Arms and the Women

by Reginald Hill

  Suddenly the fat man sank to his knees and prostrated himself with his face pressed against the young man’s sandals.

  ‘Have mercy, great Prince,’ his muffled voice pleaded. ‘Like the gods you are clearly descended from, take pity on this poor miserable wretch whose only hope for life and succour lies in your infinite generosity.’

  The young man didn’t look impressed.

  ‘What’s this you’ve brought us, Achates?’ he asked.

  Succinctly the guard commander told his story.

  ‘So, a Greek, you say? And probably a spy?’

  A cry of protest rose from the recumbent man, cut off sharply as Achates pressed the point of his sword into his neck.

  ‘Could be. Shall I set him on a griddle over a slow fire for half an hour till he’s ready to tell us?’

  A murmur of approval went up from the listening men, but the Prince said gravely, ‘This is not how our religion has taught us to treat the wayworn traveller who comes as a guest in our midst. Let food and dry clothing be brought, and when he is refreshed, I shall talk to him to discover what manner of man he is and his purpose in coming here.’

  The fat man began to gabble fulsome thanks, but the Prince silenced him with a sharp movement of his foot and went on, ‘Nevertheless, heat up the griddle in case I am not satisfied.’

  The Prince disengaged his foot and Achates prodded the Greek upright with his sword. Two young women came forward, one with some clothing, the other with a bronze platter piled high with steaming food.

  ‘That smells grand. I’m right grateful, lord. Only I need a hand to eat with.’

  ‘Only one?’ said Achates, raising his weapon. ‘Which would you like to keep?’

  ‘Nay, not so hasty,’ said the Greek, starting back. ‘Hang about.’

  He flexed his broad shoulders, took a deep breath, bowed forward, his body hunched, and with a single convulsive movement, he snapped the length of cloth which bound his wrists.

  At this moment the doorbell rang and Ellie, dragged back from the dangerous world of her imagination to the equally dangerous world of her life, knocked over the cup.

  ‘Fuck!’ she said, jumping up and shaking the coffee from the keyboard.

  Amazingly, when she finished, the screen still displayed her story but for safety’s sake she saved and switched off.

  The doorbell was ringing again.

  Even the knowledge that Detective Constable Dennis Seymour was sitting in his car right opposite the house didn’t prevent her from checking on the bellringer from behind the curtains like any suburban housewife in a sitcom.

  It was her friend, Daphne Aldermann, full of eager curiosity after having been intercepted and checked out by the watching policeman. After a short hiatus to pour herself and her guest a nerve-soothing Scotch – once you got on Dr Dalziel’s books, you followed his prescriptions to the bitter end – she had launched into the narrative with mock-heroic gusto, and thence to the calmer pleasures of self-analysis. As a long-time opponent of all forms of violent action, she felt it necessary to explain in detail to Daphne, who had no objection whatsoever to a bit of violence in a good cause, what had provoked her to physical assault.

  ‘It was using Rosie that did it,’ she said. ‘It was my own guilt feelings that really exploded, I suppose.’

  ‘Your guilt feelings?’

  Daphne wasn’t Dalziel and she certainly wasn’t that nebby infant, Novello.

  She gave her a version of the confession she’d rehearsed when talking to the Fat Man, ending with, ‘So you see what a mixed-up cow I’ve turned into. I feel like that base Indian – in Hamlet, is it? –who threw away the pearl richer than all his tribe. Only I got it back.’

  ‘Othello, I think. And the point was he had no idea that what he’d got had any value at all. And you didn’t throw Rosie away anyway,’ said Daphne Aldermann sensibly. ‘And you’ve always been a mixed-up cow, so no change there.’

  It was, she felt, in her relationship with Ellie Pascoe, her avocation to be sensible. In upbringing, outlook and circumstance, the two women were light years apart. But the mad scientist of chance had chosen to set their opposing particles on a collision course some years earlier, and while a great deal of energy had been released, it had been through fusion rather than fission.

  Ellie looked ready to meet her head-on in battle, but in the end diverted to a minor skirmish.

