The Comedians

GRAHAM GREENE

THE COMEDIANS

Graham Greene was born in 1904 and educated at Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, where he published a book of verse, he worked for four years as a sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train, which he classed as an

'entertainment' in order to distinguish it from more serious work. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and was commissioned to visit Mexico in 1938 and report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, The Power and the Glory.

Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was sent out to Sierra Leone in 1941-3. One of his major post-war novels, The Heart of the Matter, is set in West Africa and is considered by many to be his finest book. This was followed by The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, a story set in Vietnam, Our Man in Havana and A Burnt-Out Case. Many of his novels (including The Comedians) have been filmed, plus two of his short stories, and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. In 1967

he published a collection of short stories under the title: May We Borrow Your Husband?

His other publications include The Honorary Consul (1973), Lord Rochester's Monkey (1974), a biography, An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri (1975: edited), The Human Factor (1978), Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party (1980), J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice (1982) and Monsignor Quixote (1982). He has also published two volumes of autobiography: A Sort of Life (1971), and Ways of Escape (1980).

In all, Graham Greene has written some thirty novels, 'entertainments', plays, children's books, travel books and collections of essays and short stories. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1966.

'… Aspects are withing us,

and who seems

Most kingly is the King.'

Thomas Hardy

To A. S. Frere

Dear Frere,

When you were the head of a great publishing firm I was one of your most devoted authors, and, when you ceased to be a publisher, I, like many other writers on your list, felt it was time to find another home. This is the first novel I have written since then, and I want to offer it to you in memory of more than thirty years of association - a cold word to represent all the advice (which you never expected me to take), all the encouragement (which you never realized I needed), all the affection and fun of the years we shared.

A word about the characters of The Comedians. I am unlikely to bring an action for libel against myself with any success, yet I want to make it clear that the narrator of this tale, though his name is Brown, is not Greene. Many readers assume - I know it from experience - that an 'I' is always the author. So in my time I have been considered the murderer of a friend, the jealous lover of a civil servant's wife, and an obsessive player at roulette. I don't wish to add to my chameleon-nature the characteristics belonging to the cuckolder of a South American diplomat, a possibly illegitimate birth and an education by the Jesuits. Ah, it may be said, Brown is a Catholic and so, we know, is Greene … It is often forgotten that, even in the case of a novel laid in England, the story, when it contains more than ten characters, would lack verisimilitude if at least one of them were not a Catholic. Ignorance of this fact of social statistics sometimes gives the English novel a provincial air.

'I' is not the only imaginary character: none of the others, from such minor players as the British chargй to the principals, has ever existed. A physical trait taken here, a habit of speech, an anecdote - they are boiled up in the kitchen of the unconscious and emerge unrecognizable even to the cook in most cases.

Poor Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier's rule are not invented, the latter not even blackened for dramatic effect. Impossible to deepen that night. The Tontons Macoute are full of men more evil than Concasseur; the interrupted funeral is drawn from fact; many a Joseph limps the streets of Port-au-Prince after his spell of torture, and, though I have never met the young Philipot I have met guerrillas as courageous and as illtrained in that former lunatic asylum near Santo Domingo. Only in Santo Domingo have things changed since I began this book - for the worse. Affectionately,

Graham Greene

PART I

CHAPTER I

1

WHEN I think of all the grey memorials erected in London to equestrian generals, the heroes of old colonial wars, and to frock-coated politicians who are even more deeply forgotten, I can find no reason to mock the modest stone that commemorates Jones on the far side of the international road which he failed to cross in a country far from home, though I am not to this day absolutely sure of where, geographically speaking, Jones's home lay. At least he paid for the monument - however unwillingly - with his life, while the generals as a rule came home safe and paid, if at all, with the blood of their men, and as for the politicians - who cares for dead politicians sufficiently to remember with what issues they were identified? Free Trade is less interesting than an Ashanti war, though the London pigeons do not distinguish between the two. Exegi monumentum. Whenever my rather bizarre business takes me north to Monte Cristi and I pass the stone, I feel a certain pride that my action helped to raise it.

There is a point of no return unremarked at the time in most lives. Neither Jones nor I knew of it when it came, although, like the pilots of the old pre-jet air-liners, we should have been trained by the nature of our two careers to better observance. Certainly I was quite unaware of the moment when it receded one sullen August morning on the Atlantic in the wake of the Medea, a cargo-ship of the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company, bound for Haiti and Port-au-Prince from Philadelphia and New York. At that period of my life I still regarded my future seriously - even the future of my empty hotel and of a love-affair which was almost as empty. I was not involved, so far as I could tell, with either Jones or Smith, they were fellow passengers, that was all, and I had no idea of the pompes funиbres they were preparing for me in the parlours of Mr Fernandez. If I had been told I would have laughed, as I laugh now on my better days.

The level of the pink gin in my glass shifted with the movement of the boat, as though the glass were an instrument made to record the shock of the waves, as Mr Smith said firmly in reply to Jones, 'I've never suffered from mal de mer, no sir. It's the effect of acidity. Eating meat gives you acidity, drinking alcohol does the same.' He was one of the Smiths of Wisconsin, but I had thought of him from the very first as the Presidential Candidate because, before I even knew his surname, his wife had so referred to him, as we leant over the rail our first hour at sea. She made a jerking movement with her strong chin as she spoke which seemed to indicate that, if there were another presidential candidate on board, he was not the one she intended. She said, 'I mean my husband there, Mr Smith - he was Presidential Candidate in 1948. He's an idealist. Of course, for that very reason, he stood no chance.' What could we have been talking about to lead her to that statement? We were idly watching the flat grey sea which seemed to lie within the three-mile-limit like an animal passive and ominous in a cage waiting to show what it can do outside. I may have spoken to her of an acquaintance who played the piano and perhaps her mind leapt to Truman's daughter and thus to politics - she was far more politically conscious than her husband. I think she believed that, as a candidate, she would have stood a better chance than he, and, following the pointer of her protruding chin, I could well imagine it possible. Mr Smith, who wore a shabby raincoat turned up to guard his large innocent hairy ears, was pacing the deck behind us, one lock of white hair standing up like a television aerial in the wind, and a travelling-rug carried over his arm. I could imagine him a homespun poet or perhaps the dean of an obscure college, but never a politician. I tried to remember who Truman's opponent had been in that election year - surely it had been Dewey, not Smith, while the wind from the Atlantic took away her next sentence. I thought she said something about vegetables, but the word seemed an unlikely one to me then.

Jones I met a little later under embarrassing circumstances, for he was engaged in trying to bribe the bedroom steward to swop our cabins. He stood in the doorway of mine with a suitcase in one hand and two five-dollar bills in the other. He was saying, 'He hasn't been down yet. He won't make a fuss. He's not that kind of a chap. Even if he notices the difference.' He spoke as if he knew me.

'But Mr Jones …' the steward began to argue.

Jones was a small man, very tidily dressed in a pale grey suit with a double-breasted waistcoat, which somehow looked out of place away from lifts, office crowds, the clatter of typewriters - it was the only one of its kind in our scrubby cargo-ship peddling the sullen sea. He never changed it, I noticed later, not even on the night of the ship's concert, and I began to wonder whether perhaps his suitcases contained no other clothes at all. I thought of him as someone who, having packed in a hurry, had brought the wrong uniform, for he certainly did not mean to be conspicuous. With the little black moustache and the dark Pekinese eyes I would have taken him for a Frenchman - perhaps someone on the Bourse - and it was quite a surprise to me when I learnt that his name was Jones.

'Major Jones,' he replied to the steward with a note of reproof. I was almost as embarrassed as he was. On a cargo-steamer there are few passengers and it is uncomfortable to nourish a resentment. The steward with his hands folded said to him righteously, 'There's really nothing I can do, sir. The cabin was reserved for this gentleman. For Mr Brown.' Smith, Jones and Brown - the situation was improbable. I had a half-right to my drab name, but had he? I smiled at his predicament, but Jones's sense of humour, as I was to find, was of a simpler order. He looked at me with grave attention and said, 'This is really your cabin, sir?'

'I have an idea it is.'

'Someone told me it was unoccupied.' He shifted slightly so that his back was turned to my too obvious cabin-trunk standing just inside. The bills had disappeared, perhaps up his sleeve, for I had seen no movement towards his pocket.

'Have they given you a bad cabin?' I asked.

'Oh, it's only that I prefer the starboard side.'

'Yes, so do I, on this particular run. One can leave the porthole open,' and as though to emphasize the truth of what I said the boat began a slow roll as it moved further into the open sea.

'Time for a pink gin,' Jones said promptly, and we went upstairs together to find the small saloon and the black steward who took the first opportunity as he added water to my gin to whisper in my ear, 'I'm a British subject, sah.'

I noticed that he made no such claim to Jones.

The door of the saloon swung open and the Presidential Candidate appeared, an impressive figure in spite of the innocent ears: he had to lower his head in the doorway. Then he looked all round the saloon before he stood aside so that his wife could enter under the arch of his arm, like a bride under a sword. It was as though he wanted to satisfy himself first that there was no unsuitable company present. His eyes were of clear washed blue and he had homely sprouts of grey hair from his nose and ears. He was a genuine article, if ever there was one, a complete contrast to Mr Jones. If I had troubled to think of them then at all, I would have thought that they could mix together no better than oil and water.

'Come in,' Mr Jones said (I somehow couldn't bring myself to think of him as Major Jones), 'come in and take a snifter.' His slang, I was to find, was always a little out of date as though he had studied it in a dictionary of popular usage, but not in the latest edition.

'You must forgive me,' Mr Smith replied with courtesy, 'but I don't touch alcohol.'

'I don't touch it myself,' Jones said, 'I drink it,' and he suited the action to the words. 'The name is Jones,' he added, 'Major Jones.'

'Pleased to meet you, Major. My name's Smith. William Abel Smith. My wife, Major Jones.' He looked at me inquiringly, and I realized that somehow I had lagged behind in the introductions.

'Brown,' I said shyly. I felt as though I were making a bad joke, but neither of them saw the point.

'Ring the bell again,' Jones said, 'there's a good chap.' I had already graduated into the position of the old friend, and, although Mr Smith was nearer the bell, I crossed the saloon to touch it; in any case he was busy wrapping the travelling-rug around his wife's knees, though the saloon was well enough warmed (perhaps it was a marital habit). It was then, in reply to Jones's affirmation that there was nothing like a pink gin to keep away seasickness, Mr Smith made his statement of faith. 'I've never suffered from mal de mer, no sir … I've been a vegetarian all my life,' and his wife capped it.

'We campaigned on that issue.'

'Campaigned?' Jones asked sharply as though the word had woken the major within him.

'In the Presidential Election of 1948.'

'You were a candidate?'

'I'm afraid,' Mr Smith said with a gentle smile, 'that I stood very little chance. The two great parties …'

'It was a gesture,' his wife interrupted fiercely. 'We showed our flag.'

Jones was silent. Perhaps he was impressed, or perhaps like myself he was trying to recall who the main contestants had been. Then he tried the phrase over on his tongue as though he liked the taste of it: 'Presidential Candidate in '48.' He added, 'I'm very proud to meet you.'

'We had no organization,' Mrs Smith said. 'We, couldn't afford it. But all the same we polled more than ten thousand votes.'

'I never anticipated so much support,' the Presidential Candidate said.

'We were not at the bottom of the poll. There was a candidate - something to do with agriculture, dear?'

'Yes, I have forgotten the exact name of his party. He was a disciple of Henry George, I think.'

'I must admit,' I said, 'that I thought the only candidates were Republican and Democrat - oh, and there was a Socialist too, wasn't there?'

'The

Conventions

attract all the publicity,' Mrs Smith said, 'vulgar rodeos though they are. Can you see Mr Smith with a lot of drum majorettes?'

'Anyone can run for President,' the Candidate explained with gentleness and humility. 'That is the pride of our democracy. I can tell you, it was a great experience for me. A great experience. One that I shall never forget.'

2

Ours was a very small boat. I believe that a full complement of passengers would have numbered only fourteen, and the Medea was by no means full. This was not the tourist season, and in any case the island to which we were bound was no longer an attraction for tourists.

There was a spick-and-span negro with a very high white collar and starched cuffs and gold-rimmed glasses who was bound for Santo Domingo; he kept very much to himself, and at table he answered politely and ambiguously in monosyllables. For instance when I asked him what was the principal cargo that the captain was likely to take aboard in Trujillo - I corrected myself, 'I'm sorry. I mean Santo Domingo,' he nodded gravely and said, 'Yes.' He never himself asked a question and his discretion seemed to rebuke our own idle curiosity. There was also a traveller for a firm of pharmaceutical manufacturers - I have forgotten the reason he gave for not travelling by air. I felt sure that it was not the correct reason, and that he suffered from a heart trouble which he kept to himself. His face had a tight papery look, above a body too big for the head, and he lay long hours in his berth.

My own reason for taking the boat - and I sometimes suspected that it might be Jones's too - was prudence. In an airport one is so swiftly separated on the tarmac from the crew of the plane; in a harbour one feels the safety of foreign boards under the feet - I counted as a citizen of Holland so long as I stayed on the Medea. I had booked my passage through to Santo Domingo and I told myself, however unconvincingly, that I had no intention of leaving the ship before I received certain assurances from the British chargй - or from Martha. The hotel which I owned on the hills above the capital had done without me for three months; it would certainly be void of clients, and I valued my life more highly than an empty bar and a corridor of empty bedrooms and a future empty of promise. As for the Smiths, I really think it was love of the sea which had brought them on board, but it was quite a while before I learnt why they had chosen to visit the republic of Haiti. The captain was a thin unapproachable Hollander scrubbed clean like a piece of his own brass rail who only appeared once at table, and in contrast the purser was untidy and ebulliently gay with a great liking for Bols gin and Haitian rum. On the second day at sea he invited us to drink with him in his cabin. We all squashed in except for the traveller in pharmaceutical products who said that he must always be in bed by nine. Even the gentleman from Santo Domingo joined us and answered, 'No,' when the purser asked him how he found the weather.

The purser had a jovial habit of exaggerating everything, and his natural gaiety was only a little damped when the Smiths demanded bitter lemon and, when that was unavailable, Coca-Cola. 'You're drinking your own deaths,' he told them and began to explain his own theory of how the secret ingredients were manufactured. The Smiths were unimpressed and drank the Coca-Cola with evident pleasure. 'You will need something stronger than that where you are going,' the purser said.

'My husband and I have never taken anything stronger,' Mrs Smith replied.

'The water is not to be trusted, and you will find no Coca-Cola now that the Americans have moved out. At night when you hear the shooting in the streets you will think perhaps that a strong glass of rum …'

'Not rum,' Mrs. Smith said.

'Shooting?' Mr Smith inquired. 'Is there shooting?' He looked at his wife where she sat crouched under the travelling-rug (she was not warm enough even in the stuffy cabin) with a trace of anxiety. 'Why shooting?'

'Ask Mr Brown. He lives there.'

I said, 'I've not often heard shooting. They act more silently as a rule.'

'Who

are

they?' Mr Smith asked.

'The Tontons Macoute,' the purser broke in with wicked glee. 'The President's bogey-men. They wear dark glasses and they call on their victims after dark.'

Mr Smith laid his hand on his wife's knee. 'The gentleman is trying to scare us, my dear,' he said. 'They told us nothing about this at the tourist bureau.'

'He little knows,' Mrs Smith said, 'that we don't scare easily', and somehow I believed her.

'You understand what we're talking about, Mr Fernandez?' the purser called across the cabin in the high voice some people employ towards anyone of an alien race.

Mr Fernandez had the glazed look of a man approaching sleep. 'Yes,' he said, but I think it had been an equal chance whether he replied yes or no. Jones, who had been sitting on the edge of the purser's bunk, nursing a glass of rum, spoke for the first time. 'Give me fifty commandos,' he said, 'and I'd go through the country like a dose of salts.'

'Were you in the commandos?' I asked with some surprise. He said ambiguously, 'A different branch of the same outfit.'

The Presidential Candidate said, 'We have a personal introduction to the Minister for Social Welfare.'

'Minister for what?' the purser said. 'Welfare? You won't find any Welfare. You should see the rats, big as terriers …'

'I was told at the tourist bureau that there were some very good hotels.'

'I own one,' I said. I took out my pocket-book and showed him three postcards. Although printed in bright vulgar colours they had the dignity of history, for they were relics of an epoch over for ever. On one a blue tiled bathing-pool was crowded with girls in bikinis: on the second a drummer famous throughout the Caribbean was playing under the thatched roof of the Creole bar, and on the third - a general view of the hotel - there were gables and balconies and towers, the fantastic nineteenth-century architecture of Port-au-Prince. They at least had not changed.

'We had thought of something a little quieter,' Mr Smith said.

'We are quiet enough now.'

'It would certainly be pleasant, wouldn't it, dear, to be with a friend? If you have a room vacant with a bath or a shower.'

'Every room has a bath. Don't be afraid of noise. The drummer's fled to New York, and all the bikini girls stay in Miami now. You'll probably be the only guests I have.'

These two clients, it had occurred to me, might be worth a good deal more than the money they paid. A presidential candidate surely had status; he would be under the protection of his embassy or what was left of it. (When I had left Port-au-Prince the embassy staff had already been reduced to a chargй, a secretary, and two Marine guards, who were all that remained of the military mission.) Perhaps the same thought occurred to Jones. 'I might join you too,' he said, 'if no other arrangements have been made for me. It would be a bit like staying on shipboard if we stuck together.'

'Safety in numbers,' the purser agreed.

'With three guests I shall be the most envied hфtelier in Port-au-Prince.'

