Travels With My Aunt

The pleasant waters

Of the River Lee.’

The lines on Santa Sophia had never before rung so true: that dingy mausoleum could not compare with our St John’s and the mention of it would remind me always of Colonel Hakim.

One book leads to another, and I found myself, for the first time in many years, taking down a volume of Walter Scott. I remembered how my father had used the volumes for playing the Sortes Virgilianae-a game my mother considered a little blasphemous unless it was played with the Bible, in all seriousness. I sometimes suspected my father had dog-eared various pages so that he could hit on a suitable quotation to tease and astound my mother. Once, when he was suffering severely from constipation, he opened Rob Roy apparently at random and read out, ‘Mr Owen entered. So regular were the motions and habits of this worthy man …’ I tried the Sortes myself now and was astonished at the apposite nature of the quotation which I picked: ‘I had need of all the spirits a good dinner could give, to resist the dejection which crept insensibly on my mind.’

It was only too true that I was depressed: whether it was due to Miss Keene’s letter or to the fact that I missed my aunt’s company more than I had anticipated, or even that Tooley had left a blank behind her, I could not tell.

Now that I had no responsibility to anyone but myself, the pleasure of finding again my house and garden had begun to fade. Hoping to discover a more encouraging quotation, I opened Rob Roy again and found a snapshot lying between the leaves: the square yellowing snapshot of a pretty girl in an old-fashioned bathing-dress taken with an old-fashioned Brownie. The girl was bending a little towards the camera; she had just slipped one shoulder out of its strap, and she was laughing, as though she had been surprised at the moment of changing. It was some moments before I recognized Aunt Augusta and my first thought was how attractive she had been in those days. Was it a photograph taken by her sister, I wondered? But it was hardly the kind of photograph my mother would have given my father. I had to admit that it was more likely he had taken it himself and hidden it there in a volume of Scott which my mother would never read. This then was how she had looked-she could have hardly been more than eighteen-in the long ago days before she knew Curran or Monsieur Dambreuse or Mr Visconti. She had an air of being ready for anything. A phrase about Die Vernon printed on one of the two pages between which the photograph lay caught my eye: ‘Be patient and quiet, and let me take my own way; for when I take the bit between my teeth, there is no bridle will stop me.’ Had my father deliberately chosen that page with that particular passage for concealing the picture? I felt the melancholy I sometimes used to experience at the bank when it was my duty to turn over old documents deposited there, the title-deeds of a passion long spent. I thought of my father with an added tenderness-of that lazy man lying in his overcoat in the empty bath. I had never seen his grave, for he had died on the only trip which he had ever taken out of England, and I was not even sure of where it lay. I rang up my aunt, ‘Just to say goodnight and make sure that all is well.’

‘The apartment,’ she told me, ‘seems a little solitary without Wordsworth.’

‘I am feeling lonely too-without you and Tooley.’

‘No news when you came home?’

‘Only a letter from a friend. She seems lonely too.’

I hesitated before I spoke again. ‘Aunt Augusta, I have been thinking, I don’t know why, of my father. It’s strange how little one knows of one’s own family. Do you realize I don’t even know where he is buried?’ ‘No?’

‘Do you?’

‘Of course.’

‘I would have liked, if only once, to visit his grave.’

‘Cemeteries to me are rather a morbid taste. They have a sour smell like jungles. I suppose it comes from all that wet greenery.’ ‘As one grows old I think one becomes more attached to family things-to houses and graves. I feel very badly that my mother had to finish like that in a police laboratory.’

‘Your stepmother,’ my aunt corrected me.

‘Where is my father?’

‘As a half-believing Catholic,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘I cannot answer that question with any certainty, but his body, what is left of it, lies in Boulogne.’

‘So near? Why wasn’t it brought back?’

‘My sister had a very practical and unsentimental side.

Your father had gone to Boulogne without her knowledge on a day excursion. He was taken ill after dinner and died almost immediately. Food poisoning. It was before the days of antibiotics. There had to be an autopsy and my sister didn’t like the idea of transporting home a mutilated corpse. So she had him buried in the cemetery there.’

‘Were you present?’

‘I was on tour in Italy. I only heard about it much later. My sister and I didn’t correspond.’

‘So you’ve never seen the grave either?’

‘I once suggested to Mr Visconti that we make a trip, but his favourite Biblical quotation was, “Let the dead bury their dead.’” ‘Perhaps one day we might go together.’

‘I am strongly of Mr Visconti’s opinion, but I am always ready for a little travel,’ my aunt added with unsentimental glee.

‘This time you must be my guest.’

‘The anniversary of his death,’ my aunt said, ‘falls on October 2. I remember the date because it is the feast day of the Guardian Angel. The Angel seems to have slipped up badly on that occasion, unless of course he was saving your father from a worse fate. That is quite a possibility, for what on earth was your father doing in Boulogne out of season?’

STRANGELY ENOUGH I felt almost immediately at home in Boulogne.

As the direct boat from Folkestone no longer sailed, we took the Golden Arrow from Victoria and I was relieved to notice that my aunt had not brought with her the red suitcase. The English side of the Channel lay bathed in a golden autumn sunlight. By the time we reached Petts Wood the buses had all turned green, and at Orpington the oast-houses began to appear with their white cowls like plumes in a medieval helmet. The hops climbing their poles were more decorative than vines, and I would gladly have given all the landscape between Milan and Venice for these twenty miles of Kent. There were comfortable skies and unspectacular streams; there were ponds with rushes and cows which seemed contentedly asleep. This was the pleasant land of which Blake wrote, and I found myself regretting that we were going abroad again. Why had my father not died in Dover or Folkestone, both equally convenient for a day’s excursion? And yet when at last we came to Boulogne, stepping out of the one coach from Calais reserved for that port on the Flčche d’Or, I felt that I was at home. The skies had turned grey and the air was cold and there were flurries of rain along the quays, but there was a photograph of the Queen over the reception desk in our hotel, and on the windows of a brasserie I could read ‘Good Cup Of Tea. East Kent Coach Parties Welcome Here.’ The leaden gulls which hovered over the fishing boats in the leaden evening had an East Anglian air. A scarlet sign flashed over the Gare Maritime saying ‘Car Ferry’ and ‘British Railways’. It was too late that evening to search for my father’s grave (in any case the next day was his true anniversary), and so my aunt and I walked up together to the Ville Haute and strolled around the ramparts and through the small twisted streets which reminded me of Rye. In the great crypt of the cathedral an English king had been married, there were cannon balls lying there shot by the artillery of Henry VIII, and in a little square below the walls was a statue of Edward Jenner in a brown tailed-coat and brown tasselled boots. An old film of Treasure Island with Robert Newton was showing at a small cinema in a side-street not far from a club called Le Lucky where you could listen to the music of the Hearthmen. No, my father had not been buried on foreign soil, Boulogne was like a colonial town which had only recently ceased to be part of the Empire, and British Railways lingered on at the end of the quay as though it had been granted permission to stay until the evacuation was complete. Locked bathing-huts below the casino were like the last relics of the occupying troops, and the mounted statue of General San Martin on the quay might have been that of Wellington.

We had dinner in the restaurant of the Gare Maritime, after walking over the cobble-stones and across the railway lines with no one about. The pillars of the station resembled the pillars in a cathedral deserted after dark: only a train from Lyon was announced like a hymn number which no one had bothered to take down. No porter or passenger stirred on the long platforms. The British Railways office stood empty and unlighted. There was a smell everywhere of oil and weed and sea and a memory of the morning’s fish. In the restaurant we proved to be the sole diners: only two men and a dog stood at the bar and they were preparing to go. My aunt ordered soles a la Boulonnaise for both of us. ‘Perhaps my father came here the night before he died,’ I considered aloud. Ever since I had picked Rob Roy from the shelf I had thought frequently of my father, and remembering the photograph and the expression of the young girl, I believed that my aunt must have loved him too in her way. But if I were looking for sentimental memories I had come to the wrong character-a man dead was a man dead, so far as my aunt was concerned.

‘Order the wine, Henry,’ she said. ‘You know you have a morbid streak. This whole expedition is a sign of it-and the urn which you so carefully preserve. If your father had been buried at Highgate I would never have come with you. I don’t believe in pilgrimages to graves unless they serve another purpose.’ ‘What other purpose does this serve?’ I asked rather snappily. ‘I have never before been to Boulogne,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘I am always ready to visit a new place.’

‘Like Uncle Jo,’ I said, ‘you want to prolong life.’

‘Certainly I do,’ my aunt replied, ‘because I enjoy it.’

‘And how many rooms have you occupied so far?’

‘A great many,’ my aunt said cheerfully, ‘but I don’t think I have yet reached the lavatory floor.’

‘I got to go home.’ One of the men at the bar spoke in piercing English. He was a little tight and when he stooped to pat his dog he missed it completely. ‘One more for the ferry,’ his companion said. From the phrase I took it that he belonged to British Railways.

‘The bloody Maid of Kent. My wife was a maid of Kent once.’

‘But no longer, billyo, no longer.’

‘No longer. Tha’s why I have to be home at twenty-one fucking hours.’

‘She’s jealous, billyo.’

‘She’s hungry.’

‘I’ve never loved a weak man,’ my aunt said. ‘Your father wasn’t weak-he was lazy. Nothing in his opinion was really worth a fight. He wouldn’t have fought for Cleopatra herself-but he would have found a way round. Unlike Antony. It astonishes me that he ever came as far as Boulogne.’

‘Perhaps it was on business.’

‘He would have sent his partner. Now his partner-his name was William Curlew-was a weak man if ever there was one. He envied your father his little adventures-he found it hard enough to satisfy one woman. It weighed on his mind terribly, for his wife was really without fault. She was sweet, efficient, good-tempered-the fact that she was a little demanding might have been taken by another man as a virtue. Your father, who was a much more imaginative man than people usually thought or your mother realized, suggested a plan to him, for, as William had pointed out, one can’t leave a perfect woman-one has to be left. He was to write his wife anonymous letters accusing himself of infidelity. The letters would serve a fourfold purpose. They would protect his vanity, offer a reasonable explanation of his flagging attentions, crack his wife’s perfection, and might even lead eventually to divorce with his honour as a man saved (for he was determined to deny nothing). Your father composed the first letter himself;

William typed it badly on his own typewriter, and put it in the kind of yellow envelope he used for bills (that was a mistake). The letter read. “Your husband, madam, is a shameful liar and an ignoble lecher. Ask him how he spends his evenings when you are at the Women’s Institute, and how he gets through all the money he spends. What you save on the housekeeping enriches another woman’s placket.” Your father liked obsolete words-that was the influence of Walter Scott. ‘There was to be a party at the Curlews’ the evening the letter arrived. Mrs Curlew was very busy plumping cushions; she took the yellow envelope for a bill, and so she put it down on a table without looking at it. You can imagine poor William’s anxiety. I knew him well in those days, indeed your parents and I were both present at the party. Your father hoped to be in at the death, but when the time came to go, and your father couldn’t linger any longer, even on the excuse of talking a little business, the letter still remained unopened. He had to learn the details of what happened later from William. ‘Melany-that was her silly name and it sounded even sillier when attached to Curlew-was tidying up the glasses when William found the yellow envelope under an occasional table. “Is this yours, dear?” he asked and she said it was only a bill.

‘“Even a bill has to be opened,” William said and handed her the envelope. Then he went upstairs to shave. She never insisted on his shaving before dinner, but very early in their marriage she had indicated unmistakably that she preferred him at night with a smooth cheek-her skin was very delicate. (Foreigners always said that her complexion was typically English.) The bathroom door was open and William saw her put the yellow envelope down on the dressing-table still sealed. He nicked himself in three places under the strain of waiting and had to stick on little dabs of cotton wool to stop the bleeding.’ The man trailed past our table with the dog. ‘Come on. you bugger,’ he said, hauling dispiritedly on the lead.

‘Back to the maid of Kent,’ his friend teased him from the bar. I had begun to recognize the gleam in my aunt’s eyes. She had had it in Brighton, when she recounted the history of the dogs’ church, and in Paris when she told me of the affair with Monsieur Dambreuse, and in the Orient Express when she described Mr Visconti’s escape … She was deeply absorbed in her story. I am sure my father-the admirer of Walter Scott-would not have told the story of the Curlews nearly so dramatically; there would have been less dialogue and more description.

‘William,’ my aunt went on, ‘came in from the bathroom and climbed into the enormous double bed which Melany had chosen herself at Maples. In his anxiety William had not taken a book with him. He wanted the crisis to arrive. “I won’t be long, dear,” Melany said, busy with Pond’s cold cream which she preferred to any newer brand for the sake of her old-world complexion. “Was it a bad bill?” William asked.

“Bill?”

“The one you dropped.”

“Oh that. I haven’t opened it yet.”

“You’ll lose it again if you’re not careful.”

“That would be a good thing to do, wouldn’t it, with a bill?” Melany said good-humouredly, but the words belied her nature-she never kept a tradesman waiting and never allowed one to extend her credit beyond a month. Now she wiped her fingers on the Kleenex and opened the yellow envelope. The first words she read, unevenly typed, were “Your husband, madam …” “No,” she said, “not bad. Just tiresome.” And she read the letter carefully to the end-it was signed “A neighbour and well-wisher.” Then she tore it in little pieces and dropped them in her waste-paper basket. “You shouldn’t destroy a bill,” William said.

“A few shillings at the newspaper shop. I paid it this morning.” She looked at William and said, “What a good husband you’ve always been, William.” She came to the bed and kissed him and William could detect her intention. “How tired a party makes me,” he said, excusing himself weakly, with a faint yawn. “Of course, dear,” Melany said, lying down beside him without any complaint. “Happy dreams,” and then she noticed all those dabs of cotton wool. “Oh you poor dear,” she said, “you’ve cut yourself. Let your Melany make them clean,” and then and there she busied herself, for ten minutes at least, washing the wounds in chemist’s alcohol and fixing bits of Elastoplast, as though nothing important had happened. “How funny you look now,” she said, quite gay and carefree, and William told your father there was no longer any hint of danger in the kiss she planted on the end of his nose. “Dear funny William. I could forgive you anything.” It was then William gave up all hope-she was a perfect wife, uncrackably perfect, and your father used to say that the word “forgive” tolled on in William’s ears like the bell at Newgate signalling an excution.’

‘So he never escaped?’ I asked.

‘He died many years later in Melany’s arms,’ Aunt Augusta said, and we finished our apple tart in silence.

NEXT MORNING, which was just as grey as the last had been, Aunt Augusta and I climbed the long hill towards the cemetery. A shop advertised ‘Deuil en 24 heures”, and a wild boar, hung outside a butcher’s shop, dripped blood, and a notice pinned on the muzzle read, ‘Retenez vos morceaux pour jeudi,’ but Thursday meant nothing to me, and not very much to Aunt Augusta. ‘The feast of the Little Flower,’ she said, looking the date up in her missal which she had brought with her because it was a suitable occasion, ‘but a boar seems hardly suitable. Also apparently the feast of St Thomas of Hereford who died in exile in Orvieto, but I doubt if even the English have heard of him.’ Outside the gates of the Ville Haute there was a plaque commemorating the death of a ‘Hero of the Resistance’. ‘The dead of an army,’ my aunt said, ‘become automatically heroes like the dead of the Church become martyrs. I wonder about this man St Thomas. I would have thought he was very lucky to die in Orvieto rather than in Hereford. A small civilized place even today with a far, far better climate and an excellent restaurant in the Via Garibaldi.’ ‘Are you really a Roman Catholic?’ I asked my aunt with interest. She replied promptly and seriously, ‘Yes. my dear, only I just don’t believe in all the things they believe in.’

To find my father’s grave in the enormous grey cemetery would have been like finding an individual house without a street number in Camden Town. The noise of trains came up from below the hill and the smoke of coal fires from the high town blew across the maze of graves. A man from a little square house, which was like a tomb itself, offered to conduct us. I had brought a wreath of flowers, though my aunt thought my gesture a little exaggerated. ‘They will be very conspicuous,’ she said. ‘The French believe in remembering the dead once a year on the Feast of All Souls. It is tidy and convenient like Communion at Easter,’ and it is true that I saw few flowers, even immortelles, among the angels, the cherubs, the bust of a bald man like a lycee professor, and the huge tomb, which apparently contained La Famille Flageollet. An English inscription on one monument caught my eye: ‘In loving memory of my devoted son Edward Rhodes Robinson who died in Bombay where he is buried,’ but there was nothing English about his pyramid. Surely my father would have preferred an English graveyard of lichened stones with worn-out inscriptions and tags of pious verse to these shiny black made-to-last slabs which no Boulogne weather could ever erode, all with the same headlines, like copies of the same newspaper: ‘A la memoire?, ‘Id repose le corps …’ Except for a small elderly woman in black who stood with bowed head at the end of a long aisle like the solitary visitor in a provincial museum there seemed no one but ourselves in the whole heartless place. “Je me suis trompé”, our conductor said, turning sharply on his heel, and he led us back towards the grave where the old woman stood, apparently in prayer.

‘How odd! There seems to be another mourner,’ Aunt Augusta said, and sure enough, on the slab of marble lay a wreath twice as large as mine made of flowers twice as expensive from the hot-houses of the south. I laid my own beside It. The headlines were hidden: there was only part of my father’s name sticking out like an exclamation: ‘… chard Pulling’, and a date, October 2, 1923.

The little woman looked at us with astonishment. ‘Qui ętes-vous?’ she asked us.

Her accent was not quite French and my aunt replied as bluntly in English, ‘Who are you?’

‘Miss Paterson,’ the little woman replied with a hint of frightened defiance.

‘And what has this grave to do with you?’ my aunt demanded. ‘I have come here on this day for more than forty years, and I have never seen either of you here before.’

‘Have you any rights over this grave?’ my aunt asked. Something in the woman’s manner had riled her-perhaps it was her air of timid belligerence, for my aunt had little patience with weakness even when it was concealed.

The woman was cornered and showed fight. ‘I’ve never heard there are rights in a grave,’ she said.

‘A grave-like a house-has been paid for by someone.’ ‘And if a house is left abandoned for forty years, hasn’t even a stranger the right …?’

‘Who are you?’ my aunt repeated.

‘I told you. I am Miss Paterson.’

‘Did you know my brother-in-law?’

‘Your brother-in-law!’ the old lady exclaimed. She looked at my wreath, she looked at me, she looked at my aunt.

‘And this, my good woman, is Richard Pulling’s son.’

She said with dismay, ‘The family,’ as though the word meant, ‘the enemy.”