  ‘You sure it’s Othello?’ she said truculently. ‘I thought the nearest you privately educated lot got to literature was carrying the Collected Works on your head during deportment lessons.’

  ‘You’re forgetting. They made us learn a classic each morning between the cross-country run and the first cold shower,’ said Daphne. ‘So OK, something bad happens to our kids, we feel responsible. Mothers are programmed that way. Or conditioned – let’s not get into that argument.’

  ‘I know that. But knowing doesn’t stop you feeling. And being shocked how much you feel. Why ever I did it, I still can’t believe I actually assaulted those people.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Daphne, with all the ease of a natural supporter of corporal and capital punishment. ‘They had it coming. God knows what they were going to do with you, but if they get caught, probably they’ll get off with writing a hundred lines and probation. At least as he smiles at you out of the dock, you’ll be able to think, I left my mark on you, mate!’

  Ellie laughed and refilled their glasses. It had been one of the mad scientist’s better ideas to have Daphne call round that morning. As soon as she saw her, Ellie realized that of all her friends, here was the one best suited to the circumstances. With Daphne she could get serious without getting heavy, and her different world view provided a stimulating, if sometimes infuriating, change of perspective.

  They drank and Daphne said, ‘So, how’s Rosie? Did she get a whiff of all the excitement?’

  ‘We tried to keep it from her, but you never know what they pick up, do you? I was tempted to keep her off school today, but that would have confirmed there was something going on. Anyway, the holidays start tomorrow, and she made such a fuss about getting back after her illness, she’d have been brokenhearted to miss the fun of the last day.’

  ‘Children’s hearts are made of one of the least frangible materials known to man,’ said Daphne with a mother-of-two’s certainty. ‘Especially girls’. I seem to recall breaking mine on an almost daily basis but somehow surviving without resort to Dr Christian Barnard. You too, I bet.’

  ‘Perhaps. I never lost my best friend when I was Rosie’s age, but,’ said Ellie.

  There’d been two girls stricken by the meningitis bug. The other, Rosie’s classmate and best friend, Zandra, had died.

  Daphne grimaced and said, ‘I was forgetting that. Sorry. It’s funny, a child’s grief, unless you’ve experienced it yourself, you don’t think about it much… but she was keen to get back to Edengrove, you say? I’d have thought…’

  ‘Me too. We’ve talked about Zandra, naturally. Or rather I’ve talked. Rosie listens. But she doesn’t say much beyond, the nix got her. You remember the nix? The water-imp in that book she used to be crazy about, whose hobby was abducting young girls? The educational psych, who looks about fifteen and has a stutter, says I shouldn’t worry, in fact I should be pleased Rosie’s found a formula which enables her to deal with her loss. Like she’s bottling it up, you mean? I said. Like she’s dealing with it, says this adolescent expert firmly. She’ll talk when she wants to talk, just leave the channels open. Just try to let things settle back to what they were before. Routines are more than comfortable, they are essential. Christ, I reckon she must have majored on The Little Book of Psycho-pap or some such thing!’

  ‘You didn’t actually say that, did you?’

  Ellie laughed and said, ‘No. I’m getting soft. In fact, I came home and dug out Nina and the Nix from where I’d hidden it, then I had a drink and a think, and then I went and hid it again. In other words, I’ve no idea how to cope. So I decid
ed to go with the flow and when Rosie wanted to go back to school, I said, OK, why not?’

  ‘That sounds sensible.’

  ‘Yeah, except I did start wondering if it was just a way of getting out from under this madwoman who’d turned from a straightforward modern laissez-faire mum to an overbearing, over-anxious, ever-present earth mother. OK. No need to say it. That’s me all over. Self-centred. Everything comes back to me.’

  ‘You said it. But everything includes all the pain and worry too, so don’t whip yourself too hard with them scorpions.’

  ‘My, we are full of literature this morning. Othello again?’

  ‘The Bible. My father was an archdeacon, remember, so you can hardly feel threatened by that.’

  Daphne gave as good as she got, thought Ellie, which was one of the reasons she liked her.

