An Awkward Lie (21 page)

‘Wait. I’d like to send you home, and run up and finish off this business myself.’

‘You’re the most cocksure–’

‘I said wait. I realize you started this Hartsilver episode, and have to see it through. All right. But that’s the finish. I’m not going to be married to Susan the Secret Service Girl. I’m a plain unromantic man.’

There was a long silence.

‘Have said,’ Susan said. ‘It looks as if it may be quite a nice moon.’

This was true. The moon had, indeed, only taken a quick look at them, and vanished again from direct view. But elsewhere there must be a larger break in the cloud, since ahead the whole line of the down was defining itself in a faint radiance.

‘Yes,’ Bobby said. ‘But I don’t know whether it’s going to be useful, or just a bit of an embarrassment. And I think we’d better walk from here on. We could drive slowly up to the top without lights, I suppose. But on a night like this the sound of a car carries for miles. There’s a torch in the glove-box.’

They began to walk up the rest of Lark Hill. The long crest of the down, already an immemorial highway when first glimpsed by the legionaries of Caesar, now showed dark against a rapidly clearing sky.

‘There it is.’ Bobby had halted briefly to point. Ahead of them and to the right, the natural flow of the chalk, calligraphic as a brush-stroke by some Chinese master, rose abruptly, ran on a low parallel, dropped again. The Great Smithy was like a gigantic caterpillar slumbering on the sky-line. ‘About a mile away.’

‘Bobby, it still seems a pretty long shot to me. Too public. People go poking in, as I said.’

‘Have you poked in?’

‘Too busy.’

‘Well, I remember it from long ago, and I’ve read about it since. It’s megalithic – which means chiefly that it’s a kind of long gallery, walled and roofed in enormous stones. The earth and turf one sees are only a kind of top-dressing. There are some of these things where all that has been washed away. Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall, for example. It’s like what furniture-shops call a coffee-table. But you’d be putting down your cup on a stone slab three-feet thick. The Smithy’s basically like that. It’s also what’s called a chambered tomb, as you said. Think of it as a buried railway-carriage, with a lot of compartments on a corridor – all neatly buried underground. Or something roughly like that.’ Bobby paused on this wealth of comparison. ‘I’m not all that certain about it. But I do remember there was only one chamber excavated in my time, and I think a bit more has been done recently. It’s my idea that these chaps may be using some of these further burrowings for their temporary hide-out. They could probably be disguised easily enough.’

They walked rapidly on, in spite of the steep gradient. The night was quite still. When they put up a pheasant by the road-side, the whirr and clatter with which it rocketed away was like a sudden burst from a quick-firing gun close to their feet. They had found they could move without using the torch. Bobby, with Susan’s hand in his, concentrated on keeping to the middle of the faintly visible track. Susan kept a look-out on a wide arc around them. It was she who stopped and pointed next.

‘A light,’ she said. ‘Moving.’

‘I don’t see it.’

‘It comes and goes. Flickers. If the Smithy’s noon, it’s about four o’clock.’

‘Yes.’ The bearing had taken Bobby’s glance where his right shoulder had just been. ‘I think it’s a torch.’

‘Then it’s somebody being less careful than us. Is there a track over there?’

‘Yes – a very steep one. It’s the most direct way up. We used to call it the Scramble.’

‘Then there’s a spot of scrambling going on.’

‘Lovers, perhaps. Or a shepherd.’ Bobby marched on. ‘Or – let’s face it – an unsuspected reinforcement of bearded men. It can’t be your lot yet.’

‘No,’ Susan said calmly. ‘Not by a long way.’

On a Field Day with the Corps – Bobby told himself, thinking back to schooldays – he might have been told to capture the Great Smithy. That would have been by daylight. The exercise would have been all about taking cover in various improbable ways – and, of course, about one lot of chaps providing covering fire for another lot of chaps. All that firing blank had been great fun – even when one of the pros on the job came up and told you you were all dead. But at the yearly Camp it might have been a nocturnal affair, and so approximately like this. There had been Very lights and star-shells to add a little verisimilitude to those occasion and again a great deal of blazing away. But any blazing away done tonight would certainly not be with blank cartridges.

