Watcher in the Shadows (14 page)

But rest is in the mind. There was no feeling it. And this was the more exasperating because I knew that for the first time in twenty years I had all the ingredients of happiness. There was a new, dear warmth between Georgina and myself. There was the training of Nur Jehan. There was my delight in the child, Benita — a desolate delight, for I had to emphasize to myself that she was, compared to a man of forty-three, a child. And all this ruined because I could not move without a degrading .22 pistol in my pocket!

Benita had little interest in horses. She could ride, of course. The local pony club had seen to that before she was twelve — leaving her at the same time with a lasting dislike of the revivalist religion of the horse and its female pastors. Aunt Georgina, with her matter-of-fact nineteenth-century attitude, had been an exception. Georgina shrugged her shoulders at enthusiasm and simply laid down the law that a person of sense should know exactly what was going on in his or her stables just as the modern car driver ought to (but doesn’t) know enough to give precise orders to his garage.

So in the country Benita walked. In London, I gathered, never. I could not avoid these casual strolls without inexplicable surliness, and I did not want to. But she very soon spotted my preference for the open, windswept tops of the Cots wolds.

She put down my manner to a curious life and a dangerous war. Georgina had told her that much. Whether she thought I needed an exorcist or a psychiatrist I was not sure, and I don’t think she was.

One afternoon she said to me quietly:

“There is nothing behind you, Charles.”

I had looked back twice when passing along the bottom of a dry valley. The steep sides were clothed with patches of gorse, intersected by runways of silent turf. It was easy to come down from the top in short rushes quite unseen, until the range had closed to ten yards and that intent, dark face was smiling at my back. What went on ahead of me I did not care. The birds would give me warning.

I apologized for my restlessness.

“But you look as if you really expected something,” she said.

“A naturalist always does. The watcher begins to resemble the watched.”

“Are animals afraid all the time?”

I answered that I did not think so — not in our sense of the word anyway — but that fear was never far from the surface, was acceptable and might even be enjoyable. Everything which preserves must in theory be enjoyable: mating, the satisfaction of hunger and the feeding of the young. A hare, for example, obviously triumphs in a narrow escape; you can see self-confidence in the easy gallop. Extreme danger is pleasurable to a few soldiers — even civilized, sensitive soldiers. And aren’t there young idiots in America who drive cars at each other down the center of the road to see who will get out of the way first?

“All the time, all around us,” I said, “Death is making his reconnaissance.”

“But it’s life which you are afraid of,” Benita replied.

“Because I look behind me?” I laughed.

She accepted that as just an unconscious gesture. I behaved as if I were haunted, she said, only because I was continually looking back into my life instead of forward. There was enough truth in the accusation for me to accept it without awkwardness.

But God knew the haunting was real enough! I had always the impression that I was being watched, though I now believe that at the moment I was not. Physically, that is. Death was at his headquarters, collecting the intelligence reports.

Only Benita saw anything wrong with me; her father did not. There was no reason why he should. The link between us —all the link I was admitting — was Nur Jehan. Since the horse fought Georgina and Benita, and Gillon when on his back was too indulgent, only I could begin to school him.

It was never fair to call the vicar impractical. What he lacked was capital, not common sense. He was a most lovable man, unaffected, fully able to hold the respect of his parishioners outside the church and their attention within it. His only worry —a severe worry —was Chipping Marton vicarage, which he could not even keep in proper repair. He was rightly determined that at least the garden should bring in an income to pay for the house.

“My dear Dennim,” he said to me once, “you are a man of the world. You would probably agree that I should be fully justified in turning the vicarage into a guesthouse or in using my leisure, such as it is, to practice some harmless form of commerce or home industry.”

I did not agree —and since I knew that he didn’t either, I said so.

