The name of the girl was published too-Lydia Bateson.
Sunk in an armchair behind the shielding folds of the paper while Monique happily cooked a meal, I pondered this new discovery. It seemed strange that I should know her name now, but that at the time she should have been just a casual incognito. Lydia. I could have felt her name in my head. It would have been Lydia I was raping in a field, not just an attractive unknown girl. It seemed as if the person I had raped and the person I now knew was Lydia Bateson were two different individuals. It was some time before these trivial considerations could be coaxed from my mind. At least, I thought, the paper had done its duty to me, giving me fair warning to beware of an irate colonel out to avenge his daughter's honour.
In a day or so he intended to leave England, the item said. That meant he might be on his way, or even in Paris, already. For a moment I felt a wave of weak despair flow into me as if the personal fury of a father would be so much more effective than the machinery of the law. But I fought down this emotional aberration. He might never have been to Paris in his life and anyway what hope had he of finding me in such a city? I stuffed the newspaper away under a cushion. In the French papers, interest in Harvey Crawford must have been dying-there was no mention of me.
That night I found myself wavering between leaving Paris again and staying put. Rationally, I told myself, it would be much more sensible to get away-but something urged me to stay. I couldn't remember the girl's face, couldn't picture it in any detail.
In the few following days I stayed in the studio, whiling away my time with Monique. A growing sense of insecurity gathered inside me. I felt as if a coil of rope circling the whole of Paris was gradually being pulled tighter until it would find me at its center unable to escape from the noose.
The thought of Jaswant and his toughs had faded into my subconscious. I no longer regarded them as a threat. The threat;-and I told myself how ridiculous it was-seemed to me to come from the colonel and his daughter. There was between myself and them a very personal contact. They were hating me passionately with none of the impartiality of a gang of toughs or the police. The whole purpose of their lives was, for the moment, directed against me. And the girl carried in her head a picture of me which was with her, doubtless, day and night. She was unable to escape me and I was unable to escape her.
As the days followed the same routine pattern I became restless. I couldn't sit still for any length of time and spent long periods gazing from the window which was my only escape to the outside world. The studio no longer seemed a shelter but a prison in which I was being cramped until my persecutors came for me.
Monique, sensing my impatience and frustration, doted attention on me, preparing the most delicious meals, loving with abandon-but I had lost my appetite for everything. All I wanted was movement and freedom.
For hours we wouldn't speak, Monique having given up the struggle to take my mind from whatever it was that was cutting me off from her. Little things began to irritate me and a great sore of nerves built up inside me until, sitting tensely behind the shield of unseen newspapers I had to fight down impulses to shout and stamp at the blank indifferent walls.
One morning my frayed strands of control snapped.
"I'm going out," I said.
"Harvey. Please don't risk it. They may be waiting for you."
"Oh for God's sake! I'm going out."
"Oh, please. I'll go out and get anything you want. Let me go, please."
Monique's eyes had filled with tears as she implored me. But her noble insistence only creased my revulsion for my enforced confinement.
In a flare of furious temper I crashed my fist on a table.
"I'm going out I tell you. I bloody well am going out. Can't you see I'm going crazy being cooped up here."
Monique's protests whimpered into silence at my outburst and her eyes were wide with fright as they followed me to the door. On the threshold I turned.
"Bolt the door again after me. I'll be back in an hour or two."
Out in the narrow street, breathing the sudden animation of a different air I felt a surge of rejuvenating freedom. I couldn't even bother much with caution. It was like crawling from a dark cupboard and escaping a creeping claustrophobia.
My eyes reveled in the brisk movement of people and vehicles as if for some days I had been blind, and I strode with a light step.
I wasn't sure where I was going. In fact I was hardly thinking at all. Nobody approached me, no vehicle slowed alongside, nobody gave me a second glance and suddenly it seemed that I had come through a nightmare and awakened to harmless reality again.
On the Boulevard St. Germain I took a seat in the back row of a cafe terrace and sipped a beer. I sat watching the people passing; envying in a remote way their smiling faces bespeaking happy, uncomplicated lives. I thought of the past few months, of the colonel, of Lydia. I thought myself back into a dull, apprehensive depression. For three hours and five weak French beers I sat moodily on that terrace-and then I began to walk again.
I was consumed with a vague feeling of urgency, of needed accomplishment. At times it occurred to me that I should not parade myself too obviously and then I would strike off into narrow, undistinguished streets, watching everything that moved.
But the big tourist centers drew me and I had to struggle with the impulse to walk slow and staring past the well-known cafes. It became almost a physical effort to keep to the lesser visited areas.
Here and there, as I grew tired, I would slip into a small cafe and have a drink or a sandwich in company with chattering Frenchmen who after an initial glance disregarded me completely....
