Red Anger (8 page)

I decided that I had better obey, even if it blackened my character as a decent, docile refugee. Assuming Marghiloman did turn out to be a secret police agent after all, I could always plead
that I escaped from him because I thought he was a Romanian spy out to kidnap or compromise me. So I took a bus to Paddington and found that in an hour there would be a fast train stopping at
Swindon. This tempted me. Swindon was only twelve miles from my old home.

I had always been inhibited from any return—by shame, I think. My conscious mind had accepted Sokes and Caulby, the sub-conscious never. But the life of Cleder’s Priory had cleansed
me. I was destitute and an impostor, yet now I was utterly sure where I belonged. So why not have a look at my old home? So long as I did not stop and talk to anyone who had known my parents,
nobody was likely to recognise the boy of twelve in a man of twenty-three whose hair had grown much darker, and complexion—Caulby after Cairo—an unhealthy yellow. There was no hurry to
reach Molesworthy and I looked forward to covering much of the journey on foot.

It was nearly midnight when I got off at Swindon and I reckoned that it would be difficult to find a room for the night—especially since I had no baggage and did not look
prosperous—so I might as well walk by well-remembered country roads till dawn and arrive at my home with the sun, if there was any. I sometimes think a small boy sees summer sunrise more
often than others. I used to get out of bed when the dawn chorus of birds woke me and stand at the east window of my room feeling a content and sometimes a conscious joy at the miracle of another
day. But then a window framed my whole world; now I myself was the outer world and that window only a point in time and space.

I had just started to climb the long, straight road on to the Marlborough Downs when I saw the blue light of a police car coming down the hill towards me. It must have been out to a remote farm
on some scare of swine fever or anthrax, for all the roads come to a reverent standstill when they pass out of the Saxon lowland into the waving grass which washes the standing stones of our first
ancestors and covers the long barrows of the dead.

I was self-conscious about my appearance—shabby town suit, shoes too cheap for walking—so I lay down in tumbled ground where deer-horn picks had once created a field. The car passed
me and pulled up lower down the slope. The night was still, so I could hear why the police had stopped. They were asking someone apparently walking to nowhere like myself:

‘Anything wrong, sir?’

I could not hear his reply, but it satisfied them that his car had not broken down and that he was not in need of help. Evidently he did not belong on a lonely country road, for the police would
not have stopped for a tramp or any obviously agricultural bloke strolling home after slap-and-tickle with his girl or a last inspection to see that some newly bought fatstock were settling down.
He must be out of place as I was.

I stayed in cover to take a look at him, more with the idea of having a companion on my walk than anything else. When he came abreast of me, stepping out smartly and silently, I saw even by
starlight what was wrong. He gave an impression of having abandoned his car somewhere or just jumped off a train. And so, by God, he had! I had paid no particular attention to the other passengers
who had left the train at Swindon and passed the ticket collector in front of me, but there had been only one man among several women, wearing a dark suit and a dark, unbuttoned raincoat. Build
right. Raincoat right. He was undoubtedly the same man.

It did not make sense. How the hell could anyone guess that Adrian Gurney, alias Ionel Petrescu, was going to look at his old home? The only solution was that Marghiloman had telephoned his
headquarters as soon as he lost me. Watch his home, he would say, and try Paddington Station in case he’s off to warn Mrs. Hilliard of—well, whatever she ought to be warned about. But
how does the Paddington man know me? Answer disconcerting. I must have been pointed out to him some time and he must have been close behind me when I bought a ticket to Swindon.

He could have stayed right on my heels if I had taken the expected train to Totnes and even sat next to me on the bus next morning. But by going to Swindon and plunging straight into my
mysterious homeland I had completely sunk him. I wondered where the devil he thought I was aiming for in the dark and why—and what he would report back when his wanderings took him to a
telephone. He had hopelessly lost me now, for there were cross lanes ahead and one of them was the prehistoric Ridge Way which he would never recognise as a road at all.

