‘No great matter if it were. Meanwhile I’m subduing the rest of the regiment single-handed. Lucky you happened to find me, isn’t it?’
‘We had and have something up our sleeves for the whole regiment, including you. Just before we move a fake message from London reaches your colonel telling him to confine all troops to quarters. At the same time we cut his communications with Northampton. Then at H-Hour two of us release TK into the park.’
‘Almighty God! How did you get hold of that? And the impellor?’
‘From Moscow,’ said Theodore lightly. ‘We’re constantly in receipt of deliveries of cultural equipment and stores.’
‘You know, Theodore, if the 4th were the only troops in England the thing might conceivably work.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m so taken up with our local movement I forgot to tell you. We here are just part of an organisation that covers the whole country, the whole EDR. Surely you knew at least that the Festival was a national affair.’
‘No, I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about any of it. And if there’d been the slightest whisper in the regiment I’d have heard.’
‘The Guards’ morale is known to be high. And in rural districts like this one the military are isolated, impossible to mix with on any scale. It was decided that outside the larger towns, where circumstances are different, the safe course was to leave them alone and then neutralise them.’
‘With certain exceptions.’
‘You’re special, Alexander, you must admit. Son of the Controller, lover of the Deputy-Director’s wife – when are you seeing her again, by the way?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon.
‘We’ll come back to her in a minute – and now somebody with the means of blowing up half England. We have to have you.
‘What would you like me to blow up?’
‘One can’t say yet. You must just be ready, prepared. You’ll be able to lay hands on some of those projectiles?’
‘With everybody else knocked unconscious for twelve hours I should be able to manage it, yes.’
‘What chance have they got of reaching their insufflators in time?’
‘None whatsoever. One whiff and you collapse, so suddenly that there’s often a high casualty-rate from men injuring themselves as they fall. Anyway, that’s what the manual says.’
‘Excellent.’
After a brief pause, Alexander said, ‘Of course, fighting off the entire Russian army and air force the next day will stretch me somewhat.’
‘There I go again. I should have said much earlier that there’s to be a change of government in Moscow timed to coincide with all this.’
‘A coup in Moscow? Sweet Jesus! We’ll be having the Martians in next.’
‘A change of government is how it was described to me. The new leaders will be favourable to an autonomous, neutralised England. That’s all I know.’
There was a longer pause. Alexander could be heard rubbing his cheek or jaw. In the distance a pane of glass broke suddenly and violently.
‘Our friends. At least they’re presumably still alive as I speak. Well, Theodore, I think this scheme has some very interesting possibilities.’
‘Then you’re still with us now you know more about us?’
‘Yes,’ said Alexander’s voice firmly out of the darkness.
As when he was relighting his pipe, Theodore did not see his co-conspirator’s expression. This time it was accompanied by a slight lift of the shoulders.
8
The Old Parsonage turned out to be a rather large, squareish building painted pink. In front of it ran a plank fence on which someone of no great talent had recently drawn in chalk an erect penis with testicles appended. Alexander, riding through the gateway, considered that some generous neighbour, rather than the lady of the house herself, was most likely responsible, but that the second hypothesis could not be dismissed with any confidence. On the far side of the fence, out of sight from the road, there was an untidy lawn that had evergreen bushes on it. Untying the couple of metres of head-collar rope he fastened Polly to the gate and began a cautious advance, his eyes open for alternative escape-routes as if he expected to meet a Cambodian suicide squad rather than a presumably unarmed female.
The front door was ajar. He hesitated and pressed the bell beside it, which he heard ringing both then and on a second and a third try, but nobody came, so he pushed the door. A short passage manifested itself with a tiled floor of chequered pattern, rooms on each side behind glass doors, more passage beyond at right-angles and the foot of a staircase. Continuing to advance cautiously, he found a dining-room to the left, a drawing-room to the right and nobody in either. When he reached the right-angle he thought, he was almost certain, that there was a person on the landing or half-landing of the staircase, but his direct look a second later showed nobody. On the left-hand side of the house, behind the dining-room, he noticed another door that was not quite shut. It proved to give into a kitchen in which there was somebody: Mrs Korotchenko, leaning naked against the wall that faced him.
Alexander was not the kind of man to linger (or muddle his brains) over such a sight; his advance now was precipitate and he closed with her fervently. Not long afterwards he muttered,
‘Let’s go upstairs.’
‘No. Here.’
‘Come on, darling, don’t be silly, it’s so much more comfortable.’
‘Here, I tell you!’
Resolutely but not violently he caught her round the waist and tried to pull her away from the wall; in response she lifted her hands above her head and gripped what he saw to be the roller of a roller towel against which, rather than against the wall itself, she was in point of fact leaning. So supported she was in an excellent position to fend him off with her powerful legs and he soon gave up his attempt. Now he did look at her with some curiosity and she returned his look with her eyes and nostrils dilated and her lips drawn back.
‘For the love of God,’ she said through her teeth, and reached out for him. At this stage he remembered how the night before last she had shown herself to be no friend of amorous delay, and in the very least time possible set about answering her appeal. Once or twice he found her mouth with his own but each time she lifted it out of reach. She had evidently kept hold of the towel-roller and quite soon took him unawares with the strength of her arms and shoulders. By then his own strength was under severe test; however, it remained equal to all the demands made of it, even at the end when, except for the relief provided by her leaning posture, her entire weight was upon him. Her strange cry sounded, in its unmuffled form (given close to his ear, too) not liable to wake the dead but bidding fair to bring round anyone in the house who might have been merely dozing. This time the note of helplessness or hopelessness seemed plain to Alexander; another quality, perhaps more than one, still eluded him.
As silence abruptly fell he thought, he was again almost certain, that he heard a noise behind him, a slight cough or perhaps a snigger. He looked over his shoulder as smartly as he could, but saw nobody.
‘What was that?’ he asked.
‘What was what?’ Her tone was incurious.
He shook his head and said nothing. After a moment she moved unsteadily to one side and half-lay in a sprawl across the top of a line of cupboards running towards the door. This stood open; he could not remember whether or not he had shut it and dismissed the matter from his mind when Mrs Korotchenko put his hands against her as she had done before.
‘That was wonderful, darling,’ he said, and he was not exaggerating, though he would have been describing his own feelings more accurately by calling what had happened so odd as to be hard to believe already. He gazed into her face, but could find no emotions there, only signs of her physical state. Her glance met his briefly and moved on as if he had been a stranger whose eye she had caught in a public place. ‘Shall we go upstairs now?’