The Judas Boy

by Simon Raven

  Tom wondered now whether to tell Patricia about this and decided against it. She would only say that it confirmed Isobel's 'feeling'; and since Tom, despite himself, was inclined to think the same, and was therefore furious with himself for being so weak and irrational, further discussion of the topic could only lead to loss of temper. Isobel, he told himself sternly, was a silly little ass, and the Near East man was a pretentious little ass, and best leave it at that.

  'Isobel has too little to do,' he said now: 'why doesn't she have a baby?'

  'They're trying very hard. Gregory wants one even more than she does.'

  'A baby,' said Tom, looking with fond disgust at the drooling child on Patricia's lap, 'should be enough to settle even her. Smell of death, indeed. The next thing we know she'll have brought a crystal ball.'

  'Once,' said Patricia, 'when we were children, she organised a seance.'

  'What happened?'

  'Nothing really,' Patricia said. 'She pretended to go into a trance and shouted a lot of rude words. She claimed afterwards she'd never heard them before, but she was always hanging round the gardener's boy, so I expect she learnt them from him.'

  As the afternoon retreated from his window and the evening filtered slowly among the pine trees. Fielding alternately pondered and dozed. Most times that he fell asleep he was woken abruptly after a few minutes by acid heartburn which resulted from his gastronomic lunch. Once, however, he slept longer and was roused only by a tapping on the glass beside his head. This turned out to be Percival, who was standing on a platform and grinning. As soon as he saw Fielding was awake. Percival pushed his canines down over his lower lip in a rather good imitation of Count Dracula, waved, turned on his heel, and walked off with a swirl of his stylish overcoat towards the exit from the station, which, Fielding now saw, was called Linz. Apparently Percival had no luggage; nor. Fielding reflected, would one expect him to have any; like all vampires he doubtless travelled light.

  Although Fielding's thoughts grew no clearer as the evening went on, by the end of dinner he had reached a decision. The meal, being Austrian, was poor and his appetite even poorer; but two whiskies and a bottle of brisk red wine helped him to formulate his plan with some confidence. Not that it needed much formulation, for it was extremely simple: he would just follow Percival's advice and see what came of it. He would stay awake, which should not be difficult after his comatose afternoon, until, in a few hours, the train crossed from Austria into Yugoslavia; he would then lock the door of his compartment and go to bed, fully dressed in case of night alarums; and for the rest, he would keep his one eye cocked the next day and in the evening would take great care, as Percival had urged, to dine early in the Yugoslav restaurant-car and eschew the Greek. Percival had assured him that this was the way to evade the danger that threatened; and though Percival's logic was obscure, the situation was Percival's production, so to speak, and Percival must be allowed to know best.

  Having finally settled this over three large glasses of brandy. Fielding purchased a bottle of the same from the steward and went back to his compartment, where he amused himself (as he often did when slightly drunk) with reading his favourite passages from his own books.

  When the train reached the Yugoslav frontier, there was less shouting and shunting than there had been at any frontier previous. Although Fielding had expected much activity from officials, these merely glanced at the pile of passports held by the wagon-lit attendant for his charges and passed on down the train.

  Through his window, Fielding watched the Austrian dining-car as it was rolled away down a side-line (good riddance) and the Yugoslav one which was being moved up in its place. Now what, he thought to himself, can be so special about that, that Percival should have been at such pains to recommend it? No answer suggested itself, so he stretched himself flat on his bunk, half-anaesthetised with brandy, to sleep.

  'Do you think,' said Tom Llewyllyn at breakfast, 'that we might have kippers occasionally instead of boiled eggs?'

  'Baby can't eat kippers,' Patricia said.

  'Baby could have her boiled egg and we could have kippers.'

  Then Baby would be jealous.'

  'Not if she can't eat kippers anyway.'

  'She doesn't know she can't eat them anyway.'

  Baby squirted half a boiled egg, carefully accumulated in her ample checks, on to Tom's dark suit.

