Road To The Coast

by John Harris

  ‘Will they get in our way?’ she asked.

  ‘A fortnight ago I’d have said there was a chance. Alvarado’s police were pretty smart cookies. But if I know Alvarado, he’ll be at the same game as us just now – heading for the border with the rebels in full cry behind him. There are a lot of people would like to meet up with Alvarado.’

  She was silent for a moment, deep in thought, then she looked up again.

  ‘What about the other side?’ she asked. ‘The revolutionaries?’

  ‘Once we get to the river, we’ll be all right,’ he said confidently.

  She nodded. ‘We ought to be able to hire a boat easily enough, anyway.’

  ‘Or pinch one. If I may use a phrase that I’ve picked up among a wide circle of friends, you have to keep your eyes open in this game and one hand on your wallet.’

  She studied his face with its rocky planes and humorous mouth, and the high beak of a nose. ‘It sounds all right,’ she said, laughing, finding there was something about him, something impudent and completely indifferent to other people’s opinions, that amused and reassured her. ‘I’m grateful to you for your assistance, believe me.’

  ‘You can pay me back sometime – somehow.’

  He smiled at her, becoming expansive under the eyes of a female. ‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘Tempus fugits, doesn’t it? I’ll nip out and rustle up some sort of transport. Shouldn’t be difficult. You get your things together.’

  ‘What they’ve left me.’

  He nodded. ‘What they’ve left you. We’ll probably have to travel light and do a bit of walking, so don’t make it much.’

  He turned in the doorway, still holding the briefcase and she smiled impulsively.

  ‘Look out for yourself,’ she said as he disappeared. ‘I’m putting my money on you now and I wouldn’t like to see you vanish again after all you’ve promised.’

  Three

  He was back within an hour. It hadn’t been very hard to find a car. There were plenty about, mostly belonging to people like himself who were trying to get out of the way of the shooting and had been temporarily distracted by the planes, and he discovered a Ford saloon with a broken window, standing under a jacaranda tree, a big old-fashioned car, all power and roominess.

  There was a crowd down the street, gesturing and arguing near a broken building that lay lopsidedly in a pile of rubble where one of the bombs had fallen, like a child’s house of bricks that had been pushed over, and Ash watched them for a moment, his face expressionless. Then, walking quickly up to the Ford, he opened the door calmly and climbed inside. Without looking round, he started the engine and drove off without anyone noticing. It was done simply and with skill. No glancing round to see if anyone had seen him. No hesitating. No doubting. Simply get in and drive away. As though it belonged to you.

  He smiled to himself as he accelerated. It was a trick he’d learned long ago and had been practising on and off ever since. He’d first become aware of its usefulness as a boy on his way home from rabbiting, hurtling down a Worcestershire lane on a “borrowed” bicycle, so that the irate owner had brought him up before his father, a great, red, short-tempered man who, however, had condoned his behaviour by laughing at it even as he’d punished him.

  He had used it often during the war. When he’d wanted to get back to camp and the last bus had gone, he’d always helped himself to the nearest vehicle without turning a hair, whether it had belonged to a mere stores corporal collecting rations or a staff colonel with red tabs on his shoulders. Harry Ash didn’t walk. He’d even tried it once in the desert near Tobruk when they’d been cut off by the Germans – had simply walked up to an empty Italian lorry and driven it away while the triumphant occupants roistered inside a bar out of the sun. The delighted murmurs from his men had warmed his heart. ‘He’s a mad sod,’ they’d said, but they’d said it with an admiration that made up for weariness, defeat and the fact that they were miles from the rest of the retreating army.

  Round the corner, he examined the petrol tank and found it almost full, so he drove along the street until he came to a small shop, a dark cavern of a place with its goods hanging mostly round the door, dust-covered and seedy-looking. Rapping imperiously for attention, he waited a moment then, deciding that as the owner was as likely as not preoccupied like everybody else with the bombed house, he helped himself to tinned fruit and meat and bread. He glanced round for a bottle of wine, hesitated for a moment with his hand on the nearest, then he crossed the shop and chose a better one. Returning to the car, he tossed them inside and drove away. He had found long ago – in Italy in 1943 to be exact – that that period between the passing of an army and the arrival of the host of officials it trailed along in its wake, that period of chaos between the end of the fighting and the beginning of law and order, was a time when a resourceful man might do well for himself.