‘So you see,’ my aunt said, ‘we do have certain rights.’ I couldn’t understand my aunt’s harshness and I intervened. ‘I think it is very kind of you,’ I said, ‘to lay flowers on my father’s grave. It may seem strange to you that I have never been here before …’ ‘It is quite typical of you all,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘of you all. Your mother never even came to the funeral. I was the only one. I and the concierge of the hotel. A kind man.’ She added with tears in her eyes, ‘It was a wet wet day, and he brought his big umbrella …’

‘Then you knew my father … You were here …?’

‘He died gently gently in my arms,’ Miss Paterson said. She had a way of repeating words as though she were used to reading children’s books aloud. ‘It is very cold,’ my aunt interrupted. ‘Henry, you have laid your wreath, I shall go back to the hotel, this is not a place for prolonged conversation.’ She began to walk away: it was almost like an admission of defeat, and she tried to carry it off with disdain, like a great dane which turns its back on some small defenceless dog defiant in a corner and pretends it unworthy of its teeth. I said to Miss Paterson, ‘I must see my aunt home. Couldn’t you come and take a cup of tea with us this evening? I was only a small boy when my father died. I hardly knew him. I should have come here before, but, you know, I thought nobody cared any more about such things …’ ‘I know I am old-fashioned,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘so very old-fashioned.’

‘But you will at least have tea with us? At the Meurice?’ ‘I will come,’ Miss Paterson said with frightened dignity. ‘You must tell your aunt however-she is your aunt?-that she mustn’t take offence at me. He has been dead a long time. It is unfair of her to be jealous of me because I care so much, so much still.’

I repeated the message to my aunt exactly, and she was astonished. ‘Did she really believe me to be jealous? The only time I can remember being jealous was over Curran, and that experience taught me better. You know how little jealous I was even of Monsieur Dambreuse …’

‘You don’t have to defend yourself to me, Aunt Augusta,’ I said. ‘Defend myself? I certainly have not fallen as low as that. I am trying to explain my feelings, that is all. The woman seemed to me totally inadequate to her grief. You can’t pour a glass of wine into an after-dinner cup of coffee. She irritated me. To think that she was with your father when he died.’

‘Presumably there was a doctor, too.’

‘He wouldn’t have died if she had not been so feeble. I am convinced of that. Your father had to be shaken into action. The trouble with Richard was his appearance. He was strikingly good-looking. He never had to make an effort with a woman. And finally he was too lazy to struggle. If I had been with him I would have seen that he was alive today.’

‘Today?’

‘He would not have been much older than Mr Visconti.’

‘Be kind to her all the same, Aunt Augusta.’

‘I shall be as sweet as sugar,’ my aunt promised.

And that afternoon I could tell that she was really trying to hide her irritation at Miss Paterson’s mannerisms, of which there were many besides her habit of repeating words. She had, for example, a twitch in her right foot (the first time it happened I really thought that Aunt Augusta had kicked her), and, when she had been silent a little while and her mind wandered, her teeth began to click as though she were manipulating a pair of false dentures. We had tea in my aunt’s room, for there was no proper lounge in the square miniature skyscraper which sat between two identical others on the quay. ‘You must forgive us,’ my aunt said, ‘they have only Lipton’s Indian.’ ‘Oh, but I like Lipton’s,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘with one little little lump.’

‘Did you come via Calais?’ my aunt asked, making polite conversation. ‘We came that way yesterday. Or by the ferry?’

‘Oh no,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘you see, I live here. I have always lived here, that is to say since Richard died.’ She gave a scared glance at me and said, ‘Mr Pulling, I mean.’

‘Even during the war?’ my aunt asked with a touch of suspicion. She would have been glad I think, to have found a chink in Miss Paterson’s integrity, if only a small error of fact.

‘It was a time of some privation,’ Miss Paterson said. ‘Perhaps the bombardments seemed less terrible to me because I had my children to think of ‘Your children?’ my aunt exclaimed. ‘Surely Richard …’ ‘Oh no, no, no,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘I refer only to the children whom I taught. I taught English in the Lycee.’

‘Didn’t the Germans intern you?’

‘The people here were very good to me. I was protected. The mayor provided me with an identity card.’ Miss Paterson’s leg jumped. ‘After the war they even gave me a medal.’

‘A medal for teaching English?’ my aunt asked incredulously. ‘And other things,’ Miss Paterson said. She leant back in her chair and her teeth began to click. Her thoughts were far away.

‘Tell me about my father,’ I told her. ‘What brought him to Boulogne?’ ‘He wanted to give me a holiday,’ Miss Paterson said. ‘He was worried about my health. He said I needed sea air.’ My aunt rattled her spoon and I feared for her patience. ‘Just a day trip you know. We took the boat like you to Calais, for he wanted to show me where the burghers came from, and then we took a bus here to see the Napoleon column-he had just read his biography by Sir Walter Scott-and we found there was no boat back from Boulogne.’ ‘That came as a surprise to him, I suppose?’ my aunt asked with an irony which was obvious to me but not to Miss Paterson.

‘Yes,’ Miss Paterson said. ‘He was very apologetic for his lack of forethought. However we found two clean rooms in a little little inn up in the high town in the square by the mairie.’

‘Adjoining rooms, I assume,’ my aunt said. I couldn’t understand why she was so severe.

‘Yes,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘because I was frightened.’

‘Of what?’

‘I had never been abroad before, nor had Mr Pulling. I had to translate for both of us.’

‘You knew French?’

‘I had taken a course at the Berlitz.’

‘You mustn’t mind our interest, Miss Paterson,’ I said. ‘You see, I have never heard any details of my father’s death-my mother never spoke of it. She always shut me up when I asked questions. She told me he had died on a business trip, and somehow I always assumed that he had died at Wolverhampton-he often went to Wolverhampton.’

‘When did you meet my brother-in-law?’ Aunt Augusta asked. ‘May I pour you another cup of tea?’

‘Yes, please. A little bit weaker if it would not be a trouble to you. We met on the top of a 49 bus.’

My aunt paused with a lump of sugar in mid-air. ‘A 49 bus?’ she repeated.

‘Yes, you see, I had heard him ask for his ticket and when his destination

came he was fast asleep, so I woke him up, but it was too late. It was a request

stop. He was very grateful and came all the way to Chelsea Town Hall with me. I

had a basement room then in Oakley Street and he walked back to the house with

me. I remember it all so clearly, so clearly,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘as though it

were only yesterday. We found many things in common.’ Her foot gave a kick

again.

‘That surprises me,’ my aunt said.

‘Oh how we talked that day!’

‘What about?’

‘Mainly I think about Sir Walter Scott. I knew Marmion and little else, but he knew everything that Sir Walter had ever written. He could quote … He had a wonderful memory for poetry.’ She whispered as though to herself:

‘Where shall the traitor rest,

He the deceiver,

Who could win maiden’s breast,

Ruin and leave her?

In the last battle …’

‘And so it all began,’ my aunt interrupted in a tone of impatience. ‘And the traitor rests in Boulogne.’

Miss Paterson coiled up in her chair and kicked her foot vigorously. ‘Nothing began-in the way you mean,’ she said. ‘In the night I heard him knock on the door and call “Dolly!” ‘ ‘Dolly!’ my aunt repeated with distaste as though Dolly were an unmentionable word.

‘Yes. That was what he called me. My name is Dorothy.’

‘You had locked your door, of course.’

‘I had done no such thing. He was a man I trusted absolutely. I told him to come in. I knew he wouldn’t have woken me for any trivial reason.’ ‘Certainly I would not describe his reason as trivial,’ my aunt said, ‘go on,’ but Miss Paterson was far away again and her teeth clicked and clicked. She was gazing at something we could not see, and there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes. I put my hand on her arm and said, ‘Miss Paterson, don’t talk about it any more if it hurts you.’ I was angry with my aunt: her face looked as hard as a face stamped on a coin.

Miss Paterson looked at me and I could watch her beginning to return from that long time ago. ‘He came in,’ she said, ‘and he whispered, “Dolly, my darling,” and he fell down on the floor. I got down beside him and put his poor poor head in my lap and he never spoke again. I never knew why he came or what he meant to say to me.’

‘I can guess,’ Aunt Augusta said.

Again Miss Paterson coiled herself back in her chair and struck back. It was a sad sight to see these two old women at loggerheads over something that had happened so many years ago. ‘I hope you are right,’ Miss Paterson said. ‘I know well what you are thinking and I hope you are right. I would have done anything that he asked me without hesitation or regret, And I have never loved another man.’

‘You didn’t have the time to love him, it seems,’ my aunt said. ‘There you are quite quite wrong. Perhaps because you don’t know what love is. I loved him from the moment he got off the bus at Chelsea Town Hall, and I love him today. When he was dead I did everything for him-everything-there was no one else to help my poor dear-his wife wouldn’t come. There had to be a post-mortem, and she wrote to the authorities to bury him in Boulogne-she didn’t want his poor mutilated body. So there was only myself and the concierge …” ‘You have certainly been very constant,’ my aunt said, but the remark did not sound like a compliment.

‘No one else has ever again used that name he called me, Dolly,’ Miss Paterson said, ‘but in the war, when I had to use an alias, I let them call me Poupee.’

‘Why on earth did you have an alias?’

‘They were troubled times,’ Miss Paterson said and she began to look for her gloves.

I resented the way my aunt had behaved to Miss Paterson, and a slow flame of anger still burned in me when we went out to dinner for the second and last time in the deserted station. The gay wave-worn fishing boats lay against the jetty, each with a painted pious phrase across the bridge: ‘Dieu bénit la famille’ and ‘Dieu a bien fait’ and I wondered what comfort the mottoes brought in a strong Channel gale. There was the same smell of oil and fish, the same train from Lyon was awaited by no one, and in the restaurant there was the same disgruntled Englishman with the same companion and the same dog-he made the restaurant seem all the emptier with his presence as though there had never been a different customer.

My aunt said, ‘You are very silent, Henry.’

‘I have a lot to think about,’ I said.

‘You were quite taken by that miserable little woman,’ Aunt Augusta accused me.

‘I was touched to meet someone who loved my father.’

‘A lot of women loved him.’

‘I mean a woman who really loved him.’

‘That little sentimental creature? She doesn’t know what love is.’

‘Do you?’ I asked, letting my anger out.

‘I think I have had rather more experience of it than you,’ Aunt Augusta replied with calm and careful cruelty. It was true-I hadn’t even answered Miss Keene’s last letter. My aunt sat opposite me over her sole with an air of perfect satisfaction. She ate the shrimps that went with it one by one before she tackled the sole; she enjoyed the separate taste and she was in no hurry. Perhaps she did have reason to despise Miss Paterson. I thought of Curran and Monsieur Dambreuse and Mr Visconti-they lived in my imagination as though she had actually created them: even poor Uncle Jo struggling towards the lavatory. She was one of the life-givers. Even Miss Paterson had come to life, stung by the cruelty of her questions. Perhaps if she ever talked about me to another-I could well imagine what a story she could make out of my dahlias and my silly tenderness for Tooley and my stainless past-even I would come to some sort of life, and the character she drew, I felt sure, would be much more vivid than the real I. It was useless to complain of her cruelty. I had once read, in a book on Charles Dickens, that an author must not be attached to his characters, he must treat them without mercy. In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickens’s wife and mistress had to suffer so that Dickens could make his novels and his fortune. At least a bank manager’s money is not so tainted by egotism. Mine was not a destructive profession. A bank manager doesn’t leave a trail of the martyred behind him. Where was Curran now? Did even Wordsworth still survive?

‘Have I ever told you,’ my aunt asked, ‘of a man called Charles Pottifer? In his way he clung to a dead man as fervently as your Miss Paterson. But in his case the dead man was himself.’

‘Not tonight, Aunt Augusta,’ I pleaded. ‘My father’s death is enough of a story for one day.’

‘And she told it reasonably well,’ my aunt admitted, ‘though I think that given her opportunity I would have told it a great deal better. But I warn you-you will be sorry one day that you refused to let me tell you the story I proposed.’

‘What story?’ I asked, thinking of my father.

‘The story of Charles Pottifer, of course,’ my aunt said.

‘Another time, Aunt Augusta.’

‘You are wrong to be so confident in the existence of another time,’ my aunt replied and called for the bill so loudly that the dog barked back at her from the bar.

MY AUNT did not return with me to England by the car-ferry as I thought she intended. She told me at breakfast that she was taking a train to Paris. ‘There are things which I must settle,’ she said, and I remembered her warning of the night before and wondered-quite wrongly as it turned out-if she had a premonition of death.

‘Would you like me to go with you?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, ‘from the way you spoke to me last night I think you have had enough of my company for a while.’

Obviously I had hurt her deeply by refusing to listen to the story of the man called Charles Pottifer.

I saw her off at the station and received the coldest of cold pecks upon the cheek.

‘I didn’t mean to offend you, Aunt Augusta,’ I said.

‘You resemble your father more than your mother. He believed no story was of interest outside the pages of Walter Scott.’

‘And my mother?’ I asked quickly. Perhaps at last I was to be given a clue. ‘She tried in vain to read Rob Roy. She loved your father very dearly and was anxious to please, but Rob Roy was going too far.’ ‘Why didn’t she marry him?’

‘She hadn’t the right disposition for a life in Highgate. Will you buy me a Figaro before you go?’

When I came back from the bookstall she gave me the keys to her apartment.

‘If I am away a long time,’ she said, ‘I may want you to send me something or just to look in to see that all is well. I will write to the landlord and tell him you have the keys.’

I returned to London on the car-ferry. Two days before, from the window of the train, I had watched a golden England spread beside the line-now the picture was very different: England lay damp and cold, as grey as the graveyard, while the train lagged slowly from Dover Town towards Charing Cross under the drenching rain. One window could not be closed properly and a little pool of water collected at the side of the compartment; the heating had not been turned on. In the opposite corner a woman sneezed continuously while I tried to read the Daily Telegraph. There was a threatened engineering strike, and the car industry was menaced by a stoppage of cleaners in some key factory which turned out windscreen-wipers. Cars in all the BMC factories waited without wipers on the production line. Export figures were down and so was the pound. I came at last beyond the Court News to the Obituaries, but there was little of interest to read in that column. Somebody called Sir Oswald Newman had died at the age of seventy-two, he was the star death in a poor programme. He had been chief arbitrator in a building dispute in the 1950’s after retiring as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Works. He had married Rosa Urquhart in 1928, by whom he had three sons, and she survived him. His eldest was now Secretary of the International Federation of Thermofactors and an OBE. I thought of my father whispering, ‘Dolly, my darling,’ before he died on the floor of the auberge in the Haute Ville, too soon to meet Sir Oswald Newman during the building dispute, which would probably not have concerned him anyway. He always kept on good terms with his men-so my mother had told me. Laziness and good nature often go together. There were always Christmas bonuses, and he was never in the mood to fight over the rise of a penny an hour. When I looked out of the window it was not Sir Oswald Newman’s England I saw, but my father’s grave in the smoky rain and Miss Paterson standing before it in prayer, and I envied him his inexplicable quality of drawing women’s love. Had Rosa Newman so loved Sir Oswald and her son, the QBE? I let myself into the house. I had been away two nights, but like a possessive woman it had the histrionic air of being abandoned. Dust collected quickly in autumn even with the windows closed. I knew the routine that I would certainly follow: a telephone call to Chicken, a visit to the dahlias if the rain stopped. Perhaps Major Charge might address a remark to me over the hedge. ‘Dolly, my darling,’ my father whispered, dying in the small hotel, as I lay in the Highgate nursery with a night-light beside the bed to drive away the fears which always gathered after my mother-or was it my stepmother?-had pecked me goodnight. I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert. A month passed, and no news came to me from my aunt. I rang several times, but there was never any reply. I tried to interest myself in a novel of Thackeray’s, but it lacked the immediacy of my aunt’s stories. As she had foreseen I even regretted having prevented her telling me the story of Charles Pottifer. I found myself living now, when I lay awake or waited in the kitchen for the kettle to boil, or when I let The Newcomes fall shut on my lap, with memories of Curran, Monsieur Dambreuse and Mr Visconti. They peopled my loneliness. When six weeks went by without news I became anxious, in case, like my father, she had died in a foreign land. I even telephoned to the St James and Albany-it was the first time since I left the bank that I had telephoned abroad. I was nervous of my poor French when I spoke into a receiver, as though the errors might be magnified by the microphone.

The receptionist told me that my aunt was no longer there-she had left three weeks before for Cherbourg.

‘Cherbourg?’

‘The boat-train,’ the receptionist said and the line was cut before I could ask him what boat.

I feared then that my aunt had left me for good. She had come into my life only to disturb it. I had lost the taste for dahlias. When weeds swarmed up I was tempted to let them grow. Once I even consented, as a possible relief to my tedium, to attend, on Major Charge’s invitation, a political meeting: it turned out to be a meeting of British Empire Loyalists, and I supposed then that it was Major Charge who had given the organization my address for their pamphlets. I saw several of my old clients there, including the admiral, and I was glad for the first time that I was in retirement. A bank manager is not expected to have strong political preferences, particularly eccentric ones, and how quickly the gossip of my presence would have gone around Southwood. Now, if my old clients looked at me at all, it was with a puzzled expression as though they were uncertain when it was we had met and on what occasion. Like a waiter on his day-off I passed virtually unrecognized. It was an odd feeling for one who had been so much in the centre of Southwood life. As I went upstairs to bed I felt myself to be a ghost returning home, transparent as water. Curran was more alive than I was. I was almost surprised to see that my image was visible in the glass.

Perhaps it was to prove the reality of my existence that I began a letter to Miss Keene. I made several drafts before I was satisfied with what I wrote, and the letter I am copying now differs in many small details from the one I dispatched. ‘My dear Miss Keene,’ I can read in the draft, but I cut out the ‘My’ in the final version, for it seemed to presume an intimacy which she had never acknowledged and which I had never claimed. ‘Dear Miss Keene, I am truly distressed that you don’t feel properly settled yet in your new home at Koffiefontein, though of course I cannot help feeling a little glad, (I altered the T to a ‘we’ in later drafts) that your thoughts still rest sometimes on our quiet life here in Southwood. I have never known so good a friend as your father, and my thoughts often go back to those pleasant evenings when Sir Alfred sat under the Van de Velde dispensing hospitality, and you sat sewing while he and I finished the wine.’ (That last phrase I cut from the next draft-there was too much emotion in it barely concealed.) ‘I have been leading a rather unusual life the last month, much of it in the company of my aunt of whom I wrote to you. We have even gone as far afield together as Istanbul where I was a good deal disappointed with the famed Santa Sophia. I can say to you-as I couldn’t say to my aunt-that I much prefer our own St John’s Church for a religious atmosphere, and I am glad that the vicar doesn’t feel it necessary to summon the faithful to prayer by a gramophone record in a minaret. At the beginning of October we paid a visit together to my father’s grave. I don’t think I ever told you (indeed I only learnt of it recently myself) that he died and was buried in Boulogne by a strange concatenation of circumstances too long to write here. How I wish you were in Southwood that I might tell you of them.’ That sentence too I thought it prudent to eliminate. ‘I am reading The Newcomes at the moment, but I don’t enjoy it as I enjoyed Esmond. Perhaps that is the romantic in me. I open Palgrave too from time to time and read over my old favourites.’ I went on with a sense of hypocrisy: ‘My books are a good antidote to foreign travel and reinforce the sense of the England I love, but sometimes I wonder whether that England exists still beyond my garden hedge or further than Church Road. Then I think how much harder it must be for you in Koffiefontein to keep the taste of the past. The future here seems to me to have no taste at all: it is like a meal on a menu, which serves only to kill the appetite. If you ever come back to England-‘but that was a sentence I never finished, and I can’t remember now what I intended to write.

