Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene - Our Man in Havana

‘That nigger going down the street,’ said Dr Hasselbacher standing in the Wonder Bar, ‘he reminds me of you, Mr Wormold.’ It was typical of Dr Hasselbacher that after fifteen years of friendship he still used the prefix Mr friendship proceeded with the slowness and assurance of a careful diagnosis. On Wormold’s deathbed, when Dr Hasselbacher came to feel his failing pulse, he would perhaps become Jim.

The Negro was blind in one eye and one leg was shorter than the other; he wore an ancient felt hat and his ribs showed through his torn shirt like a ship’s under demolition. He walked at the edge of the pavement, beyond the yellow and pink pillars of a colonnade, in the hot January sun, and he counted every step as he went. As he passed the Wonder Bar, going up Virdudes, he had reached ‘1,369’. He had to move slowly to give time for so long a numeral. ‘One thousand three hundred and seventy.’ He was a familiar figure near the National Square, where he would sometimes linger and stop his counting long enough to sell a packet of pornographic photographs to a tourist. Then he would take up his count where he had left it. At the end of the day, like an energetic passenger on a trans-Atlantic liner, he must have known to a yard how far he had walked.

‘Joe?’ Wormold asked. ‘I don’t see any resemblance. Except the limp, of course,’ but instinctively he took a quick look at himself in the mirror marked Cerveza Tropical, as though he might really have been so broken down and darkened during his walk from the store in the old town. But the face which looked back at him was only a little discoloured by the dust from the harbour-works; it was still the same, anxious and crisscrossed and fortyish: much younger than Dr Hasselbacher’s, yet a stranger might have felt certain it would be extinguished sooner the shadow was there already, the anxieties which are beyond the reach of a tranquillizer. The Negro limped out of sight, round the corner of the Paseo. The day was full of bootblacks. ‘I didn’t mean the limp. You don’t see the likeness?’

‘No.’

‘He’s got two ideas in his head,’ Dr Hasselbacher explained, ‘to do his job and to keep count. And, of course, he’s British.’

‘I still don’t see…’ Wormold cooled his mouth with his morning daiquiri. Seven minutes to get to the Wonder Bar: seven minutes back to the store: six minutes for companionship. He looked at his watch. He remembered that it was one minute slow.

‘He’s reliable, you can depend on him, that’s all I meant,’ said Dr Hasselbacher with impatience. ‘How’s Milly?’

‘Wonderful,’ Wormold said. It was his invariable answer, but he meant it.

‘Seventeen on the seventeenth, eh?’

‘That’s right.’ He looked quickly over his shoulder as though somebody were hunting him and then at his watch again. ‘You’ll be coming to split a bottle with us?’

‘I’ve never failed yet, Mr Wormold. Who else will be there?’

‘Well, I thought just the three of us. You see, Cooper’s gone home, and poor Marlowe’s in hospital still, and Milly doesn’t seem to care for any of this new crowd at the Consulate. So I thought we’d keep it quiet, in the family.’ ‘I’m honoured to be one of the family, Mr Wormold.’

‘Perhaps a table at the Nacional or would you say that wasn’t quite well, suitable?’

‘This isn’t England or Germany, Mr Wormold. Girls grow up quickly in the tropics.’

A shutter across the way creaked open and then regularly blew to in the slight breeze from the sea, click clack like an ancient clock. Wormold said, ‘I must be off.’

‘Phastkleaners will get on without you, Mr Wormold.’ It was a day of uncomfortable truths. ‘Like my patients,’ Dr Hasselbacher added with kindliness. ‘People have to get ill, they don’t have to buy vacuum cleaners.’

‘But you charge them more.’

‘And get only twenty per cent for myself. One can’t save much on twenty per cent.’

‘This is not an age for saving, Mr Wormold.’

‘I must for Milly. If something happened tome…’

‘We none of us have a great expectation of life nowadays, so why worry?’ ‘All these disturbances are very bad for trade. What’s the good of a vacuum cleaner if the power’s cut off?’

‘I could manage a small loan, Mr Wormold.’

‘No, no. It’s not like that. My worry isn’t this year’s or even next year’s, it’s a long-term worry.’

‘Then it’s not worth calling a worry. We live in an atomic age, Mr Wormold. Push a button piff bang where are we? Another Scotch, please.’ ‘And that’s another thing. You know what the firm has done now? They’ve sent me an Atomic Pile Cleaner.’

‘Really? I didn’t know science had got that far.’

‘Oh, of course, there’s nothing atomic about it it’s only a name. Last year there was the Turbo Jet; this year it’s the Atomic. It works off the light-plug just the same as the other.’

‘Then why worry?’ Dr Hasselbacher repeated like a theme tune, leaning into his whisky.

‘They don’t realize that sort of name may go down in the States, but not here, where the clergy are preaching all the time against the misuse of science. Milly and I went to the Cathedral last Sunday -you know how she is about Mass, thinks she’ll convert me, I wouldn’t wonder. Well, Father Mendez spent half an hour describing the effect of a hydrogen bomb. Those who believe in heaven on earth, he said, are creating a hell he made it sound that way too -it was very lucid. How do you think I liked it on Monday morning when I had to make a window display of the new Atomic Pile Suction Cleaner? It wouldn’t have surprised me if one of the wild boys around here had broken the window. Catholic Action, Christ the King, all that stuff. I don’t know what to do about it, Hasselbacher.’ ‘Sell one to Father Mendez for the Bishop’s palace.’