  He was on top of the world again as he climbed out of the old jalopy by the shop where he’d met the girl. She was waiting by the door and at the sight of her, he smiled involuntarily.

  She looked relieved as he arrived and he realized she’d been scared he wouldn’t turn up now that he had her money in his pocket.

  He came round the back of the ancient vehicle, swinging the briefcase, and patted the front wing with a great red hand.

  ‘Here we are again,’ he said. ‘Large as life and, as the saying goes, twice as nasty. She’s not exactly my line of country but she’ll go and she feels comfortable.’

  He could see that by some subtle alchemy with which she was blessed she’d guessed he hadn’t turned over any money for the car and that for the first time she was beginning to have doubts about him, wishing she hadn’t abandoned her money so completely to his safe keeping.

  He assumed the breezy look of confidence that always stood him in good stead with doubters, and stopped in front of her, his feet apart, his head up, as though he were challenging her to accuse him of something. ‘Ford, 1947,’ he said. ‘Full of juice and four good tyres. Pity there’s nothing newer but it’s the sort that’ll get a wriggle on if we push her. Beggars can’t be choosers.’

  He had taken the trouble to dust off his clothes comb the plaster out of his hair, and he leaned on the car, smiling and self-assured, like a red, rangy fox.

  ‘Better get to know each other,’ he said. ‘Before we go any farther. My name’s Ash. Think of garbage and you’ve got me in one. Henry Hackforth William George Ash.’

  ‘Wow!’

  She laughed and he gave her a mock bow. ‘My old man believed in quantity rather than quality. He manufactured buttons. You’d better call me Harry. Everybody else does.’

  ‘I’ll settle for Harry,’ she agreed. ‘My name’s just Grace. I’ve only got one. Grace Rodrigo.’

  His sandy eyebrows jerked up. ‘I thought you said you were English,’ he said and she thought she caught a suggestion of condescension.

  ‘So I am. English as you are.’ There was no indignation, no hostility in her reply, only a determined attempt to correct him, to put him right from the start, to leave him in no doubt. He shrugged and indicated the small case by her feet.

  ‘Those your things?’ he asked.

  ‘Just this,’ she said. ‘I left my mink behind this trip.’

  She spoke lightly but he guessed she was keeping a tight hold on her nerves.

  He nodded and, taking the case from her, tossed it through the broken window on to the back seat of the car with the tinned food and the wine.

  ‘Fair enough,’ He opened the front door and patted the seat alongside the driving wheel. ‘Jump in and make yourself snug and we’ll beat it. Got to look slippy. Soon be dark.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ she said. ‘Shan’t be a second.’

  Ash climbed behind the wheel and sat back whistling as she disappeared into the back of the shop. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her giving money to the old woman and a feeling of well-being spread over him that finally dispersed his annoyance at the loss of the Cadi
llac. The traffic seemed to be edging out of the square at last and there was room to move now. The shooting appeared to have died away and everyone seemed anxious to spread out and get clear of the crowded little town. None more so than Harry Ash, he thought, wishing suddenly she’d hurry up. Any moment now, the owner of the Ford might turn up, all ready to cut somebody’s tripes out, and he began preparing in his mind some vague sort of story that he might offer as an excuse if he were found.

  It had seemed such a bloody simple operation, he thought, getting to the river, that vast long Paraná that coiled down into the delta with its mass of reedy islands and silted mud. A trip down that brown waterway through the plantations to the tangled route that led to the sea and the rest was easy. Uruguay across the Plata and the majestic Edwardian ferries they ran were still the traditional haven of safety for refugees from the west side of the river. All he had to do, he thought, was get there. That was all. Get there. It sounded a piece of cake if you said it quickly.

