Murray Fairchild, discovering there was no bus service, was obliged to take a taxi to the Academy from the station at Stupehampton; a distance of fourteen miles. He thought Joan Lumb should have warned him of the expense.
‘The Shrapnel Academy? They say they make nerve gas in there,’ said the driver, settling in for a chat. Murray wanted only silence. The driver was a middle-aged woman. She chain-smoked. She had a bad head cold.
‘Of course that’s only silly rumour, but what does go on there? Or is it secret?’
‘It isn’t secret,’ said Murray. He spoke courteously, in spite of his irritation. He who had deflected bullets in Vietnam, withstood torture in Argentina, and narrowly escaped defenestration in Pakistan, found difficulty in being impolite to women. ‘The Shrapnel Academy is similar to an Arts Centre, but military in its nature.’
‘Oh, I see,’ she said. He doubted that she did.
He stretched his right leg. It ached, and it itched. There was, he knew, a tracery of engorged veins between ankle and knee. The whole leg, were he to look, would have a curiously mottled red and mauve appearance. Yet his left leg remained smooth, lean and bronze. He was sixty. Various physical changes were to be expected with the years, but why should the passage of time affect the right leg, and not the left?
‘Something the matter with your leg?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Bet there is. You men are all the same. Take it to the doctor before it’s too late.’
‘Thank you for your advice,’ he said. But he did not mean to take it. No hypochondriac he, to go running to doctors. A sprinkling of antibiotic powder on a jungle sore, some quinine for malaria, a plank for a slipped disc – Murray did his own doctoring. The leg would respond to healthy living, positive thinking, in its own good time.
‘So, what’s your business at the Shrapnel Academy?’
‘I’m a guest there,’ he said, shortly. He was to be the lion at Joan Lumb’s dinner party. People would know who he was, and have the politeness not to talk about it. He wished that life could be lived without words, or at worst captions. Wham! Whee! Take that, and that! Ouch! Ugh! And the final dying Cr-cr-croak!
He wished he had chosen any other taxi than this.
‘You look like James Bond, only twenty years on,’ she observed. ‘Is that your line of business?’ She coughed and spluttered. He would need to take Vitamin C tablets as soon as possible.
‘Don’t usually find a man like you taking a taxi,’ she said, when her nasal passages were more composed. ‘What happened? Lose your licence? Driving under the influence?’
It was true that Murray had been disqualified from driving, on the grounds of drunkenness, many times, in many courts and in many lands. But if he wanted to drive, he drove, licensed or not. It was the ache in his right leg which now disqualified him as a driver, more effectively than any police force had ever managed, and obliged him to take taxis and put up with the inquisitions of strangers. He would as soon, he thought, step into a Khmer Rouge camp by night as into a taxi with a sneezing woman driver.
‘Hit the nail on the head, then!’ she remarked, when he did not reply. They were within a mile or so of the Shrapnel Academy when they approached a hitchhiker.
‘Don’t pull up,’ he said, sharply.
Once, years ago, he had stopped for a young woman, apparently involved in an accident on a Route Nationale. Out of the damaged car had stepped two armed men. Murray had been taken hostage, held for ransom, confined in a small space and it was four months before he was able to escape. Now he came to think of it, it was probably that particular confinement, that lack of exercise, which had started the trouble with his leg. He seemed to remember a sharp blow on the right knee-cap. With the remembrance came a twinge. ‘Don’t stop,’ he repeated, but the woman simply ignored him and pulled up alongside the hitchhiker. And there were bars in Agadir where men melted away at Murray’s approach!
‘Where do you want to go?’ the woman driver asked.
‘The Shrapnel Academy.’ It was a girl. Her face was muffled against the cold, but he thought the eyes had the steady, careful, haunted look of the female terrorist.
‘Drive on!’ he said, and the pain in his knee stabbed sharply.
‘I’ll just drop this fare off,’ said the driver to the girl, ‘since he’s so nervous. Then I’ll come back and give you a lift.’
‘I’d be grateful,’ said the girl, and they left her standing on the side of the road and she became part of the darkness of the past.
‘Naughty, naughty, paranoia!’ said the taxi driver to Murray.
Democracy, thought Murray, was scarcely worth preserving, or the personal freedoms which went with it, since it was preserved for the likes of the woman taxi driver, who could only abuse all possible freedoms.
‘Penny for your thoughts!’
He ignored her.
‘My, you are a deep one. I bet they do make poison gas up there.’
‘There it is ahead!’ she said, as the gates of the Shrapnel Academy appeared. ‘Bhopal, we call it, down on the rank. We got there just before the weather. They really get snowed in up here! You’ll be lucky to get out before March. Or have you brought your skis?’
‘You can see I have no skis,’ he said. She was a very stupid woman.
‘You might have the new lightweight collapsible ones tucked away in your pocket, for all I know.’
Murray did not think any such new style of skis existed. He would have heard. He’d skied across the Spanish border into France during the war, a dozen times or so. The skis themselves were always the main problem. How to dispose of them? Now if he could have put them in his pocket – but then where would have been the peril, where the point?
‘Only joking,’ she said. She charged him half what he had anticipated. He had the same sudden feeling of elation as once, when he was twelve, his mother had given him twice his normal weekly pocket money, by mistake. He went almost jauntily up the steps, and almost without limping, a thick-set, grizzled man with a wide brow, slightly brain-damaged by various blows to his head over a long period, deep eyes and a kindly manner, and hands adept at taking life, but only, ever, for the sake of principle, never inclination.