Red Anger

by Geoffrey Household

  I told my story: how, seeing the gay lights of Dover and Folkestone across the calm water, I had quietly and impulsively slipped into the sea from the Nadezhda Krupskaya and swum ashore. It was the only ship of which I knew the name. She was the mother ship and there had been a photograph of her in the evening paper. The Inspector took it all down. Evidently he understood French, though unwilling to speak it. The Russian did the questioning. His manners did not improve. He made it clear that he despised all Romanians, white, red or indifferent.

  The next day I went to gaol pending further enquiries. It seemed to me no worse than a bad hotel on a wet day—always assuming that it could be treated as a temporary inconvenience. To be compelled to accept it as home for many months—which had been more than a possibility when dealing with a shameless Sokes—would have been an appalling fate. I wondered why punishment by boredom should be considered more humane than quicker tortures.

  I was photographed and my finger prints were taken. That could be the end of the game if Adrian Gurney’s prints were also collected from any convenient surface in his Caulby lodgings; but the risk, I felt, was small. Caulby police were notable for the excellent organisation of dances and frequent changes of Chief Constable. In a plain case of suicide they were not likely to sprinkle powder on tooth glasses.

  I was happier about the photograph in which I had managed to pose as proud, sullen and solid. The result should be a fair picture of a foreign trawlerman with a nasty hang-over, not very like a smiling youth with dark moustache and hair falling over one eyebrow—which was how I would appear if there were any snaps of me available. The only official photograph of Adrian Gurney would be the duplicate of his passport photo. That, if fished out from Foreign Office archives, showed an exhausted, undernourished outcast, all eyes, with the artificial smirk insisted upon by a cheap Cairo photographer.

  My second interrogation was by a courteous Romanian exile. Preliminary chatting showed that he was devoted to every stream and village of his own Wallachia. He said frankly that he could not see why a man who was neither rich nor in danger of arrest should want to leave it. This quite sincere approach had a cunning all of its own, for it forced the refugee to show how white-hot his indignation really was.

  I decided against any indignation at all.

  ‘If I didn’t escape, I should have had to get married,’ I said.

  ‘You had—well, anticipated matrimony?’

  ‘Regularly on Tuesday evenings. And she was a very earnest, trusted party member.’

  ‘Flashing eyes and economics?’

  ‘Exactly. So one longed to infect her with the taint of frivolity.’

  ‘You were successful?’

  ‘Well, occasionally,’ I replied, grossly exaggerating a youthful affair in Assuan days. ‘But the trouble was that she was growing suspicious. And she wasn’t a girl to scratch or throw things. I could see her slapping a report on her boss’s desk and then I might find myself with a ten years’ sentence merely because I’d enjoyed a charming Saturday between two Tuesdays.’

  ‘So you very wisely chose freedom,’ the Romanian agreed. ‘But why England?’

  ‘France was too far to swim.’

  ‘I shouldn’t say that to the Security Officer if I were you.’

  ‘Democracy, you think?’

  ‘Democracy, certainly.’

  ‘Will he believe it?’

  ‘No. But it’s the right thing to say. Mention your perverse taste for political girl-friends of course!’

  ‘It’s very good of you to trust me.’

  ‘I trust the national character, my dear Mr. Petrescu. Communism will do very well for Bulgars, but for a Romanian it is inhuman. And now be good enough to tell me what a clerk from the Sulina fisheries was doing on a Russian trawler!’

  I had my story ready for that question. I invented a cousin who was a marine biologist engaged in experimental fish farming. The cousin wanted to study Atlantic species and had no difficulty in getting permission to join the Russian fleet. At my urgent request, I had been taken along as interpreter.

  ‘But you said you did not understand Russian.’

  ‘Well, what would you have said when faced with some­thing like a Tsarist colonel with a knout? I am Romanian and proud of it.’

  ‘Where did you learn Russian?’

  ‘In college.’