‘But he’s satisfied with the Turbo. It was a good machine. Of course this one is too. Improved suction for bookcases. You know I wouldn’t sell anyone a machine that wasn’t good.’

‘I know, Mr Wormold. Can’t you just change the name?’ ‘They won’t let me. They are proud of it. They think it’s the best phrase anyone has thought up since “It beats as it sweeps as it cleans.” You know they had something called a purifying pad with the Turbo. Nobody minded -it was a good gadget, but yesterday a woman came in and looked at the Atomic Pile and she asked whether a pad that size could really absorb all the radio-activity. And what about Strontium 90? she asked.’ ‘I could give you a medical certificate,’ said Dr Hasselbacher.

‘Do you never worry about anything?’

‘I have a secret defence, Mr Wormold. I am interested in life.’

‘So am I, but…’

‘You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us I’m sorry; I wasn’t referring to your wife. But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese. You don’t do crosswords, do you, Mr Wormold? I do, and they are like people: one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerned with the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion although of course one dreams that perhaps a time might come… One day I must show you my laboratory.’

‘I must be going, Hasselbacher.’

‘You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.’

When Wormold arrived at his store in Lamparilla Street, Milly had not yet returned from her American convent school, and in spite of the two figures he could see through the door, the shop seemed to him empty. How empty! And so it would remain until Milly came back. He was aware whenever he entered the shop of a vacuum that had nothing to do with his cleaners. No customer could fill it, particularly not the one who stood there now looking too spruce for Havana and reading a leaflet in English on the Atomic Pile, pointedly neglecting Wormold’s assistant. Lopez was an impatient man who did not like to waste his time away from the Spanish edition of Confidential. He was glaring at the stranger and making no attempt to win him over.

‘Buenos d Ias,’ Wormold said. He looked at all strangers in the shop with an habitual suspicion. Ten years ago a man had entered the shop, posing as a customer, and he had guilelessly sold him a sheep’s wool for the high-gloss finishing on his car. He had been a plausible impostor, but no one could be a less likely purchaser of a vacuum cleaner than this man. Tall and elegant, in his stone-coloured tropical suit, and wearing an exclusive tie, he carried with him the breath of beaches and the leathery smell of a good club: you expected him to say, ‘The Ambassador will see you in a minute.’ His cleaning would always be arranged for him by an ocean or a valet.

‘Don’t speak the lingo, I’m afraid,’ the stranger answered. The slang word was a blemish on his suit, like an egg-stain after breakfast. ‘You are British, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean really British. British passport and all that.’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘One likes to do business with a British firm. One knows where one is, if you see what I mean.’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Well, first, I just wanted to look around.’ He spoke as though he were in a bookshop. ‘I couldn’t make your chap understand that.’ ‘You are looking for a vacuum cleaner?’

‘Well, not exactly looking.’

‘I mean, you are thinking of buying one?’

‘That’s it, old man, you’ve hit it on the nail.’ Wormold had the impression that the man had chosen his tone because he felt it matched the store a protective colouring in Lamparilla Street; the breeziness certainly didn’t match his clothes. One can’t successfully follow St Paul’s technique of being all things to all men without a change of suit.

Wormold said briskly, ‘You couldn’t do better than the Atomic Pile.’

‘I notice one here called the Turbo.’

‘That too is a very good cleaner. Have you a big apartment?’

‘Well, not exactly big.’

‘Here, you see, you get two sets of brushes this one for waxing and this for polishing -oh no, I think it’s the other way round. The Turbo is air-powered.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Well, of course, it’s… well, it’s what it says, air-powered.’

‘This funny little bit here what’s that for?’

‘That’s a two-way carpet nozzle.’

‘You don’t say so? Isn’t that interesting? Why two-way?’

‘You push and you pull.’

‘The things they think up,’ the stranger said. ‘I suppose you sell a lot of these?’

‘I’m the only agent here.’

‘All the important people, I suppose, have to have an Atomic Pile?’

‘Or a Turbo Jet.’

‘Government offices?’

‘Of course. Why?’

‘What’s good enough for a government office should be good enough for me.’

‘You might prefer our Midget Make-Easy.’

‘Make what easy?’

‘The full title is Midget Make-Easy Air Powered Suction Small Home Cleaner.’

‘That word air-powered again.’

‘I’m not responsible for it.’

‘Don’t get riled, old man.’

‘Personally I hate the words Atomic Pile,’ Wormold said with sudden passion. He was deeply disturbed. It occurred to him that this stranger might be an inspector sent from the head office in London or New York. In that case they should hear nothing but the truth.

‘I see what you mean. It’s not a happy choice. Tell me, do you service these things?’

‘Quarterly. Free of charge during the period of guarantee.’

‘I meant yourself.’

‘I send Lopez.’

‘The sullen chap?’

‘I’m not much of a mechanic. When I touch one of these things it somehow seems to give up working.’

‘Don’t you drive a car?’

‘Yes, but if there’s anything wrong, my daughter sees to it.’

‘Oh yes, your daughter. Where’s she?’

‘At school. Now let me show you this snap action coupling,’ but of course, when he tried to demonstrate, it wouldn’t couple. He pushed and screwed. ‘Faulty part,’ he said desperately.

