Authors: Geoffrey Household
‘The Special Tribunal discovered that Rory had received a sum of money through a Swiss bank. When the British traced that payment back, it was found that it had been paid from an account
known to have been opened by the KGB. He had no defence except a ridiculous story that he didn’t look at his bank statements and had no knowledge of the payment.’
My naval friend made no remark immediately, apparently interested in a rise of trout. Eventually he said:
‘Ionel Petrescu, am I right in thinking that you left your country because you did not like the method of government?’
‘More or less. I wanted freedom.’
‘From what?’
‘Well, police for one thing. A man can’t spit without some blue cap asking him why.’
‘That will not last for ever.’
‘It’s lasted the hell of a time.’
‘And you believed there were no secret police, no dirty tricks in the West, eh?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Then I will open your eyes to what goes on, and when you have realised that the brutalities of government are the same everywhere you will perhaps return to your country and become a
useful citizen. We will see you come to no harm. Have you heard of the CIA, Petrescu?’
I replied that I had read about it in newspapers.
‘You know that it operates outside America to protect capitalist interests just as we do, for example, in Romania for the sake of our common defence?’
I was not happy about the way this friendly interrogation was going. All I wanted was to be forgotten by both those bands of trespassers in my country. Some time a return to the identity of
Adrian Gurney would ensure that, but meanwhile it seemed to be agreed and settled that I was a KGB agent.
‘Your Marghiloman worked for this CIA,’ he went on. ‘It was his duty to supervise Romanians who had defected to England and were suspect.’
‘The devil it was!’
‘Marghiloman is now controlled by us, thanks to the information you gave us about him, dear Petrescu. If you get the money you have deserved, it may be from his hands. In future would
you be willing to report anything you notice or can find out about him?’
‘Very willingly.’
‘Where are you going to now?’
Another question which I could not afford to answer and gave me no time to think.
‘I am going to look for work in the fields.’
‘Not very convenient as cover. But perhaps our people can handle it.’
That was too much for Petrescu and far too much for me. I said I had agreed to do a single job but that I was not going to be a full-time agent.
‘It is only Marghiloman that we wish you to make friends with and keep an eye on.’
‘He’s a double agent?’
‘You could put it that way, but it would be inadvisable for him to do any doubling. He must obey orders. Now, is there anywhere he might expect to find you?’
‘Yes. You may remember he had me followed from Swindon to the Marlborough Downs. He may think I have business there.’
‘What was your business there?’
‘I told you. I wanted to lose him. So I took the first train I saw from London and it went to Swindon. I never dreamed he had put an agent on the station to watch me.’
‘What do you suppose he thought you were doing there?’
‘I don’t know. It’s between both seas. It might have been where I kept the bombs for loading on the trawlers.’
‘Dear Petrescu, you and I can afford a sense of humour. Others cannot. Remember that! Give me a date and a time!’
If we were to avoid the more closely populated lowlands and keep to the high ground we should eventually arrive on Salisbury Plain—say, five days if we walked all the way and never risked
a lift or a bus. Time was no object and it did not matter whether Alwyn made his dash for Bristol from there or from the Downs. I remembered the lonely upland crossed by the Ridge Way. It would be
easy to find and a convincing spot for a rendezvous. It might also play on Marghiloman’s nerves a bit.
‘He is to drive to Avebury and leave the village and its Stone Circle by the Herepath running east. Where it ends he will have half a mile or so to walk. I will wait for him where the
Herepath crosses the Ridge Way, two green roads intersecting. He can’t miss it. No one will pay any attention to us. Up there they are used to archaeologists on the prowl.’
That strained my Russian to the limit. I doubt if they have the green roads of English downland, or are the caravan routes east of the Caspian green after the rains? At any rate, I had to do a
lot of explaining and write down the names for him. He must have realised that such exact knowledge of country by a refugee needed explanation, but he said nothing. We arranged the meeting for
mid-day in six days’ time.
