Red Anger

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘You’re quite right. I will get used to Willie.’

  ‘Why on earth did you let people think you were in Moscow? And how did you do it?’

  ‘Never mind the how! Why? Well, for two reasons. One was to throw off the hunt until I had a chance of getting clear away to some country where I could not be extradited. I was almost certain to be convicted and even if I got off, my career was over and my name would stink. The other reason was to find out who shopped me before I left.’

  I asked him where he had been hiding. He would not tell me in case I ever found myself in a position where I might be forced to give it away.

  ‘But I’ll put you in the picture and you can pass it on to Eudora,’ he said. ‘Last night, after I had heard your story from her, I was making my way back to my health resort—let’s say it was at the edge of a river—when I spotted two men on the opposite bank. They were nowhere near the right place of our rendezvous, and I satisfied myself that they were just waiting, not searching. But obviously I was in danger. So I lay up during the day and when we met I was taking the deadly risk of visiting the house to tell her I had to clear out.’

  ‘I hope it had nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I think now that it may have done.’

  ‘But what a coincidence that we ran into each other!’

  ‘Not altogether. Both of us had to move tonight, me to the house, you from it. Both in danger, possibly from the same quarter. And only one path which avoids the village.’

  I wished him luck, expecting that he would be gone when I returned, and trotted back over the knoll down to the Penpoles’ cottage. When I was near the edge of the wood I heard the terriers yapping. Then they stopped. There was no light behind the curtains. Like the trees around it, the cottage was alive but impassive. I did not want to break the silence, so I threw several handfuls of gravel at the Penpoles’ bedroom window.

  ‘What are you doing here? I thought you had left.’

  It was Tessa, standing stiffly a few yards behind me, wide eyes luminous in the dark. That was why the terriers had stopped barking.

  My mind was running over and over the conversation with Alwyn Rory and tuned to straight English. Startled and with no time to think, I carried on with it, forgetting that the last time I saw her I was the Portuguese servant.

  ‘I left something behind,’ I said.

  ‘You’re always coming back for something. What is it this time?’

  ‘My watch.’

  ‘Where would it be? In your room? I’ll get it.’

  ‘John might have it in his pocket. Where are they?’

  ‘At the Cricket Club dance, and so is my mother. Why are you pretending to be a Portuguese? Does she know what you are?’

  She sounded ready to burst, and I could understand Mrs. Hilliard’s distrust. Judging by her voice the girl seemed a reckless liability, likely to be indiscreet; yet I was impressed by her air of determination and her confident challenge to the stranger.

  I said that Mrs. Hilliard did know, feeling that if I said she didn’t young Tessa might go screaming for the police or dash into that Cricket Club dance with the news of her discovery. Her reaction was quite unexpected.

  ‘My mother tells me nothing!’ she exclaimed, and I heard a sob in her voice. ‘It isn’t fair! What are you doing? What had you got to say to John? Is it about Alwyn?’

  ‘Rory? No, I have nothing to do with him.’

  ‘Of course you have! What are you up to? I took the trouble to ask the baker if he had picked anyone up this morning. That’s why I am here while they’re all out—to see and listen and to hell with you!’

  ‘It paid off, Tessa,’ said Alwyn’s voice from the darkness.

  She was in his arms in an instant, stroking his hair and crying her eyes out with the sudden relief. At first I thought they were lovers and moved tactfully away into night. But it was not that at all. They considered themselves brother and sister rather than cousins, with perhaps a bit of father and daughter in it since he was seventeen when she was born. He had been around for Tessa to worship ever since her cradle.

  He came over to me with his arm round her shoulders.

  ‘I’m sorry, Willie,’ he said. ‘As soon as I was alone—well, you may learn how it is. One begins to distrust logic and instinct. So I followed you.’

  I told him there was no need to apologise, that I would have done the same.

  ‘And you’d be right, and don’t forget it! But at my age I should be sure.’

