Olura

by Geoffrey Household

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  Olura

  Geoffrey Household

  A la Lamia del Iturrigorri

  CONTENTS

  MEMORANDUM OF HENRY SEQUERRA

  NARRATIVE OF DR PHILIP ARDOWER

  MY INTERVENTION

  NARRATIVE OF OLURA MANOLI

  MY COMMENTS

  CONTINUATION OF DR ARDOWER’S NARRATIVE

  SECRET AND PERSONAL

  MEMORANDUM OF HENRY SEQUERRA

  I consign these informal records to my safe without corrections or omissions in case they should ever be required as evidence in a Court of Law. I have every reason, however, to apprehend that Justice has been done and that it will never be seen to have been done.

  The opening document is the first half of the narrative of Dr Philip Ardower, which I have chosen to place on top of the file because it presents a lucid picture of his involvement with my dear ward and goddaughter, Olura Manoli, as well as the distressing and ultimately dangerous predicament in which these two supposedly responsible people became entangled.

  The second document is Olura’s own story. When I flew to Spain in response to her obscure and censored appeal, her answers to my questions appeared emotional, over-excited and inclined to attribute importance to a variety of circumstances which had none whatever. A woman’s accuracy differs from that of a man, and it is often hard to establish the sequence of events when she considers a mood more vital than a fact and a half-truth more revealing than cold exactitude.

  That was the reason why I requested her to write down with the utmost sincerity exactly what had happened. I must admit that I did not require such sincerity to extend to unnecessary details of her personal life, though, knowing Olura, I should perhaps have expected it. Initially her account covers the same facts as Dr Ardower’s but one might be forgiven for failing, here and there, immediately to recognise that indeed they are the same.

  The third set of papers is the remainder of Ardower’s narrative, which reveals his very natural anxiety for Olura and the consequences of his chivalrous imprudence which made my intervention as difficult as it was urgent.

  During his life Theodore Manoli was closer to me than a brother. Since his death the welfare of his only daughter has been the first responsibility of love. I will not say it has been easy to discharge. Upon reaching the age of revolt—which seems an imperious necessity to the more intelligent of the younger generation—Olura chose passionately to reject Theodore’s environment, while preserving his sense of duty, his integrity and his devotion to those he loved. The Establishment was anathema to her. She referred to it with thin lips, like an Orangeman forced to mention the Roman Church. As for me, her godfather, guardian, trustee and—to carry on my simile—a cardinal not only of the Establishment but the International Establishment, I was endurable only because the darling had become attached to me at an early age.

  As I re-read these documents I perceive recurring in Olura’s character a quality which at the time I put down to her essential femininity, never realising that she had inherited it from Theodore. Indeed the most perfect illustration of it is her own christening.

  Theodore’s handwriting was unintelligible—a fact which even I hesitated to point out to him. Far from being slipshod or undecorative, it was so imposing that a reader attempting to decipher it for the first time invariably blamed his own stupidity. Even when Theodore, to avoid all possible error, wrote in printed capitals he joined them together with such luxuriance that the essential word seemed to be engrossed in the priestly script of some high and vanished civilisation.

  Upon the birth of his daughter he registered her name as Olivia. For once he was particularly careful with his capitals, and there could be no conceivable doubt that the name was Olura. It was early in the war, and Theodore was sleeping on a camp bed in the office; so the first he knew of what he had done was at the christening. I remember the loudly whispered protest of her mother when the parson pronounced the name. Theodore did not turn a hair. He said that it was charming and congratulated his secretary on so delicious a typing error. I am compelled to accuse him of preferring to accept a mistake rather than the truth about his handwriting; but at the same time I applaud his extraordinary power of instant decision. He never failed to exploit any totally unexpected situation which was obviously desirable.

  Nor indeed did she, on the occasions when she was free to act. I see that inspired inconstancy in her change of—shall I call it?—objective in the Hostal de las Olas, in her impulsive but often profitable reactions thereafter, in her instinctive realisation that Ardower must be dead and her admirable choice of the right witness to suborn.

  That perhaps is the least of the illegalities which I feel bound to record in my personal statement, the fourth and last of these documents. My motives were in no way public-spirited. I do not share the opinions of Olura, humane and liberal though they are; still less do I share those of the Alliance des Blancs which have no base but hysteria. When, however, such activities as theirs grossly disturb the peace and happiness of the individual, mere defeat is, I feel, insufficient punishment, and my qualms of conscience are allayed.

  NARRATIVE OF DR PHILIP ARDOWER

  At our first meeting it seemed to me odd that a woman of obvious sophistication should insist on dressing like Red Riding Hood. I remember arguing it out with myself—for want of anything better—as our two solitary figures approached each other across a waste of sand which should have been glittering particles of reflected sunlight and in fact was a melancholy yellow under the stormy sky.

