Appleby Plays Chicken (3 page)

‘There are ditches, all right, David my boy. Who’s going to read out the rules?’

David said something obscene about the rules.

‘Are you a chicken if you just jump?’

This time David didn’t reply. He was wondering if it would be feasible for Tom and himself simply to pick up Ogg and pitch him overboard. He was particularly without a fancy, he found, for having to take the mutilated remains of Pettifor’s nephew back to their nursery. But he had no time to pursue this possibility. The car was running gently downhill.

‘This is it, chaps.’

Timothy spoke unemotionally, and David suddenly judged his voice beautiful – an extravagant notion that had certainly never occurred to him before. And Timothy had taken his hands from the wheel.

So they were doing it – playing chicken. It was – in its small, silly way – incredible; it was like the knowledge that one’s country is now at war. What’s done cannot be undone. Ogg had started to cheer.

The pace quickened. They were on the crown of the road and the car felt as if it would go like an arrow forever. The headlights were on – without much effect in the full moonlight. But the beam just steadily skimmed the nearside ditch. David tried to glimpse the speedometer, but Ian’s humped knees were in the way. They weren’t yet hurtling, but the pace wasn’t slow. There was no chance of a fiasco now – of their simply rolling gently into the ditch at the start. They were playing chicken; the game had begun; and there was nobody to blow a whistle.

But the wind whistled. It whistled in David’s ear as he stood leaning over the front seat. That was an indication that they were getting up quite a lick. Ogg had quit cheering. Perhaps he had come out of it, and regained some rational notion of what they were booked for… There was a terrific jolt. The car had gone over a pothole. That almost certainly meant…

Yes, it did. The shock had abruptly deflected their course, and they were heading straight for the ditch. Nobody
could
grab the wheel now, for there was nothing but a split second in question. This, as Timothy said, was it. The car would be the hell of a mess. And they would be very lucky if they themselves got off with broken bones…

Bump
. When they seemed to be right off the road, and their near wheels in air, it had happened again. Incredibly, their course had shifted, and the clear road was once more in front of them – with an increasing gradient and a bend at the bottom. David heard Tom Overend gasp. It had been an absolutely fatal reprieve. For they were now moving really fast.

But David was no longer conscious of their speed. Suddenly he had become aware of nothing but his own hands. They felt enormous – like hands by Picasso in his period of elephantiasis. And they felt as heavy as if hewn out of granite.

It was the same with the others. David was visited by a quite clear intuitive knowledge of this. There were twelve hands in Timothy’s car, and each weighed a hundredweight. It had been entirely unimaginative not to know that that was how it would be. Or call it paralysis. Like the sort of dream in which terror clamps one’s feet to earth, fuses one’s tongue on the palate.

There was a lurch. Once more – but this time on a fine diagonal and with incredible momentum – they were headed for the ditch. David made a tremendous effort of will. His arms just wouldn’t stir. He glanced sideways, and saw Ogg’s face. And suddenly his arms were free, his hands were normal. He leant forward, clasped the wheel, and steered the car to the centre of the road. Timothy instantly and viciously applied the brakes. The car slowed down. The game of chicken was over.

Coasting down the hill on his motorbike, Leon Kryder came to a halt beside them. His grimness was gone. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘now you know.’ He passed, and got no reply. ‘Scared dumb?’ he asked cheerfully.

But he knew it wasn’t exactly that. They were scared; it would be impossible to recover from honest terror that quick. But they were also awkwardly avoiding one another’s glance; and Timothy had found a resource in getting out and feeling the brake drums – muttering that they were lucky not to be on fire. What’s done cannot be undone. They had played the damned game.

Arthur Drury was the first to speak. ‘Bloody nonsense,’ he said. He said it tentatively, as if fishing for the right note. Then, apparently satisfied, he conscientiously poured out all the bad language he knew – applying it impartially to Timothy’s foul old car and all its moronic passengers. ‘Although David has a gleam,’ he ended up.

‘Yes, David’s a frightful ass.’ Tom Overend took it up quickly. ‘But – thank God – he can show an atom of sense at times.’

‘A fond, a foolish, but happily a trivial episode.’ This was Timothy’s contribution as he climbed back into the car. ‘And now we go home.’

