by Thomas Hinde
Of course we’d quarrelled, though it had been something Molly didn’t enjoy. I had sometimes realized that it was the way she never got the spirit of a quarrel but always seemed to be made unhappy by it that annoyed me. Even that doesn’t quite explain the shocked, almost dizzy feeling I’d sensed in her when I’d occasionally been angry with her.
It was her complete lack of a sense of time that had occasionally made me shout at her. I’d seen her become quiet and honestly try to hurry. I’d seen how this was muddling her and making her slower.
What a fool I’d been, not to notice that it hadn’t happened lately. Still worse, it was too late to invent quarrels. I’m a good actor, but not that good. Every quarrelsome thing I’d have said I’d have seen her guessing why I was saying it.
I didn’t sleep much that night. It was the first of many when I could only sleep for a few hours before dawn.
I held Molly and my arm became numb and then got pins and needles. I moved it carefully but still lay close to her. From her even breathing I thought she was asleep.
During the hours I lay awake I decided what I must do.
Saturday dawned fine and clear and I slipped out of bed at five without waking Molly. She wouldn’t think that odd. I stood in the veranda, not showing myself, looking down across my orchards to the golf course. It was still in shadow. Its sandy bunkers and neat clumps of bushes and smooth fairways reminded me of the sand table we’d had at school for teaching military tactics. I’d always hoped we’d use it but we never did.
My plan was to wait till I saw Charlie Quorum drive down the New Lane, then to hurry down the hillside, through my orchards, and reach my side of the golf course not much later than he would reach the first tee. My fear was that ‘early’ to Charlie might mean around eight o’clock by which time Molly and the children would be about.
I’d thought of taking my Mauser. That was a beautiful gun, with a magazine to hold ten and a wooden holster to fix to the grip to make a shoulder butt. Like that it could be fired accurately up to two hundred metres. It was typically German, but with the flavour of a pre-First War Germany of archdukes and junkers. It was the sort of piece of industrial design that lasts fifty years beyond its time, a Rolls Royce of automatic pistols – and it was about as handy as a Rolls Royce.
No, for a gun which wouldn’t keep catching round my ankles I’d have chosen my Beretta. That was a beautiful gun too, but in an Italian way. It was beautifully neat to look at. Its three-and-a-half-inch barrel could be replaced in a couple of seconds when it got red-hot from rapid fire. I didn’t take it because I didn’t trust it to shoot straight at two metres, let alone golf course ranges.
It was still so early – before five-thirty – that I allowed myself to stroll along the drive towards my front gate. Small birds were hopping on the gravel and fluttering in the bushes. A blackbird made a low approach over some shrubs and landed five yards from me, cocking its tail. I suppose he was in the habit of behaving so carelessly at such an hour in the morning. A second later he’d seen me and taken off with a high warning cackle. I wondered if Charlie might also behave carelessly in the early morning. At that moment, long before I’d expected, I heard a rushing of wheels and his yellow Citroën hurried past.
There had been no time to take cover and I watched foolishly. I could only hope that because our drive met the New Lane at an angle he hadn’t seen me. I thought I would have noticed if he had looked over his shoulder, as he would have had to. What I couldn’t tell was whether he’d glanced in his mirror.
There wasn’t a moment to lose and I bounded down the hillside. I went close to the chestnut palings which separated my ground from Percy Goyle’s, aiming for the point where my orchards bordered with the golf course. I’d forgotten how steep it was. Several times my feet slid away and I only held myself by beech saplings; and once I tripped forward on to my knees in some heather, bruising one on a hidden stone. I was wet with sweat and limping by the time I reached the gap in the hedge I’d marked. It had taken longer than I expected. Charlie had already driven off and was coming towards me not a hundred yards away in the direction of the first green.
I won’t describe his whole round. There are only a few important points. Mostly he plodded after his shots in a determined but entirely conventional way, as if he might still be half asleep. In the open country I noticed his nautical roll. He moved his legs as if they were separate, trunk-like objects which he was placing one at a time in front of him, and his body swayed above them.
