Authors: Geoffrey Household
He wriggled up to the bows, cast off the mooring chain and silently let it out inch by inch before making fast again. When the boat settled on the mud she had been carried four or five yards
downstream by the ebb. It was highly unlikely that anyone on the bank would notice in gathering darkness that the movement was more than the usual slackening and tightening of the chains according
to the tide.
At low water Alwyn gave a very nervous Petrescu his navigation orders. I was to slip out under the canvas, hang on by one hand, reach for the stern chain with the other and drop into the mud
which would only come up to my knees; then I was to walk straight down to the main channel which had only a foot of water over a hard bottom and follow the channel up until it appeared to divide;
if I went boldly into the mud of the left-hand branch I could walk ashore. I must not stay more than an hour or I should have difficulty in returning on board.
I did what I was told. When I dropped into the mud, indistinguishable from night, it seemed to me that there was a lot more than two feet of it, but I did hit bottom and could move. On the
extended mooring the counter was nearly overhanging a gully in the mudbank worn by a trickle of fresh water. When I had splashed down this gully into the channel I might have been walking in any
inland stream, out of sight at the bottom of a black valley. Alwyn’s knowledge of the creek was amazingly exact. I had never understood how during his long stay on board he had been able to
meet Eudora and take on supplies without swimming or risking a boat. He was only stranded when both periods of low water happened to be in daylight or clear moonlight.
I advanced cautiously up the left-hand branch—or what I hoped was the branch for it was not at all obvious—a mere depression in the mud which in places came over my knees. It led me
safely to shore and I sat down on the bank of the creek, noticing for the first time the curious nature of the night. There was a diaphanous mist in the valley, showing a faint sheet of silver
where the moon ought to be. All sound was deadened and I had the impression that in this unworldly luminescence the land like myself was expectant.
I heard something moving behind me and slid quietly down on to the shale where I was invisible. Then Tessa appeared—a very anxious Tessa putting a finger to her lips when I showed myself
and beckoning to me to follow her. She moved fast and silently over the shale until we came to the head of the creek where the stream poured down through beds of rushes. She crossed the dry marsh
into a steeply sloping meadow from which there was a view of the whole inlet—or would have been if sight had not been limited to a moving object at fifty yards. Just above us in the next
field I heard the comfortable munching of a herd of cattle.
‘I think I was followed,’ she said. ‘But we’re all right here.’
I did not take her very seriously. Anyone on a night like that would imagine a follower. I myself while waiting had felt—fantastically rather than in fear—a presence brooding over
the creek, extensive and indifferent. England is so old and one cannot tell what insignia the ancients have left for us. A boy such as I, brought up on the bare downs where once there was a city,
is bound to be aware of them. At school of course we would frighten each other with wild exaggerations; but out after dark, sometimes alone, sometimes with my very sensible father, I learned that
one should recognise without trying to understand. That attitude seemed quite acceptable to the long dead leaver of the spiritual mark. A man’s love of his land may be as indestructible as
any other love.
‘You’ve been alone since the tide went out?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean that! One is never alone.’
I thought that a most revealing statement from a girl whose view of religion was presumably Marxist. I did not have to ask what she meant.
‘How did you come?’
Earlier in the day John had brought out supplies and hidden them in a spot close to my landing place where Alwyn always picked them up. Tessa herself had chosen to ride out in the evening,
intending to return at dawn. Nobody who happened to see her would imagine she had been out all night. She had tied up her mare fairly close to the cover where Eudora parked her car. It occurred to
me that if anyone examined this ground in daylight, the tyre tracks would reveal a number of recent comings and goings.
She settled down to wait for the bottom of the tide. All was quiet until the mare—perhaps disturbed by the sudden pearly quality of the night—whinnied a question at her. Tessa was
busy comforting and quietening her when there were movements low down in nearby undergrowth. Badger, she thought. The sound was not repeated until she heard me splashing ashore. Somebody else had
heard it and now was definitely on the move. She crept down to the hard shale and padded ahead to warn me.