‘Yes, we go home,’ Ian said – and added: ‘Sorry about this, chaps.’

Timothy glanced at him belligerently. ‘What d’you mean – sorry about this?’

‘Started it, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, shut up, for the love of mike.’ And Timothy tugged at the starter.

Only Ogg said nothing, and David’s opinion of him went up. They drove off, and for a moment Leon stood by his bike, watching them. They had been damned lucky, he thought – and if the affair left them feeling awkward, that was all to the good. They wouldn’t do it again. And they certainly had no future as mixed-up kids.

The next morning, David Henchman went off by himself.

He quite often did this. It was what the others had in mind, he supposed, when they were shouting their cheerful nonsense the evening before – their nonsense about his being a pariah and a harmless eccentric. He had never himself thought twice about this mildly solitary habit of his – or certainly not to worry over it. For one thing, it
was
mild; he was never without his modicum of sociable occasions; and indeed if there wasn’t some positively gregarious element smothered in him, he wouldn’t presumably have come to Devon with this bunch of Pettifor’s. Commonly, when he went off like this, it wasn’t with any sense of making a break for a nervously necessary solitude. It was just a happening – as was getting back again and eating his dinner beside the next fellow.

But this morning it was rather different. He was glad there was still nobody in the dining room when he finished his early breakfast; and he was annoyed when, getting outside, he came on Pettifor pottering round his old Land Rover. But Pettifor gave him only a cold and unseeing look. Probably he had got wind of the idiocy of the night before and wasn’t too pleased. David didn’t try to speak to him. In fact he damned Pettifor and Pettifor’s lot roundly to himself as he pushed out of the pub.

He didn’t however succeed in getting away without any cheery matutinal talk at all. As commonly in old places like the George, there was an archway one had to go under to reach the road. The room on top of this belonged to Dr Faircloth – and there he was at an open window, smothering his face with lather. He might have been an advertisement for the stuff, so robustly and cheerfully did he confront the day. ‘Good morning!’ he called out. ‘Off for a tramp?’

‘I thought I’d go off somewhere.’ David felt ashamed of the lack of enthusiasm with which he made this response. If retired clergymen – supposing Faircloth really to be that – are able to greet life with glad cries while shaving, then it’s only civil to do the smiling morning face business in reply. ‘Because it looks’, David added, ‘as if it might be rather a decent day.’

‘I certainly hope so.’ Faircloth, thrusting his head further through the window, took a sniff and a gulp of day, rather as if testing it before allowing the waiter to pour out a glass all round. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It will be pretty good. How I wish I could come along.’

‘Then why don’t you, sir?’ David said this with exactly the casual cordiality required. Like all Pettifor’s lot, David was a nice man with nice manners. And now, as he looked upward at Faircloth, he was interested to find that he could continue to smile engagingly while softly grinding his teeth. ‘There’s a bus in ten minutes,’ he said. It wasn’t perhaps too rash to allow a note of broader encouragement to these words. Faircloth, after all, couldn’t have breakfasted. And he probably revelled in breakfast even more than he did in shaving soap.

‘Unfortunately I must just hang around. My daughter turns up today, but I’m not sure when.’ Faircloth produced a safety razor. ‘Where do you think of going? What about Knack Tor? It’s a stiff climb, but there’s a wonderful view.’

David shook his head. At least he wasn’t going to have his route planned for him. ‘I don’t expect I’ll do much. I’ve got some reading to do.’

‘Capital – capital.’ Faircloth stopped scraping at himself to nod vigorously at this. ‘A fine day, solitude, and th
Republic
in your pocket: it’s not a bad definition of happiness.’

David had to remember not to grind his teeth too loud. Retired clergymen – particularly if of ample means – are adept profaners of mysteries. ‘I must be off,’ he said, ‘or I’ll miss that bus.’ He gave a wave – a nice man’s wave – and then dived under the archway, scowling furiously.

The quiet village street was comforting, so that it was only half-heartedly that he damned Pettifor and Pettifor’s lot once more as he made his way down it. As for Dr Faircloth, he was a thoroughly decent chap. And here was the bus, that would take him straight away from all of them. He got into it and did a good five miles. Then he walked in the loneliest direction he could spot on his map. He lit his pipe. He swung the heavy, knobbly walking stick that had been his grandfather’s. He said scraps of verse aloud.