  'Oh dear,' said Patricia. Her dressing gown fell apart to reveal the insides of two long, snaky breasts.

  'Never mind,' said Tom, breathing heavily, 'I'll go to Shepherd's Bush in the check one.'

  'Oh, darling ... I'm afraid I forgot ... It's still at the cleaners. But I expect a sports coat and flannels will be all right I mean, for the BBC...'

  'It just so happens that I'm having lunch with the Director of Features.'

  'Are you?' said Patricia, unimpressed. 'Well, eat as much as you can, darling, because I've got to take Baby to the clinic and I'll be too tired to cook proper dinner.'

  Fielding had his breakfast in the Yugoslav restaurant-car. The head waiter, although he looked and moved like a retired wrestler, had a very graceful address.

  'Eggs and bacon,' he said, 'for an English.'

  Fielding, whose liver felt like a badly blown up football on a muddy day, politely demurred; but when the head waiter's face started to crumple, he nodded assent after all and was served a few minutes later, with the best plate of eggs and bacon he had eaten in several months.

  Gregory and Isobel Stern always had breakfast downstairs in the dining-room, fully dressed. It made, as Gregory put it, a crisp start to the day; and since they lived in Chelsea, where there was much laxity in the air, it was important to have as many crisp habits as possible.

  Gregory ate some patent breakfast food compound of ground-nuts and sawdust, while Isobel knocked into a great plate of kedgeree, which she had cooked for herself.

  'What are you doing today?' Gregory asked.

  'Spring cleaning. What are you doing? Sitting in that office trying to cheat your authors, I suppose.'

  It was said with the malicious affection which of all her qualities Gregory loved most.

  'I'm going to read some of the stuff which Detterling's been sending from Athens.'

  That reminds me,' Isobel said: 'you know I told you I had that... feeling ... about Fielding Gray?'

  'Yes'—embarrassed and uneasy.

  'Well, I had another last night in a dream. Fielding and I were looking at some old ruin somewhere. All I can remember is a large stone doorway, square and flat, with two animals carved above it, large dogs they looked like, sniffing up at a collar. There was this same feeling of death I had at the station, only much stronger, as though the whole place was kind of ... seeped in it.'

  'Steeped in it,' Gregory said.

  'Well, there was a sort of ooze. That's seeping, isn't it?' '

  'But the verb is intransitive and so cannot be used in the passive voice.'

  'Passive yourself, you old cow. But the thing was,' Isobel went on, 'That there was another feeling too. With all that death about, Fielding was somehow enormously happy, quite radiant with it. "It hasn't been like this for seventeen years," he said.'

  'Seventeen?'

  'Yes, wasn't it odd? If he'd said fifteen or twenty it would have seemed quite natural; but seventeen—so precise. That's why I remembered it.'

  Gregory champed his breakfast food.

  'What was Fielding so happy about?' he enquired.

  'The dream ended then. After Fielding spoke I saw a sort of blue flash a long way off ... and then the dream ended.'

  Gregory worked hard with his tongue to remove the coating of slush from his palate. The stuff might have been made of acorns. Why was it supposed to be so good for him?

  'Could it have been the sea, this blue flash?' he asked.

  'P'raps. Why?'

  'Just a thought. You've never been to Greece, have you?'

  'No. Why?'

  'Just another thought. Tell me. Isob
el my wife: what for must I eat this rubbish every morning?'

  His eyes entreated.

  'Because you're a weedy old Jew and it's good for you.' Gregory chuckled.

  'So I'm a weedy old Jew who must go now to work for my shekels. Will my wife be waiting this evening?'

  'Waiting and ready,' she said.

  The Yugoslav countryside was green, rolling and interminable. During the morning Fielding read Richardson's Clarissa, which was even more interminable, and for lunch he has a glass of light beer and a piece of delicious but unnamed fish.

  'Will the English not eat more?' the head waiter pleaded. 'Our food is good, yes?'

