Arrows of Desire

by Geoffrey Household

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  Arrows of Desire

  Geoffrey Household

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter I

  Pezulu Pasha, the Chief of Police, was fiddling with his uniform hat, a tall shako made of white fur and lined with red silk, folding it with an air of regret and once jabbing a blunt forefinger through two holes just below the crown. An imperious hat it was, which should have been worn upright as a lighthouse, flashing in front the springing silver sapling which was the emblem of the Euro-African Federation. Tito Pezulu, however, always cocked it jauntily at an angle as if to emphasise that he was no stiff bureaucrat but a dashing leader of governed and governors alike.

  ‘I was fond of that hat,’ he complained. ‘It’s made of real fur from a forest animal. Humphrey of Middlesex gave it to me.’

  ‘The bullet was meant for me, not you,’ the High Commissioner said abstractedly.

  The futility of the act depressed him. Assassination was so useless. The State had only to buy itself a replacement and carry on. The proprietor of a puppet show was not going to give up business because a puppet was smashed.

  ‘Perhaps, sir. After all, there would be little point in removing me and landing themselves with a new man who didn’t know the country.’

  Tito Pezulu was convinced that the immigrants liked him. His attitude had always been paternal and his complexion was not very different from that of a sunburnt, weatherbeaten Briton, contrasting with the clear-cut distinguished features of the much darker High Commissioner. But in fact the immigrants didn’t like him. Ali Pretorius was sure of that. Pezulu was patronising rather than paternal.

  The High Commissioner got up from his great ebony desk, passed through the crimson rope which so unnecessarily separated him from callers, and stared out of the east window – an occasional compulsion to which normally he only surrendered when he was alone – unsure whether he was trying to concentrate thought or to avoid it.

  The windows of his office in the Residency looked down over the public gardens and white streets of Avebury and up again to the factories and satellite communities on the Marlborough Downs. Old were the sites and would have remained nameless if not for the canvas-backed maps treasured by British antiquarians which, unlike paper, were still legible. Tradition insisted that there had been some great sanctuary on that high, clear ground so obviously suited to habitation, yet no sign of it was left beyond inexplicable tall stones and curious hillocks bearing little resemblance to the ragged mounds within the forest which were indeed the impenetrable remains of cities.

  Avebury and its suburbs could not, he assured himself, be so very different from other new towns of the Euro-African Federation. They stood so sanely, only requiring benevolent administration, above the southern forests which rolled away in great billows of oak and ash netted by the lianas of ivy and bramble, pierced by no roads and revealing no silver flash of water from the many little rivers. All problems down there were for the future, for the ecologists, planners and engineers, as soon as this policy of resettlement was plainly succeeding.

  What had done the most damage to this remnant of a once great people? Was it the exile or the return? At the end of the Age of Destruction there had not been much more than half a million left alive: a mere handful to refuse uniform development when all the former nations of Europe and the shores of the Mediterranean had huddled together in horror, determined to renounce in perpetuity their former nationalities and political systems. But the British had refused and Armed Persuasion had to be used; it was discontinued when the supposed population had been reduced by half.

  The disease of primitive nationalism proved, however, ineradicable, and in the year 2241 reappeared in its most deadly form of guerrilla warfare against the Federation. When at last the insurgents surrendered, the remaining British were resettled in North Africa, while the island, like the scheduled deserts scattered throughout Asia and the Americas, was proclaimed radioactive and uninhabitable. The small parties of natives who had slunk away into the spreading forests with their last pathetic dregs of animals were abandoned to decline and extinction.

  Exile, Pretorius believed, had been the mistake which had inspired them to preserve in private their customs and codes and fanciful traditions. Instead of accepting the happy placidity of normal welfare units, they had remained a people apart, arousing such prejudices that the Supreme Council, in one of those spasms of sentiment so liable to affect popular assemblies, permitted the resettlement of the island to celebrate the year 3000. The first colony and the seat of government were established at Avebury, a newly built city surrounded by agreeable industrial estates. As their High Commissioner it was his duty to suppress any revival of nationalism while at the same time tolerating their myths and peculiarities. His administration ought to resemble a nursery school rather than a police court.

  That was a vision never to be expressed with such crudity outside his own mind; but the wings of truth were in it, even if singed by a passing bullet. Ali Pretorius, staring from his window at the lines of white houses and public buildings climbing the opposite slopes like a procession of happy children, confirmed the would-be ideal of his administration.

  He turned back from the window to the muscular mass of Pezulu Pasha confidently jammed in the chair opposite the Caesarian desk. He envied the strength and single-mindedness of his Chief of Police – or any Chief of Police if it came to that. To enforce the law was so much more easy than to question it.

  ‘I want to talk to this girl myself,’ he said.

  Pezulu objected that no examining psychologist had yet seen her.

  ‘There’s plenty of time for that. I want her as she is, not as she will be.’

  ‘Very risky, sir. The sooner you let me nip her over to North Africa, the better. You know what their underground press is like. If you do an interrogation yourself, they’ll say you beat her up.’

