Fellow Passenger (8 page)

I found the number of Reyvers Library, and took the risk. When I had him, after an intolerable delay, on the other end of the telephone, I first asked him if our conversation could be overheard. He answered in a testy high voice that it certainly could not, but that he didn’t see why ...

‘I have been instructed to get in touch with you,’ I interrupted.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘You have a car, comrade.’

He hesitated. I expect that ‘comrade’ was what he least wanted to be called in that particular week.

‘I have. Who is that speaking?’

‘It is unimportant who is speaking,’ I answered authoritatively. ‘My information is that you are not yet being followed. Is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ he said, alarmed. ‘No, I don’t think I’m followed. Why should I be? I never have been.’

‘Very well. Be at Kingston Dray in about an hour. Turn up the lane to the copse above the village, and wait under the large oak on the right-hand side at the top of the hill.’

‘I’d like to know a little more—’ he began, asserting himself.

‘You will,’ I told him. ‘But obey now, and the party will not forget it.’

He did not sound as if he cared whether the party forgot or didn’t, but finally agreed to come.

I observed him carefully through the hedge as he sat in his car. He preserved a poker-faced grimness, in which might have been just a shade of self-satisfaction. I had expected some wishy-washy, provincial intellectual with grey wisps of hair curled over his collar and none on his head. I was quite wrong. Mr Cecil Reyvers was red-faced and farmerish. Communist or not, he might turn out to be a regular John Bull. Alternatively, he might insist on his right to receive proper orders. I didn’t like it at all. However, it was most improbable that he would dare to give me away

‘Good morning, comrade,’ I said to him.

I had emerged from the hedge when he was looking the other way, and was now leaning on a gate as if I had been there, invisible, for minutes. He was obviously startled, but set his face to blank.

‘Good morning,’ he answered, and waited.

‘I am Howard-Wolferstan.’

It was astonishing to see so red a face turn pale. A monstrous improbability like the popular conception of a chameleon!

‘I’ll have nothing to do with you,’ he said. ‘I have no instructions.’

‘You can’t avoid it, comrade.’

‘You’re a spy,’ he began indignantly.

That gave him away completely. He was nothing but a liberal with an intellectual chip on his shoulder - a communist, in fact, just to annoy the stolid society of Saxminster and give himself a sense of martyrdom. Any security officer would have known at once that he was nothing but a pest and likely, if there were ever a communist government in England, to declare himself a tory.

‘We do not employ spies,’ I replied coldly.

‘No. No, of course not. But we are not expected ... I mean ... well, it’s admitted there is such a thing as patriotism.’

‘There is indeed.’

‘I am an intellectual,’ he protested. ‘The party has no right whatever to ask this sort of thing of me.’

‘The party has a right to ask anything of you.’

‘Then I insist on being instructed in the proper way.’

‘You are being instructed in the only possible way.’

He was hopelessly out of his depth. So was I, for that matter. I am sure he should have flatly refused to help me unless told to do so through the usual channels. Yet he could not doubt that I was a communist. The papers had said so, and I myself had said so in court. It would have amused me to ask him if he believed all he read in the capitalist press.

‘I won’t have anything to do with you,’ he insisted. ‘I shall resign from the party.’

‘You can resign when you like and as often as you like, comrade, but you will obey now.’

‘I don’t see what they can do to me if I refuse,’ he said sturdily.

‘You ought to know. You have been engaged on propaganda.’

That was a safe shot - though I doubt if he did anything but talk communism in and out of season. However, he would call that propaganda; so would the party whenever they wanted to make him feel important.

‘How would you like it to be spread all over the town that you assisted Howard-Wolferstan?’ I asked.

‘It would be a lie.’

‘Would it? What are you doing here? Why are the tracks of your car in this lane? Where did you tell your office that you were going, and why aren’t you there? You ought to know that we have ways of giving information to the police.’

‘Nonsense! You couldn’t prove it, and you have nothing to gain by it.’

‘Nothing to gain by it, comrade? Nothing to gain by punishing disobedience?’

‘I’ll denounce you to the police myself,’ he said.

‘No, you won’t. Whatever else you may be, you are not a traitor to your class.’

Cold sweat was dripping down my ribs. I could not have continued this duel much longer. But it was near the end. I had him completely bewildered.

‘That’s true,’ he muttered, and then shouted at me: ‘But you leave me alone!’

‘Oh, be logical, comrade!’ I insisted patronizingly. ‘You’re not a scab. You’ll never go to the police. So you’re as guilty as I am from their point of view. You might just as well help me and keep us all out of trouble.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

‘Drive me where I tell you. Salisbury, for a start.’

On the journey I did my best to make him feel that he was a gallant party member serving the peaceful future of the world; his mind had to be kept from brooding on divided loyalties and kindly, understanding policemen. But in spite of all my courtesy and eloquence I could not strike a spark of enthusiasm out of him. Of course it did not help matters that he should have to make some slight pecuniary sacrifice for the party. At Salisbury I made him buy me an oilskin coat, a cooking-pot, matches, torch, shaving things and a comb and mirror. And when we arrived at a promising lonely track, which seemed as good a destination as any, I relieved him of his spare cash and gave him a receipt for it.

I never like to part from a man on bad terms, so I thanked him with noble emotion, and asked him if there were anything at all the party could do for him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They can allow me to resign.’

I assured him that they would. I think it quite certain that they did - the silly, sturdy, little man!

Where he left me was the edge of Cranborne Chase. I remembered that remote bit of country from twenty years before when I stayed nearby with the wife of the headmaster of my progressive school.
Honi soit.
She felt that I must be lonely in my holidays. The thickets of the Chase seemed to me fairly safe to inhabit while letting my beard grow. That was what I wanted - a short, black beard to go with the drawing-board, thoroughly untidy like the rest of me but with the dirt of the careless rather than the tramp.

