by Thomas Hinde
I liked them. They had genuine humility. About their children, for instance, who were two picture-book little girls: they were genuinely as surprised as they were pleased when people said how pretty they were.
And about their house, which had been given them by Rene’s father: instead of swelling out in confidence to suit their accidental prosperity they seemed amazed, even crushed by it. I had a picture of them creeping about, occasionally looking up anxiously to see what they would be given next.
For an hour and a half we stood drinking gin and French while Jim carried a jug from glass to glass, never letting anyone’s get less than three-quarters full. There were enough of us to make a continuous heavy shout of conversation and I thought how this must contrast with the grunts and mutterings of most of our lives at home. Nothing odd in that but perhaps I noticed it more than usual because I was being more than usually careful not to drink too much.
At around nine we went out to their low-lit barbecue-veranda with the built-in grill and the antelope skull with two red bulbs for eyes. And Jim grilled chops in an apron painted with grilled chops and a genuine white chef’s hat which he’d bought from a supply shop in Soho. Janie kept shouting, ‘Take that thing off,’ and Jim said several times, ‘What, publicly expose meself!’ While other people encouraged him to keep it on, seeing how much he had looked forward to wearing it.
With the food came an eating quietness. People still talked, but you could tell their attention was half on their meat and bones. They got split up and sat on benches next to people they’d already said everything to. When it finished I expected that after a minimum interval of gratefulness they’d start to leave, and this reminded me of someone else’s party where I’d seen Janie deliberately sit on Jim’s knees and put her arm round his neck and wriggle till he became red in the face and left in confusion to take her home to bed. But that evening, perhaps because it was Friday, with a long night and two empty days ahead, they didn’t leave and gradually, as their digestions worked, they grew more lively. Janie came past and sometimes said things to provoke them, and sometimes stared at them as if genuinely astonished that they could be so boring.
About midnight I was standing by myself in the shadows at one end of the veranda. To my left Molly and Percy Goyle were talking together, slowly and with pauses, unlike most of us. She sat with her buttocks against a table and I thought she wanted to go home. Janie was beyond them, round the curve of the dark veranda, lying on one of those plastic bed-seats which fold at both ends so that I could see her legs but not the rest of her. She was trying to make Jim dance – there was music inside – and I heard Jim say, ‘What, me with me corns!’ at least three times. I was thinking about Janie and how she had this exciting discontent, how she would say with real desire, ‘Why can’t I be rich.’
At the same time I was listening to blue-rinsed Mrs. Willis, who was talking to Hubert Brightworth close on my right, and guessing the effort of imagination she was having to make to ask him about his lessons at college and the effort Hubert was having to make not to put his head in his hands and scream, when I happened to glance between them. At once I was looking through one of the veranda’s inside windows into a small half-dark room.
It was lit as if through its open doorway by some light beyond. Standing there, but out of the path of this light, were Wilfred and Rene Draycott.
They were close together, their heads bent forward. He was saying something to her. Because of the window I couldn’t hear it. As soon as he’d said it he glanced left and right. For a fraction of a second our eyes met.
It may seem a small thing. I can only say that it was one of those tiny incidents which give meaning to years of half-understood experience.
They might, I agree, have been talking about money, or their children’s bed-wetting habits, or something else they were embarrassed about. I knew at once and for certain that it was none of these things. My conviction was only confirmed when Wilfred bent and said one more thing to Rene before they moved out of sight, as if they had no secret and no glance had passed between us. But not, this was the important point, not as if it had been about something embarrassing like a leaking lavatory.
All the way home, as we went arm in arm down the Brightworths’ drive across the New Lane and along our top drive, I thought about it. It was a beautiful night, cool after the hot day, with a high half moon in a sky of faint stars. Ahead our house was a dark lump except for one upstairs window which reflected moonlight. The more I thought about it the more certain I became.
Sometime that night I formed my plan. During the Brightworths’ barbecue I remembered hearing about the Draycotts’ camping week-end. By casually ringing them – to ask them to tennis, say – I could discover when they were going. At about that time I could casually stroll over and offer them our safari camp-bed.
I could time it still more accurately; from my attic I could see, through trees, enough of the Draycotts’ drive to tell when their mini was parked by their front door and guess when it was loaded. I’d wait till I judged they’d be leaving in five minutes. And when I got there – I’d let circumstances dictate. I thought they would.
Just what I was looking for I wasn’t sure. I told myself that there were things in ‘The Larches’ which I didn’t know, which it was vital for me to find out. But as that moment of recognition receded I realized that I needed to find out whether there was anything strange inside ‘The Larches’. I needed proof, needed it badly.
The advantage of my plan was that the camp-bed would be a visible reason for being there for anyone who might be watching. It was also the best time to work. The hour after they’d left was the least likely for anyone they might have employed to come and stoke. Whether or not they wanted the camp-bed didn’t matter, but I guessed it would be too big for the mini and this would have the added advantage that I could carry it home – later.