Christmas approached with no news of my aunt, not even by the medium of a Christmas card. A card, of course, arrived from Koffiefontein, a rather unlikely card with an old church seen across an acre of snow, and a comic one from Major Charge which showed goldfish in a bowl being fed by Father Christmas; it was delivered by hand to save the stamp. The local store sent me a tear-off calendar with a different treasure of British art for each month, the colours bright and shiny as though they had been washed in Omo, and on December 23 the postman brought a large envelope which when I opened it at breakfast shed a lot of silvery tinsel into my plate, so that I couldn’t finish my marmalade. The tinsel came from an Eiffel Tower which Father Christmas was climbing with his sack over his shoulder. Under the printed Meilleurs Voeux was only one name, written in block capitals: ‘Wordsworth’. He must have seen my aunt in Paris, for how else could he have obtained my address? At the bank I had always used the official Christmas cards to send to my best clients, with the bank’s coat of arms stamped on the cover and inside a picture of the main office in Cheapside or a photograph of the board of directors. Now that I had retired there were few people to whom I posted cards: Miss Keene, of course, Major Charge perforce. I sent one also to my doctor, my dentist, to the vicar of St John’s and my former chief cashier who had become manager of a branch in Nottingham. A year before my mother had come to me for Christmas dinner, and without the aid of Chicken I had cooked a turkey quite successfully under her directions, then we had sat almost silent, like strangers in a restaurant-car, both of us feeling that we had eaten too much, until she left at ten. Afterwards I had, as was my habit, attended the midnight service with carols at St John’s.

This year, since I had no wish to cook a meal for myself alone, I booked a table for dinner at the Abbey Restaurant off Latimer Road. It proved a mistake. I had not realized they were mounting a special menu with turkey and plum pudding to attract the lonely and the nostalgic from all over Southwood. Before I left home I had rung my aunt’s number in the vain hope that she might have returned just in time for Christmas, but the bell tolled and tolled in the empty flat, and I could imagine the noise setting all the Venetian glasses atinkle. The first person I saw when I came into the restaurant, which was a very small one with heavy beams and stained-glass windows and a piece of mistletoe in an undangerous position over the toilet, was the admiral sitting all alone. He had obviously dined early and he wore a scarlet paper crown-a torn cracker lay on his plate with the remains of plum pudding. I bowed to him and he said angrily, ‘Who are you?’ At a table beyond him I could see Major Charge, who was frowning over what looked like a political pamphlet.

‘I am Pulling,’ I said.

‘Pulling?’

‘Late of the bank.’

There was an angry flush below the red paper hat, and an empty bottle of Chianti stood on the table. I added, ‘Happy Christmas, Admiral.’ ‘Good God, man,’ he said, ‘haven’t you read the news?’ I managed to get by, though the channel between the tables was very narrow, and found to my distress that my table had been reserved next to Major Charge’s. ‘Good evening, Major,’ I said. I began to wonder whether I was the only civilian in the place.

‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ Major Charge said.

‘Of course … any help … I am afraid I no longer keep up with the stock market…’

‘Who’s talking about the stock market? You don’t suppose I’d have anything to do with the City? They’ve sold this country down the river. I’m talking about my fish.’

Miss Truman interrupted us to take my order. Perhaps to encourage her customers she was wearing a paper cap, vaguely military in shape but yellow in colour. She was a large boisterous woman who liked to be called Peter; the little restaurant had always seemed too small to contain her and her partner as well-a woman named Nancy who was timid and retiring and perhaps for that reason showed herself only occasionally framed at the service hatch. Unable to look elsewhere, I made some complimentary reference to her cap. ‘Like the old days,’ she said, looking pleased, and I remembered that she had been an officer in the women’s navy.

How ambiguous my feelings were. I realized in those moments how deep was the disturbance my aunt had caused. This was my familiar world-the little local world of ageing people to which Miss Keene longed to return, where one read of danger only in the newspapers and the deepest change to be expected was a change of government and the biggest scandal-I could remember one defecting clerk who had lost too much money at the Earl’s Court greyhound track. It was more my country than England could be, for I had never seen the satanic mills or visited the northern wastes, and in my way I had been happy here; yet I was looking at Peter (Miss Truman) with an ironic eye as though I had borrowed my aunt’s vision and saw with her eyes. Beyond Latimer Road there stretched another world-the world of Wordsworth and Curran and Monsieur Dambreuse and Colonel Hakim and the mysterious Mr Visconti who had dressed up as a monsignor to escape the Allied troops, yes, and of my father, too, saying ‘Dolly darling’ to Miss Paterson with his last breath on the auberge floor and gaining a life-long devotion by dying in her arms. To whom now could I apply for a visa to that land with my aunt gone?

‘Will you take the set meal, Mr Pulling?’

‘I don’t think I can manage the plum pudding.’

‘Nancy has made some smashing mince pies.’

‘Perhaps one,” I said, ‘because it’s Christmas.’

Miss Truman rolled away with a Tom Bowling stride and I turned to Major Charge. ‘You were saying?’

‘I’m going away for the New Year. To a study group at Chesham. I’ve got to board my fish. Can’t trust them with the daily. I thought of Peter-but she’s a woman too, in a way. You can see how she feeds us. Any excuse to pile it on. She would probably do the same with the little buggers.’

‘You want me to look after your fish?’

‘I looked after your dahlias.’

And starved them of water, I thought, but I had to say, ‘Yes, of course, I will.’

‘I’ll bring you the food. Just one teaspoonful once a day. Don’t pay any attention if they come guzzling at the glass. They don’t know what’s good for them.’

‘I’ll harden my heart,’ I said. I waved away the turtle soup-it was over-familiar. Too often I had opened a bottle of it when I had no appetite even for eggs. I asked, ‘What kind of a study group?’

‘The problems of empire,’ he replied, staring at me with eyes enlarged and angry as though I had already made some foolish or unsympathetic reply. ‘I thought we had got rid of all those.’

‘A temporary failure of nerve,’ he snapped and bayoneted his turkey. I would certainly have preferred him as a client to Curran. He would never have bothered me about overdrafts: he lived carefully within the limits of his pension: he was an honest man even if I found his ideas repulsive, and then I thought of Mr Visconti dancing with my aunt in the reception room of the brothel behind the Messaggero after swindling the Vatican and the King of Saudi Arabia and leaving a wide trail of damage behind him in the banks of Italy. Was the secret of lasting youth known only to the criminal mind? ‘A man’s been looking for you,’ Major Charge said after a long silence. The admiral got up from his table and made unsteadily for the door. He was still wearing his paper crown, but when his fingers were already on the handle, he remembered it and scrunched it into a ball. ‘What man?’ ‘You’d gone to the post office-or so I imagine. At any rate you turned right not left at the bottom of Southwood Road.’

‘What did he want?’

‘He didn’t tell me. He rang and knocked and rang and knocked, making the hell of a din. Even the fish were scared, poor little buggers. There were two of them. I thought I ought to speak to them before they disturbed the whole street.’

I don’t know why, but I thought at that moment of Wordsworth, a possible message from my aunt … ‘Was he black?’ I asked.

‘Black? What an extraordinary question. Of course he wasn’t.’

‘He didn’t give a name?’

‘Neither of them did. He asked where he could find you, but I had no idea you were planning to come here. You weren’t here last year or the year before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before. All I could tell him was that I knew you went to the carol service at St John’s.’

‘I wonder who it could be,’ I said.

I had a deep conviction that I was about to find myself again in Aunt Augusta’s world, and my pulse beat with an irrational sense of pleasure. When Miss Truman brought me two mince pies I accepted them both as though I needed them to sustain me for a long voyage. I even helped myself liberally to brandy butter.

‘I used real Remy Martin,’ Miss Truman said. ‘You haven’t pulled your cracker.’

‘Pull it with me, Peter,’ I said with daring. She had a strong wrist, but I got the winning end, and a small plastic object rolled on to the floor. I was glad to see that it was not a hat. Major Charge leapt at it and gave a snort of laughter as merciless as a nose-blowing. He put it to his mouth and breathed hard, making a sound like a raspberry. Then I saw that it was shaped like a tiny po with a whistle in the handle.

‘Lower-deck humour,’ Miss Truman said in a kindly way.

‘It’s the festive season,’ Major Charge said. He blew another raspberry. ‘Hark! the herald-angels sing,’ he said in a tone of savagery, as though he were taking some kind of revenge on Christmas Eve and all its impedimenta of holy families and mangers and wise men, a revenge on love, a revenge for some deep disappointment.

I arrived at St John’s Church by a quarter past eleven. The service always began at half past eleven so as to distinguish it from the Roman Catholic Midnight Mass. I had begun to attend when I first became the bank manager, for it gave me a stable family air if I were seen at the service, and though, unlike Aunt Augusta, I have no religious convictions, I could be there without hypocrisy since I have always enjoyed the more poetic aspects of Christianity. Christmas, it seems to me, is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

For years now I have always sat in the same pew below a stained-glass window which was dedicated in 1887 to the memory of Councillor Trumbull. It shows Christ surrounded by children as he sits in the shade of a very green tree-the text, of course, is ‘Suffer little children’. Councillor Trumbull was responsible for building the square redbrick block with barred windows in Cranmer Road, which, once an orphanage, is now a detention centre for juvenile delinquents.

The carol service began with a gentler version than Major Charge’s of ‘Hark! the Herald-Angels sing’, and then we proceeded to the old favourite, ‘Good King Wenceslas’.

‘Deep and crisp and even’ the high female voices sang from the gallery-it has always seemed to me a very beautiful line, conveying the landscape of a small country England with no crowds, no traffic, to soil the snow, when even the royal palace stood among the silent and untrodden fields. ‘No white Christmas, sir, this year,’ a voice whispered in my ear from the pew behind, and turning I saw Detective-Sergeant Sparrow. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘If you can spare me a moment after the service, sir,’ he replied, and raising his prayer-book he sang in a very fine baritone voice:

‘Though the frost was cru-el,

When a poor man hove in sight

(perhaps Detective-Sergeant Sparrow like Miss Truman had once been in the Navy)

Gathering winter fu-u-el.’

I looked back at his companion. He was smartly dressed with a lean legal face. He wore a dark grey overcoat and carried an umbrella crooked for safety over his arm-I wondered what he would do with it or with the sharp crease to his trousers when the time came for him to kneel. He didn’t seem as much at home in the church as Detective-Sergeant Sparrow. He was not singing and I doubt whether he was praying.

‘Mark my footsteps, good my page,’

the sergeant sang lustily,

‘Tread thou in them boldly,’

and the voices in the gallery rose ardently to the unexpected competition from below.

At last the proper service began, and I was glad when the Athanasian Creed, which they invariably inflict on us at Christmas, was safely over. ‘As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated: but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.’ (Sergeant Sparrow coughed several times in the course of it.)

I intended-it is always my custom at Christmas-to go to Communion. The Anglican Church is not exclusive: Communion is a commemoration service, and I had as much right to commemorate a beautiful legend as any true believer has. The vicar was saying clearly, while the congregation buzzed ambiguously to disguise the fact that they had forgotten the words: ‘We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, have committed …’ I noticed that the detective-sergeant, perhaps from professional prudence, did not join in this plea of guilty. ‘We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings …’ I had never before noticed how the prayer sounded like the words of an old lag addressing the Bench with a plea for mercy. The presence of Detective-Sergeant Sparrow seemed to alter the whole tone of the service. When I stepped into the nave to go up to the altar I heard an outburst of argumentative whispers in the pew behind me and the words, ‘You, Sparrow,’ spoken very forcibly, so that I was not surprised when I saw that it was Detective-Sergeant Sparrow who knelt as my neighbour at the communion rail. Perhaps they had been uncertain whether I might not take advantage of the Communion to escape through a side-door.

When his turn with the chalice came Detective-Sergeant Sparrow took a very long swig, and I noticed afterwards that more wine had to be fetched before the Communion was finished. When I returned to my seat, the detective-sergeant trod on my heels, and in the pew behind me the whispers broke out again. ‘My throat’s like a grater,’ I heard the sergeant say. I suppose he was apologizing for his performance with the chalice.

At the end of the service they stood and waited for me at the church door, and Sergeant Sparrow introduced his companion. ‘Detective-Inspector Woodrow,’ he said, ‘Mr Pulling.’ He added with awe in a lower voice, ‘Inspector Woodrow belongs to the Special Branch.’

I shook hands after a little hesitation on both sides. “We were wondering,

sir, if you would mind assisting us again,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘I told Inspector Woodrow how helpful you had been once before over that jar of pot.’ ‘I suppose you are referring to my mother’s urn,’ I replied with as much coldness as I could muster on Christmas morning.

The congregation poured out on either side. I saw the admiral go by. In his breast-pocket he had a patch of scarlet, which I suppose was the paper cap serving as a handkerchief. ‘They told us at the Crown and Anchor,’ Inspector Woodrow said to me in a stiff unfriendly tone, ‘that you have your aunt’s keys.’ ‘We like to do things nicely,’ Sergeant Sparrow explained, ‘with the free consent of all parties concerned. It goes down so much better in court.’ ‘What exactly do you want?’ I asked. ‘A happy Christmas, Mr Pulling.’ The vicar put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Have I the pleasure of meeting two new parishioners?’

‘Mr Sparrow, Mr Woodrow, the vicar,’ I said. ‘I hope you all enjoyed our carol service.’ ‘Indeed I did,’ Sergeant Sparrow said heartily. ‘If there’s one thing I like it’s a good tune with words I can understand.’ ‘Just a moment while I find copies of our parish magazine. Quite a bumper Christmas number.’ The vicar dived back Into the dark church looking like a ghost in his surplice. ‘You understand, sir,’ Sergeant Sparrow said, ‘we could have easily got a search-warrant and made a forcible entry, but besides ruining a good lock-it’s a Chubb, very prudent of Miss Bertram-it looks bad in evidence, you understand what I mean, for the good lady. If it comes to evidence. Which we hope will not be the case.’

‘But what on earth are you looking for? Not pot again surely?’ Inspector Woodrow said in a grave hangman’s tone, ‘We are pursuing an enquiry at the request of Interpol.’

The vicar came hurrying back to us waving copies of the parish magazine. He said, ‘If you would both just turn to the last page you will find a tear-out subscription form for the coming year. Mr Pulling already subscribes.’ ‘Thank you, thank you, I am sure,’ Detective-Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘I haven’t a pen with me at the moment, but just leave it with me. A very tasteful and original design-all that holly and the birds and gravestones.’ Inspector Woodrow took his copy with evident reluctance. He held it in front of him as a witness holds a Bible in court, not quite certain what to do with it.

‘It’s a very swinging number,’ the vicar said. ‘Oh, forgive me. Poor lady. I’ll be back in one sec.’ He pursued an elderly lady down the path to Latimer Road calling, ‘Mrs Brewster, Mrs Brewster.’

‘I think before he returns,’ Inspector Woodrow said, ‘we had better go somewhere and discuss things.’

Sergeant Sparrow had already opened the parish magazine and was reading it with absorption.

‘You can come home with me,’ I said.

‘I would prefer to go to Miss Bertram’s with no further delay. We can explain matters in the car.’

‘Why do you want to go to my aunt’s flat?’

‘I’ve told you. There has been an enquiry from Interpol. We don’t want to disturb a magistrate on Christmas night. You are next of kin. Your aunt by giving you her keys has left the flat in your care …’

‘Has something happened to my aunt?’

‘It is not impossible.’ He was never satisfied unless he made four words serve for one. He said sharply, ‘The vicar is coming back … For God’s sake, Sparrow, pay attention.’

‘Now I hope you won’t either of you forget your subscription,’ the vicar said. ‘It will go to a good cause. We are furnishing a Children’s Corner in time for Easter. I would have preferred to call it a chapel, but we have some old Protestant battle-axes in Southwood. I’ll let you into a very deep secret. I haven’t even told my committee. The other day I obtained in Portobello Road an original drawing of Mabel Lucy Atwell’s. We shall unveil it at Easter, and I am wondering if we couldn’t persuade Prince Andrew …’ ‘I’m afraid, Vicar, we shall have to go,’ Inspector Woodrow said, ‘but I hope your Corner will be a great success.’ It was beginning to rain. He looked at his umbrella, but he didn’t open it. Perhaps he was not confident that the neat folds could ever be properly reproduced.

‘I will be calling on you both one day very soon,’ the vicar said, ‘when I have your addresses on the subscription form.’ ‘Sparrow!’ Inspector Woodrow spoke quite sharply. Sparrow closed the parish magazine with reluctance and followed us at the run because of the rain. As he sat down beside Woodrow in the driver’s seat, he explained apologetically, ‘There’s a story called Who’s Guilty? I thought it might be a murder story-I like a good murder story-but it was only about an old lady who was unkind to a pop singer. You can’t tell anything from titles nowadays.’

‘Now, Mr Pulling,’ Inspector Woodrow said, ‘when did you last see your aunt?’

The phrase sounded vaguely familiar. ‘Some weeks-months-ago. In Boulogne.

Why?’ ‘You travel about a great deal with her, don’t you?’ ‘Well …’

‘When did you last hear from her?’

‘I’ve told you-Boulogne. Do I have to answer these questions?’ ‘You have your constitutional rights,’ Sergeant Sparrow began, ‘like any citizen. Duties too of course. A voluntary statement always has a better sound in court. The court takes into account …’

‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, Sparrow,’ Inspector Woodrow said. ‘Aren’t you surprised, Mr Pulling, that you’ve heard nothing from your aunt since Boulogne?’

‘There is nothing about my aunt which surprises me.’

‘You aren’t anxious-in case something might have happened to her?’

‘Should I be?’

‘She has kept some very queer company. Have you ever heard of a Mr Visconti?’

‘The name,’ I said, ‘is somehow familiar.’

‘A war criminal,’ Detective-Sergeant Sparrow added unwisely.

