Hostage (7 page)

I had been inclined to think that he knew and approved. Now, watching him through his morning routine, I was sure that he did not. That made a considerable difference. I might be able to deliver the William Morris
News from Nowhere
when Shallope had left. But I had to be careful that neither Clotilde nor Rex nor any committee member remained behind. Nobody else was going to recognise Gil.

If Sir Frederick was not in the secret and had been led to believe that some innocent, mediaeval metallurgy was being carried on in his courtyard, it was most unlikely that Clotilde would accompany Shallope right into Roke’s Tining. Her voice was not deep and could not long be mistaken for a man’s, nor could she take off that hat. She was able to get away with deception when, for example, asking at a hotel desk for Dr Shallope, but not for a whole day. Then where was she? It would make sense if she were dropped at some quiet spot to keep an eye on the lane which led out to the main road and to Cheltenham, noting any traffic which loitered or behaved at all suspiciously and ready to intervene in an emergency. The appearance of Gil where he had no right to be would count as an emergency.

It was about four in the afternoon when I set out to test my theory. I reckoned that she would not be more than fifty yards from the road; farther away she could not be sure of decisive action in the event of Shallope changing his mind, or of the arrival of police. Moving along the open in dead ground and crawling at intervals to the crest above the valley I could not see her but at least I spotted where she ought to be – covering a junction of two lanes by either of which an intruder might come. The hill turf was too bare to stalk her. If she caught a glimpse of me she could slip behind any of the dry-stone walls which bounded the fields and come up for a better look.

I decided to wait, and again patience was rewarded. Soon after six a few bicycles and one car came up from Roke’s Tining. Then Shallope drove past and quickly picked up Clotilde. She had shown less subtlety than I attributed to her, simply sitting in a dip by the side of the lane where surface stone had been quarried. She had an excellent view of the approaches for quarter of a mile either way but could see nothing else.

When the car was out of sight I walked boldly down to the house. Everyone had knocked off. Monastic discipline with no overtime. I rang the bell and asked the housekeeper for Sir Frederick, saying that Ian Roberts had requested me to drop a book on him. I gave my name as plain Johns in case he should mention Herbert Johnson to Shallope. When he spoke or wrote to the bookseller, Roberts would merely think he had got the name wrong as old men do.

No explanations were called for. Sir Frederick ushered me into his study, apparently assuming that the natural way to reach Roke’s Tining was on foot. No doubt some of the members of the co-operative and the heartier visitors did so.

He wanted the Kelmscot
News from Nowhere
saying that he had not read it since youth but had always remembered Morris’s prediction that under socialism the dustman and other labourers in hard and dirty trades would have to be paid more than the intellectual in order to attract them into the unpleasant work. He had found that prophecy impossible to believe, yet had lived to see it come true.

I replied that personally I would prefer to shift garbage and at the day’s end feel that I had used my muscles, solved simple problems and completed something of value to the community rather than work on a production line turning out needless goods the only value of which was to make money for the producer.

‘That’s been put very well by the chap who was gaoled for bombing politicians and escaped,’ he said. ‘What the devil was his name? My memory, Mr Johns, is going while the rest of my old body can still praise its Maker. Despard, of course! “The Twopence off Syndrome” he called it.’

It was a curious sensation to find myself suddenly transformed back into Julian Despard. I knew very well that I need not fear recognition, but for the moment I was a trinity with all parts of me in action simultaneously. It actually produced a slight feeling of nausea.

When I had pulled myself together I said – in order to open the way for more conversation – that I had read it and found it too slight and satirical for so urgent a problem. So I do. At the time of writing I had not considered it possible to promote actively the collapse of society. I merely thought collapse desirable, and was attacking the spiritual squalor and material greed of mass democracy by way of one example which man and woman on a London bus could understand. Proof of the final degradation of the bourgeois society is that it can be enticed by an offer of twopence off to buy an unwanted article the whole value of which does not reach twopence apart from packaging and the costly narcotics of advertising.