As I crouched at my attic window on that quiet summer morning, watching and waiting, many things which had been obscure began to grow clear.
Though I’d taken trouble to know about our neighbours, this had been an exercise, no more real than the routine posting of sentries when the battle is a hundred miles away. Because till now I’d believed it would be someone passing through whom I’d have to intercept. In the week since the call had come I’d watched the papers for statesmen paying visits, remembering how a policeman had appeared at our crossroads two years before and an hour later a prince from some Far Eastern neutralist state had driven by on his way to our local airport. That policeman standing there so innocent and useless, looking at his watch and wondering if the prince was going to make him late for his dinner, had summed up a lot.
I’d even walked once or twice up and down the main road, taking a note of bushes and walls, and of which had covered retreats to woods and open country. I saw how wrong I’d been. They weren’t interested in things so out of date and powerless as princes and statesmen. I saw that it wasn’t even likely to be an interception of some secret man of power whose name never reached the papers. They didn’t work in such a haphazard way.
I hadn’t been put here on the chance that I might be useful sometimes in the next fifteen years. They’d had a reason for needing me in this part of the country, leading the life I led, knowing the people I knew. From the first they had probably guessed how I was to be used, though they couldn’t tell me.
It was someone local that I was going to take care of.
Take care of? This too was a conviction which had grown unnoticed but now became complete. Over the years a series of events too insignificant to remember had made me understand what was to be required of me. The abruptness of the stand-by call, the way it had assumed that I would need no further explanation, told me that the plan had not changed.
I’d been foolish about Draycott. When I’d had local suspicions – and I’d had these too – I’d looked for the double bluff, not the man who was hiding a powerful and cunning intelligence behind stupidity but the int
elligent person who was really intelligent. I’d ignored the triple or simple bluff – depending on how you looked at it. That was Draycott.
Now that I had the clue, things I’d felt about Draycott made sense. My surprise that he could bear to foresee, as he must a dozen times a day, everything that was likely to happen to him between now and dying – or at least feel its flavour. The flavour of failure. It could only be some unsuspected hidden belief that prevented him from folding up with depression.
I found my feeling for him utterly changed. I no longer liked his humility, because I could see that it wasn’t humility. The things I’d liked him for – Boodles – the gift car which had to be a mini – were exactly those I now hated. I hated the way he lost his keys and was being made to design soap wrappers. I hated his servility. I felt for him what one animal feels for another who is ill or wounded. I didn’t want to look at him. If I looked at him I would want to destroy him.
At eight I saw him drive his car from their garage into the open, pass behind tall firs and park by their front door, half in sight and half hidden by some silver birches. From the way its red paint shone in the sunlight I guessed it had been polished. The number of journeys they made to it amazed me.
Time after time they came with more camping equipment, as if they might have been loading three full-sized cars. Perhaps because the things they carried were often so small that I couldn’t tell what they were they suggested ants who were trying to move a pile of sand a grain at a time.
Once they came out together and stood looking at it, then went together to hunt inside it. I guessed that in desperation they had decided to sacrifice something. After that they increasingly often carried things back from car to house. They seemed to fall into competition, one loading, the other unloading, doing it faster, starting to run. I guessed they had set themselves a time to leave, because without such a target they would have no sense of starting in defeat and muddle.
Could this excessively careful loading really be explained by nervousness about camping?
I needed self-control to wait, as I had decided I must, till at last one of the two little girls had been lifted in. Then I hurried.
‘It’s terribly kind of you.’ Wilfred was embarrassingly grateful. If it had been possible he would have taken it whether he needed it or not, but the car was totally full. Tents, sleeping-bags and pillows overflowed from the back, which was packed to the roof, into the front. Close against one window I could see the golden curly head of one little girl but no sign of her body or arms. She had a fixed look, as if she had just been woken from sleep. I couldn’t see the other. Rene, in front, was sitting on a pile of rugs so that her head was close against the roof and forced forward on to her chest. In this position she had turned it sideways to peer at me through the top inch of the window. I thought something might be preventing her from turning it straight again.
It was all their own work. Alone and with no vindictive outside interference they had spent two hours working themselves into this condition.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Just an idea. Seeing you loading made me remember it.’
When I said this I saw Wilfred start and turn his head as if it was a shock to be reminded that I could see down into his drive and he must check the window so that he wouldn’t forget again. I distinctly saw him stop this movement.
‘It’s not that we’ve got any camp-beds,’ Wilfred said. ‘But . . .’ He gave a weak laugh. He looked at my feet. He didn’t look at the car. It was too shameful.
‘Make it tough for them,’ I said. ‘Maybe they won’t ask again.’
‘Maybe,’ Wilfred said, but not hopefully.
‘Have a good time,’ I said.
‘Thanks.’
‘You’ve got lovely weather.’
He looked up as if surprised to see it.
I realized that he was waiting for me to go. It could have been politeness: in his own drive he was host and mustn’t abandon a guest even if an uninvited one. Twelve hours before I would have accepted the explanation. Annoyingly, the longer he waited the politer he was being, while the longer I stayed the more rudely (and surprisingly) I was behaving.
