Soldier No More Page 9

  “He was here in the spring, was he?”

  “Two weeks, sir. And three games of rugger, that’s what he did. And all the bills paid—and wages for me and Charlie, and Old Billy and Cecil, in advance right until the end of October, cash money—“ she shook her head disbelievingly “—not like with Mr Nigel, nothing on tick, all cash money … It’s got so if they want credit, Old Billy says, he could get anything he wants, the builders’ merchants are so pleased to see him now—not like Mr Nigel… Except Mr Nigel never spent anything on the house, if he could help it, even with the rain coming in through the end gable so I had to put the old tin bath to catch it, to stop it coming through into the dining room! But not a drop comes in now, with the roof done good as new—“

  Stocker’s reservations on Audley’s finances echoed inside Roche’s head. There had been some money, and then there had been very little of it. But here was Audley satisfied with nothing but the best, even down to restorations in original materials plundered from old houses by his own private staff of restorers!

  “And the bathrooms are done, like with things you never saw before— except Charlie remembers them, that he’s seen in France when he was there—“

  “Bidets, you mean, Clarkie?”

  “If you say so, sir.” Mrs Clarke sniffed her disapproval of all things French. “The plumbing’s all done, anyway. And the electric wiring, that the insurance man wanted.”

  “And central heating?”

  “No, sir—he won’t have that done.”

  Wimpy nodded at Roche. “The lingering legacy of a public school education.”

  “But he doesn’t come home much in the winter,” said Mrs Clarke loyally. “He’s like Mr Nigel there … So Charlie lights all the fires twice a week to keep the old place aired … and that roof’s made a heap of difference, I can tell you.” She nodded. “You wouldn’t hardly recognise it.”

  Wimpy smiled. “I should like to see it… remembering the discomforts of the past.” He flicked a glance at Roche. “Would you like to have a look, David? Would that be okay, Clarkie?”

  “Of course, sir.” She turned to Roche. “It’s a beautiful old place, sir—it was a crime to let it go to wrack and ruin. But Master David’s put that right.” She gave Wimpy a sly look. “All it needs now is a woman’s touch, to my way of thinking, sir, Mr William.”

  Wimpy shook his head. “No sign of that on the horizon, I’m afraid, Clarkie. And it’d need an exceptionally resilient young woman to handle our David—let alone capture him.”

  “Hmm …” Ada Clarke pursed her lips, but didn’t deny the assessment. “A mistress it needs, I still say.”

  “It’s had one or two of those, by golly!” Wimpy chuckled.

  “I didn’t mean that, sir—and well you know it! There were too many of them up to the war … But there’s never been a real lady since—since—“ she broke off suddenly, staring at Wimpy blankly for an instant, then seeming to notice Roche again as a stranger just in time. “There now! You want to go up to the house, and I’ve got my Charlie’s tea to think about—if you should see him you tell him to come on back now, he’s up there somewhere—“ she rose from her chair and began fussing over the plates and teacups “—and there’s some parcels for Master David you can take up for me while you’re about it, and save me the bother—“

  VI

  THEY MADE THEIR way up the long, curving gravel drive between great banks of hawthorn and briar and elder interlaced with blackberry branches.

  “Going to be a good year for blackberries.” Wimpy nodded at the cascades of unripe greeny-red fruit. “Charlie never cuts the hedges back until after the jam-making and bottling—always wonderful picking along here.”

  Roche balanced the parcels with which he was loaded, and attempted to sort out his thoughts. He was aware that he had been fed with a great deal of information about David Audley, which might be priceless because it was of a kind that money and conventional interrogations would never have bought, except that he still didn’t know why it should be so valuable.

  “I used to pick them along here with Charlie when we were both boys,” continued Wimpy. “ ‘Pick one—eat one’ was our motto, as I recall.”

  Wimpy, as well as Ada Clarke and Charlie, was an old retainer of the Audley family, Roche decided. But there must be a class difference in the relationship which he hadn’t yet worked out.

  “You knew him—Nigel Audley—before Oxford?”

