‘At least you are now at home,’ he said. ‘And that is good, very good.’
‘At home, yes. But when a man has given his life, it stays where he gave it. I do not see what they see.’ He opened his yellow hand towards two prosperous, pink salesmen exchanging heavily printed cards as they left the bar. ‘I do not feel what they feel. That is why I could not pass one of my people without seeing if he was in need.’
He sounded like a missionary with this talk of love and his people. That could never have been the way of district commissioners. They had been great men, too proud to seek companionship from wounded students. They did not, he was sure, ask if they might sit down.
It was his hour for the special, weekly visit to the hospital. He struggled to his feet, the bright steel supports faintly clinking between knee and ankle.
‘I will drive you there and wait for you.’
‘I am a man,’ he answered resentfully. ‘I will go out alone.’
Red Carpet Treatment
To a tired American who, on her second day in England, had just missed her train back to London and had two hours to wait for another, it had looked all that a small hotel ought to be – green and white, built in the days before Stanborough had become an industrial town, with a front door opening upon a quiet courtyard flanked by eighteenth-century houses.
Inside, however, it was utterly without welcome. Two old ladies were knitting on a sofa. A retired military man – at a guess – was asleep in front of an inadequate electric fire. A party of three men in a corner had busy glasses and ash-trays in front of them, but seemed affected by the general hush.
She just sat. Nobody paid any attention to her. It was nearly as cold as the railroad junction. After a while the uncompromising back of the manageress was to be seen behind the glass of the combined bar and office at the back of the lounge.
‘Three doubles, please!’
The manageress carried a tray of whiskies over to the three men. She showed exemplary patience at the disturbance.
‘Can I have some dinner?’ Janet asked as she passed.
‘I am sorry, dinner is finished.’
‘A sandwich will do.’
‘I am sorry, we do not serve food in the lounge to non-residents.’
The creature vanished among its account books and bottles. Janet felt that the universe had run down and time had ceased. The two old ladies tottered off to bed. The major woke himself up with a complicated snore, looked anxiously round the lounge and marched out.
The three men were left, enjoying themselves decorously over drinks. Their quietness annoyed her. If they couldn’t be more lively after those large doses of alcohol, when could they be? They were tall, dressed in good tweeds and in their thirties. All looked exasperatingly alike, though she had to admit that they weren’t. One was clean-shaven; one had a dark moustache; and the third a fair moustache.
They had looked up and smiled at her encounter with that intolerable woman, but Janet had not responded. A minute later she decided that the smiles were sympathetic, but it was too late. They ignored her politely – all except fair moustache of whose eyes she was occasionally aware.
Twenty interminable minutes passed. An unshaven porter in dirty shirt and green baize apron put his head through the bar hatch and said:
‘Time, gentlemen, please!’
Dark moustache looked at his watch.
‘Nonsense – it’s not half past ten yet! And this lady has been waiting half an hour to be served.’
‘The missus says it’s time,’ replied the porter.
He crashed down the bar hatch with the finality of a guillotine and disappeared.
Janet got up, thankful that the spell which had condemned her to see and not be seen was broken. The three men also rose.
‘Madam,’ said fair moustache, ‘I can only hope that you have graced this country long enough to know that all our hotels are not like this.’
‘I guess there are hellholes everywhere,’ Janet replied a little too emphatically, and then smiled.
They stood before her with such an air of concern and apology. They swayed very gently like benevolent elephants, but there was nothing else in speech or manner to suggest that the order of ‘three doubles’ had been repeated for most of the evening.
‘Mike,’ asked clean-shaven, ‘the red carpet?’
‘Indubi-dubitably, Jim,’ answered Mike-fair-moustache. ‘The lady has been humiliated, and she shall leave this hellhole, as she so rightly described it, with befitting dignity.’
Forty feet of bright crimson carpet ran from the front door across the lounge, past the bar hatch and down a passage. Jim and Mike walked straight out of the door with the leading edge. Dark moustache reluctantly followed with the rear end as if he were holding up a bride’s train. They spread the carpet down the steps and across the courtyard.
