Red Anger

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘Oh, they came down yesterday and are staying with him. Slung with cameras. Very humble and very persistent. You know the type. They were taking shots of the house from all angles yesterday. Perhaps Forrest was warning me that they might turn up to look at the chimneys by moonlight. If they do, darling, give ’em a nightcap and tell them I’ve gone to bed.’

  ‘What the hell are they doing here anyway?’

  ‘They are either carrying the benefits of civilisation into Devon or bringing back the peace of Devon to America. It depends on how some earnest professor of sociology taught them to view thatched cottages with no drains.’

  Tessa hung around a bit talking to the Penpoles and then, as her mother showed no sign of moving, went back to the house. Mrs. Hilliard must have noticed a faint atmosphere of disapproval in the room, but she addressed herself to me rather than the Penpoles.

  ‘I’m sorry, Willie, but one can always read in Tessa’s face whatever she doesn’t want to think.’

  Possibly—for a mother. The girl’s mouth was sensitive and uncertain at the corners, which could set nearly as hard as John’s or slightly quiver. The quiver, it’s true, was liable to give her away in any situation which demanded a convincing mask.

  ‘You haven’t been fishing in American waters, have you, Willie?’

  It was a remark which meant nothing to John, but had definite implications for me now that she had opened my eyes to all the interest there might be in a refugee swimming ashore from a Russian trawler fleet. I replied that she was the only American I had ever met and I could not believe she was typical.

  ‘I became what I wanted to become, Willie. And I tried to bring up Alwyn just as my two men would have wished.’

  I could only look my sympathy. Words were inadequate—and any way an impertinence—when I thought of the traitor and what the disgrace must have meant to her. She let it go at that, and shortly afterwards went back to the house with John.

  Mrs. Penpole left me alone while she made up a bed for me and then took me upstairs to a pleasant little attic, so near to the trees that it would have tempted a squirrel. After saying goodnight she turned in the doorway, her round, rosy face peering at me with rather the expression of my mother when she was pretending to be stern.

  ‘What I want to know, young man, is be ’ee on our side or bain’t ’ee?’

  I replied that Mrs. Hilliard seemed to think I was.

  ‘And I ’ope her’s right with ’ee actin’ as a Portugal and all. And if it be Mr. Alwyn ’ee wants to know more about, ’e’s bin under my veet like a fourpenny rabbit since ’e were that ’igh, and I tell ’ee Mr. Alwyn couldn’t ’ave done what they’m sayin’ no more than I can stand on me ’ead no more. The only fault ’e ’ad was to see the best in everyone.’

  I led her on to talk of her employer, asking what Mrs. Hilliard meant by her two men. Had she married twice?

  Indeed not, Mrs. Penpole said as if it were quite unthinkable. She had meant Alwyn’s father, Major Rory. Filling up the doorway, she gave me then and there a sketch of the family history. The Hilliards had been prosperous farmers at Cleder’s Priory, father to son for eight generations until the last Hilliard who had become a man of mark in South Devon—partly due to a university education, partly to his interest in all the classless sports of horsemen. And gloriously classless he seems to have been, equally at home with labourers, the neighbouring farmers and the county magnates.

  ‘’Ee could meet anyone at his table, me dear,’ she said. ‘And them as was ’mazed by it, well, they doant come again and good riddance. Too good for this world ’e was and the Lord took ’im early.’

  So much for Hilliard—and as fair a time as another to fill in the youth of Eudora though from later knowledge. She had been as much in revolt against wealthy, stock-broking parents as any hippies of today, and with more reason considering all the economic miseries of America in the nineteen-thirties. She met the brothers-in-law, Hilliard and Major Rory, when they were running a refugee camp for Spanish republican children on the Devon coast and were both desolated by the loss of Hilliard’s sister who had broken her neck in the hunting field. Eudora was weary, I think, of protests and marchings, of anarchist sacrifice and communist treachery; she was ready to see that integrity and deep love of fellow men were not the exclusive possessions of the left. So she married Hilliard and surrendered herself to the simplicity of his country life. When Major Rory was killed at Dunkirk, his thirteen-year-old-son, Alwyn, made his home with the Hilliards.

