Rule Britannia (15 page)

“Ah, darling, there you are,” she said as Emma entered. Wally Sherman sprang to his feet. “It was so very kind of Lieutenant Sherman to call and enquire after me. I’ve been telling him our troubles. Poor darling Terry in hospital with a broken leg, and all because he was waiting at the gate for the doctor to arrive. I feel so terribly to blame. But apparently they have troubles of their own down at the camp. That nice Corporal Wagg who was in the stables last weekend has disappeared, never returned to camp last night, and Lieutenant Sherman wondered if any of us had seen him. I asked him to wait until you got back.”

“Corporal Wagg?” Emma shook her head. “No. He hasn’t been here since they all went off on Tuesday. Wasn’t he down on Poldrea beach the evening of the firework display? I have a feeling I saw him then. You remember, I was with you at the time.”

She looked across at Wally Sherman. He had the grace to show faint signs of discomfort.

“Sure,” he said, “I remember. Corporal Wagg was on the beach with the girl from the farm, Myrtle Trembath. We’ve made enquiries at the farm but nothing doing.” He turned to the recumbent figure on the sofa. “Look, ma’am, I don’t want to bother you with all this, especially as you’ve not been well, and you have the added anxiety of the boy in hospital. Perhaps Miss Emma…?”

He looked to Emma for help, and as he turned his head towards her she caught the imperceptible nod from her grandmother. The nod suggested, “You’re on your own.”

Emma smiled. “Of course,” she said. “If there’s anything I can do please say so. Come into the other room and we’ll have some coffee. Will you be all right, darling? Do you want me to get you anything?”

The invalid shook her head. “Don’t worry about me.” She patted the sofa for Folly to struggle up beside her. “The aged pair will look after each other,” she added, smiling at the lieutenant. “We’ll probably both take a nap before lunch. My son may be down this evening and I have to be in good form for him.”

Emma and her companion left the room and Wally Sherman turned to Emma.

“How bad is she?” he asked. “She sure looks pale. Did you have to send for family?”

“My father is rather worried,” confessed Emma. “He’s coming down through the night, or so I understood over the telephone.”

“I guess she ought to be hospitalized,” said the lieutenant.

“Oh, no… one of the household is enough. Such a chapter of accidents, it never ends. What is it actually about Corporal Wagg? Missing, did you say?”

They had passed into the dining room. It was laid for two. Emma wondered if Wally Sherman thought it odd that an elderly woman who had suffered a heart attack should be thinking of sitting down to lunch.

“Well, that’s what I didn’t want to say in front of your grandmother,” he said. “The fact is, we have reason to believe the corporal was intending to call here yesterday, in the late afternoon, at least according to Myrtle Trembath. He did have a word with her, you see. We’ve established that.”

“I must be crazy.” Emma smote her forehead. “What can you think of me?” she asked. “I remember now, but what with the worry over my grandmother and then with the doctor knocking down Terry, the whole thing went out of my mind. Of course, yes. Myrtle telephoned me, soon after the doctor had carted off poor Terry, to say Corporal Wagg wanted to see Terry, and I told her it was no use, he wouldn’t be here, he would be in hospital. Then I think I lay down in the music room and had a rest, I’d been on the go all day, and, frankly, forgot all about the telephone call until this moment. Anyway, he never turned up. He must have changed his mind.”

“I guess he did,” said the lieutenant. “I’ve already asked your Joe, and the two other lads, who were in the vegetable plot at the back of your house, and none of them saw him. Well, I guess it’s not your problem. We’ll have to make enquiries round the whole district. It’s possible he took a walk after leaving the farm, and twisted his ankle or something, but that’s very remote, and anyway we’ve got a chopper up looking, they’ll report if there’s a sign of anything.” He began walking back towards the hall.

“Coffee?” Emma asked.

“No, I must get going. Thanks all the same. Oh, by the way, what is the name of the old boy who lives in a shack in your wood? I thought I’d check with him before reporting back to base.”

“Mr. Willis,” said Emma. “He’s a bit of a recluse.”

The door of the music room had come ajar—Folly had pushed it open with her nose.

“What’s that about Mr. Willis?” called Mad from the sofa. She seemed to be struggling to her feet.

