The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown

by Geoffrey Household

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  The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown

  Geoffrey Household

  Contents

  I

  Zita

  II

  Magda

  III

  Sanctuary

  IV

  Dniester to Danube

  V

  Despina

  VI

  Nadya

  I

  Zita

  He spoke tenderly of the youth he had been as if there were no connection through the navel string of the years, as if age had come upon him in a sudden access. This painstaking description of a former self grew night by night from the hotel terrace like some lusty shrub forcing up the paving slab laid over its roots.

  ‘This wasn’t a hotel then,’ he said. ‘Fifty years ago it was the villa of—well, a poor widow I suppose one might call her.’

  It was difficult to imagine Bernardo Brown in the nineteen twenties. So little evidence was left beyond laughter in the eyes. His body must always have been strong and stocky; now it had become a bit roly-poly, but then it would have bounced upright when it hit the ground. Features, precise and clean-cut, could not be resurrected; to prophesy how a young face will change is far easier than to guess what an old face once was. Subtraction helped. Take away the bags under the eyes, the spaniel jowls under the cheeks, and it was possible to see the deep hollows where a few white bristles escaped the razor as fine lines on a pale tan which had soon deepened to mahogany and at last reverted to the present sandiness of colour and texture. Yes, he could have been a very good-looking boy of more than middle height with dark brown, wavy hair. No doubt the full, mobile mouth was then alive with that inner amusement which the grey eyes still retained.

  Guesswork could reach no farther, but always he must have held the promise of the highly civilised European he was. He looked like a fine type of business man from the Basque Provinces, cunning, candid and kind. One could not tell whether he was British or Spanish till he spoke. Then his English—a rather old-fashioned, careful English—left no doubt that it was his native language.

  ‘What beat me was that anyone could think I mattered,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more patrician than royalty, nothing more plebeian than police—yet both alike in being self-confident and after me, a plain, respectable shipping clerk. Contented, or near it. Who the devil is ever contented under the age of thirty? One wants more money for less work, and some sort of freedom which one can’t put a name to. Still, I was far from wanting freedom to travel over half Europe with no more than small change in my pocket and all of them intent on talking to me.’

  His father had been a bowler-hatted foreman at the big Bilbao shipyard: one of the skilled emigrants common in days when Glasgow, Belfast and Newcastle were still considered to be the world’s nurseries of craftsmen. In order to marry the daughter of a deep-sea fishing skipper he turned Catholic—or at any rate sufficiently Catholic for the port of Bilbao. The sole result of the union was Bernardo.

  He was educated by Jesuits who saw in him a possible theologian, for he had a precocious interest in doctrine and languages, ancient or modern. They had already begun to add Hebrew to his Greek and Latin when they decided that scholar he might be, but priest never. In fact he was being punctiliously diseducated by his father once a week or so. Pious responses during the day. Wellsian machine-socialism at home. This disconcerting process gave him the ironical detachment of a mature actor under cover of which he could build his own morality. Looking back, he didn’t think it was wholly beneficial; he felt too much of an observer, set apart from his fellows. But it was by no means bad training for an outlaw.

  His education was completed by a business course in London and a desk at a shipping office so that the lines of his future career were more or less settled when in 1918 his parents, eager to see him again, were offered free passage on a newly built ship being delivered to the British Government. She was extinguished by two torpedoes in the Western Approaches. Bernardo, now that both of them had gone, could never quite accept his father’s country as his only home. He returned to Bilbao as Number Two of his firm’s local agency. Not bad, he said, at the age of twenty-four.

  So there he was in July 1925, a shipping agent with good prospects and bilingual—or rather better if one counts fluent French and a classical education—but without any special interests except girls, the sea and the mountains. He was inclined to underestimate the young Brown. Tastes have to start from somewhere and be formed.

  It was on a Sunday, after sunset, that he found himself at Lequeitio, having walked twenty-three miles across country from Bilbao alone and sometimes singing his way over the hill turf—no doubt bilingually. He intended to return by an an elderly bus which left at ten, God willing and assuming that prospective passengers could be routed out from the taverns. He never did return, at least not from Lequeitio.

  ‘The beach below this terrace was just as it is,’ he said, ‘except a lot cleaner. No ice-cream cartons. No desolate French letters. Close under the wall would have been a very private place to take your girl if there had been any. In those days in the north of Spain no girl would have been out after dusk with a man. And look at them now!’

  So he had been by himself, wandering along the beach below the villa which was now a hotel. It was at the bottom of a roughly rectangular bay. The left or western side was occupied by the little town and its fishing quays, with the narrow entrance to the harbour in the north-west corner. The eastern side was closed by an old causeway, covered at half tide and nearly awash at low, which led to a sparsely wooded island. Beyond the causeway was the river running out into the Atlantic over a sand bar.

  The shore along which Bernardo Brown had been walking was empty except for a dinghy moored in the angle of the causeway and the beach. He supposed that somebody was shrimping or searching for clams. He ought to have considered, he said, that anyone engaged in so lowly an occupation would not have possessed a boat with an engine in it. But why give the boat a thought at all? The night was softly overcast and velvet black. He was silently padding over the sand, dreamily content between his hills and the sea. A pity he had not been singing.

