The Human Factor (8 page)

‘I don't know if my wife would agree.'

‘Tell her I asked you to. I leave it to her – if it's too painful . . .'

Castle turned at the door, remembering his promise. ‘Could I have a word with you about Davis, sir?'

‘Of course. What is it?'

‘He's had too long at a London desk. I think that at the first opportunity we ought to send him to Lourenço Marques. Exchange him for 69300 who must need a change of climate by now.'

‘Has Davis suggested that?'

‘Not exactly, but I think he'd be glad to get away – anywhere. He's in a pretty nervous state, sir.'

‘What about?'

‘A spot of girl trouble, I expect. And desk fatigue.'

‘Oh, I can understand desk fatigue. We'll see what we can do for him.'

‘I
am
a little anxious about him.'

‘I promise you I'll bear him in mind, Castle. By the way, this visit of Muller's is strictly secret. You know how we like to make our little boxes watertight. This has got to be your personal box. I haven't even told Watson. And you shouldn't tell Davis.'

CHAPTER II

I
N
the second week of October Sam was still officially in quarantine. There had been no complication, so one less danger menaced his future – that future which always appeared to Castle as an unpredictable ambush. Walking down the High Street on a Sunday morning he felt a sudden desire to give a kind of thanks, if it was only to a myth, that Sam was safe, so he took himself in, for a few minutes, to the back of the parish church. The service was nearly at an end and the congregation of the well-dressed, the middle-aged and the old were standing at attention, as they sang with a kind of defiance, as though they inwardly doubted the facts, ‘There is a green hill far away, without a city wall.' The simple precise words, with the single
tache
of colour, reminded Castle of the local background so often to be found in primitive paintings. The city wall was like the ruins of the keep beyond the station, and up the green hillside of the Common, on top of the abandoned rifle butts, had once stood a tall post on which a man could have been hanged. For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief – it would do no harm to mutter a prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the God of the Common and the castle, that no ill had yet come to Sarah's child. Then a sonic boom scattered the words of the hymn and shook the old glass of the west window and rattled the crusader's helmet which hung on a pillar, and he Was reminded again of the grown-up world. He went quickly out and bought the Sunday papers. The
Sunday Express
had a headline on the front page – ‘Child's Body Found in Wood'.

In the afternoon he took Sam and Buller for a walk across the Common, leaving Sarah to sleep. He would have liked to leave Buller behind, but his angry protest would have wakened Sarah, so he comforted himself with the thought that Buller was unlikely to find a cat astray on the Common. The fear was always there since one summer three years before, when providence played an ill trick by providing suddenly a picnic party among the beech woods who had brought with them an expensive cat with a blue collar round its neck on a scarlet silk leash. The cat – a Siamese – had not even time to give one cry of anger or pain before Buller snapped its back and tossed the corpse over his shoulder like a man loading a sack on to a lorry. Then he had trotted attentively away between the trees, turning his head this way and that – where there was one cat there ought surely to be another – and Castle was left to face alone the angry and grief-stricken picnickers.

In October however picnickers were unlikely. All the same Castle waited till the sun had nearly set and he kept Buller on his chain all the way down King's Road past the police station at the corner of the High Street. Once beyond the canal and the railway bridge and the new houses (they had been there for a quarter of a century, but anything which had not existed when he was a boy seemed new to Castle), he let Buller loose, and immediately, like a well-trained dog, Buller splayed out and dropped his
crotte
on the edge of the path, taking his time. The eyes stared ahead, inward-looking. Only on these sanitary occasions did Buller seem a dog of intelligence. Castle did not like Buller – he had bought him for a purpose, to reassure Sarah, but Buller had proved inadequate as a watchdog, so now he was only one responsibility more, though with canine lack of judgement he loved Castle more than any other human being.

The bracken was turning to the dusky gold of a fine autumn, and there were only a few flowers left on the gorse. Castle and Sam searched in vain for the rifle butts which had once stood – a red clay cliff – above the waste of Common. They were drowned now in tired greenery. ‘Did they shoot spies there?' Sam asked.

‘No, no. What gave you that idea? This was simply for rifle practice. In the first war.'

‘But there are spies, aren't there – real spies?'

‘I suppose so, yes. Why do you ask?'

‘I just wanted to be sure, that's all.'

Castle remembered how at the same age he had asked his father whether there were really fairies, and the answer had been less truthful than his own. His father had been a sentimental man; he wished to reassure his small son at any cost that living was worth while. It would have been unfair to accuse him of dishonesty: a fairy, he might well have argued, was a symbol which represented something which was at least approximately true. There were still fathers around even today who told their children that God existed.

‘Spies like 007?'

‘Well, not exactly.' Castle tried to change the subject. He said, ‘When I was a child I thought there was a dragon living here in an old dug-out down there among those trenches.'

‘Where are the trenches?'

‘You can't see them now for the bracken.'

‘What's a dragon?'

‘You know – one of those armoured creatures spitting out fire.'

‘Like a tank?'

‘Well, yes, I suppose like a tank.' There was a lack of contact between their two imaginations which discouraged him. ‘More like a giant lizard,' he said. Then he realized that the boy had seen many tanks, but they had left the land of lizards before he was born.

‘Did you ever see a dragon?'

‘Once I saw smoke coming out of a trench and I thought it was the dragon.'

‘Were you afraid?'

‘No, I was afraid of quite different things in those days. I hated my school, and I had few friends.'

‘Why did you hate school? Will I hate school? I mean
real
school.'

‘We don't all have the same enemies. Perhaps you won't need a dragon to help you, but I did. All the world hated my dragon and wanted to kill him. They were afraid of the smoke and the flames which came out of his mouth when he was angry. I used to steal out at night from my dormitory and take him tins of sardines from my tuck-box. He cooked them in the tin with his breath. He liked them hot.'

