Our Man in Havana

Chapter 6

He said to Beatrice, ‘I was just leaning forward to switch on the engine. That saved me, I imagine. Of course it was his right to fire back. It was a real duel, but the third shot was mine.’

‘What happened afterwards?’

‘I had time to drive away before I was sick.’

‘Sick?’

‘I suppose if I hadn’t missed the war it would have seemed much less serious a thing killing a man. Poor Carter.’

‘Why should you feel sorry for him?’

‘He was a man. I’d learnt a lot about him. He couldn’t undo a girl’s corset. He was scared of women. He liked his pipe and when he was a boy the pleasure-steamers on the river at home seemed to him like liners. Perhaps he was a romantic. A romantic is usually afraid, isn’t he, in case reality doesn’t come up to expectations. They all expect too much.’

‘And then?’

‘I wiped my prints off the gun and brought it back. Of course Segura will find that two shots have been fired. But I don’t suppose he’ll want to claim the bullets. It would be a little difficult to explain. He was still asleep when I came in. I’m afraid to think what a head he’ll have now. My own is bad enough. But I tried to follow your instructions with the photograph.’ ‘What photograph?’

‘He had a list of foreign agents he was taking to the Chief of Police. I photographed it and put it back in his pocket. I’m glad to feel there’s one real report that I’ve sent before I resign.’

‘You should have waited for me.’

‘How could I? He was going to wake at any moment. But this micro business is tricky.’

‘Why on earth did you make a microphotograph?’

‘Because we can’t trust any courier to Kingston. Carter’s people

whoever they are have copies of the Oriente drawings. That means a double agent somewhere. Perhaps it’s your man who smuggles in the drugs. So I made a microphotograph as you showed me and I stuck it on the back of a stamp and I posted off an assorted batch of five hundred British colonials, the way we arranged for an emergency.’

‘We’ll have to cable them which stamp you’ve stuck it to.’

‘Which stamp?’

‘You don’t expect them to look through five hundred stamps, do you, looking for one black dot.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. How very awkward.’

‘You must know which stamp..

‘I didn’t think of looking at the front. I think it was a George V, and it was red -or green.’

‘That’s helpful. Do you remember any of the names on the list?’ ‘No. There wasn’t time to read it properly. I know I’m a fool at this game, Beatrice.’

‘No. They are the fools.’

‘I wonder whom we’ll hear from next. Dr Braun… Segura…’

But it was neither of them.

The supercilious clerk from the Consulate appeared in the shop at five o’clock the next afternoon. He stood stiffly among the vacuum cleaners like a disapproving tourist in a museum of phallic objects. He told Wormold that the Ambassador wanted to see him. ‘Will tomorrow morning do?’ He was working on his last report, Carter’s death and his resignation.

‘No, it won’t. He telephoned from his home. You are to go there straight away.’

‘I’m not an employee,’ Wormold said.

‘Aren’t you?’

Wormold drove back to Vedado, to the little white houses and the bougainvilleas of the rich. It seemed a long while since his visit to Professor Sanchez. He passed the house. What quarrels were still in progress behind those doll’s house walls?

He had a sense that everyone in the Ambassador’s home was on the look-out for him and that the hail and the stairs had been carefully cleared of spectators. On the first floor a woman turned her back and shut herself in a room; he thought it was the Ambassadress. Two children peered quickly through the banisters on the second floor and ran off with a click of little heels on the tiled floor. The butler showed him into the drawing-room, which was empty, and closed the door on him stealthily. Through the tall windows he could see a long green lawn and tall sub-tropical trees. Even there somebody was moving rapidly away.

The room was like many Embassy drawing rooms, a mixture of big inherited pieces and small personal objects acquired in previous stations. Wormold thought he could detect a past in Teheran (an odd-shaped pipe, a tile), Athens (an icon or two), but he was momentarily puzzled by an African mask -perhaps Monrovia?

The Ambassador came in, a tall cold man in a Guards tie, with something

about him of what Hawthorne would have liked to be. He said, ‘Sit down, Wormold.

Have a cigarette?’

‘No thank you, sir.’

‘You’ll find that chair more comfortable. Now it’s no use beating about the bush, Wormold. You are in trouble.’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course I know nothing -nothing at all -of what you are doing here.’

‘I sell vacuum cleaners, sir.’

