Red Anger

by Geoffrey Household

  Alwyn had advised me to call Tessa at her office since at home she shared a downstairs telephone with other young women who were always fluttering to and from it making privacy difficult. She was secretary to one of the partners in a vast firm of chartered accountants, and one would normally get her at the extension number. The first time I got her boss, so I started a sales patter until he cut me off. The second time I got Tessa.

  I said shortly that I was Willie and would wait in any public place she suggested with news for her. The reply—Temple Gardens at a quarter to six—was immediate and businesslike with none of the agitation I expected.

  I did not expect either that she would look as she did when she walked towards me between the lawns of the Gardens. Evidently social revolution was kept for evenings and week-ends. She had caught from Eudora the upright, debonair way of holding herself, more common among American women than English. She was also very charmingly dressed in the kind of tunicky thing which had just become fashionable. With her fair hair shoulder length she looked at a little distance like a picture of some Anglo-Saxon boy in a history of costume, and close to was all the more feminine by contrast.

  I explained to her that I wanted the right clothes in which to idle up to 42 Whatcombe Street and ask if I could have a pad for the night.

  ‘Don’t ask for anything,’ she said. ‘Just wander in and sit down. If somebody offers you pot, take it. But perhaps you like the stuff?’

  ‘I’ve smoked hashish in Egypt and much prefer alcohol.’

  ‘You’ll find they don’t use it much. What were you doing in Egypt?’

  I pulled myself up. That had been a quite unnecessary remark.

  ‘On my way to Portugal.’

  ‘Thank you. I won’t ask any more questions.’

  ‘That takes a weight off my mind. Your mother said I was a very poor liar.’

  ‘I had the hell of a row with her. Why do you all distrust me?’

  ‘Because you are utterly honest, Miss Hilliard. And so the less you know, the better.’

  ‘Oh, I see! You mean I’m a poor liar too.’

  She cheered up a lot. That was not at all the same thing as being accused of indiscretion.

  ‘You’ll need jeans instead of trousers, and that windbreaker is too square,’ she said. ‘I think you’d be all right with an Afghan coat and some beads. And if anyone asks you who recommended Whatcombe Street, say it was Rupert and you met him in Cornwall.’

  After giving me a good description of the young man, his normal wanderings and his opinions, she promised to buy me a proper outfit in the King’s Road and leave it in a suitcase at Charing Cross Station. If I turned up next day at the same time she would give me the ticket and I could collect it.

  ‘May I ask just one question? It might be useful to Alwyn when you see him.’

  ‘Provided you don’t go off the deep end when I refuse to answer.’

  ‘Have you met anyone called Ionel Petrescu?’

  ‘No,’ I replied truthfully. ‘Why?’

  She then told me all that had happened after we said goodbye to her. Alwyn’s premonition of trouble had been right.

  When Eudora returned from the Cricket Club dance, she was intercepted on her way to bed by her excitedly whispering daughter. Tessa delivered Alwyn’s message and was bitterly hurt when her mother, too, refused to tell her where he had been hidden or to give any clear account of what I was doing in his company. The fact was, of course, that she did not know and must have been anxious lest I should turn out, after all, to be an incredibly clever security agent.

  ‘I was so proud of her and eager to help,’ Tessa said, ‘and then she accused me of coming down to the Priory to poke about in the middle of the night instead of staying in London with my half-baked friends like Rachel Iwyrne to whom I’d introduced Alwyn.’

  I am sure the insinuation was not anything like as strong as that, even allowing for her mother’s anxiety, but it was strong enough for an over-sensitive Tessa who night after night had accused herself of being indirectly responsible for the whole disaster at Whatcombe Street. The result was that she swore she would never again come down to Cleder’s Priory so long as she lived, jumped straight into her car and started back to London.

  She was belting along between Bovey Tracy and Exeter, probably driving as dangerously as any twenty-year-old in a filthy temper, when a car passed her and waved her down. Two men got out, shoved official-looking identity cards at her and claimed to be police officers. Having searched the back of the car and the boot, they flashed lights on the nearside hedge as if thinking it possible that a passenger had jumped out. They asked her why she was in such a hurry and if she did not realise that she was endangering other lives besides her own. When they had reduced her to pulp by their air of authority they invited her to help the police with their enquiries.

  They were, they said, Special Branch officers on the look-out for a certain Ionel Petrescu and had reason to believe she might be giving him a lift. She angrily denied any knowledge of Petrescu and asked what he looked like. The description seemed vague, as all police descriptions are except to policemen, and she was too impatient to listen carefully. She never spotted that it fitted me and assumed that they were really on the trail of Alwyn after she had aroused suspicion by her fast, sudden departure from Molesworthy.

  ‘Had the car followed you all the way from there?’ I asked.

  ‘No, only for some miles. But I’ll bet there were pigs of some sort on the road keeping track of me by radio.’