Their attitudes respectfully suggested Sir Walter Raleigh and his cloak. She hesitated. But there was no other way of leaving the hotel. She walked the length of the carpet disapprovingly, then giggled and swept the three a graceful curtsey.
The front door slammed.
‘Glad to get rid of us even if it costs ’em a carpet, Noll,’ said the clean-shaven Jim.
‘You and Mike. …’ began Noll-dark-moustache severely.
He was interrupted by an inviting hiss from the level of the pavement. The hoarse whisper of that unspeakable porter came from a grating under the steps.
‘Neat! Very neat! I ain’t seen nothink, see? I was down ’ere with the furnace, see? You got two minutes before she comes back to check the bar takin’s. We could nick ’alf the pub if you and me gets together. Ask for Len at Bob’s Pull-in Café.’
‘This,’ said Mike, staring at the shut door, ‘comes under the head of Things-which-were-funny-at-the-time.’
‘But we can’t run away like a bunch of juvenile delinquents,’ Noll protested. ‘Ring the bell and put it back!’
‘Ring, hell! How long is it going to take that manageress to see a joke? And with Len swearing blind that he stopped us getting away with it, which he would …’
‘JP accused of stealing carpet,’ said Noll in a voice which quoted headlines.
‘What’s a JP?’ Janet asked.
‘I am – and it’s what you call a judge.’
‘Roll it up and leave it in the backyard,’ Mike proposed decisively.
Between the silent houses which lined the court was a narrow passage. The three rolled up the carpet with one hearty shove, carried it through the alley and put it in the back of a parked station-wagon.
‘Hop in!’ Mike invited. ‘You’re too conspicuous.’
‘I don’t see how, or that it matters.’
‘Hair auburn. Complexion pale. Dressed in grey-green suit. Height five foot seven. Build slight. Speaks with American accent, possibly assumed. Suspected alias, Carpet Kate.’
Janet, sounding to herself too impeccably formal, replied that her name was Janet Morland and that she was catching the 11.05 back to London.
‘You shall. Noll, we must go round two corners and think this out.’
‘Now, I’d better introduce your fellow criminals,’ said Noll as the car rolled away. ‘I am Oliver Cromwell. Can’t help it. I really am. Descended from the same family. This is Jim Blaize, Clerk to the Justices. I have warned him before not to nick carpets in bars where they aren’t used to him. And this party with the ginger moustache is Michael Lanchester. He is a wicked squire and farms. We’re all from the next county and nobody knows us here in Stanborough – or I’d go straight to the police station and fix this silly business.’
‘It wouldn’t be easy to keep it quiet even at home,’ Mike Lanchester remarked.
‘It would,’ said Jim. ‘I’ve told that local reporter of ours that if he doesn’t leave the pair of us out of his news it’s going to be justifiable homicide when I sit on his body.’
Janet froze. She was in a strange country and she had only been there thirty-six hours. She had
always heard that English country gentry were the most correct of human beings with the possible exception of Chinese mandarins. Still, homicide …
‘I forgot to mention that Jim is also the Coroner,’ said Oliver Cromwell.
At the back of the hotel was a high blank wall with one small door in it. On the opposite side of the street were no houses, only locked garages, more walls and a builder’s yard. Janet was relieved. Under such favourable circumstances even three lunatics could return a carpet.
‘All we have to do,’ said Noll, ‘is to stand on the roof of Mike’s car, pass the carpet up to a chap on the wall and pitch it over. I’ll just go up and see where it will fall.’
He climbed from the car onto the coping of the wall.
‘There’s a lean-to shed on this side,’ he reported. ‘If we roll the carpet down the slates it will land right in front of the hotel’s back door. The old girl can’t miss it.’
He hunched himself along the wall, and stood up to get a better view of a lit window.
