Toll for the Brave. Jack Higgins

by my sociologist friend who tried to pull her out of the way and started again so I punched him none too gently under the breastbone, knuckles extended, and he went down with a shrill cry.

      I don’t really remember what happened after that except that Sheila led me out and no one tried to get in the way. I do know that it was raining hard, that I was leaning up against my car in the alley at the side of the house beneath a street lamp.

      She buttoned me into my trenchcoat and said soberly, ‘You were pretty nasty in there.’

      ‘A bad habit of mine these days.’

      ‘You get in fights often?’

      ‘Now and then.’ I struggled to light a cigarette. ‘I irritate people or they annoy me.’

      ‘And afterwards you feel better?’ She shook her head ‘There are other ways of relieving that kind of tension or didn’t it ever occur to you?’

      She had a bright red oilskin mac slung around her shoulders against the rain so I reached inside and cupped a beautifully firm breast.

      She said calmly, ‘See what I mean?’

      I leaned back against the car, my face up to the rain. ‘I can do several things quite well besides belt people. Latin declensions which comes of having gone to the right kind of school and I can find true north by pointing the hour hand of my watch at the sun or by shoving a stick into the ground. And I can cook. My monkey is delicious and tree rats are my speciality.’

      ‘Exactly my type,’ she said. ‘I can see we’re going to get along fine.’

      ‘Just one snag,’ I told her. ‘Bed.’

      She frowned. ‘You didn’t lose anything when you were out there did you?’

      ‘Everything intact and in full working order, ma’am.’ I saluted gravely. ‘It’s just that I’ve never been any good at it. A Chinese psychiatrist once told me it was because my grandfather found me in bed with the Finnish au pair when I was fourteen and beat all hell out of me with a blackthorne he prized rather highly. Carried it all the way through the desert campaign. He was a general, you see, so he naturally found it difficult to forgive me when it broke.’

      ‘On you?’ she said.

      ‘Exactly, so I don’t think you’d find me very satisfactory.’

      ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we?’ She was suddenly the lass from Doncaster again, the Yorkshire voice flat in the rain. ‘What do you do with yourself – for a living, I mean?’

      ‘Is that what you call it?’ I shrugged. ‘The last of the dinosaurs. Hunted to extinction. I enjoy what used to be known in society as private means – lots of them. In what little time I have to spare, I also try to write.’

      She smiled at that, looking so astonishingly beautiful that things actually stopped moving for a moment. ‘You’re just what I’ve been seeking for my old age.’

      ‘You’re marvellous,’ I said. ‘Also big, busty, sensuous…’

      ‘Oh, definitely that,’ she said. ‘I never know when to stop. I’m also a lay-out artist in an advertising agency, divorced and thirty-seven years of age. You’ve only seen me in an artificial light, love.’

      I started to slide down the side of the car and she got a shoulder under my arm and went through my clothes.

      ‘You’ll find the wallet in my left breast pocket,’ I murmured.

      She chuckled. ‘You daft ha’p’orth. I’m looking for the car keys. Where do you live?’

      ‘The Essex coast,’ I told her. ‘Foulness.’

      ‘Good God,’ she said. ‘That must be all of fifty miles away.’

      ‘Fifty-eight.’

      She took me back to her flat in the King’s Road, just for the night. I stayed a month, which was definitely all I could take of the hub of the universe, the bright lights, the crowds. I needed solitude again, the birds, the marshes, my own little hole to rot in. So she left her job at the agency, moved down to Foulness and set up house with me.

      Oscar Wilde once said that life is a bad quarter of an hour made up of exquisite moments. She certainly gave me plenty of those in the months that followed and that morning was no exception. I started off in my usual frenzy and within minutes she had gentled me into making slow, meaningful love and with considerably more expertise than when we had first met. She’d definitely taken care of that department.

      Afterwards I felt fine, the fears of the hour before dawn a vague fantasy already forgotten. I kissed her softly under her rigid left nipple, tossed the sheets to one side and went into the bathroom.

      A medical friend once assured me that the shock of an ice-cold shower was detrimental to the vascular system and liable to reduce life expectancy by a month. Admittedly he was in his cups at the time but I had always found it an excellent excuse for spending five minutes each morning under a shower that was as hot as I could bear.

      When I returned to the bedroom Sheila had gone, but I could smell coffee and realised that I was hungry. I dressed quickly and went into the sitting-room. There was a log fire burning on the stone hearth and she had her easel set up in front of it.

      She was standing there now in her old terry towelling robe, the palette back in her left hand, dabbing vigorously at the canvas with a long brush.

      ‘I’m having coffee,’ she said without turning round. ‘I’ve made tea for you. It’s on the table.’

      I poured myself a cup and went and stood behind her. It was good – damn good. A view from the house, the saltings splashed with sea-lavender, the peculiarly luminous light reflected by the slimy mud flats, blurring everything at the edges. Above all, the loneliness.

      ‘It’s good.’

      ‘Not yet.’ She worked away busily in one corner without turning her head. ‘But it will be. What do you want for breakfast?’

      ‘I wouldn’t dream of disturbing the muse.’ I kissed her on the nape of the neck. ‘I’ll take Fritz for a walk.’

      ‘All right, love.’

      The brush was moving very quickly now, a frown of concentration on her face. I had ceased to exist so I got my hunting jacket from behind the door and left her to it.

      I have been told that in some parts of America, Airedales are kept specifically to hunt bears and they are excellent swimmers, a useful skill in an area like Foulness. But not Fritz who was Sheila’s one true love, a great, shaggy bundle in ginger and black, amiable to a degree in spite of a bark that could be heard half a mile away. He had ceased to frighten even the birds and was terrified of water, objecting to even the mildest wetting of his paws. He romped ahead of me along the rutted grassy track and I followed.

      Foulness – Cape of Birds, the Saxons called it and they were here in plenty. I have always had a liking for solitude and no more than fifty-odd miles from London, I rotted gently and in the right place for it. Islands and mist and sea walls to keep out the tide, built by the Dutch centuries ago. Creeks, long grass, stirring to change colour as if brushed by an invisible presence, the gurgle of water everywhere and the sea creeping in like a ghost in the night to take the unwary.

      The Romans had known this place, Saxon outlaws hidden here from the Normans, and now Ellis Jackson pretended for the moment that this was all there was.

      In the marshes autumn is the saltings purple and mauve with the sea-lavender, the damp smell of rotting vegetation. Birds calling constantly, lifting from beyond the sea wall uneasily, summer dead and winter yet to come. Gales blowing in off the North Sea, the wind moaning endlessly.

      Was this all there was – truly? A bottle a day and Sheila Ward to warm the bed? What was I waiting for, here at the world’s end?

      Somewhere in the far distance I heard shooting. Heavy