Roger was running hard again now. He realized that he could not hope to escape in the Green and headed for the high iron railings on the north side of the little park.
Adrenalin flooding the system.
He dared not look back but before he got half way to the small gate which he was aiming for he heard behind him the steady thudding of running feet. An implacable engine throb.
A renewed effort. The sharp pain of straining muscles all along the back of his legs. Something in his neck beating heavily.
Only a few yards to the gate now. The thudding feet behind him definitely louder.
A child, with a tricycle headed across his path at right angles. In front or behind? He would have to slow down if he was to let the boy get across.
At any instant he expected to feel a hand clutching at his flying coat.
He forced his legs to stride out a fraction harder. The child looking up from his handlebars in astonishment. And close behind the sound of the thumping feet breaking their implacable rhythm, skidding on the fine gravel over the asphalt.
And at last the narrow gate. And through. A scattering of people walking along the pavement on this quiet side of the square. Traffic in the street moderately light, checked by a clanking steam-roller bearing down towards him.
He jumped out into the road in front of it.
The risk of an accident. Perhaps the easiest way out. The hospital bed. Cool whiteness and safety. Out of it all.
Up on to the far pavement. The steam-roller thundering by.
A taxi came to a fast halt a little farther up the street. The air-filled mountain of the Bosun forcing his way out, thrusting a note at the driver between pink puffy fingers.
Running again. A penance. Forcing the body to act against the desire for utter rest. The power of the will.
He turned into Kildare Street. This time the Museum would be no refuge.
Keep running at all costs. Easy enough to outdistance the Bosun. But what if the man in the black coat had got across the road without having to wait for the traffic? The pavements were much less crowded than in Grafton Street. The infrequent visitors to the massive clubs. Only one man coming up the street.
A familiar figure.
Colonel Myles.
‘Hello there, you seem to be in a devil of a hurry.’
To stop? Or to run past?
The peace of standing still.
Roger came to a halt in front of the erect figure of the colonel. Trim moustache, piercing eyes.
Roger puffing and snorting. His mouth unashamedly open.
‘You seem to be a bit out of training. Young fellow like you.’
Roger with an effort closed his jutting lower lip and smiled.
‘I had a notion that I could catch a bus if I ran as hard as I could,’ he said.
Struggling not to gasp the words.
He smiled again.
‘But I’m not really in that much of a hurry.’
He turned round. Slowly and easily.
At the corner the Bosun and the pillar of respectability. In conference. At a check.
That was the answer. To keep talking. Always to be in deep conversation with a respectable citizen. In a position where you could not be kidnapped without causing a lot of fuss.
‘I was looking for you this morning as a matter of fact,’ Colonel Myles said.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes, I have a little time to spare. I’m waiting for a document and there seems to be some delay. Slight failure in staff work. So I thought, if you wanted to know anything about Cromwellian Ireland from me, now would be the time.’
Unexpected salvation.
‘That would suit me down to the ground.’
‘Well, shall we step in here to my club? I was on my way round. There’ll be no one about much at this hour. We can talk in comfort.’
At the corner the Bosun and his henchman appeared to have agreed on a plan. They set off purposefully towards Roger and the colonel.
Roger relaxing. The pleasant pain of tired muscles.
‘That would suit me excellently,’ he said.
Up the steps to the club. The begrimed two-hundred-year-old walls. Impregnable.
The uniformed porter saluted the colonel smartly. The big door swung to behind them.
Safety.
Chapter Fifteen
Brown leather armchairs arranged in massive clumps all about the long high room. Growing in among them a scattering of spindly ashtrays on tall stands. At either end a wide fireplace in white marble streaked with fine dark grey lines. Above them two portraits, of men with calm expressions.
The enormous carpet was red with an aimless design in dark green. Under one of the tall windows there was a big oak table with journals arranged on it in much considered ranks – Irish newspapers on the extreme left, English newspapers next to them, next English periodicals, then Irish periodicals ranging from The Irish Tatler at the top to Hermathena, A Series of Papers by Members of Trinity College, Dublin, at the foot. And on the extreme right a rank of miscellaneous foreign journals.
The room was entirely deserted.
‘Ah good,’ said the colonel, ‘we can sit by the fire. I’m afraid I’m getting to the stage now where I begin to appreciate my comforts.’
He led Roger over to the two armchairs nearest the fire.
Roger relaxing as they approached the generous wall of heat emanating from the deeply glowing pulsating coals. A pause. Time to appraise the situation.
A rapid survey of the events of the morning. With depressing results. Certainly Fergus Peck had seemed embarrassed by questions about the Bosun. He had even lied about him. But did this really prove he was the Infiltraitor? After all, George Wyndham had seemed almost equally put out in a different way by talk about Eric. And Austin Boycott was as dangerously enigmatic as ever.
And even Etain ought still to be considered. He had meant to find an opportunity of asking her about her new record-player and he had missed his chance. What if she could provide no convincing explanation in spite of everything?