Is it fair to call such an insignificant human folly the final degradation? Yet degradation it is, and insignificant it is not. Twopence Off Nothing lies at the base of all the economics of the developed world. It will be plain enough when food, warmth and work at last begin to fail.

I asked him if he had always been attracted by socialism.

‘Once upon a time, Mr Johns! Once upon a time! I now see that it is unworkable, demanding one unproductive apparatchik to every ten citizens. I therefore must call myself an anarchist.’

‘Bombing politicians like your Julian Despard?’

Despard did not, but I am never sorry that the politicians thought he meant to.

‘A Christian Anarchist, sir! I believe in example, not violence. You will understand if you come and see what we are doing, and perhaps you will have a meal with us afterwards.’

Indeed I was anxious to understand, but to my regret I could not risk the much wanted meal and made my excuses. Apparently several members of the co-operative lived in the house beside those whom I had seen going home. It was better not to show myself. So far I had only been seen by him and the housekeeper who opened the door.

The industrial wing was all of a hundred yards long, a third of it of the same date as the house, the rest an addition in Cotswold stone. It was, I felt, what a place of work should look like – a Utopian impossibility but to be kept in mind as an ideal. Gammel opened the doors of the empty workshops. Among the crafts was the usual damned pottery, cabinet-making using beech and oak from the estate and, as Ian Roberts had said, spinning and weaving all the way from the fleece to a finished serge which would have stopped a knife thrust let alone the wind. Sir Frederick told me that the product was known to trawlermen and that he hoped for trials by the Navy.

‘I am a capitalist to the extent that I provide capital,’ he said, ‘but my share of the profits is the same as that of the rest of us. I consider myself as no more or less necessary than the accountant.’

He led me to the large building outside the courtyard. This was the blacksmith’s shop, but far from the conventional village industry. Though on a small scale it was right up to date, so far I was capable of judging, with lathes, rollers and a lot of precision machinery for cutting and stamping.

He explained to me that there was always a market for small and intricate pieces which had to be specially made by hand.

‘The shop has been discovered by a wide circle, Mr Johns. Given exact specifications, we can forge, shape and temper anything small – even machine tools. It is known to inventors that they may work here on a prototype with complete confidence in our discretion. Sometimes very interesting and unexpected guests! We have one at the moment, a Dr Shallope from the Ministry of Defence.’

The daring of it! I was and still am amazed. Yet it’s logical. The most dangerous development would be if Shallope, through accident or police inquiries, were detected using a false name on his holiday. Granted that he is above suspicion, why should he not spend a couple of weeks working on some invention of his own for which Roke’s Tining had all the facilities? Since he is living in a hotel and keeping his daily visits secret, he and Magma obviously hope that his presence here will not be known; but if it does become known he has a reasonable story ready.

I asked Sir Frederick what Dr Shallope was working on.

‘He asked us all to sign the Official Secrets Act, so I am afraid I can’t say more than it’s a very revolutionary advance on the Stirling cycle heat engine, efficiency depending on the length of the cylinder and a special alloy used for the lining. We carry a good inventory and were ready to supply and prepare the metals he needs, but he doesn’t want much from us beyond one large, simple forging and a lot of little tricky ones. A crate of his own materials was delivered here.’

‘And he works quite openly in the blacksmith’s shop?’

‘No, no, Mr Johns! That would be too much to ask. In the house there is an extensive basement with all normal laboratory equipment. I fixed it up for myself when I was investigating the recycling of domestic sewage to edible protein. I was unsuccessful. My ideas are ahead of my time but my chemistry is, I am amiably told, fifty years out of date. However, the problem has since been solved and gives us hope for the future.’

‘And the laboratory can be rented to Dr Shallope or anyone else?’

‘Well, not anyone. Certainly not anyone, Mr Johns. But I have known Shallope for many years. We are members of the same club. You must not think I have any liking for London. To my way of thinking it is a detestable hell-hole of conspicuous and unnecessary consumption, taking the lies of advertising agents as its Bible and worshipping one febrile fashion after another. The permissive society should be destroyed like Sodom, not for its permissiveness which is nothing new, but for its gullibility which is. However, one cannot lose touch with one’s society, as Lot may well have said. I am no hermit and I visit my club every second Wednesday.

