"You mean you stay where you are and fight whatever you see," said Churchill.
"Have some hock. Well yes, though that denigrates some of the subtleties. You ought to read the chap's article in the Military Quarterly. It's called, um… ‘Node and Anti-Node: Tomorrow's Denial?' You know. With a question mark."
"Sounds fascinating."
"It's the most adult piece of thinking I've seen for a long time. Since the van Gelder-Hernandez-Funck mobility equations came out in ‘62, probably. Do you feel like a bit of fun this evening?" added Ross-Donaldson in the same tone.
"Yes. What sort of fun?"
"Let's look up Lucy. You know her, don't you? Lady Hazell? Oh, you must meet her. She'd like you. I suppose one might call it a slight Bacchante complex in her case, with possible Jocastan undertones. We'll drive over after dinner."
When the meal ended, Churchill and Ross-Donaldson returned to the ante-room, where they soon put down a cup of coffee and a glass of Cockburn 1945. Taking their leave presented no difficulty, for Colonel White had abjured formal dessert except on the weekly guest night. In the hall, Ross-Donaldson stopped and turned to Churchill.
"I'd better just look in at the Command Post," he said. "Coming?"
They went to the rear of the hall and stood for a moment in front of the door of what had been the morning-room. Then the door slid aside and they entered.
A sergeant and a corporal were facing them at attention. Ross-Donaldson told them to sit down. Immediately beneath the beams of the ceiling were television screens giving views of the main gate and, from various angles, a long low building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and a concrete pathway. As Churchill glanced up at these a soldier with a slung machine-pistol moved slowly and silently across one and out of shot. Elsewhere there was a telephone direct to the civilian exchange, another telephone and a remote-control unit connected by underground cable to the camp exchange and wireless station respectively, and a large red button marked GENERAL ALARM.
"Hullo, Fawkes," said Churchill to the corporal. "I thought you were spending all your time over at the hospital keeping the Viet Cong from getting together with Captain Hunter."
"That packed up yesterday, sir," said Fawkes. "I think Captain Leonard reckoned the Reds would have lost heart by then. I arrived back just in time to get on the roster for this lot. Captain Hunter's coming out tomorrow anyway, I hear."
Although he spoke with his usual cheerfulness, Fawkes did not look well. His face was pale and there was sweat on his upper lip.
"Are you all right, Fawkes?" asked Churchill. "Feeling rough?"
"I have got a bit of a head, but it's nothing really."
"Would you like me to get you anything? I can fix up a relief for you if you want."
"No, I'll be okay, honest. Thanks very much all the same, Mr. Churchill."
A buzzer sounded. The sergeant got up and went and looked through the thick panel of one-way glass in the door.
"It's the bloke with our tea, sir," he said. "Can I go ahead?"
"Certainly," said Ross-Donaldson.
The sergeant pressed a stud and the door slid back. A well-built young man of perhaps twenty came in carrying two pint china mugs. At the sight of the two officers he straightened his back. Without looking ridiculous he managed to hand over the teas in a sort of posture of attention, then turned and saluted Ross-Donaldson.
"Signalman Pearce, sir," said Fawkes.
"Good evening, Pearce," said Ross-Donaldson. "Do please carry on."
Churchill remembered hearing the name from Hunter. He was struck by the healthy look of the young man's complexion and eyes and by the extreme smartness of his turnout. He would have made a good model for a recruiting poster, thought Churchill, had it not been for his air of intelligence.
The sergeant and Ross-Donaldson began discussing an arms inspection due to take place the following morning. Churchill turned towards them. He heard Pearce talking in an undertone.
"These were all I could get. I should take three now and another couple about one A.M. Remember I'll be on the switchboard at ten so you can give me a buzz there if you want anything."
"Thanks, Andy. Don't worry about me."
The internal telephone rang.
"Command Post, Corporal Fawkes speaking. Right. Go ahead in five minutes, at… twenty-one twenty-five hours. Okay. Cheers." Fawkes turned to Ross-Donaldson. "Just the floodlight check, sir."
