Read Online Red Anger by Geoffrey Household - Free Book Online Page B

and avoiding interrogation by his fictitious publisher friend turned out to be quite simple. We were strolling up the Charing Cross Road carrying northwards a
roaring mass of impatient death. He was waiting meekly, like a disciplined foreigner, to cross Earlham Street when I saw a chance to dash over to the island in Cambridge Circus, and from there
plunged across to the Palace Theatre a yard ahead of the thundering stream sweeping out of Shaftesbury Avenue. I don’t know what happened to Marghiloman. I think he reached the island and had
to stand there till the lights changed. Meanwhile I had half a dozen turnings to choose from. When I found a telephone box I decided to call Mrs. Hilliard who ought to be at home and sipping her
outsize glass of sherry before dinner.
    I got through to her at once and told her discreetly that the man who had been expecting me seemed likely to give trouble.
    ‘You do surprise me, Willie,’ she said. ‘Where are you calling from?’
    ‘A box in Soho.’
    ‘And you were wondering if there was still a job for a Portuguese till the sky clears?’
    ‘As a matter of fact I was, Mrs. Hilliard.’
    ‘Were you thinking of going home before coming here?’
    ‘Just to get my things.’
    ‘Well, if I were you, I shouldn’t. I suggest you take a train at once and then walk from wherever it lands you. And don’t go through Molesworthy! You know the Penpoles’
cottage in the wood—aim for that, preferably at night!’
    ‘But it’s not as serious as all that.’
    ‘Very likely it is not. But if Mr. Marghiloman is anxious for more conversation this is one of the places where he would look for you. Now, jump on the first bus you see, and do what I
tell you!’
    I decided that I had better obey, even if it blackened my character as a decent, docile refugee. Assuming Marghiloman did turn out to be a secret police agent after all, I could always plead
that I escaped from him because I thought he was a Romanian spy out to kidnap or compromise me. So I took a bus to Paddington and found that in an hour there would be a fast train stopping at
Swindon. This tempted me. Swindon was only twelve miles from my old home.
    I had always been inhibited from any return—by shame, I think. My conscious mind had accepted Sokes and Caulby, the sub-conscious never. But the life of Cleder’s Priory had cleansed
me. I was destitute and an impostor, yet now I was utterly sure where I belonged. So why not have a look at my old home? So long as I did not stop and talk to anyone who had known my parents,
nobody was likely to recognise the boy of twelve in a man of twenty-three whose hair had grown much darker, and complexion—Caulby after Cairo—an unhealthy yellow. There was no hurry to
reach Molesworthy and I looked forward to covering much of the journey on foot.
    It was nearly midnight when I got off at Swindon and I reckoned that it would be difficult to find a room for the night—especially since I had no baggage and did not look
prosperous—so I might as well walk by well-remembered country roads till dawn and arrive at my home with the sun, if there was any. I sometimes think a small boy sees summer sunrise more
often than others. I used to get out of bed when the dawn chorus of birds woke me and stand at the east window of my room feeling a content and sometimes a conscious joy at the miracle of another
day. But then a window framed my whole world; now I myself was the outer world and that window only a point in time and space.
    I had just started to climb the long, straight road on to the Marlborough Downs when I saw the blue light of a police car coming down the hill towards me. It must have been out to a remote farm
on some scare of swine fever or anthrax, for all the roads come to a reverent standstill when they pass out of the Saxon lowland into the waving grass which washes the standing stones of our first
ancestors and covers the long barrows of the dead.
    I was self-conscious about