  'Your food is excellent. But I'm saving myself up for dinner.'

  Fielding pointed to a printed slip on the table, which begged to inform passengers in French, English, German and Italian (but not in Serbo-Croat) that dinner would be at 6.30 p.m. in order to enable them to conclude the meal in comfort before the train reached the Greek frontier.

  'Ah, yes,' said the head waiter, and ambled crab-wise away down the aisle.

  'Fielding Gray, good,' the Director of Features said: 'Cyprus ... not so good.'

  'Fielding knows about Cyprus.' said Tom.

  'And other places, I take it' The Director looked sternly at Tom's tweed jacket. 'So why Cyprus?' he said.

  'Why not? I told you I was sending him there some days ago. Why bring it up again now?'

  The Director, being of privileged rank, was lunching Tom in a private room in the Television Centre. A vegetarian, he had ordered the meal in advance: an undressed salad with some faddy kind of bread and for Tom, as a concession, a hard-boiled egg.

  'What's your ... line on Cyprus?' the Director of Features asked.

  'That depends on Fielding. I've suggested he should start by checking back in the record for ... inconsistencies.'

  The Director shuddered.

  'Cyprus is an emergent nation now, you know that.'

  'No more so now than it was a week ago—when I first told you I was sending Gray. If you've got any new objections to his assignment, for God's sake be plain.'

  'When will he reach Athens?'

  'In about twenty-four hours. Rather less.'

  'Send him a wire there,' the Director quacked. 'Tell him to hang on in Athens until further notice, as you may want him to research into something different after all.'

  'Is this what's known as carte blanche?'

  'Simply a suggestion,' said the Director, suddenly very mild. 'which may be in everyone's best interest. Just ask him to wait. He'll probably be glad of a chance to have a good look round Athens.'

  'That's not the point, Director.'

  'I'm only trying to insure against ... muddle. And that rings a bell. There've been complaints from Administration that you haven't turned in your National Insurance Card. See to it—there's a good chap.'

  During the afternoon. Fielding read more of Clarissa. It was, he decided, a work of obsession; its detailed and unhurried logic, its long and loving repetitions, demonstrated its author's total commitment and belief. The reader too believed, believed so completely that he became at first fascinated and then disgusted by a world clogged with so much greed, complacency, prudishness and spite. Every time Fielding reached a temporary saturation point, he looked out of the window for ten minutes; but the Yugoslav landscape still rolled about as boringly as ever, and the only relief was an occasional crude farm building, some sullen cattle or a group of chunky children waving at a wayside halt. Four o'clock, five o'clock, six. Nothing had happened all day, and in half an hour he must go for his early dinner.

  That evening at 5.30 plump Maisie had a visitor who was called Somerset Lloyd-James, MP. This gentleman had been a client of Maisie's for nearly eight years, with only a brief interval some three years back when there had been, through no real fault of either's, a minor misunderstanding. Now, after he had finished pretending to be a newly pubescent schoolboy whom Maisie, the under-matron, was seducing in the sick-room, Somerset Lloyd-James said:

  'Fielding Gray. He did come to see you before he left?'

  'Yes, Nugent'

  Nugent was the name which Somerset had chosen for the schoolboy.

  'That's enough for that for now. What! want to know is, what did Fielding ... seem to feel about this trip to Cyprus?'

  'Nothing in particular. Should he have done?'

  'Lots of people would have been very pleased at an assignment like that'

  'He wasn't. He was sorry if anything.'

  'Ah.' said Somerset: 'why?'

  'I don't think he likes the people much—after what they did to his face.'

  'So that when he comes up with his stuff he'll do his worst for them?'

  'He certainly won't kill himself finding excuses for them.'

  Thank you,' said Somerset Lloyd-James, MP: 'that's what I wanted to know ... You can call me Nugent again now. Matron. I've got such a frightful pain—just here. Do you think I could have a day in the sicker?'

