Red Anger (7 page)

‘What made him choose you?’

‘Well, my mother was Romanian.’

‘Your father took your mother’s name?’

‘An old Romanian custom.’

‘Mr. Prefacutu, I guess that Women’s Lib was not that popular in Romania when you were born.’

I spotted for the first time that she was American or had lived long in America.

‘Why do you find it inconvenient to use your real name?’

‘That’s no business of yours or theirs.’

‘By God, the boy has told me the truth for once!’ she exclaimed. ‘What have they got on you?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘Well, they have now. You’re a traitor and you’ll fetch up in the Old Bailey.’

‘I don’t see much harm in just giving you an address, Mrs. Hilliard. I haven’t the least sympathy for your nephew. My opinion of him is just the same as that of the rest of his
countrymen. He seems to have been a good fellow but lots of communists are.’

‘What makes you think he was a nice guy?’

‘Only something the landlord of your pub told me. I called in there to ask my way. He thought I was the Portuguese butler come down for an interview, just as you did.’

‘Boy, you’ve given me an idea. How about pretending to be just that for a day or two? I’ve a feeling that it’s for your good and I can cancel the real interview. But
you’re perfectly free to have a meal and then go. John will drive you to Totnes. He’ll say nothing of what happened and I shall tell Forrest at the pub that you didn’t suit
me.’

I agreed to stay—an instant decision which needs a bit of explaining. In taking Mr. Marghiloman’s money I had promised to observe her carefully and report on how she had reacted, but
I don’t think that counted for much. Curiosity decidedly did count. There were loose bits and pieces all over the place which might be picked up and used as they had been in the case of Uncle
Vasile. And the lost dog was still in need of a leader in spite of the fact that its devotion to Councillor Sokes had been an unmitigated disaster. Mrs. Hilliard radiated leadership—the
dominant female of a pack if I ever saw one. What she wanted of me or for me was beyond guessing, but my answer to her was certainly inspired by an instantaneous, improbable picture of a return to
my own identity and my own west country.

So I put on the black suit and black tie which she had rooted out from somewhere and next morning began my duties—or what resembled my duties near enough after a hint or two from her. She
seemed to do very well without a resident married couple. Wives of the hunt servants came in for a few hours daily to clean up and accepted my presence quite naturally. Even John Penpole, the
Huntsman, assumed that I had been mistaken on arrival for just another lousy snooper round the house and that I really was a Portuguese who had arrived unexpectedly.

All I knew was how to serve drinks and to make a variety of omelettes. That was enough to keep up appearances. When neighbours dropped in—which they did often for business or a
chat—Mrs. Hilliard told them that I was only there for a day or two until a new couple turned up. She knew her village, she said, and she wasn’t going to give them a juicy bit of
scandal to enjoy about how the old girl had taken to good-looking, young Latins in the flower of her age.

She was out to dinner, all dressed up, on the night after my arrival. The rest of the time she was at home and I saw a good deal of her, always speaking my broken English and taking orders
respectfully. She called me Willie, after asking me what my Christian name was and getting the answer that it was anything she liked.

The third day after my arrival gave us one of those glorious English mornings when the scattered oaks and elms of the parkland round the house drooped in the green heat as if to protect the
smaller life beneath them. Mrs. Hilliard told me that she was going out to sit on the Bank—a smooth turf rampart which must once have been an outer wall of the original priory—and at
midday I was to bring her a well-iced Tom Collins in a pint glass.

When I arrived with the tray she was sitting among the arm-chair roots of an ancient mulberry—sprung as likely as not from a seed spat out by a passing monk. The aged foxhound, Bridget,
was at her feet, and Sack-and-Sugar curled on top of her felt hat. Sack was a polecat ferret who plainly adored her and was treated with caution by everyone else. He was a melanistic sport, black
with a yellowish-white belly and had the air of a chattering familiar spirit—which she recognised by digging up the name of Sack-and-Sugar from the records of witch trials.

‘Willie, we are now alone,’ she said. ‘I shall not have to endure your English and we can talk. By the way, did I see you from my window tickling Sack’s tummy this
morning?’

‘Oughtn’t I to?’ I asked innocently.