  For Tessa it was the last straw that Special Branch, after torturing her mother and herself for weeks—she had almost persuaded herself that it was physical torture—should still be at it. She arrived back in her Fulham flat at nine in the morning bursting to tell someone about the latest police atrocity, but found that all her friends in the building had left for their offices; and so, trapped between anxiety for Alwyn and fury with her mother, she called up Rachel Iwyrne—to her the other innocent and persecuted victim of the Mornix case.

  I looked sympathetic and said nothing. It was alarming to imagine the girl nobly reminding herself that she must never neglect dear Rachel merely because she had ruined the career of a Minister by living at an address from which a spy had escaped. Tessa saw right through my tactful silence and said fiercely that I must not be prejudiced; that sort of thing could happen to any woman who had the courage to reject bourgeois values.

  Well, perhaps it could; so I reserved judgment. Later on this Rachel became a far too close acquaintance of mine and I could then understand that to ruthlessly idealistic youth she might be irresistible.

  Rachel had come round to Tessa’s flat at once and calmed her down. Tessa did not mention the reasons for her sudden departure from Molesworthy—that was too delicate ground—but let go all her resentment at high-handed police action and demanded why she should be suspected of giving lifts to an unknown Ionel Petrescu. Rachel answered that of course there must be some connection with Alwyn, wherever he was hiding, that the investigation must be still going on and that they should both always be prepared for more questioning. Eventually Rachel helped her to pack a bag and charitably insisted on putting her up and protecting her for at least a few days.

  What, Tessa asked me, did I think of it all? I played it down, saying that probably it had nothing at all to do with Alwyn and that the police might have been looking for some prisoner escaped from Dartmoor. Anyway, I could not understand why Special Branch should have taken an interest in Ionel Petrescu. But one thing in her story had particularly aroused my curiosity: that Rachel, speaking of Alwyn, should have used the phrase ‘wherever he was hiding’. Tessa was sure of her words. It sounded as if the woman knew or suspected that he was not in Russia.

  However, I was not going to emphasize that and start off my alliance with Alwyn’s difficult cousin on the wrong foot. I found myself fascinated by her as well as respecting her, and I tried to lead the conversation to Molesworthy and more personal ground.
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  ‘Do you always call your mother Eudora?’

  ‘Yes. She wouldn’t let Alwyn call her Aunt Eudora because she said it sounded like the family terror. And I picked it up from him.’

  ‘Where did she get Sack?’

  ‘Bought the little freak half-grown off a gamekeeper! Her precious Sack! She’s a ridiculous old bag.’

  ‘But there’s no one who doesn’t love her.’

  Tessa growled like an offended cat and did not deny it.

  ‘Some time you must tell me all the truth. Will you?’ she asked.

  ‘When there is no more danger, yes.’

  ‘I think you’ll be bored when there isn’t.’

  ‘God forbid! I just want to be a simple farmer if there’s ever a chance of it.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I thought you said you weren’t going to ask any questions.’

  ‘But surely you can tell me about yourself. Why are you doing this for Alwyn?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because I’m sorry for him. Because we have the same values. It isn’t that I resent injustice. I’ve learned to live with that.’

  ‘But such a risk for a stranger!’

  ‘None of you three could ever be a stranger to me.’

  ‘Or you to us, Farmer Willie,’ she answered.

  Her steady eyes held a comradeship which I had never known from any woman of my own age, so I felt I could ignore the plural ‘us’.

  The following day I took over the luggage ticket. Tessa hardly stopped. Whatever I was, she had realised that we should be seen together as little as possible. I had the impression that she had been thinking over her mother’s courage and continual anxiety and at last appreciated Eudora’s determination that no one should end up in gaol but herself.

  I recovered the suitcase and changed in the station lavatory, blushing for myself. Tessa’s choice for me was far worse than the Afghan garment. She had bought what appeared to be a Hussar’s frock-coat, dark blue with decaying frogs. A florid label from a Youth Boutique had been loosely sewn over the discreet original of Savile Row. There were also jeans and sandals to which a note was attached: take off your socks. When I emerged from the lavatory, a passing porter remarked:

  ‘Lost the band, squire?’

  Probably I should not have laughed, only proceeded on my way in unshaven dignity. But my amusement did a lot for morale, getting me contentedly into my part as the first burst of applause must do for an actor.

  The scene at 42 Whatcombe Street was much as Alwyn had described it. There was a girl in the porch dressed in plastic deer skin and an old curtain with an enormous sphere of frizzy blonde hair. She was thoughtfully scratching it while talking to a bloke whose merry eyes were just visible and dominated a splendid set of dark whiskers. I passed them with a hello, went in boldly, sat down on the floor with my back against the wall and began to eat some stale food from my knapsack. My uniform coat and sandals seemed to be a passport, but hair and beard were hopelessly insufficient. I decided that my two elder brothers—stockbrokers both of them—had held me down and cut it all off.

  Nobody paid more than passing attention to me. I was there, and since a roof over his head was every man’s right I could stay there. Having finished my stale bread and jam, I asked where the tap was. Whiskers had dropped his girl and come in to inspect me. He tossed me a can of beer and asked me where the hell I got that coat. I said it was my grandfather’s and he hadn’t missed it yet.

