Soldier No More

by Anthony Price

  “It’s got you, hasn’t it?” said Wimpy. “Good!”

  Roche turned towards him, and found that he was smiling. “What d’you mean—it’s got me?” He frowned. “Good?”

  “It’s in your face. It doesn’t take everyone that way. But you’re one of the lucky ones—or unlucky, maybe.” Wimpy’s own face was animated by mischief, almost malice. “I was hoping you would be, because it could help you.”

  It could help you?

  “Let’s say … you need to see this place, I think, if you’re to have a chance of understanding my David—which frankly I don’t any more, to be honest—“ Wimpy seemed to have overheard that last unspoken question “—because this is David’s obsession, so far as I can make out. And I don’t wonder, even if he is hardly ever here—I don’t wonder—“

  Roche didn’t wonder either.

  “Yes … a bit of the old Matthew, chapter four, verse nine, eh?” said Wimpy softly. “ ‘All these things will I give thee, if only thou wilt fall down and worship me’—if I whispered that in your ear, supposing I had horns and a forked tail and oakum in my boots, how would you reply, young Roche?”

  Had that been what the schoolmaster had seen in his face, thought Roche: had the envy been so naked?

  He stared all the harder at the house to hide his annoyance with himself. To possess such a place—to hold such a piece of Old England—any sensible man would lie and cheat and steal, and do any dishonourable thing, certainly. And fight, of course, as no doubt those old Romans and Saxons and Normans had done—and scheme too, as no doubt those Elizabethan Catholics had done, with the Virgin Queen’s Gestapo breathing down their necks—

  He found a false smile to give Wimpy. “I don’t think I could afford to run it on my pay, not even with the expenses thrown in, let alone employ Cecil and Old Billy, and Mr and Mrs Clarke.”

  Wimpy nodded. “Good point. I’d have to throw in gold as well, of course. But the Devil always does that, doesn’t he!”

  And yet there was a mystery here, to add to all the others, now that he’d seen the house: if this was David Audley’s obsession, the restoration of the family home to its past glory, his father’s intention seemed to have been the exact opposite—to use it, and mortgage it to finance its use, and to let it decay all the while… and even at the last to try to sell it over his son’s head, which only a German bullet in 1940 had prevented?

  “You think we might get at him—at David Audley—through the house, somehow?” Roche faced the little man squarely, frowning sincerity at him. After all, the virtue of this diversion was that if it paid off it would cease to be a diversion. Not Mr Nigel, but Master David, was the objective.

  “Hmmm … not if ‘get at’ means ‘threaten’, certainly.” Wimpy shook his head slowly. “Threatening my David could be … unproductive, let’s say. It isn’t something I’d undertake lightly—he has a streak of obstinacy a mile wide.”

  At least Wimpy and Oliver St.John Latimer agreed on something, then!

  Roche nodded at the house. “Where does the money come from?” It was rather a straight question, but it followed naturally.

  “Blessed if I know!” Wimpy’s shoulders lifted. “I suppose you could look into that—he could be up to some fiddle, I shouldn’t wonder … the way we’re taxed these days, it can hardly be honest money, and that’s a fact!” He turned his gaze to Roche, still with the ghost of the smile on his face. Then the eyelids shuttered like a camera, and the next expression on the reel was cool and calculating. “But I’d do that carefully if I were you, if it’s a volunteer you’re after … I think … if it’s a fiddle it’ll be fool-proof— income-tax-inspector-proof, rather.”

  Roche felt his own eye drawn again towards the house. He had never owned anything like it—he had never even imagined owning anything like it. All that he possessed could be packed into a tin trunk and two large suitcases, plus a couple of tea-chests for his books. Up until recently his heaviest piece of baggage had been an idea, an article of faith which he had pretended to himself was an unshakeable political conviction, which Julie had bequeathed to him as the sole beneficiary of her will. But he hadn’t really owned the idea for a long time now, and perhaps it had never really been his.

  “You take my point? I rather think you do, eh?” Wimpy was observing him narrowly, but was evidently misinterpreting his face this time.

  Roche felt his back muscles shiver. How could the man have come so close, after having been so wide of the mark? “But his father didn’t take the point, did he!”

