Star Science Fiction 1 - [Anthology] Read online

  He hesitated, obviously a little embarrassed. Then he spoke, with an air of plunging:

  “It is concerning Tavia, Sir Gerald—er, Mr. Lattery. I think perhaps you don’t understand the degree to which the whole situation is fraught with unpredictable consequences. It is not just my own responsibility, you understand, though that troubles me greatly—it is the results that cannot be foreseen. She really must come back before very great harm is done. She must, Mr. Lattery.”

  I watched him. His earnestness was beyond question, his distress perfectly genuine.

  “But, Doctor Gobie—” I began.

  “I can understand what it may mean to you, sir, nevertheless I do implore you to persuade her. Not just for my sake and her family’s, but for everyone’s. One has to be so careful; the results of the least action are incalculable. There has to be order, harmony; it must be preserved. Let one single seed fall out of place, and who can say what may come of it? So I beg you to persuade her—”

  I broke in, speaking gently because whatever it was all about, he obviously had it very much at heart.

  “Just a minute, Doctor Gobie. I’m afraid there is some mistake. I haven’t the least idea what you are talking about.”

  He checked himself. A dismayed expression came over his face.

  “You—?” he began, and then paused in thought, frowning. “You don’t mean you haven’t met Tavia yet?” he asked.

  “As far as I know, I do. I’ve never even heard of anyone called Tavia,” I assured him.

  He looked winded by that, and I was sorry. I renewed my offer of a drink. But he shook his head, and presently he recovered himself a little.

  “I am so sorry,” he said. “There has been a mistake indeed. Please accept my apologies, Mr. Lattery. You must think me quite light-headed, I’m afraid. It’s so difficult to explain. May I ask you just to forget it, please forget it entirely.”

  Presently he left, looking forlorn. I remained a little puzzled, but in the course of the next day or two I carried out his final request—or so I thought.

  * * * *

  The first time I did see Tavia was a couple of years later, and, of course, I did not at the time know it was she.

  I had just left The Bull. There was a number of people about in the High Street, but just as I laid a hand on the car door I became aware that one of them on the other side of the road had stopped dead, and was watching me. I looked up, and our eyes met. Hers were hazel.

  She was tall, and slender, and good-looking—not pretty, something better than that. And I went on looking.

  She wore a rather ordinary tweed skirt and dark-green knitted jumper. Her shoes, however, were a little odd; low-heeled, but a bit fancy; they didn’t seem to go with the rest. There was something else out of place, too, though I did not fix it at the moment. Only afterwards did I realize that it must have been the way her fair hair was dressed —very becoming to her, but the style was a bit off the beam. You might say that hair is just hair, and hairdressers have infinite variety of touch, but they haven’t. There is a kind of period-style overriding current fashion; look at any photograph taken thirty years ago. Her hair, like her shoes, didn’t quite suit the rest.

  For some seconds she stood there frozen, quite unsmiling. Then, as if she were not quite awake, she took a step forward to cross the road. At that moment the Market Hall clock chimed. She glanced up at it; her expression was suddenly all alarm. She turned, and started running up the pavement, like Cinderella after the last bus.

  I got into my car wondering who she had mistaken me for. I was perfectly certain I had never set eyes on her before.

  The next day when the barman atThe Bull set down my pint, he told me:

  “Young woman in here asking after you, Mr. Lattery. Did she find you? I told her where your place is.”

  I shook my head. “Who was she?”

  “She didn’t say her name, but—” he went on to describe her. Recollection of the girl on the other side of the street came back to me. I nodded.

  “I saw her just across the road. I wondered who she was.” I told him.

  “Well, she seemed to know you all right. ‘Was that Mr. Lattery who was in here earlier on?’ she says to me. I says yes, you was one of them. She nodded and thought a bit. ‘He lives at Bagford House, doesn’t he?’ she asks. ‘Why, no, Miss,’ I says, ‘that’s Major Flacken’s place. Mr. Lattery, he lives out at Chatcombe Cottage.’ So she asks me where that is, an’ I told her. Hope that was all right. Seemed a nice young lady.”

  I reassured him. “She could have got the address anywhere. Funny she should ask about Bagford House—that’s a place I might hanker for, if I ever had any money.”

  “Better hurry up and make it, sir. The old Major’s getting on a bit now,” he said.

  Nothing came of it. Whatever the girl had wanted my address for, she didn’t follow it up, and the matter dropped out of my mind.

