Cleder’s Priory was a gem of a seventeenth-century house, compact and ornate with parkland running up to the front door and a walled garden which looked as if it was all that remained of a much vaster one. I recognised that because our own farm-house had stood in pasture. My father could not afford to keep up more than the kitchen garden and the fruit on its walls.
I rang the bell which Mrs. Hilliard answered herself. She was a very imposing personage in her middle fifties getting on for six feet tall, though some of that may have been made up by a mass of white hair almost as towering as in pictures of fashion two hundred years ago. She was dressed in a blue seaman’s jersey, smart and expensive jodhpurs and a pair of carpet slippers.
She, too, asked if I was the Portuguese. I answered that I was Romanian and had been entrusted with a message for her. She took me into the entrance hall where I handed over the envelope while we both remained standing. She read the slip of paper. Eyes gave away nothing. Mouth was perhaps a little tighter than before.
‘Your name?’ she asked.
‘My name it is Prefacutu.’
‘And who gave you this?’
‘Anozzer Romanian. In London.’
‘And where did he get it?’
‘From zer Russian Embassy.’
‘I see. Well, thank you very much. You’ll find it difficult to get back to London now, so you had better stay the night. That suits you?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘Come along, and I’ll show you your room. It’s in the annexe.’
I picked up my bag and followed her through a fine, oak-panelled living room, furnished in half a dozen different and dignified styles so far as they could be seen under dogs and bits of saddlery. We went out through French windows into the walled garden closed on the far side by a two-storey building like a range of stables—a blank face of ancient, rose-coloured brick with magnificent pear trees espaliered over it.
She led me through a door into a sort of kitchen full of sacks and tubs with an immense, lidded boiler—a copper we used to call it—and a butcher’s blood-stained slab; then up some stairs into a passage which looked as if it had once served living quarters. She ushered me into a room which had indeed an old bed in it and a broken arm-chair. Before I could protest or even show surprise she had slammed the door and locked it.
‘You can hear me all right?’ she asked from outside.
‘I just come bring letter,’ I said. ‘Know nozzing!’
‘Well, what you do know you’re going to spill. If you climb out of the window you’ll land in the kennel yard. The hounds are all right if people come in through the gate, but one can’t say what they might do to anyone who drops into the middle of them from the air. That boiler you passed is for cooking their meat, by the way. There’s a pot under the bed. Empty it down the chute! Goodbye for the present, Mr. Prefacutu!’
I heard her footsteps go down the stairs and die away. She was quite right about the window. It was boarded up, but through the cracks I could see the hounds lazing in the yard below. Her suggestion that they might attack anyone who startled them by dropping from the sky was hardly believable, but might well alarm some city-bred foreigner. However, it was not an experiment I was eager to try, though brought up among dogs including foxhound puppies. Every countryman has heard stories—usually myths—of babies and helpless old people who have fallen into pig sties or kennels.
The chute sounded hopeful, but it wasn’t. Either it had been there since these outbuildings were first constructed or some groom had made it. It was a rusty iron pipe splayed out into a funnel at the top, and it led, my nose told me, directly down to the dung heap. Walls and door were solid. So there I was.
Having satisfied myself that escape was going to be a hard night’s work—assuming I could detach a leg of the iron bed to use as a lever—I sat down in the ruins of the chair and tried to make sense of my reception. It looked as if Mrs. Hilliard were about to hand me over to the police or—as the innkeeper put it—worse. If that was so, the sooner, the better. On the other hand she wanted a lengthy, personal chat with me first. She must also be reckoning that I had too guilty a conscience to yell for help. The old bitch, I said to myself, was wrong there. In the last of the light I saw through the boarded window someone attending to the hounds and shouted to him to let me out. He paid no attention whatever.
Nobody brought me anything to eat or drink. When night fell I wrenched off a bit of my bed fairly easily and started to poke around in the pitch darkness for a bit of rotten flooring I had noticed earlier. I was making progress, or thought I was, when my improvised lever slipped on the smooth top of a beam and crushed my thumb against a sound plank. I called on God to damn and blast the thing to bloody hell and hopped round the room mouthing further comments on its birth and sexual practices.