The Ambassador looked at him with undisguised distaste. ‘Vacuum cleaners? I wasn’t referring to them.’ He looked away from Wormold at the Persian pipe, the Greek icon, the Liberian mask. They were like the autobiography in which a man has written for reassurance only of his better days. He said, ‘Yesterday morning Captain Segura came to see me. Mind you, I don’t know how the police got this information, it’s none of my business, but he told me you had been sending a lot of reports home of a misleading character. I don’t know whom you sent them to: that’s none of my business either. He said in fact that you had been drawing money and pretending to have sources of information which simply don’t exist. I thought it my duty to inform the Foreign Office at once. I gather you will be receiving orders to go home and report who to I have no idea, that sort of thing has nothing to do with me.’ Wormold saw two small heads looking out from behind one of the tall trees. He looked at them and they looked at him, he thought sympathetically. He said, ‘Yes, sir?’ ‘I got the impression that Captain Segura considered you were causing a lot of trouble here. I think if you refused to go home you might find yourself in serious trouble with the authorities, and under the circumstances of course I could do nothing to help you. Nothing at all. Captain Segura even suspects you of having forged some kind of document which he says you claim to have found in his possession. The whole subject is distasteful to me, Wormold. I can’t tell you how distasteful it is. The correct sources for information abroad are the embassies. We have our attaches for that purpose. This so-called secret information is a trouble to every ambassador.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I don’t know whether you’ve heard it’s been kept out of the papers but an Englishman was shot the night before last. Captain Segura hinted that he was not unconnected with you.’

‘I met him once at lunch, sir.’

‘You had better go home, Wormold, on the first plane you can manage the sooner the better for me and discuss it with your people -whoever they are.’ ‘Yes sir.’

The R.C.M. plane was due to take off at three-thirty in the morning for Amsterdam by way of Montreal. Wormold had no desire to travel to Kingston, where Hawthorne might have instructions to meet him. The office had been closed with a final cable and Rudy and his suitcase were routed to Jamaica. The codebooks were burnt with the help of the celluloid sheets. Beatrice was to go with Rudy. Lopez was left in charge of the vacuum cleaners. All the personal possessions he valued Wormold got into one crate, which he arranged to send by sea. The horse was sold -to Captain Segura.

Beatrice helped him pack. The last object in the crate was the statue of St Seraphina.

‘Milly must be very unhappy,’ Beatrice said.

‘She’s wonderfully resigned. She says like Sir Humphry Gilbert that God is just as close to her in England as Cuba.’

‘It wasn’t quite what Gilbert said.’

There was a pile of unsecret rubbish left to be burnt.

Beatrice said, ‘What a lot of photographs you had tucked away -of her.’ ‘I used to feel it was like killing someone to tear up a photograph. Of course I know now that it’s quite different.’

‘What’s this red box?’

‘She gave me some cuff-links once. They were stolen, but I kept the box.

I don’t know why. In a way I’m glad to see all this stuff go.’

‘The end of a life.’

‘Of two lives.’

‘What’s this?’

‘An old programme.’

‘Not so old. The Tropicana. May I keep it?’

‘You are too young to keep things,’ Wormold said. ‘They accumulate too much. Soon you find you have nowhere left to live among the junk-boxes.’ ‘I’ll risk it. That was a wonderful evening.’

Milly and Wormold saw her off at the airport. Rudy disappeared unobtrusively following the man with the enormous suitcase. It was a hot afternoon and people stood around drinking daiquiri’s. Even since Captain Segura’s proposal of marriage Milly’s duenna had disappeared, but after her disappearance the child, whom he had hoped to see again, who had set fire to Thomas Earl Parkman, junior, had not returned. It was as though Milly had outgrown both characters simultaneously. She said with grown-up tact, ‘I want to find some magazines for Beatrice,’ and busied herself at a bookstall with her back turned.

‘I’m sorry,’ Wormold said. ‘I’ll tell them when I get back that you know nothing. I wonder where you’ll be sent next.’

‘The Persian Gulf perhaps. Basra.’

‘Why the Persian Gulf?’

‘It’s their idea of purgatory. Regeneration through sweat and tears. Do Phastkleaners have an agency at Basra?’

‘I’m afraid Phastkleaners won’t keep me on.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ve got enough, thanks to poor Raul, for Milly’s year in Switzerland.

After that I don’t know.’

‘You could open one of those practical joke shops -you know, the bloodstained thumb and the spilt ink and the fly on the lump of sugar. How ghastly goings-away are. Please don’t wait any longer.’ ‘Shall I see you again?’

‘I’ll try not to go to Basra. I’ll try to stay in the typists’ pool with

Angelica and Ethel and Miss Jenkinson. When I’m lucky I shall be off at six and we could meet at the Corner House for a cheap snack and go to the movies. It’s one of those ghastly lives, isn’t it, like UNESCO and modern writers in conference? It’s been fun here with you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Now go away.’

