clipping about Ruth Meriden. So?
There was no answer.
Andrew opened the Green Line Guide again and gazed at the cryptogram above the London-Bishops Stortford timetable.
SS 729.
When he looked out of the window a few minutes later, the plane was over England.
Five
After the first twenty-four hours London seemed curiously empty. Andrew was still doing the things he had long dreamed of doing; seeing the places that, in Thessaly, had sometimes appeared as remote as Everest or Xanadu. To cross Piccadilly Circus had become an enormous ambition; let him but see Charing Cross Station again and stout Cortez could have the Pacific. But, of course, the reality was less satisfactory. The joys of homecoming were somehow superficial. He felt restless and vaguely uneasy. Never before had he had with quite such intensity the feeling that there was something missing.
If this was to be the mood of the maturer Maclaren, he could regret the loss of the more youthful exuberance that had sent him to his European experiences without a thought for his own interests. Of course, he was alone in the world; but then, he always had been. Now it was like coming back to search among scattered ruins for a lost past and discovering that after all there was nothing to be retrieved.
There had been no relatives on hand to greet him. His mother had died while he was still a student at Edinburgh. His father had accepted an important medical post in the Pacific during the war and had stayed on out there to continue research in tropical diseases. He had some uncles and aunts and innumerable cousins, but, even if he had been interested in them, none was in London.
He had good friends who were delighted to see him again and eager to help him. He had arranged to stay with one of them until he found accommodation, but the expected meeting had been postponed. Roger Lang had rushed off to America, leaving a hurried note and the keys of his flat in Holland Park, but this disappointment had nothing to do with his mood. He had other friends and they welcomed him warmly enough. Some of them frankly envied him; and really he had to admit that he was not out of luck. Home again, a comfortable flat to live in, a month of freedom, and then work that he wanted to do, with the promise of a specialist’s career in the future.
There had been a note awaiting him, asking him to call up Dr. Jeffrey at the Kingsland Road Eye Hospital as soon as he arrived.
The old man said: “Hello, son! Got in a day late, didn’t you? What put this bee in your bonnet about glaucoma?”
“It was thrown at me, sir. Quite a few cases in some parts of Greece.”
“Carotene deficiency. Xerophthalmis breaking out all over the place. They will have their damn silly wars.”
Andrew smiled. “It’s wonderful to think I’ll be working with you, sir.”
“Save that for a few months. Wait till you find out what it’s like to be a registrar at this madhouse.”
“I’m grateful to you for the job.”
“You wouldn’t have got it if I hadn’t thought I could use you. Don’t run away with the notion that you’ve been favoured because of your father. What you wrote about intraocular pressure happened to interest me. Look in on me next week sometime. We’ll discuss procedure. You’ll have every opportunity to work out your ideas. Meanwhile, enjoy your holiday.”
After three days of it the month ahead of him began to look like eternity. He thought of asking old Jeffrey if he couldn’t start work earlier, but he suspected it would be impossible. The hospital had been emphatic about the date of the vacancy. Another man was moving on. Andrew would have to wait till the discarded shoes were ready for him.
Nothing to do on a sunny morning but shop for socks and a couple of preposterously expensive shirts. The prices of clothes depressed him. Or something did. He wished he hadn’t come home. He wished he had stayed in Larissa another week or so. If he had put off the trip till a more reasonable date, he wouldn’t have encountered Pyotr Grigorievitch Kusitch or be wandering along Bond Street on this bright day plagued by anxiety about the little man. Anxiety? Or simply the tantalising probability that he would never know for certain whether the little man had been the central figure in a melodrama or just plain mad?
He turned left into Oxford Street, descended the stairway of the first underground station, bought a ticket, and stepped onto the escalator. He did it all reluctantly, under some inward protest. His mood went down, down, down with the moving stairway. Then he touched bottom, and his mind suddenly cleared. He walked round and stepped onto the ascending escalator. He thrust his ticket into the hand of the collector and hurried on, afraid that the man might challenge him. He hadn’t used a train, yet he had a feeling of guilt, as if he had broken a contract with the London Transport Executive. He hurried away from the scene of the crime towards the telephone booths. He took up the directory A-D, and flicked over the leaves. Bla… Blan… Blandish! His moving finger halted. He made a mental note of an address and walked out into the sunlight again.
For the first time since his homecoming, he felt like a man with a purpose. He swung round one corner, strode on, turned another corner, and slowed a little, noting the numbers. The odds were on one side, the evens on another. He crossed the road. A few more paces and he was there.
The Blandish Gallery had an elegant front. It had a beautiful door of burnished bronze and one small Dufy in a large window. A hand-lettered placard in a bronze frame announced an exhibition of water colours by Christophe Chambord.
Andrew Maclaren had the sensation of something inside him dropping with the gravitational abandon of a plummet. It was something extraphysical, something completely unscientific and quite beyond material diagnosis. You could approach it only through the figurative. It was as the falling stick of a spent rocket. It was the dead meteor hope.
The exhibition of sculptures by Ruth Meriden was over. The press notice preserved by Kusitch might have been clipped a month ago or a year ago; it was all the same now. Andrew went back gloomily to the tube station and bought another ticket.
When he let himself into the flat, he saw the Green Line Coach Guide lying on Roger Lang’s desk. He picked it up and threw it into Roger Lang’s wastebasket.
That was that!
He almost spoke it aloud to put the finality of it beyond question. He was finished with Kusitch; Ruth Meriden was expunged from his mind. He poured himself a drink to celebrate the liberation. After a second drink he crossed to the wastebasket and recovered the Coach Guide. He opened it at the marked page and stared at the cryptogram, but all he found in it was a resolute determination to be meaningless. He was sure it was something simple, possibly absurdly simple. The trouble was he had no knowledge of such things. They were a special study. They required an unusual aptitude, a sort of…
And then inspiration came.
Charley Botten!
He blinked. He looked up another telephone number and then realised that he could do nothing about it till after office hours. He paced Roger Lang’s carpet till darkness came. At the first feasible moment he dialled the number, and miraculously the receiver at the other end was lifted.
“Charley?” he demanded. “This is Andrew Maclaren; remember? I’ve just got back from Athens.”
Mr. Botten said: “How are things in Greece?” He didn’t sound as if he cared.
Andrew decided that the question was not one he need answer. He asked: “Are you still in M.I. five?” “Resigned years ago,” Charley answered. “I’m in business. Anyway it wasn’t M.I. five.”
“What I really mean is do you still go in for ciphers and puzzles and things?”
“Certainly. I’m a stockbroker. What can I do for you?”
“I want to see you urgently. May I call? I’ve got something I can’t make out.”
“So have I. I think it’s ulcers but it may be a delayed hangover. Come along at once.”
Face to face with his caller, Mr. Botten was more cordial. He listened to some account of Mr. Kusitch and