‘I’m afraid you must have injured yourself, Mr. Prefacutu,’ said a quiet voice outside the door. ‘And how very good your English is!’
My thumb hurt like the devil and I hadn’t the heart to play the fool with broken English. Nothing gives away a man’s true native language so absolutely as a fine string of idiomatic curses, especially if he reverts in agony to the barndoor dialect of his youth.
‘Wiltshire, Mr. Prefacutu? Or is it Somerset?’
‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t know you were there.’
‘Oh, don’t apologise! I’ve used much worse in the hunting field.’
‘Would you mind telling me why the hell you are keeping me here and spying on me?’
‘Because I have had just about enough of slick young gentlemen from MI5 and their dumb agents.’
‘I am not a slick young gentleman from MI5. I could be one of their agents, but I don’t think so.’
‘What’ll you do if I let you out?’
‘Dot you one and run.’
‘Why not have something to eat first?’
‘I don’t want anything to eat.’
‘Temper, temper! Come out of there, young man, and behave yourself!’
She unlocked the door and threw it back, standing on the far side of it.
‘If there’s any dotting to be done I’ll do it. Go down the stairs in front of me and continue across the garden! You will see a rather larger man than you standing at the French window. Say good evening to him politely and sit down until I join you.’
I did what she ordered, for there was no escape from the garden. I observed a burly man standing in the lit window and that he carried a hunting crop, so I greeted him as if all this was in the day’s hospitable work. Mrs. Hilliard entered not far behind me.
‘Thank you, John,’ she said to her retainer. ‘That will be all right now.’
‘I’ll be over the way in the gun-room, Master, if you should want me.’
When he had gone out and closed the door, she offered me a cigarette and made herself comfortable between one very aged foxhound and an immovable tom-cat. I myself was more upright in a chair opposite to her. It was the proper position for interrogation though she had not obviously arranged it.
‘Now, Mr. Prefacutu! Why did you come here speaking English like some sort of greaser just off the boat?’
I replied that I was told it might carry more conviction.
‘Who told you? A Whitehall office boy?’
‘I have nothing to do with Whitehall.’
‘Do you want to be fed to the hounds?’
‘They might touch it boiled, Mrs. Hilliard, but not raw.’
‘I don’t see why not. You won’t taste of soot if you were brought up in Wiltshire.’
‘I can speak it.’
‘I’ll say you can! Do you think the address you gave me is correct?’
‘I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. The chap I got it from was really a Romanian and in touch with the Russian Embassy.’
‘What made him choose you?’
‘Well, my mother was Romanian.’
‘Your father took your mother’s name?’
‘An old Romanian custom.’
&
nbsp; ‘Mr. Prefacutu, I guess that Women’s Lib was not that popular in Romania when you were born.’
I spotted for the first time that she was American or had lived long in America.
‘Why do you find it inconvenient to use your real name?’
‘That’s no business of yours or theirs.’
‘By God, the boy has told me the truth for once!’ she exclaimed. ‘What have they got on you?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘Well, they have now. You’re a traitor and you’ll fetch up in the Old Bailey.’
‘I don’t see much harm in just giving you an address, Mrs. Hilliard. I haven’t the least sympathy for your nephew. My opinion of him is just the same as that of the rest of his countrymen. He seems to have been a good fellow but lots of communists are.’
‘What makes you think he was a nice guy?’
‘Only something the landlord of your pub told me. I called in there to ask my way. He thought I was the Portuguese butler come down for an interview, just as you did.’
‘Boy, you’ve given me an idea. How about pretending to be just that for a day or two? I’ve a feeling that it’s for your good and I can cancel the real interview. But you’re perfectly free to have a meal and then go. John will drive you to Totnes. He’ll say nothing of what happened and I shall tell Forrest at the pub that you didn’t suit me.’
