He was now peering through the gap in the curtains at the window that overlooked the fields. He turned to me, and said, ‘Drink up, Usher’s coming. You can go out by the way you came in.’
‘Now hold on,’ I said. ‘We can face him down together.’
Lambert smiled and shook his head.
‘A small chance remains that he and I might reach an accommodation, but there’ll be no chance of it if we have company.’
And there was somehow nothing else for it. I would leave, and I would return directly with the Chief. If I was too late, then it was too bad.
Lambert walked towards the far door. He unbolted it, stepped into the back garden and, as I quit the room by the front door, I heard him say ‘Hello again’ in a fascinating, dead tone. There was some smooth answering murmur from Usher, and then Lambert said, ‘Look — let’s talk out here in the garden. It’s pleasant here, don’t you think?’
I stepped through the front door, and there stood the wife, kicking her heels.
‘This way,’ I said, indicating the most direct route towards the woods, and she stood still for a moment, just to show that she would not take any more orders from me.
I waited for her at the railing that bordered the woods. I had managed the angle so that we could not be seen from the rear of the gardener’s cottage, and the wife had followed my footsteps very precisely along the scorched grass, although keeping at twenty yards’ distance.
‘And are you any the wiser?’ she said, looking at the sporting cap, which I had fixed back on my head.
The railing stood between us.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Come out of the grounds.’
‘You left in a tearing hurry,’ she said.
‘Usher came up to the cottage by the back way. The two of them are talking in the garden now.’
‘I think you should have stood your ground. If you’re dead set on filling up our week-end with this business you should go about it properly.’
I made no reply.
‘You’re scared of that man Usher, why don’t you admit it?’ she said, climbing over the railing.
I put out my hand to help her.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she said, and struck out for the main woodland track.
Now it was my turn to follow her at a distance.
‘Do you want to know what all those papers of Lambert’s are about?’ I called after her.
No answer. She walked on with swishing skirts.
‘It’s the mobilisation of the British Army,’ I said.
The wife said nothing to that, but I knew by the change that had overcome her walk that she was impressed.
Chapter Nineteen
We tramped on through the woods.
We’d missed the best route back to the village, but I knew the general direction. Sometimes I walked ahead, sometimes the wife. Sometimes we walked parallel on separate narrow tracks through the trees. Every so often the wife would shoot a look of fury at me, and at my green sporting cap in particular.
As we walked on, I thought of the timetable clerks at the Company offices in York, who worked amid heaps of graphs and diagrams and maps and were considered the brightest sparks of the place, while the men in charge of them were the leading intellects of all. John Lambert was evidently one of the men in charge of the men in charge. He would have the brains to overturn a conviction for murder. If he spoke out against a hanging, people would listen. But who did he plan to speak out to?
Was Usher the man? Or was he out to silence Lambert?
I’d read in the railway papers of the mobilisation schemes, but the subject was always very cagily approached: ‘It is likely that plans are in hand…’; ‘It would be expected that at such a critical time…’
I glanced again towards the wife.
It was crazy to be rowing, for we’d struck a business of the very gravest sort. Everything, from the Moroccan crisis to the women’s question to the strikes and riots flaring all across the country — it was all wrapped up in the War Question. France had been the enemy for a while (there always had to be one), but the French had given way to the Germans, who fitted the part much better. You didn’t hear much about Anglo-German friendship any more. Instead, it was all war talk — and war talk and railway talk overlapped more and more. I’d heard of a scheme to connect the barracks at Aldershot with East Anglia without going through London. Get the regular army out fast — push ’em out through the Essex ports. But there was more to the planning than that. The whole question had to be looked at contrariwise as well: you’d need a programme for getting the troops into defensive positions in the event of invasion, and another for bringing back the dead or injured — a scheme for hospital trains. You knew the planning went on, and all you could do was trust that it was being done well.
But for all that, the row with the wife was just as strong in my thoughts. It was hardly our first one. We had small ones regularly about the late hours I was called on to work. It all boiled down to the demands the Chief placed upon me, which the wife did not understand. The Chief’s wife seemed to stand anything; he lived his whole life in a man’s world.
‘I’m sorry I packed you off,’ I called to her through the trees, after twenty minutes or so.
‘You did not pack me off,’ she called back, crashing through some ferns. ‘I chose to leave.’
‘Well, I’m sorry that I made you choose to leave then,’ I said. ‘I just think it was a bit of a distraction to start telling him that you couldn’t use a railway timetable.’
‘Credit me with some intelligence, please. I wanted to keep him talking,’ said the wife.
‘Funny way of going about it,’ I said, ‘… by talking yourself.’
‘I had the idea that I was on the verge of a discovery.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, get back in your box,’ she said. ‘And take that flipping cap off.’
‘I will not,’ I said. Indicating a path, I stopped and said to the wife, ‘After you.’
‘Stow it,’ she snapped back, but she led off in the direction I’d shown her.
The woods gave out and a cricket ground came into view. The pavilion put me in mind of a white wooden railway station. At one end of the ground stood three tall poplars, and they might have been giant wickets, only they stood some way beyond the boundary. The wicket was a strip of especially bright green light.
I followed the wife along the lane that bounded the pitch, which turned out to connect with the second village green of Adenwold. We walked past the silent churchyard, the shops and cottages, and began drifting along the hedge-tunnel, where the bees whirred as they worked the great green walls. The neglected ladder remained in place, looking very forlorn, for the hedge could grow and it could not.
I heard what might have been a motor-car in the far distance, and stopped to try and make out the sound, but the wife kept walking, drawing her straw hat against the left-hand hedge, and taking down her hair, which you would have thought a complicated business but which she accomplished with two impatient strokes of her right hand. When she took her hair down, that always meant she was going off into her own world.
As we trudged on past the station yard, the hour chimes from the church floated up, the bell toiling with great effort, as though climbing a steep hill to the maximum number: twelve o’clock. Hugh Lambert had forty-four hours left; his brother possibly fewer still. The train that might bring the Chief was due in twenty-seven minutes’ time. I called up to the wife: ‘I’m off to meet the train in. I’ll come up, presently.’
But she just walked on towards The Angel.
I crossed the station yard, and walked up onto the ‘up’, where a smell of white-wash, combined with the great heat of the day, made me feel faint. The whole of the platform seemed to tilt for a moment and the signal box lurched.
The signalman was up there, leaning on his balcony. Eddie by name. He appeared to be grinning down at the porter, Woodcock, who sat on the fancy bench smoking, and looking at a pot of white-wash set down by the
