The Hour of the Donkey

'You took the baby, Harry—what's the difference taking the child?'

Bastable blinked at him. 'I ... I couldn't leave the baby—on the road . . . ' He trailed off, baulking at the truth.

'Then you can't leave her— here.' Wimpy gestured round the attic. 'What'll happen to her if our chaps counter-attack again? For God's sake, Harry—what'll happen if they don't counter-attack, come to that? Do you want to leave her behind?'

Whatever they did would be wrong. To stay here was out of dummy4

the question. But to take her with them ... or to leave her behind . . . each of those alternatives was equally monstrous, the way Wimpy had put them to him. If there had been no Germans outside he would surely have reversed his argument, but so long as there were Germans to be bamboozled the child wasn't an encumbrance—she was the best part of their disguise.

And Wimpy was right, of course—as always.

But that didn't make it right—

'Harry ...' Their eyes met, and Bastable understood that Wimpy already knew exactly what he was doing, and why he was doing it, and the price of the doing. 'Remember the Brigadier, Harry. We've still got a job to do— remember?'

Bastable remembered, and was ashamed and angry with himself.

He had forgotten again. He had been so busy saving his own skin, so preoccupied with his own fears, he had forgotten that the mischief the false Brigadier could do far outweighed this little life in his arms, however defenceless and innocent.

'I'll go first,' said Wimpy.

'No—' It was all academic, anyway. He couldn't stay here, and he couldn't prise the limpet loose.

'Yes.' Wimpy swivelled awkwardly beside the trap-door opening, and sank to his knees above the top step. 'I'll have to go down backwards ... my bloody ankle, and all that.'

Bastable watched him descend on hands and knees, towards dummy4

the curtain at the bottom of the steep stair, and was doubly ashamed.

He had always regarded Wimpy as a slightly ridiculous figure as well as an irritating blighter: the archetypal talkative, know-all schoolmaster, full of useless information and Latin tags, over-critical of his seniors and prone to lecturing his equals—equals like Harry Bastable, who had made their way in the real world of business and commerce where there was no captive audience of small boys to tyrannize over and punish ... a ridiculous figure, too clever by half but often not half clever enough, and never more ridiculous than now.

backing down a dusty stair on his hands and knees in ill-fitting black coat and pin-striped trousers and wing- collar.

But the better man, nonetheless: not only cleverer than Harry Bastable, but also braver and more resourceful and more resilient—quite simply better, and never more obviously better than now, in the old Frenchman's Sunday best, half-crippled but still leading the way, damn it!

'Okay, then!' Wimpy rose to one foot, steadying himself on the wall with one hand and clasping his white flag in the other, at the bottom of the stair. He looked up at Bastable.

'Now, Harry—give me a minute or two on the other side of the curtain . .. and if nobody starts shooting, then come on down and join the party—okay?'

Bastable watched him disappear through the curtains. The sound of gun-fire in the distance was as continuous as ever, but it was definitely in the distance, he noted with mixed dummy4

feelings of relief for their own immediate prospects and disappointment for the British Army. In this part of the battlefield the counter-attack had clearly failed: the tanks he had seen, when rescue and safety had seemed for a moment to be only minutes away, must have marked the furthest point of the assault, unsupported by infantry, the final wave of a tide already ebbing. It had been just enough to create a fortunate confusion, without which their madcap escape from the aid post would almost certainly have failed—he realized that with a shiver of fear at the so-nearly might-have-been. It had saved them . . . but it had still left them high-and-dry in enemy territory—or in a no-man's-land the enemy had been quick to recapture.

It all depended on how speedily those SS officers returned to hunt for their missing prisoners ... Unless, of course, the British tanks or the German dive-bombers had accounted for the bastards . . .

The savage hope that they had been shot to pieces, blown limb from limb, or crushed to bloody pulp under steel tank treads flared within him, so that he tightened his grip on the limpet which was attached to his body.

The limpet returned the grip, holding him as though her life depended on it.

And there was no answer to that—except that it did depend on him now.

The moment was up.

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Very carefully, blindly but very carefully, forcing himself to concentrate on each narrow tread in turn rather than on the fearful unknown beyond the curtain, Harry Bastable descended the attic stair.

Now the curtain was ahead of him.

It wasn't the unknown: it was the Germans who were beyond that curtain, and this was the last frontier between him and them—and Wimpy was mad to make him do what he was doing, quite mad, and he had been just as mad, and weak and foolish too, to let himself be pushed and stampeded into this folly.

Wimpy had to be stopped before it was too late!

He pushed between the curtains.

It was too late: Wimpy was already almost at the bottom of the main staircase; he had changed his method of