  The cloak and hood were, I admitted, practical enough when one had packed only summer clothes and yet foresaw the probable need of something warm and decorative. So what was wrong? Too conspicuous. But women liked to be conspicuous, provided they did not achieve originality by being out of fashion. A good point for her. So long as she looked attractive she didn’t care whether she was in fashion or not. Very well! But had she any right to sail among the mediocrities of the hotel like a great lady? She was too young to be a great lady. The crimson cloak and hood suggested Disneyland rather than a Duchess.

  She had arrived a couple of days before, and since then had kept very much to herself. Already she was plainly adored by the maïtre d’hotel and her waiter, but to the rest of us she gave no more than shy smiles in passing. I formed the impression that she was on her guard rather than shy, that she faintly resented the interest she aroused. She looked courageous, but as if she couldn’t afford, even in that easiest of hotels, to leave the necessity for courage in her bag upstairs.

  She was walking up the estuary, in full sail over the deserted beach with the gusty north-west wind behind her. I was plugging along towards her with my eyes half-shut against the stinging squalls of sand above high water mark. As we passed I wished her good-morning without shortening my stride, and was surprised when she stopped. It was reasonable enough that she should; but I had been over-impressed by her air of hesitant privacy. I expected nothing but the shy smile.

  We chatted for a moment about the hotel and the weather, and then she asked me what was at the head of the estuary. I had found, I told her, nothing but marsh; it was impossible to cross over to the other side without swimming or going miles round by the road.

  ‘I see why you wanted to,’ she said.

  The little village of Maya across the water beckoned an invitation, and not merely because it was across the water. Outcrops of rock had forced the estuary into a curve. At the bottom of the loop was a small new-moon beach with boats drawn up on it. The anchorage was so sheltered and the sands so steep that there was no neces
sity for a quay. Two gay villas, of the type you can never buy because the owner’s grandchildren would be so disappointed, crowned the rocky headlands, and a single street of red roofs straggled up from the comfortable quadrilateral of the waterside inn. It had a little terrace with a green awning over it, and announced its speciality to be Prawns and Lobsters.

  ‘I’m told one can wade across easily at low tide,’ I answered. ‘But the channel is still too deep to tackle without a swim-suit. I was looking for a shallow higher up the river. They say the prawns are marvellous at that pub.’

  She asked when low tide was. In something less than a couple of hours, I told her. And even then the wind at the mouth of the river would add another foot to the depth.

  ‘It looks as if we could get over just upstream from that boat,’ she said.

  It didn’t look like anything of the sort. There was a quite considerable fishing launch anchored in the channel, which had not yet begun to heel over though the keel was probably touching sand. But she wanted to go. Therefore it was possible.

  ‘Let’s try!’ she said.

  It is never any use arguing about wind, tide and the clock when a woman has decided that you are unenterprising and that they will all obey her. I observed, perhaps drily, that I saw she was a romanticist.

  ‘And you?’ she retorted. ‘Weren’t you looking for a crossing too?’

  ‘But that was greed.’

  ‘Oh, was it? Your prawns are going to taste exactly like any others!’

  The intelligence behind that reply was exciting. So, outside the hotel, was she. Shorten her a good six inches, and her graceful, high-breasted body could be compared to that of some lovely Latin peasant with a jar on her head. One couldn’t call her slim in the sense of those revolting, so-called vital statistics, with their dead, unmoving 34s and 26s like the readings on a pressure gauge, which are flung at us by every newspaper and advertisement and mean absolutely nothing to me. The figures were as irrelevant to her as to classical Greek sculpture or to one of Lely’s provocative lovelies at the court of Charles II. For the rest, I took notice of that fairish hair in some fashionably thick arrangement, the large grey eyes, the straight but utterly unaggressive nose. The mouth might have been a little too full for some, and the upper lip a little too long for others; but any of them at any age would have been enchanted to look at a non-existent river crossing with her.

  I told her to wait while I rolled up my trousers and tried out the channel. It was three feet deep; soft, sticky sand at the bottom added another six inches.

  ‘You could do it if you took them off,’ she said.

  Well, but what about you?’

  ‘Oh, I was hoping for a swim.’

  She took off the crimson cloak and rolled it into a bundle. She was wearing a severe blue swim-suit with a loose sweater over it.

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘My shirt,’ I pointed out, ‘is very short, and …’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of you. I was thinking of highly shockable Spaniards on the other side.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And I refuse to sit at a café table in soaked trousers and this gale.’

  ‘Put my cloak on,’ she suggested, ‘and hold it up as high as you can without shocking Spaniards.’

  I was most unwilling to be watched on an open beach—for villagers, though invisible, are always fascinated by the antics of foreigners—while putting on a woman’s red cloak and taking off my trousers under it. But I had to. I am sensitive to making myself in any way noticeable. She didn’t seem to give a damn. I tried to square her free and easy manners with her reserve in the hotel and verged, I think, on the right answer: that if she felt something was worth doing, she was completely uninhibited in her approach to it.

  We crossed—she splashing along confidently, I looking like an old woman going out to pawn her husband’s pants. Behind a convenient rock I returned to masculinity and handed back the cloak.

