Red Anger

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘Your Marghiloman worked for this CIA,’ he went on. ‘It was his duty to supervise Romanians who had defected to England and were suspect.’

  ‘The devil it was!’

  ‘Marghiloman is now controlled by us, thanks to the in­formation you gave us about him, dear Petrescu. If you get the money you have deserved, it may be from his hands. In future would you be willing to report anything you notice or can find out about him?’

  ‘Very willingly.’

  ‘Where are you going to now?’

  Another question which I could not afford to answer and gave me no time to think.

  ‘I am going to look for work in the fields.’

  ‘Not very convenient as cover. But perhaps our people can handle it.’

  That was too much for Petrescu and far too much for me. I said I had agreed to do a single job but that I was not going to be a full-time agent.

  ‘It is only Marghiloman that we wish you to make friends with and keep an eye on.’

  ‘He’s a double agent?’

  ‘You could put it that way, but it would be inadvisable for him to do any doubling. He must obey orders. Now, is there anywhere he might expect to find you?’

  ‘Yes. You may remember he had me followed from Swin­don to the Marlborough Downs. He may think I have business there.’

  ‘What was your business there?’

  ‘I told you. I wanted to lose him. So I took the first train I saw from London and it went to Swindon. I never dreamed he had put an agent on the station to watch me.’

  ‘What do you suppose he thought you were doing there?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s between both seas. It might have been where I kept the bombs for loading on the trawlers.’

  ‘Dear Petrescu, you and I can afford a sense of humour. Others cannot. Remember that! Give me a date and a time!’

  If we were to avoid the more closely populated lowlands and keep to the high ground we should eventually arrive on Salisbury Plain—say, five days if we walked all the way and never risked a lift or a bus. Time was no object and it did not matter whether Alwyn made his dash for Bristol from there or from the Downs. I remembered the lonely upland crossed by the Ridge Way. It would be easy to find and a convincing spot for a rendezvous. It might also play on Marghiloman’s nerves a bit.

  ‘He is to drive to Avebury and leave the village and its Stone Circle by the Herepath running east. Where it ends he will have half a mile or so to walk. I will wait for him where the Herepath crosses the Ridge Way, two green roads intersecting. He can’t miss it. No one will pay any attention to us. Up there they are used to archaeologists on the prowl.’

  That strained my Russian to the limit. I doubt if they have the green roads of English downland, or are the caravan routes east of the Caspian green after the rains? At any rate, I had to do a lot of explaining and write down the names for him. He must have realised that such exact knowledge of country by a refugee needed explanation, but he said nothing. We arranged the meeting for mid-day in six days’ time.

  He collected his children and drove off. As soon as I was sure he was well on the road to Exeter I returned to Alwyn and made my report. He had no objection to approaching Bristol from the east, but thought I had been too bold in arranging to meet Marghiloman. I pointed out that he was a colleague of mine, however unwilling, in the KGB and that I was sure to get something out of him which would be of use to MI5 or to us—perhaps clear evidence which would prove Alwyn’s innocence. I also said that I seemed fairly certain to receive five hundred pounds and that he would find it an invaluable help towards getting on board a ship. He refused to accept anything from me.

  ‘You will, or I’ll give it to a fund for destitute refugees,’ I told him. ‘I’d choke every time I bought a drink with KGB money. But you can take it with a good conscience and use it for your private cold war.’

  ‘We’ll see. Personally I think they’ll run you like a credit account—pay in a little and demand more goods.’

  It was prudent to move off straightaway without waiting for Forrest. We made the horses comfortable and took to the Blackdown Hills—now two nondescript travellers mind­ing their own business and, we hoped, hardly worth a glance from the police once we were further away from their zone of operations.

  This was not country that either of us knew. We could only keep the setting sun more or less behind us until night­fall, making use of far too many roads. We had had the devil’s own luck with the weather, but now it had broken. The driving, grey rain of the west country poured down, and we took shelter under the remains of a corrugated iron roof more or less supported by three good posts and one broken. Our only comfort was the remains of Tessa’s picnic—cold beef sandwiches and three bottles of claret. We drank the lot and woke up in the morning with fuzzy heads and added depression. It was still raining.

