Heavy, p.18
Heavy, page 18
“Now,” said Ernest, with a satisfaction Mr. Haxonbury couldn’t share. “If you’ll rotate yourself, Rodney, you’ll see there’s a clear view down to the munitions mound, and from this elevation we can see right into the gully behind it.”
“We can,” said Mr. Haxonbury, peering across the road and through the gateway. The “stand” of trees, if that’s what it was, looked small and unimpressive, and mostly naked. They didn’t provide what he’d have called cover. “I don’t see any racy-looking girls.”
“No,” agreed Ernest. “Do you see anywhere else you can see the whole of the mound from?”
Mr. Haxonbury went to stand up: Ernest put out a hand, touched the front of his shirt.
“Down in front,” he muttered.
Mr. Haxonbury looked at the hand on his shirt. The fingers were a series of knobbles. The nail beds were raw. They sat at the wrong angle on the wrists: he looked down at Ernest’s face, which had creased itself up into a sudden “v” of agony.
You should be in a hospital, he thought, for the first time. What the hell am I doing?
* * *
It was beginning to grow quite chilly, a fact which Maureen observed with a kind of distant dismay. It wouldn’t do to catch a cold while she was trying to uncover a mystery of this magnitude.
She patted her pockets. There were absolutely no cigarettes left. No rolling papers. No more than a pinch of tobacco. Plenty of matches, of course, but nothing which could reliably clear her head.
The yellow house stood silent against the stars. Maureen watched the light in the upstairs window, the light in the kitchen, and the light in the sitting room with interest.
After a while she wandered over to the beaten-up car. There were so many maps in the back seat that it was quite, quite impossible to guess at what they might be planning.
There was also a Ronson lighter, and no bloody rolling papers or tobacco.
She squared up her shoulders, picked up her traded bicycle, and marched up to the front door.
At the last moment, she changed direction, and went to the back door instead.
The house’s presumable owner was scraping leftovers into a tin in the kitchen. Maureen knocked politely on the back door.
In the warm glow of the kitchen doorway the old woman looked positively angelic: she frowned at Maureen and Maureen’s bicycle, and said, “Don’t track mud across my kitchen floor.”
“Good evening,” said Maureen cheerfully, wringing out her beret. “Would you mind awfully asking the chaps in your guest room if they’d like a word?”
The old woman folded her arms and pinched up her mouth.
“They’re convalescing,” she said, with the firmness of a ward sister. “You’re not to bother them, whoever you are.”
“I’m a friend,” Maureen said, convinced that she probably ought be. The dark little woman and Mr. Ridell clearly worked for some sort of Nefarious Power. They were agents of The Establishment, and if Maureen was anything she was fiercely and committedly anti-authoritarian. She added, putting the beret back on her head. “And I’ve got some dreadfully important news for them.”
The old woman said, “Well, what is it?” in a voice that suggested she didn’t believe a word.
She reminded Maureen rather of one of her stricter teachers, all bosom and birch and no lenience for things like the eating of apples in class.
“A most terrifically sensitive matter,” said Maureen, “I shouldn’t think they’d like anyone else to get wind of it.” With a spark of inspiration, she added, “I came as soon as I found out. Cycled like mad. That’s why I’m all muddy and wet – didn’t even stop for an umbrella!”
“From where?” the old woman asked, with a hard stare.
“Oh, miles away,” Maureen said, refusing to be tripped. It was hardly the first time someone had tried to catch her out on a lie. She remembered perfectly well the name of the village she’d acquired the bicycle in, but it seemed foolhardy to give away that kind of information. “Would you mind?”
In reply, the old woman closed the door in her face.
Maureen was about to knock again, more pointedly, when she heard footsteps moving to the front of the house. She waited.
After a cold and tedious interval which appeared to go on for absolutely years, the old woman returned with a scrap of paper and a pencil.
She said, “Whatever it is you want to tell them—”
“It’s not terribly discreet, is it?” Maureen asked, taking the pencil and paper all the same.
The old woman bristled. “I worked for any number of confidential exchanges when I did my service,” she said, in a cold voice, “If a secret is to be kept, I can keep it. Just put it down here and get off my property.”
Maureen said, “I shall have to speak to them myself.”
“They can decide on that,” said the old woman. “I shan’t have girls of your sort consorting with men like that one with the flashy suit in my house.”
“I’m staying at the vicarage,” said Maureen, who took it as an article of faith that the village must have one, “they can reach me there, I suppose.”
The old woman looked faintly triumphant, and Maureen suspected that the place in question did not have a telephone installed.
She wrote: They’re after you. I can help. Call vicar or nearest equiv. I will be there.
The old woman took the paper off her, and all but slammed the door.
The vicarage was, to Maureen’s disgust, boarded up.
She climbed over the back fence, and found such a chaos of plants and such a general air of unkemptness that it was quite obvious the parish was being served from another place entirely. No one had been here in a while, and the roof had fallen in.
“Sod,” said Maureen, out loud, and she went back to her borrowed bicycle.
A little further into the village she found a pub.
“Do you have a room?” she asked, cornering the landlady outside the building. “And a telephone? It’s a matter of national security.”
