Paid and Loving Eyes

problem, no? So your spy-master has an innocent parlour game distributed to secret sympathizers. They look like partially painted mica slices sort of, with roman numerals on each transparency. The secret sympathizers—Royalist, Parliamentarian, whatever—going about their daily business would receive an innocent letter for birthday greetings, some such, bearing a date or some numeral. The sympathizer hastens to the children’s nursery for a merry game of Appearances, and casually notes the matching numbered slice. He superimposes it on the miniature portrait, and finds himself now staring at… at a middle-aged woman pedlar! Get it? He now knows that the next secret messenger must be of that description. They were Flemishmade, usually, and are unbelievably rare. I’d only ever seen one complete set before, and that was on a BBC Antiques Roadshow, where the expert didn’t know what they were for and thought them a simple entertainment. Some entertainment!

But.

This pack I’d actually heard of before. They’d been sold at a local auction a year since. I’d missed them by a whisker, arrived too late to bid. Tinker told me they’d gone to some French bloke who lived near Ladyham. For a fortune.

Had Baff pulled the breakdowner on Troude? And been exterminated for his pains? From then till six o’clock in the morning I sat and thought. And thought.

Then I cast caution to the winds, walked up the lane to the phone by the chapel and phoned Almira.

“It’s me, love,” I told her. “Let’s go.”

“Oh!” she said, brightly gathering her wits. Somebody was with her. “Very well, ah, Claudine. I’ll come right over.”

Two hours later, I was shivering in the minutest aerodrome you ever did see, at Earls Colne. We flew in a thing called a Piper Saratoga, which looked like a sparrow that had swallowed a watch. I closed my eyes, and dozed through a flight, a landing, an interminable drive, and finally came to a rest where oblivion awaited between clean white sheets. It was broad daylight everywhere except in my head.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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Opposites aren’t. I always find this. Murder, when you go into it, tries to be something else, like unwonted killing, not quite murder as such. Motive’s the same; it isn’t anything like an explanation. The only two things that stay what they start out are love and hate. They’re white-hot hundred-per-centers, complete of themselves. Idyll therefore is not idyllic. I could have told Almira that, if she wasn’t a woman and therefore likely to laugh at whatever I said. It’s the way they are.

So, in lovely France, in a pleasant house miles from anywhere, with two lovely ponds in the lovely garden, not another building to be seen from the lovely stone terrace, lovely herbaceous borders to gladden the eye, lovely exciting Almira for the one lovely exciting essential, and lovely food baked or whatever by unseen hands below stairs, I was utterly bored sick. If heaven’s like this, I thought, screaming inside.

That fourth day in France was the real landmark. I woke up, came to. Almira was lying beside me on the bed. The house was an odd shape. The main bedroom had the disconcerting feature of being open to the rest of the house, so when you turned on your side you could see down into the hallway and part of the living room. If a door to the left was ajar you could also see the feet of an elderly lady called Madame Raybaud who cooked and gave instructions about where things had to be left. She went berserk when I moved a bag of groceries half an inch. Centimetre.

The place was silent, except for Almira’s gentle breaths whoofing on my shoulder. It was early afternoon. You’ve to go to sleep after noon grub for about an hour. You get used to it, but it’s a terrible waste of effort. I lay on my back, sweating from the heat, and gazed at the ceiling. Shadows on the plaster walls, a portrait of the Madonna, a crucifix, not much furniture, though some quite old, of local rusticity that I liked.

Almira turned over. The thick fluffy mattress clung to you for dear life whatever you did, but me and Almira had conquered that by compelling passion. She was good, vibrant, desirous, didn’t simply lie there waiting for you to get active. She joined in with an eagerness I’d come to relish. Mind you, I relish inert birds too, so there’s no means of telling which is best. I looked at her sleeping form, and felt a warmth that shouldn’t be there. Birds get into you, and then you’re helpless. I’m not afraid of commitment, no. How could a bloke like me be scared of loving one bird for life, to the exclusion? I’m decisive, sure, definite. It’s my character.

The window shutters looked simple but had a folklore all their own. Simple hooks got you mad by staying hooked just as you thought, here comes daylight and a vision of the valley. I wrestled silently with the damned things, finally got them open enough to see out. Windows are for looking from, not blocking up.

Our house was a size, on the shoulder of a vale with a river coursing below. No anglers that I could see. Back home they’d be out in droves with coloured umbrellas and odd hats and flasks, murdering minnows. No other farmhouses. Small fields, I noticed, no cattle in them to speak of. Where the hell did Madame Raybaud hail from? She came on a bike. It made me smile, thinking of Forna’s cousin. She’d have to wait for her fee now.

There’s nothing to see in countryside, is there, so I leaned on the sill, thinking of Baff. East Anglia was as depressingly rural as this, so possibly not far away out there an assortment of strange characters lurked possibly as exotic as ours. Was there a Dicko Chave, perfect gentleman, proposing to any bird who stood still long enough? A Sherry, giving exciting welcomes to hotel guests for a consideration? Glass faker-makers like Phoebe Colonna and Steve Yelbard? Did Gallic versions of Gazza’s Tryste Service trundle these dusty lanes, bearing Dianas to some costly nocturnal lust? I found myself shivering, don’t know why, chucked trousers on and padded downstairs.

The terrace was a longish paved area under vines and clematis, between foliage that fell away down the hillside. No definite edge to the garden that I could see. It blended with scrub. Lazy smoke rose from the greenery. Did we have beavering gardeners as well as a cook? We were complete, a nuclear family or something. I looked at my feet. Very odd, but the strangely new slippers fit me. I’d tugged them on without thought. These trousers weren’t mine. They were new. I’d brought nothing except what I’d worn when, practically walking in my sleep, I’d stepped out of Almira’s motor. She’d brought none of my things, silly cow. That’s the trouble with women, never… never…

Some fault in the logic halted me. I sat on the wall at the end of the terrace. Nobody’d know I was here. No phone, no nearby village. I’d walked along the lane for a couple of miles, finding only a couple of cottages set back from the verge, orchards, a field or two, woods. It was picturesque rural tranquillity at its most poisonously repellent.