He went to the magazine stall and found Milly. ‘We’re off,’ he said.

‘But, Beatrice -she hasn’t got her magazines.’

‘She doesn’t want them.’

‘I didn’t say good-bye.’

‘Too late. She’s passed the emigration now. You’ll see her in London.

Perhaps.’

It was as if they spent all their remaining time in airports. Now it was the K. L. M. flight and it was three in the morning and the sky was pink with the reflection of neon-lighted stands and landing-flares, and it was Captain Segura who was doing the ‘seeing off’. He tried to make the official occasion seem as private as possible, but it was still a little like a deportation. Segura said reproachfully, ‘You drove me to this.’

‘Your methods are gentler than Carter’s or Dr Braun’s. What are you doing about Dr Braun?’

‘He finds it necessary to return to Switzerland on a matter to do with his precision instruments.’

‘With a passage booked on to Moscow?’

‘Not necessarily. Perhaps Bonn. Or Washington. Or even Bucharest. I don’t know. Whoever they are they are pleased, I believe, with your drawings.’ ‘Drawings?’

‘Of the constructions in Oriente. He will also take the credit for getting rid of a dangerous agent.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. Cuba will be a little quieter without you both, but I shall miss

Milly.’

‘Milly would never have married you, Segura. She doesn’t really like cigarette-cases made of human skin.’

‘Did you ever hear whose skin?’

‘No.’

‘A police-officer who tortured my father to death. You see, he was a poor man. He belonged to the torturable class.’

Milly joined them, carrying Time, Life, Paris-Match and Quick. It was nearly 3.15 and there was a band of grey in the sky over the flare-path where the false dawn had begun. The pilots moved out to the plane and the air-hostesses followed. He knew the three of them by sight; they had sat with Beatrice at the Tropicana weeks ago. A loudspeaker announced in English and Spanish the departure of flight 396 to Montreal and Amsterdam. ‘I have a present for each of you,’ Segura said. He gave them two little packets. They opened them while the plane wheeled over Havana; the chain of lights along the marine parade swung out of sight and the sea fell like a curtain on all that past. In Wormold’s packet was a miniature bottle of Grant’s Standfast, and a bullet which had been fired from a police-gun. In Milly’s was a small silver horseshoe inscribed with her initials.

‘Why the bullet?’ Milly asked.

‘Oh, a joke in rather doubtful taste. All the same, he wasn’t a bad chap,’ Wormold said.

‘But not right for a husband,’ the grown-up Milly replied.

They had looked at him curiously when he gave his name, and then they had put him into a lift and taken him, a little to his surprise, down and not up. Now he sat in a long basement-corridor watching a red light over a door; when it turned green, they had told him, he could go in, but not before. People who paid no attention to the light went in and went out; some of them carried papers and some of them brief-cases, and one was in uniform, a colonel. Nobody looked at him; he felt that he embarrassed them. They ignored him as one ignores a malformed man. But presumably it was not his limp.

Hawthorne came down the passage from the lift. He looked rumpled as though he had slept in his clothes; perhaps he had been on an all night plane from Jamaica. He too would have ignored Wormold if Wormold had not spoken. ‘Hullo, Hawthorne.’

‘Oh, you, Wormold.’

‘Did Beatrice arrive safely?’

‘Yes. Naturally.’

‘Where is she, Hawthorne?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘What’s happening here? It looks like a court martial.’

‘It is a court-martial,’ Hawthorne said frostily and went into the room with the light. The clock stood at 11.25. He had been summoned for eleven. He wondered whether there was anything they could do to him beyond sacking him, which presumably they had already done. That was probably what they were trying to decide in there. They could hardly charge him under the Official Secrets Act. He had invented secrets, he hadn’t given them away. Presumably they could make it difficult for him if he tried to find a job abroad, and jobs at home were not easy to come by at his age, but he had no intention of giving them back their money. That was for Milly; he felt now as though he had earned it in his capacity as a target for Carter’s poison and Carter’s bullet. At 11.35 the Colonel came out; he looked hot and angry as he strode towards the lift. There goes a hanging judge, thought Wormold. A man in a tweed jacket emerged next. He had blue eyes very deeply sunk and he needed no uniform to mark him as a sailor. He looked at Wormold accidentally and looked quickly away again like a man of integrity. He called out ‘Wait for me, Colonel’ and went down the passage with a very slight roll as though he were back on a bridge in rough weather. Hawthorne came next, in conversation with a very young man, and then Wormold was suddenly breathless because the light was green and Beatrice was there.

‘You are to go in,’ she said.

