'Wait!' Jenny surfaced first: Jenny was never better than in danger. 'If we're running, Mr Buller — Reg — ?' She half-looked at Ian, as though to remind him that even Paul Mitchell had wanted them to run.
That was their old technique: one picked up the unasked question from the other. 'Where are we going, Reg?' He moved slightly, so as to block Buller's passage towards the door. 'We're running . . . where?'
Buller grinned at him. 'We ain't exactly runnin' , Ian lad.' He replaced his empty beer-glass on the table, beside the empty whisky-glass. 'Because I don't reckon there's an 'ole deep enough for us to run to, not now — not even if we go an' call on the Lady's dad, even — ' He started to move towards Ian.
' Where, Mr Duller?' Jenny moved too, alongside Ian.
'Not "where", Lady.' Buller stopped. ' Who is the name of our dummy2
game now, I reckon — where just takes us to him. And we know where.'
Now they were shoulder-to-shoulder in the way, just like in the old days. Only now . . . Frances Fitzgibbon was between them, somehow, thought Ian: now they were just business associates, and allies at need.
'Spain, Mr Buller?' Jenny drew a breath.
'Audley, Lady.' Buller's expression hardened. 'The only bloke who can get us out from under is Audley. Because ... if 'e knows, then we can maybe make a deal with 'im. An' ... if 'e doesn't know . . . then 'e'll know what's what when we've told
'im. An' then 'e'll 'ave to be on our side, to save 'is own skin.'
He started to move towards them. 'Okay?'
Ian didn't know which of them moved first. But they both moved, anyway.
And he completed that belated truth then: as with lies, and with all the sins, great and little, so with vengeance and revenge: you never knew, until too late, what a great work you'd started out on — until too late!
PART TWO
Jennifer Fielding and The Ghosts of
Salamanca
dummy2
1
Although the sun had nowhere near reached its full strength Jenny already felt a prickle of sweat between her shoulder blades. And, as she sensed it, another spike of corn-stubble gouged her ankle painfully, reminding her again that she had chosen the wrong shoes this morning. She had planned to look cool and elegant for this encounter, and she was going to end up a perfect mess, sweaty, injured and angry. And it was all Ian's fault — bloody, bloody Ian!
'Ouch!' She stopped to examine the damage. There was a glistening dark-red globule marking the injury, not far from the unsightly smear of its predecessor, which was mixed with red dust. Sweaty, injured, angry and dirty — bloody, bloody, bloody Ian! 'Wait for a moment! I'm hurt, Ian — Ian?'
He hadn't even stopped. He was striding ahead, quite oblivious of her. And now she couldn't even see the rocky plateau towards which he started for, when they'd left the car on the edge of that fly-blown village: there was a long undulation of lethal corn-stubble blocking the view. And she was wearing the wrong shoes.
(They weren't really the wrong shoes: they were her bloody best shoes . . .or, they had been, anyway; it was because he had insisted on leaving the car there, bloody-miles from where they were going — that had made them wrong. 'I can see his car,' he had said, lowering his binoculars, speaking in his strange new voice. ' It's up the track, just by that hut — a dummy2
silver Rover Sterling. But we'll go from here. I want to walk . . . I want to think. There's plenty of time. Come on, then.')
He had stopped at last, silhouetted in the glare at the top of the rise against the pure blue cloudless sky. But he still wasn't looking at her: he had his binoculars glued to his eyes again, still oblivious of her.
Well, that bloody settled it, thought Jenny. This was the new Ian — a problem Ian, and a difficult one; and all the more of a problem, and all the more difficult, because the old one had always been easy and simple, and just tedious in the usual obvious ways, like a dumb-clever brother —
' Ian! Sod you!' she shouted at his back.
Now, at last, after he'd observed what he wanted to check on, he turned towards her. 'What is it?'
'It's all right, darling.' She realized as he turned that the greatest mistake of all would be to whinge, like a man.
Indeed, to whinge as Ian himself did (or, had used to do; but this was a different Ian, she had to remember). 'It's just ...
your legs are longer than mine . . . Have you spotted him?'
'Yes.' He turned back, away from her, lifting the binoculars again.
'Yes?' She was conscious of looking at the new Ian with new eyes, now that he wasn't interested in looking at her. That
'wimp' image had always been unfair, of course: he had been very far from that in Beirut that time, everyone had said dummy2
afterwards; more like a hero, they'd said, but she'd taken that with a pinch of salt (or, anyway, taken it for granted: in wars and emergencies, scholars and poets down the ages had rarely been among the skulkers . . . and a scholar and a poet was what the poor darling really was — or, in a better world, might have been). 'Where?'
'On the Greater Arapile.' He lowered the binoculars, and then pointed. 'See where his car's parked — the Rover? Just beyond that hut. Imagine that's the centre of a clock, and the hour-hand is pointing at eleven — follow that line up to the top, Jenny. He's standing just to the right of that monument.
It must be a battle memorial of some sort.'
Jenny shaded her eyes and stared.
'”The Greater Arapile".' The binoculars came up again.
'That's where the French were, when the battle started in 1812. And the Duke of Wellington came along behind us, from the "Lesser Arapile" to the village. He must have had his lunch just about where we left the car: that was when he saw they'd over-extended their line of march, and threw his chicken leg over his shoulder and said "That will do!" So the story goes, anyway.'
Either it was the glare, or perhaps she needed glasses, but she couldn't see a damn thing in the desolate parched landscape. 'I really don't need to know about the battle — do I, darling?'
'It's an interesting battle.' He spoke distantly, as though to a child. 'When people think of Wellington they think of dummy2
Waterloo . . . like, when they think of Nelson, it's Trafalgar . . . But Nelson's finest victory was the Nile — or maybe it was at St Vincent that he really showed what he was made of ... So this was maybe Wellington's "finest hour" . . .
ye-ess: " That will do!"'
Jenny squinted hopelessly at a blur of boring fields and boring rocks, and knew that it wasn't her own finest hour.
Or, anyway, not yet. 'I didn't know it was the Duke of Wellington we were interested in, darling. I thought it was David Audley.'
'We could do a book on Spain instead, you know.' The new Ian was impervious to sarcasm. 'All those people on holiday on the Costa Blanca, and the Costa Brava . . . and now Spain in the Common Market. And the ETA link with the IRA . . .
And we could take the history all the way from the Black Prince, and the War of the Spanish Succession, and Wellington . . . and the Civil War, with the International Brigades — ' The binoculars went down, and then up again '