‘Well, anybody else who tried it would have had a hole in his thumb you could hang an earring from.’

‘I suppose he must have taken to me, Master.’

There was a twinkle in her sea-blue eye, but I was not going to admit that I had had four ferrets of my own as a boy, and the gaiety of them used to run back and forth between us.

‘You don’t trust me, do you?’

‘I can see that everyone else does.’

‘Well, would you buy a second-hand car from me, as they say?’

‘Not for a moment if it was a recent model.’

‘What the hell do you mean by that, Willie?’

‘You wouldn’t have had any respect for it. But I’d buy a thirty-year-old Rolls-Royce from you.’

She threw up her head and bayed like a hound, upsetting Sack who had to scramble back by way of the white coiffure. It was the first time I had seen her laugh.

‘Trust, Willie, is an instinct. You are a first-rate actor but a rather poor liar with no name and no past and only the vaguest indications that you were born an honest babe in Wiltshire.
And yet I am sure that you are not working willingly for the Russians or for that whisky-sodden club of MI5. I stress
willingly
. Why do you think I asked you to stay on?’

‘Because you couldn’t make up your mind about me.’

‘Go up one, young Prefacutu! And I wanted time to ask a friend of mine for advice. That’s where I went all dressed up to kill.’

‘What did he think?’

‘That you don’t know your ass from your elbow.’

‘Ass, Mrs. Hilliard?’

‘Willie, my upbringing as a young lady in Connecticut prevents me to this day from pronouncing that word as it should be. Ass it is and ass it will remain. And don’t you talk to me
about Chaucer!’

‘Chaucer is the gardener?’ I asked, for I didn’t know his name.

‘How far did your schooling go in Wiltshire?’

‘A bit beyond the fox is in the box.’

‘Not in this hunting country he isn’t. But the cat is on the mat and if we are to know why, you must decide that you don’t like the job and return to London.’

‘I shall be sorry.’

‘So will Sack. He gets a mite bored with only me to talk to. And I shall give you a letter to my nephew—just a message saying that I have his address and could do with some
caviare.’

I agreed to deliver it, adding that if I ran into trouble she must promise to say exactly what happened.

‘Word of honour. And now does your trust go far enough to give me your real name?’

I nearly did, but had to tell her that Willie would do very well for the time being.

I returned to London regretfully, well aware that I would gladly have stayed on as permanent butler if I knew anything about butling or a groom if I knew anything about horses. After two empty
days I kept my appointment with Mr. Marghiloman and brightened up when I saw him already at the corner table in the pub.

After I had handed over Mrs. Hilliard’s letter, he led me on to talk about her. I kept quiet about her odd reception of me and told him that she seemed very calm and composed. I added, a
bit romantically, that she had the air and finesse of a great lady. He ignored the vehement flow of my Romanian saying with a smile that no doubt she could play the part if she wanted to.

This annoyed me. Mrs. Hilliard could doubtless play any part which suited her, and perhaps it was a part when first she arrived in Devon; but now it was an extension of her natural self and she
belonged to her valley as if the steep, lush slopes of it had grown up around her. I stopped myself just in time from telling him so. Instead I remarked that I had too little experience of English
and Americans to be able to see through them.

‘She was a hell-cat in her youth, Mr. Prefacutu,’ he said. ‘Mixed up with all the revolutionaries of those days and ran guns for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil
War.’

‘Well, she’s a highly respectable Master of Hounds now.’

‘A pose! Engels rode to hounds. And her daughter is worse. Anarchist or communist. She was mixed up in the escape of Mornix, too.’

‘I didn’t know she had a daughter.’

‘You don’t seem to have talked to her much.’

‘Not about her family.’

‘But according to you, you were four days in the house!’

Instinctively I decided to say nothing of being mistaken for a Portuguese manservant and being compelled to keep up the part, which accounted for the lack of any intimate conversation.

‘Just waiting for her letter,’ I explained.

‘And silent all the time?’

His pleasant voice had not altered and the warning took a second to sink in. I began to suspect one of the reasons why he had asked me to go down with the Moscow address. There could be no
better way of inserting myself into Mrs. Hilliard’s life and any secrets she might have.

