The Storytellers by Robert Mercer-Nairne

much about as around freedom , a concept she instinctively understood but would have been hard-pressed to define, just as countless academics had been. For her, it didn’t need defining. It was obvious. If there was no law which applied to all, and if people were unable to associate with one another for their mutual benefit as they chose, there was no freedom.
    â€˜Lawlessness in one direction and beliefs in the other, Harve, arefreedom’s arch enemies,’ she’d once told him, ‘and both are masters of disguise.’
    â€œMudd!”
    Harvey smiled to himself. He’d miss that cry. Even if others hearing it for the first time would have been shocked, he knew the heart it came from and they didn’t. Inside he found George Gilder at his desk with tears streaming down both cheeks.
    â€œYou’ve nailed it, Mudd. You bloody well have. Now let’s get this into print and pray our great British electorate is woken from its sleep!”
    * * *
    Miranda returned to her room to find her revolutionary hero sitting on her bed with caked blood around his nostrils and a bump the size of a cricket ball on the side of his head. Overwhelmed by feelings of motherhood and desire she had attended to his wounds and then to her need with such passion that the girl in the room next door, who had grown used to the sounds of rapture, was driven to come and ask if all was well. Jack had been far from sure that it was. Every part of him ached as Miranda extracted from him the highlights of his battle along with his last drops of energy.
    â€˜It was an epic,’ he assured her, ‘a battle like no other. You should have been there.’ And he fell asleep with the words ‘a triumph’ and Miranda on his lips.
    Early next morning, she slipped out to get a newspaper, half expecting to read that her lover had been made Commissar of the People’s Committee, Midlands District. She opened the enemy publication first, hoping that self-interest would have forced it to reverse its normally hostile coverage, but her hopes were quickly dashed. The headline across the front of The Sentinel read: Flying Pickets Blockade Family Business – Owner’s Daughter Near Death .
    Beneath a grainy picture of a lorry approaching a row of pickets,she read that a forty-year-old family business had been brought to its knees by thugs intent on preventing it from making fuel deliveries to its customers. The owner’s daughter had been pulled from her cab and savagely beaten. A picture of the woman’s blood in the snow ran alongside another of her lying on a hospital bed, heavily bandaged and attached to tubes.
    Convinced it was largely propaganda, she scanned the other papers, but all reported essentially the same facts. Returning to The Sentinel , she forced herself to read it in full until she came to the words ‘…Mr Jack Pugh, a member of Militant Tendency based in Cowley, and a witness to the outrage, fled the scene with two accomplices, although “fled” might be generous, as Mr Pugh was seen colliding with a club-wielding colleague in his rush to the car with such force that his two companions had to throw him into the vehicle before driving off.’
    The words ‘a witness to the outrage’ made her feel physically sick. Had her lover only been a witness? Had he not been directing events? And if he had been directing events, would he not have been responsible for the woman’s condition. Feelings of hot and cold, fear and anger, swept over her. And to think his ‘war wounds’ might have been self-inflicted! This was not what she had imagined. This was not what she wanted to read. The police would now be involved and the only name mentioned in the entire article belonging to a likely perpetrator was that of Jack Pugh. He had to go – and now.
    * * *
    Jack hobbled out of Brasenose College like a smitten dog and stood in the archway wondering what to