The High Commissioner

by Jon Cleary

  “The ones that stand up to pee are the boys.”

  Coburn looked around the elegant hall, then bade at Malone. “Watch it, mate. You’re making the old mansion sound like a vulgar music hall. Hooroo again. Have a nice restful night.”

  He went out, closing the door after him, a young man whose only trouble in the world was a bird who was too much with it.

  Malone stood for a moment listening to the quietness of the house about him. A car went by outside, its horn hooting derisively: someone thumbing his nose at one of the embassies. The house creaked, feeling its age. Malone began to climb the stairs, feeling his own age, all thirty-one years of it. Christ, he thought; and laughed at himself.

  He knocked at the door of the Quentins’ bedroom, annoyed at himself for his tentativeness. He would rather have talked to them downstairs; but Lisa or Joseph might be home any minute. Deep in the bowels of the house he could hear a radio playing: that must be the cook. He hadn’t seen her in his three days in the house: she was like a pit pony, never allowed out into the light.

  Quentin opened the door and said, “Come in, Scobie.”

  He hesitated, then he stepped into the big room. Quentin closed the door and stood with his back to it for a moment; Malone felt trapped and looked back over his shoulder defensively. Then Quentin moved away from the door, sat down beside Sheila on the wide four-poster bed.

  Malone stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. He wanted to turn, to fling open the door and demand that they follow him downstairs to the library: he would lock the door there against all interruptions. It still would not be neutral territory, but it would be more neutral than this. They had reduced him to the level of a private investigator; they sat facing him, holding each other’s hands, as if waiting for the flash of his camera. This was the room of their secrets and he should never have allowed himself to come this far. He moved back to the door, put his hand on the knob, but Quentin said, “Sit down, Sergeant. That’s what you want us to call you from now on, isn’t it? Sergeant.”

  There was a chair beside the door covered in yellow Thai silk, a woman’s bedroom chair that seemed to float on a soufflé of ruffles. Malone sat down on it, felt the Thai silk with his rough palm, thought of the dead Jamaica. Then he looked across at the Quentins and made himself think of the dead Freda. “I’m repeating my question,” he said in his best formal policeman’s voice, “which of you killed Freda Corliss?”

  The linked hands tightened on each other. “I don’t think we have to answer that,” Quentin said after a moment. “I have admitted causing the death of my first wife and you have a warrant for my arrest. That’s all there is to it. I’ll reserve my plea till we get back to Sydney and I’m charged in court.”

  That should stop me dead, Malone thought. But he heard himself go on speaking, the Celtic tongue that never knew when enough was enough: “When I get up in court to give evidence against you, I’m going to have to tell everything that is in the file on you.”

  “I don’t know what is in the file. But if there is anything that implicates my wife, they would have issued a warrant for her, too.”

  Malone looked at Sheila. “You must have been afraid that there was something in it that implicated you. Otherwise why did you try to open my brief-case?”

  She did not even attempt to deny it. Her face tightened, the jaw coming down, as Malone had seen women’s faces tighten in the moment just before they screamed; he tensed, ready to jump forward and slap her face as she went into hysteria. But again her control came back, just in time this time; she shuddered like an old woman with the ague, and Quentin raised an arm and put it about her trembling shoulders. He glared at Malone and almost shouted, “Leave us alone! Get out and leave us alone!”

  Malone shook his head, not at Quentin but at himself: why the hell was he persisting, torturing himself as well as them? But he knew the answer and he could not understand why Quentin did not know it: “Christ Almighty, can’t you see I’m trying to help you!” His own voice was as anguished as Quentin’s had been.

  “How can you help me, trying to bring Sheila into this?” He held her closer to him; her trembling communicated itself to him. “I tell you she had nothing to do with it! I killed Freda – it was an accident – but I killed her! You understand, it was me! Me!”