  “His father? Whose father?” Wimpy frowned.

  “Audley’s—David Audley’s. ‘Mr Nigel’—the expectancy and rose of the fair state,” quoted Roche brutally. “Wasn’t ‘Mr Nigel’ about to sell the house?” He threw the truth down like a gauntlet between them, challenging Wimpy to choose where his loyalty lay, with the father, his old comrade-in-arms, or with The Old House and his David.

  The schoolmaster’s face clouded. “Ah … well … Nigel … was Nigel.” He looked up and around nervously, as though he’d only just realised where he was, and Nigel—was —Nigel might be eavesdropping on them. “Clarkie said we ought to look out for her Charlie, because it’s time for his tea—half of which we’ve already eaten … And she also said, sotto voce, as we were leaving—as I was leaving—that old Charlie’s having one of his turns … in his downhill phase, as the headshrinkers say … which means, the sooner he’s back home, the better. You just wait here, old boy, and I’ll go look for him—he’s in the garden somewhere.” Wimpy started to turn away before Roche could open his mouth to protest. “Talk about Nigel later, maybe.” The turn went through a full circle so that Wimpy was facing him again while retreating backwards towards the wrought-iron gate into the walled garden. “Just look after the books till I get back.” Wimpy pointed to the pile of historical novels he had deposited on the gravel. “Or, better still, take ‘em into the house and stack ‘em on the table by the door, and then have a scout round for yourself—right?”

  Roche shut his mouth. If Wimpy was transparently set on ducking the question, solving his loyalty-dilemma simply by quitting the field, at least he was offering something attractive in exchange: to enter The Old House without a running commentary was a chance not to be missed.

  “Right.” Wimpy waved vaguely, half at Roche, half at the house, and swivelled back towards the gate.

  Roche watched him disappear through the trailing cascade of magenta-flowered clematis which covered the stone archway above the gate. Then he dumped his own armful of books alongside Wimpy’s and stamped across the gravel forecourt to the porch.

  As the door swung open a burst of sunlight edged with rainbow colours caught him full in the face.

  He shifted his head, shielding his eyes from the light with his hand, and stared up the beam of light through an arch full of dancing dust-motes into a stained-glass window—a high window blazoned with a rich coat-of-arms, yellow and red and blue, set at the top of a carved oak staircase—beyond which the afternoon sun blazed.

  Directly ahead of him was an immense refectory table, dark with age like the panelling all around it, with a great bowl of roses on it. Some of the roses had shed their petals in different-coloured piles around the bowl, on a fine coating of dust which the sunlight betrayed. He sniffed, and the scent of the roses, mixed with a damp cellar-smell from somewhere under his feet, combined with the stained-glass to carry him back to this morning’s church and Genghis Khan. He wrinkled his nose, uncertain whether it was the cloying rose-scent-plus-church-smell which made him think of funerals, or the memory of Genghis Khan which also made him think of death, that disturbed him more.

  His eyes were becoming accustomed to the strange mixture of brightness from the searchlight-beam of the sun and shadow accentuated by the dark panelling, with its ghost-marks of pictures which had once hung on the walls.

  Family portraits, maybe? And no prizes for guessing what had happened to them, one by one, as Mr Nigel’s horses let
him down in the last furlong before the winning post, also one by one; the pictures were always the first thing to go, the easiest things to pack off to Sotheby’s and Christie’s. All that was left on the walls was a line of old photographs up the staircase, school and college groups of cricketers and oarsmen sun-bleached to pale sepia-brown; and the refectory table, which was too big to sell, and the grandfather clock in the furthest corner, silent at ten minutes to noon or midnight—had that also been too big, or not worth the trouble of selling? Or had Adolf Hitler saved the last furniture with the house by his own pre-emptive bid for Europe and all its contents in 1939?

  In spite of the sunlight, the house was cool, almost chilly, he could feel its cold breath against his cheeks. It wouldn’t do to let his imagination stray too far here: reason advised him that thick walls and stone-flagged floors could hold winter all the year round when the owner was mostly absent, and fires were only lit occasionally, and that this house had been trapped in the vicious circle of such absences for a generation, so it was no wonder that its atmosphere was unwelcoming; but beneath reason he could sense an older instinct of unreason, which whispered very different rumours inside his head, of the enmity of old things to the flesh and blood of intruders like himself, and to would-be destroyers, like Mr Nigel, who had not lived to come safe home to the house he had neglected.