  “Oh yes. My father was up there with his father—the one that was killed in 1917… They were both at Balliol at the same time. Only Dad was clever and poor and Audley grand-père was clever and rich … But they rowed in the same eight, and they became friends. And they stayed friends even after Dad metamorphosed into a poor schoolmaster, like me after him—it’s in the blood, I’m sorry to say, dear boy!” He bobbed his head at Roche. “Only I didn’t really get to know Nigel until Oxford—I knew Charlie better until then, as a matter of fact. Poor old Charlie!”

  Poor old Charlie … . This had been—and still was—a strange intertwining of people and families, across the boundaries of class and money, here and in Oxford, and through two world wars, which had turned the schoolmaster into Audley’s guardian and the housemaid into something more than his nurse.

  “She brought him up, in effect—Mrs Clarke?” The question followed the thought.

  “David?” Wimpy nodded. “In effect—I suppose she did. In association with St. George’s and Immingham and Rudyard Kipling, you might say— they brought him up too, just as much, no matter how much he resisted them.”

  “He … resisted them?”

  Wimpy twisted a smile at him. “Not on the surface. One thing a boarding-school teaches you … is to conform or go under. And yet the saving grace of the British system is that it always manages to throw up a percentage of eccentrics and rebels nevertheless, to leaven the lump. So they have the great potential for good or evil…”

  Bloody-minded, remembered Roche. That had been Latimer’s assessment, and since Latimer was a product of the same system he should know a fellow spirit.

  “I’m not sure that David has decided which horse to back,” continued Wimpy. “Perhaps you’ll be the catalyst—you’re the man he could be waiting for. Freddie Clinton could be right.”

  Roche frowned. “What d’you mean? Right about what?” Wimpy walked in silence for a time. “What do I mean? I think I mean… if you could recruit David—if he came to you of his own free will this time, not as a conscript, like in the war—“

  “They don’t conscript people into Intelligence.”

  “Wrong word? It was Intelligence or back to regimental duty, but after what he’d seen in Normandy that wasn’t a choice … No, what I mean is, if you can’get him to give you his loyalty freely just once, then that’ll be it. ‘Whether she be good or bad, one gives one’s best once, to one only. That given, there remains no second worth giving or taking’—Pertinax in Puck, once again. I don’t think he’s given his best yet, to anyone or anything. That’s all.”

  It was more than enough to Roche: it was dust and ashes bitter in his mouth. No one was a greater authority on the second best than he: he had spent years giving it, ever since Julie. Whoever Pertinax was, he was right.

  “We’re getting close to the house. It’s just round the curve ahead, through the trees,” said Wimpy. “It really is a fascinating old place—“

  “What was wrong between Audley and his father?” asked Roche.

  “Nigel?” Wimpy half-stumbled, tipping the topmost of his share of the parcels into the trackway ahead of him. “Damn! Mustn’t damage the merchandise. Can you rescue that book for me, old boy? You’re not so heavily laden as I am.”

  The division of the parcels had appeared equal to Roche, but it seemed churlish to refuse the request. He set down his own burden—of books also; all the parcels contained books by the shape and feel of them—and set about recovering the fallen volume, which had half emerged from its torn wrapping.
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br />   He couldn’t resist the temptation to examine it—it would be a history book, something to do with Visigoths or Islamic doctrines, for a bet—

  But it wasn’t. Or rather, it wasn’t quite: the garish dustcover illustrated the head of a warrior as though picked out in stained-glass, one-eyed and bearded and helmeted—The Twelve Pictures, by Edith Simon. Letting the remnants of the wrapping drop, he opened the book.

  ‘The Twelve Pictures’ is a novel as rich and wonderful as a medieval tapestry—a tapestry of beauty and terror…

  “Interesting?” inquired Wimpy politely.

  Roche looked up at him. “It’s an historical novel—about Attila and the Huns.” He couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice.