  She said, ‘Listen, can you stay for lunch? I’d really like to talk. Or we could go out and get a sandwich at the pub.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m on my way to the Mossy Bank Garden Centre, would you believe? It’s the other side of the bypass and as I was going to be so close, I couldn’t resist dropping in to see how you were. Patrick and I are lunching in their caff, God help us. He’s been advising them on roses and I think he feels the sight of his expensive wife will help prepare them for the sight of his expensive bill. I’d suggest you came but I think your Save the Peatbogs T-shirt might be counterproductive. I could manage a drink this evening though.’

  ‘Shit. I’ve got my Liberata group coming round.’

  ‘What’s that? Plastic kitchenware or one of those sexy undies groups?’

  ‘No, the Liberata Trust’s a human rights organization, sort of Amnesty with feminist attitude… oh, ha ha.’

  She saw from her friend’s face that she was being sent up.

  Daphne said, ‘Oh well, if you’d rather save the world than have a drink with your friend…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Truth is, the world’s had to look after itself over the past couple of months. I’ve been feeling guilty – yes, I know; there I go again – so when Feenie rang about the next meeting, I said why not have it round here?’

  ‘Feenie? You don’t mean Serafina Macallum, the mad bag lady?’

  ‘That’s right. Our founder, chair and driving force. How on earth do you know her?’

  ‘She sold us the bothy. Or at least her lawyer did. We never met her during the negotiations, but I’ve come close to being run down by her several times, both in that clapped-out Land Rover she drives, and on that ancient bike. You’d think she had something against me.’

  Ellie concealed the thought that this was probably truer than Daphne guessed. She knew that what Feenie Macallum resented about the break up of her family estate wasn’t losing bits of property but the kind of people she had to lose them to.

  Her own ignorance of the details of the Aldermanns’ purchase of a country cottage lay in her knee-jerk disapproval when Daphne had mentioned it a couple of years earlier.

  ‘Patrick loves to see the kids and their friends enjoying themselves but he does go white when he sees them turning the garden into a football pitch or a badminton court, so I said, Why don’t we buy a chunk of unspoilt countryside which they can then spoil to their hearts’ content,’ she’d said.

  And Ellie hadn’t been able to bite back the caustic comment that helping put the price of rural housing out of the reach of other people’s children hardly seemed a proportionate solution to Patrick’s concern for his precious roses.

  The cottage hadn’t been much mentioned between them thereafter, and when it was, Ellie hadn’t been able to decide if Daphne’s insistence on calling it the bothy was diplomatic understatement or provocative meiosis. Nor was she really sure whether her own attitude was pure social indignation or part dog-in-the-manger envy.

  Now she wished she hadn’t been so quick to make it a no-go area, both conversationally and geographically, as her certainty that Feenie Macallum would have soaked the purchasers for as much as she could get, then put the money to some very good use, would have allowed her to have her cake and eat it.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Daphne, ‘she doesn’t look as if she knows what day of the week it is. Ring her up, tell her she’s got it wrong.’

  ‘Feenie is as sharp as a butcher’s knife,’ retorted Ellie. ‘And there are others concerned and I’ve mucked them about once already. The meeting should have been yesterday, but when I thought I was going to be riding herd on the school outing, I had to ring round everybody and rearrange. Oh God. I forgot to remind Peter they were coming.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Daphne. ‘What pleasanter surprise can there be for a hard-working bobby than to come home and find his house full of anarchist do-gooders? So let’s see if we can find a window in your crowded calendar. Lunch sometime later this week? Patrick’s going to some horticultural conference in Holland in the morning, Diana’s down at her cousin’s in Dorset and David’s at the bothy with some sixth-form chums. God, you are lucky to be in the State system. Costs you nothing and they spend most of their time at school, while we pay a fortune and ours are hardly ever there!’

  Ellie smiled, but didn’t rise. A wise avenger picks her own payback time. Lunch at Rosemont, which invariably consisted of Marks and Sparks goodies tarted up to look home-made, should provide a good launch pad.

