The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown

by Geoffrey Household

  Yes, the ex-parlourmaid would be up in the village already, whispering to her cronies and appalled as if she had given hospitality to Dracula’s Hungarian daughter. And soon the men would know. He could imagine the nods and murmurs in the bar and the sudden guffaws. Prurient curiosity was inevitable to start with, but it would not be long before those healthy agriculturalists were disinfecting the whole story with humour, and humour was never far from pity.

  ‘What did her husband say?’ he asked.

  ‘She kept him off. I could see that. When I caught his eye, he shook his head in a sad sort of way. He wanted to help, but he didn’t dare.’

  This was the end. The village policeman would get it from his wife or the first friend with whom he downed a pint; after a couple of questions he could be sure that this was the wanted girl and that her companion had been hiding close by. Common sense told Bernardo that they must separate at once. Love and blazing anger prohibited anything of the sort. She would have to be left to her own bitter loneliness some time, but not yet. Meanwhile the risk of travelling together had to be taken.

  These little closed communities among the elms had become too hot for them. They had probably been wrong to leave the anonymity of city streets though it had seemed the most certain way of escape with only desperate minutes to spare. The best bet now was to try to return before telephones could ring in police stations and the cars and bicycles converged on them.

  He explained to Nadya that if only they could reach London they might be lost for good. They could live as they had in Bucarest and perhaps he could get a job under still another false name.

  ‘Look here!’ he said, tracing the map with his finger. ‘We daren’t try Aylesbury or Brackley, but there are trains to London from this place called Bletchley and we can get there on this cross-country line with lots of little stations. They can’t be watching all of them.’

  She paid no attention, not even reacting to the deliberately cheerful reminder of Bucarest.

  ‘I’m going to let them catch me. I can’t come to any harm, David.’

  That was true enough; she had committed no crime in England. But what would become of her? Suppose no refugee organisation would have anything to do with her now? In her present mood he could imagine her curling up in some corner and simply collapsing like a deserted, misshapen kitten.

  ‘I’ll tell them you left me days ago, and have gone I don’t know where.’

  ‘You will not. Who threw up everything to help me in Bucarest when she had a safe, peaceful future?’

  ‘I don’t deserve gratitude. I don’t want it.’

  He tried to impress her with the vital importance of hurry.

  ‘Just forget all about that blasted woman!’ he said. ‘She doesn’t matter and we haven’t time for a lot of babytalk.’

  ‘You put up with it from Despina.’

  ‘I did not. She was always calm.’

  ‘Because she didn’t love you.’

  ‘I hope she didn’t, but she pretended remarkably well. Now, listen!’

  She was to walk alone to Claydon station and he would walk to Marsh Gibbon. Both were about the same distance. They would take the next train to Bletchley unless it was due within ten minutes of arrival at the station. They would travel apart and leave the train apart, always keeping in sight of one another. He would look out of the window at Claydon to see that she had got on safely.

  ‘And at Bletchley,’ he added, ‘just cross to the London platform wherever it is and wait while I buy the tickets. I’m the least likely to be recognised. I’ll leave the Pozharski jacket in a ditch.’

  She agreed and at last produced a set smile. He gave her quarter of an hour’s start and then set off for Marsh Gibbon. The farmer’s linen coat gave him confidence, and he did not attempt to avoid the occasional cars and pedestrians. It must be difficult for the police to put out any really conclusive description of him so long as he kept his hair safely under his cap.

  He waited nearly an hour for the next train to Bletchley. Arriving at Claydon, nine minutes later, he looked out of the window. She was not there and she did not get in. This was the devil. He jumped out just as the train started, explaining to the stationmaster that he wanted to break his journey and see a friend, and walked back along the route she ought to have taken, afraid that she had not been concentrating on his instructions and had lost her way.

  He was half way back after casting right and left at all cross lanes without any conviction that he could overtake and find her. If she had really lost herself, she might be absolutely anywhere and he had no hope of picking up her trail without continually asking questions. But she couldn’t have lost her way; the lanes were well sign-posted. She might of course have been arrested. It seemed the least likely explanation. They had hardly seen a cop since arriving in the district, and it was too soon for police headquarters, wherever it was, to have got the news.

  He sat on a stile despairingly trying to work out what she could have done. It took him a lot of intelligent, logical analysis, dismissing one alternative after another, before he turned his thoughts from geography to the girl herself. It occurred to him that he had been obsessed by the effect on their escape of that prying into her privacy rather than its effect on her. His impatience could have been nearly as devastating as her elopement from the convent. Not only had she been reminded by a cruel fool that she was a monster at a fair, but she had been overwhelmed by a sense of guilt.

  There was one place worth trying. It could be her temporary refuge from loneliness. Great caution was necessary in broad daylight, but she herself had managed it the day before.

  He strode out for their usual rendezvous, followed the hedges and approached the Dutch barn from the back. As he began to climb rustling up the haystack he was agonized to hear passionate sobbing which stopped as soon as she detected the intruder. This time he would not allow any turning away from him. Four breasts, twenty breasts—why should she think it mattered? She was his sister, his beloved friend. He was very careful to speak only English, avoiding all suspect Romanian endearments.