He collected his children and drove off. As soon as I was sure he was well on the road to Exeter I returned to Alwyn and made my report. He had no objection to approaching Bristol from the east,
but thought I had been too bold in arranging to meet Marghiloman. I pointed out that he was a colleague of mine, however unwilling, in the KGB and that I was sure to get something out of him which
would be of use to MI5 or to us—perhaps clear evidence which would prove Alwyn’s innocence. I also said that I seemed fairly certain to receive five hundred pounds and that he would
find it an invaluable help towards getting on board a ship. He refused to accept anything from me.
‘You will, or I’ll give it to a fund for destitute refugees,’ I told him. ‘I’d choke every time I bought a drink with KGB money. But you can take it with a good
conscience and use it for your private cold war.’
‘We’ll see. Personally I think they’ll run you like a credit account—pay in a little and demand more goods.’
It was prudent to move off straightaway without waiting for Forrest. We made the horses comfortable and took to the Blackdown Hills—now two nondescript travellers minding their own
business and, we hoped, hardly worth a glance from the police once we were further away from their zone of operations.
This was not country that either of us knew. We could only keep the setting sun more or less behind us until nightfall, making use of far too many roads. We had had the devil’s own
luck with the weather, but now it had broken. The driving, grey rain of the west country poured down, and we took shelter under the remains of a corrugated iron roof more or less supported by three
good posts and one broken. Our only comfort was the remains of Tessa’s picnic—cold beef sandwiches and three bottles of claret. We drank the lot and woke up in the morning with fuzzy
heads and added depression. It was still raining.
When it cleared we climbed sulkily uphill into heather and began munching bilberries for breakfast. They acted as a pick-me-up—or perhaps our spirits were revived by this windy ridge from
which, down the Vale of Taunton, we could see the sand-clouded waters of the Bristol Channel and to the south, blue Lyme Bay. For me it was still another marriage to my land and for Alwyn a last
embrace before divorce. We were both very silent throughout the morning.
I was glad to see that he looked a lot more scruffy and unrecognisable—unwashed, short of sleep and in John’s old clothes which fitted badly. The only trouble I foresaw was that it
would be difficult for anyone curious about him to place him, not a tramp, not an underpaid school teacher on holiday, not a farmer. Neither farmers nor their workers ever walked anywhere.
‘Who’s on strike?’ Alwyn asked.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen a paper for days.’
It was not a bad idea. I went down to the little town of Chard and bought newspapers and some much needed maps, together with a warm loaf and butter. We settled down to decide a route and invent
our identities. As usual car workers were on strike. The production line tempted us no more than it did them. There was also an unofficial strike among dockers at Southampton. Dockers, we felt,
would do very well—a sturdy lot quite likely to stretch their legs in the countryside. Alwyn’s Devon dialect came to him so naturally that he could speak it without effort. I myself was
tired of Wiltshire, broken English, Russian, Romanian and what-have-you and afraid I might easily slip up in any emergency. So I decided to be a clerk with standard English.
The next day took us through the lovely Dorset country by Beaminster and Cattistock. It was a Sunday and distant church bells continued to praise the gift of life even if there was no longer
much of a congregation underneath them. We found it hard to remember that we were hunted men.
Coming down into Cerne Abbas, the Giant faced us—that nobly phallic demi-god cut in the chalk. It was new to us both and started me off with memories of the Marlborough Downs where we were
going, bare except for the whispering grass and the tombs, temples, forts and ditches which so affected my boy’s sense of the continuity of our land.
‘Not melancholy?’ Alwyn asked.
‘Not to me or my father. They were our friends and ancestors. He used to say that if we felt their presence in our time, it was sacred.’
‘Presences. Yes. Closed, dark, the silence of the tide bringing presences more mindless than yours. Adrian, those weeks in the derelict were hell. There was no coming out of the tomb
for me except sometimes to talk to Eudora.’
Lulled into security we put up for the night in a cottage outside the village owned by a garrulous dame in her fifties—one of those women who desperately want to belong to an outer world
and conceive it in terms of their daily paper. She hung about after our supper, talking and talking. She said she had a son who was a Southampton docker and gave us his name. We had already
committed ourselves to our identities and we said, a little too soon, that we did not know him. He turned out to be one of the leaders of the strike. Alwyn had been too clever. Choose a natural,
common, convincing part and you are all the more likely to run up against the real thing!
