The same small boy was poking his head out of the gap between the heavy doors, only now he could see that little face more clearly: enormous horn-rimmed spectacles, metal-braced teeth, and head encased in its baseball cap, which bore the legend ‘ Forget—
Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State Hell’, superimposed on the red-white-and-blue starred flag of the Confederate States of America; and, as he observed the tiny apparition, it succeeded in squeezing itself through the gap only to trip on its own feet, to sprawl in the gravel.
Barnet… and bloody Tewkesbury — ?
‘What is it, darling?’ Mrs Audley addressed her son, at her feet, as he searched blindly for his spectacles, which had jumped off his little nose, to fall just short of Tom’s feet.
‘Here—’ Tom bent to retrieve the spectacles, but failed to complete his sentence as he observed the long blonde plait which had fallen out of the baseball cap. Instead, he thought Christ! I’m slipping! I can’t tell the little girls from the little boys now!
‘Thank you.’ Little Miss Audley pushed her spectacles back on to her face quickly, and gave Tom half-a-second’s half-blind acknowledgement before offering her mother another pair of spectacles, which she had been carrying in her hand. ‘Your glasses, Mummy.’
‘What, darling?’ Mrs Audley gazed vaguely at her daughter for another half-second, and then accepted what was being offered to her. ‘Oh—thank you, Cathy dear!’
Miss Audley turned back to Tom. ‘Thank you.’
‘Not at all.’ Tom searched for something to say. She might be anything from eleven to fourteen, but now that they were both wearing spectacles each was a dead ringer for the other, straight up-and-down and flat as a board, and blonde, yet wholly feminine with it: how could he have failed to see! ‘Miss Audley—?’
Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State
‘My daughter, Sir Thomas,’ answered Mrs Audley. ‘Cathy.’ She nodded at the child. ‘Sir Thomas Arkenshaw, Cathy.’
Cathy Audley gave Tom a fearsomely precocious doubting frown, as baffled as any of her elders and betters, as she offered him her hand.
Smart girl, thought Tom. ‘Miss Audley.’ But to hell with her.
‘Your husband is expecting me, Mrs Audley, I believe?’
After having re-examined his identification through her thick-lensed spectacles, Mrs Audley looked at him properly at last. ‘Yes, Sir Thomas… Cathy, go and tell your father that Sir Thomas has arrived.’
‘Yes, Mother.’ Cathy focused properly on him again also, but again registered doubt. ‘Sir Thomas… Ark-Arken-?’ She began to retreat backwards towards the gap in the barn doors. ‘Arken-what?’
‘ Shaw,’ completed Tom. ‘Like in “certain”.’
She grinned at him as she slid into the gap. ‘Or “George Bernard”?
Or “Tripoli”?’
Tom frowned. Tripoli—! But by then she had vanished again.
‘I’m sorry, Sir Thomas,’ said Mrs Audley, shaking her head.
‘Sometimes she’s grown up. But sometimes she says things no one but her father understands—I’m sorry!’
‘Don’t be.’ Tripoli? wondered Tom. ‘She’s delightful, Mrs Audley
—like your house.’ Tripoli? he thought again. Exactly like the house! ‘But what did she mean by “Tripoli”?’
She shook her head again. ‘Heaven only knows! I certainly don’t!’
She laughed, half-regretfully, half-proudly. ‘But please—it’s Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State
“Faith”, not “Mrs Audley”, Sir Thomas.’ She gestured towards the porch. ‘Do come inside—David will be with us directly.’
‘Then it’s “Tom”.’ The thought of Audley—not David, and a world away from Father— dragged Tom back to harsh reality. And not Tripoli either—Tripoli was a damnably nasty Libyan memory: he had been scared stiff that one time he’d been in Tripoli, sailing under false colours on a dangerous coast—once in Tripoli was enough, and he was glad that he could never go back there. ‘Please lead the way… Faith.’
He followed her into what seemed for a moment like cool darkness, smelling of furniture polish and the old-house-damp which so often rose from deep cellars beneath. Then he was at the foot of an oak staircase, looking up towards a window ablaze with stained-glass sunlight.
And Panin, he thought— Nikolai Andrievich Panin— who was another world away from David Audley here and these two females-of-the-species, but also in the same world that he and Audley both inhabited outside it.
‘Tom—’ Faith Audley accepted the diminutive as of right, having been quite properly unimpressed with ‘Sir Thomas’ even before she’d had a clear view of him ’—we have to go through the kitchen because we’ve lost the key to the French windows in the dining room. David says he hung it up, for the winter… but heaven only knows what he actually did with it… It’ll turn up one day, of course… He’s down in the orchard making one of his bonfires—
making a bonfire is one of the two jobs he’s good at… the other is making compost heaps—‘ She threw her domestic prattle over her Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State shoulder as she led him down a short passage towards a stone-arched doorway ’—bonfires and compost heaps are major scientific operations, according to him, and I’m not allowed to touch either of them—‘ Beyond the door lay a huge kitchen, dominated by an equally huge table, scrubbed pale with time and elbow-grease ’—which is ludicrous really, because I’m the scientist in the family, and David doesn’t really know why one wire must go on one terminal—‘
She was already opening another door while Tom was still taking in the kitchen’s weird mixture of ancient-and-modern, between its smoke-darkened beams and stone-flagged floor, and the gleaming plastic gadgetry of electric cooker and microwave and dish-washer, via a middle-aged solid fuel Aga stove, with a museum-array of copper saucepans and a blackened fireplace furnished with an iron turning-spit which could have roasted a whole pig to celebrate the news of any battle of the Wars of the Roses, if this household had been on its winning side.
‘Tom—?’ Faith Audley’s voice issued from the half-light of another passage.
‘Coming!’ Damn the Wars of the Roses! Tom shook his head.
Another short corridor, with a laundry room on one side and a larder on the other, and other doors—for the extremes of boiler and freezer, maybe—?
Tom blinked as the light streaming through the last door hit him, and stepped out of the house in Faith Audley’s wake, following her under another stone archway which had never started its life in a Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State kitchen garden wall, its crudely defaced heraldic shields reminding him of the bigger arch above the barn doors.
Then the full sun hit him as he emerged from the archway into a little courtyard at the back of the house, with a stone well-head in the centre of it and a fine view of the high downland away across a coarse winter lawn in the foreground.
But no sign of Audley—? He frowned towards the man’s wife.
‘This is the first good day we’ve had, when it hasn’t rained much
—’ She wasn’t looking at him, but at the grass ‘—but does he prune the roses? Oh no! ’ She turned to him at last, sniffing the air as she did so. ‘ He has to make a bonfire… and if the wind stays in this direction… we shall get the benefit of it—’ She swung round to look at the house ‘—in fact, I’d better go and close all the windows before it’s too late—excuse me, Sir Thomas— Tom… But I’ll put the kettle on for a cup of tea while I’m about it. David will be here directly.’ She indicated the nearest of a group of dirt-stained white ironwork chairs. ‘He knows I was bringing you here.’