Account Rendered & Other Stories

by Marjorie Eccles

  The clocks were the only things ever seriously to disturb Eunice’s placidity. The relentless chimes and strikes counting and measuring out the quarter-hours of her life drove her mad, while their constant ticking was like the Chinese water torture to her. Throughout the day, throughout the night, they ticked and chimed and struck, the silvery tones of the walnut bracket clock vying with the loud bong of the kitchen wall-clock and the double strike and the slow, measured thunk of the grandfather—the longcase—not to mention the Westminster chimes on the landing and the Whittington ones in the study.

  It was no use stopping them while Spencer was out at work, because starting them again put the chimes and strikes out of kilter. Spencer’s rage when this happened made even the noise of the clocks seem easy to bear He had been a British Army sergeant once, and still wore a stiff moustache and a bristly haircut. He was compact and muscular. His temper was nasty when roused.

  The years with Spencer had, after all, been no big deal, and Eunice sometimes wondered if the clocks were a punishment for the wrong done to his first wife. But at least now she was spared the worst atrocity of the lot: a wooden wall-clock decorated with garish Highland scenes and ‘A Souvenir from o’er the Border’ painted around the face, with the long and repetitious tune of ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ marking the quarters. Several years ago they’d been burgled and it had been lost, along with some ugly Victorian silver that had belonged to Spencer’s mother. The police, thank God, had found neither clock nor silver.

  Spencer lifted the first bottle of champagne from the bucket, uncorked it faultlessly and poured it so they might toast his future retirement. He could have stayed on until he was sixty-five, but he’d elected to go at sixty. ‘Well, you please yourself,’ Eunice had said, ‘but you, retiring at sixty? You’re a young man yet!’

  He wasn’t going to disagree with that, but she hadn’t fooled him. She didn’t want him under her feet all day, keeping her from her confounded garden. Their garden, upon which his own eye had now lit.

  He wasn’t going to be idle, he told her. He had plans for his retirement. Weekly trips to the library. Auctions where he might find the odd clock bargain. Visits to stately homes. Railway museums. He didn’t mention the holidays abroad, he knew she’d never be persuaded to leave her garden.

  He was full of the little economies they might make, too, and began to list them as the wine loosened his tongue—Eunice could dispense with the services of Mrs Cathcart, who presently came twice a week, because he wasn’t a man who was afraid of turning his hand to a bit of help with the housework. And he would make their own wine, he added, gazing reflectively into his Sainsbury’s champagne-type bubbles. Of course, they’d get rid of Eunice’s car—not that they’d get anything for it, B-reg and all that, but they’d save on the tax and insurance.

  Eunice, who’d heard all this before and had succeeded in coming to terms with what was going to happen by so far ignoring it, sipped her wine. She was totally unprepared when Spencer dropped his bombshell. ‘I think,’ he remarked, evidently continuing something he’d begun earlier, ‘the track can run along there’—pointing to her herbaceous border—‘and come along to the tunnel which I’ll make here.’

  ‘There’ appeared to go smack through the middle of the magnificent clump of lilium regale that had taken years to establish. ‘Here’ was just where the small rockery was, a little beyond the flagged path outside the French windows. Looking at it, Eunice’s heart, not normally a volatile organ, jumped about like a wild thing inside her ribcage. She felt sick. The moment she’d dreaded for years was here.

  ‘Track?’ she echoed faintly. ‘What track?’

  ‘My steam railway track. I knew you weren’t listening.’ He repeated what he’d said before and outlined its proposed route through the peonies, skirting the Japanese maple, with a little station, maybe, at that point, there . . . where this year Nevada excelled herself in a huge arched spread of white fragrance. ‘I’ve always wanted a steam railway, ever since I was a lad.’

  Eunice’s horrified mind took in the enormity of what he was saying, and what she was going to have to do. She looked around at her beautiful garden. ‘You have? I never knew.’

  ‘Oh, yes, dear, I’ve been planning it for years,’ he said.

