Barnes, the dapper dark-haired secretary, came straight to the point. Refusing Renthall’s offer of an armchair, he held a sheet of pink duplicated paper in his hand, apparently a minute of the last Council meeting.
‘Mr Renthall, the Council has been informed of your intention to hold a garden fte in some three weeks’ time. I have been asked by the chairman of the Watch Committee to express the committee’s grave misgivings, and to request you accordingly to terminate all arrangements and cancel the fte immediately, pending an inquiry.’
‘I’m sorry, Barnes, but I’m afraid our preparations are too far advanced. We’re about to issue invitations.’
Barnes hesitated, casting his eye around Renthall’s faded room and few shabby books as if hoping to find some ulterior motive for Renthall’s behaviour.
‘Mr Renthall, perhaps I could explain that this request is tantamount to a direct order from the Council.’
‘So I’m aware.’ Renthall sat down on his window-sill and gazed out at the watch-towers. ‘Hanson and I went over all this, as you probably know. The Council have no more right to order me to cancel this fte than they have to stop me walking down the street.’
Barnes smiled his thin bureaucratic smirk. ‘Mr Renthall, this is not a matter of the Council’s statutory jurisdiction. This order is issued by virtue of the authority vested in it by its superiors. If you prefer, you can assume that the Council is merely passing on a direct instruction it has received.’ He inclined his head towards the watch-towers.
Renthall stood up. ‘Now we’re at last getting down to business.’ He gathered himself together. ‘Perhaps you could tell the Council to convey to its superiors, as you call them, my polite but firm refusal. Do you get my point?’
Barnes retreated fractionally. He summed Renthall up carefully, then nodded. ‘I think so, Mr Renthall. No doubt you understand what you’re doing.’
After he had gone Renthall drew the blinds over the window and lay down on his bed; for the next hour he made an effort to relax.
His final showdown with the Council was to take place the following day. Summoned to an emergency meeting of the Watch Committee, he accepted the invitation with alacrity, certain that with every member of the committee present the main council chamber would be used. This would give him a perfect opportunity to humiliate the Council by publicly calling their bluff.
Both Hanson and Mrs Osmond assumed that he would capitulate without argument.
‘Well, Charles, you brought it upon yourself,’ Hanson told him. ‘Still, I expect they’ll be lenient with you. It’s a matter of face now.’
‘More than that, I hope,’ Renthall replied. ‘They claim they were passing on a direct instruction from the watchtowers.’
‘Well, yes…’ Hanson gestured vaguely. ‘Of course. Obviously the towers wouldn’t intervene in such a trivial matter. They rely on the Council to keep a watching brief for them, as long as the Council’s authority is respected they’re prepared to remain aloof.’
‘It sounds an ideally simple arrangement. How do you think the communication between the Council and the watchtowers takes place?’ Renthall pointed to the watch-tower across the street from the cabin. The shuttered observation tier hung emptily in the air like an out-of-season gondola. ‘By telephone? Or do they semaphore?’
But Hanson merely laughed and changed the subject.
Julia Osmond was equally vague, but equally convinced of the Council’s infallibility.
‘Of course they receive instructions from the towers, Charles. But don’t worry, they obviously have a sense of proportion — they’ve been letting you come here all this time.’ She turned a monitory finger at Renthall, her broadhipped bulk obscuring the towers from him. ‘That’s your chief fault, Charles. You think you’re more important than you are. Look at you now, sitting there all hunched up with your face like an old shoe. You think the Council and the watch-towers are going to give you some terrible punishment. But they won’t, because you’re not worth it.’
Renthall picked uneagerly at his lunch at the hotel, conscious of the guests watching from the tables around him. Many had brought visitors with them, and he guessed that there would be a full attendance at the meeting that afternoon.
After lunch he retired to his room, made a desultory attempt to read until the meeting at half past two. Outside, the watch-towers hung in their long lines from the bright haze. There was no sign of movement in the observation windows, and Renthall studied them openly, hands in pockets, like a general surveying the dispositions of his enemy’s forces. The haze was lower than usual, filling the interstices between the towers, so that in the distance, where the free space below their tips was hidden by the intervening roof-tops, the towers seemed to rise upwards into the air like rectangular chimneys over an industrial landscape, wreathed in white smoke.