  There was a crash as the battery on the crossroads started again abruptly and he ducked instinctively inside the car and listened to the twitter of conversation in the square break out once more.

  ‘Hurry up, for God’s sake,’ he shouted urgently into the shop. ‘Or they’ll be back again!’

  If only this little lot, he thought, staring round him contemptuously, who had seemed so matey when he had arrived in the district, all set to accept whatever change of government should arrive and swop sides with the usual degree of aplomb, hadn’t suddenly been overcome by a fit of unexpected loyalty and started throwing things at everybody in sight!

  If only he hadn’t been clot enough in Alta Gracia to try to persuade Elvira to come along too! If only he’d cleared off straight away instead of trying to change her mind. For a moment, his eyes clouded with nostalgia at the memory of the lady he’d left behind in the north, weeping salty tears like sleet in a south-easter as she had stormed at him; but it didn’t last long. He believed in living for the present and always had. He never let his mind dwell too much on things, or he’d long since have been borne down by the load of iniquities he’d perpetrated during the course of an eventful life.

  In the end, he’d left her to find her own way home, deciding that, in spite of her charms and a performance of unparalleled accomplishment, her interest in England, home and beauty would never be quite so strongly developed as his own.

  He glanced round as he heard Grace Rodrigo’s voice in the shop and decided with a sudden grin that perhaps, after all, the delay in Alta Gracia and the wrong route he’d taken at Concepción in trying to miss the patrols across the vast concrete road to the coast, hadn’t worked out too badly after all. This woman backing out of a door at the rear of the shop now, was something a bit different from Elvira. This girl had some quality entirely her own, a determined vitality, a luxurious healthy capacity for living like his own that Elvira couldn’t have hoped to equal.

  He smiled at the thought, then, glancing again towards the shop, he sat up sharply, the feeling of well-being disappearing abruptly, the cosy contentment that his day-dreams had brought on disintegrating at once like smoke before a breeze.

  For, following Grace Rodrigo from the shop, clutching a small parcel, was a child.

  For a long time, the three of them started at each other, Ash from the car, his face suddenly cold, the well-worn gallantry gone, the woman from the doorway, hesitant but determined, the child with a blank frightened face, obviously scared by Ash’s size.

  ‘Here, what’s this?’ To Ash just then, his mind full of interesting speculation about the journey to the coast, for a pretty woman in need of the help of a strong, quick-witted man, especially a woman as clearly built for the enjoyment of life as Grace Rodrigo was, suddenly to introduce a child into the proceedings seemed to be not far short of criminal negligence.

  ‘You never said anything about children,’ he said, and her face became set so that he caught a glimpse in it of an indomitable will beneath the laughter.

  ‘You never gave me a chance,’ she snapped back.

  His eyes were wandering over the child’s face with the same cool arrogance with which he had regarded Grace Rodrigo from the doorway of the shop. There was the same black – Assyrian black – hair, he noticed, the same dark eyes that indicated the same foreign blood somewhere in the past that had given her her name, the same rounded lips and straight nose.

  ‘Whose is she?’ he demanded. ‘Yours?’

  She nodded, her eyes flashing defiance at him. ‘She’s with me.’

  ‘You were hiding her,’ he accused. ‘Getting a buggy ride under false pretences.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t. She was asleep in there. She’s worn out. She’s travelled a long way.’

  Ash looked again at the child, his face red, his eyes unencouraging. He had actually started to look forward to the journey to the coast. His rage at the loss of the Cadillac had vanished in his contemplation of travel with this splendid creature, Grace, and to find her saddled with a child and with the child doubtless somewhere a husband and a troublesome conscience brought into his face an anger that drowned the breezy charm.

  Grace Rodrigo stared at him for a moment, while the child stood in the doorway, clutching the parcel, then she moved forward to open the door of the car.

  Ash stood behind her, his face indignant but making no move to stop her, towering over them, his shadow knifing across the wedge of sunlight between the car and the shop door.

  ‘You look as though you’ve been hit on the head with a coal hammer,’ she said coolly.