  Of course, it was foolish to let such thoughts unnerve him; and they were only the combined product of his own disturbed emotions, and his own fascination with old buildings, and maybe too much of Ada Clarke’s rich fruit cake unsettling his digestion.

  It was only an old empty house, and the afternoon sun was shining outside, and Wimpy wasn’t far away—Genghis Khan was far away, and Audley was even further, and Mr Nigel was bones in a war grave long-forgotten, and none of them could touch him at this moment, any more than the house itself could reach out at him.

  There were doors, panelled in the panelling, ahead of him—to the right, and to the left, under the staircase—that door would lead to the cellars … to the wine-cellar, at a guess; which would be full of racks emptied, but not renewed, by Mr Nigel, for another guess … cellars full of cobwebs and the damp smell which was in his nostrils, and he certainly wasn’t about to scout around in them unless Wimpy was cheerfully leading the way, by God!

  The door on the right didn’t look much more inviting, but there were those arched passages on each side of him which he’d half-glimpsed in the first moment after he’d ducked the sunlight, before his whole attention had been drawn up to the stained-glass coat-of-arms … one way would lead to the day rooms, most likely—the sitting room, and the library, and maybe a study; the other way to a dining room, and a breakfast room, and then the kitchen and the pantries, and the servants’ quarters; though with an old hodge-podged place like this, which already seemed vastly bigger inside than it had from the outside, full of unsuspected space, such regularity might well be a bad guess. He could only tell by looking for himself.

  Left or right? Roche peered down the left-hand passage, undecided, his eye lifting to the flaking white-washed vaulting above the panelling. For sure this part of the house, which had survived the great fire on the day of Elizabeth Tudor’s death, had in any case been the older wing. Wimpy had said—

  The recollection of what Wimpy had said died unthought as he turned towards the right-hand passage, which was identical with the left-hand one, except that the door at the end of it was open, and that there was someone standing in it staring at him.

  Christ! He hadn’t heard that door open—there hadn’t been a sound after his own footfalls on the flagstones which had carried him through the porch and the archway of the original door into the hallway—

  Christ! He hadn’t heard that door open because it hadn’t opened: the man had been standing there, staring at him, ever since he had entered the house, watching him silently, as soundless as the house itself!

  An insect crawled back up Roche’s spine as he returned the stare. This right-hand passage wasn’t exactly identical … or … or it was, but the wisteria overhung the low window recessed into the thickness of the wall on this side, deepening the shadow with a green cast.

  It had to be Ada Clarke’s Charlie—it was either Ada Clarke’s Charlie or it would vanish in the instant he addressed it—

  “Hullo there?” Somewhere between the intention and the final articulation the words lost their planned heartiness, and echoed hollowly down the passage instead. “Good afternoon—Mr Clarke, is it?”

  That was better. The figure moved, shifting its feet so that the sound of hobnails scraping on stone released Roche from fear. Ghosts didn’t wear hobnailed boots; or, if they did, the phantom hobnails wouldn’t scrape like that; and ghosts weren’t so substantial, and Charlie Clarke was nothing if not substantial: he filled the doorway, all of six-foot-three, with long arms and huge hands in proportion.

  Also, the collarless striped shirt, the Fair Isle knitted pull-over and the shapeless corduroy trousers was no uniform for any self-respecting spectre in this setting. Doublet-and-hose, or satin breeches, or even Mr Nigel’s well-pressed battle-dress—any of those might not be out of place in The Old House, but not a Fair Isle pullover. Not even the faintly green-tinged light which filtered into the passage through a window half-obscured by wisteria could make a convincing ghost of Charlie Clarke on second glance.

