'I don't want that sort of feather, David. But what if he doesn't laugh?'
'Oh, he'll laugh - old Haddock'll see the joke, whether it's on him or us. He won't have changed. Aged, maybe… but not changed.' Audley nodded. 'He should be just about ready for drinking now: aged in the wood.' Another nod: he was excited, rather than pleased, at the prospect. 'Besides which… if I don't quit - and I'm damned if I'm going to quit for Oliver St John Latimer - what can they do to me? The way things are at Cheltenham, they need me more than I need them right now.' Another nod. But this time the excitement was smoothed by rather smug confidence. 'So what can they do to me?'
'Oh, great! Bravo!' murmured Richardson. 'Vintage patriotism, 1984: "My country needs me - but it's paying less than the going rate". But you're asking the wrong question, I suspect.'
'And what is the right question?'
'You may well ask!' But Richardson didn't seem disposed to answer.
Audley waited, and Elizabeth decided to wait too.
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The landscape was closing in on them again. There were more orchards now, as well as vineyards - peaches, or almonds maybe, or even olives, but something exotic, anyway; but, more strange than the flora (and there was no sign of any fauna, except Frenchmen in French vehicles, which made the road even more foreign), was the suddenly-jagged landscape.
'It's not worth looking, Miss Loftus.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Just because you can't see them, it doesn't mean they aren't there. Or, anyway, that they haven't got us covered. They're at St Servan, anyway.'
'I was looking at the countryside, actually.'
'Uh-huh?' Richardson drove in silence for a time. 'Nice, isn't it? Myself, I don't like the French. But then my mother was Italian, so I suppose I'm biased. However… your Italian -
he has his faults, but he wants to be a gentleman, even when he's picking your pocket, or cutting your throat. But your Frenchman - he's got style, but no one would ever accuse him of being a gentleman.'
'Balderdash!' said Audley. 'Poppycock!'
'Possibly,' agreed Richardson equably. 'But when it comes to self-interest - call it La France, if you like - he can be mean and smart, is what I mean.'
'It isn't what he means at all, Elizabeth,' said Audley. 'Come to the point, Pietro.'
'Okay. Have it your own way.' Richardson shrugged. 'The further we drive up this pretty road - and if those clouds weren't in the way you might just see Mont Ventoux, Miss Loftus
- the further we drive up it, the queasier I feel.' Another shrug. 'If we were just tourists…
but no one's ever going to accuse you of being just a tourist, David… And if Andy Dale got just a whiff of KGB up there, at St Servan, before he glimpsed this French DST fellow…
And now you say that it was the Yanks led you to this old boy in the first place - ' Shrug ' -
God knows what he's done - I don't want to know, not now: I want to be able to say Mein Gott! I voss only obeying orders: I voss only drivink ze car! — just so we get in quickly, and then get out quickly. Will you at least do that?'
It was looking less and less like a good idea, and more and more like a stampeded amateurish error, thought Elizabeth. 'We won't stay for lunch, Mr Richardson. All right?'
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'I hope you won't, Miss Loftus - I hope you won't!'
"There's a two-star restaurant in St Servan,' said Audley.
'La Vieille Auberge.' Richardson nodded. 'Have you ever been in a French slammer, Miss Loftus?'
'Shut up, Peter,' said Audley. 'Just drive.'
'Onomatopoeic, Miss Loftus,' said Richardson. 'American slang for the sound of the prison door closing. And I'll bet there isn't a CIA man to be found in a thirty-mile radius of us now. Because they're not nearly as stupid as their allies like to think.'
'Shut up, Peter,' said Audley again. 'Just drive.'
Peter Richardson just drove.
'Have you been in the field long, Miss Loftus?' he said at length.
'Drive, Peter,' said Audley.
She couldn't even concentrate properly on the countryside, after she found she couldn't think straight. Not even when she saw a strange field, and caught a stranger smell.
'Lavender,' said Richardson obligingly. 'Or a sort of lavender. What they grow is some sort of hybrid - the real stuff grows wild, higher up, with thyme and rosemary. I remember stopping off up here - oh, it must have been fifteen years ago - when I was driving my first girl down to Amalfi, to see my mother's folks. We stopped off further north, though - Buis-les-Baronnies, it was… It was okay then, because there were no missiles on the Plateau d'Albion… Now, when I come over, I keep to the autoroute, just to be on the safe side.'
Eventually he stopped, quite deliberately.
'Phone-box here, just round the corner. Got to make a call.'
Elizabeth sat in silence, until it became oppressive.
'Have I made a mistake, David?'
Audley stared down the village street, in which nothing moved. 'We all make mistakes.
Maybe I made a mistake, a long time ago. If I did, then maybe we've both made another one now. Join the club.'
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Richardson came back.
'That's okay. He's just gone out on his terrace, to read his morning paper. He'll have his coffee. And then some more coffee. By the time we get there he'll be thinking about his first drink.' He let in the clutch.
'But I still don't think I made a mistake, Elizabeth,' said Audley.
Peter Richardson just drove, again.
There were hills now, and twisting valleys, up and down, and through and around, with scrubland rising up here and there above fertile fields, hinting at the wilder country of Peter Richardson's real lavender. And -
And that had been the country to which Haddock Thomas had taken his beautiful scheming Delphi, long ago. And had he returned here to die here, because this was where he had once been happy?
And there were villages, set high up on one side, or low down on another - low down, but still on promontories in their valleys, each with its ruined medieval castle tower and its church - each at once different from the last one, yet identical.
It was perched on the side of a ridge - a plateau, almost - also just as different, but just the same -
'I'll go straight in, and drop you off outside his place. I can turn round at the top, somewhere… I have to come down a different way, but I'll sound the horn - one short, one long, one short - as I come by, underneath his terrace. Then I'll fill up the tank at the gas station, and I'll have a drink at the auberge - for an hour?' Richardson glanced over his shoulder at Audley. 'Same signal -okay?'
Elizabeth cracked. 'And if everything isn't all right?'
'Long-short-long… if I'm lucky.' He signalled and slowed to leave the main road. 'Dead silence if I'm not. Okay?'
Elizabeth craned her neck to try to take in the terrain of St Servan-les-Ruines, but too late, because of listening to Peter Richardson: the huddle of the village was already lost behind a screen of trees, and she had lost the shape of everything. But it was still so peaceful that the whole charade was utterly unreal, anyway.
'Here we go, then,' said Richardson, in a voice so suddenly-serious, like a fighter pilot dummy2
making his low-level run, that she was jolted from unreality to reality.
It was larger than it had seemed, on that first uninformed look, when it had been just another village: there was a street, and another street, with shops in it - even a shop with dresses in it, which no English village would ever have possessed; but then no English village she knew of still had a baker's shop - a butcher's shop - never mind a two-star auberge —