"That's just exactly what I do mean. An' I'll go and get Tom Yates meantime."
"Ah—and they'll make mincemeat of me meantime, too, woman. Them's young an' I'm not."
"Then you just take your old gun with you. They won't 'ave dummy2
the guts to tackle you then, not if you stand up to them."
Charlie had the gravest doubts about the validity of this theory of his wife's—it was not the first time he heard her voice it, that young hooligans had no courage. But he could recall the way the rats had behaved at threshing time, in the days before the combine harvesters when there was still plenty of work to be had on the land: if you left the rats alone they soon made themselves scarce, pests though they were.
But if you cornered them—they fought, rats or no, snapping at the stick as it broke their backs.
And that, it seemed to Charlie, was what she was asking him to do to these young buggers—to corner 'em.
"I dunno about that," he began doubtfully.
"Well I do," Mrs. Clark snapped back, through the rustle of clothes pulled hurriedly over her head. "And I knows something else too: that I promised Master David that I'd look after the house while he was away—and so I will. So if you won't go up to it, then I shall have to. And you can go and wake up Tom Yates."
Charlie swore under his breath and wrenched at his trousers.
Somehow he had been manoeuvred into a corner himself, a corner from which there was no escape except by doing his wife's bidding. He never could fathom how she managed it, but it was a position with which he was all too bitterly familiar.
He was swearing still, steadily and bitterly, as he edged his dummy2
way up the lane towards the Old House five minutes later.
Of all the nights of this rotten summer, this was the worst for such tom-fool behaviour. It was pitch black and chilly and sopping wet, without a breath of wind. The rain must have stopped an hour or more since and the heavy summer foliage had had time to drip off its surplus moisture, so that everything was quiet enough to hear a mouse stir.
It was this stillness that made him swear now. He had tried two or three steps on the gravel drive, but the scrunch of his iron-shod boots had deafened him. His only chance of a silent approach to the house was by the rough strip of grass beside the high hedgerow on his right.
He thought he knew both the grass and the hedge like the back of his hand; he had walked beside the one and picked blackberries and hazelnuts from the other innumerable times. But now he stumbled awkwardly, his trousers already soaked to the knee, his face lashed every now and then by unseen twigs and sodden leaves.
And yet, perversely, this discomfort aroused in him a determination to do the job his wife had thrust upon him.
When he had blundered out of the cottage he had been half decided to save himself the unpleasantness—and very possible danger—of catching the little sods in the act by warning them of his advance with a bit of well-judged noise.
But now, as he moved silently from the grass verge to the springy turf of the lawn, the smouldering irritation inside him ignited into a murderous rage.
dummy2
He'd learn they little buggers!
There was a lot in life that irritated Charlie Clark: big cars and noisy motorcycles, long hair and short skirts, letters from government ministries asking him questions he didn't want to answer or telling him things he didn't care to know about, and the high price and the low strength of beer. And most of all being bullied by anyone in the world but his wife—
he didn't like that much either, but he reckoned it was more or less covered by the promise he'd made to the vicar when they'd gone to the altar together.
But always the enemy had been either intangible or plainly beyond his reach—always except those two times.
It was queer that he could never remember either of those two episodes in any detail. He could really only remember what had happened before and what had happened after.
There had been the quick, clever boy at the village school, who had mocked him once too often. And then there had been blood on Charlie's knuckles afterwards, and no more mocking.
And the second time had been more like tonight, even though he had had a rifle in his hands then, not a cranky old twelve-bore.
Not unlike this very night, though it had been much warmer, as was only to be expected in foreign parts. Almost as dark, anyway, except that they'd been fools that time too, and showed a bit of a light to guide the patrol.
dummy2
Charlie's eyes picked up the glimmer of the torch inside the Old House the moment he came out from the lane on to the springy turf of the lawn. They'd drawn the curtains now, but it was a powerful bright light, that was sure. Only trouble, it was in a first-floor room—he knew the downstairs pretty well, but wasn't so sure of the lie of the upstairs.
And there'd been more smell the last time, the rich smell of farmyard middens. But then it'd been a farmhouse, longer and lower than this one, huddled into the ground almost.
There was talk in the platoon that the farmers kept all their money in boxes under their beds, not trusting the foreign banks—which showed they had some sense, Charlie had thought, seeing as he didn't trust the banks at home either—
and also that it was all in gold francs, too. By the time of the raid Charlie had privately searched several farmhouses with those gold francs in mind, but either it was an old wives' tale or someone had been there before him; personally he doubted the story, for all the farms seemed to him poor and rough, without a decent suite of furniture between them, not at all like those he was used to in Sussex, where farmers were usually men of substance and very often gentlemen, too.
Still, they didn't ought to have treated that old farm the way they had, throwing the grenades through the windows and kicking in the doors, all shouting like savages.
Charlie knew he had shouted with the rest, and kicked too, but that had only been because he'd been angry, red, raging angry at being drilled and marched one way, then marched dummy2
another way, and forced to cower in ditches in terror of bombs and bullets, with never a chance to get his own back.
But it'd never do to kick in the door of the Old House, even the old kitchen door and even if it hadn't been solid seasoned oak, which he reckoned wouldn't reward anyone's boot. And anyway—she'd given him a key, he had it somewhere, thought Charlie confusedly, fumbling for reality in his mind while he searched his jacket with his free hand.
He had to get it right, just like the sergeant had taught him, making him repeat it until he had the meaning by heart: First you creeps up quiet-like, to take 'em by surprise—then you goes in noisy, to frighten the bollocks off 'em!
And first he did get it right, with the key hardly scratching the keyhole it entered. But no amount of care could stop the lock clicking unmistakably, or the latch clattering or the hinges creaking—it was as though the whole door had turned against him, bit by bit, damn it.
Charlie clutched the twelve-bore against his chest and stood irresolutely, listening to the absolute silence of the house ahead of him.
It was a silence which confused him far more than it frightened him, until the memory of the flashing light in the upstairs room came back to him—the evidence of his own eyes.
The time had come to be noisy!
With a furious growl and in total darkness Charlie launched dummy2
himself across the kitchen. The first chair in his way went spinning; he banged into the edge of the table, driving it back so that it overturned another chair. But the table's position orientated him to the passage door. Three more skidding paces, hobnails skittering on the stone floor, brought him against it. Behind him something breakable crashed to the floor.
Four more paces took him down the passage to the foot of the stairs—the last footfall was muffled by the carpet with the eastern writing on it that his wife had told him never to put a boot on. Well, he'd got both boots on it now!