‘What’s the verdict?’

‘I can’t speak to you now. Where are you staying?’

He told her.

‘I’ll come to you at six. If I can.’

‘Am I to be shot at dawn?’

‘Don’t worry. Go in now. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’

‘What’s happening to you?’

She said, ‘Jakarta.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The end of the world,’ she said. ‘Farther than Basra. Please go in.’ A man wearing a black monocle sat all by himself behind a desk. He said, ‘Sit down, Wormold.’

‘I prefer to stand.’

‘Oh, that’s a quotation, isn’t it?’

‘Quotation?’

‘I’m sure I remember hearing that in some play -amateur theatricals. A great many years ago, of course.’

Wormold sat down. He said, ‘You’ve no right to send her to Jakarta.’

‘Send who to Jakarta?’

‘Beatrice.’

‘Who’s she? Oh, that secretary of yours. How I hate these Christian names. You’ll have to see Miss Jenkinson about that. She’s in charge of the pool, not me, thank God.’

‘She had nothing to do with anything.’

‘Anything? Listen, Wormold. We’ve decided to shut down your post, and the question arises what are we to do with you?’ It was coming now. Judging from the face of the Colonel who had been one of his judges, he felt that what came would not be pleasant. The Chief took out his black monocle and Wormold was surprised by the baby-blue eye. He said, ‘We thought the best thing for you under the circumstances would be to stay at home -on our training staff. Lecturing. How to run a station abroad. That kind of thing. ‘ He seemed to be swallowing something very disagreeable. He added, ‘Of course, as we always do when a man retires from a post abroad, we’ll recommend you for a decoration. I think in your case -you were not there very long -we can hardly suggest anything higher than an O. B. E.’

They greeted each other formally in a wilderness of sage-green chairs in an inexpensive hotel near Gower Street called the Pendennis. ‘I don’t think I can get you a drink,’ he said. ‘It’s Temperance.’

‘Why did you come here then?’

‘I used to come with my parents when I was a boy. I hadn’t realized about the temperance. It didn’t trouble me then. Beatrice, what’s happened? Are they mad?’

‘They are pretty mad with both of us. They thought I should have spotted what was going on. The Chief had summoned quite a meeting. His liaisons were all there, with the War Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry. They had all your reports out in front of them and they went through them one by one. Communist infiltration in the Government -nobody minded a memo to the Foreign Office cancelling that one. There were economic reports -they agreed they should be disavowed too. Only the Board of Trade would mind. Nobody got real touchy until the Service reports came up. There was one about disaffection in the navy and another about refuelling bases for submarines. The Commander said, “There must be some truth in these.”

‘I said, “Look at the source. He doesn’t exist.”

“We shall look such fools,” the Commander said. “They are going to be as pleased as Punch in Naval Intelligence.”

‘But that was nothing to what they felt when the constructions were discussed.’

‘They’d really swallowed those drawings?’

‘It was then they turned on poor Henry.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call him Henry.’

‘They said first of all that he had never reported you sold vacuum cleaners but that you were a kind of merchant-king. The Chief didn’t join in that hunt. He looked embarrassed for some reason, and anyway Henry -I mean Hawthorne produced the file and all the details were on it. Of course that had never gone farther than Miss Jenkinson’s pool. Then they said he ought to have recognized the parts of a vacuum cleaner when he saw them. So he said he had, but there was no reason why the principle of a vacuum cleaner might not be applied to a weapon. After that they really howled for your blood, all except the Chief. There were moments when I thought he saw the funny side. He said to them, “What we have to do is quite simple. We have to notify the Admiralty, the War Office and the Air Ministry that all reports from Havana for the last six months are totally unreliable.”

‘But, Beatrice, they’ve offered me a job.’

‘That’s easily explained. The Commander crumbled first. Perhaps at sea one learns to take a long view. He said it would ruin the Service as far as the Admiralty was concerned. In future they would rely only on Naval Intelligence. Then the Colonel said, “If I tell the War Office, we may as well pack up.’ It was quite an impasse until the Chief suggested that perhaps the simplest plan was to circulate one more report from 59200/5 -that the constructions had proved a failure and had been dismantled. There remained of course you. The Chief felt you had had valuable experience which should be kept for the use of the department rather than for the popular press. Too many people had written reminiscences lately of the Secret Service. Somebody mentioned the Official Secrets Act, but the Chief thought it might not cover your case. You should have seen them when they were balked of a victim. Of course they turned on me, but I wasn’t going to be cross-examined by that gang. So I spoke out.’ ‘What on earth did you say?’

