The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown

by Geoffrey Household

  The arête ended in a buttress which an experienced rock climber would, he assured himself, find as easy as a ladder. What about the cliffs of Kanchenjunga? To hell with ropes! Great care was all one needed. Bernardo clung to it, half circled it, zig-zagged up it, forcing himself to ignore the sheer drop beneath which was now nearing the full four hundred feet.

  He reached a bit of a platform the size of a tea table and again rested. He could not see what was above him, but at least grass, bushes and a large clump of sea pinks were protruding over the edge of something which might be a terrace or might be the top. The last twenty feet of loose stones embedded in earth were vilely unsafe but held fast. He was up though still not quite home and dry, for he had arrived on a vertical slab of hanging cliff which might fall that day or stay put for a hundred years. However, one had only to drop into the fissure which separated the slab from the rest of Spain and scramble up the other side. The gradient of the solid land when he reached it was about one in two, but with enough gorse and shrub to catch him whenever he slid on the short, too smooth turf. Then at last the slope flattened and his eyes could rest on the green Vizcayan countryside, miles and miles of it with nothing perpendicular until one came to the crags of Mount Gorbea in the distance.

  It was over. He dropped on the grass, welcoming the sun after that clammy, north-facing cliff while he got his breath back and the muscles of arms and legs gradually stopped their involuntary quivering. When he stood up and shook off whatever mud and dust would leave his wet clothes before setting out on the simple walk back to Bilbao, he saw somebody observing him through binoculars. A ruined wall which must once have kept sheep and cattle from straying too near the edge ran up and down well inland from the line of cliffs. The man was standing on the highest visible section of wall, quarter of a mile away, from which he would have a view of a considerable stretch of coast.

  It was disturbing to be examined through binoculars, but Bernardo decided not to arouse suspicion by running away. After all he had nothing to explain; he could well be taking an innocent, meditative walk along the cliffs.

  The man lowered his glasses and strode decisively down the hill towards him. He carried himself well—a proud, athletic sort of chap with a bald head, in spite of appearing in his early thirties, and a clear, sunburnt complexion etched with deep lines.

  ‘Not so common as to-day,’ old Bernardo said. ‘Now, there’s a change for you! Any European with a good, ruddy tan was almost certainly engaged in agriculture.’

  Features and colouring were not those of a Spaniard. He put down the stranger as a foreign visitor walking for his pleasure and likely to sympathise with anyone doing the same. The man looked as if he ought to have a knapsack on his back, but evidently preferred to keep tooth brush and spare socks in his pockets which bulged.

  ‘What were you doing down there?’ he asked Bernardo in bad Spanish, waving a hand at the sea.

  That was startling. The utter destruction of the boat could not have been seen, nor the beach nor his climb, but there was no hope of denying—against those powerful binoculars—that he had rowed a boat in to some sort of landing place.

  ‘Catching lobsters.’

  ‘And your companion?’

  ‘What companion?’

  ‘I have been watching you for the last two hours.’

  ‘Oh, that one!’ Bernardo answered as casually as he could. ‘He’s down below at the foot of the cliff.’

  ‘And where do you come from?’

  ‘Baquio.’

  ‘You are not dressed like a fisherman.’

  ‘Man, can’t one fish for pleasure? Yesterday, I remind you, was Sunday.’

  ‘Good! Then let us walk to Baquio where you can identify yourself.’

  ‘But I can’t leave my companion down there.’

  ‘Your companion is dead, friend. Did you kill him or was he shot at Lequeitio?’

  Bernardo Brown threw out his palms in a gesture of incomprehension. It did him no good. The foreigner pulled one of the bulges from his pocket, ordered him to link his hands behind his head and searched him thoroughly, taking his wallet in spite of Bernardo’s protests. Twenty-five pesetas, his address book and the signed photograph of a strip dancer who had performed a month earlier at the Bilbao music hall were no great loss, but his identity card was. For the first time he experienced the feeling, later to become familiar, that he had lost all personality in a world no more controllable than a dream.

