Soldier No More (13 page)

His eyes were becoming accustomed to the strange mixture of brightness from the searchlight-beam of the sun and shadow accentuated by the dark panelling, with its ghost-marks of pictures which had once hung on the walls.

Family portraits, maybe? And no prizes for guessing what had happened to them, one by one, as Mr Nigel’s horses let him down in the last furlong before the winning post, also one by one; the pictures were always the first thing to go, the easiest things to pack off to Sotheby’s and Christie’s. All that was left on the walls was a line of old photographs up the staircase, school and college groups of cricketers and oarsmen sun-bleached to pale sepia-brown; and the refectory table, which was too big to sell, and the grandfather clock in the furthest corner, silent at ten minutes to noon or midnight—had that also been too big, or not worth the trouble of selling? Or had Adolf Hitler saved the last furniture with the house by his own pre-emptive bid for Europe and all its contents in 1939?

In spite of the sunlight, the house was cool, almost chilly, he could feel its cold breath against his cheeks. It wouldn’t do to let his imagination stray too far here: reason advised him that thick walls and stone-flagged floors could hold winter all the year round when the owner was mostly absent, and fires were only lit occasionally, and that this house had been trapped in the vicious circle of such absences for a generation, so it was no wonder that its atmosphere was unwelcoming; but beneath reason he could sense an older instinct of unreason, which whispered very different rumours inside his head, of the enmity of old things to the flesh and blood of intruders like himself, and to would-be destroyers, like Mr Nigel, who had not lived to come safe home to the house he had neglected.

Of course, it was foolish to let such thoughts unnerve him; and they were only the combined product of his own disturbed emotions, and his own fascination with old buildings, and maybe too much of Ada Clarke’s rich fruit cake unsettling his digestion.

It was only an old empty house, and the afternoon sun was shining outside, and Wimpy wasn’t far away—Genghis Khan was far away, and Audley was even further, and Mr Nigel was bones in a war grave long-forgotten, and none of
them
could touch him at this moment, any more than the house itself could reach out at him.

There were doors, panelled in the panelling, ahead of him—to the right, and to the left, under the staircase—that door would lead to the cellars … to the wine-cellar, at a guess; which would be full of racks emptied, but not renewed, by Mr Nigel, for another guess … cellars full of cobwebs and the damp smell which was in his nostrils, and he certainly wasn’t about to scout around in
them
unless Wimpy was cheerfully leading the way, by God!

The door on the right didn’t look much more inviting, but there were those arched passages on each side of him which he’d half-glimpsed in the first moment after he’d ducked the sunlight, before his whole attention had been drawn up to the stained-glass coat-of-arms … one way would lead to the day rooms, most likely—the sitting room, and the library, and maybe a study; the other way to a dining room, and a breakfast room, and then the kitchen and the pantries, and the servants’ quarters; though with an old hodge-podged place like this, which already seemed vastly bigger inside than it had from the outside, full of unsuspected space, such regularity might well be a bad guess. He could only tell by looking for himself.

Left or right? Roche peered down the left-hand passage, undecided, his eye lifting to the flaking white-washed vaulting above the panelling. For sure this part of the house, which had survived the great fire on the day of Elizabeth Tudor’s death, had in any case been the older wing. Wimpy had said—

The recollection of what Wimpy had said died unthought as he turned towards the right-hand passage, which was identical with the left-hand one, except that the door at the end of it was open, and that there was someone standing in it staring at him.

Christ! He hadn’t heard that door open—there hadn’t been a sound after his own footfalls on the flagstones which had carried him through the porch and the archway of the original door into the hallway—

Christ
! He hadn’t heard that door open because it hadn’t opened: the man had been standing there, staring at him, ever since he had entered the house, watching him silently, as soundless as the house itself!

An insect crawled back up Roche’s spine as he returned the stare. This right-hand passage wasn’t exactly identical … or … or it was, but the wisteria overhung the low window recessed into the thickness of the wall on this side, deepening the shadow with a green cast.

It had to be Ada Clarke’s Charlie—it was either Ada Clarke’s Charlie or it would vanish in the instant he addressed it—

“Hullo there?” Somewhere between the intention and the final articulation the words lost their planned heartiness, and echoed hollowly down the passage instead. “Good afternoon—Mr Clarke, is it?”

