by John Lodwick
“I found it weeks ago,” said the newcomer, reassured perhaps by the protective presence of a stranger. “I often come here when you’re out with uncle.”
The eldest boy, his fist clenched, hit his cousin hard upon the chin. “Well, you bloody well won’t come here any more,” he said.
“Here . . . steady on,” said Rumbold.
He examined the child. The resemblance to Fiona was striking: the same green eyes, the same fair hair, the same wide mouth and pallor, but with these primary features of heredity others which had certainly not come from the mother . . . spindle shanks, a tall, domed forehead, an almost complete absence of that muscular development associated with the first decade of life, when trees are climbed and balls thrown and caught with vigour.
The eldest boy must have seen sufficient in Rumbold’s stare to justify a continuance of his baiting tactics. “He collects flowers,” he said. “Collects flowers on the cliffs and presses them.”
“Do you?” asked Rumbold.
The small victim said nothing.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Rumbold.
“I’m not afraid,” he said. “They won’t play with me, so I play by myself. And I’ve got better games than they have, I can tell you.”
“I shouldn’t be at all surprised. I’ll come and play with you myself one day, but cut along now or you’ll be late for your lunch.” He smiled, not so much at the boy as at the schoolroom jargon he had employed in addressing him. How the years slipped off one’s shoulders!
“But I don’t want to go,” the boy said. “I want to stay and watch you shoot.”
This reply appeared to delight the two cousins. Joining hands, they danced round the cave, chanting: “Dirty, dirty Dessy . . . his pants are always messy,” a taunt which was evidently not without some foundation, for the boy blushed deeply and began to snivel.
“All right,” he said. “But you just wait. I’ll pay you out. Wait and see.”
And he ran up the steps and disappeared, pausing only to fling a stone which struck the wet wall of the cave with a dull sound.
“You see,” said the eldest boy contemptuously. “You see what a funk he is. He won’t fight with us. He won’t even wrestle when I tie one hand behind my back.”
“You’re a good bit older,” observed Rumbold.
“Michael isn’t much older. He could wrestle with Michael, couldn’t he? But he’s always been like that, always funking. When we showed him our tame ferrets he was sick. He’s like a bloody girl.”
“What’s his father like?” said Rumbold.
“Oh, Uncle Jim’s not bad, but he can’t farm like Dad. You just look at his land and ours and you see the difference. As for Auntie Mary . . . that’s Desmond’s mother . . . she’s been in bed for two years. Two years! Just imagine that, and Dad says there’s nothing wrong with her at all. Sheer laziness, he says, hypo . . . hypo. . . .”
“Hypochondria?” suggested Rumbold.
“Yes, that’s it . . . hypochondria. Listen, we’d better go and shoot now or Dad will tan us. He gets mad when we don’t bring back a pigeon. He thinks we’re idling because he doesn’t know about this place.”
They ascended the steps. The two boys pulled up a fresh rhododendron bush and planted it in the place of the one to which Rumbold had taken exception. In half an hour Rumbold shot two pigeons and a rook and explained to his companions, upon their demand, the principles of childbirth and the composition of high explosive.
“Shall I see you to-morrow?” he said when, looking at his watch, he saw that the time was past mid-day.
“Not to-morrow. We’ve got to go to a beastly Point-to-Point at Okehampton. But the day after if you like. We’ll take you ferreting. Magnus . . . that’s our biggest one . . . is a real terror. He drinks neat whisky.”
They walked slowly towards the farm. At a gate leading to the main road Rumbold paused. “Well, goodbye,” he said. “Goodbye,” they replied, but seemed embarrassed. They were not very articulate children. “It’s been jolly good fun, sir,” burst out the elder one. “You won’t split about the hide-out, will you?” “No fear,” said Rumbold, and to prove it gave them his penknife, receiving in return a priceless conker which had remained unbeaten throughout the winter term at school.