"Thank you, Fawkes… Well, I'm afraid they're going to have to turn up whether they've been up all night or not, Sergeant. I'm not going to lay it on twice over. Anything else? Oh, who's Duty Officer?"
"Captain Leonard, sir."
As the officer directly responsible to the Colonel for the discipline of the unit, Ross-Donaldson evidently felt that it would be unsafe to react to this name in almost any way at all. He inclined his head about an inch without looking at anybody, said good night and left.
Churchill followed. In the hall again, the two entered their names in the Sign Out book that lay on a handsome gate-leg table. After writing down a local telephone number in the Location column and bracketing it against both names, Ross-Donaldson hesitated.
"I'd better just ring and make sure," he said. "You go on."
Lighting a cigarette, Churchill strolled outside and moved to-wards the officers' car park. This brought him near Hut D4.
D4 was the long single-story building Churchill had been looking at just now on the Command Post television screens. Its contents were the reason for the Colonel's carefully planned system of guards. Overhead lights illuminated it and the pathway round it, where Churchill could see the two sentries pacing. Farther off, two other figures could be made out, members of the patrol that circuited the area at all times. They were passing the foot of the steel scaffolding that supported one of the permanently manned machine-gun posts. The other was in the roof of the farmhouse. The guns were heavy-caliber weapons mounted on tripods. The noise with which they fired their 12.75 mm. alloy-jacketed ammunition (as heard at a recent practice alarm) was immense. Such bullets would penetrate any vehicle which Colonel White considered at all likely to be used in an attempt to enter D4. A mere armored car would be riddled in seconds. In the event of a full-scale tank assault, agreed to be a remote possibility in peacetime, the Colonel was to call on a neighboring RAF base for assistance.
Churchill contemplated D4. The thought of what was inside it hardly weighed upon him. He had felt nothing but a remote excitement when, three weeks earlier, a pair of five-ton lorries escorted by a full platoon of motorized infantry had delivered there a number of large sealed boxes. What he disliked about the building tonight was its reminders of a world which had started to disappear almost as he was starting to walk and talk, but which he knew about from written and other records. Even this, however, was less unwelcome than the kind of future the sight of D4 seemed to promise. It felt to him like a personal rather than simply a general future. The memory of the dispatch-rider's death five days earlier came into his mind as he stood in the darkness waiting for Ross-Donaldson, that and the memory of the girl he had seen earlier on the afternoon in question.
Just then D4 and its environs became in an instant totally bright as the floodlights round it were switched on. Churchill flinched, and could have sworn that the sentries on the path did the same, each seeming to check in his stride. Near the single gateway in the fence they crossed and diverged, then one after the other passed out of sight round the angles of the building. For a quarter of a minute nothing moved. At the end of that time the lights went off and their image shrank and swirled and grew again on Churchill's retinas. The check had been successfully completed.
Ross-Donaldson came up and said, "I suppose in a way one wouldn't have expected it. Second-stage concealment theory in a non-hostility context. Somebody with old Chalky White's history would have been much more likely to keep the beams on all night long so that even a Russian on a moon-run could see D4, let alone any inquisitive strangers in the village. I t
ried to get her but she was engaged both times."
"Well, at least that means she's in," said Churchill as they got into Ross-Donaldson's jeep.
"Not necessarily. The engaged signal is given whenever the connecting apparatus is engaged, which will be the case if another subscriber is attempting to raise the same number. And Lucy's number is one people are constantly attempting to raise. It's one of the things about her. And her number. Of course, I did get here a couple of weeks before you and the other S1 chaps, so I've had longer to explore and a clearer field at the outset. But even so I am slightly astonished you haven't come across Lucy before, or she you. I thought that most of the Mess had been round at her place at one time or another, except for people like Leonard and Venables of course. And Willie Ayscue. And the Indians and Pakistanis. Yes, I suppose there are quite a few who haven't been, when you come to work it out carefully. Adjutant and Lieutenant Churchill. Recreational."