  But if second glance stripped the supernatural from Charlie it did nothing to lessen the hostile vibrations which eddied round Roche as they stared at each other—the same sensation his sixth sense had picked up moments before, but had ascribed to the house itself. And there was something no less creepy about the sensation now that its source had become tangible: the way both Wimpy and Mrs Clarke had spoken of Charlie, the man was at best a simpleton, but at worst—in his downhill phase—perhaps something more dangerous. And the confirmation of that lay not only in the gorilla-length arms and meat-plate hands, but also in the way those addled brains had been able to transmit a signal before Roche had set eyes on the signaller. Which, by any standards, was strong magic to beware of, not to ignore.

  “It’s ‘Charlie’, isn’t it?” said Roche tentatively. “Charlie, my name’s Roche—David Roche.” The giving of names freely was an old ritual of peaceful intentions.

  The words unlocked Charlie’s legs, but not his tongue. He took two slow steps out of the doorway, and then stopped. But that short advance carried his face out of deep shadow into enough light for Roche to make out the little pig-eyes and heavy chin separated by a button nose and tiny mouth in a brick-red expanse of face. The sum total was so close to being classically oafish, if not actually brutish, with no spark of anything in the eyes, that the contrast between Charlie and his wife was not so much surprising as painful.

  Roche licked his lips. “I was… I was hoping to meet Mr… Master… David—your Master David, Charlie,” he lied nervously. “Is he home?”

  The mention of Audley appeared to take Charlie by surprise, his eyes almost disappearing into the frown which descended on them.

  Charlie took a deep breath. “Not ‘ere—“ the words came from deep down, through layers of gravel “—what are you doin’ ‘ere?”

  It was a good question, but altogether unanswerable. More than ever, Roche wished that Wimpy was at his side.

  “I came here with Mr Willis, Charlie.” However dim and downhill Charlie might be, he couldn’t forget Wimpy. No one could forget Wimpy, he was supremely memorable.

  “You know Mr Willis, Charlie.” Whatever the Germans had done to Charlie at Dunkirk seventeen years before, they had done thoroughly. “Major Willis—Master David’s guardian.”

  Charlie’s baffled expression cleared magically. “Captain Willis, you mean,” he growled.

  “Captain Willis,” he agreed hastily. Captain Willis?

  “Arrragh!” The gravel rattled in Charlie’s throat. “Captain Willis is ‘D’ Company, an’ Mr Nigel, that’s Major Audley—he’s ‘B’ Company. An’ Captain J
ohnson, that was Mr Johnson until just recently—‘e’s ‘A’ Company now, of course …”he nodded slowly at Roche”… an’ ‘C’ Company is…is…” the nod faded away as Charlie cast around in the lost property room of his memory, and failed to find the name of ‘C’ Company’s commanding officer, who had let him down by being unmemorable after seventeen years. “ ‘C’ Company is…” he rocked slowly from side to side “—‘A’ Company is Captain Johnson, that was Mr Johnson as was …”

  Roche watched the Caliban-face twitch with the effort of putting the names of men who had most of them been dead and buried for years to formations which had long been disbanded. Someone—some irate sergeant-major or despairing corporal—had once hammered those names into Charlie’s memory so firmly that they were still there in the present tense.

  “Captain Willis is out in the garden,” he nodded at Charlie.

  “ ‘D’ Company—I just told you,” said Charlie irritably. Then his incongruous little mouth twisted into some sort of grin. “Get hisself killed on that motor-bike of his one of these days, ‘e will—Captain Willis, that was schoolmastering before the war broke out.” He nodded back in Roche’s direction. “That’s ‘im what learns young Master David his letters, an’ thinks the world of ‘im, like my Ada does—‘D’ Company, ‘e is.” He focussed on Roche, and frowned as though he was seeing him for the first time, but could supply no 1940 name for what he saw. “Who are you, then?”

  “I’m—“ Roche stopped abruptly as the macabre reality of Charlie’s ‘downhill phase’ registered fully with him. The man was in his own private time-warp, so it seemed from all those present tenses and ‘Captain’ Willis and ‘young’ Master David.

  “I’m Captain Roche, Royal Signals,” he snapped. Whatever it might mean, there was one sure way of finding out, albeit a cruel and risky one.

  “Is Master David not home, Clarke?” he snapped in Captain Roche’s military voice, long disused.