Olura

by Geoffrey Household

  When my story arrived at the end of Duyker, it was my turn to be reticent. I skated over the struggle, just saying that I had inevitably knocked him about but that I could not understand what had caused his death.

  ‘You drove his false teeth down his threat,’ she said, ‘and he suffocated.’

  A macabre and faintly comic end for that bully of the open spaces. Civilisation had caught up with him at last. Olura’s voice had an edge of hysteria. She too must have sensed the contrast between the man and his death. She pictured, of course, a nasty smack in the mouth, not the savage effect of the sjambok. I did not disillusion her.

  ‘It was my only weapon,’ I said.

  ‘But he meant to kill you! And you really fired that shot at your feet?’

  ‘Well, yes. I had to get away.’

  ‘You had no right to expose yourself like that! Suppose he had gone on shooting?’

  I replied that it was dark and that he was hardly in a state to aim accurately. I was almost apologetic. Don’t women have any constant principles at all? I had expected to be a pariah for indulging in bestial violence, and there I was being gently rebuked for not killing Duyker when I had the chance and preferring to take a very slight risk with my own life.

  ‘How do you know so much?’ I asked.

  ‘Gonzalez. He has been keeping my godfather informed.’

  That sounded very hopeful. It might, I said, be impossible ever to prove Vigny’s account of the murder of Livetti, but there could be no doubt that the rest of my story was true. I could describe the house, the room behind the kitchen, the car, the journey, everything.

  ‘It’s much worse than that, Philip.’

  The car and the body had been discovered in the morning by a passing farmer. When the police got in touch with Vigny, he must have brilliantly played dismay and ignorance. He took the offensive at once, stating regretfully that I had called at the villa to accuse him of killing Livetti and planting the body in a bathroom window of the Hostal de las Olas. I had apparently persuaded myself into an idée fixe that he was responsible, ever since he and Duyker had happened to pass Miss Manoli’s car on the road. I became excited and violent and even picked up a vermouth bottle with the intention of smashing General Sauche. Damn him! Of course my fingerprints would have been found on it, and wrong way up.

  They were unwilling to cause annoyance and scandal, of which they had had quite enough already, so they put me under temporary restraint and did not send for the police. They even wished me to have a chance to continue, as they thought, my escape. Very wrong, but it would be understood that they had a sporting sympathy for any fugitive. So Duyker kindly took me up into the mountains and turned me loose. I must have grabbed some weapon and killed him.

  This was appalling. I could not see any answer. It was quite as good a story as the truth. The Algerian would swear whatever he was told to swear. Nobody could ever prove that he was in the car that night with Duyker.

  ‘There was just one shot?’ Olura asked.

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘I was thinking of Vigny,’ she said vaguely. ‘I saw something. Wait a minute! Yes, what Vigny would believe. It would never occur to him that you wouldn’t take life when you could.’

  Her opinion of me was romantic. If I could have got the muzzle of the revolver to point at Duyker instead of my feet, I am sure I would have tried to pull the trigger. My life was at stake and I was very frightened.

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘It means that Vigny thinks you never had control of the gun, and that Duyker fired the shot. He could have killed you.’

  ‘No body. No evidence.’

  ‘Duyker bled all over you. Philip. You left that out. Those revolting clothes of yours over there—you don’t spill wine. Tell me the truth! Wouldn’t the police have found blood all over the place?’

  I admitted reluctantly that it was a common result of deep face wounds.

  ‘And where you hid to watch the Algerian?’

  Plenty. I remember trying to wipe some of it off with leaves.’

  ‘It would look as if you had been hit.’

  ‘Not to the police. They don’t know there was any gun.’

  She exclaimed against the stupidity of police. It wasn’t them, she said, she was thinking of.

  ‘It’s Vigny, Philip, Vigny!’ she insisted. ‘He must have been taken by police to look at the ground. I wonder if we couldn’t persuade him that you crawled off to die.’

  I still could not catch up with all these jumps which were more instinct than thought. Justice, police, evidence—one is accustomed to consider crime in those terms. Olura, however, despised the lot as a sort of game which the participants treated very seriously but had nothing to do with essential truth. Take Civil Disobedience, for example! She would expect her Prebendary Flanders to be acquitted on the grounds of his excellent character and idealistic motives however many statutory offences he had wilfully committed. Her contempt for the majesty of the law was now working the other way round. She saw nothing whatever wrong in faking evidence against the guilty.

  She was feeling her way to what lay on the other side of the hill through people, not through facts. The maddeningly feminine way of influencing events! Still, she was on to something. Vigny, puzzling out the Algerian’s report, must indeed find the struggle difficult to reconstruct. If Duyker always retained possession of the gun, why hadn’t he fired again and again? If it was I who had control of it, why didn’t I kill him while he was still very much alive? Anything might have happened, but certainly the possibility existed that I had been hard hit, not worth another shot, yet managing to crawl off while Duyker was choking. The police, since they did not know there had been any gun, would not look for my body. And Vigny dared not be caught hunting for it.

  So far as my trial for murder was concerned, all this got us nowhere. I could not prove there had ever been any shot. The bullet, fired more up than down, might have gone anywhere. And I had not the faintest notion where I was when I buried the sjambok and untied from my ankles the two halves of the hobble which would show how the rope was severed.