Bobby had gone over the dead Leaver’s revolver with care. His hand was on the butt of it in the pocket of his jacket now. For they had come to their first critical place: the point at which the prehistoric track – venerable artery of commerce, war, migration – upon the verge of which the Great Smithy stood, crossed the little-frequented modern road they had been following. Here, turning to the right, they had to take to the turf. So far, hedges, telegraph-poles, post-and-rail fences had marched on one or the other side of them – giving some illusion, at least, of screening them from hostile view. Now there was only this immemorial arterial road. It was bounded on either side, no doubt, by some miserable strand of wire. But (in this struggling moonlight, at least) its breadth seemed like that of a motorway of the sort that swept you out of Seattle or Chicago. It was a very unprotected place.

They were before the Great Smithy – facing the giant caterpillar head-on through a scattering of beeches. And the moon had suddenly appeared high above them, seemingly unchallenged in the heavens. Almost as if at the flick of a switch, it had reduced to nonsense the notion of a stealthy nocturnal approach. There was one further clump of trees to which a dash for concealment could be made. But after that they would be confronting a sinister no man’s land of bare turf. If caught there by an enemy securely under cover, their position would be as ugly as could be.

‘They’ve made rather a suburban job of it.’ Bobby whispered. He was moved not by any particular wish to be disrespectful to the Ministry of Works or to the learned persons known as the Curators of Ancient Monuments, but rather by an obscure feeling that flippant words steady the nerves. And the trim little brick path did seem out of context. It led straight from a neat gate in a perimeter fence to the Smithy’s entrance. The entrance was a narrow slit, and impenetrably dark. It was like a gash in the conscious mind through which one gazed into the recesses of the anarchic id. On either side of it – casually present, it seemed, rather than set there for any ritual purpose – were two of the great sarsen stones which lay about the surface of the down like the abandoned tennis-balls of departed gods.

It might be quicker to get through the gate than over the fence. The gate – Bobby saw – had one of those notices expensively manufactured in cast-iron which the Ancient Monuments people seemed to be particularly fond of. It no doubt told you that you were liable to prosecution if you started bashing the Smithy around, or succumbed to the temptation to scratch your name on it. Bobby had a sudden odd fantasy which came and went in an instant of time: he was crouching by the gate, and a bearded character took a pot-shot at him from that sinister orifice ahead, and the bullet slammed into the notice and thereby saved his life.

This at least made him wonder whether he should draw his own revolver. He also wondered whether he ought to hand it to Susan. Perhaps he had exaggerated his familiarity with this form of small-arm. Probably people in Susan’s peculiar line of business, whether male or female, were required to put in an hour’s practice with such things once a week. And he and Susan weren’t at the moment in a position in which merely conventional notions of what is proper to one sex or the other ought to be too rigidly applied. Bobby wanted to hold on to the thing himself, nevertheless.

‘Keep that gun ready,’ Susan said. ‘And listen.’

For a full minute they stood immobile, straining their ears. There wasn’t a sound. Or certainly there wasn’t a sound from the Smithy – any more than there was the faintest gleam of light from it. But Bobby realized how easy it was, in a situation like this, to start imagining things. He could have sworn that – as with the poet Wordsworth upon an occasion of similar alarm – there were low breathings coming after him.

‘Sounds,’ he whispered, ‘of undistinguishable motion.’

‘Steps almost as silent as the turf they trod.’ For an instant Susan’s hand took his; she had accepted this too as an aid to keeping one’s nerve. ‘And low breathings coming after us. But I expect it’s sheep. Bobby, we’ll go through the gate. And then each make for one of those two trees on the left. You take the one nearest the path.’

They broke cover and ran. The gate opened with a loud creak. Bobby told himself that one would keep it that way if one had set up house in the recesses of the Great Smithy and wanted due notice of inconvenient intrusion. But at least nothing happened, and they gained their trees. But now they were separated by some yards, and a whisper would have to be something of a stage-whisper if it were to carry between them. And again Bobby seemed to hear stealthy movement. He looked all round, and in particular back among the beeches for the forms of straying animals – sheep or even cattle – which ought to be clearly enough visible in this light. He could see nothing that suggested the faintest movement. And now his fancy took another undisciplined bound – so that what his eye sought was human forms, prone and creeping: here the sheen of a naked torso and there the glint of the tip of a spear. Such carryings-on had been all the go up here through millennia which showed the armies of Hadrian and Alfred, of Harold and William, as but of yesterday. Perhaps some ghostly re-enactment of ancient battle, foray, surprise, regularly accompanied the full of Solo’s moon.

