Baf drove a dark green sportscar: it scuttled between the high hedges as if it were a beetle running for cover. Baf had owned the car for a week. It was thirty years old, two years older than blond Baf himself. There was a map-light attachment on the dashboard and a compass stuck by suction to the windscreen. Baf drove with the roof open, regardless of the cold. He wore a leather flying jacket with a fur collar, turned up high beneath his square and handsome jaw. He was in a hurry to see Muffin, who worked at the Shrapnel Academy. Muffin was Joan Lumb’s secretary. Baf had visited the Academy, in secret, many times. He would telephone ahead, so Muffin would be watching the drive when he arrived. She would open one of the side doors for her lover. They would hurry up the back-stairs to her small bedroom on the third floor where he would throw himself upon her, leaving her scarcely any time at all to remove her garments. The red horse-heads upon her royal blue headscarf and his fur collar were etched into the other’s erotic consciousness.
Reader, what is etched in yours? What collar-bone, what little patch of textured skin, what dangling pendant? Think! Remember! Keep back the glacier of age by the sheer warmth, the sheer force of sexual recollections, wild imaginings! It can be done: it is worth the doing.
Today Baf would go to the front door, openly. He too had been invited by Joan Lumb to come to dinner and meet the General. The dinner would no doubt be boring, but Baf would at least stay overnight, officially. Muffin would have the sense to put him in a room easily accessible to hers. And Baf would take the opportunity, during the Saturday morning, of cornering the General and demonstrating the miniaturised weaponry he carried in a velvet-lined Victorian knife box in the boot of the car. Once such fire power would have needed a half-mile wagon train to carry it. Now, a knife box! Oh, nifty! Oh, progress! Stunning! Oh, the cleverness of men! Bump, goes the knife box the other side of a hump-backed bridge. Up, down, bump, and bump again.
Baf did not think he would marry Muffin. Someone better would probably come along: Kashoggi’s daughter, Arafat’s niece. And Muffin, to be fair, felt that marriage to Baf was likewise unsuitable. One married, she supposed, for a quiet life. Sooner or later, Muffin expected to be the wife of one of the young officers who came to the Shrapnel Academy for courses in Weapons Through the Ages, The Rule of Law, The Concept of the Just War, and so forth. She also sometimes thought, regretfully, that it probably wouldn’t make much difference which one it was. They all seemed much the same: that is to say, shy and sweet, rather like Muffin herself. If she smiled at them, they would smile shyly and sweetly back, but she had to smile first. Muffin was spectacularly long-legged and shaggy-headed: she had large blue eyes with droopy lids. She seemed to inspire romantic rather than erotic love in the hearts of young men other than Baf. If she dropped a drawing-pin, when pinning lists and rotas on the noticeboards, there would be a dive to the rescue, and a trembling of hands if hers touched theirs. Well, that was right. Husbands should respect wives. And Baf didn’t respect Muffin; she could tell by the things he did in bed. Muffin thought she would just put off marriage as long as she possibly could. But how the gentle, soulful young cadets were ever to become men of war, she could not imagine: storm towns and drop bombs and so on!
Baf realised that the bump and lurch after the hump-backed bridge, which he had rather enjoyed, was unfamiliar. He had taken a wrong turning, an easy enough thing to do in such a spiderweb of lanes: the light snow which was now falling blanked out detail and made one crossroads much like another. He stopped at the next signposted turning, took out the map and switched on the map-light, pleased to have found an opportunity for making use of it. The compass, alas, had fallen off the windscreen. Baf located it on the floor, re-licked its suckers, and pressed it on again. It stayed. A right turn and then another should, he imagined, after proper consultation of map and compass, bring him back to familiar territory. So he had planned his route in the past, in the uncharted wastes of the Sahara, and in jungle tracks in Bolivia and over the South African veldt. A compass had never fallen off before. He imagined it was the cold and damp which did it.
After the first right turn his headlights picked out a motorbike lying by the side of the hedged road. He slowed, thinking perhaps there had been an accident. He saw no signs of a body, but after the next turn came upon a young woman, walking away from him in the centre of the narrow road. She carried a rucksack in one hand, and a bike helmet in the other. When she heard the car, she pressed herself against the hedge to let it pass. Baf slowed, stopped, lowered the window. There was not much of her to be seen, inasmuch as a donkey jacket concealed her figure, and her head was wrapped in a long woolly scarf, of the kind he had so often seen on Jumble Sale stalls in his youth, when his mother had been active raising funds for the Little Sisters of Mercy Overseas. But she was young, female, in trouble and he wished to help.
‘Can I give you a lift?’
‘No, you cannot.’
The reply was curt: the tone of voice almost offensive. Baf was hurt. He noticed, so bright was the map-light which he now switched on, that she was wearing heavy boots and that their laces were double-knotted. He had the feeling that if he pressed the matter she might well produce a knife and use it. She was the kind of young woman who carried cartons of pepper to throw in men’s eyes, and handy pocket tear-gas sprays to blind them. Then when the man was helpless, weeping and coughing, and no doubt deafened by an alarm siren as well, she would get him with the boots. Girls like that were everywhere, these days. Baf wound up the window, and carried on. Let her walk. Muffin, in similar circumstances, would have accepted a lift. Those who looked for evil found none, and Baf had certainly meant none. He was glad to notice it was snowing harder, as he turned into the grounds of the Shrapnel Academy.