  When it cleared we climbed sulkily uphill into heather and began munching bilberries for breakfast. They acted as a pick-me-up—or perhaps our spirits were revived by this windy ridge from which, down the Vale of Taunton, we could see the sand-clouded waters of the Bristol Channel and to the south, blue Lyme Bay. For me it was still another marriage to my land and for Alwyn a last embrace before divorce. We were both very silent throughout the morning.

  I was glad to see that he looked a lot more scruffy and unrecognisable—unwashed, short of sleep and in John’s old clothes which fitted badly. The only trouble I foresaw was that it would be difficult for anyone curious about him to place him, not a tramp, not an underpaid school teacher on holiday, not a farmer. Neither farmers nor their workers ever walked anywhere.

  ‘Who’s on strike?’ Alwyn asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen a paper for days.’

  It was not a bad idea. I went down to the little town of Chard and bought newspapers and some much needed maps, together with a warm loaf and butter. We settled down to decide a route and invent our identities. As usual car workers were on strike. The production line tempted us no more than it did them. There was also an unofficial strike among dockers at Southampton. Dockers, we felt, would do very well—a sturdy lot quite likely to stretch their legs in the countryside. Alwyn’s Devon dialect came to him so naturally that he could speak it without effort. I myself was tired of Wiltshire, broken English, Russian, Romanian and what-have-you and afraid I might easily slip up in any emergency. So I decided to be a clerk with standard English.

  The next day took us through the lovely Dorset country by Beaminster and Cattistock. It was a Sunday and distant church bells continued to praise the gift of life even if there was no longer much of a congregation underneath them. We found it hard to remember that we were hunted men.

  Coming down into Cerne Abbas, the Giant faced us—that nobly phallic demi-god cut in the chalk. It was new to us both and started me off with memories of the Marlborough Downs where we were going, bare except for the whispering grass and the tombs, temples, forts and ditches which so affected my boy’s sense of the continuity of our land.

  ‘Not melancholy?’ Alwyn asked.

  ‘Not to me or my father. They were our friends and ancestors. He used to say that if we felt their presence in our time, it was sacred.’

  ‘Presences. Yes. Closed, dark, the silence of the tide bring­ing presences more mindless than yours. Adrian, those weeks in the derelict were hell. There was no coming out of the tomb for me except sometimes to talk to Eudora.’

  Lulled into security we put up for the night in a cottage outside the village owned by a garrulous dame in her fifties—one of those women who desperately want to belong to an outer world and conceive it in terms of their daily paper. She hung about after our supper, talking and talking. She said she had a son who was a Southampton docker and gave us his name. We had already committed ourselves to our identities and we said, a little too soon, that we did not know him. He turned out to be one of the leaders of the strike. Alwyn had been too clever. Choose a natural, common, convincing part and you are all the mo
re likely to run up against the real thing!

  No amount of ‘oh yes, of course’ could put it right. We were marked down as a pair of disreputable, unwashed liars. She burned the breakfast bacon deliberately, and though we parted on outwardly cordial terms I could see she had dreams of appearing on TV as the unmasker of two wanted burglars.

  She had asked us where we were off to now. Back to Southampton, we said, by train from Dorchester. There would be a bus to Dorchester in five minutes she yapped triumphantly. No wriggling out of that. We had to take it. Dorchester was a dangerous centre of roads to and from the west and the last place we wanted to be seen. So we got off at the next village, which meant that the bus driver would remember us if asked.

  We were annoyed but not worried. Alwyn thought that our old-fashioned, innocent method of transport made us fairly safe. A criminal hardly ever walked, stealing a car or fixing false number plates and disappearing into the mass rather than into the country. It was also in our favour that there were two of us. The police were hot after Alwyn Rory but knew nothing of Ionel Petrescu.

