A train for Rugby was leaving in a minute. He dashed into the booking office and bought tickets for Brackley, the first stop. They might not have enough money for the fare to Rugby and anyway it did not matter where they went. They drew still more attention to themselves by running for the train and jumping into the last carriage as it pulled out.
Walking up the train they found a compartment to themselves and drew breath.
‘We’ve done it, David! We’re safe!’
‘Safe? With the Admiral roaring his head off? What did you tell him?’
‘It was wonderful. God put the words straight into my mouth.’
‘Good for him! It’s this damned coat which will sink us. You’re all right. There are lots of little, fat girls about.’
‘I am not fat or little, David.’
‘Well, you know what I mean. I’ve made a mess of it. They’ll be telephoning every damned station you can get to quickly from Charing Cross. Those cops at Marylebone will get a medal for putting them on to us and there’ll be more of them waiting at Brackley.’
‘I can go back to Captain Walinski if you like.’
Bernardo recovered calm and said it was what she ought to do.
‘You’ve got the old boy in your pocket and he told you himself that there was nothing against you. You have only to swear I lifted the key off him and you didn’t know till it was too late. Nadya, little darling, take that line and you can’t go wrong!’
‘When you say “little darling” do you mean dragutsica?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘The sort of little you used to call Despina?’
‘Damn Despina! Will you listen? It’s all in character. Just look at my history of violence; Bobo—Nepamuk—that pinstriped sod. And the bleeding barge, which is bound to come out. And now I’ve locked the head of the British Security Service in his office. Oh, my God!’
‘Yes, David. Do you think that was what he was?’
‘Well, it would be just like them to have their dirty work done by Rule Britannia in this blasted country.’
‘It’s a beautiful country. Look at that!’
The wide valley spread out like a river of green as it flowed down into the Vale of Aylesbury. In Bernardo’s mood of resentment he saw it as a self-satisfied land with its cattle and fat sheep placed exactly where a child with a toy farm would place them, all segmented by pretty hedges rising in a blaze of white hawthorn to the orderly stands of beeches on the skyline. And where was the water rushing down through the woods and narrow meadows of Vizcaya or silvering the Romanian plain? Water in this country ran tidily underground.
‘It’s all so loved,’ Nadya said.
But of course it was. Everyone loved the country in which his eyes were born. Even the Russian refugees ached for their birches and rolling lowlands. He sulkily said something of the sort.
‘But this looks as if it were loved. Like an animal.’
She had gone deep there. Tame it was, but tame as some glossy, splendid animal conscious of love and answering it. She went on to say that her first impression of his country was its peacefulness.
‘Peaceful? But there’s a chap wandering round every half acre all day. Nobody can feel alone.’
‘Not that kind of peace, David. That’s for explorers and monks and sometimes you. This is peace for everyone. Did you notice the gardens?’
Yes, he had noticed the gardens, and the English half of him had inevitably longed for one of its own. But safety was what he wanted first, and there was none.
They had crossed the Vale of Aylesbury when the brakes went on and the train pulled up in a cutting. The sudden silence was absolute except for the faint voices of travellers in the next-door compartments. Dense scrub covered the thirty-foot slope. The new shoots and new leaves made it appear thicker and taller than Mediterranean maquis. Turned soil left alone for sixty or more years had recreated a primeval England.
‘Why don’t we jump out and run for it?’ Nadya suggested.
She gave him no time to protest again that she herself was in no danger if she played her cards right. She had the door half open already turning to him with a smile of invitation as if to get out and pick cowslips. Another of those unaccountable feline pounces from a nothing to a possible something. At any rate the result could not be worse than meeting police on Brackley station or, if they were not there yet, exhibiting themselves in a small market town and sticking in the memory of every passer-by.
She had already slid into cover when he hit the ground. They heard the guard shout at them, but they had vanished. The train slowly clanked into life again and left silence and the scent of hawthorn behind. Nadya actually did pick cowslips—one for him and one for herself.
On the level ground above the cutting was open grassland with no adequate cover. Speed in getting away was more important than any half-hearted attempt at concealment, so they stepped out boldly, crossed a road and followed a green track up to high ground until they came to a junction of footpaths in a desolate space between hedges.
Till then Bernardo had only known that he was half an hour by train from Brackley, which was far from helpful. From the high ground he could see what sort of country lay below and make a vague mental map of it. To the south-east was the Vale of Aylesbury; to the north miles and miles of the rolling Midlands, so full of tall, hedgerow elms that Nadya thought she looked down on forest. He had seen enough of England to know that there was none, but all the same this toy landscape could be safer than Hungary or Romania for anyone who needed to avoid the public. While he had been dreaming of wild distances, Nadya had instinctively recognised the privacies of an utterly foreign land though she had only a short railway journey to go on.
But even assuming they could disappear into those privacies, where then? His mind ran as usual to a port for himself, provided some sort of refuge could be found for Nadya. The longer she stayed with him, the more she was going to be tarred with the same brush. The Admiral might be no longer well-disposed, furiously suspicious of that sob story and fuming because he had let one suspect and one established criminal slip through his fingers in the most humiliating way when the police had only passed them over to him as a favour. Money was going to be their worst problem. Apart from a few foreign notes which could not be changed in a country bank without attracting curiosity they had only fifteen shillings and some coppers.