‘Are the police on to Alwyn?’ I asked.
‘No. Eudora and I are sure they aren’t. They think Alwyn is making for London or a port. It’s you, Adrian. Somebody else has been making enquiries about Willie.’
‘But they couldn’t possibly know I am here.’
She told me that her admirable Tommy Bostock had called her up saying that he had had a visit from a detective who wanted her to confirm that she had bought a blue, military frock-coat for
someone called Willie. Tommy had told the man that he knew nothing about a blue coat but that a Willie Yonell existed all right and was a friend of hers in Devon.
‘When you bought the coat, did you leave your name and address?’
‘Yes. I hadn’t enough money, so I paid by cheque.’
Then at last the reason why I was expected around the estuary was unmistakable. Somebody keeping an eye on Whatcombe Street had noticed the new arrival in the blue coat and was perhaps getting
ready to question him when he vanished. But the coat remained. So the ‘Military Club sort of bloke’, pretending that the coat might have been his, stopped Ciampra on the street and
found out from the label the shop where it had been bought and who bought it.
Tessa. Friend of the enigmatic Rachel. Frequent visits to Whatcombe Street. Her political opinions far over to the left. Ciampra, I remembered, had even believed she might be mixed up in the
Mornix escape. Well worth investigation. But by whom?
Special Branch and MI5 had at that time no more interest in her or the highly respectable Eudora, whatever might have been the enthusiasms of her youth. The KGB must know all about Tessa from
Rachel and knew enough about me because I had confessed as much as I felt could safely enter their files. Indeed I was their agent in a small way of business. So this continual interest in me must
stem from the mysterious Marghiloman. He alone could guess that Willie Yonell was Ionel Petrescu. And his methods followed a pattern. The visit to Tommy Bostock was the second time that his people
had passed themselves off as British police.
Yes, it was me they were after, not Alwyn—me, the trawlerman off the Russian fleet who was so perfunctorily cleared by MI5. Marghiloman first kills two birds with one stone. He sends his
suspect down to Devon with a first-class excuse for getting on intimate terms with the aunt and cousin of a traitor; at the same time he gets confirmation that Alwyn Rory really is in Moscow.
Suspect then vanishes, but turns up—of all places—at Whatcombe Street, convincingly disguised by Tessa.
Charts, he asked me about—charts of the remote Kingsbridge Estuary. What the hell were we supposed to be landing there or sending off from there? It was a monstrous edifice of suspicion
which would hang together very reasonably on paper—always provided the compiler of the file stuck to paper and prejudice and either knew very little of the human beings involved or insisted
on disbelieving what he was told.
‘We have to get Alwyn out of here. It’s become the worst possible spot for him,’ I said.
‘But where can he go?’
‘Wherever he meant to before he decided to expose Rachel—if we can get him there.’
‘Will he listen to you?’
‘Not me or even you and Eudora. He’s blind obstinate.’
There was no sign at all of the unknown. He must have been waiting hopefully near the bank of the creek or perhaps keeping an eye on the mare until Tessa returned to her. He was probably unaware
that he had been spotted. From his position we could not have been visible when we ran for it.
‘Are you going back to London?’ I asked after a silence.
‘No! I told my firm I was ill. I can’t bear it any more.’
‘Accountancy?’
‘That! No, it’s no worse than anything else—proving to capitalists that they haven’t made a profit when they did and that they made the hell of a profit when they
didn’t! Money doesn’t mean a thing any more, Adrian. For the State and industry and the individual it is simply debt, and debt is whatever the economists say it is and every two years
they change their minds. I’m sick of them and their tame politicians, sick of crooks who don’t care and idealists who don’t understand. And if they did understand they’d be
more desperate than ever, for they’d see that the world they want is this. I’ve discovered that I am selfish.’
‘You? I wish you were.’
‘Well, I am. The only way out Voltaire could see was to cultivate one’s garden. So I’m going to. There’s no means of giving all this to millions of townsmen who
wouldn’t be content with it anyway. So I might as well enjoy peace and keep a patch of sanity in the world.’