  ‘Mrs. Hilliard seems to have fallen in love with England,’ I said.

  ‘That’s as may be, Mr. Willie, but us zurely fell in love with she.’

  I slept soundly, though not quite off guard since I’d heard John creep into the cottage just before dawn and wondered why he and Mrs. Hilliard had stayed up so very late. I was woken up by Amy Penpole with a breakfast tray. When I apologised for not being up and about already, she reminded me that I was supposed to have gone off with the baker’s van and so I should stay where I was and not come downstairs.

  I sat there trying to plan what I ought to do and how I could disentangle Eudora Hilliard from all the embarrassment I had caused her and myself from whatever mess I was in. I was not supposed to show myself in Molesworthy or at the house or even at the Penpoles’ cottage. Tessa was being deliberately deceived about me. The pretence of being a Portuguese was finished. Obviously Ionel Petrescu must be removed as far as possible from everyone who wanted a serious talk with him. If Mrs. Hilliard was right and he was believed to have secrets of Russian trawlers, it was surprising that he had been put through such a perfunctory interrogation in London.

  She turned up in the middle of the morning looking worn and old, and bringing Sack-and-Sugar with her for comfort. He was annoyed at not being allowed to walk and was wriggling furiously in the poacher’s pocket of her tweed coat.

  She asked me if Amy was looking after me all right and agreed that I had better stay up in the attic for the time being.

  ‘Are you sure you have told me everything?’

  I said that I had told her everything I knew and it would all be clearer if we knew who ‘they’ were. When could she ask her friend?

  ‘I asked him last night. He said he would have to think it over but meanwhile you had better get out of here. What do you yourself think you ought to do?’

  ‘Leave tonight. No one saw me arrive and no one will see me go.’

  ‘If you don’t lose your way in the dark. Let’s see what Sack has to say.’

  She put him down on the floor of the attic. He humped himself round the angle between floor and wall examining everything and then climbed to my shoulder, opening with his claws a shallow scratch on my neck which he proceeded to lick with enjoyment. Ferrets can’t help it. The long, nonretractable claws can be the devil wherever one’s skin is too tight or too thin. It is then their habit to kiss the wound better and get a snack at the same time.

  ‘He says it’s good, tasty Wiltshire, but that blood may be about when ferrets and others are trusted too easily.’

  ‘I trusted him because I know him. Like trusting you,’ I answered, burying my hand in the shapeless bunch of fine fur and getting very gently nipped in acknowledgment.

  ‘Well, isn’t that nice! But I’m not sure you should, Willie—not all the way. Now, follow the path you know until you come to the ford and then don’t go too far south or you’ll get tied up among the creeks of the Kingsbridge Estuary. And of course keep clear of Totnes! Once you’re well inland, you’ll take some finding. And I’m going to give you some money to carry you over and you have to accept it. What will you do?’

  ‘Get taken on wherever I see them starting the potato harvest.’

  She collected Sack who had burrowed under the carpet and become a wave instead of a particle. We decided that I should never risk sending her an address, but I promised an anonymous picture postcard to let her know that all was well with me.

  The long day passed with the a
id of a dog-eared volume called Everyman’s Farriery which was as depressing as a medical dictionary and made me wonder how anybody managed to get a horse on the road at all. When it was full dark I shouldered my knapsack with enough food and drink in it to last me a day and thanked John and Amy. Mrs. Hilliard must have given me a good character for they treated me as if I were their personal agent about to set off into enemy territory.

  I knew the path as far as the top of the ridge. The narrow ribbon of turf, pitted by hooves, was unmistakable even at night; but when I reached the bare knoll where Tessa had failed to find the leash I was not sure of the way—what with the sheep tracks and the dead-end alleys into the surrounding bracken where a cow might have calved or hounds crashed in after a hare till John called them off. The ridge was so familiar to Mrs. Hilliard that I doubt if she realised how it would appear to a stranger in starlight.