And there were other possibilities still virtually unexplored. Colonel Myles himself, for instance.
Roger turned to him as they sat down in front of the fire.
‘You’ve been retired for some time now?’ he asked quickly.
‘Retired from the Army, yes. But I’ve only recently totally abandoned any sort of gainful work. Or, to be accurate, found that it has abandoned me.’
‘What work was that?’ Roger said.
The casual question.
‘Oh, the usual sort of thing. Odd chores for the War House, you know. This and that.’
‘And now you no longer work for them in any capacity?’
The piercing eyes looking straight at Roger.
‘No,’ the colonel said. ‘Wish I did in many ways. When you’ve spent the best part of your life in the British Army you miss it.’
‘But you enjoy living over here?’
‘I do and I don’t to be perfectly frank. Ireland’s a very different place to what it was when I was a boy.’
‘And you resent, to some extent, the changes?’
A shrewd look from the bright eyes.
‘Ah, not in the way you think, I fancy. I don’t think everywhere would be the better for British rule, you know.’
‘But you must have done a fair bit of helping to uphold British rule in your time?’
The colonel touched his spruce grey moustache.
‘Well, I was in India and Palestine, certainly,’ he said. ‘But I was simply posted there, you know. I didn’t have any divine mission or anything.’
Roger sat forward in the big shiny brown leather armchair.
‘This interests me,’ he said. ‘You mean you were quite happy to go to such places and carry out British policy simply as a soldier, even though there was a certain parallel with the case of Ireland, where you are in favour of the so-called oppressed country?’
‘You find it hard to understand?
’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply it was dreadfully immoral conduct or anything. It’s just that to me it’s an unusual way of looking at things.’
The cold grey winter light in the tall windows. The big empty room with the two cool portraits looking at each other calmly across the silence. And the sudden intimacy of the conversation. As if both participants realized that it was about something more than its outward form indicated.
The total seriousness of question and reply. Something at stake.
‘An unusual way of looking at things?’
The colonel leant back against the rubbed leather. Still sitting alertly.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose you can say that I look at things as a soldier. Soldiering has been in the family for generations, you know. I’ve a couple of nephews in the London Irish at this moment. The elder will inherit Brownstown, though I’m not sure that there will be much left to leave him. That’s what I meant when I said that Ireland was a very different place than it was forty or fifty years ago: it’s not a place that Brownstown fits into very well.’
He looked deeply at the glowing contorted coals. The shape of the future.
After a while Roger said:
‘The soldier’s way of looking at things. I think I see what you mean. Yours but to do and die, if that’s not too much of a cliché. And I don’t mind admitting that I envy you.’
Again the piercing glint of the eyes enmeshed in their network of fine lines.
‘My simple certainties, eh? But you know what faith is, don’t you?’
A quick look.
‘Faith is, after all, no more than an attitude of mind. And the mind is a shifting sort of thing. Faith isn’t that mantelpiece over there, a thing that exists and has to be physically knocked to pieces if it is to cease to exist. Faith is no more than what one happens to believe at any single moment. There’s no guarantee that one is going to believe it at the next moment, even though one has believed it for all the moments of a lifetime.’
The door at the far end of the room opened and a portly white-haired man put his head round it. He looked for a moment at the two pairs of legs stretched out beside the pulsating fire.
He withdrew.
‘All the same,’ Roger said slowly, ‘I noticed you used the present tense when you said you had the soldier’s way of looking at things.’
‘Yes. Yes, I did. And it’s true that I still have, or if you like, up to this very moment I have had that way of seeing the world.’
A sharp laugh.
‘And a pretty fool I suppose it makes me look. An ex-soldier, a finished soldier, who is incapable of doing anything else but go on being a soldier.’
Roger leant forward again. He looked at the colonel’s weathered face with intensity.
‘Unless you are still doing your duty as it has come to you in orders, complete with instructions to deny that you are doing so,’ he said.
Colonel Myles sat a little further back in the big brown armchair. His bright eyes opened a fraction farther.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I confess,’ he said.
Roger smiled.
‘Oh, just a hypothetical case. It occurred to me that with your philosophy of life you would be prepared to deny that you were acting as a soldier out of a soldierly sense of duty.’
‘Yes, I suppose I would be prepared to do that,’ said Colonel Myles. ‘Though it’s a complicated point of view.’
He looked at the floor. The piercing eyes seemed to be tracing the intricate pattern of the green on the red of the carpet, the tortuous lines on the simple background.
‘However,’ he said looking up and speaking more briskly, ‘luckily my concerns at the moment are no more complicated than the intractable history of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland.’
And they talked about Cromwell. They lunched together in the comfortable richness of the club dining room and returned to their brown leather armchairs by the glowing fire for coffee. Roger at times wondered whether when all this was at an end he would be able to remember anything the colonel had said.
But, he reflected, he was at least gaining a respite. The Bosun outside might be planning some new move, but the club was sacred ground. Ireland might not be what it had been forty years before, but a kidnapping from such a place as this would still be an impossibility.
