Authors: Geoffrey Household
So the triple agent was professionally cautious and left Greenwich on foot, which experience showed to be far the best way of avoiding persons who might wish to trace his movements. No ticket
collectors. No bus conductors. No police checks on motor vehicles. I was now splendidly fit after so much open air and exercise, all the yellow of my complexion having turned to a weather-beaten,
rural tan. I reached Basingstoke in two days which was good going. A train to Exeter and two more days’ walking landed me in the morning on the slope of the knoll above Cleder’s
Priory.
I had lost all sense of urgency, that artificial urgency of London where women chattered their way from one shop window to another and men hurried to earn a living by selling unnecessary objects
or to spend money on acquiring them. Febrile activity is not so apparent in Eastern Europe. One would have more sympathy for communism if only its chief ambition was not to catch up in the race
after futility.
Below me, deep Devon spread over combes and hillocks without a human being in sight unless one counted two splashes of colour on the seats of distant tractors. Yet every acre of the
scene—woodland, pasture, corn ready for harvest—was the result of unremitting work, unremitting love. Urgency? There was never anything else in the life of the land, but no sign of it
and certainly no pretence of it.
In the valley behind me I caught a glimpse of Eudora, John Penpole and the pack returning from exercising the hounds. I had never seen her on a horse before. That straight pillar of devotion and
integrity was a formidable sight when mounted on a dapple grey which must have been all of seventeen hands. In a narrow lane they came on Tessa, whose lower half at once vanished in the flood of
adoring hounds. I had no idea that she had left London. She had evidently made up the quarrel with Eudora, for I could just hear the ring of their voices and it was happy.
Eudora and John rode on with the pack, intending to skirt the high ground and return to the kennels by way of Molesworthy. Tessa climbed directly up the path through the bracken. She looked in
her natural environment, exposing my dream of romantically rescuing her from London as the nonsense it was. I don’t know why the fact that she was walking alone and using her eyes should have
revealed to me another Tessa. If she had been riding I might have felt that she was merely forcing herself into some resentful pleasure; but as it was I could understand why her Tommy Bostock had
accepted me so easily when I claimed to be a friend of hers from Devon. He had been aware of this other Tessa, as I was not.
At the top of the ridge her eyes were following a pair of sailing buzzards and she did not see me until I said good morning.
‘You turn up like a bad penny, Adrian,’ she said.
‘I see you’ve been talking to Eudora. About time for both of you!’
‘Yes. She couldn’t understand what you were doing with Alwyn.’
‘And what have you told her?’
‘Everything.’
After talking to Tommy Bostock, Eudora had driven straight to London and sailed like a battleship into Rachel’s flat, guns hooded and the pennants of England, Old and New, streaming
behind. She and Tessa had fallen into each other’s arms and at once returned to Molesworthy. Thereafter there was little point in either keeping secrets from the other when Alwyn had trusted
Tessa to groom me for the Whatcombe Street caper.
‘What about Rachel?’
She did not answer, but asked me if I had seen Alwyn recently.
‘Over a week ago. He is still in England.’
‘Are they on his trail? Is he in danger?’
‘He doesn’t think so.’
‘Adrian, tell me if I’ve done the right thing! Look at this!’
She pulled out an envelope from her shirt pocket and handed it to me; it contained two sheets of paper—one, she said, in Rachel’s writing, the other in Alwyn’s, both
unsigned.
Alwyn’s to Rachel read:
‘We are both in danger. Can I talk to you? T knows where I am. She was there on her tenth birthday.’
Rachel’s note to Tessa was:
‘Greatly surprised to get this. I thought he was away.’
Alwyn must have dropped his message at Rachel’s flat before leaving London, for he would not have trusted post or telephone. It was cleverly worded—merely a warning that the
investigation of both was far from over and without any hint of innocence or guilt.
‘How did you get it?’ I asked.
‘It was given to Amy Penpole by a young man she didn’t know.’
Tessa said that she had not yet consulted Eudora whose prejudice against Rachel was too strong.
‘She would not have let me answer. She would have said it was a trap.’