‘Let me try,’ the stranger said, and in the coupling went as smooth as you could wish.

‘How old is your daughter?’

‘Sixteen,’ he said and was angry with himself for answering.

‘Well,’ the stranger said, ‘I must be getting along. Enjoyed our chat.’ ‘Wouldn’t you like to watch a cleaner at work? Lopez here would give you a demonstration., ‘Not at the moment. I’ll be seeing you again -here or there,’ the man said with a vague and insolent confidence and was gone out of the door before Wormold thought to give him a trade-card. In the square at the top of Lamparilla Street he was swallowed up among the pimps and lottery sellers of the Havana noon.

Lopez said, ‘He never intended to buy.’

‘What did he want then?’

‘Who knows? He looked a long time through the window at me. I think perhaps if you had not come in, he would have asked me to find him a girl.’ ‘A girl?’

He thought of the day ten years ago and then with uneasiness of Milly, and he wished he had not answered so many questions. He also wished that the snap-action coupling had coupled for once with a snap.

He could distinguish the approach of Milly like that of a police-car from a long way off. Whistles instead of sirens warned him of her coming. She was accustomed to walk from the bus stop in the Avenida de Belgica, but today the wolves seemed to be operating from the direction of Compostella. They were not dangerous wolves, he had reluctantly to admit that. The salute which had begun about her thirteenth birthday was really one of respect, for even by the high Havana standard Milly was beautiful. She had hair the colour of pale honey, dark eyebrows, and her pony-trim was shaped by the best barber in town. She paid no open attention to the whistles, they only made her step the higher seeing her walk, you could almost believe in levitation. Silence would have seemed like an insult to her now.

Unlike Wormold, who believed in nothing, Milly was a Catholic: he had been made to promise her mother that before they married. Now her mother, he supposed, was of no faith at all, but she had left a Catholic on his hands. It brought Milly closer to Cuba than he could come himself. He believed that in the rich families the custom of keeping a duenna lingered still, and sometimes it seemed to him that Milly too carried a duenna about with her, invisible to all eyes but her own. In church, where she looked more lovely than in any other place, wearing her feather-weight mantilla embroidered with leaves transparent as winter, the duenna was always seated by her side, to observe that her back was straight, her face covered at the suitable moment, the sign of the cross correctly performed. Small boys might suck sweets with impunity around her or giggle from behind the pillars, she sat with the rigidity of a nun, following the Mass in a small gilt edged missal bound in a morocco the colour of her hair (she had chosen it herself). The same invisible duenna saw to it that she ate fish on Friday, fasted on Ember Days and attended Mass not only on Sundays and the special feasts of the church, but also on her saint’s day. Milly was her home-name: her given name was Seraphina in Cuba ‘a double of the second class’, a mysterious phrase which reminded Wormold of the race-track. It had been long before Wormold realized that the duenna was not always by her side. Milly was meticulous in her behaviour at meals and had never neglected her night-prayers, as he had good reason to know since, even as a child, she had kept him waiting, to mark him out as the non-Catholic he was, before her bedroom door until she had finished. A light burnt continually in front of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. He remembered how he had overheard her at the age of four praying, ‘Hail Mary, quite contrary.’ One day however, when Milly was thirteen, he had been summoned to the convent school of the American Sisters of Clare in the white rich suburb of Vedado. There he learnt for the first time how the duenna left Milly under the religious plaque by the grilled gateway of the school. The complaint was of a serious nature: she had set fire to a small boy called Thomas Earl Parkman, junior. It was true, the Reverend Mother admitted, that Earl, as he was known in the school, had pulled Milly’s hair first, but this she considered in no way justified Milly’s action which might well have had serious results if another girl had not pushed Earl into a fountain. Milly’s only defence of her conduct had been that Earl was a Protestant and if there was going to be a persecution Catholics could always beat Protestants at that game. ‘But how did she set Earl on fire?’

‘She put petrol on the tail of his shirt.’

‘Petrol!’

‘Lighter-fluid, and then she struck a match. We think she must have been smoking in secret.’

‘It’s a most extraordinary story.’

‘I guess you don’t know Milly then. I must tell you, Mr Wormold, our patience has been sadly strained.’

Apparently, six months before setting fire to Earl, Milly had circulated round her art-class a set of postcards of the world’s great pictures. ‘I don’t see what’s wrong in that.’

‘At the age of twelve, Mr Wormold, a child shouldn’t confine her appreciation to the nude, however classical the paintings.’ ‘They were all nude?’

‘All except Goya’s Draped Maja. But she had her in the nude version too.’

Wormold had been forced to fling himself on Reverend Mother’s mercy he was a poor non-believing father with a Catholic child, the American convent was the only Catholic school in Havana which was not Spanish, and he couldn’t afford a governess. They wouldn’t want him to send her to the Hiram C. Truman School, would they? And it would be breaking the promise he had made to his wife. He wondered in private whether it was his duty to find a new wife, but the nuns might not put up with that and in any case he still loved Milly’s mother. Of course he spoke to Milly and her explanation had the virtue of simplicity.

‘Why did you set fire to Earl?’

‘I was tempted by the devil,’ she said.

‘Milly, please be sensible.’

‘Saints have been tempted by the devil.’

