The Day the Call Came

by Thomas Hinde

  But I still held the cord. I began to notice how his face was turning purple. I knew that his eyes would be swell­ing out of his head. Suddenly I was angry. Why wouldn’t he die? I put my foot on his shoulder and pulled with all my strength. The cord broke.

  At the instant this happened I imagined that he would rise slowly to his feet and turn to face me. I was petrified. With relief I saw him roll on to his side and heard his head hit the brick of the veranda.

  I ran. I’d always known I’d have to hurry once the job was done. I’d have to behave as if I thought I’d escape, however little I expected to. That wasn’t how I ran. I ran with panic. Something had happened which I didn’t understand.

  I ran through the woods and out on to the New Lane. I came running in at our front gate. Molly was in the drive. I hadn’t expected that. I stopped, realizing with horror that I was still holding the broken end of the cord.

  ‘I heard something,’ she said.

  It muddled me. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘It was like someone crying,’ she said.

  I turned to stare with her up the drive. I was imag­ining Percy at the gate, his face purple, his eyes coming out of his head. Then I couldn’t see him but only the moon, round and full in the evening sky above the trees. I ran past her towards the house.

  I ran to the attic and lifted the floorboards. There was no sound. The beating hum had stopped. I gave the call-up signal. I gave it several times. There was no answer. What did it mean?

  I ran to the bedroom telephone and used the call-up procedure reserved for class one emergencies. No one answered.

  I got out the escape clothes. That was what I had to do. However much I was shivering with panic I must carry out the routine. I put on the alpaca jacket and grey check sponge-bag trousers. As I struggled with them I noticed that I’d started to make a thin, whimpering noise like a dog shut in a room. I put on the suède shoes but my hands were shaking too much to tie them. After my second attempt to set the moustache there was glue up my nose. There was no time to do better. I’d heard a door shut in the house below. Grabbing the panama hat, I hurried to the cellar.

  I began to take the wine bottles out of the rack. The wall behind was blank. I began to put them back. I dropped a bottle and it broke. I stopped putting them back and began to take them from other racks. It was far too slow. I began to pull the complete racks away from the walls. I staggered against one and it toppled.

  I pulled all the racks from all the walls. The walls were of plain grey brick. I trod among the bottles to get out of the cellar. I missed my footing and went on both hands and knees among the broken bottles. I felt their sharp glass edges. I stood up. My hat had come off and my moustache was crooked. There were dark wet patches on my trousers and my hands were dripping. Molly was at the top of the cellar steps.

  I climbed towards her and she ran away screaming. Why was she running away from me like that? ‘Stop,’ I shouted but she ran out through the front door, leaving it open, across the drive and down the hillside. She stop­ped screaming on the drive but when she was jumping among the bushes ten yards down the hill she began again. She screamed with a continuous high squeal, like a pig I’d heard being killed illegally during the war. Why did she squeal like that? It made me very angry.

  It also brought me to my senses. I took off the alpaca jacket and hung it in the hall. It could wait there for now. I got a wet towel and sponged the blood and wine off my trousers. There was a deep cut in one knee and the blood kept running into my sock.

  There had been a mistake. Perhaps I had been too clever at interpreting that last message. Perhaps I had wanted to misinterpret it. Whatever it was, something had gone badly wrong. There had been an information leak too. How else could my transmitter have been inter­fered with and my cellar safe bricked up? Perhaps for many years there had been a continuous information leak so that everything I had done had been known and reported.

  I fetched the panama and reset the moustache in the hall mirror. Now that I was warned there might still be time to undo what had been done so badly. I must wait now for their order which I had so impatiently anticipated. I thought I knew what it would be.

  I couldn’t hear her squealing any more. She had disap­peared somewhere down the hillside in the dusk. Perhaps she had fallen.

  It didn’t matter. She would have to come back.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Thomas Hinde is the pen-name of Sir Thomas Willes Chitty, who was born in 1926 in Felixstowe, Suffolk, the son of a boys’ school headmaster. He was educated at University College, Oxford, where he read Modern History, and began writing his first novel while serving as a teacher to a farmer’s two children. He worked as a civil servant and later for the public relations department of Shell Oil Company in England and Kenya before becoming a full-time writer in 1960.

  His first novel, Mr. Nicholas, appeared in 1952 to great critical acclaim. The influential critic Kenneth Allsop called it ‘one of the few really distinguished post-war novels’, and it was widely praised in both England and America. Other successes followed and secured Hinde’s reputation as one of the most talented English novelists of his generation; some of the best are Ninety Double Martinis (1963), The Day the Call Came (1964), and Games of Chance (1965), the latter comprising two novellas, ‘The Interviewer’ and ‘The Investigator’. High (1968), a novel set on a college campus, drew on Hinde’s experiences teaching at the University of Illinois from 1965 to 1967. Four further novels appeared in the 1970s, followed by Daymare in 1980, and, after a twenty-six-year gap, In Time of Plague (2006). Hinde has also published more than a dozen nonfiction books. He and his wife, Susan Chitty, who is also a writer, live in Sussex.

  ABOUT THE COVER

  Cover: The cover features a reproduction of the original dust jacket art by Victor Reinganum. Born in 1907, Reinganum studied art in London and Paris and became a freelance illustrator in the late 1920s when he was hired by Radio Times. He went on to do freelance work for Shell, London Transport, British Rail, and others, and later was well known for his dust jackets, among which his designs for Muriel Spark’s books are perhaps the best known. Reinganum disliked categories, but the abstract nature of his art generally led to his work being classified as ‘Surrealist’, and his work was frequently shown at Surrealist art exhibitions. He died in 1995.