Gunner Kelly Read Online Free PDF Page A

station had said, and the map said so too. “ There’s a turning on your left by a dead tree. Down the hill — and stay in low gear, because it’s steep — and over the water-splash in the trees there, at the bottom, and it’s a long mile from there, what there is of it. You can’t miss it .”
    That was what they always said, You can’t miss it , to reassure you at least for a time, until you had missed it.
    “ There are road-signs, yes ?” He could read a map and find his way as well as any man, and better than most. But he had bitter experience of the irrationality of English directions and was suspicious of the man’s confidence.
    “No. Leastways … there were … but there aren’t at the moment. But you turn by a dead tree, and just follow the road. There ain’t nowhere else to go once you’re on it, see?” The man had begun to regard him curiously then.
    “ Thank you. And there is an hotel there ?” Curiosity, in Benedikt’s experience, was the father of information.
    “ There ain’t a hotel, no. There’s a pub — they might have a room, I dunno .” The curiosity increased. “ They’re a queer lot there .” The man spoke of the inhabitants of Duntisbury Royal, who lived no more than five miles from his petrol pumps, as though they were an alien race hidden behind barbed wire and minefields.
    “ Queer ?” All the same, Benedikt rejoiced in what he guessed was the old correct meaning of the word, the use of which he had been cautioned against in modern polite speech: it was good to know that here, deep in the Wessex countryside, the natives still guarded the language of his mother, Shakespeare’s tongue.
    “ Ah …” The garage man’s face closed up suddenly, as though he had decided on second thoughts that the queerness of his neighbours was no foreigner’s business. “ That’s £16.22, sir — sixteen-pounds-and-twenty-two-pence .” He adjusted the speed of his diction to that which the English reserved for the presentation of bills to foreigners, so that there could be no possible misunderstanding, let alone argument.
    “ Ach — so !” Benedikt played back to him deliberately. This might be the only garage for miles around, and if this man was both a gossip and the local supplier to Duntisbury Royal, then so much the better. “ I may pay by credit card, yes? Or cash ?”
    The man looked doubtfully at the card, and then at Benedikt, but then finally at the gleaming Mercedes and its CD passport. “ Either of ‘em will do, sir .” He bustled to find the correct form, and then squinted again at the card. “ ’Weez-hoffer‘ ,” he murmured unnecessarily to himself, as though to indicate to Benedikt that he would have preferred cash from a foreigner and was noting the name just in case.
    “Wiesehöfer,” said Benedikt. “Thomas Wiesehöfer.”
    The man filled in the card number painfully. But his curiosity rekindled as he did so. “ On holiday then ?”
    “ On holiday .” Benedikt nodded at the garage man and pretended to search for the right words and not find any. “ On holiday…ach so !” It galled him when he prided himself on being able to pass almost for English … or British , as Mother always insisted, who had been half-Scottish herself.
    He studied the water-splash out of the driver’s window, just a metre beyond his front wheels. The stream rippled across the tarmac in a patch of sunlight where the road crossed it, but it didn’t look very deep. All the country hereabouts was open and empty, and he had dropped down from the high ridge in the low gear which the garage man had advised; but now he was on the miniature flood-plain of a little valley, and at this point, where the road crossed the stream, trees and bushes grew luxuriantly, making a secret place of it.
    He looked up from the sun-dappled water, and caught a glimpse of the little girl watching him from her hiding place between the telephone box and the summer tangle of leaves. Of course, she would