‘You are not a saint.’

‘Exactly. That’s why I fell.’ The chapter was closed -at any rate it would be closed that afternoon between four and six in the confessional. Her duenna was back at her side and would see to that. If only, he thought, I could know for certain when the duenna takes her day off.

There had been also the question of smoking in secret.

‘Are you smoking cigarettes?’ he asked her.

‘No.’

Something in her manner made him rephrase the question. ‘Have you ever smoked at all, l Milly?’

‘Only cheroots,’ she said.

Now that he heard the whistles warning him of her approach he wondered why Milly was coming up Lamparilla from the direction of the harbour instead of from the Avenida de Belgica. But when he saw her he saw the reason too. She was followed by a young shop assistant who carried a parcel so large that it obscured his face. Wormold realized sadly that she had been shopping again. He went upstairs to their apartment above the store and presently he could hear her superintending in another room the disposal of her purchases. There was a thump, a rattle and a clang of metal. ‘Put it there,’ she said, and, ‘No, there.’ Drawers opened and closed. She began to drive nails into the wall. A piece of plaster on his side shot out and fell into the salad; the daily maid had laid a cold lunch.

Milly came in strictly on time. It was always hard for him to disguise his sense of her beauty, but the invisible duenna looked coldly through him as though he were an undesirable suitor. It had been a long time now since the duenna had taken a holiday; he almost regretted her assiduity, and sometimes he would have been glad to see Earl burn again. Milly said grace and crossed herself and he sat respectfully with his head lowered until she had finished. It was one of her longer graces, which probably meant that she was not very hungry, or that she was stalling for time.

‘Had a good day, Father?’ she asked politely. It was the kind of remark a wife might have made after many years.

‘Not so bad, and you?’ He became a coward when he watched her; he hated to oppose her in anything, and he tried to avoid for so long as possible the subject of her purchases. He knew that her monthly allowance had gone two weeks ago on some ear-rings she had fancied and a small statue of St Seraphina. ‘I got top marks today in Dogma and Morals.’

‘Fine, fine. What were the questions?’

‘I did best on Venial Sin.’

‘I saw Dr Hasselbacher this morning,’ he said with apparent irrelevance. She replied politely, ‘I hope he was well.’ The duenna, he considered, was overdoing it. People praised Catholic schools for teaching deportment, but surely deportment was intended only to impress strangers. He thought sadly, But I am a stranger. He was unable to follow her into her strange world of candles and lace and holy water and genuflections. Sometimes he felt that he had no child.

‘He’s coming in for a drink on your birthday. I thought we might go afterwards to a nightclub.’

‘A nightclub!’ The duenna must have momentarily looked elsewhere as Milly exclaimed, ‘O Gloria Patri.’

‘You always used to say Alleluia.’

‘That was in Lower Four. Which nightclub?’

‘I thought perhaps the Nacional.’

‘Not the Shanghai Theatre?’

‘Certainly not the Shanghai Theatre. I can’t think how you’ve even heard of the place.’

‘In a school things get around.’

Wormold said, ‘We haven’t discussed your present. A seventeenth birthday is no ordinary one. I was wondering…’

‘Really and truly,’ Milly said, ‘there’s nothing in the world I want.’ Wormold remembered with apprehension that enormous package. If she had really gone out and got everything she wanted… He pleaded with her, ‘Surely there must be something you still want.’

‘Nothing. Really nothing.’

‘A new swim-suit,’ he suggested desperately.

‘Well, there is one thing… But I thought we might count it as a Christmas present too, and next year’s and the year after that.’ ‘Good heavens, what is it?’

‘You wouldn’t have to worry about presents any more for a long time.’

‘Don’t tell me you want a Jaguar.’

‘Oh no, this is quite a small present. Not a car. This would last for years. It’s an awfully economical idea. It might even, in a way, save petrol.’ ‘Save petrol?’

‘And today I got all the etceteras -with my own money.’ ‘You haven’t got any money. I had to lend you three pesos for Saint Seraphina.’

‘But my credit’s good.’

‘Milly, I’ve told you over and over again I won’t have you buying on credit. Anyway it’s my credit, not yours, and my credit’s going down all the time.’

‘Poor Father. Are we on the edge of ruin?’

‘Oh, I expect things will pick up again when the disturbances are over.’

‘I thought there were always disturbances in Cuba. If the worst came to the worst I could go out and work, couldn’t I?’

‘What at?’

‘Like Jane Eyre I could be a governess.’

‘Who would take you?’

‘Senor Perez.’

‘Milly, what on earth are you talking about? He’s living with his fourth wife, you’re a Catholic…

‘I might have a special vocation to sinners,’ Milly said. ‘Milly, what nonsense you talk. Anyway, I’m not ruined. Not yet. As far as I know. Milly, what have you been buying?’

‘Come and see.’ He followed her into her bedroom. A saddle lay on her bed; a bridle and bit were hanging on the wall from the nails she had driven in (she had knocked off a heel from her best evening shoes in doing it); reins were draped between the light brackets; a whip was propped up on the dressing-table. He said hopelessly, ‘Where’s the horse?’ and half expected it to appear from the bathroom.

‘In a stable near the Country Club. Guess what she’s called.’

‘How can I?’

‘Seraphina. Isn’t it just like the hand of God?’

