A Time to Kill

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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal.

Ecclesiastes, 3

Roland had telephoned me to look him up the next time I was in London and, when I answered that it wouldn’t be for a month, had asked me casually, but insistently, if I couldn’t drive up some time during the week-end and have lunch with him.

So there I was in his flat with a silent, Sunday London outside. I fear I was very smug with self-satisfaction, warmed by the strength of the pink gins before lunch and a pleasurable sense of being wanted by a man who didn’t lightly give his confidence. That I was wanted a deal more elsewhere did not, then, impress me at all. When Cecily and the children showed themselves a little hurt that I should use a free Sunday to go to London, I remember pointing out – I hope not too pompously – that I was still on the Reserve, and that an order, however it was given, was an order.

‘You’ll never believe who has had the cheek to come and see me,’ said Roland.

‘Somebody I know?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think you ever actually spoke, but you certainly knew each other. It was Pink.’

Pink wasn’t a man against whom I bore any malice. True, he had fired a few shots in my general direction, but even in them there was a certain style. He wasn’t a treacherous, slinking, brilliant pansy like his former boss, Colonel Hiart. He was just a disappointed, simple-minded romantic, who had made the country too hot to hold him.

‘Where’s he living?’

‘Alone on a boat,’ Roland said. ‘And he thinks it safe enough – what Pink would call safe enough – to lie low in the Essex marshes. He has grown a beard and nobody knows that he’s in England. I ought to hand him over to the police. They want him for attempted murder and illegal landing of aircraft. But they would have more trouble in getting a conviction than he’s worth.’

Roland always talked of the police as if they were a body of incalculable experts whose opinions must be respected but could only be guessed. I’ve heard a general discuss a cabinet minister in much the same tone. He seemed on excellent terms with Scotland Yard, and an inspector of the Special Branch had treated him, in my presence, with a grim and humorous deference. That indeed was all I knew of Roland, except that he had financed Peter Sandorski’s underground. The only time I ever asked him a direct question – whether he belonged to the Foreign Office or the War Office – he laughed and said he didn’t know himself.

‘I’ll put you in the picture,’ he went on. ‘Sandorski had a most valuable week in Vienna, and on the strength of his report we were able to act. The new fascism is just as dead abroad as Heyne-Hassingham’s People’s Union in England.

‘But if you don’t let political lunatics have one toy to play with, they’ll soon find another. Members of the People’s Union and its allied parties abroad have split like this: chaps who were trying to escape from monotony have taken to religion or societies with comic hats and chaps who just wanted to be ordered about have drifted towards communism. That seems incredible to us, but there it is! You’ll remember that ex-communists made some of Hitler’s toughest Nazis; and today in Germany it’s the ex-Nazi who makes the toughest communist.

‘Now friend Pink is a Brer Rabbit – allus some-whar, whar he ain’t got no bizness. He’s been in bad company, and on one such occasion he heard a couple of drunk German fellow-travellers blabbing away, all full of German tears and hatred, when they thought they were alone. So he came to me. He’s an old-fashioned patriot, is Pink, and born a couple of hundred years after he should have been.

‘How far what he heard is a genuine plan or a dream of a plan or just pot-house talk worked up by Pink’s imagination, I don’t know. But this is it – Plot with the deepest, darkest P for communist agents to go round this country spreading foot-and-mouth disease.’

I said it was just the sort of yarn that any stalwart of the People’s Union would think up to frighten old ladies and get their subscriptions.

‘And the old lady writes her cousin, the general,’ Roland added, ‘and he to me, and I have to send him a note of thanks which doesn’t look like a printed form. Oh, I warned Pink that he must think up a better yarn than that one, and told him to get back on board quick, or I’d let the police know he was in London. I wish now that I had had a little more patience. You’ve seen this, I suppose?’

He passed me a newspaper cutting. It joyfully reported the preposterous story put out by East German communists that American aircraft had dropped Colorado beetles on their potato fields.

‘They must have minds like Pink’s,’ I said.

‘Pink? Not a bit! He’s thrashing the air all the time. Whereas these people – well, the only sure thing is that they calculate every move to the last place of decimals. And not a fault in the arithmetic – except, thank God, that their axioms are all wrong!

‘According to our experts, Roger, this beetle story can only mean that they themselves have committed, or intend to commit or might intend to commit some very similar crime. Then, if they are caught, they can say it was justifiable retaliation.