“The limit of the permissible,” he went on. “Yes, one soon arrives at it. Two hundred years ago the Vicar of Chipping Marton worked the land and fed his family. We clergy of today have not the time and probably not the skill. Yet to produce, to make grow, to create — that much I feel is allowable to a servant of the Creator. I have given my spare time to specialties with some success. You will find
Gloxinia Rev. Matthew Gillon
in most nurserymen’s catalogues, though I doubt if I made fifty pounds out of it. I grew tomatoes and strawberries for seed. Admiral Cunobel was unconvinced, but I was able materially to assist Benita in London until it appeared that the varieties which had been recommended to me were very subject to disease. I feel that Nur Jehan is in that category of innocent creation which I permit myself. My conscience insists that to keep so beautiful an animal at stud is a valuable service to the community.”

The real trouble was that Gillon never saw or couldn’t afford to see that capital was essential to consolidate the results of his industry. But, granted a run of luck, it might not have been. The admiral, though ribald, had never discouraged his parson until the arrival of Nur Jehan. At least strawberries and tomatoes could not career down the village street looking for affection, or roll luxuriously in an angry neighbor’s uncut hay.

Matthew Gillon was unnecessarily grateful and always very conscious that I might be sacrificing my interests to his affairs. He made a point of collecting nature notes from his parishioners in case they might be of use to me, and he pressed his daughter, who was very properly inarticulate about everything she really valued, to show me the secret places of her childhood.

Benita, however, rather resented my profession, since she ascribed to it the sudden fits of distraction which interrupted conversation. In any case she wasn’t interested in causes, only in effects. If you can catch with your pencil the essential mechanics of a bird’s wing and the subtle change of shading which marks on an open down the transition from one grass to another, mere words are dull and the microscope irrelevant.

She did sometimes condescend to pass on facts in the sort of voice which you would expect from a nymph surprised by a zoologist in dark glasses. One afternoon when her father and I were mucking out the stable and she was soaping leather, she remarked:

“There are squirrels in the Wen Acre Plantation if you want to watch them.”

The plantation was of mixed conifers and beech at the head of the dry valley where Benita and I had walked — an early and most successful experiment of the Forestry Commission which belonged to its countryside as honestly as any other Cotswold wood. It deserved to lose its artificial name and be called the Wen Acre Hanger.

“How blind we are!” Gillon exclaimed. “I have driven along that road once a week for eight years.”

I suggested that he was not likely to see squirrels from a car when passing along the upper end of the plantation.

“And anyway, Daddy,” Benita added, “they weren’t there last summer.”

“Weren’t they indeed? Well, the little imps have found the perfect home. Bless me, I haven’t seen a red squirrel since before the war! I shall certainly stop when I pass tomorrow.”

When I saw him the following evening he was full of triumph and humility. He had started early for the weekly visit to a bedridden old shepherd which took him past the top of the plantation, and had spent an hour wandering under the trees.

“Three I saw for certain,” he announced, “and I believe there were four. I thought I had found the dray, too, though on the way home I had to admit to myself that it was an old magpie’s nest.”

He told us how he had stayed perfectly still for twenty minutes —the amateur always feels that anything over ten is a marvel of patience — and that one of the squirrels had actually come close to his feet, trustful as a gray squirrel in a park.

“I ventured greatly,” he went on. “I offered a piece of biscuit. It took it in its paws and ate it, looking at me all the time. I — I was amazed! And flattered! Do you feel, Dennim, that I was justified?”

“Oh, Daddy, it was somebody’s pet!” said Benita.

It must, of course, have been a squirrel brought up by human hands and then turned loose. But I did not want to spoil the vicar’s vision of himself as a humble disciple of St. Francis. In any case he had every right to pride himself on moving cautiously and giving an impression of saintly harmlessness. It does not take long for a tame animal to become as wild as its companions.

I could not resist going up to have a look at the squirrels myself. I went alone, for it would have been impossible to explain to Benita why I took such care to avoid cover till I knew it was empty. There were four of them, fine little beasts with rather darker tails than usual.

I could not find the two drays any more than the vicar. Normally that would have been a challenge and I should have spent a couple of weeks on verifying what the family life of the two pairs really was. But I was impatient. My time was fully taken up. Nur Jehan had just begun to answer his helm, as the admiral put it, by pressure of legs alone.

