Red Anger

by Geoffrey Household

  She settled down to wait for the bottom of the tide. All was quiet until the mare—perhaps disturbed by the sudden pearly quality of the night—whinnied a question at her. Tessa was busy comforting and quietening her when there were movements low down in nearby undergrowth. Badger, she thought. The sound was not repeated until she heard me splashing ashore. Somebody else had heard it and now was definitely on the move. She crept down to the hard shale and padded ahead to warn me.

  ‘Are the police on to Alwyn?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Eudora and I are sure they aren’t. They think Alwyn is making for London or a port. It’s you, Adrian. Somebody else has been making enquiries about Willie.’

  ‘But they couldn’t possibly know I am here.’

  She told me that her admirable Tommy Bostock had called her up saying that he had had a visit from a detective who wanted her to confirm that she had bought a blue, military frock-coat for someone called Willie. Tommy had told the man that he knew nothing about a blue coat but that a Willie Yonell existed all right and was a friend of hers in Devon.

  ‘When you bought the coat, did you leave your name and address?’

  ‘Yes. I hadn’t enough money, so I paid by cheque.’

  Then at last the reason why I was expected around the estuary was unmistakable. Somebody keeping an eye on Whatcombe Street had noticed the new arrival in the blue coat and was perhaps getting ready to question him when he vanished. But the coat remained. So the ‘Military Club sort of bloke’, pretending that the coat might have been his, stopped Ciampra on the street and found out from the label the shop where it had been bought and who bought it.

  Tessa. Friend of the enigmatic Rachel. Frequent visits to Whatcombe Street. Her political opinions far over to the left. Ciampra, I remembered, had even believed she might be mixed up in the Mornix escape. Well worth investigation. But by whom?

  Special Branch and MI5 had at that time no more interest in her or the highly respectable Eudora, whatever might have been the enthusiasms of her youth. The KGB must know all about Tessa from Rachel and knew enough about me because I had confessed as much as I felt could safely enter their files. Indeed I was their agent in a small way of business. So this continual interest in me must stem from the mysterious Marghiloman. He alone could guess that Willie Yonell was Ionel Petrescu. And his methods followed a pattern. The visit to Tommy Bostock was the second time that his people had passed themselves off as British police.

  Yes, it was me they were after, not Alwyn—me, the trawlerman off the Russian fleet who was so perfunctorily cleared by MI5. Marghiloman first kills two birds with one stone. He sends his suspect down to Devon with a first-class excuse for getting on intimate terms with the aunt and cousin of a traitor; at the same time he gets confirmation that Alwyn Rory really is in Moscow. Suspect then vanishes, but turns up—of all places—at Whatcombe Street, convincingly disguised by Tessa.

  Charts, he asked me about—charts of the remote Kingsbridge Estuary. What the hell were we supposed to be landing there or sending off from there? It was a monstrous edifice of suspicion which would hang together very reasonably on paper—always provided the compiler of the file stuck to paper and prejudice and either knew very little of the human beings involved or insisted on disbelieving what he was told.

  ‘We have to get Alwyn out of here. It’s become the worst possible spot for him,’ I said.

  ‘But where can he go?’

  ‘Wherever he meant to before he decided to expose Rachel—if we can get him there.’

  ‘Will he listen to you?’

  ‘Not me or even you and Eudora. He’s blind obstinate.’

  There was no sign at all of the unknown. He must have been waiting hopefully near the bank of the creek or perhaps keeping an eye on the mare until Tessa returned to her. He was probably unaware that he had been spotted. From his position we could not have been visible when we ran for it.

  ‘Are you going back to London?’ I asked after a silence.

  ‘No! I told my firm I was ill. I can’t bear it any more.’

  ‘Accountancy?’

  ‘That! No, it’s no worse than anything else—proving to capitalists that they haven’t made a profit when they did and that they made the hell of a profit when they didn’t! Money doesn’t mean a thing any more, Adrian. For the State and industry and the individual it is simply debt, and debt is whatever the economists say it is and every two years they change their minds. I’m sick of them and their tame politicians, sick of crooks who don’t care and idealists who don’t understand. And if they did understand they’d be more desperate than ever, for they’d see that the world they want is this. I’ve discovered that I am selfish.’