Instinctively he had crouched down, and he wondered whether it would be any use actually to get on his belly and crawl. He didn’t think so. On the contrary, indeed, it was now his business to stand up and be counted. For if his guess was right, if the bearded men with their prisoner were really somewhere concealed within the Smithy, then the only way to cope – short of waiting passively for help – was to take the place by storm. Of course they
ought
to wait for help – help which might now be arriving in less than half an hour. No other behaviour could honestly be called rational. But if the bearded men had taken the risk and trouble of bringing Hartsilver up here, it certainly wasn’t for any purpose that could be called a pretty one. They had only to know, or even to fancy they knew, that the old man had the solution of that idiotic code virtually at his command, and they might treat him in a fashion too barbarous for decent contemplation. In short, the only choice was to rush the beggars.

Bobby’s right hand already grasped the revolver. He put his left hand in his pocket and brought out the torch. It would be needed the instant he was beyond that dark portal. He looked down at his shoes, and toed off each in turn. He could run quite silently on the brick path that way. He glanced at Susan behind her tree, and saw that she was kicking off her shoes too. Which meant he hadn’t an instant to spare. This Hartsilver business had hit her hard. She was quite capable of taking the lead, and of dashing into the Smithy unarmed. Or she might take it into her head to shout and to run nowhere in particular – this by way of drawing the enemy’s fire.

Bobby was running now – running as he had never run down a touch-line in his young athletic life. But even as he ran he noticed something at his feet. The moon, still doing its stuff, had cast there the shadow of a dancing human head. Susan was very close behind him indeed.

Nothing. Silence. Darkness. Darkness cut only by the beam of his own torch. Chill. And a smell that wasn’t quite of earth – but rather of unbelievable antiquity. If unbelievable antiquity can smell.

Swiftly he cast the beam into the first chamber. It lay on his left hand. Nothing was revealed, and he hurried on. It was a surprisingly long way to a second aperture, and when he reached it and raked it there was only a small empty space. He went further, and stopped dead. He had to do this. He was confronting a door. A door is not a common appurtenance of a megalithic chambered tomb.

It was a stout wooden door – with a couple of bolts of the kind that can be secured with a padlock. But the door was slightly ajar. And it moved as they looked at it. But only through the smallest angle. Perhaps a faint draught – a sighing to and fro of faint currents of air – was at play in this gloomy place.

There was nothing out of the way about it. This came to Bobby almost at once. It hadn’t been imported by wandering Slavonic personages with beards. The Ministry of Works – which one thought of as simply a bowler-hatted gentleman carrying an umbrella – had caused it to be installed out of a provident care for the safety of those members of the archaeologically-minded public who might penetrate as far as this into the
arcanum
of the Great Smithy. Beyond this point the going was still hazardous. Only, the bowler-hatted gentleman had forgotten his padlock. Or perhaps it was still upon requisition from another Government Department.

‘It looks like a mare’s nest, wouldn’t you say?’ For the first time for what seemed an aeon, Susan spoke confidently and aloud. ‘No go, in fact. We must start again.’

‘No doubt.’ Bobby’s eye was on the faintly swaying door. It had explained itself to him in a flash, but he didn’t like it, all the same. He told himself that it was simply a final test of nerve. He could creep towards it. Or he could do as he had been doing, and make a dash at it. He made a dash. This time, Susan was only inches behind him.

A small chamber, very void indeed. And a
cul-de-sac
. So that was the end of this wild-goose chase. As Susan said, they must start again.

The chill air with its queer smell – its neolithic smell – stirred behind Bobby and Susan. The Ministry’s useful door had closed behind them. They heard a bolt going home.

‘The first chamber must have another off it,’ Bobby said quietly. ‘They were lurking there.
Plus
Hartsilver, poor bastard.’ He hesitated. ‘Susan, I’m sorry.’