  She was wrong about the prawns. They did not taste like any others—as you, Sequerra, will agree. Possibly for her they did. She had no interest in food and drink.

  We talked easily but without intimacy. She appeared to have a mind of high quality, though untrained. She cared too much about vague service to her fellows and too little about knowledge, like so many of the generation ten years younger than my own. Opinionated? A bit of a prig? Well, if she was, I could hardly distinguish it, for she possessed all the social graces.

  There was a continual roar of speech and laughter from the bar behind the terrace. The crew of the María de Urquijo, the launch now high and dry in the channel, were drinking away their leisure while fishing was impossible. She thought the racket extravagantly loud. I may have replied that I was glad there were still men in the world who did not care how much noise they made. Basques when speaking Spanish, as these were, are more full-mouthed than in their own language.

  We stayed an hour and crossed back to our home sands by a knee-deep paddle. On the open beach the wind was too fierce for conversation and too cold to stop and watch the savage seas meeting land for the first time on their journey from Labrador. In any case we had seen all we wanted of that frustrated fury from the hotel windows. Plainly she thought so too, especially as rain was now pouring down.

  She went straight up to her room to change, and I might have imagined that she had had enough of me as well, though she thanked me sweetly for prawns and my company. She had put on again her manner for public places, as if she had been too short-sighted to be sure of any of us and taken refuge in a comprehensive smile.

  The Hostal de las Olas was a hotel with some pretensions to luxury: one of the show-pieces of the Spanish Tourist Office. The guests were pleasantly cosmopolitan, pleasantly prosperous, without belonging in any sense to what I believe is called the International Set for whom the prices of the Hostal would not have been enough. They were far too high for me. Mere longing for a hot bath took me there in the first place, and a windfall in the shape of unexpected royalties from the paperback of my Iberian Migrations enabled me to stay on.

  I had been wandering about from farm to village fonda in the remoter valleys of Vizcaya, and had then spent a couple of weeks at Eibar. I speak and write Euzkadi—Basque, that is—with ease and purity, but I had noticed that in discussing the techniques of modern industry I was sometimes unsure of the form of Spanish loan-words. That was why I chose busy Eibar where such discussions are hardly avoidable. I deprecate philologists who are content with book knowledge. If my subject were English Literature I should feel a fraud unless I could converse without effort in idiomatic Elizabethan.

  A succession of gales, confining us to the hotel lounge and bar when we should have been dispersed along the beaches, enhanced that easy pleasure which we took in our fellow holiday-makers. Sea and a shade of boredom produced that eagerness to talk and be talked at which is more common on board ships than in hotels. There were an affable German publisher with his pretty wife and daughter and a number of genial French families with a papa who had arrived near the top of his profession and could afford to do himself well. The handful of English and the few Spaniards kept as a rule to themselves, through fear, I think, of being forced to speak a foreign language—though in fact some of them may have had far more fluency than the rest of us who misused each other’s languages atrociously but in the best of good humour.

  My most frequent companions were two unattached Frenchmen. Major Vigny, a parachutist, had been a security officer in Algeria and had, I gathered, been forcibly retired by de Gaulle. He spoke excellent Berber, and this—my tastes being what they are—compensated for his political opinions which were some thirty years out of date. His constant companion, introduced to me as des Aunes, was more reserved. He had a very courteous air of authority and I suspected that he might be a General. In the absence of any experience entitling me to recognise French Generals, it is probable that I was merely going by the respect which Commandant Vigny p
aid to him.

  When I came downstairs after changing damp shirt and sweater, I found Vigny in the bar, endeavouring to be polite to the weather while leaving no doubt that he thought it a deliberate insult to the French. He had the same attitude to the lunch hour. He complained that eating at 2.30 made him drink too much too early. Evidently he had only recently arrived in Spain. Des Aunes, on the other hand, had no more objection than I to lunching even at three, which suggested that he had been longer in the country. It was a fair speculation that he might have belonged to the O.A.S and found it healthier to live in exile.

  I joined Vigny at the window, placing my fino on the sill alongside his Cinzano.

  ‘I see that you are very English after all,’ he said. ‘You can amuse yourself in the rain.’

  ‘In our cloistered existence,’ I replied, ‘we keep our first youth longer than the military.’

  ‘Take it from me, Professor—you won’t have any luck.’

  It was never any good explaining to him that I was not a professor, merely a Fellow of my College. And I dislike the everyday use of the doctorate, especially when on holiday among the English. One tends to be cornered at the bar by comparative strangers and asked secretively if any reliable remedy is known for piles.

  ‘I haven’t given a thought to the possibilities,’ I said, not quite truly. ‘But why shouldn’t they be there?’

  ‘Her tastes are notorious.’

  I was surprised that he knew anything about her. He had never made any remark when he saw her passing through the lounge.

  ‘You don’t read your papers then?’ he asked.

  ‘Recently, no.’

  ‘You should have seen her photograph often enough in the last three years.’

  ‘I have an incurable habit of reading. It leaves me little time to look at the pictures. Who is she?’

  ‘Olura Manoli,’ he said.