He reached into his pocket and took a long drink of brandy, careless of precarious balance, hoping to stave off an ulcerous hunger. An unfurled hedgehog came from a grassy bank and walked at leisure across the path, eyes calm under spiny impregnable defences. Ralph considered it put on a fine front against those it had no wish to be bothered with, an anti-social bore in the hedgehog world, when no one in his right mind could wish to be otherwise in any sort of world.
A single block of enlarged vision beyond the twin funnels of his binoculars scanned the multitudinous bricks of the great wall, broken only by the high elm leading to the side window of Handley’s studio. His will centred on it as he examined all possible angles and limits of that huge flank, always drawn back to the window until it seemed that if he spread his arms and gave one great foot-thrust from the fork of the tree he would fly across the deceptively narrow expanse of field and land in a few seconds by the window he so much wanted to go in by.
Lowering the glasses, it was as impossibly far off as ever. It didn’t worry him. Subtlety and solitude ruled out any shocks from life, and he smiled at the pleasures of continual observation, that nevertheless gave no results and got him no closer to what in such a desperate key he wanted to get his hands on. It was a game, and the course was an unstoppable zombie-like action leading to a double and satisfying jackpot. He smoked a pipe to comfort himself under the drizzle and raindrops from higher branches, which might have been torture to anyone less fundamentally preoccupied.
When he next allowed his focus to drift up to Handley’s window he saw that it was slightly open, a pleasant surprise, because he felt as if it had suddenly become more human. It had. A head fixed there had a sort of machine where the eyes should have been, and with a shock he realised that they were more powerful binoculars than the infantry glasses of his father’s slung round his neck. By some invidious mechanism of auto-attraction both sets of glasses seemed unable to cease observing the other, and this situation was painful to Ralph, because he’d been at it longer and could only be the cause of this unexpected retaliation. He wanted to smile, wave, and nonchalantly slip his glasses back in their case, but they seemed glued to his eyes, his arms frozen at the joints, and he would have been set in that pose all day if Handley’s window had not slammed shut. He imagined he’d heard the noise of it, though he couldn’t remember having actually seen the face rip aside even though he’d been fixed on it to the end.
Half in and half out of an overcoat, Handley ran at great speed across the yard, disappeared for a moment between the caravans, then seemed to go head first through the window of his Rambler. A few seconds later it dropped out of sight like a submarine.
Embarrassing questions stung his face like ants, and all the answers pointed to the fact that he’d better get out of the wood. He threw the empty bottle into a bush, and the ten-foot jump folded him like a joiner’s ruler, but he straightened and looked for a hollow tree-bole in which to hide his binoculars, where they would stay dry and safe till he returned for them in a few days.
When they were stowed, and the tree noted by pointing the bottleneck towards it from the far side of the path, he walked leisurely back to his car. Studying the map in its dry cabin, it was obvious which way Handley would go to bar his exit to the metalled road. And yet, perhaps when he dashed out so wildly to his car just now he’d only gone down to the village for a drink, and not because he’d seen him perched in the tree. But his paranoid senses told him that such an assumption was the dangerous road to normality, and that evasive tactics were necessary. To avoid Handley’s obvious manoeuvre, his best plan was not to turn back but to continue through the wood, in spite of the quagmire, and take the bridle track running through Waller’s farm, which would eventually bring him to a road miles out of harm’s way, so that while Handley was waiting in useless fury at the southern exit he would be through Catham and half-way to Boston.
After appalling difficulties in the mud, tackled with such noble restraint that he actually enjoyed them, he drove along the last stretch of hedgebound track before the paved road. Turning a bend on the last hundred yards his way was completely blocked by the longside view of a black twenty-foot station-waggon. Handley himself stood by it, smoking a long thin cigar to calm his impatience, and on first seeing the Land-Rover — which he thought for a moment might be Waller’s who also had one and who wore a cap the same style as Ralph’s — he felt a pang of disappointment, which then turned to joy at having an intensely complex plan worked out in a few seconds triumphantly succeed.
Being so neatly trapped made Ralph reflect that maybe older people were more devious after all, and had developed greater reserves of cunning in the extra time that one still had to suffer through. This reflection showed on his face in a cold look of neutrality, an unexpected meeting with someone he tried not to know.
Handley walked up to his cab. ‘Where are your binoculars?’
‘What binoculars?’
‘Eyes. Glass eyes. Spy rings.’ He looked inside but they weren’t to be seen.
‘I haven’t any,’ said Ralph.
‘You’ve been spying on my house for the last two hours. My sons were watching you, and I saw you as well. Get down.’
The sudden closing of the trap in a ten-to-one chance had unnerved Ralph. He wanted to stay in the protection of his car, but Handley came back from his own with a long heavy monkey-wrench. ‘If you don’t get down, I’ll smash your headlights.’
He lifted the spanner, and only a quick strangled cry from Ralph stopped it splintering the glass.
‘All right,’ Handley said, when he stood before him on the path. ‘If you don’t stop chasing Mandy I’ll break every bone in your body. You’ve no right or reason to sit like a batman in that wood for days with your binoculars trained on us. I’d think you were casing the joint if I thought there was anything worth nicking. But next time I see you spying you’ll be for it. I’ve got enough witnesses to peg you down. It’s called loitering with intent to commit a felony, and don’t think that because I’m an artist and an anarchist I wouldn’t call the police and have you put away. I could have done it any time this morning, and they’d have been on to you while you were still stuck up that tree hoping for a sight of Mandy, and you’d have been in the loony-bin already. All that stopped me was the thought that it might upset her, and no man in his right senses would want to do that, which makes me wonder how straight in the head you are if you’re supposed to have any regard for her at all.’
Ralph heard him, and did not hear. The words registered, but did not hurt. Paranoia absorbed his tirade, and vanity took the bite out of them. Handley didn’t like him, because he was almost as invulnerable as he was himself, with that firm jaw, penetrating brown eyes and a pride that, because it didn’t fit the final uncertainty of them, was flawed in a grave way.
‘Is that all?’ he wanted to know.
‘Yes, but it’s only the end if you make sure I’ve seen the last of you.’