  Malone stood up, began to walk about the room. He passed a dressing-table loaded with bottles: Arden, Rubinstein, Revlon could no longer offer much to disguise the crumbling face of the woman on the bed. He saw himself and the Quentins reflected in the mirror: they were watching him, like caged animals watching their keeper. He stopped, looked at the photograph on the dressing-table: Quentin with a beard and in naval uniform, Sheila in a dress that now looked ridiculously long and with the upswept hair of twenty-odd years ago. They looked happy, carefree; but that might have been only for the benefit of the photographer. But he knew that the camera could lie, or anyway could be tricked: it could never be used to authenticate the emotions it showed. He nodded at the photograph and said, “Were you really as happy as that?”

  Quentin seemed to realise that Malone was not going to be dismissed. He slumped a little, still keeping his arm round Sheila. “There were occasional days. Sergeant—” He looked up, a note of pleading now in his voice. “What is in that file?”

  Malone sat down on the dressing-table stool, his back to the mirror. “It’s not so much what’s in it, but what’s not in it. The omissions. What you can read between the lines, if you like.”

  “That sort of evidence is never admitted in court,” Quentin said. “Juries aren’t expected to read between the lines.”

  “A Crown Prosecutor is.”

  “Nobody else seems to have read between them. Why did you?”

  Malone looked at Sheila. “You weren’t careful enough, Mrs. Quentin. I wasn’t trying to trap you, I didn’t even suspect you. But you gave yourself away. You were the one who started me reading between the lines.”

  Sheila spoke for the first time, her voice no more than a croaking whisper. “How?”

  “You told me about the coolibah tree when you were a child. You tried to cover that up by saying your grandfather had brought it over from the eastern States. And I swallowed it – I guess there are some coolibahs in the West. But in the file on you they say you were brought up in northern Queensland. There are coolibahs there, at least as far north as Townsville.”

  “None of that proves anything,” said Quentin. “What if my wife did come from Queensland instead of Western Australia?”

  “Why tell lies about it? There was one other thing. This morning at breakfast, just before that man from the American Embassy was announced, Mrs. Quentin said something that didn’t register with me right then. She said, ‘We knew it couldn’t last.’ We. You told me the night I arrived here she knew nothing about it, that she didn’t even know about your first wife.” Suddenly his anger came back: “I trusted you! I’ve gone out of my way to help you, put myself out on a limb—”

  “I didn’t ask it for myself,” Quentin said tonelessly. “I told you it was for the conference—”

  “To hell with the conference! I was trying to help you—” He caught the trembling note in his voice just in time; he hated to sound querulous. He suddenly felt that his anger was artificial; what he really felt was sadness, a sense of loss. But what had he lost? A friend? There hadn’t been time for that. And yet perhaps there had been. He had felt admiration, respect, yes and pity, too; and pity, he sensed rather than knew, was a part of love, of friendship. Whatever it was, he had lost something; and Quentin had caused him to lose it. He said, quietly now, “We three will be on that plane for home on Saturday, and the conference and everything else that’s occupied you for the past twenty years will be behind you. You’re not going to be any hero when you get into the dock. All that’s going to help you is the truth.”

  The Quentins sat in an attitude that could have been shock or despair: they were stiff, brittle: one felt they could have broken with
a touch of the hand. Again Malone had the image that they were waiting for the divorce photographer’s flash globe. This was the bed where they had made love, whispered their secrets, waited in the well of the night for this dreaded moment that had finally come. Sheila was the first to move. She stood up, moved to the window and looked out. It was still light and the last of some homing pigeons scratched a silent scrawl on the sky.

  “Are you prepared to listen to the truth, Sergeant?”

  They are no longer calling me Scobie; slowly I am becoming lees and less involved. He warned her: “I’ll be listening officially. I’ve done enough of the other sort—” He looked at Quentin, who turned away with what could have been shame.

  “You can take it all down if you like,” said Sheila. “And I’ll sign it.”

  “No,” said Quentin, but there was no real argument in his voice. “You’ll sign nothing.”

  “Please, darling. We had this argument all those years ago.” She looked back at Malone. “Do you want to take it all down?”