‘But, Milly, I can’t possibly afford…’

‘You needn’t pay for her all at once. She’s a chestnut.’

‘What difference does the colour make?’

‘She’s in the stud-book. Out of Santa Teresa by Ferdinand of Castile.

She would have cost twice as much, but she fouled a fetlock jumping wire.

There’s nothing wrong, only a kind of lump, so they can’t show her.’

‘I don’t mind if it’s a quarter the price. Business is too bad, Milly.’ ‘But I’ve explained to you, you needn’t pay all at once. You can pay over the years.’

‘And I’ll still be paying for it when it’s dead.’

‘She’s not an it, she’s a she, and Seraphina will last much longer than a car. She’ll probably last longer than you will.’

‘But, Milly, your trips out to the stables, and the stabling alone.. ‘I’ve talked about all that with Captain Segura. He’s offering me a rock-bottom price. He wanted to give me free stabling, but I knew you wouldn’t like me to take favours.’

‘Who’s Captain Segura, Milly?’

‘The head police officer in Vedado.’

‘Where on earth did you meet him?’

‘Oh, he often gives me a lift to Lamparilla in his car.’

‘Does Reverend Mother know about this?’

Milly said stiffly, ‘One must have one’s private life.’

‘Listen, Milly, I can’t afford a horse, you can’t afford all this stuff. You’ll have to take it back.’ He added with fury, ‘And I won’t have you taking lifts from Captain Segura.’

‘Don’t worry. He never touches me,’ Milly said. ‘He only sings sad Mexican songs while he drives. About flowers and death. And one about a bull.’ ‘I won’t have it, Milly. I shall speak to Reverend Mother, you’ve got to promise…’ He could see under the dark brows how the green and amber eyes contained the coming tears. Wormold felt the approach of panic; just so his wife had looked at him one blistering October afternoon when six years of life suddenly ended. He said, ‘You aren’t in love, are you, with this Captain Segura?’

Two tears chased each other with a kind of elegance round the curve of a cheek-bone and glittered like the harness on the wall; they were part of her equipment too. ‘I don’t care a damn about Captain Segura,’ Milly said. ‘It’s just Seraphina I care about. She’s fifteen hands and she’s got a mouth like velvet, everybody says so.’

‘Milly dear, you know that if I could manage it…, ‘Oh, I knew you’d take it like this,’ Milly said. ‘I knew it in my heart of hearts. I said two novenas to make it come right, but they haven’t worked. I was so careful too. I was in a state of grace all the time I said them. I’ll never believe in a novena again. Never. Never.’ Her voice had the lingering resonance of Poe’s Raven. He had no faith himself, but he never wanted by any action of his own to weaken hers. Now he felt a fearful responsibility; at any moment she would be denying the existence of God. Ancient promises he had made came up out of the past to weaken him.

He said, ‘Milly, I’m sorry..

‘I’ve done two extra Masses as well.’ She shovelled on to his shoulders

all her disappointment in the old familiar magic. It was all very well talking about the easy tears of a child, but if you are a father you can’t take risks as a schoolteacher can or a governess. Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes for ever, like making a face when the clock strikes?

‘Milly, I promise if it’s possible next year.

Listen, Milly, you can keep the saddle till then, and all the rest of the stuff.’

‘What’s the good of a saddle without a horse? And I told Captain Segura…’

‘Damn Captain Segura-what did you tell him?’

‘I told him I had only to ask you for Seraphina and you’d give her to me. I said you were wonderful. I didn’t tell him about the novenas.’ ‘How much is she?’

‘Three hundred pesos.’

‘Oh, Milly, Milly.’ There was nothing he could do but surrender. ‘You’ll have to pay out of your allowance towards the stabling.’ ‘Of course I will.’ She kissed his ear. ‘I’ll start next month.’ They both knew very well that she would never start. She said, ‘You see, they did work after all, the novenas, I mean. I’ll begin another tomorrow, to make business good. I wonder which saint is best for that.’

‘I’ve heard that St Jude is the saint of lost causes,’ Wormold said.

It was Wormold’s day-dream that he would wake someday and find that he had amassed savings, bearer-bonds and share-certificates, and that he was receiving a steady flow of dividends like the rich inhabitants of the Vedado suburb; then he would retire with Milly to England, where there would be no Captain Seguras and no wolf-whistles. But the dream faded whenever he entered the big American bank in Obispo. Passing through the great stone portals, which were decorated with four leaved clovers, he became again the small dealer he really was, whose pension would never be sufficient to take Milly to the region of safety. Drawing a cheque is not nearly so simple an operation in an American bank as in an English one. American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter. ‘Well,’ he seems to express in the sunny warmth of his smile, ‘who would have believed that I’d meet you here, you of all people, in a bank of all places?’ After exchanging with him news of your health and of his health, and after finding a common interest in the fineness of the winter weather, you shyly, apologetically, slide the cheque towards him (how tiresome and incidental all such business is), but he barely has time to glance at it when the telephone rings at his elbow. ‘Why, Henry,’ he exclaims in astonishment over the telephone, as though Henry too were the last person he expected to speak to on such a day, ‘what’s the news of you?’ The news takes a long time to absorb; the teller smiles whimsically at you: business is business.

‘I must say Edith was looking swell last night,’ the teller said.

Wormold shifted restlessly.

