“A resistance, you mean?”
“I don’t talk about that. I do still have some shreds of a private life, and I intend to hang on to them. I suppose it is true, that everyone has his price.”
A clear image came to me of the woman in the photograph, the smiling girl with the pretty mouth. Andrews folded the watch in his hand, pressing it shut.
“How long did it take you to make that?” I said.
“A long time,” Andrews said. He smiled to himself, as if at some private joke. “Can I offer you something to eat?”
I stayed, and we talked. I told him about Miranda, and he told me about his childhood in Devon, his first encounter with a Breguet watch, at the town museum in Exeter. Some details of his stories seemed disconcertingly familiar, and several times I experienced that same feeling I had had earlier, that there was a wider sense to everything, just out of sight.
Andrews got up to put a lamp on. It was only then that I realised how late it was.
“I should be going,” I said. “It’ll be getting dark soon.”
I had no idea what time the last bus went. In the light of what Andrews had told me the idea of breaking curfew was unthinkable.
“You’re welcome to stay,” said Andrews. “There’s a spare bed upstairs.”
“No, thank you,” I said. For some reason the idea of spending the night there unnerved me.
“Then at least say you’ll come again. It’s been just like the old days, having you here.”
I laughed to show I knew he was joking, but his face remained serious. Suddenly I was anxious to leave.
“I will, I’ll come soon,” I said.
“See that you do. Mind how you go.”
He waved to me from the doorway. I wondered if he ever got lonely. Dover Road stood silent, a ghost place. With the dusk approaching and to my increasingly anxious mind the place seemed to me like a mock-up, a stage set for some elaborate deception.
It was growing dusk. The forest loomed before me, its greens leached to lavender by the approaching twilight. In the Bull Inn the lamps were already lit, and further along the road towards the village there were lights showing in the windows of most of the houses. It was not long till curfew, but I reasoned that as long as I could get myself on a bus within the next half hour there would be nothing to worry about. I set off in the direction of the High Street, walking briskly in what I hoped was a businesslike fashion. I had just come in sight of the bus stop when I saw something terrible: a roadblock had been set up outside the post office. There were four soldiers manning it; all of them were armed with rifles. I stopped in my tracks, ducking sideways into an alleyway lined with dustbins. My heart was racing. There was no question of approaching the barrier. Even though I had not breached the curfew and it was still my legal right to pass along the street I knew beyond any doubt that in practice this would count for nothing, that the soldiers would find some pretext to arrest me. What might happen after that was something I did not care to think about.
The safest move was to go back the way I had come, to return to Owen Andrews’s house and take him up on his offer of spending the night there. I hesitated, knowing this was the logical course of action but still reluctant to take it. I trusted Andrews completely; the place I did not trust at all. As the dusk came steadily onwards, seeming to curl out from beneath the trees like tendrils of smoke, I realised I had a horror of it, that for some reason the thought of spending the night at Shooter’s Hill was almost as impossible for me as the idea of confronting the soldiers at the barricade.
I felt horribly trapped. I cowered in the alleyway, staring at the trees opposite and knowing I had to make a decision in the next few minutes or risk breaking the curfew. It was then that it came to me there was a third option: I could bypass the checkpoint by cutting through the forest. The idea seemed simple enough. I was actually within sight of the checkpoint, and less than half a mile from the village boundary. I could walk that in less than fifteen minutes. I would not need to go far into the woods, just enough to keep me out of earshot of the soldiers. I should emerge on the Shooter’s Hill Road somewhere between the hospital and Blackheath.
I ran quickly across the road, hoping that one of the soldiers down by the barrier would not choose that moment to turn his gaze in my direction. I slipped in between the trees, my feet crunching through leaf litter. The slope down from the road was steeper than I had imagined. I tripped against an exposed root and almost fell. In less than a couple of minutes I had completely lost sight of the road.
I had imagined there would be a pathway, some kind of track to follow but there were none, or at least none that I could find, and in the oncoming darkness it was difficult to see clearly for more than a couple of yards. I kept going, fighting my way through the underbrush in what I hoped was a westerly direction. There were no landmarks to guide me, no sounds other than the scuffling of my feet in the leaves and my own rapid breathing. I stopped moving, straining my ears for the rumble of a logging truck or even for the voices of the soldiers at the barricade but there was nothing. I could not have been more than a mile from the lighted windows of the Bull Inn, yet it was as if I had unwittingly strayed into some other universe. I could smell the trees all around me, the pungent odour of tree bark and rising chlorophyll. I remembered something from my schooldays, that it was during the hours of darkness that plants released their pent up stores of oxygen, and it seemed to me that I could feel their exhalations all around me, the collective green-tinged sigh of a thousand trees. The dark was growing, spreading across the forest floor like marsh gas. From somewhere further off came the echoing melancholy hooting of a night owl.
I walked for what felt like hours. I could no longer see where I was going, and had no idea of whether I was even vaguely headed in the right direction. I was very afraid, but the state of high nervous tension that had taken me over when I first realised I was lost had worn itself out, blunting my terror to a dull background hum, a mental white noise that drove me incessantly forward whilst slowing the actions and reactions of my brain. Finally I came to a standstill. The woods seemed to close in around me, shuffling forward to block my escape like some vast black beast that knows its prey is all out of running. I slid to the ground where I stood, the dampness settling at once into my clothes. Until that moment I had not realised how cold it was. I began to shiver. I knew that if I was to spend the night in the open I had to get under cover somehow, but I was too exhausted by my flight through the woods to make any decisions. I closed my eyes, thinking confusedly that this might make the darkness less terrible. When I opened them again some minutes later it was to the sight of a yellowish glow, moving slowly towards me from between the trees. I could hear something also, the soft shushing sound of someone or something doing their best to move quietly across a ground that was ankle-deep in twigs and dry leaves.
I moved from a sitting to a lying position, stomach down in the dirt, never taking my eyes from the pale light that though still some distance off appeared to be coming closer with every second. I was torn by indecision. I did not wish to fall into the hands of soldiers or carjackers, but on the other hand I was desperate to be out of the forest. At that moment the thought any human company seemed better than none. As the light came closer I was able to discern amidst the surrounding darkness of trees the deeper, blacker bulk of a human figure: somebody carrying a torch, and coming my way.