by Evelyn Waugh
Mr. Pinfold fought back with the enemy’s weapons. He was obliged to hear all they said. They were obliged to hear him. They could not measure his emotions, but every thought which took verbal shape in his mind was audible in Angel’s headquarters and they were unable, it seemed, to disconnect their box. Mr. Pinfold set out to wear them down with sheer boredom. He took a copy of Westward Ho! from the ship’s library and read it very slowly hour by hour. At first Goneril attempted to correct his pronunciation. At first Angel pretended to find psychological significance in the varying emphasis he gave to different words. But after an hour or so they gave up these pretences and cried in frank despair: “Gilbert, for God’s sake stop.”
Then Mr. Pinfold tormented them in his turn by making gibberish of the text, reading alternate lines, alternate words, reading backwards, until they pleaded for a respite. Hour after hour Mr. Pinfold remorselessly read on.
On his last evening he felt magnanimous towards all except Angel and Goneril. Word had got round the passengers that he was leaving them and as he sauntered among them he noted genuine regret in the scraps of talk he overheard.
“Is it really because of that game of Mr. Angel’s?” he heard Mrs. Benson ask.
“He’s very much annoyed with all of us.”
“You can hardly blame him. I’m sorry now I took any part in it.”
“It wasn’t really very funny. I never saw the point really.”
“What’s more we’ve cost him a lot of money. He may be able to afford it, but it’s unfair, all the same.”
“I never believed half they said about him.”
“I wish I’d got to know him. I believe he’s really very nice.”
“He’s a very distinguished man and we’ve behaved like a lot of badly brought up children.”
There was no hatred or ridicule now in any of their conversations. That evening before dinner, he joined the Scarfields.
“In a couple of days it will be getting hot,” she said.
“I shan’t be here.”
“Not here? I thought you were going to Colombo?”
He explained the change of plan.
“Oh, what a pity,” she said with an unmistakable innocence. “It’s only after Port Said that one ever really gets to know people.”
“I think I’ll dine at your table tonight.”
“Do. We’ve missed you.”
So Mr. Pinfold returned to the Captain’s table and ordered champagne for them all. None except the Captain’s table knew of his imminent departure. Throughout all the tumult of the journey this little group had remained isolated and unaware of what was afoot. Mr. Pinfold was still not sure of the Captain. That quiet sea-dog had turned a Nelson eye on proceedings far beyond the scope of his imagination.
“I’m sorry we shan’t have you with us, particularly now you are feeling so much better,” he said, raising his glass. “I hope you have a comfortable flight.”
“Urgent business, I suppose?” said Glover.
“Just impatience,” said Mr. Pinfold.
He remained with the group. Glover gave him advice about tailors in Colombo and cool hotels in the hills suitable for literary work. When they broke up, Mr. Pinfold said good-bye, for the Caliban was due in harbor early and all would be busy next morning.
On his way to his cabin he met the dark figure of Mr. Murdoch, who stopped and spoke to him. His manner was genial and his voice richly redolent of the industrial North.
“Purser tells me you’re landing tomorrow,” he said. “So am I. How do you reckon to get to Cairo?”
“I haven’t really thought. Train, I suppose.”
“Ever been in a Wog train? Filthy dirty and slow. I tell you what, my firm’s sending a car for me. I’d be glad of your company.”
So it was arranged they should travel together.
The night still belonged to Angel and Goneril. “Don’t trust Murdoch,” they whispered. “Murdoch is your enemy.” There was no peace in the cabin and Mr. Pinfold remained on deck watching for the poor little pharos of Port Said, recognized its beam, saw the pilot come aboard with a launchful of officials in tarbooshes, saw the waterfront come clear in view, populous even at that hour with touts and scarab-sellers.
