The old cliche of mist enshrouding the landscape was peculiarly apt. The absence of bird song in the country is more sepulchral than a churchyard. There was only the irregular crunch of shoes and stick on the road surface. I cursed Harry again for robbing me of my gun.
I reached the farm entrance where the milk churns waited to be collected. Ahead, in normal visibility, I would have seen the house and other buildings instead of just the blanched, overhanging hedgerow festooned with cobwebs and droplets of moisture.
I limped into the yard, my eyes compensating in mobility for my legs.
I stood for a moment scanning the gray buildings for a movement, reminded of the day when Duke and Harry had driven the jeep in there, with me in the back, triumphant, but nervous about the outcome until Barbara, radiant, her black hair springing against the white sweater, had stepped from the house and smiled.
I bit back my thoughts and approached the farmhouse.
My knock was answered by George Lockwood. Twenty years can render dramatic changes in a face. His was little altered. Some extra gaps among the teeth, a slightly more hollow look to the cheekbones, but the left eye still had its bloodshot wedge, and the eyebrows were as dark as formerly, though the rest of his hair had whitened.
He said nothing. He assessed me. The look was steady, interested, unsurprised. He knew me. He might even have expected me.
I explained superfluously, “I called on Sunday, hoping to see you and Mrs. Lockwood. I’m Theo Sinclair,”
He nodded. At least I was understood.
“May I come in?”
The focus of his eyes altered. He looked past me, taking in the yard.
I told him, “I’m alone this time.”
He stepped back from the door, leaving it open, and turned and shuffled along the passage.
I followed, closing the door after me.
The smell of baking wafted to me with the pungent, remembered odor of the house, the mustiness of old carpets and ancient stone. More evocative still, I heard Mrs. Lock-wood’s small, muted voice ask, “Who is it, George?” Then I entered the kitchen, and as she saw me she said, “Theo, my dear!” and opened her arms for me to embrace her.
She’d altered more than her husband, shed most of the stoutness of her middle years, and acquired a network of wrinkles that gave her a depressed look when the smile receded. Arthritis had begun to deform her finger joints. She wore her hair, now silver-white, in the same severe style, scraped back from the forehead and fastened above the neck.
She said, “You can still find room for a plateful of fresh-baked scones, I reckon.”
“Emphatically.” More of a welcome than last time, I thought. Casually, I asked, “Where’s Bernard this morning?”
“Plowing. He’ll come by presently.”
I tried not to register panic at the prospect.
So the three of us sat around the old-fashioned wooden table and ate hot scones with strawberry jam and drank tea from the brown pot simmering on the range while I told them what I’d done with my life since 1944. In a few, crisp sentences.
“And what brings you back?” Mrs. Lockwood asked.
“Duke Donovan’s daughter persuaded me to bring her here on Sunday. We met Bernard.”
“I heard.”
“Didn’t have the good fortune to see you, though, so I came back.”
George Lockwood now found his voice and used it ex-pressively, on a rising note of disbelief. “Donovan had a daughter?”
“Bernard told us,” Mrs. Lockwood reminded him quite sharply, adding, with a confidential smile in my direction, “Father’s not so quick on the uptake as he were.”
“Didn’t know he were married,” persisted George.
“George,” said Mrs. Lockwood in a hard-pressed, discouraging voice. Turning to me, she switched to a more generous note. “Theo, my dear, have some more butter on that. ‘Tisn’t the war now, you know.”
I took the butter dish and said, “Duke Donovan’s daughter, Alice, believes her father was innocent.”
“What do she know about it?” said George, not so tardy on the uptake as his wife alleged.
“She’s not the only one,” I said. “Do you remember Harry Ashenfelter, the other GI?”
Behind me, a new voice said, “What about Ashenfelter?” Bernard’s.
I don’t know how he’d managed to enter so quietly or how long he’d been there while his parents talked on, buttering their scones and registering nothing. It shook me, literally. I spilled tea on my trousers. I turned and looked into the twin barrels of the shotgun.
“Sit down, Bernard,” said his mother placidly. “It’s only Theo, come to see us.”
“For no good purpose,” said Bernard, inching the gun towards my eyes. “He’s coming with me.”
Mother and son faced each other across the room, mentally squaring up. Once, I’d have backed Mrs. Lockwood. Her small voice was misleading. She possessed a steely personality with the will to enforce it, as I’d discovered painfully during the war when I learned the secondary purpose of the mangle. In those days she’d been more than a match for Bernard, large as he was. He’d always backed off. Twenty years on, I wasn’t so confident. Bernard’s status had altered. He was the farmer now.
To his credit, George Lockwood sided with his wife and spoke up. “What’s got into ‘ee today?” he demanded of Bernard. “We don’t carry guns in this house.”
Bernard said in a low, level voice that conceded nothing, “If the bastard do what I say, there won’t be no shooting indoors.” He kicked my leg hard. “Get up!”
Mrs. Lockwood scraped back her chair and slapped her gnarled right hand on the table. “Bernard, this is no way to deal with it.”
“Mother,” said Bernard in the same tightly controlled voice, “you’d best not interfere.” This time he jabbed the muzzle of the gun hard against my throat. “Out.”
The neck is a vulnerable area. There isn’t much flesh to absorb such a thrust. The pain was intense, but the effect on my windpipe was worse. I hawked and gulped for breath. It was like drowning, gasping for air that couldn’t reach my lungs. As I rocked forward I felt one of Bernard’s hands across the breadth of my forehead, forcing it back and upward, compelling me to rise. He virtually picked me off the chair one-handedly and stood me up. I was propped against the table facing him, spluttering wretchedly.
From behind me, I heard Mrs. Lockwood repeat, more as a plea than a command, “Bernard, this isn’t the way,” and through my discomfort I concluded that this was the limit of her protest.
I was mistaken. She was out of her chair in the next second and round the table wrestling with him for the gun. He easily could have knocked her down, but he simply gripped the stock with one hand and the twin barrels with the other, and resisted.
They persevered with this unequal struggle for perhaps a quarter of a minute, until she gave up the attempt and settled instead for keeping a token handhold on the gun, shouting bitterly at her husband. “Can’t you do nothing but sit there?”
I suspect that George Lockwood knew his son was physically more than a match for them both. He didn’t stir from his seat at the table.
By now you’re thinking what about Theo Sinclair? What was he doing to support the old lady and help himself? But you’ve got to remember the situation I was in. The shotgun was still a matter of inches from my chest. There wasn’t anything I could usefully do except try to appease Bernard. I found sufficient breath to gasp, “All right, All go. I’m on the way out.”
Bernard commented, “Too bloody true.”
He’d given my words an ugly twist, turning them into a threat that I didn’t seriously believe. I’d never rated him as a likely killer. He was dangerous because the shotgun was a lethal weapon, but I doubted whether he was sufficiently passionate or stupid to kill a man willfully.
So I made an appeal to his better nature. Leaning heavily on my stick, that old friend in adversity, I picked my