More and more my mind began to center on Colonel Bateson and Lydia. They were the only names in my head. I tried to picture Lydia's face, but it was a vague undefined outline; the features were without form. Every time I felt I had them, the picture just failed to become whole and blurred away into other faces.
I toured the outskirts of the central area of Paris until my eyes became tired with the fixed intensity of watching and my legs felt heavy and strained. As the dusk flattened on the city and the lights glowed out I resignedly caught a metro to Odeon and walked wearily back to the apartment.
Monique greeted me with tears and I was tired enough to submit willingly to her fussing around me.
But that first little sortie had dispeled my fears of the police or Jaswant's toughs and the following day I insisted on going out again. Monique implored me to stay in, but I was more reasonable then I had been the day before and managed to reassure her.
"I just can't stand being shut in," I told her, "and if I didn't go out I'd be likely to break a window or something. I promise I'll be careful, but I'm sure they're looking for me in Switzerland or somewhere miles away in any case."
"All right, darling. But I shan't be happy until you come back."
I kissed her and went out into the warm afternoon.
This time I walked more boldly through the heart of St. Germain-des-Pres and on towards the Champ- Elysees. I scrutinized the face of everyone who passed near me.
It wasn't until I settled on a crowded terrace on the Champs-Elysees that I realized consciously that I'd been looking expressly for Lydia and her father. Had I passed Jaswant I probably shouldn't have recognized him.
I tried again to build a picture of her face and, failing, imagined her body as it had writhed from me those months ago. But even her body seemed to lack reality-a picture of cardboard.
I left the cafe aware that I was acting a little unwisely and began walking again briskly.
For a long time I walked blindly, seeing nothing but faces, faces, at which I peered with a strange, mixed feeling of hope and misgiving. With dusk glooming down again I found myself at one of the northern Portes a cluttered, busy, working class exit from Paris.
And it was there that I saw them.
I knew immediately. I didn't have to see the details of her face. I didn't even notice
what she was wearing. I saw them clearly on the opposite side of the street revealed half by the fading light, half by the early glow of street lamps.
For a moment I was nonplussed. I stood transfixed and stared across at them with a sudden chill of horror at our proximity and then I turned abruptly, a prickling at the back of my neck, and stared into a shop window.
They were walking steadily, but not fast and, as I half turned to watch them go, I realized with a start that they were looking specifically for me, scouring the districts, looking for me as they turned every corner just as I had been searching for them. A peculiar panic overwhelmed me as I watched them dwindling in the lights and the curbside trees, cut off completely from time to time by strollers.
I checked myself in the middle of an impulse to walk quickly, without a backward glance, in the opposite direction, to take a metro, better still a taxi and get to the other side of the city, get home to Monique, safely shielded by the four walls I'd hated. But stronger and counteracting was the frightening impulse to follow them, get them in sight again, see where they were going, have a good look at them, hear their voices if possible, find out what they were going to do. With a hot feeling in my chest, as if I were about to stalk a tiger, I paced quickly after them.
For a moment I thought I'd lost them, but as a rabble of slouching Algerians made off down a side street, I saw them in the space that was left, the colonel big and hunched looking straight ahead, the girl, slim in a skirt and blouse the way I remembered her, darting quick glances into the lighted doorways of cafes.
Drawn on against my better judgment I crossed to their pavement and began to overhaul them. I had no idea in my head. I just wanted to get close to them and, automatically as I walked I put my band in the pocket of my coat and felt there the automatic which I carried with me everywhere.
I chuckled grimly at my advantage. Here they were searching Paris for me, perhaps almost on the point of giving up-and here I was about fifty yards behind, getting closer and staring straight at their backs.
It was the girl who mainly focused my attention. So this was Lydia. Studying her slim back, the tautness of the skirt over the buttocks, the well-shaped legs, the realness of her flooded back to me. This was Lydia the girl I'd picked up and raped, whose face I couldn't remember. And now months later, here she was some hundreds of miles from the spot with not a thought in her head but to find me-and here I was no more now than a dangerous thirty yards behind.
My heart warmed to the risk I was taking and I stayed at that distance, keeping a few people between us all the time, waiting for something to happen, sure that it would.
Occasionally the girl glanced round and then I would align myself with someone between us or walk purposefully into a doorway as if I lived there.
As I was beginning to wonder if, perhaps, I should force myself away before something disastrous happened, they turned, suddenly, into a cafe.
I waited in a doorway for a minute or two and then crossed the road quickly. I moved up in the shadow of the trees until I was opposite the cafe, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on it all the time. A great oblong of light glared through the glass door, dimly yellowing the pavement and the trees. Through the door I could make out a number of men drinking at the bar. The long window of the cafe was covered with lace curtain. I couldn't see anything through it.