  * * *

  The next morning, Eunice went into town to do some shopping. Before she went, she announced that if the track was to go through the rockery by the French window the stones and some of the plants would need to be moved, and she’d do it on Tuesday.

  ‘Isn’t it a bad time of year for moving plants?’

  ‘I’ll settle them in plenty of peat—they won’t realize they’ve been moved. There’s a nice shady place for them on the other side of the bridge.’

  Spencer was very busy while she was out. Afterwards, he cleaned up the tools and put them all back in place so that she wouldn’t notice they’d been used.

  It was raining the next day, but that didn’t prevent Eunice starting on the job. He watched her from the kitchen window, monolithic in a shapeless old waterproof garment and gumboots, patiently trudging up the steep, narrow path of the quarry with her first barrowload of stones.

  He knew how she hated his precious clocks, though she’d long ago given up saying so. After that burglary, in fact. She’d been very shifty about it and he’d suspected for years why the police had never been able to trace any of those stolen goods—the Scottish clock and the silver, taken while he was away on a business trip. It had been fairly obvious, knowing Eunice as he did, that to get rid of them she’d bury them somewhere in the garden, but where, in a garden this size? He’d known that one day, if he waited, she’d give herself away and he’d find out what she’d done with them.

  She’d gone white when he’d mentioned tunnelling under that rockery.

  There was the second bottle of champagne left from Sunday, nearly full. Eunice had suddenly seemed to lose her taste for it after his announcement about the rockery. He’d corked it up again with one of those gizmos that was supposed to keep it drinkable, and put it back in the fridge. It shouldn’t be too bad.

  He took it out and poured a glass, holding it in readiness as Eunice came to the bridge with the heavy barrow. She paused and lowered it, and he began to sweat. She wasn’t going to cross after all. But, after a moment, she lifted the barrow again and moved. When she reached the middle, the planks he’d loosened yesterday gave with the heavy weight and he watched his wife, jerked forward and off balance as the barrow tipped, tumble down the steep crevasse of the stream, with the barrowload of stones on top of her. He smiled and lifted his glass. Now he could go out and finish the job she’d started. No chance of salvaging anything much of his clock by this time, but at least he’d have proof of her perfidy, and justification for what he’d done. He tipped the glass and drained the champagne.

  The clocks all over the house began to chime eleven o’clock as Spencer Harrison died from the Paraquat put into the champagne bottle by his wife. Outside, under the aubrietia and alyssum and miniature junipers by the French windows, the first Mrs Harrison, put there by Eunice before she constructed her rockery twenty years ago, slept on undisturbed.

  JOURNEY’S END

  The train was just about to leave Platform 9 at Euston station when the boy with the backpack loped towards the open doors and with great energy sprang on board.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he asked, sticking his head into the carriage and addressing the passenger in the nearest seat, ‘but is this the train for Milton Keynes?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Eliot Voysey. ‘That’s where I’m going.’

  ‘Great! Thanks.’

  The boy stepped further inside, seconds before the doors closed and the whistle blew. He struggled to separate himself from his gigantic backpack and heaved it on to the rack as the train began to slide out of the station, before throwing himself down opposite Eliot, taking the aisle seat and politely folding his long legs out of the way of the old man’s walking-stick. ‘
Close!’ he grinned. A wide, white smile. Not a whit out of breath. He was broad-shouldered, tanned and had a clean-cut, college-boy appearance. American, or possibly Canadian, thought Eliot, acknowledging the remark with a smile of his own before going back to his reading.

  Five minutes along the line came the announcement, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the 14.04 train from London Euston to Milton Keynes Central, calling at Harrow and Wealdstone, Bushey, Watford Junction . . . ’

  The boy laughed outright as the disembodied voice droned on, and the train forged ahead. ‘They always do that?’

  ‘Hmm? Do what?’ asked Eliot absently, looking up from his proofs.

  ‘Wait until the train sets off before they tell you where it’s going? I mean—too bad if you’re on the wrong one after all!’ And then he blushed, as though his frank amusement might be taken for criticism.