“Don’t move, ma’am,” cried the lieutenant. “I just had the idea I’d call on your tenant and ask if by any chance he had seen the corporal yesterday.”

“He’s not strictly my tenant,” replied Mad, lying back against the cushions, “but such a dear. He has a wonderful voice, you know, and used to sing in a choir. He’s been retired for some years but I think he had connections with the Presbyterian church. Em darling, why don’t you go down with Lieutenant Sherman and see if Mr. Willis is at home? There’s plenty of time before lunch.”

Emma got the message. By playing go-between she might avert possible danger. On the other hand, she might walk into it. The beachcomber, despite his invaluable assistance the night before, was of unknown caliber where lying was concerned. Taffy was a Welshman… Taffy was a thief… Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of beef.

“If he’d like me to go with him, of course,” she said.

“Like it,” said Wally Sherman, as they walked across the orchard a few moments later. “I didn’t dare hope I’d be this lucky. Know something?” He smiled down at Emma. “Your grandmother is on our side.”

Our side… The path we’re going to descend together was where the beachcomber walked last night, carrying the dead corporal trussed in sacking. If you look over your shoulder, Wally Sherman, you’ll see where Andy shot the corporal dead. Oh please, God, let everything be all right…

“Once things settle down,” Wally Sherman was saying, and he would hold on to her arm, which made walking more difficult, “you and I are really going to get acquainted. Would you slap my face if I asked how old you are?”

“Twenty.”

“I can give you five years. You don’t look it, you know. You’re more like sweet seventeen. The trouble with our girls back home is they’re all spoiled.”

The trouble with me at the moment is that when we cross the stile and walk along the cliff path we might see the corporal’s body lying there on the shore, or splayed out among the seaweed on the rocks at the far end, because the tide’s going out and it won’t be low water before one o’clock, judging by what Jack Trembath said last night, and if we see the body lying there then I can’t cope anymore, I shan’t know what to say, what to do…

“I don’t ask you to believe me,” Wally Sherman was saying, “but that very first day I met you, after the landing, when Colonel Cheeseman and I came to your house to fix up about a communications post, I said to myself, “That girl is really something, and you’ll have to look a long while before you find another like her.’ ”

Emma did not answer. They were drawing nearer to the stile. If I play along with him, she thought, ten to one it will mean another clinch in the woods and I just can’t take it, but if I give the brush-off he’ll be hurt, he might even turn sour. None of this would matter if he wasn’t one of them, if the helicopter wasn’t scanning the sea out there beyond the point.

“I haven’t scared you, have I?” he asked, putting up his hands to jump her over the stile.

She was reminded of an illustration in an old Edwardian novel in the bookshelf at home, where a young man in hunting costume, twisting his mustache, was asking the young woman of his choice, “Have I done anything to offend you, Nellie?” The only reply was to turn his query into one of her own.

“No, of course you don’t scare me,” she said, “but I think you ought to realize that a great many of us in the neighborhood, perhaps throughout the country, are in a state of shock. I’m not talking about personal affairs, my grandmother, Terry, but about what all of you have done by just appearing among us, setting up barricades, that warship at anchor there in the bay. The circumstances just aren’t normal, for you, for me, for any of us.”

“I know, I know,” he said, “you’re so right,” and he looked suddenly vulnerable, like one of their own boys, Joe, Terry, even Andy. He helped her over the stile (unnecessary, she usually vaulted it), and they walked down to the cliff path in silence.

“There are my chaps,” he said suddenly, “down there on the beach.”

Her heart jumped, as she saw two of the marines poking about among the seaweed. Wally Sherman put up his hands and hailed them. They looked up, and raised their hands in a negative gesture.

“I’m going along to the woods,” he shouted. “Meet you back here in about a half hour. Nothing so far.”

Supposing, she thought, the beachcomber had gone out? Supposing Wally Sherman wants to break into the hut on his own? Supposing there is something there? A sick feeling of apprehension returned. The responsibility seemed overwhelming. She musn’t let him sense this, she must keep up a pretence of calm.

“I still don’t see,” she said, “why Corporal Wagg couldn’t have gone in quite another direction, after leaving the farm. Mightn’t he have taken a walk inland, for instance, or gone into St. Austell, or along the coast the other side of the bay?”