That was better. The figure moved, shifting its feet so that the sound of hobnails scraping on stone released Roche from fear. Ghosts didn’t wear hobnailed boots; or, if they did, the phantom hobnails wouldn’t scrape like that; and ghosts weren’t so substantial, and Charlie Clarke was nothing if not substantial: he filled the doorway, all of six-foot-three, with long arms and huge hands in proportion.

Also, the collarless striped shirt, the Fair Isle knitted pull-over and the shapeless corduroy trousers was no uniform for any self-respecting spectre in this setting. Doublet-and-hose, or satin breeches, or even Mr Nigel’s well-pressed battle-dress—any of those might not be out of place in The Old House, but not a Fair Isle pullover. Not even the faintly green-tinged light which filtered into the passage through a window half-obscured by wisteria could make a convincing ghost of Charlie Clarke on second glance.

But if second glance stripped the supernatural from Charlie it did nothing to lessen the hostile vibrations which eddied round Roche as they stared at each other—the same sensation his sixth sense had picked up moments before, but had ascribed to the house itself. And there was something no less creepy about the sensation now that its source had become tangible: the way both Wimpy and Mrs Clarke had spoken of Charlie, the man was at best a simpleton, but at worst—
in his downhill phase
—perhaps something more dangerous. And the confirmation of that lay not only in the gorilla-length arms and meat-plate hands, but also in the way those addled brains had been able to transmit a signal before Roche had set eyes on the signaller. Which, by any standards, was strong magic to beware of, not to ignore.

“It’s ‘Charlie’, isn’t it?” said Roche tentatively. “Charlie, my name’s Roche—David Roche.” The giving of names freely was an old ritual of peaceful intentions.

The words unlocked Charlie’s legs, but not his tongue. He took two slow steps out of the doorway, and then stopped. But that short advance carried his face out of deep shadow into enough light for Roche to make out the little pig-eyes and heavy chin separated by a button nose and tiny mouth in a brick-red expanse of face. The sum total was so close to being classically oafish, if not actually brutish, with no spark of anything in the eyes, that the contrast between Charlie and his wife was not so much surprising as painful.

Roche licked his lips. “I was… I was hoping to meet Mr…
Master
…
David—your Master David, Charlie,” he lied nervously. “Is he home?”

The mention of Audley appeared to take Charlie by surprise, his eyes almost disappearing into the frown which descended on them.

Charlie took a deep breath. “Not ‘ere—“ the words came from deep down, through layers of gravel “—what are you doin’ ‘ere?”

It was a good question, but altogether unanswerable. More than ever, Roche wished that Wimpy was at his side.

“I came here with Mr Willis, Charlie.” However dim and downhill Charlie might be, he couldn’t forget Wimpy. No one could forget Wimpy, he was supremely memorable.

“You know Mr Willis, Charlie.” Whatever the Germans had done to Charlie at Dunkirk seventeen years before, they had done thoroughly. “
Major
Willis—Master David’s guardian.”

Charlie’s baffled expression cleared magically. “
Captain
Willis, you mean,” he growled.

“Captain Willis,” he agreed hastily.
Captain
Willis?

“Arrragh!” The gravel rattled in Charlie’s throat. “Captain Willis is ‘D’ Company, an’ Mr Nigel, that’s Major Audley—he’s ‘B’ Company. An’ Captain Johnson, that was Mr Johnson until just recently—‘e’s ‘A’ Company now, of course …”he nodded slowly at Roche”… an’ ‘C’ Company is…is…” the nod faded away as Charlie cast around in the lost property room of his memory, and failed to find the name of ‘C’ Company’s commanding officer, who had let him down by being unmemorable after seventeen years. “ ‘C’ Company is…” he rocked slowly from side to side “—‘A’ Company is Captain Johnson, that was Mr Johnson as was …”

Roche watched the Caliban-face twitch with the effort of putting the names of men who had most of them been dead and buried for years to formations which had long been disbanded. Someone—some irate sergeant-major or despairing corporal—had once hammered those names into Charlie’s memory so firmly that they were still there in the present tense.

“Captain Willis is out in the garden,” he nodded at Charlie.

“ ‘D’ Company—I just told you,” said Charlie irritably. Then his incongruous little mouth twisted into some sort of grin. “Get hisself killed on that motor-bike of his one of these days, ‘e will—Captain Willis, that was schoolmastering before the war broke out.” He nodded back in Roche’s direction. “That’s ‘im what learns young Master David his letters, an’ thinks the world of ‘im, like my Ada does—‘D’ Company, ‘e is.” He focussed on Roche, and frowned as though he was seeing him for the first time, but could supply no 1940 name for what he saw. “Who are you, then?”