'It's not very safe to be envied,' the purser said. 'You would do much better, all three of you, if you continued with us. Myself I don't care to go fifty yards from the water-front. There is a fine hotel in Santo Domingo. A luxurious hotel. I can show you picture-postcards as good as his.' He opened the drawer and I caught a brief glimpse of a dozen little square packets French letters which he would sell at a profit to the crew when they went on shore to Mиre Catherine's or one of the cheaper establishments. (His sales talk, I felt certain, would consist of some grisly statistics.) 'What have I done with them?' he demanded uselessly of Mr Fernandez, who smiled and said,

'Yes,' and he began to search the desk littered with printed forms and paperclips and bottles of red, green and blue ink, and some old-fashioned wooden pen-holders and nibs, before he discovered a few limp postcards of a bathing-pool exactly like mine and a Creole bar which was only distinguishable because it had a different drummer.

'My husband is not on a vacation,' Mrs Smith said with disdain.

'I'd like to keep one if you don't mind,' Jones said, choosing the bathingpool and the bikinis, 'one never knows …' That phrase represented, I think, his deepest research into the meaning of life.

3

Next day I sat in a deck-chair on the sheltered starboard side and let myself roll languidly in and out of the sun with the motions of the mauve-green sea. I tried to read a novel, but the heavy foreseeable progress of its characters down the uninteresting corridors of power made me drowsy, and when the book fell upon the deck, I did not bother to retrieve it. My eyes opened only when the traveller in pharmaceutical products passed by; he clung to the rail with two hands and seemed to climb along it as though it were a ladder. He was panting heavily and he had an expression of desperate purpose as though he knew to what the climb led and knew that it was worth his effort, but knew too that he would never have the strength to reach the end. Again I drowsed and found myself alone in a blacked-out room and someone touched.me with a cold hand. I woke and it was Mr Fernandez who had, I suppose, been surprised by the steep roll of the boat and had steadied himself against me. I had the impression of a shower of gold dropping from a black sky as his spectacles caught the fitful sun. 'Yes,' he said, 'yes,'

smiling an apology as he lurched upon his way.

It seemed as though a sudden desire for exercise had struck everyone except myself on the second day out. For next it was Mr Jones - I still couldn't bring myself to call him Major - who passed steadily up the centre of the deck adjusting his gait to the movement of the ship. 'Squally,' he called to me as he went by, and again I had the impression that English was a language he had learnt from books - perhaps on this occasion from the work of Dickens. Then, unexpectedly, back came Mr Fernandez, skidding in a wild way, and after him, painfully, the pharmacist on his laborious climb. He had lost his place, but he stuck the race out stubbornly. I began to wonder when the Presidential Candidate would appear, he must have had a heavy handicap, and at that moment he emerged from the saloon beside me. He was alone and looked unnaturally detached like one of the figures in a weather-house without the other. 'Breezy,' he said, as though he were correcting Mr Jones's English style and sat down in the next chair.

'I hope Mrs Smith is well.'

'She's fine,' he said, 'fine. She's down there in the cabin getting up her French grammar. She said she couldn't concentrate with me around.'

'French

grammar?'

'They tell me that's the language spoken where we are going. Mrs Smith is a wonderful linguist. Give her a few hours with a grammar and she'll know everything except the pronunciation.'

'French hasn't come her way before?'

'That's no problem for Mrs Smith. Once we had a German girl staying in the house - it wasn't half a day before Mrs Smith was telling her to keep her room tidy in her own language. Another time we had a Finn. It took Mrs Smith nearly a week before she could get her hands on a Finnish grammar, but then there was no stopping her.' He paused and said with a smile that touched his absurdity with a strange dignity, 'I've been married for thirty-five years and I've never ceased to admire that wornan.'

'Do you often,' I asked disingenuously, 'take holidays in these parts?'

'We try to combine a vacation,' he said, 'with our mission. Neither Mrs Smith nor I are ones for undiluted pleasure.'

'I see, and your mission this time is bringing you … ?'

'Once,' he said, 'we took our vacation in Tennessee. It was an unforgettable experience. You see, we went as freedom riders. There was an occasion in Nashville on the way down when I feared for Mrs Smith.'

'It was a courageous way to spend a holiday.'

He said, 'We have a great love for coloured people.' He seemed to think it was the only explanation needed.

'I'm afraid they'll prove a disappointment to you where you are going now.'

'Most things disappoint till you look deeper.'

'Coloured people can be as violent as the whites in Nashvflle.'

'We have our troubles in the U.S.A. All the same I thought - perhaps - the purser was pulling my leg.'

'He intended to. The joke's against him. The reality's worse than anything he can have seen from the waterfront. I doubt if he goes far into the town.'

'You would advise us like he did - to go on to Santo Domingo?'

'Yes.'

His eyes looked sadly out over the monotonous repetitive scape of sea. I thought I had made an impression. I said, 'Let me give you an example of what life is like there.'

I told Mr Smith of a man who was suspected of being concerned in an attempt to kidnap the President's children on their way home from school. I don't think there was any evidence against him, but he had been the prize sharpshooter of the republic at some international gathering in Panama, and perhaps they thought it needed a prize marksman to pick off the Presidential guard. So the Tontons Macoute surrounded his house - he wasn't there - and set it on fire with petrol and then they machine-gunned anyone who tried to escape. They allowed the fire-brigade to keep the flames from spreading, and now you could see the gap in the street like a drawn tooth. Mr Smith listened with attention. He said, 'Hitler did worse, didn't he?

And he was a white man. You can't blame it on their colour.'

'I don't. The victim was coloured too.'

'When you look properly at things, they are pretty bad everywhere. Mrs Smith wouldn't like us to turn back just because …'

'I'm not trying to persuade you. You asked me a question.'

'Then why is it - if you'll excuse another - that you are going back?'

'Because the only thing I own is there. My hotel.'

'I guess the only thing we own - Mrs Smith and me - is our mission.' He sat staring at the sea, and at that moment Jones passed. He called at us over his shoulder, 'Four times round,' and went on.

'He's not afraid either,' Mr Smith said, as though he had to apologize for showing courage, as a man might apologize for a rather loud tie which his wife had given him by pointing out that others wore the same.

'I wonder if it's courage in his case. Perhaps he's like me and he hasn't anywhere else to go.'

'He's been very friendly to us both,' Mr Smith said firmly. It was obvious that he wished to change the subject.

When I knew Mr Smith better I recognized that particular tone of voice. He was acutely uneasy if I spoke ill of anyone even of a stranger or of an enemy. He would back away from the conversation like a horse from water. It amused me sometimes to draw him unsuspectingly to the very edge of the ditch and then suddenly urge him on, as it were, with whip and spurs. But I never managed to teach him how to jump. I think he soon began to divine what I was at, but he never spoke his displeasure aloud. That would have been to criticize a friend. He preferred just to edge away. This was one characteristic at least he did not share with his wife. I was to learn later how fiery and direct her nature could be - she was capable of attacking anyone, except of course the Presidential Candidate himself. I had many quarrels with her in the course of time, she suspected that I laughed a little at her husband, but she never knew how I envied them. I have never known in Europe a married couple with that kind of loyalty.

I said, 'You were talking about your mission just now.'

'Was I? You must excuse me, talking about myself like that. Mission is too big a word.'

'I'm

interested.'

'Call it a hope. But I guess a man in your profession wouldn't find it very sympathetic.'

'You mean it's got something to do with vegetarianism?'

'Yes.'

'I'm not unsympathetic. My job is to please my guests. If my guests are vegetarian …'

'Vegetarianism isn't only a question of diet, Mr Brown. It touches life at many points. If we really eliminated acidity from the human body we would eliminate passion.'

'Then the world would stop.'

He reproved me gently, 'I didn't say love,' and I felt a curious sense of shame. Cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any Monoprix store - it's built into all poor-quality goods.

'Anyway you're on the way to a vegetarian country,' I said.

'How do you mean, Mr Brown?'

'Ninety-five per cent of the people can't afford meat or fish or eggs.'

'But hasn't it occurred to you, Mr Brown, that it isn't the poor who make the trouble in the world? Wars are made by politicians, by capitalists, by intellectuals, by bureaucrats, by Wall Street bosses or Communist bosses - they are none of them made by the poor.'

'And the rich and powerful aren't vegetarian, I suppose?'

'No sir. Not usually.' Again I felt ashamed of my cynicism. I could believe for a moment, as I looked at those pale blue eyes, unflinching and undoubting, that perhaps he had a point. A steward stood at my elbow. I said, 'I don't want soup.'

'It's not time for soup yet, sah. The captain asks you kindly to have a word with him, sah.'

The captain was in his cabin - an apartment as bare and as scrubbed as himself, with nothing personal anywhere except for one cabinet-sized photograph of a middle-aged woman who looked as if she had emerged that instant from her hair-dresser's where even her character had been capped under the drying helmet. 'Sit down, Mr Brown. Will you take a cigar?'

'No, no thank you.'

The captain said, 'I wish to come quickly to the point. I have to ask your cooperation. It is very embarrassing.'

'Yes?'

He said in a tone heavy with gloom, 'If there is one thing I do not like on a voyage it is the unexpected.'

'I thought at sea … always … storms …'

'Naturally I am not talking of the sea. The sea presents no problem.' He altered the position of an ash-tray, of a cigarbox, and then he moved a centimetre closer to him the photograph of the blank-faced woman whose hair seemed set in grey cement. Perhaps she gave him confidence: she would have given me a paralysis of the will. He said, 'You have met this passenger Major Jones. He calls himself Major Jones.'

'I've spoken to him.'

'What are your impressions?'

'I hardly know … I hadn't thought …'

'I have just received a cable from my office in Philadelphia. They wish me to report by cable when and where he lands.'

'Surely you know from his ticket …'

'They wish to be sure that he does not alter his plans. We go on to Santo Domingo … You have yourself explained to me that you have booked to Santo Domingo, in case at Port-au-Prince … he may have the same intention.'

'Is it a police question?'

'It may be - it is my conjecture only - that the police are interested. I want you to understand that I have nothing against Major Jones. This is very possibly a routine inquiry set on foot because some filing-clerk … But I thought … you are a fellow Englishman, you live in Port-au-Prince, on my side a word of warning, and on yours …'

I was irritated by his absolute discretion, absolute correctness, absolute rectitude. Had the captain never slipped up once, in his youth or in his cups, in the absence of that well coiffured wife of his? I said, 'You make him sound like a card-sharper. I assure you that he hasn't once suggested a game.'

'I never said …'

'You want me to keep my eyes open, my ears open?'

'Exactly. No more. If it were anything serious they would surely have asked me to detain him. Perhaps he has run away from his debtors. Who knows? Or some woman business,' he added with distaste, meeting the gaze of the hard woman with the stony hair.

'Captain, with all respects, I'm not trained to be an informer.'

'I am not asking anything like that, Mr Brown. I cannot very well demand of an old man like Mr Smith … in the case of Major Jones …' Again I was aware of the three names, interchangeable like comic masks in a farce. I said, 'If I see anything that merits a report - I'm not going to look for it, mind.' The captain gave a little sigh of self-commiseration. 'As if there were not enough responsibilities for one man on this run …'

He began to tell me a long anecdote about something which had occurred two years before in the port we were coming to. At one in the morning there had been the sounds of shots and half an hour later an officer and two policemen had appeared at the gangway: they wanted to search his ship. Naturally he had refused permission. This was sovereign territory of the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company. There had been a lot of argument. He had complete belief in his night-watchman - wrongly as it turned out, for the man had been asleep at his post. Then on his way to speak to the officer of the watch the captain had noticed a trail of blood spots. It led him to one of the boats and there he had discovered the fugitive.

'What did you do?' I asked.

'He was attended by the ship's doctor and then, of course, I handed him over to the proper authorities.'

'Perhaps he was seeking political asylum.'

'I do not know what he was seeking. How could I? He was quite illiterate, and in any case he had no money for his passage.'

4

When I saw Jones again, after the interview with the captain, I felt a prejudice in his favour. If he had asked me to play poker at that moment I would have consented without hesitation and gladly have lost to him, for an exhibition of trust might have removed the bad taste which remained in my mouth. I took the port-side route around the deck to avoid Mr Smith and was slapped with spray; before I could dive down to the cabin I met Mr Jones face to face. I felt guilty, as though I had already betrayed his secret, when he stopped his walk to offer me a drink.

'It's a bit early,' I said.

'Opening time in London.' I looked at my watch - it read five minutes to eleven - and felt as though I were checking his credentials. While he went in search of the steward I picked up the book he had left behind him in the saloon. It was an American paperback with the picture of a naked girl sprawled face down upon a luxurious bed and the title was No Time Like the Present. Inside the cover in pencil was scrawled his signature - H. J. Jones. Was he establishing his identity or reserving this particular book for his personal library? I opened it at random. ' "Trust?" Geoff's voice struck her like a whiplash …' And then Jones came back carrying two lagers, I put the book down and said with unnecessary embarrassment, ' Sortes Virgilianae. '

' Sortes what?' Jones raised his glass and turning the pages of his mental dictionary and perhaps rejecting 'mud in your eye' as obsolete brought out a more modem term, 'Cheers.'

He added after a swallow, 'I saw you talking to the captain just now.'

'Yes?'

'An unapproachable old bastard. He'll talk only to the toffs.' The word had an antique flavour: this time his dictionary had certainly failed him.

'I wouldn't call myself a toff.'

'You mustn't mind me saying that. Toff has a special sense for me. I divide the world into two parts - the toffs and the tarts. The toffs can do without the tarts, but the tarts can't do without the toffs. I'm a tart.'

'What exactly is your idea of a tart? It seems to be a bit special too.'

'The toffs have a settled job or a good income. They have a stake somewhere like you have in your hotel. The tarts - well, we pick a living here and there - in saloon bars. We keep our ears open and our eyes skinned.'

'You live on your wits, is that it?'

'Or we die on them often enough.'

'And the toffs - haven't they any wits?'

'They don't need wits. They have reason, intelligence, character. We tarts

- we sometimes go too fast for our own good.'

'And the other passengers - are they tarts or toffs?'

'I can't make out Mr Fernandez. He might be either. And the chemist chap, he's given us no opportunity to judge. But Mr Smith - he's a real toff if ever there was one.'

'You sound as though you admire the toffs?'

'We'd all like to be toffs, and aren't there moments - admit it, old man - when you envy the tarts? Sometimes when you don't want to sit down with your accountant and see too far ahead?'

'Yes, I suppose there are moments like that.'

'You think to yourself. "We have the responsibility, but they have all the fun." '

'I hope you'll find some fun where you are going. It's a country of tarts all right - from the President downwards.'

'That's one danger the more for me. A tart can spot a tart. Perhaps I'll have to play a toff to put them off their guard. I ought to study Mr Smith.'

'Have you often had to play a toff?'

'Not too often, thank the Lord. It's the hardest part of all for me. I find myself laughing at the wrong moment. What, me, Jones, in that company, saying that? I get scared sometimes too. I lose the way. It's frightening to be lost, isn't it, in a strange city, but when you get lost inside yourself … Have another lager.'

'This

one's

mine.'

'I'm not sure I'm right about you. Seeing you there … with the Captain …

I looked through the windows as I went by … you didn't look exactly at your ease … you aren't a tart by any chance pretending to be a toff?'

'Does one always know oneself?' The steward came in and began to distribute the ash-trays. 'Two more lagers,' I told him.

'Would you mind,' Jones said, 'if I made it a Bols this time. I get blown up and sort of windy with too much lager.'

'Two Bols,' I said.

'Do you ever play at cards?' he asked, and I thought that after all the moment had come to purge my guilt; all the same I replied with caution,

'Poker?'

He was too frank to be true. Why had he talked to me so openly about the toffs and the tarts? I got the impression that he guessed what the captain had said to me and was testing my reaction, dropping his candour into the current of my thoughts to see if it changed colour like a piece of litmuspaper. Perhaps he thought that my allegiance in the last event would not necessarily be to the toffs. Or perhaps my name Brown had sounded to him as phoney as his own.

'I don't play poker,' he retorted and twinkled his black eyes at me as much as to say, 'I've caught you there.' He said, 'I always give away too much. In friendly company. I haven't got the knack of hiding what I feel. Gin-rummy's my only game.' He pronounced the title as though it were a nursery game - a mark of innocence. 'You play it?'

'I've played it once or twice,' I said.

'I'm not pressing you. I just thought it might pass the time till lunch.'

'Why

not?'

'Steward, the cards.' He gave me a little smile as much as to say, 'You see, I don't carry my own marked packs.'

It really was, in its way, a game of innocence. There was no easy means of cheating. He asked, 'What shall we play? Ten cents a hundred?'

Jones brought to the game his own special quality. He noticed first, he told me later, in what part of his hand an inexperienced opponent kept his discards and by that means he judged how near he was to a gin. He knew by the way his opponent arranged his cards, by the length of his hesitation before playing, whether they were good, bad or indifferent, and if the hand were obviously good he would often propose fresh cards in the certainty of refusal. This gave his opponent a sense of superiority and of security, so that he would be inclined to take risks, to play on too long in the hope of a grand gin. Even the speed with which his opponent took a card and threw one down told him much. 'Psychology will always beat mere mathematics,' he said to me once, and it was certain that he beat me nearly always. I had to have a hand ready made to win.

He was six dollars up when the gong went for lunch. That was about the measure of the success he wanted, a modest win, so that no opponent ever refused him the chance to play again. Sixty dollars a week is not a big income, but he told me that he could depend on it, and it kept him in cigarettes and drink. And of course there were the occasional coups: sometimes an opponent despised so childlike a game and insisted on fifty cents a point. Once in Port-au-Prince I was to see that happen. If Jones had lost I doubt whether he could have paid, but fortune even in the twentieth century does sometimes favour the brave. The man was capot in two columns and Jones rose from the table two thousand dollars the richer. Even then he was moderate in victory. He offered his opponent his revenge and lost five hundred and a few odd dollars. 'There's another thing,' he once revealed to me, 'women as a rule won't play you at poker. Their husbands don't like it - it has a loose and dangerous air. But gin-rummy at ten cents a hundred - it's only pin-money. And of course it increases one's range of players quite a lot.' Even Mrs Smith, who would have turned away, I am sure, with disapproval from a game of poker, sometimes came and watched our contests.