‘Please keep your eye on the road, Sparrow,’ the inspector said.

‘General Abdul-you’ve heard of General Abdul, I presume?’

‘… Perhaps, yes, I seem to know the name.’

‘You were with your aunt in Istanbul some time ago. You arrived by train and you were expelled after a few hours. You saw a Colonel Hakim.’ ‘I saw some police officer or other certainly. An absurd mistake.’

‘General Abdul made a statement before he died.’

‘Died? Poor fellow. I didn’t know. I can’t see how his statement can concern me.’

‘Or your aunt?’

‘I’m not my aunt’s keeper.’

‘The statement concerned Mr Visconti. Interpol has circulated the details. Until now we had always assumed that Mr Visconti was dead. We had written him off.’

‘By the way,’ I said, ‘before we go any further, I must tell you that I haven’t got my aunt’s keys with me.’

‘I had hardly expected that. I wanted only your permission to enter. I assure you that we’ll do no damage.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t allow it. The flat is in my charge.’

‘It would look so much better if it ever came to a jury, Mr Pulling,’ Sparrow began, but the inspector interrupted him. ‘Sparrow. Take the next turning on the left. We will take Mr Pulling home.’

‘You can call on me after Christmas,’ I said, ‘that is, if you have a search-warrant.’

I HAD EXPECTED the inspector and Detective-Sergeant Sparrow to come and see me, but they didn’t even telephone. A picture postcard turned up unexpectedly from Tooley. It was the view of a rather ugly temple in Katmandu and she had written on it, ‘I am on a marvellous trip. Love Tooley.’ I had quite forgotten that I had given her my address. There was no reference to Christmas (the season, I suppose, had passed unnoticed in Nepal), and I felt the more proud of her casual remembrance.

When Boxing Day was over I drove to the Crown and Anchor a little before closing time in the afternoon. I wanted to see the flat in case the inspector turned up with his search-warrant. If there were any discreditable remnants of Wordsworth still lying about the place I wanted to remove them, and I carried a small weekend case with me for the purpose. All my working life I had been strictly loyal to one establishment, the bank, but my loyalty now was drawn in quite another direction. Loyalty to a person inevitably entails loyalty to all the imperfections of a human being, even to the chicanery and immorality from which my aunt was not entirely free. I wondered whether she had ever forged a cheque or robbed a bank, and I smiled at the thought with the tenderness I might have shown in the past to a small eccentricity.

When I reached the Crown and Anchor I looked cautiously in at the window of the saloon bar. Why cautiously? I had every right to be there-it was still opening time. The day was grey with a threat of snow and the customers were all pressing against the bar to get their last refill before three o’clock. I could see the back of the girl, who was still in jodhpurs, and a large hairy hand laid against it. ‘Another double,’ ‘Pint of best bitter,’ ‘Double pink.’ The clock stood at two minutes to three. It was as though they were whipping up their horses on the last straight before the winning post, and there was a great deal of irregular crowding. I found the right key to open the side-door and climbed the stairs. On the second landing I sat down for a moment on my aunt’s sofa. I felt as illicit as a burglar and I listened for footsteps, but of course there was only the buzz and murmur of the bar.

When I opened the door of the flat I found everything in deep darkness. I set an occasional table rocking in the hall and something Venetian tinkled into fragments on the floor. When I drew the curtains the Venetian glasses had no glitter-they had gone dead like unused pearls. There was a scurf of correspondence on the floor among the broken glass, but it consisted mainly of circulars and I didn’t bother to examine them for the moment. I went into my aunt’s bedroom with a sense of shame-yet hadn’t she asked me to see that all was in order? I remembered how meticulously Colonel Hakim had explored the hotel room and how easily he had been outwitted, but I could see no candles anywhere, except in the kitchen where they were of a normal size and weight-presumably a genuine precaution against an electric failure.

In Wordsworth’s room the bed had been stripped and the hideous Walt Disney figures had all been put into drawers. The only decoration left was a framed photograph of Freetown harbour which showed market women in bright dresses descending some old steps with baskets on their heads towards the waterfront. I hadn’t noticed it when I came before-perhaps my aunt had hung it there in memory of Wordsworth.

I returned to the sitting-room and began to go through the post. One day my aunt might send me a forwarding address, but in any case I wanted to save anything remotely personal from the scrutiny of Woodrow and Sparrow if they came. My old acquaintance Omo had written, and there were various bills from a laundry, a wine-merchant’s, a grocer’s. I was surprised not to find a bank statement, but remembering the gold brick and the suitcase stuffed with notes, I thought that perhaps my aunt preferred to keep her resources liquid. In that case it seemed to me wise to take a closer look among the dresses she had left behind, for it would be dangerous to leave cash about in the empty flat. Then among the bills I came on something which interested me-a picture postcard from Panama showing a French liner on a very blue sea. The card was written in French, in a tiny economic script to take full advantage of the small space. The writer signed himself with the initials A.D. and he wrote, so far as I could make out, what a concours de circonstances miraculeux it had been to find my aunt on the ship after all these years of a triste séparation and what a calamity it was that she had left the boat before the end of the cruise and not given him a longer chance to live over again the memories they shared. After her departure A.D.’s lumbago had taken a turn for the worse and the gout had revived in his right toe.

Could this possibly, I wondered, be Monsieur Dambreuse, the gallant lover who had kept two mistresses in the same hotel ? If he were alive, then perhaps Curran was alive too. It was as though my aunt’s crooked world were destined to a kind of immortality-only my poor father lay certainly dead in the smoke and rain of Boulogne. I admit that a pang of jealousy struck me because on this voyage I had not been my aunt’s companion. It was to others that she now recounted her stories.

‘Forgive us coming in without ringing, Mr Pulling,’ said Detective-Sergeant Sparrow. He stood back to allow Inspector Woodrow to precede him according to protocol into the sitting-room. The inspector was carrying his umbrella which looked as if it hadn’t been opened since I had seen him last. ‘Good afternoon,’ Inspector Woodrow said stiffly. ‘It is just as well we have found you here.’

‘The door being open …’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘I have a search-warrant,’ Inspector Woodrow told me before I could ask him, and he held it out for my inspection. ‘All the same we prefer a member of the family to be present at a search.’

‘Not wishing to make a commotion,’ Sergeant Sparrow said, ‘which would be disagreeable to all, we were waiting in our car across the street till the manager closed the bar, but then seeing you come in, we thought we could do things on the quiet without even the manager knowing. Much nicer for your aunt because there would have been a lot of gossip in the bar tonight, you can be sure of that. You can’t trust a barman not to talk to his locals. It’s like husband and wife.’

While he spoke the inspector was busy examining the room. ‘Looking at her mail, eh?’ the sergeant asked me. He took the card out of my hand and said, ‘Panama. Signed A.D. Now you wouldn’t have an idea who A.D. is?’

‘No.’

‘You see, it might be an alias. Interpol doesn’t get much co-operation in Panama,’ the sergeant said, ‘except in the American zone.’ ‘Keep the card, Sparrow,’ the inspector said, ‘nonetheless.’

‘What have you got against my aunt?’

‘You know, sir, we err on the side of kindness,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘We could have charged her over that cannabis affair, but seeing what an old lady she was and the coloured man taking off to Paris like that, we let her be. The case wouldn’t have stood up well in court anyway. Of course we didn’t know a thing then about this undesirable connection of hers.’ ‘What connection?’

I wondered if they had arranged their two parts beforehand: the sergeant being told to keep me occupied while the inspector searched the flat, as he was now doing.

‘This man Visconti, sir. An Italian as you might surmise with a name like that. He’s a viper.’

‘All this glass,’ the inspector said. ‘Curious stuff. It’s like a museum.’ ‘Venetian glass. My aunt worked once in Venice. I expect a lot were gifts-from her clients.’

‘Very valuable? Collectors’ pieces?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

‘Works of art?’

‘It’s a matter of taste,’ I said.

‘Miss Bertram knew a lot about art, I daresay. Any pictures?’

‘I don’t think so. Only a photo of Freetown in the spare room.’

‘Why Freetown?’

‘Wordsworth came from there.’

‘Who’s Wordsworth?’

‘The black valet,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘The one who took off to France when we found the pot.’

They trailed from room to room and I followed them. I thought that Woodrow was less thorough in his search than Colonel Hakim. I had the impression that he expected nothing and was only anxious to make a formal report to Interpol that every effort had been made. Every now and then he tossed me a question without looking round. ‘Has your aunt ever mentioned this fellow Visconti?’ ‘Oh yes, many times.’

‘Is he alive, would you say?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Any idea if they are still in contact?’

‘I wouldn’t think so.’

‘The old viper would be over eighty by now,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘Nearer ninety, I’d guess.’

‘It seems a bit late to be chasing him even if he is alive,’ I said. We had left my aunt’s room and entered Wordsworth’s. ‘That’s one of the troubles of Interpol,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘Too many files. It’s not real police work they do. Not one of them has ever been on the beat. It’s a Civil Service. Like Somerset House.’

‘They do their duty, Sparrow,’ Woodrow said. He took down the photo of Freetown harbour and turned it over. Then he hung it up again. ‘It’s a good-looking frame,’ he said. ‘Cost more than the photograph.’ ‘Italian too from the look of it,’ I said, ‘like the glass.’ ‘Perhaps given her by the man Visconti?’ Sergeant Sparrow asked.

‘There’s no indication on the back,’ the inspector said. ‘I had hoped for an inscription. Interpol haven’t even a specimen of his signature-leave alone finger-prints.’ He consulted a piece of paper.

‘Have you ever heard your aunt mention any of these names-Tiberio Titi?’

‘No.’

‘Stradano? Passerati? Cossa?’

‘She’s never spoken to me very much about her Italian friends.’

‘These weren’t friends,’ Inspector Woodrow said. ‘Leonardo da Vinci?’

‘No.’

He began to go through the rooms all over again, but I could tell that it was only for form’s sake. At the door he gave me a telephone number. ‘If you hear from your aunt,’ he said, ‘if you ever do, please ring us at once.

‘I promise nothing.’

‘We only want to ask her a few questions,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘There’s no charge against her.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘It is even possible,’ Inspector Woodrow said, ‘that she might be in serious personal danger. From her unfortunate associations.’ ‘Particularly from that viper Visconti,’ Sergeant Sparrow chimed in.

‘Why do you keep on calling him a viper?’

Sergeant Sparrow said, ‘It’s the only description Interpol has given us. They haven’t so much as a passport photo. But he was once described as a viper by the Chief of Police in Rome in 1945. All their war records were destroyed, the chief’s dead, and we don’t know now whether viper was a physical description or what you might call a moral judgement.’

‘At least,’ the inspector said, ‘we now have a postcard from Panama.’

‘It’s something for the files,’ Detective-Sergeant Sparrow explained to me. When I double-locked the door and followed them, I was left with the sad impression that my aunt might be dead and the most interesting part of my life might be over. I had waited a long while for it to arrive, and it had not lasted very long.

WHILE THE SHIP was tugged out into the yellow tidal rush and the untidy skyscrapers and the castellated customs house jerked away, as though they rather than the ship were at the end of the rope, I thought of that distant day’s depression and of how wrong my fears had proved. It was eight on a July morning and the sea-birds wailed like the cats in Latimer Road and the clouds were heavy with coming rain. There was one break of sunlight over La Plata which gave the dull river a single silver streak, but the brightest spot in the sombre scape of water and shore was the flames from gas pipes flapping against the black sky. There were four days ahead of me, up the Plata, the Parana and the Paraguay, before I joined my aunt, and I left the Argentine winter for my overheated cabin and began to hang up my clothes and arrange my books and papers into a semblance of home.

More than half a year passed after my encounter with the detectives before I received any news of my aunt. I had become convinced of her death by that time, and once in a dream I was badly frightened by a creature crawling across the floor towards me with broken legs which swung like a snake’s tail. It was going to pull me down within reach of its teeth, and I was paralysed with terror like a bird before a snake. When I woke I remembered Mr Visconti, though I believe it is a cobra and not a viper which is supposed to paralyse birds. During that empty time I received one more letter from Miss Keene. She wrote in her own hand, for a clumsy servant had broken the keyboard of her typewriter. ‘I was just going to write,’ she said, ‘how stupid and clumsy these blacks are, and then I remembered how you and my father had discussed racialism one night at dinner and I felt as though I were betraying our old house in Southwood and the companionship of those days. Sometimes I fear that I am going to be quite assimilated. In Koffiefontein the Prime Minister no longer seems the monster we thought him at home: indeed he’s criticized here sometimes as an old-fashioned liberal. I find myself when I meet a tourist from England explaining apartheid so convincingly. I don’t want to be assimilated, and yet if I am to make my life here …” The broken sentence sounded like an appeal which she was too shy to make clear. There followed the gossip of the farm: a dinner party to neighbours who lived more than a hundred miles away, and then one paragraph which I found a little disturbing: ‘I have met a Mr Hughes, a land surveyor, and he wants to marry me (please don’t laugh at me). He is a kind man in his late fifties, a widower with a teenage daughter whom I like well enough. I don’t know what to do. It would be the final assimilation, wouldn’t it? I’ve always had a silly dream of one day coming back to Southwood and finding the old house empty (how I miss that dark rhododendron walk) and beginning my life all over again. I am afraid of talking to anyone here about Mr Hughes-they would all be too encouraging. I wish you were not so far away, for I know you would counsel me wisely.’

Was I wrong to read an appeal in that last sentence, a desperate appeal in spite of its calm wording, an appeal for some decisive telegram ‘come back to Southwood and marry me’? Who knows whether I might not have sent one in my loneliness if a letter had not arrived which drove poor Miss Keene right out of my mind?

It was from my aunt, written on stiff aristocratic note-paper bearing simply a scarlet rose and the name Lancaster with no address, like the title of a noble family. Only when I read a little way into the letter did I realize that Lancaster was the name of an hotel. My aunt made no appeal; she simply issued a command, and there was no explanation of her long silence. ‘I have decided,’ she wrote, ‘not to return to Europe and I am giving up my apartment over the Crown and Anchor at the end of the next quarter. I would be glad if you would pack what clothes there may be there and dispose of all the furniture. On second thoughts however keep the photograph of Freetown harbour for me as a memento of dear Wordsworth and bring it with you.’ (She had not even told me where to come at that point of the letter or asked me if it were possible.) ‘Preserve it in its frame which has great sentimental value because it was given me by Mr V. I enclose a cheque on my account at the Credit Suisse, Berne, which will be sufficient for a first-class ticket to Buenos Aires. Come as soon as you can, for I get no younger. I do not suffer from gout like an old friend whom I met the other day on a packet boat, but I feel nonetheless a certain stiffness in the joints. I want very much to have with me a member of my family whom I can trust in this rather bizarre country, not the less bizarre for having a shop called Harrods round the corner from the hotel, though it is less well stocked, I fear, than in the Brompton Road.’

I telegraphed to Miss Keene, ‘Joining my aunt in Buenos Aires shortly. Will write,’ and set about selling the furniture. The Venetian glass, I am afraid, went for a song. When all was sold at Harrods’ auction rooms (I had some dispute with the landlord of the Crown and Anchor over the sofa on the landing) I received enough for my return ticket and fifty pounds in travellers’ cheques, so I did not cash my aunt’s draft on the Swiss bank and I paid the little that was over into my own account, for I thought it better for her to have no assets in England if she planned not to return.

But as for joining my aunt in Buenos Aires, my forecast had been too optimistic. There was no one to meet me at the airport, and when I arrived at the Lancaster Hotel I found only my room reserved and a letter. ‘I am sorry not to be here to greet you,’ she wrote, ‘but I have had to move on urgently to Paraguay where an old friend of mine is in some distress, I have left you a ticket for the river-boat. For reasons too complicated to explain now I do not wish you to take a plane to Asuncion. I cannot give you an address, but I will see that you are met.’

It was a highly unsatisfactory arrangement, but what could I do? I hadn’t sufficient funds to stay in Buenos Aires until I heard from her again, and I felt it impossible to return to England, when I had travelled so far on her money, but I took the precaution of changing her single ticket to Asuncion into a return.

I propped the photograph of Freetown harbour in its expensive frame at the back of my dressing-table and supported it with books on either side. I had brought with me among more ephemeral literature Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the collected poems of Tennyson and Browning, and at the last minute I had added Rob Roy, perhaps because it contained the only photograph I possessed of my aunt. When I opened the book now the pages naturally divided at the photograph, and I found myself thinking not for the first time that the happy smile, the young breasts, the curve of her body in the old-fashioned bathing costume were like the suggestion of a budding maternity. The memory of Visconti’s son as he took her in his arms on Milan platform hurt me a little, and I looked out of my porthole, to escape my thoughts, into the winter day and saw a tall lean sad grey man gazing back at me. My window gave on to the bows and he turned quickly away to watch the ship’s wake, embarrassed at having been noticed. I finished my unpacking and went down to the bar.

There was the restlessness of departure about the ship. Lunch, as I learnt, was to be served at the curious hour of eleven-thirty, but until that time the passengers could no more settle than can the passengers on a Channel crossing. They came up and down the stairs, they looked at the bar and inspected the bottles and went away again without ordering a drink. They streamed into the dining-room and out again, they sat down for a moment at a table in the lounge, then rose to look through a porthole at the monotonous river scene which was to be with us for the next four days. I was the only one to take a drink. There was no sherry, so I took a gin and tonic, but the gin was Argentinian, though the name was English, and had a foreign flavour. The low wooded shore of what I took to be Uruguay unrolled in the misty rain which now began to clear the decks. The water of the river was the colour of coffee with too much milk.

An old man who must have been well into his eighties reached a decision and sat down beside me. He asked me a question in Spanish which I couldn’t answer. ‘No hoblo Espanol, senor? I said, but this scrap of Spanish which I had learnt from a phrase-book he took as an encouragement and at once began to deliver a small lecture, removing from his pocket a large magnifying glass and laying it down between us. I tried to escape by paying my bill, but he grabbed it from my hand and stuck it under his own glass, at the same time ordering the barman to refill mine. I have never been in the habit of taking two drinks before lunch, and I definitely did not like the taste of the gin, but for lack of Spanish I had to submit.

He was making some demand on me, but I could not guess what. The words el favor were repeated several times, and when he saw I didn’t understand, he held out his own hand as a demonstration and began to examine it through the magnifying glass. A voice said, ‘Can I be of any help?’ and turning I saw the sad lean man who had watched me through my porthole. I said, ‘I don’t understand what this gentleman wants.’ ‘His hobby is reading hands. He says he’s never had the opportunity to read an American’s.’

‘Tell him I’m English.’

‘He says the same applies. I don’t think he sees much difference. We are both Anglo-Saxon.’