In the hubbub of early morning and the successive interviews with port officials Mr. Pinfold was intermittently aware that Goneril and Angel were still jabbering, still impotently trying to obstruct. Only when at last he went down the gangway did they fall silent. Mr. Pinfold had been to Port Said often before. He had never expected to feel affection for the place. That day he did. He watched patiently while unshaven, smoking officials examined him, his passport, and his baggage. He cheerfully paid a number of absurd impositions. An English agent of Mr. Murdoch’s company warned them:
“… Pretty tricky drive at the moment. Only last week there was a chap hired a car to go to Cairo. The Wog drove off the road just after Ismailia into a village. He was set on, all his luggage pinched. They even took his clothes. Not a stitch on when the police picked him up. And all they said was he ought to consider himself lucky they hadn’t cut his throat.”
Mr. Pinfold did not care. He posted his letter to his wife. He and Murdoch drank a bottle of beer at a café and suffered their boots to be cleaned two or three times. The funnels of the Caliban were plainly to be seen from where he sat, but no voices came from her. Then he and Murdoch drove away out of sight of the unhappy ship.
The road to Cairo was more warlike than he had known it ten years back when Rommel was at the gates. They passed through lanes of barbed wire, halted and showed passports at numerous barriers, crept in dust behind convoys of army trucks, each with a sentry crouched on the tailboard with a tommy-gun at the ready. There came a longer halt and closer scrutiny at the turning out of the Canal Zone, where swarthy, sullen English soldiers gave place to swarthy, sullen Egyptians in almost identical uniforms. Murdoch was a man of few words and Mr. Pinfold sat enveloped in his own impervious peace.
Once during the war he had gone on a parachute course which had ended ignominiously with his breaking a leg in his first drop, but he treasured as the most serene and exalted experience of his life the moment of liberation when he regained consciousness after the shock of the slipstream. A quarter of a minute before he had crouched over the open manhole in the floor of the machine, in dusk and deafening noise, trussed in harness, crowded by apprehensive fellow-tyros. Then the dispatching officer had signaled; down he had plunged into a moment of night, to come to himself in a silent, sunlit heaven, gently supported by what had seemed irksome bonds, absolutely isolated. There were other parachutes all round him holding other swaying bodies; there was an instructor on the ground bawling advice through a loudspeaker; but Mr. Pinfold felt himself free of all human communication, the sole inhabitant of a private, delicious universe. The rapture was brief. Almost at once he knew he was not floating but falling; the field leaped up at him; a few seconds later he was lying on grass, entangled in cords, being shouted at, breathless, bruised, with a sharp pain in the shin. But in that moment of solitude prosaic, earthbound Mr. Pinfold had been one with hashish-eaters and Corybantes and Californian gurus, high on the back-stairs of mysticism. His mood on the road to Cairo was barely less ecstatic.
Cairo was still pocked and gutted by the recent riots. It was thronged with stamp-dealers who had come for the sale of the royal collection. Mr. Pinfold had difficulty in finding a room. Murdoch obtained one for him. There was difficulty with his air passage and there, too, Murdoch helped. Finally on the second day when Mr. Pinfold was provided by the concierge of his hotel with all the requisite documents—including a medical certificate and a sworn statement, necessary for a halt in Arabia, that he was a Christian—and his departure was fixed for midnight, Murdoch invited him to dine with his business associates in Ghezira.
“They’ll be delighted. They don’t see many people from home these days. And to tell you the truth I’m glad to have a companion myself. I don’t much like driving about alone
after dark.”
So they went to dinner in a block of expensive modern flats. The lift was out of order. As they climbed the stairs they passed an Egyptian soldier squatting in a flat doorway, chewing nuts, with his rifle propped behind him.
“One of the old princesses,” said Murdoch, “under house-arrest.”
Host and hostess greeted them kindly. Mr. Pinfold looked about him. The drawing-room was furnished with the trophies of long residence in the East. On the chimney-piece was the framed photograph of a peer in coronation-robes. Mr. Pinfold studied it.
“Surely that’s Simon Dumbleton?”
“Yes, he’s a great friend of ours. Do you know him?”
Before he could answer another voice broke in on that cozy scene.
“No, you don’t, Gilbert,” said Goneril. “Liar. Snob. You only pretend to know him because he’s a lord.”
