A Long Walk to Wimbledon

by H. R. F. Keating

  He felt an inward sinking. Was the fellow about to go chasing off once more? It was not so long since the last time and, though that had been justified ten times over, if he was going to stop in this way every ten or twenty minutes they would not get as far even as crossing the River before darkness fell once more.

  ‘Don’t much care for that. Think I’ll just have a look-see.’

  Of course.

  The soldier-crusader moved off at a fast lope towards the arch leading through into the interior of the Estate. Mark looked at Dr Satpathi.

  ‘I fear we had better go after him,’ the Indian said. ‘Otherwise we are likely to lose him altogether.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Brian Parkinson had stood for a moment just on the far side of the arch, looking sharply from left to right and loosening the pistol at his belt. Then he had moved out of sight. They ran to catch him up.

  What had that sharp commanding shout from up above been, Mark asked himself, all at once prey to doubts of every sort. Who was up there? And where exactly were they? On the roof? And why had they shouted in that way?

  Brian Parkinson, they saw when they had come through the archway, was running hard across a wide asphalted area on the inner side. It was plain he was in pursuit of something. A moment later he disappeared through a gap between two more of the flats blocks.

  Mark glanced at Dr Satpathi and set off with him in the same direction, half hurrying, half hesitating.

  ‘Stay where you are.’

  The order, shouted out, came from behind them. They turned. In the arch two men were standing, dressed in long heavy army-greatcoats, one cradling a carbine, the other with some lighter weapon up to his shoulder. They appeared to have emerged from a narrow door in the side of the low archway.

  Then, from the gap between the two blocks through which Brian Parkinson had raced, there came more shouts.

  Mark turned to go and see what was happening.

  ‘Stand still, I said.’

  It was the older of the two men in the archway, dark-bearded and sullen-faced, in his fifties, rather portly but plainly not to be laughed at, or disobeyed.

  He stood where he was. Behind him he could still hear shouts, clearly angry. One of the voices was a woman’s.

  Then there was a silence, and a little later the sound of tramping feet. At last into his view there came first Brian Parkinson, looking distinctly hangdog, pistol and cricket-bat both glaringly missing, then a man holding a pointed shotgun and next two others with between them the person they had seen briefly come out through the archway, now plainly recognisable as a woman, a slight-looking girl of nineteen or twenty. She was struggling a little in her captors’ grip.

  Brian Parkinson saw him.

  ‘Seem to have got into a spot of trouble,’ he called. ‘Silly, but I never actually did have any ammo to make a fight of it.’

  Part Five

  The portly guard with the carbine seemed to be particularly incensed by Brian Parkinson’s cheerful call, cheerful in spite of the gun at his back.

  ‘What are you bringing them here for?’ he shouted at the escorting party. ‘Get them over to Mr Lillimass. I’ve been down off the roof long enough. Get them away.’

  He turned to go with a heavy swing of his shoulders.

  ‘And take these two as well,’ he added. ‘I can’t accept responsibility. Jack, you’d best go with them. And come back as fast as you like.’

  His young companion, who had been standing with his gun pointed at the two of them all the while – Mark saw now that it was only an air-gun, but a pellet in the face was surely something to fear – took a hasty step forward, realised that it was hardly practical to walk with his weapon constantly up at the shoulder, lowered it awkwardly and eventually used it to gesture them in behind the small procession which had shuffled round and was setting off again in the direction from which it had come.

  They followed, Mark now speculating about the effect of an air-gun pellet in the back of the neck.

  Steadily they marched on a zigzagging route deeper and deeper into the Estate, twisting past the various flats blocks, some long and only two storeys high, others going up seven or eight floors, each named apparently after different parts of the Lake District, Coniston, Langdale, Hawkshead, Cartmel, Silverdale. What was life like up there now, two hundred miles and more away? Any sentimental links with such parts had long been severed. It might as well be somewhere in forgotten Africa.