There was nothing I could do but hold out my hand. The old man examined it with extreme care through the magnifying glass. ‘He asks me to translate, but maybe you’d rather I didn’t. It’s kind of personal, a fortune.’ ‘I don’t mind,’ I said, and I thought of Hatty and her tea-leaves and how she had foreseen my travels in her best Lapsang Souchong. ‘He says you have come from a long way off.’

‘That’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?’

‘But your travels are nearly over.’

‘That can hardly be true. I have to go back home.’

‘He sees a reunion of someone very close to you. Your wife perhaps.’

‘I have no wife.’

‘He says it could be your mother.’

‘She’s dead. At least …’

‘You have had a great deal of money in your care. But no longer.’

‘At any rate he’s scored there. I was in a bank.’

‘He sees a death-but it’s far away from your heart-line and your life-line.

It’s not an important death. Perhaps a stranger’s.’

‘Do you believe in this nonsense?’ I asked the American. ‘No, I guess not, but I try to keep an open mind. My name’s O’Toole. James O’Toole.’

‘Mine’s Pulling-Henry,’ I said. In the background the old man continued his report in Spanish. He seemed not to care whether it was translated or not. He had pulled out a notebook and was writing things down. ‘You a Londoner?’

‘Yes.’

‘I come from Philadelphia. He wants me to tell you that yours is the nine hundred and seventy-second hand he’s studied. Sorry, nine hundred and seventy-fifth.’ The old man closed his notebook with an air of satisfaction. Then he shook hands with me and thanked me, paid for the drinks, bowed and departed. The magnifying glass bulged in his pocket like a gun. ‘Mind if I join you?’ the American asked. He wore an English tweed coat and a pair of old grey flannel trousers: thin and melancholy, he looked as English as I did; there were small lines bitten by care around the eyes and mouth, and like a man who has lost his way he had a habit of looking this way and that with anxiety. He had nothing in common with the Americans whom I had met in England, noisy and self-confident, with the young unlined faces of children romping and shouting to one another across the nursery floor. He said, ‘You going to Asuncion too?’ ‘Yes.’

‘There’s nowhere else on this trip worth a visit. Corrientes isn’t too bad-if you don’t spend a night. Formosa-that’s a dump. Only smugglers get off there, though they do talk of the fishing. I guess you’re not a smuggler?’ ‘No. You seem to know these parts well.’

‘Too well,’ he said. ‘You on vacation?’

‘I suppose so. Yes.’

‘Going to see the Iguazu Falls? Lots of people go there. If you do, better stay on the Brazilian side. Only good hotel.’

‘Are they worth a visit?’

‘Maybe. If you like that kind of thing. Just a lot of water if you ask me.’

The barman obviously knew the American well, for he had made him a dry

Martini without a word said, and he drank it now morosely and without pleasure. ‘It’s not like Gordon’s,’ he said. He took a slow look at me, almost as if he were memorizing my features. ‘I took you for a business-man, Henry,’ he said. ‘Vacationing all by yourself? Not much fun. Strange country. And you don’t speak the language-not that Spanish is any good outside the city. In the country they all speak Guarani.’

‘Do you?’

‘A smattering.’

I noticed he asked questions more than he answered them, and when he gave me information it was the kind of information which I could have obtained from any guide-book.

‘Picturesque ruins,’ he said, ‘old Jesuit settlements. They appeal to you, Henry?’

I felt he wouldn’t be satisfied until I had told him more. What was the harm? I wasn’t carrying a gold brick or a suitcase stuffed with notes. As he said, I was no smuggler. ‘I am visiting an old relation of mine,’ I said and added, ‘James.’ I could see he wanted that too.

‘My friends call me Tooley,’ he said automatically, and it was quite a while before in my mind the coin fell. ‘Are you in business here?’ ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘I do research work. Social research. You know the sort of thing, Henry. Cost of living. Malnutrition. Degree of illiteracy. Have a drink.’

‘Two is all I can take, Tooley,’ I said, and it was only at the repetition of the name that I remembered, remembered Tooley. He pushed his own glass forward for another.

‘Do you find things easy in Paraguay? I’ve read in the papers you Americans have a lot of trouble in South America.’

‘Not in Paraguay,’ he said. ‘We and the General are like that.’ He raised his thumb and forefinger and then transferred them to his refilled glass. ‘He’s quite a tough dictator, so they tell me.’ ‘It’s what the country needs, Henry. A strong hand. Don’t mistake me though. I keep out of politics. Simple research. That’s my line.’

‘Have you published anything?’

‘Oh,’ he replied vaguely, ‘reports. Technical. They wouldn’t interest you, Henry.’

It was inevitable that when the bell rang we should go into lunch together. We shared the table with two other men. One was a grey-faced man in a blue city suit who was on a diet (the steward, who knew him well, brought him a special dish of boiled vegetables which he looked at carefully before eating, twitching the end of his nose and his upper lip like a rabbit). The other was a fat old priest with rogue eyes who looked rather like Winston Churchill. I was amused to watch O’Toole set about the two of them. Before we had finished our bad liver pate, he had found that the priest had a parish in a village near Gorrientes, on the Argentine side of the border, and before we had eaten our equally bad pasta he had broken a little way into the taciturnity of the man with the nose like a rabbit’s. He was apparently a business-man returning to Formosa. When he mentioned Formosa O’Toole looked at me and gave a little nod of confirmation: he had placed him.

‘Now I’d guess you to be a pharmacist?’ he said, leading him on. The man had little English, but he understood that. He looked at O’Toole and twitched his nose. I thought he was not going to reply, but out the phrase came with all its international ambiguity, ‘Import-export.’ The priest for some reason began to speak of flying saucers. They swarmed over Argentina, so it seemed-perhaps if we had clear nights we would observe one from the boat.

‘You really believe in them?’ I asked, and the old priest in his excitement abandoned his little English altogether.

‘He says,’ O’Toole explained, ‘that you must have seen yesterday’s Nacíon. Twelve cars were stopped coming from Mar del Plata to Buenos Aires on Monday night. When a flying saucer passes overhead a car-engine stops. The reverend father believes they have a divine origin.’ He translated almost as rapidly as the other talked. ‘Recently a couple who were driving to Mar del Plata for the weekend were surrounded by a cloud. The car stopped and when the cloud dispersed they found they were in Mexico near Acapulco.’

‘And he believed even that?’

‘Sure. They all do. Once a week on the radio at Buenos Aires you can hear a programme all about flying saucers. Who’s seen them that week and where. Our friend here says it may be the explanation of the flying house of Loretto. It was just picked up in Palestine, like those people on the road to Mar del Plata, and dumped down in Italy.’

They served us a tough steak and afterwards oranges. The priest lapsed into silence and ate with a slight frown. Perhaps he felt in the presence of unbelievers. The business-man pushed back his plate of boiled vegetables and excused himself. I asked my neighbour what I had been longing to ask all through the meal: ‘Are you married, Tooley?’

‘Yeah. Sort of.’

‘You’ve got a daughter?’

‘Sure. Why? She’s studying in London.’

‘She’s in Katmandu,’ I said.

‘Katmandu! Why, that’s Nepal.’

The lines of anxiety deepened. “That’s a hell of a thing to tell me,’ he said. ‘How do you know?’ I told him about the Orient Express, but I left out any references to the young man. I said she was with a group of students, which was true when I last saw her. He said, ‘What can I do, Henry? I’ve got my work. I can’t go chasing round the world. Lucinda doesn’t know the worry she gives.’ ‘Lucinda?’

‘Her mother chose the name,’ he said with bitterness.

‘She calls herself Tooley now like you.’

‘She does? That’s new.’

‘She seemed to have a great admiration for you.’

‘I let her go to England,’ he said. ‘I thought she’d be safe there. But

Katmandu!’ He pushed away the orange which he had so carefully sliced. ‘Where’s she living? I doubt if there’s a good hotel in the place. If there’s a Hilton at least you know where you are. What shall I do, Henry?’ ‘She’ll be all right,’ I said without conviction.

‘I could send a cable to the embassy-I suppose there’s an embassy.’ He got up abruptly and said, ‘I’ve got to take a leak.’

I followed him out of the dining-room and down a corridor to the lavatory. There we stood side by side in silence. I noticed his lips moving-perhaps, I thought, he was having an imaginary dialogue with his daughter. We left the lavatory together and without a word he sat down on a bench on the port side of the deck. It was no longer raining, but it was grey and cold. There was nothing to see but some small trees growing at the edge of the dirty river, an occasional hut, and through the trees an expanse of brown scrub stretching to the horizon without a hill in sight.

‘Argentina?’ I asked to break the silence.

‘It’s all Argentina,’ he said, ‘till we reach the Paraguay river our last day.’ He took out a pocket-book and made some notes. They seemed to be figures. When he had finished he said, ‘Excuse me. It’s a record I keep.’

‘Research?’

‘Kind of a study I’m making.’

‘Your daughter told me you were in the CIA.’

He turned on me his sad and anxious eyes. ‘She’s a romantic,’ he said. ‘She imagines things.’

‘Is the CIA romantic?’

‘A kid thinks so. I guess she saw some report of mine marked Secret. Anything’s Secret that goes to a government department. Even malnutrition in Asuncion.’

I wasn’t sure which of them I believed.

He asked me with an air of helplessness, ‘What would you do, Henry?’ ‘I said, ‘If you were really in the CIA you could probably find out how she was from one of your men there. You must have a man in Katmandu.’ ‘If I were really in the CIA,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to get them mixed up in my private affairs. Have you any children, Henry?’ ‘No.’

‘You are a lucky man. People talk about the age of reason. There’s no such thing. When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can’t go away from them.’

‘How would I know?’

He brooded awhile, staring out over the scrub which never changed. The boat moved slowly against the strong flow to the sea. He said, ‘My dad was all against the divorce-for the sake of the child. But there are limits to what a man can take-she began to bring her boy-friends home. She was corrupting Lucinda.’

‘She didn’t succeed,’ I said.

NEXT MORNING I missed O’Toole: he didn’t appear at breakfast, and I looked for him in vain upon the deck. There was a heavy mist over the river which the sun took a long time to disperse. I felt a little lonely without my only contact. Everyone else was settling into a shipboard relation: even a few flirtations had begun. Two old men paced the deck fiercely, showing off their physical fitness. There was something obscene to me about their rapid regular walk-they seemed to be indicating to all the women they passed that they were still in full possession of their powers. They wore slit jackets in imitation of the English-they had probably bought them at Harrods-and they reminded me of Major Charge.

We had pulled up at a town called Rosano during the night (the voices, the shouts, the noise of chains had entered my dreams and made them dreams of violence some while before I woke), and now the river, when the mist rose, had changed its character. The water was sprinkled with islands, and there were cliffs and sand bars and strange birds piping and whispering beside us. I experienced far more the sensation of travel than when I passed all the crowded frontiers in the Orient Express. The river was low, and a rumour spread that we might not be able to get beyond Gorrientes because the expected rains of winter had not come. A sailor on the bridge was continually heaving the lead. We were within half a metre, the priest told me, of the ship’s draught, and he moved on to spread despondency further.

I began for the first time seriously to read Rob Roy, but the moving scenery was a distraction. I would begin a page while the shore was half a mile away, and when I lifted my eyes after a few paragraphs, it had approached within a stone’s throw-or was it an island? At the beginning of the next page I looked again, and the water was now nearly a mile wide. A Czech sat down beside me. He spoke English and I was content to close Rob Roy and listen to him. He was a man who having once known prison enjoyed freedom to the full. His mother had died under the Nazis, his father under the Communists, he had escaped to Austria and married an Austrian girl.

His training had been scientific, and when he decided to settle in the Argentine he had borrowed the money to start a plastics factory. He said, ‘I looked around first in Brazil and Uruguay and Venezuela. One thing I noticed. Everywhere but in the Argentine they used straw for cold drinks. Not in the Argentine. I thought I’d make my fortune. I made two million plastic straws and I couldn’t sell a hundred. You want a straw? You can have two million for free. There they are stacked in my factory today. The Argentines are so conservative they won’t drink through a straw. I was very nearly bankrupt, I can tell you,’ he said happily.

‘So what do you do now?’

He gave me a cheerful grin. He seemed one of the happiest men I had ever met. He had shed his past fears and failures and sorrows more completely than most of us can do. He said, ‘I manufacture plastic material and let other fools risk their money on what they make with it.’

The man with the rabbit nose went twitching by, grey as the grey morning.

‘He gets off at Formosa,’ I said.

‘Ah, a smuggler,’ the Czech said and laughed and went on his way. I began to read Rob Roy again while the leadsman called the sounding. ‘You must remember my father well; for as your own was a member of the mercantile house, you knew him from infancy. Yet you hardly saw him in his best days, before age and infirmity had quenched his ardent spirit of enterprise and speculation.’ I thought of my father lying in his bath in his clothes, just as later he lay in his Boulogne coffin, and giving me his impossible instructions, and I wondered why I felt an affection for him, while I felt none for my faultless mother who had brought me up with rigid care and found me my first situation in a bank. I had never built the plinth among the dahlias and before I left home I had thrown away the empty urn. Suddenly a memory came back to me of an angry voice. I had woken up, as I sometimes did, afraid that the house was on fire and that I had been abandoned. I had climbed out of bed and sat down at the top of the stairs, reassured by the voice below. It didn’t matter how angry it was: it was there: I was not alone and there was no smell of burning. ‘Go away,’ the voice said, ‘if you want to, but I’ll keep the child.’

A low reasonable voice, which I recognized as my father’s, said, ‘I am his father,’ and the woman I knew as my mother slammed back like a closing door, ‘And who’s to say that I’m not his mother?’

‘Good morning,’ O’Toole said, sitting down beside me. ‘Did you sleep well?’

‘Yes. And you?’

He shook his head. ‘I kept on thinking of Lucinda,’ he said. He took out his notebook and again began to write down his mysterious columns of numerals.

‘Research?’ I asked. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘this is not official.’ ‘Making a bet on the ship’s run?’

‘No, no. I’m not a betting man.’ He gave me one of his habitual looks of melancholy and anxiety. ‘I’ve never told anyone about this, Henry,’ he said. ‘It would seem kind of funny to most people, I guess. The fact is I count while I’m pissing and then I write down how long I’ve taken and what time it is. Do you realize we spend more than one whole day a year pissing?’ ‘Good heavens,’ I said.

‘I can prove it, Henry. Look here.’ He opened his notebook and showed me a page. His writing went something like this:

July 28

7.15 0.17

10.45 0.37

12.30 0.50

13.15 0.32

13.40 0.50

14.05 0.20

1545 0.37

18.40 0.28

10.30 ? Forgot to time

4 m. 31 sec

He said, ‘You’ve only got to multiply by seven. That makes half an hour a week. Twenty-six hours a year. Of course shipboard life isn’t quite average. There’s more drinking between meals. And beer keeps on repeating. Look at this time here-1 m. 55 sec. That’s more than the average, but then I’ve noted down two gins. There’s a lot of variations too I haven’t accounted for, and from now on I’m going to make a note of the temperature too. Here’s July 25-6 m. 9 sec. n.c.-that stands for not complete. I went out to dinner in BA and left my notebook at home. And here’s July 27-only 3 minutes 12 seconds in all, but, if you remember, there was a very cold north wind on July 25 and I went out to dinner without an overcoat.’

‘Are you drawing any conclusions?’ I asked.

‘That’s not my job,’ he said. ‘I’m no expert. I just report the facts and any data-like the gins and the weather-that seem to have a bearing. It’s for others to draw the conclusions.’

‘Who are the others?’

‘Well, I thought when I had completed six months’ research I’d get in touch with a urinary specialist. You don’t know what he mightn’t be able to read into these figures. Those guys deal all the time with the sick. It’s important to them to know what happens in the case of an average fellow.’ ‘And you are the average fellow?’

‘Yes, I’m hundred per cent healthy, Henry. I have to be in my job. They give me the works every so often.’

‘The CIA?’ I asked.

‘You’re kidding, Henry. You can’t believe that crazy girl.’ He fell into a sad silence as he thought of her, leaning forward with his chin in his hand. An island with the appearance of a gigantic alligator floated downstream with its snout extending along the water. Pale green fishing boats drifted downstream faster than our engines could drive us against the current-they passed rapidly like little racing cars. Each fisherman was surrounded by floating blocks of wood to which his lines were attached. Rivers branched off into the grey misty interior, wider than the Thames at Westminster but going nowhere at all.

He asked, ‘And she really called herself Tooley?’

‘Yes, Tooley.’

‘I guess she must think of me sometimes?’ he said with a sort of questioning hope.

IT WAS TWO DAYS LATER that we came to Formosa on a day which was as humid as all the others had been. The heat broke on the cheek like little bubbles of water. We had turned off the great Parana river the night before near Corrientes, and now we were on the Paraguay. Fifty yards across the water from the Argentinian Formosa the other country lay, sodden and empty. The import-export man went ashore in his dark city suit carrying a new suitcase. He went with rapid steps, looking at his watch like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. It certainly seemed an ideal town for smugglers with only a river to cross. In Paraguay I could see only a crumbling hut, a pig and a small girl. I was tired of walking the deck, so I went ashore too. It was a Sunday and quite a crowd had collected to see the boat come in. There was a pervading smell of orange petals, but it was the only sweet thing about Formosa. One long avenue was lined with oranges and trees bearing rose-coloured flowers, which I learnt later to be lapachos. The side-streets petered out a few yards away into a niggardly wild nature of mud and scrub. Everything to do with government, business, justice or amusement lay in the one avenue: a tourist hotel of grey cement on the water’s edge had been half-built, for what tourists? Little shops selling Coca-Cola: a cinema which advertised an Italian Western: two hairdressers: a garage with one wrecked car: a cantina. The only house of more than one storey was the hotel, and the only old and beautiful building in the long avenue proved, as I came closer to it, to be the prison. There were fountains all down the avenue but they didn’t play.