  Eventually I found the right opening and started downhill. There was not a sound, and I could not hear my own footsteps on the short turf until I was walking through a mush of last year’s brown stems which had fallen across the path. The swishing disturbed some creature so close that I could just make out the waving tops of the fern as it pushed through the stems. I stood still, instinctively alarmed, for the hillside was as lonely as any in England and the forest of waist-high bracken, an intangible surface stretching away like the top of a cloud, could hide anything. Having dismissed tigers as highly improbable—I used to frighten myself deliciously with them as a boy—I was left with badger or rabbit, both too small for such a marked swaying of the tops, or deer or sheep which would plunge noisily away. The only common animal I could think of, too bulky to slip between stems but able to wriggle away at ground level, was man. So I did the same on the opposite side of the path, hoping that the other fellow had only heard my approach and had not caught sight of me.

  Again there was absolute silence for what seemed a very long time. It confirmed my guess that it was not an animal, but a man who was trying to avoid me or lying in wait for me. I ventured to stick up my head. Nothing to be seen. A light breeze had sprung up from the south which was rustling the fronds. I was impatient to get past him and away, so I pushed very slowly through the stems causing, I hoped, so delicate a movement above me that it would not be distinguishable in the dark from the effect of the wind. Once on the soundless turf of the path and in the black shadow of the wall of bracken I started to crawl downhill, paying close attention to fallen fronds and deep hoof marks with standing water. After a minute or two of this concentration on the ground I looked up, and there bang opposite to me was a bearded man on hands and knees playing exactly the same game.

  We stared at each other with, as it were, one paw raised. If we had been animals, one would have eventually snarled and displayed and the other—unless equally dominant—slid off into cover. As it was, we had equally guilty consciences which comes to the same thing. It’s also possible that the human sense of the comic had some influence, for there could hardly be a more preposterous situation than two grown men very cautiously crawling towards each other on hands and knees. So far as I remember, the complete banality of our greeting went something like this:

  ‘Adrian Gurney, of course!’

  ‘Then you must be Mrs. Hilliard’s friend.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘We both had the same idea when the breeze blew up.’

  ‘Obvious, when you come to think of it.’

  It was perplexing why Mrs. Hilliard’s friend—so respectable that she put on smart clothes to dine with him—should be as anxious not to be spotted as I myself. When he stood up, muddy to the knees and with an untidy beard going grey, I could smell him.

  ‘I suppose we ought to have fired simultaneously,’ I said with the hearty inanity of youth.

  ‘Ever handled an automatic?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The chances are you’d have been high and right. And I’m out of practice. So neither would have scored.’

  ‘Well, perhaps I’d better be on my way.’

  ‘You couldn’t run back and give a message to John Penpole, could you? Then I wouldn’t have to go down to the house.’

  ‘Of course. I’ve plenty of time.’

  ‘Just say that their friend has gone away.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Yes. And before you go tell me one thing, Mr. Gurney—when you were interrogated, what ship did you say you escaped from?’

  ‘Nadezhda Krupskaya. There was a photograph of her in the paper.’

  ‘I see. That clarifies matters a lot.’

  ‘Then can’t you tell me who’s after me and why? According to Mrs. Hilliard, you said I didn’t know my arse from my elbow.’

  Pushing half way into the bracken he made himself comfortable, leaning on one arm.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘and I’ll do my best. Where you slipped up, Mr. Gurney, was in your superb contempt for Caulby police. And you might have got away with it if it hadn’t been for Miss What’s-It of Wandsworth. But when you committed suicide and compelled your employer to tie himself into knots it was certain they would send your finger prints to Scotland Yard.

  ‘Now then! What happens when this very dubious character, Ionel Petrescu, swims ashore? He may be a crook or a spy or very useful indeed. His prints go automatically to the Yard, but it is unnecessary for the moment to put a name to them. Back comes the reply to MI5 that the prints are those of the late Adrian Gurney.