  With every step they took Mark felt an increasing grey despair. The Estate was a whole isolated labyrinth. How would they ever get out of it? Even if they made a break for it now – and to try would be senseless – it could well take hours of dodging and hiding before they could reach the archway leading out into Hampstead Road again. An hour, two hours, at the very least subtracted from the shrinking ration that remained to Jasmine away in Wimbledon. Why had he been so stupid as to go running after that mad knight-errant with his ammunitionless pistol?

  And the deeper they went the more markedly different the whole atmosphere was from the slow broken-down world he had become used to. Everything was tidy. Extraordinarily tidy, strikingly in contrast to anything he had seen since the Second Riots. None of the buildings was damaged, and all of them were noticeably in a decent state of repair, if with awkward-looking patches and areas of differently coloured paint. And each square of garden between the blocks had been cultivated to the full and despite the clamp-down of winter was neat and orderly with dead plants cut down, earth newly turned in crisply dug rows and not a weed in sight. Even the hedges bordering the plots had been trimmed. Only in the first square they had come to had a couple of them been broken, where no doubt Brian Parkinson had been chased or had himself chased after the fleeing girl.

  And who was she? And why had she been apparently trying to run away? Why? And why had she been stopped the moment she had got beyond the boundary of the Estate? And where were they frog-marching her to now?

  Each half minute that they went along strengthened his impression of there being, behind the façade of neglect and emptiness, a community here that was a great deal more organised, and much larger, than the little gathering of neighbours up in Highgate that he had thought of as the pattern of the new life. He glimpsed faces peering briefly out of the windows they passed, well-curtained windows and well-fed faces. The guards marching them along, too, looked distinctly different, now he came to think about it, to the Highgate people and those they had seen even as near here as at Mornington Crescent. Their faces were not so pinched, their bodies not so hunched, their beards and hair were better looked after and even their teeth were less yellow. When was the last time he had had toothpaste himself?

  But it was a hostile community too. He could have no doubt of that.

  And deeper into it they went. Only once had he caught a glimpse, far away down at the end of a straight internal road, of what was presumably the outer boundary. And at the road end, stretching right across from one building to another, there had been a twelve-foot-high barrier of piled-up car bodies.

  They turned another corner and came upon a scene of unexpected activity. In a sunken walled playground a game of football was taking place between two teams of boys, one with scraps of red material round their arms, the other with scraps of green. And, young as the players were, the game was being pursued with a purposefulness that, he felt, he had not seen devoted to anything, game or business, for many many long months.

  The referee’s whistle blew in sharp blasts in the cold air.

  As they tramped past – was he right in thinking the pitch was actually rather too small? – he saw that at the far end there was even a little crowd of spectators, younger children than the players, with watching over them two mothers hugging themselves in the chill. He wondered why the two of them were there. Surely with high barricades at every access road and with guards on the roof above the entrance archway there was no need to look after children like that?

  ‘Billy, pay attention or y
ou’ll get a smack.’

  The voice rang out to him above the clatter of running feet on the asphalt and the referee’s whistle blasts. It sounded brightly cheery. But it added suddenly to his feeling of pervading unease.

  Then, round yet another corner, they came at last to what was evidently their destination, a large single-storeyed building with a board outside saying ‘Tenants Commonroom’ and another great-coated guard standing at the entrance swinging a long smooth yellowish wooden club from a strap round his wrist. They came to a straggly halt in front of him.

  ‘Intruders,’ the leader of their procession explained. ‘Caught trying to effect entry.’

  Mark felt a jab of resentment. All right, so they had been ‘effecting entry’, but what of it? Why were they being marched here because of that?

  And what was going to happen to them?

  And how long would they be kept here?

  The guard with the long club nodded them inside.