  ‘You keep fussing about evidence, my darling,’ she repeated. ‘It’s Vigny we must think of. Suppose your body was found, where’s his story then? And who took the gun out of Duyker’s hand?’

  It wasn’t worth arguing. Unless my body was found—and at the moment I found it far too pleasant a possession to part with—her fantasies contained nothing but vague possibilities of playing on the nerves of the military. I pointed out that if I could not show a motive for assassinating me, Vigny’s story was as good as mine. What would really shake him was evidence proving he had planted Livetti in the hotel—which he hadn’t.

  ‘Oh, that!’ she said as if it were just a minor inconvenience. ‘We could have that.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Mary Deighton-Flagg.’

  I rolled over indignantly and sat on a sea thistle. It added to the force with which I expressed my opinion of Mary Deighton-Flagg’s character and reliability.

  ‘It’s never worth while being rude to people, Philip,’ she said primly. ‘All that is quite true. But in her way she likes me and she badly needs money.’

  ‘But, Olura,’ I protested, ‘I can’t understand you. If it was a policeman who proposed to fabricate false evidence, you’d be the first to say nothing could justify it.’

  She answered that I should not be stupid, that she was not a policeman but a woman very much in love, and why were we wasting precious hours in talk?

  She insisted that I should stay for the time being on the Ermita, where I was safe. She would try to swim out again on the first calm night. Meanwhile we could even see each other. Kneeling behind a rock and holding my arm as if I were likely to be inattentive, she pointed out where there were specks of red on the terrace and where there were not.

  She could persuade herself that I was near her and camping out on an unconventional summer holiday. Sky was blue and
water silky. I do not think she realised the hostility of the place when wisps of cloud squirmed over it and the spouting of the sea was orderless, without even the tranquilliser of rhythm. She was even glad for my sake of the ruined walls and crazy roof of that home-made cell which nothing on earth would induce me to enter.

  At dusk I made her leave, for I disliked the look of the weather. So did Allarte. I could tell that. We watched the María de Urquijo nose her heaving, fendered bows right up to the land rock while Allarte flung ashore three packets. He could have no idea that there might be two to be fed; so extra food meant that he foresaw a period when the island would be unapproachable.

  I saw the last of Olura with every miserable kind of forboding, though there was no reason to be afraid for her. When she put on her swim-suit and frog feet, dived clean from the landing rock and rose to wave good-bye, the sea was calm enough and the lights of Maya clear. An hour and a half later I saw the signal of safe arrival which she had promised to give: a light flicking on and off in her bedroom window.

  Next morning the wind carried spurts of drizzle and the sea was getting up. With no handy cave, no fire and no tool but a small pocket-knife I was in a worse state than palaeolithic man, when the coast was nearer to the continental shelf and the Ermita a pleasant knoll in temperate forest. All I could do for shelter was to choose an overhanging rock and build up on the open side a tight-packed hedge of heather and brush.

  For two days the weather closed down, and Maya was simply a grey horizon where even the red of roof tiles was hardly distinguishable. The next two—of sun and high wind—were endurable, for I could at least feel dry and clearly see from time to time the dot on the terrace which was Olura.

  On the fifth and sixth days she was no longer there, and I tortured myself with the thought that she might have been mad enough to steal a dinghy and try to row to the Ermita. I knew very well that she would not attempt to swim. No doubt my morbid imagination was partly inspired by hunger. Nothing remained of Allarte’s food parcels but a few stale, damp rolls. I was down to trying raw mussels, limpets and shrimps—all of them equally revolting.

  The whole scheme of hiding began to seem to me mere cowardly procrastination. With increasing melancholy I saw that I must make my way at once to England. They could extradite me if they had a case, and to hell with it! But first I must see Olura again. I gave myself all of a fifty-fifty chance of spending a few hours at the villa undetected. The police must long since have grown tired of waiting through wet and windy nights for their predictable criminal.

  At nightfall the rain came in again from the Atlantic, gentle but reinforcing my decision to get out. The surf was still formidable. On the western side of the Ermita the landing rock was curtained by spray, and the whale-back where I had found Olura certain death for ship or man. But under the lee of the island there was nothing much wrong with the sea if I could reach it. The fissure where we had come ashore was a vile maelstrom of leaping foam and driftwood. So there was nothing for it but to go in from a ledge of the cliff—a much higher dive than I had ever taken before. I was, I can see, so damnably depressed that I did not much care whether I lived or drowned. An exaggeration, perhaps. But life meant life with Olura, and I had persuaded myself through too many lonely days and nights that it was out of the question.

  With the wind behind me I swam for the beach, not the estuary. The breakers got me, but only once; and when they couldn’t smash they helped. I landed fairly close to the Hostal, shaken and dazed but able to stagger out of the surf. When I had rested and coughed up the water, I walked along the sands—Leander’s old journey to daily paradise—towards the estuary.

  There was light behind the curtains of the living-room. Evidently you were at home. I could neither see nor hear any police by the edge of the water. They would not have needed a mounted man to catch me. Allarte’s launch was rocking at anchor in the driving rain, and Maya beach was empty.

