For the Good of the State

by Anthony Price

  ‘Come clean, Tom, damn you!’ snapped Audley.

  Tom frowned at the long downhill road ahead. They had come back too quickly to Audley’s ‘Do you know something I don’t know?’ when he had thought he’d headed the old man off the question. ‘Come clean—?’

  ‘Huh! Or as clean as you know how, anyway!’ Audley shifted, to fix a direct eye on him. ‘Last night you were pissed off … You didn’t know what the hell was happening, Tom—I know the signs … because I have been there before myself—in no-man’s-land, with one hand tied behind my back, and one foot in a bucket, and some silly fool to look after … I have been there, so I recognize the symptoms … so don’t fuck me around, eh?’

  This was bad, thought Tom: once again, he had underestimated the man, and he needed more time to sort out the how and the why. ‘What—?’

  ‘I said—’ Audley stopped suddenly as the road narrowed and fell away steeply between high earth-banks. ‘Watch your speed, man, watch your speed!’

  Tom was already doing just that, with the garage man’s warning about the brakes suddenly ringing in his ear. The old car could certainly show a clean pair of rear wheels to its peers on the straight, he had established. But it wasn’t good running he had to worry about now, it was good stopping. And, from the way he was tensed up in the passenger’s seat, Audley was sharing his fears.

  Slowly, under insistent pumping of the foot-brake, the car agreed to decrease its speed to the point where he could enlist the gears to help him. ‘I’m sorry, David. I was thinking of other things.’

  ‘So was I.’ Audley sniffed and hugged himself. ‘This bloody bocage—it always gives me the creeps.’

  ‘“Bocage”?’ Then Tom remembered Audley’s ancient history as a teenage yeomanry tank-commander in 1944, and seized on it gratefully. ‘You mean, this is like Normandy, is it?’

  Audley didn’t reply, but sat hunched up and silent until Tom himself recalled out of his subconscious the long lines of graves in the Polish war cemetery on the road from Caen to Falaise, so many of which marked the last resting place of tank crewmen who had died half a continent away from home, for their country’s freedom and in vain.

  ‘Yes—’ Audley sat up suddenly ‘—yes and no. Like and unlike.’ Sniff. ‘Funny thing, memory: it goes away for years. Then it comes back.’ He sniffed again, and turned towards Tom. ‘Now, young Thomas Arkenshaw … alternatively, you said. And, alternatively … someone didn’t need to follow us yesterday because that someone already knew where we were going, hey?’

  Tom nodded. Over the next ridge, then Mountsorrel would be somewhere down the other side, to the left. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Yes,’ Audley agreed harshly. ‘Our side knew. And Nikolai Andrievich’s side knew. And neither of those sides can be trusted, for a start. But there’s more to you this morning than that deplorable truth. Which, for another start, wouldn’t cheer you up—’

  ‘David!’ Old memories of blazing tanks, more often British and Polish than German in the bloody bocage, had given Tom more time, and more time advised him to come clean. Or, at least, fairly clean. ‘Let me—’

  ‘No!’ Audley cut him off. ‘Don’t attempt to deny it—or explain it … at least until I have finished thinking aloud, anyway.’ Sniff. ‘Yesterday you were unhappy … and, as you have admitted, somewhat careless. Today, you are happy, but careful … And you refused to talk business until we were away from the Green Man and in a safe—huh! relatively safe—car, in the middle of nowhere. Right?’

  Tom managed to open his mouth, but Audley forestalled him. ‘And I do not think—I do not believe—that your happiness is simply the product of youth and a good night’s sleep.’ A handkerchief appeared from nowhere and the old man blew his nose on it. ‘Whereas I had a dreadful night, full of fly-blown nightmares … But that is because I have heard the chimes at midnight too often, and now I like to have my own true woman within reach beside me, and my own true mattress beneath me … But now the fresh air has blown the cobwebs from my brain and I can see clearly again.’ The old man balled up the damp handkerchief and stuffed it into the pocket of his pale expensive raincoat, and flourished a fresh one from another pocket. ‘So—I tell you this only for your dear mother’s sake—so if you are about to deceive me, I caution you to do it well. Because, for her sake, I have decided to trust you this morning until I think you are playing me false. But then, also for her sake, I will pack you back to that pen-pushing paper-hanger Frobisher, and you can make your peace with him as best you can.’ Audley wiped his face with the fresh handkerchief. ‘Is that crystal clear, now?’

