Don't Look Now (33 page)

'Thank you very much,' said Robin.

He wondered whether he should tell them that they were standing within a hundred yards or so, perhaps, of a place where three men had been crucified two thousand years ago, and then he decided they would not believe him; or, if they did, it would not impress them very much. For Jesus was not important to them, not like Abraham or David, and, anyway, so many men had been tortured and killed around Jerusalem since then that the young man might very well say, with justice, so what? It would be more tactful to wish them a happy holiday instead. It was the 14th day of Nisan, and at sundown all work would cease. He put the small piece of rock in his pocket.

'I hope you have a very pleasant Pesach,' he said.

The young man stared. 'You Jewish?'

'No,' answered Robin, uncertain whether the question related to his nationality or to his religion. If the latter, he would have to reply that his father was an atheist, and his mother went to church once a year on Christmas Day. 'No, I come from Little Bletford in England, but I do know that today is the 14th day of Nisan and that you have a public holiday tomorrow.'

This, in fact, was the reason for so much traffic, he supposed, and the reason why the city itself had been so crowded. He hoped the young man was suitably impressed by his knowledge.

'It's your Feast of Unleavened Bread,' he told him.

The young man smiled again, showing his row of white teeth, and, laughing, he called something over his shoulder to his companion with the drill, who shouted in reply, before applying his drill to the surface of the road again. The ear-splitting sound began once more, and the young man cupped his hands to his mouth and called up to Robin, 'It is also the Festival of our Freedom,' he shouted. 'You are young, like us. Enjoy it too.'

Robin waved his hand and began walking towards the New Gate, his hand clenched tightly round the piece of rock in his pocket. The Festival of our Freedom ... It sounded better than the Passover. More modern, more up to date. More suitable for, as his grandmother would say, this day and age. And whether it meant freedom from bondage, as it did in the Old Testament, or freedom from the rule of the Roman Empire, which the Jews hoped for at the time of the crucifixion, or freedom from hunger and poverty and homelessness, which the young men digging in the road had won for themselves today, it was all one and the same thing. Everyone, everywhere, wanted freedom from something, and Robin decided that it would be a good idea if Pesach and Easter could be combined throughout the world, and then all of us, he thought, could join in celebrating the Festival of our Freedom.

The bus took the road north from the Mount of Olives before sundown. There had been no further drama. Bob and Jill Smith, having searched the precincts of the Holy Sepulchre in vain, had turned their steps in the direction of the New Gate and had come across Robin, perfectly composed, entering the city behind a group of singing pilgrims from the coast. The bus had been late departing because of Miss Dean. The ambulance had taken her to hospital, where she had been detained for a number of hours suffering from shock, but luckily with no external or internal injuries. She had been given an injection and a sedative, and then the doctor had pronounced her fit to travel, with strict injunctions that she should be put straight to bed directly they were back in Haifa. Kate Foster had become nurse in charge of the patient.

'It is so kind of you,' Miss Dean had murmured, 'so very kind.'

It was decided by all not to mention her unfortunate accident. Nor did Miss Dean allude to it herself. She sat silently, with a rug over her knees, between the Fosters. Lady Althea was silent too. Her blue chiffon scarf masked the lower part of her face, giving her the appearance of a Moslem woman who had not relinquished the veil. If anything, it added to her dignity and grace. She too had a rug over her knees, and the Colonel held her hand beneath it.

The young Smiths held hands more openly, Jill sporting a new bangle, an inexpensive one that Bob had bought for her as they passed near one of the suks on their return earlier in the day after finding Robin.

Babcock sat beside Robin. Like Miss Dean, he also wore a change of clothing--a pair of trousers borrowed from Jim Foster which were a shade too large for him. No one passed any remarks, and for this he was unspeakably thankful. No one looked back at the city of Jerusalem as the bus skirted Mount Scopus--that is to say, no one but Robin. The ninth hour of the 14th day of Nisan had come and gone, and the thieves, or the insurrectionists, whichever they were, had been taken down from their crosses. Jesus too, his body perhaps in a grave deep in the rock below where the young labourers had been drilling. Now the young men could go home, and wash, and meet their families, and look forward to the public holiday. Robin turned to the Rev. Babcock at his side.