  When he gave Tessa the message for Eudora, she exclaimed that she couldn’t possibly talk to her mother without reproaching her for her unfair silence and having a row. Alwyn told her that was silly. Eudora was forced to trust the Penpoles but had no right to compromise anyone else. He added:

  ‘There would never be any reason for rows, Tessa, if you remembered that she is you, only thirty years older. Eudora—I can see her as a girl carted off by a policeman and slapping his face. She doesn’t mistrust you. She mistrusts herself in you, and you can tell her so with my love. Did anybody see you come here?’

  ‘No. I left by the garden and through the stables.’

  He put on a pair of owlish, thick-rimmed glasses and patted his wavy, greying hair further down on his forehead, asking if she would recognise him. She peered closely into his face studying it from all angles, partly to be sure of his safety and partly, I think, because she wanted to store his features away in memory.

  ‘I probably would if I was looking for you,’ she said, ‘but never if I wasn’t. And you have gone a little grey. Where have you been?’

  He refused to tell her, giving the same reason he had given to me, and then asked her if she knew what had happened to Rachel Iwyrne.*

  ‘I still see her sometimes. She gave up the flat at Whatcombe Street and is writing a book. Your beastly people gave her hell.’

  ‘They had to.’

  ‘When shall I see you again?’

  ‘When you get a letter from a foreign country with an invitation to come out and visit someone you’ve never heard of.’

  ‘You’re sure it wouldn’t be better to face it out?’

  ‘Tessa dear, I hardly know which would be worse—to be found guilty when all of you down here believe I couldn’t be, or to be acquitted when all England took it for granted I was guilty. To disappear and be forgotten—that’s all I want.’

  They said goodbye, and Alwyn and I started back together—not with any intention of remaining together but because the path was the only safe route and we had to be well away from the district before dawn.

  He knew his country inside out, having wandered all through it during his school holidays and hunted over it in more recent years whenever he could come down from London for a winter week-end. He led me across the Dartmouth road and after that by deep Devon lanes, windless and lightless as mine shafts, which climbed to bridle paths where the southwest wind ruffled the grass and one knew that in daylight would be somewhere a glimpse of the sea. When the sun came up we were resting in a combe not far from Harberton, clear of all those who might be curious about us, with a stream at our feet and a crumbly, red bank which fitted our backs—a pair of unwashed hikers, just possibly father and son, with nothing to single us out from other innocents.

  Casually, talking for himself as much as for me, he reviewed the unsatisfactory situation we had left behind and followed in imagination his cousin’s movements as she passed cautiously back from the Penpoles’ cottage to the walled garden, miserably aware that she might have compromised his safety and shying at any vertical blackness which could be an observer creeping through the trees on a parallel course. But it was not that which disturbed him. He seemed to anticipate some conflict of emotions when she met her mother.

  Seeing that I was puzzled by Tessa’s character, he explained a little of her, love and amusement at her absurdities in his voice. She supported herself and earned her living as simply as any middle-class working girl. It was Eudora’s conviction—inspire
d by the gin-swilling, privileged youngsters who infested the wealthy New England society in her youth—that Tessa had to make her way in the world without a private income. The same, years earlier, had applied to him. Both of them accepted this non-intervention—more than accepted it. They couldn’t imagine anything else. When Tessa married or if she needed capital to buy a business she would get it, but meanwhile she must be the co-equal of her contemporaries.

  Far from resenting this discipline, she gloried in it. Nothing would have induced her to become a conventional county débutante exploiting hereditary wealth. She saw herself as a white-collar worker with a right to pursue her ideal visions of what society ought to be and to ignore what it actually was. Her two-room flat was shared with a young zoologist, a year or two older; that was an economy, she insisted, though in fact it was an airy gesture meant to prove that to civilised human beings sex was irrelevant. Naturally this infuriated her mother who at that age—I suspect, though Alwyn didn’t say so—had shared bedrooms, sleeping bags and hillsides with the opposite sex, but not for a ridiculous principle.

  After a sleep in the morning we set off on a long march which landed us near sunset on the slope below Powderham Castle overlooking the River Exe. Alwyn was exhausted. Wherever he had been, it was somewhere with no opportunity for exercise. Myself, I thought we had now lost all interested parties, if there ever were any, and could safely treat ourselves to a bed and a good clean-up; but Alwyn wanted to lie another night close to his own earth.

