Echo of Barbara

by John Burke

‘Never mind about looking back at it.’ She sensed now what his anger, controlled yet savage, must have been when he was a big, healthy man. ‘What I’m getting at is what your feelings were like when you . . . when you decided you couldn’t bear to meet me again.’

  On this there should be no difficulty. She had worked this out thoroughly with Roger. But she did not let her own, contrived anger loose. She stooped over the table and let time run through her fingers as, very slowly, she picked up her glass and turned, holding it out.

  ‘Do you think I could have another one, Sammy?’

  She watched his back as he went to the counter. Sammy. His wife, she had been told, had never called him that. It was Barbara’s name for him, and it had been understood that nobody else could use it.

  She wondered about them. What was existence like for the two of them now? She tried to imagine them before she came — the two of them, with Barbara gone and Roger working in London for the larger part of the time. How had they talked, what pattern of life together had they been able to establish; what did they mean to one another?

  He came back with the glasses. He might have been reading her mind. Without preamble, he said:

  ‘I suppose you think it’s a queer set-up, the way I . . . wander about on my own?’

  ‘You’re not on your own today.’

  ‘But I don’t bring your mother,’ he said. ‘I haven’t done, at all. We haven’t gone out together since I got back.’

  ‘Have you asked her to come with you?’

  ‘Not once,’ he said.

  ‘She’s not happy.’ They were treading on uncertain ground.

  ‘You think I’m not being fair to her?’

  ‘I think,’ she plunged, ‘that she . . . that Mother wants things. You ought to do something to settle her mind. All our minds,’ she added with an impatient jerk of her head.

  He was deaf to her meaning. Abstractedly he said: ‘The trouble is, I’m not human any longer. You stop being human when you’ve been in prison for a few years. It’s hard to explain, but it happens. Either you harden — they’re the lucky ones, maybe — and you come out determined to get your own back on the whole system that put you there; or else you cease to live. I ceased.’

  ‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘And it’s not fair on the others — the people you’ve left outside, waiting for you.’

  ‘There isn’t such a place as outside. You are inside, and there are people on top of you and crowded all around you. Even when there’s silence, it’s thick and heavy. When I came out I . . . I didn’t want to talk. I still don’t. To anyone but you.’

  She said: ‘Sammy —’

  ‘All you want when you’re free . . . Free,’ he mused, sidetracked by a word. ‘This is what they call being free. But I don’t feel that I’ve got away. Somehow I almost lost my voice while I was inside — and I lost more than that. Whatever it is that you’ve lost, you don’t find it again when you get out. All you want is peace. No, not just peace: nullity. You don’t want to exist, so you will yourself to stop existing.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  Now he smiled, faintly. ‘You couldn’t know,’ he said, touching her arm.

  But I know, she said to herself.

  Footsteps creaked on wooden stairs within the wall at their backs. A door opened, and a tall young man with sandy hair came into the bar.

  Sam Westwood swung towards him, greeting him with relief.

  ‘Hello, Adam. Wondered if we’d see you this morning.’

  ‘It’d be an odd morning when you didn’t.’

  The young man glanced at Sam’s glass, took a step towards the counter, and then became aware of Paula. He stopped.

  Sam said: ‘I’d like you to meet my daughter. Barbara, this is Adam Collier — he has the good fortune to be living in this establishment.’

  His hand was strong and supple. She looked into a pair of startling blue eyes, full of laughter and shrewdness. Her first thought was that he ran a grave risk of banging his head on the beams.

  ‘Sam’s told me about you,’ he said.

  ‘Not a lot.’ Sam’s quick, sibilant assurance was meant to put her at her ease.

  ‘By no means a lot,’ Adam Collier agreed. ‘Not nearly enough, in fact. He didn’t even mention that you were expected home from the big city this week.’

  ‘It was a last-minute decision,’ she said.

  ‘I’m glad it was made.’

  Perhaps his smile was too frank, his charm too ready; but certainly his arrival had brought life into the room. He was commandingly taking Sam’s glass from him, and cocking an enquiring eyebrow at her own. A few seconds later they were sitting at one of the tables, and two new arrivals had started a sociable buzz of conversation in one of the other corners.

  ‘Adam,’ said her father — and with the introduction of a total stranger he became in some disconcerting way more solidly her father — ‘is a writer. Or so he says. I think it’s only an excuse.’ He grinned. He was happier than she had seen him. This was a friend: it was a man’s relationship, making no personal demands. ‘Writers can work when and where they like — and you can always say that you stay at a country pub in order to get local colour.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ returned Adam easily, ‘I write.’

  Paula asked: ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘My present opus’ — he gave his shoulders an engagingly self-conscious wriggle — ‘is a rather dull little thing about economics and our present society.’

  ‘And you need to stay in the country to write that?’

  Sam chuckled. It was a refreshing sound. ‘I wondered about that, too. I thought economics were worked out in the cities these days, not on the land.’

  ‘You can see ’em more clearly from a distance,’ said Adam Collier.

  They were talking about nothing. He did not look like a writer — but perhaps writers never did — and she could not believe that Sam cared about writers and writing anyway; but somehow the conversation took wing, and they were all three laughing, and there was a clink as glasses were gathered together and taken to the bar, and more laughter.