This last was said to, and taken down in writing by, a corporal who emerged from the guard-hut by the gate. The gate itself, a massive affair of steel and concrete which it would have taken a fair-sized shell to knock off its hinges, was pushed open by one of the sentries, while the other peered vigilantly up the road, as if aware that this would be a good moment for an attack by hostile motorcyclists, should one be in preparation.
They turned right into what was no more than a lane, and then immediately left. Fifty yards farther on they crossed directly over a substantial trunk highway and traveled along a minor road with tall hedgerows on either side. Ross-Donaldson had at once taken up his own words to the guard corporal. "Recreational. I suppose that is the way to describe it. Do you think it'll help Leonard to know that we've been recreating?"
"He has to keep a check, presumably. But I do wonder what he gets out of these guard reports. If you and I were spies going off to meet our contact we'd be unlikely to tell the guard so. And we'd vary the times and everything, so that-"
"An omnifariously randomized schedule indistinguishable from the genuinely random. Quite so. However, I'm sure this is at least as clear to Leonard as it is to us. From all points of view he must start by doing what's expected of him. It's only then that he can surprise people. Are you warm enough?"
The jeep had no side-screens, but the rush of air was no more than cool. It smelled vaguely of earth and vegetation. Except for their headlights it was quite dark. "I'm fine," said Churchill, then went on.
"Why don't the Indians and Pakistanis ever go and see this Lucy woman?"
"Oh, I'm sure they sense that they wouldn't get on together. They and she."
"Doesn't she like non-Europeans?"
"I've no idea. Light me a cigarette, Churchill, would you? No, it's what they'd feel about it. Not what she'd feel about it, if I know her. One of them explained to me the other day that they all have very excellent, very loving wife in Bombay or Karachi. I think it was your friend Moti Naidu."
"It doesn't sound like him."
"I'm sorry, I know I'm not good at imitations. I must stop doing them."
"Why does it matter if they have any sort of wife in Bombay?"
"Well, I don't care personally one way or the other."
"No, I mean why should that stop them going to see Lucy?"
"Having a wife might not stop me, but people like Asians often hold these strict views about marital fidelity."
"Are you trying to tell me that they couldn't go to see this woman without popping into bed with her?"
"It's unlikely. She might jib a bit at taking on old Chatterji."
Churchill felt slightly alarmed. "Christ, what sort of set-up has she got there?"
"It's what you might call a maison à une fille. She practices promiscuous polyandry. You'll see."
"Christ."
"I thought I'd conveyed that. Anyway, everything's very well handled. Only those with exceptionally low embarrassment thresholds would feel any discomfort."
"How good-looking is she?"
"Quite sufficiently. She spends a lot of money on her clothes and jewelry and stuff of that kind. She's the widow of a man who became very rich as a result of making furniture, so rich that they had to give him a knighthood. They hadn't been married very long, and he'd been a knight an even shorter time, when he fell off his yacht in the Adriatic and was drowned. There are no children of the marriage."
"What was she before she was married?"
"I don't know. She's never said and I've never thought to inquire. I don't even know how long she's been polyandrous. One would imagine quite a time, but it's probably the sort of activity in which a high pitch of expertness is soon reached."
Anticipation and nervousness were mixed in Churchill. After thinking for a while he decided that, although he had very little idea of what he was in for and still wondered energetically how many other men might turn out to be looking up Lucy tonight, he would be disappointed rather than relieved if for any reason she proved unavailable. He cheered up a lot at this thought, and became impatient to arrive.
"How far now?" he asked.
"We're just coming up to halfway, which I take to be St. Jerome's Priory. It's behind that peak on the left. You can't actually see it from the road. In fact the site's well concealed from most points along the natural approaches. It lies at the top of what looks like a perfect example of a mesa, though one would expect other such formations to be found in the area, and I haven't identified any. More probably it's the remains of an unusually broad band of vertical strata whose slopes have been subject to a lot of snow action, giving us a kind of eroded hog's back. Anyway, a useful spot for a place full of valuables that isn't allowed to defend itself."
