Blott on the Landscape

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Surprise is of the essence,’ he explained to Hoskins.

  ‘She’s had that already,’ Hoskins pointed out. He had in his time supervised the eviction of too many obstinate householders to be daunted by the threat of Lady Maud, and besides he was relying on Sir Giles to undermine her efforts. ‘She’s not going to give us any trouble. You’ll see. When it comes to the push she’ll go. They all do. It’s the law.’ Dundridge wasn’t convinced. From his personal experience he knew how little the law meant to Lady Maud.

  ‘The thing is to move quickly,’ he explained.

  ‘Move quickly?’ said Hoskins. ‘You can’t move quickly when you’re building a motorway. It’s a slow process.’

  Dundridge waved his objections aside. ‘We must hit at key objectives. Seize the commanding heights. Maintain the initiative,’ he said grandly.

  Hoskins looked at him doubtfully. He wasn’t used to this sort of military language. ‘Look, old boy, I know how you feel and all that but …’

  ‘You don’t,’ said Dundridge vehemently.

  ‘But what I was going to say was that there’s no need to go in for anything complicated. Just let things take their natural course and you’ll find people will get used to the idea. It’s amazing how adaptable people are.’

  ‘That’s precisely what’s worrying me,’ said Dundridge. ‘Now then the essence of my plan is to make random sorties.’

  ‘Random sorties?’ said Hoskins. ‘What on earth with?’

  ‘Bulldozers,’ said Dundridge and spread out a map of the district.

  ‘Bulldozers? You can’t have bulldozers roaming the countryside making random sorties,’ said Hoskins, now thoroughly alarmed. ‘What the hell are they going to randomly sort?’

  ‘Vital areas of control,’ said Dundridge, ‘lines of communication. Bridgeheads.’

  ‘Bridgeheads? But—’

  ‘As I see it,’ Dundridge continued implacably, ‘the main centre of resistance is going to be here.’ He pointed to the Cleene Gorge. ‘Strategically this is the vital area. Seize that and we’ve won.’

  ‘Seize it? You can’t suddenly go in and seize the Cleene Gorge!’ shouted Hoskins. ‘The motorway has to proceed by deliberate stages. Contractors work according to a schedule and we have to keep to that.’

  ‘That is precisely the mistake you’re making,’ said Dundridge. ‘Our tactics must be to alter the schedule just when the enemy least expects it.’

  ‘But that’s impossible,’ Hoskins insisted. ‘You can’t go about knocking people’s houses down without giving them fair warning.’

  ‘Who said anything about knocking houses down?’ said Dundridge indignantly. ‘I certainly didn’t. What I have in mind is something entirely different. Now then what we’ll do is this.’

  For the next half hour he outlined his grand strategy while Hoskins listened. When he had finished Hoskins was impressed in spite of himself. He had been quite wrong to call Dundridge a nincompoop. In his own peculiar way the man had flair.

  ‘All the same I just hope it doesn’t have to come to that,’ he said finally.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Dundridge. ‘That bitch isn’t going to sit back and let us put a motorway through her wretched house without putting up a struggle. She’s going to fight to the bitter end.’

  Hoskins went back to his office thoughtfully. There was nothing illegal about Dundridge’s plan in spite of the military jargon. In a way it was extremely shrewd.

  The Committee for the Preservation of the Cleene Gorge met under the Presidency of General Burnett at Handyman Hall. Lady Maud was the first speaker.

  ‘I intend to fight this project to the bitter end,’ she said, fulfilling Dundridge’s prediction. ‘I have no intention of being driven from my own home simply because a lot of bureaucratic dunderheads in London take it into their thick skulls to ignore the recommendations of a properly constituted Inquiry. It’s outrageous.’

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ said Mrs Bullett-Finch, ‘particularly after what Lord Leakham said about preserving the wildlife of the area. What I can’t understand is why they changed their minds so suddenly.’

  ‘As I see it,’ said General Burnett, ‘the change is a direct consequence of Puckerington’s resignation. I have it on the highest authority that the Government felt that the new candidate was bound to lose the by-election if they went ahead with the route through Ottertown.’

  ‘Why did Puckerington resign?’ asked Miss Percival.

  ‘Ill-health,’ said Colonel Chapman. ‘He’s got a dicky heart.’