  ‘You? I wish you were.’

  ‘Well, I am. The only way out Voltaire could see was to cultivate one’s garden. So I’m going to. There’s no means of giving all this to millions of townsmen who wouldn’t be content with it anyway. So I might as well enjoy peace and keep a patch of sanity in the world.’

  I was reluctant to stop listening to her deep-toned, disillusioned voice, but the tide was on the turn and I had to pick up the supplies and go.

  ‘You can’t go now,’ she said. ‘You can’t risk that spy spotting you, and it’s the end for Alwyn if he does.’

  Perhaps I accepted that too easily. But there was no denying that the interested party who was watching the mare must have heard me sploshing ashore.

  ‘And your patch of sanity will be here?’ I asked.

  It was hard to believe that anyone shared the silver-misted night with us except the bullocks I had glimpsed beyond the hedge and whatever little animal was plopping in and out of the stream.

  ‘Oh, anywhere! Anywhere with honesty of purpose and men swearing happily and trees in the night and things that you watch grow day by day. All this!’ she repeated with a catch in her voice.

  ‘But you shouldn’t be sad about it.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s only that here and now is a meaning. And you know it and I know it.’

  ‘I haven’t said so.’

  ‘It’s not necessary. Speech covers things up. The sound of it is what matters. Tell me something in Romanian!’

  I told her plenty in Romanian, for I was free to say exactly what I thought of her and what I might have said if I had been anything but a Willie with no future and a hardly recommendable past. I kept my voice low and steady, fairly impassionate as if I were reciting poetry. Once I was.

  ‘You see? You didn’t understand a word.’

  ‘And you’ll see that I did. I know it was what I wanted you to say to me.’

  There is no need to go into what happened then. As she once—much later—had the impertinence to point out, it must have been one of the very few occasions when an International Marxist and an agent of the KGB were completely united.

  When we returned into our lives—or out of them, according to how you look at it—the first light of dawn was on us and the creek filling and there could be no reaching Alwyn and Rachel till the following night. Our unknown companion was cautiously on the move. He passed quite close to us, bending low among the rushes and aiming for the higher ground. His game was obvious. He did not want Tessa to know that she had been observed; so he was not going to risk running into us by taking the track which we normally used. When there was no more cover he cut straight up towards the road, trusting to the semi-darkness to conceal his movements—which it would have done if we had still been on the other side of the creek. He found a gap in the hedge above us and climbed over. I heard a rip and a muffled exclamation as his trousers caught on hidden barbed wire.

  There was great excitement among the bullocks who thought a more serious breakfast than grass had arrived early. The whole score of them charged towards him, and then I saw his head and shoulders outlined against the sky as he climbed on something. It amused me that this sewer rat, perhaps very effective with guns and bugs and walkie-talkies and God knows what, should be completely at sea among the normal occupatio
ns of honest men. I told Tessa to stay where she was and ran downstream—taking a chance that he would see me but he was too busy waving at the bullocks—then into dead ground and up the hill until I found a gate.

  I advanced upon him across the field. Confidence, truculence and a near-empty bag of fertiliser which I found by the gate represented agricultural authority. He was standing precariously on a field roller in front of a semicircle of two-year-old Red Devon bullocks prime for market. A youngish man he was, of indeterminate class, with a face as clean-cut and keen as an advertisement for after-shave. He was efficiently dressed in a leather jacket and sweater, carrying a small pack and wearing a beret. I gave him the speech of my youth, for I was never any good at Devon dialect.

  ‘What be doin’ ’ere? Aafter rabbits, be ’ee or aafter my beasts?’

  ‘Call ’em off!’ he begged. ‘Call ’em off!’

  I shooed them a few yards away, all but one who put his lovely wet muzzle in my hand and added convincing local colour.

  ‘You own this land?’ he asked.

  ‘I does. And me faather before me.’