The woman in question, who looked as if she had been pickled in brine for the last ten years, and who was accompanied by a small grey dog that immediately began barking, put her hands on her hips.
“We don’t let to your sort,” she snapped.
“I am aware I am covered in mud, madam,” said Maureen, borrowing Mummy’s Telephone Voice and Diane’s most stuck-up manner, “but that is a part of the necessary strictures of the service. I will have the use of your telephone or I will be forced to commandeer it through other means, and your business may find itself under inspection.”
The landlady gave her an incredulous look. “Well don’t you have a nice turn of phrase for a common tart.”
“I’m not acquainted with the standards for good-time girls in this part of the country,” Maureen said with absolute honesty, “but in London they are rather more made-up and rather less sodden than this. In fact, they take positive pride in being well turned-out.”
The pub’s landlady squinted at her. “You can’t have a room on account.”
Maureen, who had at most enough money for a further indulgence in tobacco, said, “Will you be satisfied with a personal cheque?”
The landlady squinted even harder. Her dog barked.
She sat beside the telephone in the saloon bar with a glass of lukewarm water, a rubbery sandwich containing what purported to be cheese, and a fresh cigarette, and she waited.
“No better than she ought to be,” muttered one of the barmaids to her employer. “Look at that hair.”
“That may as be,” said the landlady, apparently convinced Maureen couldn’t hear her over the chatter of the bar. “But the young idiot will catch her death if I leave her outside and I can’t have that on my conscience.”
“What’s she want the telephone for? I’m supposed to call our Bert—”
Maureen ignored them. The sandwich filled a hole she hadn’t noticed was forming: the cigarette did rather better work. She wondered if the cantankerous old trout at the yellow house would ever pass on her message at all.
* * *
The telephone, of course, rang while she was using the lavatory. It was what Diane always called Sod’s Sodding Law, although occasionally with rather stronger language than that. There was some confusion: the barmaid thought it was Bert, the landlady thought it was the police, and when it was clear that the call was for Maureen after all, the whole of the saloon was so shocked to find her telling the truth that there was no way to hold a private conversation.
Still, Maureen thought, as a very mysterious accent greeted her, the notion of a private telephone conversation in this country was an absurd one. Everyone knew They were listening.
“I understand you’ve taken it upon yourself to be a Good Samaritan,” said the odd accent. Maureen knew at once it must be the Bandaged Man: the spiv looked like he would eat, breathe, and sleep Cockney. There was a smidgen of Cockney in the Bandaged Man’s voice, but on the whole she supposed that was because the spiv had been Rubbing Off on him, the way one’s associates did. She wondered if the spiv had let him make the call or if he’d forced him to.
“I consider myself a friend to the friendless,” said Maureen, which earned her a sharp look from the landlady.
“No one could call you the opposite,” agreed the Bandaged Man.
Maureen’s heart leapt. She’d heard about this. Henry Perkins had one page from a training manual he said his cousin had taken when he was doing his Service. It was a simple, verbal code. Of course, everyone knew it, but the presence of it in the conversation confirmed Something Was Going On.
“We shan’t meet,” Maureen said, following the protocol, her pulse singing. “It would be too dangerous.”
“I’m local,” the Bandaged Man said, “The area is quite safe, the lines secure.”
Maureen nodded to herself, and took a pull on a second cigarette. “In that case – the river to the North?”
He took it in his stride, as if he had been doing it all his life. “The one where there are no trees on the bank,” he said, “with the dip?”
Maureen quickly reversed the instructions. Something that resembled the inverse of his conversation had indeed flashed by her while she was making her way to the yellow house.
“We can’t meet in the ditch,” she said, fidgeting her beret. “In the afternoon.”
There was something quite odd about the line, Maureen thought. It sounded as if they were speaking through a glass. When the conversation ended she saw the landlady watching her.
In the room there was a pen laid out on the night stand, very pointedly, for the signing of personal cheques. Maureen screwed up her face and tried to recall the location they’d studiously avoided discussing.
There was a hump: a not-ditch. Trees. To the South. No river. If it was the place she had passed, it was somewhere easily observable from a distance and that – Maureen removed her beret and tossed it like a quoit at the bedposts, which it missed – was what she would do.
After all, one couldn’t be too careful, and They might come down upon one if one went straight to the rendezvous like a novice.
* * *
Shortly after dawn Maureen climbed out of the pub window. She left the bicycle by the back door, and began a long, slow trudge South.
Her passage was somewhat aided by the appearance of a milkman who was grateful for both the company and the cigarette, but she was still quite blown by the time she reached the copse, and sorely in need of a good breakfast and a set of clothes that weren’t muddy.
These, she thought, as she scaled one of the trees and thrust herself deep into the remaining foliage, were beyond saving. No quantity of soap flakes would rescue them from the sheer quantity of Countryside that had worked its way into the fibres.
From the top of the tree, Maureen could see the hump, the road, the tops of the houses in the village she had come from, the progress of a very beaten-up and rusty car along the road from the yellow house, and a farmer making his way down from the opposite direction with a couple of hands and a black and white dog. If the tree weren’t so uncomfortable and the need for a cigarette so dire the scene might almost be idyllic.