  I was on safe ground at last for I could talk of my education as it had been and as it would have continued if I had not gone to Egypt—which of course I never mentioned. The interview resolved itself into a pleasant chat which might—if there had been anything to drink—have equally well taken place in a Bucarest café.

  His report released me from gaol. I was put up at a hostel and provided with clothes at government expense. Two days later I was escorted to London and underwent a further and very lengthy interrogation, conducted this time partly in Russian and partly in French by a cordial Englishman who appeared satisfied, assured me that I would find nothing but good will and wished me luck.

  I was indeed impressed by the good will. A simple, furnished room was found for me in the house of a French-speaking landlady and work which allowed me to keep my own hours and to feel of service to my true country. I was employed by the Institute of Foreign Affairs to translate magazine articles from Russian and Romanian into French. The librarian to whom I delivered my fair copies explained that they were required for educational departments of the E.E.C. That was the reason why the translations were not directly into English. It seemed odd, but who was I to question it or have suspicions?

  I joined an English class for immigrants to which I had been recommended by the police, but dropped the lessons as soon as I discovered that nobody was interested in my presence or absence; it was too much of a strain to keep up sham ignorance and a consistently bad accent. What I had not foreseen was my loneliness, except for casual contacts in restaurants or on the street. Patience, I told myself, was the only remedy. I had only to stick it out for a few more weeks and then I would be free to slide off into rural England and vanish.

  Of Sokes and Caulby I knew nothing and was too cautious to make enquiries. There had been short paragraphs in one evening and two morning papers reporting the suicide of Adrian Gurney with a mention of the car but nothing about the motive. Evidently the suicide of an insignificant clerk was not news so long as the police kept the more puzzling features to themselves. My past must have come out as soon as Sokes stated that he had met his personal assistant in Paris. Therefore I must have a passport, and reference to the Foreign Office would produce my history. But it seemed most unlikely that the routine answer to a police enquiry, perhaps dealt with by a clerk on a printed form, could lead to anyone spotting the possible connection between Gurney and Petrescu.

  At any rate all danger at Caulby would be over by now and Sokes’s accounts in faultless order. The police, helped by some ingenious psychiatrist, might well decide that Adrian Gurney, frustrated outcast from Egypt and the streets of Paris, had been so upset by reading and signing his employer’s love letters that he had suffered from the delusion that he himself was the lover and Sokes his powerful rival.

  In spite of loneliness I was comforted by a feeling that I was never isolated from my fellows. Strangers in pubs would invite me to have a drink. Occasionally on the street people would ask me the time or—excusing themselves politely—the way to some street of which I had never heard. I put this down to something attractive about my face or perhaps an unaggressive bearing. After all, if you want to know the way or the time you have a choice of dozens of passers-by and you choose unconsciously to appeal to the chap who looks least occupied and reasonably obliging. It seemed to my inexperienced mind a sort of compliment.

  After six weeks the translation job dried up. I was told that for the present there were no suitable documents, that when there were any the Library would get in touch with me and that meanwhile I should apply to my nearest Labour Exchange for work. The Exchange offered only manual labour
but could not compel me to accept it; they advised me to take more trouble with my English if I wanted an office job. I was broke, worried and came to the conclusion that my face showed it, for the flattering casual contacts had become noticeably less.

  I was wasting an afternoon—from the business point of view—in the National Portrait Gallery when I was joined by a well-dressed, obviously cultured citizen in his late forties. He remarked pleasantly that the typical English face had not changed much since the eighteenth century. I guessed that he himself was not English though his accent was perfect. After we had exchanged a few commonplaces he asked me what country I came from. When I replied that I was Romanian he broke enthusiastically into the language and we went at it like a couple of long-lost exiles. He was very free with information about himself, giving his name as Marghiloman, of an old political family. He had escaped, he said, in the short interim between the liberation of the country by the Russians and the final take-over when the Iron Curtain came down; now that things were much easier, he had no trouble in corresponding with relations and was on friendly terms with the personnel of the London Embassy. He believed he could safely go back for a long stay whenever he liked.