He was wearing a new beige wind-jacket. It was so new that it didn’t fit him properly. He wore it like a naughty schoolboy who has been put into it by his mother but won’t try to make it fit. It was zipped up to the chin but the collar point of a tartan shirt stuck up half-way along one side of his red neck.
I didn’t try to follow him closely. There wasn’t enough cover. But I’d planned my positions so that I’d be close to him at several points in the first nine holes. He wasn’t likely to play more. In particular there was a long, well-bushed ridge which was near the fourth tee at one end and the fifth tee at the other. I could reach this ridge across some low ground which would be out of sight while he was playing the third. Unfortunately there was no corresponding out-of-sight period after the fifth before the sixth took him right along the side of my ridge. If he made a bad shot and came up there to hunt for his ball he might stumble on me before I had had any chance to escape.
It was a chance I had to take. I got there safely as I’d planned and was only about five yards from him when he drove off for the fourth. I heard him grunt at the same instant that I heard his driver whack the ball, an involuntary grunt of air forced out by the effort. After that he took a pace forward and stood watching it, hand raised above his eyes. He was humming, I noticed, on an ascending note as his ball soared, then a descending note as it fell. He ended with a dramatic suddenness that told as plainly as if I’d seen it that he’d landed in a bunker. His timing was perfect and I had to check my laugh which even when alone he had played for.
He must have done that hole quickly because I’d only just traversed the ridge to my position near the fifth tee when I heard him panting up to it. It wasn’t a good position, because it gave me only a narrow view of him through a gorse bush, but it had the advantage that it was so close that I could hear every noise his clothes made as he bent and stamped around. And it was well hidden: the gorse bush was one of the thickest and I was at its centre. Unfortunately the ground below a gorse bush is an uncomfortable place to kneel and I had had no time to clear it. Apart from the live spikes which were against my face and arms I could feel a dead one going deeply into my left and already bruised knee.
Perhaps it was this which distracted me, because a second later I had no idea what had taken him out of my sight. He was still extremely close, even closer than before, judging by his puffing. I didn’t dare turn my head an inch.
But I went on trying to guess why, when he had already teed up his ball, he had moved towards the bushes. Had he dropped another ball which had run in this direction and he was now fetching? Or seen a nice piece of gorse for a buttonhole? More alarming, had he noticed something strange in the gorse bush, which he was now staring down on, with raised club, or was he ready to burst into heavy laughter?
As I listened, my skull creeping at the idea of the blow which might be hanging over it, I heard the most astonishing noise. It was a sort of squelching hiss. I didn’t begin to recognize it. Perhaps I would never have recognized it if, a few seconds later when I could see him again by the tee, I hadn’t noticed Charlie give his nose a single upward wipe on the sleeve of his new beige wind-jacket. At once I had no doubt: Charlie Quorum had been blowing his nose into the bushes.
I’ve always found this a peculiarly disgusting habit. When I thought of Charlie doing it, his finger and thumb compressing that spot-holed nose, the hanging trails of snot he’d had to lodge on the bushes, I wanted to come out and strike him. It was an impulse which
frightened me because there was a second when I didn’t care how disastrous it would be.
I forced myself to try to guess what it might mean. As soon as I began to reason I felt calmer.
I saw at once that there might be nothing to explain: Charlie had failed to put a handkerchief in his new jacket pocket. His nose had started to run. It didn’t remove my surprise that an ex-First Secretary should do such a thing, even when he was of Irish extraction and believed himself alone. He would have to overcome years of habit training. And he had done it on the open end of a ridge where he was in silhouette for several hundred yards in three directions.
I’d got no farther than this – it had taken me only a second and Charlie still hadn’t driven – when something even more interesting began to happen. I heard a shout. Directly beyond Charlie, still a hundred yards from him in the direction of the club house, I saw a figure advancing down the fairway.