‘It was a swell evening, it certainly was. Me? Oh, I’m fine. Well now, what can we do for you today?’

‘Why, anything to oblige, Henry, you know that… A hundred and fifty thousand dollars for three years… no, of course there won’t be any difficulty for a business like yours. We have to get the 0.1K. from New York, but that’s a formality. Just step in any time and talk to the manager. Monthly payments? That’s not necessary with an American firm. I’d say we could arrange five per cent. Make it two hundred thousand for four years? Of course, Henry.’ Wormold’s cheque shrank to insignificance in his fingers. ‘Three hundred and fifty dollars’ the writing seemed to him almost as thin as his resources. ‘See you at Mrs Slater’s tomorrow? I expect there’ll be a rubber. Don’t bring any aces up your sleeve, Henry. How long for the O. K.? Oh, a couple of days if we cable. Eleven tomorrow? Any time you say, Henry. Just walk in. I’ll tell the manager. He’ll be tickled to death to see you.’

‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Wormold.’ Surname again. Perhaps, Wormold thought, I am not worth cultivating or perhaps it is our nationalities that keep us apart. ‘Three hundred and fifty dollars?’ The teller took an unobtrusive glance in a file before counting out the notes. He had hardly begun when the telephone rang a second time.

‘Why, Mrs Ashworth, where have you been hiding yourself? Over at Miami? No kidding?’ It was several minutes before he had finished with Mrs Ashworth. As he passed the notes to Wormold, he handed over a slip of paper as well. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Mr Wormold. You asked me to keep you informed.’ The slip showed an overdraft of fifty dollars.

‘Not at all. It’s very kind of you,’ Wormold said. ‘But there’s nothing to worry about.’

‘Oh, the bank’s not worrying, Mr Wormold. You just asked, that’s all.’ Wormold thought, If the overdraft had been fifty thousand dollars he would have called me Jim.

For some reason that morning he had no wish to meet Dr Hasselbacher for his morning daiquiri. There were times when Dr Hasselbacher was a little too carefree, so he looked in at Sloppy Joe’s instead of at the Wonder Bar. No Havana resident ever went to Sloppy Joe’s because it was the rendezvous of tourists; but tourists were sadly reduced nowadays in number, for the President’s regime was creaking dangerously towards its end. There had always been unpleasant doings out of sight, in the inner rooms of the Jefatura, which had not disturbed the tourists in the Nacional and the Seville-Biltmore, but one tourist had recently been killed by a stray bullet while he was taking a photograph of a picturesque beggar under a balcony near the palace, and the death had sounded the knell of the all-in tour ‘including a trip to Varadero beach and the night-life of Havana’. The victim’s Leica had been smashed as well, and that had impressed his companions more than anything with the destructive power of a bullet. Wormold had heard them talking afterwards in the bar of the Nacional. ‘Ripped right through the camera,’ one of them said. ‘Five hundred dollars gone just like that.’

‘Was he killed at once?’

‘Sure. And the lens -you could pick up bits for fifty yards around.

Look. I’m taking a piece home to show Mr Humpelnicker.’ The long bar that morning was empty except for the elegant stranger at one end and a stout member of the tourist police who was smoking a cigar at the other. The Englishman was absorbed in the sight of so many bottles, and it was quite a while before he spotted Wormold. ‘Well I never,’ he said, ‘Mr Wormold, isn’t it?’ Wormold wondered how he knew his name, for he had forgotten to give him a trade-card. ‘Eighteen different kinds of Scotch,’ the stranger said, ‘including Black Label. And I haven’t counted the Bourbons. It’s a wonderful sight. Wonderful,’ he repeated, lowering his voice with respect. ‘Have you ever seen so many whiskies?’

‘As a matter of fact I have. I collect miniatures and I have ninety-nine at home.’

‘Interesting. And what’s your choice today? A dimpled Haig?’

‘Thanks, I’ve just ordered a daiquiri.’

‘Can’t take those things. They relax me.’

‘Have you decided on a cleaner yet?’ Wormold asked for the sake of conversation.

‘Cleaner?’

‘Vacuum cleaner. The things I sell.’

‘Oh, cleaner. Ha ha. Throw away that stuff and have a Scotch.’

‘I never drink Scotch before the evening.’

‘You Southerners!’

‘I don’t see the connection.’

‘Makes the blood thin. Sun, I mean. You were born in Nice, weren’t you?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Oh well, one picks things up. Here and there. Talking to this chap and that. I’ve been meaning to have a word with you as a matter of fact.’ ‘Well, here I am.’

‘I’d like it more on the quiet, you know. Chaps keep on coming in and out.’

No description could have been less accurate. No one even passed the door in the hard straight sunlight outside. The officer of the tourist police had fallen contentedly asleep after propping his cigar over an ashtray; there were no tourists at this hour to protect or to supervise. Wormold said, ‘If it’s about a cleaner, come down to the shop.’

‘I’d rather not, you know. Don’t want to be seen hanging about there. Bar’s not a bad place after all. You run into a fellow-countryman, have a get together, what more natural?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, you know how it is.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Well, wouldn’t you say it was natural enough?’

Wormold gave up. He left eighty cents on the counter and said, ‘I must be getting back to the shop.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t like to leave Lopez for long.’