I was reluctant to stop listening to her deep-toned, disillusioned voice, but the tide was on the turn and I had to pick up the supplies and go.
‘You can’t go now,’ she said. ‘You can’t risk that spy spotting you, and it’s the end for Alwyn if he does.’
Perhaps I accepted that too easily. But there was no denying that the interested party who was watching the mare must have heard me sploshing ashore.
‘And your patch of sanity will be here?’ I asked.
It was hard to believe that anyone shared the silver-misted night with us except the bullocks I had glimpsed beyond the hedge and whatever little animal was plopping in and out of the
stream.
‘Oh, anywhere! Anywhere with honesty of purpose and men swearing happily and trees in the night and things that you watch grow day by day. All this!’ she repeated with a catch in her
voice.
‘But you shouldn’t be sad about it.’
‘I’m not. It’s only that here and now is a meaning. And you know it and I know it.’
‘I haven’t said so.’
‘It’s not necessary. Speech covers things up. The sound of it is what matters. Tell me something in Romanian!’
I told her plenty in Romanian, for I was free to say exactly what I thought of her and what I might have said if I had been anything but a Willie with no future and a hardly recommendable past.
I kept my voice low and steady, fairly impassionate as if I were reciting poetry. Once I was.
‘You see? You didn’t understand a word.’
‘And you’ll see that I did. I know it was what I wanted you to say to me.’
There is no need to go into what happened then. As she once—much later—had the impertinence to point out, it must have been one of the very few occasions when an International
Marxist and an agent of the KGB were completely united.
When we returned into our lives—or out of them, according to how you look at it—the first light of dawn was on us and the creek filling and there could be no reaching Alwyn and
Rachel till the following night. Our unknown companion was cautiously on the move. He passed quite close to us, bending low among the rushes and aiming for the higher ground. His game was obvious.
He did not want Tessa to know that she had been observed; so he was not going to risk running into us by taking the track which we normally used. When there was no more cover he cut straight up
towards the road, trusting to the semi-darkness to conceal his movements—which it would have done if we had still been on the other side of the creek. He found a gap in the hedge above us and
climbed over. I heard a rip and a muffled exclamation as his trousers caught on hidden barbed wire.
There was great excitement among the bullocks who thought a more serious breakfast than grass had arrived early. The whole score of them charged towards him, and then I saw his head and
shoulders outlined against the sky as he climbed on something. It amused me that this sewer rat, perhaps very effective with guns and bugs and walkie-talkies and God knows what, should be
completely at sea among the normal occupations of honest men. I told Tessa to stay where she was and ran downstream—taking a chance that he would see me but he was too busy waving at the
bullocks—then into dead ground and up the hill until I found a gate.
I advanced upon him across the field. Confidence, truculence and a near-empty bag of fertiliser which I found by the gate represented agricultural authority. He was standing precariously on a
field roller in front of a semicircle of two-year-old Red Devon bullocks prime for market. A youngish man he was, of indeterminate class, with a face as clean-cut and keen as an advertisement for
after-shave. He was efficiently dressed in a leather jacket and sweater, carrying a small pack and wearing a beret. I gave him the speech of my youth, for I was never any good at Devon dialect.
‘What be doin’ ’ere? Aafter rabbits, be ’ee or aafter my beasts?’
‘Call ’em off!’ he begged. ‘Call ’em off!’
I shooed them a few yards away, all but one who put his lovely wet muzzle in my hand and added convincing local colour.
‘You own this land?’ he asked.
‘I does. And me faather before me.’
‘I am a police officer,’ he announced, coming down from the roller.
I could have betted any money he was going to say that.
‘Not from round these parts you ain’t.’
‘No. From London. There’s been some queer goings-on down here.’
‘And there’s bin a pack of tomfools askin’ questions. You’ll be one of them Special Branch coppers?’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s what I am.’
‘Well, they giv I the word so I should reckernise ’em.’
‘What word?’
‘That’s for ’ee to say.’
‘Well, we don’t all know it.’