by MARY HOCKING
‘I’m sorry to have brought you all this way.’ She spoke in a dull voice, rather as though apologizing for wasting his time. She went on: ‘The police are keeping very quiet.’
‘The police aren’t here.’
He explained about Rose and Milo. She was silent for a while and then she said, in that flat, unemphatic voice:
‘He could have escaped, then, if it hadn’t been for me?’
‘Possibly.’
‘He can still escape. He wasn’t going to meet his friend until this evening.’
He said nothing and she asked:
‘What are you going to do about it?’
It was all so different from what he had expected; he had been prepared for an emotional outburst in answer to which he could have defended himself, thereby stimulating his own beliefs. Now he could only answer wearily:
‘I shall telephone the police and make sure he stays in his hotel until they come.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
He looked at her face, disfigured by cuts and bruises, the eyelids swollen with tears. She seemed more real to him than ever before and infinitely more dear. Inexplicably, this strengthening of his feeling for her hardened his purpose. He said:
‘I’ve no choice. The decision was made by Raoul himself a long time ago.’
She did not answer, but began to play with the children again. He got up.
‘Will you come with me?’
She shook her head. The children seemed to absorb her attention completely; she gathered them to her almost jealously, calling out sharply if any of them wandered very far from her. He walked away, hurt and puzzled. He went into the hotel and picked up the receiver.
It was six o’clock. In the inn at Poblejo a big, dark man with a crooked nose and a slight foreign accent was asking the proprietor what time it was.
‘Six o’clock, Señor.’
‘My friend should be here now. I will give him half an hour.’
The proprietor looked puzzled. It seemed a long way to come if one was not prepared to wait longer than half an hour. The man read something of this in the other’s eyes. He went outside and strolled up and down in the courtyard. He knew that half an hour was not long to wait for a man with whom one had shared so many hazards. But then Trennet could have escaped some time ago if he had been more co-operative: one cannot draw too often on friendship’s account. He looked across at the monastery, resting quietly in the fold of the hills; he could see part of the cloisters, the uncluttered serenity of a Romanesque arch. He turned and walked to the front of the inn where the view was more dynamic, the mountains towering above and the road struggling up from San Juan de la Cruz. If Trennet had been arrested, then the police were probably already on the look-out for an accomplice. That meant that he was risking imprisonment in order to give Trennet half an hour. Friendship could scarcely demand more.
He left Poblejo at the same time that the Captain and Milo were leaving Barcelona police headquarters in the first of three cars headed towards San Juan de la Cruz.
It was a sultry evening with banks of slow-moving cloud to the north. The streets of the city were full of people, many of whom had come into the town for the Corpus Christi celebrations at the week-end. As the police car nosed into the Paseo de Gracia Milo had a glimpse of Rose Winston. She looked very cool and fresh in a pale lemon dress and she walked erect, her head tilted back slightly as she glanced up at her companion, a tall, fair young man in a well-cut English suit. There was a lot of traffic at this point and for a while, as the car crawled along, Milo had a chance to observe Rose. She looked the same as ever, except that something about the way she walked, her hand resting lightly on the young man’s arm, made her seem like a visitor to the city, a young English matron on a properly chaperoned sightseeing expedition. He turned away, too bored to be angry any more.
‘It pays to show these people one’s strength, you see,’ the Captain said when at last the car, freed of the restrictions of the city roads, bounded forward.
‘Which people?’ Milo asked, wincing as a group of women who had been chatting at a corner scattered as the car skidded round a corner. He was never happy in a car.
‘This Englishman,’ the Captain explained irritably. ‘He has learnt something from his beating.’
The car bumped over a trail of stones from a recent fall of rock and Milo gritted his teeth and clung to the handrail. He had an unpleasant feeling that Señor Kerr had learnt his greatest lesson from him rather than from the Captain. Señor Kerr had learnt to judge the man he was dealing with, and his judgements so far were shrewd enough to make Milo wonder whether he had set a trap for himself. The Captain was saying:
‘I hope he can keep Trennet there.’
‘Didn’t you get in touch with the local men?’
‘With Aristo?’ The Captain shook his head. ‘He has been after my job for a long time. Why should I present him with an opportunity like this?’
‘He could have taken the blame if anything goes wrong.’
The idea of anything going wrong did not appeal to the Captain. It had not appealed to James, either, when he stood in the narrow hall of the hotel after he had put the receiver down. Until the police arrived he was responsible for Raoul. He hesitated for a moment or two, and then went up the stairs. The corridor above was dark and there were a number of doors leading off it. One door was very slightly open. He stood looking at it, listening. Nothing happened, but he had the feeling that someone was listening on the other side of the door. He pushed it open and went into the room. Raoul was standing by the window with his hands behind his back, the nonchalant air was a little strained suggesting that he had only just taken up this pose. James shut the door, locked it and put the key in his pocket. Raoul said:
‘Don’t be so silly.’
