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GUNNER KELLY
A NOVEL
by
ANTHONY PRICE
© Anthony Price 1983
PART ONE
How Colonel Butler’s breakfast was spoilt
I
Colonel Butler loved all his three girls equally, but (as he was accustomed to tell himself when they presented their problems to dummy1
him) differently. Because, notwithstanding the identical red of their hair, they were entirely different people.
And that was why Jane had his attention now across the breakfast table, absolutely but unequally with the disquiet which he might have diverted from his Times to Sally or Diana.
“I said, Father,” she repeated, “I think I have done something rather silly. ”
“Yes.” Butler nodded gravely, just as he would have done for Sally or Diana, but without the pretence which paternal gravity would have required for them. “I heard you the first time, Jane.”
He stopped there, and the difference widened with his silence and hers. With Sally and Diana he would have added some soothing verbal placebo. But then, with Sally it would have been merely something to do with horses, and with Diana merely something to do with men; but it was the horse that Sally loved, not (in spite of temporary infatuations) any particular horse; and Diana, whose physical resemblance to her late mother went disturbingly more than skin deep, seemed to feel much the same way about men; and in both cases Colonel Butler and his money had together proved more than a match for any emergency in the past.
But Jane was different.
“Tell me—” Butler overcame his Anglo-Saxon reticence with a conscious effort “—darling.”
With Jane it was different: with Jane, from the moment when she had ceased to be a thing and had become a person, life had been reason and calculation, not emotion. With Jane, Butler had never dummy1
been sure whether she was the least loving or the most loving of his children—whether, because she felt most deeply, she had armoured herself most carefully against feeling, or whether, because she felt nothing, she was impervious to life’s shot and shell. And so, because he loved her equally, he had found himself worrying about her more, because she brought him fewer problems, and those almost purely academic, balancing one relative benefit coldly against another: Mathematics or English (she excelled at both)? Oxbridge or Bristol (mathematician or barrister, and no serious question about entry, but a faint sympathy in Butler himself for other mathematicians or prisoners at the bar eventually . . . just as his ultimate sympathy in her sisters’ cases was not truly with them, but with the horses and men they chose to ride into the ground, which were the animals with which—with whom—he himself could identify, having been similarly ridden in his time)?
But she was still his daughter—his flesh and his red hair and his responsibility and his equal love; and now—his instinct and experience both told— she was in deep trouble at last, who had never been in such trouble before.
The realisation of that, cold as the shrill, distant sound of Chinese bugles blowing the charge against the last handful of his company in Korea, stripped all Butler’s worries away from him momentarily (the true leak at Cheltenham, which was not the one the Russians had so carefully let them have . . . Mitchell and Andrew could only handle that at a pinch; but the problem with the Americans could only be dealt with by David Audley, whose own private links with dummy1
the CIA would have to be cashed in when he got back from leave .... So he would have to give St John Latimer carte blanche at Cheltenham—the more he disliked Latimer, who hated Audley, the more he inconveniently needed both of them to do what had to be done—even though Audley coveted that job . . .).
But for the moment it was Jane who mattered—
“Tell me, darling.” This time he managed something close to encouragement, if not sympathy.
“Yes . . .” Some other process of reasoning, very different in content, but equal in duration and sufficient to nerve her to answer him, animated Jane “... Father, you remember when I took the little car last week . . . ?”
As though summoned by the memory, Sally breezed out of the kitchen into the breakfast-room, carrying her enormous horsewoman’s breakfast.
“I remember. It was last Saturday, to be exact,” Sally agreed.
“Because I had to get a lift to the gymkhana the other side of Winchester that day—”
“Go and eat in the kitchen, Sal.” Jane looked up at her sister uncompromisingly. “I’ve got business to transact with Father.”
Sally gave her younger sibling one quick, sharp glance, and then picked up the plate again and was gone before Butler could say a word. And that, if anything had been required to consolidate Butler’s disquiet, confirmed it beyond question: however much they might be at odds on day-to-day matters, they never failed to decode each other’s Most Urgent signals in an emergency.
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Silly was what worried him now. Because, where Sally and Diana were given to hyperbole, Jane’s weakness was understatement, so that she would not admit to being unwell until she was too ill to walk.
Suddenly, he found himself simultaneously suppressing reasons for panic while discounting them: she was only nineteen years old, but hard-headed and sensible with it. . . but she was still only nineteen years old—
The Mini was still in pristine condition—he had washed it himself on Sunday, and it bore no marks of any chance encounters—and Jane wasn’t the hit-and-run type— Or ... No—No. Butler had staked his life on several occasions when the odds were better not computed, but he was quite happy to stake it again this morning across the breakfast-table that his youngest daughter wasn’t pregnant. All the known facts of circumstance and character were against it, apart from the cheerfulness of her greeting only a few minutes before—
Only a few minutes before? Butler’s eyes dropped to the table, to beside her plate on it: one letter, but hand-written, not official—
just a few lines on a single sheet of paper, without even an address so far as he could see at the distance and upside-down—hardly more than a brief scrawl, but signed with a flourish—
He raised his eyes to meet hers, with his imagination up against a blank wall of incomprehension.
“I went to see David, Father.”
“David?” Jane had no boyfriend named David. In fact, Jane had no dummy1
boy-friend, full-stop.
“Uncle David, Father.”
Butler was there as she spoke. David was David Audley—and, somewhat to his surprise, that in itself was reassuring: no matter how eccentric, even maverick, Audley might be in professional matters, when it came to Jane he had no doubt that the man would behave responsibly. Even . . . with the untimely death of Jane’s godfather, Audley rather quaintly regarded himself as an unofficial substitute for that role, for which only one other parent had regarded him suitable, to his chagrin.
So, for once at least, and in this instance in particular, Audley could be trusted, surely—
Surely? He looked at Jane. “You went to see David Audley?”
“About Becky, Father—Becky Smith.” Jane nodded.
“Becky Smith?” Butler repeated the name blankly, aware that he might have registered any young man’s name for future reference, but that no female from school or university would have fixed herself in his mind unless he could add a face to a name. And there was no file in his memory on any Becky Smith.