  ‘I did start,’ she told him, ‘but I knew I mustn’t. So I turned back.’

  ‘I don’t believe that was what God told you.’

  ‘God has left me.’

  ‘Because he is talking to me now. He said: try the haystack!’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me! ... What else did he say?’

  ‘That Mr. Bernardo Brown should be ashamed of himself.’

  ‘I don’t know him. I only know David. For ever and ever David.’

  ‘Then don’t you run away again! We’ll try it together and after dark. There’s a late train. I looked them all up while I was waiting. And there must be something on to London.’

  It was always the same with Nadya. When she had comfort in mind and body she went to sleep. She must have formed the habit as a waif in Russia, putting her tail round her nose when it was the only refuge. Bernardo disengaged himself, retaining her hand, and considered the chances.

  First, they had to walk together to Claydon station. He knew that he could now trust her to walk far behind or far ahead of him, yet they might so easily lose touch in the darkness and he was not going to risk any repetition of that. Her desolation had not been so very different from his own, though at the time he had hidden from himself what he felt by damning and blasting the lanes, his stupidity and her incompetence. It was on the trains, not on the road, that they needed more than a fair share of luck. They could have counted on it earlier in the day.

  Never was the night of the leafy Midlands more placid. They passed no one in the lanes. There was no one on the two platforms of the station—a horizontal dimness, lit by a few oil lamps, among the greater, vertical darkness of the elms. He told Nadya to go on alone, buy her ticket to Bletchley and cross to the far platform. When he saw that she was over and inconspicuously waiting for the train, he too went through, saying good-night to the stationmaster.

  A large and venerable locomotive
rocked in out of the night, hauling two almost empty coaches. There seemed no point in travelling in separate compartments since anyone interested in the passengers could spot them both at a glance. One station after another was passed with little sign of life beyond the friendly scatter of lights from villages in the distance. Four passengers got on; nobody got off. Then the line curved round an embankment suddenly carrying them out of rural England and into the white light of Bletchley station.

  The train docked in its own bay. On the left was the exit and booking hall; on the right, a mainline platform with an empty train standing at it. Two uniformed police were alongside the ticket collector. A man in a bowler hat had started to walk towards the new arrival, leaving no doubt what he was and whom he wanted. Bernardo opened the door on the wrong side, ran round the locomotive and the train on the opposite line with Nadya alongside him and raced down the track.

  They were shouted at by railwaymen, but only when they were clear of the empty coaches did the police see them. They crossed a road bridge and then bore to the right, instinctively choosing the spur by which they had arrived rather than the signal lights and shining metals of the main line. With the pursuit a train’s length behind them they slid down the embankment and climbed a fence. Close to it was the privet hedge of a suburban garden through which Bernardo crashed, making a gap for Nadya, then over a wooden fence into another garden with police now closing up. Gardens evidently stretched away for house after house and unless they could get out of them into the wide space or field which separated the row from the curving embankment they were bound to be caught. Either the gardens had no gates leading to railway property or they could not spot them in the dark. The only hope was a greenhouse in the next garden up against the boundary wall which might give a possible way over if they could reach it in time.

  ‘No!’ Nadya whispered. ‘Better way!’

  She picked a flower pot out of a pile and handed it to him.

  ‘Throw it!’

  He saw at once what she meant. The flower pot smashed into the greenhouse low down. While they dropped flat, close under the wall of the house, the chase—two bowler hats and three uniforms now—passed within yards of them, over the next fence and over the boundary wall by way of the greenhouse, smashing more panes.

  ‘Back, David!’

  He obeyed without question the greater experience of a juvenile delinquent. He could understand Scheeper and that tree now. She was keeping up with ease, running lightly and fast. It was the first time he had seen her run, for never before had it been essential. A revelation for him. Her dumpy top half postulated clumsy legs so that his sub-conscious continued to insist that they were although his eye was well aware that they were slender.

  They crept back along the route they had taken, reached the foot of the railway embankment and began to follow it round the curve. Ahead of them the party had broken out of the gardens and were combing the rough land where the elusive pair might have dropped to the ground hoping to be overrun in the dark. Two figures were up on the embankment itself, throwing powerful beams along the track to spot the fugitives if they tried to cross it. In the houses more windows were lit where the inhabitants had been stirred up by the crash of glass or police knocking at their front doors.

  They had to stay where they were, crouched at the foot of the embankment close to the station but well outside the range of its lights, while their pursuers were casting back and forth over the rough ground. Then the pack crossed the railway to beat out whatever cover there was on the other side. It was safe to move very cautiously forward.

  Immediate danger was over except for a cop on the line itself whose figure could just be made out against the sky. It was doubtful if he could see them when they passed below him but he would certainly hear them, for it was impossible to move quietly through the weeds and tufts of grass at the foot of the embankment. Bernardo scrambled up and wriggled across the line to see if the other side offered an easy passage round the sentry. It seemed to be very broken ground sprinkled with low scrub which was being thoroughly searched. The number of lights showed that the police had been reinforced.

