Fellow Passenger (28 page)

Seated comfortably in the chestnut, I composed my thoughts to the business in hand. I ought to show, I told myself, a little reasonable perturbation in order to arouse pity, and be ready to drop it as soon as it interfered with the language of the heart. But when I had got my breath back, I found that I needed a very different type of self-discipline. The memory of Cornelia, the certainty that she would come, began to flood me with an excitement which I had not known since my twenties.

About midnight I heard two light footsteps on the leaves and then silence. In the sentimental mood I had created, I imagined her pausing like the usual frightened deer. But I could not see a thing and I kept silence. A moment later that intolerable man, Peter, passed beneath my tree with his great blunderbuss of a holster bumping against his leg, and shone his torch on the wire. I do not know whether he had heard me plunging about the kitchen garden or whether this was the dutiful round of once a week. I am inclined to think it was the latter. He looked too important for a man who suspected trouble.

I had nicely judged Cornelia’s period of hesitation. At twenty-five past twelve she appeared without making a sound, and a deal more efficiently than any frightened deer. Looking down on her, I seemed to see a slight movement of exasperation at finding no one to meet her.

‘You are infinitely kind,’ I said softly.

She jumped, and retorted sharply:

‘No!’

‘May I come down?’

‘It’s merely,’ she said, ‘that I don’t like injustice.’

‘If
you
believe in me—’ I began.

‘I have no opinion whatever. I am going by what Sir Alexander said.’

This was magnificent. The tone of annoyance with herself was exactly right. I told her that I was going to drop a rope.

I had only seen her standing up - with dignity - in court, and I was surprised to find that her head came no higher than my shoulder. She was what the English, always unfeeling in their expressions of admiration, describe as a pocket Venus. To modern taste she was far more alluring than any Venus. Where slimness was required, she was tense and delicate; where it was not, she was in the full flower of the late twenties. That such an anemone of a woman should be a Doctor of Science, with metallurgy as her special subject, was astonishing.

She stared at my beard as if it were something which had grown unexpectedly in a sterilized test-tube.

‘I don’t wonder they never caught you,’ she said. ‘Only your voice is the same.’

I apologized for appearing in her presence with so much hair, and explained that it was my only hope.

‘It looks clean,’ she replied remotely.

‘I only left Southampton this morning.’

‘Have you found a ship?’

‘Possibly. But I don’t want to go.’

She refused to see the implication and my imploring eyes. I was silent, and did not help her.

‘Well, what
have
you to tell me?’ she asked.

‘I was only thinking that your crucibles must be of moonlight and your alembics of crystal.’

‘I don’t use crucibles,’ she replied, ‘and if alembics are what I think they are, I like them large. Please be quick. It’s not too safe. The security officer—’

Her assurance failed her. Both of us, of course, were remembering simultaneously that I had been mistaken for the detestable Peter.

‘He has gone past,’ I said, ‘playing Indians. But if you want to listen to my story, I dare say we should be safer the other side of the wall.’

‘Will you give me your word of honour that you are not a communist or a spy?’ she asked.

‘Yes. What I said about myself in court was all true.’

She laughed. Her voice was rather higher in pitch, rather more Kensingtonian than I should have chosen for her, but it was made delicious, when she was at ease, by a lazy intonation with no more self-control in it than a nightingale’s gurgle.

‘You seem to go in and out of here very easily,’ she said.

I climbed up the rope and pulled her into the chestnut after me. Then I transferred the hook to the branch which overhung the wall, and we slid down into the field. Crawling along the branch was not everybody’s meat, but she did it without flinching.

‘Holidays in the Alps?’ I asked when we reached the ground.

‘Yes.’

She did not sound enthusiastic. I Imagine that men who climb mountains are tired in the evening.

I remembered from my former visit that there had been the remains of a haystack about a hundred yards out from the wall. It was still there, but now rebuilt of this year’s grass. Under a tarpaulin was a dry patch which could not have been bettered for telling one’s past or exploiting the possibilities of the present.

First, I gave her a brief sketch of my father as he was in his prime. The character seemed to please her. She said that in many ways it resembled what she believed to be my own. Then I told her - without, I must admit, revealing that his name had been Tutty - of the somewhat unconventional career of his youth. I knew she would be no more shocked than I was.

‘So you, too, were just a burglar?’ she asked.

The tone of her voice suggested disappointment rather than contempt. I protested. I told her that my past had been adventurous but blameless, as she ought to know if she read her Sunday papers and subtracted those incidents which were obviously impossible. So far as I knew, I was merely recovering family property. I had not the slightest idea that my father’s title to it was dubious.

‘But did you find it?’ she asked.

‘No. I’m pretty sure that I went to the wrong chimney.’

‘And so you want me to help you to get in and search the right one?’

‘I never dreamed of it,’ I declared passionately.

‘But the risk! Alone! You mustn’t do it.’

‘Are they still ghost-hunting in the attics?’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘They decided it was you all along.’

That gave me a wonderful opening.

‘It was,’ I said. ‘Twice I was only waiting for a chance just to see you again.’

‘I don’t know whether that makes your behaviour better or worse,’ she replied. ‘And I must go now.’

She had flaring nostrils which appeared to be completely uncontrollable. The adorable child! She was as conscious as I of our accidental and unfinished symphony. And a beard was new to both of us. It added, under the influence of the haystack, a sweet and pastoral innocence to our mutual discoveries. I could even accept her romantic point of view when she insisted - and meant it - that time and place were not yet.

‘Claudio darling,’ she murmured, ‘shouldn’t you give this stuff back to the heirs of the Lockinges?’