  He started and even his start seemed in keeping with him, vast and unsubdued. ‘What did you expect?’ he asked. ‘A red carpet and a wreath of roses?’

  She smiled faintly in apology. ‘I’m sorry. It doesn’t need much of calculation to realize I’ve gummed up the works for you a bit.’

  He ignored her attempt to reduce the tension. ‘You might have warned me,’ he said. ‘I’d have brought some more kids along for her to play with. Perhaps of few dolls. A couple of footballs, or whatever it is they fiddle about with.’

  Her smile vanished and she gave him the sort of cold contemptuous look he liked to use himself on people from time to time and, being on the wrong end of it for once, he was vaguely disconcerted. There was something about her, some elusive quality he couldn’t put his finger on – not breeding, not wealth, for he was certain that she’d known neither – but an unruffled fortitude in difficulty and a determination to mould things to her own way of thinking that somehow managed to check his tongue.

  Looking at her, he suspected that the best thing would be to chuck, them both out of the car immediately and have done with it before it was too late, or he’d be in it right up to the ears, Lord, Protector and friend to the whole boiling of ’em. She’s probably even got one of those half-baked little poodles with her somewhere, he decided contemptuously, and a kid on a bottle. If she’d been a man trying a dodge like that on him, he’d have had her out of the game in one, with a clout round the ear to make her eyes fall out. But a bloke just couldn’t do that to a woman. Especially a woman like she was, for there was still something about her that drew him to her, not helplessness which was Elvira’s stock-in-trade – by God no, not helplessness – but something vital and alive that appealed to a like rebellious spirit in himself.

  ‘You surely don’t expect me to leave her behind, do you?’ she was saying quietly, indicating the child beside her, all dark eyes and serious, heart-shaped face.

  He stared back at her, his face expressionless. ‘I didn’t say anything about leaving her behind,’ he pointed out.

  ‘No. But you’ve got what’s known as a mobile face.’

  ‘You might have told me, that’s all. I believe in playing square with people.’

  She returned his stare with steady eyes, remembering the money she’d given him. ‘Always?’ she asked.

  ‘Nearly always.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘So I’ve cheated a bit
. I was desperate. What are you going to do?’

  He lifted his head. ‘I’ve accepted the inevitable,’ he said. ‘All the same’ – he drew in his breath as though he were filling his lungs for a tremendous shout at her – ‘we’ve got to travel fast. Damned fast! Will she be able to keep up?’

  ‘She’ll keep up if I tell her to.’

  ‘She’s not very big.’

  ‘She’ll keep up all right.’ She looked at him shrewdly. ‘If you ask me, you’ve not had much to do with children.’

  He stared at the child and received a grave stare in return. She was about eight years old and clutched the parcel to her as though she regarded him with awe as some sort of highwayman who was likely to snatch it from her at the first possible opportunity.

  ‘Her name’s Teresa,’ Grace said. ‘You might as well know her name. You’ll be seeing a lot of her. Say “Hallo” to Mr Ash, Teresa. He’s going to help us.’

  The child nodded her head. ‘Hallo, Mr Ash,’ she said in an odd croaky voice and with an accent that made him think immediately of home, and her solemn face cracked in a smile that gave her a shy elfin look. Then she leaned forward eagerly, her face alive with interest.

  ‘Mr Ash, have you got a gun?’

  Ash started and turned on her quickly, his face curiously slack. Grace had been quite right. He knew nothing about children and for once in his life he felt uncomfortably out of his depth.

  ‘A gun?’ he barked. ‘What do I want a gun for?’

  ‘In case anybody stops us. Everybody else’s got guns.’

  Ash gaped for a moment, then he frowned. ‘Well, I’m the odd one out,’ he said sharply. ‘I don’t carry guns. Nasty things, guns. Liable to go off. If I produced a gun, so would they, then we’d all be at it, like ticks on a mad dog.’

  For a second there was an uneasy silence, then Grace pushed the child into the car and climbed in after her. Ash still made no move and went on staring at them, a baffled expression on his face.