October Men Read online

  I

  THE GENERAL SAT quietly in his car at the airport terminal, waiting for his mother and his mistress.

  To have driven himself after dark was, he knew, an emotional action, perhaps even a foolish one. But then he had never attempted to impose on his private life that ruthless discipline which had characterised his professional career. Indeed, he was convinced that those with great power and responsibility must allow themselves a calculated measure of self-indulgence, which was then not a weakness but a safety valve; as a student of history he frequently reminded himself that in matters that did not concern the state it was Caesar’s wife who had to be above suspicion, not Caesar.

  He drew on his cigar, puffing the smoke carefully out of the window. He wasn’t supposed to smoke cigars either, in fact he had promised both women that he wouldn’t smoke at all while they were away. Yet he felt only mildly guilty about his broken promise, for he had also never been able to resist the minor forbidden things of life, like smoking cigars and parking in the prohibited area right in front of the terminal. And from the number of cars parked around him the latter was clearly a national characteristic, and in his view a healthy one.

  In any case, it was comforting to know that he had only himself to blame for being at the wheel when most sensible men of his age who worked as hard as he did were in their beds. For even if he might fret at his mother for her ridiculous economy in taking a cheap night flight he had to admit that she had neither asked nor expected him to attend her return. She had simply assumed that he would send his driver—which would have been less embarrassing as well as easier, since he suspected that she knew very well that her companion was as necessary to his peace of mind as to her own.

  In fact there were plenty of good, sensible reasons for his not being here at Leonardo da Vinci, truly. Only there were two other reasons, neither better nor more rational, which outweighed them all.

  Quite simply and literally, he could not wait to get his hands on Angela. Not (somewhat to his surprise) in any lascivious way, but just in a strangely old-fashioned loving manner. All he wanted to do was to take hold of those splendid hips, one hand to each flank, and look at her. If it went no farther than that tonight he would not be discontented; it had taken him forty years and two marriages to discover that there was more than one kind of intimacy through which a man could enjoy a woman’s company, and he was almost as excited about that discovery as he had been all those years ago about the otner.

  Physically, the feel of those hips would be enough. There was no denying that Angela’s legs were long and elegant, her bottom shapely for a woman of her years, and her bosom magnificent. But the General had always liked hips, for they were the one thing about women that reminded him of horses. And Angela’s hips were incomparable.

  Yet if Angela was one indulgent reason for making this sweaty drive (though a reason more spiritual than his mother might suspect), there was also a contrary physical reason which no one suspected.

  For the truth was that the General could no longer see very well at night.

  He, whose military reputation was founded on those two famous night actions, one against the British and the other against the Germans, now feared that age was beginning to impair his night vision. And characteristically he was fighting this sign of incipient decay as furiously as he had ever done any of his human enemies.

  So to have let anyone else drive this night, as he would have done without a thought a few years earlier, would have been to pass up a challenge to impose his will on his body. It was typical of him to dramatise this as a battle against odds, an immortal rearguard action, just as he saw his relationship with Angela as the bonus of a fully-matured intelligence. He would not let it occur to him that the spectres of old age and loneliness, which stalked ordinary men and women, would ever dare approach him.

  So now he sat smoking happily in the No Parking lot, thinking of hips and screwing his eyes up in an attempt to watch the late night life of the airport.

  Anyway, the car was more comfortable than the lounge at the terminal, with its smart chairs architect-designed for discomfort and its depressing collection of waiting humanity nervous with excitement or querulous with tiredness, and with the bored cleaners manoeuvring their huge vacuum machines over the black rubber floors.

  He glanced at his watch. The scream of the reversed jets he had heard a few minutes before would have been those of the Alitalia DC9 from Heathrow, which had probably left Pisa about the same time as he had set out from the villa. Any moment now the first passengers would be spilling out.

  Not that they were any different nowadays from coach and railway passengers. The General could remember the old Rome airport in the old days, when the world was young and air travel was high adventure. He could even remember—how could he ever forget!—being presented to Marshal Balbo there at the beginning of one of his great aerial expeditions.

  It had been one of the decisive moments of his life when the Marshal had shaken his hand and looked him in the eye and admonished him never to lead from the back—and had lived up to his own words moments later as the formation of long-range bombers roared overhead. Here they began to come. But there was no need to stir himself, because his mother would be last. She always came last, and he could remember his father ranting at her for it on railway platforms halfway across the world.

  Balbo had been wrong, of course. There were times to lead from the front and times to lead from the back. And the hardest times of all were when it was prudent to let others lead. But Balbo had changed his life, nevertheless—though less by the example of his career than by the manner of his death. For it had been on the day that the Duce had murdered the Marshal in the air above Tobruk because he knew the truth about the armed forces and wasn’t afraid to speak it that the young Captain Montuori had ceased to be a Fascist…

  He nodded to himself philosophically, watching the travellers congregate outside the terminus, idly sorting them into their proper categories with half his mind, natives and foreigners, holidaying couples and rucksacked students—only the unlucky, the ignorant and the young braved midsummer Rome!