'It's rather a shame,' he said, 'that we couldn't have stayed two more days.'

Babcock, who wished for nothing more than to be safely back on board ship so that he could shut himself in his cabin and try to forget his shame in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, marvelled at the resilience of the young. The boy had been dragging round the city all day, and had nearly lost himself into the bargain.

'Why, Robin?' he asked.

'Well, you never know,' Robin replied. 'Of course it's not very probable in this day and age, but we might have seen the Resurrection.'

MY PART IN the affair started on September 18th, when my chief sent for me and told me he was transferring me to Saxmere on the east coast. He was sorry about it, he said, but I was the only one with the necessary technical qualifications for the particular work they had on hand. No, he couldn't give me any details; they were an odd lot down there, and shut themselves up behind barbed wire at the slightest provocation. The place had been a radar experimental station a few years back, but this was finished, and any experiments that were going on now were of an entirely different nature, something to do with vibrations and the pitch of sound.

'I'll be perfectly frank with you,' said my chief, removing his horn-rimmed spectacles and waving them in the air apologetically. 'The fact is that James MacLean is a very old friend of mine. We were at Cambridge together and I saw a lot of him then and afterwards, but our paths diverged, and he tied himself up in experimental work of rather a dubious nature. Lost the government a lot of money, and didn't do his own reputation much good either. I gather that's forgotten, and he's been reinstated down at Saxmere with his own hand-picked team of experts and a government grant. They're stuck for an electronics engineer-- which is where you come in. MacLean has sent me an S.O.S. for someone I can vouch for personally in other words, he wants a chap who won't talk. You'd do me a personal favour if you went.'

Put like this, there was little I could do but accept. It was a damned nuisance, all the same. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to leave Associated Electronics Ltd., and its unique facilities for research, and drift off to the east coast to work for someone who had blotted his copybook once and might do so again.

'When do you want me to go?' I asked.

The chief looked more apologetic than ever.

'As soon as you can make it. The day after tomorrow? I'm really very sorry, Saunders. With any luck you'll be back by Christmas. I've told MacLean I'm lending you to him for this particular project only. No question of a long-term transfer. You're too valuable here.'

This was the sop. The pat on the back. A.E.L. would forget about me for the next three months. I had another question, though.

'What sort of a chap is he?'

'MacLean?' My chief paused before replacing his horn-rims, always a signal of dismissal. 'He's what I'd call an enthusiast, the kind that don't let go. A fanatic in his way. Oh, he won't bore you. I remember at Cambridge he spent most of his time bird-watching. He had some peculiar theory then about migration, but he didn't inflict it on us. He nearly chucked physics for neurology, but thought better of it-- the girl he later married persuaded him. Then came the tragedy. She died after they'd only been married a year.'

My chief replaced his spectacles. He had no more to say or, if he had, it was beside the point. As I was leaving the room he called after me, 'You can keep that last piece of information to yourself. About his wife, I mean. His staff down there may not know anything about it.'

It was not until I had actually packed up at A.E.L. and left my comfortable digs, and the train was drawing out of Liverpool Street station, that the full force of my situation hit me. Here I was, lumbered with a job I didn't want in an outfit I knew nothing about, and all as a personal favour to my chief, who obviously had some private reason for obliging his one-time colleague. As I stared moodily out of the carriage window, feeling more bloody-minded every minute, I kept seeing the expression on my successor's face when I told him I was going to Saxmere.

'That dump'?' he said. 'Why, it's a joke--they haven't done any serious research there for years. The Ministry have given it over to the crackpots, hoping they'll blow themselves to pieces.'

A few discreet off-hand enquiries in other quarters had brought the same answer. A friend of mine with a sense of humour advised me over the telephone to take golf-clubs and plenty of paperbacks. 'There's no sort of organisation,' he said. 'MacLean works with a handful of chaps who think he's the Messiah. If you don't fall into line he ignores you, and you'll find yourself doing sweet f.a.'

'Fine. That suits me. I need a holiday,' I lied, hanging up with feelings of intense irritation against the world in general.