‘Of course, experts are always too ingenious, and I’m utterly unconvinced. The game wouldn’t be worth the candle, you see. It’s true that Pink’s story fits their policy of pinpricks in sore spots. But they’d be caught, and they must know it. And when they were, the fury and contempt in the Western world would be out of all proportion to the nuisance value of the epidemic.’

‘Well, that rules it out,’ I said.

‘It should, and it does,’ he answered. ‘And yet I wish I had heard of this Colorado beetle stunt before I turned Pink out of my office.’

Pink had put himself completely into Roland’s power – proof, at any rate, that he had made himself believe his own story. He had told Roland both the false name that he was using and the name of his little cruiser. She was too small and unimportant to be registered anywhere; and so long as he kept to quiet anchorages and didn’t visit yacht clubs, nobody was likely to bother him until the end of the summer.

There was a warrant out for him, however, and if he drew any attention to himself he was pretty sure to be picked up by the police. Roland couldn’t and wouldn’t guarantee him freedom from arrest, and was most unwilling to have any direct dealings with him. So he had conceived the unprincipled idea that Pink should communicate with him through me. Had I any objection?

‘But why me?’ I protested.

‘Well, he was going round at once from Essex to Poole on the track of his precious plot,’ Roland answered, ‘and as he won’t be far from you and knows your part of Dorset well, I thought it would be easy for him to hop on a bus or a bicycle and see you after dark if he had anything further to report.’

I didn’t receive Roland’s proposal with any enthusiasm. The last thing I wanted was that bandit Pink turning up in the middle of the night and upsetting Cecily. I suggested that Pink’s feelings towards me could hardly be those of a friendly caller.

‘Good lord, he’s too much of a fighting man to resent defeat,’ Roland insisted. ‘And anyway, he must think you were always obeying my orders. Love me, love my dog!’

‘Look here,’ I said, the dog taking one last wriggle towards freedom, ‘if this tale were true, Pink couldn’t have got hold of it. I’ve no idea what his contacts have been, but I’ll bet anything they are just nasty, international small fry, who wouldn’t be trusted by a responsible communist any more than by you.’

‘My dear Roger, you’re perfectly right,’ he replied. ‘But life would be very simple if I only used people I could trust. And the same goes for them. So be a good fellow, and let me tell Pink that he can call on you if he must.’

Thinking it all over on my drive home, I came to the conclusion that Pink was unlikely to bother me. His whole story was an extravagant effort to put himself right with the police, and I was surprised that Roland even thought him worth an envelope and stamp. He was certainly giving him no more – no help, no money and no faith. Pink could be counted on to compromise any organization which used him.

I made good time – considering the road was full of Sunday evening traffic going in the opposite direction – and arrived home before Jerry’s and George’s bedtime. It was a glorious June evening; so, to give them a treat, Cecily and I pretended to make a picnic out of their simple supper, and drove them up to Hardy’s Monument to eat it. We could see a hundred miles of the Channel, all the way from the Needles to Start Point.

The slim, grey streaks of the warships in Portland Harbour made me feel more kindly towards Pink. Somewhere he was in all that blue, alone in his boat, a white speck lost at five miles distance, without wife or children and looking back on his broken career as a sailor. But if he
would
think he was Nelson, what did he expect? You can’t disobey orders and get away with it – at least, you can’t if you’re a bullheaded lunatic like Pink. And then, after that, to take up with the People’s Union and run the risk of being tried for high treason! No, his thoughts while he cooked and lived and slept in his twelve-by-six cabin must have been dark as the mud beneath his keel.

The children were dashing about, picking up spent cartridges from the heather, when Cecily asked me how the interview with Roland had gone. I said that he wanted to use me as a post-box – which, so far as it went, was true. There was no point in worrying her with Pink’s morbid inventions.

‘Is that all?’ she asked.

‘It’s all he’s going to get,’ I answered positively.

I meant it, too, as I watched my boys tumbling after each other in and out of the hollows, their faces glowing in the last rays of the red sun. Then Cecily began to fuss because they hadn’t enough sweaters on; so we chased and caught them, and took them home to bed.

I gave little more thought to Pink and Roland, except to wish in moments of disgruntled self-analysis – the ten minutes, for example, while one shaves a solemn and far too familiar face – that I hadn’t gone rushing off to London so easily. I knew very well that my motive had been sheer vanity, for I needed nothing, and least of all Roland’s complications, to put more interest into my life.