‘She has telephoned the cops already,’ he whispered. ‘I can see ’em in there. Smart police force in Stanborough! It’s a curious thing,’ he added confidingly to Janet, ‘I’ve no head for heights and I’d never have dared to stand on this wall in daylight. Yet here I am at night steady as a rock with absolute …’
The rending crash was succeeded by a trickle of falling slates and an instant’s silence. Then action broke out all along the front. A whistle blew. Two doors slammed in the hotel. There was a splintering explosion as Noll showed he was still alive by knocking out some window which he couldn’t open. Mike Lanchester started the car. The justice of the peace shot out of the door in the wall covered with cobwebs and plaster.
‘Damn it, I went through the roof!’ he said.
A second later they were cruising innocently through the well-lit streets.
‘The next thing is to put Miss Morland on her train,’ Mike said firmly, ‘before she has to send for her consul to bail her out.’
He drove very carefully down a long street of little red-brick houses until the lights of the station were a hundred yards ahead.
‘Stop!’ Janet ordered, and nearly went through the windscreen.
‘Sorry! I thought you saw a bicyclist without a rear light.’
‘I just remembered that I told the hotel female I was waiting for a train,’ she explained.
‘Oh, the police won’t believe that!’ said Jim Blaize. ‘They’ll think it was your cover story.’
‘One never knows what they will or won’t believe,’ Noll warned, gloomily fishing for bits of slate inside his shirt. ‘When they stopped the car with all Mike’s silver from the manor in it, they waved him on again because he said his mother was ill.’
‘I’ll go with her,’ said Mike, taking immediate charge.
Janet liked the proprietary air with which he accompanied her to the station as if he were seeing off a guest.
‘This sort of thing always happens as soon as one arrives in a foreign country or not at all,’ he said. ‘I wish we could have met more formally.’
She responded at once.
‘I’d never forgive you if you didn’t write to me care of the consulate and tell me what happened.’
‘You’ll probably see it in tomorrow’s evening paper anyway. Well, here we are!’
They entered the booking hall. By the ticket collector’s box, stolidly examining the passengers for London, were two constables.
‘Turn round quietly as if we had just been checking the timetables and walk straight back to the car!’ Mike whispered. ‘They haven’t spotted us yet.’
All went well while they crossed the station courtyard. Then they heard a shout of ‘Hey!’
‘Don’t look round! Pretend it can’t possibly be meant for us!’
But it was. Janet gave a hitch to her pencil skirt and ran. The car was already turned and the door open. They beat the constables to it by three seconds.
‘That is the end,’ Mike Lanchester said as they shot off into a network of obscure streets. ‘Even if we get clear they can trace the car to me.’
Jim remarked cheerfully that they had dealt with the evidence while the two were away. A piece of sacking hanging out from the boot had got tied round the rear numberplate, and Noll had decorated the front with engine oil.
‘But it’s all very well,’ Noll said. ‘I’m going to surrender and explain as best I can. We can’t get clear without some tricky driving and we are none of us sober enough. Slow and cautious, yes. Fast, no. I gave a bloke three months last week for thinking he could drive because he could still talk.’
Janet approved. If they had to stand in the dock while their story was telephoned through to eager sub-editors it was just too bad, but they deserved it. Still, it did seem specially hard on Mike who wasn’t a judge or a coroner or anything else. And why specially, she asked herself. Oh, well …
‘I shall drive,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in rallies, and I’ve got an international driving licence.’
‘I don’t think it’s good here unless you register it. But that,’ Noll added hopefully, ‘is a minor crime.’
‘Where to?’ she insisted.
‘The first cop who will believe us. And he’s thirty miles away. And we daren’t take any of the main routes out of town.’
‘It looks as if we could get on to the Gloucester road by going down past the gas-works and along a track,’ said the coroner, studying the map.
To judge by the protests from the other two, Jim Blaize was famous for optimistic short cuts. But they could suggest nothing better.