  When he was nearly beneath the villa, he heard a shout, running and a scuffle above him. A suitcase was dropped over the wall, instantly followed by somebody who picked it up and ran for the moored dinghy. Somebody else on the terrace fired shots into the darkness. One seemed to hit the fugitive who staggered and recovered; another passed very close to Bernardo’s ear, destroying all possibilities of calm calculation.

  He dropped flat on the beach and heard the dinghy begin to putt-putt off into the night. It was challenged from somewhere beyond the causeway. When there was no reply and no attempt to return, a fusillade of rifle fire was aimed—presumably—in its general direction, sending an occasional ricochet howling down the beach.

  What Bernardo did then was, he admitted, the act of a terrified lunatic. He could have boldly shouted at the top of his voice that he was on the beach and that people should look out where they were firing; he could have stayed where he was, crouching under cover of the terrace wall until the excitement died down, or run along the beach and up to the nearby town square. He instantaneously rejected the lot. Whether he stayed or ran, he risked being grabbed as an accomplice and compelled to spend a night in the police station.

  The trigger-happy Pair of the Civil Guard—he had recognised their challenge—had now stopped spraying the water around the sunke
n causeway with their carbines and were probably closing in on him. Civil Guards pullulated around the slums of Baracaldo where the Bilbao steelworkers lived and plotted their republic, but had little business among the seaside villas of the well-to-do; so the Pair must, he thought, have been lying in wait for a gang of smugglers or burglars.

  He wriggled quickly down to the edge of the sea, tied his shoes round his neck and took to the water careful not to make a splash. A dripping squelching passenger on the last bus would arouse only laughter. Someone with a skinful of the dark Rioja wine always fell in off the quay.

  There he stayed with a toe on the bottom, trying to decide from lights within the villa and lights moving towards it when it was safe to swim for the nearest steps. He wondered what the man in the dinghy was up to. If he had not been caught at his work, whatever it was, he must have intended to chug straight out of the harbour and into the freedom of the Bay of Biscay. He might still be able to manage it. Telephone communication with the harbourmaster or coastguards was bound to be slow.

  Bernardo was congratulating himself on having done the right thing in an emergency—always a satisfying experience for youth—when a powerful acetylene lamp fizzed on the terrace and threw a beam across the water which picked up his face before he could dip it under. Someone yelled:

  ‘There he is!’

  And there he was. Nobody bothered to fire at him from the terrace. He was caught. He could count on reception committees on the beach, at the shore end of the causeway and the quayside. His only chance was to swim straight for the island and hope to reach it before any boats put out after him.

  ‘I meant to run across the island and dive into open sea on the other side,’ he said. ‘God, I was in a stew! I was much more frightened of wading ashore with my hands up than all the unknown risks of surf and currents.’

  So he struck out for the island, swimming under water whenever the beam looked like picking him up. His plan seemed futile as soon as he was committed to it. A boatload of police could cross the narrow harbour entrance and arrive on the western shore of the island before he could reach the southern.

  Still, these things take time, especially on a Sunday night. When he landed he had the island to himself. In the darkness it appeared sufficiently overgrown to conceal him, but then he remembered how small it really was. His best bet was to try to get clear away along the sand bar at the river mouth wading or swimming through the edge of the surf. What absurdly worried him, now that he had broken contact, was that he would be late at the office.

  To his surprise he heard an engine and made out the dim outline of the dinghy close to the tumbled rocks where the end of the old causeway rose from the bay; it was bumping against the boulders, out of control with the propeller still turning over. The Pair of the Civil Guard seemed to have just arrived at the other end of the causeway. Presumably they had hurried over to the villa after assuming that the criminal had escaped and then had also noticed that the engine was running but not moving away. They were now trying to wade over to the island, slipping on the weed, splashing into unseen pools and doing a poor best to keep their curses from echoing through the night. Bernardo Brown said that never since that night had he heard such vivid abuse of the Holy Family. Being recruited from men of unquestionable devotion to the Church, the Civil Guard had all its technicalities to play with.

  There was a body lying on the bottom boards of the dinghy, whether dead or unconscious he did not know. What leapt to his mind was that if he could drag or float the boat over the causeway he was clear. Given enough fuel in the tank, he need not even worry that he had missed the last bus.

  The engine was an old-fashioned, reliable, single-cylindered Kelvin. He threw out the clutch and waded about looking for a passage. The Pair were some two hundred yards away and there was never any doubt of their position. One was complaining of what God and the limpets had done to his backside and the other had lost his carbine. Meanwhile Bernardo found a helpful slope with two linked pools beyond it and quickly manhandled the boat over the causeway, attracting only shouts and wavering torch beams which had not the range to reach him. It was amazing, he said regretfully, what a sturdy but quite ordinary fellow could accomplish in youth without suffering more than a few aches next day.