  Except his mother, naturally, who behaved in her own way, regardless of everything and everyone.

  The General watched a pale-coloured car farther up the parked line to his left slide forward smoothly, curving in front of him in the wake of a big grey Fiat into which the blonde woman with the baby—

  His thought was extinguished by the fierce headlights of another car on his right which for one blinding instant illuminated the driver of the pale car moving across his front. It was like a photographic flash, so brief was it, but still long enough to transmit an image through the General’s eye and etch it on his brain, to be instantly registered, identified and remembered.

  Remembered!

  He sat rigid with excitement: there was no possibility of mistake, not one ten-thousandth particle of a possibility, no question of failing night sight playing him false with the vision of that profile, unremarkable but unforgotten.

  Or unremarkable on this side, anyway. And since the years had changed its hungry outline so little they would have done nothing to erase the scar on the other side which ran from cheekbone to jawline —the General’s own parting gift, delivered with the raking stock of his sub-machine gun. And he would not have misused a good weapon so if there hadn’t been a company of German Alpine troops on the hillside less than three hundred metres below them: he would have used it as the Beretta company had intended, and good riddance!

  But maybe he should have taken the risk at that—he thrust the hot memory down as the car passed out of his range of sight. The Bastard had been out of his territory then, just as he was out of his territory now. Only now he was out of his time too—sitting there alo
ne in his car, sitting alone like the General, waiting for someone, also like the General. Except that he had driven off smartly having met nobody—the flashing headlights had shown that too. So someone hadn’t come?

  The General swore and reached for the ignition. Someone had been here right enough—but the Bastard had not been here waiting to say “Hullo” to him!

  He slammed the gear selector over, flicked the light switch and jammed his foot on the accelerator. There was still just about time enough to catch up with him—

  Except that his mother was standing directly in his way.

  He jammed down his foot on the brake pedal even more fiercely than he had done on the accelerator. The car tyres squealed and slithered.

  “Mother, for the love of God—“ the General began despairingly “Mother—“

  “Raffaele!” The General’s mother had a remarkably deep voice for so very feminine a woman, and although her admonitory tone towards him had changed over the course of fifty-eight years, it was fundamentally still that of a long-suffering mother to her slow-witted son. “Don’t sit there with your mouth open, Raffaele!”

  “Mother—“

  The General’s mother turned her back on him. It was a well-dressed back too, he noticed bitterly; after four years of widowhood black still dominated her wardrobe conventionally—but it was always the black of Antonelli and Mila Schoen and Valentino (and God in His heaven only knew what English house she had probably found by now to spend his money on).

  “Angela!” The General’s mother did not shout, she simply projected her voice. “Tell that fellow to bring the cases here.”

  He reached out and switched off the engine: when the odds were hopeless even the bravest man could surrender without discredit, and these odds, as he had good reason to know, were infinitely too much for him.

  “Raffaele! Are you going to sit there all night?”

  The General groped for the door handle. Already it had a quality of unreality, that sudden vision of the past. And he was really too old for these night games, anyway: there was something more than a little ridiculous about the idea of tearing through the night after his old enemy. And finally, it was too late now—his mother had seen to that. It had been too late ever since he had used the butt instead of the bullet twenty-eight years ago.

  And then, as his fingers touched the handle, the General was pricked by that ancient instinct, that atavistic feeling of unease which had once been like an extra sense to him, as to be relied on as sight and hearing and smell.

  He had thought that it had atrophied during his long spell behind desks of increasing size. But here it was stirring his innermost soul again: too old, it was saying, if you are too old, then so is your enemy. Too old to be waiting in the darkness unless there is really something worth waiting for.

  “Raffaele!”

  So the grey Fiat was worth waiting for—or rather the grey Fiat’s occupants, who would be on the passenger list for all to see.

  It was as simple as that.

  “Coming, Mother!” said the General happily.

  At the precise moment that General Raffaele Montuori put his foot on the tarmac at Leonardo da Vinci Airport, Mrs. Ada Clark put her foot on the worn piece of carpet beside her bed in her cottage on the edge of Steeple Horley.

  It had been the gammon steak at her sister-in-law’s, which had been salted enough to preserve it until Judgement Day and which had dried her mouth until she could bear it no longer—it was a wonder to Mrs. Clark that Jim looked so well after so many years of bad cooking, of over-salted meat and under-salted vegetables, and altogether too much out of packets and tins.

  And that line of well-used sauce bottles told its own tale too, of flavourless food that went begging for a taste of something real, no matter what.

  Mrs. Clark searched irritably with her toes for her slippers in the darkness, looking out of the window as she did so. It had been clear earlier, but had clouded over now in preparation for the further rain which the BBC weatherman had forecast, so that it was impossible to see where the dark sky began and the roll of the downs ended.

  Suddenly the foot stopped searching, thirst was forgotten and Mrs. Clark was wide awake, staring breathlessly out of her window.

  There it was again, only longer this time!

  Decisively she reached across the bed and shook her husband by the shoulder.

  “Charlie, wake up!”

  Charlie Clark groaned unbelievingly.