‘To the gas-works, Kate, if I can find ’em,’ Mike said. ‘And we drive on the left of the road.’
The gas-works were complicated by the presence of a brewery and a flour mill. All the lanes between them ended at gates or loading bays.
‘I think this must be right,’ said Jim Blaize at last, pointing to a narrow cinder track across a marshy, derelict field.
Noll pointed out that if it was wrong they could never turn round.
‘We could always set fire to Mike’s car and walk.’
‘But what about the carpet?’ Noll asked.
‘I’d forgotten the carpet.’
Janet drove slowly ahead, the wheels crunching over cinders. Water seemed to be multiplying on all sides. They came to a barrier of iron railings with a gate only half shut.
‘Bit of luck!’ Jim exclaimed, getting out to open it. ‘If there’s a gate at the other end, we’re away!’
As she passed through, the headlights shone on a maze of tanks and ponds connected by batteries of pipes. It was evidently the town waterworks or sewage farm. Probably both, she reflected bad-temperedly. And did they let off first offenders in this country or just allow them to use lipstick after the first month inside?
Mike seemed instinctively to realise her sudden panic.
‘You’re a lovely driver,’ he said. ‘This track seems to have been made for two wheelbarrows to pass in safety.’
‘Wheelbarrows don’t skid,’ Janet answered, hastily correcting another where the cinders had worn to dust and solidified the mud.
The gate at the far end was chained and padlocked. There was no passing it without a hacksaw and no room to turn; but the track, with a ditch on both sides, curved round to follow the fence. It seemed to be a ringroad circling the plant.
At the next corner the ditches disappeared and the navigable area opened out, sloping up to a sludge tank on the left and down to level grass on the right. It suggested the banking on a miniature race track.
Janet slightly accelerated round the bend and was instantly out of control. She stopped with one rear wheel balanced uncertainly on the edge of the tank.
‘Skating rink,’ said Mike Lanchester, getting out to inspect the surface. ‘The tank has been leaking, and that nice, tempting surface is two inches of mud over smooth stone. The grass is all right if you take it steady.’
The three men got out an
d bounced the rear end of the car down the slope.
The ringroad took them back again to the entrance. Just as they were about to pass through and return to the gas-works a purposeful car entered the track at the town end. It could only be the police.
‘Had to expect it with our lights wandering about the low ground like a lot of blasted pixies!’ Noll groaned. ‘Now you, dear Carpet Kate, run like hell, climb the fence, find a respectable-looking driver on the Gloucester road and vanish! We shall deny all knowledge of you.’
Janet prepared to do so. She wasn’t going to be arrested, probably brutally, in a sewage farm just for mixing with coroners and squires. Didn’t they run the damned police anyway? And if they thought of their public positions instead of behaving like a lot of port-soaked bucks … but that was mean. And it was narrow-minded to be more afraid of English gaols than American. She was not going to desert them. And with the decision came inspiration.
‘Noll, I like to think this is a waterworks,’ she said. ‘But whatever it is we leave it in company. Just you remember your great ancestor because the Lord has delivered them into our hands or whatever it wasn’t he said.’
As the car came bounding through the gate she fled away in front. The police could certainly drive, even on an eight-foot wide cinder track, but she had been over it before and they had not. At the padlocked gate she hesitated an instant as if to confirm that it was shut, and then shot off by the ringroad with the police car ten yards behind.
On the curve where the track widened Janet took the grass. The police, seeing a chance to pass and get in front, swung round the top of the banking. There was a black fountain of sludge as they skidded slap over the edge into the tank.
A roar of delight went up from the three men. They waved out of the windows. Janet, grinning happily to herself, kept on course for the open gate and the gas-works.
‘Stop!’ the coroner ordered. ‘Carpet Kate, we are going to kiss you.’
They did. She noticed that Mike Lanchester was a little shy about it. It might be that he was the only one who really wanted to.
‘How ever did you think of it?’ Noll asked.
Days of Your Fathers Page 9