Eight
Pinfold Regained
Mr. Pinfold landed at Colombo three days later. He had spent one almost sleepless night in the aeroplane where a pallid Parsee sprawled and grunted and heaved beside him; and a second equally wakeful alone in a huge, teetotal hotel in Bombay. Night and day Angel, Goneril, and Margaret chattered to him in their several idioms. He was becoming like the mother of fractious children who has learned to go about her business with a mind closed to their utterances; except that he had no business. He could only sit hour after hour waiting in one place or another for meals he did not want. Sometimes from sheer boredom he spoke to Margaret and learned from her further details of the conspiracy.
Are you still in the ship?”
“No. We got off at Aden.”
“All of you?”
“All three.”
“But the others?”
“There never were any others, Gilbert. Just my brother and sister-in-law and me. You saw our names in the passenger list, Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Angel. I thought you understood all that.”
“But your mother and father?”
“They’re in England, at home—quite near Lychpole.”
“Never in the ship?”
“Darling, you are slow in the uptake. What you heard was my brother. He’s really awfully good at imitations. That’s how he first got taken on by the B.B.C.”
“And Goneril is married to your brother? There was never anything between her and the Captain?”
“No, of course not. She’s beastly but not like that. All that was part of the Plan.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand. You must see it’s all rather confusing.” Mr. Pinfold puzzled his weary head over the matter; then gave it up and asked: “What are you doing in Aden?”
“Me? Nothing. The others have their work. It’s awfully dull for me. May I talk to you sometimes? I know I’m not a bit clever but I’ll try not to be a bore. I do so want company.”
“Why don’t you go and see the mermaid?”
“I don’t understand.”
“There used to be a mermaid at Aden in a box in one of the hotels—stuffed.”
“Don’t tease, Gilbert.”
“I’m not teasing. And anyway that comes pretty badly from a member of your family. Tease indeed.”
“Oh, Gilbert, you don’t understand. We were only trying to help you.”
“Who the devil said I needed help?”
“Don’t be cross, Gilbert; not with me anyway. And you did need help you know. Often their plans work beautifully.”
“Well, you must realize by now that it hasn’t worked with me.”
“Oh, no,” said Margaret sadly. “It hasn’t worked at all.”
“Then why not leave me alone?”
“They never will now, because they hate you. And I never will, never. You see I love you so. Try not to hate me, darling.”
From Cairo to Colombo he talked intermittently to Margaret. To the Angels, husband and wife, he made no answer.
Ceylon was a new country to Mr. Pinfold but he had no sense of exhilaration on arrival. He was tired and sweaty. He was wearing the wrong clothes. His first act after leaving his luggage at the hotel was to seek the tailor Glover had recommended. The man promised to work all night and have three suits ready for him to try on next morning.
“You’re too fat. You’ll look ridiculous in them. They won’t fit… You can’t afford them… The tailor’s lying. He won’t make clothes for you,” Goneril monotonously interpolated.
Mr. Pinfold returned to his hotel and wrote to his wife: “I have arrived safe and well. There does not seem to be much to see or do in Colombo. I will move as soon as I have some clothes. I rather doubt whether I shall get any work done. I had a disappointment leaving the ship. I thought I should get out of range of those psycho-analysts and their infernal Box. But not at all. They still annoy me with the whole length of India between us. As I write this letter they keep interrupting. It will be quite impossible to do any of my book. There must be some way of cutting the “vital waves”. I think it might be worth consulting Father Westmacott when I get back. He knows all about existentialism and psychology and ghosts and diabolic possession. Sometimes I wonder whether it is not literally the Devil who is molesting me.”
He posted this by air mail. Then he sat on the terrace watching the new cheap cars drive up and away. Here, unlike Bombay, one could drink. He drank bottled English beer. The sky darkened. A thunderstorm broke. He moved from the terrace into the lofty hall. To a man at Mr. Pinfold’s time of life few throngs comprise only strangers. In the busy hall he was greeted by an acquaintance from New York, a collector for one of the art galleries, on his way to visit a ruined city on the other side of the island. He asked Mr. Pinfold to join him.
At that moment a gentle servant appeared at his side: “Mr. Peenfold, sir, cable.”
