Soldier No More

Knight with Armour— aye, and more about the 5th dummy5

century from Palfrey's Princess in the Sunset— than from anything he could offer them.' He gave Roche a knowing leer. 'He conceded Duggan, but Palfrey's purple passages about delicate over- bred Roman maidens having to submit to the sweaty embraces of hairy Goths were a bit too much for him.' He sighed. 'But we can't squat here all day, maundering over David's extraordinary taste in literature—

and it is very odd, I grant you ...' Wimpy gazed at the book in his hand.

Odd, certainly; though perhaps not altogether extraordinary if Audley had been raised on a diet of Kipling; and maybe not extraordinary at all on second thoughts, if the eccentric Wimpy's hand had been in that raising. And yet the little schoolmaster himself had magnified his own surprise, thought Roche: he had wondered at these books, even though they were undoubtedly Audley's books—apart from the carefully-typed addresses . . . Dr D. L. Audley (to await arrival), c/o Mrs C. Clarke, The Lodge, Steeple Horley, Sussex.

'Come on, then.' Wimpy straightened up, balancing his armful of historical fiction but leaving their wrappers at his feet. 'I'll ask Charlie to clear up this mess on his way home.

The house is just ahead, round those trees—'

At first glimpse, through a scatter of silver birches, The Old House was disappointing—almost another Audley contradiction.

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After Major Stocker's casual description—'not so big, but very old and rather nice'—Roche hadn't expected a minor stately home. But from the way Wimpy and Mrs Clarke had spoken, almost reverently, of the care lavished on the restoration and of the high days and nights of Nigel Audley's smart parties in the thirties, he had mentally prepared himself for a substantial manor, of the sort with which so many English villages were still blessed and which complemented the glorious little parish churches, his own special interest—medieval church, Stuart or Georgian manor, and Victorian school, plus ghastly twentieth-century village hall, that was the progression he had most often observed.

But The Old House was something different: a mixture of stone and weathered brick and half-timber, with windows and gables of different sizes apparently inserted at random—

long and low . . . lower, indeed, than the windowless, ivy-covered barn beside it—the ivy at odds with a wisteria on the house—which had been tacked on to it at right angles, to form an L-shaped courtyard.

'Magic, isn't it!' murmured Wimpy, at his shoulder. 'It always takes my breath away—I envy you the first sight of it, old boy. 'Earth has not anything to show more fair', and stout Cortez and Chapman's 'Homer', and all that, eh?'

The scales fell from Roche's eyes.

'Or 'Merlin's Isle of Gramarye', even,' continued Wimpy softly, almost to himself. 'The kitchen garden's full of bits of dummy5

Roman tile, and we found coloured tesserae from a pavement when they dug the drain at the corner—I swear there's a villa underneath it somewhere . . . 'Merlin's Isle', that's what we used to say, David and I—there's a track that runs behind the house, just below the rise of the downland up above— O that was where they hauled the guns That smote King Philip's fleet! '—remember Puck's song? Or maybe you don't. . .'

Roche's mouth was dry. 'It's . . . ' he swallowed awkwardly

'. . .it must be very old,' he said.

'Older than old. God knows how old!' Wimpy paused. 'It's the servants' quarters, actually—the kitchen wing of the original house, the 15th century house that was burnt down in 1603—the very day Queen Elizabeth died, the records say.

But there was a fortified manor here before that house, and a Saxon hall before that. . . and, for my money, a Roman villa before that. And God only knows what before that, as I say. . .

But the barn was built in the 1570s—the family was Catholic then, and there's a local legend that there's a 'Priest's hole' in the house somewhere, but no one's ever found it . . . It's certainly a fact that Elizabeth's officers raided the house regularly. But they never caught anyone, so it's either just a legend, or the hiding-place is too damned well hidden. You pays your money and you takes your choice . . . But David and I have spent hours tapping and poking and prying, when Nigel was away, and we haven't found anything yet. . . But we live in hopes, because—if you ask me—because it'll be a dummy5

useful thing to have, a secret hiding place in one's house, in this country one day.'

Roche looked at Wimpy questioningly. 'What?'

'Oh, it'll be all right under Hugh Gaitskell—he may be a damned intellectual, but he's in the Attlee-Bevin tradition, the old Labour Party I voted for in '45. It'll be okay when he gets in after Macmillan—which he will next time . . .But there are some damned dodgy bastards in the wings after that, if you ask me—chaps who've never either done an honest day's work or smelt gunpowder properly. . . the way Ernie Bevin and Clem Attlee did, old boy ... I tell you, we're in for a bad fifty years now—a bad twenty-five years, anyway, even if the bloody Russians don't shit on us from a great height! So a prudent Englishman would do well to have a numbered account in Switzerland —always supposing it was legal!—and a secret hiding place in his house—' he pointed at The Old House '—if only he can damn well find it!'

Roche blinked at him, and then stared at the house to hide his confusion. If David Audley didn't yet have the hiding place, it did look as though he had acquired the numbered account; and if this was what his legal guardian had taught him that was not to be wondered at, either. And just at this precise moment, he—David Roche, as ever was—wished that he had the same, only more so, and with better and more urgent reason.

'Hah—sorry!' Wimpy coughed apologetically. 'Got on my jolly old soap-box in a moment of weakness—bad form—and dummy5

particularly bad form with you, eh, old boy? And that isn't the object of this exercise anyway.' He nodded towards the house. ' That is the object which I wanted you to study, David Roche.'

Roche studied The Old House obediently, though the act of obedience required no effort: he couldn't keep his eyes off it—