  ‘Frequently,’ replied Eliot drily, who did his own share of criticizing a chaotic system he was forced to endure, despite his age, on a regular basis: almost every time he came up to London to see his publisher, or for his medical treatments, in fact. ‘Fortunately the next station’s not far. One could always alight and get a train back.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Obviously reassured by Eliot’s ironic tone that he hadn’t put his foot in it, unwittingly transgressed some code of British etiquette, the boy’s embarrassment receded. He relaxed and leaned forward, hands clasped loosely between his knees, seemingly fascinated by the unedifying prospect of the north London suburbs now flashing past.

  ‘You’ve been to Milton Keynes before?’ Eliot asked after a few moments, abandoning the small print as too difficult to read in the swaying train. The lad seemed likeable and inclined to talk, there was an hour to fill to the end of the journey, and at this time of day they were the only passengers in the carriage. Later, in the rush hour, every train in this direction would be packed to suffocation with commuters and their infernal mobile phones.

  ‘No, it’s my first visit . . . and while I’m there, I’ve a mind to see the place where my grandad was stationed during the war, though I never knew him. As a matter of fact, neither did my father. He was killed just before Dad was born.’

  ‘Air crew?’ There had been American Air Force bases locally.

  ‘No, he wasn’t killed on operations. He—er, died in an air raid on London, went up on a weekend pass and never came back.’ Unexpressed was the youthful wish that he’d been able to claim a more heroic end for his unknown grandfather—that he’d been a bomber or a fighter pilot, maybe, going down in a blaze of glory—and he didn’t notice the sudden tightening of Eliot’s hand around the knob of his stick. ‘Though I guess he did his share,’ he added fairly. ‘He was in the Canadian Air Force, but he was one of those what you call ’ems—boffins?—attached to that hush-hush place. Bletchley Park, wasn’t it called?’

  ‘Was he indeed? Then you’ve reason to be proud of him,’ Eliot said quietly. ‘What was he—a cryptanalyst?’

  ‘A mathematician. Actually, I guess he was pretty bright.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been there if not. Only the crème de la crème were recruited to work there.’

  The boy looked pleased at that. ‘You knew it during the war?’

  Eliot nodded. ‘I lived nearby. I’m still not far away.’

  The question took him back more than fifty years. To when the small town of Bletchley and its surrounding villages had suddenly found themselves bursting at the seams with people billeted in every house that had a spare bed, the railway station was thronged, the pubs in the evenings packed and noisy. There’d been little petrol for private cars in wartime, and mostly you had to rely on clapped-out buses and bicycles for transport, but the sound of motorcycles revving through hitherto sleepy villages had been heard night and day, with dispatch riders bringing, as was revealed later, secret messages for the Park.

  For Bletchley Park, a Victorian mansion then owned by the Government, otherwise known as Station X, had formed the hub of British wartime intelligence. Few people had known the full extent of its operations at the time—not even those who worked there—not then, or for thirty years afterwards. It had been the most famously guarded wartime secret in the British Isles. In fact, the work done there was now generally accepted to have shortened the war by several years, through its breaking of enemy codes and ciphers, notably the fiendishly complicated Enigma code, which the Germans had arrogantly believed unbreakable. Proving them wrong had been a momentous achievement which provided the chief means of gaining access to the enemy’s secrets. In order to accomplish this daunting task, hundreds of men and women had been recruited, the brightest and best brains in the country: academics, linguists, teachers, promising young luminaries from universities, experts from the armed forces. They were forbidden by the Official Secrets Act to talk about their work, and they did not. Considering that the numbers who were eventually employed there grew into several thousands, this was scarcely less amazing than the scope of the work itself.

  Rumours had, of course, flown around among the local populace as to what exactly was going on at the Park. All those fit and able young men with cushy jobs, when they should have been in uniform, on active service, tutted the old biddies of Stoke Peverel, knitting scarves and balaclava helmets for all they were worth. At the vicarage, next to the Norman church, where Eliot lived with his aunt and uncle, one or two intelligent guesses were put forth which, many years later, turned out to have been not so far off the mark. But at the time, no one involved could be drawn to comment on the nature of their work.