He walked back to his hotel. A letter awaited him. Over his luncheon mutton and two veg. he read it. “I am here,” wrote Fiona, “en pleine pudibonderie bourgeoise. How goes it with you and shall I see you by Saturday?” Peterhead, it seemed, had not changed for the better. The house was still gas-lit but might serve them as a haven for the remaining winter months. “We are married now,” he read. “I am afraid that this is quite essential as Scottish betrothals do not run their course beneath a single roof. We were married, for your information, in Barcelona. . . .”
Of the sister, not a word. In length the letter reached six pages, the last three of which were devoted to the expression of sentiments more tender: “Darling, forgive all that I said to you in the pub. You have given a new meaning to my horrid life. I know we can be happy, and all that I have to give is yours.”
When he had finished his lunch, Rumbold took the letter upstairs and copied it out upon a writing pad. After about an hour he had achieved a fair imitation of Fiona’s hand. With practise, he knew that he would do still better.
Ten
The sand was soft. In places the prevailing south-west winds had stacked up drifts, and here the foot sank in to the ankle and caused small crabs busy building nests to scurry. Several times Rumbold was obliged to halt and shake the ballast from his shoes.
He made his way beneath the cliffs. He was searching for a path. At length he found one, treacherous, twisting, along which some band of hardy trippers had perhaps slithered on their bottoms in the summer, but of which few could ever have attempted the ascent. Down upon his hands and knees went Rumbold. Allez . . . oop, and with fingers clawing for the grass, and calf muscles tensed he left sea-level. Dislodged at every redeployment of his feet, pebbles and even more formidable fragments of England’s heritage fell, bounding and rebounding to the rocks beneath. Pausing to regain breath he saw the beach below him, blank and melancholy, its only inhabitants a school of sea-gulls grouped like pontoon players round a broken barrel.
At the summit of the path the sea-bound breeze, beating offshore from the relatively warmer land, caught him in the face with stinging insistence. He rested for a moment, concealed by bracken, checking his position. To his right, a mile inland, lay Verron Farm, hidden from where he sat by the wood in which he had shot the previous day. To his left, but only slightly, and much nearer—the uncle’s farm, the home of little Desmond, whom he could see some distance off, playing a solitary game upon the extreme edge of the cliffs.
Rumbold stood up: in this rolling and uncultivated downland no great need for concealment. At most, the two farmers turned loose their flocks of scraggy sheep upon it, and on Sundays, perhaps, a horse recuperating with a bellyful of heather from the labours of the plough. The fertile land, the acres which paid the income tax and the trips to race-meetings lay far distant from this salt-blown scrub. If farm-hands passed here they came with a purpose: to shoot a rabbit, not to admire the view.
Rumbold approached the boy. His feet made no sound upon the turf. The boy held a cricket bat. He stood in the correct stance, his eyes fixed upon a ghostly bowler or surveying the placing of equally ghostly fieldsmen. At intervals he played a stroke, sometimes defensive, sometimes a cut or a drive through the covers. When this happened he would call out “four” or “two”, or pat the turf in front of him with the flat part of his bat.
“Hullo,” said Rumbold.
Startled, the boy turned round. He seemed both resentful and ashamed. “Hullo,” he said.
“What are you playing cricket for in winter?” said Rumbold.
“
We’re on tour,” said the boy.
“Ah, England in Australia . . . is it?”
“No,” said the boy. “I told you I had better games than they had. I’m Liberia. . . .”
Rumbold sat down. He lit a cigarette. “Tell me about Liberia,” he said.
The boy hesitated. “I can’t stop now,” he said. “We’re 342 for six. I’m in the middle of an over.” He looked about him as if, already, he saw the protests of the fieldsmen, the outraged umpires.
“Why not pretend it’s the tea interval?” suggested Rumbold. He stretched his legs and sucked a blade of grass. Green juice in his mouth, the grey of the tobacco smoke which had rinsed his lungs: it tasted good. The boy sat down. He made a note in pencil upon a pad. “I have to remember the score,” he said seriously.