  There were three large rooms in the flat with a kitchen and bathroom at the end of a passage. Eight occupants were visible when I arrived. After dark there were thirteen. How many were visitors and how many permanent lodgers, and of the lot how many slept there on any given night it was difficult to establish. Special Branch would certainly have had a job to sort them out. They looked damned odd, but the communal living was a successful fact and would have suited me fine if I had had the enterprise to discover a similar joint in Paris instead of struggling on my own. Furniture was common property, mostly broken but serviceable, bought for a song and left behind when a member cleared out. If you hadn’t got a bed you used a sleeping bag or—in any case—the floor, frock-coat and a borrowed pillow. Yet things were comparatively orderly as I found when I slipped out to buy some chops and asked Whiskers and his girl to join me. We waited patiently for our turn at the kitchen, and I was not popular when I wiped the grease off used plates with a banana skin instead of washing them. I had thought it was a nice touch and in character.

  In the course of the evening questions about my life were perfunctory, but about my opinions they went fairly deep. The members of the commune were consumed by curiosity about a very unsatisfactory world and I sympathised with their enthusiasm for change, futile though it was. I tended towards a Maoist position, with which I was familiar from lectures at school on Marxist heresies and from reading the Little Red Book which always seemed to me an admirable manual for Boy Scouts, easily defensible and possibly what China needed.

  Nobody bothered about where I came from or what my surname was. Willie was enough. They did ask me who had told me I could find friends there, and I produced Rupert. Oh, yes, he had been very much one of them in the spring before the fuzz turned the place inside out. I pretended alarm and asked what the fuzz had been after. And so that first night I got an outline of the story from their point of view.

  The house belonged to Rachel Iwyrne who had let the ground floor flat to the commune and herself lived above. Lieutenant Mornix had walked in with a nod and a smile past a group of four who were sitting in the porch enjoying the sun. They thought he was going upstairs to see Rachel, but instead he entered the flat, the door of which was always open. There he was ignored; they supposed he was an architect or builder come to see about some promised alterations.

  He went down the passage and out of the back door into a little yard containing only the dustbins and a plane tree. Most of the space was occupied by a chap called Bob who was mending a sofa and half blocking the door. No one actually saw Mornix’s movements; he must have come back, nipped into the bathroom which was just inside the back door, changed there and jumped out of the window into the yard. The next thing was that Bob and a stranger looking like an extra hairy apostle walked out of the front door, said they had some money and why not all go round to the boozer? So a few of them did. Bob set up the drinks, left the bar with his friend to telephone and was never seen again.

  All the next day I stayed on, establishing my bona fides by carrying a banner in a minor demo against the borough council—for what cause I never knew—and cultivating Whiskers’ friendship. When we went out together in the evening he became very frank over his red plonk. His name was Ciampra and he was a Maltese whose parents had sent him to England to complete his education, enrolling him in a college which advertised extensively in the hope of catching innocents abroad and specialised in fake degrees.

  Ciampra discovered the swindle in a matter of weeks but had not enlightened his parents. He had reverted to the normal interests of Mediterranean youth and by means of passing from one opinionated girl to another had eventually arrived at the haven of 42 Whatcombe Street. He had no moral sense whatever, but instead of living off the vices of society, like so many of his London compatriots, he had decided to exploit the virtues. His ambition was to buy a degree in theology from his college and start up a new religion—likely to be more profitable in the long run than a new brothel with the advantage that the police could not demand a cut. He had seen through me, he told me. I’d got too much sense of humour and was over-acting. That frock-coat had shown him that I was out for an easy pad and girl friends just as he was.

  I said that after the story I had heard about a spy escaping I’d have thought they would all be more suspicious of strangers.

  ‘We are, Willie,’ he replied. ‘Two narks we’ve thrown out already. They made the mistake of never washing. Over-acting, like you. But I could see they weren’t enjoying it. Too serious. Too many questions.’


  ‘Did they find out any more, do you think?’

  ‘They can’t have done, because I hear Miss Rachel is still around. She used to come downstairs and look us over like a bloody anthropologist. Influence of Premarital Sex on Political Concepts. Title of Thesis! Saw it on her notebook!’

  ‘Wouldn’t you expect her to be still around?’

  He reminded me that everyone assumed Mornix had changed in the bathroom. The door was locked; his clothes were found inside; and he had got out through the window, which was open, to join Bob in the yard.

  ‘Anything wrong with that?’ he asked.

  One had to have lived in the place to find anything wrong with it. I said that what with girls washing their hair or their panties, blokes outside yammering for a pee, somebody having a bath, somebody else wanting the soap so he could wash at the kitchen sink, it seemed to me difficult for this Bob to have ensured that the bathroom was free when Mornix needed it.

  ‘And you can’t do a job of that sort without split timing,’ he pointed out. ‘I know.’

  He didn’t say how he knew. It was unnecessary. I think it likely that his quick intelligence had been recognised in a less high-minded world than Whatcombe Street and that he had sat in on the neat plotting of crime.