Fellow Passenger (29 page)

While I was in this mood, a blasted policeman approached me silently from behind on his bicycle. He wished me a good morning to which I replied instinctively with a good night - and we thereby established that he was going on duty and I was bound for bed.

He got off his bike and walked along with me chatting. What he wanted to say was:
What have you got in that basket’?
But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. I looked respectable. I was well spoken and casual. I might indeed have been a naval officer on leave.

I searched my imagination for what I could possibly have been doing. Those roots on top of my basket were meant to create an atmosphere in daylight. They were no sort of an excuse for trudging along a country lane in the small hours.

‘Moon in the first quarter, constable,’ I said vaguely. ‘I know it sounds silly. But there you are. Possibly you have a garden and yourself believe in sowing and planting with the waxing moon.’

He looked at me closely.

‘Cut yourself, have you?’ he asked suspiciously, and shone his torch on my face.

‘Look here, constable!’I began indignantly. ‘Because I like to collect plants—’

‘It’s all right, sir,’ he said with a broad grin. ‘No names, no pack drill!’

‘But what makes you suddenly think I’m O.K.?’

‘Well, you’ll excuse my mentioning it,’ he said, ‘but I should wash all that lipstick off before you meet anyone you know.’

My embarrassment must have rung true. I felt it.

‘One goes quite innocently to a garden at dusk,’ I explained, ‘and before one knows it, it’s five a.m.’

‘We all get a bit of luck sometimes,’ he answered, mounting his bicycle. ‘Good night, sir!’

That night-flowering face which could be, if she chose, so drowsy and full-lipped! It was proper that she should have attended to her complexion before coming to meet me, but I now realized that even after her successful exploration of the chimney she had stopped to repair her lips before returning to the tree. Attention to detail was always a marked characteristic of Cornelia.

After this astonishing escape I gave my beard - and the odd spots she had discovered where there wasn’t any - a scrub in the first stream I came to. Dripping with water and restored to a keener sense of self-preservation, I took refuge among the willows and clumps of bushes on the bank and watched the sun rise. It favoured the British Isles by clocking in between two glorious crimson-striped clouds and then took the rest of the day off.

I remained where I was, visited only by some squelching heifers, until farm workers and bearded gentlemen in duffle-coats might reasonably be seen about their business. Soon after nine I made my way by field paths and tracks to the outskirts of Saxminster and the station. Full confidence at once returned when I had picked up my bag and gun-case. That precious badge of social standing demanded that I should live up to it by taking a first-class ticket on the London train. I did so - though the extravagance reduced my capital to two pounds - and settled down in a corner seat to sleep.

From Paddington I took a taxi to a small West-end hotel which had the double advantage of an excellent address and of guests so notoriously antique that it was unlikely I should meet anyone I knew. I stopped on the way to buy a hare which I placed on top of Cornelia’s shopping bag. It was an odd way for a man of substance to carry his game, but it reinforced the effect of the gun-case and impressed the hotel porter.

I chose to name myself the Hon. Peter Bowshot St John Godolphin. He was an old schoolfellow and intimate of mine, whom I had rediscovered in a primitive little paradise of his own making, half-way down the eastern slopes of the Andes. If ever a man were completely lost to sight, he it was. He allowed me to help him with a few necessaries, but made me swear not to bring down on him his family or their letters. He wanted to be left in peace with his three Indian wives and his peculiar religion. He tried to explain it to me. I gathered that if you died drunk you flew up unscathed and smiling past the seven devils whose business it was to intercept your soul on the way to heaven and to return it in some unpleasant form to earth. He did not want to risk dying sober and being reincarnated as a flying bed-bug. Where he lived, they did fly.

I had had no breakfast and little supper, so morale was low; but after a very edible lunch - though more to the taste of the surrounding dowagers than mine - and some tentative exploration of the wine list, I was ready for the test. Locking the remainder of my valuables in my suitcase, I took one of the gold jars and went round to a respectable pawnbroker in the Strand - the sort of place which a thief would avoid, and a salaried man, unused to pawnbrokers, would hope to find fatherly and understanding.