When the sun rose I looked down again on my village and the square, stone house to the west of it where I was born. The walled garden had gone and in its place was a range of batteries for
laying hens. The forest of hawthorn above the upper ley, into which I would vanish when deservedly unpopular at home, had been grubbed up and was now good grass with bullocks on it of a cross-breed
I did not know. The barns were of concrete, white-roofed, instead of a mess of ancient timber where the calves could snuggle down between warm walls of baled straw, and I with them. That farmer
must have been making twice as much as my father, even allowing for inflation.

I did not go down for a closer look. I was not in the least depressed by the changes, which represented the style in which I should have farmed myself with perhaps a bit more tolerance for old
ways; but I saw little hope of such peace for Ionel Petrescu, and it was that thought which made me turn away.

I slept through the morning sheltered from the wind by the kindly grave of some neolithic ancestor, and then struck south enjoying every moment of the walk and free to speak normal English since
I had no pretence to keep up. I covered the twenty odd miles to Westbury, too exhilarated to feel more than healthy tiredness, and got on a train to Tiverton—a part of Devon where no one
could conceivably expect me. On arrival I had to take stock of myself. I needed new shoes, toilet necessaries, a knapsack and some sort of cheap windbreaker instead of coat and tie. When I had
bought them and paid for a night’s lodging, there was little left of Marghiloman’s fifty pounds.

Next day there was a steady drizzle from the Atlantic. I started off stiff, with a blister on my heel and feeling that I had been far too hasty in bolting from London. I did not want to sponge
on Mrs. Hilliard and was depressed at the thought of my future when she had given me her advice and I had sneaked out by the back door. Perhaps I could get a job on a remote farm and drop the
identity of Ionel Petrescu, pretending that I had just come out of prison. No farmer would mind that so long as I proved myself a willing worker.

Speculations on the crime I might have committed cheered me up, and soon afterwards a kindly truck driver picked me up out of the rain and gave me a lift. He was bound for Plymouth and dropped
me off on the way with only some ten miles to walk to Molesworthy. Eventually I settled down on a dry bank from which I could see the chimneys of Cleder’s Priory and nothing at all of the
village.

I had long hours of the evening to wait there. Mrs. Hilliard’s instructions began to seem unnecessarily dramatic. All this stuff about making my way to the Huntsman’s cottage after
dark sounded as if coverts and parkland were full of spies and field-glasses. When I had been playing the Portuguese a week earlier she never bothered about where I went or who saw me. However, I
supposed I had better behave as if the man in the raincoat were waiting for me in Molesworthy.

John Penpole’s cottage was somewhere in the woodland between me and the house; exactly where I did not know. I had been there once by a metalled track from the Priory, but never from this
side. In the dusk I saw a girl on a horse cantering easily through tall bracken which proved that she must be on a path. She rode as far as a knoll further along the ridge where I was, searched for
something that was not there and with very obvious annoyance cantered back again, disappearing into the wood.

In the last of the light I went up to the point where the girl had halted and found the path without difficulty. The narrow strip of turf between tall bracken could not be missed even in the
dark. It led me into the wood and soon I saw ahead of me the lit curtains of John’s fairy-tale cottage.

As soon as I entered the clearing, his hunt terriers started to yap. John came to the door, beckoning me in with a cordial nod. Mrs. Hilliard and Mrs. Penpole were sitting in the living room. A
jug of cider with the remains of a large pollock and a raspberry pie suggested that she had had supper there. When I addressed her respectfully in my broken English, she said:

‘We’re all friends here, Willie. Wiltshire or plain English as you like, but not that bloody awful noise.’

John’s red face split with a grin. Unless one knew him well the sudden gash joining together his set of horseman’s wrinkles on both sides of the mouth was hard to interpret. It could
be a tightening of thin lips or a genial smile.

‘We’ll leave you alone with him, Master,’ he said.

‘No, you won’t. You stay here and Willie and I will use the kitchen. If we hear anyone come to the front door, we‘ll slip out at the back. I’ll cut him a sandwich or two
if you don’t mind, Amy, and we’ll take the cider.’

When we were settled on hard chairs with the kitchen table between us, I asked her if she had been waiting for me.

‘I was so. And I sent my daughter up to the top of the hill to look for a leash I hadn’t left there. It occurred to me a bit late that if you had avoided Molesworthy you could be
stumbling around half the night before you found the private path. Now, what sort of trouble do you think you’re in, Willie?’