‘But did that
really
happen?'

‘No, of course not, but it almost seems now as though it had. Once I lay in bed in the dormitory crying under the sheet because it was the first week of term and there were twelve endless weeks before the holidays, and I was afraid of – everything around. It was winter, and suddenly I saw the window of my cubicle was misted over with heat. I wiped away the steam with my fingers and looked down. The dragon was there, lying flat in the wet black street, he looked like a crocodile in a stream. He had never left the Common before because every man's hand was against him – just as I thought they were all against me. The police even kept rifles in a cupboard to shoot him if he ever came to town. Yet there he was, lying very still and breathing up at me big warm clouds of breath. You see, he had heard that school had started again and he knew I was unhappy and alone. He was more intelligent than any dog, much more intelligent than Buller.'

‘You are pulling my leg,' Sam said.

‘No, I'm just remembering.'

‘What happened then?'

‘I made a secret signal to him. It meant “Danger. Go away,” because I wasn't sure that he knew about the police with their rifles.'

‘Did he go?'

‘Yes. Very slowly. Looking back over his tail as though he didn't want to leave me. But I never felt afraid or lonely again. At least not often. I knew I had only to give a signal and he would leave his dug-out on the Common and come down and help me. We had a lot of private signals, codes, ciphers . . .”

‘Like a spy,' Sam said.

‘Yes,' Castle said with disappointment, ‘I suppose so. Like a spy.'

Castle remembered how he had once made a map of the Common with all the trenches marked and the secret paths hidden by ferns. That was like a spy too. He said, ‘Time to be going home. Your mother will be anxious . . .'

‘No, she won't. I'm with you. I want to see the dragon's cave.'

‘There wasn't really a dragon.'

‘But you aren't quite sure, are you?'

With difficulty Castle found the old trench. The dug-out where the dragon had lived was blocked by blackberry bushes. As he forced his way through them his feet struck against a rusty tin and sent it tumbling.

‘You see,' Sam said, ‘you did bring food.' He wormed his way forward, but there was no dragon and no skeleton. ‘Perhaps the police got him in the end,' Sam said. Then he picked up the tin.

‘It's tobacco,' he said, ‘not sardines.'

That night Castle said to Sarah as they lay in bed, ‘Do you really think it's not too late?'

‘For what?'

‘To leave my job.'

‘Of course it isn't. You aren't an old man yet.'

‘We might have to move from here.'

‘Why? This place is as good as any.'

‘Wouldn't you like to go away? This house – it isn't much of a house, is it? Perhaps if I got a job abroad . . .'

‘I'd like Sam to stay put in one place so that when he goes away he'll be able to come back. To something he knew in childhood. Like you came back. To something old. Something secure.'

‘A collection of old ruins by the railway?'

‘Yes.'

He remembered the bourgeois voices, as sedate as the owners in their Sunday clothes, singing in the flinty church, expressing their weekly moment of belief. ‘A green hill far away, without a city wall.'

‘The ruins are pretty,' she said.

‘But
you
can never go back,' Castle said, ‘to your childhood.'

‘That's different, I wasn't secure. Until I knew you. And there were no ruins – only shacks.'

‘Muller is coming over, Sarah.'

‘Cornelius Muller?'

‘Yes. He's a big man now. I have to be friendly to him – by order.'

‘Don't worry. He can't hurt us any more.'

‘No. But I don't want you troubled.'

‘Why should I be?'

‘C wants me to bring him here.'

‘Bring him then. And let him see how you and I . . . and Sam . . .'

‘You agree?'

‘Of course I agree. A black hostess for Mr Cornelius Muller. And a black child.' They laughed, with a touch of fear.

CHAPTER III

1

‘H
OW
's the little bastard?' Davis asked as he had done every day now for three weeks.

‘Oh, everything's over. He's quite well again. He wanted to know the other day when you were going to come and see us. He likes you – I can't imagine why. He often talks of that picnic we had last summer and the hide-and-seek. He seems to think no one else can hide like you can. He thinks you are a spy. He talks about spies like children talked about fairies in my day. Or didn't they?'

‘Could I borrow his father for tonight?'

‘Why? What's on?'

‘Doctor Percival was in yesterday when you were away, and we got talking. Do you know, I really think they may be sending me abroad? He was asking if I'd mind a few more tests . . . blood, urine, radio of the kidneys, et cetera, et cetera. He said they had to be careful about the tropics. I liked him. He seems to be a sporting type.'

‘Racing?'

‘No, only fishing as a matter of fact. That's a pretty lonely sport. Percival's a bit like me – no wife. Tonight we thought we'd get together and see the town. I haven't seen the town for a long while. Those chaps from the Department of the Environment are a pretty sad lot. Couldn't you face being a grass widower, old man, just for one evening?'

‘My last train leaves Euston at 11.30.'

‘I've got the flat all to myself tonight. The Environment men have both gone off to a polluted area. You can have a bed. Double or single, whichever you prefer.'

‘Please – a single bed. I'm getting to be an old man, Davis. I don't know what plans you and Percival have. . .'

‘I thought dinner in the Café Grill and afterwards a spot of strip-tease. Raymond's Revuebar. They've got Rita Rolls . . .'

‘Do you think Percival likes that sort of thing?'

‘I sounded him out, and can you believe it? He's never been to a strip-tease in his life. He said he'd love to take a peek with colleagues he can trust. You know how it is with work like ours. He feels the same way. Nothing to talk about at a party for reasons of security. John Thomas doesn't even have a chance to lift his head. He's morose – that's the word. But if John Thomas dies, God help you, you might as well die too. Of course it's different for you – you are a married man. You can always talk to Sarah and . . .'