For the Good of the State

was no lie. ’But you’ve had a phone-call, I gather.‘

‘I have.’ Audley advanced across the terrace in his enormous navvy’s gumboots, which looked as though they had steel toe-caps, until he was able to look down on Tom from close quarters from his six-foot four. ‘But I won’t shake your hand.’

‘No?’ What confused Tom was that the big man’s intense scrutiny of him was nevertheless not in the least hostile—if anything his expression was as innocently friendly as his battered features allowed. ‘Well, you don’t have to—’ He stopped as Audley’s hands came up, palms upwards.

‘I’ve been making a bonfire.’ Audley presented two massive, dirt-encrusted paws. ‘So I’m not really fit for decent company—my wife won’t even let me in her kitchen. She says I’m like “Pig-pen”

in Peanuts.’ He grinned a huge grin. ‘Charlie Brown—? She’s a Charlie Brown addict, is my wife.’ He chuckled. ‘I see myself rather as Schroeder, the intellectual one—with her as Lucy, because she packs a mean right hook. But she sees me as “Pig-pen”—we never see ourselves as others see us, do we?’

Tom struggled against an enveloping sense of unreality. The idea of the willowy, blue-blooded Mrs Audley, pale and fragile, packing any sort of punch… the idea of her in those huge hands, bear-hugged… was incongruous to the point of disbelief. And there was also the unlikely offspring of this unlikely union, and Tripoli too, in the back of his mind.

But there was another explanation to all this, which was tripping him before he’d started to move: one thing Jaggard and Harvey and Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State rumour were agreed on was that Audley was tricky. So he had to be tricky too!

‘Your daughter packs a mean punch too, Dr Audley.’ He grinned back at the man.

‘She does?’ Audley hadn’t expected that reply. ‘She does—yes.’

He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’

‘Yes. She had me with a reference to “Tripoli”—in relation to George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Arken-shaw. But I shall have to work it out before I take you away from your bonfire, anyway.’

Another possibility opened up. ‘And I suppose I should be glad that it was a bonfire and not a well-rotted compost heap—?’

Audley stared at him, momentarily off-put. Then his eyes softened, and he smiled the ugly man’s smile—the legendary smile Tom had heard of, which had softened women down the ages according to Willy.

‘Ah! Now I see it!’ Audley nodded at him. ‘I didn’t see it at first…

and I don’t really see it now—the resemblance. But it’s there in the mind—Danny— and now Tom Arkenshaw! ’

‘It?’ Tom realized that Audley had been too quick for him. ‘What resemblance?’ The second question came out before he could stop it. ‘Danny?’ The third was too closely-coupled to the second, damn it!

‘Danuta— Danushia… or Danka—?’ Audley closed his eyes for an instant, and when he opened them again he wasn’t looking at Tom at all, but at someone else who wasn’t on the terrace with them, but in another place and another time. ‘But Danny to us, Tom Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State Arkenshaw— Danny Dzieliwski—’ He pronounced the name better than most Englishmen did: Den-chev-less-ka—‘your mum, Tom Arkenshaw—Diana, Lady Arkenshaw, dowager baroness, I suppose that would be now, eh?’ Suddenly Audley’s face was an inscrutably battered mask, like the defaced coat-of-arrns on the archways of his home. ‘Now that she’s sailing under British colours? And whose colours are yours this afternoon, Tom Arkenshaw, I wonder—eh?’

Bloody Jaggard had miscalculated! was all Tom could think for a moment. If he’d thought that Audley wouldn’t see through this, by God!

‘You know my mother, sir?’ He felt dreadfully young now.

‘I did.’ Audley’s face was no longer inscrutable—it was brutal now. ‘Don’t mess with me, boy: you may not know that as well as I know it, but you know it well enough. Because that’s why you’re here—because someone thinks I’ll treat you better because of it…

Baynham, it could be… It wouldn’t be Jack Butler—he doesn’t play games like that… Or it could be Stacey—or Jaggard… Or, most likely, because he’s inclined that way, it could be Garry Harvey—’ All the time he’d been building his bonfire, out in the orchard since that phone-call, Audley must have been going through the possibilities, against what Research and Development would have told him; but, although he’d got some of them spot on, he hadn’t had enough information for certainty.

‘That isn’t why I’m here, sir.’ That was all Tom could manage as he thought I should have phoned up Mother—I’m an idiot!

‘No?’ Audley grasped the winding handle of the well, and swung it Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State as idly as Tom had thrown the stone into the well, making the chain squeak. ‘But… the bugger of it is that I will treat you better.

So whichever of them it is, he’s no fool!’ He dropped the handle.

“Tripoli”, she said, did she? Well, you’ll have to work that one out for yourself, I’m afraid!‘ Then he frowned at Tom. ’But as for your long-forgotten—long-forgotten, but never-forgotten—mother, Tom Arkenshaw… how is the dear girl… after longer than either of us would care to remember? She’s well, I hope?‘

That was more than Tom cared to think about. ‘My mother is very well, sir.’ He had to buy time to think about that, although thinking about Mamusia as a ‘dear girl’ was altogether too much to think about. ‘And my job now is to keep you in the same excellent state of health—that’s why I’m here, Dr Audley.’

‘Me?’ Audley sniffed the air suddenly, and Tom was aware that he’d caught the same smell, of that distant bonfire taking hold,

‘What’s that supposed to mean, may I ask?’

They had come to the point. And it was mercifully a world away from Mother. ‘It means Panin, sir—Nikolai Andrievich Panin.’