The avenue must lead me somewhere, I thought, but I was wrong. I passed the bust of a bearded man called Urquiza who, judging from the carved inscription, must have had something to do with Liberation-from what?-and ahead of me I saw rise up above the orange trees and the lapachos a marble man upon a marble horse who was certainly General San Martin-Buenos Aires had made me familiar with his features and I had seen him upon the seafront at Boulogne too. The statue closed the avenue as the Arc de Triomphe closes the Champs Elysées; I expected some further avenue beyond, but when I reached the statue I found the hero sat on his horse in a waste of mud at the furthest limit of the town. No strollers came so far, and the road went no further. Only a starving dog, like a skeleton from the Natural History Museum, picked his way timorously across the dirt and the rain pools towards me and San Martin. I began to walk back. If I describe this ignoble little town in such detail, it is because it was the scene of a long dialogue I held with myself which was only interrupted by a surprising encounter. I had begun, as I passed the first hairdresser, to think of Miss Keene and her letter of shy appeal which surely deserved a better response than my brief telegram, and then in this humid place, where the only serious business or entertainment was certainly crime, and even the national bank had to be defended on a Sunday afternoon by a guard with an automatic rifle, I thought of my home in Southwood, of my garden, of Major Charge trumpeting across the fence, and of the sweet sound of the bells from Church Road. But I remembered Southwood now with a kind of friendly tolerance-as the place which Miss Keene should never have left, the place where Miss Keene was happy, the place where I myself no longer belonged. It was as though I had escaped from an open prison, had been snatched away, provided with a rope ladder and a waiting car, into my aunt’s world, the world of the unexpected character and the unforeseen event. There the rabbit-faced smuggler was at home, the Czech with his two million plastic straws, and poor O’Toole busy making a record of his urine.

I passed the end of a street called Rua Dean Furnes which petered away like all the others into no-man’s-land, and I stayed a moment outside the governor’s house, which was painted with a pink wash. On the verandah were two unoccupied chaises-longues and the windows were wide open on an empty room with a portrait of a military man, the President I suppose, and a row of empty chairs lined up against the wall like a firing squad. The sentry made a small movement with his automatic rifle and I moved on towards the national bank where another sentry made the same warning movement when I paused.

That morning in my bunk I had read Wordsworth’s great Ode in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Palgrave like Scott carried signs of my father’s reading in the form of dog-eared pages and knowing so little about him I had followed every clue and so learned to enjoy what he had enjoyed. Thus when I first entered the bank as junior clerk I had thought of it in Wordsworth’s terms as a ‘prison-house’-what was it my father had found a prison, so that he double-marked the passage? Perhaps our home, and my stepmother and I had been the warders.

One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books. (I don’t think there was much passionate love in Marion Crawford, and only a shadow of it in Walter Scott.)

I can remember very little of the vision preceding the prison-house: it

must have faded very early ‘into the light of common day,’ but it seemed to me, as I put Palgrave down beside my bunk and thought of my aunt, that she for one had never allowed the vision to fade. Perhaps a sense of morality is the sad compensation we learn to enjoy, like a remission for good conduct. In the vision there is no morality. I had been born as a result of what my stepmother would have called an immoral act, an act of darkness. I had begun in immoral freedom. Why then should I have found myself in a prison-house? My real mother had certainly not been imprisoned anywhere.

It’s too late now, I said to Miss Keene, signalling to me desperately from Koffiefontein, I’m no longer there, where you think I am. Perhaps we might have comforted ourselves once and been content in our prison cell, but I’m not the same man you regarded with a touch of tenderness over the tatting. I have escaped. I don’t resemble whatever identikit portrait you have of me. I walked back towards the landing stage, and looking behind me I saw the canine skeleton on my tracks. I suppose to that dog any stranger represented hope. ‘Hi, man,’ a voice called. ‘You in number one hurry?’ and Wordsworth was suddenly there a few yards away. He had risen from a bench beside the bust of the liberator Urquiza and advanced towards me with both hands out and his face slashed open with the wide wound of his grin. ‘Man, you not forget old Wordsworth?’ he asked, wringing both my hands, and laughing so loudly and deeply that he sprayed my face with his happiness.

‘Why, Wordsworth,’ I said with equal pleasure, ‘what on earth are you doing here?’

‘My lil bebi gel,’ he said, ‘she tell me go off Formosa and wait for Mr Pullen come.’

I noticed that he was every bit as smartly dressed now as the rabbit-nosed importer and he too carried a very new suitcase.

‘How is my aunt, Wordsworth?’

‘She pretty OK,’ he said, but there was a look of distress in his eyes and he added, ‘She dance one hell too much. Ar tell her she no bebi gel no more. Ef she no go stop … Man, she got me real worried.’

‘Are you coming on the boat with me?’

‘Ar sure am, Mr Pullen. You lef everyting to old Wordsworth. Ar know the customs fellows in Asuncion. Some good guys. Some bad like hell. You lef me talk. We don wan no humbug.’

‘I’m not smuggling anything, Wordsworth.’ The noise of the ship’s siren summoned us, wailing up from the river.

‘Man, you lef everyting to old Wordsworth. Ar just gone tak a look at that boat and ar see a real bad guy there. We gotta be careful.’ ‘Careful of what, Wordsworth?’

‘You in good hands, Mr Pullen. You lef old Wordsworth be now.’ He suddenly took my fingers and pressed them. ‘You got that picture, Mr Pullen?’

‘You mean of Freetown harbour? Yes, I’ve got that.’ He gave a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Ar lak you, Mr Pullen. You allays straight with old Wordsworth. Now you go for boat.’ I was just leaving him when he added, ‘You got CTC for Wordsworth?’ and I gave him what coins I had in my pocket. Whatever trouble he might have caused me in that dead old world of mine, I was overjoyed to see him now.

They were carrying the last cargo on to the ship through the black iron doors open in the side. I made my way through the steerage quarters where women with Indian faces sat around suckling their children and climbed the rusting stairs to the first-class. I never noticed Wordsworth come on board, and at dinner he was nowhere to be seen. I supposed that he was travelling in the steerage and saving for other purposes the difference in the fare, for I was quite certain that my aunt would have given him a first-class ticket. After dinner O’Toole suggested a drink in his cabin. ‘I’ve got some good bourbon,’ he said, and though I have never been a spirit-drinker, preferring a glass of sherry before a meal or a glass of port after it, I accepted his invitation gladly, for it was our last night together on board. Again the spirit of restlessness had taken over all the passengers in the ship, and they seemed touched with a kind of mania. In the saloon an amateur band had begun to play, and a sailor with hairy legs and arms, dressed inadequately as a woman, had whirled in a dance between the tables, demanding a partner. Now in the captain’s cabin, which was close to O’Toole’s, someone was playing the guitar and a woman squealed. It wasn’t what you expected to hear from a captain’s quarters. ‘No one will sleep tonight,’ O’Toole remarked, pouring out the bourbon.

‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘a lot more soda.’

‘We’ve made it. I thought we were going to be stuck fast at Corrientes. The

rain is damn late this year,’ and as though to soften his rebuke of the weather there came a long peal of thunder which almost drowned the music of the guitar. ‘What did you think of Formosa?’ O’Toole asked.

‘There wasn’t much to see. Except the prison. A fine colonial building.’ ‘Not so good inside,’ O’Toole said. A splash of lightning was flung over the wall and made the cabin lights flicker. ‘Met a friend, didn’t you?’ ‘A friend?’

‘I saw you talking to a coloured guy.’

What was it that made me cautious, for I liked O’Toole? I said, ‘Oh, he wanted money. I didn’t see you on shore.’

‘I was up on the bridge,’ O’Toole said, ‘looking through the captain’s glasses.’ He changed course abruptly. ‘I can’t get over you knowing my daughter, Henry. You can’t imagine how I miss that girl. You never told me how she looked.’

‘She looked fine. She’s a very pretty girl.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘so was her mother. If I ever married again I’d marry a plain girl.’ He brooded a long time over the bourbon, and I looked around his cabin. He had made no attempt, as I had made the first day, to make it a temporary home. His suitcases lay on the floor filled with clothes; he had not bothered to hang them. A razor beside the wash-basin and a Bantam book beside his bed seemed to be the extent of his unpacking. Suddenly the rain hit the deck outside like a cloud-burst.

‘I guess winter’s here all right,’ he said.

‘Winter in July.’

‘I’ve got used to it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen the snow for six years.’

‘You’ve been out here for six years?’

‘No, but I was in Thailand before this.’

‘Doing research?’

‘Yeah. Sort of…’ If he was usually as tongue-tied as this it must have taken him a long time to unearth every fact he required. ‘How are the urine statistics?’

‘More than four minutes thirty seconds today,’ he said. He added glumly, ‘And I haven’t reached the end,’ lifting the bourbon. When the next peal of thunder had trembled out he went on, obviously straining after any subject to fill the pause, ‘So you didn’t like Formosa?’

‘No. Of course it may be all right for fishing,’ I said.

‘Fishing!’ he exclaimed with scorn. ‘Smuggling is what you mean.’

‘I keep on hearing all the time about smuggling. Smuggling what?’ ‘It’s the national industry of Paraguay,’ he said. ‘It brings in nearly as much as the mate and a lot more than hiding war criminals with Swiss bank accounts. And a darn sight more than my research.’

‘What have they got to smuggle?’

‘Scotch whisky and American cigarettes. You get yourself an agent in Panama who buys wholesale and he flies the stuff down to Ascuncion. They are marked “goods in transit,” see. You pay only a small duty at the international airport and you transfer the crates to a private plane. You’d be surprised to see how many private Dakotas there are now in Asuncion. Then your pilot takes off to Argentina just across the river. At some estancia a few hundred kilometres from BA you touch down-they nearly all have private landing grounds. Not built for Dakotas perhaps but that’s the pilot’s risk. You unload into trucks and there you are. You’ve got your distributors waiting with their tongues hanging out. The government makes them thirsty with duties of a hundred and twenty per cent.’

‘And Formosa?’

‘Oh, Formosa’s for the small guy working himself up on the river traffic. All the goods that arrive from Panama don’t go on in the Dakota. What do the police care if some of the crates stay behind? You’ll buy Scotch cheaper in the stores at Asuncion than you will in London and the street boys will sell you good American cigarettes at cut-rate. All you need is a rowboat and a contact. One day though you’ll get tired of that game-perhaps a bullet’s come too close-and you’ll buy a share in a Dakota and then you’re in the big money. You tempted, Henry?’

‘I didn’t have the right training at the bank,’ I said, but I thought of my aunt and her suitcases stuffed with notes and her gold brick-perhaps there was something in my blood to which a career like that might once have appealed. ‘You know a lot about it,’ I said.

‘It’s part of my sociological research.’

‘Did you never think of researching a bit deeper? The frontier spirit, Tooley.’ I teased him only because I liked him. I could never have teased Major Charge or the admiral in that way.

He gave me a long sad look, as though he wanted to answer me quite truthfully. ‘You don’t save enough money in a job like mine to buy a Dakota. And the risks are big too, Henry, for a foreigner. These guys fall out sometimes and then there’s hijacking. Or the police get greedy. It’s easy to disappear in Paraguay-not necessarily disappear either. Who’s going to make a fuss about an odd body or two? The General keeps the peace-that’s what people want after the civil war they had -and a dead man makes no trouble for anyone. They don’t have coroners in Paraguay.’

‘So you prefer life to the frontier spirit, Tooley.’

‘I know I’m not much good for my girl three thousand miles away, Henry, but at least she gets her monthly check. A dead man can’t write a check.’ ‘And I suppose the CIA aren’t interested?’

‘You shouldn’t believe that nonsense, Henry. I told you-Lucinda’s romantic. She wants an exciting father, and what’s she got? She’s saddled with me. So she has to invent things. A report on malnutrition’s not romantic.’ ‘I think you ought to bring her home, Tooley.’

‘Where’s home?’ he said and I looked around the cabin and wondered too. I don’t know why I wasn’t quite convinced. He was a great deal more reliable than she was.

I left him with his Old Forester and returned to my cabin on the opposite deck. O’Toole was port and I was starboard. I looked out at Paraguay and he looked out at Argentina. The guitar was still playing in the captain’s cabin and someone was singing in a language I couldn’t recognize-perhaps it was Guarani. I hadn’t locked my door, and yet it wouldn’t open when I pushed. I had to put my shoulder to it to make it give. Through the crack I saw Wordsworth. He faced the door and he had a knife in his hand. When he saw who it was he held the knife down.

‘Come in, boss,’ he said in a whisper.

‘How can I come in?’

He had wedged the door with a chair. He removed it now and let me in.

‘Ar got to be careful, Mr Pullen,’ he said. ‘Careful of what?’ ‘Too much bad people on this boat, too much humbug.’ His knife was a boy’s knife with three blades and a corkscrew and a tin-opener and something for taking stones out of horses’ hoofs-cutlers are conservative and so are schoolboys. Wordsworth closed it and put it in his pocket. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what do you want, you happy shepherd boy?’ He shook his head. ‘Oh, she’s a wonder, your auntie. No one ever talk to Wordsworth like that befo. Why, she come right up to me in the street outside the movie palace an she say, clear like day, “Thou child of joy.” Ar love your auntie, Mr Pullen. Ar ready to die for her any time she raise a finger an say, “Wordsworth, you go die”.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said, ‘that’s fine, but what are you doing barricaded in my cabin?’

‘Ar come for the picture,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t you wait till we get ashore?’ ‘Your auntie say bring that picture safe, Wordsworth, double quick or you no come here no more.’

A suspicion returned to me. Could the frame like the candle be made of gold? Or did the photograph cover some notes of a very high denomination? Neither seemed likely, but neither was impossible with my aunt. ‘Ar got friends in customs,’ Wordsworth said, ‘they no humbug me, but, Mr Pullen, you a stranger here.’ ‘It’s only a photograph of Freetown harbour.’ ‘Ya’as, Mr Pullen. But your auntie say …’ ‘All right. Take it then. Where are you sleeping?’ Wordsworth jerked his thumb at the floor. ‘Ar more comfortable down below there, Mr Pullen. The folks that they sing an dance an have good time. ‘They don wear no cravats an they no don go wash befo meals. Ar dou like soap with my chop.’

‘Have a cigarette, Wordsworth.”

‘If you don mind, Mr Pullen, I smoke this here.’

He pulled a ragged reconstructed cigarette out of a crumpled pocket, ‘Still on pot, Wordsworth?’

‘Well, it’s a sort of medicine, Mr Pullen. Arm not too well these days. At got a let o’ worry.’

‘Worry about what?’

‘Your auntie, Mr Pullen. She allays safe with old Wordsworth. Ar no cost her nothing. But she got a fellah now-he cost her plenty plenty. An he too old for her, Mr Pullen. Your auntie no chicken. She need a young fellah.’ ‘You aren’t exactly young yourself, Wordsworth.’

‘Ar no got ma big feet in no tomb, Mr Pullen, lak that one. Ar no trust

that fellah. When we come here he plenty sick. He say, “Please Wordsworth,

please Wordsworth,” an he mak all the sugar in the world melt in his mouth. He live in low-class hotel, but he ain got no money. They go to turn him out an, man, he were plenty scared to go. When your auntie come he cry like a lil bebi. He no man, sure he no man, but he plenty plenty mean. He say sweet things alright alright, but he allays act mean. What wan she leave Wordsworth for a mean man like him? Tell me that, man, tell me that.’ He let his great bulk down on my bed and he began to weep. It was like a spring forcing its hard way to the surface, spilling out of the crevices of a rock.

‘Wordsworth,’ I said, ‘are you jealous of Aunt Augusta?’

‘Man,’ he said, ‘she war my bebi gel. Now she gon bust ma heart in bits.’

‘Poor Wordsworth.’ There was nothing more I could say. ‘She wan me quit,’ Wordsworth said. ‘She wan me for come bring you, and then she wan me quit. She say, “I give you biggest CTC you ever saw, you go back Freetown and find a gel,” but I no wan her money, Mr Pullen, I no wan Freetown no more, and I no wan any gel. I love your auntie. I wan for to stay with her like the song say: “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens: oh, with me abide , . . Tears have no bitterness,” but man, these tears are bitter, tha’s for sure.’

‘Wherever did you learn that hymn, Wordsworth?’

‘We allays sang that in St George’s Cathedral in Freetown. “Fast falls the eventide.” Plenty sad songs like that we sang there, an they all mak me think now of my bebi gel. “Here lingrin still we ask for nought but simply worship thee.” Man, it’s true. But now she wan me to quit, an go right away an never see her no more.’

‘Who is this man she’s with, Wordsworth?’

‘I won spik his name. My tongue burn up if I spik his name. Oh, man, I bin faithful to your auntie long time now.’

It was to distract him from his misery and not to reproach him that I said, ‘You remember that girl in Paris?’

‘That one who wan do jig-jig?’

‘No, no, not that one. The young girl on the train.’

‘Oh, ya’as. Sure. I member her.’

‘You gave her pot,’ I said.

‘Sure. Why not? Very good medicine. You don think I do anytin bad with her? Why, man, she was the ship that gone by one day. She too young for old Wordsworth.’

‘Her father’s on the boat now.’

He looked at me with astonishment. “You don say!’

‘He was asking me about you. He saw us on shore.’

‘What he look lak?’

‘He’s as tall as you but very thin. He looks unhappy and worried and he wears a tweed sportscoat.’

‘Oh, God Almighty! I know him. I seen him plenty in Asuncion. You got to be bloody careful of him.’

‘He says he’s doing social research work.’

‘What that mean?’

‘He investigates things.’

‘Oh, man, you’re right there. I tell you sometin. Your auntie’s fellah-he don like that man around.’

I had meant to distract him, and I had certainly succeeded. He pressed my hand hard when he left me, carrying the picture concealed under his shirt. He said, ‘Man, you know what you are to Wordsworth. You help of the helpless, Mr Pullen. O abide with me.’

WHEN I WENT up ON DECK after breakfast we were already approaching Asuncion, Red cliffs were honeycombed with caves. Half-ruined huts stood at the very edge of the cliff and naked children with the pot-bellies of malnutrition stared down on us as the boat passed, moving like an overfed man who picks his slow way home after a heavy meal, giving little belches on the siren. Above the huts, like a medieval castle dominating some wretched village of mud and wattle, stood the great white bastions of Shell.

O’Toole came and stood beside me as the immigration officers arrived on board. He asked, ‘Can I be of any help? Give you a lift or anything?’ ‘Thank you very much, but I think I shall be met.’

The steerage passengers were going ashore. He said, ‘If you want any help at any time…. I know most of the ropes. You’ll find me at the embassy. They call me a second secretary. It’s convenient.’

‘You’re very kind.’

‘You are a friend of Lucinda …’ he said. ‘Katmandu seems the hell of a long way off. Maybe some mail will have come in.’

‘Is she a good correspondent?’

‘She writes me picture postcards,’ he said. He leant forward on the rail.

‘Isn’t that your friend?’ he asked.

‘What friend?’

I looked at the steerage queue on the gangway and saw Wordsworth.

‘The man who spoke to you on shore.’

I said, ‘All coloured men look very much alike to me at that distance,” ‘It’s not often you see an African here,” he said. ‘I guess it’s your friend.’