It was exasperating not to know how much time they had—till next day, perhaps, if their departure from Marylebone was only discovered as a result of routine enquiries; none at all if the police were waiting on the platform at Brackley and the guard reported a man and a girl jumping out of the train. He remembered past experience. The right game was to stock up with food at once, while he could still risk showing his face in public.
From their miniature plateau they looked down on a village half a mile away. It had a church; it would certainly have a pub; it might or might not have a shop. He told Nadya to stay where she was and left the deadly Norfolk jacket with her. A man in his shirt sleeves on a warm May afternoon would pass in a village though not in London.
With his cap covering Scheeper’s white mèche there was nothing much to single him out from his fellows. He passed a red brick cottage marked Police Station with a notice board outside entirely concerned with abortion in cattle and a by-election for the Rural District Council. The walls were covered by a climbing rose in leaf and a fine broom in flower. It was difficult to be afraid of anything so far removed from the usual barrack-like building of Europe.
The village did have a shop with a little food and a surprising stock of buckets, brooms and fly papers. He bought a loaf, butter, biscuits, tins of bully beef and a cheap sturdy knife, and as an afterthought two pint bottles of lemonade in case clean water should be hard to find. The old lady who kept the place spread the lot out on the counter and asked:
‘On ’oliday, be yer?’
‘Camping with some boy scouts.’
‘Don’t yer ’ave nothing to
put all this ’ere in?’
‘Not unless I go back for it.’
‘Oi can give yer an old sack if yer don’t mind bein’ seed with it like.’
Bernardo was all for being seed with it. The sack with some lumps at the bottom provided protective colouring; he would appear to be just slipping out, coatless, from cottage to field with vaguely agricultural requirements. When he left the shop he saw that the police station at the other end of the street had lost its picture-postcard innocence. Standing outside was a police car which he approached slowly, not daring to stop or turn back in case he drew attention to himself. The car drove off fast with four men in it, two of them in uniform. At the same time the village constable came out, jumped on his bicycle and rode straight past Bernardo without looking at him. He gave the impression of being absorbed by the urgency and importance of his task.
So that settled the question of time. They hadn’t any. He returned to Nadya and found her sitting in the sun and contentedly messing about with the Norfolk jacket. When she held it up for him he hardly recognised it; she had ripped off the fur collar and turned it inside out to show the silk lining. It looked like the ultimate wreck of something cut by a ladies’ tailor in the eighteen nineties.
He told her what he had seen in the village and insisted that they had to move at once.
‘They can’t catch us down there,’ she said, pointing to the vale, all dark green on light green and dotted with brown jets where oak and ash were still in bud.
But they could, and without anything so drastic as watching cross-roads. Two or three of those constables on their silent bicycles could be just as effective. A man and a girl carefully avoiding villages, forcing their way through hedges, inevitably getting mixed up on tracks which only led to farms, would soon be reported.
‘We shall be safe at night, but there are six hours of daylight left.’
‘Why don’t we go back quickly to the cutting?’ Nadya suggested. ‘They’ll never look for us there.’
A gamble, but a fair one. The fugitives would be expected to bolt away from the railway as far and as fast as they could. The search would fan out from their starting point, but the hinge of the fan was not worth bothering with. The trouble was returning to the cutting. Across the open fields it was no longer safe. The only way was to risk walking along the road as far as a bridge which crossed the line.
The coat inspired him. She, not he, ought to be wearing it. And if she wore his cap as well ...
He explained to her that tramps, male and female, were a common sight on the by-roads of England and that they looked as abandoned and disreputable as anything out of Gorky. He helped her into the coat which came nearly to her knees and was completely shapeless. He added his cap, squashed and twisted, and rubbed her face with leaf mould. The result was convincing. If a cop passed her on the stretch of road he was more likely to stop and ask her if she had seen the wanted pair than to suspect she might be one of them.
‘When you get to the bridge,’ he said, ‘see that there is nobody in sight and no train and nip over the wall. Find a good place in the cutting and wait for me.’
‘But what about you?’
‘I’ll try the same trick afterwards under cover of the hedges. Leave me your own coat and I’ll carry it folded over my arm. And your hat can go in the sack.’
She set off down the green lane and reached the road unobserved. She was then out of his sight until she was within a hundred yards of the bridge. There a farm cart passed her, its driver paying no attention. She was over the wall and into cover and nobody any the wiser.
While he was planning his own route, a car stopped on the road, dropped two men and drove away. To his alarm they took the track up to the open space where he was. Bernardo looked frantically round for cover. Hedges were windswept and thin, and ditches shallow. The only hope was a low, thick holly standing by itself in a corner. So long as the new arrivals did not separate he might be able to keep moving round it.
