‘With fifty stolen box files? Oh sure. Sure.’
De Lisle examined Turner over the top of the harpsichord. ‘You complement one another. I look at you and I think of Leo. You’re Saxon. Big hands, big feet, big heart and that lovely reason that grapples with ideals. Leo’s the other way round. He’s a performer. He wears our clothes, uses our language but he’s only half tamed. I suppose I’m on your side, really: you and I are the concert audience.’ He closed the harpsichord. ‘We’re the ones who glimpse, and reach, and fall back. There’s a Leo in all of us but he’s usually dead by the time we’re twenty.’
‘What are you then?’
‘Me? Oh, reluctantly, a conductor.’ Standing up, he carefully locked the keyboard with a small brass key from his chain. ‘I can’t even play the thing,’ he said, tapping the bleached lid with his elegant fingers. ‘I tell myself I will one day; I’ll take lessons or get a book. But I don’t really care: I’ve learnt to live with being half-finished. Like most of us.’
‘Tomorrow’s Thursday,’ Turner said. ‘If they don’t know he’s defected, they’ll be expecting him to turn up, won’t they?’
‘I suppose so,’ de Lisle yawned. ‘But then they know where to go, don’t they, whoever they are? And you don’t. That is something of a drawback.’
‘It might not be.’
‘Oh.’
‘We know where you saw him, at least, that Thursday afternoon, don’t we, when he was supposed to be at the Ministry? Same place as he took Pargiter. Seems quite a hunting-ground for him.’
De Lisle stood very still, the keychain still in his hand.
‘It’s no good telling you not to go, I suppose?’
‘No.’
‘Asking you? You’re acting against Bradfield’s instructions.’
‘Even so.’
‘And you’re sick. All right. Go and look for your untamed half. And if you do find that file, we shall expect you to return it unopened.’
And that, quite suddenly, was an order.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Thursday’s Child
The weather on the plateau was stolen from other seasons and other places. It was a sea wind from March which sang in the wire netting, bending the tufts of coarse grass and crashing into the forest behind him; and if some mad aunt had planted a monkey-puzzle in the sandy earth, Turner could have hopped straight down the path and caught the trolley-bus to Bournemouth Square. It was the frost of November whose icy pipes encased the bracken stems; for there the cold had hidden from the wind and it gripped like arctic water at his ankles; the frost of a stone crevice on a north face, when only fear will set your hands to work, and life is treasured because it is won. The last strips of an Oxford sun lay bravely dying on the empty playing-field; and the sky was a Yorkshire evening. in autumn, black and billowing and fringed with grime. The trees were curved from childhood, bent by the blustering wind, Mickie Crabbe’s boyhood bent at the taps in the washroom, and when the gusts had gone they waited still, backs arched for the next assault.
The cuts on his face were burning raw and his pale eyes were bright with sleepless pain. He waited, staring down the hill. Far below to his right lay the river, and for once the wind had silenced it, and the barges called in vain. A car was climbing slowly towards him; a black Mercedes, Cologne registration, woman driver; and did not slow down as it passed. On the other side of the wire, a new hut was shuttered and padlocked. A rook had settled on the roof and the wind tugged at its feathers. A Renault, French diplomatic registration, woman driver, one male passenger: Turner noted the number in his black book. His script was stiff and childish, and the letters came to him unnaturally. He must have hit back after all, for two knuckles on his right hand were badly cut, as if he had punched an open mouth and caught the front teeth. Harting’s handwriting was neat, rounding the rough corners, but Turner’s was big and downright, promising collision.
‘You are both movers, you and Leo,’ de Lisle had said some time last night, as they sat in their deep armchairs. ‘Bonn is stationary but you are movers… You are fighting one another, but it is you against us… The opposite of love is not hate but apathy… You must come to terms with apathy.’