Chiddingfold! Victoria House, Chiddingfold.
It wasn’t easy to find the place. Surrey was a large county, and signposts had been removed to frustrate troop movements in the event of an invasion. He headed south, away from London, reasoning that it must be out of the surburban reaches. Going through Hampton Court on the first night, he broke into three cars parked outside a pub before he found what he needed: a county map.
Chiddingfold was near Haslemere on the Sussex border, too far to reach in a night, so he walked the twenty miles to Guildford, and laid up in some outbuildings at a farm just south of the town. He found apples stored there in boxes, and ate enough to satisfy hunger and thirst in one.
The following night was a Saturday and a full moon, so he was glad he had not left too many miles to cover, because people would be out later than usual. It was after eleven when he started, and half-past two in the morning when he finally located Victoria House. Happily, it was a detached building in its own grounds. No telephone wires were visible. He had no wish to disturb Annabelle Plumridge’s sleep if he could avoid it, but it was a relief to know that she couldn’t call the police.
The first thing was to see whether the key fitted. He started up the drive towards the house.
In bed, Annabelle heard the crunch of gravel outside. ‘Listen!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Just listen, Simon. There’s someone outside!’
‘A fox, I expect.’
‘No, it’s too heavy for that. He’s by the front door! Oh, God, what if it’s my husband!’
Corporal Harker swung his legs to the floor and pulled on a pair of shorts. He went to the chair over which he had draped his uniform and drew his baton from its sheath. Then he glided out of the door and downstairs.
Annabelle shrank back in bed, pulling the sheet tight around her neck. She heard the sound of a key turning in the door, a shout of surprise and then a crack that made her gasp with terror, followed by two more, then silence.
The suspense was petrifying before the landing light came on, and Corporal Harker stood in the doorway holding his baton. ‘I’m afraid I had to hit him,’ he said, breathing heavily.
‘Charlie? My husband?’ whispered Annabelle.
He hesitated. ‘Private Plumridge, yes. You don’t have to come downstairs. I can deal with it.’
‘Is he...?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Oh, my poor Charlie!’ Annabelle started to sob.
‘Come off it,’ Corporal Harker said in the sharp voice of authority he used in the guard room. ‘You told me you couldn’t bear to live with a deserter. You said you fancied me in my red cap and white gaiters.’
‘I know, but...’
‘He must have had a thin skull. Some people do. It’s better this way. Your reputation, my career.’
‘But what shall we do with him?’
‘Easy. You don’t have to do a thing. Better if you stay up here. I’ll put him in the van and take him with me. I know a couple of bomb sites on the way back to barracks. I’ll hide him under some rubble, and even if they find him, no one will ever guess who he was, or how it happened.’
‘I suppose it was just bad luck,’ Annabelle said to appease her feelings of shock.
‘That’s right,’ Corporal Harker confirmed. ‘He was unlucky. Dead unlucky.’
The Secret Lover
‘Pam.’
‘Yes?’
‘Will you see him this weekend?’
Pam Meredith drew a long breath and stifled the impulse to scream. She knew exactly what was coming. ‘See who?’
‘Your secret lover.’
She summoned a coy smile, said ‘Give over!’ and everyone giggled.
For some reason, that last session of the working week regularly turned three efficient medical receptionists into overgrown schoolgirls. They were all over thirty, too. As soon as they arrived at the health centre, on Saturday morning, they were into their routine. After flexing their imaginations with stories of what the doctors had been getting up to with the patients, they started on each other. Then it was never long before Pam’s secret lover came up.
He was an inoffensive, harassed-looking man in his late thirties who happened to walk into the centre one afternoon to ask for help. A piece of grit had lodged under his left eyelid. Not one of the doctors or the district nurse had been in the building at the time, so Pam had dealt with it herself. From her own experiences with contact lenses, she had a fair idea how to persuade the eye to eject a foreign body, and she had succeeded very quickly, without causing the patient any serious discomfort. He had thanked her and left in a rush, as if the episode had embarrassed him. Pam had thought no more about him until a fortnight later, when she came on duty and was told that a man had been asking for her personally and would be calling back at lunchtime. This, understandably, created some lively interest in reception, particularly when he arrived at five minutes to one carrying a bunch of daffodils.
