'I'll be going now,' he said, getting up. 'I'll see you a week from today.'
He went out of the room without waiting for her response and left the house by the kitchen door, crossing the lawn and pausing at the shed to slip the letter under the door. The puddles in the dirt track outside the wicket gate reflected the washed blue sky.
He stopped for a moment to savour the extraordinary events of the past half-hour. He had walked across the room to the cabinet in her presence and taken out the tankards! He had done what he meant to do. Assert himself! He only wished he could bring it to Mr Wolverton's attention. Somehow ram it down his throat!
As it was, he couldn't even tell Jimmy Pullman what he'd done, or what he planned to do. It would have to remain his secret.
Always in the past he had lacked courage, he thought, needing an explanation for the mediocrity of his life. But he felt if he could do this one thing return next week and take the tankards — the whole of his future might change. In spite of everything he had a deep-rooted belief in his own good fortune.
' You're a lucky devil.'
Harold grinned at the remembered words. They had been spoken to him by a woman he had picked up one evening in the high street in Folkestone. It was in the second year of the war. He'd forgotten her name now.
They had walked arm in arm from the upper town to one of the pubs in the harbour, down the same winding road that, day by day, echoed to the marching feet of thousands of men on their way to the moored Channel steamers, and to France. (Harold heard them still in his dreams, those marching feet.) She told him her fiance had been killed at Loos and he had wondered whether this bright-eyed girl with the brassy manner might not feel contempt for a man who, with the help of weak eyesight and a cough he had learned to exaggerate, had worked himself a soft posting in the quartermaster's stores at Shorncliffe Camp. She soon put him right.
'I'll take a live man over a dead hero any day,' she declared, and proved it to him a few hours later, up against the wall in a dark alleyway behind the pub.
'You're a lucky devil.'
He never saw her again, but her words stayed with him. As the war continued, and the casualty lists lengthened, and weak eyes and doubtful lungs were no longer enough to keep a man out of the trenches, Harold had waited for the day when his name would be added to the columns marching down daily to the water's edge. It never arrived. He had remained at his post in the quartermaster's stores. And with the passing of time he came to see that what the girl had told him was true, though in a way she could not have imagined. He was specially blessed. Anointed. One of those, who, by fate or accident, was destined to escape the slaughter.
He still had the shiny new shilling he had been given when he enlisted and he had drilled a hole in it and threaded it on to his key ring. Even now, in moments of doubt or indecision, he would find himself slipping his hand into his pocket and running his thumb over the milled edge.
Amos Pike slipped into the kitchen and deposited the parcel of food he had brought in the pantry. He waited, expecting to hear the old woman's voice from the front room asking who was there. When she didn't speak he went through and found her sitting in her usual place by the window. In the fading light of early evening she seemed unusually pale and shrunken and he looked at her with cold-eyed concern.
'I brought you some things,' he said, in his dead voice.
'Thank you, Mr Grail.'
She sounded breathless, uneasy.
'I got some fish, like you asked.' He studied her face, observing the faint tremor that tugged at the corners of her mouth.
'Thank you,' she whispered again.
Pike's brow creased. He seldom conversed with anyone, but his instincts, like an animal's, were strongly developed.
'Is something wrong?' he asked.
She shook her head at once. 'No, nothing. Thank you for bringing the food.' She kept repeating herself.
He knew she found his presence unsettling, but now there was something else in her manner: a kind of tension, which she was trying to hide. He moved a little closer. He wanted to get to the bottom of this.
Distrust and suspicion were the dominant strains of his character, together with his need, and it was this last — the constant thrust of his longing — which caused him to turn away suddenly and leave her sitting where she was.
He would find out later what had upset her.
A last-minute change in Mrs Aylward's itinerary had meant a delay of several hours in his departure for Rudd's Cross. Normally he accepted these occasional disruptions in his plans without emotion. He could afford to take the long view.
But this afternoon for the first time he had felt impatience. The everyday world with its routine of chores and duties was becoming a burden to him.
Though he wasn't aware of it, the frail moorings that bound him to common reality were starting to fray.
Twilight was falling when he opened the shed door, and he failed to see the letter lying on the floor at his feet. When he lit the paraffin lamp a minute later he had already stripped the dust cloth off his motorcycle and thrown it aside. It fell on the floor, covering the white envelope.
He reached the forest before midnight and slept, wrapped in his groundsheet, beside his motorcycle until dawn. At first light he was on the move, hoisting his heavily laden bag on to his shoulder and striding, silent and ghostlike, through the thick ground mist that swirled about the tree trunks.
He found the dugout as he had left it, apart from a layer of mud that had accumulated at the bottom with the recent rains. He used his entrenching tool to scrape it out, stamping the remaining wet soil into a hard surface, and then went in search of one of the many stands of saplings with which the forest was seeded, returning an hour later with two armfuls of poles, which he trimmed and laid side by side on the packed mud floor, damp-proofing the pit.
At noon he broke off to open a tin of bully beef.
All morning he had kept his mind fixed on the minutiae of the jobs he was engaged in: on the branch he was trimming to size, on the neatness of the levelled floor. But he had been conscious all the time of the forces gathering within him: a tidal bore of emotion that throbbed at his nerve ends, making his skin prickle and burn as though lava flowed in his veins.
The sensation was thrilling. But it also made him uneasy. Self-control was the anchor of his life. It had steadied him through years of near-unbearable anguish and aching need, and the fear of losing it now was enough to calm him and keep his mind fixed on the tasks ahead.
When he had finished eating he left the area again, this time heading for a nearby pond, and returned with a sheaf of willow branches. Earlier he had nailed together a rough frame from the remaining saplings and now he began to plait the willow into a lattice to be fixed to the frame. It was painstaking work, and twice he had to return to the waterside for more willow laths, but by five o'clock he had constructed a roof for the dugout and laid it in place.
Collecting his bag and tools he retired into the refuge he had built. Now that his preparations were complete he was able to relax, lighting a cigarette and brewing a mess tin of tea on the Primus stove he had brought on his last visit. While it was still light he went through the contents of his bag, picking out those items he meant to leave behind. The stove he wrapped in oilcloth and stowed in a corner with the tinned supplies, following the pattern he had established, preparing himself for several visits and a long period of anticipation.
But even as he did these things he felt a seed of doubt. He wasn't sure he could wait. His experience at Highfield had been unique, a period when time had seemed suspended, a moment of sweet indecision prolonged to the point where he had temporarily lost the power to act. In retrospect he seemed to have sat for countless evenings in the woods above the village while the excitement mounted in him bit by bit like the slow accretion of coral.
He felt different now. The pressure inside his chest was like a clenched fist. His desire was growing by the day.
The last thing he did before leaving the dugout was to cut fresh brush, which he used to camouflage the site, threading the branches into the surrounding undergrowth, creating the illusion of a dense thicket.
Having made a final inspection of the area to satisfy himself that all was as it should be, he returned to