  They breasted the new ridge, and Tom caught a glimpse of heather-dark moorland away to his left, with its sharply treeless skyline under the rain-clouds. But he knew that he couldn’t see so far into Audley in spite of Jaggard’s calculations and the man’s own admissions—even in spite of that once-upon-a-time special relationship with Mamusia. Because Audley had his own true woman now; and, anyway, Audley was also not to be trusted, in his own right.

  ‘Crystal clear, David.’ And yet, in spite of that mistrust (and perhaps because of Mamusia; but more, perhaps, because he had never met anyone in the service like this strange, garrulous, dangerous old man), he felt himself drawn to him, and into the game. ‘If I double-cross you, then you’ll shop me. Right?’

  ‘Hmm … ’ For the first time, Audley was taking notice of his surroundings. ‘Just tell me one thing then, Tom—’

  ‘One thing?’ They were going down again. But this time he had the right low gear in advance; because, although he could see nothing as the high Devon bocage banks reared up again on each side, he knew that Mountsorrel must be down there somewhere, just ahead and to the left, on its own spit of land above the ancient river crossing.

  ‘Yes.’ Audley’s tone was casual, but his big hands were squeezing each other nervously on his lap, again as though his bocage-memories of well-sited German 88s and lurking panzerfaust infantry had returned with the earth-banks. ‘One simple question to start off with, anyway. Now that we know where we stand, as it were.’

  The road twisted, and then straightened again so that Tom could see clear down to the parapets of a narrow little stone bridge at the bottom of the hill. So there had to be an opening of some sort on the left before that. ‘Go on, David.’

  ‘Yes.’ The hands continued to work. ‘Just where the devil are we going?’

  ‘Ah!’ There was a gap ahead, in the high bank on the left; and although it looked small … and it was unsignposted (but then Mountsorrel wasn’t National Trust, of course) … it was the only gap he could discern in this last hundred yards, before the bridge. ‘Ah!’ He pumped the foot-brake furiously, debating whether to overshoot and then back up the hill rather than attempt the turning on his first run. ‘Here, as it happens, is where we’re going … I think—’ The hell with it! he thought, swinging the wheel.

  The old car creaked in every metal bone and sinew, and canted over dangerously as it slithered in slow motion into a sharp left-hand turn, so that for a moment he feared that it would slam broadside into the bank which rose up again on the lower side of the entrance. But, by the grace of God, it accepted his change of direction, and then stalled in a final protest.

  ‘Indeed?’ Audley had lurched against him, swearing under his breath, as they had taken the turn. But now his voice was only mildly incredulous. ‘And where, pray, is here, Tom?’

  He might well ask, thought Tom, surveying the unpromising vista up the muddy rutted track ahead between future luxuriant banks of stinging nettles.

  ‘That is to say—‘ Audley amended his question suddenly ’—does Panin know how to get to Bodger’s Farm?‘

  ‘Bodger’s Farm?’ Tom followed Audley’s pointing finger. On the passenger’s side, on the wreck of a five-bar gate propped against two oil drums, a crudely-painted board bore that legend.

  ‘Is this where you wanted to go?’ inquired Audley politely. ‘And, if it is, will he be able to get here?’<
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  Tom’s confidence weakened. But then long experience of similar places reanimated it. ‘He has my Ordnance Survey map with the rendezvous marked. I gave it to his escort this morning, before breakfast.’

  ‘His escort? His minder, you mean?’ Audley grinned wolfishly at him. ‘What was he like?’

  Tom turned the ignition key, and the engine purred sweetly at the first touch. ‘He didn’t look the part.’ He grinned back at Audley. ‘He seemed a rather inoffensive little fellow, actually.’ He engaged first gear cautiously. ‘Very polite, he was, David. In barely adequate English.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Audley looked around him curiously. ‘Well, I’m sure appearances are deceptive … We’re going on, are we?’

  The wheels squelched and spun, and then took hold.

  ‘For a little way. Then we shall have to walk across the fields, I expect.’