‘Ah, Lopez. I want to talk to you about Lopez.’ Again the explanation that seemed most probable to Wormold was that the stranger was an eccentric inspector from headquarters, but surely he had reached the limit of eccentricity when he added in a low voice, ‘You go to the Gents and I’ll follow you.’ ‘The Gents? Why should I?’

‘Because I don’t know the way.’

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey. Wormold led the stranger through a door at the back, down a short passage, and indicated the toilet. ‘It’s in there.’

‘After you, old man.’

‘But I don’t need it.’

‘Don’t be difficult,’ the stranger said. He put a hand on Wormold’s shoulder and pushed him through the door. Inside there were two washbasins, a chair with a broken back, and the usual cabinets and pissoirs. ‘Take a pew, old man,’ the stranger said, ‘while I turn on a tap.’ But when the water ran he made no attempt to wash. ‘Looks more natural,’ he explained (the word ‘natural’ seemed a favourite adjective of his), ‘if someone barges in. And of course it confuses a mike.’

‘A mike?’

‘You’re quite right to question that. Quite right. There probably wouldn’t be a mike in a place like this, but it’s the drill, you know, that counts. You’ll find it always pays in the end to follow the drill. It’s lucky they don’t run to waste-plugs in Havana. We can just keep the water running.’ ‘Please will you explain…?’

‘Can’t be too careful even in a Gents, when I come to think of it. A chap of ours in Denmark in 1940 saw from his own window the German fleet coming down the Kattegat.’

‘What gut?’

‘Kattegat. Of course he knew then the balloon had gone up. Started burning his papers. Put the ashes down the lay and pulled the chain. Trouble was late frost. Pipes frozen. All the ashes floated up into the bath down below. Flat belonged to an old maiden lady Baronin someone or other. She was just going to have a bath. Most embarrassing for our chap.’

‘It sounds like the Secret Service.’

‘It is the Secret Service, old man, or so the novelists call it. That’s why I wanted to talk to you about your chap Lopez. Is he reliable or ought you to fire him?’

‘Are you in the Secret Service?’

‘If you like to put it that way.’

‘Why on earth should I fire Lopez? He’s been with me ten years.’ ‘We could find you a chap who knew all about vacuum cleaners. But of course naturally we’ll leave that decision to you.’

‘But I’m not in your Service.’

‘We’ll come to that in a moment, old man Anyway we’ve traced Lopez -he seems clear But your friend Hasselbacher, I’d be a bit careful of him.’ ‘How do you know about Hasselbacher?’

‘I’ve been around a day or two, picking things up. One has to on these occasions.’

‘What occasions?’

‘Where was Hasselbacher born?’

‘Berlin, I think.’

‘Sympathies East or West?’

‘We never talk politics.’

‘Not that it matters East or West they pla3 the German game. Remember the Ribbentrop Pact. We won’t be caught that way again.’ ‘Hasselbacher’s not a politician. He’s an old doctor and he’s lived here for thirty years.’

‘All the same, you’d be surprised… But agree with you, it would be conspicuous if yo dropped him. Just play him carefully, that’s all He might even be useful if you handle him right.’

‘I’ve no intention of handling him.’

‘You’ll find it necessary for the job.’

‘I don’t want any job. Why do you pick or me?’

‘Patriotic Englishman. Been here for years Respected member of the European Traders Association. We must have our man in Havana you know. Submarines need fuel. Dictator drift together. Big ones draw in the little ones.

‘Atomic submarines don’t need fuel.’

Quite right, old man, quite right. But wars always start a little behind the times. Have to be prepared for conventional weapons too. Then there’s economic intelligence -sugar, coffee, tobacco.’

‘You can find all that in the Government year-books.’ ‘We don’t trust them, old man. Then political intelligence. With your cleaners you’ve got the entre everywhere.’

‘Do you expect me to analyse the fluff?’

‘It may seem a joke to you, old man, but the main source of the French intelligence at the time of Dreyfus was a charwoman who collected the scraps out of the waste-paper baskets at the German Embassy.’ ‘I don’t even know your name.’

‘Hawthorne.’

‘But who are you?’

‘Well, you might say I’m setting up the Caribbean network. One moment.

Someone’s coming. I’ll wash. You slip into a closet. Mustn’t be seen together.’

‘We have been seen together.’

‘Passing encounter. Fellow-countrymen.’ He thrust Wormold into the compartment as he had thrust him into the lavatory, ‘It’s the drill, you know,’ and then there was silence except for the running tap. Wormold sat down. There was nothing else to do. When he was seated his legs still showed under the half door. A handle turned. Feet crossed the tiled floor towards the pissoir. Water went on running. Wormold felt an enormous bewilderment. He wondered why he had not stopped all this nonsense at the beginning. No wonder Mary had left him. He remembered one of their quarrels. ‘Why don’t you do something, act some way, any way at all? You just stand there…’ At least, he thought, this time I’m not standing, I’m sitting. But in any case what could he have said? He hadn’t been given time to get a word in. Minutes passed. What enormous bladders Cubans had, and how clean Hawthorne’s hands must be getting by this time. The water stopped running. Presumably he was drying his hands, but Wormold remembered there were no towels. That was another problem for Hawthorne but he would be up to it. All part of the drill. At last the feet passed towards the door. The door closed. ‘Can I come out?’ Wormold asked. It was like a surrender. He was under orders now.