I was very manly, gruff and embarrassed. I told the fellow some yarn - which no doubt he had heard many times before - to the effect that I should certainly redeem the pledge in two days’ time, and meanwhile wanted all I could get on it. He spent some time in the back of the shop, telling me he had to satisfy himself that the article was solid gold. Possibly he was looking up the list of missing valuables and telephoning the police and my hotel. I tried to feel patient and look confident. The risk had to be taken. Eventually he came back and offered me forty pounds. I ran him up to fifty-five.

Now came my metamorphosis into a more solid citizen. I had no time for a tailor, so did the best I could with ready-mades. I was surprised that I could be fitted so well. My experience till then had been only of Cork Street, when I was rich, and slop shops, when I was destitute, with nothing in between. My aim was to appear as Peter Godolphin might - if he had just turned up from foreign parts and bought himself linen, shoes, a discreet tweed suit, bowler hat and umbrella to be going on with.

That was enough for the day, and there was not much left of the fifty-five pounds by the time I had chosen my restaurant and dined. I spent ten well-deserved hours in bed, dreaming of Cornelia so long as I was awake and of nothing at all when I slept.

My temporary borrowing of Peter Godolphin’s name was not wholly due to his retiring nature. When we were both about nineteen, Peter - even then a fanatic - was inspired by Voices to believe that by backing second favourites he could restore the family fortunes. He managed, at any rate, to restore his own by having his grandmother’s rope of pearls perfectly matched in artificial pearls, and selling the original. He had even supplied himself with a letter of authorization into which the buyer did not enquire too closely. That was the shop I needed. It specialized in the disposal of aristocratic valuables. The proprietor was not dishonest - he would have been rightly horrified at the suggestion - but he was so determined to preserve a reputation for extreme discretion that he never asked enough questions.

After refreshing my memory of Peter’s relations from De-brett, I packed in tissue paper the jewel case, the powder box and the remaining jar, and took them round to their new home. I really did not look at all like Peter - except that we were both brown-eyed and dark-haired - and I did not claim to be him. I let the proprietor do all the work.

When I had mysteriously mentioned a certain rope of pearls he fell on my neck, apologizing profusely for not recognizing me under so much sun-tan and such a beard. Sherry was produced in the office, dark-panelled and smelling of silver. Where had I been? South Africa. Was I home for good? For a year to see how I liked it. How was my Aunt Lucy? Moved from Cannes to Bordighera. Six hundred pounds I got from him. He showed some fatherly disapproval when I said I would prefer cash to a cheque, but the request was not unfamiliar to him. I promised to return the following week to allow him to inspect a diamond tiara and necklace which had been left to me by a second cousin.

With all this money in hand and the value of the diamonds to come, winter caused me no more anxiety. I could retire to the country under any name which pleased me and begin cautious negotiations for a false passport - or possibly a genuine one if I could get hold of a likely birth certificate and establish a new identity. But the sooner I was out of London, the better. Though Peter Godolphin enjoyed it, he felt no safer than Faiz Ullah.

There could be no moving, however, until Cornelia’s party was over. I bought the necessary outfit, allowing myself an avuncular and adoring smile at her
naïveté.
She must, I thought, have been unduly fascinated by society columns in the evening papers and failed to realize that occasions in October for white tie and tails are rare - if, that is, one has no connection with theatre or charity balls or government contractors.

On the Tuesday, our menu chosen and our table booked, I telephoned her. She sounded overjoyed to hear that I had safely disposed of my father’s property and that I was safe. She told me that she would stay at the Westminster Palace Hotel, but that I was not to call for her there. She insisted that she would meet me in the lounge of Claridge’s at eight.

