Gerald Seymour - The Contract

Johnny stiffened, turned, saw Mrs Ferguson, still in her apron.

'That's very sweet of you, thanks.'

'Mr Mawby's just come…'

' I heard the car, I'd better be getting inside.'

'You're away early in the morning Mr Carter says.'

'That's right, on my travels, something like that anyway.'

'Keep safe, Johnny.'

His hand shook and the cup rattled in the saucer and the tea spoon chimed against the china. He heard her feet pattering back towards the rear door that served the kitchen. For a few moments he watched the cloud gunning across the face of a small moon, picked out star patterns, then abruptly swung to the french windows, opened them and stepped into the living room.

Mawby stood in the centre of the carpet, Carter was sitting reading, Smithson and Pierce played backgammon near the fire. That's the team, Johnny, that's the Dipper's back-up. As good as you could expect, as bad as you were likely to find. Pretty average, and why should it be anything else? Johnny took a chair near the window.

'Fit and ready, Johnny?' Mawby said heartily.

'As fit as I ought to be.' 'I wanted to see you before you went off, that's why I came down. Henry put your case about going these two days early, said you wanted to rub-up your language in West Germany for 48 hours…'

'That's right.'

'You kept it for the last, sprung the idea late.'

'I said to Mr Carter that I thought it important.'

'I'm not making a thing of it, Johnny. I'm not forbidding it…' Mawby paused and Johnny saw his tiredness, the strain at his eyes and the nerves that chipped at the facade of calm. 'You're in Magdeburg, and we're not, I understand your attitude. There's something that I've said before, but which I want to emphasise again… if it goes nasty, if it starts to slide, then you quit. You don't risk capture. It's critical that you remember that. If it's falling apart, out you come, regardless of any other consideration. Is that clear?'

'That's very clear, Mr Mawby.'

'Good hunting. We'll have a bit of a party when we meet up again.'

There was a half smile at Johnny's face. 'I'll look forward to that.'

'I expect you want to get yourself a shower, and put your things together…'

There was an awkwardness settling in the room, all grown men and none knowing the script of the occasion.

'I'd like to do that.'

Mawby stared at Johnny and the gleaming public confidence of a few seconds before had been stripped. A naked and uncovered face.

'It's a good plan, isn't it, Johnny… it ought to work…'

'Doesn't matter if it's a good plan or not. It's the one that we have. Good night, Mr Mawby.'

'Good night, Johnny,' Mawby said. 'And good luck…'

Johnny closed the door quietly behind him, slowly climbed the stairs.

Time to pack the few belongings that he had brought from Cherry Road.

The routine of the house at Holmbury had swiftly changed course.

Johnny gone, Mawby back for a night and then away, Smithson and Pierce heading for London.

A house of echoes and memories as it had been many times before.

And the moment for the boy to be told.

Two mornings after the exodus Carter took Willi outside. A fine, cheerful morning and Carter pushed a wheelbarrow with a fork in it and handed a hoe to the boy and suggested that if the weather held up they could put in a day's weeding and tidy the old place. They needed some fresh air, had been c. ooped up long enough, had earned the right to unwind before the launching. The wheelbarrow dented the grass as it was taken to the middle of the lawn in front of the house and Carter gazed around him at the acreage of flower beds with their vermin weeds.

Where to start… begin with the roses. It had been an impromptu idea over breakfast, and so he was dressed in his familiar two piece suit. He tucked the ends of his trousers into his socks. They would have to clean their shoes meticulously afterwards or Mrs Ferguson would scalp them, but nobody had ever thought to provide Wellington boots at the house, nobody had ever thought of gardening as a useful therapy for defectors.

George would be watching them from the patio, sitting on the oakwood bench and pretending the newspaper he had collected from the front gate held his attention. George would be watching the boy.

They started at the rose bed. Willi hoeing at the grass tufts, loosening them and throwing them into the barrow. Carter discarding his jacket onto the branch of a small birch and turning the cleaned earth. They worked close to each other, a few feet apart.

'You remember when we went to London, what I said then, about helping us?' Carter puffed and his hands rested comfortably on the fork's handle.

The boy chopped at the grass. 'I remember, Mr Carter.'

'I said then that if you helped us, we would help you.'

'You said something like that, Mr Carter.' Willi did not look up, no emotion on his face. A neutered thing they had made of him since his return to the house.

'We are very pleased with the way that you have helped us, Willi, and in particular with the way that you co-operated after Johnny came down here. You've earned the truth from us. And with the truth you'll be able to help us all the better in the last stage of what we plan.'

Willi gouged at the earth beneath the grass roots.

'What is the truth, Mr Carter?'

Carter hadn't reached Johnny and he hadn't reached the boy. He remembered how he had once heard his neighbours talking over the garden fence and unaware that he was within earshot. 'He's a dull old cove', the husband had said; 'a proper queer blighter', the wife had replied. Not a man who excited trust, was he? God knows, and he tried.

And the suit and the briefcase and the tale of government business and the long periods away, they weren't Henry Carter's fault. But that was the verdict of his neighbours. Dull and queer… If he couldn't find Johnny's soul then he must find the boy's.

Carter said, 'It's our hope, Willi, that within a week you will be reunited with your father…'

The boy's head flicked round. A voltage charge through him. Eyes wide, mouth sagging, hoe held limp.

'… within a week we will have your father in the West. You will be together again. Your father, yourself, and we presume your sister also.

That's what we have all been working towards. That's what everything that has been happening here has been aimed at. We are bringing your father out.'

Carter smiled with affection, saw a tear dribble on the cheek of the boy, saw the hands clench in astonishment.

God, it was unfair what he had done to the kid. Unfair, and he looked into the opened face and saw the disbelief faltering with the child-joy.

'The DDR are releasing my father to emigrate?'

'No.'

'It is not possible then… how is it possible?'

'I said that we are bringing your father out.'

'You will try to bring him through the frontier?' the boy challenged and the happiness was sinking.

'We will bring him out on the autobahn.'

'What does my father say of this?'

'At this moment he is unaware of the plan.'

'My father has not been told, he does not know?'

'No.'

'And the authorities in the DDR have not given permission for him to leave?'

'No.'

Willi threw the hoe down onto the ground, slapped his hands together to shake off the earth. He spoke very quietly.

'You take a great risk.'

'We have worked very hard at the plan, Willi.'

'The risk that you take is not with yourselves, it is with my father and my sister. You endanger them.'

Carter gazed into the small and now frightened face of the boy. 'We think that we have minimised the risk to them. Everything has been thought of, most carefully.'

'Johnny is the man who is going to see my father in Magdeburg?'