When at last the Formalities were over and I stood beside, my luggage on the corner of a street named after Benjamin Constant, I looked around awhile in vain for Wordsworth. Families exchanged greetings and drove away in cars. The Czech plastics manufacturer offered me a lift in his taxi. A small boy wanted to clean my shoes and another tried to sell me American cigarettes. A long colonnaded street, which sloped uphill in front of me, was full of liquor shops, and old women sat against the wall with baskets of bread and fruit. In spite of the dirt and fumes of old cars the air was sweet with orange blossom. Somebody whistled and I turned to see Wordsworth getting out of a taxi. He lifted my two heavy suitcases as though they were empty cardboard boxes. ‘Ar look for friend,’ he said, ‘too plenty humbug here.’ I had never before been driven in quite such a decrepit taxi. The lining was torn and the stuffing leaked out of the seat. Wordsworth punched at it to make it more comfortable. Then he made motions to the driver which the man seemed to understand. ‘We drive aroun a bit,’ Wordsworth said. ‘Ar wan to see if they lef us alone.’ He looked out of the window, while the taxi ground and shook. All the other taxis which passed us were smart enough, and sometimes the drivers shouted what I took to be insults to our old man who had a white moustache and a hat without a crown. ‘Suppose we’re not left alone,’ I said, ‘what do we do?’

‘We tak bloody good care,’ Wordsworth said vaguely.

‘You seem to have chosen the oldest taxi.’

Soldiers were goose-stepping in front of the cathedral, and a very early tank stood on a plinth up on the green sward. The orange trees were everywhere, some in fruit and some in blossom.

‘He good friend of mine,’

‘You talk Spanish?’ I asked.

‘No. He don know no Spanish.’

‘What does he talk?’

‘He talk Indian lingo.’

‘How do you make him understand?’

‘I give him smokes,’ Wordsworth said. ‘He lak pot.’

Except for the skyscraper of a new hotel it was a very Victorian town. One soon ceased to notice the cars-they were an anachronism; there were mule carts and sometimes men on horses, there was a little white castellated Baptist church, a college built like a neo-Gothic abbey, and when we reached the residential quarter I saw big stone houses with bosky gardens and pillared porticos above stone steps which reminded me of the oldest part of Southwood, but in Southwood the houses would have been split into flats and the grey stone would have been whitewashed and the roofs would have bristled with television masts. In place of the orange and banana trees, I would have seen neglected rhododendrons and threadbare lawns.

‘What is the name of my aunt’s friend, Wordsworth?’ I asked.

‘I don remember,’ Wordsworth said. ‘I don wanta remember. Ar wanta forget.’ A little crumbling house with Corinthian pillars and broken windows was called School of Architecture on a board which had been split by the seasons, but, however tumbledown the houses, the flowers were everywhere. A bush of jasmine blossomed with white and blue flowers on the same bush. ‘We stop here’ Wordsworth said and he shook the driver’s shoulder. It was an enormous house with a great untidy lawn which ended in a dark green fuzz of trees, a small wood of banana, orange, lemon, grapefruit, lapacho. On the two sides visible to me through the gates wide stone steps led up to separate entrances. The walls were blotched with lichen and were four storeys high.

‘It’s a millionaire’s house,’ I said.

‘You jus wait,’ Wordsworth replied.

The iron gates were rusty and padlocked. Worn pineapples were carved on the gateposts, but the gates, draped with barbed wire, had lost their dignity. A millionaire may once have lived there, I thought, but no longer. Wordsworth led me round the corner of the street and we approached the house from the back through a little door which he locked behind him and through the grove of sweet-smelling trees and bushes. ‘Hi!’ he called to the great square block of stone, ‘hi!’ and got no response. The house in its solidity and its silence reminded me of the great family tombs in the cemetery at Boulogne. This was a journey’s end too.

‘Your auntie she got a bit deaf,’ Wordsworth said. ‘She no young no more, no more.’ He spoke regretfully, as though he had known her as a girl, and yet she had been over seventy when she picked him up outside the Grenada Palace. We went up one flight of stone steps and into the hall of the house. Paved with cracked marble, the big hall was unfurnished. The windows had been shuttered and the only light came from a bare globe in the ceiling. There was no chair, no table, no sofa, no pictures. The one sign of human occupation was a mop which leant against one wall, but it might have been left there a generation ago by someone hired to tidy up after the furniture-removers had departed.

‘Hi!’ Wordsworth shouted. ‘Hi! Mr Pullen be here,’ and I heard the click of high heels along a passage overhead. A flight of pink marble stairs rose to the first floor, and at the head of them my aunt appeared. The light was too dim to see her clearly, and it may have been my imagination which read into her voice an older, more tremulous tone than I had remembered. ‘Why, Henry,’ she said, ‘you are welcome home.’ She came slowly down the stairs, and perhaps it was the bad light which caused her to clutch at the banister. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said, ‘that Mr Visconti is not here to greet you. I had expected him yesterday.’ ‘Mr Visconti?’

‘Yes’ my aunt said, ‘Mr Visconti. We are happily reunited. Did you bring the picture safely?’

‘Ar got it’ Wordsworth said, holding up his new suitcase. ‘Mr Visconti will be relieved. He was afraid of the customs. You look well, Henry,’ she said, kissing my cheek and leaving on the air a smell of lavender. ‘Come, let me show you your room.’ She led me up to the first landing which was as bare as the hall and opened a door. This room at least contained a bed and a chair and a cupboard, though nothing else. My aunt may have thought some explanation was needed, for she said, ‘The furniture will be arriving any day now.’ I opened another door and saw a room which was empty except for two mattresses laid together on the floor and a dressing-table and stool that looked new. ‘I have given you the bed,’ my aunt said, ‘but I couldn’t do without my dressing-table.’ ‘Is this your room?’

‘Sometimes I miss my Venetian glass, but when the curtains go up and the furniture arrives … You must be hungry, Henry. Wordsworth will bring your bags. I have a little meal prepared.’

I could no longer be surprised by the furnishing of the dining-room-an immense room which had been lit once by three chandeliers; the wires sprouted like weeds out of holes in the ceiling. There was a table but no cloth, and the chairs were packing-cases. ‘It’s all a little rough,’ my aunt said, ‘but when Mr Visconti returns you will see how soon we shall get things in order.’ The meal came out of tins, and there was a sweet red wine of local origin which tasted like an evil medicine of childhood. I thought of my first-class ticket on the boat with shame. ‘When Mr Visconti is back,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘we plan to give you a party. A house like this is made for parties. We shall have a barbecue with an ox roasted whole in the garden, and there will be coloured lights in the trees, and music, of course, for dancing. A harp and a guitar-that is the fashion here. The polka and the gallop are the national dances. I shall invite the Chief of Police, the Jesuit Provincial (for his conversation of course), the British Ambassador and his wife. The Italian Ambassador, no-it would not be tactful. We must find some pretty girls for you, Henry.’ A splinter from the packing-case scratched my thigh.

I said, ‘You will need a little furniture first, Aunt Augusta.’

‘That goes without saying. I regret that I cannot ask the Italian Ambassador-he is such a handsome man, but under the circumstances … I shall have to tell you something, Henry, that only Wordsworth knows …’ ‘Where is Wordsworth now?’

‘In the kitchen, Mr Visconti prefers us to eat alone. As I was going to say, Henry, when you interrupted me, Mr Visconti has taken to an Argentine passport and he is known here as Mr Izquierdo.’

‘I am not altogether surprised, Aunt Augusta.” I told her how the two detectives had searched her flat.

‘General Abdul is dead by the way.’

‘I rather expected that. Did they take anything away?’

‘Nothing except a picture postcard from Panama.’

‘Why did they want that?’

‘They thought it might have something to do with Mr Visconti.’ ‘How absurd the police always seem to be. The card must have been sent by Monsieur Dambreuse. I met him on the boat going out to Buenos Aires. Poor man, he had aged a great deal. I didn’t even recognize him until he began to tell me about his metallurgical company and his family in Toulouse.’ ‘And he hadn’t recognized you?’

‘That is not so surprising. In those days, when we were living at the St James and Albany, I had black hair, not red. Red was Mr Visconti’s favourite colour. I kept red especially for him.’

‘The police were acting for Interpol,’ I said.

‘It’s absurd of them to treat Mr Visconti like a common war criminal. There are lots of such men hidden around here. Martin Bormann is just across the border in Brazil and the unspeakable Dr Mengeles of Auschwitz is said to be with the army near the Bolivian border. Why doesn’t Interpol do anything about them?

Mr Visconti was always very kind to Jews. Even when he had those dealings with Saudi Arabia. Why should he be chased out of the Argentine where he was doing quite well in the antique business? There was an American in Buenos Aires who made the most impertinent enquiries, Mr Visconti told me. Mr Visconti had sold a picture to a private purchaser in the States, and this American, who claimed to be a representative of the Metropolitan Museum, said the picture had been looted ‘

‘Was the man’s name O’Toole by any chance?”

‘It was.’

‘He’s here in Asuncion now.’

‘Yes, I know that. But he is not finding people so co-operative here. After all the General has German blood.’

‘He was with me on the boat and he told me he was doing social research.’

‘That’s quite untrue. Like the Metropolitan Museum. He’s in the CIA.’

‘He’s Tooley’s father.’

‘Tooley?’

‘The girl on the Orient Express.’

‘How very interesting. I wonder if that could be of any use to us,’ my aunt reflected. ‘You say he was on the boat with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘He may have been following you. Such a fuss about a few pictures. I seem to remember that you and his daughter became great friends on the train. And there was all that business of the pregnancy …’

‘Aunt Augusta, that had nothing to do with me.’

‘Rather a pity,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘under the circumstances.’ Wordsworth came into the room wearing the butcher’s apron in which I had first seen him in the flat above the Crown and Anchor. Then his services in washing up had been recognized and praised, but I could tell they were taken for granted now.

‘Chop finished?’

‘We will have our coffee in the garden,’ my aunt said grandly. We sat down in the meagre shade of a banana tree. The air was sweet with orange and jasmine, and the moon swam palely in the pale blue daylight sky. It looked as worn and thin as an old coin, and the craters were the same colour as the sky, so that one seemed to be looking through holes at the universe behind. There was no sound of traffic. The clip-clop of a horse belonged to the same ancient world of silence.

‘Yes, it’s very peaceful,’ my aunt said, ‘only an occasional gun-shot after dark. The police are sometimes trigger-happy, I forget whether it’s one lump or two.’

‘I wish you would tell me a little more, Aunt Augusta. I can’t help being puzzled. This big house and no furniture… and Wordsworth here with you.’ ‘I brought him from Paris,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘I was travelling with rather a lot of ready money-nearly everything I had left, though I kept enough in Berne to pay for your ticket. A frail old lady like myself needed a bodyguard.’

It was the first time I had ever heard her admit to being old.

‘You could have taken me with you.’

‘I wasn’t sure about your attitude to certain things. You were rather shocked, you remember, about that gold bar in Istanbul. What a pity General Abdul made a mess of the affair. We could have done now with the twenty-five per cent.’

“Where has all your money gone. Aunt Augusta? You haven’t even a bed to sleep in.’

‘The mattresses are perfectly comfortable, and I have always found a soft bed enervating. When I arrived here poor Mr Visconti was in a very low state. He was living on credit in a really horrible little hotel. All his money had gone on his new passport and bribes to the police. God knows how Dr Mengeles manages, but I expect he has a numbered account in Switzerland. I only arrived just in time. He was sick too, poor fellow, from living mainly on mandioca’ ‘So you gave him your money a second time, Aunt Augusta?’ ‘Of course, what do you expect? He needed it. We bought this house for a song (someone was murdered here twenty years ago and people are very superstitious) and what was left has been well invested now. We have a half share in a very promising enterprise.’

‘A Dakota by any chance?’

My aunt gave a little excited giggle. ‘Mr Visconti will tell you all about it himself.’ ‘Where is he?’

‘He meant to be back yesterday, but there has been a lot of rain and the roads are very bad.’ She looked with pride at the empty shell of her house. She said, ‘You won’t know this place in a week’s time. When the chandeliers are hung in the hall, and the furniture arrives. I so wanted it to be ready before you came, but there were delays in Panama. A lot always depends on Panama.’ ‘And what about the police?’

‘Oh, they won’t interfere with an established business,’ my aunt said. All the same another day passed and Mr Visconti had not returned from wherever he was. My aunt slept late on her mattresses, Wordsworth was busy cleaning, and I walked around the town. Preparations were in progress for some festival. There were decorated cars of pretty girls parked at street corners, Outside the cathedral and the military academy, which faced each other over the little memorial tank, squads of soldiers goose-stepped. There were pictures of the General everywhere-sometimes in uniform and sometimes in civilian clothes looking like the amiable well-fed host of a Bavarian bierstube. There had been unpleasant, stories in Buenos Aires about his early rule-enemies tossed out of aeroplanes into the jungle, bodies washed up on the Argentine shore of the two great rivers with their hands and feet bound with wire, but there were cheap cigarettes on the street and cheap whisky in the stores and no income tax to pay (so my aunt had told me) and even the bribes were not unreasonable if one were doing well and could pay regularly, and the oranges lay under the trees hardly worth the bother of gathering when they were threepence a dozen in the market, and everywhere there was the smell of flowers. I hoped that Mr Visconti’s investment would prove a success. There were worse places than this to end one’s days.

But when I returned home the second evening Mr Visconti was not there, and my aunt was having a bitter argument with Wordsworth. As I crossed the lawn I could hear her voice sounding hollowly from the empty hall at the head of the garden steps. ‘I am not your bebi gel, Wordsworth, any more. Understand that. I have kept enough money for you to return to Europe …’ ‘Ar no wan yo money,’ Wordsworth’s voice replied.

‘You’ve taken plenty of my money in the past. The CTCs you’ve had from me and all my friends …’

‘Ar tak yo money them times because you lov me, you slip with me, you lak jig-jig with Wordsworth. Now you no slip with me, you no lov me, I no wan your damn money. You give it him. He tak everytin you got. When you got noting at all, you come to Wordsworth, and ar work for you and ar slip with you an you lov me and you lak jig-jig all same last time.’

I stood at the bottom of the steps. I couldn’t turn my back and walk away.

They would have seen me.’

‘Don’t you understand, Wordsworth, all that’s finished now I have Mr Visconti back. Mr Visconti wants you to go, and I want what he wants.’ ‘He be feared of Wordsworth.’

‘Dear, dear Wordsworth, it’s you who should be afraid. I want you to leave now-today-don’t you understand that.’

‘Okay,’ Wordsworth said, ‘ar go. You ask me an ar go. Ar no feared of that man. But you no slip with me no more an ar go.’ My aunt made a movement as though she wished to embrace him, but Wordsworth turned away from her and came down the steps. He didn’t even see me, though I was only a step away. ‘Goodbye, Wordsworth,’ I said and held out my hand. I had a fifty-dollar note, concealed in it. Wordsworth looked at the note but he didn’t take it. He said, ‘Goodbye, Mr Pullen. Man, the darkness deepens, sure thing, sure thing, she no abide with me.’ He pressed my left hand which was moneyless and went off down the garden.

My aunt came out on to the steps to see the last of him. ‘How will you do without him in this big house?’ I asked. ‘Staff are easy to come by and much cheaper than Wordsworth with all his CTCs. Oh, I’m sorry for poor Wordsworth,’ she added, ‘but he was only a stop-gap. Everything has been a stop-gap since Mr Visconti and I were separated.’

‘You must love Visconti a great deal. Is he worth it?’

‘To me he is. I like men who are untouchable. I’ve never wanted a man who needed me, Henry. A need is a claim. I thought that Wordsworth wanted my money and the comfort I gave him at the Crown and Anchor, but there’s not much comfort for anyone here and you saw how he wouldn’t even take a CTC. I’m disappointed in Wordsworth.’ She added as though it were relevant, ‘Your father was pretty untouchable too.’

‘All the same I found your photograph in Rob Roy.’

‘Perhaps he wasn’t untouchable enough’ she said, and she added with venom in her voice, ‘Think of the little schoolteacher and “Dolly, darling” and dying in her arms.’

The house was twice as empty now that Wordsworth had gone and we were alone. We ate our evening meal almost in silence, and I drank too much of the heavy sweet medicinal wine. Once we heard the distant sound of a car and my aunt went at once to the big windows which gave on to the garden. The single globe on the enormous ceiling hardly stretched that far, so that she looked slim and young in her dark dress, and in the obscurity I would never have taken her for an old woman. She quoted at me with a scared smile:

‘She only said, “The night is dreary,

He cometh not,” she said.’

She added, ‘Your father taught rne that.’

‘Yes, I learnt it from him too-in a way. He turned down that page in Palgrave.’

‘And no doubt he taught it to Dolly darling,’ she said. ‘Can’t you imagine her reciting it over the grave in Boulogne like a prayer?’ ‘You are not untouchable, Aunt Augusta.’

‘That’s why I need a man who is. Two touchables together, what a terrible life they always make of it, two people suffering, afraid to speak, afraid to act, afraid of hurting. Life can be bearable when it’s only one who suffers. It’s easy to put up with your own suffering, but not someone else’s. I’m not afraid of making Mr Visconti suffer. I wouldn’t know how. I have a wonderful feeling of freedom. I can say what I like, and it will never get under that thick dago skin of his.’

‘And if he makes you suffer?’

‘It’s only for a little time, Henry. Like now. When he doesn’t come and I don’t know what’s keeping him, and I fear …’

‘There can’t be anything seriously wrong. If there had been an accident you would have heard from the police.”

‘My dear, this is Paraguay. I am afraid of the police.’

‘Then why do you stay here?’

‘Mr Visconti hasn’t all that much choice. I daresay he might be safe in Brazil if he had enough money. Perhaps when he’s made a fortune, we can move there. Mr Visconti has always wanted to make a fortune, and he believes he can at last make one here. He has come close to making a fortune so many times. There was Saudi Arabia and then there were the Germans …’

‘If he makes one now he won’t have very long to enjoy it.’

‘That’s not the point. He’ll die happy if it’s there. Stacked gold bars. (He has always had a fancy for gold bars.) He’ll have done what he set out to do.’

‘Why did you want me to come,’ Aunt Augusta?’

‘You are the only family I have, Henry-and you can be of great use to Mr Visconti.’

It was not an idea which appealed to me greatly.

‘I can’t speak a word of Spanish,’ I said.

‘Mr Visconti wants somebody he can trust to keep the books. Accounts have always been his weak point.’

I looked around the empty room. The bare globe flickered with an approaching storm. The packing-case scratched hard against my thigh. I thought of the two mattresses and the dressing-table upstairs. The books didn’t seem to need very much accounting. I said, ‘I planned to leave after I had seen you.’ ‘Leave? Why?’

‘I was thinking that perhaps it’s almost time I settled down.’

‘What else have you been doing? For far too long.’

‘And married I was going to say.’

‘At your age?’

‘I’m not nearly as old as Mr Visconti.’