‘I told them even if I’d known I wouldn’t have stopped you. I said you were working for something important, not for someone’s notion of a global war that may never happen. That fool dressed up as a Colonel said something about “your country”. I said, “What do you mean by his country? A flag someone invented two hundred years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the T. U. C. and British Railways and the Co-op? You probably think it’s your regiment if you ever stop to think, but we haven’t got a regiment he and I. ” They tried to interrupt and I said, “Oh, I forgot. There’s something greater than one’s country, isn’t there? You taught us that with your League of Nations and your Atlantic Pact, NATO and UNO and SEATO. But they don’t mean any more to most of us than all the other letters, U. S. A. and U. S. S. R. And we don’t believe you any more when you say you want peace and justice and freedom. What kind of freedom? You want your careers.” I said I sympathized with the French officers in 1940 who looked after their families; they didn’t anyway put their careers first. A country is more a family than a Parliamentary system.’ ‘My God, you said all that?’

‘Yes. It was quite a speech.’

‘Did you believe it?’

‘Not all of it. They haven’t left us much to believe, have they? even disbelief. I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.’

‘Any human being?’

She walked quickly away without answering among the sage-green chairs and he saw that she had talked herself to the edge of tears. Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution. He watched her move away across the dreary room and he thought: Darling is a manner of speech, fourteen years between us, Milly -one shouldn’t do anything to shock one’s child or to injure the faith one doesn’t share. She had reached the door before he joined her.

He said, ‘I’ve looked up Jakarta in all the reference-books. You can’t go there. It’s a terrible place.’

‘I haven’t any choice. I tried to stay in the pool., ‘Did you want the pool?’

‘We could have met at the Corner House sometimes and gone to a movie.’

‘A ghastly life -you said it.’

‘You would have been part of it.’

‘Beatrice, I’m fourteen years older than you.’

‘What the hell does that matter? I know what really worries you. It’s not age, it’s Milly.’

‘She has to learn her father’s human too.’

‘She told me once it wouldn’t do my loving you.’

‘It’s got to do. I can’t love you as a one-way traffic.’

‘It won’t be easy telling her.’

‘It may not be very easy to stay with me after a few years.’ She said, ‘My darling, don’t worry about that any longer. You won’t be left twice.’

As they kissed, Milly came in carrying a large sewing basket for an old lady. She looked particularly virtuous; she had probably started a spell of doing good deeds. The old lady saw them first and clutched at Milly’s arm. ‘Come away, dear,’ she said. ‘The idea, where anyone can see them!’ ‘It’s all right,’ Milly said, ‘it’s only my father.’

The sound of her voice separated them.

The old lady said, ‘Is that your mother?’

‘No. His secretary.’

‘Give me my basket,’ the old lady said with indignation.

‘Well,’ Beatrice said, ‘that’s that.’

Wormold said, ‘I’m sorry, Milly.’

‘Oh,’ Milly said, ‘it’s time she learnt a little about life.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of her. I know this won’t seem to you like a real marriage…’

‘I’m glad you are being married. In Havana I thought you were just having an affair. Of course it comes to the same thing, doesn’t it, as you are both married already, but somehow it will be more dignified. Father, do you know where Tattersall’s is?’

‘Knightsbridge, I think, but it will be closed.’

‘I just wanted to explore the route.’

‘And you don’t mind, Milly?’

‘Oh, pagans can do almost anything, and you are pagans. Lucky you. I’ll be back for dinner.’

‘So you see,’ Beatrice said, ‘it was all right after all.’

‘Yes. I managed her rather well, don’t you think? I can do some things properly. By the way, the report about the enemy agents surely that must have pleased them.’

‘Not exactly. You see, darling, it took the laboratory an hour and a half floating each stamp in water to try to find your dot. I think it was on the four hundred and eighty-second stamp, and then when they tried to enlarge it well, there wasn’t anything there. You’d either overexposed the film or used the wrong end of the microscope.’

‘And yet they are giving me the O. B. E.?’

‘Yes.’

‘And a job?’

‘I doubt whether you’ll keep it long.’

‘I don’t mean to. Beatrice, when did you begin to imagine that you were…?’

She put her hand on his shoulder and forced him into a shuffle, among the dreary chairs. Then she began to sing, a little out of tune, as though she had been running a long way in order to catch him up. ‘Sane men surround You, old family friends. They say the earth is round My madness offends. An orange has pips, they say, And an apple has rind…’ ‘What are we going to live on?’ Wormold asked.

‘You and I can find a way.’

‘There are three of us,’ Wormold said, and she realized the chief problem of their future that he would never be quite mad enough.