  During the day I had come to know him as well as I had ever known any man. He may well have puzzled his colleagues at MI5, for he was no townsman and no sort of policeman. I think he may have been brilliant in dealing with foreign agents and less sure with his own folk. He was too fond of them. As Amy Penpole had said, his only fault was to see the best in everyone—not perhaps a desirable quality in a security officer.

  The silver estuary of the Exe spread out beneath us, all the way from the unspectacular, very English river to the golden shoals where curlews called and the half ebb streamed fast out of the narrows with the sand on one side and the red cliffs on the other. I felt that the river presented itself to him as a boundary between his home and the wide world which he proposed to re-enter, as if once across the Exe he would never return. He was wrong in that. He did return. It had been a brilliant move to hole up in Devon until his escape to Moscow was accepted and he could slide out unnoticed into exile; but I doubt if he ever realised how strong was his reluctance to leave the deep green womb of his birth.

  His physical weariness emphasized melancholy. He needed me, young as I was, for we shared the same sort of upbringing—mine interrupted at the age of twelve, his not until the disaster. The long shadows of elms on the evening grass were to him sheer poetry, while for me they included the comfort of the cattle beneath them; but our love of the country had the same quality. A peasant love.

  He told me something of the Mornix case, perhaps to dispel any lingering doubts that I might have. When he came to the question of his overdraft I nearly asked him why he had not appealed to Eudora, but kept my mouth shut on the impertinence. Remembering how she had brought up the pair of cousins, I saw that it would never even have occurred to him. His career, his debts, his future were profoundly his own.

  ‘Can’t you think of anybody who knew your habit of shoving bank accounts away when you didn’t want to look at them?’ I asked.

  He replied somewhat haughtily that for six weeks he had thought of little else.

  ‘Not Tessa? She might have let it slip somewhere.’

  ‘Certainly not Tessa. I’ve never shown her the defenceless side of me.’

  ‘She seems to think all police are an outrage on humanity.’

  ‘She’s a sweet joke. Special Branch had to put her through the hoops since she had often visited Whatcombe Street. But they would have got in a couple of interviews all she could tell them and are unlikely to have bothered her afterwards.’

  ‘And you’re sure of this Rachel Iwyrne?’

  ‘Quite sure. She couldn’t possibly know of the bank statements. Tessa was more intimate with her than I ever was. I liked her well enough to recommend her to the Minister when he wanted to know about communes—and only God Almighty could have foreseen that he would fall in love with her and that Mornix would escape through Whatcombe Street.’

  ‘From what you tell me about her she sounds unreliable.’

  He took up my remark so sharply that I suspected he was not quite so sure of her political sympathies as he had been. He said that it depended what I meant by unreliable, that Cromwell’s Puritans were unreliable but patriots more flaming in foreign war than the royalist Establishment. Rachel’s passion for turning society scientifically upside down meant more love of country, not less.

  ‘Of course she is wide open to libel and misrepresentation,’ he went on. ‘So was Eudora in her youth. So is Tessa. The CIA blew their tops when Rachel took up with her Minister. But there was nothing treasonable about her. We told them that what was good enough for half a dozen distinguished dons, the London School of Economics and MI5 ought to be good enough for them. But they suspected the Old Boy Network of stalling them. That was why they went behind our backs to their tame M.P. and leaked the Mornix escape when we were trying to keep it quiet. I don’t know how the Russians framed me or why. Dog doesn’t normally eat dog. But my duty is to find out. And alone.’

  I asked him if he really believed it was worth the risk. After all, with his experience, he could reach Brazil or some other convenient country, and if he had to exchange elms for palms it was better than the streets of London and getting caught.

  ‘I won’t be caught by MI5 if I am careful. By the Russians I might be, and that’s goodnight. It’s safe, you see, because I don’t exist. Not a question from anybody if I disappear completely and for ever as if I were picked off the face of the earth by little green men.’

  ‘Did they nearly get you the night before last?’