She stretched herself out along a branch and scratched the back of one of her legs.
The beaten-up car pulled into a field on the far side of the road. A couple of figures, one in a black coat and the other wearing a grey blanket as a sort of cape, expelled themselves from the car and staggered like drunks until they flopped down beside a gate.
The farmer and his dog turned back.
Maureen put the side of her thumb in her mouth and gnawed on it irritably. One couldn’t give one’s position away by smoking. It would be terribly silly. Trees did not exhale nicotine. She would just have to wait.
The two farm hands went on down the road, hidden by the hedge.
They came up to the gate.
The figure in the black coat got to his feet. There was a certain amount of arm-waving, and the taller of the farm hands took a step forward. The figure in the black coat stopped waving his arms.
The man under the grey blanket slumped, and did nothing.
Maureen turned at the sound of an engine. From a cross road, some distance down, a car was approaching. It appeared black in the morning light, and went swiftly over the uneven roads.
In the field, the man in the black coat was helping the man under the grey blanket to stand up. When the shorter of the farm hands – a woman, Maureen could see now – tried to stop him he waved his arms again. She said something, and he stood back.
The black car pulled up by the gate.
All four of the figures turned, surprise running through them so obviously that their movement seemed choreographed.
Maureen gripped the branch more tightly, and frowned to herself.
The black car’s door opened.
A man that she recognised, even at this height and distance, as the handsome military intelligence officer got out and approached the field.
Heavy: Ten
The night Pig passed in a farm outbuilding, far from anywhere his habitual screaming could disturb the sleep of Miss Gaitskill or the farmer whose property they’d commandeered, was one of the most peaceful of his adult life. The smell of old cow shit and the rustling of a countryside settling down to sleep just after the dying of the sun reminded his muscles of his childhood.
He slipped out of consciousness recalling Michael (later Mickey, later Lance Corporal Ridell, later ‘Mr. Ridell will remain in this ward until his psychological condition improves’, and eventually ‘We regret to inform you’) and William (‘Acting Sergeant William Ridell has performed his duty to his country; be proud knowing that your son…’) and himself, tagging along behind, shorter and younger by a decade… the paddock, the forest stretching out at the edge of the farm’s land, and William muttering that the deer had to be kept out of the feed bins somehow.
He woke with a red sunrise to find himself drowning in blood.
Pig rolled over and choked until he brought up a little bile. It had been a good couple of weeks since he’d last had one of these in his sleep.
Roger Dunmeady, who had the tenancy of the farm, and Mrs. Dunmeady, who had a patchy memory and was frightened of Pig’s face, gave them a breakfast which included egg, but no bacon, and beef sausages which had a texture Pig remembered as containing Real Meat: he suspected they had their own sideline. Not bright, with a Government agent sitting at their table. Maybe they thought they could bribe her.
Pig had formed a number of opinions of Miss Gaitskill in their largely silent pursuit, and one of the most prominent was that she could not be bribed.
Roger Dunmeady, who’d had children and now didn’t appear to have children any more, said he would lead them down to the place Miss Gaitskill described.
He hadn’t been privy to the phone call. There had been one Miss Gaitskill made from a call box, before they stopped following the car, and one which she made from a pub, before they came up to the farm. After the second, she’d been poised, ready.
They borrowed coats from Roger Dunmeady. Pig couldn’t figure out why, especially, since his height and face and her dark skin and Negro hair made them undisguisable, but he struggled into a too-small brown coat and for a moment remembered taking one off, to put on a surplace and gown, fidgeting in the vestry. The memory was like a toothache.
The road was banked with mud. No one had been at the hedges recently; they bristled and burst into the path, a ripe full summer of foliage still clinging to the twigs. On a busier lane the passing traffic, the passing sheep might have trimmed them, but here they relied on labour that simply wasn’t there any more.
Roger Dunmeady explained the remainder of the route to Miss Gaitskill, and went home.
Miss Gaitskill led him down to a five-bar gate.
Pig said, as the thought occurred, “Do you have a gun?”
Miss Gaitskill started, as if she hadn’t been expecting him to speak again. She looked up at him with an expression Pig had no hope of understanding, and said, “I have you. The remainder shouldn’t be necessary.”
Pig didn’t ask her any more questions. He thought, You know a man in a corner will fight in ways you can’t predict, but chewed on it. It wasn’t as if it mattered if she got shot. If he got shot.
They came through the open gate.
Squatting in the field beside the hedge were the spiv, his clothes wrecked, and the man Pig had deposited at the spiv’s house. The latter’s condition had improved and his face was naggingly familiar now that he no longer looked just like someone about to die.
The spiv leapt to his feet.
Pig sighed, and pushed him back down into the soil. “Steady.”
“Mr. Shoe,” said Miss Gaitskill, addressing herself to the other man, the familiar man with the familiar name to go with his familiar face. “This was not what I’d intended for you.”
“I know,” said Mr. Shoe, “you intended for me to die in a basement somewhere.”
“No,” said Miss Gaitskill.
The spiv said, peering up at Pig as if Pig was a tree, “What’s going to happen to me?”
