Operation Pax (2 page)

Of course she had swallowed it. Staggering, but they nearly all did.

Or had she?

Routh’s breathing quickened. After all, one day you’d be caught out. One day you’d meet a trap. More often now you met a woman who knew, who tumbled. It was because of articles in the pocket mags, because of Scotland Yard programmes on the Woman’s Hour. Then you had to smile yourself quickly out, make for another town, change for a time the thing you pretended to sell. And one day you’d meet some dim little woman who’d do better, who’d give you a cheque and then call straight round on the police. It might be the wife of a policeman. Come to think of it, there must be plenty. It might be the wife of a local detective sergeant. And perhaps the woman with the hare lip was that.

There was a sudden cold sweat on Routh. He wrenched his eyes up from the counter. The teller had become the baldish back of a head, and blue serge trousers shiny in the beam of the bleak October sun. He was whispering into a sort of box or pen behind him. Routh heard the undistinguishable whispering and heard the tick of the big clock and heard still his heart that now had something slack and impotent in its throb like the sea idly pulsing in a cave… He knew with a quick rush of lucidity that he had lost his head. There was a sharp relief in knowing, in knowing that now he could only act out the logical consequences of panic. He knew that it was probably still true that the teller was debating whether to pay out three ten when there was only fifteen bob in the account. But he knew it was no use knowing that… And then he saw himself.

It sometimes happened with Routh. As if a great mirror were let down from heaven he would see himself as he there and then stood. It happened to him at bad moments, mostly. Backing off a doorstep with his mouth twisted in malice, beaten by a woman that wouldn’t buy. Pawing a drab who disgusted him. Cringing in a pub before some drunken bully. And now.

The other Routh was standing beside him, sweat on his brow and with one cheek twitching, his eyes fixed in terror on a blue serge jacket shiny at the seams. The other Routh’s left hand had gone to his mouth and furtively he was gnawing at a ragged cuticle. The boy from the good grammar school hiding behind the second rate public-school tie. The Army deserter with the Air Force moustache. The outlaw, the bandit, the lone wolf sweating into his soiled vest, having to battle with his knees, his breathing, his sphincter control in order to bring off a seventy shilling swindle.

Rage and humiliation and naked fear swept over Routh. There was nobody on this side of the counter. He turned and ran from the bank, ran for the two-stroke round the corner.

Pulsing sturdily between his calves the worn old engine thrust the miles behind at a steady thirty-five. Suppose the bank rang up the police and told the story. That would be five minutes. The woman hadn’t been on the telephone – he had noticed that – and it would be another ten minutes before they had one of their CID men on her doorstep. Another five and he’d have the type of fraud taped and his report back at headquarters…

But the familiar recital of dangers and chances that should have crossed and recrossed Routh’s mind like a stage army, tedious and inescapable as a chain of cigarettes, was today reluctant to march. Riding blindly across country, he had to keep coaxing it from the wings. The raddled old thoughts that ought to have cut their routine capers effortlessly before his fatigued attention had gone shy like kids being smacked and cajoled through their first turn in panto.

Routh was frightened at this inertness of his fears. He knew that when his own arguing and reassuring voice left him other voices came at him instead – voices out of the past. Daddy’s. Mummy’s. Darling, darling Mummy… The throttle was full open already, so if they came he couldn’t get away from them that way.
Suppose the bank rang up the police
…

Around Routh, this morning of an autumn that had come early held shafts of sunlight through vapour, held dark rich ploughland backed by a dozen greens turning to russet and gold. Already there was a litter and soon there would be a mush of chestnut leaves on the macadam. A leaf caught in the spokes and flipped at the mudguard like the whirr of a flushed bird. Routh rode blind, deaf. What stretched before him was not a high road but a plank, slimy and supple, across a little weir.
Come on, old chap, have a go
. Routh felt Mummy’s too quickly apprehensive hand tighten on his own. She could see how difficult the plank was, whereas Daddy’s eyes behind their queer pebble glasses saw only the idea of it. Again Daddy was urging him. And he was hanging back. He was hanging back because already, secretly, he had attempted the crossing and had failed. Half-way he had turned giddy and fallen. In a second he had been down in the pool – down, down, suffocating and with a roaring in his ears, as if someone had pulled the plug on him, or let him out with the bath water. An old man pottering with a fishing rod had given him a hand to the side. Probably he had been in some real danger of drowning.