The two could see at once that nobody was at the top of the green lane. They were about to search the ditches when one of them came across the fur collar which Nadya had ripped off. He had no doubt what it was and declared that Brown and his popsy must have dashed up that promising lane and then gone round or through the village below. The roads out of it were under surveillance, and if they tried the long, bare slopes on both sides of the railway they were sure to be seen. Either way they would be caught before dark.
They trotted down to the village on the same route that Bernardo had taken; he gathered that the car was waiting for them there. In another five minutes they would have picked up his trail at the shop and learn that he was going about without a coat. It was an easy deduction that the popsy could be wearing it, inside out or not. The only comfort was that Nadya had been right; it never occurred to the two detectives that the wanted couple had gone back to the cutting.
The mention of Brown showed that his true name had now been passed on to the police. Bernardo Brown alias David Mitrani alias Henri Scheeper, an international criminal if there ever was one. No wonder the village constable had gone charging off on his bicycle with his eyes on promotion instead of the pavement. Bernardo ran down the green lane. The road was empty. So long as he stayed between its high hedges he knew he could not be seen. He decided to get it over, walking fast and chancing the traffic. He had to race a goods train to the bridge but was into cover by the time the locomotive came abreast.
It was far from safe to walk along the track in full view of the bridge. While the casual passer-by would take him for a railwayman any of those plain-clothes cops cruising round the district would be after him at once. He moved by short dashes in and out of the scrub, looking and listening before he showed himself. He felt like an inadequate, young rabbit always moving when he shouldn’t, and was thankful when Nadya called from above and he could dive into the railway jungle for good.
The spot she had chosen was so thickly overgrown that he could not see her till she moved. There was a small patch of vegetation to sit on and a view through an elder bush of the line below. He told her how he had been nearly caught and asked if she had been seen. She didn’t think so. She had pushed her way along the top of the cutting between the fence and the scrub.
After some cautious work with the knife had produced a roomier den they opened up the sack and ate. In spite of bottled lemonade Bernardo was at peace for the first time in twenty-four hours. The passing trains emphasised their security as if occupying the same space but a different time to theirs. In the evening a couple of linesmen walked along the track, occasionally inspecting the cutting for signs of erosion.
Bernardo wanted to get clear as soon as it was dark. Nadya was for staying where they were; and since he could not specify exactly what was to be gained by hurry he had to agree. She had a good point, saying that since their train had been held up on this stretch of line it was probable that another would be; if it was a goods train they could slip into any convenient truck and go wherever it took them. She added that anxiety had kept her awake all the previous night, that she was sleepy and there was room to curl up.
For a long time he sat up with knees to chin dozing, depressed and thinking about her. The adventures of her childhood and life with Stepanov must have accustomed her to sleep anywhere. The ground was damp and it would be vilely cold at dawn, yet she appeared content to accept the present for what it was without looking forward to the hopeless complexities of their situation. Partly it must be due to her blind confidence in seizing an opportunity although, when one came to think of it, her instinct would get her nowhere unless he took over and built on what she had created. That seemed to be the pattern ever since their eyes had first met at the Moş. A good partnership, but could it continue? It was impossible to avoid capture, to eat or get a roof over their heads so long as they remained together.
‘I am cold,’ she said.
There was no room for more than one of them to lie down, but he had the support of yi
elding branches at his back. He took Nadya on his knee and threw over her Pozharski’s jacket on which she had been lying. She evidently found the arrangement a lot more comfortable than he did and wriggled into position with her head on his shoulder. In sleep her voice sometimes purred in unintelligible Russian. The common warmth brought on some stirring of excitement, and he rebuked the offending instrument; it had no business whatever, he told it, to think that this child who trusted him and would not leave him was Despina in a similar position. Memories of the Moş huffed and puffed in two opposite directions. Her hair tickled him. He retired to a mentally neutral corner and decided that some day she ought to let it grow again to the length it had been then.
Day came with a promise of still more fine weather, though the sun on the east-facing slope of the cutting was more cheerful than warm. When they had stood up and shaken the stiffness out of their limbs, cold seemed of less importance than continued freedom. The lemonade was finished at breakfast but an ample supply of food remained. They lazed away the daylight hours expecting a train to stop. None of them did.
They were impatient for the long twilight to end. The obvious game then was to follow the railway, lying down or taking cover whenever a train or a railwayman was approach ing. Since the first could be heard far off and the other carried a bobbing light, they had little fear of being caught. In single file they crunched on over the ballast at the side of the line, easily avoiding trouble except on long, bare embankments where twice they had to dive over the edge. Before midnight they came to a complicated junction with a lit signal box and no station. The right-hand line seemed to have the least traffic so they followed it, vanishing at once into a primeval England where the sight of man was rare and the wild life was accustomed to the passage of a fiery dragon which did no harm. A badger waddled across the line showing his white streaks in the darkness like a phosphorescent little bear—which Nadya thought he was. The sides of cuttings were busy rabbit warrens. The scent of hawthorn mingled with half a dozen faint unknowns in the heavy night air. Toy landscape? By God, it wasn’t! If only one could build a hut and light a fire one could live on the bounty of the railway indefinitely.
The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown Page 24