James did not answer.
‘I heard you,’ Raoul went on. ‘It was good of you to ’phone from here, otherwise I shouldn’t have known it was still possible for me to get away.’ He was very animated, but gave the impression of deliberately winding himself up. ‘But I shall have to hurry to keep my appointment. It’s after six now, and I don’t think my friend will wait very long. So you had better unlock the door at once.’
Still James said nothing.
Raoul laughed, not very convincingly. ‘You must cooperate or I shall have to resort to melodrama.’
James leant against the door. Raoul brought his right hand from behind his back and pointed a gun at James’s stomach.
‘As you see, I made good use of the money I took from you. Now, give me the key, please.’
James made no movement. He was not much interested in the scene. The external world had lost its importance, he no longer felt in any way responsive to Raoul; he seemed to be governed by a small, hard core in the centre of his being which intended to defy not Raoul so much as his own reason.
Raoul said, ‘It’s very painful to be shot in the stomach.’
James answered, ‘You’ve killed before. Did you always talk so much?’
Raoul raised the gun slowly, as though it was almost too heavy for him; he kept his eyes on the other man’s, waiting for some sign, even the flicker of an eyelid, that would restore his sense of urgency and enable him to shoot. James met his gaze with blank uninterest. They faced each other like this for several seconds, then Raoul slowly lowered his arm. He looked down at his hand, smiling a little ruefully; it was such a simple action that had been required of him, he was perplexed by his inability to go through with it. But then he was very tired. There was not much more that he wanted to do now. He tossed the gun in the air, caught it, and extended the butt to James. James took it, but his hands were suddenly wet with sweat and he dropped it. When he bent down to pick it up he found that his heart was pounding. There was a rim of sweat on his forehead. Raoul was smiling, quite composed now.
‘So you want life so much?’ he murmured. ‘Well, why should I take it from you?’
He went and lay down on the bed. T
ime passed. At a quarter to seven he turned his head to the window and looked at the mist- darkened sky. He said:
‘Armand will be leaving. He wouldn’t wait long.’
After that he sat for a while hunched in the corner against the wall, staring at the gun. He said to James:
‘It’s all over now. You can put that away.’
‘I’ll put it away when the police come.’
This disturbed Raoul; he thought about it for some time in a muddled way and then said:
‘I don’t want to go with the police. How silly! That means that I shouldn’t have handed that gun over to you. Tell me, will you really shoot me if I try to make a break?’
‘Yes.’
‘That would be one way out.’
Raoul considered the position thoughtfully, then he said, smiling a little apologetically as though to excuse a weakness:
‘I don’t want to die in this room. Otherwise I might make you shoot me.’
James said nothing.
‘I would rather die in the open,’ Raoul persisted gently. ‘A man should be allowed to choose the way he dies, don’t you think?’
‘But, as you pointed out some time ago, you renounced your right to choose.’
Immediately the eyes went blank and Raoul turned his face away. There was silence in the room again except for the clock which began to tick very loudly. This disturbed James more than it disturbed Raoul. James was thinking that Raoul had reached a crossroads; one way he would have a quick run and a clean end to it, the other way he would be driven deeper and deeper into an intricate legal maze in which he would be slowly strangled to death. The room seemed to be growing smaller, the walls moved closer. Raoul’s eyes met his, sick and dark with fear, no longer the eyes of a dangerous man.
The clock said seven forty-five. Not much longer now. But the walls seemed to contract again, the thudding of the clock pulsed in his veins and the eyes of the man on the bed grew bigger and more desperate. Through the ill-fitting window James could feel the chill air creeping into the room. He got up and opened the window. Was it something in the vast darkness out there, or something awakened in himself that confused the issues of right and wrong, that made a mockery of ideas that had seemed sound enough to the lawyer at his desk in Glasgow? The damp night air made Raoul shiver, but the eyes did not waver; the coiled body had become more tense. Still holding the gun James went to the door and pressed the bell which was close to the light switch; he, waited, watching the taut figure on the bed, until he heard footsteps in the corridor and saw the chambermaid. Then he stepped out of the room, concealing the gun behind him, and said to the girl:
‘I wonder if you would bring me up something to eat—cheese and bread, perhaps, and a glass of wine.’
She said: ‘For two?’
He hesitated. ‘Yes. For two.’
But when he went back, the room was empty.
He stood for a long time at the window looking down over the sloping roof at the darkness of the yard, the outhouses and a shadowy field beyond. Nothing stirred. He looked at the sky; no stars and there was a dankness in the air that threatened a heavy mist in the mountains. A kind night for the hunted. But Raoul would be no match for Milo: if you take to the heather, you must know the heather. He looked at his watch. It was after eight. The police would be here soon. He could rely on Milo. Milo would not drag a man down from the mountains to rot in prison; such an act would tarnish his image of himself.