  Part right he was and part wrong, as we found out tramp­ing northwards along the crest of Woolland Down with half of Dorset spread out below us and the other half glimpsed down wooded valleys. The road through the grass was narrow and open and entirely without traffic until we saw a police car coming up behind us. It stopped and a cop got out to talk to us. He wanted to know if we had spent the night in Cerne Abbas. Yes, we had. Dockers? Yes, we were.

  ‘There’s a good lady thinks you aren’t.’

  Alwyn said nothing. I could see that he feared the game was up and that he was waiting to hear what evidence the police had before committing himself. Myself, I was without his sense of guilt and could appreciate more readily that it was a hundred to one the police were as bored with the woman as we were.

  ‘Only pulling her leg, mate! She asked if we knew her son, Jim Halran. As if we didn’t, the silly bastard calling us all out for nothing! Never heard of him, I told her, not wishing to get into an argument. What did she say about us?’

  ‘She didn’t like the look of you. What made you get off the Dorchester bus?’

  Fortunately I had bought a paper. That inspired me—that and a dread of being searched. My passport in the name of Adrian Gurney was in my pocket. Dorset police would remember who he was, or rather had been.

  ‘Because as soon as we opened the paper we saw the strike was still on. So we changed our minds and thought we’d go to Salisbury. Better train service home from there, too! Did you think we’d bust into the Bank of England or what?’

  ‘Just checking up on you. It’s a man and a woman we’re looking for.’

  Alwyn cheered up.

  ‘Like we to take us’n shirts off, mate?’ he asked. ‘What’s they done?’

  ‘Don’t know except that it’s big stuff.’

  He described us perfectly—a woman riding side saddle and a well-dressed groom. They might be on foot now and she might be dressed as a man. We should keep our eyes open and run down to the nearest police station if we saw them on our way to Salisbury. Now on friendly terms, he wanted to know why we were on strike when we were earning three times what he did. Alwyn dealt with that one in his broadest Devon—a fiery and convincing defence of a man’s right to strike whenever he bloody well pleased. I suppose he had read enough reports in his time on unrest in the docks to know just where communist influence began and ended.

  When the police car had driven away we sat on the grass to get our breath back and wished to God we had saved a bottle of that claret.

  ‘How the hell did they get on to Lady Enid?’ I asked.

  He explained that it was certainly due to the search for Rachel, who could well be with Alwyn Rory.

  ‘Suppose our Chipperfield’s Circus story reached the police. They might have thought nothing of it if the circus had been in the district, but it wasn’t. Then wide enquiries bring in a mass of reports of when and where the pair were seen. Description of groom fits me. Description of lady sounds all wrong for Rachel, but her face could not be seen clearly under the veil and informants were vague. The incident at the church highly suspicious.’

  He added that Forrest and the horses must have got safely home, or the police would not still be looking for a pair of riders. He thought we could be more confident after what we had learned. Rory was with Rachel or he was alone. But it would be as well to sleep rough in future and clean ourselves up at streams or in public baths so that we looked respectable. I must be clean-shaven and we must buy a clothes brush.

  That was the last word we ever had with the police. Whatever they were looking for, it was not two honest and perhaps envied pedestrians, and probably they had decided that to continue an intensive search for Rory in the West Country was not worth the organisation required. When we were crossing Salisbury Plain he was very tempted to make his dash for Bristol, but then considered that the longer he delayed, the less port police would be on their toes. He had also come round to my way of thinking and was hoping to make good use of any information which Marghiloman—who was no amateur spy like Rachel—might be persuaded to divulge.

  I had to look a fairly clean and neutral Petrescu for the interview with my KGB colleague, so when we had worked our way round Devizes I suggested that I should spend a night under a roof. To my surprise he wanted to join me and for the same reason: preparing for the meeting.

  ‘But suppose he recognises you?’