At thirty-three, Pam was the second youngest of the medical receptionists. She exercised, dieted and tinted her hair blonde and she was popular with many of the men who came in to collect their prescriptions, but she was not used to floral tributes. In her white overall she thought of herself as clinical and efficient. She had a pale, oval face with brown eyes and a small, neat mouth that she had been told projected refinement rather than sensuality. Lately, she had noticed some incipient wrinkles on her neck and taken to wearing polo sweaters.
Under the amused and frankly envious observation of her colleagues, Pam had blushingly accepted the flowers, trying to explain that such a tribute was not necessary, charming as it was. However, when the giver followed it up by asking her to allow him to buy her a drink at the Green Dragon, she had found him difficult to refuse. She had stuttered something about being on duty after lunch, so he had suggested tomato juice or bitter lemon, and one of the other girls had given her an unseen nudge and planted her handbag in her hand.
That was the start of the long-running joke about Pam’s secret lover.
Really the joke was on the others. They hadn’t guessed it in their wildest fantasies, but things had developed to the extent that Pam now slept with him regularly.
Do not assume too much about the relationship. In the common understanding of the word, he was not her lover. Sleeping together and making love are not of necessity the same thing. The possibility was not excluded, yet it was not taken as the automatic consequence of sharing a bed, and that accorded well with Pam’s innate refinement.
So it wasn’t entirely as the girls in the health centre might have imagined it. Pam had learned over that first tomato juice in the Green Dragon that Cliff had a job in the cider industry which entailed calling on various producers in the West Midlands and South-West, and visiting Hereford for an overnight stay once a fortnight. He liked travelling, yet he admitted that the nights away from home had been instrumental in the failure of his marriage. He had not been unfaithful, but, as he altruistically put it, anyone who read the accounts of rapes and muggings in the papers couldn’t really blame a wife who sought companionship elsewhere when her husband spent every other week away on business.
Responding to his candour, Pam had found herself admitting that she, too, was divorced. The nights, she agreed, were the worst. Even in the old cathedral city of Hereford, which had no reputation for violence, she avoided going out alone after dark and she often lay awake listening acutely in case someone was tampering with the locks downstairs.
The first lunchtime drink had led to another when Cliff was next in the city. The fortnight after, Pam had invited him to the house for a ‘spot of supper’, explaining that it was no trouble, because you could do much more interesting things cooking for two than alone. Cliff had heaped praise on her chicken cordon bleu, and after that the evening meal had become a fortnightly fixture. On the first occasion, he had quite properly returned to his hotel at the end of the evening, but the following time he had introduced Pam to the old-fashioned game of cribbage, and they had both got so engrossed that neither of them had noticed the time until it was well after midnight. By then, Pam felt so relaxed and safe with Cliff that it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to make up the spare bed for him and invite him to stay the night. There had been no suggestion on either side of a more intimate arrangement. That was what she liked about Cliff. He wasn’t one of those predatory males. He was enough of a gentleman to suppress his natural physical instincts. And one night six weeks after in a thunderstorm, when she had tapped on his bedroom door and said she was feeling frightened, he had offered in the same gentlemanly spirit to come to her room until the storm abated. As it happened, Pam still slept in the king-size double bed she had got used to when she was married, so there was room for Cliff without any embarrassment about inadvertent touching. They had fallen asleep listening for the thunder. By then it was the season of summer storms, so next time he had come to the house, they had agreed that it was a sensible precaution to sleep together even when the sky was clear. You could never be certain when a storm might blow up during the night. And when the first chill nights of autumn arrived, neither of them liked the prospect of sleeping apart between cool sheets. Besides, as Cliff considerately mentioned, using one bed was less expensive on the laundry.