At least three weeks of discomfort would, I reckoned, be necessary; but not much more, for this Mediterranean chin of mine needs shaving twice a day. My poor mother’s family were quite remarkable for the luxuriance of their beards and whiskers, and the speeches which issued from those romantic and usually political coverts impressed out of all reason the clean-shaven Church and the merely moustachioed Army. Long before the communists ever thought of it, my ancestors lived by the theory of continuous revolution; but they weren’t such damned fools - for they had all had good classical educations - as to believe that revolution settled anything beyond the temporary question of who was going to pay the taxes and who was going to spend them. Even in my few months of youthful craziness I agreed with them. What I was after then was the unity of Europe. My communism was a mere exasperated protest like that of poor Cecil Reyvers.

My short stay as a wild man of the woods in Cranborne Chase was intensely unpleasant. It rained. I caught a cold. And although my chosen square mile was uninhabited it had disadvantages. There was some kind of school nearby, and small, excitable boys were always popping up in unexpected places. Fortunately they never for one moment kept their mouths shut, and gave me ample warning of their approach. There was also a gamekeeper, eternally playing nursemaid to pheasants and partridges, and accompanied by dogs. I gave up attempting to use the ground in daytime. I made myself a chimpanzee platform in the heart of a glorious evergreen oak, stocked it with stolen sacks to give some warmth and only came down at night to do my foraging and cooking.

There was not much to cook - a few carrots from cottage gardens and the eggs and squeakers of wood-pigeons. Their nests were plentiful, and often within reach of a ravenous climber. I just managed to endure ten shivering days, but could stand no more of this forest euphemistically called temperate. I still had no really convincing beard, and abandoned the project. Instead, I gave myself a bald head - it took hours of experimenting with a safety razor to arrive at the effect produced by nature - and sideboard whiskers down to the lobes of my ears. These connected with the growth of hair which starts close under my eyes, and changed my high-cheekboned, narrow face to a square one.

This gypsy-like appearance was out of keeping with the original character, so I thought myself into a more swashbuckling part - the frank and loud Bohemian, easily sure of hospitality and with a taste for free beer rather than stolen milk.

I had spent nothing, so, when I took the road, I had some nine pounds in my pocket thanks to the generosity of Mr Reyvers and my companion in the service cellar. This wealth was reduced to three when I had bought an army pack, a few oil paints, a folding easel and a couple of canvasses in Shaftesbury. I preserved the portfolio of sketches in case I were ever asked to draw. I can’t. I draw as primitively as a child of six. But someone in authority once told me that the child’s was the correct approach to abstract art. So I decided that abstract art would be my line. I did not expect my work to interest a dealer - unless I signed it Howard-Wolferstan - but hoped it would be good enough, in any emergency, for a baffled public.

I felt reasonably confident, for the newspapers had dropped me. They and the public were obsessed by the search for a gentleman who had ingeniously drowned his wife in four inches of water, and I don’t suppose the average reader, confronted by photographs of both of us, would have cared or remembered which was which. Meanwhile, I wandered north through Wiltshire, sleeping rough, eating cheap and discreetly wasting time until it should be assumed that I had left the country.

On the fourth day I came to a village green where a cricket match was about to begin. A tent was set up, the pitch marked, and the home eleven waiting for the arrival of their opponents. I settled down on the grass to watch, for it is a game I have always enjoyed. Sheer skill. No violent and unseemly exercise. No freezing with cold or getting rubbed in the mud. And it has about it the atmosphere of
fiesta
- not of red and gold, but of green and white. Cricket, paradoxically, is the English diversion most likely to be appreciated by any lover of the Spanish way of life.

This was the perfect afternoon for it, warm and windless, with the wicket drying after rain and white geese wandering from common to pond like a solemn party of selectors on their way to the bar. The home eleven was true to village form. Six of them were local gentry in ancient, yellowing flannels; four were dressed as they pleased; and one wasn’t there at all. The captain was a tall, fair fellow, who seemed altogether too diffident and indecisive. A type too common in our countryside. The squire without land; the parson without a congregation; the former colonial servant with nothing to serve. It matters so little what they do that they cannot help showing they are aware of it.

‘Lovely day, sir, ’I said as he passed me.

His eye fell on me with alarm and disapproval. However, I was evidently settling down to be an interested spectator, so he could hardly be impolite. He continued with me the anxious debate which he was carrying on with himself.

‘But I daren’t put ‘em in if we win the toss,’ he objected in answer to nothing. ‘We might never get them out.’

‘They’re all that good?’ I asked.

‘County second eleven, most of them.’

‘All the same, on that drying wicket—’

‘I know, I know,’ he said desperately. ‘I know.’

‘Let me bowl,’ I suggested. ‘You’re a man short, aren’t you?’

He was more alarmed than ever. I might be respectable, but I was dirty.

‘O’Reilly had a bald head, too,’ I encouraged him.

That made him smile.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

I had not really decided on a name, and he took me by surprise.

‘Michael Bassoon,’ I answered. ‘I’m a painter.’

I was hopelessly out of practice, but I thought I could probably bother the reserves of a second-class county after a wild over or two. My medium-paced off-break had always been phenomenal, though more impressive to a spectator than a steady bat. I could never keep a length, and it was not much use to make the ball jump sideways like a startled hare when it pitched as a long hop.

The game was short and brutal. I took six wickets for nine, and we had our opponents all out for something under fifty. But it was too soon. The pitch was as treacherous for us as for them. We scored thirty-nine. I nearly decapitated a goose with a six into the pond, and was clean bowled trying to do it again.