  He was over and away. The bar at the river mouth which was taking the force of a restless Biscay swell caused some peaks in his continuous chart of panic—not so much from the breakers as the hollows between them which slammed the dinghy on the sandy bottom. However, he got through and headed straight out to sea. When Lequeitio was well astern he turned west and closed the coast—or where he hoped the coast would be. He could handle a boat but knew damn-all about navigation.

  He was also much occupied by the corpse. When he tried to revive it or bandage it or do whatever decency required, he found that it had bled to death. A bullet low down between the shoulders had pierced something essential, probably a main artery. The bottom of the boat and the thwarts were still all sticky with blood in spite of the water he had shipped in crossing the bar and the frantic bailing when he was over. While attending to his passenger he had paid little attention to the tiller, let alone the stars.

  The tank ran dry before dawn, and he was left rocking in a faintly phosphorescent blackness. He had planned to make the Guernica River during the night and to beach the boat in some quiet marshy creek on the left bank from which he could easily walk to Bilbao. As it was, daylight showed him that he was miles from the coast. He could only recognise the high bluff of Cape Machichaco.

  Well, he had at least a pair of oars. For the moment the worst risk was that a fishing boat might pass close and see the corpse. He propped it up as if squatting on the bottom boards and supported the lolling head in a credible position by means of the suitcase jammed firmly between a thwart and the engine housing. He hoped that the dead man would pass as a lazy fellow fast asleep while his companion rowed.

  It was a long pull. By midday, blistered and very thirsty, he was rowing along the iron-bound coast with not a hope of landing except in the little fishing port of Arminza or on the beach at Baquio. He could of course have thrown his idle companion overboard but intensely disliked so drastic a solution; the dead should be found and identified even if nothing else could be done for them. Anyway the boat was pickled in blood. He was bound to be questioned, whether or not the villages of the coast had been warned to look out for him.

  The only remotely possible landing place he could see was at the foot of a rock fall which centuries of Biscay rain had smoothed into a climbable gully. Outlying black boulders appeared in the suck and vanished in the swell like hungry whales. He would have been very glad, after all, of some help in sight, but there was only a fishing boat steaming north, sometimes a dark rectangle higher than his horizon, sometimes showing only a speck of funnel and a plume of smoke. If its skipper spotted the boat at all, he probably assumed that some daring longshoreman was profiting from settled weather to drop a few lobster pots close under the cliffs.

  Bernardo rowed hard for the rocks, hurdling one on a breaking crest and smashing broadside into the next. A third sea left the sinking dinghy precariously balanced on a longer reef beyond which was more sheltered water. He dived in and swam ashore on a triangular beach of huge pebbles, followed at intervals by the oars, the rudder and the forepart of the dinghy; the stern half, weighed down by the engine, had been rolled off into deep water by the tremendous backwash, and the corpse hurled into a pool where it was floating among weed. When Bernardo had drunk his fill of the fresh water seeping down from the gully he had at last leisure to consider his position.

  Absent from the office and not at home? Well, a good, believable excuse would have to be invented. Corpse and boat? It was unlikely that either would ever be found. Would it be known that two persons, not one, were in the boat? That also seemed unlikely. The Pair could not know that the wanted man was dead; they were bound to assume that when he ran his boat into the causeway he had taken to the wate
r in a panic but had swum back again after being picked up by the searchlight and finally heaved the dinghy over into the river.

  So Bernardo could stroll home without a care provided there was a way to be found up the cliff which appeared to have plenty of ledges and chimneys between the perpendicular crags. He felt some compunction at leaving his late passenger in the heaving weed to be eaten by crabs and dragged him up the beach—if one could call it a beach—where he lay curled up and safe from anything but the spray of high seas.

  It was not easy to spot the gully which had been so obvious from the boat and ended somewhere among the great boulders which towered over him. He scrambled up them and was then faced by a climb so monstrous that it would only have been attempted by an optimistic young man with no alternative. It was more than doubtful that he could ever get off the beach again in one piece, and even if he could there was nowhere else to land.

  He worked his way up the gully, sometimes taking the broken rock of the sides, sometimes digging toes into the slippery mud. At the head of the fall he was relieved to find jagged rock. The cliff was climbable, and a slip would only carry him down to his starting point with nothing worse than skinned hands and knees.

  The easiest route was out to his right. He was extremely careful to take no risks and to concentrate on every step and handhold. This absorption in the very immediate future was too successful. When he stopped on a ledge to consider the way off it he nearly fainted then and there. Below him was no saving gully but a sheer drop into the sea with a pair of planing ravens emphasising the vast emptiness of the air.

  So back in a cold sweat to the cracks and chimneys. Now again he had the gully beneath him, though so far beneath that it would break him up if he crashed into it. To his left was a steep arête which he climbed by the suicidal method of tufts of grass. The top was so narrow that he could totter to rest with a leg in space on each side of it. Below the outer precipice of the arête white streaks of foam wrote Arabic from rock to rock; on the inner side was a deep cleft where he might remain alive if not too badly hurt but would certainly remain for ever.