A gust of rain splashed against the windows. I began to tell my aunt about Miss Keene and of the evening when I had nearly proposed to her. ‘You are suffering from loneliness,’ my aunt said. ‘That all. You won’t be lonely here.’

‘I really think Miss Keene loves me a little, I get a bit of pleasure from the thought that perhaps I could make her happy.’ I was arguing without conviction, waiting for my aunt’s denial, and even hoping for it. ‘In a year,’ my aunt said, ‘what would you two have to talk about?’ She would sit over her tatting-I didn’t realize that anyone still tatted-and you would read gardening catalogues, and then when the silence was almost unbearable she would begin to tell you a story of Koffiefontein which you had heard a dozen times before. Do you know what, you’ll think about when you can’t sleep in your double bed? Not of women. You don’t care enough about them, or you wouldn’t even consider marrying Miss Keene. You will think how every day you are getting a little closer to death. It will stand there as close as the bedroom wall. And you’ll become more and more afraid of the wall because nothing can prevent you coming nearer and nearer to it every night while you try to sleep and Miss Keene reads. What does Miss Keene read?’

‘You may be right, Aunt Augusta, but isn’t it the same everywhere at our age?’

‘Not here it isn’t. Tomorrow you may be shot in the street by a policeman because you haven’t understood Guarani, or a man may knife you in a cantina because you can’t speak Spanish and he thinks you are acting in a superior way. Next week, when we have our Dakota, perhaps it will crash with you over Argentina. (Mr Visconti is too old to fly with the pilot.) My dear Henry, if you live with us, you won’t be edging day by day across to any last wall. The wall will find you of it’s own accord without your help, and every day you live will seem to you a kind of victory. “I was too sharp for it that time,” you will say, when night comes, and afterwards you’ll sleep well.’ She said, ‘I only hope the wall hasn’t found Mr Visconti. If it has I will have to go out and look for it myself.’

THE FAR OFF MURMUR of great crowds woke me next morning; I thought at first that I was back in Brighton and that the sea was turning the shingle. My aunt was already up and had prepared breakfast with grapefruit picked in the garden. From the town came snatches of music.

‘What’s happening?’

‘It’s the National Day. Wordsworth warned me, but I had forgotten. If you go into town carry something red.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s the colour of the governing party. The Liberal party is blue, but it’s unhealthy to carry blue. No one does.’

‘I haven’t got anything red.’

‘I’ve got a red scarf.’

‘I can hardly wear a woman’s scarf.’

‘Stuff it in your breast pocket. It will look like a handkerchief.’

‘Won’t you come into town with me, Aunt Augusta?’

‘No. I must wait for Mr Visconti. He will come today for sure. Or at least he’ll send a message.’

I needn’t have been shy of wearing the scarf. Most men in the street wore red scarves round their necks, and many scarves were printed with a picture of the General. Only the bourgeois confined themselves to a handkerchief, and some to a handkerchief barely on display at all but pressed in the hand and showing only through the knuckles-perhaps they would rather have carried blue. There were red flags everywhere: you would have thought the town had been taken over by the Communists, but red here was the colour of conservatism. I was held up continually at street crossings by processions of women in red scarves carrying portraits of the General and slogans about the great Colorado party. Groups of gauchos came riding into town with scarlet reins. A drunk man fell out of a tavern door and lay face down in the road with the General’s genial face spread over his back as the horses picked their way across him. Decorated cars carrying pretty girls with scarlet camellia blossoms in their hair went by. Even the sun looked red through the morning mist.

The movement of the crowd edged me towards the Avenue of Mariscal Lopez where the processions were passing. Across the road were stands reserved for the government and the diplomats. I could recognize the General taking the salute, and the stand next door must have been that of the American Embassy, for in the back row I could see my friend O’Toole pressed into a corner by a stout military attache. I waved to him and I think he must have seen me because he gave a shy smile and spoke to the fat man at his side. Then a procession passed and I lost sight of him.

It was a procession of elderly men in shabby suits-a few were on crutches and some had lost an arm. They carried banners representing their old units. They had fought in the Chaco war, and once a year, I suppose, they had this moment of pride. They looked more human than the colonels who followed them, standing upright in their cars, in dress uniforms with gold tassels and epaulettes, all with black moustaches and all quite indistinguishable; the colonels looked like painted skittles waiting for a ball to bowl them over. After an hour I had had enough of watching and walked into the centre of town, to the new skyscraper hotel, to buy an English-language newspaper, but there was only a five-day-old New York Times. A man spoke to me in a confidential voice before I went into the hotel; he had a distinguished intellectual air; he might have been a diplomat or a university professor. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said.

‘Any U.S. dollars?’ he asked me rapidly, and when I shook my head (for I had no desire to break any local currency laws) he walked away. Unfortunately when I emerged again from the hotel with my newspaper he was back on the opposite pavement and failed to recognize me. ‘Any U.S. dollars?’ he whispered. I said ‘No’ again and he glared at me with an air of disgust and disdain, as though I had been playing a childish practical joke.

I walked back towards the edge of town and my aunt’s house, interrupted at street corners by the tag end of processions. A palatial house covered in banners bore a number of scarlet placards; it was probably the headquarters of the Colorado party. Stout men in city suits who sweated in the morning sun climbed up and down the wide steps wearing red scarves. One of them stopped and demanded, or so I supposed, what I wanted. ‘Colorado?’ I asked. ‘Yes. Are you American?’

I was glad to find someone who spoke English. He had the face of an amiable bulldog, but he needed a shave. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m English.’ He gave a short bark which did not sound amiable at all, and at that moment, perhaps because of the heat, the sun and the scent of flowers, I was overcome by a fit of sneezing. Without thinking I drew my aunt’s red scarf from my breast pocket and blew my nose. It was most unfortunate. I found myself sitting on the pavement without knowing how I got there, and my nose streamed with blood. Fat men surrounded me, all of them in dark suits and all with the faces of bulldogs. Others like them appeared on the balcony of the Colorado house and looked down at me with curiosity and disapproval. I heard the word ‘Ingles’ repeated often, and then a policeman yanked me on to my feet. Afterwards I was to think how lucky I had been; if I had blown my nose near a group of gauchos I might well have received a knife in the ribs. Several fat men accompanied me to the police station, including the one who had struck me. He carried my aunt’s scarf, the evidence of a crime. ‘It’s all a mistake,’ I assured him. ‘Mistake?’ His English was very limited. At the police stationa very imposing building, built to withstand a siege-everyone began to speak at once with noise and fury. I felt at a loss how to behave. I kept on repeating ‘Ingles’ without effect. Once I tried ‘Ambassador,’ but it wasn’t in their vocabulary. The police officer was young and worried-I imagine his superior officers were all at the parade. When I said ‘Ingles’ for the third time and ‘Ambassador’ for the second he hit me but without conviction-a blow which hardly hurt me at all. I was discovering something new. Physical violence, like the dentist’s drill, is seldom as bad as one fears.

I tried ‘Mistake’ again, but no one could translate that word. The scarf was handed from one to another, and a patch of snot was pointed out to the officer. He picked up what looked like an identity card and waved it at me. I suppose he was demanding my passport. I said, ‘I left it at home,’ and three or four people began to argue. Perhaps they were disagreeing on the meaning of what I said.

Oddly enough it was the man who had struck me who proved most sympathetic.

My nose was still bleeding and he gave me his handkerchief. It was not very clean and I feared blood poisoning, but I didn’t want to reject his help, so I dabbed rather tentatively at my nose and then offered him his handkerchief back again. He waved it away with a gesture of generosity. Then he wrote something on a piece of paper and showed it me. I read the name of a street and a number. He pointed at the floor and then pointed at me and held out the pencil. Everyone pressed nearer with great curiosity. I shook my head. I knew how to walk to my aunt’s house, but I had no idea of the name of the street. My friend-I was beginning to think of him as that-wrote down the name of three hotels. I shook my head.

Then I spoilt everything. For some unknown reason, standing beside the officer’s desk in the hot and crowded room, with an armed sentry at the door, my mind went suddenly back to the morning of my stepmother’s funeral, the chapel full of distant relatives, and the voice of my aunt breaking the reverent whispers: “I was present once at a premature cremation.’ I had looked forward to the funeral as a break in the orderly routine of my retirement and what a break it had proved. I had been worried, I remembered, about the rain falling on my lawn-mower. I began to laugh, and when I laughed all the enmity returned. I was again the insolent foreigner who had blown his nose on the flag of the Colorado party. My first assailant snatched away his handkerchief, and the officer, pushing aside those who stood in his way, strode to my side and gave me a severe cuff on my right ear which began to bleed in its turn. Desperately trying to find the name of anyone they might know, I let out Mr Visconti’s alias. ‘Senor Izquierdo,’ I said with no effect at all, and then, ‘Senor O’Toole.’ The officer paused with his hand raised to strike again and I tried, ‘Embassy-Americano.’ Something about those words worked, though I was not sure whether the working was in my favour. Two policemen were summoned and I was pushed down a corridor and locked into a cell. I could hear the officer telephoning and I could only hope that Tooley’s father really knew the ropes. There was nothing to sit on in the cell-only a piece of sacking under a barred window too high for me to see anything but a patch of monotonous sky. Somebody had written on the wall in Spanish-perhaps a prayer, perhaps an obscenity, I couldn’t tell. I sat down on the sacking and prepared for a long wait. The wall opposite me reminded me of what my aunt had said: I trained myself to be thankful that the wall seemed to keep its distance.

To pass the time I took out my pen and began to doodle on the whitewash. I put down my initials and was irritated, as often before, because they represented a famous sauce; then I wrote the date of my birth, 1913, with a dash against it where someone else could fill in the date of my death. It occurred to me to record a family history-it would help to pass the time if I were to have a long stay-so I wrote down my father’s death in 1923 and my stepmother’s less than a year ago. I knew nothing of my grandparents, so the only relative left me was my aunt. She had been born somewhere around 1895, and I put a question mark after the year. It occurred to me to try to work out my aunt’s history on the wall which had already begun to take on a more friendly family air. I didn’t entirely believe all her stories and perhaps I might discover a chronological flaw. She had seen me at my baptism and never again, so she must have left my father’s house somewhere around 1913, when she was eighteen-it could not have been long after the snapshot had been taken. There had been the period with Curran in Brighton-that must surely have been after the first world war, so I put Dogs’ Church 1919 with another question mark. Curran had left her, she had gone to Paris, and there in the establishment in the Rue de Provence she had met Mr Visconti-perhaps about the same time as my father died in Boulogne. She would have been in her twenties then. I began to work on the Italian period, her travels between Milan and Venice, Uncle Jo’s death, her life with Mr Visconti, which had been interrupted by the failure of his Saudi Arabia scheme. I put tentatively the date 1937 against Paris and Monsieur Dambreuse, for she had returned to Italy and been reunited with Mr Visconti at the house behind the Messaggero before the outbreak of the second war. Of the last twenty years of her life I knew nothing before the arrival of Wordsworth. I had to admit that I had found nothing intrinsically false in the chronology. There was ample time for all she had told me to happen and a great deal more besides. I began to speculate on the nature of the quarrel with my so-called mother. It must have occurred round about the time of the pretended pregnancy-if that story were true … The door of the cell was thrown open and a policeman brought in a chair. It seemed a kindly action and I got up from the sacking to take advantage of it, but the policeman pushed me roughly away. O’Toole came in. He looked embarrassed. ‘You seem to be in trouble, Henry,’ he said. ‘It’s all a mistake. I sneezed and then I happened to blow my nose ‘

‘On the Colorado colours outside the Colorado H.Q.’

‘Yes. But I thought it was my handkerchief.’

‘You are in an awful spot,’

‘I suppose I am.’

‘You could easily have a ten-year sentence. Do you mind if I sit down? I’ve been standing for hours at that damn parade.”

‘Of course. Please.’

‘I could ask for another chair.”

‘Don’t bother. I’m getting used to this sack.’

‘I guess what makes it worse,’ O’Toole said, ‘is that you did it on their National Day. It seems kind of provocative. Otherwise they might have been content to expel you. What made you ask for me?’

‘You said you knew the ropes and they didn’t seem to understand “English Embassy”.’

‘Your people don’t count for very much here, I’m afraid. We provide their arms-and then there’s the new hydroelectric station we are helping them to build … not far from the Iguazu Falls. It will serve Brazil too-but Brazil will have to pay them royalties. Great thing for the country.’ ‘Very interesting,’ I said with some bitterness.

‘Of course I’d like to help you,’ O’Toole said. ‘You are a friend of

Lucinda. I’ve had a postcard from her by the way. She’s not in Katmandu. She’s in Vientiane, I don’t know why.’

‘Look, O’Toole,’ I said, ‘if you can’t do anything else, you might at least ring up the British Embassy. If I’m to have ten years in prison I’d like a bed and a chair.’

‘Sure’ O’Toole said, ‘I can arrange all that. I guess I could arrange your release too-the Chief of Police is a good friend of mine …’ ‘I think my aunt knows him too,’ I said.

‘Don’t bank on that. You see, we’ve had some fresh information about your relative. The police don’t want to act, I guess some money has passed, but we’re bringing pressure on them. You seem to be mixed up with some pretty shady characters, Henry.’

‘My aunt’s an old lady of seventy-five.’ I glanced at the notes I had made on the wall: Rue de Provence, Milan, Messaggero. I would have certainly called her career shady myself nine months ago, and yet now there seemed nothing so very wrong in her curriculum vitas, nothing so wrong as thirty years in a bank. ‘I don’t see what you can have against her,’ I said.

‘Your friend, that black fellow, came to see us.”

‘I’m certain he told you nothing against my aunt.’

‘That’s right, he didn’t, but he had plenty to say about Mr Izquierdo. So I persuaded the police to keep him out of circulation awhile.’ ‘Is that part of your social research?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps he suffered from malnutrition.’

‘I guess I sort of lied to you, Henry,’ he said, looking ashamed again.

‘Are you in the CIA like Tooley told me?’

‘Well … kind of… not exactly,’ he said, clinging to his torn rag of deception like a blown-out umbrella in a high wind.

‘What did Wordsworth tell you?’

‘He was in a pretty bitter mood. If your aunt hadn’t been so old I’d have said it was love. He seemed jealous of this guy Izquierdo.’ ‘Where’s Wordsworth now?’

‘He’s sticking around. He wants to see your aunt again when things blow over.’

‘Are they likely to blow over?’

‘Well, Henry, they could. If everyone were reasonable.’

‘Even my sneeze?’

‘I guess so. As for Mr Izquierdo’s smuggling racket-no one cares a devalued dime about that if only he’d be reasonable. Now you know Mr I.’ ‘I’ve never met him.’

‘Maybe you know him under another name?’

‘No,’ I said.

O’Toole sighed. ‘Henry,’ he said, ‘I want to help you. Any friend of Lucinda can count on me. We can have this whole thing tied up in a few hours. Visconti’s not important, not like Mengeles or Hermann.’

‘I thought we were talking about Izquierdo.’

‘You and I and your friend Wordsworth know it’s the same man. So do the police, but they protect these guys-anyway till they run out of cash. Visconti nearly ran out of cash, but then Miss Bertram arrived and paid up.’ ‘I don’t know a thing,’ I said. ‘I’m simply here on a visit.’

‘I guess there was a good reason why Wordsworth met you in Formosa, Henry. Anyway I’d like to have a word with your aunt and a word from you might make it easier for me. If I persuaded the police to let you go, you and I could see her together …’

‘What exactly are you after?’

‘She must be anxious about Visconti by this time. I can reassure her.

They’ll only hold him in jail a few days till I give the word.’ ‘Are you offering her some kind of bargain? I warn you she won’t do anything to hurt Mr Visconti.’

‘I just want to talk to her, Henry. With you there. She mightn’t trust me alone.’

I was feeling very cramped on the sacking, and I saw no reason not to agree.

He said, ‘It may take an hour or two to get you released. Everything is disorganized today.” He stood up, ‘How are the statistics, O’Toole?’ ‘This parade’s put everything out, I was afraid to drink any coffee for breakfast. All these hours of standing without taking a leak. I ought to cancel today altogether. It’s not what you’d call a normal day.’ It took him more than an hour or two to persuade them to let me go, but they forgot to take the chair from the cell after he’d gone and they brought me some thin gruel, and these I took for favourable signs. To my own surprise I wasn’t bored, though there was nothing I could usefully add to the history on the wall, except two problematical dates for Tunis and Havana. I began in my head to compose a letter to Miss Keene describing my present circumstances: ‘I have insulted the ruling party of Paraguay and I’m mixed up with a war criminal wanted by Interpol. For the first offence the maximum penalty is ten years. I am in a small cell ten feet by six, and I have nothing to sleep on but a piece of sacking. I have no idea what is going to happen next, but I confess I am not altogether unhappy, I am too deeply interested.’ I would never really write the letter, for she would be quite unable to reconcile the writer with the man she had known.

It was quite dark outside when at last they came to release me. I was led back down the corridor and through the office, and there they solemnly returned me my aunt’s red scarf, and the young officer slapped my back in a friendly way, urging me through into the street where O’Toole waited for me in an ancient Cadillac. He said, ‘I’m sorry. It took longer than I thought. I’m afraid Miss Bertram will be nervous about you too.’

‘I don’t think I count much beside Mr Visconti.’ ‘Blood’s thicker than water, Henry.’

‘Water’s not the term to use for Mr Visconti.’

There were only two lights on in the house. As we came through the trees at the bottom of the garden someone flashed a light on our faces, but the light went out before I could see who held the torch. I looked back from, the lawn and could see nothing.

‘Are you having the place watched?’ I asked.

‘Not me, Henry.’

I could tell that he was uneasy. He put his hand inside his jacket.

‘Are you armed?’ I said.

‘One has to take precautions.’

‘Against an old lady? My aunt’s the only one here.’

‘You can never be sure.’

We went forward across the lawn and climbed the steps. The globe in the dining-room shone down on two empty glasses and an empty bottle of champagne. It was still cold to the touch when I picked it up. When I put it down I knocked over one of the glasses and the sound rang through the house. My aunt must have been in the kitchen, for she came at once to the door. ‘Where on earth have you been, Henry?’

‘In prison. Mr O’Toole helped me to get out.’

‘I never expected to see Mr O’Toole in my house. Not after what he did to Mr Izquierdo in Argentina. So you are Mr O’Toole.’

‘Yes, Miss Bertram. I thought, it would be a good thing if we could have a friendly talk. I know how anxious you must be about Mr Visconti.’ ‘I’m not in the least anxious about Mr Visconti.’

‘I thought perhaps … that not knowing where he was … all this long delay …’

‘I know perfectly well where he is,’ my aunt said. ‘He’s in the lavatory.’

The flush of water could not have come more exactly on cue.