It came from his wife and read: “Implore you return immediately.”
It was not like Mrs. Pinfold to issue a summons of this kind. Could she be ill? Or one of the children? Had the house burned down? She would surely have given some explanation? It occurred to Mr. Pinfold that she must be concerned on his account. That letter he had sent from Port Said, had it said anything to cause alarm? He answered: “All well. Returning soon. Have written today. Off to the ruins,” and rejoined his new companion. They dined together cheerfully, having many tastes and friends and memories in common. All that evening, though there was an undertone in his ears, Mr. Pinfold was oblivious of the Angels. Not till late, when he was alone in his room, did the voices break through. “We heard you, Gilbert. You were lying to that American. You’ve never stayed at Rhinebeck. You’ve never heard of Magnasco. You don’t know Osbert Sitwell.”
“Oh God,” said Mr. Pinfold, “how you bore me!”
*
It was cooler among the ruins. There was refreshment in the leafy roads, in the spectacle of gray elephants and orange-robed, shaven-pated monks ambling meditatively in the dust. They stopped at rest-houses where they were greeted and zealously served by old servants of the British Raj. Mr. Pinfold enjoyed himself. On the way back they stopped at the shrine of Kandy and saw the Buddha’s tooth ceremoniously exposed. This seemed to exhaust the artistic resources of the island. The American was on his way farther east. They parted company four days later at the hotel in Colombo where they had met. Mr. Pinfold was alone once more and at a loose end. He found waiting for him a pile of clothes from the tailor and another cable from his wife: “Both your letters received. Am coming to join you.”
It had been handed in at Lychpole that morning.
“He hates his wife,” said Goneril. “She bores you, doesn’t she, Gilbert? You don’t want to go home, do you? You dread seeing her again.”
That decided him. He cabled: “Returning at once” and set about his preparations.
*
The three suits were pale pinkish buff (‘How smart you look,” cried Margaret); they were not entirely useless. He wore them on successive days; first in Colombo.
It was Sunday and he went to Mass for the first time since he had be
en struck ill. The voices followed him. The taxi took him first to the Anglican church. “… What’s the difference, Gilbert? It’s all nonsense anyway. You don’t believe in God. There’s no one here to show off to. No one will listen to your prayers—except us. We shall hear them. You’re going to pray to be left alone, aren’t you, Gilbert? Aren’t you? But only we will hear and we won’t let you alone. Never, Gilbert, never…” But when he reached the little Catholic church, which ironically enough, he found to be dedicated to St. Michael and the Angels, only Margaret followed him into the dusky, crowded interior. She knew the Mass and made the Latin responses in clear, gentle tones. Epistle and Gospel were read in the vernacular. There was a short sermon, during which Mr. Pinfold asked: “Margaret, are you a Catholic?”
“In a way.”
“In what way?”
“That’s something you mustn’t ask.”
Then she rose with him to recite the creed and later, at the sacring-bell, she urged: “Pray for them, Gilbert. They need prayers.” But Mr. Pinfold could not pray for Angel and Goneril.
On Monday he arranged his passage. On Tuesday he spent another ineffably tedious night at Bombay. On Wednesday night at Karachi he changed back into winter clothes. Somewhere on the sea they may have passed the Caliban. They steered far clear of Aden. Across the Moslem world the voices of hate pursued Mr. Pinfold. It was when they reached Christendom that Angel changed his tune. At breakfast at Rome Mr. Pinfold addressed the waiter, who spoke rather good English, in rather bad Italian. It was an affectation which Goneril was quick to exploit.
“No spikka da Eenglish,” she jeered. “Kissa da monk. Dolce far niente.”
“Shut up,” said Angel sharply. “We’ve had enough of that. I’ve got to talk to Gilbert seriously. Listen, Gilbert, I’ve got a proposition to make.”
But Mr. Pinfold would not answer.
Intermittently throughout the flight to Paris Angel attempted to open a discussion.
“Gilbert, do listen to me. We’ve got to come to some arrangement. Time’s getting short. Gilbert, old boy, do be reasonable.”