  ‘My dear Tito, they have known me for two years as their High Commissioner. If after that they can say or even think that I would beat anybody up, then nothing matters any more.’

  ‘Well, if you insist. But I would like a neutral witness to be present.’

  ‘Sometimes I feel that in all this island I am the only neutral.’

  ‘You mustn’t take it to heart, sir. What I mean by a neutral witness is one of their people, but in our pay.’

  The attempt on the High Commissioner had taken place when he stepped out into a patch of sunshine after inaugurating the new Museum of Science. The polygonal terrace in front of the new building was surrounded by a balustrade with a lion rampant at each of the corners. Lions and pilasters were decorated by wreaths and wands of flowers in the green and red of the Federation.

  This display had been organised by the Council of Communal Design, an ineffective but well-meaning body which considered itself above the inelegance of political action. Helpers had been recruited from the College of Arts, noted for an unruliness hitherto only expressed in satirical pamphlets and impudent graffiti. Pezulu Out from the members’ lavatory at the Trade Institute had been photographed by the Faculty of Communal Design, and its cartoon of Pezulu making water in his hat had been exhibited – in private – as an example of excellence in script and colour. Pezulu had been amused, and now blamed himself for failing to appreciate that among these students might be cells dedicated to action as well
as art.

  The would-be assassin was a girl in her late teens. Her wand of flowers concealed an old-fashioned rifle which, seen at a distance, was of a shape not immediately familiar to populace and police. Its accuracy made it an ideal weapon since it did not have to be programmed for any required intimidation, and the single bullet, directed at an individual by sight alone, could kill.

  Kneeling in the cover of a richly garlanded lion, she had fired the shot which narrowly missed the High Commissioner and scored on Tito Pezulu’s hat. Arrested before she could mix with the crowd, she maintained that she had acted alone. However, no rifle was missing from the Sporting Club and she could never had laid her hands on such an obsolete but accurate weapon without the help of some underground organisation.

  Those lines of uniformly cheerful houses which had so comforted Pretorius by their air of peace and placidity rarely showed much evidence of individual taste; but one of them, at the end of its terrace, had an undefinable air of solidity which might have been due to the squareness of the front lawn or the hinged front door instead of the usual sliding panel, or simply to the fact that the federal tenant, Alfred Brown, was a respectable and prominent member of the Town Assembly.

  The living room looked east over the rolling grassland which in the distance met the threatening forest as a beach meets the sea. It was clean and functional as a hospital cell, with all furniture and domestic machinery concealed behind the wall panels. Even the table and the seating could be made to disappear if not required. Yet Alfred Brown, as if to remind himself of that other Britain, had cluttered up the place with fake mementos from the antique dealers of North Africa. There was a grandfather clock with no face, a mahogany commode, its true use forgotten, with a tasselled cover of rotting embroidery and a clumsy, ornate dresser of plastic wood, its scrolls and garlands moulded rather than carved. It pleased Alfred to show in this harmless manner a respect for the past which could hardly be proscribed as nationalism. Mrs Brown complained that she couldn’t clean the place because one of his treasures was always in the way. She preferred their life in North Africa and said so, but love and loyalty had forced her to give way to husband and daughter.

  In that living room, a week before the unparalleled assault on Tito Pezulu’s hat, Silvia Brown was sitting at her father’s table with two male companions both at least ten years older than herself. She had been told from babyhood that she was a perfect example of the old British type. Neighbours on the African housing estate where she was brought up used to call on her parents just to look at her. Deep blue eyes and golden hair were very uncommon owing to centuries of intermarriage.

  In spite of all this adulation Silvia Brown was in no way conceited. She had given herself to the cause of her people with comparatively humble dedication; the nearest she ever came to romanticising herself was sometimes, when waking in a desolate first light, to enter on a half-dreamed communion with Britannia – that mythical figure who turned up in fragments of Old English poetry and was believed by some to have been a Goddess of the Ocean, by others a forgotten heroine of the Age of Destruction. After her parents had come out to the island with the second wave of immigrants, Silvia had been much in demand for festivals and pageants until the police closed them down as contributing to nationalism. She was undoubtedly a joy to British eyes, though too tall and muscular for the more delicate taste of the Federation.

  Her two companions did not look markedly British; in the street they could well have been taken for government employees. Unit Green was thin and a little bent, perhaps a schoolmaster, perhaps an associate of the Society of Mathematicians trying to deduce from charred fragments of equations theories of the Universe only intelligible to physicists who had been dead a thousand years.

  Green was indeed an expert in extending knowledge, but of a more mundane nature. He was a master printer who produced and distributed the Avebury Clarion, a harmless weekly organ which chronicled the social news, the rare crimes and entertainments of the immigrant community together with the births and deaths and licences to produce children. The paper was patronised by the High Commissioner himself, who would occasionally contribute a witty light essay. Its full contents, however, were only known to selected subscribers and newsagents, and could be obtained by ironing flat the wrapping paper in which parcels of the Clarion were delivered. A news sheet specially printed for British eyes then appeared; it had nothing to do with births and licences but by no means excluded desirable deaths.

  At the table discussion had come to a halt. The third person broke the momentary silence.

