Chapter Two

A Round Trip to Cheltenham

The two identical Hartmann Knocabouts stood, already packed, beneath the false mirror in the foyer, like a demon­stration of one of the less obvious axioms devised by the Alexandrian geometers. In the reception room the butler, a dumb and slightly Oriental dwarf, pressed the button that released the ornamental screen: he entered. The butler handed him his gloves.

“The telephone?” he asked.

In reply the butler removed the receiver from its cradle and offered it, as mute as himself, across the intervening space. Dead.

“Very good. The Locust is at the garage, I take it?” The butler nodded. “There’s no particular hurry. When they’ve finished you can drive it on to Carmarthen. Wire me from there.”

He turned for a last survey of the room. Depersonalized by dust covers, the furniture could not evoke so much as aflicker of sentimental regret. Like the monolithic pavilions of a defunct World’s Fair, the room seemed already to be impatient for its own era of privacy, decay, and picturesque abandonment.

His fingers wriggled into kid gloves. Now there must be some gesture of departure, the closing of curtains, keys in locks. The butler stood at the opposite end of the room; he removed, from a pocket of his waistcoat, a key, turned, fit­ted it into the glass door of the bookshelves, turned the key.

“Not,” he said, “the Dickens.”

Obediently the butler reached, on tiptoe, to the fourth shelf and removed a slim sextodecimo volume of frayed morocco. Relocked the shelves. Crossed the room, padding on bare parquet, offered the book to its owner.

“Yes, that will do nicely.” He slipped it in the pocket of his raincoat. “Goodbye, then.”

The butler lifted a pudgy white-gloved hand and waved goodbye.

In the foyer he dipped his knees, caught a handle in each hand, and rose with the weight of the suitcases. The steel screen purred shut, sealing his past. He kicked open the front door. The taxi was waiting, aglow in the drizzle.

“Paddington,” he said.

“It’s fifteen after eleven, sir. No trains are running now.”

“My train leaves at eleven-thirty.”

The driver shrugged, and lifted the flag of the meter, which ticked off sixpences and fractions of miles along the Brompton Road, through Knightsbridge and past the flood-lit Corinthian columns of Apsley House, turning left and turning left again along the perimeter of Hyde Park, then right into Gloucester Terrace.

The station clock said eleven-thirty.

“Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”

He walked with his two bags toward Gate 6. A blue-uniformed ticket puncher waved at him, across the intervening space, to hurry. But for the two of them, the station looked as deserted as a cathedral in one of those counties tourists never find. Liora had carried on about her cathe­drals, Salisbury, Winchester, Wells, all through the bombes.

While the man worried the ticket with his punch, he glanced backward, thinking he had seen her. It was only a young American, in army surplus, seated on a knapsack, her back propped against the Sherwood green tin of W. H. Smith’s, sleeping or seeming to sleep.

The conductor was waiting outside the blue sleeping car to help him with his bags. Before he had been shown to his compartment, the train had begun to move.

“I will arrive . . .?”

The conductor glanced at the destination hand-written on the ticket. “At half past six. The engine is changed once in Bristol and again in Swansea.”

He found the bed in his compartment already made, the sheet spread back to receive his body, the pillow plumped. He drew the blinds. He removed his raincoat, his gloves.

He began to read:

Escalus.

My Lord.

Of government the properties to unfold. . .


On the small screen in his own compartment, the conduc­tor watched the swaying man turn the pages of his little book. Often, to his distress, he would turn them backward instead of forward, but not so often, after all, that he did not reach the end. He then rose, swaying, and began to undress, unknotting, first, the black bow tie, prying off the cufflinks from his cuffs. He shrugged out of the jacket, loosed the cummerbund, slipped the suspenders from his shoulders, unbuttoned his fly, stepped out of the trousers.

He hung trousers, jacket, shirt inside the closet of simu­lated wood, placed tie, cummerbund and cufflinks on the shelf above. He lifted the handle of the door toLOCK.

Then he moved for a moment out of range of the closed-circuit camera. The microphone picked up the sound of running water. He returned, naked now, to the bed and pulled the upper sheet loose. The conductor, who, though probably no older than this man, could no longer think of himself as fit, had time briefly to admire the sturdiness of these limbs, the trimness of the torso. Then the light blanked.

“The second camera,” a voice commanded.

The conductor adjusted a knob at the side of the screen. It now showed a man’s head, cradled in his hands, sway­ing. He stared directly at the lens concealed in the ceiling for several minutes. Even when his eyes had closed, his face did not seem to relax. It was a quarter past two.

The conductor picked up his copy ofNews of the World and read the captions beneath each picture. At a quarter to three, a buzzer, at E-flat frequency, brought him to his feet.

The man was now asleep.

The conductor flipped up the switch markedVENTbeneath the screen and watched as the mask descended over the man’s face. When the mask was retracted, the facial muscles at last showed some degree of relaxation.

He went into the corridor and pulled theEMERGENCYcord. He unlocked the upper half of the door, reached in, turned the handle down toOPEN.

He pulled the slack, naked, fit body out of the bed. Twelve cars ahead the engine whistled. He stood low for a better grip beneath the armpits. The floor lurched.

Four men had gathered in the corridor. They watched the conductor pulling the man across the beige Acrilan without offering to help. Lights flickered by outside the windows. The train was approaching Cheltenham well ahead of schedule. It came to a full stop by the siding of a cable warehouse. While the four men unloaded the limp body on to the boards of the siding, the conductor returned to the compartment for the two suitcases, and again for the clothes and the copy ofMeasure for Measure . There was barely time to place these on the platform before the train was moving again. Spools of heavy cable flicked pastaccelerando . The four men returned, each to his own compartment.

The conductor tidied the mussed bed, plumped the pil­low, scoured the sink.

At Cheltenham the engine was switched. By four o’clock the string of cars was rolling back home to Paddington. Lights cut long arcs through the incessant drizzle.