He came closer. He shouted again, ‘Hallo there.’ He was unusually tall. I became increasingly sure that it was Jim Brightworth.
Presently I could see his big pointed nose. He carried a bag of clubs slung on his shoulder and was wearing the sort of narrow cap with a peak that American generals wear for golf. The peak of his cap was a similar shape and about as long as his nose.
‘I made it,’ Jim shouted.
He came up to the tee and watched Charlie drive.
I’d expected something, of course, or I wouldn’t have been here. Jim was the last thing I’d expected. It made me realize that I’d half expected Wilfred Draycott. All my tentative theories of the last three days now had to be reshaped.
Either I was mistaken and Charlie’s early-morning golf was the genuine health-obsession of a retired man; or more sinister and complicated things were happening around me than I’d imagined.
Perhaps it was strange that I should start to discover these now, and never have seen them before, despite the careful way I had watched. There were two explanations: first, I might have watched in the wrong way, or without the conviction that there was anything to discover; second, perhaps there had been nothing to discover. I had a sense of some crisis at hand which was disturbing them into this new and almost panicky activity. It fitted with the alert I’d had.
When he’d teed up Jim flexed his arms, pretended to roll up his sleeves, shouted ‘fore’ down the empty fairway and drove. If they said anything else to each other they did it too cleverly for me to hear.
‘That’ll make you smile on the other side of your arse,’ Jim shouted. Charlie gave some poker-faced grunts, and they went away in diverging directions in pursuit of their balls.
The next twenty minutes were alarming. If Charlie had been alone I might have risked a dash across the open when his back was turned. To trust that both of them would stay facing away for long enough for me to reach my orchard was absurd. Anyway the risk of waiting now seemed worthwhile. It wasn’t likely that they would talk at such an obvious place as a tee, where recording microphones could be fixed. If they spoke to each other it would be in open country.
I spent those minutes making ground along the ridge. I did it in short rushes for I was in full view. Every few yards I dropped like a shot animal and lay flat till I was sure I’d not been seen. I stopped when I found a dense bush.
I got deeply into it. I took a double handful of peaty soil and wiped my face with it. I stuck some twigs in my hair. By the time I saw them turn towards the sixth tee I felt safe – unless a ball actually trickled up to me, and even then I might trickle it away. Or unless one of them lost a ball and began to beat about.
An advantage I had, even if they passed close, was that the sun had risen and was lighting the course brightly, but it was still so low that it cast the long black shadow of my ridge half across their fairway. Glancing from there towards me they would be dazzled.
I was relieved when they each made straight shots and advanced in similar directions, Charlie twenty yards ahead. As soon as Jim found his ball he gave an enormous laugh. He stood looking at it. He gave another. ‘Well, bugger me,’ he shouted. Charlie seemed not to hear till he had hit his own, then came across.
They stood together looking at it and I could see Charlie’s chest bouncing with intentionally unhidden hidden laughter. When Jim played there was an all round spatter of earth as if a small explosive shell had hit the ground. They went off together.
Ten minutes later I was doubling along my orchard fence, climbing the hillside to my garden. I reached the bathroom unseen and washed.
That day we went for a picnic. To my family’s surprise I drove ten miles to reach the coast road. I told them I had an idea – that was true.
I joined the Saturday creep to that hillside which we could see from our house. Towards the summit, before it doubled back and went over the top, there were several side tracks down which cars could turn on to heath land. Some were already occupied by parties with aluminium folding chairs and gas-cylinder stoves.
I went a few yards down one which looked difficult and seemed less used – but there were others it might have been. Anyway, I wasn’t sure what I hoped to discover.