  She knew that Adam Collier was studying her from time to time. His expression was something she was used to: she had experienced it before. But there was an undertone that was new. He liked her being there, and he was a man who liked women — but also he was puzzled. Or at any rate curious in a probing, analytical sort of way.

  ‘Shall we be seeing a lot of you down here now?’ he asked.

  ‘It all depends.’ It was the best answer. At so many times, in so many places, it had been the best answer.

  ‘Let’s hope she stays,’ said Adam to Sam.

  ‘Here’s hoping,’ said Sam — not yet confidently, but with an infectious cheerfulness that she had not encountered in him before.

  He was not drunk. He was not even slightly irresponsible. It was just that for the first time he was relaxed, and what must have been the old Sam Westwood was reasserting himself.

  Adam sprawled his long legs across the fireplace.

  Paula said: ‘It must be nice, to work where you want to work, when you feel like it.’

  He wrinkled up his eyes thoughtfully. She had seen a picture like that, once — it came back to her confusingly, then resolved itself: it had been the picture of a young, grinning fox cub, adorable yet lean and savage.

  ‘Things can go wrong,’ he said into his glass. ‘Things don’t always work out the way you expect — or the way you want them to.’

  ‘No,’ said Sam with a solemn shake of his head.

  Paula laughed. ‘Sammy —’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The two of you. You look so philosophical. Or something.’

  ‘Or something,’ Adam repeated.

  She was suddenly uncomfortable. She wanted to leave. And yet at the same time she did not want to break away from this warm, cosy circle. Everything was false and wrong, and the moments of instinctive, natural pleasure were only spasmod
ic — and then they, too, were wrong because they clashed with reality. She ought not to be sitting and talking. She ought to be neither enjoying nor hating the company of Adam Collier and Sam Westwood: her job was to be cool and calculating, to concentrate on working out the best means and the right moment for asking Sam Westwood where he had hidden a fortune.

  She still smiled, and turned towards Adam as he spoke. But she was thinking: It’s time we got away from here, it’s too comfortable and too uncomfortable.

  Sam Westwood said: ‘It’s time we got away from here. It’s too comfortable — our healthy outdoor programme is being undermined, eh, Barbie?’

  His opening words and his whole inflection were so much the same as what she had heard in her mind that she was at a loss to reply. He had taken her up as swiftly as an echo. There was a twinkle of complicity in his eyes as though he understood just what she had been thinking. Which was absurd. But the sensation of swift, tingling contact remained.

  Earlier this morning he had picked up, as he might have snatched it from the air, her speculations about himself and his wife. Now this. It was true, then, what Roger had said: there had always been this close bond between Sam Westwood and his daughter, and . . .

  But it was nonsense! She was not Barbara Westwood. For a fantastic moment she had felt the kinship, believed that it existed between this father and this daughter.

  He was not her father. She was not his daughter.

  ‘Time we weren’t here,’ said Sam.

  Adam Collier was lurching to his feet and smiling down at them. His heartiness seemed too good to be true, yet she was disturbed and unsure of herself when he said: ‘We’ll meet again, won’t we? We’ve just got to meet again.’

  *

  There was a telephone in the inn, but he used it only to answer incoming calls — and there had so far been only two of those. For his own calls he waited until he was in Easterdyke itself, in the impersonal telephone-box with the background music, even through the closed door, of the same gnawing at the shingle.

  ‘Hello, Fred. No, you can scrub that out. I’m not coming back. Something new. Yes, new . . . No, I’m not wasting my time. Not any longer. At least, I don’t think so . . . The daughter’s arrived. Yes, the daughter. The one we got all that detail on. It looks as though she’s come home to get the old man’s secrets out of him. I’ve a hunch something is going to break — I can feel it in the air.’

  A bus rumbled past; the sea pounded its cymbals; the voice on the line was metallic and matter-of-fact.

  ‘Of course,’ Adam replied. ‘You know me. I’ll turn on the charm. Yes, all of it. I don’t often get the chance of doing it and getting paid for it, do I? Leave it to me. I’m fairly confident now.’

  He rang off and left the telephone-box. The wind off the sea snatched at his breath. It ought to have been exhilarating, but it wasn’t.

  He was confident, all right; but not very happy.

  Chapter Eight

  The road was wet, and the light from headlamps splashed confusingly at corners, blurring across the windscreen. The wipers ticked to and fro. Roger lit a cigarette with one hand and pressed his foot down harder on the accelerator.

  The country ahead was dark, spotted only here and there with a glimmer of light from farms or clusters of distant houses. The rain flickered like a bead curtain, into which the car plunged.

  There were few people on the road tonight. Only, every now and then, a rattling farm lorry swung out of a side road, or a local bus lumbered up towards him and went past hissing in wetness, its frieze of light like a ship rocking through the dark.

  And, every now and then, in his mirror he caught a glimpse of headlamps a long way behind.

  It was not until he was within twenty miles of Easterdyke that he seriously began to wonder if he were being followed.