  Their own side of the embankment was safer as the search of the strip of field between houses and railway had been abandoned. They silently followed the boundary wall of the gardens and were very nearly spotted by some officious citizen who popped his white face over it and searched the neighbourhood with a powerful acetylene lamp. The greenhouse, two gardens back, was the obvious method of dealing with him. Bernardo crawled along the foot of the wall, found half a brick and produced another satisfying crash. The white face disappeared. The beam of the lamp was thrown across the gardens, and someone yelled:

  ‘Oy! Got ’em! Police!’

  The cop on the line shouted something down to the other side but his companions were uninterested, probably accustomed to being thrown off the right scent by too enthusiastic members of the public. Bernardo and Nadya crept on under the shadow of the wall and returned to the foot of the embankment as soon as they were safely past the sentry. They could now be fairly sure that there was no trouble ahead of them, so they trotted along the metals for a mile before stopping to rest and think.

  The night was utterly silent. There was no pursuit. Bernardo again found it difficult to accept his own importance. He was not a bank robber, merely a desperate and suspicious character with a record of comparatively minor offences. It was an effort to remember that he was wanted in Spain for the murder of some princely crook. But there it was, and the police were not at all likely to give up. They seemed to ignore railway lines but one could bet they had blocked all likely roads. And what about bridges over the railway which would allow them to keep an eye on both?

  The first bridge loomed up after another mile. He treated it with proper caution, taking to the fields in order to circle round it. When they had slipped across the road which the bridge carried he stealthily reconnoitred the approach. He could make out a car standing just short of the parapet. A few more yards along the line and it would have been all up.

  The railway itself had proved too risky, so they ploughed across the damp meadows alongside it until they came up against a wood surrounded by a low barbed wire fence. The moon was now getting up in a clear sky; the wood offered a return to the darkness which nerves, badly shaken by their narrow escape, demanded. It might be a belt of trees with little cover or it might offer refuge for a day or two.

  After worming under the wire they pushed their way through a tangle of ash, thorn and overgrown laurel. The centre of the wood was open, but too rough to be called a glade. The moon showed a sandy waste of mounds, holes and bramble bushes with knee high growth between them. There was a strong smell of fox. A startled roebuck bounced into cover.

  Stumbling and tripping across the moonlit mess they found on the other side a stand of larches. Beneath the trees was pitch darkness and a soft, dry bed of needles. They had a place to rest and—up the easily climbed trees—a possible hiding place in emergency. Beyond the larches a rutted, overgrown track led out into the open past what looked like a disused hut.

  Both were enchanted by the copse and its promise. Inexplicable England! On its own small scale the place was wilder, more tangled, more full of hidden life than any Romanian forest Bernardo had seen, yet it was within four miles of a busy town and bordered by the railway. The damp and warmth of May had accumulated in a mere thicket—so far as he could judge it was not more than twenty acres—lush growth and a concentration of animal life which would be scattered far and wide in the great woods of Europe and seldom seen.

  They settled down under the larches, prepared to spend the rest of the night there and explore ways of escape in the morning. Anyone entering the copse could be heard and avoided. Even half a dozen searchers would think the place empty while the pair they wanted were hidden among the dark stems of the laurels or with bodies half way down a badger sett and head and shoulders invisible unless stepped on. It was futile to look forward to London or any
where else, but for the moment they were safe.

  Some time after one they heard movement through the bushes too clumsy to be that of an animal. Then there was a thud followed by a string of curses which Bernardo recognised as Hungarian. He signalled to Nadya to remain under the larches and crawled silently forward until he could distinguish anything moving in the open centre of the wood. Moonlight caught on white hair. The intruder was undoubtedly Sigismond Pozharski mopping his forehead. He sat down in full view on one of the little tumps thrown up centuries ago by the spade of man or quite recently by the claws of badger.

  ‘Bernardo, dear boy,’ he remarked to nothing, ‘if you are roosting here along with somebody’s pheasants, will you kindly come out?’

  He lit a cigar and remained squatting on his tump like an amiable troll.

  ‘The police, so far as I know, are nowhere near the bridge where you so wisely avoided them. The car was Kalmody’s. He picked you up with night glasses.’

  Bernardo preserved complete silence. The glasses were now hanging on Pozharski’s chest, unpleasantly reminding him of Bobo’s.

  ‘Whenever we meet, you always assume I am ill-disposed. I am not. Nor is Istvan. It’s a long story how we were able to trace you. Meanwhile I may point out that my housekeeper was seriously alarmed by an absolute procession of lice hatching out from a Romanian cabman’s hat.’

  Bernardo rose to his feet and strolled out into the open.

  ‘My dear fellow! It was only a fifty-fifty chance. How glad I am! And now present me to this clever Miss Andreyev.’

  Nadya came forward uncertainly and suspiciously, for Pozharski must be aware of her history as far back as the Moş. He took both her hands, treating her at once as if she were the daughter of an old friend.

  ‘You never told me what she was like, Bernardo.’