“He’d have checked in at the roadblocks,” replied the lieutenant. “We have barricades on the road to St. Austell, and along the coast road too. We’ve tried these. No, that’s the puzzle. The Trembath girl at the farm was the last to see him. At least, as far as we know. I’m just hoping your old recluse in the woods may give us a lead.”

They came to the edge of the wood and climbed through the opening the further side of the hedge. The trees closed in upon them.

“Someone’s been along here,” he said. “Those are footprints in the mud, though it rained plenty in the night.”

“It’s always muddy here,” she told him. “People come up from the cottages a mile or so away to look for kindling. You see, it’s a sort of no man’s land. It belongs to nobody, there are endless legal arguments about it.”

“Spooky sort of place,” he said. “I guess you don’t come here on your own by night?”

He squeezed her arm. She prayed for patience, and for courage too. The roof of the hut appeared through the trees. A thin wreath of smoke was coming from the chimney.

“I’d say the old boy was at home, wouldn’t you?” asked Wally Sherman.

Emma halted before they reached the clearing. “Look, we can’t frighten him, poor dear. He does at least know me. Shall I go ahead and knock on the door, and then you follow?”

“Okay.”

Emma advanced through the clearing. The door was firmly shut. She knocked, but there was no answering shout. She remembered that Mr. Willis had seemed a little deaf, and nervously, reluctantly, she moved round the hut to the window at the side and peered through. The interior looked different somehow, viewed from this angle, or possibly what furniture she remembered from yesterday had been moved. The bed Terry had lain in was against the further wall, and the table too. There was an old-fashioned tin bath in the center of the room and Mr. Willis was standing in it, wearing only a pair of underpants, his torso nude. He was scrubbing himself with what looked like a brush. The sight, which, had the little boys been with her, would have brought instant mockery and stifled laughter, struck her, at this particular moment, as painful, and in a peculiar way horrific; here was an old man, barely known to her, who had committed a dangerous act for all their sakes, being spied upon within his own four walls, believing himself safe, alone; and to burst in upon him suddenly, while he was washing, was like breaking into his thoughts, known only to himself, close-guarded.

Timidly, she tapped the window. Her shadow must have warned him, more than the sound, for he looked up startled, the eyes without spectacles wide open, alarmed, and with a protective gesture he hunched his lean shoulders, clasping the scrubbing-brush against his belly. It’s no good, thought Emma, one hasn’t the right, and she turned away from the window, shaking her head at the lieutenant, gesturing with her hand.

“What’s wrong?” he called softly. “Isn’t he at home?”

That was the trouble. He was at home. The squatter’s hut, the four walls, the plain interior, the tin bath upon the floor belonged to the beachcomber alone. Nobody else had any rights. Least of all the lieutenant, waiting there under the trees. Why am I making such an issue of this, she wondered?

“He’s home,” she called back, “but we can’t go in. He’s taking a bath.”

Wally Sherman laughed. “Is that it? I thought he was hanging from a beam at least by the expression on your face. I’ll go.”

“No,” said Emma, “no… wait.” She went back to the door and knocked again. This time the summons was answered. The door opened and Mr. Willis appeared on the threshold. He wore a towel round his waist covering his underpants, and had put on a long cotton vest. “Who is it?” he asked. Then recognition came. The startled expression went, but his face remained guarded, curious.

“They’re looking for the corporal,” whispered Emma, “been to the farm and our place. Asked us who lived here. I told your name, offered to show the way. Officer suspects nothing.”

Mr. Willis nodded. He narrowed his eyes, peering towards the trees. “Would you mind if I fetched my spectacles?” he said. “I see very little without them. I was just taking a bath, you see, I’m not dressed for a visit.” He spoke up so that the lieutenant could hear. He waved a hand in his direction. “Please to walk in,” he called. “Excuse my appearance. It’s bath day and washing day all in one for me.”

He vanished into the interior and Emma waited for her companion.

“You go in,” she told him, “I’d better wait outside.”

Wally Sherman lowered his head and passed inside the door, winking at Emma. It isn’t funny, though, she thought, it isn’t funny… She thrust her hands in her pockets and stared around her. The vegetable plot in the clearing was carefully raked. He had winter greens there, and brussels sprouts, and in the far corner a compost heap, mostly seaweed. He had been burning dead leaves, too, and what looked like an old sack. A sack…