For some minutes I waited uncertainly and then, my heart thumping, I dodged through the traffic. On the edge of the opposite pavement I hesitated again, my body a bundle of nervous energy, preparing me for instant flight. Making a quick decision I stepped quickly up to the door to peer in. As I reached it, it opened and I was face to face with the colonel.
The sudden shock paralyzed me. I was completely deprived of the power of movement and it flashed through my mind that this was a moment of climax in my personal history.
In the second or two that followed, the colonel stepped aside and his daughter walked out looking straight into my eyes.
With the suddenness of the meeting she looked away with an involuntary movement, like a shudder, and walked quickly on up the street. Her father stared at her, then at me and had caught her in a moment. She said something to him and the two of them had turned toward me.
I suppose I could have run for it and had whistles blowing, crowds chasing me. But I hardly thought of it. My hand clenched over the automatic in my pocket and I stayed where I was, staring at them.
We faced each other for some seconds, like duellists unwilling to make the first move, and then the colonel came heavily towards me.
I had recovered my calm; a dynamic calm, potential and ready to break into furious activity. My eyes glared into the colonel's as he came towards me and instead of letting fly at me, as I felt had been his first impulse, he stopped, confronting me and demanded in biting tones: "Your name Crawford?"
"No," I said. "Sorry."
He stared at me, pulled short by my nonchalance, but unbelieving, and then he whirled on the girl, who had come quietly up to us regarding me with horrified eyes as if a little piece of the past had come right back to her.
"Sure?" he snapped.
The girl nodded.
As he turned back to me I took out the automatic quietly and caught the girl by the arm.
"Keep away and keep quiet," I said pointing the gun at the colonel. "Your daughter's coming with me as a surety for my protection. You'll see her if you don't make a sound."
I had reckoned without the rash wrath of a father.
With a military roar, the colonel lunged at me, murder in his eyes. My fist, weighted with the little automatic, caught him on the side of the jaw and he crashed onto his side as the girl screamed.
I grasped her, digging the automatic into her back. Passers-by turned, stopped, stared, slow to become involved. Men peered through the glass door of the cafe and then came out into the street. A crowd began to gather around us reluctant and menacing at the same time.
"Move!" I snapped at the girl, "or I'll shoot you and your old man."
Sections of the crowd swayed towards us as we moved towards the road and I swept the automatic in an arc, snapping threats. The ranks broke; there was a hum of conversation and somebody called for the police.
A hundred yards down the road a taxi was parked. "Run!" I snapped, pushing the girl towards the vehicle.
The crowd moved slowly after us cutting us off from the colonel lying dazed on the ground; there was more shouting.
As I ripped open the door and bundled the girl into the back seat behind the bewildered driver, I heard the colonel shouting in English. I looked back quickly and saw blue police uniforms pushing through the crowd. I fired a shot over the jostling, following mass and it disintegrated into dim figures pushing and clawing hysterically for safety. I barked an order at the driver, threatening him with the gun as I slumped in beside the girl and the taxi shot forward. A stone crashed onto the bodywork and then we were round a corner.
"Here we are together again in a car," I said with a grin, quietly astonished at my own calmness.
"You must be mad," she gasped.
"Perhaps I am."
I snapped orders at the driver and, peering through the back window, could see another taxi careening through the traffic. There was no mistaking its objective. I was sure it contained the colonel.
Somewhere from another direction I heard the mad hee-hawing siren of a police van.
With my gun at his neck, the chauffeur did wonders with the car, weaving in and out of traffic, racing through narrow streets, doubling back and eventually heading out towards Le Bourget Airport and Belgium beyond.
For a moment I thought we'd made it, but on a long, straight stretch of road, the colonel's taxi came pounding. Behind it, at some distance, the siren followed, blaring out into the darkness.
Grimly hostile, my driver put his foot down on my command and we left the city's outskirts at breakneck speed.
"It's very nice to see you again," I s
aid without taking my eyes from the back window. The colonel's taxi was losing ground. "I'd become quite obsessed with you."
"You won't get away with it. All the police in Paris want you."
I wondered with a grin how many times she'd read a similar remark in a thriller. Did she read thrillers? "Do you read thrillers?"
She cringed away, keeping to the extreme end of the seat.
"Well you're in one now-and your father's fading out of the picture."
In what seemed no time at all we had passed Le Bourget and were racing through country. We had lost the colonel's taxi, but the police siren was more insistent and I could see its distant lights drawing slowly closer. v
"Get a move on!" I snapped at the driver.
Rape Page 19