The Westminster Palace would not have been my choice for her; but after all she had only the pay of a scientist, and it was cheap, comfortable and handy - one of those enormous, fairly modern joints where everything was slightly spurious, from the glittering cocktail bar, where there was little gin in the cocktails, to the restaurant, where a full complement of waiters served food of tea-shop standard. My instinct was strongly against it. I suspected that the Westminster Palace was just the place which would appeal to criminals in their brief periods of prosperity between one gaol sentence and the next. However, I had to go there. It was a move which Cornelia might or might not be expecting, but certainly would not resent.

On Wednesday afternoon I moved over to the Westminster Palace. I did not use the name of Peter Bowshot St John Godolphin or carry my gun-case, feeling that one would arouse suspicion, and the other alarm. So I became William Winthrop of Birmingham, by profession Foreign Representative. The hall porter and the reception clerk treated me, after the same searching look, with the same degree of polite contempt. My beard suggested that I had not even a decent wish to win friends and influence people; my choice of the Westminster Palace showed that I had learned nothing abroad.

It was not the right hour to reveal to Cornelia my presence under the same roof so I changed at leisure and went over to Claridge’s. A little after eight she irradiated the entrance to the lounge. That was why she had not wanted me to call for her! That was why she had demanded a white tie! Lady Lockinge’s tiara crowned her dark brown hair. Lady Lockinge’s diamonds hung lightly from her neck and flamed upon - there is no name for that decorative and sexless interval. They covered in barbaric abandon the whole of the space which, in a man, would be occupied by the V of his waistcoat.

Europe stared at her, and whispered that she was of course American. America goggled, and guessed that she was foreign royalty. Her dress was of white lace, matching the roughness of the diamonds and not, I think, outrageously expensive. The sable cape, however, which was slipped slightly back from her shoulders to reveal the necklace, must have made every woman feel that mink was a mere perquisite of film stars. Where she got it from I never knew and could not ask. I suspect, perhaps charitably, that it was a legacy from a wealthy great-aunt, refashioned by the best of furriers in exchange for half the skins.

I rose to meet her. She passed unconcernedly across the lounge with just the right mixture of modesty and of delight in her own appearance. I suddenly realized that my bored and unconventional little scientist had probably attended an excellent finishing school before she disappointed her mother by immuring herself in lecture-rooms and laboratories.

‘I couldn’t resist it,’ she said. ‘It’s unfair to ask a woman to handle such things and not wear them once.’

‘Wear them always,’ I begged her.

She accepted this politeness with a smile which I could translate as I liked.

‘What on earth do you suppose they think we are?’ she asked.

‘The sturdy Englishwoman to your left,’ I told her, ‘the one who has never been the mistress of anything but foxhounds has just conjectured that we are South American millionaires.’

For myself, it was a good guess. I might well have been a jungly and conservative magnate from a remote mining town, taking his pesos through London on the way to spending them in Paris. Cornelia was an unlikely Latin. She was dark enough and exquisitely groomed and of the right proportions; but the anemone face was too dreaming for vivacity, and such a texture of skin could never be found below the Tropic of Cancer.

She looked a little alarmed at mention of South America. She certainly could not afford to be caught hobnobbing with a spy, while covered with unaccountable diamonds.

‘My darling,’ I assured her, ‘is it conceivable that the traitor Howard-Wolferstan, whom everyone knows to be on the run, could possibly be in Claridge’s accompanied by such a woman as you?’

I hardly liked to tell her that she was in the same class as a gun-case, a sweep’s brushes and a portable easel, but I explained over our drinks some of the invaluable properties I had used in my escape, and let her draw the parallel.

So on to dinner. I look back, realizing that I was being tested and summed up. Indeed, I realized it at the time. Hadn’t, she said that she wanted to know me better? But the laboratory in which she was pouring me from tube to tube was so full of warmth and rapture that food passed unnoticed and wine unsavoured. I am half ashamed, in fact, that the essential quality of the evening should be no different from that which would be felt by any imaginative boy entertaining his girl at a coffee stall.