Ted the barman, pleased at my appearance of complete normality, was only too glad to serve me when I asked for pie, pickle, and cheese. "Nice to see you up and about again, Love-joy." He beamed.
"Thanks, Ted."
"Completely well now, eh?"
"A bit shaky on my pins now and again," I said.
With transparent relief he said it was understandable. "The girl friend had one of these viruses too," he said. "She was off work a month. Time them researchers got onto things like that and left smoking alone."
Back in my old surroundings with Dandy Jack and the rest popping in and out for the odd deal, I passed the time in utter contentment. I honestly admire antique dealers, like me. They are the last cavaliers, surviving as an extraordinary clone against fantastic odds by a mixture of devotion, philosophy, and greed. The enemy, it practically goes without saying, is the succession of malevolent governments who urbanely introduce prohibitive measures aimed at first controlling and then finally exterminating us. We don't bow to them. We don't fit neatly into their lunatic schemes for controlling even the air everyone breathes. The inevitable result is hatred, of us and of our freedom. It includes the freedom to starve, and this we do gladly when it's necessary. But we are still free, to be interested in what we do, to love what we practice and to work as and when we choose. And we work on average a good twelve hours a day every day, our every possession totally at risk every minute we live. And these poor duck eggs in the civil service actually believe they can bring us to heel! It's pathetic, honestly. Our ingenuity will always be too profound for a gaggle of twerps— I hope.
Listening to the banter going on hour after hour in the bar, my troubles receded and my fears vanished. We ranged over subjects as far apart as Venetian gondoliers' Renaissance clothing to Kikuyu carvings, from eighteenth-century Eskimo gaming counters to relics from the early days of the American wild west. It was lovely, warm, and comfortable.
Then I noticed it was dark outside.
Chapter 15
I rose and left amid a chorus of good nights, quite like old times. The two strangers promised they'd be back about noon the next day, same place, and I promised I'd fetch my stuff.
The road to the cottage seemed endless. Worse still, it was quiet in a degree I'd never before experienced. My old car seemed very noisy. Its engine throbbed a beat out into the dark on either side of the road only to have it pulsed back to reintensify the next chug. In the center of a growing nucleus of contained deep pulsation, the motor moved on between high hedges behind its great rods of beamed headlight. A moon ducked its one eye in and out of static cloud at me. It was one of those nights where moon shadows either gather in disquieting clusters or spread across moon-bright lanes making sinister pools where the ground you have to tread is invisible.
The probing lights turned across the hedges down by the chapel. Unfortunately nobody was about, or I could have bolstered my courage by giving them a lift. With a sinking heart I swung into the path and curved to a stop outside my door. The silence, no longer held back by the throb of the great engine, rushed close and paused nearby in the darkness. I switched my door alarm off, using the key, and went in.
Even the cottage seemed worried. The electric light had a wan air about it as if it too was affected by concern. I examined the miniature hallway for marks but found no signs of intrusion. My unease persisted. I pulled the curtains to and flicked on the living-room lamps to make it seem cozier. Putting the TV on seemed a wise move until I realized that I would be deaf to the sound of anyone approaching as well as blinded by the darkness. Easy meat for whoever was watching out there.
To encourage what resolution I had left, I made a rough meal I didn't want. I hit on the idea of putting the radio on for a few moments. That way, when I eventually switched it off it might seem as though I had begun preparations for bed. With another stroke of genius I turned the hall light out and cautiously opened the front door a chink, just enough to get my arm out and insert the alarm key in the raised box on the door alcove. I usually didn't bother to set the alarm when I was indoors, but it might prove one more thing to lessen my many disadvantages. With the door safely closed and barred again I felt pleased at my inventiveness. Nobody could now pierce my perimeter, so to speak, without Geoffrey being roused at his police house. It would admittedly take some while for him to come hurtling over on his pedal-cycle, but I could hold the chap until he came.
A braver man would have decided to be bold, perhaps take a weapon and stalk the blighter out there in all that darkness. I'm not that courageous, nor that daft. Whoever was outside would see me leave from either door, while I would be treading into the unknown. Let the cops pinch him if he tried any funny stuff, I thought. They get paid for looking after us. Geoffrey had had my break-in and two chickens with fowl pest, and that had been his lot since Michaelmas. Big deal.
I've never really believed very much in all this subliminal learning stuff they talk about nowadays. You know the sort of thing—showing a one-second glimpse of a complex map in semidarkness and getting psychiatrists to see if you can remember its details twenty years later. Nor do I go in for this extrasensory perception and/or psychomotive force, spoon bending, and thought transference. Yet as I forced my food down and swilled tea, my discomfiture began to grow from an energy outside myself. It was almost as if the cottage had been reluctantly forced into the role of an unwelcome spectator to a crime about to be committed. That energy was, I became certain, generated by the watcher in the copse. Either I was acting as a sort of receiver of hate impulses or I was imagining the whole thing and he was at home laughing his head off, knowing I was bound to be getting hysterical. My plan to flush him out by the advertisement and my inquiries had backfired. He was now forewarned, and I was set up for reprisal.
Humming an octave shriller than usual, I went about my chores, finished the food, and washed up. It was important not to vary my routine. I got my bed ready in the adjoining room, leaving the bedside lamp on for about half an hour to simulate my usual reading time. Then I switched it off together with the radio, and the whole place was in darkness.
Living so far from other people—a few hundred yards seemed miles now—the cottage always had alternative lighting about: candles, a torch, two or three oil lamps. It would be safe to use the torch only if I hooded it well, say with a handkerchief or a dishcloth, and was careful to keep the beam directed downward. There was no need of it indoors, because I knew every inch of every room, but there might come an opportunity to catch him in its illumination like a plane in a searchlight. I'd get a good glimpse of him and just phone the police. Notice that my erstwhile determination and rage had now been transmuted through fear into a desire for an army of policemen to show up and enforce the established law—another instance of Lovejoy's iron will.