  ‘I am a police officer,’ he announced, coming down from the roller.

  I could have betted any money he was going to say that.

  ‘Not from round these parts you ain’t.’

  ‘No. From London. There’s been some queer goings-on down here.’

  ‘And there’s bin a pack of tomfools askin’ questions. You’ll be one of them Special Branch coppers?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s what I am.’

  ‘Well, they giv I the word so I should reckernise ’em.’

  ‘What word?’

  ‘That’s for ’ee to say.’

  ‘Well, we don’t all know it.’

  ‘You tell I what un was or I’ll set the beasts on ’ee. Coom, me beauties!’ I called. ‘Coom! Coom!’

  It must have been near enough to the farmer’s feeding call, for those splendid, obliging bullocks put their heads down and their tails up and came.

  ‘I’ll shoot,’ he warned me, getting back on the roller.

  ‘What with?’

  He pulled out an automatic—more, I think, to show me that he was armed than with any intention of blazing away at Red Devons.

  ‘Got a licence for that there?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t need a licence. I’m working with your police, I tell you. Ever heard of the CIA?’

  I had, but as hardly more than a communist’s bogeyman. At my college we had to endure weekly lectures on international affairs. I remembered one of the pundits telling us of the incredible cavortings of the CIA in Latin America which, he said, had been more forceful propaganda for socialism than anything the U.S.S.R. had thought up. At the time it sounded to me more like a typically Romanian dig at the Russians than a statement of fact.

  This fellow, however, was no American and I told him so.

  ‘They train British to do the job for them here.’

  ‘Duty, like?’

  ‘Duty.’

  ‘Communists and such?’

  ‘And such! And plenty of them.’

  ‘Well, we ain’t got none ’ere. And if they socialists want my vote they must raise the milk prices. But I’ll ’elp ’ee.’

  ‘How far does your land go?’ he asked.

  ‘Down to top o’ creek.’

  ‘Are you out much after dark?’

  ‘I ain’t out aafter dark but before light I am. And a good thing too, with ’ee muckin’ about on me land and threatenin’ to shoot me beasts.’

  He said he never meant to, that the gun was just for personal protection. By God, I was enjoying myself!

  ‘Protection ’gin who?’

  ‘Have you come across any foreigner round here, speaking broken English?’

  ‘What’s ’is name?’

  ‘Ionel Petrescu. Sometimes called Willie.’

  ‘Two other fellas was aaskin’ about ’im some time back. What do ’ee want ’im for? ’E can’t ’elp bein’ a furriner.’

  ‘When I tell you that he came off the Russian trawler fleet, you’ll guess what we want him for.’

  ‘Anchor ’em in Goodshelter Creek, like? Not enough waater!’

  ‘Enough for a small boat at night. Did you ever hear of Alwyn Rory?’

  ‘’Im that let the spy go?’

  ‘He knows this coast. I wouldn’t be surprised if he escaped from here.’

  ‘Naa! They was arl aafter un, but didn’ find un.’

  ‘What about his aunt and her daughter? Ever see them here?’

  ‘Mrs. ’illiard? Ah, I’d like to see un ’ere, but ’tis out of ’er country, ’ard-workin’ pack she’s got and they foxes are killin’ of my lambs. What’s wrong with daughter? Lives in London, don’t she?’

  ‘She rode down to the creek last night and her horse is still there. What do you think she’s up to?’

  ‘Same as the rest of ’em. Meetin’ ’er sweet’eart. Where be to if I let ’ee go?’

  ‘Off to Plymouth.’

  ‘Comin’ again?’

  ‘If I do, there’ll be more than one of us.’

  ‘Not on my land there won’t.’

  ‘Ten quid any use to you?’

  ‘I’ll ’ave no Americans frittin’ me beasts like they does on the flicks. I’ll set the police on ’em, I will!’

  ‘I’ll make it twenty if you move your cattle out of the valley and keep your mouth shut.’

  ‘’And it over, mister, and we’ll shake on it.’