  “Is it, indeed?” Wimpy reflected the surprise back at him. “I wouldn’t have thought that would be quite his style of light reading—not these days …”

  That was it exactly. Oxford and Cambridge were notoriously addicted to whodunits and mysteries—they were even given to writing the things. But historians (and although Audley wasn’t an academic he was certainly an historian) were surely the last people to indulge in third-class relaxation in their own chosen subject.

  “Let’s have a look at the others,” exclaimed Wimpy, his eyes alight with mischief and curiosity. “We shouldn’t… but I can never resist temptation, old boy!”

  It was hardly the place to start tearing open parcels, in the middle of a leafy lane, but the little schoolmaster had set down his parcels and was ripping at them before Roche could suggest as much.

  “Here’s another one—The Restless Flame, by Louis de Wohl… about St. Augustine of Hippo. And it’s second-hand, so he must have ordered it—yes, it’s from old Evan White in Guildford, of course! A damn good bookseller—he doesn’t overcharge for the Loebs I’ve been extracting from him … And here’s another one—Jack Lindsay’s The Barriers Are Down … let’s see … ‘Gaul during the break-up of the Roman Empire’. And a new Penguin—Graves’ Count Belisarius. I read that in hardcover before the war, I bought it for the school library in fact—“

  They were all historical novels, new and second-hand; there wasn’t a serious history book among them.

  “Alfred Duggan—Winter Quarters,” concluded Wimpy. “I must get that for the school library, I didn’t know he’d got a new one out—a damn fine writer. I was arguing with Steve Bates, our sixth form History man, just not long ago that his hopefuls could learn more about the First Crusade from Duggan’s Knight with Armour—aye, and more about the 5th century from Palfrey’s Princess in the Sunset—than from anything he could offer them.” He gave Roche a knowing leer. “He conceded Duggan, but Palfrey’s purple passages about delicate over-bred Roman maidens having to submit to the sweaty embraces of hairy Goths were a bit too much for him.” He sighed. “But we can’t squat here all day, maundering over David’s extraordinary taste in literature—and it is very odd, I grant you …” Wimpy gazed at the book in his hand.

  Odd, certainly; though perhaps not altogether extraordinary if Audley had been raised on a diet of Kipling; and maybe not extraordinary at all on second thoughts, if the eccentric Wimpy’s hand had been in that raising. And yet the little schoolmaster himself had magnified his own surprise, thought Roche: he had wondered at these books, even though they were undoubtedly Audley’s books—apart from the carefully-typed addresses … Dr D. L. Audley (to await arrival), c/o Mrs C. Clarke, The Lodge, Steeple Horley, Sussex.

  “Come on, then.” Wimpy straightened up, balancing his armful of historical fiction but leaving their wrappers at his feet. “I’ll ask Charlie to clear up this mess on his way home. The house is just ahead, round those trees—“

  At first glimpse, through a scatter of silver birches, The Old House was disappointing—almost another Audley contradiction.

  After Major Stocker’s casual description—‘not so big, but very old and rather nice’—Roche hadn’t expected a minor stately home. But from the way Wimpy and Mrs Clarke had spoken, almost reverently, of the care lavished on the restoration and of the high days and nights of Nigel Audley’s smart parties in the thirties, he had mentally prepared himself for a substantial manor, of the sort with which so many English villages were still blessed and which complemented the glorious little parish churches, his own special interest—medieval church, Stuart or Georgian manor, and Victorian school, plus ghastly twentieth-century village hall, that was the progression he had most often observed.

  But The Old House was something different: a mixture of stone and weathered brick and half-timber, with windows and gables of different sizes apparently inserted at random—long and low … lower, indeed, than the windowless, ivy-covered barn beside it—the ivy at odds with a wisteria on the house—which had been tacked on to it at right angles, to form an L-shaped courtyard.

  “Magic, isn’t it!” murmured Wimpy, at his shoulder. “It always takes my breath away—I envy you the first sight of it, old boy. ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’, and stout Cortez and Chapman’s ‘Homer’, and all that, eh?”

  The scales fell from Roche’s eyes.