Well, that was all right. The knobbly stick, the pipe that was now so respectably ancient, his khaki shorts, his sky-blue windcheater, his well-worn Gunner’s shoes: they were all extremely right and comforting. It was indeed a gorgeous day, with a light wind that you could get out of whenever you wanted to soak in warm spring sunshine. He found a sheltered corner by a stream and read for what he felt was hours and hours. Plato’s subject was justice – not an easy subject, it seemed. Once David looked up and said aloud – and rather to his own confusion – ‘The man can write.’ And once he filled another pipe. Then the sunshine became fitful for a time, and he decided to move on. He would get right up somewhere on the moor.

In the valley out of which he was presently climbing the stream was lined with heavily pollarded willows; they were thrusting up abundant withies of an astonishing red, like ginger-haired giants sprouting from earth, or explosions from a stick of accurately dropped bombs. At first he could hear tractors in the fields behind him and somewhere somebody was shooting. But presently there was nothing at all. He was on a narrow track the course of which was marked by posts carrying a single telephone wire; on every fourth or fifth post there would be a hawk, and as he approached, the bird would flap away, deceptively heavy like an owl, before rising and wheeling buoyantly over the empty moor. Presently he struck off across the turf. It was spongy in places, but he found it possible to tramp briskly more often than not. He had no goal in view – except that he vaguely felt himself to be looking for prehistoric hut circles.

David’s imagination was much possessed at this time by the notion of unfathomable antiquities, by what Thomas Mann had called time-coulisses, by the sense that today’s most immemorial legends had been equally immemorial legends long ago. So he climbed happily, his mind mooning around what he vaguely knew of the Early Iron Age. The sling – a new and deadly weapon – had advanced into Britain across this country. The hill forts, with their multiple ramparts, were a memorial of that sort of warfare – outer defences of the coveted iron in the Forest of Dean. Then as now, battle had the same objectives – and they weren’t romantic. Or almost the same. Iron then; oil or uranium today. And so with the weapons: now the guided missile; yesterday the smooth pebble or the baked clay bullet hurled from the leather loop. A sling would still be an engine to reckon with on bare ground like this. But he wondered if it had ever been any sort of weapon of precision, as the tale of David and Goliath would suggest. Or had it needed organized companies of slingers to be effective? He had an idea he’d read that in the La Tène culture things had been organized that way.

Mooning along like this, he hadn’t been attending to the map, and presently he had a thoroughly satisfactory sense of having lost himself. Ahead of him, the moor rose to a succession of rock-crowned eminences. Two – a big and a little one – were close together; and he thought he’d now stop and identify them. It wasn’t difficult. The little one was called the Loaf, and the big one was Knack Tor. It was Knack Tor that Faircloth had been burbling about, and that he himself had rather snootily turned down. Well, he’d have a go at it after all.

David strode on, peopling the next slope with lurking men in skins, in woad; imagining he heard the pebble or the flint sing suddenly past his ear. It was all nonsense – utterly remote from him, and yet quite easily to be conjured up in this way. Its charm lay in that. And he didn’t, as he moved his ghostly warriors over the moor, cast himself for any hero’s role. At least he wasn’t childish enough for
that
– and anyway it was all too unformed and shadowy for drama. Now there was a lark singing above his head. Its song seemed to set a seal on the absolute silence surrounding him.

The effect of a great loneliness was remarkable; it was as if he had been in one of the uninhabited places of the earth. A quarter of a mile away two dark ponies were browsing, and nothing else moved. They might have been prehistoric creatures, innocent of human association. No new animal had been domesticated, David told himself inconsequently, since man first learned to leave any record of himself other than his bones. And there was no impress of humanity upon all this landscape except a false one: the piles of slabbed and tumbled rock on the summits of many of the tors. They looked like savage, like Cyclopean altars – so that one expected to see a thin curl of smoke going up from their flat tops. But it was merely the interior economy of the earth that had voided them and set them there; they possessed no meaning save what the fancy cared to lend them.