That day at lunch - I don't know how the conversation arose - we got on the subject of war. I think it was the pharmaceutical traveller who began it; he had been he said, a warden in civil defence and he had an urge to recount the usual bomb-stories, as obsessive and boring as other men's dreams. Mr Smith sat with a fixed mask of polite attention and Mrs Smith fidgeted with her fork, while the chemist went on and on about the bombing of a Jewish girls' hostel in Store Street ('We were so busy that night no one noticed it had gone') until Jones broke brutally in with, 'I lost a whole platoon myself once.'

'How did that happen?' I asked, glad to encourage Jones.

'I never knew, 'he said. 'No one came back to tell the tale.'

The poor chemist sat with his mouth a little open. He was only half way through his own story and he had no audience left: he resembled a sea-lion which has dropped its fish. Mr Fernandez took another helping of smoked herring. He was the only one who showed no interest in Jones's story. Even Mr Smith was intrigued enough to say, 'Tell us a little more, Mr Jones.' I noticed that we were all reluctant to give him a military title.

'It was in Burma,' Jones said. 'We had been dropped behind the Jap lines to make a diversion. This particular platoon lost touch with my H.Q. There was a youngster in command - he wasn't properly trained in jungle fighting. Of course in those conditions it's always sauve qui peut. Strangely enough I didn't have a single other casualty - just that one complete platoon, nipped off our strength like that,' he broke off a portion of bread and swallowed it.

'No prisoners ever came back.'

'Were you one of Wingate's men ?' I asked.

'The same kind of outfit,' he replied with his recurrent ambiguity.

'You spent a lot of time in the jungle?' the purser asked.

'Oh well, I had a kind of knack for it,' Jones said. He added with modesty,

'I'd have been no good in the desert. I had a reputation, you know, for being able to smell water like a native.'

'That might have been useful in the desert too,' I said, and he gave me a look across the table dark with reproach.

'It's a terrible thing,' Mr Smith said, pushing away what was left of his cutlet - a nut-cutlet, of course, specially prepared, 'that so much courage and skill can be spent in killing our fellow-men.'

'As Presidential Candidate,' Mrs Smith said, 'my husband had the support of conscientious objectors throughout the state.'

'Were none of them meat-eaters?' I asked, and it was the turn now of Mrs Smith to regard me with disappointment.

'No laughing matter,' she said.

'It's a fair question, dear,' Mr Smith gently reproved her. 'But it isn't so strange, Mr Brown, when you think of it, that vegetarianism and conscientious objection should go together. I was telling you the other day about acidity and what effect it has on the passions. Eliminate acidity and you give a kind of elbow-room to the conscience. And the conscience, well, it wants to grow and grow and grow. So one day you refuse to have an innocent animal butchered for your pleasure, and the next - it takes you by surprise, perhaps, but you turn away in horror from killing a fellow-man. And then comes the colour question and Cuba … I can tell you I had the support of many theosophist groups as well.'

'The Anti-Blood Sports League too,' Mrs Smith said. 'Not officially, of course, as a League. But many members voted for Mr Smith.'

'With so much support …' I began, 'I'm surprised …'

'The progressives will always be in a minority,' Mrs Smith said, 'in our lifetime, but at least we made our protest.'

And then of course the usual wearisome wrangle began. The traveller in pharmaceutical products started it - I would like to give him capital initials like those of the Presidential Candidate, for he seemed truly representative, but in his case of a baser world. As a former air-raid warden he regarded himself as a combatant. Besides, he had a grievance; his bomb reminiscences had been interrupted. 'I can't understand pacifists,' he said,

'they consent to be protected by men like us …'

'You do not consult us,' Mr Smith gently corrected him.

'It's hard for most of us to distinguish between a conscientious objector and a shirker.'

'At least they do not shirk prison,' Mr Smith said. Jones came unexpectedly to his support. 'Many served very gallantly in the Red Cross,' he said. 'Some of us owe our lives to them.'

'You won't find many pacifists where you are going,' the purser said. The chemist persisted, his voice high with his own grievance, 'And what if someone attacks your wife, what then?'

The Presidential Candidate stared down the length of the table at the stout pale unhealthy traveller and addressed him as though he were a heckler at a political meeting, with weight and gravity. 'I have never claimed, sir, that with removal of acidity we remove all passion. If Mrs Smith were attacked I had a weapon in my hand, I cannot promise that I would not use it. We have standards to which we do not always rise.'

'Bravo, Mr Smith,' Jones cried.

'But I would deplore my passion, sir. I would deplore it.'

5

That evening I went to the purser's cabin before dinner, I forget on what errand. I found him seated at his desk. He was blowing up a French letter till it was the size of a policeman's truncheon. He tied the end up with ribbon and removed it from his mouth. His desk was littered with great swollen phalluses. It was like a massacre of pigs.

'Tomorrow is the ship's concert,' he explained to me, 'and we have no balloons. It was Mr Jones's idea that we should use these.' I saw that he had decorated some of the sheaths with comic faces in coloured ink. 'We have only one lady on board,' he said, 'and I do not think she will realize the nature …'

'You forget she is a progressive.'

'In that case she will not mind. These are surely the symbols of progress.'

'Suffering as we do from acidity, at least we need not pass it on to our children.'

He giggled and set to work with a coloured crayon on one of his monstrous faces. The texture of the skin whined under his fingers.

'What time, do you think, we'll arrive on Wednesday?'

'The captain expects to tie up by the early evening.'

'I hope we get in before the lights go out. I suppose they still go out?'

'Yes. You will find nothing has changed for the better. Only for the worse. It is impossible to leave the city now without a police-permit. There are barricades on every road out of Port-au-Prince. I doubt if you will be able to reach your hotel without being searched. We have warned the crew that they leave the harbour only at their own risk. Of course they will go just the same. Mиre Catherine will always stay open.'

'Any news of the Baron?' It was the name some gave to the President as an alternative to Papa Doc - we dignified his shambling shabby figure with the title of Baron Samedi, who in the Voodoo mythology haunts the cemeteries in his top-hat and tails, smoking his big cigar.

'They say he hasn't been seen for three months. He doesn't even come to a window of the palace to watch the band. He might be dead for all anyone knows. If he can die without a silver bullet. We've had to cancel our call at Cap Haпtien the last two trips. The town is under martial law. It's too close to the Dominican border, and we aren't allowed in.' He drew a deep breath and began to inflate another French letter. The teat stood out like a tumour on the skull, and a hospital smell of rubber filled the cabin. He said, 'What makes you go back?'

'One can't just leave a hotel one owns …'

'But you did leave it.'

I wasn't going to confide my reasons to the purser. They were too private and too serious, if one can describe as serious the confused comedy of our lives. He blew up another capote anglaise, and I thought: Surely there must be a power which always arranges things to happen in the most humiliating circumstances. When I was a boy I had faith in the Christian God. Life under his shadow was a very serious affair; I saw Him incarnated in every tragedy. He belonged to the lacrimae rerum like a gigantic figure looming through a Scottish mist. Now that I approached the end of life it was only my sense of humour that enabled me sometimes to believe in Him. Life was a comedy, not the tragedy for which I had been prepared, and it seemed to me that we were all, on this boat with a Greek name (why should a Dutch line name its boats in Greek?), driven by an authoritative practical joker towards the extreme point of comedy. How often, in the crowd on Shaftesbury Avenue or Broadway, after the theatres closed, have I heard the phrase -'I laughed till the tears came.'

'What do you think of Mr Jones?' the purser asked.

'Major Jones? I leave such questions to you and the captain.' It was obvious that he had been consulted as well as I. Perhaps the fact that my name was Brown made me more sensitive to the comedy of Jones. I picked up one of the great sausages of fish-skin and said, 'Do you ever put one of these to a proper use?'

The purser sighed. 'Alas, no. I have reached an age … Inevitably I get a crise de foie. Whenever my emotions are upset.'

The purser had admitted me to an intimacy and now he required an intimacy in return, or perhaps the captain had demanded information on me too and the purser saw an opportunity of providing it. He asked me, 'How did a man like you ever come to settle in Port-au-Prince? How did you ever become an hфtelier. You don't look like an hфtelier. You look like - like …'

but his imagination failed him.

I laughed. He had asked the pertinent question all right, but the answer was one I preferred to keep to myself.

6

The captain honoured us the next night with his presence at dinner, and so did the chief engineer. I suppose there must always be a rivalry between captain and chief, as their responsibilities are equal. So long as the captain had taken his meals alone the chief had done the same. Now one at the head of the table and the other at the foot, they sat with equality under the dubious balloons. There was an extra course in honour of our last night at sea, and, with the exception of the Smiths, passengers drank champagne. The purser was unusually restrained in the presence of his superior officers (I think he would have liked to join the first officer on the bridge in the freedom of the windy dark), and the captain and chief were a little bowed under the sense of occasion, like priests serving at a major feast. Mrs Smith sat on the captain's right and I on his left, and the mere presence of Jones precluded easy conversation. Even the menu was an added difficulty, for on this occasion the Dutch feeling for heavy meat dishes was given full rein and Mrs Smith's plate too often reproached us with its bareness. The Smiths, however, had carried with them from the States a number of cartons and bottles which like buoys always marked their places, and perhaps because they felt they had surrendered their principles in drinking something as doubtful in its ingredients as Coca-Cola, they mixed their own beverages tonight with the aid of hot water.

'I understand,' the captain said gloomily, 'that after dinner there is to be an entertainment.'

'We're only a small company,' the purser said, 'but Major Jones and I felt that something must be done on our last night together. There is the kitchen-orchestra, of course, and Mr Baxter is going to give us something very special …' I exchanged a puzzled glance with Mrs Smith. Neither of us knew who Mr Baxter could be. Had we a stowaway on board?

'I have asked Mr Fernandez to help us in his own way, and he has gladly consented,' the purser went happily on. 'We shall end by singing Auld Lang Syne for the sake of our Anglo-Saxon passengers.' The duck went past a second time, and the Smiths to keep us company helped themselves from their packets and bottles.

'Excuse me, Mrs Smith,' the captain said, 'but what is that you are drinking?'

'A little Barmene with hot water,' Mrs Smith told him. 'My husband prefers Yeastrel in the evening. Or sometimes Vecon. Barmene, he thinks, excites him.'

The captain gave a scared look at Mrs Smith's plate and cut himself a wedge of duck. I said, 'And what are you eating, Mrs Smith?' I wanted the captain to taste the full extravagance of the situation.

'I don't know why you should ask, Mr Brown. You have seen me eat it every evening at the same hour. Slippery Elm Food,' she explained to. the captain. He put down his knife and fork, pushed away his plate and sat with his head bowed. I thought at first that he was saying a grace, but I think in fact he had been overcome with a feeling of nausea.

'I shall finish up with some Nuttoline,' Mrs Smith said, 'if you cannot supply a yoghourt.'

The captain cleared his throat harshly and looked away from her down the table, flinched a little at the sight of Mr Smith, who was shovelling some dry brown grains across his plate, and fixed his eyes on harmless Mr Fernandez, as though he might be in some way responsible. Then he announced in a duty voice, 'Tomorrow afternoon we arrive, I hope, by four o'clock. I would advise you to be prompt at the customs as the lights in the town generally go out around six-thirty.'

'Why?' Mrs Smith demanded. 'It must be very inconvenient for everyone.'

'For economy,' the captain said. He added, 'The news on the radio tonight is not good. Rebels are said to have attacked across the Dominican border. The government claims that all is quiet in Port-au-Prince, but I would advise those of you who are stopping here to keep in close touch with your consulates. I have received orders to land passengers promptly and proceed at once to Santo Domingo. I am not to delay for cargo.'

'We seem to be hitting a spot of trouble, dear,' Mr Smith said from his end of the table and he took another spoonful of what I took to be Froment - a dish he had explained to me at lunch.

'Not for the first time,' Mrs Smith replied with grim satisfaction. A sailor came in, bringing a message for the captain, and as he opened the door a breeze set the French letters asway; they whined where they touched. The captain said, 'You must excuse me. My duty. I have to go now. I wish you all a convivial evening,' but I wondered whether the message had been pre-arranged - he was not a sociable man and he had found Mrs Smith hard to accept. The chief rose too as though he feared to leave the ship alone in the captain's hands.

Now that the officers had gone, the purser became his old self again and he egged us on to eat more and drink more. (Even the Smiths after a good deal of hesitation - 'I am not a true gourmand,' Mrs Smith said - gave themselves a second' helping of Nuttoline.) A sweet liqueur was served which the purser explained was 'on' the company, and the thought of a free liqueur mesmerized us all - except, of course, the Smiths - into further drinking, even the pharmaceutical traveller, though he looked at his glass with apprehension as though green was the colour for danger. When eventually we reached the saloon a programme was lying on every chair. The purser said gaily, 'Chins up,' and began to beat his hands softly on his plump knees as the orchestra entered, led by the cook, a cadaverous young man, with cheeks flushed by the heat of stoves, wearing his chef's hat. His companions carried pots, pans, knives, spoons: a mincer was there to add a grinding note, and the chef held a toasting-fork as a baton. In the programme the piece they played was called Nocturne, and it was followed by a Chanson d'Amour, sung by the chef himself, sweetly and uncertainly. Automne, tendresse, feuilles mortes, I could catch only a few of the melancholy words between the hollow crash of spoon on pot. Mr and Mrs Smith sat hand-in-hand on the couch, the rug spread over her knees, and the traveller in pharmaceutical products leant earnestly forward, watching the thin singer; perhaps with a professional eye he was considering whether any of his drugs might be of use. As for Mr Fernandez he sat apart, every now and then writing something down in a notebook. Jones hovered behind the purser's chair, occasionally leaning down and whispering in his ear. He seemed in the throes of a private enjoyment, as if the whole affair were his own invention, and when he applauded it was with a self-congratulatory glee. He looked at me and winked as much as to say, 'Just you wait. My imagination doesn't stop here. There are better things yet to come.'

I had meant to go to my cabin when the song was over, but Jones's manner awoke my curiosity. The pharmaceutical traveller had already disappeared, but I remembered it was past his usual bedtime. Jones now called the leader of the orchestra into conference: the chief drummer joined them with his big copper saucepan under his arm. I looked at my programme and saw that the next item was a Dramatic Monologue by Mr J. Baxter. 'That was a very interesting performance,' Mr Smith said. 'Didn't you find it so, my dear?'

'The pots were serving a better purpose than cooking an unfortunate duck,' Mrs Smith replied. Her passions had not been perceptibly weakened by the removal of acidity.

'Very nicely sung, wasn't it, Mr Fernandez?'

'Yes,' said Mr Fernandez and sucked the end of his pencil. The pharmaceutical traveller entered wearing a steel helmet - he had not gone to bed, but had changed into a pair of blue jeans and had a whistle clenched between his teeth.

'So that's Mr Baxter,' Mrs Smith said in a tone of relief. I think she disliked mysteries; she wanted all ingredients of the human comedy marked as precisely as one of Mr Baxter's drugs or the label on the bottle of Barmene. The pharmaceutical traveller could easily have borrowed the blue jeans from a member of the crew, but I wondered how he had obtained his steel helmet.

Now he gave a blast of his whistle to silence us, though only Mrs Smith had spoken, and announced: 'A Dramatic Monologue entitled "The Warden's Patrol".' To his obvious dismay a member of the orchestra reproduced an airraid siren.

'Bravo,' Jones said.

'You should have warned me,' Mr Baxter said. 'Now I'm off my cue.'

He was interrupted again by a roll of distant gunfire produced on the bottom of a frying-pan.

'What's that supposed to be?' Mr Baxter demanded angrily.

'The guns in the estuary.'

'You are interfering with my script, Mr Jones.'

'Proceed,' Jones said. 'The overture is over. The atmosphere is set. London 1940.' Mr Baxter gave him a sad hurt look and announced again, 'A Dramatic Monologue entitled "The Warden's Patrol" composed by Post Warden X' Holding his palm over his eyes, as though to ward off falling glass, he began to recite.

'The flares came down over Euston, St Pancras,

And dear old Tottenham Road,

And the warden walking his lonely beat

Saw his shadow like a cloud.

'Guns in Hyde Park were blasting away

When the cry of the first bomb came,

And the warden shook his fist at the sky

As he mocked at Hitler's fame.

'London will stand, St Paul's will stand,

And for every death we have here,

A curse will arise from a German heart

Against their devilish Fuhrer.

'Maples is hit, Gower Street's a ghost,

Piccadilly's alight - but all's well.

We'll use our ration of bread for toast,

For the blitzkrieg's dead in Pall Mall.'

Mr Baxter gave a blast on his whistle, came sharply to attention, and said,'The all-clear has sounded.'

'And none too soon,' Mrs Smith replied.

Mr Fernandez cried excitedly, 'No, no. Oh no, sir,' and I think with the exception of Mrs Smith there was general agreement that anything coming afterwards would be in the nature of an anti-climax.

'That calls for more champagne,' Jones said. 'Steward!'

The orchestra went back to the kitchen except for the conductor who stayed at Jones's request. 'The champagne's on me,' Jones said. 'You deserve a glass if any man did.'

Mr Baxter sat down suddenly beside me and began to tremble all over. His hand beat nervously on the table. 'Don't mind me,' he said, 'it's always been this way. I get my stage-fright afterwards. Would you say that I was well received?'

'Very,' I said. 'Where did you find the steel helmet?'