  ‘I don’t think so. All that is certain is that the two men I saw had tried to follow Eudora and John and lost them in the dark. Now that you’ve given me more details than she could, I see that it was you they expected Eudora to meet, not me. Whoever wants to talk to you had no idea he was near an unexpected prize.’

  ‘So you are going back again?’

  ‘No. That’s over. I’m going first to 42 Whatcombe Street if it isn’t watched.’

  He described the commune and its youthful inhabitants.

  ‘With grey hair?’ I asked. ‘You’ll never pass.’

  ‘I’m not going to open my shirt down to the navel with a medallion of Hitler hanging on it. I have other ideas, Willie.’

  I did not at all want to be picked off the face of the earth by little men, red or green. On the other hand, Eudora, Alwyn and the impetuous Tessa—they had become in their way such a definite, tangible part of all I had longed for in Bucarest and Cairo and Caulby. I was committed to them and nothing else. So I asked:

  ‘Could I go to Whatcombe Street for you?’

  When he refused to allow it, I reminded him that after living at the bottom of society in Cairo and not far off it in Paris I ought to be able to play the part and get away with it. And if Mornix could make himself unrecognisable, so could I—given a bit of help. But of course I would not know what questions to ask.

  He looked at me and through me as if I were a complete stranger who had to be summed up instantly and conclusively. After all, to him I was no more than a companion on a cross-country walk who, according to his dubious account of himself, had shown some enterprise and ingenuity in the past.

  ‘Why do you want to mix yourself up in this?’ he asked.

  I made a very immature, rambling attempt to explain my motives—a medley of self-interest and liking for them all, together with an incoherent statement of faith which nobody but Alwyn would have come near to understanding. It boiled down to saying that all this—by which I vaguely meant the tumbled valley
s of the Exe and the Otter and the blue, smooth hills of Dorset on the horizon—would not taste so good if it wasn’t served.

  ‘You sound like Tessa,’ he said, smiling. ‘You want an earthly paradise.’

  ‘Tessa hasn’t got it and thinks she knows how to make it. But if you had lived my life, you’d see that now in a way, for me, I have got it. And if I feel that to me it is worth it, that’s my business and I can’t express it any better.’

  ‘You’ve expressed it well enough for both of us. Now, questions are easy. If you are accepted, you might get some new angle of the story from them without trying. All I want is a picture of who were the suspects at the end of it all and what 42 Whatcombe Street knew but wasn’t saying.’

  ‘How shall I find you?’

  ‘Don’t bother about that! I shall find you. Now, Tessa could help with your appearance. Don’t go near her digs, but telephone her to meet you somewhere—’ he gave me her home and business numbers ‘—and tell her what you are doing for me, but not a word more than you must.’

  ‘As Ionel Petrescu?’

  ‘Not on any account. Just as Willie. Dig up that passport of yours some time and keep it in your pocket as a last resort in any emergency. Are you sure you can find it?’

  I explained that since I had hidden it at night it should not be too difficult to pick up the markers at night, and I described the overgrown chalk slope where it was.

  I left him tucked in between bales of barley straw with the bats of early dusk for company. I had no anxiety about him in his present circumstances. As he said, he did not exist. Nor, for that matter, did I. There appeared to be some disadvantages about non-existence, but so long as neither of us ran into someone who was actually looking for us—an unlikely accident—we were safe.

  I crossed the river below Exeter and spent a long, comfortable night in the usual cottage with the usual motherly woman, kindly to youth in spite of the fact that it had a three-day beard and was a menace to the daintiness of the bathroom. In the morning I took a bus to London, getting off in the outer suburbs. It was a bit of a puzzle where to live until I was ready to tackle Whatcombe Street, for I had little experience of my own country between the extremes of rural village and respectable lodgings in a provincial town. Eventually I ran across two young men and a girl with bedrolls on their backs and sandals on their feet who directed me to a cheap and cheerful house in Greenwich, frequented by foreign students who wanted to see the historic river. There I met contemporaries, not much younger than myself, from very conventional backgrounds compared to my own, yet expressing protest in their style of dress and speech. I liked them, and had little doubt that I could make myself acceptable at Whatcombe Street.