‘Happy thunder storms.’
He grinned and watched me as I strolled away up his drive.
I went as far as the bend before I glanced back. He was no longer by his car but ten yards away, turning the corner of his house. I wasn’t surprised.
Whatever he did there didn’t take long because I was only a short way beyond the bend when I heard the car door slam and the engine start. A moment later they lurched past. They waved and I waved.
I waited till they were through the drive gates on to the New Lane and I’d heard them labour up through two gears, the second with a grind of cogs which hurt my teeth, before I stepped into the bushes.
I laid the camp-bed in a hollow and sprinkled it with leaves. Using cover I made my way quickly back towards the house. I had no time to waste. It was easy going because their garden, like the others off the New Lane, was chiefly birch scrub where it wasn’t uncut pine wood.
I had an instinct to see the side of the house where he’d made that quick return when he’d thought I wasn’t watching, the sort of instinct I like to follow in this work. I watched it now from a rhododendron thicket. There were various closed windows, one of frosted glass, set in walls of grey pebble-dash. Directly ahead, about four yards away across a small square of concrete, was the pea-green side door. It looked deserted in the sunlight. Had he gone back to make sure it was locked?
Under a stone by the doorstep was a piece of paper. I strained my eyes but the angle was too acute.
Ten seconds later I could read it. By that time I was half-way to undoing the lock. I stood close to the door, wearing cotton gloves of course, working by feel, looking down at that piece of paper. ‘Monday one pint only please.’
I was certain that he’d gone back to leave it. But why, I reasoned, should he want to do that at the last moment, when it was apparently a normal domestic message. The only explanation was that to his wife it wouldn’t seem normal, because they’d already agreed to place some other order – or because they didn’t order milk in that way. It was a coded message, which he could safely leave because no one – except his wife – would think it odd.
I stood in the kitchen, the door closed behind me but unlocked, working this out. Likely as it seemed, it meant abandoning the theory that he and his wife were working together. The moment when I had seen them in that dark room at the Brightworths’ speaking in that secretive way must have some other explanation, and it was from that moment that my suspicions had started. I didn’t decide. I stored away the two theories side by side. There was no time to decide because I had begun to hear noises.
They made me run with sweat. I didn’t mind. A good internal drench of adrenalin makes me operate better. I don’t take credit for this; it’s just good luck. My mind goes at double the speed and in the two seconds after I’d started to hear these continuous scraping, rustling noises I’d already slipped a hand into my pocket for my gun, remembered and congratulated myself that I’d decided to bring my knuckle-dusters which were safer, quieter and usually more accurate, and checked with myself that the last thing I should do was start the fighting.
At the same time I’d been through five or six theories of what it might be, from the chimney sweep – no van in the drive – to a trapped starling. The likeliest was some cleaning woman, and I was ready to tell her how the back door had been open and, not knowing she was here, I’d come in to write a message, when I saw the door from the kitchen to the front of the house start to open. It opened slowly. Twice it hesitated, stopped, then started to open again. My grip in my pocket tightened.
The alarming thing was that no one was opening it. When the gap was about a foot and a half it stopped completely. I could see beyond it down several yards of cream passage. They were empty. More alarming, I could still hear obscure scraping and breathing noises.
I remembered Boodles.
I cursed him. He was already right into the kitchen but from where I was standing he’d been hidden by the kitchen table top. I got my fist out quickly after that to give him a knock on the head which would quiet the deep-throated watchdog howling I expected him to start at any moment. He didn’t.
He just went on watching me and soon I knew that the moment of danger, if there’d been one, had passed. I still hesitated about giving him that quieting knock but decided against. This was a bad miscalculation, but seemed reasonable at the time. I don’t like unnecessary cruelty.
As soon as I started to do the job, working quickly and thoroughly, I suspected that I’d been wrong. Instead of returning to sleep in some hairy corner, or collapsing where he was, from the effort of being on his feet, he followed me. And he watched. He stood in the doorway of each room I went into, watching me as I turned over papers, tapped walls, felt under upholstery, opened drawers. He got on my nerves.
Twice I led him back to the sitting-room, where on evenings when we’d visited the Draycotts he’d slept continuously on the fire rug, and tried to make him lie there. He let me take him to it, then followed me away again. I didn’t like to shut a door, not being able to guess the effect of frustrating such an obsession.
I’d just returned after the second of these failures to the Draycotts’ bedroom with double bed, rose-pink paper and lace curtains, and was looking into Rene Draycott’s fitted wardrobe of hanging dresses – as soon as I’d opened its flimsy door I’d known that Wilfred had made it because of its mis-sawn struts, nails which had been bent at the head and ill-fitting panels which let in wedges of light, though the outside was glossy cream. I was staring at this with surprise because I hadn’t known that Wilfred was a handyman, feeling an instinctive anger at this new incompetence, when I heard a car in the drive.