“I’m—“ Roche stopped abruptly as the macabre reality of Charlie’s ‘downhill phase’ registered fully with him. The man was in his own private time-warp, so it seemed from all those present tenses and ‘Captain’ Willis and ‘young’ Master David.

“I’m Captain Roche, Royal Signals,” he snapped. Whatever it might mean, there was one sure way of finding out, albeit a cruel and risky one.

“Is Master David not home, Clarke?” he snapped in Captain Roche’s military voice, long disused.

Charlie’s features twitched with the effort of thinking.

“Well, Clarke?” Roche jogged him mercilessly. “Speak up!”

Charlie stiffened out of his stoop. “No, sir.”

Roche braced himself. “Is Major Audley home, then?” This time he hardly dared to watch Charlie’s face, the thoughts behind it were unguessable and didn’t bear thinking about.

“No, sir,” said Charlie. “Haven’t seen him today, sir.” God, it was true! One end of this interrogation stood in 1957, but the other was trapped in 1940, with no years in-between! And, what was worse—Roche’s flesh crawled at the possibility—was
Haven
’
t seen him today, sir
…. How many times did Charlie catch sight of his Mr Nigel, and the other ghosts of Mr Nigel’s time, drifting round The Old House? But he had work to do now, in 1957.

“Hmmmm …” Captain Roche’s simulated annoyance almost choked him. “I was hoping to catch one of them, damn it!” He frowned at Charlie, whose face had settled into blank immobility. What business Captain Roche had with Mr Nigel and Master David was none of Fusilier Clarke’s business.

And yet it was in that private area that the work had to be done. “
Hmmm
…
Seems to me, Clarke, that the Major doesn’t hit it off very well with his son—am I right?” he said briskly.

Charlie started twitching again. “Sir?” The gravel reduced the word to a croak.

“Mr Nigel and Master David—why don’t they get on? Speak up, man! Don’t pretend you don’t know!”

Charlie’s mouth opened and shut, and his head jerked from side to side, and his eyes rolled and ended up staring past Roche, over Roche’s shoulder to the line of ancestral photographs running up the staircase as though he was pleading with them to come to his assistance.

“Come on, Clarke—you can tell me. I’m a friend of the family, you know.”

“
And so you are
!” The voice came from the doorway on Roche’s right, just out of his vision, and it was Wimpy’s.

“So you are, my dear fellow—a good friend of the family!” said Wimpy genially. “Afternoon, Fusilier Clarke.” The geniality remained, but there was iron beneath the velvet. “You cut along back to your billet now and have your tea, and I’ll talk to you later—right? Oh … and there’s a bit of a mess on the road, you’d better clear that up smartly or sar-major will see it, and then there’ll be hell to pay, I shouldn’t wonder. Right?”

“Sir!” Charlie’s hobnails cracked to attention on the flagstones. “Sir!”

Wimpy nodded. “Off you go then, Clarke.”

Only after Charlie had departed did Wimpy move again, and then he circled Roche, ignoring him and breathing in The Old House’s damp smell half-critically and half as though it was doing him a power of good.

“Well, old boy …” Wimpy didn’t look at him “… you took a bit of a risk there, didn’t you!”

“I did?” Ignorance was never an excuse, but it was all he had to offer.

Wimpy nodded at the line of photographs. “Big chap, Charlie Clarke… Seen him lift a five-hundredweight truck to save his mates popping the jack under the rear wheel, to change it—Charlie’s only party trick, you might say … We had two like him in the battalion, with too few brains and too much brawn—never should have been recruited, except maybe into the Pioneers … I had one of them in my company, ‘Batty’ they called him, because of the way he’d run amok. But he was killed in France in ‘40.”

Roche watched Wimpy sigh, and was grateful for the past tense: at least both of them were together in 1957 now, however uncomfortable the next few minutes might be!

“The other one was Charlie, in Jerry Johnson’s company—General Sir Gerald Johnson as he is now—and Fusilier Charlie Clarke as
he
is still… they were both lucky, after a fashion, anyway.” He looked at Roche at last, but bleakly. “They both survived, that is—Jerry to prosper in his chosen profession, and Charlie … after Dunkirk … to be Charlie, only less so at intervals—to be Charlie in 1940,
before
Dunkirk, as you have discovered, Captain Roche, eh?”