The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (31 page)

It was exasperating not to know how much time they had—till next day, perhaps, if their departure from Marylebone was only discovered as a result of routine enquiries; none at all if the police were waiting on the platform at Brackley and the guard reported a man and a girl jumping out of the train. He remembered past experience. The right game was to stock up with food at once, while he could still risk showing his face in public.

From their miniature plateau they looked down on a village half a mile away. It had a church; it would certainly have a pub; it might or might not have a shop. He told Nadya to stay where she was and left the deadly Norfolk jacket with her. A man in his shirt sleeves on a warm May afternoon would pass in a village though not in London.

With his cap covering Scheeper’s white mèche there was nothing much to single him out from his fellows. He passed a red brick cottage marked Police Station with a notice board outside entirely concerned with abortion in cattle and a by-election for the Rural District Council. The walls were covered by a climbing rose in leaf and a fine broom in flower. It was difficult to be afraid of anything so far removed from the usual barrack-like building of Europe.

The village did have a shop with a little food and a surprising stock of buckets, brooms and fly papers. He bought a loaf, butter, biscuits, tins of bully beef and a cheap sturdy knife, and as an afterthought two pint bottles of lemonade in case clean water should be hard to find. The old lady who kept the place spread the lot out on the counter and asked:

‘On ’oliday, be yer?’

‘Camping with some boy scouts.’

‘Don’t yer ’ave nothing to put all this ’ere in?’

‘Not unless I go back for it.’

‘Oi can give yer an old sack if yer don’t mind bein’ seed with it like.’

Bernardo was all for being seed with it. The sack with some lumps at the bottom provided protective colouring; he would appear to be just slipping out, coatless, from cottage to field with vaguely agricultural requirements. When he left the shop he saw that the police station at the other end of the street had lost its picture-postcard innocence. Standing outside was a police car which he approached slowly, not daring to stop or turn back in case he drew attention to himself. The car drove off fast with four men in it, two of them in uniform. At the same time the village constable came out, jumped on his bicycle and rode straight past Bernardo without looking at him. He gave the impression of being absorbed by the urgency and importance of his task.

So that settled the question of time. They hadn’t any. He returned to Nadya and found her sitting in the sun and contentedly messing about with the Norfolk jacket. When she held it up for him he hardly recognised it; she had ripped off the fur collar and turned it inside out to show the silk lining. It looked like the ultimate wreck of something cut by a ladies’ tailor in the eighteen nineties.

He told her what he had seen in the village and insisted that they had to move at once.

‘They can’t catch us down there,’ she said, pointing to the vale, all dark green on light green and dotted with brown jets where oak and ash were still in bud.

But they could, and without anything so drastic as watching cross-roads. Two or three of those constables on their silent bicycles could be just as effective. A man and a girl carefully avoiding villages, forcing their way through hedges, inevitably getting mixed up on tracks which only led to farms, would soon be reported.

‘We shall be safe at night, but there are six hours of daylight left.’

‘Why don’t we go back quickly to the cutting?’ Nadya suggested. ‘They’ll never look for us there.’

A gamble, but a fair one. The fugitives would be expected to bolt away from the railway as far and as fast as they could. The search would fan out from their starting point, but the hinge of the fan was not worth bothering with. The trouble was returning to the cutting. Across the open fields it was no longer safe. The only way was to risk walking along the road as far as a bridge which crossed the line.

The coat inspired him. She, not he, ought to be wearing it. And if she wore his cap as well ...

He explained to her that tramps, male and female, were a common sight on the by-roads of England and that they looked as abandoned and disreputable as anything out of Gorky. He helped her into the coat which came nearly to her knees and was completely shapeless. He added his cap, squashed and twisted, and rubbed her face with leaf mould. The result was convincing. If a cop passed her on the stretch of road he was more likely to stop and ask her if she had seen the wanted pair than to suspect she might be one of them.

‘When you get to the bridge,’ he said, ‘see that there is nobody in sight and no train and nip over the wall. Find a good place in the cutting and wait for me.’

‘But what about you?’

‘I’ll try the same trick afterwards under cover of the hedges. Leave me your own coat and I’ll carry it folded over my arm. And your hat can go in the sack.’

She set off down the green lane and reached the road unobserved. She was then out of his sight until she was within a hundred yards of the bridge. There a farm cart passed her, its driver paying no attention. She was over the wall and into cover and nobody any the wiser.

While he was planning his own route, a car stopped on the road, dropped two men and drove away. To his alarm they
took the track up to the open space where he was. Bernardo looked frantically round for cover. Hedges were windswept and thin, and ditches shallow. The only hope was a low, thick holly standing by itself in a corner. So long as the new arrivals did not separate he might be able to keep moving round it.

The two could see at once that nobody was at the top of the green lane. They were about to search the ditches when one of them came across the fur collar which Nadya had ripped off. He had no doubt what it was and declared that Brown and his popsy must have dashed up that promising lane and then gone round or through the village below. The roads out of it were under surveillance, and if they tried the long, bare slopes on both sides of the railway they were sure to be seen. Either way they would be caught before dark.

They trotted down to the village on the same route that Bernardo had taken; he gathered that the car was waiting for them there. In another five minutes they would have picked up his trail at the shop and learn that he was going about without a coat. It was an easy deduction that the popsy could be wearing it, inside out or not. The only comfort was that Nadya had been right; it never occurred to the two detectives that the wanted couple had gone back to the cutting.

The mention of Brown showed that his true name had now been passed on to the police. Bernardo Brown alias David Mitrani alias Henri Scheeper, an international criminal if there ever was one. No wonder the village constable had gone charging off on his bicycle with his eyes on promotion instead of the pavement. Bernardo ran down the green lane. The road was empty. So long as he stayed between its high hedges he knew he could not be seen. He decided to get it over, walking fast and chancing the traffic. He had to race a goods train to the bridge but was into cover by the time the locomotive came abreast.