  It was about a month later that I saw her again. I’d kind of slipped into the habit of going riding once or twice a week with a girl called Marjorie Cranshaw, and running her home from the stables afterwards. The way took us by one of those narrow lanes between high banks where there is barely room for two cars to pass. Round a corner I had to brake and pull right in because an oncoming car was in the middle of the road after overtaking a pedestrian. It pulled over, and squeezed past me. Then I looked at the pedestrian, and saw it was this girl again. She recognized me at the same moment, and gave a slight start. I saw her hesitate, and then make up her mind to come across and speak. She came a few steps nearer with obvious intention. Then she caught sight of Marjorie beside me, changed her mind, with as bad an imitation of not having intended to come our way at all as you could hope to see. I put the gear in.

  “Oh,” said Marjorie in a voice that penetrated naturally, and a tone that was meant to, “who was that?”

  I told her I didn’t know.

  “She certainly seemed to know you,” she said, disbelievingly.

  Her tone irritated me. In any case it was no business of hers. I didn’t reply.

  She was not willing to let it drop. “I don’t think I’ve seen her about before,” she said presently.

  “She may be a holiday-maker for all I know,” I said. “There are plenty of them about.”

  “That doesn’t sound very convincing, considering the way she looked at you.”

  “I don’t care for being thought, or called, a liar,” I said.

  “Oh, I thought I asked a perfectly ordinary question. Of course, if I’ve said anything to embarrass you—”

  “Nor do I care for sustained innuendo. Perhaps you’d prefer to walk the rest of the way. It’s not far.”

  “I see. I am sorry to have intruded. It’s a pity it’s too narrow for you to turn the car here,” she said as she got out. “Good-bye, Mr. Lattery.”

  With the help of a gateway it was not too narrow, but I did not see the girl when I went back. Marjorie had roused my interest in her, so that I rather hoped I would. Besides, though I still had no idea who she might be, I was feeling grateful to her. You will have experienced, perhaps, that feeling of being relieved of a weight that you had not properly realized was there?

  * * * *

  Our third meeting was on a different plane altogether.

  My cottage stood, as its name suggests, in a coombe— which, in Devonshire, is a small valley that is, or once was, wooded. It was somewhat isolated from the other four or five cottages there, being set in the lower part, at the end of the track. The heathered hills swept steeply up on either side. A few narrow grazing fields bordered both banks of the stream. What was left of the original woods fringed between them and the heather, and survived in small clumps and spinneys here and there.

  It was in the closest of these spinneys, on an afternoon when I was surveying my plot and deciding that it was about time the beans came out, that I heard a sound of small branches breaking underfoot. I needed no more than a glance to find the cause of it; her fa
ir hair gave her away. For a moment we looked at one another as we had before.

  “Er—hullo,” I said.

  She did not reply at once. She went on staring. Then:

  “Is there anyone in sight?” she asked.

  I looked up as much of the track as I could see from where I stood, and then up the opposite hillside.

  “I can’t see anyone,” I told her.

  She pushed the bushes aside, and stepped out cautiously, looking this way and that. She was dressed just as she had been when I first saw her—except that her hair had been a trifle raked about by branches. On the rough ground the shoes looked even more inappropriate. Seeming a little reassured, she took a few steps forward.

  “I—” she began.

  Then, higher up the coombe, a man’s voice called, and another answered it. The girl froze for a moment, looking scared.

  “They’re coming. Hide me somewhere, quickly, please,” she said.

  “Er—” I began, inadequately.

  “Oh, quick, quick. They’re coming,” she said urgently.

  She certainly looked alarmed.

  “Better come inside,” I told her, and led the way into the cottage.

  She followed swiftly, and when I had shut the door she slid the bolt.

  “Don’t let them catch me. Don’t let them,” she begged.

  “Look here, what’s all this about. Who are ‘they’?” I asked.

  She did not answer that; her eyes, roving round the room, found the telephone.

  “Call the police,” she said. “Call the police, quickly.” I hesitated. “Don’t you have any police?” she added.

  “Of course we have police, but—”

  ‘Then call them, please.”

  “But look here—” I began.

  She clenched her hands.

  “You must call them, please. Quickly.”

  She looked very anxious.

  “All right, I’ll call them. You can do the explaining,” I said, and picked up the instrument.

  I was used to the rustic leisure of communications in those parts, and waited patiently. The girl did not; she stood twining her fingers together. At last the connection was made:

  “Hullo,” I said, “is that the Plyton Police?”

  “Plyton Police—” an answering voice had begun when there was an interruption of steps on the gravel path, followed by a heavy knocking at the door. I handed the instrument to the girl and went to the door.

  “Don’t let them in,” she said, and then gave her attention to the telephone.

  I hesitated. The rather peremptory knocking came again. One can’t just stand about, not letting people in; besides, to take a strange young lady hurriedly into one’s cottage, and immediately bolt the door against all comers—? At the third knocking I opened up.