  Malone hesitated, became involved again. “I’ll see. Tell me what you have to say first.”

  Sheila sighed, then began to talk, calmly and with something like relief: “I killed Freda, but it was an accident. I had gone to see her that day to ask her to give John a divorce—”

  Malone interrupted: “How long had you know each other before that?”

  “Three months, perhaps a littie longer. I did come from Queensland, from Charters Towers. My parents were dead and I came down to Sydney to work. I worked for Manly Council as a typist and I met John one day when he came into the Town Hall on business. We started meeting each other secretly – I had no friends and neither did he, so there was no one to recognise us when we were together. There was only Freda.” She turned to Quentin. “Do you want me to tell him about her?”

  Quentin, shoulders slumped, looked sideways at Malone. All his dignity was gone: dignity requires some hope, some belief that not everything is lost. “I was never in love with Freda nor she with me. I realised that a month after we were married. I was young and lonely, a boy from the bush. I’d just had my twenty-first birthday. She was a good-looking girl and, well, I suppose you could say she had the attraction of being foreign. Australians in those days didn’t meet many foreigners. And perhaps I was sorry for her, I don’t know. She didn’t love me, she told me that a couple of years after we were married. We didn’t sleep in the same room after that. I’m not blaming her for anything, trying to make out she was calculating or anything like that. She was just as lonely as I was, and more than that, she was scared. She’d come from Europe – well, I’ve told you all about that. Our marriage was some sort of haven for her. And she never wanted to leave it. When I told her about Sheila, she just didn’t want to know. She’d lock herself in her bedroom and not talk to me for days.”

  He looked at Sheila and she nodded sympathetically. Then she took up the story again: “John and I went away for a week together. We decided we’d go away together for good. I’m not trying to excuse ourselves when I say we were truly in love, which John and Freda never were. I’m just giving it as the reason. When people are in love they do a lot of things without worrying too much about the consequences for others.”

  “We did worry,” Quentin protested, but weakly.

  She nodded. “I know we did, darling. That was why I went to see Freda that Monday afternoon. I’d never met her up till than,” she said to Malone. “That was the one and only time. If I hadn’t gone to see her, tried to be – well, decent, I suppose – she’d still be alive. John was at work, he didn’t know anything about my being there. Not till he came home and found—” She stopped, her mouth open in a half gasp; it was as if she had just opened a door on that scene of twenty-three years ago. Quentin moved to get off the bed, but she shook her head and he sat back. She swallowed and went on: “I pleaded with Freda to give John a divorce, but she wouldn’t listen. She called me names – and I don’t say I didn’t deserve them. But I got angry then, told her we were going away anyway. She had been sewing when I called on her – we were in the front room and she had a sewing basket on the couch beside her. When I got angry, so did she. She picked up the scissors, threatened me with them and told me to get out of the house, to leave John alone and not break up her marriage. I don’t even know if she intended hurting me with the scissors. She might even only have been trying to frighten me. All I know is that I grabbed them and we struggled and the next thing—”

  Again there was the half gasp. This time Quentin came off the bed quickly, moved across the room and took her in his arms. She buried her face against his chest and sobbed quietly. He held her to him and looked over her head at Malone.

  “She sat there with Freda till I came home a couple of hours later. We did nothing then for at least another couple of hours, perhaps longer. All I can remember was that it was dark. Both of us wanted to go to the police and each of us talked the other out of it. If we’d gone to them, told them the truth, do you think they’d have believed it? Australians are puritans about marriage – they are now and they were then. The wife could be a Gorgon or a–a Madame Cholon, but if the husband had a mistress, no matter how much he and the mistress might be in love, all the sympathy is going to be for the wife. Especially if she bad been killed by the mistress.”

  “Don’t you think Freda deserved some sympathy?” Malone said.