It was typical, I suppose, of my approach to the whole business that I hadn't checked thoroughly on timetables, and therefore an added annoyance to find that I had to get out at Ipswich, wait forty minutes, and board a slow train to Thirlwall, which was the station for Saxmere. It was raining when I finally descended upon the empty windswept platform, and the porter who took my ticket told me that the taxi which usually waited for this particular train had been snapped up five minutes before.

'There's a garage opposite the Three Cocks,' he added. 'They might still be open and could run you over to Saxmere.'

I walked past the booking office carrying my bags and blaming myself for my bad staff-work. As I stood outside the station wondering whether to brave the doubtful hospitality of the Three Cocks--it was close on seven, and even if a car was not available I could do with a drink--a very ancient Morris came swerving into the station-yard and pulled up in front of me. The driver got out and made a dive for my bags.

'You are Saunders, I take it?' he asked, smiling. He was young, not more than about nineteen, with a shock of fair hair.

'That's right,' I said. 'I was just wondering where the hell I'd raise a taxi.'

'You wouldn't,' he answered. 'On a wet night the Yanks swipe the lot. Anything on wheels that will take 'em out of Thirlwall. Hop in, will you?'

I'd forgotten about Thirlwall being a U.S. air-base, and made a mental note to avoid the Three Cocks in my leisure hours. American personnel on the loose are not amongst my favourite companions.

'Sorry about the rattle,' apologised the driver as we swerved through the town to the accompaniment of what sounded like a couple of petrol cans rolling under the back seat. 'I keep meaning to fix it, but never find time. My name's Ryan, by the way, Ken Ryan, always known as Ken. We don't go in for surnames at Saxmere.'

I said nothing. My Christian name is Stephen, nor had anyone ever shortened it to Steve. My gloom increased and I lit a cigarette. Already the houses of Thirlwall lay behind us and our road, having traversed a mile or two of flat countryside consisting of turnip fields, suddenly shot up on to a sandy track across a heath, over which we proceeded in a series of bumps until my head nearly hit the roof.

My companion apologised once more.

'I could have taken you in by the main entrance,' he said, 'but this way is so much shorter. Don't worry, the springs are used to it.

The sandy track topped a rise and there below us, stretching into infinity, lay acre upon acre of waste land, marsh and reed, bounded on the left by sand-dunes with the open sea beyond. The marshes were intersected here and there by dykes, beside which stood clumps of forlorn rushes bending to the wind and rain, the dykes in their turn forming themselves into dank pools, one or two of them miniature lakes, ringed about with reeds.

Our road, the surface of which was now built up with clinkers and small stones, descended abruptly to this scene of desolation, winding like a narrow ribbon with the marsh on either side. In the far distance a square tower, grey and squat, stood out against the skyline, and as we drew nearer I could see beyond the tower itself the curving spiral of the one-time radar installation, brooding over the waste land like a giant oyster-shell. This, then, was Saxmere. My worst forebodings could not have conjured up a more forbidding place.

My companion, sensing probably from my silence that I lacked enthusiasm, gave me a half-glance.

'It looks a bit grim in this light,' he said, 'but that's the rain. The weather's pretty good on the whole, though the wind is keen. We get some stunning sunsets.'

The laugh with which I greeted his remark was intended to be ironic, but it missed its mark, or was taken as encouragement, for he added, 'If you're keen on birds you've come to the right spot. Avocets breed here in the spring, and last March I heard the bittern boom.'

I choked back the expletive that rose to my lips--his phraseology struck me as naïve--and while admitting indifference to all objects furred or feathered I expressed surprise that anything in such a dreary locality should have a desire to breed at all. My sarcasm was lost, for he said, quite seriously, 'Oh, you'd be surprised,' and ground the Morris to a halt before a gate set in a high wired fence.

'Have to unlock this,' he told me, jumping out of the car, and I saw that now we had come to Saxmere itself. The area ahead was bounded on all sides by this same fence, some ten feet in height, giving the place the look of a concentration camp. This agreeable vista was enhanced by the sudden appearance of an Alsatian dog, who loped out of the marshes to the left, and stood wagging its tail at young Ken as he unlocked the gate.