And so it came out; with hesitancy at first, then with a rush of which there was no holding. God alone knew where the boy had got the idea . . . perhaps in some geography lesson when, bored by temperate climes, his eyes had strayed downwards to the torrid coasts of Africa. To others, Liberia was a Negro republic, inaugurated and preserved by Yankee philanthropists: to him it was an independent and somewhat bellicose state populated by a clean-limbed race of predominantly Irish origin. Sport ruled here, but not only sport, for while other children lived their dream-world piecemeal, this one had fitted his within an all-embracing framework. Now a monarchy, now republic . . . each change of regime providing the excuse for positional warfare on the cliff-tops . . . governed by a multiplicity of political parties in the Gallic style (constant elections) with an aristocracy (here he did not seem inventive) whose names were constantly repeated in the National rugby and cricket teams; with stamps, with coinage (pennies treated by electrolysis in the lab. at school), with civil and criminal laws (every decent British murder was at once repeated in Monrovia, the capital); with a spirit of Imperialism as obstinate and pedantic as that of the Mother Country in her palmy days.
For, though Britain knew it not, Sierra Leone and Gambia had quite recently changed hands. The future of Portuguese West Africa hung in the balance. Rumbold was shown the campaign maps, hidden in a grubby pocket-book. The Supreme Commander, whose description he obtained, possessed a perhaps entirely fortuitous resemblance to Montgomery.
“With Britain we want only a just peace,” said the boy (his terminology perhaps borrowed from his father’s Times), “but with Portugal it is different . . . their Queen has refused the marriage offer of our King.”
“But there is no Queen of Portugal,” said Rumbold.
The boy waved this aside. Eventualities arose which justified some tampering with history.
“But doesn’t Liberia ever lose?”
“Oh, yes, sometimes.” His eyes lit up. “Then we have a revolution” . . . generally, it seemed, conducted by some popular cricket professional who, gaining power, abolished all sports other than his own. Thus, he was always sure to be supplanted when the football season started.
And King Rudolph; safe, on and off, upon his throne until the boy heard of Mayerling (the monarch had, of course, following a distinguished example, indulged in several Morganatic unions). And the cricketers; browned, tanned simple souls, juggling with the bat and ball, unaware that in a few years, with the discovery of Keats, they would have suffered a cruel metamorphosis and become poets. And the gallant soldiers, whose future, had they but known it, would have been the firing squad for refusal to sign the first Peace Manifesto, when the boy caught that virus at fourteen. And the gradual transformation of this manly, Spartan State into a gynæcocracy as its creator, wrestling with puberty, learnt to wriggle beneath the sheets, a page from mother’s Vogue in his right hand.
Yes, Rumbold was glad that it lay within his power to save Liberia. He felt no compunction, no regret. A blinding pain, a broken head, a body lying multiply contused among the rocks. One push, a simple shove, and fifty years were snatched away, a decimal point altered in demographical statistics.
The boy rose. The tea interval, it seemed, was over. Rumbold watched him at his miming. Wickets were falling quickly. “All out,” he announced presently. “And Bradman made a duck.”
Rumbold lay back. He placed his hands behind his neck. The grey clouds scudded overhead. Ceiling three thousand feet. “Where is your father?” he asked. “I saw a car coming out of your drive when I was on the road.”
“They’ve gone to Newton Abbot for the day. I’m to have a picnic lunch in the kitchen.”
“You’ll taste better food when your head is in the rock pools,” said Rumbold to himself. “Go on . . . why don’t you play?”
“I am playing,” said the boy. “You don’t have to run about to play. I’m making an election speech inside my head.”
“Supposing,” said Rumbold, sitting up. “Supposing that I were to kill you.”
“It depends how you did it,” said the boy, intrigued.
“All right . . . supposing I were to hit you on the head?”
“There’s only the bat to do it with. You couldn’t do much with that.”
“Well, never mind. Supposing I did do it. What would happen then?”
