Fellow Passenger

by Geoffrey Household

  I found the number of Reyvers Library, and took the risk. When I had him, after an intolerable delay, on the other end of the telephone, I first asked him if our conversation could be overheard. He answered in a testy high voice that it certainly could not, but that he didn’t see why…

  ‘I have been instructed to get in touch with you,’ I interrupted.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘You have a car, comrade.’

  He hesitated. I expect that ‘comrade’ was what he least wanted to be called in that particular week.

  ‘I have. Who is that speaking?’

  ‘It is unimportant who is speaking,’ I answered authoritatively. ‘My information is that you are not yet being followed. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, alarmed. ‘No, I don’t think I’m followed. Why should I be? I never have been.’

  ‘Very well. Be at Kingston Dray in about an hour. Turn up the lane to the copse above the village, and wait under the large oak on the right-hand side at the top of the hill.’

  ‘I’d like to know a little more—’ he began, asserting himself.

  ‘You will,’ I told him. ‘But obey now, and the party will not forget it.’

  He did not sound as if he cared whether the party forgot or didn’t, but finally agreed to come.

  I observed him carefully through the hedge as he sat in his car. He preserved a poker-faced grimness, in which might have been just a shade of self-satisfaction. I had expected some wishy-washy, provincial intellectual with grey wisps of hair curled over his collar and none on his head. I was quite wrong. Mr Cecil Reyvers was red-faced and farmerish. Communist or not, he might turn out to be a regular John Bull. Alternatively, he might insist on his right to receive proper orders. I didn’t like it at all. However, it was most improbable that he would dare to give me away.

  ‘Good morning, comrade,’ I said to him.

  I had emerged from the hedge when he was looking the other way, and was now leaning on a gate as if I had been there, invisible, for minutes. He was obviously startled, but set his face to blank.

  ‘Good morning,’ he answered, and waited.

  ‘I am Howard-Wolferstan.’

  It was astonishing to see so red a face turn pale. A monstrous improbability like the popular conception of a chameleon!

  ‘I’ll have nothing to do with you,’ he said. ‘I have no instructions.’

  ‘You can’t avoid it, comrade.’

  ‘You’re a spy,’ he began indignantly.

  That gave him away completely. He was nothing but a liberal with an intellectual chip on his shoulder—a communist, in fact, just to annoy the stolid society of Saxminster and give himself a sense of martyrdom. Any security officer would have known at once that he was nothing but a pest and likely, if there were ever a communist government in England, to declare himself a tory.

  ‘We do not employ spies,’ I replied coldly.

  ‘No. No, of course not. But we are not expected…I mean…well, it’s admitted there is such a thing as patriotism.’

  ‘There is indeed.’

  ‘I am an intellectual,’ he protested. ‘The party has no right whatever to ask this sort of thing of me.’

  ‘The party has a right to ask anything of you.’

  ‘Then I insist on being instructed in the proper way.’

  ‘You are being instructed in the only possible way.’

  He was hopelessly out of his depth. So was I, for that matter. I am sure he should have flatly refused to help me unless told to do so through the usual channels. Yet he could not doubt that I was a communist. The papers had said so, and I myself had said so in court. It would have amused me to ask him if he believed all he read in the capitalist press.

  ‘I won’t have anything to do with you,’ he insisted. ‘I shall resign from the party.’

  ‘You can resign when you like and as often as you like, comrade, but you will obey now.’

  ‘I don’t see what they can do to me if I refuse,’ he said sturdily.

  ‘You ought to know. You have been engaged on propaganda.’

  That was a safe shot—though I doubt if he did anything but talk communism in and out of season. However, he would call that propaganda; so would the party whenever they wanted to make him feel important.

  ‘How would you like it to be spread all over the town that you assisted Howard-Wolferstan?’ I asked.

  ‘It would be a lie.’

  ‘Would it? What are you doing here? Why are the tracks of your car in this lane? Where did you tell your office that you were going, and why aren’t you there? You ought to know that we have ways of giving information to the police.’

  ‘Nonsense! You couldn’t prove it, and you have nothing to gain by it.’

  ‘Nothing to gain by it, comrade? Nothing to gain by punishing disobedience?’

  ‘I’ll denounce you to the police myself,’ he said.

  ‘No, you won’t. Whatever else you may be, you are not a traitor to your class.’

  Cold sweat was dripping down my ribs. I could not have continued this duel much longer. But it was near the end. I had him completely bewildered.

  ‘That’s true,’ he muttered, and then shouted at me: ‘But you leave me alone!’

  ‘Oh, be logical, comrade!’ I insisted patronizingly. ‘You’re not a scab. You’ll never go to the police. So you’re as guilty as I am from their point of view. You might just as well help me and keep us all out of trouble.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Drive me where I tell you. Salisbury, for a start.’