  On my part I did not tell the story of how I had arrived in England. Although Petrescu had only been news for a day, he might remember and draw me into difficult explanations. So I said my name was Prefacutu and left my past vague, allowing him to think that my family lived in Paris and I had received special permission to join them there.

  We got on splendidly and I was impressed by his general air of sophistication and his courtesy to the much younger man. In some ways I was still very simple. I had certainly shown a lot of panicky ingenuity in my own affairs but had rushed all my fences without stopping to think what might be on the other side. Looking back, I find my mixture of low cunning and over-confidence exactly like that of a growing boy.

  We strolled across Trafalgar Square together and settled down at a quiet corner table in the saloon bar of a nearby pub. He appeared fascinated by the stories I could tell him, mostly humorous, of life under the present régime and relations with the Russians.

  ‘It sounds as if you spoke Russian,’ he said.

  ‘I do. Fluently but not very well.’

  He then hesitated as if thinking something over and deciding at last to take the plunge.

  ‘Would you do something for me? Frankly, it is for them. But there’s nothing whatever which need bother your conscience.’

  I asked him what it was. He replied that he wanted a message delivered. He could ask anybody to do it—or anybody who was not in an official position—but to carry conviction the messenger should be an obvious foreigner from eastern Europe. A Romanian would do perfectly.

  Carrying messages for Russians was too much even for my sweet innocence. I told him that I did not like it at all, but if he cared to give me the details I would at least listen.

  ‘It’s about that rat Alwyn Rory. He was clever enough to get clear and is safely in Moscow.’

  I had read of the escape of Lieutenant Mornix from 42 Whatcombe Street just before leaving Caulby. It must have increased the profits of the daily press to such an extent that they could afford to turn down advertisements. The story had everything—fornication in high places, spies a-spying, committees a-sitting, a minister resigning and the disappearance of Alwyn Rory, a civil servant belonging to MI5. Newspapers insisted that he had escaped to Russia, but the Russians had never claimed that he did.

  ‘How do you know he’s in Moscow?’

  ‘Because I was at school with the First Secretary of the Romanian Embassy and we have kept up our friendship. On politics we agree to differ.’

  ‘It seems to me you’d be the perfect double agent,’ I said.

  He ignored the silly brashness of the remark.

  ‘Yes, I am—if you mean just explaining one side to the other. So my friend entrusted to me a message for Rory’s nearest relation—an aunt whom he is very fond of. He is anxious that she should know he is alive and that she should have his address. No harm in that, is there? The man can do no more damage to us.’

  I admitted rather reluctantly that it might be a kindly thing to do even if Rory did not deserve it.

  ‘But naturally they don’t want to risk sending it through the post or telephoning. They have to deny Rory’s presence in Russia for the moment. Later on, of course, they’ll let it leak through the correspondents of the London papers. Now, I wondered if you would go down and give her the address in person. You have enough English for that and you need say nothing at all about yourself. If a question of your bona fides comes up and she gets some Russian-speaking friend to test you, you’ll pass.’

  ‘If the message is just an address and no more …’ I began.

  ‘I’ll show it to you.’

  He pulled out an unsealed envelope and gave it to me. Inside was nothing but the name Alwyn Rory and a Moscow address.

  ‘I shouldn’t expect you to do it for nothing,’ he said.

  I was a little unhappy about that; but his whole explanation sounded open and simple and I could see no way in which handing over the address might harm my country. In the very unlikely event of running into trouble I could always say I had been asked to deliver an envelope by a Romanian friend, a Mr. Marghiloman. That would only reinforce my identity as Ionel Petrescu. Besides, it seemed very possible that our own security people knew all about Marghiloman and were humane enough to allow a message to go through to the aunt. No doubt my reasoning was also affected by the fact that I was broke.