  The aspect of the man on my doorstep took me aback. Not his face—that was suitable enough in a young man of, say, twenty-five—it was his clothes. One is not prepared to encounter something that looks like a close-fitting skating-suit, worn with a full-cut, hip-length, glass buttoned jacket; certainly not on Dartmoor, at the end of the summer season. However, I pulled myself together enough to ask what he wanted. He paid no attention to that as he stood looking over my shoulder at the girl.

  “Tavia,” he said. “Come here!”

  She didn’t stop talking hurriedly into the telephone. The man stepped forward.

  “Steady on!” I said. “First, I’d like to know what all this is about.”

  He looked at me squarely.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he said, and raised his arm to push me out of the way.

  I have always felt that I would strongly dislike people who tell me that I don’t understand, and try to push me off my own threshold. I socked him hard in the stomach, and as he doubled up I pushed him outside and closed the door.

  “They’re coming,” said the girl’s voice behind me. “The police are coming.”

  “If you’d just tell me—” I began. But she pointed.

  “Look out!—at the window,” she said.

  I turned. There was another man outside, dressed similarly to the first who was still audibly wheezing on the doorstep. He was hesitating. I reached my twelve-bore off the wall, grabbed some cartridges from the drawer and loaded it. Then I stood back, facing the door.

  “Open it, and keep behind it,” I told her.

  She obeyed, doubtfully.

  Outside, the second man was now bending solicitously over the first. A third man was coming up the path. They saw the gun, and we had a brief tableau.

  “You, there,” I said. “You can either beat it quick, or stay and argue it out with the police. Which is it to be?”

  “But you don’t understand. It is most important—” began one of them.

  “All right. Then you can stay there and tell the police how important it is,” I said, and nodded to the girl to close the door again.

  We watched through the window as the two of them helped the winded man away.

  * * * *

  The police, when they arrived, were not amiable. They took down my description of the men reluctantly, and departed coolly. Meanwhile, there was the girl.

  She had told the police as little as she well could—simply that she had been pursued by three oddly dressed men, and had appealed to me for help. She had refused their offer of a lift to Plyton in the police car, so here she still was.

  “Well, now,” I suggested, “perhaps you’d like to explain to me just what seems to be going on?”

  She sat quite still facing me with a long level look which had a tinge of—sadness?—disappointment?—well, unsatisfactoriness of some kind. For a moment I wondered if she were going to cry, but in a small voice she said:

  “I had your letter—and now I’ve burned my boats.”

  I sat down opposite to her. After fumbling a bit I found my cigarettes and lit one.

  “You—er—had my letter, and now you’ve—er—burnt your boats?” I repeated.

  “Yes,” she said. Her eyes left mine and strayed round the room, not seeing much.

  “And now you don’t even know me,” she said.

  Whereupon the tears came, fast.

  I sat there helplessly for a half-minute. Then I decided to go into the kitchen and put on the kettle while she had it out. All my female relatives have always regarded tea as the prime panacea, so I brought the pot and cups back with me when I returned.

  I found her recovered, sitting staring pensively at the unlit fire. I put a match to it. She watched it take light and burn, with the expression of a child who has just received a present.

  “Lovely,” she said, as though a fire were something completely novel. She looked all round the room again. “Lovely,” she repeated.

  “Would you like to pour?” I suggested, but she shook her head, and watched me do it.

  “Tea,” she said. “By a fireside!”

  Which was true enough, but scarcely remarkable.

  “I think it is about time we introduced ourselves,” I suggested. “I am Gerald Lattery.”

  “Of course,” she said, nodding. It was not to my mind an altogether appropriate reply, but she followed it up by: “I am Octavia Lattery—they usually call me Tavia.”

  Tavia?—Something clinked in my mind, but did not quite chime.

  “We are related in some way?” I asked her.

  “Yes—very distantly,” she said, looking at me oddly. “Oh, dear,” she added, “this is difficult,” and looked as if she were about to cry again.

  “Tavia . . ?” I repeated, trying to remember. ‘There’s something . . .” Then I had a sudden vision of an embarrassed elderly gentleman. “Why, of course; Now what was the name? Doctor—Doctor Bogey, or something?”

  She suddenly sat quite still.

  “Not—not Doctor Gobie?” she suggested.

  “Yes, that’s it. He asked me about somebody called Tavia. That would be you?”

  “He isn’t here?” she said, loo
king round as if he might be hiding in a corner.

  I told her it would be about two years ago now. She relaxed.

  “Silly old Uncle Donald. How like him! And naturally you’d have no idea what he was talking about?”

  “I’ve very little more now,” I pointed out, “though I can understand how even an uncle might be agitated at losing you.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid he will be—very,” she said.

  “Was: this was two years ago,” I reminded her.