“Come, come, my boy, this is no time for petty loyalties when your country’s future is at stake.”
“Well, sir, I’ve felt for some time that there’s been too much feminine influence in our Department. Have you seen Colonel Plum’s secretary?”
“Hokey-pokey, eh?”
“You could call it that, sir.”
“Enemy agent, eh?”
“Oh no, sir. Have a look at her.”
The Director sent for Susie. When she had gone he said, “No, not an enemy agent.”
“Certainly not, sir, but a frivolous, talkative girl. Colonel Plum’s intimacy…”
“Yes, I quite understand. You did perfectly right to tell me.”
“What did he want, sending for me like that and just staring?” asked Susie.
“I think I’ve arranged a promotion for you.”
“Ooh, you are sweet.”
“I’m just moving into a new flat.”
“Lucky you,” said Susie.
“I wish you’d come and advise me about the decorations. I’m no good at that kind of thing.”
“Oh no?” said Susie in a voice she had learned at the cinema. “And what would Colonel Plum say?”
“Colonel Plum won’t have anything to say. You’re rising far above ADDIS.”
“Ooh.”
Next morning Susie received an official intimation that she was to move to the Director’s office.
“Lucky you,” said Basil.
She had admired all Ambrose’s decorations except the Brancusi sculpture. That had been put away, out of sight, in the box-room.
At Brixton Gaol Mr. Rampole enjoyed many privileges that were not accorded to common criminals. There was a table in his cell and a tolerably comfortable chair. He was allowed, at his own expense, some additions to prison fare. He might smoke. The Times was delivered to him every morning and for the first time in his life he accumulated a small library. Mr. Bentley from time to time brought him papers for which his signature was required. In every way his life was much easier than it would have been in similar circumstances in any other country.
But Mr. Rampole was not content. There was an obnoxious young man next to him who, when they met at exercise, said, “Heil Mosley,” and at night attempted to tap out messages of encouragement in Morse. Moreover Mr. Rampole missed his club and his home at Hampstead. In spite of a multitude of indulgences he faced the summer without enthusiasm.
In a soft, green valley where a stream ran through close-cropped, spongy pasture and the grass grew down below the stream’s edge, and merged there with the water-weed where a road ran between grass verges and tumbled walls, and the grass merged into moss which spread upwards and over the tumbled stones of the walls, outwards over the pocked metalling and deep ruts of the road; where the ruins of a police barracks, built to command the road through the valley, burnt in the Troubles, had once been white, then black, and now were one green with the grass and the moss and the water-weed; where the smoke of burned turf drifted down from the cabin chimneys and joined the mist that rose from the damp, green earth; where the prints of ass and pig, goose and calf and horse, mingled indifferently with those of barefoot children; where the soft, resentful voices rose and fell in the smoky cabins, merging with the music of the stream and the treading and shifting and munching of the beasts at pasture; where mist and smoke never lifted and the sun never fell direct, and evening came slowly in infinite gradations of shadow; where the priest came seldom because of the rough road and the long climb home to the head of the valley, and no one except the priest ever came from one month’s end to another there stood an inn which was frequented in bygone days by fishermen. Here in the summer nights when their sport was over, they had sat long over their whisky and their pipes professional gentlemen from Dublin and retired military men from England. No one fished the stream now and the few trout that remained were taken by ingenious and illicit means without respect for season or ownership. No one came to stay; sometimes a couple on a walking tour, once or twice a party of motorists, paused for supper, hesitated, discussed the matter and then regretfully pushed on to the next village. Here Ambrose came, perched on an outside-car, from the railway station over the hill six miles distant.
He had discarded his clerical disguise, but there was something about his melancholy air and his precision of speech which made the landlord, who had never had contact before with an intellectual Jew, put him down as a “spoilt priest.” He had heard about this inn from a garrulous fellow in the packet-boat; it was kept by a distant connection of this man’s wife’s, and though he had not himself visited the place, he never lost an opportunity of putting in a good word for it.
Here Ambrose settled, in the only bedroom whose windows were unbroken. Here he intended to write a book, to take up again the broken fragments of his artistic life. He spread foolscap paper on the dining-room table; and the soft, moist air settled on it and permeated it so that when, on the third day, he sat down to make a start, the ink spread and the lines ran together, leaving what might have been a brush stroke of indigo paint where there should have been a sentence of prose. Ambrose laid down the pen, and because the floor sloped where the house had settled, it rolled down the table, and down the floor-boards and under the mahogany sideboard, and lay there among napkin rings and small coins and corks and the sweepings of half a century. And Ambrose wandered out into the mist and the twilight, stepping soundlessly on the soft green turf.
In London Basil set Susie to work. She wanted to be taken out in the evenings too often and in too expensive a style. He set her to work with needle and silk and embroidery scissors, picking off the AS from the monograms on Ambrose’s crepe-de-Chine underclothes and substituting a B.
Like horses in a riding school, line ahead to the leading mark, changing the rein, circling to the leading mark on the opposite wall, changing rein again, line ahead again, orderly and regular and graceful, the aeroplanes manoeuvred in the sharp sunlight. The engines sang in the morning sky, the little black bombs tumbled out, turning over in the air, drifting behind the machines, breaking in silent upheavals of rock and dust which were already subsiding when the sound of the explosions shook the hillside where Cedric Lyne sat with his binoculars, trying to mark their fall.
There was no sign of spring in this country. Everywhere the land lay frozen and dead, deep snow in the hills, thin ice in the valleys; the buds on the thorn were hard and small and black.
“I think they’ve found A Company, Colonel,” said Cedric.
Battalion Headquarters were in a cave in the side of the hill a shallow cave made by a single great rock which held up the accumulations of smaller stone which in years had slid down from above and settled round it. The Colonel and the Adjutant and Cedric had room to sit here; they had arrived by night and had watched dawn break over the hills. Immediately below them the road led farther inland, climbing the opposing heights in a series of bends and tunnels. At their feet, between them and the opposite escarpment, the land lay frozen and level. The reserve company was concealed there. The Headquarter troops formed a small protective perimeter round the cave. Twenty yards away under another rock two signallers lay with a portable wireless set.
“Ack, Beer, Charley, Don…Hullo Lulu, Koko calling; acknowledge my signal; Lulu to Koko over.”
They had marched forward all the preceding night. When they arrived at the cave Cedric had first been hot and sweaty, then, after they halted in the chill of dawn, cold and sweaty. Now with the sun streaming down on them he was warm and dry and a little sleepy.
The enemy were somewhere beyond the farther hills. They were expected to appear late that afternoon.
“That’s what they’ll do,” said the Colonel. “Make their assault in the last hour of daylight so as to avoid a counterattack. Well, we can hold them for ever on this front. I wish I felt sure of our left flank.”