Cat and Mouse (17 page)

‘Splendid! House assembly at four o'clock then, young Cavendish, with high tea immediately afterwards. Till then you're free to meet your friends and swap stories of the hols, eh, what!’ Dr Duncan beamed again, then turned to watch a pony and trap which was approaching with another pupil up the drive behind them.

On the return journey Deborah sat beside Simon in the front of the car. At first neither spoke much. Deborah was thinking of Tom's face when she had left him. He had been standing in the middle of a group of his friends, his grey-green eyes alight, cheerful, not apparently concerned at all that she was leaving. Anxious for her to be gone, in fact, so that he could immerse himself into a world of boys. And so she had kissed him, very lightly, on the forehead, knowing that even so small a display of affection was an embarrassment in his boys' world. And now she would not see him for at least a month.

Perhaps longer, Deborah thought. Perhaps much longer. If I stay long in London the baby will start to show and there will still be no agreed story with Charles. When he finds out, poor Tom's world will absolutely fall apart and it will be entirely my fault.

‘He seems happy there.’ Simon's words broke in upon her thoughts. She glanced at him. He sat quietly beside her, his eyes on the road, his handsome, classical profile smooth in the afternoon sun. She wondered that he had spoken at all; he was normally so quiet, reserved with her.

‘Yes. Yes, I think it's a good school.’

‘He'll be better off there, with all the trouble at home.’

Simon's tone was quite neutral, but Deborah felt a blush spread across her face. Did he know, then, about the argument she and Charles had had this morning? About the other disagreements between them, and her reasons for going to London? And if he did know, was he actually going to have the insolence to discuss these things?

As coldly as she could, she said: ‘I beg your pardon? What trouble do you mean?’

He took his time answering. They left the rutted track and came on to a metalled road. ‘The UVF, of course. What else? The conflict with the Liberal government and the British army.’

‘Oh, that.’ Her blush faded. ‘Why, do you think there'll really be fighting?’

‘It's possible, yes, of course. Why else would we be doing all this training?’ Simon glanced at her, a faint smile on his thin lips. A rather mocking, patronising smile, she thought. As though to imply, this is something you don't know anything about, because you're only a woman. And then — was there something else, behind that?

‘Let's hope both sides come to their senses first,’ she said. ‘It won't do anyone any good, to have loyal Irishmen and Englishmen fighting each other.’

‘No, of course not,’ Simon agreed.

It seemed a banal enough conversation. Deborah thought: I was a fool to blush, I've misjudged this young man again. He's a decent enough young boy, polite, helpful, well behaved. I'm just jealous of him because he broke in when I was trying to seduce Charles, and because he always has Charles's attention when Charles is playing soldiers and I'm shut out.

Then Simon said: ‘It's rather like a marriage, isn't it?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘A marriage. The Union between England and Ireland is like that, don't you think? Two unequal partners linked together by law. So long as both sides want the same things, everything's fine. But when they don't want the same things they quarrel and things fall apart. Sometimes, one partner even goes off with someone else. Then there's dreadful trouble.’

She stared at him, her heart beating quickly. There was a superior, knowing smile on Simon's face. Surely he was not just making conversation now — he
was
dangerous, after all! But what did he mean? He couldn't know about her and James Rankin , that was impossible. So . . .

The answer ran through her like lightning.
Charles must have a mistress — and this young devil knows about it!
He's gloating — trying to tell me without saying so in so many words. The smooth little swine!

The car rattled on past fields of cows and sheep, through a village. Neither of them spoke, but twice Simon glanced at her, smiling coolly. At last she said: ‘You're not talking about politics at all, Simon, are you?’

‘I beg your pardon, Madam?’ This time it was his turn to try to look confused. But it was definitely there, Deborah thought. Behind the smooth face and raised eyebrows, a smile of deep inner amusement. Mocking. It's true, he's patronising me, she thought.

‘You're trying to tell me something about my husband, aren't you?’

Simon's frown was almost a parody of concern. ‘No, Mrs Cavendish, of course not. I was only trying to discuss the politics of the Union. No more.’

It was an utterly miserable situation to be in. Deborah could not prove the young man was lying, laughing at her. If she went on and challenged him he would only act as though she were deranged, and yet she could not retract what she had already said. Nor could she order him out of the car or drive it herself; she did not know how to. She had to sit beside him for the next two hours.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Have it your own way. I don't believe you, but in any case it's none of your business. I'd appreciate it if you would keep your thoughts to yourself for the rest of the journey.’

And that, at least, he did. But nothing she could say or do could keep the cool, knowing smile off the young man's lips, or the look of mocking contempt out of his eyes . . .

I
T WAS half an hour before the speech, and the streets of Newtownards were already so crowded that it was almost impossible to move.

Werner von Weichsaker sheltered in a bank doorway and watched the hordes of people flowing past. He was a tall, angular, bony man, wearing a long belted raincoat and a flat tweed cap. The face under the cap was lean, hungry, alert — like a wolf sniffing the air for prey. He had a prominent nose, strong clean-shaven jaw, thin lips, slightly sunken cheeks, and eyes of a pale, unnatural shade of blue. Many people were fascinated by those eyes, but few could meet their gaze for long. The blue was so pale, and there was a strange white ring within it, around the iris; when he became angry this widened, like the sun burning through mist on a midsummer's day, and people tended to look away, lest they were burnt also.

Now he was not angry, merely amused and observant. He surveyed the crowds of Ulstermen and women in front of him, and thought, this must be the strangest form of loyalty the world has ever seen.

The street was like a river, with waves of cloth caps and bowler hats streaming up and down in swirls and eddies between banks of low, grey, slate-roofed houses. The faces of the men were solid, heavy, rural, reddened by the endless wind they met every day in the fields. Dour, heavy-featured farmers for the most part, with big noses and solid jaws. They wore thick, serviceable suits, broad leather belts, and strong hobnailed boots. Grey clouds blew briskly over the smoky rooftops, but no one seemed downcast by the weather. Everywhere there was laughter, shouting, the hum of anticipation.

Werner heard the sound of music further up the street, and immediately the current of people began to flow towards it. He stepped from his haven in the doorway and went with the stream, letting it carry him where he wanted to go, into the main square.

Here he saw the band. It was composed entirely of men and boys in the soberest and most respectable of clothes imaginable — black suits, bowler hats, shining polished shoes. Their faces, too, were straight, solemn, unmoving. Yet beneath this sobriety was something fervent, powerful, messianic. Over his dark suit each man wore an embroidered sash of brilliant red, white, or orange; gleaming silver fifes made piercing, defiant music; and the shattering
boom!
of the great Lambeg drum throbbed through the crowd with enough force to make the bricks dance in the walls.

Every building in the square was bright with Union Jack bunting, and the platform behind the band seemed composed of nothing else. Werner smiled ironically to himself. These men are rebels, he thought. Every one of them. Rebels whose first thought is to pledge loyalty to their King!

‘Come along now, move back there, sir, will you?’ There were very few police in the square, but Werner was shoved firmly backwards by a line of men who were clearly soldiers. Few of them wore uniform and most held wooden staves rather than rifles, but their military bearing was unmistakable. Their sergeant was a short, solid, bullet-headed type recognisable anywhere, and behind him and his corporals, the whole operation was directed by a mounted officer.

But it was not the sergeant Werner had come to see. It was the officer. Werner saw him, and knew him instantly. As he stared, the pale, hot ring widened in his eyes.

A lean, athletic individual, the officer sat with one hand on his hip, coolly surveying the scene. He had that air of unconscious arrogance so natural to the British army, and clearly assumed that all matters in the square were completely under his control. From time to time a runner pushed his way up to him, saluted, and ran off again with fresh orders; and once the officer urged his horse forward into the crowd, pointing at something casually with his swagger stick. Immediately a file of soldiers rushed past him and made a space for two elderly ladies who were in danger of being crushed.

That's the man, Werner thought. That's why I'm here. Charles Cavendish, colonel in the Ulster Volunteer Force. Once soldier of the British Empire, an officer trained at Sandhurst. And before that again, head of house at Eton, captain of cricket, senior prefect, the prototype of the English public schoolboy.

The sort of man Werner hated now, but had once longed to become.

Even now, as a grown man, the memories made him blush and shake with rage.

Long ago, Werner's father, a German diplomat, had convinced himself that the English public schools were the finest educational institutions in the world. It followed, therefore, that his son should have the benefit of going to one. So, when he was thirteen, young Werner, wearing the high top hat and stiff collar of a freshman, had walked proudly with his father through the medieval gates of Eton College, the finest public school in the world.

And there, Werner's hell had begun.

In the first place, his English, although carefully nurtured by six months of private lessons from his English governess, Miss Brinton, proved woefully inadequate. His accent was ludicrous and he didn't know the right name for anything — words like ‘tuck’ ‘fag’, ‘skive’, ‘creep’, and ‘Pop’ meant nothing to him. He had not been to a prep school, so he knew nothing of their traditions, either. He couldn't play cricket or rugby, he had hardly even been away from home before. And, worst of all, he had an innate conviction of his own superiority.

That conviction was both the one thing that kept him going, and also, if only he'd realised it, the main cause for all the cruelty he received. The English boys might, perhaps, have tolerated a foreigner with all Werner's manifest shortcomings, if only that foreigner had had a sense of humour and a willingness to laugh at himself and try to learn; but Werner had none of these virtues. When the others mocked him he stiffened; when they ragged him and tried to teach him to hold a cricket bat he lashed out and hit them with it. One boy was quite badly injured and had to spend a week in the infirmary, but Werner, even when ordered to by the housemaster, failed to apologise. From that moment, his fate was sealed. He had rejected the boys' crude attempts to teach him, insulted the English national game, and spurned the advice of authority. He was on his own, an unrepentant hyena in the lions' den.

It did not take him long to realise how lonely his fate was to be. It is not pleasant to get into bed at night and find that your pillow crackles and is full of snails, to feel woodlice creeping out of your nightshirt pocket as you sleep, or to get up in the morning and step in a dog turd inside your own shoe. There were other games too, such as being tossed in a blanket, roasted in front of a dormitory fire, trussed with your elbows to your knees and made to cockfight, which had a long history in the British public school. Werner suffered every one.

There was a day when the senior prefects found young Werner, with his hands tied behind him, his head jammed in the bottom of a sash window, and his trousers around his ankles. The boy's face was weeping bitter tears into the quadrangle, but the prefects didn't see that, because his head was outside the room; what they saw, as they came into the room, was the boy's smooth, wriggling buttocks. On each buttock an eye was painted — an eye with fetching long lashes. The eyes were painted so cunningly that they appeared to wink at the prefects as the owner of the buttocks struggled and strained to get free.

And so the prefects' first response was to laugh. That laugh mortified Werner to his core, for these were the very type of young men, only a year or so away from a commission in the army, whom Werner had so far worshipped. One day, he hoped, he would become one of those godlike figures himself. But after this . . .

Of course, the prefects had released him, and officially disapproved, but not before one — the head of house, Cavendish — had placed his large hand on the wriggling buttocks in a casual, intimate, patronising gesture that was somehow worse than anything that had gone before. And when Werner was free, and they saw who he was, they showed scant sympathy.

Especially when he spat at them.

For although Werner could not prevent these things happening, his spirit was never quite broken. That was the one thing he had to hang on to, and the thing that ensured that the torments continued. He even struck back once, arranging for a dead snake to rot slowly in his principal tormentor's mattress. But that only made things worse.

It led to the incident, finally, when they broke his hand. The day when they pegged him out on the grass, below the bank at the far end of the cricket pitch where no one would find them, and put ants in his hair and slugs up his nose in an attempt to make him say foul things about his mother. When he would not, and insulted their own mothers instead, they brought the big cricket roller, the one that weighed half a ton, to the top of the bank and held it there, poised above him, insisting that if he defied them it would be the last thing he would ever do.