James put the gun away and eased his cramped fingers. He was thinking: you are supposed to emerge from this kind of experience feeling that you ‘know yourself’. In fact, the debate within himself had intensified, the argument had become more violent and less coherent. He was a civilized man, he had reported Raoul to the police because he believed deeply in civilized values; and yet at the last he he had given way to something felt in the blood, to the instinctive sympathy of the hunter for his prey.
Presently, as he stood by the window, he saw lights winking between trees a long way off and realized that cars were passing along a road. Milo would be in one of the cars. James went down the stairs, feeling as though he was about to greet an accomplice.
Chapter Eighteen
To the north the landscape had a grey, smudged appearance, like a child’s painting in which one colour has been allowed to run into another; the mountain peaks had vanished and the lower slopes were a dark, blurred shadow. The roofs of the houses in the village were wet and cobwebs of mist rose from the fields, but further down the valley it was beginning to clear.
James and Frangcon stood on the doorstep of the hotel. They had been there since the first shiver of light parted the mist. It had been very quiet, the occasional rumble of a cart, the distant barking of a dog, and then, just after eight, there was the sound of a shot. They waited, but only the echo came, muffled by mist. The Captain, who was also in the street, came hurrying up to them.
‘I told them not to loose off a lot of shots,’ he grumbled.
He had given a lot of orders as they huddled over a map in the dining room of the hotel. He had made a long speech designed to show that he was something of a psychologist.
‘Now, I put myself in his place. What would I do? I do not know the land well, so I avoid the mountains to the west because they look impassable; but I would also avoid the way to the north because there is a fairly open stretch there. And so . . .’
Later, they had gone up to the room from which Trennet had escaped. While James told them how he had gone to the door and talked to the chambermaid, Milo was thinking: Trennet is a man who has lived dangerously for many years, yet he does not try to take the gun from Señor Kerr, instead he plunges into the night unarmed. This is not a man who wants to escape, this is a man who wants only to feel the earth beneath him when they finally beat him down instead of the unrelenting concrete of a prison cell. Such a man does not plan his escape route, he runs straight ahead until he falls and breaks his neck, or someone else puts an end to his misery.
‘And I want him alive,’ the Captain was saying. ‘I don’t want anyone to loose off a lot of shots.’
Milo sensed that Señor Kerr was watching him, but he would not look at him. He had been neatly trapped by his own sense of honour. He was very angry with Señor Kerr as he went out into the night.
Since he and the others went there had been no news; nothing until the one shot was heard.
‘It couldn’t mean anything, could it?’ Frangcon asked. ‘There wouldn’t be just the one shot, would there?’
James did not answer. But he turned her away from the mountains and began to walk slowly along the street in the direction where the valley opened outwards. The mist was clearing rapidly now and they could see the pattern of fields and vineyards taking shape. He looked down at Frangcon and saw that she was gazing across the valley and he had once more the feeling that she had gone away from him.
‘Shall we ever come back to Spain?’ she murmured.
He put his arm through hers.
‘We shall come back.’
‘I don’t know that I want to.’
Once sadness had skimmed across the bright surface of life, now it had penetrated and become a part of the fabric. She became quiet, emptying herself of the stresses of thought and feeling, seeking stillness at the storm’s centre. Beside her, James, still struggling to reconcile the irreconcilable, insisted:
‘We shall come back.’
He would never understand Spain fully, or Frangcon either; he would be like a traveller in a strange land in which wonder must always be tinged with fear. But as he watched the beguiling golden light spreading across the valley, he knew that this was the beginning of a love which would last the rest of his life.
In the mountain pass Milo clambered across to the ledge where Raoul lay. Perhaps it was because he was a pawn in another man’s game that the majesty of the mountains failed to touch him; perhaps it was simply that he was getting old. He stood looking down at the man he had shot. It was not a clean
kill; in the mist the man had been only a moving shadow. But there was no resistance in him and blood ebbed fast; he was little more than a bundle of bones now. Milo felt no personal pity, but he was sad that even death had lost its splendour. The bleached lips moved and Milo thought that perhaps he wanted to leave a message; he bent forward, but Raoul said only two words: ‘El Sarat.’ He died soon afterwards without speaking again and Milo made the sign of the cross over the hollow breast and closed the empty eyes.
Mary Hocking
Born in London in 1921, Mary was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls School, Acton. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) attached to the Fleet Air Arm Meteorology branch and then briefly with the Signal Section in Plymouth.
Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.
The book was a success and enabled Mary to relinquish her full time occupation to devote her time to writing. Long before family sagas had become cult viewing, she had embarked upon the `Fairley Family’ trilogy – Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, and Welcome Strangers – books which give her readers a faithful, realistic and uncompromising portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, between the years of 1933 and 1946.
For many years she was an active member of the `Monday Lit’, a Lewes-based group which brought in current writers and poets to speak about their work, an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.