'It's just one of those things I carry around in the bottom of my trunk. Somehow I've never parted with it. I expect it's the same with you - there are things you keep …'

It was true enough: they were more portable objects than a steel helmet, but they were just as useless - photographs, an old postcard, a membership receipt long out of date for a nightclub off Regent Street, an entrance-ticket for one day to the casino at Monte Carlo. I was sure I could find half a dozen such if I turned out my pocket-book. 'The blue jeans I borrowed from the second officer - but they have a foreign cut.'

'Let me pour you out a glass. Your hand is still trembling.'

'You really liked the poem?'

'It was very vivid.'

'Then I'll tell you what I've never told anyone before. I was Post Warden X. I wrote it myself. After the May blitz in '41.'

'Have you written much else?' I asked.

'Nothing, sir. Oh, except once - about the funeral of a child.'

'And now, gentlemen,' the purser announced, 'if you will look at our programme you will see that we have come to very a special turn promised us by Mr Fernandez.'

And a very special turn it proved to be, for Mr Fernandez broke as suddenly into tears as Mr Baxter had broken into the trembles. Had he drunk too much champagne? Or had he been moved genuinely by Mr Baxter's recitation? I doubted that, for he seemed to have no words of English except his yes and no. But now he wept, sitting straight upright in his chair; he wept with great dignity, and I thought: 'I have never seen a coloured man weep before.' I had seen them laughing, angry, frightened, but never overcome like this man with inexplicable grief. We sat silent and watched him; there was nothing any of us could do, we couldn't communicate. His body shook slightly, just as the saloon shook with the vibration of the ship's engines, and I thought that this, after all, was a more suitable way than music and songs to approach the dark republic. There was plenty for all of us to weep for where we were going.

Then I saw the Smiths for the first time at their best. I had disliked the quick rap Mrs Smith had given poor Baxter - I suppose that any poem about war was offensive to her; but she was the only one of us now to move to Mr Fernandez' help. She sat down beside him, saying not a word, and took his hand in hers; with the other she stroked his pink palm. She might have been a mother comforting her child among strangers. Mr Smith followed her and sat down on Mr Fernandez' other side, so that they formed a little group apart. Mrs Smith made small clucking noises as she might have done to her child, and, as suddenly as he had begun, Mr Fernandez ceased to weep. He stood up, lifted Mrs Smith's old horny hand to his lips, and strode out of the saloon.

'Well,'

Baxter

exclaimed,

'What on earth do you suppose … ?'

'Very strange,' the purser said. 'Very strange indeed.'

'A bit of a damper,' Jones said. He held up the champagne bottle, but it was empty and he put it down again. The conductor picked up his toastingfork and returned to the kitchen.

'The poor man has troubles,' Mrs Smith said; it was all the explanation needed, and she looked at her hand as though she expected to see on the skin the impress of Mr Fernandez' full lips.

'A real damper,' Jones repeated.

Mr Smith said, 'If I may make a suggestion, perhaps we should bring the entertainment to a close now with Auld Lang Syne. Midnight is not far off. I wouldn't like Mr Fernandez, all alone down there, to think that we continued

- skylarking.' It was hardly the word I would have used to describe our celebrations so far, but I agreed with the principle. We had no orchestra now to accompany us, but Mr Jones sat down at the piano and picked out a fair rendering of the awful tune. Rather self-consciously we joined hands and sang. Without the cook and Jones and Mr Fernandez we made a very small circle. We had hardly yet experienced 'Old Acquaintance', and yet our cups were already exhausted.

7

It was well after midnight when Jones rapped on my cabin door. I was going through some papers with the idea of destroying anything which might be unfavourably interpreted by the authorities - for instance there had been an exchange of letters concerning the possible sale of my hotel and in some of them there were dangerous references to the political situation. I was sunk in my thoughts and I responded nervously to his knock as though I were already back in the republic and a Tonton Macoute might be at the door.

'I'm not keeping you awake?' he asked.

'I haven't started undressing.'

'I was sorry about tonight - it didn't go as well as I wished. Of course the material was limited. You know, I have a kind of thing about a last night on board - one may never see each other again. It's like New Year's Eve, when you want the old codger to go out well. Isn't there something they call a good death? I didn't like that black fellow crying that way. It was as though he saw things. In the future. Of course I'm not a religious man.' He looked at me shrewdly. 'You neither I would say.'

I had the impression he had come to my cabin for a purpose - not merely to express his disappointment at the entertainment, but perhaps to make a request or to ask a question. If he had been in a position to threaten me, I would even have suspected he had come for that. He wore his ambiguity like a loud suit and he seemed proud of it, like a man who says 'You must take me as you find me.' He continued, 'The purser says you really own that hotel …'

'Did you doubt it?'

'Not exactly. But you didn't seem the type. We don't always put the right descriptions on our passports,' he exclaimed in a tone sweetly reasonable.

'What have you got on yours?'

'Company director. And that's quite true - in a way,' he admitted.

'Anyway it's vague enough,' I said.

'And what's on yours?'

'Business

man.'

'That's even vaguer,' he exclaimed triumphantly.

Interrogation, partly concealed, was to be the basis of our relationship in the short time it lasted: we would snatch at small clues, though in great matters we would usually pretend to accept the other's story. I suppose those of us who spend a large part of our lives in dissembling, whether to a woman, to a partner, even to our own selves, begin to smell each other out. Jones and I learnt a lot about one another before the end, for one uses a little truth whenever one can. It is a form of economy.

He said, 'You've lived in Port-au-Prince. You must know some of the big boys there?'

'They come and go.'

'In the army, for example?'

'They've all gone. Papa Doc doesn't trust the army. The chief-of-staff, I believe, is hiding in the Venezuelan Embassy. The general's safe in Santo Domingo. There are some colonels left in the Dominican Embassy, and there are three colonels and two majors in prison - if they are alive. Did you have introductions to any of them?'

'Not exactly,' he said, but he looked uneasy.

'It is well not to present introductions till you are sure your man is still alive.'

'I have a chit from the Haitian consul-general in New York recommending me …'

'We've been at sea three days, remember. A lot can happen in that time. The consul-general may have sought asylum …'

He said as the purser had done, 'I wonder what brings you back, conditions being what they are.'

The truth was less fatiguing than invention and the hour was late. 'I found I missed the place,' I said. 'Security can get on the nerves just as much as danger.'

He said, 'Yes, I thought I had had my fill of danger in the war.'

'What unit were you in?'

He grinned at me; I had played a card too obviously. 'Oh, I was a bit of a drifter in those days,' he said. 'I moved around. Tell me, what kind of chap's our ambassador?'

'We haven't got one. He was expelled more than a year ago.'

'The

chargй then.'

'He does what he can. When he can.'

'We seem to be sailing towards a strange country.'

He went to the porthole as though he expected to be able to see the land across the last two hundred miles of sea, but there was nothing to be observed except the light of the cabin lying on the surface of the dark swell like yellow oil. 'Not exactly a tourist paradise any longer?'

'No. It never really was.'

'But perhaps a few opportunities for a man of imagination?'

'It

depends.'

'On

what?'

'The kind of scruples you have.'

'Scruples?' He looked out into the rolling night and he seemed to be weighing the question with some care. 'Oh, well … scruples cost a lot …

Why did you suppose that nigger really wept?'

'I've no idea.'

'It was an odd evening. I hope we do better next time.'

'Next

time?'

'I was thinking of when this year ends. Wherever we may be.' He came away from the porthole and said, 'Oh well, it's time for shut-eye, isn't it? And Smith, what do you suppose he's up to?'

'Why should he be up to anything?'

'You may be right. Don't mind me. I'm going now. The trip's over. No getting out of it now.' He added with his hand on the door, 'I tried to cheer things up, but it wasn't much of a success. Shut-eye's the answer to all, isn't it? Or that,s how I see it.'

CHAPTER II

I WAS returning without much hope to a country of fear and frustration, and yet every familiar feature as the Medea drew in gave me a kind of happiness. The huge mass of Kenscoff leaning over the town was as usual half in deep shadow; there was a glassy sparkle of late sun off the new buildings near the port which had been built for an international exhibition in so-called modern style. A stone Columbus watched us coming in - it was there Martha and I used to rendezvous at night until the curfew closed us in separate prisons, I in my hotel, she in her embassy, without even a telephone which worked to communicate by. She would sit in her husband's car in the dark and flash her headlights on at the sound of my Humber. I wondered whether in the last month, now that the curfew was over, she had chosen a different rendezvous, and I wondered with whom. That she had found a substitute I, had no doubt. No one banks on fidelity nowadays.

I was lost in too many difficult thoughts to remember my fellowpassengers. There was no message waiting for me from the British Embassy, so I assumed that at the moment all was well. At immigration and customs there was the habitual confusion. We were the only boat, and yet the shed was full: porters, taxi-drivers who hadn't had a fare in weeks, police, and the occasional Tonton Macoute, in his black glasses and his soft hat, and beggars, beggars everywhere. They seeped through every chink like water in the rainy season. A man without legs sat under the customs counter like a rabbit in a hutch, miming in silence.

A familiar figure forced his way towards me. As a rule, he haunted the airfield, and I had not exp ected to see him here. He was a journalist known to everyone as Petit Pierre - a mйtis in a country where the half-castes are the aristocrats waiting for the tumbrils to roll. He was believed by some to have connexions with the Tontons, for how otherwise had he escaped a beatingup or worse? And yet there were occasionally passages in his gossip-column that showed an odd satirical courage - perhaps he depended on the police not to read between the lines.

He seized me by the hands as if we were the oldest of friends and addressed me in English, 'Why, Mr Brown, Mr Brown.'

'How are you, Petit Pierre?'

He giggled up at me, standing on his pointed toe-caps, for he was a tiny figure of a man. He was just as I had remembered him, hilarious. Even the time of day was humorous to him. He had the quick movements of a monkey, and he seemed to swing from wall to wall on ropes of laughter. I had always thought that, when the time came, and surely it must one day come in his precarious defiant livelihood, he would laugh at his executioner, as a Chinaman is supposed to do.

'It's good to see you, Mr Brown. How are the bright lights of Broadway?

Marilyn Monroe, lots of good bourbon, speak-easies … ?' He was a little out of date, for he had not been further than Kingston, Jamaica, in thirty years.

'Give me your passport, Mr Brown. Where are your luggage tickets?' He waved them above his head, pushing through the mob, arranging everything, for he knew everyone. Even the customs man allowed my baggage to pass unopened. He exchanged some words with a Tonton Macoute at the door and by the time I emerged he had found me a taxi. 'Sit down, sit down, Mr Brown. Your luggage is just coming.'

'How are things here?' I asked.

'All as usual. All quiet.'

'No

curfew?'

'Why should there be a curfew, Mr Brown?'

'The papers reported rebels in the north.'

'The papers? American papers? You don't believe what the American papers say, do you?' He leant his head in at the taxi door and said with his odd hilarity, 'You can't think how happy I am, Mr Brown, to see you back.' I almost believed him.

'Why not? Don't I belong here?'

'Of course you belong here, Mr Brown. You are a true friend of Haiti.' He giggled again. 'All the same many true friends have left us recently.' He lowered his voice just a tone, 'The government has been forced to take over some empty hotels.'

'Thanks for the warning.'

'It would have been wrong to let the properties deteriorate.'

'A kindly thought. Who lives in them now?'

He giggled. 'Guests of the government.'

'Do they run to guests now?'

'There was a Polish mission, but they went away rather soon. Here comes your luggage, Mr Brown.'

'Shall I get to the Trianon before the lights go out?'

'Yes - if you go direct.'

'Where else should I go?'

Petit Pierre chuckled and said, 'Let me come with you, Mr Brown. There are road-blocks now between Port-au-Prince and Pйtionville.'

'All right. Get in. Anything to avoid trouble,' I said.

'What were you doing in New York, Mr Brown?'

I replied truthfully, 'I was trying to find someone to buy my hotel.'

'You had no luck?'

'No luck at all.'

'No enterprise in such a great country?'

'You expelled their military mission. You had the ambassador recalled. You can't expect much confidence there, can you? My God, I completely forgot. There's a presidential candidate on board the boat.'

'A presidential candidate? I should have been warned.'

'Not a very successful one.'

'All the same. A presidential candidate. What does he come here for?'

'He has an introduction to the Secretary for Social Welfare.'

'Doctor Philipot? But Doctor Philipot …'

'Anything

wrong?'

'You know what politics are. It's the same in all countries.'

'Doctor Philipot is out?'

'He has not been seen for a week. He is said to be on holiday.' Petit Pierre touched the taxi-driver's shoulder. 'Stop, mon ami.' We hadn't got as far yet as the Columbus statue, and the dark was rapidly falling. He said, 'Mr Brown, I think that I had better go back and find him. You know how it is in your own country - one must avoid giving a false impression. It would not do for me to come to England carrying an introduction to Mr Macmillan.' He waved to me as he went away. 'I will come up presently for a whisky. I am so glad, so glad, to see you back, Mr Brown,' and he departed with that air of euphoria, based on nothing at all.

We drove on. I asked the driver - he was probably a Tonton agent, 'Shall we get to the Trianon before the lights go out?' He shrugged his shoulders. It was not his job to give away information. The lights were still burning in the exhibition building used by the Secretary of State, and there was a Peugeot parked by the Columbus statue. Of course there were a lot of Peugeots in Port-au-Prince, and I couldn't believe that she would be cruel enough or tasteless enough to choose the same rendezvous. All the same I said to the driver, 'I'll get out here. Take my luggage up to the Trianon. Joseph will pay you.' I could hardly have been less prudent. The colonel in charge of the Tontons Macoute would certainly know next morning exactly where I had left the taxi. The only precaution I took was to see that the man really drove away. I watched the tail-lights until they were out of sight. Then I made my way towards Columbus and the parked car. I came up behind it and saw the C.D. number plate. It was Martha's car and she was alone. I watched her for a little while without being seen. It occurred to me that I could wait there, a few yards away, until I saw the man who came to meet her. Then she turned her head and stared in my direction; she knew that someone was watching her. She lowered the window half an inch and said sharply in French, as though I might be one of the innumerable beggars of the port, 'Who are you? What do you want?' Then she turned on her headlights. 'Oh God,' she said, 'so you've come back,' in the kind of tone she might have used for a recurrent fever.

She opened the door and I got in beside her. I could feel uncertainty and fear in her kiss. 'Why have you come back?' she asked.

'I suppose I missed you.'

'Did you have to run away to discover that?'

'I hoped that things might change if I went away.'

'Nothing has changed.'

'What are you doing here?'

'It's a better place than most to miss you in.'

'You weren't waiting for anyone?'

'No.' She took one of my fingers and twisted it till it hurt. 'I can be sage, you know, for a few months. Except in dreams. I've been unfaithful in dreams.'

'I've been faithful too - in my way.'

'You needn't tell me now,' she said, 'what your way is. Just be quiet. Be here.'

I obeyed her. I was half-happy, half-miserable, because it was only too evident one thing hadn't changed, except that now without my car she would have to drive me back and run the risk of being seen near the Trianon: we wouldn't say good night beside Columbus. Even while I made love to her I tested her. Surely she wouldn't have the nerve to take me if she were expecting another man at the rendezvous, and then I told myself that it wasn't a fair test - she had nerve for anything. It was no lack of nerve that tied her to her husband. She gave a cry which I remembered and stuck her hand over her mouth. Her body lost its tenseness, she was like a tired child resting on my knees. She said, 'I forgot to close the window.'

'We'd better get up to the Trianon before the lights go out.'

'Have you found someone to buy the place?'

'No.'

'I'm

glad.'

In the public park the musical fountain stood black, waterless, unplaying. Electric globes winked out the nocturnal message, 'Je suis le drapeau Haпtien, Uni et Indivisible. Franзois Duvalier.'

We passed the blackened beams of the house the Tontons had destroyed and mounted the hill towards Pйtionville. Halfway up there was a roadblock. A man in a torn shirt and a grey pair of trousers and an old soft hat which someone must have discarded in a dustbin came trailing his rifle by its muzzle to the door. He told us to get out and be searched. 'I'll get out,' I said,

'but this lady belongs to the diplomatic corps.'

'Darling, don't make a fuss,' she said. 'There are no such things as privileges now.' She led the way to the roadside, putting her hands above her head and giving the militiaman a smile I hated.

I said to him, 'Don't you see the C.D. on the car?'

'And can't you see,' she said, 'that he can't read?' He felt my hips and ran his hands up between my legs. Then he opened the boot of the car. It was not a very practised search and it was soon over. He cleared a passage through the barrier and let us go by. 'I don't like you driving back alone,' I said. 'I'll lend you a boy - if I've got one left,' and then after I had driven half a mile further I went back in my mind to the old suspicion. If a husband is notoriously blind to infidelity, I suppose a lover has the opposite fault - he sees it everywhere. 'Tell me what you were really doing, waiting by the statue?'

'Don't be a fool tonight,' she said. 'I'm happy.'

'I never wrote to you that I was coming back.'

'It was a place to remember you in, that was all.'

'It seems a coincidence that just tonight …'

'Do you suppose this was the only night I bothered to remember you?'

She added, 'Luis asked me once why I had stopped going out in the evening for gin-rummy now the curfew had lifted. So next night I took the car as usual. I had no one to see and nothing to do, so I drove to the statue.'

'And Luis is content?'

'He's

always

content.'

Suddenly, around us, above us and below us, the lights went out. Only a glow remained around the harbour and the government buildings.

'I hope Joseph has kept a bit of oil for my return,' I said. 'I hope he's wise as well as virgin.'

'Is he virgin?'

'Well, he's chaste. Since the Tontons Macoute kicked him around.'

