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

out of a cheap dance hall. At that period there was no photograph of me available beyond the picture, taken in the courthouse, with the unrecognizable grin, and none in my flat for the police to collect. I dislike photographs of myself. They always make me look too dark.
     
    I found the number of Reyvers Library, and took the risk. When I had him, after an intolerable delay, on the other end of the telephone, I first asked him if our conversation could be overheard. He answered in a testy high voice that it certainly could not, but that he didn’t see why ...
     
    ‘I have been instructed to get in touch with you,’ I interrupted.
     
    ‘What can I do for you?’
     
    ‘You have a car, comrade.’
     
    He hesitated. I expect that ‘comrade’ was what he least wanted to be called in that particular week.
     
    ‘I have. Who is that speaking?’
     
    ‘It is unimportant who is speaking,’ I answered authoritatively. ‘My information is that you are not yet being followed. Is that correct?’
     
    ‘Yes,’ he said, alarmed. ‘No, I don’t think I’m followed. Why should I be? I never have been.’
     
    ‘Very well. Be at Kingston Dray in about an hour. Turn up the lane to the copse above the village, and wait under the large oak on the right-hand side at the top of the hill.’
     
    ‘I’d like to know a little more—’ he began, asserting himself.
     
    ‘You will,’ I told him. ‘But obey now, and the party will not forget it.’
     
    He did not sound as if he cared whether the party forgot or didn’t, but finally agreed to come.
     
    I observed him carefully through the hedge as he sat in his car. He preserved a poker-faced grimness, in which might have been just a shade of self-satisfaction. I had expected some wishy-washy, provincial intellectual with grey wisps of hair curled over his collar and none on his head. I was quite wrong. Mr Cecil Reyvers was red-faced and farmerish. Communist or not, he might turn out to be a regular John Bull. Alternatively, he might insist on his right to receive proper orders. I didn’t like it at all. However, it was most improbable that he would dare to give me away
     
    ‘Good morning, comrade,’ I said to him.
     
    I had emerged from the hedge when he was looking the other way, and was now leaning on a gate as if I had been there, invisible, for minutes. He was obviously startled, but set his face to blank.
     
    ‘Good morning,’ he answered, and waited.
     
    ‘I am Howard-Wolferstan.’
     
    It was astonishing to see so red a face turn pale. A monstrous improbability like the popular conception of a chameleon!
     
    ‘I’ll have nothing to do with you,’ he said. ‘I have no instructions.’
     
    ‘You can’t avoid it, comrade.’
     
    ‘You’re a spy,’ he began indignantly.
     
    That gave him away completely. He was nothing but a liberal with an intellectual chip on his shoulder - a communist, in fact, just to annoy the stolid society of Saxminster and give himself a sense of martyrdom. Any security officer would have known at once that he was nothing but a pest and likely, if there were ever a communist government in England, to declare himself a tory.
     
    ‘We do not employ spies,’ I replied coldly.
     
    ‘No. No, of course not. But we are not expected ... I mean ... well, it’s admitted there is such a thing as patriotism.’
     
    ‘There is indeed.’
     
    ‘I am an intellectual,’ he protested. ‘The party has no right whatever to ask this sort of thing of me.’
     
    ‘The party has a right to ask anything of you.’
     
    ‘Then I insist on being instructed in the proper way.’
     
    ‘You are being instructed in the only possible way.’
     
    He was hopelessly out of his depth. So was I, for that matter. I am sure he should have flatly refused to help me unless told to do so through the usual channels. Yet he could not doubt that I was a communist. The papers had said so, and I myself had said so in court. It would have amused me