  ‘May I ask your name?’ Eliot asked the boy, somewhat abruptly.

  ‘Ian Sutherland.’

  Sutherland. So. It didn’t, after what had already been said, come as a surprise. Eliot felt he’d always known this time would arrive, one day, and likely when he least expected it. At his age, he had long since ceased to believe that coincidences don’t happen, but—the chances of meeting this particular person here, at this precise time? It was unfortunate, to say the least, in view of what Eliot was now expecting to occur hourly, and had been ever since he’d seen the first men with their theodolites, measuring up for the new housing estate near Stoke Peverel. The letter in his wallet, still unread after its receipt three weeks ago, felt to be burning a hole through his pocket.

  A pause had fallen while these disturbing thoughts passed through his mind. The boy, who was looking at him curiously, evidently wondering at the effect of his name on the old man, broke the silence by saying uncertainly, ‘My folks left Scotland and settled in Vancouver, way back.’ An explanation seemed to strike him. ‘Hey! You didn’t by any chance know him? He was Ian Sutherland, too. I was named for him.’

  ‘Indeed I did,’ Eliot was bound to admit, falling silent again while the boy registered his amazement at the coincidence, the train drew into busy Watford, and he himself gathered his wits against the onslaught of questions that was sure to come, the battering of memories and emotions he’d tried to ignore for over fifty years. ‘It’s not so surprising, really,’ he said eventually, waiting until a couple of passengers entered the carriage, but passed through into the next one. It was a stopping train, no more than five minutes between stations now. He’d have done better to wait for the through train—and then he wouldn’t have met this young man and been faced with things he would rather not have faced. But it was impossible to extricate himself now, there was more than half an hour to go, and Sutherland’s grandson had a right to know what little could be told. ‘I came to know quite a lot of those who worked at the Park. My name’s Voysey, by the way—Eliot Voysey.’ He extended his hand which the boy gripped warmly.

  ‘Did you work there too, sir?’

  ‘No, no! I’d just left college and come back to live with my aunt for the duration, to replace a teacher in the village school who’d enlisted for the Navy. I myself was never called up because of this.’ He tapped his lame leg. He had long ago lost the frustration, the shame of not being able to do his bit for hi
s country, like his peers, but he could still remember how it had felt. ‘My aunt and uncle kept open house at the vicarage for any of the people from the Park who cared to drop in after church on Sundays, and quite a lot of them did, and on other evenings as well. Sandwiches, you know, bit of cake or a biscuit, cup of coffee. God knows how my aunt did it with the rationing, but she was a redoubtable lady, and people helped out . . . Your grandfather used to play the piano for us, quite beautifully, I remember. He had hands just like yours.’

  He nodded towards the boy’s large, powerful hands, like his grandfather’s, big enough to be able to span an octave and a half, no doubt. And he remembered the first Ian’s hands around Leonie’s waist as she stood on tiptoe to let him kiss her goodnight, before mounting her bicycle and riding off to the big, rambling old manor house nearby where she was billeted with dozens of other Wrens.

  She had a tiny waist, not disguised by the trim, crisp WRNS uniform, the white shirt, neat navy jacket and skirt, the saucy hat, much preferable to the lumpen uniforms the WAAF or the ATS were compelled to wear. Perish the thought that she’d chosen to join the WRNS simply because of the uniform—but there was no denying it was very becoming, and emphasized her delicate colouring, the pale skin, the dark brown hair, the only truly deep violet eyes he had ever seen. Eliot, twenty years old and fathoms deep in love, knew he would never love anyone else, and realized bitterly that his passion must forever remain his own secret—though if all the circumstances had been otherwise, he might have been encouraged to hope things could have been different. For he and Leonie shared the same sense of humour, enjoyed discussing the books they’d read, she encouraged him in his ambition to believe he might have a worthwhile future as a historian when the war was over—a faith in him which had been more than justified.