"What?" She almost bit her tongue on the question: if he was ready to be indiscreet then she mustn't interrupt him.
"Oh—he was careless! He let me get a sight of him, when he was just slipping into his car to follow you, round the back of the church at the fête ... I was thinking of going for a quick drink, actually."
"In preparation for a boring evening?"
Instead of replying he put his foot down on the accelerator and overtook the children's car, and the next one, and the next one too, into the flashing lights of an approaching lorry which couldn't quite work up enough speed for a head-on collision.
Then he cleared his throat. " I was going for a drink, but he was going after you. It was careless of him to let me spot him . . . But if he took the risk that meant he couldn't afford to lose you—and you weren't routine after that—d'you see, Elizabeth?"
She saw—half-saw, didn't see at all, but saw enough to imagine his moment of truth, when this terrible Russian had dummy3
surfaced in the wake of the dull Miss Loftus at the parish church tower restoration fund sale and fête: it was one of those enlivening occurrences which might have been amusing if she hadn't been at the other end of it.
"And we still don't know why—I suppose your burglars may have been contract labour, and he was keeping his eye on his investment . . . but I don't go very much on that—it doesn't have the right feel about it... But we're checking them out, by God! In fact, Elizabeth, after our mutual acquaintance Joseflvanovitch we're checking everyone out—"
"Including me?" She tried to match his tone, even though now she was out of her depth.
"Including you, naturally! And for the second time ... In fact, I did you this morning, Elizabeth—you've been double-washed, and wrung-out and dried on the line . . . and you're what we call 'clean'—"
" 'Clean'?" It was a reflex, not a question: she knew it was true, but the thought of being 'double-washed, and wrung-out and dried' stung her. "Are you sure?"
"We're never sure." The joke was lost on him—if it was a joke.
"But we have to draw the line somewhere. Your closest known security-risk is two removes away, and that passes for white in our book. Which . . . presumably ... is why you are privileged to meet Mrs David Audley in the very near future, as I've already said."
Meeting Mrs David Audley, clean or dirty, wasn't something dummy3
she wished to think about. "You make me sound very dull."
"Dull..." He tripped the indicator, swinging the car out of the line on to a side-road. Just in time, as the road sign flashed by, Elizabeth caught the legend Upper Horley—5 and Steeple Horley— 5½. "Dull . . ."
Horley? She screwed up her memory, from the Book of Wessex Villages and The Parish Churches of Sussex and Hampshire in the bookcase in her bedroom, on the shelf dating from her childhood voyages of exploration in Margaret's company during the holidays, by bus or bicycle.
"Yes, I guess you could say 'dull'," reflected Paul.
The Horleys, Upper and Steeple, had been just outside their range, tucked under the Downs away to the east, or east-nor'-
east, unserved even then by any traceable public transport.
"Or maybe 'wasted'," murmured Paul.
But they had been on the list; or Steeple Horley had, for its gem of a church, complete with recumbent stone crusader and the re-used Roman bricks it shared with the much-decayed manor house built on the site of a Saxon hall mentioned in the Domesday Book—
Paul's last murmur registered suddenly, breaking her concentration. " 'Wasted'? What d'you mean—'wasted'?"
"Ah . . . well, you haven't exactly spread your wings for long flights since you came down from Oxford, have you, Elizabeth?" He raised one hand off the wheel defensively before she could reply. "Just an observation, that's all."
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"I don't see that it's any of your business." She felt herself bristling, but then the bleak truth submerged her anger as another signpost pointed them to the Horleys, in preference for a No Through Road to some unnamed farm.
"Someone had to look after my father."
"Sure. And a house-keeper did that perfectly well when you were at school and at Oxford . . . Mrs Carver, No. 3, Church Row. And she's still hale and hearty—don't tell me he couldn't have afforded her, because we both know bloody well that he could have done."
"I didn't know that. I thought we were . . . not exactly poor, but not rich."
"Doesn't matter—forget it—" he shook his head "— he wasn't an invalid, your esteemed father, that's what I mean. He may have had a heart condition, but he didn't need a First-Class honours graduate to . . . to—how did you put it so graphically?
—to 'type his bloody books, and cook his bloody meals, and wash his bloody laundry'—eh?"
He knew too much—too bloody much—about Father, and Mrs Carver, as well as about the foolish Miss Loftus, who had let slip far too much under the combined pressures of fear and self-pity and brandy.
"But I suppose you thought it was your duty—right?" He slashed the word at her, almost contemptuously. "You had to do your duty by him?"
Another signpost: Upper Horley left, Steeple Horley right—
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and it would have to be left here, because there was only the church and the "much-decayed" manor the other way, the book had said.
Pride came to her aid. "So what if it was—my duty?"
"Then do your duty now!" He fed the wheel to the right, to Steeple Horley and another No Through Road which had to end in half-a-mile under the steeple and the shoulder of the high downs curving above them. "Stretch yourself for us, Elizabeth."
It wasn't the thought of duty which stretched her—she had never even thought of duty in relation to Father: he had been there, sitting at his chair in the study, when she had come down from Oxford for the last time, and Mrs Carver had already been given her notice, and everything had been taken for granted, herself included . . . but perhaps that was what duty was—the thing that happened, and the state of mind which made it happen, without any conscious thought on either side, the giving and the taking being equally automatic.
But it wasn't that which stretched her now, it was the certainty that Mrs Audley was waiting for her half-a-mile ahead, or less—and that she needed Paul to help her—
God! What a mess I am— hair, clothes, face— !
The Vengeful—Father had gone back to France, to re-write the chapter—
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But not back to France . . . that first writing had been just routine— just as she had been just routine when she'd first glimpsed Paul in the mirror, and he had seen her—
The car was slowing down—it was turning past a little cottage, into a gravel drive—past the cottage garden, with its apple trees already heavy with fruit, and the runner-beans, bright with their harvest to come, festooned over their bean-poles—and banks of blackberry bushes now, on either side—
but Father had gone to France to re-write the chapter—
"It has to do with the survivors. The Fortuné sank somewhere off the Horse Sands, but that was at night, and no one knows where exactly, and there were only four survivors. But there were also survivors from the Vengeful—
they came ashore on the Normandy coast—he had a footnote about them . . . But . . ."
"Good girl!" He braked, slowing from his snail's-pace to stop altogether between the blackberry bushes, with the curve of the drive still ahead. "But what?"