No amount of ‘oh yes, of course’ could put it right. We were marked down as a pair of disreputable, unwashed liars. She burned the breakfast bacon deliberately, and though we parted
on outwardly cordial terms I could see she had dreams of appearing on TV as the unmasker of two wanted burglars.
She had asked us where we were off to now. Back to Southampton, we said, by train from Dorchester. There would be a bus to Dorchester in five minutes she yapped triumphantly. No wriggling out of
that. We had to take it. Dorchester was a dangerous centre of roads to and from the west and the last place we wanted to be seen. So we got off at the next village, which meant that the bus driver
would remember us if asked.
We were annoyed but not worried. Alwyn thought that our old-fashioned, innocent method of transport made us fairly safe. A criminal hardly ever walked, stealing a car or fixing false number
plates and disappearing into the mass rather than into the country. It was also in our favour that there were two of us. The police were hot after Alwyn Rory but knew nothing of Ionel Petrescu.
Part right he was and part wrong, as we found out tramping northwards along the crest of Woolland Down with half of Dorset spread out below us and the other half glimpsed down wooded
valleys. The road through the grass was narrow and open and entirely without traffic until we saw a police car coming up behind us. It stopped and a cop got out to talk to us. He wanted to know if
we had spent the night in Cerne Abbas. Yes, we had. Dockers? Yes, we were.
‘There’s a good lady thinks you aren’t.’
Alwyn said nothing. I could see that he feared the game was up and that he was waiting to hear what evidence the police had before committing himself. Myself, I was without his sense of guilt
and could appreciate more readily that it was a hundred to one the police were as bored with the woman as we were.
‘Only pulling her leg, mate! She asked if we knew her son, Jim Halran. As if we didn’t, the silly bastard calling us all out for nothing! Never heard of him, I told her, not wishing
to get into an argument. What did she say about us?’
‘She didn’t like the look of you. What made you get off the Dorchester bus?’
Fortunately I had bought a paper. That inspired me—that and a dread of being searched. My passport in the name of Adrian Gurney was in my pocket. Dorset police would remember who he was,
or rather had been.
‘Because as soon as we opened the paper we saw the strike was still on. So we changed our minds and thought we’d go to Salisbury. Better train service home from there, too! Did you
think we’d bust into the Bank of England or what?’
‘Just checking up on you. It’s a man and a woman we’re looking for.’
Alwyn cheered up.
‘Like we to take us’n shirts off, mate?’ he asked. ‘What’s they done?’
‘Don’t know except that it’s big stuff.’
He described us perfectly—a woman riding side saddle and a well-dressed groom. They might be on foot now and she might be dressed as a man. We should keep our eyes open and run down to the
nearest police station if we saw them on our way to Salisbury. Now on friendly terms, he wanted to know why we were on strike when we were earning three times what he did. Alwyn dealt with that one
in his broadest Devon—a fiery and convincing defence of a man’s right to strike whenever he bloody well pleased. I suppose he had read enough reports in his time on unrest in the docks
to know just where communist influence began and ended.
When the police car had driven away we sat on the grass to get our breath back and wished to God we had saved a bottle of that claret.
‘How the hell did they get on to Lady Enid?’ I asked.
He explained that it was certainly due to the search for Rachel, who could well be with Alwyn Rory.
‘Suppose our Chipperfield’s Circus story reached the police. They might have thought nothing of it if the circus had been in the district, but it wasn’t. Then wide enquiries
bring in a mass of reports of when and where the pair were seen. Description of groom fits me. Description of lady sounds all wrong for Rachel, but her face could not be seen clearly under the veil
and informants were vague. The incident at the church highly suspicious.’
He added that Forrest and the horses must have got safely home, or the police would not still be looking for a pair of riders. He thought we could be more confident after what we had learned.
Rory was with Rachel or he was alone. But it would be as well to sleep rough in future and clean ourselves up at streams or in public baths so that we looked respectable. I must be clean-shaven and
we must buy a clothes brush.