  ‘Why should he? His interest is in Petrescu and refugees. I think the CIA picked the right man for that job, but he’s not big enough to have been employed on dynamite like the Mornix—Rory case. I’ll see what the set-up is when we get there.’

  We found beds for the night, of course not using our dockers-on-strike line. Alwyn produced the most convincing bit of lying I had ever heard from him. He claimed that our car had broken down in Devizes and that he had managed to find accommodation there for his wife and children. He and I, being short of money, had decided to sleep rough when we came across the bed-and-breakfast notice and thought we might just afford it. It was the sort of trouble which might hit anyone returning from a cheap holiday in a cheap, second-hand car—a shy, pathetic story accepted with a kindness which made us slightly ashamed of our­selves. But we had left no shade of suspicion behind us if the police ever made enquiries.

  In the morning, rested, well-fed and with Alwyn’s beard looking a little less as if he had merely omitted to shave, we started out early to cheer up the wife and children. When we were out of sight of the house we turned off the Devizes road and struck across the open down for the River Kennet. So past my father’s farm and on to the Ridge Way.

  It was a good day for that great sweep of rolling upland with a light wind giving intervals of cloud and sunshine so that distance, though marked by the tumuli and standing stones of the dead, was incalculable. I was puzzled because I could not see Silbury Hill where it ought to be. Under cloud it appeared as a singularly long, dark green field of roots stretching away to a point. Then the sun showed that the point was the top of our pyramid and my long field a trick of perspective. The Grey Wethers disappeared like rabbits or were lumpy as resting sheep or stood up as boldly as five thousand years ago when our ancestors chose from them the boulders with which to build their temple.

  We lay down in the grass on the reverse slope of a Long Barrow which overlooked the junction of the Ridge Way and the Herepath by which Marghiloman would come if he came at all.

  ‘Myself I would never meet a secret agent here,’ Alwyn said. ‘It looks utterly empty but one could post a platoon so that not a man would be seen.’

  ‘Towns and parks—that’s all they know. They won’t picture this at all.’

  ‘Nor did I. I wish I had.’

  ‘There’s nobody much about except at lambing.’

  ‘But someone ought to be detailed to watch your meeting.’

  I pointed out that there was no need. Petrescu and Marghiloman could
be trusted to report on each other, and anyway both were expendable.

  We saw Marghiloman strolling up the Herepath, stopping at intervals to get his breath back and look around him. I had the impression that he was surprised rather than sus­picious—a civilised man interested by a new environment.

  ‘Find out if he has ever seen me! If he hasn’t, give me a signal by smoothing down your hair in the wind!’

  Marghiloman arrived at the Ridge Way and turned a little way up it. Sliding down behind the tumulus I walked round to meet him. He greeted me with nervous politeness in the Romanian we had last spoken together. He was no longer the overbearing, confident fellow of the Charing Cross Road and I was able to dominate the interview from the start.

  ‘It is some time since we met,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I am glad you have now been persuaded to be sensible.’

  ‘You appeared so ingenuous.’

  ‘And you a man of such distinction.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t come here for compliments. I have been instructed to hand over two hundred and fifty pounds. You will be told when and where to collect the rest.’

  I answered without showing any disappointment that I was quite content, and counted and pocketed the money.

  ‘This is a very strange place to meet.’

  ‘Not if one’s cover is agriculture.’

  ‘You are a long way from the coast.’

  ‘Would you expect me to live on it, Mr. Marghiloman? Here I am only fifty miles from each coast.’

  ‘I see, I see. I had no idea … well … of course.’

  ‘When you kindly sent me down to Devon, did the CIA expect Rory to be there?’

  ‘No. But they wanted confirmation that he was in Russia.’

  ‘Have you any description of him? A photograph, per­haps?’

  ‘No. He is nothing but a name to me. You must ask about Rory higher up—if you have the right, that is. I know so little of your position, Mr. Petrescu.’

  I ran my fingers through my hair, and Alwyn materialised almost instantly. While we were engaged in conversation he had managed to reach a smooth, grassed bank and follow it till he was behind us.