  “Or ‘Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye’, even,” continued Wimpy softly, almost to himself. “The kitchen garden’s full of bits of Roman tile, and we found coloured tesserae from a pavement when they dug the drain at the corner—I swear there’s a villa underneath it somewhere … ‘Merlin’s Isle’, that’s what we used to say, David and I—there’s a track that runs behind the house, just below the rise of the downland up above— O that was where they hauled the guns That smote King Philip’s fleet! “—remember Puck’s song? Or maybe you don’t…”

  Roche’s mouth was dry. “It’s … “ he swallowed awkwardly “…it must be very old,” he said.

  “Older than old. God knows how old!” Wimpy paused. “It’s the servants’ quarters, actually—the kitchen wing of the original house, the 15th century house that was burnt down in 1603—the very day Queen Elizabeth died, the records say. But there was a fortified manor here before that house, and a Saxon hall before that… and, for my money, a Roman villa before that. And God only knows what before that, as I say… But the barn was built in the 1570s—the family was Catholic then, and there’s a local legend that there’s a ‘Priest’s hole’ in the house somewhere, but no one’s ever found it … It’s certainly a fact that Elizabeth’s officers raided the house regularly. But they never caught anyone, so it’s either just a legend, or the hiding-place is too damned well hidden. You pays your money and you takes your choice … But David and I have spent hours tapping and poking and prying, when Nigel was away, and we haven’t found anything yet… But we live in hopes, because—if you ask me—because it’ll be a useful thing to have, a secret hiding place in one’s house, in this country one day.”

  Roche looked at Wimpy questioningly. “What?”

  “Oh, it’ll be all right under Hugh Gaitskell—he may be a damned intellectual, but he’s in the Attlee-Bevin tradition, the old Labour Party I voted for in ‘45. It’ll be okay when he gets in after Macmillan—which he will next time …But there are some damned dodgy bastards in the wings after that, if you ask me—chaps who’ve never either done an honest day’s work or smelt gunpowder properly… the way Ernie Bevin and Clem Attlee did, old boy … I tell you, we’re in for a bad fifty years now—a bad twenty-five years, anyway, even if the bloody Russians don’t shit on us from a great height! So a prudent Englishman would do well to have a numbered account in Switzerland—always supposing it was legal!—and a secret hiding place in his house—“ he pointed at The Old House “—if only he can damn well find it!”

  Roche blinked at him, and then stared at the house to hide his confusion. If David Audley didn’t yet have the hiding place, it did look as though he had acquired the numbered account; and if this was what his legal guardian had taught him that was not to be wondered at, either. And just at this precise moment, he—David Roche, as ever was—wished that he had the same, only more so, and with better and more ur
gent reason.

  “Hah—sorry!” Wimpy coughed apologetically. “Got on my jolly old soap-box in a moment of weakness—bad form—and particularly bad form with you, eh, old boy? And that isn’t the object of this exercise anyway.” He nodded towards the house. “That is the object which I wanted you to study, David Roche.”

  Roche studied The Old House obediently, though the act of obedience required no effort: he couldn’t keep his eyes off it—off its detail, of which nothing appeared to have been planned and everything was irregular; and yet the whole, the sum of the detail, fitted together like a perfect jigsaw in its frame of trees, with the soaring curve of the downland behind it. The mystery of his first disappointment niggled him; had it been that he simply wanted something about Audley to be simple and predictable and ordinary?

  “I’ll say one thing for Cecil and Old Billy,” murmured Wimpy. “They’re damned cantankerous pair of old rogues, but they’ve done a bloody marvellous job on that roof. If they can do as well with the barn, they may get into heaven yet…”

  Roche shifted his gaze unwillingly from the ancient mulberry tree at the corner of the house, its sagging branches crutched with rusty iron supports as befitted the oldest living inhabitant of the picture, to the dilapidated roof of the barn, with its chaos of moss-covered tiles. In one place the ridge was sagging like the mulberry’s branches.

  “Well?” inquired Wimpy. “What d’you think of it?”

  Roche estimated the artfully restored roof of the house against that of the barn. It would cost a pretty penny—that roof would have to be stripped, and the rotten timbers replaced … but Wimpy had said they’d found the oak for that—