  ‘You expect? You haven’t been here before, then?’

  ‘No.’ Tom caught a glimpse of a grey roof through the straggling hedge on his right, down the side of the hill.

  ‘You didn’t see Panin himself?’

  ‘No.’ More roofs, and a hint of yellowish-grey stone. And, in the left foreground, the ruin of an antique farm-tractor half-sunken on the verge beside the track, with the remains of last year’s dead nettles still entwined in it.

  ‘I see—’ Audley stopped suddenly as Bodger’s Farm presented itself to them at last, in all its agricultural squalor.

  Tom decided against entering the farmyard morass, even though that would take him closer to what must presumably be the farmhouse itself, for lack of a more likely parking place: any vehicle with less than four-wheel drive attempting that yard might find itself a permanent resident—like the abandoned Rover, old but not yet vintage, which lay wheel-less on one side, to serve now (judging by its present occupants) as a chicken-house.

  ‘You did say … ’ Audley’s tone was gently hopeful, looking for confirmation rather than information ‘ … that we weren’t actually meeting … here … didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes—no—’ Tom caught a flicker of movement at one curtained window in the blank face of the house ‘—I’ll just go and get directions, David. Okay?’ He opened his door, observing what seemed to be the farmer’s domestic refuse pile, which included non-biodegradable washing-up liquid containers among other unspeakable material which was already sodden and well-rotted. ‘If you’d like to go up there, towards the field—by that gate?’

  He stepped out gingerly, into the mud in preference to the domestic midden; which, from its smell, included fish-heads as well as cabbage leaves; and thought, as he did so, that a high, dry summer might not be preferable on Bodger’s Farm, because this would be the kingdom of flies, and blow-flies, and all manner of winged insects then. But he must move, now that he was moving, before Audley could protest.

  A large dominant cockerel, with bright red upstanding comb and jaunty tail-feathers, eyed him sidelong from its vantage-point on the roof of the Rover with bright reptilian certainty, regretting only that he was too big to be edible, then turning away and defecating nervously on the stained and pitted metal, which had once been some Sunday driver’s pride-and-joy.

  Tom searched for something just slightly better than filth on which to place his good clean shoes, wondering as he did so what Audley was wearing (and, for God’s sake, what shoes Comrade Professor Panin and his minder might have laced up this morning, in all innocence!). But long before he reached the flagstones set in the overgrown grass in front of the farmhouse door he gave up the attempt, and walked through the muck regardless.

  (The trouble was, he decided, that the farm was huddled into the hillside, halfway down on its own platform across which all the rainwater from the top evidently made its way, unregulated by anything so outrageously Roman or modern as a drainage system, so it seemed.)

  There was no bell or button on the door, which had last been painted when King George VI (or maybe his father) had been on the throne. But there was nothing to push or pull, so he rapped on it with his knuckles instead.

  No answer—no sound from within. But he had seen that movement at the low window on his left, with its half-drawn faded curtains. So he knocked again, more sharply than before.

  (The incongruous ambience of this squalid place, he thought, was its clashing colours: against the old natural greens and red-browns and greys of grass and mud, and roof and wall, there was the garish yellow of the ranks of plastic drums outside the barn and the vivid orange of the plastic sacks he could see inside it; and the bright red of the brand-new tractor also inside it, beside the sacks—all probably paid for by the EEC, yet as out-of-place and unnatural as the empty squeezee Fairy Liquid and Palmolife pressure containers on the cabbage-stalk-fish-nead garbage heap through which he’d walked just now.)

  The door-latch snapped behind him, making him jump just as he had reached Audley in his survey (Audley stamping through the mud, oblivious of it!). But the door didn’t open, it only shivered as he turned back to it; but then the bolts inside cracked, and the key inside clicked, and the door began to open, scraping on the floor beneath it.

  Tom composed his face into a mask of obsequious inquiry even before he could see anyone in the opening.

  ‘Good morning—’ (Could the farmer be Mr Bodger? But could anyone be Mr Bodger?) ‘—sir … I’m sorry to bother—’ (or should it be bodger? he thought insanely) ‘—to bother you, so early in the morning, sir.’