‘Does Mrs. Hilliard go down to the sea much?’

‘Not so far as I know.’

‘Or to the creeks of the Kingsbridge estuary?’

‘I don’t think so. Kingsbridge is all of ten miles away.’

‘Did you ever see in the house a chart of the estuary?’

‘Yes. There was one belonging to Alwyn Rory.’

‘Any marks on it?’

‘Plenty. He must have done a lot of sailing there at one time.’

‘Did you ever see a chart of the estuary when you were on the
Nadezhda Krupskaya
, Ionel Petrescu?’

So he had known all along who I was. It didn’t bother me, though I would have bolted straight out of the place if he had called me Gurney. I assumed of course that he was an agent of
British security and that I had been framed. It stood to reason that there would be Romanian agents to keep an eye on dubious Romanians. I knew something—or thought I did—of the dirty
tricks played by that sort of crook, bound to bring cases or be sacked. I decided to bluff it out.

‘I’m in the clear with police and immigration authorities, and you can’t send me back now,’ I said.

He must have picked up instantly what was in my mind.

‘Oh, can’t we?’ he replied. ‘Not for carrying letters between a traitor in Moscow and his aunt?’

‘I did it out of kindness, as you know. And Mrs. Hilliard will back me up.’

‘How did you hurt your thumb?’

‘Squashed it in a door.’

‘What are you living on?’

‘Savings.’

‘I think you had better have a steady job to keep you out of trouble.’

‘I’ll take anything where they don‘t mind my bad English. I was doing all right with translations.’

‘Well, no time like the present!’ he said, resuming his former cordiality. ‘I’ve got a publisher friend in Bloomsbury who might use you. He always works late and we can
go up and see him now if you like. Are you prepared to tell all the truth about yourself?’

I said I was and went with him, babbling about the beauties of Romania as if I had no suspicions and meanwhile trying to think. Something in all this did not fit. I had been too long in
England—let alone all that one unconsciously picks up in boyhood—to believe that British security would use so gross an
agent provocateur
. Any court would throw out the case
against me at once.

But a genuine refugee from an East European country would not know that. I remembered Mrs. Hilliard’s remark that the cat was on the mat and that delivery of her letter to her nephew would
help us to know why. I hadn’t time to puzzle over the why, but who was the cat? It sounded like MI5, suspecting that Rory, Mrs. Hilliard and her daughter had been up to something treasonable
in the Kingsbridge estuary. On the other hand, the blackmail smelt strongly of KGB, though it seemed highly improbable that the Russians believed I had really swum ashore from the fishing
fleet.

Getting rid of Mr. Marghiloman and avoiding interrogation by his fictitious publisher friend turned out to be quite simple. We were strolling up the Charing Cross Road carrying northwards a
roaring mass of impatient death. He was waiting meekly, like a disciplined foreigner, to cross Earlham Street when I saw a chance to dash over to the island in Cambridge Circus, and from there
plunged across to the Palace Theatre a yard ahead of the thundering stream sweeping out of Shaftesbury Avenue. I don’t know what happened to Marghiloman. I think he reached the island and had
to stand there till the lights changed. Meanwhile I had half a dozen turnings to choose from. When I found a telephone box I decided to call Mrs. Hilliard who ought to be at home and sipping her
outsize glass of sherry before dinner.

I got through to her at once and told her discreetly that the man who had been expecting me seemed likely to give trouble.

‘You do surprise me, Willie,’ she said. ‘Where are you calling from?’

‘A box in Soho.’

‘And you were wondering if there was still a job for a Portuguese till the sky clears?’

‘As a matter of fact I was, Mrs. Hilliard.’

‘Were you thinking of going home before coming here?’

‘Just to get my things.’

‘Well, if I were you, I shouldn’t. I suggest you take a train at once and then walk from wherever it lands you. And don’t go through Molesworthy! You know the Penpoles’
cottage in the wood—aim for that, preferably at night!’

‘But it’s not as serious as all that.’

‘Very likely it is not. But if Mr. Marghiloman is anxious for more conversation this is one of the places where he would look for you. Now, jump on the first bus you see, and do what I
tell you!’