  ‘That sounds great,’ she said. ‘Any day but tomorrow. We’re going out to Enscombe. They’ve got some kind of menagerie at the Hall. Ed Wield, who lives in the village, was foolish enough to mention it to Rosie and she didn’t leave him alone till he promised to show her round.’

  ‘Wield? That’s the ugly sergeant, isn’t it? Didn’t you say he was a bit…?’

  Daphne made a rocking gesture with her hand.

  ‘Gay?’ said Ellie. ‘That’s right. Except not a bit. All of him. And despite anything you learned at Sunday School, it doesn’t mean he lies in wait for small children.’

  ‘Never thought it did,’ said Daphne. ‘He struck me as a very nice man. And I recall Daddy saying that he preferred his curates gay, as it was easier to look after the choir when the curate was around than it was to look after the curate with the Mothers’ Union in full cry. Now I must whizz off and earn my keep. A garden centre caff! The mind boggles.’

  ‘Regards to Patrick,’ said Ellie. ‘And watch out for greenfly.’

  She waved her friend goodbye, noting with self-mocking envy that since last they met she’d changed her car again for a sporty Audi, gave another wave to DC Dennis Seymour, and went back inside.

  Mention of her Liberata meeting reminded her that she’d promised herself to do a bit of preparation. She’d completely neglected this and most other commitments during the past few weeks, but when Feenie Macallum asked questions, a wise acolyte had answers. She went back upstairs and switched on the laptop. There were no visible aftereffects of the coffee and she clicked on Liberata in her Documents and studied the names that came up. These were the women Feenie had allocated to her to be in correspondence with. Most were in prison. All were in trouble. Few were able to reply, so writing to them was often an act of faith. But as Feenie said, even if the letter is intercepted, it tells someone out there that we know these women exist and are victims, and that might make the difference between life and death.

  She selected the first on her list, Bruna Cubillas, the first alphabetically but also the first in Ellie’s affections. There’d been replies from Bruna, enough for a real relationship to be established, and written with an intensity of feeling that took Ellie by surprise. She’d mentioned this to Feenie, who’d said, ‘If someone offers you a helping hand when you’re drowning, you grip tight.’

  She began to write.

  Dear Bruna,

  How are you? I am sorry I have not written to you for so long but my life was turned upside down a little while ago.

  She paused and tried to think how turned upside down could be rendered in Spanish. She usually made some attempt to translate the more idiomatic bit
s of her letters, though perhaps by now it wasn’t necessary. Bruna had said she was keen to build on her smattering of English, and asked for some books to help her. Ellie had sent off a boxful, ranging from The House at Pooh Corner to a complete Shakespeare, but what progress she might have made Ellie had no idea. A hasty postscript to Bruna’s last letter had offered a gracias for ‘the book’, meaning presumably the suspicious and repressive prison regime had allowed only one of her boxful through. That was, she worked it out, almost a year ago. Ellie had written several letters since, but her last had been several weeks before Rosie’s illness. She thought ruefully of how flimsy a thing her concern for this poor imprisoned and probably tortured woman thousands of miles away had proved in the presence of immediate and personal pain, but she couldn’t feel guilty. Once, perhaps, but not now. Am I growing more or less selfish?

  She returned her attention to the letter.

  How much of her recent trauma should she lay out here? Feenie’s words came back to her. ‘Tell them everything about yourself,’ she commanded. ‘However trite, however tragic. That way they’ll know you really care, you’re not just dishing up nourishing broth for the peasants. What you’re doing is letting them know there is a real world still going on beyond their prison walls, there are real people still living their lives beyond the blank faces of their guards and torturers.’

  But when Ellie had asked for information about Bruna, Feenie had shaken her head.

  ‘Best you don’t know,’ she said. ‘These women live under regimes and in circumstances you can’t imagine. Sometimes they are totally innocent, but sometimes they may have done things which you in your ignorance could find hard to understand or justify. All you need to know is that they are suffering cruel and unnatural treatment. It is your task to give them hope. What they give you in return is up to them.’