  ‘And now his suitcase! Lead the way!’

  ‘But look here!’ Bernardo shouted. ‘There is no path!’

  ‘Then how did you get here?’

  ‘I climbed.’

  ‘The cliffs are unclimbable. Don’t waste my time with lies! We will go down the way you came up.’

  Bernardo began to object excitably and in detail, but was cut short. The man had reason on his side. The cliffs were indeed unclimbable; therefore there was a practicable path, and Bernardo must know it as well as the discreet landing place.

  ‘No nonsense, and lead the way!’ the stranger repeated. ‘I remind you that if I kill you here no one will ever know.’

  That was very true. It also cut the other way. Bernardo put the thought out of his mind which was normally peaceable and introverted. But unless this lunatic stopped insisting on his goat track, smugglers’ path or whatever he had in mind before it was too late, the leader was surely going to die, and the follower probably.

  ‘It’s incredible what a man will do for money when he is used to heavy doses of the stuff and can’t live without it,’ old Bernardo said. ‘Of course at the time I knew nothing of his character and his motive. I just saw a reckless nihilist with one idea in his head. He never considered the risk that I might be telling the truth, only the physical risks. Every criminal takes those. What about gangsters as ready to face a tommygun as any devoted soldier? And the risk this well-muscled tough was prepared to take was not, from his point of view, at all unacceptable. The route down to the landing place was hair-raising all right. He knew that. But if I could do it, he could.’

  The first part, down through the steep furze, was easy enough. At the edge it was difficult to see what was below, and Bernardo was far from sure of the exact point at which he had returned, as it then seemed, to life. He worked his way along the border between turf and eternity until an outward curve of the cliff brought the clump of sea pinks into view. That at least marked the top of his route. He could also see from this angle exactly what he had climbed and nearly went over the brink with vertigo. It had affected him only once when clinging to the face.

  The menace of that automatic or revolver—or perhaps half a pipe for all he knew, having concentrated on the black hole at the end—followed him all along the edge a safer twenty feet above him. There was nothing for it but to prove to the fellow that no way down existed. He lowered himself into the fissure behind the half-detached crag. That bit, worn by foxes or a very daring bunch of sheep, really did look like a path, and his companion remarked ‘I told you so’ or words to that effect.

  He scrambled up to the top of the crag, closely followed. To climb down from there on to the table-sized platform demanded more courage than anything else in all his life. He would have clung weeping to his insecure hand-holds if it had not been for the worse threat above. However, once again he found his feet standing on the buttress.

  From above there was no certain indication that this little platform was the absolute end of the possible. A broad ledge, just below, curved away inwards until it narrowed to nothing. Bernardo had never before noticed it, for his climb had been up the sheer side of the buttress clinging to cracks, eyes blurred by sweat and terror. The man looking down from above could not help noticing it. The beginning, the inviting beginning of this ledge presumably confirmed his certainty that a path existed, though he did not much care for the way down to it.

  ‘You came up here?’ he asked. It was an exclamation rather than a question.

  ‘I did,’ Bernardo an
swered. ‘This is it.’

  He could accuse himself of nothing more, and he hoped his reply could not be considered murder. Anyway it was the truth. So far as there was a route, this was it. He had already explained that descent was inconceivable.

  He even told the fellow, whose questions were beginning to sound hysterical, where to put his feet—correctly, too. It was the big pair of binoculars which did it. Hanging on the man’s chest they did not allow him to get closely balanced against the face of rotten rock. He tried to swing them behind him with his right hand, and the slab which was the hold for his left hand pulled out.

  Bernardo returned to the top, his palms slipping with sweat on those lightly embedded stones. He was trembling but beyond fear. The prolonged scream had emptied him. It grew lower in pitch like a jet engine as it increased its distance. He refused to let his eyes follow. The sound of the impact made it certain that the body fetched up on rock, not in water.