‘So it is. But for Rachel.’
I had always been apprehensive of what the effect on Tessa might be when she learned the truth about her patronising friend, and hoped that it would be someone else who had to disillusion her.
Now I had to do it myself, and just at the morning when I felt that her confidence was growing.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I found out at Whatcombe Street that Rachel helped Mornix to escape. It could not have been done without her.’
‘Did Alwyn believe it when you told him?’
‘He did. It fitted.’
She was silent too long, and I said inanely that it must be a shock.
‘Yes. But once one knows it, no. It’s always been in the back of my mind, Adrian. It wasn’t that I couldn’t believe it. It’s that I wouldn’t.’
She saw how uneasy I was at her silence and put her hand over mine.
‘I was trying to remember what I could have given away. Nothing, I think. I have never even hinted that he wasn’t in Moscow. And of course she must have known all along. But
I’m glad you never told me who Ionel Petrescu was.’
‘That doesn’t matter any more. Nobody is looking for him.’
‘And nobody is looking for Adrian Gurney either?’
‘Adrian Gurney is in suspended animation. I am just Willie, and I have news for Alwyn which he ought to know. Where is he and what did you do?’
She had acted as soon as she received the message and telephoned Rachel to meet her at the village of Frogmore. Then she had guided her as far as the entrance to a track which led up to the
patch of neglected woodland where Alwyn was.
‘He used to have a hide there for watching a buzzard’s nest. He wanted to make notes of everything the pair caught and brought back. It was the day after my tenth birthday and he
said that now he had a treat of our own for me. A gipsy picnic. I’ll never forget it. Grilled young rabbit and sorrel salad and fat wild strawberries and cream. From the edge of the wood you
could see for miles around. The hide was made of hazel wands and turf. There wouldn’t be much of it left, but he could repair it in a day and it was quite comfortable and
rainproof.’
‘You didn’t go up yourself with Rachel?’
‘No. Lots of reasons. I didn’t want to intrude. So I just asked her to give Alwyn my love and picked her up later. I can take you there now if you like.’
But I did not wish to intrude either. The unexpected situation was very tricky. It was impossible to guess what Alwyn was up to or who might be with him, and there was the added difficulty that
the KGB might after all be keeping an eye on their new agent.
‘I suppose he can reach us if he needs us?’
‘Easily. Does he know you are here?’
‘No. He told me to stay right out of it. I meant to, but now I can’t.’
She asked why I couldn’t, saying that he was right and that I ought to consider the risk of assisting a trusted government servant believed to have taken a bribe from the KGB and defected
to Moscow. God knows I had considered it, but the thing had happened and the risk was irrelevant.
‘Because Alwyn has taken me back into my world.’
‘The land? You really want to make your life on it?’
I was amazed that she had remembered a single remark of mine in Temple Gardens and had spotted what I vaguely meant by my world. On the face of it love of the land hardly explained a
half-British exile up to the eyes in essentially urban intrigue.
‘Don’t you, Tessa?’
‘It’s opting out. It’s an escape.’
‘What’s wrong with an escape? Nothing is worth serving except what one loves. And who can love forms of government?’
‘Democrats pretend they do.’
‘Well, let ’em!’
I told her something of my conversations with Alwyn, though they had not been conversations so much as silences.
‘We don’t love England for what it makes or votes or thinks,’ I explained, ‘but for what it is—for the sake of the eyes one was born with, if you like.’
‘Just the peace and the green?’
‘Oh, much more than that! I can’t analyse it. The fields have their own honour and everywhere else it’s only a funny word. Values—I found that yours were mine.’
‘Eudora’s and Alwyn’s?’
‘And yours—the other Tessa.’
‘You can’t cut me in half like a piece of cheese. Are you coming down to the house with me?’
I had to refuse though I wanted hours more of her. It would be too difficult to explain to any women working in the house the reappearance of a Willie who could no longer pretend to be a
Portuguese.
‘Where will you be if Alwyn needs you?’ she asked.
‘Is there a pub where no one is likely to recognise me, but not too far away?’