  They came, through two sets of double-doors, into a very large room which at once reminded Mark a little of one of the self-confident London clubs of old, read about in novels once. It was dotted with groups of armchairs in some of which a number of old people sat crouchingly, a few playing desultory games of drafts or dominoes, others snoozing in the warmth from the two big fires at either end, crackling and cheerful, burning what looked like chunks of the joists of wrecked houses. But the chairs were arranged with a great deal more regimentation than in any club, all in groups of three, shoulder to shoulder, with a small table symmetrically in front like so many unmoving drum-majors each leading a silent puffing blowing band. And, prominent above the nearer fireplace, was a large painted board with the word ‘Rules’ at its head.

  But there was no time to read it. The young man with the air-gun pressed him sharply forward and the whole small procession of them went clattering up the length of the room to where, in front of the far fireplace, there was a flat desk with a small red-faced man of about sixty sitting behind it. He was remarkable in that he was as clean-shaven as Brian Parkinson, but, more, his hair had been trimmed with immense precision and slicked back with grease in a style dating right back to the fifties.

  He was busy ticking off items in a long list, dipping each time an ancient fountain-pen into a bottle of pallid home-made ink. And he continued with this task, without making any move to look up, long after they had come to a noisy halt in front of the desk.

  Paperwork, Mark thought. How it sprang up. Even the preacher at the Baths had had his scrap of paper to read out the next day’s tasks from. Perhaps man had been doomed solely by being a paperwork-creating animal, and only with the wrenching away of the whole super-structure of civilisation in ruined London had the activity withered at last into nothingness. Here once more to spring up again, an ineradicable weed.

  The leader of the escort gave a loud cough. But still the man with the slicked-down hair – it must be the Mr Lillimass they had been sent to – went on dipping his pen in the pale ink and making his precise little ticks.

  ‘Hello, old boy.’

  It was Brian Parkinson.

  ‘Silence in the ranks,’ bellowed the guard behind him.

  He subsided, although from the sound of his compressed breathing it was plain he would not be able to stop himself talking for long.

  But, before he quite broke out again, Mr Lillimass abruptly looked up.

  ‘Well, well, and what’s all this then?’

  ‘Prisoners, Mr Lillimass. Attempting to effect entry.’

  The leader of their party seemed absolutely unable to get away from his set phrase.

  ‘Very good. Very good. They’ll have to be dealt with in due – ‘

  He stopped short and slowly rose from his chair. It was indeed a small man, scarcely five foot six.

  He stood still for a moment, turning his head sideways so as to peer round the burly battle-bloused form of Brian Parkinson at the front.

  ‘But what do I see here?’ he said at last, in a noticeably over-loud voice.

  He came round the desk, taking strides that were a heavy parody of someone creeping up on tiptoe on an unsuspecting prey. Yet, Mark thought with the blood beginning to race in his veins, somehow this is not at all ludicrous.

  The pantomimed stalk brought Mr Lillimass finally slap in front of Dr Satpathi.

  ‘I thought so, I thought so,’ he said. ‘What we have here is a tropical. Nothing short of a bloody tropical.’

  He thrust his face, which excitement was making a purply blue, right up close to Dr Satpathi’s.

  ‘Well, well,’ he went on, in the same loud voice intended to be listened to in the furtherest corners of the big room, listened to with sniggering. ‘So we have tropicals attempting to effect entry now, do we? Tropicals? Well, well, this puts an entirely different complexion on the matter. Entirely different.’

  He turned and went hurrying round to the far side of the desk again. There he peered at what Mark realised was a curious relic from the past, a movable desk calendar. It was shabby now, but evidently once, with its gilt finish and elaborate little windows for day, date and month, it had been a toy of considerable cost.

  ‘And tomorrow,’ Mr Lillimass pronounced, his examination of the toy completed, ‘is Sunday. Sunday for Church parades, for the celebration of duly approved weddings and other miscellaneous religious purposes. The day of rest. A day to be kept holy.’

  He jerked suddenly upright, a small rigid figure.

  ‘Very well then,’ he snapped. ‘Trial will have to be this evening. No doubt about that. It’s the Old Folk’s film night, but they’ll have to miss that for once. We can’t wait about when it’s going to be a trial.’