I got out the glasses and helped Dan and Peggy find our house. It wasn’t easy. Even when I had the line of them, ours seemed curiously unlike itself, lower and pinker and half hidden at one end by what must have been my fir copse. Oddly, the most prominent and recognizable was Percy Goyle’s neo-Tudor mansion. Its double row of twirled Tudor chimneys were plain and so was the circle of his lawn among trees, as if it must have been tilted in this direction. Close to the veranda was a small mark which might have been Percy himself sitting in a deckchair reading, as he often did.
We drove on. We ate cold chicken and drank cider. We lay in the dappled shade – it was too hot in the sun – and Dan and Peggy climbed trees. They were unexpectedly quiet and I knew what was going to happen about a second before the first twig hit my shirt.
It should have been pleasant by that peaceful wood. I should have felt calmed after the two hours we’d spent in engine fumes, advancing and halting, blocked by things ahead we couldn’t see. Gradually I should have been able to forget that they were all around me, filling the roads, and lose the sense that I could still hear their engines. I was too worried.
I was worried that I’d left home, putting myself out of touch at such a time. But perhaps I was more worried by the ideas that Jim Brightworth was someone different from the person I’d thought him. I tried to fit deceit behind his schoolboy warmth. I tried to fit a deeper cunning behind his schoolboy motives, which always seemed most transparent when he tried to hide them. I couldn’t do it.
It was dangerous to become over-observant, reading significance into the insignificant. A casual round of golf by friends who were not such close friends of mine that I knew their every movement. Was I becoming jumpy?
I drove home. I mowed the lawn. There was work to do in the orchards but I preferred to stay near the house.
The message about the escape procedure came that evening. Somehow the fact that I’d been half expecting it all day made it more, not less of a shock. It was a shock to realize that I didn’t take the escape procedure seriously.
I was on the tennis court where Dan and Peggy had called me to show me their game. They’d got the idea from something I’d said that long rallies were the test of ability and were concentrating on these to the exclusion of trying to win points. They’d given up scoring and were counting rally shots, till at twenty-seven Peggy missed because she could no longer wait to hear how impressed I’d been. It was a record. She stood in front of me wanting, I thought, to be hugged, while Dan at the other end shouted, ‘You little wet’. At that moment I heard the telephone.
I began to run away from them across the lawn towards the house with what must have seemed surprising abruptness. Normally I’m calm about telephone calls.
All the way I could hear it ringing. I heard not only the soft bell in the office but the loud one outside the back door
clanging towards the fir trees. They didn’t seem exactly synchronized. I wanted to get there before Molly. If she’d been indoors she’d have reached it already, so I knew she was somewhere in the garden but couldn’t remember where, and as I ran I glanced left and right for the wheelbarrow or garden tools but didn’t see them. I pushed past the office chair and lifted the receiver. I heard the dialling tone.
It had been ringing up to the moment I lifted it. At exactly the same second they must have put down their receiver. That was the first thought I had.
I worked the receiver rest up and down in quick flashes, giving the ready-to-receive signal. Still nothing happened. I don’t know why I went on listening. Presently I could hear them.
What was clever was that the dialling tone wasn’t interrupted by their voice. It went on all the time and the voice was behind it, not much louder but perfectly distinct. I guessed what it meant. They’d tapped the wire.
It gave me the feeling that they were near again, a feeling I hadn’t had since that first message, typed in my office. And even then I’d felt they’d come and gone. Those three men flashing to me across the country had emphasized my sense of isolation. That was as near as they could get, because things which I couldn’t even guess at were going wrong. It was why I’d driven out there on the way to our picnic. Now I felt that we were winning again. They were operating close around me and I was one of them. It was a comforting feeling. Later I lost it.
Speaking through the dialling tone they gave me the instructions, starting with destruction of secret material, going on to disposal of weapons and ending with procedure at rendezvous. Where this would be and how I was to get there I would be told at the time. Meanwhile there were the code words to memorize and the change of clothes to prepare.
I listened carefully, making a few notes. Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter that neither I nor they should take the escape procedure seriously. It had to be arranged. That was all.