‘I should,’ I admitted. ‘But if they are as poor as the rest of us, think how they would hate to repay the insurance!’

‘And won’t it be hard for you, if you take it, to prove that it was ever there?’

‘My idea was,’ I said, ‘that we should leave just enough in the chimney to back up Harry Cole’s story.’

‘We?’ she asked.

Cornelia intoxicated me. I don’t know how the damned atomic station ever got any work done at all with that little nun of science popping in and out of laboratories. Or can it be that only I found her so intolerably provocative, and that her colleagues thought of her as just a pretty woman occasionally complaisant from sheer boredom?

‘Angel,’ she said at last. ‘But this is utterly humiliating!’

Ah, well, the moment a haystack ceases to be paradise, it must inevitably become a haystack again.

‘Have you realized that in a quarter of an hour I can come back to you with whatever your father left?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t given it a thought,’ I answered truthfully. ‘And so long as you do come back to me I don’t care.’

I meant it. An hour earlier I had realized to perfection what Cornelia could do for me. But whenever I touched her, nothing but Cornelia existed.

‘Where am I to look?’

‘Is there a staircase to the attics from your wing?’

‘Of course there is. It has a door at the top. It’s supposed to be locked.’

I felt a pang of jealousy. If the Ministry of Supply cared sufficiently for the welfare of their women workers, that door should have been locked, not merely supposed to be.

‘Then go up the stairs and turn to the right at the top. Look in the chimney of the third attic on the right.’

We returned to the wall and the overhanging branch. I swarmed up the rope and pulled Cornelia up after me. Then she slid down into the Manor garden.

‘Wait for me in the tree,’ she said, as I prepared to follow. ‘Don’t ruin it all now!’

A man of less mercurial temperament than mine might have squatted in the fork congratulating himself, like a constipated owl, upon his conquest and the complete success of his plans. I thank the Lord that whenever the present is enjoyable I have the gift of living in it. I could think of nothing but the delicious responses and reactions of Cornelia.

She returned in less than a quarter of an hour. I had not even begun to look at my watch. She carried a large shopping bag of basketwork.

‘It was still there,’ she whispered excitedly. ‘Claudio, how marvellous!’

I slid down to her side. Her eyes were dancing with intelligence and triumph. Up till then, in my experience, those eyes had been cold, or half-closed or pools of meaning which had no immediate connection with the higher centres. This was her laboratory look, perhaps. Soot into gold and diamonds was a remarkable transmutation.

‘This is what I have brought you to be going on with,’ she said.

She held open the bag. In it were two small round jars, a powder box and a small jewel case, which appeared to be of solid gold.

‘And the rest?’ I asked.

‘There were some rings. I left those and the bag in the chimney. It had nearly rotted away. The collar and the tiara I’m not going to give you yet. You’re in an impossible mood, and suppose you were caught!’

She was all ready to be humiliated again, the little love! In all my experience I had never met such an exquisite mixture of modesty and abandonment. I would have asked her to marry me on the spot, if I had not feared that she might suspect a sordid motive. A house in Quito was the right background for her, though I doubted if any thickness of wrought iron or any height of wall could confine her curiosity to its proper object.

‘Are you sure they can never be traced?’ she asked, when she, but not I, had returned to sanity.

‘It’s forty-five years since my father removed them,’ I replied. ‘I shouldn’t think jewellers keep records that long.’

I was delighted to see that, in any case, the four pieces did not lend themselves to easy recognition. They were felicitously simple. Either Lady Lockinge had been a woman of surprising taste for her day, or she had had a favourite toilet set of tortoiseshell or ivory exactly copied in gold.

‘When you have sold them, would we be quite mad to meet in London?’

I replied that, properly managed, I did not think there was any risk at all, and that I would dare anything to meet her anywhere. She said that she wanted to see - reasonably enough - what I was like in my true setting:

‘Dance with me. Give me the evening that you would have done six months ago. White tie and tails.’

As a fugitive and an underpaid scientist, we certainly needed it.

‘You must be as bored with the present as I am,’ I exclaimed.

‘No! But with the sort of life we lead, horribly bored!’

I was surprised by the vehemence of her reply, but realized that I only knew the more frivolous and human side of her. It may be that her emotional life was all the more tempestuous because of the reaction from the sober and devoted masculinity of her profession. Even a female scientist who looks like one must experience her strains and stresses, but how much more difficult when both your mirror and your metallurgy give you the satisfaction of faultless achievement!

‘Wednesday night,’ she suggested. ‘And, if you can, telephone me on Tuesday where to meet you. But don’t take a risk, Claudio! You’re being foolish now. Do you realize it will be daylight in three hours?’

That startled me. I could not afford to be seen walking the roads, especially in that neighbourhood, at an hour when anyone but a farm labourer would arouse curiosity. After a farewell which recaptured for me the sweet desperation of partings at the age of seventeen, I vanished into the tree.

Though I hoped I should never have to return to the Manor garden, I left my rope coiled in the fork of the tree; it might be useful if Cornelia ever wished to meet me without passing through the gate. I made a half-circuit of the wall, and put back the roll of wire where I found it. The shopping bag clinked as I walked. I packed Lady Lockinge’s dressing-table set in fronds of bracken and laid on top a number of plants pulled up by the roots from a hedgerow. They would pass - unless some amateur botanist looked at them too closely - as a gift from a friend’s garden to my own.

I covered half the distance to Saxminster at a good round pace, stopping only to take cover from two cars and another cautious pedestrian whose pockets looked suspiciously full. Poached rabbits, probably. After that I strode along in a dream of Cornelia, constructing an indefinite future for myself on the proceeds of the diamonds in which her part was still more indefinite.