Colonel Butler looked down at his desk, at the note-pad near his left hand, and drew a deep breath. During his military career he had lived very happily by the book, being led and leading others, both of which conditions were as natural to him as breathing. But now the book was gathering dust . . . and Audley was a man who could be neither led nor driven, but whose unique value to Queen and Country lay in that restless free-ranging intuition. So it was his own plain duty to ensure that Audley functioned to maximum efficiency, however eccentrically, even if it meant temporarily ignoring the easiest thing in the world.
So that was it: he had to leave Audley alone, but not leave him alone; to show confidence in him while lacking confidence; to trust dummy1
him while not trusting him; to do nothing while doing quite a lot; above all, to let him know none of that . . . somehow . . .
As the silence on the other end of the line lengthened, Colonel Butler moved the note-pad to his right, transferred the phone to his left hand, picked up a pencil, and started to write down names, and then to cross them out one after another, as the alternative to the easiest thing in the world became harder and harder.
PART TWO
Foxes in the Chase
I
Beside the ford there was a crude plank footbridge with a single guard-rail, and on the rail was perched a little blonde child in a very grubby pinafore dress.
Benedikt stopped the car at the water’s edge and leaned out of the window in order to address her.
“Please. . . .” He let the foreignness thicken his voice. “Please, is this the way to ... to Duntisbury Royal?”
The child stared at him for a moment, and then slid forwards and downwards until her toes touched a plank, without letting goof the rail.
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Benedikt smiled at her. “Please—” he began again. But before he could repeat the question she ducked and twisted, and scuttled away like a little wild creature into a shadowy gap between the bushes on the other side of the water and an antique-looking telephone box.
Well, it was the way to Duntisbury Royal—it had to be, Benedikt reassured himself. “Up the road about three miles” , the man at the petrol station had said, and the map said so too. “There’s a turning on your left by a dead tree. Down the hill— and stay in low gear, because it’s steep— and over the water-splash in the trees there, at the bottom, and it’s a long mile from there, what there is of it. You can’t miss it.”
That was what they always said, You can’t miss it, to reassure you at least for a time, until you had missed it.
“There are road-signs, yes?” He could read a map and find his way as well as any man, and better than most. But he had bitter experience of the irrationality of English directions and was suspicious of the man’s confidence.
“No. Leastways . . . there were . . . but there aren’t at the moment.
But you turn by a dead tree, and just follow the road. There ain’t nowhere else to go once you’re on it, see?” The man had begun to regard him curiously then.
“Thank you. And there is an hotel there?” Curiosity, in Benedikt’s experience, was the father of information.
“There ain’t a hotel, no. There’s a pub— they might have a room, I dunno.” The curiosity increased. “They’re a queer lot there.” The dummy1
man spoke of the inhabitants of Duntisbury Royal, who lived no more than five miles from his petrol pumps, as though they were an alien race hidden behind barbed wire and minefields.
“Queer?” All the same, Benedikt rejoiced in what he guessed was the old correct meaning of the word, the use of which he had been cautioned against in modern polite speech: it was good to know that here, deep in the Wessex countryside, the natives still guarded the language of his mother, Shakespeare’s tongue.
“Ah ...” The garage man’s face closed up suddenly, as though he had decided on second thoughts that the queerness of his neighbours was no foreigner’s business. “That’s £16.22, sir—
sixteen-pounds-and-twenty-two-pence.” He adjusted the speed of his diction to that which the English reserved for the presentation of bills to foreigners, so that there could be no possible misunderstanding, let alone argument.
“Ach— so!” Benedikt played back to him deliberately. This might be the only garage for miles around, and if this man was both a gossip and the local supplier to Duntisbury Royal, then so much the better. “I may pay by credit card, yes? Or cash?”
The man looked doubtfully at the card, and then at Benedikt, but then finally at the gleaming Mercedes and its CD passport. “Either of ‘em will do, sir.” He bustled to find the correct form, and then squinted again at the card. “’Weez-hoffer‘,” he murmured unnecessarily to himself, as though to indicate to Benedikt that he would have preferred cash from a foreigner and was noting the name just in case.
“Wiesehöfer,” said Benedikt. “Thomas Wiesehöfer.”
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The man filled in the card number painfully. But his curiosity rekindled as he did so. “On holiday then?”
“On holiday.” Benedikt nodded at the garage man and pretended to search for the right words and not find any. “On holiday. . .ach so!” It galled him when he prided himself on being able to pass almost for English ... or British, as Mother always insisted, who had been half-Scottish herself.
He studied the water-splash out of the driver’s window, just a metre beyond his front wheels. The stream rippled across the tarmac in a patch of sunlight where the road crossed it, but it didn’t look very deep. All the country hereabouts was open and empty, and he had dropped down from the high ridge in the low gear which the garage man had advised; but now he was on the miniature flood-plain of a little valley, and at this point, where the road crossed the stream, trees and bushes grew luxuriantly, making a secret place of it.
He looked up from the sun-dappled water, and caught a glimpse of the little girl watching him from her hiding place between the telephone box and the summer tangle of leaves. Of course, she would have been told not to speak to strange men in cars, so he couldn’t rationally fault her behaviour. But he liked children, and was used to them, and prided himself on being good with them and was accustomed to their trust, so that— however irrationally—he recoiled from the role of strange-man-in-a-car and was disturbed by her fear.
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Yet there was more to it than that, his momentary irrationality told him: the very young were innocent, and gullible and inexperienced with it, but they sometimes knew more than the very wise, picking up vibrations of danger with senses which atrophied as their experience of life increased; and now he was about to enter her secret little English valley—
But that was absurd fantasy! He broke contact with her and shifted the gear-lever into drive. It wasn’t her valley, and it was only secret for the lack of a proper signpost—the busy main road almost within earshot, and it was only the foreignness of this small-scale countryside which he was foolishly letting himself be upset by, as he might be upset by some unpalatable local dish or custom to which he was unused, but which was unpalatable only because it was different from what he was accustomed to.