Come on, old chap. Over you go. We’ll come round by the bridge and join you
. His fear was irrational. He could only get bruised and wet a second time, could do no more than make himself ridiculous. But the thought of the first time – of the moment that was like a plug pulled – was too bad. He remembered the covert and dripping slipping home, round by the canal with street boys guffawing and in through the back garden… He took a great breath, and did it. He crossed the plank as his parents watched; and turned, exalted. He expected them to wave, to move upstream to the bridge. But Daddy had laid his hand on Mummy’s shoulder to stop her.
Now then back again, old chap
. Daddy shouted it as if Niagara were between them. It made him sound mad. Mummy had gone pale. She was wringing her hands, mute like a silent film. And a glint from Daddy’s glasses, caught by the boy as he tried to brace himself, was like instantaneous intelligence flashed across a battlefield on a mirror. It wasn’t the burden of his own funk he must carry over the plank again. It was Daddy’s. And he knew that if he broke under it once he always would.

There had been a man in the next field, turning a machine that chopped up turnips. He had been looking over the hedge wonderingly when Mummy came and pulled him blubbering from the grass. Routh knew now that it would have been no good successfully making that second crossing. For there would always have been another one. That was Daddy’s madness. But on the silent walk home, as he peeped snivelling from behind Mummy’s skirts, he saw only Daddy’s cheeks held two bright red spots. And that one of the cheeks was twitching.

It was a memory that Routh had come to fear as the entrance to a long tunnel of fantasy, worn mercilessly smooth by the constant cramped transpassage of his straightened mind. The injustices, the deprivations, the slights, the cruelties leered at him from their niches. Routh cheated, scorned, mocked, ignored – he hungered after the endless images, but feared them more than he hungered.

Always this engulfing fantasy threatened to hurl him from his safety, from his rational mind’s chosen vocation as a petty crook into some unguessable madness. To live by robbing obscure households of half a week’s pay: it was the life of measure, of dangerous pride eschewed, of due and wary regard for the gods. Routh of the indomitable will, Routh the planning animal: the danger came when these were thrust aside by the long review of Routh the victim of circumstances, Routh doomed by Daddy, Routh spitefully beaten, Routh unjustly sacked, Routh demeaned and degraded in seedy travelling companies and troops of pierrots on the sands. And as Routh recreated in himself the sense of a whole society with cruel hand outstretched and eager to pull the plug, terrifying hints of hidden and dangerous volitions rose up through his weak anger. His whole body shook like a trumpery room given over to some obscure and vicious brawl.

It trembled now so that the Douglas left a wavy track behind it. The wash of fear that had swept over him in the bank and robbed him of three pounds ten was mounting, and as it mounted was meeting some strange new chemistry full of menace. He could no longer think about the number of minutes it would take for the police to begin inquiries there behind him.

Routh swerved at the side of the road and came jolting to a stop. There was now no dissociated part of him to control the machine. His eyes were misted with tears in which his anger, his resentment, his enormous self-pity welled up and out. That he should have been baulked of three pounds ten was a wrong deeper than any plummet of his mind could sound. At the same time it was a deprivation so squalidly insignificant that the spectacle of his own helpless anger at it was unbearable. The tears released by the sorry conflict had no power to assuage, afforded no relief to the weedy figure astride the old Douglas by the roadside. That figure in its pinched and manikin stature, was too vividly before him. It seared his vanity. To banish it, to vindicate in himself the generous inches that all the world had conspired to deny: this was the claimant need of his whole being… He looked ahead up the empty road and saw the figure of a woman.

She had overtaken and passed him regardless – a girl in breeches and leggings whom one would have taken at first for a boy. She was whistling. And her whistling picked out, as with a sudden strong accent, the stillness and loneliness of the place. As he looked, the woman turned to her left and disappeared down a lane. It could be distinguished as winding between high hedged banks to a hamlet nearly two miles away. Even more than this stretch of unfrequented secondary road, it seemed a place of solitude and secrecy. Routh slipped from the saddle and pushed the Douglas behind a nearby thorn.