  He cleared out as fast as he could feeling perfectly safe, safe as in the womb. It was the effect of contrast. At one moment he had been doomed to certain death; at the next he was a free man with nothing on his conscience. Being convinced that he could not be traced through any of his movements, he hardly gave the future a thought, never considering that the movements of others might have some bearing on it. Young men who tend to be introverted make very bad criminals.

  What the bald-headed foreigner had been up to was easy to guess. He didn’t fall from heaven, so he had to be an accomplice. He might have been in the woods behind the villa and heard the firing, or he might have waited for the arrival of the dinghy further along the coast. The boat was too small for anything but a short voyage out of the harbour and into darkness.

  When the burglar, or whatever he was, did not turn up at the landing place he was clearly in bad trouble. If he had been arrested or killed, that was that; but if he had escaped he might be anywhere—perhaps wounded, perhaps with an empty tank. So in the morning his partner decided to watch the open sea from several headlands where mile after mile of coast was visible. It was long odds against spotting a drifting boat but his hunch had paid off—or would have paid off if not for his obsession with a path up the cliff.

  ‘My reconstruction was not far out, but the older I get the more I see that speculation should be kept for bedtime,’ Mr. Brown said. ‘What I ought to have been thinking about was plain boy-scout stuff.’

  Well, he was not. A little slinking from cover to cover, a bit of hiding behind field walls to let people pass, and he would have been all right. But there he was with this exaggerated feeling of safety, kicking up the red dust on a by-road as he tramped towards Bilbao and the office. And so he walked slap into another Pair of the Civil Guard lounging along in search of the rare evil-doers among the Basque peasantry.

  Bernardo had not fully realised the effect of his appearance, for he was still too occupied by the man inside the clothes. They were of course heavy with dirt and sea water and flapping against him. Even if the Pair had not been warned to keep eyes open for anyone who might have secretly landed from a boat they would have stopped him to find out if he needed help.

  ‘How did you get into that condition?’

  ‘Fell in.’

  ‘Where?’

  The only place behind him—omitting Lequeitio—where he could reasonably have fallen in was the fishing port of Bermeo, so he chose it.

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Sleeping on the quay.’

  ‘Identity card, please.’

  Bernardo made a show of looking through his pockets and exclaimed that he must have lost it. He gave a false name and address. He said that he had got drunk in a tavern, missed his bus back to Bilbao, spent the night on the quay, rolled over into the water and was now making his way home.

  What time was the bus? What tavern? Who were his companions? Was the fishing fleet in or out? He wriggled on the hook and was proved to be lying. He would have come straight out with all the truth if it had not been for the extra corpse somewhere at the foot of the cliffs. He was very much afraid that nobody would believe the bald-headed foreigner’s obstinate insistence on a path till it was too late.

  The Pair put on an unusual solemnity. No triumphant jokes. No coarseness or knocking about. Bernardo assumed that it was because he was a respectable middle-class citizen; that much was evident from his clothes and shoes in spite of their disreputable state. One of them set off at a military pace to Bermeo and a telephone. The other marched his prisoner away from the road into the shade of a clump of dwarf oaks where they could see and not readily be seen. It was all very exceptional. The Pair rarely separated. Normal practice was to bring in a suspect together.

  A couple of hours passed. Bernardo was wet, shivering, hungry and longed for a drink. There was hardly any conversation to while away the time. His escort refused to answer questions and—more surprising still—seemed to think it was his duty not to put any.

  About five in the afternoon a large, black limousine cruised slowly along the road. The guard stood up and signalled to it. When it stopped, his companion jumped from his seat alongside the chauffeur, threw open the door and stood at the salute while a resplendent major of his corps got out, followed by a tall civilian in an obviously expensive suit of dark but sporting English tweed. All three walked up to the oaks where Bernardo was being so discreetly detained.