  Lady Maud said nothing. What she had just heard explained a great many things and suggested more. She knew now why Sir Giles had smiled so secretively at her and why he had had that air of expectation. Everything suddenly fell into place in her mind. She understood why he had been so alarmed about the possibility of a tunnel, why he had insisted on Ottertown, why he had been so pleased at Lord Leakham’s decision. Above all, she realized for the first time the full enormity of his betrayal. Colonel Chapman put her thoughts into numbers.

  ‘I suppose there is this to be said for it. I’ve heard a rumour that we are going to get increased compensation,’ he said. ‘The figure mentioned was twenty per cent. That makes your sum, Lady Maud, something in the region of three hundred thousand pounds.’

  Lady Maud sat rigid in her chair. Three hundred thousand pounds. It was not her share. Sir Giles owned the Hall. Owned it and had put it up for sale in the only way legally available to him. Faced with such treachery there was nothing left for her to say. She shook her head wearily and while the discussion continued round her she stared out of the window to where Blott was mowing the lawn.

  The meeting broke up without any decision being taken on the next move.

  ‘Poor old Maud seems quite broken up about this dreadful business,’ General Burnett said to Mrs Bullett-Finch as they walked across the drive to their cars. ‘It’s knocked all the spirit out of her. Bad business.’

  ‘One does feel so terribly sorry for her,’ Mrs Bullett-Finch agreed.

  Lady Maud watched them leave and then went back into the house to think. Committees would achieve nothing now. They would talk and pass resolutions but when the time for taking action came they would still be talking. Colonel Chapman had given the game away by talking about money. They would settle.

  She went down the passage to the study and stood there looking round the room. It was here that Giles had thought the whole thing out, in this sanctum; at this desk where her father and grandfather had sat, and it was here that she would sit and think until she had planned some way of stopping the motorway and of destroying him. In her mind the two things were inextricably linked. Giles had conceived the idea of the motorway, he would be broken by it. There was no compunction left in her. She had been outwitted and betrayed by a man she had always despised. She had sold herself to him to preserve the house and the family and the knowledge of her own guilt added force to her determination. If need be she would sell herself to the devil to stop him now. Lady Maud sat down behind the desk and stared at the filigree of her grandfather’s silver inkstand for inspiration. It was shaped like a lion’s head. An hour later she had found the solution she was looking for. She reached for the phone and was about to pick it up when it rang. It was Sir Giles calling from London.

  ‘I just thought I had better let you know I shan’t be back this weekend,’ he said. ‘I know it is a damned inconvenient time for me to be away with all this motorway business going on, but I really can’t get away.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Lady Maud, feigning her usual degree of indifference, ‘I daresay I’ll be able to cope without you.’

  ‘How are things going?’

  ‘We’ve just had a committee meeting to discuss the next move. We are thinking of organizing protest meetings round the county.’

  ‘That’s the sort of thing we need,’ said Sir Giles. ‘I’m doing my damnedest down here to get the Ministry to reconsider. Keep up the good work at you
r end.’ He rang off. Lady Maud smiled grimly. She would keep up the good work all right. And he could go on doing his damnedest. She picked up the phone and dialled. In the next two hours she spoke to her bank manager, the Head Keeper at Whipsnade Zoo, the Game Warden at Woburn Wildlife Park, the managers of five small private zoos and a firm of fencing experts in Birmingham. Finally she went outside to look for Blott.

  Ever since the night of Dundridge’s visit she had been worried by Blott’s attitude. It hadn’t been like him to behave like that and she had been alarmed by the sound of the shotgun going off outside. She rather regretted what she had said about his drinking too. It certainly hadn’t had any good effect. If anything he had taken to going off to the Royal George more often and late one night she had heard him singing in the pinetum. ‘Typically Italian,’ she thought, confusing ‘Wir Fahren Gegen England’ with La Traviata. ‘Probably pining for Naples.’ But Blott stumbling through the park was merely drunk and if he was pining for anything it was for her innocence which Dundridge’s visit had destroyed.

  She found him, as she had expected, in the kitchen garden. ‘Blott,’ she said, ‘I want you to do something for me.’

  Blott grunted morosely. ‘What?’