‘Amy’s sister at South Pool can give you a room. You can trust her not to talk, and John can visit you there.’
South Pool was at the end of a creek running east from the Kingsbridge Estuary. A boat could come alongside the road at half tide, but anyone who had run up against the ebb had not time for more
than one drink at the pub before he’d find his dinghy hard aground on the mud. So it was not much of a place for the holiday-maker unless he liked messing about in boats with the accent on
the mess. The cottage where I stayed suited me well and was typical of South Devon—fuchsia hedge, valerian growing out of the garden wall, a room to let and a notice of Cream Teas.
On the third day, which was August 29th, I came back from exploring the creeks in which Marghiloman had been so interested, and was told by Amy’s sister in a confidential whisper that if I
took the footpath up the valley I would find Mrs. Hilliard who wanted to talk to me. I followed the stream but saw no sign of her until a piercing whistle came from behind a hedge. She was too
downright for patient hide-and-seek. The whistle could have been heard quarter of a mile off.
When I joined her I recognised her veiled, firm expression as that which I had seen on the day I delivered Alwyn’s Moscow address.
‘We’re in trouble, Willie,’ she said.
Alwyn had turned up at John’s cottage the previous night and sent for her and Tessa. He said that his plans had gone wrong and he was about to be taken off by boat. He had brought it on
himself and there was no way of getting out of it. As he did not know when he would see them again he had come down to say goodbye.
Eudora was now in the picture, aware of Rachel’s visit to him and of my conversation with Tessa, but she could not get all the complicated details out of him for he would not stop more
than ten minutes, insisting that he had to be back before dawn in case of early visitors. She told him that I had come down to give him some vital message and that she was sure I would help. He
replied that I was a bloody young fool and was to obey him and keep out. On no account was anyone to visit his hide.
It all sounded to me like Alwyn at the end of his tether with no fight left in him. I was having none of that. I told her that if she could show me from a distance exactly where he was holed up
I would act the part of a busy agricultural labourer, passing directly below the birthday wood so that he could see me. I would not disobey and call on him, but would let him know unmistakably that
I was there if it was safe to talk and I was needed.
We went separately to her car which was higher up the valley, and drove off at once by a roundabout route. So far away from Alwyn’s retreat, such precautions were probably unnecessary but
we were taking no chances. As soon as the wood was in sight on the ragged Devon skyline, so tumbled compared to the clean sweep of my own downland, Eudora pointed out the landmarks and where I
could strike a footpath. She then drove down into a deep lane where the car was safe from observation.
I could see why buzzards and Alwyn had chosen the place to nest in undisturbed. The long strip of pasture below the wood was shamefully neglected. My guess was that it belonged to some farmer
who could not get labour and was himself too old to bother with an outlying patch of poor land. There were thistles, clumps of bramble and a few sheep competing with rabbits for the grass. I could
think of no way of making my presence convincing. There was nothing that a farmhand could usefully do.
However, the Lord managed it for me as for Abraham—providing not a ram caught in a thicket but a ewe stuck fast in a bramble bush. Alwyn must have spotted her and would be cursing himself
because he could not take the risk of being asked by a grateful farmer—who might turn up at any time—where he had come from and where he was going.
It took a full ten minutes to cut her free with a pocket knife and without gloves. In the course of the operation he was bound to see and recognise me. I came out bleeding, and the ewe, as
always, thought it was all my fault and didn’t stop to say thank you. But still there was no Alwyn and I continued to circle the hill.
A tongue of the copse straggled down thinly to the lower ground, and there I came on him. He was standing against a tree and beckoned me to him.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked in an army voice. ‘I told you to confess who you are and get on with your life.’
‘It wasn’t very good advice. Thanks to you, I am now in the pay of the KGB.’
He asked me what the hell I meant and I told him they wanted me to find out from Eudora what the evidence was which sunk him.
‘As if they didn’t know!’
‘Well, it’s worth five hundred pounds to them.’
‘Then I should tell them and take it and give your Mr. Marghiloman a case of champagne.’
‘They don’t know who Marghiloman is.’