whatcombe Street and is writing a book. Your beastly people gave her hell.’

‘They had to.’

‘When shall I see you again?’

‘When you get a letter from a foreign country with an invitation to come out and visit someone you’ve never heard of.’

‘You’re sure it wouldn’t be better to face it out?’

‘Tessa dear, I hardly know which would be worse—to be found guilty when all of you down here believe I couldn’t be, or to be acquitted when all England took it for granted I
was guilty. To disappear and be forgotten—that’s all I want.’

They said goodbye, and Alwyn and I started back together—not with any intention of remaining together but because the path was the only safe route and we had to be well away from the
district before dawn.

He knew his country inside out, having wandered all through it during his school holidays and hunted over it in more recent years whenever he could come down from London for a winter week-end.
He led me across the Dartmouth road and after that by deep Devon lanes, windless and lightless as mine shafts, which climbed to bridle paths where the southwest wind ruffled the grass and one knew
that in daylight would be somewhere a glimpse of the sea. When the sun came up we were resting in a combe not far from Harberton, clear of all those who might be curious about us, with a stream at
our feet and a crumbly, red bank which fitted our backs—a pair of unwashed hikers, just possibly father and son, with nothing to single us out from other innocents.

Casually, talking for himself as much as for me, he reviewed the unsatisfactory situation we had left behind and followed in imagination his cousin’s movements as she passed cautiously
back from the Penpoles’ cottage to the walled garden, miserably aware that she might have compromised his safety and shying at any vertical blackness which could be an observer creeping
through the trees on a parallel course. But it was not that which disturbed him. He seemed to anticipate some conflict of emotions when she met her mother.

Seeing that I was puzzled by Tessa’s character, he explained a little of her, love and amusement at her absurdities in his voice. She supported herself and earned her living as simply as
any middle-class working girl. It was Eudora’s conviction—inspired by the gin-swilling, privileged youngsters who infested the wealthy New England society in her youth—that Tessa
had to make her way in the world without a private income. The same, years earlier, had applied to him. Both of them accepted this non-intervention—more than accepted it. They couldn’t
imagine anything else. When Tessa married or if she needed capital to buy a business she would get it, but meanwhile she must be the co-equal of her contemporaries.

Far from resenting this discipline, she gloried in it. Nothing would have induced her to become a conventional county débutante exploiting hereditary wealth. She saw herself as a
white-collar worker with a right to pursue her ideal visions of what society ought to be and to ignore what it actually was. Her two-room flat was shared with a young zoologist, a year or two
older; that was an economy, she insisted, though in fact it was an airy gesture meant to prove that to civilised human beings sex was irrelevant. Naturally this infuriated her mother who at that
age—I suspect, though Alwyn didn’t say so—had shared bedrooms, sleeping bags and hillsides with the opposite sex, but not for a ridiculous principle.

After a sleep in the morning we set off on a long march which landed us near sunset on the slope below Powderham Castle overlooking the River Exe. Alwyn was exhausted. Wherever he had been, it
was somewhere with no opportunity for exercise. Myself, I thought we had now lost all interested parties, if there ever were any, and could safely treat ourselves to a bed and a good clean-up; but
Alwyn wanted to lie another night close to his own earth.

During the day I had come to know him as well as I had ever known any man. He may well have puzzled his colleagues at MI5, for he was no townsman and no sort of policeman. I think he may have
been brilliant in dealing with foreign agents and less sure with his own folk. He was too fond of them. As Amy Penpole had said, his only fault was to see the best in everyone—not perhaps a
desirable quality in a security officer.