  Quentin shook his head in despair. “You don’t understand, do you? So how could we have expected” – he changed the tense – “expect a jury to understand? I felt more than just sympathy for Freda. I grieved for her – not just for her death but for her whole life—”

  “He wept for her.” Sheila turned in her husband’s arms. “Because he didn’t love her and loved me instead, didn’t mean he had no feelings towards her. But maybe you wouldn’t understand that, Sergeant,” she added bitterly. “Policemen never have much time for charity, have they?”

  Malone looked at Quentin, not defensively but sardonically. He was surprised when Quentin said, “Don’t say that, Sheila. Not about him.”

  Malone gazed steadily at him, trying to hold up his own defences. But something began to crumble them: the roots of friendship? he wondered. He said with real regret, “There’s nothing I can do to help you now.”

  “You can,” Quentin said quietly; he seemed to realise that all of Malone’s antagonism had now gone. “Just forget everything my wife has told you.”

  “No!” Sheila pushed herself away from him. “We’ve got to tell them everything. It’s the only way, tell them the truth!”

  “Darling.” Quentin’s voice was gentle, not bitter. “I’ve seen this past week how little the truth counts. People believe what they want to believe. They are only interested in the truth if it’s convenient.”

  “Convenient to what?” She was past understanding compromise: now the truth had been told she wanted nothing less.

  Quentin shrugged. “Their politics, their morals, anything. Scobie has said” – he was Scobie again, the friend – “he’s said no jury would believe it was an accident. Not after so long, not after we ran away. One of us has got to pay for it. And it’s not going to be you,” he said firmly. “The warrant is for me and that’s the way it’s going to remain.”

  Sheila shook her head, but she was weeping now, beyond words. There was nothing left of the beautiful poised woman Malone had first met only three nights ago. Quentin took her in his arms again and looked at Malone.

  “Would you leave us alone, please, Scobie?”

  Malone went to the door, opened it He turned and said hesitatingly, “You won’t try anything foolish?”

  “Suicide?” Quentin didn’t even sound shocked by the question. He shook his head. “No. I’ve been waiting twenty-three years to pay this debt. I’m not going to run away again.”

  IV

  Lisa said, “I got the cook to take tham up something on a tray. What’s going on, Scobie? Is there something wrong between them?”
>
  “It’s personal, I think. They’ve had some bad news.” He was disgusted at his fluency: lying was becoming his second language. But he had committed himself again to the Quentins; no matter how he felt towards Lisa, be was not committed towards her. “He said something about going back to Australia on Saturday.”

  They were dining alone in the big dining-room, sitting together at one end of the long table. Lisa, joking, had insisted that Malone take the head of the table. He had not argued, but he was acutely aware of the unconscious irony of the joke: he was now head of this house.

  Lisa looked up from her plate, a forkful of food” stopped half-way to her mouth. “Back to Australia? Saturday?”

  “Don’t broadcast it. He asked me to keep it quiet. He’ll tell you about it later.” Everyone would have to be told sooner or later; he wondered how she would react to the truth when she learned of it.

  “But I’ll have to get them tickets – are they both going?”

  He nodded. “He’s got the tickets. You don’t have to worry about those.” Quentin’s cheque was in his pocket. The envelope had been lying sealed on his bed when he had gone upstairs to wash his hands just before dinner. He was not going to argue about it any more. The money meant nothing to him right now, but it meant less to Quentin. And it would mean still less again in the future. “They’re on the five-thirty plane Saturday.”

  She looked at him shrewdly. “And you too?” He nodded. She put down her fork, trying hard to contain her impatience with him. “Scobie, what is going on? You know more than you’re telling me.”

  He didn’t reply at once, dodged behind a mouthful of food. He was hungry, but he had no taste; Lisa had told him he was eating Osso Bucco, but it could have been dog’s meat. At last he said, “I can’t tell you anything, Lisa. Not yet, anyway.”

  “I know you’re a security man,” she said impatiently, “but what’s security got to do with their personal problems? They’re not going to sack him, are they?” The thought seemed to horrify her. She had her own idea of treason, a government betraying an individual.