He felt a sense of lassitude. He ought to be taking advantage of his temporary safety, but instead he was content to sit in front of the enormous fire and act as if the Bosun had never come to Ireland to receive the Sir Patrick Dun Medal, as if Eric Smith had not died, as if the erect figure sitting beside him with the spruce grey strip of moustache and the piercing eyes might not be Eric’s murderer.
But at last the subject of Cromwell’s influence on Ireland appeared to be exhausted. Colonel Myles got briskly out of the great brown sea of his chair and rang the china bell-pull beside the mantelpiece.
‘You’ll take some tea, won’t you?’ he said.
‘That would be very nice,’ said Roger.
He looked out of the tall windows. The cold grey light had almost gone. Soon the early winter darkness would be complete. He seemed to feel the force of the chill wind.
A return to duty.
‘But, look,’ he added, ‘I’ve taken up a terrible amount of your time. I mustn’t keep you any longer.’
‘Well,’ the colonel said, ‘I certainly intend to have tea. But if you’ve got affairs that take you elsewhere, don’t let me keep you.’
The bright eyes twinkled. The network of fine lines wrinkling up.
‘I seem to remember there was a bus that had to be caught rather urgently,’ he said.
Roger was caught off balance.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, yes. I was in a hurry, wasn’t I?’
‘Where were you off to?’
The quiet question. The orderly room reputation for being able to detect the most plausible liar in the regiment.
Perhaps the question needed no answer. Perhaps the colonel knew very well why Roger had been running so fast down Kildare Street with his mouth wide open straining for air and his legs pricking with protest at being forced to keep moving. Perhaps there had been no respite.
Perhaps the cats had been playing with the mouse.
Roger smiled.
The door opened and a manservant came into the room.
‘Ah, splendid,’ said the colonel. ‘Tea, please.’
He turned to Roger.
‘You are staying?’
Nothing else to do. No doubt the Bosun had taken the elementary precaution of leaving somebody to watch the club entrance, and he had no plan for outwitting them.
‘If I may.’
‘Then tea for two. Buttered toast and some of that very good plum cake.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
The man left, closing the door discreetly.
An awkward silence.
Roger decided that the colonel was hardly likely to put his question again. Unless it was not a real question but the first teasing move in whatever the Bosun planned for him when he was captured. On the other hand, if this was simply a friendly meeting between two. colleagues it would seem odd not to answer a simple, mildly bantering inquiry.
If.
The silence grew.
The colonel looked at the door as if there might be some dereliction of duty over the tea.
Suddenly Roger saw a way of killing two birds with one stone. He had been afraid that the Bosun might have set up a watch on his bank. Here was a way out.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘you couldn’t lend me by any chance a small sum? When I bumped into you this morning I was chasing like mad to get to my bank. And I’m afraid I’ve missed it altogether now.’
‘Bank?’ said the colonel. ‘I thought you said “bus”.’
The reasonable reply of a mind used to spotting inconsistencies? Or the cat with the mouse?
‘Bus it was,’ said Roger. ‘My bank is tucked away on the no
rth side where I have a rather disreputable flat. I wanted to get there before lunch.’
The colonel said nothing. The moment of complete silence. What lay at the other end of it? A brutal accusation of lying?
The colonel put his hand to his inside pocket.
For an absurd instant Roger was convinced that he was going to bring it out holding a pistol. A sudden squall of cold rain beat against the windows of the great warm room.
But the colonel’s hand when it emerged was clasping only a wallet. He opened it.
‘Let me see. Hm, yes. I can spare five pounds, if that’s any good to you.’
The prosaic tones.
A refinement of the teasing game? Was there a wallet in the pocket and a pistol in a holster under the tweed jacket? Had the colonel amused himself by making a cool choice?
‘That’s very kind of you, if you really can spare so much. I’ll write you a cheque, if that’s all right. Just in case I don’t see you in the next day or two.’
‘Are you going away somewhere then?’
‘No.’
Not the properly mild tone for an answer.
Roger tried again.
‘No, I’m not thinking of going away particularly. It’s just that sometimes I prefer not to work at the School itself.’
He looked at the trimly erect figure standing in front of the great glowing fire.
‘It’s one of the penalties of my particular line of research,’ he said, ‘that I do occasionally have to visit other parts of Ireland. I’m not much of a traveller, I’m afraid. I like my comforts. But you, I suppose, escape all that?’
‘It would scarcely worry me in any case,’ Colonel Myles replied. ‘If you’ve been liable to move at more or less a moment’s notice for the greater part of your life, you learn how to do it without inconveniencing yourself.’
The question not exactly answered.
Roger took out his chequebook and began writing on the broad arm of the wide brown leather chair.
‘But now you no longer have to leave your home?’ he said.
Casually.
The colonel standing in front of the fire looking down at him.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘After all, Cromwell travelled over most of the British Isles. I occasionally feel the need to see some particular battle site or what not, you know.’
The Dog It Was That Died Page 15