We entered the steep drive lined with palm trees and bougainvillaea. I always wondered why the original owner had called the hotel the Trianon. No name could have been less suitable. The architecture of the hotel was neither classical in the eighteenth-century manner nor luxurious in the twentieth-century fashion. With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork decorations it had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of the New Yorker. You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him. But in the sunlight, or when the lights went on among the palms, it seemed fragile and period and pretty and absurd, an illustration from a book of fairy-tales. I had grown to love the place, and I was glad in a way that I had found no purchaser. I believed that if I could own it for a few more years I would feel I had a home. Time was needed for a home as time was needed to turn a mistress into a wife. Even the violent death of my partner had not seriously disturbed my possessive love. I would have remarked with Frиre Laurent, in the French version of Romeo and Juliet, a sentence that I had reason to remember:

'Le remиde au chaos

N'est pas dans, ce chaos.'

The remedy had been in the success which owed nothing to my partner: in the voices calling from the bathing-pool, in the rattle of ice from the bar where Joseph made his famous rum punches, in the arrival of taxis from the town, in the hubbub of lunch on the verandah, and at night the drummer and the dancers, with Baron Samedi, a grotesque figure in a ballet, stepping it delicately in his top-hat under the lighted palms. I had known for a short time all of this.

We drew up in the darkness, and I kissed Martha again: it was still an interrogation. I could not believe in a fidelity that lasted for three months of solitude. Perhaps - it was a less disagreeable speculation than another - she had turned to her husband again. I held her against me and said,'How is Luis?'

'The same,' she said, 'always the same.' And yet I thought she must have loved him once. This is one of the pains of illicit love: even your mistress's most extreme embrace is a proof the more that love doesn't last. I had met Luis for the second time when I was among the thirty guests at an embassy cocktail party. It seemed to me impossible that the ambassador - that stout man in the late forties whose hair gleamed like a polished shoe - did not remark how often our eyes met across the crowded room, the surreptitious touch she gave me with her hand as we passed. But Luis kept his appearance of established superiority: this was his embassy, this was his wife, these were his guests. The books of matches were stamped with his initials, even the bands round his cigars. I remember him raising a cocktail glass to the light and showing me the delicate engraving of a bull's mask. He said, 'I had them specially designed for me in Paris.' He had a great sense of possession, but perhaps he didn't mind lending what he possessed.

'Has

Luis

comforted

you while I was away?'

'No,' she said, and I cursed myself for my cowardice in so phrasing the question that her answer remained ambiguous. She added, 'No one has comforted me,' and at once I began to think of all the meanings of comfort from which she might choose one to satisfy her sense of truth. For she had a sense of truth.

'You've got a different scent.'

'Luis gave me this for my birthday. I'd finished yours.'

'Your birthday. I forgot …'

'It

doesn't

matter.'

'Joseph is a long time,' I said. 'He must have heard the car.'

She said, 'Luis is kind to me. You are the only one who kicks me around. Like the Tontons Macoute with Joseph.'

'What do you mean?'

Everything was just as before. After ten minutes we had made love, and after half an hour we had begun to quarrel. I left the car and walked up the steps in the dark. At the top I nearly stumbled on my suitcases which the driver must have deposited there, and I called, 'Joseph, Joseph' and no one replied. The verandah stretched on either side of me, but no table was laid for dinner. Through the open door of the hotel I could see the bar by the light of a tiny oil-lamp, like the ones you place beside a child's bed or the bed of someone sick. This was my luxury hotel - a circle of light which barely touched a half-empty bottle of rum, two stools, a syphon of soda crouched in the shadow like a bird with a long beak. I called again, 'Joseph, Joseph,' and again nobody answered. I went back down the steps to the car and said to Martha, 'Stay a moment.'

'Is something wrong?'

'I can't find Joseph.'

'I ought to be getting back.'

'You can't go alone. Don't be in such a hurry. Luis can wait a moment.'

I mounted the steps again to the Hotel Trianon. 'A centre of Haitian intellectual life. A luxury-hotel which caters equally for the connoisseur of good food and the lover of local customs. Try the special drinks made from the finest Haitian rum, bathe in the luxurious swimming-pool, listen to the music of the Haitian drum and watch the Haitian dancers. Mingle with the йlite of Haitian intellectual life, the musicians, the poets, the painters who find at the Hotel Trianon a social centre …' The tourist brochure had been nearly true once.

I felt under the bar and found an electric torch. I went through the lounge to my office, the desk covered with old bills and receipts. I had not expected a client, but even Joseph was not there. What a homecoming, I thought, what a homecoming. Below the office was the bathing-pool. About this hour the cocktail guests should have been arriving from other hotels in the town. Few in the good days drank anywhere else but the Trianon, except for those who were booked on round tours and chalked everything up. The Americans always drank dry Martinis. By midnight some of them would be swimming in the pool naked. Once I had looked out of my window at two in the morning. There was a great yellow moon and a girl was making love in the pool. She had her breasts pressed against the side and I couldn't see the man behind her. She didn't notice me watching her; she didn't notice anything. That night I thought before I slept, 'I have arrived.'

I heard steps in the garden coming up from the direction of the swimming-pool, the broken steps of a man limping. Joseph had always limped since his encounter with the Tontons Macoute. I was about to go out on to the verandah to meet him when I looked again at my desk. There was something missing. All the bills were there which had accumulated in my absence, but where was the small brass paper-weight shaped like a coffin, marked with the letters R.I.P., that I bought for myself one Christmas in Miami? It had no value, it had cost me two dollars seventy-five cents, but it was mine and it amused me and it was no longer there. Why should things change in our absence? Even Martha had changed her scent. The more unstable life is the less one likes the small details to alter. I went out on to the verandah to meet Joseph. I could see his light as it corkscrewed along the curving path from the pool.

'Is it you, Monsieur Brown?' he called up nervously.

'Of course it's me. Why weren't you here when I arrived? Why have you left my suitcases … ?'

He stood below me looking up with a sick expression on his black face.

'Madame Pineda gave me a lift. I want you to drive back with her into the town. You can return on the bus. Is the gardener here?'

'He

go

away.'

'The

cook?'

'He

go

away.'

'My paper-weight? What's happened to my paper-weight?'

He looked at me as though he didn't understand.

'Have there been no guests at all since I left?'

'No, monsieur. Only …'

'Only

what?'

'Four nights ago Doctor Philipot he come here. He say tell nobody.'

'What did he want?'

'I tell him he no stay here. I tell him the Tontons Macoute look for him here.'

'What did he do?'

'He stay all the same. Then the cook go away and the gardener go away. They say they come back when he go. He very sick man. That's why he stay. I say go to the mountain, but he say no walk, no walk. His feet they swell bad. I tell him he go before you come back.'

'It's the hell of a mess for me to come back to,' I said. 'I'll talk to him. Which room is he in?'

'When I hear the car, I call to him - Tontons, get out quick. He very tired. He not want to go. He say "I be old man." I tell him Monsieur Brown he ruined if they find you here along. All same for you, I say, if Tontons find you in the road, but Monsieur Brown he ruined if they catch you here. I tell him I go and talk to them. He go out then quick quick. But it was only that stupid taxi-man with the luggage … So I run tell him.'

'What are we going to do with him, Joseph?' Doctor Philipot was not a bad man as government officials go. He had even during his first year of office made some attempt to improve the conditions of the shanty-town along the waterfront; they had built a water-pump, with his name on a stamped cast-iron label, at the bottom of the Rue Desaix, but the pipes had never been connected because the contractors had not received a proper rake-off.

'When I go in his room he not there any more.'

'Do you think he's made for the mountain?'

'No, Monsieur Brown, not the mountain,' Joseph said. He stood below me with his head bowed. 'I think he gone done a very wicked thing.' He added in a low voice the inscription on my paper-weight, 'Requiescat In Pace,' for Joseph was a good Catholic as well as a good Voodooist. 'Please, Monsieur Brown, come with me.'

I followed him down the path to the bathing-pool in which I had seen the pretty girl making love, once, in another epoch, in the golden age. It was empty of water now. My torch lit the shallows and a litter of leaves.

'Other end,' Joseph told me, standing quite still, not going any nearer. Doctor Philipot must have walked up to the narrow cave of shadow made by the diving-plank, and now he lay in a crouched position below it with his knees drawn towards his chin, a middle-aged foetus ready dressed for burial in his neat grey suit. He had cut his wrists first and then his throat to make sure. Above the head was the dark circle of the pipe. We had only to turn on the water to wash the blood away; he had been as considerate as possible. He could not have been dead for more than a few minutes. My first thoughts were selfish ones: you cannot be blamed if a man kills himself in your swimming-pool. There was easy access to it direct from the road without passing the house. Beggars used to come here to try to sell trumpery wooden carvings to the guests swimming in the pool.

I asked Joseph, 'Is Doctor Magiot still in town?' He nodded.

'Go to Madame Pineda in the car outside and ask her to drive you to his house on the way to the embassy. Don't tell her the reason. Bring him back - if he'll come.' He was the only doctor in town, I thought, with the courage to attend even a stone-dead enemy of the Baron. But before Joseph could start up the path there was a clatter of footsteps and I heard the unmistakable voice of Mrs Smith. 'The New York customs could learn a thing or two from the men here. They were very polite to us both. You never find such courtesy among white people as you do with coloured.'

'Look out, my dear, there's a hole in the path.'

'I can see well enough. There's nothing like raw carrots for the sight, Mrs...'

'Pineda.'

'Mrs

Pineda.'

Martha brought up the rear carrying an electric torch. Mr Smith said, 'We found this good lady in the car outside. There seemed no one around.'

'I'm sorry. I'd quite forgotten you were going to stay here.'

'I thought Mr Jones was coming here too, but we left him with a police officer. I hope he's not in trouble.'

'Joseph, get the John Barrymore suite ready. See that there are plenty of lamps for Mr and Mrs Smith. I must apologize for the lights. They will come on any moment now.'

'We like it,' Mr Smith said, 'it feels like an adventure.'

If a spirit hovers, as some believe, for an hour or two over the cadaver it has abandoned, what banalities it is doomed to hear, while it waits in a despairing hope that some serious thought will be uttered, some expression which will lend dignity to the life it has left. I said to Mrs Smith, 'Tonight would you mind having only eggs? Tomorrow I'll have everything organized to suit you. Unfortunately the cook went off yesterday.'

'Don't bother about the eggs,' Mr Smith said. 'To tell you the truth we are a little dogmatic about eggs. But we've got our own Yeastrel.'

'And I have my Barmene,' Mrs Smith said.

'Just a little hot water,' Mr Smith said. 'Mrs Smith and I are very mobile. You don't have to worry about us. You've got a fine bathing-pool here.' To show them the extent of the pool Martha began to move the ray of her lamp towards the diving-board and the deep end. I took it quickly from her and turned it up towards the fretted tower and a balcony which leant over the palms. A light already glowed up there where Joseph was preparing the room. 'There's your suite,' I said. 'The John Barrymore suite. You can see all over Port-au-Prince from there, the harbour, the palace, the cathedral.'

'Did John Barrymore really stay here?, Mr Smith asked. 'In that room?'

'It was before my time, but I can show you his liquor bills.'

'A great talent ruined,' he remarked sadly.

I couldn't forget that presently the light rationing would be over and the lamps would go on all over Port-au-Prince. Sometimes the light was out for close on three hours, sometimes for less than one - there was no certainty. I had told Joseph that during my absence 'business' was to be as usual, for who could tell whether a couple of journalists might not stop for a few days to write a report on what they would undoubtedly call 'The Nightmare Republic'? Perhaps for Joseph 'business as usual' meant lights as usual in the palm trees, lights around the pool. I didn't want the Presidential Candidate to see a corpse coiled up under the diving-board - not on his first night. It was not my idea of hospitality. And hadn't he said something about a letter of introduction he carried to the Secretary for Social Welfare?

Joseph appeared at the head of the path. I told him to show the Smiths to their room and afterwards to drive down town with Mrs Pineda.

'Our luggage is on the verandah,' Mrs Smith said.

'You'll find it in your room by now. It won't stay dark much longer, I promise. You must excuse us. We are a very poor country.'

'When I think of all that waste on Broadway,' Mrs Smith said, and to my relief they began to mount the path, Joseph lighting the way. I stayed at the shallow end of the pool, but now that my eyes were accustomed to the dark I thought I could detect the body like a hump of earth. Martha said, 'Is something wrong?' and flashed her light up towards my face.

'I haven't had time to see yet. Lend me that torch a moment.'

'What was keeping you down here?'

I let the torch play on the palm trees well away from the pool as though I were inspecting the light installations. 'Talking to Joseph. Let's go up now, shall we?'

'And run into the Smiths? I'd rather stay here. It's funny to think I've never been here before. In your home.'

'No, we've always been very prudent.'

'You haven't asked after Angel.'

'I'm

sorry.'

Angel was her son, the unbearable child who helped to keep us apart. He was too fat for his age, he had his father's eyes like brown buttons, he sucked bonbons, he noticed things, and he made claims - claims all the time on his mother's exclusive attention. He seemed to draw the tenderness out of our relationship as he drew the liquid centre from a sweet, with a long sucking breath. He was the subject of half our conversations. 'I must go now. I promised Angel to read to him.' 'I can't see you tonight. Angel wants to go to the cinema.' 'My darling, I'm, so tired this evening - Angel had six friends to tea.'

'How

is Angel?'

'He was ill while you were away. With the grippe.'

'But he's quite better now?'

'Oh yes, he's better.'

'Let's

go.'

'Luis doesn't expect me as early as this. Nor Angel. I'm here. We may as well be hanged for a sheep.'

I looked at the dial of my watch. It was nearly eight-thirty. I said, 'The Smiths …'

'They are busy with their luggage. What's worrying you, darling?'

I said feebly, 'I've lost a paper-weight.'

'A very precious paper-weight?'

'No - but if a paper-weight's gone, what else has gone?'

Suddenly all around us the lights flashed on. I took her arm and wrenched her round and moved her up the path. Mr Smith came out on to his balcony and called to us, 'Do you think Mrs Smith could have another blanket on the bed, just in case it turns chilly?'

'I'll have one sent up, but it won't turn chilly.'

'It certainly is a fine view from up here.'

'I'll turn out the lights in the garden and then you'll see better.'

The controlling switch was in my office and we had almost reached it when Mr Smith's voice came again. 'Mr Brown, there's someone asleep in your pool.'

'I expect it's a beggar.'

Mrs Smith must have joined him, for it was her voice I heard now.

'Where, dear?'

'Down

there.'

'The poor man. I've a good mind to take him down some money.'

I was tempted to call up, 'Take him your letter of introduction. It's the Secretary for Social Welfare.'

'I wouldn't do that, dear. You'll only wake the poor fellow up.

'It's a funny place to choose.'

'I expect it's for the sake of the coolness.'

I reached the office door and turned out the lights in the garden. I heard Mr Smith say, 'Look there, dear. That white house with the dome. That must be the palace.'

Martha said, 'A beggar asleep in the pool?'

'It does happen.'

'I never noticed him. What are you looking for?'

'My paper-weight. Why should anyone take my paper-weight?'

'What did it look like?'

'A little coffin with R.J.P. stamped on it. I used it for non-urgent mail.'

She laughed and held me still and kissed me. I responded as well as I could, but the corpse in the pool seemed to turn our preoccupations into comedy. The corpse of Doctor Philipot belonged to a more tragic theme; we were only a sub-plot affording a little light relief. I heard Joseph move in the bar and called to him, 'What are you doing?' Apparently Mrs Smith had explained their needs to him: two cups, two spoons, a bottle of hot water.

'Add a blanket,' I said, 'and then get moving to the town.'

'When shall I see you again?' Martha asked.

'The

same

place,

the same time.'

'Nothing has changed, has it?' she asked me with anxiety.

'No, nothing,' but my tone had an edge to it, which she noticed.

'I'm sorry, but all the same you've come back.'

When at last she drove away with Joseph I went back to the pool and sat on its edge in the dark. I was afraid the Smiths might come downstairs and make conversation, but I had been waiting only a few minutes by the pool when I saw the lights go out in the John Barrymore suite. They must have taken the Yeastrel and the Barmene and they had now lain down to their untroubled sleep. Last night the festivities had kept them up late, and it had been a long day. I wondered what had happened to Jones. He had expressed his intention of staying in the Trianon. I thought too of Mr Fernandez and his mysterious tears. Anything rather than think of the Secretary for Social Welfare coiled up under the diving-board.

Far up in the mountains beyond Kenscoff a drum beat, marking the spot of a Voodoo tonnelle. It was not often one heard the drums now under Papa Doc's rule. Something padded through the dark, and when I turned on my torch I saw a thin starved dog poised by the diving-board. It looked at me with dripping eyes and wagged a hopeless tail, as though it were asking my permission to jump down and lick the blood. I shooed it away. A few years ago I had employed three gardeners, two cooks, Joseph, an extra barman, four boys, two girls, a chauffeur, and in the season - it was not yet the end of the season - I would have taken on extra help. Tonight by the pool there would have been a cabaret, and in the intervals of the music I would have heard the perpetual murmur of the distant streets, like a busy hive. Now, even though the curfew had been lifted, there was not a sound, and without a moon not even a dog barked. It was as though my success had gone out of earshot too. I had not known it for very long, but I could hardly complain. There were two guests in the Hotel Trianon, I had found my mistress again, and unlike Monsieur le Ministre I was still alive. I settled myself as comfortably as I could on the edge of the pool and began my long wait for Doctor Magiot.

CHAPTER III

1

FROM time to time in my life I had found it necessary to provide a curriculum vitae. It usually began something like this. Born 1906 at Monte Carlo of British parents. Educated at the Jesuit College of the Visitation. Many prizes for Latin verse and Latin prose composition. Embarked early on a business career … Of course I varied the details of that career according to the recipient of the curriculum.