‘But where was I? Ah yes, Shallope! I must admit I do not like all his secrecy and special locks on the door. If he went away and left something on which ought to be off he might blow us all up. But the terms he offered were most generous and we shall be sorry to lose him. He leaves us tomorrow. The prototype is already packed for transport.’

When he said goodbye to me he showed me the entrance to the basement. I wished that it had been out in the courtyard, but even if it had been and I could break in I would not know how to put this heat engine – and what heat! – out of action. That’s a job on which one would hesitate to use explosives.

The Action Committee has briefed Shallope most ingeniously. My guess is that he was in actual fact known to be working on a revolutionary engine and that he may have been backed by some endorsement from the Ministry of Defence. Forged? Or do we have a civil servant of the necessary standing?

I had a meal of sorts at a safe distance and then slept a few hours under the stars and out of the wind. Before dawn I was in position on the open hillside with a perfect view of the road. My camouflage is worth remembering. These dry-stone walls all over the uplands can stand for years without repair, but once storm or the horses of an enthusiastic hunt have loosened the cap stones it does not take long for sheep to do the rest. When looking for Clotilde I had noticed such a gap. In the half light I scooped out a hollow for my body and reached out for earth and the lighter stones to cover me. It was a deal less comfortable than a similar job with brushwood or bamboo but even more effective. Anyone patrolling the bare country could see at a glance that not another soul was there.

I watched the Groads’ Construction Company truck that we had driven to Blackmoor Gate going down to Roke’s Tining. It returned in an hour with an unremarkable load which can be seen on any highway. It carried two short lengths of drainpipe lightly cased in wood and straw, with innocent ends blocked by wooden plugs just visible. The pipes might be unloaded in a builder’s yard or on any site where drains were being laid. Alternatively, would anyone take special notice if a party of workmen had access to a main sewer, lowered a length of pipe and pushed it into a disused outlet?

When the truck had driven away towards Northleach and London, Herbert Johnson shook out his clothes in the breeze, picked up his car, paid his bill at Witney and returned home. Enough of this action in the field. I have now to think of action within the bleak uplands and tangled undergrowth of my own mind.

I am about to kill a man. My conscience is uneasy. It now belongs to me, not to an ideal, and has become a dialogue with the self. I use this diary to reveal to me whether one side or the other is lying.

How curious that I, trained to show no mercy for the sake of man’s future happiness, should be hesitant when I decide to wipe out an individual! I would not have shrunk from killing, for example, in the course of hijacking a plane to rescue a comrade.

The explosion of this bomb would infallibly bring established society to its knees, spreading such panic and horror followed by the suppression of all civil liberties that the New Revolution becomes acceptable as an alternative. Terrorism is like a painful operation to bring society back to health. Is that why I shrink from assassinating Shallope?

But the health of society is not of universal value. What is? As I try to answer that, the switchboard of the brain at once connects me to Paxos. From youth on I have experienced similar unforgettable communions when I have known a passing ecstasy which has nothing to do with human society and is, I think, common to all animals. I am only able to describe it as surrender to a purpose though I do not know what purpose there can be except to force me to surrender. What I receive from the switchboard is only a vivid memory of shape and colour, containing neither prohibition nor encouragement nor any undertone of morality. All it conveys is:
you are a part of this.
There’s a deduction to be drawn, I suppose, from that simple axiom. If I am a part, then what I carry with me into the whole affects the whole.

To hell with religion, if that can be called religion! Neutrons are what I ought to be thinking about. I am a traitor. I have made up my mind that there must be a limit to terrorism. Therefore I am bound to question whether any terrorism at all is justifiable. I shrink from killing Shallope merely because I take on myself the responsibility for coldblooded murder. I can claim, like a hanging judge, that this is an unpleasant duty, but there is no family or club to which I can return for a glass of port and absolution.