He heard Hawthorne tiptoeing near. ‘Give me a few minutes to get away, old man. Do you know who that was? The policeman. A bit suspicious, eh?’ ‘He may have recognized my legs under the door. Do you think we ought to change trousers?’

‘Wouldn’t look natural’ Hawthorne said, ‘but you are getting the idea. I’m leaving the key of my room in the basin. Fifth floor Seville Biltmore. Just walk up. Ten tonight. Things to discuss. Money and so on. Sordid issues. Don’t ask for me at the desk.’

‘Don’t you need your key?’

‘Got a pass key. I’ll be seeing you.’

Wormold stood up in time to see the door close behind the elegant figure and the appalling slang. The key was there in the washbasin -Room 501.

At half-past nine Wormold went to Milly’s room to say good night. Here, where the duenna was in charge, everything was in order the candle had been lit before the statue of St Seraphina, the honey-coloured missal lay beside the bed, the clothes were eliminated as though they had never existed, and a faint smell of eau-de-Cologne blew about like incense.

‘You’ve got something on your mind,’ Milly said. ‘You aren’t still worrying, are you, about Captain Segura?’

‘You never pull my leg, do you, Milly?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Everybody else seems to.’

‘Did Mother?’

‘I suppose so. In the early days.’

‘Does Dr Hasselbacher?’

He remembered the Negro limping slowly by.

He said, ‘Perhaps. Sometimes.’

‘It’s a sign of affection, isn’t it?’

‘Not always. I remember at school -‘ He stopped.

‘What do you remember, Father?’

‘Oh, a lot of things.’

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it. But somehow, through no virtue of his own, he had never taken that course. Lack of character perhaps. Schools were said to construct character by chipping off the edges. His edges had been chipped, but the result had not, he thought, been character only shapelessness, like an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art. ‘Are you happy, Milly?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes.’

‘At school too?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Nobody pulls your hair now?’

‘Of course not.’

‘And you don’t set anyone on fire?’

‘That was when I was thirteen,’ she said with scorn. ‘What’s worrying you, Father?’

She sat up in bed, wearing a white nylon dressing-gown. He loved her when the duenna was there, and he loved her even more when the duenna was absent: he couldn’t afford the time not to love. It was as if he had come with her a little way on a journey that she would finish alone. The separating years approached them both, like a station down the line, all gain for her and all loss for him. That evening hour was real, but not Hawthorne, mysterious and absurd, not the cruelties of police-stations and governments, the scientists who tested the new H-bomb on Christmas Island, Khrushchev who wrote notes: these seemed less real to him than the inefficient tortures of a school-dormitory. The small boy with the damp towel whom he had just remembered -where was he now? The cruel come and go like cities and thrones and powers, leaving their ruins behind them. They had no permanence. But the clown whom he had seen last year with Milly at the circus that clown was permanent, for his act never changed. That was the way to live; the clown was unaffected by the vagaries of public men and the enormous discoveries of the great.

Wormold began to make faces in the glass.

‘What on earth are you doing, Father?’

‘I wanted to make myself laugh.’

Milly giggled. ‘I thought you were being sad and serious.’ ‘That’s why I wanted to laugh. Do you remember the clown last year, Milly?’

‘He walked off the end of a ladder and fell in a bucket of whitewash.’ ‘He falls in it every night at ten o’clock. We should all be clowns, Milly. Don’t ever learn from experience.’

‘Reverend Mother says..

‘Don’t pay any attention to her. God doesn’t learn from experience, does He, or how could He hope anything of man? It’s the scientists who add the digits and make the same sum who cause the trouble. Newton discovering gravity he learned from experience and after that…’

‘I thought it was from an apple.’

‘It’s the same thing. It was only a matter of time before Lord

Rutherford went and split the atom. He had learned from experience too, and so did the men of Hiroshima. If only we had been born clowns, nothing bad would happen to us except a few bruises and a smear of whitewash. Don’t learn from experience, Milly. It ruins our peace and our lives.’

‘What are you doing now?’

‘I’m trying to waggle my ears. I used to be able to do it. But the trick doesn’t work any longer.’

‘Are you still unhappy about Mother?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Are you still in love with her?’

‘Perhaps. Now and then.’

‘I suppose she was very beautiful when she was young.’

‘She can’t be old now. Thirty-six.’

‘That’s pretty old.’

‘Don’t you remember her at all?’

‘Not very well. She was away a lot, wasn’t she?’

‘A good deal.’

‘Of course I pray for her.’

‘What do you pray? That she’ll come back?’

‘Oh no, not that. We can do without her. I pray that she’ll be a good Catholic again.’

‘I’m not a good Catholic.’

‘Oh, that’s different. You are invincibly ignorant.’

‘Yes, I expect I am.’

‘I’m not insulting you, Father. It’s only theology. You’ll be saved like the good pagans. Socrates, you know, and Cetewayo.’ ‘Who was Cetewayo?’

‘He was king of the Zulus.’

‘What else do you pray?’

‘Well, of course, lately I’ve been concentrating on the horse.’

He kissed her good night. She asked, ‘Where are you going?’

‘There are things I’ve got to arrange about the horse.’ ‘I give you a lot of trouble,’ she said meaninglessly. Then she sighed with content, pulling the sheet up to her neck. ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it, how you always get what you pray for.’