What a lot too was left out or was of doubtful truth in even those opening statements. My mother was certainly not British, and to this day I am uncertain whether she was French - perhaps she was a rare Monegasque. The man she had chosen for my father left Monte Carlo before my birth. Perhaps his name was Brown. There is a ring of truth in the name Brown - she wasn't usually so modest in her choice. The last time I saw her, when she was dying in Port-au-Prince, she bore the name of the Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers. She had left Monte Carlo (and incidentally her son) hurriedly, soon after the Armistice of 1918, with my bills at the college unsettled. But the Society of Jesus is used to unsettled bills; it works assiduously on the fringe of the aristocracy where returned cheques are almost as common as adulteries, and so the college continued to support me. I was a prize pupil, and it was half expected that I would prove in time to have a vocation. I even believed it myself; the sense of vocation hung around me like the grippe, a miasma of unreality, at a temperature below normal in the cool rational morning but a fever-heat at night. As other boys fought with the demon of masturbation, I fought with faith. I find it strange to think now of my Latin verses and compositions - all that knowledge has vanished as completely as my father. Only one line has obstinately stuck in my head - a memory of the old dreams and ambitions: ' Exegi monumentum aere perennius …' I said it to myself nearly forty years later when I stood, on the day of my mother's death, by the bathing-pool of the Hotel Trianon in Pйtionville and looked up at the fantastic tracery of woodwork against the palms and the inky storm-clouds blowing over Kenscoff. I more than half-owned the place and knew that soon I would own it all. I was already in possession, a man of property. I remember thinking, 'I am going to make this the most popular tourist hotel in the Caribbean,' and perhaps I might have succeeded if a mad doctor had not come to power and filled our nights with the discords of violence instead of jazz.

The career of an hфtelier was not, as I have indicated, the one which the Jesuits had expected me to follow. That had been finally wrecked by a college performance of Romeo and Juliet in its very staid French translation. I was given the part of the aged Friar Lawrence, and some of the lines I had to learn have remained with me to this day, I don't know why. They hardly have the ring of poetry. ' Accorde-moi de discuter sur ton йtat.' Frиre Laurent had the power of making even the tragedy of the star-crossed lovers prosaic.

' J'apprends que tu dois, et rien ne peut le reculer, Etre mariйe а ce comte jeudi prochain.'

The part must have seemed to the good fathers a suitable one under the circumstances and not too exciting or exacting, but I think my vocational grippe was already very nearly over, and the interminable rehearsals, the continual presence of the lovers and the sensuality of their passion, however muted by the French translator, led me to my breakout. I looked a good deal older than my age, and the dramatic director, if he could not make me an actor, had at least taught me adequately enough the secrets of make-up. I

'borrowed' the passport of a young lay professor of English literature and bluffed my way one afternoon into the Casino. There, in the surprising space of forty-five minutes, due to an unlikely run of nineteens and zeros, I gained the equivalent of three hundred pounds, and only an hour later I was losing my virginity, inexpertly and unexpectedly, in a bedroom of the Hфtel de Paris.

My instructress was at least fifteen years older than myself, but in my mind she has remained always the same age, and it is I who have grown older. We met in the Casino where, seeing that I was pursued by good fortune - I had been making the bets over her shoulder - she began to lay her tokens alongside mine. If I gained that afternoon more than three hundred pounds, perhaps she gained nearly a hundred, and at that point she stopped me, counselling prudence. I am certain there was no thought of seduction in her mind. It is true that she invited me to have tea with her at the hotel, but she had seen through my disguise better than the officials of the Casino, and on the steps she turned to me like a fellow-conspirator and whispered, 'How did you get in?' I was no more to her, I am sure, at that moment than an adventurous child who had amused her.

I didn't even pretend. I showed her my false passport, and in the bathroom of her suite she helped me to rub out the traces of make-up which on a winter's afternoon, in the light of the lamps, had passed for genuine lines. I saw Frиre Laurent disappear wrinkle by wrinkle in the mirror above the shelf where lay her lotions, her eyebrow-pencils, her pots of pomade. We might have been two actors sharing a dressing-room.

Tea at the college was served on long tables with an urn at the end of each. Long baguettes of bread, three to a table, were set out with meagre portions of butter and jam; the china was coarse to withstand the schoolboyclutch and the tea strong. At the Hфtel de Paris I was astonished at the fragility of the cups, the silver teapot, the little triangular savoury sandwiches, the йclairs stuffed with cream. I lost my shyness, I spoke of my mother, of my Latin compositions, of Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps without evil intention, I quoted Catullus to show off my learning. I cannot remember now the gradation of events which led to the first long adult kiss upon the sofa. She was married, I remember she told me, to a director of the Banque de l'Indochine, and I had visions of a man ladling coins into a drawer with a brass scoop. He was at the moment on a visit to Saigon where she suspected him of supporting a Cochinese mistress. It was not a long conversation; I was soon back at the beginning of my studies, learning a first lesson in love on a big white bed with carved pineapple bedposts, in a small white room. What a lot of details I can still remember of those hours after more than forty years. For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience - the rest is observation - but I think it is equally true of us all. An odd thing happened as we lay on the bed. She was finding me shy, frightened, difficult. Her fingers had no success, even her lips had failed their office, when into the room suddenly, from the port below the hill, flew a seagull. For a moment the room seemed spanned by the length of the white wings. She gave an exclamation of dismay and retreated: it was she who was scared now. I put out a hand to reassure her. The bird came to rest on a chest below a gold-framed looking-glass and stood there regarding us on its long stilt-like legs. It seemed as completely at home in the room as a cat and at any moment I expected it to begin to clean its plumage. My new friend trembled a little with her fear, and suddenly I found myself as firm as a man and I took her with such ease and confidence it was as though we had been lovers for a long time. Neither of us during those minutes saw the seagull go, although I shall always think that I felt the current of its wings on my back as the bird sailed out again towards the port and the bay. That was all there was, the victory in the Casino, and in the white-andgold room a few further triumphant minutes - the only love-affair I have ever had which ended without pain or regret. For she was not even the cause of my departure from the college; that was the result of my own indiscretion in dropping into the collection-bag at mass a roulette token for five francs which I had failed to cash. I thought I was showing generosity, for my usual contribution was twenty sous, but someone spotted me and reported me to the Dean of Studies. In the interview which followed the last vestige of my vocation was blown away. I parted from the fathers with politeness on both sides; if they felt disappointment I think they also felt a grudging respect - my exploit was not unworthy of the college. I had successfully concealed my small fortune under my mattress, and when they were assured that an uncle, on my father's side, had sent me my fare to England with promises of future support and a position in his firm, they relinquished me without regret. I told them that I would repay my mother's debt as soon as I had earned enough (a promise they accepted with a little embarrassment because they obviously doubted whether it would ever be fulfilled), and I assured them too that I would certainly get in touch with a certain Father Thomas Capriole S.J. at Farm Street, an old friend of the Rector's (a promise which they believed I might keep). As for the notional uncle's letter, it had been a very easy one to compose. If I could deceive the Casino authorities I had no fear of failing with the Fathers of the Visitation, and not one of them thought of demanding to see the envelope. I set out to England by the international express which halted then at the little station below the Casino. It was my last sight of the baroque towers that had dominated my childhood - a vision of grown-up life, the palace of chance, where anything at all might happen as I had well enough proved.

2

I would lose the proper proportions of my subject if I were to recount every stage of my progress from the casino in Monte Carlo to another casino in Port-au-Prince, where I found myself again in possession of money and in love with a woman, a coincidence no more unlikely than the encounter on the Atlantic between three people called Smith, Brown and Jones. In the long interval I had led a hand-to-mouth existence, except for a period of peace and respectability which came with the war, and not all my occupations were of the kind to find a place in my curriculum vitae. The first job I obtained, thanks to my good knowledge of French (my Latin was singularly unhelpful), was at a small restaurant in Soho where I served for six months as a waiter. I never mentioned that, nor my graduation to the Trocadero, thanks to a forged reference from Fouquet's in Paris. After some years at the Trocadero I rose to being adviser to a small firm of educational publishers who were launching a series of French classics with notes of a scrupulously cleansing nature. That did find a place in my curriculum. Others that followed did not. Indeed I was a little spoilt by the security of my employment during the war, when I served in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, supervising the style of our propaganda to Vichy teffitory, and even had a lady novelist as my secretary. When the war was over I wanted something better than my old life of hand-to-mouth, though nevertheless for some years I returned to that way of life, until at last an idea came to me south of Piccadilly, outside one of those galleries where you are likely to see a less than pedigree work by an obscure seventeenthcentury Dutch painter, or perhaps it was outside a gallery a degree lower in the trade where a taste for jovial cardinals enjoying their Friday salmon was mysteriously catered for. A middleaged man wearing a double-breasted waistcoat and a watchchain, a man remote, I would have said, from artistic interests, stood gazing at the pictures, and suddenly I thought I knew exactly what was passing in his mind. 'At Sotheby's last month a picture fetched a hundred thousand pounds. A picture can represent a fortune - if one knew enough or even took a chance,' and he stared very hard at some cows in a meadow, as though he were watching a little ivory ball running round a groove. It was surely the cows in the meadow at which he gazed and not the cardinals. No one could possibly envisage the cardinals in a Sotheby sale. A week after that vision south of Piccadilly I gambled most of what I had accumulated during more than thirty years and invested in a trailer-caravan and about twenty inexpensive prints - there was an Henri Rousseau at one end of the scale and a Jackson Pollock at the other. I hung these on one side of my van with a record of the sums which they had fetched at auction and the date of the sales. Then I procured a young art student able to turn me out rapidly a number of rough pastiches which he signed each time with a different name - I would often sit with him while he worked and try out signatures on a piece of paper. In spite of the example of Pollock and Moore, which proved that even an Anglo-Saxon name could have value, most of the names were foreign. I remember Msloz only, because his work obstinately refused to sell, and in the end we had to paint out his signature and substitute Weill. I had come to realize that the purchaser wanted, as his minimum satistion, to be able to pronounce a name - 'I got a new Weill the other day,'

and the nearest that even I could get to Msloz sounded like Sludge, a name which may have caused unconscious purchaser-resistance. I would drive from one provincial city to another dragging my trailer, and come to rest in a well-to-do suburb of an industrial city. I soon realized that scientists and women were of little use to me: scientists know too much, and few housewives love to gamble without the sight of ready cash that Bingo provides. I needed gamblers, for the point of my exhibition was really this:

'Here on one side of the gallery you can see the pictures which have fetched the highest prices in the last fen years. Would you have guessed that these

"Cyclists" by Lйger, this "Station-master " by Rousseau were worth a fortune? Here, on the other, you have a chance to spot their successors and win a fortune too. If you lose, at least you have something on your walls to talk about to your neighbours, you gain the reputation of being an advanced art-patron, and it won't cost you more than -' My price varied from twenty to fifty pounds according to the neighbourhood and the customer; I even once sold a two-headed woman a long way after Picasso for a hundred. As my young man became more skilful at his job he would turn me out an assorted half-dozen paintings in a morning and I paid him two pounds ten for each. I was robbing nobody; with fifteen pounds for a morning's work he was well satisfied; I was even helping young promise, and I am sure that many a dinner party in the provinces went better because of some outrageous challenge to good taste upon the walls. I once sold an imitation Pollock to a man who had Walt Disney dwarfs planted in his garden, around the sun-dial and on either side the crazy paving. Did I harm him? He could afford the money. He had an air of complete invulnerability, though God knows for what aberration in his sexual or business life Dopey and the other dwarfs may have compensated.

It was soon after my success with Dopey's owner that I received my mother's appeal - if you could call it an appeal. It came in the shape of a picture-postcard which showed the ruined citadel of the Emperor Christophe at Cap Haпtien. She wrote on the back of it her name, which was new to me, her address and two sentences, 'Feel a bit of a ruin myself. Nice to see you if you come this way.' In brackets after 'Maman' - not recognizing her hand I read it first not unsuitably as 'Manon' - she added 'Comtesse de LascotVilliers.' It had taken many months to find me. I hadn't seen my mother since one occasion in Paris in 1934, and I had not heard from her during the war. I daresay I would not have answered her invitation but for two things - it was the nearest she had ever approached to a maternal appeal, and it was really time for me to finish with the travelling art-gallery, for a Sunday paper was trying to find out the source of my paintings. I had more than a thousand pounds in the bank. I sold the caravan, the stock and the reproductions to a man who never read the People for five hundred pounds, and I flew out to Kingston, where I looked around unsuccessfully for business opportunities before taking another plane to Port-au-Prince.

3

Port-au-Prince was a very different place a few years ago. It was, I suppose, just as corrupt; it was even dirtier; it contained as many beggars, but at least the beggars had some hope, for the tourists were there. Now when a man says to you, 'I am starving,' you believe him. I wondered what my mother was doing at the Hotel Trianon, whether she was existing there on a pension from the count, if there had ever been a count, or whether perhaps she was working as a housekeeper. She had been employed when I saw her last in 1934 as a vendeuse in one of the minor couturiers. It was regarded in that pre-war period as a rather smart thing to employ an Englishwoman, so she had called herself Maggie Brown (perhaps her married name really was Brown).

For the sake of prudence I took my bags to the El Rancho, a luxurious Americanized hotel. I wanted to be comfortable so long as my money lasted, and nobody at the airport could tell me anything about the Trianon. As I drove up between the palm trees it looked bedraggled enough: the bougainvillaea needed cutting back and there was more grass than gravel on the drive. A few people were drinking on the balcony, among them Petit Pierre, though I was to learn soon enough that he paid for his drinks only with his pen. A young well-dressed negro met me on the steps and asked me whether I needed a room. I said I had come to see 'Madame la Comtesse' - I couldn't keep the double-barrelled name in mind and I had left the postcard in my hotel room.

'I am afraid she is sick. Is she expecting you?'

A very young American couple in bath-robes came up from the pool. The man had his arm around the girl's shoulder. 'Hi, Marcel,' he said, 'a couple of your specials.'

'Joseph,' the negro called. 'Two rum punches for Mr Nelson.' He turned back to me with his inquiry.

'Tell her,' I said, 'that Mr Brown is here.'

'Mr

Brown?'

'Yes.'

'I will see if she is awake.' He hesitated. He said, 'You have come from England?'

'Yes.'

Joseph came out of the bar carrying the rum punches. He had no limp in those days.

'Mr Brown from England?' Marcel asked again.

'Yes, Mr Brown from England.' He went upstairs reluctantly. The strangers on the balcony were watching me with curiosity, except for the young couple - they exchanged cherries intensely with their lips. The sun was about to set behind the great hump of Kenscoff.

Petit Pierre asked, 'You have come from England?'

'Yes.'

'From

London?'

'Yes.'

'London was very cold?'

It was like an interrogation by the secret police, but in those days there were no secret police.

'It was raining when I left.'

'How do you like it here, Mr Brown?'

'I have only been here two hours.' The next day I had the explanation of his interest: there was a paragraph about me in the social column of the local paper.

'You're coming on fine with your backstroke,' the young man said to the girl.

'Oh, Chick, do you really mean it?'

'I mean it, honey.'

A negro came half-way up the steps and held out two hideous pieces of wood-carving. Nobody paid him any attention and he stood there, holding them out saying nothing. I never even noticed when he went away.

'Joseph, what's for dinner?' the girl called.

A man walked round the balcony carrying a guitar. He sat down at a table near the couple and began to play. Nobody paid him any attention either. I began to feel a little awkward. I had expected a warmer welcome in my mother's home.

A tall elderly negro with a Roman face blackened by the soot of cities and with hair dusted by stone came down the stairs, followed by Marcel. He said,'Mr Brown?'

'Yes.'

'I am Doctor Magiot. Will you come into the bar for a moment?'

We went into the bar. Joseph was mixing some more rum punches for Petit Pierre and his party. A cook wearing a high white hat pushed his head through the door and retreated again when he saw Doctor Magiot. A very pretty half-caste maid stopped talking to Joseph and went out on to the balcony carrying linen cloths to cover the tables.

Doctor Magiot said, 'You are the son of Madame la Comtesse?'

'Yes.' It seemed to me that I had done nothing but answer questions since I arrived.

'Of course your mother is anxious to see you, but I wanted first to tell you certain facts. Excitement is dangerous for her. Please when you see her be very gentle. Undemonstrative.

I smiled. 'We have never been demonstrative. What's wrong, doctor?'

'She has had a second crise cardiaque. I am surprised that she is alive. She is a very remarkable woman.'

'Oughtn't we to call in … perhapsT

'You need not be afraid, Mr Brown. The heart is my speciality. You will not find anyone more competent than I am nearer than New York. I doubt whether you will find one there.' He was not boasting; he was just explaining, for he was used to being doubted by white people. 'I was trained,'

he said, 'under Chardin in Paris.'

'No

hope?'

'She can hardly survive another attack. Good-night, Mr Brown. Don't stay with her too long. I am glad you were able to come. I was afraid she might have no one to send for.'

'She didn't exactly send for me.'

'Perhaps one night you and I might have dinner together. I have known your mother many years. I have a great respect …' He gave me the kind of bow with which a Roman emperor might have brought an audience to an end. He was in no way condescending. He knew his exact value. 'Goodnight, Marcel.' To Marcel he gave no bow at all. I noticed that even Petit Pierre let him go by without greeting or question. I was ashamed at the thought that I had suggested to a man of his quality a second opinion. Marcel said,'Will you come upstairs, Mr Brown?'

I followed him. The walls were hung with pictures by Haitian artists: forms caught in wooden gestures among bright and heavy colours - a cockfight, a Voodoo ceremony, black clouds over Kenscoff, banana-trees of stormy green, the blue spears of the sugar-cane, golden maize. Marcel opened the door and I went in to the shock of my mother's hair spread over the pillow, a Haitian red which had never existed in nature. It flowed abundantly on either side of her across the great double bed.