It was far from safe to walk along the track in full view
of the bridge. While the casual passer-by would take him for a railwayman any of those plain-clothes cops cruising round the district would be after him at once. He moved by short dashes in and out of the scrub, looking and listening before he showed himself. He felt like an inadequate, young rabbit always moving when he shouldn’t, and was thankful when Nadya called from above and he could dive into the railway jungle for good.

The spot she had chosen was so thickly overgrown that he could not see her till she moved. There was a small patch of vegetation to sit on and a view through an elder bush of the line below. He told her how he had been nearly caught and asked if she had been seen. She didn’t think so. She had pushed her way along the top of the cutting between the fence and the scrub.

After some cautious work with the knife had produced a roomier den they opened up the sack and ate. In spite of bottled lemonade Bernardo was at peace for the first time in twenty-four hours. The passing trains emphasised their security as if occupying the same space but a different time to theirs. In the evening a couple of linesmen walked along the track, occasionally inspecting the cutting for signs of erosion.

Bernardo wanted to get clear as soon as it was dark. Nadya was for staying where they were; and since he could not specify exactly what was to be gained by hurry he had to agree. She had a good point, saying that since their train had been held up on this stretch of line it was probable that another would be; if it was a goods train they could slip into any convenient truck and go wherever it took them. She added that anxiety had kept her awake all the previous night, that she was sleepy and there was room to curl up.

For a long time he sat up with knees to chin dozing, depressed and thinking about her. The adventures of her childhood and life with Stepanov must have accustomed her to sleep anywhere. The ground was damp and it would be vilely
cold at dawn, yet she appeared content to accept the present for what it was without looking forward to the hopeless complexities of their situation. Partly it must be due to her blind confidence in seizing an opportunity although, when one came to think of it, her instinct would get her nowhere unless he took over and built on what she had created. That seemed to be the pattern ever since their eyes had first met at the Moş. A good partnership, but could it continue? It was impossible to avoid capture, to eat or get a roof over their heads so long as they remained together.

‘I am cold,’ she said.

There was no room for more than one of them to lie down, but he had the support of yielding branches at his back. He took Nadya on his knee and threw over her Pozharski’s jacket on which she had been lying. She evidently found the arrangement a lot more comfortable than he did and wriggled into position with her head on his shoulder. In sleep her voice sometimes purred in unintelligible Russian. The common warmth brought on some stirring of excitement, and he rebuked the offending instrument; it had no business whatever, he told it, to think that this child who trusted him and would not leave him was Despina in a similar position. Memories of the Moş huffed and puffed in two opposite directions. Her hair tickled him. He retired to a mentally neutral corner and decided that some day she ought to let it grow again to the length it had been then.

Day came with a promise of still more fine weather, though the sun on the east-facing slope of the cutting was more cheerful than warm. When they had stood up and shaken the stiffness out of their limbs, cold seemed of less importance than continued freedom. The lemonade was finished at breakfast but an ample supply of food remained. They lazed away the daylight hours expecting a train to stop. None of them did.

They were impatient for the long twilight to end. The obvious game then was to follow the railway, lying down or taking cover whenever a train or a railwayman was approach
ing. Since the first could be heard far off and the other carried a bobbing light, they had little fear of being caught. In single file they crunched on over the ballast at the side of the line, easily avoiding trouble except on long, bare embankments where twice they had to dive over the edge. Before midnight they came to a complicated junction with a lit signal box and no station. The right-hand line seemed to have the least traffic so they followed it, vanishing at once into a primeval England where the sight of man was rare and the wild life was accustomed to the passage of a fiery dragon which did no harm. A badger waddled across the line showing his white streaks in the darkness like a phosphorescent little bear—which Nadya thought he was. The sides of cuttings were busy rabbit warrens. The scent of hawthorn mingled with half a dozen faint unknowns in the heavy night air. Toy landscape? By God, it wasn’t! If only one could build a hut and light a fire one could live on the bounty of the railway indefinitely.

They came to a small station where no one was on duty but a barn owl. Not far away a stream was flowing under the line. The ripple of water and the timber platform suggested to Bernardo a forgotten quay on some remote Vizcayan estuary; even there one could find no wilder seclusion. The station was called Wotton Underwood, but more important than a mere name was the discovery of a station tap. They could drink and fill the lemonade bottles.

After another hour they crossed a bridge over a main road running east and west—a perfectly useless piece of information provided by the Pole Star. They walked on in a void of friendly, mysterious darkness, not knowing what was in any direction or what would be the result of arriving there. At any rate it was most unlikely to be a place where police were waiting for them.

The first red streaks of the early dawn hung over wide patches of woodland to the right of the line. They cut across the fields and pushed through a belt of hazel into true forest, silent in its age as soon as the clatter of disturbed
wood-pigeons had disappeared. The wind was getting up from the south-west, reminding Bernardo of weeks in the two English Mays he had known which would have soaked an Eskimo to the skin and then frozen him. They had had luck with their weather, and now it was over.

Low clouds swept over the trees which at first gave shelter from the driving rain and then very little. Both were already dripping when they discovered a fallen elm under which they squatted, she huddled in the Norfolk jacket, he with her coat over his shoulders. Even Nadya was for once dejected. The rain underlined their helplessness—no more food, no money except for the foreign notes which remained, no certain destination, no possibility of ever getting dry. Bernardo was haunted by a disquieting sense of continuity as if a steady state of desperation had endured from a Moldavian wood into an English one and his existence between the two had been illusion. And illusion it was—he couldn’t get away from that—maintained only by the ridiculous optimism of an unsustainable David Mitrani. Nadya was the only reality.