  ‘Then the only question left is: which of us?’

  A common enough type of organiser was Unit Smith, thin-lipped, the eyes expressionless and lacking any obvious right to fire and dominate his companions.

  ‘I am sorry to open it all up again, Smith, but I still do not agree with the timing,’ Green objected. ‘The proposed action has not been well enough integrated with my propaganda campaign.’

  The white calm which hid the tension and ability of Smith changed to a calm white heat.

  ‘You’ve no choice, mate. The committee approved the timing and we are delegated to take action.’

  ‘I’m tired of them.’

  ‘Of course! So am I. But you intellectuals never understand that the object of a committee is to take responsibility for whatever has been decided before it meets.’

  Silvia Brown asked impatiently if they hadn’t talked long enough. Smith silently agreed with her, for he could answer his own question and already knew very well who would fire the shot. He could congratulate himself on the imperceptible manoeuvres by which he had ensured that Silvia Brown would be available and willing. How invaluable was that saintly delirium of youth dedicated to an ideal! Silvia and her cell of students were blindly scornful of all conventional scruples and could be sacrificed with no great loss to the movement. Green, that precious fellow who seemed to believe that words were action, must not be allowed to take the edge off the girl.

  ‘Dear friend,’ he said, ‘none of us will ever forget the wonderful clarity with which you seconded the motion. You told us that if we killed a High Commissioner who was a stupid, cruel brute, all the liberals in the Federation would start yapping that he deserved it. And so our protest would be lost. But when we wipe out a generous, futile official like Pretorius it will be plain that our protest is not against him but against our treatment by the Federation.’

  ‘And I don’t take back a word of it! But you confused me when you suddenly asked who would do it.’

  ‘Who did you think would do it?’ Silvia exclaimed. ‘Your office boy?’

  Unit Green half rose from his chair but then decided that humility would be a more fitting retort than rebuke.

  ‘It was only the timing which I doubted, Silvia. But when that is agreed I am quite prepared to do the job myself. If caught I shall not be missed.’

  Smith brought him down to earth.

  ‘No “if” about it! A prominent citizen, and on the terrace armed!’

  But in the confusion Silvia might not be noticed before she could escape; that he had foreseen before selecting her. He waited for her to volunteer.

  ‘I shall be in the party which decorates the terrace,’ she said. ‘I could hide the weapon in an armful of tall flowers.’

  Smith pretended horror. It could not be allowed. She was too young.

  ‘But it must be me. You are too valuable to be risked. And dear old Green here – I’ll bet he can’t shoot straight.’

  ‘I’ll jump out and stick a knife in him.’

  ‘Before Pezulu gets you?’ Silvia asked. ‘And you wouldn’t look right kneeling behind a sheaf of chrysanthemums. I would.’

  Silly old things rifles were, but shooting with them was still taught in the Sporting Club like fencing and archery; and when she shot at a target she imagined that she was a freedom fighter at some battle in the past. At the Club, however, rifles and even bows were kept locked up to discourage similar fantasies
. She had not a hope of smuggling one through the security checks.

  ‘Can you provide the weapon?’ she asked Smith.

  ‘Three of them to choose from if you can hide them here.’

  The High Commissioner, determined to carry out a dispassionate interrogation of Silvia Brown himself, glanced through the tray of cards from official callers expressing their regrets and apologies in the hope of finding the neutral witness required by Pezulu. Summoning his ADC, he asked if any of them were still out in the anteroom.

  He had deliberately picked young Julian Cola to accompany him to Avebury, well aware that he was going to need some cheerful associate who took nothing too seriously. Julian filled the bill. He was devoted, dependable and outwardly irresponsible.

  ‘Sorry the hat has sprung a leak, Chief!’ Julian said, with a courtly nod to Pezulu. ‘Well, sir, the Assembly has gone into special session so the Mayor and the Chairman of Committees have had to leave to take their seats. They hate to lose their attendance money. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is still hanging around.’

  ‘He’ll do.’

  ‘No, sir. Not that crafty old hypocrite!’ Pezulu protested.

  ‘The immigrants respect him, Tito. What he says goes. He’s the sort of leader the plain man admires.’

  ‘As if anyone knew what an exchequer was or why it had a chancellor!’

  ‘All their titles are meaningless. But the British like to preserve the prestige of vanished power.’

  Yes, but prestige could recreate power. Pretorius was perplexed by so alien a figure. The Chancellor was corrupt in everything but money, yet he was treated as if he were a sort of priest, a survival from the days before all organised religion had faded away. History, he remembered, showed that politicians when promising the impossible had frequently declared themselves inspired by a divine purpose.

  ‘Show him in, Julian, will you? And then I want this Silvia Brown here.’

  The Chancellor made his entry with outstretched arm and hand, nicely calculated to show eagerness without loss of dignity. Theatre – all theatre! But so was this stern and noble residence on its bare hill; so was the automatic, ceremonious opening of that massive double door of British oak set in its immense and superfluous frame of rare woods from Africa. Pretorius preferred simplicity. It occurred to him that nowhere in Avebury, not even in this Silvia Brown, was he likely to find it.