  ‘Is this the man who was interrupted in his disgraceful attempt?’ the major asked in fluent French, his Spanish accent sounding as if it were played on steel with cracked drum sticks.

  ‘No, no! That’s not him,’ the civilian answered pleasantly. ‘The fellow who broke in was slimmer with fair hair.’

  He gave an impression of geniality. There was no hint of criticism or disappointment in his voice. His bearing was easy and distinguished. He wore a soft, dark brown moustache which matched his eyes and was neither the tooth brush then in fashion nor the luxurious, soup-straining growth of an older generation.

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Nothing like him!’

  ‘Then may I go now?’ Bernardo asked, also using French which seemed to be the agreed language for this incident. ‘I am hungry and I need a bath and a drink. If a man can’t have too much wine on a Sunday evening without being run in for it, I ask with great respect: where are we?’

  The civilian laughed.

  ‘Come back with me and we’ll soon put that right,’ he said.

  The major of the Civil Guard seemed doubtful, but gave way to the other’s casual air of authority. Warm hospitality, the tall civilian insisted, was a duty. It was most desirable that there should never be any ill will at all among the local inhabitants.

  The Pair continued their patrol. The major was dropped at his front door where there was an inordinate exchange of compliments. Bernardo, though well accustomed to lengthy strings of Spanish politeness, was impatient with so much artificial nonsense in French. At last surrendering to physical exhaustion he sank back on the cushions of the car and did not listen. The position might have become clearer to him if he had. While the car purred off to the villa and he was alone in the back with his aristocratic companion, who appeared to be courteously avoiding any personal questions, he was vaguely aware that he was expected to know something which he did not.

  They entered an annexe on the landward side of the villa which appeared to be some sort of guest suite occupied by his companion. He was given a stiff brandy and soda and the use of the bathroom. A valet took away his clothes to be dried and brushed, and laid out for him shirt, underpants and a superb dressing gown of padded silk with a fur collar.

  When he re-entered the living room he felt more like himself—a cheerful self very tired after, say, a football match—but shy at his own gorgeousness. He was immediately put at his ease by the unconcern of his host and by a small table placed at the open window, gay with bottles of sherry and four different varieties of the delectable shell-fish of the Basque coast. His rescuer said:
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  ‘A more serious meal will be along in a few minutes. If you will excuse me, I shall only join you in these. I have to dine later with Her Majesty.’

  ‘Her Majesty Queen Ena of Spain?’ Bernardo asked.

  ‘Her Majesty the Empress Zita,’ the other replied.

  Bernardo, too astonished for manners, asked who she was. He had supposed—so far as he had given it a thought—that the villa beneath which he had been strolling till bullets started to fly about belonged to some wealthy industrialist or perhaps was the summer residence of a Madrid politician.

  There was no reply. The lips under the fur-like moustache became for a moment more grim than genial. The slight awkwardness was banished by Bernardo’s evident appreciation as dish by dish his scratch dinner appeared. He remembered the menu exactly, since he had not eaten for nearly twenty-four hours and the meal was of outstanding delicacy: foie gras en gelée, a superb red mullet and a dish of small round pancakes with scraps from paradise sandwiched between them. Retrieving his manners half way through the second wine he remarked that his reception was like something out of the Arabian Nights.

  ‘I am enchanted that you should find it so,’ his host answered. ‘But didn’t the traveller then have to tell his story? I know you are not the man who entered this villa last night, but the face I saw in the water was yours.’

  ‘It was,’ Bernardo admitted. ‘And it’s very kind of you not to tell the police.’

  ‘Not kind at all. I intend to have the truth out of you before they get it. First, who are you?’

  ‘My name is Bernardo Brown and I work in Bilbao.’

  ‘English? They all thought you were Spanish.’

  ‘My mother was.’

  The man immediately deserted his rather formal French and broke into perfect English with a slight accent.

  ‘Good God! What the devil is an Englishman doing mixed up in this?’