  ‘Within a week they have the whole of your history. Then let us imagine a small conference of these whisky-sodden louts, as Eudora calls them, at which some bright spark asks why the police should be allowed to run you in as a pretended suicide and public nuisance when you have propaganda value as Ionel Petrescu besides other likely values.

  ‘That brings us to what you really want to know. First of all a fake job was found for you and you were left quite free to live as you liked. They wanted to see who your contacts were, who tried to contact you and if you would be any use as an agent. How long were you on your own?’

  ‘About five weeks.’

  ‘Well, that must have been enough to convince them that your life was exceptionally dull and that you were of no interest to anyone. But patience pays off. Other people were watching them and you and waiting till they were sure you had no protection. When the lion has finished his meal, the jackals come around.’

  ‘Mrs. Hilliard thought I must have been a puzzle.’

  ‘Considering that Nadezhda Krupskaya is stuffed so full of aerials and electronics that she must blow out her fish through the bottom as soon as the trawl starts spilling them out over the top, it’s not surprising. So we will try to follow Russian reasoning when they learn of your well-publicised landing. One. Nobody was missing from that or any other ship; therefore this Ionel Petrescu was a British agent who somehow managed to hide on board till there was a chance of getting home with his information. Two. But their security makes this so unlikely that it can be dismissed; therefore you were probably slung out of, say, a midget submarine and swam ashore. Three. But if that is so, why was your arrival publicised? Answer—a very weak one—to persuade them that we know a lot more about their trawlers than we really do.’

  He turned to the subject of Marghiloman, still speaking as if he was well accustomed to the concise summary of reports.

  ‘Marghiloman has found out, a, that apparently you are a genuine Romanian and not under orders to pretend to be one; b, that since you gave a false name there is something fishy about you although your life in London has been an open book—perhaps too open; c, that you were prepared to do a very questionable job for another Romanian, so that you are or soon can be made wide open to blackmail, and you will then confess the truth about yourself or else.’

  ‘But why tail me?’

  ‘I have several answers to that, Mr. Gurney, none of them sure. But I am glad to see you take care in lonely places.’

  ‘You think I may be in da
nger?’

  ‘Of kidnapping, very possibly. You are a refugee, known to be without protection and without family or intimate friends. Who is going to know if you disappear?’

  That was unquestionably true. After all, I was counting on it myself that I could disappear. I said that he seemed to be very familiar with the ways of MI5 and asked him if he had ever known Alwyn Rory.

  ‘Quite well.’

  ‘Round here no one can believe he was guilty. What do you think?’

  ‘He was guilty of folly, over-confidence and perhaps cowardice. But he was not a traitor.’

  ‘If only he had not defected one could believe it. I’d like to believe it.’

  ‘He did not defect.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I am Rory. The letter you brought to Eudora was a rather crude attempt to find out whether she believed I had escaped to Russia.’

  I did not know what I ought to say. Absurdly the ‘ought’ seemed more important than anything I wanted to say. All the inexplicable behaviour of Mrs. Hilliard and the Penpoles, prepared to defend their fugitive even to the extent of imprisoning a suspicious stranger till he talked, at once fell into place. It was hard to make a complete about-turn and accept all the blast of newspaper indignation as mistaken. On the other hand, the only clear realities among all these drifting phantoms of cold war at sea were my trust in Eudora Hilliard, the waving bracken which was so kindly a shelter both to this fugitive and myself, and his personality with its incisive intelligence and direct, well-calculated, take-it-or-leave-it attack. So I gave in to the shock and simply carried on from his last remark.

  ‘But the Russians must know you are not in Moscow,’ I said.

  ‘Mr. Gurney, I have spent fifteen years trying to follow Russian reasoning, and I haven’t succeeded yet.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better call me Willie? Your aunt does.’

  Consciously I only meant that if we were ever in the presence of a third party I’d like the name of Gurney to be avoided. But how much more the simple remark implied: that I had no intention of giving him away and that there might even be some mutual activity.