The boy considered the question. “A farm-hand did something very like that to a little girl not long ago,” he said. “They’re hanging him at Dorchester to-morrow.”
“I could strangle you,” said Rumbold.
The boy sketched parallel lines with his bat in the sandy soil: trenches perhaps: a pitched battle in his war against the Portuguese. “No good,” he said. “For then I’d scratch and the police would find fragments of cloth between my finger nails. They’d catch you easily.”
“Not so easily as that,” said Rumbold. “Look at it my way. I told them in the hotel this morning that I’d have my lunch in Salcombe. The way I’ve come by the cliffs is a short cut. If I killed you now I could be drinking a pint in Salcombe inside twenty minutes.”
“And supposing I screamed?” said the boy.
“No one would hear you,” said Rumbold. “Only the sea-gulls.”
The boy made a wry mouth: “I don’t really like this story,” he said. “Tell me a nicer one.”
Rumbold looked at his watch. The time was a quarter past eleven. “What shall I tell you?” he said. “Shall I tell you about myself? Once upon a time there was a little boy who lived in a back street in a town near London. . . .”
“How old?”
“About your age, but with this difference that his mother made him wear short trousers till he was twelve because she hadn’t enough money to buy him long ones.”
“But trousers are not very expensive,” said the boy.
“Everything seems expensive when your father’s saving up to have five pounds a week at sixty and a brass-plated coffin for his funeral. The boy cottoned on to that right away, so he did his best to rectify matters. He stole. . . .”
“What did he steal?”
“Sweets at first: he used to open the lockers of the other boys when they were in the playground. It wasn’t a good school like yours . . . only ten pounds a term and a guinea extra for music lessons. The Masters lived in: that was what first gave the boy the idea of stealing money. He used to go up to their rooms in the break. He always took something with him, an exercise book or a hockey list, so that if he was found there he would have an excuse. The nicest Master was also the most stupid: he always left his drawer open, so naturally it was he who lost most.”
Rumbold’s turn now to draw pictures in the sand. He sat cross-legged, sucking the grit from behind his finger nail. “Of course at that time,” he said, “the boy’s needs were modest. He only wanted a Meccano set or an air pistol like the one your cousin has. The money meant nothing to him except as a means to these ends. But as he grew older and wanted a motor-bike or wanted to take girls to the pictures he began to see that money was important in itself.”
He paused, surveying the boy, who watched him, rapt and attentive. “And it is, too, you know,” he said, “unless I’ve made a dreadful mistake.”
“Go on,” said the boy. “I’ve pinched things myself.”
Rumbold lit another cigarette. “Well as soon as this boy realised that,” he said, “he stopped stealing from necessity, and began to steal partly from sheer pleasure and partly to have a reserve to fall back upon if times got bad.”
“But wasn’t he ever caught?” asked the child.
“Never. Mind you, there were some pretty close shaves, and once there were police in the house. The boy blubbed a lot in the lavatory that day, but he stuck to his story because he knew that if he admitted one thing the whole of the rest would come out. It’s quite easy to steal if your parents are respectable. This boy’s parents were eminently respectable. His father belonged to the Rotary Club. He wanted his son to work in a bank.” Rumbold laughed. “That was a good joke, wasn’t it?”
“But you can’t steal money from a bank,” said the child. “I’ve heard my own Dad say so.”
“Oh, when I say ‘steal’ you mustn’t take me literally,” said Rumbold. “My young man was long past simple pilfering by this time. Naturally, you can’t take hard cash from a bank but you can sell the clients’ secrets to people who are interested in them. And it’s surprising what interest is taken in the monthly rise and fall of a big account. One thing leads to another in that game. The position of the intelligent bank clerk is ideally suited for blackmail. . . .”
He paused. “Especially abroad,” he said. He paused again, staring at the sand, but seeing instead the Place du Théâtre Français in Paris, the clock across the street, the red and yellow awnings of the Régence. It was there in the embrasure used by lovers that he had met Montenotte, once a week, usually after lunch.