I agreed to stay—an instant decision which needs a bit of explaining. In taking Mr. Marghiloman’s money I had promised to observe her carefully and report on how she had reacted, but I don’t think that counted for much. Curiosity decidedly did count. There were loose bits and pieces all over the place which might be picked up and used as they had been in the case of Uncle Vasile. And the lost dog was still in need of a leader in spite of the fact that its devotion to Councillor Sokes had been an unmitigated disaster. Mrs. Hilliard radiated leadership—the dominant female of a pack if I ever saw one. What she wanted of me or for me was beyond guessing, but my answer to her was certainly inspired by an instantaneous, improbable picture of a return to my own identity and my own west country.
So I put on the black suit and black tie which she had rooted out from somewhere and next morning began my duties—or what resembled my duties near enough after a hint or two from her. She seemed to do very well without a resident married couple. Wives of the hunt servants came in for a few hours daily to clean up and accepted my presence quite naturally. Even John Penpole, the Huntsman, assumed that I had been mistaken on arrival for just another lousy snooper round the house and that I really was a Portuguese who had arrived unexpectedly.
All I knew was how to serve drinks and to make a variety of omelettes. That was enough to keep up appearances. When neighbours dropped in—which they did often for business or a chat—Mrs. Hilliard told them that I was only there for a day or two until a new couple turned up. She knew her village, she said, and she wasn’t going to give them a juicy bit of scandal to enjoy about how the old girl had taken to good-looking, young Latins in the flower of her age.
She was out to dinner, all dressed up, on the night after my arrival. The rest of the time she was at home and I saw a good deal of her, always speaking my broken English and taking orders respectfully. She called me Willie, after asking me what my Christian name was and getting the answer that it was anything she liked.
The third day after my arrival gave us one of those glorious English mornings when the scattered oaks and elms of the parkland round the house drooped in the green heat as if to protect the smaller life beneath them. Mrs. Hilliard told me that she was going out to sit on the Bank—a smooth turf rampart which must once have been an outer wall of the original priory—and at midday I was to bring her a well-iced Tom Collins in a pint glass.
When I arrived with the tray she was sitting among the arm-chair roots of an ancient mulberry—sprung as likely as not from a seed spat out by a passing monk. The aged foxhound, Bridget, was at her feet, and Sack-and-Sugar curled on top of her felt hat. Sack was a polecat ferret who plainly adored her and was treated with caution by everyone else. He was a melanistic sport, black with a yellowish-white belly and had the air of a chattering familiar spirit—which she recognised by digging up the name of Sack-and-Sugar from the records of witch trials.
‘Willie, we are now alone,’ she said. ‘I shall not have to endure your English and we can talk. By the way, did I see you from my window tickling Sack’s tummy this morning?’
‘Oughtn’t I to?’ I asked innocently.
‘Well, anybody else who tried it would have had a hole in his thumb you could hang an earring from.’
‘I suppose he must have taken to me, Master.’
There was a twinkle in her sea-blue eye, but I was not going to admit that I had had four ferrets of my own as a boy, and the gaiety of them used to run back and forth between us.
‘You don’t trust me, do you?’
‘I can see that everyone else does.’
‘Well, would you buy a second-hand car from me, as they say?’
‘Not for a moment if it was a recent model.’
‘What the hell do you mean by that, Willie?’
‘You wouldn’t have had any respect for it. But I’d buy a thirty-year-old Rolls-Royce from you.’
She threw up her head and bayed like a hound, upsetting Sack who had to scramble back by way of the white coiffure. It was the first time I had seen her laugh.
‘Trust, Willie, is an instinct. You are a first-rate actor but a rather poor liar with no name and no past and only the vaguest indications that you were born an honest babe in Wiltshire. And yet I am sure that you are not working willingly for the Russians or for that whisky-sodden club of MI5. I stress willingly. Why do you think I asked you to stay on?’
‘Because you couldn’t make up your mind about me.’
