Leiser rushed to the study—he seemed to know the game— to write down his answers. As soon as he had left the room Avery said accusingly, “That was you. That was your voice speaking at the end.”
“Was it?” Haldane replied. He might not have known.
There were other tapes too, and they had the smell of death; the running of feet on a wooden staircase, the slamming of a door, a click, and a girl’s voice asking—she might have been offering lemon or cream—”Catch of a door? Cocking of a gun?”
Leiser hesitated. “A door,” he said. “It was just the door.”
“It was a gun,” Haldane retorted. “A Browning nine millimeter automatic. The magazine was being slid into the butt.”
In the afternoon they went for their first walk, the two of them, Leiser and Avery, through Port Meadow and into the country beyond. Haldane had sent them. They walked fast, striding over the whip grass, the wind catching at Leiser’s hair and throwing it wildly about his head. It was cold but there was no rain; a clear, sunless day when the sky above the flat fields was darker than the earth.
“You know your way around here, don’t you?” Leiser asked. “Were you at school here?”
“I was an undergraduate here, yes.”
“What did you study?”
“I read languages. German principally.”
They climbed a stile and emerged in a narrow lane.
“You married?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Kids?”
“One.”
“Tell me something, John. When the Captain turned up my card . . . what happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“What does it look like, an index for so many? It must be a big thing in an outfit like ours.”
“It’s in alphabetical order,” Avery said helplessly. “Just cards. Why?”
“He said they remembered me: the old hands. I was the best, he said. Well, who remembered?”
“They all did. There’s a special index for the best people. Practically everyone in the Department knows Fred Leiser. Even the new ones. You can’t have a record like yours and get forgotten, you know.” He smiled. “You’re part of the furniture, Fred.”
“Tell me something else, John. I don’t want to rock the boat, see, but tell me this . . . Would I be any good on the inside?”
“The inside?”
“In the Office, with you people. I suppose you’ve got to be born to it really, like the Captain.”
“I’m afraid so, Fred.”
“What cars do you use up there, John?”
“Humbers.”
“Hawk or Snipe?”
“Hawk.”
“Only four-cylinder? The Snipe’s a better job, you know.”
“I’m talking about nonoperational transport,” Avery said. “We’ve a whole range of stuff for the special work.”
“Like the van?”
“That’s it.”
“How long before . . . how long does it take to train you? You, for instance; you just did a run. How long before they let you go?”
“Sorry, Fred. I’m not allowed … not even you.”
“Not to worry.”
They passed a church set back on a rise above the road, skirted a plowed field and returned, tired and radiant, to the cheerful embrace of the Mayfly house and the gas fire playing on the golden roses.
In the evening, they had the projector for visual memory: they would be in a car, passing a marshaling yard; or in a train beside an airfield; they would be taken on a walk through a town, and suddenly they would become aware that a vehicle or a face had reappeared, and they had not remembered its features. Sometimes a series of disconnected objects were flashed in rapid succession on the screen, and there would be voices in the background, like the voices on the tape, but the conversation was not related to the film, so that the student must consult both his senses and retain what was valuable from each.
Thus the first day ended, setting the pattern for those that followed: carefree, exciting days for them both, days of honest labor and cautious but deepening attachment as the skills of boyhood became once more the weapons of war.
For the unarmed combat they had rented a small gymnasium near Headington which they had used in the war. An instructor had come by train. They called him Sergeant.