He was up in the attic when his wife called up to him.
“The phone, Peter. For you.”
“Who is it?”
“Our friend.”
He clambered down the ladder, brushing the dust from his clothes and in the hall he picked up the phone. It was only a short conversation and then he walked into the kitchen.
“He’ll be here at mid-day. I’d better finish the attic. I’ll need the vacuum cleaner.”
The three of them ate together. Borsch and pirozhki followed by lemon sorbet. When the woman left the two men together they got straight down to business.
“When can you take the radio?”
“Now if you want.”
“Where are you putting it?”
“Under the kitchen floor.”
“Isn’t that risky?”
“No. It’s the last place anyone would look.”
“And the aerial?”
“I’ve already fitted one in the attic.”
“Don’t forget to give me that American’s visiting card. That could be very useful.”
He smiled, patting his jacket pocket. “I haven’t forgotten it.”
12
There had been a Hipcress farming on the Romney Marshes long before Napoleon contemplated invasion, and one of the early Hipcresses had helped dig out the channel for the Military Canal. They were none of them good farmers although they were financially quite successful. They had a hunger for land that outran their husbandry. All farmers complain about the weather and the crops but Albert Hipcress didn’t complain. He seethed silently with anger against the government, the tax office, the National Farmers’ Union and neighbours with more than his five hundred acres.
Hipcress was a bachelor of forty-five, and with his unprepossessing appearance and his country bumpkin manners seemed likely to remain one. But he assumed that every woman on the marshes, single or otherwise, saw him as a prime target because of his five hundred acres. His farming was simple and primitive. Potatoes, beans, and sheep. His lambing record was poor, but his feed costs were minimal.
The farmhouse itself was a pleasant, rambling old house alongside two disused oasts, and beyond the oasts were two large metal-clad barns. The shepherd’s cottage was a hundred yards away, barely visible from the farmhouse itself.
Albert Hipcress sat in the farm kitchen next to the Rayburn solid-fuel cooker, reading a week-old copy of the Kent Messenger. He wore a pair of old felt slippers and a pair of shiny blue serge trousers held up by a pair of army braces. He looked up at the old clock on the mantelpiece. There was half an hour yet. He used the tool to lift the hotplate, spat into the fire and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He walked through to his tiny office that had once been a larder and switched on the light. Taking a bunch of keys from his trouser pocket he unlocked the bottom drawer in the ancient roll-topped desk, took out a blue folder and turned over the pages until he came to the balance sheet. He had not only read it many times before in the past month but he could have recited the figures blindfolded. The farm itself was valued at £672,000. The stock was written down to £7,000 and the plant and machinery at £24,320. Albert Hipcress used contractors to avoid capital expenditure. But the last figure was the one that pleased him most. Cash at bank. £943 on current account and £34,000 on deposit. The scattered cottages that he owned were not included in the farm accounts.
He walked through to the bedroom. The light at the side of the bed was already on, the bottle of whisky and the two glasses were on the cast-iron mantelpiece over the gas-fire. The corner of the sheets was turned down neatly on the bed. And then he saw the lights of the car as it went over the hump-backed bridge across the feeder to the canal. He was downstairs, waiting at the back door as it swept in to draw up between the oasts where nobody could see it. He heard her high heels as she hurried across the concrete yard. Then he saw her and she was the one he’d asked for.
“Hello, Mr. H. How are you?”
He nodded. “Not bad. How are you?”
The girl laughed softly. “Rarin’ to go, honey.”
Upstairs he sat on the edge of the bed watching as she took off her sweater, chatting to him, her firm young breasts swinging and bouncing as she struggled with the zip of her skirt. And then she was naked, standing smiling at him as he stared at her body.
“There you are, Mr. H. That’s what you’ve been waiting for all the week isn’t it?”
It was seven o’clock the next morning when she left the farmhouse and hurried over to the cottage.
The Romney Marshes are not dairy country, its bleakness and its terrain can only support sheep, and the Romney Marsh sheep were bred to withstand the biting winds and the soggy marshland. On the marshes shepherds had always been known as “lookers” and on the Hipcress farm the “looker’s” cottage was almost hidden from the farmhouse by a mild slope of the ground and a small copse of beech trees.
There had been no “looker” on the Hipcress farm for the last twenty years and the cottage had stood empty for most of the time. Albert Hipcress had often wondered if there wasn’t some way he could make some cash out of the “looker’s” cottage. He spoke to the estate agents in Rye and a few weeks later they had sent a man to see him. The estate agents suggested that he could possibly get seven to ten pounds a week rent for the cottage provided it was tidied up a bit.
Hipcress took an instant dislike to the man the agents sent to look at the cottage. He was a city man, smiling, confident and condescending. But when Hipcress said ten pounds a week the man had accepted. When they looked over the cottage together Hipcress said that it was up to a tenant to put it in order and bear