I saw little of my host except at dinner, for his local dictatorship extended beyond his own village and vicar, and he kept himself busy with all the usual bumbling committees, where he was dreaded for his outspokenness, but indispensable. He considered it a duty of hospitality to preserve his guests from the teas and luncheons which accompanied these activities, so that I was surprised when he told me that I had been especially included in an invitation from General Sir Thomas Pamellor.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“The county’s prize pongo,” said the admiral. “Lives just the other side of Cirencester. But he’ll give you the best lunch outside London if you can stand him.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Matter with him is that he’s a bore, boy! Good God, when Thomas retired they had to call in extra police to control the celebrations in Whitehall! It had got so bad that if you had a position of any responsibility in this country you couldn’t talk to a visiting Frenchman without Thomas dropping in beforehand to tell you what you oughtn’t to say. Hell’s bells, if there’s anything we and the French don’t know about each other after a thousand years of fun and games, that ass Thomas is the last person to spot it! But his cook, boy! Mustn’t miss that! A pity we can’t take Frank with us. He might pick up a hint or two.”

General Sir Thomas Pamellor at once reminded me of a fine freshly caught shrimp. Not that he was small, but he sprouted hair at odd angles from eyebrows and mustache, and his coloring was exactly the right mixture of sand and gray. Lady Pamellor was a slightly smaller shrimp, but cooked. She was bright pink and had a good deal of pink in her dress. She gazed at her still-living companion with admiration. There was not much else she could do, for Sir Thomas never stopped giving us extracts from his unwritten memoirs throughout six courses.

“Frankly, I never knew a Frenchman I couldn’t get on with,” said Pamellor. “I was only a colonel then, but whenever and wherever there was trouble with the French, Churchill gave the same order: Turn Pamellor loose on ‘em!”

“Very right!” the admiral agreed naughtily. “You’re the last person they would suspect of playing a deep game.”

“Exactly, Cunobel! A simple soldier and simple liaison. You can’t have too much of it. Now then, mon vieux, I used to say, here’s British policy! And I’d tell him. Here’s French policy! And I’d tell him that, too. Then all we had to do was to go our own way and make the thing work.”

“He speaks such very beautiful French,” said Lady Pamellor, making her sole contribution to the conversation.

And on he went.

“Just tell me what you want, I said to de Gaulle, and I’ll see that Churchill falls in with it. So far as he can, of course, so far as he can! Our own army, that was the trouble. I remember one of our very high commanders. I won’t mention his name. ‘Any more from you,’ I said, ‘and I’ll send a signal straight to the Cabinet.’”

“And did you?” Cunobel asked.

“God bless my soul, yes! I was always sending signals direct to the Cabinet. I remember a major of the Deuxieme Bureau, when I was in Paris after the war, warning me that they had copies of all of them.”

“Broke your cipher, you mean?”

The admiral choked, and did his best to pretend that a truffle had gone the wrong way.

“Good Lord, no I My little secretary had been pinching the en clair drafts from the wastepaper basket. ‘Never mind!’ I said to the major. ‘There’s nothing I tell my government that I am not prepared to tell yours.’ A pity that I hadn’t more influence on policy! I could have made us just a band of brothers.”

When Lady Pamellor had swum delicately off and hidden herself beneath the rocks of the drawing room, Sir Thomas pressed cigars upon us and one of the finest brandies I have ever tasted. I can well imagine the French putting out a legend that they found him useful.

“I hear you’ve been in a spot of trouble, Dennim,” he said.

I instantly joined the odd thousand Europeans who must have thought it wise to impress Sir Thomas with their sincerity.

“Trouble?” I asked, puzzled. “No.”

“Bomb, eh?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Shall we say I read it in the paper?” replied the general with heavy diplomacy.

Cunobel was magnificent.

“Damned Cypriots!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t leave that kind of thing to the army when I was a boy! Sent a cruiser, gave ‘em a party and showed ‘em over the gun turrets!”

“Cypriots?” Sir Thomas asked. “They didn’t tell me you had been in Cyprus.”