Read Online Fellow Passenger by Geoffrey Household - Free Book Online Page A

closest mesh. An experienced stowaway who knew all about seamens pubs and seamen’s papers might be able to slip through, but I did not think much of my own chances. London, then? But hadn’t I read that all wanted men tried to disappear in London? And how the devil did one live in London - apart from pinching milk bottles - with no money and no identity?
     
    I think what really influenced me against the life of a fugitive in a town - certainly as sordid and depressing in reality as in imagination - was the grey village down the hill towards which my feet were pointing. It was just waking up, and satisfying to all senses. I could smell the wood smoke drifting up from the new-lit breakfast fires and hear the distant clink of a bucket where some honest woman preferred her well water to the tap for making tea. The harmonies of English summer sights, which affect me more deeply than any ingenious arrangement of sounds, led from movement to movement, each one expected and yet individual: the colour of roofs, the early-morning mist on water, the flowers in the rectory garden, the long shadows of hedges and elms on meadowland, the leaping green of hill turf.
     
    Damn it, I thought, if I am going to hide, let it be where I can enjoy myself! And if I am caught, at least I shall have a few pleasant days to remember. I knew what I was talking about. I’d had ten days in gaol. And during all of them I was keenly conscious of the pleasure which my memories of a May night and Dr Cornelia were providing.
     
    So I was all for staying in the country, so long as I could quickly put a good many more miles between myself and Saxminster, and then find a quiet spot in which to grow a beard. Movement was the difficulty. Any simple alteration of my appearance would pass in the dusk, but to travel in daylight by public transport or to trudge along the roads was asking for trouble. I had not seen a paper since my escape, but I had no doubt that my photograph was now familiar to every reader of English between Land’s End and Alaska. There had been no such sensation since the reappearance of Chris Emmassin in Moscow. For headlines I expect I beat him. He had only deserted, whereas I had escaped from the magistrates’ court in broad daylight with - for surely one could trust the newspapermen to add it - all the atomic secrets of the nation.
     
    Lying on the hillside and poetically digesting the loin of that unfortunate and unrationed lamb, it occurred to me that since I was a communist to the whole world except myself, I might as well get some help from my fellow outcasts. True, I only knew one, and him by hearsay - poor Cecil Reyvers, who kept a bookshop in Saxminster. He sounded like a local joke, more resembling a harmless atheist or anarchist.
     
    Down in the village the red box of a public telephone glittered in the morning sun and tempted me. The police, against their better judgment, would probably be keeping an eye on Cecil Reyvers’ shop, but they could not think the town eccentric of such importance that his telephone would be tapped. Whose signature was necessary to tap a telephone? The Home Secretary? A Justice of the Peace? I could not remember. If done at all, it was probably with a sound John Bullish denial that such an outrage was possible.
     
    I was sorry for Cecil Reyvers, but I was going to larn him to be a communist. I waited till ten to give him plenty of time to arrive in his shop, and then walked down the lane which led from my copse to the village of Kingston Dray. I passed a few people, but they did not pay the slightest attention to a scruffy and preoccupied artist. My disguise was better than I realized at the time. A well-dressed South American type was what my fellow-countrymen were looking for. The newspapers, as I found later, had impressed on the public that I was a handsome Latin. Some of them called me slick, and others called me sinister; but they were all agreed - damn them! - that I was a maiden’s dream