When he straightened up again, Exeter's hand gripped his shoulder and squeezed like a vise. They stared at each other.
Well! So there were other men who had trouble with watery eyes these days? Lot of it going around.
"Edward—"
Somebody screamed farther along the hall. Then screamed again.
Smedley wanted to dive under the bed. He forced himself to stand up and go to the door. Confused voices rising in protest, more screams ... Some poor bugger having nightmares. A nurse hurried by. Then another.
Then the heavy tread of the guard. They all went by. Splendid!
He glanced around. Exeter was sitting up straight, face pale, eyes wide.
"Enfilading fire, old man!” Smedley said cheerily. He waved his stump and departed.
If one of the nurses came out to fetch something and saw a doctor in the corridor—but that didn't happen.
Smedley went back to bed and wept until his sleeping pill took effect.
On Sunday it rained most of the day. He practiced left-handed writing all morning. In the evening he walked down to the village and posted two letters, to the addresses Exeter had given him.
4
FALLOW IN HOLIDAY TIME WAS A MORGUE THESE DAYS. IN ANOTHER week the inmates would start to trickle back, and the school year would start up again. Meanwhile, only a half dozen or so masters and three or four wives remained on the premises. Before the war there had always been a few boys in permanent residence, sons of parents abroad. The problems of finding staff, both academic and domestic, had forced the board of governors to abandon the practice of providing year-round board in the meantime. A revolution was sweeping England “in the meantime,” and only the far future would show how many of those expedients were temporary.
Early on Tuesday, David Jones cycled into Wassal and caught the local train to Greyfriars. The service was extremely poor on that line now, but rural buses were worse, almost as rare as dodoes in the England of 1917. After a twenty-minute wait, he entrusted his mortal coil to the Great Western Railway Company once more and was borne eastward toward London. The express was packed with people, many of them servicemen. At first he thought he would have to stand in the corridor the whole way, but a young gunner rose and donated his seat to the elderly gent, for which the same was suitably grateful. Considering that Jones was bound on paying his respects to the military, the tribute was ironic.
A couple of hours brought him to Paddington. From there he took the tube to Cannon Street and emerged into a dreary, drizzly gray morning, rank with the stench of coal and petrol. Letting the scurrying crowds rush by him, he strolled across London Bridge at a leisurely pace to his destination, Guy's Hospital.
He spent the remainder of the morning in conversation with William Derby, another Fallow old boy—not so old, really. He could not be more than twenty-five. He had been broken and blinded on the Somme, but his morale was heartrending. The ones that needed cheering up were almost easier. Like Julian Smedley, most of them were so happy to be out of the fighting that they regarded their disabilities as blessings. In time the reality would sink in.
By lunchtime, Jones's task was done. He did not like London. Before the war he had rarely come up to town except to pass through on his way to somewhere else. It was too big, too busy, too grimy. The war had brought to it a frantic, hothouse exuberance that did nothing to change his feelings. His new, self-imposed assignment of visiting the wounded had taken him there a dozen times in the last two months. One precaution he had learned from bitter experience was to bring his lunch with him, so today he sat on a damp bench on the Victoria Embankment and ate his sandwiches. Ten years ago all the taxicabs in London had been pulled by horses. Now there was hardly a horse to be seen anywhere. The smell of the city had changed, but petrol fumes were hardly an improvement.
He had the rest of the day before him. There were many other maimed young men he could call on, although none he knew of whom he had not visited at least once. He was haunted by the problem of one he could not visit, Edward Exeter.
In more than thirty years of teaching, he could recall no boy so cursed. His parents had been foully slaughtered in a native uprising in Kenya. He himself had been implicated in another murder, and seriously injured. Now he was in danger of being shot as a spy. It was madness! What had he ever done to provoke the Furies so? Out of all the hundreds of boys Jones had taught in his career, he would have ranked none ahead of Edward Exeter.
The only help he could think to provide was to track down Alice Prescott. He had last met her in 1914, when she had rushed down to Greyfriars to visit her young cousin in hospital. She had been a very self-possessed miss even then. Exeter had been suffering from a severe case of puppy love, but her heart—so Jones had suspected—had been mortgaged elsewhere. She had been fond of Edward, without question, because they had grown up together in Africa, but she had not spoken of him as a prospective lover.
Jones had written to her a couple of times afterward, relaying what skimpy information he had been able to gather about Exeter's disappearance. The correspondence had withered for lack of purpose. When her famous uncle, the Reverend Roland Exeter, died a couple of years later, Jones had sent a sympathy card to her last known address. It had been returned, recipient unknown. The war had raged ever more wildly since then. She might well be married or driving an ambulance in Palestine by now.
But he had promised Julian Smedley that he would try to devise some way of assisting Exeter, assuming that the mysterious John Three confined in Staffles was truly the missing man. In the days since, Jones had experienced no brain waves, had achieved nothing practical. He had written a careful note to the widowed Mrs. Bodgley, but she could hardly be expected to assist a boy she had barely known, one suspected of murdering her only son. The only possible helper in this affair was Alice Prescott. To the best of his knowledge, she was the only family Exeter possessed.
He fed his crusts to the restless pigeons and headed for the underground again. Miss Prescott's last known address had been in Chelsea, a modest location that would have been handy for her clients. She had been a teacher of piano, and the nearby area of South Kensington would have provided many wealthy families with children in need of such social improvement.
He found the flat. There was nobody home, which was hardly surprising in the middle of the afternoon. He rang a few doorbells in the vicinity, spoke with a few harried, suspicious women, and eventually found one who remembered Miss Prescott. It had only been three years, after all. He spun a yarn about news of a long-lost relative; either that or his accent convinced the lady that he was not a bill collector. After a long wait in a dim corridor, he was rewarded with an address in Hackney. Doffing his hat in salute, David Jones departed in search of the nearest tube station.
Hackney, of course, lay on the other side of the City. He could not afford taxis, so he had a choice of bus, tram, or tube. The advantage of the tube was that it displayed maps in all the stations. Even a country yokel could not get lost on the underground.
How often could a young lady change her address in three years?
Twice.
Three times, and apparently never for the better. There had been money in the family once.
The rain had started again. By the time darkness fell, he was in Lambeth, south of the river, and not very far from his starting point at Guy's Hospital. Whatever Miss Prescott was doing in that grim, working-class area, she was not likely to be teaching piano to the pampered offspring of rich matrons.