Appleby Plays Chicken Read Free Page A

there are others, in which you hazard a higher ratio of lives per automobile. What you might call over here utility chicken. And you don’t need a cliff. A perfectly ordinary road will do.’
    ‘That sounds more our style.’ Ian Dancer’s dark eyes glinted above his pewter tankard as he threw off this. ‘Tell us more, Leon.’
    ‘You want a straight road, a bit of a slope, and handsome ditches on each side. You have four or five people aboard, all placed so that they can make a grab at the wheel. Off you go, with somebody steering only until you’ve got up speed. After that, the first man who touches the wheel is the chicken.’
    David shook his head. ‘Not nearly so good as the cliff,’ he said. ‘Lacks drama, while continuing to promise mess.’
    Ian put down his tankard. ‘You mean you wouldn’t care for it?’
    ‘Of course I wouldn’t care for it.’ David spoke a shade shortly.
    Timothy nodded. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘Chicken, if indulged in at all, should plainly be sumptuously dressed. Austerity chicken would be a bloody flop. Let’s go to bed.’
    Old Pettifor was already on his feet. His business being with young men, singly and in groups, it is conceivable he had scented something he didn’t care for. Certainly he was uneasy. ‘To bed, to bed, to bed; there’s knocking at the gate,’ he murmured. ‘What’s done, cannot be undone; to bed, to bed, to bed.’
    They stood up and watched him from the room. It wasn’t merely that he liked to mutter Shakespeare idly in his beard. He had reminded them of a brute fact.
    But that night they played chicken, all the same.
     
    Afterwards, David found he couldn’t clearly tell why. But he supposed Ian to have been at the bottom of it. There had been two elder Dancers up at Oxford a few years before; and they were still legendary. Perhaps Ian had a wild streak by way of family endowment. Or perhaps he just felt obscurely compelled to measure up to his brothers – who by this time were probably staid and prosperous young bankers or brokers in bowler hats. There was no doubt that the chicken idea had power to get under the skin.
    Certainly they weren’t encouraged by Leon. The thing went through in the face of a sort of grim anger that was something quite new in him. He had declared instantly that he wouldn’t play. Then he had gone off and had some carefully casual conversation with the landlord, who was working late cleaning up the bar. He came back and said briefly that he now knew a bit about doctors, district nurses, hospitals, and ambulances. This did have a chilly effect, but it failed to stop the prank from going forward. Ian – this was David’s guess – had taken it into his head to exploit a sort of smothered feud that existed oddly between the entirely good-natured Timothy and a man called Arthur Drury, who was entirely good-natured too. These two never jeered at each other, but stuck to an elderly politeness; probably neither could have explained in what the mutual irritation lay. Anyway, Ian had worked on it. David hadn’t attended to the drift of the talk. He simply knew – out in the inn yard and a clear moonlight – that the game of chicken was essentially a challenge between Timothy and this chap Drury, but that others were involved, including himself after all.
    ‘You’ll probably pile up your car,’ he said prosaically to Timothy. ‘And it won’t be honest to fudge up a claim on your insurance company.’
    Timothy made no direct reply. He was the son of wealthy and indulgent parents – a fact to which he hated the slightest allusion. He flung open the doors of his big ancient tourer. ‘Muck in, chaps,’ he said. ‘We’re going to find a hill.’
    Arthur Drury and Ian scrambled in beside him, and David found himself in the back with the two remaining members of Pettifor’s reading party. One of these, Tom Overend, he knew quite well; they had gone to tutorials together the term before. The other was a mere infant