Here Be Monsters

us that they're just waiting at St Servan. Or they may not be there at all -

I don't want to influence you, Miss Loftus. Because they could be as incompetent as we are, even. Unlikely as it may seem.'

That was dirty play. Because they both knew that the French might make big mistakes, usually for political reasons, but they seldom failed at this level, and particularly not where the Americans and the British were involved, who were soft targets.

' Harumph!' Audley emitted a strangulated sound, after having tried almost pathetically to keep silent. 'Remember what Colonel Butler always says: ' Booger them! Thee do tha' owern thing, lass!''

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Colonel Butler had certainly never said anything like that in her hearing, if it was a Lancashire accent which Audley was attempting to reproduce.

But the French motorway signs were coming up ahead -

Pride or prudence? Or common sense? Father believed that women had been fabricated from Adam's rib without any of those qualities -

Major Birkenshawe had said once, when she had come to say 'Goodnight', although she had not been going to bed, because she had been typing one of Father's manuscripts at the time: 'Come on, Loftus

— you knew Jerry was going to hit you with his E-boats, that last time - because you'd got the Ultra decode - Liza, my dear! Off to bed? Just trying to get a straight answer from your father - eh, Loftus?'

And Father had said, without looking at her, as though she didn't exist, 'My dear Birkenshawe —

the Navy, unlike the Army, isn't hired to run away. It's hired to fight -Goodnight, Elizabeth - '

'Turn right, Mr Richardson. I have absolutely no desire to visit the underground car park at Avignon. So let's go to St Servan.'

Richardson drove, as he was told: signalled, slowed, drove… slowed again, signalled again, and finally accelerated without another word, letting his silence pronounce his disapproval.

Elizabeth stared out of the window, trying to see what she found herself looking at. She had always wanted to visit Provence: it was one of those places every schoolteacher ought to know, the land of van Gogh and Cezanne, and Madame de Sevigne, and Daudet and his mill, and Tartarin de Tarascon, and St Louis at Aigues-Mortes, and above all the monumental relics of the Romans. But in Father's time she had never travelled anywhere, and now she couldn't see anything at all - just a rich foreign countryside like a great busy market garden full of fiercely growing things glimpsed in gaps in cypress hedges and lattices of bamboo.

Why was nothing ever as it ought to be, not even freedom and power and adventure?

'Hah-hmm…' Audley cleared his throat, as though to attract her attention. 'Quite right, Elizabeth. For the record.'

She looked at him in surprise. 'For the record?'

He smiled. 'You didn't ask me for advice. You did your own thing. But, for the record, I am advising you nevertheless… to go on to St Servan.' He tapped Richardson on the shoulder, dummy2

somewhat urgently. 'Got that, Peter Richardson? ' Dr Audley insisted - ' - got that?'

'Uh-huh.' They burst out of a shadowy avenue of cypresses into open country at last, with hills ahead, and other hills behind misting into a heat haze. ''There is the enemy - there are the guns': if Captain Nolan comes back from the Valley of Death he will dutifully recall what Lord Lucan said to Lord Cardigan. Just so he comes back all in one piece is all he cares about now. But he will dutifully and gratefully recall every last word and syllable afterwards. If there is an afterwards.'

Elizabeth still looked at Audley, trying hard not to feel affection for him. Because sentiment was always dangerous in this game, and with someone as devious as David it might well be dangerously misplaced, too. 'Why, David?'

'I was going to ask you the same question, my dear.'

Why?'

'I asked first.'

'But you're in charge. I am but a soldier-of-the-line -… Or, in these parts, a time-expired legionary cheated in his discharge.'

'Then, if I'm in charge, I can pull rank on you, David.'

Another smile. 'And I recruited you, didn't I? So I have no one else to blame, except myself?' He also chuckled. 'Fair enough!'

It wasn't fair enough: if they had played dirty with her, they'd played even dirtier with him. But it was a dirty game, and no one had forced him to play it. And she had other, dirtier doubts about him, anyway.

'I'm too old for this sort of thing. But, more than that - much more than that - I'm too busy: I have much more urgent and important things to do, than worry about some allegedly horrendous mistake I made, years ago - That, when the brains were out, the man would die, And there an end; but now they rise again, With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools -

'So now I must stop what I ought to be doing, and manoeuvre to protect my back from my enemies on my own side. And I can't blame them, that's the trouble. Because, in their shoes I might be doing just the same thing. Because there is something bloody queer about all this - I know that, if I know nothing else.'

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