  On the journey I did my best to make him feel that he was a gallant party member serving the peaceful future of the world; his mind had to be kept from brooding on divided loyalties and kindly, understanding policemen. But in spite of all my courtesy and eloquence I could not strike a spark of enthusiasm out of him. Of course it did not help matters that he should have to make some slight pecuniary sacrifice for the party. At Salisbury I made him buy me an oilskin coat, a cooking-pot, matches, torch, shaving things and a comb and mirror. And when we arrived at a promising lonely track, which seemed as good a destination as any, I relieved him of his spare cash and gave him a receipt for it.

  I never like to part from a man on bad terms, so I thanked him with noble emotion, and asked him if there were anything at all the party could do for him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They can allow me to resign.’

  I assured him that they would. I think it quite certain that they did—the silly, sturdy, little man!

  Where he left me was the edge of Cranborne Chase. I remembered that remote bit of country from twenty years before when I stayed nearby with the wife of the headmaster of my progressive school. Honi soit. She felt that I must be lonely in my holidays. The thickets of the Chase seemed to me fairly safe to inhabit while letting my beard grow. That was what I wanted—a short, black beard to go with the drawing-board, thoroughly untidy like the rest of me but with the dirt of the careless rather than the tramp.

  At least three weeks of discomfort would, I reckoned, be necessary; but not much more, for this Mediterranean chin of mine needs shaving twice a day. My poor mother’s family were quite remarkable for the luxuriance of their beards and whiskers, and the speeches which issued from those romantic and usually political coverts impressed out of all reason the clean-shaven Church and the merely moustachioed Army. Long before the communists ever thought of it, my ancestors lived by the theory of continuous revolution; but they weren’t such damned fools—for they had all had good classical educations—as to believe that revolution settled anything beyond the temporary question of who was going to pay the taxes and who was going to spend them. Even in my few months of youthful craziness I agreed with them. What I was after then was the unity of Europe. My communism was a mere exasperated
protest like that of poor Cecil Reyvers.

  My short stay as a wild man of the woods in Cranborne Chase was intensely unpleasant. It rained. I caught a cold. And although my chosen square mile was uninhabited it had disadvantages. There was some kind of school nearby, and small, excitable boys were always popping up in unexpected places. Fortunately they never for one moment kept their mouths shut, and gave me ample warning of their approach. There was also a gamekeeper, eternally playing nursemaid to pheasants and partridges, and accompanied by dogs. I gave up attempting to use the ground in daytime. I made myself a chimpanzee platform in the heart of a glorious evergreen oak, stocked it with stolen sacks to give some warmth and only came down at night to do my foraging and cooking.

  There was not much to cook—a few carrots from cottage gardens and the eggs and squeakers of wood-pigeons. Their nests were plentiful, and often within reach of a ravenous climber. I just managed to endure ten shivering days, but could stand no more of this forest euphemistically called temperate. I still had no really convincing beard, and abandoned the project. Instead, I gave myself a bald head—it took hours of experimenting with a safety razor to arrive at the effect produced by nature—and sideboard whiskers down to the lobes of my ears. These connected with the growth of hair which starts close under my eyes, and changed my high-cheekboned, narrow face to a square one.

  This gypsy-like appearance was out of keeping with the original character, so I thought myself into a more swashbuckling part—the frank and loud Bohemian, easily sure of hospitality and with a taste for free beer rather than stolen milk.

  I had spent nothing, so, when I took the road, I had some nine pounds in my pocket thanks to the generosity of Mr Reyvers and my companion in the service cellar. This wealth was reduced to three when I had bought an army pack, a few oil paints, a folding easel and a couple of canvasses in Shaftesbury. I preserved the portfolio of sketches in case I were ever asked to draw. I can’t. I draw as primitively as a child of six. But someone in authority once told me that the child’s was the correct approach to abstract art. So I decided that abstract art would be my line. I did not expect my work to interest a dealer—unless I signed it Howard-Wolferstan—but hoped it would be good enough, in any emergency, for a baffled public.

  I felt reasonably confident, for the newspapers had dropped me. They and the public were obsessed by the search for a gentleman who had ingeniously drowned his wife in four inches of water, and I don’t suppose the average reader, confronted by photographs of both of us, would have cared or remembered which was which. Meanwhile, I wandered north through Wiltshire, sleeping rough, eating cheap and discreetly wasting time until it should be assumed that I had left the country.

  On the fourth day I came to a village green where a cricket match was about to begin. A tent was set up, the pitch marked, and the home eleven waiting for the arrival of their opponents. I settled down on the grass to watch, for it is a game I have always enjoyed. Sheer skill. No violent and unseemly exercise. No freezing with cold or getting rubbed in the mud. And it has about it the atmosphere of fiesta—not of red and gold, but of green and white. Cricket, paradoxically, is the English diversion most likely to be appreciated by any lover of the Spanish way of life.

  This was the perfect afternoon for it, warm and windless, with the wicket drying after rain and white geese wandering from common to pond like a solemn party of selectors on their way to the bar. The home eleven was true to village form. Six of them were local gentry in ancient, yellowing flannels; four were dressed as they pleased; and one wasn’t there at all. The captain was a tall, fair fellow, who seemed altogether too diffident and indecisive. A type too common in our countryside. The squire without land; the parson without a congregation; the former colonial servant with nothing to serve. It matters so little what they do that they cannot help showing they are aware of it.