He turned by the sign post. It pointed to a place with a queer name – Milton Porcorum. He followed the whistling woman rapidly, exalted by the fierce purity of his intention. Beside him walked another Routh, a new and triumphant externalization, Routh gigantic and terrible. Routh the destroyer. He was ahead. Through this gap, as she came up with it, he would spring.

In fact, he slithered. It was less effective. But the woman pulled up, startled. She was older than he had thought – about thirty, with pale blue eyes and a thin, firm mouth. She was suddenly quite still. Routh gave a queer cry. At his first grab she quivered. At his second she vanished. The woman vanished and as she did so agonizing pain shot up Routh’s left arm. It was such pain that his knees crumpled beneath him. He was kneeling in mud and his head was going down into mud. He struggled and the pain sickened him.

‘Rub your nose in it.’

The voice of the woman from behind and above him carried to him inexorably his preposterous fortune. He put his face in the mud and moved it about feebly.

‘And now in a bit of gravel.’

Throbbing to quickened pain Routh was kneed and twitched across the lane. Again his face went down.

‘Rub it harder.’

The voice, mocking and excited, ended in a low laugh. Constrained by his agony, Routh did what he was told. He felt the skin of his nose and cheek go raw. He heard a quick controlled intake of breath, sensed skilled hands passing swiftly to a new hold, felt the earth drop away from him and swing back with shattering force low in the belly. For a long time he lay semi-conscious and helpless, deeper beneath his nausea than ever child sunk powerless in a chill brown pool. Through his ears passed waves of uncertain sound. It might have been the distant voices of street Arabs jeering at an abject small boy.

When at length Routh got to his feet it was early afternoon. His left arm was numb and his face felt bruised and scarified. He fingered over it tenderly with his right hand. His mind was an unfamiliar chaos. Staggering up the lane, he fumbled for a pocket mirror, and had to empty his pocket of slivers of glass. Into one of these, held up in a trembling hand, he peered apprehensively. At a first glimpse he felt a surge of mortified vanity, a fierce resentment. This was an outrage. He had been brutally assaulted. And not as in a clean row in a pub. There had been something dirty in it. What good were the police if they couldn’t keep people like that behind bars?

For a moment longer Routh stood halted in the lane, his disordered body swaying slightly as he manoeuvred the now tiny scrap of glass before his face. The damage in point of fact was inconsiderable, for his subjection had been after all chiefly symbolical. Under the mud it looked like three long scratches and one raw patch over a cheekbone. He felt a flicker of returning conceit. Wily Routh. He hadn’t rubbed his face in the gravel half as hard as he’d intended. There was some salve to injured vanity in that. But he needed water.

He realized that he was moving in the wrong direction. The two-stroke was up the lane, behind him. He was following the path that the woman must have continued on. He stopped, scared. She might come again and take him and twist him about. But something told him that the apprehension was unreal. He would not see her again. He went on, remembering that earlier he had passed no water for miles, and guessing that in a very little valley into which the lane presently dipped there would be a stream or spring.

He had come upon a high wall. Blank and curving, it followed the line of a concealed lane with which his own had now merged. It was no more than the sort of wall which, running perhaps for miles round a gentleman’s park, speaks in the simplest picture language of a vanished social order. The great house within would long since have been sold for a fraction of what it would now cost to build this massive outwork. And it would shelter a private sanatorium, an establishment for training bank clerks, an approved school. In all this there was no reason why Routh should feel himself in the presence of something indefinably sinister. Only the wall was very blank and surprisingly high.

And then Routh saw the man.

The appearance of this human figure, sudden and unaccountable, suggested a
coup de
théâtre
for which the wall’s sinister air had been a build-up deliberately achieved. At one moment the wall stretched unbroken before Routh, every foot of its well-appointed surface void in the bleak and shadowless sunlight. And at the next moment the man was there, an immobile and waiting figure some seventy yards away, with the unbroken stone behind him like a backcloth.