  There was no reason why another car should not use this road all the way from London to the coast. Plenty of people lived down here or paid visits to the district. So Roger said to himself, and slowed. Let the car overtake him and go its way.

  The lights drew closer now; then fell back.

  He dropped to a crawl approaching the crossroads where he normally went straight on. The road to the left was a minor one: he had once taken it by mistake, and found himself winding back towards the main road for London, twisting and turning through tiny villages and patches of woodland. Nobody who knew the district would turn left here.

  He swung the wheel, and turned left.

  The road twisted so sharply between hedges and under trees that he could not see the lights behind him for some little while. Then, as he slowed along a straight stretch, the two bright eyes came into view.

  Roger felt a brief twitch of panic. His cigarette burned down hot to his lips. He flicked it out into the rain, and accelerated.

  If there were a side road soon, he might reach it under cover of the hedges and race down it, leaving them to go straight on. But they would have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right which way he had gone.

  Anyway, he might drive into a lane which petered out in some field. So many of them did, round here.

  But then what would happen? Nobody could be after him for anything serious. He knew nothing, possessed nothing worth having, was in no secrets.

  Except that he knew where his father was.

  But . . .

  He drove on automatically while vague shapes and threats uncoiled in his mind. He was only guessing. Just because a car happened to be taking the same road — perhaps because the driver was lost, and thought that the car ahead was bound to be going to somewhere reasonably big — he was letting himself imagine things.

  A building loomed up out of the rain. Standing on the grass verge was an inn sign.

  Roger slid in to the side of the road. A few seconds later he was in the saloon bar drinking a large Scotch. The place was surprisingly full. Men must trudge here from houses scattered around the district. There was a warming, reassuring buzz of conversation.

  He drank, watching the door.

  The swish of tyres was audible along the road. It came closer, slowed, and stopped.

  There was a long pause. The door of the saloon opened part of the way, stayed open for a moment, then closed again. This was followed by the thump of the door into the public bar.

  The two bars were divided by the shelves of bottles between. There was an opening at each end. The landlord walked round, sometimes appearing at one end, sometimes at the other, not unlike a figure from a little weather-house, popping out at alternate ends.

  Roger half turned. He saw the shoulder of a man in a raincoat, leaning on the bar. Beyond it was the profile of another — a lean, ordinary face.

  Roger waited for five minutes, his fingers warming and growing damp on the glass. Then he moved out of sight, edging across the room towards the far window.

  The men moved. They appeared in the opening at the other end of the bar. Still neither of them looked directly through at him.

  He could be making it all up. This business was getting him jittery. Waiting for Paula Hastings to worm the truth out of his father . . . stalling with Stan Morrison . . . living on his nerves, anticipating every day that something would go irreparably wrong . . .

  He went back to the counter and ordered another drink — loudly. On the other side of the shelves, a minute later, there was the clink of a glass and a voice said: ‘Same again.’

  Roger downed his drink in one gulp and went swiftly to the door. He slipped into the driving seat, trembling, and tried to make his hands and feet work fast.

  It was not until the engine stuttered into life that he realized his pursuers might have fixed it, or punctured his tyres. But they had not done so. He drew away fast, and raced through the small village that lay immediately ahead.

  They had not wanted to immobilize the car. All they wanted was to find out where he was going.

  He looked up into his mirror. Were two men coming out of the public bar and climbing into their car?
It was already too far away to be sure; and then the end of the village main street cut off his view.

  He drove more recklessly than he was used to, scraping hedges and cutting corners. A man and woman plodding along through the rain with heads down did not see him until the lights flowed up to their feet; then they staggered towards the ditch, arms waving apprehensively.

  Roger followed the road until he saw the arc of steely lights over a hillside ahead. Here was the main road, slicing right across country. He vacillated for a few seconds, then drove out on to its exposed surface. Here at least there was a fair amount of traffic. He joined in the procession heading towards London.

  Ten miles back, he turned off again. These were unfamiliar roads — he had so far used the same route on every trip — but he knew his general direction, and after a couple of errors found himself within an hour back on the Easterdyke road, further down.

  There were no pursuing eyes. He had shaken them off — if they had ever been following him at all.

  *

  Rain had not come to Easterdyke until late in the afternoon. The morning had been a pellucid grey, with no breath of wind. The waves rose and fell in long surges, but there was a smoothness in their undulation that echoed the tranquillity of the land.

  Sam Westwood got up early. When Paula came in to breakfast, he said:

  ‘It’s time you came out in the canoe with me.’

  She had never in her life been on the sea. ‘I didn’t know you — we had a canoe.’

  ‘We haven’t. I borrow it from a young chap along the creek. We sometimes go out together, but the novelty soon wore off for him. I think he’s messing about with a motorbike at present.’ He glanced at her keenly. ‘Unless, of course, you’re still a bit afraid —’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. She wanted to be with him. Within these few days she had experienced something that was utterly new: she found herself completely at home in this strange relationship with Sam Westwood. Even knowing what she knew, knowing what lay ahead of her when she fulfilled the agreement with Roger Westwood, she was happy.

  If Sam’s real daughter had only felt like this . . .