Gerald Seymour: A Line in the Sand

About as dead as the rest of the wretched place."

Fenton, he knew, lived in Beaconsfield, not on his own salary but on family money; couldn't have managed Beaconsfield, the restaurants, the delicatessens and the bijou clothes shops where his wife went on a desk head's wage. Money was seldom far from Geoff Markham's thoughts, nagging like a dripping tap. Vicky and his future were about money. He was driving faster.

It was strange, but he hadn't seemed to register the village when they came into it, less than an hour before. It had not seemed a part of the present and the future. The village was history, to be left behind once the removal van had arrived. But no removal van was coming, and the village its lay-out, entry and exit route, topography, community was as important as any of those isolated white-walled farmhouses in South Armagh, Fermanagh and East Tyrone.

Fenton was again massaging his moustache and showed no interest in what was around him. Through the trees was the shimmer of silver grey from stretching inland water. The road in front was straight and empty, he had no need to concentrate. Markham's mind was on the landscape, as it would have been if he had been driving in Ireland.

They reached the crossroads, and the main road for Ipswich, Colchester and London. He paused for traffic with the right of way, and the smile brightened on Fenton's face. He checked the distance they had come since leaving the house.

"About bloody time. You never said could you live there? Damn sure I couldn't."

It wasn't for Markham to pick a pointless argument with his superior.

"I couldn't, but it's right for him."

"Come again?"

"He chose well, Perry did."

"Don't give me riddles."

Markham pulled out into the main road and slashed his way through the gears for speed.

"He wants to make a stand, he won't run… It's good ground for him. One road in and the same road out. The sea is behind and it can be monitored. Natural barriers of flooded marshland to the north and the south with no vehicle access. If you were in a city street or a town's suburban road, you couldn't get protection like that. He chose well, if he's really staying."

They would be back in London, on Millbank, in three hours. Then the bells would start clamouring and the calls would go out for the meeting.

He went, like a sleep-walker, around the ground floor of his house, and seemed not to recognize the possessions they had collected over four years. Frank Perry felt a stranger in his house. He had made himself three cups of instant coffee, sat with them, drunk them, then paced again.

Of course he knew the reality of the threat. Whatever had been done with the information he'd given in the briefings at the house behind Pall Mall, he would have made a lasting enemy of the authorities in Iran. He'd assumed that the information had been used to block sales of equipment and chemicals from the factories of the old Eastern bloc and from Western Europe, from the works of his old company in Newbury. There would have been expulsions of Iranian trade attach, the loss of their precious foreign-exchange resources, and the programme would have been delayed. Of course the threat was real, and he'd known it.

However hard he had tried to put the past behind him, it had stayed with him. Sometimes it was a light zephyr wind on his face; sometimes it was a gale beating against his back. For four years, it had always been there. He had never been able, and God he'd tried, to escape the past.

Through those years, Frank Perry had been waiting for them. He couldn't have put features to their faces, but he'd known they'd come in suits, with polished shoes, with a briefcase that wouldn't be opened, with knowledge that would be only partially shared. They'd be so recognizable and predictable. From the moment he'd seen them run from the car to his front door he'd known who they were and what they would tell him. He had rehearsed, more times than he could count, what he would say to them, and had finally said it.

He stopped pacing. He stared out of the window across the green. His fists were clenched. Everything he could see, the homes of his friends, the shop, the hall and the pub at the end of the road, were as normal and unremarkable as they had been before the men from London had come. It was hard for Frank Perry to believe that anything had changed, but it had and he knew it.

His fingernails pressed hard into the palms of his hands. He would fight to hold everything that was precious to him.

Meryl Perry held the umbrella over the child's head and sheltered him all the way from the car, through the gate, up the path to the front door. The child shivered as they waited for the door to be opened. The Carstairs lived in a fine house on the main street, the only road through the village. They both worked and had good positions; she would only just have reached home, and he wouldn't be back for an hour. The child bolted through the open door.

"You're a saint, Meryl. Thanks ever so."

"Don't worry about it, Emma, wouldn't let him get soaked."

"You wouldn't, others might. Look, you're drenched. You're a sweetheart."

"I'm doing tomorrow, and you're doing the rest of the week, right?"

"Actually, Meryl, I was going to ask you can you do all this week? It's a real bash at work, and Barry's in too early to take them. I'll make it up the week after."

"No problem, what friends are for."

"You're brilliant don't know what I'd do without you."

The door closed on her. Her ankles were sodden, her stockings clammy. She liked Emma Carstairs, and Frank was Barry's best friend. They had good times together. The school-run to Halesworth had been their first touch point She hadn't had friends, not like Emma and Barry, before she had moved to the village. She hurried back to the car, the rain lashing her while she furled the umbrella. Off again, taking Donna home. She turned by the village hall, then went back past the church and up the lane to the council houses. She dropped Donna at her front gate.

"Thanks so much, Mrs. Perry."

"You'd have drowned at the bus stop."

"Vince didn't stop, nor that stuck-up Mary Wroughton."

"Leave off, Donna probably they didn't see you."

"I'd have ruined my hair, you're really kind."

"And I'll see you next week, when Frank and I are out."

"Always enjoy babysitting at yours, Mrs. Perry. Thanks again." The girl was out of the car and running for her front door. Her Stephen was scowling beside her, but he was eight and any child of that age objected to babysitters. She poked him, he put his tongue out at her, and they both laughed. He'd had behavioural problems in the city, but not since they had moved to the village; the best thing she could have done for Stephen was bring him here. She drove back into the village. There were no cars in front of Mrs. Fairbrother's, no guests checked in. Past the Martindales' pub, too early to be open. Vince's van was outside his terraced house, strange that he hadn't seen Donna at the bus stop. Dominic Evans, he was always nice to her, was running back into his shop with the ice-cream sign, probably going to shut up early, he was always helpful, and Euan. She parked as close as possible to their front gate and Stephen scampered for the door. Peggy's bicycle was askew against the Wroughtons' garage door. Meryl was locking her car, umbrella perched over her head, as Peggy came down the Wroughtons' path.

"Meryl, hold on."

"Yes, Peggy."

"I've that typing for you you said you would?"

"Of course I did."

"For the Red Cross and the Wildlife."

"No problem."

"Can't thank you enough, don't know what I did before you came. Oh, Meryl, you couldn't manage the Institute's minutes? Fanny's got an awful cold I think there's a lot of it about."

"Thanks, Meryl."