‘Go up one, young Prefacutu! And I wanted time to ask a friend of mine for advice. That’s where I went all dressed up to kill.’
‘What did he think?’
‘That you don’t know your ass from your elbow.’
‘Ass, Mrs. Hilliard?’
‘Willie, my upbringing as a young lady in Connecticut prevents me to this day from pronouncing that word as it should be. Ass it is and ass it will remain. And don’t you talk to me about Chaucer!’
‘Chaucer is the gardener?’ I asked, for I didn’t know his name.
‘How far did your schooling go in Wiltshire?’
‘A bit beyond the fox is in the box.’
‘Not in this hunting country he isn’t. But the cat is on the mat and if we are to know why, you must decide that you don’t like the job and return to London.’
‘I shall be sorry.’
‘So will Sack. He gets a mite bored with only me to talk to. And I shall give you a letter to my nephew—just a message saying that I have his address and could do with some caviare.’
I agreed to deliver it, adding that if I ran into trouble she must promise to say exactly what happened.
‘Word of honour. And now does your trust go far enough to give me your real name?’
I nearly did, but had to tell her that Willie would do very well for the time being.
I returned to London regretfully, well aware that I would gladly have stayed on as permanent butler if I knew anything about butling or a groom if I knew anything about horses. After two empty days I kept my appointment with Mr. Marghiloman and brightened up when I saw him already at the corner table in the pub.
After I had handed over Mrs. Hilliard’s letter, he led me on to talk about her. I kept quiet about her odd reception of me and told him that she seemed very calm and composed. I added, a bit romantically, that she had the air and finesse of a great lady. He ignored the vehement flow of my Romanian saying with a smile that no doubt she could play the part if she wanted to.
This annoyed me. Mrs. Hilliard could doubtless play any part which suited her, and perhaps it was a part when first she arrived in Devon; but now it was an extension of her
natural self and she belonged to her valley as if the steep, lush slopes of it had grown up around her. I stopped myself just in time from telling him so. Instead I remarked that I had too little experience of English and Americans to be able to see through them.
‘She was a hell-cat in her youth, Mr. Prefacutu,’ he said. ‘Mixed up with all the revolutionaries of those days and ran guns for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.’
‘Well, she’s a highly respectable Master of Hounds now.’
‘A pose! Engels rode to hounds. And her daughter is worse. Anarchist or communist. She was mixed up in the escape of Mornix, too.’
‘I didn’t know she had a daughter.’
‘You don’t seem to have talked to her much.’
‘Not about her family.’
‘But according to you, you were four days in the house!’
Instinctively I decided to say nothing of being mistaken for a Portuguese manservant and being compelled to keep up the part, which accounted for the lack of any intimate conversation.
‘Just waiting for her letter,’ I explained.
‘And silent all the time?’
His pleasant voice had not altered and the warning took a second to sink in. I began to suspect one of the reasons why he had asked me to go down with the Moscow address. There could be no better way of inserting myself into Mrs. Hilliard’s life and any secrets she might have.
‘Does Mrs. Hilliard go down to the sea much?’
‘Not so far as I know.’
‘Or to the creeks of the Kingsbridge estuary?’
‘I don’t think so. Kingsbridge is all of ten miles away.’
‘Did you ever see in the house a chart of the estuary?’
‘Yes. There was one belonging to Alwyn Rory.’
‘Any marks on it?’
‘Plenty. He must have done a lot of sailing there at one time.’
‘Did you ever see a chart of the estuary when you were on the Nadezhda Krupskaya, Ionel Petrescu?’
So he had known all along who I was. It didn’t bother me, though I would have bolted straight out of the place if he had called me Gurney. I assumed of course that he was an agent of British security and that I had been framed. It stood to reason that there would be Romanian agents to keep an eye on dubious Romanians. I knew something—or thought I did—of the dirty tricks played by that sort of crook, bound to bring cases or be sacked. I decided to bluff it out.
Red Anger Page 5