I told her all that happened after I delivered her letter and of the attempt to keep track of my movements.

‘So your name is not Prefacoot or whatever, but Petrescu—which doesn’t make things any easier when I’ve been taking it all along that you were born and bred in this
country.’

‘I said Marghiloman thought my name was Petrescu, Mrs. Hilliard.’

‘And you thought he wasn’t an agent of MI5?’

‘I don’t really know what that is. Just security police?’

‘It sits in an office swapping files about suspects and working out the wrong line for hounds to follow. The hounds are called Special Branch and are not pleased when people like you talk
of security police. We’ve had the whole pack of ’em here searching the house from top to bottom. Knew all about little Eudora’s politics when she was twenty. There are two sets of
jerks, Willie, who never forget the Spanish Civil War—left-wing socialists and right-wing dicks. They gave my married couple polite hell which is why they left and I wasn’t that sorry.
Dragged up more dirt about my crazy daughter than I knew myself. Had a go at John and Amy. Tapped all the telephones—or so the village postmistress said, though I guess she’d never
notice it if they did. I’d had about enough of it when you blew in.’

I said I hoped that I had not started up her troubles all over again.

‘What do you think the man in the raincoat was up to?’

‘Ordered to find out what I was doing in Swindon and stuck to the trail.’

‘We’ll hope that’s all. What
were
you doing in Swindon?’

‘Well, you warned me not to go through Molesworthy, so I thought I’d make a job of it and not risk travelling down to Devon. I got off at Swindon because the train was going to
Bristol.’

‘O.K. But when you had dished this guy in the raincoat why did you carry on over the Marlborough Downs?’

‘It seemed easier than turning back.’

‘Did you live near Swindon in happier days?’ she asked acutely.

‘It’s got all Wiltshire to the south, Mrs. Hilliard.’

‘See here, Willie—why should I shop you when you can shop me? What have you done and why did you do it?’

She was irresistible, and I gave her my whole life story. When I had finished, she said:

‘Adrian—no, we’ll keep it Willie—you thought the Russian trawler fleet was out just to catch fish?’

‘Yes, of course.’

My voice must have carried conviction, for it was what I did think. My naïveté was not all that astonishing. Brought up in a communist country, I had been brain-washed by steady
propaganda that Russian intentions were always peaceful and always misunderstood. None of us wholly believed it, but there was no reason to suspect that very necessary fishing could be cover for
active espionage. And provincial Caulby had not enlightened me. Ten years ago the trawler fleets and their objectives were not so widely publicised as now.

‘God Almighty, boy, you must have set everyone a puzzle! It’s you they are after. I don’t see how Alwyn’s letter comes in, but it’s you.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘That’s what I’m going to ask a friend of mine—the same I went to see the day after your arrival when you saw me all dressed up for dinner. He won’t split on you
and nor will I.’

The hunt terriers started to yap. John immediately came through the kitchen and out by the back door into darkness. He returned almost at once to say that it was only Miss Tessa.

‘Thank you, John. You and I will be going out later.’

‘Very good, Master. Tide’s dead low about two.’

We followed him back to the living room and were all sitting there innocently when Tessa Hilliard came in.

‘Not another of them!’ she exclaimed, looking at me with utter contempt.

‘No, dear, that’s the Portuguese who was here.’

‘Why has he come back?’

‘Just to return some money that John lent him. You know how it is. Nobody ever trusts the post in foreign countries.’

‘Mrs. ’Illiard, I go now,’ I said, taking my cue. ‘I ’ave not notice zer time.’

‘Nonsense, boy! Stay the night with the Penpoles and the baker will give you a lift to the main road in the morning. What is it, Tessa?’

I gathered that she had arrived from London earlier in the day and after her ride had spent the evening with friends in the village, dropping in to the Crown and Thistle. She was a tall, slim
girl with a calmly determined air which did not quite fit her bitten nails and the angry impatience which I had noticed when she thought she was alone. Her face was triangular and resembled her
mother’s, opening up like a tulip from delicate chin to a broad, high brow. I found her intensely attractive, and wondered if the left-wing opinions which Marghiloman had mentioned were
sufficiently far-out to give a shabby Portuguese half a chance.