  Mrs. Clark shook the shoulder again. “Charlie, there’s someone up at the Old House—someone breaking in! Wake up!”

  Charlie rolled on to his back, blinking in the darkness, grappling with the unpalatable sequence of information.

  Finally he computed an answer, or at least a delaying question. “ ‘Ow do you know? You can’t see nothing, surely?”

  “I can see a light, a flashing light—like a torch going on and off.”

  “Car lights, that ‘ud be.”

  “That it’s not!” Mrs. Clark insisted hotly. “You don’t get no reflections all that way, and there are those trees in the way. And besides—“ she overrode his murmur of disagreement triumphantly “—there aren’t no cars on the road, or I’d ‘uv heard ‘em. I tell you there’s someone up at the Old House. Someone as don’t dare switch the lights on.”

  Charlie grumbled under his breath and heaved himself out of bed, reaching for his pullover.

  “I reckon it’ll be some of those tearaways from the town,” Mrs. Clark said to him over her shoulder, the outrage quavering in her voice. “A gang of them broke into a big house down Midhurst way last week—it was in the paper. They said there’d been seven robberies round there in the last month.”

  Charlie felt his way round the bed until he was standing beside his wife. As he bent down to peer out of the little window she pointed quickly.

  “There! You see where the flash came—“

  “Yes, I see’d ‘un.” Charlie was not given to believing half he was told or a tenth of what he read, but he always believed his own eyes. And there had been no doubt about that pale light. “It’ll be they young buggers right enough—young buggers they are.”

  Mrs. Clark nodded at the vehemence in her husband’s voice. It frightened her to think of them loose in the beautiful house she had scrubbed and polished for a lifetime—scrubbed and polished so much that she almost felt it was partly hers and she was part of it.

  But also it angered her, and the anger grew steadily, crowding out the fear.

  Charlie moved away from her.

  “What you goin’ to do?” She could hear him fumbling in the darkness. “Don’t you put the light on, Charlie!”

  “I ain’t a fool. I’m lookin’ to put me trousers on, an’ then I’ll get on down to the police house. Let ‘em sort it out.”

  “What!” Mrs. Clark rounded on him fiercely, her sense of outrage now dominant. The police house was at Upper Horley, two long miles away, and half of that uphill. “You’ll not do that! You do that an’ they’ll be out an’ gone by the time Tom Yates gets ‘ere—out and gone.”

  A terrible vision of destruction rose in her imagination, compounded of all she had heard and read. They weren’t like the old-time burglars she had known in her youth, men who knew the value of things and were interested only in what they could sell—they were destroyers now who did unspeakable, senseless, wasteful things. They were the invaders from a world she could not comprehend, the city jungle spilling into the quiet, ordered countryside.

  Charlie stared towards her in the blackness, one pyjama-clad leg half stuffed into his trousers.

  “You don’t mean for me to go up there—?”

  “That’s just exactly what I do mean. An’ I’ll go and get Tom Yates meantime.”

  “Ah—and they’ll make mincemeat of me meantime, too, woman. Them’s young an’ I’m not.”

  “Then you just take your old gun with you. They won’t ‘ave the guts to tackle you then, not if you stand up to them.”

/>   Charlie had the gravest doubts about the validity of this theory of his wife’s—it was not the first time he heard her voice it, that young hooligans had no courage. But he could recall the way the rats had behaved at threshing time, in the days before the combine harvesters when there was still plenty of work to be had on the land: if you left the rats alone they soon made themselves scarce, pests though they were. But if you cornered them—they fought, rats or no, snapping at the stick as it broke their backs.

  And that, it seemed to Charlie, was what she was asking him to do to these young buggers—to corner ‘em.

  “I dunno about that,” he began doubtfully.

  “Well I do,” Mrs. Clark snapped back, through the rustle of clothes pulled hurriedly over her head. “And I knows something else too: that I promised Master David that I’d look after the house while he was away—and so I will. So if you won’t go up to it, then I shall have to. And you can go and wake up Tom Yates.”

  Charlie swore under his breath and wrenched at his trousers. Somehow he had been manoeuvred into a corner himself, a corner from which there was no escape except by doing his wife’s bidding. He never could fathom how she managed it, but it was a position with which he was all too bitterly familiar.

  He was swearing still, steadily and bitterly, as he edged his way up the lane towards the Old House five minutes later.

  Of all the nights of this rotten summer, this was the worst for such tom-fool behaviour. It was pitch black and chilly and sopping wet, without a breath of wind. The rain must have stopped an hour or more since and the heavy summer foliage had had time to drip off its surplus moisture, so that everything was quiet enough to hear a mouse stir.

  It was this stillness that made him swear now. He had tried two or three steps on the gravel drive, but the scrunch of his iron-shod boots had deafened him. His only chance of a silent approach to the house was by the rough strip of grass beside the high hedgerow on his right.

  He thought he knew both the grass and the hedge like the back of his hand; he had walked beside the one and picked blackberries and hazelnuts from the other innumerable times. But now he stumbled awkwardly, his trousers already soaked to the knee, his face lashed every now and then by unseen twigs and sodden leaves.