  ‘Lovely day, sir,’ I said as he passed me.

  His eye fell on me with alarm and disapproval. However, I was evidently settling down to be an interested spectator, so he could hardly be impolite. He continued with me the anxious debate which he was carrying on with himself.

  ‘But I daren’t put ’em in if we win the toss,’ he objected in answer to nothing. ‘We might never get them out.’

  ‘They’re all that good?’ I asked.

  ‘County second eleven, most of them.’

  ‘All the same, on that drying wicket——’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said desperately. ‘I know.’

  ‘Let me bowl,’ I suggested. ‘You’re a man short, aren’t you?’

  He was more alarmed than ever. I might be respectable, but I was dirty.

  ‘O’Reilly had a bald head, too,’ I encouraged him.

  That made him smile.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  I had not really decided on a name, and he took me by surprise.

  ‘Michael Bassoon,’ I answered. ‘I’m a painter.’

  I was hopelessly out of practice, but I thought I could probably bother the reserves of a second-class county after a wild over or two. My medium-paced off-break had always been phenomenal, though more impressive to a spectator than a steady bat. I could never keep a length, and it was not much use to make the ball jump sideways like a startled hare when it pitched as a long hop.

  The game was short and brutal. I took six wickets for nine, and we had our opponents all out for something under fifty. But it was too soon. The pitch was as treacherous for us as for them. We scored thirty-nine. I nearly decapitated a goose with a six into the pond, and was clean bowled trying to do it again.

  After the game we retired to the village pub. When the diffident captain had supplied me with a pint, he frightened me into hiccups by remarking:

  ‘I’ve never seen an off-break like yours since Howard-Wolferstan’s.’

  ‘Good Lord, you mean the spy!’ I exclaimed.

  I cursed myself for my intemperate longing to play cricket again. My reply must have sounded wildly unnatural, but the tone, I suppose, passed as surprise and interest.

  The name caught the attention of three or four other members of the team who were standing at the bar alongside. That was what the captain intended. He could at last claim some serious attention.

  ‘That’s the man! But I don’t think he was a spy.’

  ‘Did you know him?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I knew him very well at Oxford. No more sense than a monkey! I can imagine him robbing a bank, but he never cared enough about anything to be a real communist.’

  A libellous character! Still, I must admit that at the age of twenty I had not reached the responsibility of later years. He did not know me. He had merely heard of me, and very inaccurately. We may have had friends in common. But he had evidently watched me often enough playing cricket, and, talking to a stranger, it was a forgivable social lie to claim my acquaintanceship.

  ‘He admitted that he was a communist,’ I said.

  ‘My own speciality at that age was black magic,’ he answered surprisingly. ‘One would look back on those things with shame if they weren’t so absurd.’

  ‘But then what was he doing at Moreton Intrinseca?’

  ‘After women, of course. That was his hobby.’

  I regretted that I could not show my indignation. Women have never been of great importance in my life. I delight in them immensely, yes. But I have never been under the influence of one woman for more than a month.

  ‘At least,’ I said, ‘it is one of the few hobbies which can be enjoyed by both sexes.’

  That amused the party. Howard-Wolferstan was forgotten in the excitement of having amongst them a lecherous Bohemian straight from Chelsea. The cricketers listened to indecorousness as fast as I could invent it. It’s odd that the English should always consider that painters have the morals of stud bulls. I find it hard to believe that the creative mind can live in
a state of excitement so continuous as that of the average business man.

  Among my audience was the wicket-keeper. Courtesy demands that even in the private papers of a Traitor the name I give to him should be false. But a name of some sort I must use, if only for my own convenience. Flesh, character and name seem to be equally essential for solidity. Leave out the first, and you get something which interferes with the second law of thermodynamics. Leave out the second, and you have an exhibit at an agricultural fair. And without a name you have an unsatisfactory reality, as of some haunting woman once seen and never forgotten.

  Robert Donolow—that’s the wicket-keeper—was a farmer and looked it. He was a man who could look any part so long as it called for a good presence and an honest geniality. He had been, I gathered, a diplomatist. The same face, with a little more pallor, would have suited that cheerful profession equally well.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked.

  I answered that I was going nowhere in particular, and that if I couldn’t find a cheap pub I should put up at a cottage.

  ‘Why not come back with me and stay the night?’

  In such an atmosphere of bluff good-fellowship I could not possibly refuse; yet the invitation was somehow suspicious. Even admitting that I was well-spoken, intelligent and could bowl, I was not the sort of person whom I myself—if I had been myself—would have invited home without an ulterior motive. I was unkempt, probably disreputable, and there was no evidence whatever, beyond the portfolio, colours and folding easel, that I could paint.

  I got into his battered estate car, and for the first couple of miles we discussed the match. Then, after a pause, he asked me: