Watcher in the Shadows

by Geoffrey Household

  From here I could have followed the south-eastern edge of the Cotswolds and returned Nur Jehan to Chipping Marton in a couple of days. It seemed too soon – a blank ending with all to begin over again and the initiative out of my hands once more. So we travelled west and spent the third night above Broadway.

  On the fourth day I followed the watershed to the south, aiming for Roel Gate. This was all open country, silent except for the jingle of Nur Jehan’s bit and the larks which continually sprang up in front of us and hovered singing. On my outward journey I had passed along the edge of it wishing that I had time to stop and devote a couple of days entirely to the schooling of Nur Jehan. I had arbitrarily set myself Jim Melton’s cottage as a destination and refused to deviate from the stages But now I had all the time in the world – or as much of it as the tiger was inclined to allow me.

  The country seemed short of my own special requirements, which were water for Nur Jehan and close cover for me. So I looked through the list of addresses which Georgina had given me, and found a promising spot some three or four miles away, just south of the road from Stow-on-the-Wold to Tewkesbury.

  I was welcomed effusively by the hearty lady who owned this immense and probably unproductive farm. Her main interest, to judge by the deep, ripe carpet of dogs around her feet, was the breeding of still more of them. She explained that she was no rider herself – the doggies would be jealous – but that all the Pony Clubs knew of her lovely barn.

  I listened with formal courtesy to a flow of reminiscences larded with the names of distinguished horsewomen – few men – who had stayed at her house or camped at the lovely barn. She insisted on showing me the bedrooms and how comfortable they were. I chose the barn rather to her surprise. At last I obtained my dismissal and directions to ride up the hill to a clump of trees just over the horizon.

  The huge, empty barn stood among a thick windbreak of beeches. It was desolate and austere, I thought, rather than lovely; but it was dry, with the honey smell of centuries of Cotswold hay. The site was perfect in good weather for horse and man. Spring water splashed into a trough. The silent turf stretched away for a half mile to the north and west.

  The clump of trees was altogether too easy to find in darkness; and that I was there could be confirmed from a long way off by a good pair of binoculars or even by a discreet use of the telephone. My usual evening reconnaissance would not therefore be of much value. Yet the more I looked at the place, the more I felt this might be the end. The tiger could purr with satisfaction. After a quiet and quick attack he would have all the rest of the night to get clear of the body. But since I was expecting him, the odds were on the defence – so heavily that I reckoned I could deal with him mercifully. And that was still essential. I could not kill him unless he had a gun in his hand.

  Even so, I hoped to be able to talk before deciding what to do with him.

  Nur Jehan thought the place a horse’s paradise. He was coming on fast. In action over open country or on the verge of a road he was now quick to obey and intelligent. His only fault was in quieter movement – out of school, as it were – when he saw no reason why he should be prevented from light entertainment, such as trying to stamp with his forelegs on silly chickens, or from stopping to eat whatever took his fancy.

  About four in the afternoon I was grooming Nur Jehan, who had at last been taught to change from trot to canter with the off fore leading. The stallion was reproachful, for his mouth hurt – he was so unused to discipline that it would have hurt if he had been bitted with a velvet-covered willow-twig – and I was completely absorbed in rewarding him with all the sensual pleasure which curry-comb and brush could give.

  I looked up suddenly at the sound of hooves, remembering that the Mauser was under my coat ten good yards away, and observed with relief the arrival of Benita. Under the circumstances my welcome showed more than the usual fatherly warmth. It must have sounded enthusiastic.

  ‘How did you find us?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, your last postcard said you would pass one side or the other of Stow-on-the-Wold today. So Georgina asked a friend of hers to put me up for a couple of nights and lend me a pony. Daddy was getting anxious.’

  I inquired no further. I was well aware of my aunt’s opinion, but I did not agree. I had no intention of letting Benita know what I thought of her and I did my best not to admit it to myself. It was not my business to know which of them had proposed the visit.

  ‘After that it was easy,’ Benita went on. ‘Georgina’s girlfriend telephoned all the other horsy people, and we soon heard you were at the barn. Why don’t you stay at the farm and be comfortable?’

  ‘Too many dogs,’ I said. ‘Nur Jehan and I don’t like them.’

  It evidently puzzled her that I, who was always looking around and behind me, should choose to sleep in so lonely a spot.

  ‘You are not expecting anybody?’ she asked.

  That was too close to the bone. Since I detected a faintly jealous note in her voice, I replied with deliberate vulgarity that men of my age generally preferred luxury hotels to haystacks.

  ‘But you,’ she said, ‘would be quite likely to choose a gorse bush. What’s that under your coat?’

  She had caught a glimpse of the Mauser in its holster as I moved my kit to make room for her between the smooth roots of a great beech. I told her that it was a wooden horseman’s flask, and ascribed it vaguely to the Carpathians.

  ‘What do you keep in it?’

  ‘Wine. The wood gives a bitter taste. You wouldn’t like it.’

  She looked disappointed. Some form of hospitality would ease the perceptible tension between us. I offered her whisky and spring water which I mixed in vicar’s daughter proportions. I always found it difficult to remember that she was also a commercial artist.

  I think it was because her face had that exquisite mixture of liveliness and innocence which belongs to seventeen rather than twenty-three, and is in any case more common among French than English. She had no lack of worldly wisdom. Her tough profession saw to that. She accepted life as it was; but she was rooted so firmly in her beloved countryside that life as it was seemed to her more to be enjoyed than pitied. I don’t mean that she was insensitive. She did not think of natural beauty as an escape from humanity. She had no need of escape at all.

  ‘We have talked so much about you, Charles, since you left,’ she said, when I had settled down on the dry leaves by her side.

  I replied that I hoped Aunt Georgina had given me a good character.

  ‘Not altogether. She said you had lost your youth before you had time to enjoy it.’

  ‘No! I did enjoy it. Vienna, America, a profession which I loved – Good Lord, I knew I was having the time of my life!’

  ‘I suppose she meant that you couldn’t pick it up again.’

  I agreed that she probably did and was prepared to leave it at that.

  ‘Don’t you ever feel that you belong here now?’

  Her great, heavily-lashed grey eyes were on me and forced me into sincerity. I pointed to the sweep of the turf, the golden stone walls and a church tower rising above the trees in a distant valley, all delicate and unreal in the beginning of the clear evening light. I told her how often in my ride I had thought of this as her country, each pervading the other, and how I longed to come out of my spiritual forests and could not. I tried to explain that I thought of myself as a European living gladly and appreciatively in England but that I had no real right to the union of love.

  ‘Why on earth not?’ she asked. ‘You have earned every right.’

  ‘I haven’t earned anything.’

  ‘Georgina has told me all about you, Charles,’ she replied impatiently. ‘The Austrian underground and the Gestapo and the rescue of the women from Ravensbruck. And then you wouldn’t even take our George Cross. You are the most absurdly proud man I ever came across!’

  I m
ust admit I had never thought of myself as proud, and I said so.

  She let me have it. No sweet seventeen about her at all. She reminded me of a falcon suddenly loosed from the fist: a lovely, brooding thing detonated into a bronze and silver arrow of energy.

  ‘You’re still a boy,’ she accused me. ‘You’ve never got over being the Graf von Dennim. You won’t admit there is anything higher than that. What you do is what you think a Dennim ought to do. You never take. You never give other people a chance. It’s all giving, giving, giving by your own laws and nobody else’s. I wish to God the Dennims still owned half Europe or whatever they did own. And then perhaps you could just be content with giving away material things and not be too proud to have to hide yourself in squirrels and that damned horse.’

  ‘About Nur Jehan,’ I said, firmly changing the subject after a silence. ‘We all accept so much nonsense without thinking. Of course he can be ridden by a woman!’

  ‘Who has ridden him?’

  ‘No one yet. But the cause is simple. Your legs aren’t long enough.’

  ‘No?’ she asked, looking along the slim length of her outstretched jodhpurs until she arrived at her toes.

  ‘For Nur Jehan, I mean,’ I replied desperately. ‘And Georgina’s legs are shorter still. He has a very sensitive rib – from an old wound probably. My heel goes behind and below it. Yours doesn’t and a boy’s wouldn’t. But your father and I have long legs, and so, I expect, did his former owner.’

  I think Benita then remarked that it was delightful how kind old maids and bachelors were to animals, but I do not remember.

  I am compelled to dehumanize her. I find that in writing autobiography you cannot please a woman. You are bound to say too much or too little for her. Benita complains with reason that I have devoted far more space to Nur Jehan than to her. But when I have ventured upon more detailed description either of her or of that late afternoon in the windbreak outside the barn, down comes the censorship upon my pages. She insists and very rightly that it is nobody’s business but our own.

  And there was I with my utterly misplaced chivalry! I made one last effort by calmly identifying myself with the old maids and bachelors. We knew very well, I said, that we had plenty to give to an animal, but were too humble to believe we had much left to offer our fellows.

  ‘Too proud,’ she answered. ‘Suppose you or I died tonight which would be older than the other?’

  That was the end of my self-control. It should, of course, have doubled it. After all, I was quite likely to die that night – which was by far the best of all my reasons for pretending to Benita that my affection for her was fatherly. But I was so moved that I behaved like a boy of twenty who believes that no one has ever known such love before. And why the devil not? I very often do believe it.

  It was after seven when Nur Jehan and her pony cantered along the top of the plateau and down to the east. At the main road Benita insisted that Nur Jehan’s day had been long enough and that he should not walk the six miles to Stow-on-the-Wold and back again.

  I accepted the excuse, though I knew the stallion was not in the least tired. It was best that we should separate quickly. On the way down through cut woodland, where hazel and elder grew close to the path, I had once heard another horse. There was nothing surprising in that, but I had to know who was the rider – and I was not going to revive her memories of the valley below the Wen Acre Plantation by suddenly playing Red Indians through the undergrowth and leaving her with the impression that her future husband was in need of a psychiatrist.

  To avoid the close cover I took Nur Jehan straight up the bare, sharp slope and back towards the barn along high ground. The long fields were still bathed in light and deserted as a prairie. The routine of the farms was over for the day.

  I too felt permeated by the light. Benita brought this dear land with her just as surely as if she had been heiress to a thousand acres. I could neither analyse nor recognize myself. It is a startling rebirth to begin living in the future after ten years of obsession with the past. I found myself thinking of the economics of marriage with all the responsibility of a sound young man at the beginning of his career. I was at the beginning in a way. I had never bothered with half a dozen different appointments which were quite certainly within my reach. The next one with a decent salary would be mine. That and her pencil – any zoologist would jump at the chance of getting her as an illustrator – would keep us in reasonable comfort for a start. I smiled with amusement at my own dreaming.

  ‘Good evening, sir! That is a splendid animal.’

  Hearty, perfectly in keeping with his surroundings, the man rode out of a little covert of thorn on the edge of the escarpment. He appeared to have just passed through it. There was nothing to suggest that he had watched me take leave of Benita, noted my route back and waited for me.

  His face was strong and casual. If I had not seen him before I might never have noticed its quality of intentness. He wore a bowler hat, breeches and boots, a faultless jacket. The bushy eyebrows were not there. My guess that they had been stuck on was right; their purpose was to prevail as the dominant point in any description of him. Nor was his hair dark any more. It was white, prematurely white. Yet we had all called him the dark gentleman. He looked older and more distinguished than at Hernsholt. He was riding a chestnut mare, a Cotswold hunter of sixteen hands, up to his weight and with powerful quarters.

  My start disconcerted Nur Jehan. In collecting the stallion I managed to collect myself.

  ‘Good evening, sir!’ I replied.

  How right I had been to tackle him in my own way! He was indeed above suspicion. Even if I could have proved that he had taken a room in my street, the police would be almost bound to accept his innocent explanation of it. It was inconceivable that he should have blown a postman in half, murdered Sporn and Weber and ingeniously kept Dickfuss praying three days for death before he allowed him to die. I could have sworn the man was a magistrate and in the running for Sheriff of the county.

  ‘Are you going far?’ he asked.

  ‘Just exercising.’

  It would have been the end of me if I had admitted that I was bound directly for the lonely clump of trees on the horizon half a mile ahead where, as he must have known, I was camping. My only hope was to keep him off and lead him, without arousing any suspicion, suddenly down to the world of farms and villages. He had caught me on the only evening when I had for a moment forgotten him. I was completely at his mercy. I had no chance of beating him to the draw, since the clumsy holster of the Mauser was under my left armpit.

  ‘A worthwhile job,’ he said cordially. ‘Of course we have all heard of you and Nur Jehan.’

  ‘You live here?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I am just staying with friends.’

  His manners were pleasant and assured. Evidently he had not the least idea that I had recognized him. Inside me I was screaming to myself that if he killed me he was doomed, that my friends knew enough about him to establish his identity, and that I must tell him so. But would he think it true? Was it in fact true? There was no evidence against him but mine. And I was not going to be alive to give it.

  He came up on my right, for he had to. We were now walking our horses side by side. Imperceptibly the pace slowed. I could not allow him to drop behind and shoot me through the back, but I could not stop without some explanation. I could not even sit up, touch Nur Jehan with my heel and bolt for it. True, I might get clear. I was familiar enough with his character to know that he never took a chancy shot. But the fellow was an experienced horseman; he would spot at once that it was deliberate flight. It was quite possible that he would raise his bowler hat ironically and vanish – to reappear on some other evening when love had made me careless at whatever home I shared with Benita.

  ‘He is only half trained,’ I said in order to put the blame for any sudden move on Nur Jehan. ‘He was brought up as a pe
t.’

  ‘Yes. Always disastrous. Is he excitable?’

  ‘No. And your mare?’

  He was evasive. He did not know. That proved at any rate that the mare did not belong to him. He was the sort of man who would unhesitatingly be lent a good horse.

  Whatever move I made must not be obvious. It must appear to this purring tiger that Nur Jehan was solely responsible. I sat loosely and continued to chat. Then I drove my left heel hard into the stallion’s tender rib and prayed that I wouldn’t be thrown.

  Nur Jehan failed me. Instead of bucking or bolting, he snorted, shook his head and continued to walk. He clearly liked the horse alongside him and was not going to be deterred from a promising acquaintanceship by carelessness on the part of his rider.

  My companion noticed nothing, for he could not see my left leg and I had not gathered my horse. I tried it again. This time Nur Jehan stopped dead, offended and puzzled. He did not particularly resent pressure which he felt to be accidental; what he would not stand was deliberate use of a sore rib to give orders. But the friend on his back was sitting easily and not giving any orders. The circumstances were all wrong.

  This considerate rider also stopped. That was what I dreaded and had been trying to avoid. Unless we were to stay there all night I had to start first and allow him to remain for a decisive second or two behind me. I played the inefficient horseman and sawed at Nur Jehan’s mouth, who began to dance.

  ‘Completely untrainable!’ I shouted angrily.

  ‘Weren’t you perhaps a little hard on his mouth?’

  ‘Damn his mouth!’

  ‘Patience, my dear sir!’ advised my executioner very pleasantly. ‘Patience always leads to the result you want in the end.’

  He had now started to ride with half his right hand stuffed carelessly into his outside coat pocket. He went ahead for a moment and crossed my path on the excuse of looking closely at some sheep which he pretended to admire. He made it extremely difficult for me to avoid coming up on his right. Riding side by side in that position I had no defence against a shot through the pocket and into the liver – or into anywhere if the unseen weapon were of sufficient calibre to knock me off my horse.