  Maisie suppressed a sigh.

  'I'm sorry to bear that, Nugent mi.,' she said: 'you'd better lie down there and let me have a look at you ...'

  Tessie Buttock was sitting fatly on the fender in the front ball of her hotel.

  'Woozums, woozums,' she intoned to Albert Edward, who was lying in a rocking chair, 'how we do miss that ugly Fielding, to be sure. All those interesting chats about his writing friends and all their filthy habits. Not to mention what he pays so regular for his room. We're not so full these days, woozums darling, that we can forget about that.' She reached over and rocked Albert Edward's chair. 'It might even be a mercy if they decided to pull the old place down. They'd have to pay quite a bit for the compensation. But then Fielding would have nowhere to come home to.' A jagged smile cut into her mean, fleshy face. 'You see, woozums, this is the only home he's got. All he's got in the world is those dirty writing friends, and some trollop up west, and the pair of us. I wonder—don't you wonder, woozums?—what he's doing now.'

  What Fielding was doing just then was walking down the corridor to the Yugoslav dining-car. Since this had been put on next to the wagon-lit coach for Athens, he had only a short way to go: and in fact it was even shorter than he expected, because the door at the end of the sleeping-car was locked.

  Now he came to think of it, no one had come through to announce dinner; he had simply assumed that this would be at 6.30 as notified by the printed slip on his table at lunch, and he had therefore left his compartment promptly though unsummoncd at 6.29. Perhaps there was some sort of delay (trouble with the cooking apparatus, trouble with the staff) and the door had been locked to fend off importunate diners till all was ready. Then surely the head waiter or one of his underlings would have been hovering with explanation or reassurance? But then again, he thought, this was an iron curtain country (more or less), and such places were notoriously careless of one's convenience. Perhaps the sleeping-car attendant would know what was going on.

  The attendant had a cubby hole at the other end (the front end) of the sleeping-car. When Fielding reached it, its door was open and it was deserted. This in itself meant nothing. What was mildly worrying, however, was that the pile of passengers' passports, which were entrusted to the attendant and which Fielding had several times seen stacked on his table when going to and from the loo, had disappeared; and what was more discouraging still was that at this end of the car as at the other the connecting door was locked.

  Calm, calm. Proceeding back along the carpeted corridor, Fielding knocked, one by one, on the doors of the compartments. One by one, as he received no answer, he opened them, only to find that in each case the compartment was empty; not only empty, but swept, garnished, pristine, unspotted by the least trace of occupancy past or present. When he opened his own door, which was half-way along, he stepped back, on sudden impulse, in case of ambush or trap; but it was exactly as he left it. Nor did this bring comfort, for a presence there, however alien, might have offered information, would certainl
y have offered human company, for which he suddenly yearned. The remaining doors, between his own and the end, he flung open, desperate and sweaty, without knocking. Nobody. Nothing. Once more he tried the door through to the dining-car: immovable as the gate of a tomb.

  For some time now the train had been gradually slowing down. He looked out of the window. Dark now, nothing to see ... but surely ... lights, the lights on the rest of the train? But of course, unless the train was on a bend he wouldn't see them. One way to settle it. He forced down the window in the side door next to him and thrust his head into the night. Far away, in the direction from which the train had come, there was a single red light, receding: otherwise nothing, total blackness. And forward? Nothing at all, beyond the yellow-lit window at the front end of the sleeping-car, nothing at all except some kind of looming mass, darkness visible, as it were, which was near, how near?—nearer anyhow, suddenly all above him. now ...

  The train (train?) must have been swallowed by a tunnel. Not four feet from him the light from the corridor window played on a furry black wall. The speed was still decreasing; but just as the wheels seemed about to stop entirely, they gathered way again, first slightly, then definitely, then vigorously. There must be a slope, he thought: there's nothing to pull it, nothing now except this lone car and me alone in it. Where? Why? How? Never mind that, only one thing to think about—escape.