“He must be on the road by now.”
“Where’s Haldane?”
“Asleep.”
“How can anyone sleep at a time like this?”
“It’ll be daylight soon.”
“Can’t you do something about that fire?” Leclerc asked. “It shouldn’t smoke like that, I’m sure.” He shook his head suddenly, as if shaking off water, and said, “John, there’s a most interesting report from Fielden. Troop movements in Budapest. Perhaps when you get back to London …” He lost the thread of his sentence and frowned.
“You mentioned it,” Avery said softly.
“Yes. Well, you must take a look at it.”
“I’d like to. It sounds very interesting.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“Very.”
“You know,” he said—he seemed to be reminiscing—”they still won’t give that wretched woman her pension.”
He sat very straight on the motorbike, elbows in as if he were at table. It made a terrible noise; it seemed to fill the dawn with sound, echoing across the frosted fields and stirring the roosting poultry. The mackintosh had leather pieces on the shoulders; as he bounced along the unmade road its skirts fluttered behind, rattling against the spokes of the rear wheel. Daylight came.
Soon he would have to eat. He couldn’t understand why he was so hungry. Perhaps it was the exercise. Yes, it must be the exercise. He would eat, but not in a town, not yet. Not in a cafe where strangers came. Not in a cafe where the boy had been.
He drove on. His hunger taunted him. He could think of nothing else. His hand held down the throttle and drove his ravening body forward. He turned onto a farm track and stopped.
The house was old, falling with neglect; the drive overgrown with grass, pitted with cart tracks. The fences were broken. There was a terraced garden once partly under plow, now left as if it were beyond all use.
A light burned in the kitchen window. Leiser knocked at the door. His hand was trembling from the motorbike. No one came; he knocked again, and the sound of his knocking frightened him. He thought he saw a face, it might have been the shadow of the boy sinking across the window as he fell, or the reflection of a swaying branch.
He returned quickly to his motorbike, realizing with terror that his hunger was not hunger at all but loneliness. He must lie up somewhere and rest. He thought: I’ve forgotten how it takes you. He drove on until he came to the wood, where he lay down. His face was hot against the bracken.
It was evening; the fields were still light but the wood in which he lay gave itself swiftly to the darkness, so that in a moment the red pines had turned to columns of black.
He picked the leaves from his jacket and laced up his shoes. They pinched badly at the instep. He never had a chance to break them in. He caught himself thinking, It’s all right for them; and he remembered that nothing ever bridged the gulf between the man who went and the man who stayed behind, between the living and the dying.
He struggled into the harness of his rucksack and once again felt gratefully the hot, raw pain in his shoulders as the straps found the old bruises. Picking up the suitcase he walked across the field to the road where the motorbike was waiting; five kilometers to Langdorn. He guessed it lay beyond the hill: the first of the three towns. Soon he would meet the roadblock; soon he would have to eat.
He drove slowly, the case across his knees, peering ahead all the time along the wet road, straining his eyes for a line of red lights or a cluster of men and vehicles. He rounded a bend and saw to his left a house with a beer sign propped in the window. He entered the forecourt; the noise of the engine brought an old man to the door. Leiser lifted the bike onto its stand.
“I want a beer,” he said, “and some sausage. Have you got that here?”
The old man showed him inside, sat him at a table in the front room from which Leiser could see his motorbike parked in the yard. He brought him a bottle of beer, some sliced sausage and a piece of black bread; then stood at the table watching him eat.