  ‘No.’

  It was the captive girl. A fiercely angry shout.

  Looking at her closely now for the first time, Mark was struck not so much by her appearance – she had dark curly hair and a pleasant prettyish face – but by the air of resilience, of springiness, of spring-likeness that radiated from her. Why he felt it so strongly he found hard to account for. It might have come from the tiny upward tilt of her head, from the glow of her wide brown eyes, from simply the way she carried herself. But it was unmistakable. An upspringing.

  At her shout of protest Mr Lillimass had jumped up from his chair as if a blast of steam had operated a piston under him.

  ‘Not a word out of you,’ he yelled. ‘You’ve caused trouble enough already, my girl. Breaking out of detention, trying to escape. The cells are what you want. The cells.’

  ‘Listen to me, Mr Lillimass.’ She was speaking with an intent earnestness that was like a true-sounding bell. ‘Listen, you’re not going to do it to this poor man. He came in because of me. And I’m damned if –‘

  ‘Don’t you use language, my girl. No woman’s permitted to use language on this Estate.’

  ‘I’ll use what language I like. When you and the Rev. between you go taking innocent – ‘

  ‘Gag her. Stop her. Shut her up.’

  Mr Lillimass’s face had darkened to a bruised blue. The two men on either side of the girl were quick to obey him. One clamped his hand across her mouth and the pair of them lifted her clean off her feet.

  ‘Take her away,’ Mr Lillimass shouted. ‘Get her into the cells. And you can take this lot with you.’

  ‘Look here,’ Brian Parkinson said loudly. ‘You can’t – ‘

  But the man with the gun at his back jabbed him hard and he subsided.

  In seconds they had been wheeled round and were marching back down the length of the big room, the two men carrying the girl, her long legs flailing, leading the way. The last thing Mark saw was Mr Lillimass heading determinedly towards a large blackboard that stood on an easel in a corner with a chalked announcement on it about the Old Folk’s Film Show. It was clear that instead he would write up that tonight there would be a trial.

  A trial? They were to be kept locked up and then tried? It was monstrous. Monstrous. How would he get to Wimbledon now
in the time remaining to him?

  And what did these people think they were doing in any case? What set of laws had they invented, now that all law had been floodswept away, so as to need trials for transgressors? Had the very recklessness outside made them eager in this walled domain they had built to embrace some extraordinary imposed code in all its severities?

  And the girl, the upspringing creature? ‘Detention’? Was that some sort of punishment she had been awarded in the past? But for what crime? And why had it been on behalf of Dr Satpathi in particular that she had burst out the way she had done? And why had Mr Lillimass been so anxious then to have her silenced?

  Then another thing, who was – was it? – the Rev? Someone, the girl had said, who went about taking the innocent. And what? Doing what to them? She had been gagged before she could say.

  They came to a halt at a low windowless single-storey brick-built structure. The young man with the airgun was told to open its solid door. It was fastened by a pair of long external bolts grimed with rust and he had some difficulty in pulling them back.

  Mark saw that a little way along there was a dingy board fixed to the wall, its lettering almost obliterated. He made an effort to piece it out and eventually got it. ‘Solid Fuel Store.’

  Brian Parkinson was shifting noisily from foot to foot. Was he contemplating making a break for it? Mark took a surreptitious look at Dr Satpathi. But he was standing gazing down at his shoes, apparently resigned to whatever was happening to him. The young man working on the bolts at last wriggled the lower one free and heaved the door wide to reveal a pitch-black interior.

  ‘Get in,’ the escort leader said, giving Brian Parkinson a sharp shove with his shotgun.

  He stumbled forward. A chance gone. But the barest of chances. And now nothing for it but to go meekly in after him.

  As soon as Dr Satpathi in his turn had shuffled inside, the door behind them was banged to without the girl being pushed in to join them. They heard the heavy bolts being twisted and forced into their sockets. The darkness seemed complete.