  A generous lot, the CIA agents! That made seventy altogether which I’d had off this chap and Marghiloman. I pocketed his twenty and led him to the gate followed by the ferocious herd. He said he had a bicycle up on the main road, so I gave him such bucolic and complicated directions how to reach it that he would never suspect I hadn’t the least idea how to reach it myself.

  I rejoined my darling Tessa and sent her back alone to recover her mare in case my benefactor should catch a glimpse of us together. It was now full dawn; one of Alwyn’s peepholes ought to allow him to see her riding openly home up the Cousin’s Cross track. He could infer that something had gone wrong but that there was no immediate danger.

  We arranged that Eudora should meet me on the bracken path about midday. I could walk there openly. The police had probably never heard of Ionel Petrescu and certainly didn’t want him. The CIA appeared to have fallen back for reorganisation. I had to admit that the instinct proper to very experienced crooks had led them correctly, though starting from preposterous evidence. Petrescu could afford to laugh at them—or would have done if not too indignant to laugh—but they were dangerously close to the bigger, far more triumphant capture of the traitor whom they believed to be in Moscow. It was going to be difficult to extricate him, and what to do with Rachel was beyond me.

  Eudora was tucked away off the path with some very welcome lunch, her pile of white hair showing among the bracken like the scut of a giant rabbit. She said that she had heard as much of my story as I had had time to tell Tessa and now wanted the rest of it. Tessa herself was busy at the house making some essential preparations for Alwyn’s escape.

  When she had got it all from me, expanded and clarified by her acute questions, she was appalled. My own reaction was British indignation mixed with a Romanian tolerance of normal government iniquities, but hers was cold anger at this secret interference by her country of birth in the affairs of her country by adoption. That Tessa should have attracted suspicion did not surprise her; it was too much to expect such an earnest and romantic Agency to understand the contempt with which MI5 regarded parlour revolutionaries. As for me, she understood both her countries well enough to guess at what happened. MI5 had told their solemn allies that I was of no importance and had not swum ashore from any fishing fleet, skating over my long and unusual life story which alone could explain the whole thing. And they were dead certain to have been too professionally mysterious, impatient and therefore not believed.

  ‘But me!�
� she exclaimed. ‘Still little violent Eudora, the scourge of Wall Street and the FBI! Willie, let’s sell my story to the papers! I was Stalin’s Mistress—how’s that for a title? What would they think of it here in Devon?’

  ‘The joke of the century if it wasn’t for Alwyn. But as it is …’

  ‘As it is, you press a button in the White House and up comes some smirking, fat-bellied bloodhound with a gun in his pants and Eudora’s file all alone on a tea trolley. Willie, listen to me! Sometimes my Puritan ancestors speak through me! In my day America was terrified lest the masses should be corrupted by communism. And what has happened? It’s not the masses but the governing class which has been corrupted. The lying of the State—straight from Russia! Conform or be suspected—straight from Russia! The end justifies any means. That’s an old one, but where did the CIA get it from? Straight from Russia, and the KGB at that! The threat—well, it exists all right, but you meet it proudly with the morals of long civilisation not with those of the scum of the earth. By God, they are worse than Franco! I’ll bet you that if I went back to Spain he’d ask me to a party and talk horses with me like a Christian gentleman and wouldn’t even have me searched before I came in.’

  I was left gasping by this tirade. If that was the fire and splendour of Eudora’s youth, there must have been a whole cabinet of files on her, not one.

  ‘And has it occurred to you,’ she went on, ‘that my Kill-a-Commie-for-Christ compatriots will have found out by this afternoon that you were not the nineteenth century farmer you pretended to be, which wouldn’t have taken in anyone except a nice, clean American boy or some bloody fascist from Surbiton recruited to throw the money around with a nice, clean English accent?’

  ‘You think they won’t believe him, Mrs. Hilliard?’

  ‘I am quite sure of it, Willie. That gang of arrogant thugs is efficient and somebody is talking to the real owner of those bullocks right now. I have to get Alwyn away in broad daylight. And by the grace of God the South Devon Agricultural Show is tomorrow!’