  No answer, not even a grunt. Only the shadowy presence of someone taller than his own ceiling, therefore stooped under it, and a waft of smell composed of innumerable elements, in which damp walls predominated but paraffin and unwashed clothes and fried bacon fat also played their parts, among other things which he could not even guess at.

  Tom tried to continue without breathing in too much of it. ‘Do you mind if … ’ The incongruity of the request enveloped him, like the smell ‘ … if I go to see your castle, sir?’ The incongruity increased beyond his imagination as he thought of Gilbert de Merville riding to Mountsorrel Castle this way, on his iron-shod destrier, eight hundred years ago—eight-and-a-half hundred years ago—in this same mud, if not this same world.

  The presence shook itself. ‘Cross the fields. Follow the track. ’Bout ‘alf a mile. You can’t miss it—church is on t’other side, opposite.’

  Tom was overwhelmed by gratitude and relief, so that he felt in his pocket willingly. ‘There is a charge, I presume?’

  ‘No charge.’ The presence also seemed relieved, as though he had expected someone worse, in direct descent from Joscelin himself, demanding money rather than offering it. ‘Jus’ make sure you shuts the gates … ’cause I’ve got beasts up there, that way.‘

  ‘Of course.’ Tom remembered Panin, and offered what was in his hand nevertheless. ‘I have two friends—two foreign gentlemen—who are also coming shortly … If you would be so good as to direct them … This is for your trouble, sir—’

  The door started to close, with the bank note ignored. ‘No trouble. Jus’ so they closes the gates, that’s all.’ The words just managed to escape as it snapped shut, and as Tom turned away he heard the key click in the lock and the bolts rattle back top and bottom.

  He crossed the yard diagonally, through a mixture of what looked like one part of Exmoor mud to three parts of cow-dung, to where Audley stood unconcernedly in a clump of dead nettles beside another antique farm-gate which was secured to its post by a loop of bright orange plastic rope.

  The old man regarded him quizzically. “This is the right place, then?‘

  ‘Yes.’ As he unhooked the gate he observed that Audley’s shoes were only slightly less mud-and-dung encrusted than his own. But they were stout heavy country shoes, and Audley didn’t seem to mind, anyway; if anything, he sounded much more polite and friendly than earlier, when he’d been in relative comfort. Perhaps the sight of all the piles of refuse reminded him of his beloved compost heaps. ‘This way—about half a mile.’
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  ‘Indeed?’ Audley waited while he closed the gate. ‘Now, tell me, Tom … what gave you the idea of this particular rendezvous? Rather than any other?’

  Tom winced. It had seemed an innocently interesting idea, both in his head and on the map, after reading Panin’s note the night before. ‘I was rather hoping you weren’t going to ask that.’ He studied the deeply-rutted track with distaste. ‘Shall we walk on the grass?’

  ‘Yes. That would be the sensible thing to do,’ agreed Audley. “I rather approve of it, that’s all.‘

  ‘Approve of it—?’ Tom failed to avoid a rich new cow-pat, and slid dangerously in it for a second before he regained his balance.

  ‘Ye-ess. In the open, and nice and private, like he wants. But make the bugger suffer a bit for his privacy. Yes … I like it, Tom.’ Audley beamed at him. ‘So now you tell me why you’re so happy—or why you were so happy first thing, if not now … Right?’

  They had already topped a minor corrugation in the side of the valley, so that now a small lateral re-entrant lay below them. But there was no sign of Mountsorrel on the spur ahead. ‘I had a visitor last night, David.’

  ‘A visitor?’ Audley was striding out on his long legs, his pale raincoat flapping, as though he knew where he was going. Or as though, even if he didn’t know, he was confident of getting there.

  The memory of Willy cheered Tom, restoring his happiness in that instant. ‘A girl I know. A very pretty girl, too.’

  ‘Well, well!’ Audley didn’t miss a step. ‘Now that is cunning such as I love to hear. Or uncommonly good management, anyway … Or quite exceptional good luck—which will do just as well.’ He sniffed, and then chuckled throatily. ‘Give me a minder who’s lucky—then I’m truly safe, by golly!’ He threw a grin over his shoulder. ‘Perhaps that fellow yesterday really was aiming at me. But with you beside me he never had a hope, eh?’