VISITORS TO THE CRESENT

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘I wasn’t running away,’ he answered indifferently. ‘It was just that once I realized that you might not like my spying, it seemed wrong to stay in your house.’

  The naïvety of the remark, which seemed to hint at some minor breach of etiquette, chilled her.

  ‘Didn’t it occur to you before that I wouldn’t like it?’

  He shook his head wearily.

  ‘I didn’t think it was anything to do with you until Harper came along with his talk of sanctuary.’ He still sounded perplexed. ‘All this spying, this intrigue and double-intrigue, spins such a complex web that any questions of right and wrong get hopelessly tangled. It’s as though, once you are caught up in it, you have a kind of dispensation from the ordinary rules of conduct. I don’t suppose you understand that?’

  She felt that in a sense she understood very well; it seemed even now so unreal to her that she could not be shocked at what he had done. But she was afraid for him, and so she said sharply: ‘The law will be explicit enough about the rights and wrongs of your conduct, and it won’t give you any exemption, except possibly on one ground. You must go to the police.’

  ‘One ground?’ he repeated, puzzled but without hope.

  ‘Edward,’ she spoke with a kind of desperate gentleness, ‘however muddled things may seem in your mind now, the reason why you first became involved is at least fairly clear. You must go to the police and explain.’

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘They will come for me soon enough.’

  ‘But that is just what mustn’t happen! You must dissociate yourself voluntarily from Vickers, you must . . .’

  He said with heavy humour:

  ‘Do you want me to tell them a funny story about Vickers taking over the shop and running it as a front for an espionage ring without my suspecting he was interested in anything but antiques?’

  ‘No.’ She spoke quietly, persuasively, trying by stealth to reach him. ‘I want you to tell them why you are doing this; because there is some nobility in what you have done, because it is something which decent people would understand.’

  A little colour came into his face, a faint uneasy glow beneath the tight-stretched skin.

  ‘Tell that to Anna Pevrik, to the Countess, to Anton Slevak and see what answer they will give you! They will teach you not to throw words like nobility about so carelessly.’

  ‘Perhaps Anna and the others are too close to see things clearly.’

  But the little flame of anger had died down and he was very still beside her. She had the impression that now he was trying not to listen to her.

  ‘But what you have done has been forced on you to save your wife and child.’

  Her words were lost in the ebb and flow of the traffic. He watched a young girl with a book under her arm walk slowly across the grass. The girl was joined by a young man who put his arm round her; the couple sat down on the grass, leaning together. How simple, Edward thought, how . . .

  ‘It wouldn’t exonerate you completely, of course.’ Jessica was speaking slowly, as though she were dealing with a patient whose mental balance was precariously adjusted. ‘But the police would take into account the fact that you have been subject to blackmail and a good defence counsel . . .’

  The arguments sounded lame, like the stilted phrases read out in law courts. There could be no danger here, Edward thought as he listened. And yet, the moment that he relaxed, she said:

  ‘You have your wife’s letters, they must prove something.’

  ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No!’

  He put his hands to his eyes like a child blotting out something it cannot face.

  ‘You must not speak of my wife! Do you understand? You have no right.’

  ‘But she is a woman, she . . .’

  ‘But she is not your kind of woman! You could never understand her. Never! How could you understand? You have no knowledge of dangers but those that have been surmounted; you have never been defeated, humiliated, abandoned. There are no scars to mar your beauty, to corrode your gentleness.’

  The man and the girl on the grass did not move; it was as though the whole world had stiffened at his outburst. Beside him, Jessica whispered:

  ‘I had no idea you loved her so much.’

  The words flicked him to further violence.

  ‘Then you are very stupid! Why should I do all this otherwise?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why? Tell me that.’

  But she did not answer. A long habit of reticence prevented her from pressing home her advantage; the victory which was so near passed her by. They sat in silence and Edward grew quiet again.

  An aeroplane flew overhead, too fast for sight. Jessica watched the faint white scar cut across the blue sky. This was the noonday nightmare, bright with delirium. It was very hot. There were little beads of sweat on her forehead and she felt sick. Edward said bitterly:

  ‘You must go. Go to your policeman. You belong with him.’

  ‘But you belong with us,’ she protested. It would be so much easier if she could persuade him of this. ‘You belong with us.’ she repeated. ‘Not with Vickers, with us.’

  The soft, insistent little phrases fluttered at him and caught him round the heart. He turned his head away.

  ‘I will think about it,’ he promised desperately. ‘Only please go now.’

  She looked at him uneasily: she knew the value of his promises.

  ‘If you don’t, Edward, I shall have to betray you.’ She pleaded: ‘Please spare me that.’

  He seemed to grow smaller, a frail, sick man shrinking into himself.

  ‘I promise,’ he said. He said it as he might have said: ‘I will tell you. I will tell you everything if you will only leave me alone.’ Once, it would have seemed a great betrayal; but he had travelled a long way since then and now he had no qualms. He looked at her and repeated: ‘I promise.’

  Still, she hesitated. Her face had a dry, bleached look that frightened him and troubled memory.

  ‘I promise,’ he repeated, quivering, ‘I promise.’

  ‘In the morning, I shall go to the police,’ she said quietly. ‘Please spare me that, Edward.’

  There was no pity here, he told himself; only a desperate fear for her own peace of mind. He fanned the little spark of resentment because it made it easier to lie to her. When at last she left him, he watched her as she walked away. She walked slowly and her shoulders drooped, but her footsteps did not falter and she did not look back. A kind of strength surged up in him, a new, harsh anger.

  ‘Why should I spare you?’ he asked. ‘You and Harper are strong; you are the people who know where you stand and what you believe, who have the strength to pay whatever price is demanded. You are the ones that endure and survive. Why should I ease your burden?’ He remembered the scene in the police station, the scorn in the young inspector’s eyes; the young inspector had known better than to talk to him of nobility. ‘You belong with us.’ Never! In the end, there would be nothing but contempt; they would close their ranks against him.

  He could not sustain his anger; it drained slowly from him, leaving him shivering in the bright sunlight. He had told Jessica that it seemed wrong to stay in her house, and this was true; but it was a thing of emotion rather than a belief arrived at as a result of a conscious intellectual process of thought—something felt in the stomach rather than the mind. Sonya had taught him to suspect emotion; but emotion, though suspect, was becoming strong and insistent lately. He was finding that he was uneasy in Anna’s house, too. Anna, he now realized, would reject him completely if she found out that he had worked for the communists. ‘Worked for the communists.’ It was the first time he had put it so baldly to himself. His stomach reacted again; in its sick hollow something small and panic-stricken fluttered. What difference does it make? he asked himself. He had worked for so many causes, always under pressure of one kind or another, never really understanding because the great abstractions did not mean anything to him, had n
o power to move him whose only joy had lain in things small and homely.

  He looked around him with growing desperation. He could not stay with Anna; he could not stay with Jessica. What was to become of him?

  He looked towards the heath. It was green, but rather forlorn, like a land in a fairy story, full of an uneasy enchantment; it seemed to beckon, but he knew that if he ventured into it all the familiar landmarks would gradually fall away and he would never find the way back. The wilderness no longer appealed to him. He was afraid. He walked back to the street. The young man and the girl with the book were standing up, laughing and dusting down their clothes. Edward walked along the street.

  The street was full of people in bright summer clothes, rejoicing, pink and sweating in the sudden heat. They passed him by without a glance. He wanted, with a desperation strong as thirst, to make some kind of contact, to be assured that he was not completely unacceptable. He saw several Jews: it had been a Jew that had come to his house for refuge and now he hated all the Jews. But perhaps, in one of their faces, he would see a gleam of understanding. But there was nothing: the world seemed to have turned its back on him. But he could not make the return journey himself. It was only in the eyes of others that he could find the reassurance he needed; just as only in the eyes of others could he discover whether he was beautiful or ugly, lovable, amusing. It was not a thing he could do for himself. One word, he thought in agony, staring into the faces of strangers; one word, one gesture would be enough. He himself could make no movement; he had avoided understanding for so long that he had forgotten how to ask for it. It must come now as a gift, or not at all.

  A constable passed by, Edward thought: I have only to touch him, to tell him who and what I am, and he would grant me release. But that was an illusion of course; because then they would begin to question him, and the questions would go deeper and deeper . . . Nevertheless, the attraction of the constable was strong. Harper had started all this; perhaps only he could finish it, Edward followed the constable at a distance for some time, and close behind Edward there walked a young girl carrying a book.

  IV

  On the evening that Jessica watched Vickers sending out his wireless message more active steps were being taken elsewhere. The message had been picked up, not for the first time, at Scotland Yard and at two wireless stations on the outskirts of London. At each place a bearing had been taken, a line plotted, and where the lines converged a triangle had been drawn on a map of London. The small area within the triangle included the Holland Park district.

  A few evenings later, while a police sergeant was laboriously reproducing an overheard conversation in the Red Lion, a mobile van equipped with a wireless receiver began to tour the Holland Park area. Harper was in Cambridge, but a message received from his office made him decide to return to London late that night. Meanwhile, MacLeish went down to Potter Street police station to interview Paddy Brett.

  Paddy had blazed off at the constable who came to call on her and she had expended more energy on the station sergeant. MacLeish recognized his own weakness in her as soon as he saw her: she had given too much too early in the battle. He noted also, in an impersonal way, that physically she looked rather frail. She was very thin and there was a feverishness in her vivacity. Given time, she would crack; and the one thing he had plenty of was time. So, just for once, he adopted Harper’s tactics and deliberately allowed her to explode her fireworks. He went over her previous statement with a patient thoroughness that she was unwise enough to dismiss as muddle-headedness. By about half-past nine he was rewarded by the usual symptoms of strain; the quick blinking of the eyes, the constant moistening of the lips, the ragged answers, the desire to escape betrayed by furtive glances round the room.

  ‘I’ve been over this a dozen times,’ she protested too stridently. ‘What’s the trouble? Can’t the constable read his shorthand back?’

  ‘You don’t want to retract anything?’

  ‘No.’

  MacLeish gave her a long, judicial stare and said:

  ‘I am giving you a chance to tell me the truth.’

  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that he was no more concerned with the truth than she was, but something in his tone silenced her. For the last quarter of an hour she had been telling herself that the ordeal was nearly over, that she would soon be out in the street where the air was cool and the light less harsh. But the note of satisfaction in his tone warned her that this was only the first stage in their encounter: the preliminary skirmish was over and battle would now commence. Her heart gave a little flutter of dismay.

  MacLeish noticed her distress.

  ‘Well, carry on!’ she said impatiently. ‘You’ve given me my chance and you know what you can do with it.’

  He watched her hands twisting in her lap, the muscles flexing as she braced herself for another effort. He had sat like that in the dentist’s waiting-room when he was a kid, and his mother had told the dentist off for keeping him in suspense. He got to his feet.

  ‘I’ll send out for sandwiches and some tea for you, if you like?’ he offered.

  He counted on a last show of defiance and was rewarded by a quick refusal.

  ‘I’m fussy where I eat.’

  ‘Very well.’

  He himself was hungry and thirsty, and he saw no reason why he should not freshen up before he went any further. He left her alone for an hour.

  She fed on her hatred of him and by the time that he returned she had drawn heavily on her reserve of strength. This time the constable had been replaced by a sergeant. The sergeant was Paddy’s idea of the typical policeman: square, thick-set, with a bull neck and the face of a man who likes trouble, particularly if the liking can be legalized by a uniform. He sat down beside MacLeish and fixed his eyes on Paddy’s legs.

  ‘Miss Brett, I believe you had a drink at the Red Lion in Parliament Street today,’ MacLeish said suddenly.

  She felt her stomach muscles tighten and she was alarmed at how breathless she sounded when she retorted:

  ‘It’s not a criminal offence, is it? There were plenty of policemen there.’

  MacLeish bent his head over a report on the table: ‘Guzzling beer and telling one another dirty stories?’

  Paddy clenched her hands together. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘You remember Mr. Ames saying that?’

  Her throat was so dry that she could hardly swallow and her eyes pricked as though needles were being jabbed into them. She tried to concentrate, to work out what the next question would be, to keep one move ahead of him.

  ‘Answer me, please.’

  ‘Maybe he said something of the sort. I don’t remember every remark a fellow makes when I’m drinking with him.’

  The sergeant gave a knowing smile; although she turned her head away she was aware of his eyes sliding down her body with a contemptuous lust that made her fingers ache to claw at him.

  ‘But you do remember what he said afterwards?’ MacLeish insisted.

  The need to attack was imperative.

  ‘He said that he hoped I would stick to the truth about what happened on April 20th because he had an idea that the police might try to frame him.’

  This jibe did not disturb MacLeish because he knew that the little spurt of anger was more than she could afford now. He said softly:

  ‘I don’t think that’s the way Ames put it.’

  ‘It’s the way I remember it.’

  ‘And there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Was there? Well, you tell me about it then.’

  ‘If your memory needs refreshing . . .’ MacLeish read out a statement. ‘Do you deny that Mr. Ames said that at the time when he was supposed to be with you he was in fact drinking at a club in the West End?’

  ‘He can’t have been if he was with me, can he?’

  He realized that once she was brought to a point where all that was required was a simple denial she would be on stronger ground. He shifted his attack.<
br />
  ‘Do you often meet Mr. Ames?’

  She looked at him, her eyes blinking rapidly. Her reactions were becoming very slow; each time his questions took a new direction her mind stumbled and for a while nothing made any sense.

  ‘Answer me,’ he rapped out. ‘Do you often meet Mr. Ames?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever been out with him before, in fact?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why was it so important that you should see him on this occasion?’

  ‘I suppose he wanted a drinking companion.’

  ‘He goes to the Red Lion nearly every day, I believe – why should it so suddenly be important to have a companion?’

  ‘All right!’ For the first time she shouted. ‘He wanted to discuss the alibi with me. Christ! We got to that point half an hour ago.’

  She put her hand to her eyes. It was like a merry-go-round, question and answer, question and answer, question and answer, and then round to the same point again, the same question swinging out towards her. Now he was saying:

  ‘Wouldn’t it seem reasonable to you that something must have happened to make him feel that the alibi would no longer stand?’

  She tried to break away from the relentless rhythm.

  ‘There have been lots of security checks at places recently and I suppose people are getting nervous . . .’

  ‘Security checks?’ MacLeish managed to sound very surprised. ‘What are you suggesting?’

  She had not attached much importance to the things which Ames had muttered about security; now she wondered whether she had made a mistake. While she fumbled with this new development, MacLeish was repeating his question:

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  His voice drilled into her brain so that she had to reply to stop the pressure.

  ‘Just that it makes everyone nervous, feeling they’re watched all the time . . .’

  ‘You think Mr. Ames is worried from the security point of view?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you have just said that he was nervous and felt . . .’

  ‘I didn’t say that! I meant people generally who work in that kind of outfit.’

  ‘When you talked to him about this alibi was the question of security mentioned?’