  It was slack water at the top of the tide. I walked a little upstream, putting your promontory between myself and the village, swam down to the rocks below the terrace and dragged myself up. I waited some time with my head over the wall until I was sure there was no one about. The lamp behind the curtain beckoned. I crawled to the french window, for it seemed to be the easiest way of progressing. Anyway I did not want to be seen against the light. When I tapped, you opened; and the sad thing from the sea crawled over the threshold to be told that Olura had been arrested and removed.

  SECRET AND PERSONAL

  I had sat through the long evening in a mood of sullen anger, directed as furiously against Ardower as the persecutors of Olura. Pity did not immediately overcome it. This down-and-out derelict who writhed across the threshold was Olura’s lover. The culmination of all the Utopian delusions of her short life was to give her heart to a half-drowned, exhausted murderer on the run. Humiliation was complete.

  He was unamenable to any suggestion for his comfort until I had answered his questions. I informed him shortly that Olura had been arrested the previous day on a charge of concealing a felony, and that I personally was surprised that the authorities had held their hand as long as they did.

  Refusing my recommendations of brandy and a hot bath, Ardower mentioned that he was very hungry. Perhaps I would be so good as to lend him a razor? Steadying himself by a grip on the table and with his ironical eyes holding mine, he explained this obscure addition to the menu by announcing that he preferred to shave before dinner. I did not appreciate this veiled insolence.

  I escorted him upstairs. He needed my arm. To support a much younger man creates a greater intimacy than being supported by him. That too I resented. While he shaved and rubbed himself down, I impatiently collected such provisions as were in the house and laid them out in my bedroom. With so many idle Spanish police about, one’s privacy downstairs was always uncertain.

  He ate and drank enormously, becoming slightly intoxicated. Though too tired to give me more than a bare outline of the facts, he would not rest until he had confirmed Olura’s story. When he became incoherent in his determination to explain himself, I led him to her room and expressed my hope that he would accept her hospitality. He appeared unduly moved, so I left him.

  I must now append some account of the machinations of my dear and unaccountable goddaughter which indirectly led to her arrest.

  On August 19th Lieutenant Gonzalez called at our villa and informed us that our movements and communications were now free of all restraint, but that Olura must remain in Spain as an essential witness. The authorities regretted that her passport could not yet be returned; they would, however, make all necessary arrangements if she wished to leave for some resort with more opportunities for society and entertainment. She refused to make any move whatever until she had news of her Philip.

  Gonzalez, who had developed a soul in duplicate, one for use as a security man and the other for private life, pleaded ignorance. He said that the Livetti case was now in the hands of civil police, where it ought to have been all along, and that the political branch was no longer in the picture. It is possible that liaison between the two organisations was limited and cumbrous and that Gonzalez had shown no curiosity after handing over his prisoner; it is also possible that he did not tell us of Ardower’s release because it would deprive him of a further opportunity to call.

  My next move was to obtain information as from one reasonable man to another. As Madrid had proved difficult, I approached the Provincial Government of Vizcaya after telephoning London and Paris for the necessary introductions. Among the projects which interested our consortium was the modernisation of the Spanish steel industry. I was therefore persona grata.

  A small wine was held in my honour, at which I had arranged that the Chief of Police should be present. With these officials and others I normally spoke French. If they found it an effort, I had recourse to the sixteenth-century language—after all, the Spanish of Cervantes—which my family has always preserved as a proud tradition of the home, tho
ugh abandoning, rather than changing, its religion.

  When I was alone with the Provincial Governor and his Chief of Police, I mentioned that Olura appeared to have become involved, as rich young women on holiday will, with a certain Philip Ardower and that I was much exercised at learning that he had been under suspicion of violence to a press photographer. Would it be too much to ask what had happened to him?

  To my surprise the question aroused a note of mischievous geniality. Dr Ardower, they said, was a serious scholar of Basque language and literature. He had, it was true, hidden the body of this photographer, but he had no more politics than a monkey. His motive was clear, even chivalrous; and in fact he had saved Mr Mgwana and my goddaughter from a scandal which the Government would have been the first to deprecate.

  Preliminary examination having established his innocence, he had been temporarily expelled from Spain—this in view of the delicacy of the investigation and its possible repercussions. He had left an impression of audacity which might be termed impertinence if not redeemed by a gracious courtesy and the fact that he showed no resentment. They regretted that he preferred the society of the lower classes to that of more influential people who would have been charmed to entertain so distinguished a scholar.

  I could see faintly appearing the character which Olura had drawn for me. But then the faces around me became sterner. Ardower had secretly returned. Nobody knew how or when, and they were all most uneasy about the why. The motor-cycle of a Civil Guard had been—for a mere matter of ten minutes—impudently stolen. Without much hope it had been examined for fingerprints. The department had expected, if any, those of an enterprising and badly wanted agitator who had been illicitly organising the port workers. Instead, it found Ardower’s. Apparently he was unfamiliar with motor-cycles and had not lifted the machine off its stand by the carrier, but by the tank—on the underside of which was a complete set of prints of his right hand.