  ‘I want you to establish good relations with Mrs. Hilliard,’ he went on. ‘To do that you might have to stay down there a day or two. So you had better take fifty pounds in case of unforeseen expenses. And when you come back you might tell me how you got on—whether she was ashamed or just maintaining Rory’s innocence against the odds or perhaps pro-Russian. Suppose we meet here a week from today, same time?’

  He gave me Mrs. Hilliard’s address but said little more about her beyond the fact that she was a widow in her fifties and had strong left-wing sympathies in her youth. She lived in South Devon at a house called Cleder’s Priory in the village of Molesworthy.

  I took his fifty and the envelope and went home. I must emphasize that I had nothing against Romania—except that it was not my country—and this very typical Romanian reminded me in some way of my stepfather, also a very pleasant, persuasive character ready to appreciate both sides of any intrigue. However, I have to admit a humiliating resemblance to the ingenuous American sitting alone in a foreign café and welcoming some highly respectable stranger of polished manners who entertains him in his own language and offers to give him an option on the site of the Eiffel Tower.

  Molesworthy was below the southern edge of Dartmoor. I took a train down to Totnes and then had a three-hour bus journey over a distance which a stout-hearted walker could have covered in the same time. I had never realised that so many railways in Devon had been closed, thus returning country life, for those too old or too poor to drive, to the conditions of the eighteenth century.

  I got off at Buckland and trailed along from signpost to signpost until I arrived at Molesworthy. I inspected three or four likely abodes for a widow, but none of them was called Cleder’s Priory; so I went into the pub for a pint of bitter. It was just past opening time and the bar of the Crown and Thistle was empty. In reply to my enquiry the landlord said Cleder’s Priory was lower down the valley, and added:

  ‘You’ll be the new Portuguese butler Mrs. Hilliard is expecting, I dare say?’

  That seemed a handy excuse for my presence, so in my most grotesque English I allowed him to think that I had come down to be interviewed. Marghiloman had not given me the impression that Mrs. Hilliard was the sort of person to have butlers and I had expected that she lived quite modestly in some pretty village house.

  ‘Is rich? True?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, not what you’d call stinking rich. Too well liked
for that she is. She’s got money all right, but she’ll help anyone any time. Sporting old girl, too. Master of Hounds. It ain’t what they call a fashionable pack, but we has our fun. And it’s a damn shame that the married couple who worked for her left her like that.’

  ‘Zey ’ave a bust-up?’

  ‘Dunno. But it was all along of her nephew. Well, you might as well know it now as later. He’s that Rory which let the spy escape. I’d never have believed it of him and I don’t. A real gentleman he was. I remember as once Mrs. Hilliard had just taken on my brother as whipper-in and I wanted to go out to see if he were any good, but I couldn’t because the missus was away in Plymouth looking after her mother who was took ill as always when ’twas inconvenient. “Don’t you bother, Jack,” Mr. Rory says. “I’ll look after the bar and you can have my Sherry-and-Bitters—” lovely hunter he was! “—so you don’t break your bleeding neck trying to keep up with your brother on that damn screw of yours.”’

  I had to look blank at all this rush of west country talk, though God knows it was gloriously familiar, and got the conversation back to the vanished married couple.

  ‘Worst snobs I ever knew! Always telling me how they’d worked for Lady Slingemup or some such name. And what do you suppose they did when the police and worse began snooping round here? They upped and cleared off! And if you get the job I hope you’ll see that Mrs. Hilliard has the service she deserves. And you’ll find we don’t care whether a man’s a Portugoose or a Chinaman so long as he’s a sweet, easy bloke. You married?’

  I said I wasn’t but could do as much as any woman and better than most. That seemed to amuse him. He slapped me on the shoulder and assured me I’d get a good job easily in Kingsbridge or Salcombe if the old girl didn’t like me.