'My dear,' she said, as though I had come to see her from the other side of town, 'how nice of you to look in.' I kissed her wide brow like a whitewashed wall and a little of the white came off on my lips. I was aware of Marcel watching. 'And how is England?' she asked as though she were inquiring after a distant daughter-in-law, for whom she did not greatly care.

'It was raining when I left.'

'Your father could never stand his own climate,' she remarked. She might have passed anywhere for a woman in her late forties, and I could see nothing of an invalid about her except a tension of the skin around her mouth which I noticed years later in the case of the pharmaceutical traveller.

'Marcel, a chair for my son.' He reluctantly drew one from the wall, but, when I sat in it, I was as far from her as ever because of the width of the bed. It was a shameless bed built for one purpose only, with a gilt curlicued footboard more suitable to a courtesan in a historical romance than to an old woman dying.

I asked her, 'And is there really a count, mother?'

She gave me a knowing smile. 'He belongs to a distant past,' she said, and I could not be certain whether she intended the phrase to be his epitaph or not. 'Marcel,' she added, 'silly boy, you can safely leave us alone. I told you. He is my son.' When the door closed, she said with complacency, 'He is absurdly jealous.'

'Who is he?'

'He helps me to manage the hotel.'

'He isn't the count by any chance?'

'Mйchant,' she replied mechanically. She had really caught from the bed - or was it from the count? - an easy enlightened eighteenth-century air.

'Why should he be jealous then?'

'Perhaps he thinks you're not really my son.'

'You mean he is your lover?' I wondered what my unknown father, whose name - or so I understood - was Brown, would have thought of his negro successor.

'Why are you smiling, my dear?'

'You are a wonderful woman, mother.'

'A little luck has come my way at the end.'

'You

mean

Marcel?'

'Oh, no. He's a good boy - that's all. I meant the hotel. It is the first real property I have ever possessed. I own it completely. There is no mortgage. Even the furniture is paid for.'

'And the pictures?'

'They are for sale, of course. I take a commission.'

'Was it alimony from the count which allowed you … ?'

'Oh, no, nothing like that. I gained nothing from the count except his title, and I have never checked in the 'Almanac de Gotha to see whether it exists. No, this was a little piece of pure good fortune. A certain Monsieur Dechaux who lived in Port-au-Prince was anxious about his taxes, and as I was working for him at the time in a secretarial capacity I allowed him to put this hotel under my name. Of course I left him the place in my will and as I was over sixty and he was thirty-five the arrangement seemed to him quite a secure one.'

'He trusted you?'

'He was quite right to trust me, my dear. But he was wrong in trying to drive a Mercedes sports car on the roads that we have here. It was a lucky chance he killed only himself.'

'And so you took over?'

'He would have been very happy to know of it. My dear, you can't imagine how much he detested his wife. A big fat negress without education. She could never have run the place properly. Of course after his death I had to alter my will - your father, if he is still alive, might have been next of kin. By the way, I have left the fathers of the Visitation my rosary and my missal. I was never quite happy about the manner in which I treated them, but I was very pressed for money at the time. Your father was a bit of a swine, God rest his soul.'

'Then

he

is dead?'

'I have every reason to believe it, but no proof. People live so long nowadays. Poor man.'

'I've been talking to your doctor.'

'Doctor Magiot? I wish I had met him when he was younger. He's quite a man, isn't he?'

'He says if you keep quiet …'

'Here I am lying flat in bed,' she exclaimed with a knowing and pleading smile. 'I can do no more to please him, can I? Do you know the dear man asked me if I would like to see a priest? I said to him, 'But surely, doctor, a long confession would be a little too exciting for me now - with such memories to recall?' Would you mind going to the door, dear, and opening it a little way?'

I obeyed her. The passage was empty. From below came a chink of cutlery and a voice saying, 'Oh, Chick, do you really think I could?'

'Thank you, dear. I just wanted to be quite certain … While you are up, would you give me my brush? Thank you again. So much. How nice it is for an old woman to have a son around …' She paused. I think she expected me courteously, like a gigolo, to contradict the fact of her age. 'I wanted to speak to you about my will,' she went on in a tone of slight disappointment, as she brushed and brushed her improbable and abundant hair.

'Oughtn't you to rest now? The doctor told me not to stay long.'

'They have given you a nice room, I hope? Some of the rooms remain a little bare. For want of ready cash.'

'I left my bags at El Rancho.'

'Oh, but you must stay here, my dear. El Rancho - it wouldn't do - to advertise that joint,' she used the American expression. 'After all - it was what I had to tell you - this hotel will be yours one day. Only I wanted to explain - the law is so complicated, one must take precautions - that it's in the form of shares, and I have left to Marcel a third interest. He will be very useful if you treat him right, and I had to do something for the boy, hadn't I?

He has been rather more than a mere manager. You understand? You are my son, so of course you understand.'

'I

understand.'

'I'm so glad you are here. I didn't want any little slip … Never underestimate a Haitian lawyer, when it comes to a testament … I'll tell Marcel that you'll take over the actual direction immediately. Only be tactful, that's a good boy. Marcel is very sensitive.'

'And you, mother, rest quiet. If you can, don't think any more about business. Try to sleep.'

'They say that to be dead is about as quiet as you can get. I don't see any point in my anticipating death. It lasts a long time.'

I put my lips again against the whitewashed wall. She closed her eyes in an artificial gesture of love, and I tiptoed away from her to the door. When I opened it very softly so as not to disturb her I heard a giggle from the bed.

'You really are a son of mine,' she said. 'What part are you playing now?'

Those were the last words she ever said to me, and I am not sure to this day what exactly she meant by them.

I took a taxi to El Rancho and stayed there for dinner. The place was crowded, a buffet of Haitian food carefully adapted to American tastes was laid by the swimmining-pool, a bony man in a conical hat performed lightning taps upon a Haitian drum, and it was then, on my first evening, I think, that the ambition was born in me to make the Trianon successful. For the moment it was too obviously a hotel of the second class. I could imagine the small tourists' agents who included it in their round-trip programmes. I doubted whether the profits could possibly satisfy both Marcel and myself. I was determined to succeed, in the biggest possible way; I would have the delight one day of sending the surplus guests uphill to El Rancho with my recommendation. And the strange thing was that my dream did come true for a short time. In three seasons I was able to transform the shabby place into the bizarre high spot of Port-au-Prince, and through three seasons I watched it die again, until now there were only the Smiths upstairs in the John Barrymore suite and Monsieur le Ministre dead in the bathing pool. I paid my bill and took a taxi back down the hill and entered what I had already begun to regard as my sole property. Tomorrow I would go through the accounts with Marcel, I would interview the staff, I would take control. I was already planning how best to buy Marcel out, but that would have to wait until my mother had gone on to her further destiny. They had given me a big room on the same landing as hers. The furniture, she said, had all been paid for, but the floorboards needed renewal, they bent and creaked under my feet, and the only thing of value in the room was the bed, a fine large Victorian bed - my mother had an eye for beds - with big brass knobs. It was the first time I could remember that I had lain down to sleep in a bed I had not paid for with breakfast included - or had not been in debt for, as was the case at the College of the Visitation. The sensation was an oddly luxurious one and I slept well - until a jangling hysterical old-fashioned bell woke me, while I was dreaming - God knows why - of the Boxer Rebellion. It rang and rang, and now I was reminded of a fire-alarm. I put on my dressing-gown and opened my door. Another door opened at the same moment from the same landing and I saw Marcel emerge, with a half-asleep look on his wide flat negro face. He wore a pair of bright scarlet silk pyjamas and he hesitated just long enough for me to see the monogram over the pocket: an M interlaced with a Y. I wondered what the Y stood for, until I remembered that my mother's Christian name was Yvette. Were the pyjamas a sentimental gift? I doubted that. More likely the monogram was an act of defiance on my mother's part. She had very good taste, and Marcel had a fine figure to swathe in scarlet silk, and she wasn't petty enough to mind what her second-rate tourists thought.

He saw me watching him and he said in a tone of apology, 'She wants me.' Then he went slowly, with what seemed reluctance, to her door. I noticed that he didn't knock before he went in.

I had an odd dream when I got back to sleep - odder than the Boxer Rebellion. I was walking by the side of a lake in the moonlight and I was dressed like an altar-boy - I felt the magnetism of the still quiet water, so that every step I took was nearer to the verge, until the uppers of my black boots were submerged. Then a wind blew and the surge rose over the lake, like a small tidal wave, but instead of coming towards me, it went in the opposite direction, raising the water in a long retreat, so that I found I walked on dry pebbles and that the lake existed only as a gleam on the far horizon of the desert of small stones, which wounded me through a hole in my boots. I woke to an agitation that shook the stairs and floors throughout the hotel. Madame la Comtesse, my mother, was dead.

I was travelling light, my European suit was too hot to wear, and I had only a choice of gaudy sports-shirts to put on for the chamber of death. The one which I chose I had bought in Jamaica; it was scarlet and covered with print taken from an eighteenth-century book on the economy of the islands. They had tidied my mother up by that time, and she lay on her back in a pink diaphanous nightdress wearing an ambiguous smile of secret or even sensual satisfaction. But her powder had caked a little in the heat, and I couldn't bring myself to kiss the hard flakes. Marcel stood by the bed, dressed correctly in black, and his face dripped with tears like a black roof in storm. I had thought of him simply as my mother's last extravagance, but it was no gigolo who said to me in a tone of anguish, 'It was not my fault, sir. I said to her again and again, "No, you're not strong enough. Wait just a little. It will be all better if you wait".'

'What did she say?'

'Nothing. She just took off the sheets. And when I see her like that it is always the same.' He started to leave the room, shaking his head as though to get the rain out of his eyes, and then he came hurriedly back, went down on his knees by the bed, and thrust his mouth against the sheet where it was rounded by her stomach. He knelt there in his black suit looking like some negro priest at an obscene rite. It was I, not he, who left the room, and it was I who went to the kitchen and set the servants to work again for the guests'

breakfast (even the cook was partly incapacitated by tears), and it was I who telephoned to Doctor Magiot. (The telephone frequently worked in those days.)

'She was a great woman,' Doctor Magiot said to me later, and 'I hardly knew her' was all I could say in my stupefaction.

The next day I went through her papers to find her will. She had not been very tidy: the drawers of her desk were given up indiscriminately to bills and receipts in no order that I could detect; there was a confusion even in the years. Sometimes among a pile of laundry-receipts I came on what used to be called a billet-doux. One in English, written in pencil on the back of a hotel menu, said, 'Yvette, come to me tonight. I am dying slowly. I long for the coup de grеce.' Was it from a hotel guest? I wondered whether she had kept it for the sake of the menu or of the message, for the menu was a very special one for some July 14 celebration.

In another drawer, which otherwise contained mainly tubes of glue, drawing pins, hair-slides, fountain-pen refills and paper-clips was a china pig-bank. The pig was light, but it rattled all the same. I didn't want to break it open, but it seemed foolish to throw it away like that, unexamined, on the growing pile of lumber. When I cracked it apart I found a Monte Carlo roulette token for five francs like the one I had put in the chapel collection many decades ago and a tarnishing medal, attached to a ribbon. I couldn't make out what it was, but when I showed it to Doctor Magiot he recognized it. 'The medal of the Resistance,' he said, and it was then that he added, 'She was a great woman.'

The medal of the Resistance … I had had no communication with my mother during the years of the occupation. Had she earned it or had she filched it or had it been given her as a love-token? Doctor Magiot had no doubt at all, but I had difficulty in thinking of my mother as a heroine, though I had no doubt at all that she could have played the part, as she could have played the grande amoureuse with the English tourists. She had convinced the fathers of the Visitation of her moral rectitude, even against the dubious background of Monte Carlo. I knew very little of her, but enough to recognize an accomplished comedian.

However, though her bills were untidy, there was nothing untidy about her will. It was clear and precise, signed by the Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers and witnessed by Doctor Magiot. She had turned her hotel into a limited company and assigned a nominal share to Marcel, another to Doctor Magiot, and one to her lawyer who was called Alexandre Dubois. Sho possessed the ninety-seven other shares, as well as the three transfers which were neatly pinned to the document. The company owned everything to the last spoon and fork and I was allotted sixty-five shares and Marcel thirty-three. I was to all intents the owner of the Trianon. I could begin at once to realize the dream of the night before - or only with such delay as the quick burial of my mother, a quickness entailed by the climate, presented. In these arrangements Doctor Magiot proved invaluable; she was transported that very afternoon to the small cemetery in the mountain village of Kenscoff, where she was dug in with due Catholic rites among the small tombs and Marcel wept unashamedly by the grave, which looked like a hole dug for drains in a town street, for all around were the little houses the Haitians constructed for their dead; in them on the Feast of All Souls they would leave their bread and wine. While the ceremonial trowels of earth were deposited on the coffin, I wondered how best I could dispose of Marcel. We had been standing in the gloom of the ink-black clouds which always assembled over the mountain at that hour and now they broke on us with a dash and fury, and we ran for our taxis, the priest in the lead and the gravediggers bringing up the rear. I didn't know it then, but I know now that the diggers would not have returned before the morning to cover up my mother's coffin, for no one will work in a cemetery at night, unless it is a zombie who has left his grave at the command of an houngan to labour during the dark hours.

Doctor Magiot gave me dinner that night at his own home, and in addition he gave me a great deal of good advice which I was unwise enough to discount because I thought he might perhaps have an idea of obtaining the hotel for another client. It was the one share he possessed in my mother's company which made me suspicious even though I held the signed transfer. He lived on the lower slopes of Pйtionville in a house of three storeys like a miniature version of my own hotel with its tower and its lace-work balconies. In the garden grew a dry spiky Norfolk pine, like an illustration in a Victorian novel, and the only modern object in the room, where we sat after dinner, was the telephone. It was like an oversight in a museum arrangement. The heavy drape of the scarlet curtains, the woollen cloths on the occasional tables with bobbles at each corner, the china objects on the chimney-piece that included two dogs with the same gentle gaze as Doctor Magiot's, the portraits of the doctor's parents (coloured photographs mounted on mauve silk in oval frames), the pleated screen in the unnecessary fireplace, spoke of another age; the literary works in a glass-fronted bookcase (Doctor Magiot kept his professional works in his consultingroom) were bound in old-fashioned calf. I examined them while he was out

'washing his hands', as he put it in polite English. There were Les Misйrables in three volumes, Les Mystиres de Paris with the last volume missing, several of Gaboriau's romans policiers, Renan's Vie de Jйsus, and rather surprisingly among its companions Marx's Das Kapital rebound in exactly the same calf so that it was indistinguishable at a distance from Les Misйrables. The lamp at Doctor Magiot's elbow had a pink glass shade, and quite wisely, for even in those days the electric current was erratic, it was oil-burning.

'You really intend,' Doctor Magiot asked me, 'to take over the hotel?'

'Why not? I have a little experience of restaurant work. I can see great possibilities of improvement. My mother was not catering for the luxury trade.'

'The luxury trade?' Doctor Magiot repeated. 'I think you can hardly depend on that here.'

'Some hotels do.'

'The good years will not always continue. Not very long now and there will be the elections …'

'It doesn't make much difference, does it, who wins?'

'Not to the poor. But to the tourist perhaps.' He put a flowered saucer upon the table beside me - an ash-tray would have been out of period in this room where no one had ever smoked in the old days. He handled the saucer carefully, as though it were of precious porcelain. He was very big and very black, but he possessed great gentleness - he would never ill-treat, I felt sure, even an inanimate object, such as a recalcitrant chair. Nothing can be more inconsiderate to a man ot Doctor Magiot's profession than a telephone. But when it rang once during our conversation he lifted the receiver as gently as he would have raised a patient's wrist.

'You have heard,' Doctor Magiot said, 'of the Emperor Christophe?'

'Of

course.'

'Those days could return very easily. More cruelly perhaps and certainly more ignobly. God save us from a little Christophe.'

'Nobody could afford to frighten away the American tourists. You need the dollars.'

'When you know us better, you will realize that we don't live on money here, we live on debts. You can always afford to kill a creditor, but no one ever kills a debtor.'

'Whom do you fear?'

'I fear a small country doctor. His name would mean nothing to you now. I only hope you don't see it one day stuck up in electric lights over the city. If that day comes I promise you I shall run to cover.' It was Doctor Magiot's first mistake prophecy. He underrated his own stubbornness or his own courage. Otherwise I would not have been waiting for him later beside the dry swimming-pool where the ex-Minister lay still as a hunk of beef in a butcher's shop.

'And Marcel?' he asked me. 'What do you propose to do with Marcel?

'I haven't decided. Tomorrow I must have a word with him. You know he owns a third of the hotel?'

'You forget - I witnessed the will.'

'It occurred to me that he might be ready to sell his shares. I have no cash, but I could probably borrow from the bank.'

Doctor Magiot put his great pink palms on the knees of his black formal suit and leant towards me as though he had a secret to convey. He said, 'I would advise you to do the opposite. Let him buy your shares. Make it easy for him and let him buy them cheap. He is a Haitian. He can live on very little. He can survive.' But there again Doctor Magiot proved to be a false prophet. He saw the future of his country clearer than the fate of the individuals who composed it.

I said with a smi1e, 'Oh no, I've taken a fancy to the Trianon. You'll see - I shall stay and I shall survive.'

I waited two days more before I spoke to Marcel, but in the interval I had a word with the bank manager. The last two seasons in Port-au-Prince had been good ones. I outlined my plans for the hotel, and the manager, who was a European, made no difficulty in advancing me the money I needed. The only point on which he proved difficult was the rate of repayment. 'You are virtually asking me to repay in three years?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Well, you see, before that there are the elections.'

I had hardly seen Marcel since the funeral. Joseph, the barman, came to me for orders, the cook and the gardener came to me, Marcel had abdicated without a fight, but I noticed when I passed him on the stairs that he smelt strongly of rum, so I had a glass of it ready for him when we came together at last to talk. He listened without a word and he accepted what I had to say without dispute. What I offered him was a lot of money in Haitian terms, and I offered it in dollars and not gourdes, even though it represented half the nominal value of his shares. For psychological effect I had the money on me in hundred-dollar bills. 'You had better count them,' I told him, but he put the money in his pocket without checking it. 'And now,' I said, 'if you will sign here,' and he signed without reading what he signed. It was as easy as that. No scene at all.

'I'll need your room,' I said, 'from tomorrow.' Was I harsh to him? What partly influenced me was the embarrassment of dealing with my mother's lover, and it must have been awkward for him too to meet her son, a man much older than himself. Just before he left the room he spoke of her. 'I pretended not to hear the bell,' he said, 'but she rang again and again. I thought she might need something.'

'But she only needed you?'

He said, 'I am ashamed.'

I could hardly have discussed with him the powerful influence of my mother's sexual desires. I said, 'You haven't finished your rum.' He drained the glass. He said, 'When she was angry with me or when she loved me she called me "You big black beast." That is what I feel now, a big black beast.'

He went out of the room, one buttock heavily swollen with hundred-dollar bills, and an hour later I watched him going down the drive, carrying an old cardboard suitcase. He had abandoned in his room the scarlet silk pyjamas with the monogram Y M.

For a week after that I heard nothing from him. I was very busy at the hotel. The only one who really knew his job was Joseph (I made him famous later for his rum punches), and I could only suppose that our guests were so used to eating badly at home, they accepted the cook's dishes as just an inseparable feature of human life. He served over-cooked steaks and icecream. I found myself living almost entirely on the grapefruit which he found it hard to spoil. The season was nearly at an end and I longed for the last guest to go, so that I could give the cook his quietus. Not that I knew where to find his successor - good cooks were not easy to find in Port-auPrince. One night I felt a strong need to forget the hotel, so I took myself to the casino. In those days, before Doctor Duvalier came to power, there were enough tourists to keep three roulette tables busy. You could hear the music from the night club below, and occasionally a woman in evening dress, tired of dancing, would bring her partner to the tables. Haitian women are the most beautiful in the world, I think, and there were faces and figures there which would have made a fortune for their owners in a Western capital. And always for me in a casino was the sense that anything might happen. 'Man has but one virginity to lose,' and I had lost mine that winter afternoon in Monte Carlo.

I had been playing for several minutes before I saw that Marcel was sitting at the same table. I would have shifted, but I had already won once en plein. I have a superstition that only a single table each night is lucky and tonight I had found my lucky table, for in twenty minutes I was already a hundred and fifty dollars to the good. I caught the eye of a young European woman across the table. She smiled and began to follow my stakes, saying a word to her companion, a fat man with an enormous cigar, who fed her with tokens and never played himself. But the table which was so lucky for me was unlucky for Marcel. Sometimes we placed our stakes on the same square and then I lost. I began to wait until he had laid his tokens before I placed my bet, and the girl, who saw what I was at, followed suit. It was as though we were dancing in step - as in a Malayan ron-ron - without touching. I was content because she was pretty and because I remembered Monte Carlo. As for the fat man I could deal with that trouble later. Perhaps he too belonged to the Banque de l'Indochine.

Marcel was following a mad system. It was as though he were bored with the game and the quicker he lost the quicker he could leave the table. Then he saw me and shovelling together the remainder of his tokens he laid them all on zero which had not come up for more than thirty turns. He lost, of course, as one always loses with a desperate throw, and he pushed back his chair. I leant across to him with a ten-dollar token. 'Have a bit of my luck,' I said.

Was I trying to humiliate him, to remind him that he had been my mother's paid lover? I don't remember now, but if that was my motive, I certainly failed. He took the token and replied with great courtesy in his careful French, ' Tout ce que j'ai eu de chance dans ma vie m'est venu de votre famille. ' He bet again on zero and zero came up - I hadn't followed him. He returned me my token and said, 'Excuse me. I must go away now. I have a great need to sleep.' I watched him leave the salle. He had over three hundred dollars to change now. He was off my conscience. And though he was certainly very black and very big, it was unfair, I thought, to have called him, as my mother had done, a beast.

Somehow all the seriousness was drained out of the salle when he left. We were all small-timers now, playing for fun, risking nothing and gaining nothing but the price of a few drinks. I raised my winnings to three hundred and fifty dollars and dropped them to two hundred only for the pleasure of seeing the man with the cigar lose a little too. Then I stopped. Exchanging my tokens I asked the cashier who the girl was.

'Madame

Pineda,'

he

said, 'a German lady.'

'I don't like Germans,' I said with disappointment.

'Nor do I.'

'Who is the fat man?'

'Her husband - the ambassador.' He named some small South American state, but I forgot it the next moment. I used to be able to distinguish one South American republic from another by the postage stamps, but I had left my collection behind at the College of the Visitation, as a gift to the boy whom I considered my greatest friend (I have long forgotten his name).

'I don't like ambassadors much either,' I told the cashier.

'They are a necessary evil,' he replied, counting out my dollar notes.

'You believe that evil is necessary? Then you're a Manichean like myself.' Our theological discussion could go no further, for he had not been educated at the College of the Visitation, and in any case the girl's voice interrupted us. 'Husbands too.'

'What about husbands?'

'A necessary evil,' she said, putting down her tokens on the cashier's desk. We admire the qualities which are beyond our reach; so I admired loyalty, and at that moment I nearly walked away from her for ever. I don't know what restrained me. Perhaps detected in her voice another quality which I find admirable - the quality of desperation. Desperation and truth are closely akin - the desperate confession can usually be trusted, and just as it is not given to everyone to make a deathbed confession, so the capacity for desperation is granted to very few, and I was not one of them. But she had it and it excused her in my eyes. I would have done better to have followed my first thought and walked away, for I would have walked away from a lot of unhappiness. Instead I waited for her at the door of the salle while she picked up her winnings.

She was the same age as the woman I had known in Monte Carlo, but time had reversed our ages. The first woman had been old enough to be my mother, and now I was old enough, to be this stranger's father. She was very dark and small and nervous - I would never have taken her for a German. She came towards me counting her dollars, to hide her timidity. She had made a desperate cast, and now she didn't know what to do with the bite at the end of her line.

I asked, 'Where's your husband?'

'In the car,' she said and looking out I noticed for the first time the Peugeot car with the C.D. plates. In the front seat beside the wheel the big man sat smoking his long cigar. His shoulders were wide and flat. You could have hung a poster on them. They looked like a wall closing a cul-de-sac.

'When can I see you again?'

'Here. Outside in the car park. I can't come to your hotel.'

'You know who I am?'

'I ask questions too,' she said.

'Tomorrow

night?'

'At ten. I must be back at one.'

'And now - will he want to know what's kept you?'

'He has infinite patience,' she said. 'It is a diplomatic quality. He waits to speak till the political situation is ripe.'

'Then why must you be back at one?'

'I have a child. He always wakes around one and calls for me. It's a habit

- a bad habit. He has nightmares. About a robber in the house.'

'Your only child?'

'Yes.'

She touched my arm and at that moment the ambassador in the car put out his right hand and sounded the horn, twice but not too impatiently. He didn't even turn his head or he would have seen us.

'You're summoned back,' I said, and with my first claim on her the shadow of other claims fell on me.

'I suppose it's nearly one.' She added quickly, 'I knew your mother. I liked her. She was real.' She went out to the car. Her husband opened the door for her without turning, and she got behind the wheel: the end of his cigar glowed beside her cheek, like a warning lamp at the edge of a road under repair.

I went back to the hotel and Joseph met me on the steps. He said that Marcel had come back half an hour before and asked for a room for the night.

'Only for tonight?'

'He say he go tomorrow.'

He had paid in advance, putting down the sum which he knew to be correct, he had ordered two bottles of rum to be sent up, and he asked if he might have the room of Madame la Comtesse.

'He could have had his old room.' But then I remembered that the new guest - an American professor - was there.

I wasn't unduly troubled. In a way I was touched. I was glad that my mother had been so liked by her lover, and by the woman in the casino whose first name I had forgotten to ask. I would have liked her myself perhaps if she had given me half a chance. Perhaps I had in mind the hope that her likeability might have been passed on to me - a great advantage in business - as well as two-thirds of her hotel.

4

I was nearly half an hour late when I found the car with the C.D. sign outside the casino. There had been a great deal to keep me, and I was not really in the humour to come at all. I couldn't pretend to myself that I was in love with Madame Pineda. A bit of lust and a bit of curiosity was all I thought I felt, and driving into town I remembered everything in the register against her, that she was a German, that she had made the first move, that she was an ambassador's wife. (I would certainly hear the chandeliers and the cocktail glasses tinkle in her conversation.)

She opened the car door for me. 'I nearly gave you up,' she said.

'I'm sorry. A lot of things have happened.'

'Now you are here, we had better drive away. Our colleagues begin to arrive after eleven when the official dinners are over.'

She backed the car out. 'Where are we going?' I asked.

'I don't know.'

'What made you speak to me last night?'

'I don't know.'

'You followed my luck?'

'Yes. I suppose I was curious to see what your mother's son was like. Nothing new ever happens here.'

Ahead of us the port lay in a wash of temporary floodlights. Two cargoships were being unloaded. There was a long procession of bowed figures under sacks. She swung the car round in a half-circle and brought it into a deep patch of shadow close to the white statue of Columbus. 'None of our kind come here at night,' she said, 'and so no beggars come either.'

'What about the police?'

'The

C.D. plate has some value.'

I wondered which of us was using the other. I had not made love to a woman for some months and she - she had obviously reached the dead-end of most marriages. But I was crippled by the events of the day and I wished I had not come and I couldn't help remembering she was German, even though she was too young to bear any guilt herself. There was only one reason for us both to be here and yet we did nothing. We sat and stared at the statue which stared at America.

To escape from the absurdity I put my hand on her knee. The skin felt cold; she wore no stockings. I said, 'What's your name ?'

'Martha.' She turned as she answered and I kissed her clumsily and missed her mouth.

She said, 'We needn't, you know. We're grown-up people,' and suddenly I was back in the Hфtel de Paris and powerless, and no bird came to save me on white wings.

'I only want to talk,' she lied to me gently.

'I would have thought you had plenty to talk about at the embassy.'

'Last night - would it have been all right, if I could have come to your hotel?'

'Thank God, you didn't,' I said. 'There was trouble enough there.'

'What kind of trouble?'

'Don't let's talk about it now.' Again, to disguise my lack of feeling, I acted crudely. I pulled her body out from under the wheel and thrust her across my thighs, scraping her leg on the radio-set, so that she exclaimed with pain.

'I'm

sorry.'

'It was nothing.'

She settled herself more easily, she put her lips against my neck, but I felt nothing: nothing moved in me, and I wondered how long she would put up with her disappointment, if she were disappointed. Then for a long moment I forgot all about her. I was back in the midday heat knocking at the door of what had been my mother's room and getting no response. I knocked and knocked, thinking that Marcel was in a drunken sleep.

'Tell me about the trouble,' she said. Suddenly I began to talk. I told her how the room-boy became anxious and then Joseph, and how finally, when there was no reply to my knocking, I used the pass-key and found that the door was bolted. I had to tear down the partition between two balconies and scramble from one to the other - luckily the guests were away swimming on the reef. I found Marcel hanging from his own belt from the centre light: he must have had great resolution, for he had only to swing a few inches to land his toes on the curlicued ends of my mother's great bed. The rum had all been drunk except a little in the second bottle, and in an envelope addressed to me he had put what was left of the three hundred dollars. 'You can imagine,' I said, 'how I've been occupied since. What with the police - and the guests too. The American professor was reasonable, but there was an English couple who said they were going to report it to their travel agent. Apparently a suicide places a hotel in a lower price-bracket. It's not an auspicious beginning.'

'It was a horrible shock,' she said.

'I didn't know him or care about him, but it was a shock, yes, it really was a shock. Apparently I shall have to have the room purified by a priest or an houngan. I'm not sure which. And the lamp has to be destroyed. The servants insist on that.'

It proved a relief to talk and with words desire came. The back of her neck was against my mouth and one leg spread-eagled across the radio. She shivered and her hand shot out and by bad chance fell on the rim of the wheel and set the klaxon crying. It went on wailing like a wounded animal or a ship lost in fog until the shiver stopped.

We sat in silence in the same cramped position, like two pieces of machinery which an engineer had just failed to fit. It was the moment to say good-bye and go: the longer we stayed the greater demands the future would hold for us. In silence trust begins, contentment grows. I realized I had slept a moment, woken, and found her sleeping. Sleep shared was a bond too many. I looked at my watch. It was long before midnight. The cranes ground over the cargo-ships and the long procession of workers passed from boat to warehouse, bent under their cowls of sacks like capuchin monks. One leg hurt me. I shifted it and woke her.

She struggled away and said sharply, 'What's the time?'

'Twenty to twelve.'

'I dreamt the car had broken down and it was one in the moming,' she said.

I felt put in the place where I belonged, between the hours of ten and one. It was a daunting thought how quickly jealousy grows - I had barely known her for twenty-four hours and already I resented the demands of others.

'What's the matter?' she asked.

'I was wondering when we shall see each other again.'

'At the same time tomorrow. Here. This is as good as any other place, isn't it? Take a different taxi-driver, that's all.'

'It wasn't exactly an ideal bed.'

'We'll get in the back of the car. It will be all right there,' she said with a precision that depressed me.

So it was our affair began and so it continued with minor differences: for example, a year later she changed her Peugeot for a newer model. There were occasions - once her husband was recalled for consultation - when we escaped the car; once with the help of a woman-friend we passed two days together at Cap Haпtien, but then the friend went home. It sometimes seemed to me that we were less lovers than fellow-conspirators tied together in the commission of a crime. And like conspirators we were well aware of the detectives on our tracks. One of them was the child. I went over to a cocktail party at the embassy. There was no reason why I should not have been invited, for within six months of our meeting I had become an accepted member of the foreign community. My hotel was a modest success - though I was not content with modesty, and I still dreamt of that first-class cook. I had met the ambassador first when he drove one of my guests - a fellow-countryman - back to the hotel after a dinner at the embassy. He accepted and praised one of Joseph's drinks, and the shadow of his long cigar lay for a while across my verandah. I have never heard a man use the word 'my' more frequently. 'Have one of my cigars.' 'Please let my chauffeur have a drink.' We spoke of the coming elections. 'My opinion is the doctor will succeed. He has American support. That is my information.'

He invited me 'to my next cocktail party'.

Why did I resent him? I was not in love with his wife. I had 'made' her, that was all. Or so I believed at the time. Was it that in the course of our conversation he had discovered I had been educated by the fathers of the Visitation and claimed a kind of kinship - 'I was at the College of St Ignatius'

- in Paraguay, Uruguay - who cares?

I learnt later that the cocktail party to which in due course I was invited belonged to the second-class order, the first-class - where caviare was served

- being purely diplomatic - ambassadors, ministers, first secretaries, while the third-class was purely 'duty'. It was a compliment to be included in the second which was supposed to contain elements of 'fun'. There were a number of rich Haitians there with wives of a rare beauty. The time had not yet come for them to flee the country or to remain shut in their houses at night for fear of what might happen to them in the dark curfewed streets. The ambassador introduced me to 'my wife' - 'my' again, and she led me to the bar to find me a drink. 'Tomorrow night?' I asked, and she frowned at me and pursed her lips to indicate I was not to speak - that we were under observation. But it was not her husband she feared. He was busy showing

'my' collection of Hyppolite's paintings to one of his guests, moving from picture to picture, explaining each one, as though the subjects too belonged to him.

'Your husband can't hear in all this din.'

'Can't you see,' she said, 'that he is listening to every word?' But the 'he'

was not her husband. A small creature, not much more than three feet high, with dark concentrated eyes, was forcing his way towards us with the arrogance of a midget, thrusting aside the knees of guests as though they were the undergrowth of a wood which belonged to him. I saw he had his eyes on her mouth, as though he were lip-reading.

'My son Angel,' she introduced him, and always I thought of him after that in the English pronunciation of the name, like a kind of blasphemy. Once he had regained her side he hardly left it, though he never spoke at all - he was too busy listening, while his small steely hand grasped hers, like one half of a handcuff. I had met my real rival. She told me when we next met that he had asked a great many questions about me.

'He smells something wrong?'

'How could he at his age? He's barely five.'

A year passed, and we found ways of outwitting him, but his claims on her remained. I discovered she was indispensable to me, but when I pressed her to leave her husband, the child blocked her escape. She could do nothing to endanger his happiness. She would leave her husband tomorrow, but how could she survive if he took Angel from her? And it seemed to me that month by month the son grew more to resemble the father. He had a way now of saying 'my' mother, and once I saw him with a long chocolate cigar in his mouth; he was putting on weight rapidly. It was as though the father had incarnated his own demon to ensure that our affair did not go too far, beyond the bounds of prudence.

There was a time when we took a room for meeting above a Syrian store. The store-keeper, whose name was Hamit, was completely reliable - it was just after the Doctor came to power, and the shadow of the future was there for anyone to see, black as the cloud on Kenscoff. Any kind of connexion with a foreign embassy had value for a stateless man, for who could tell at what hour he might not have to take political asylum? Unfortunately, though we had both closely examined the store, we did not realize that, in a corner behind the pharmaceutical products, there were a few shelves given up to toys of better quality than could be found elsewhere, and among the groceries, for the luxury trade had not yet entirely ceased, a tin of bourbon biscuits could occasionally be found, a favourite provender of Angel between meals. This led to our first big quarrel.