"It's pretty much of a ruin, isn't it?"
"The western end of the chapel and a corner of the refectory are relatively intact, but elsewhere there isn't much that's higher than a couple of feet. Cromwell slighted it so thoroughly that they probably couldn't face the thought of rebuilding. It must have cost the most appalling effort originally, with everything having to be brought up on pack-animals."
After another twenty minutes or so they turned off the road through a stone gateway and drove up between two lines of trees to a substantial house. Churchill realized that their journey from the camp had brought them along the diagonal of a kind of flattened square, with the village and the mental hospital at the other two corners and the Priory somewhere in the middle. There were lights burning in the house, though dimly.
Ross-Donaldson parked the jeep next to two other cars. He got out and straightened his jacket.
"I'm getting fat," he said morosely. "It's all that eating and drinking we do. But what I can't see is why being fat isn't good for you. Surely you'd be much fitter, you'd get much more out of the exercise, give your muscles more work to do, sweat more and so on, if you walked and ran about the place wearing a special boiler-suit padded with thirty pounds or so of sand. But that's an exact equivalent of being thirty pounds overweight. And why doesn't being fat make you thin? The boiler-suit arrangement certainly would."
"There must be a fallacy somewhere," said Churchill as they waited in the extensive portico.
"No doubt. I suppose Lucy hasn't gone off to St. Tropez and left the lights on. It would be in character. Ah, here we are."
The door opened slightly. A man's voice said something brief.
"Good evening," said Ross-Donaldson. "We've come to see Lady Hazell."
"Who are you?"
"A friend of hers. Who are you?"
Further indistinguishable words were said, this time in a grumbling tone, then the door was pulled wide. Following Ross-Donaldson in, Churchill looked about for the man who had opened to them, but he was nowhere to be seen. This would have been more surprising if the hall had been better lit. As it was, the only illumination, wan and pinkish, came from a couple of bulbs on or near the staircase that mounted the far wall. Across this there hung a gigantic figure, a mythological personage or beast portrayed perhaps on a tapestry. Other beings looked down
from elsewhere on the walls and stood about the place in three-dimensional form. Directly ahead was a doorway from which a slightly stronger light was shining. Churchill walked through it.
The room he entered was as full of pictures and statuary as the hall had been. This gave so strong an impression of over-crowding that it was some time before he was sure that there were only about four actual people present. Two or three men were calling to one another.
"Get her cage up here."
"I'm not going to lift that thing.".
"Can't you see she's frightened? Leave her alone for a bit."
"Go on, grab her and get it over."
One of the men was standing on a chimneypiece, clinging with one hand to the corner of an ornate picture-frame while he lunged upwards and outwards with the other. A periwigged face stared past his hip.
"Gin and tonic," he said coaxingly. "Gin and tonic, gin and tonic, gin and tonic."
"Gin and tonic," said another, ghostly voice.
"Come here, you fool."
The man made a quick snatching motion and over-balanced, sending the picture swinging to and fro on its nail. He fell noisily but, it soon proved, without hurting himself, across a table, a chair and the corner of a large writing-desk. At the same moment a small dark shape detached itself from the picture-rail, where it had been practically invisible, and made with a beating of wings into the middle of the room. A grey parrot with a bald crown to its head settled neatly on Ross-Donaldson's right shoulder.
"Okay now, keep still and we've got her. Cage over here quick. You're all right, birdie-gin and tonic."
"Gin and tonic."
A half-full glass was proffered and the parrot seemed to drink.
"That's it, you love the stuff, don't you, you old soak?"
"Here we are. Come on, in you get, curse you."
"She can't, she's got her foot caught in this wire or whatever it is on this chap's shoulder."
"Chain mail," said Ross-Donaldson. "Quite customary."
"Customary or not, let's get her perishing foot out. Now…"
"That's no good, somebody'!! have to hold her."
The Anti-Death League Page 6