  ‘You know the wall safe in the study?’ Blott nodded. ‘I want you to open it for me.’

  Blott shook his head and went on weeding the onion bed. ‘Not possible without the combination,’ he said.

  ‘If I had the combination I wouldn’t have to ask you to open it,’ Lady Maud said tartly.

  Blott shrugged. ‘If I don’t know the combination,’ he said, ‘how do I open it?’

  ‘You blow it open,’ said Lady Maud. Blott straightened up and looked at her.

  ‘Blow it open?’

  ‘With explosive. Use a … what are those things with flames … oxy …’

  ‘Acetylene torch,’ said Blott. ‘It wouldn’t work.’

  ‘I don’t mind how you do it. You can pull it out of the wall and drop it from the roof for all I care but I want that safe opened. I’ve got to know what is inside it.’

  Blott pushed back his hat and scratched his head. This was a new Lady Maud speaking. ‘Why don’t you ask him for the combination?’ he said.

  ‘Him?’ said Lady Maud with a new contempt. ‘Because I don’t want him to know. That’s why.’

  ‘He’ll know it if we blow it open,’ Blott pointed out.

  Lady Maud thought for a moment. ‘We can always say it was burglars,’ she said finally.

  Blott considered the implications of this remark and found them to his liking. ‘Yes, we could do that. Let’s go and have a look at it.’

  They went into the house and stood in the study examining the safe which was set into the wall behind some books.

  ‘Difficult,’ said Blott. He went into the dining-room next door and looked at the wall on that side. ‘It’s going to do a lot of damage,’ he said when he came back.

  ‘Do whatever damage you have to. The house is coming down if we don’t do something. What does it matter if we do some damage to it now? It can always be repaired.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Blott, who had begun to understand. ‘Then I’ll use a sledgehammer.’ He went round to the workshop in the yard and returned with a sledgehammer, a metal wedge and a crowbar.

  ‘You’re quite sure?’ he asked. Lady Maud nodded. Blott swung the sledgehammer against the dining-room wall. Half an hour later the safe was out of the wall. Together they carried it outside and laid it on the drive. It was quite small. Blott twiddled the knob idly and tried to think what next to do.

  ‘What we need is some high-explosive,’ he said. ‘Dynamite would do it.’

  ‘We haven’t got any dynamite,’ Lady Maud pointed out. ‘And you can’t go into a shop and buy it. You couldn’t bore a hole in it and hoik things out with a wire?’

  ‘Too thick and the steel is too hard,’ said Blott. ‘It’s like armour-plate on a tank.’ He stopped. Like a tank. Somewhere among the armoury of weapons he had collected during the war there was a rocket-launcher. It was in a long wooden box and labelled PIAT. Projectile Infantry Anti-Tank. Now where had he buried it?

  17

  As dusk fell over the Cleene Gorge Blott left the Lodge with a spade. He had had his supper, sausages and mashed potatoes, and was comfortably full. Above all he was happy. As he followed the park wall round to the west and found the exact spot where he had climbed over as a prisoner of war he was boyishly excited. There had been a piece of iron fencing which he had propped against the wall to give himself a leg-up. It was still there, rusting in a patch of stinging-nettles. Blott dragged it out and leant it against the wall and climbed up. The barbed-wire had gone but as he straddled the top of the wall and dropped down on the other side he had the same feeling of freedom he had experienced night after night over thirty years before. Not that he had disliked life in the camp. He had felt freer then than at any time before. To sneak out at night and roam the woods on his own was to escape from the orphanage in Dresden and all the petty restrictions of his dreadful childhood. It had been to cock a snook at authority and to be himself.

  And so it was now as he pushed through the bracken and began to climb through the trees. He was doing the forbidden thing again and he exulted in it. Half a mile up the hillside he came to a clearing. You turned left here. Blott turned left, following the old instinct as surely as if there had been a path there, and came out into the setting sunlight behind a mound of stones that had once been a cottage. Here he turned up the hill again until he found the tree he was looking for. It was a large old oak. Blott went round the trunk and found the slash he had made in the bark. He walked away from the tree, counting his paces. Then he took off his jacket and began to dig. It took him an hour to get down to the cache but it was there exactly where he had recalled. He pulled out a box and prised the lid open with a hammer. Inside caked in grease and wrapped in oilskin was a two-inch mortar. He dragged out another box. Mortar bombs. Finally he found what he was looking for. The long box and the four cases of armour-piercing rockets. He sat down on the box and wondered what to do next. Now that he came to think about it, all he needed were the rockets. All he had to do was to tie a piece of string to the fin and drop it from a height on to the safe. That would do the trick just as well as firing the rocket at the safe.

  Still, he had come so far, he might as well take the PIAT home with him and clean it up. It would make an interesting souvenir. Blott put the mortar back with the cases of bombs, and covered them with earth. Then he went back down the hill with the long box. It was very heavy and he had to stop fairly frequently to rest. By the time he got back to the Lodge it was dark. He humped the box up to his room and went back for the rockets. He didn’t take those up to his room but left them in the grass outside. He didn’t feel like sleeping beside some rockets that were thirty years old.

  In the morning he was up early and busy in the Gorge. He fetched the safe down on a wheelbarrow and stood it upright at the bottom of the cliff. Then he took a long piece of twine and tied it to the knob of the combination lock before going back up the cliff with it and attaching it to an overhanging branch so that it ran in a straight line some fifty feet down to the safe. Finally he fetched two of the finned projectiles and tied a short length of string to the fin of the first. At the other end of the string he tied a small ring, undid the twine and fitted the ring over it and tied it back on to the branch. Then he lay down at the top of the cliff and removed the cap from the detonator on the nose of the rocket. Blott peered over the edge. There was the safe directly below. He held the PIAT bomb out and let go and watched as it plummeted down the twine. The next moment there was a flash and a roar. Blott shut his eyes and pulled his head back and as he did so something hurtled past him into the air above. He looked up. The fin of the rocket reached its peak, curved over and fell into the road behind him. Blott got up and went down to the safe. The bomb had missed the combination lock but it had done its job. A small hole the size of a
pencil was blown in the front of the safe and the door was loose.

  Lady Maud was having breakfast when the blast came. For a moment she thought Blott was out shooting rabbits but there had been a concussion and an echo about the explosion that had suggested something more powerful than a shotgun. She went outside and saw Blott coming down the cliff path on the other side of the river. Of course, the safe. He had sworn he would blow it open and that’s what he had done. She ran across the lawn and through the pinetum and over the footbridge.

  Blott was bending over the safe when she came up.

  ‘Have you done it?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, it’s open,’ said Blott, ‘but there’s nothing much in it.’ Lady Maud could see that. The safe was much smaller inside than she had expected and it appeared to be filled with burnt, charred and torn fragments of paper. She reached in and picked one out. It was a portion of what had once been a photograph. She held it up and looked at it. It appeared to be the legs of a naked man. She reached in and took out another piece, this time an arm, a bare arm and what looked like a woman’s breast. She peered into the safe again but apart from the shreds of photographs there was nothing inside.

  ‘I’ll go and get an envelope,’ Lady Maud said. ‘Don’t touch anything until I get back.’ She walked off thoughtfully towards the Hall while Blott went back to the top of the cliff and collected the unused PIAT bomb. At least he knew now that they worked. ‘Might come in handy,’ he said to himself and took it back to the Lodge.

  An hour later the safe was buried under some bushes at the base of the cliff and Blott had gone back to the kitchen garden. In the study Lady Maud sat at the desk and examined the fragments of photographs, trying to sort out which portion of anatomy fitted the next. It was a difficult task and an unedifying one. The photographs were too charred and torn to be reassembled properly and besides the force of the explosion had decapitated the participants in what even on this slender evidence appeared to be a series of extremely unnatural acts. And slender was the word. Certainly in the case of the man. That ruled out Sir Giles. It was a pity. She could have done with some photographic proof of his obscene habits. She picked up another fragment and was about to look for the appropriate place in the jigsaw puzzle where it would fit when she suddenly realized where she had seen those slender legs and pale feet. Of course. Twinkling across the marble floor of the hall. She looked again at the portion of leg, at the arm. She was certain now. Dundridge. Dundridge engaged in … It was unthinkable. She was just trying to work out what this extraordinary idea implied when the front doorbell rang. She went out and opened the door. It was the manager of the high-security fencing company.