The Malady in Maderia

by Ann Bridge

  “Not a bit—good practice for driving a hearse!” Julia replied blithely.

  Next morning, accordingly, she was waiting at the small local airfield when the plane touched down; driving back towards Glentoran up the blue-grey road beside the sea, with Aglaia beside her, she said over her shoulder to Colin—“Do you remember this Watherston person?—Philip sees him when he goes to Edinburgh. He’s somehow connected with the Service.”

  “I know who you mean—I barely know him.”

  “Well listen, both of you—” and she repeated what Philip Reeder had said.

  “But that’s nonsense—he didn’t bring off any coup in Spain!” Aglaia objected.

  “No, we know that; but if that’s the story that’s going round, mightn’t it be better to stick to it? What do you say, Colin?”

  “Yes, of course” the young man said at once. “I’m surprised it’s got out at all—but not in the least that it should have got a bit garbled! Yes, Ag—stick to that. But I don’t suppose they’ll ask you any questions; they know well enough we can’t talk—all but my mother,” he added.

  “But we can’t pretend you weren’t in Madeira; Mrs. Hathaway is sure to have written to Aunt Ellen, at least.”

  “No, of course not; I just went to Madeira for a spot of leave, and nothing whatever happened!” Colin said. “Thanks for the tip, Julia.”

  At lunch, sure enough, Philip Reeder, dividing woodcock into halves with great speed and skill, came out with—“Well, Colin, I hear we have to congratulate you on some quite top-hole piece of work. Good show. I suppose you cant tell us what it was?”

  “Philip, you know he can’t!” his wife expostulated.

  “Oh well, I thought he might give us a hint what to look out for in the papers, when it all comes to light” Philip said. “Everything seems to be turning pretty sour in Spain, especially with the Russians trying to butt in and get a ROTA for themselves. The Russians are always at the bottom of trouble these days.”

  Aglaia turned a startled gaze on her husband, but said nothing. Colin said “Too right, Philip,” and pushed the tray with brown crumbs and bread sauce towards his hostess.

  After lunch Forbes, Mrs. Monro’s aged butler, appeared in the library with a message to say that Mrs. Monro hoped young Mr. and Mrs. Monro would come to tea with her at half past four.

  “Yes, thank you, Forbes—we’ll be there” Colin said. “That will give you nice time to get unpacked, darling” he added to his wife.

  When the party dispersed, Aglaia to her unpacking, the two Reeders to their various avocations, “Come up the glen” Colin said to Julia.

  “Yes, rather—I’ll just get a coat.” She ran upstairs, and looked in on the nursery party. “Master Philip’s nearly finished his rest; then we’re going down to the farm with the others to see the calves” Nurse Mackenzie said. “I must say, Madam, it is a pleasure to be in a proper nursery again. Those twins!” Julia laughed and went downstairs.

  As she and her cousin strolled up the glen, where the leaves of the sycamores, mottled and golden, were beginning to fall among the dark shapes of the rhododendrons—“There’s so much I want to hear, I don’t know where to begin asking” Julia said.

  “ ‘The choice is yours’, as no Government department will ever dare to say again” Colin replied easily, tucking his arm through hers. “Oh, it is nice to be back” he said, looking round him with a contented sigh. “There’s nowhere like Glentoran.”

  “Dead right.”

  “Well, ask away” he said.

  “Well, if you’ve heard, I’m dying to know exactly what was in the cofrezinho” Julia began.

  “Oh yes, I saw Sir Paircy, as our friend calls him, and he told me. It was really damned ingenious—the gas concentrate was in little granules, for all the world like that sago stuff— very small.”

  “Oh yes, pearl tapioca; it made my least-favourite nursery pudding.”

  “Mine too. Well anyhow, the Russian chemists had somehow contrived a substance to cover it, that disintegrates when it gets touched by some solar ray—that’s why it had to be kept in lead-lined containers. Then, here in Britain, it was to be distributed at night, calm and easy; and as soon as the sun got up the gas would be released, just as it was on the plateau—with precisely the results that you saw on the sheep and the child.”

  “But suppose it was an overcast day?” Julia objected.

  “Doesn’t matter—this thing, the ray or what-have-you, penetrates cloud-cover. Sir Percy tried to explain, but I couldn’t begin to understand it all, still less pass it on intelligibly. He did use some queer expression like “photo-synthesis in reverse,” but that didn’t help me—does it you?”

  “No, not a bit. Anyhow go on.”

  “Well, that was it. Chemically apparently fool-proof, if they could only have managed to see the results. But you see, thanks to us they never got any results—so their whole experiment has been a complete failure. We’ve got the films, and the tapes; they’ve got damn-all. But best of all, for us, is that Sir Percy and his team know the precise chemical composition of this new gas, so that they can make an antidote to counter it that can be airborne too, for mass distribution. They’re working on that at Porton now.”

  “Yes, you couldn’t very well go round injecting even the armed forces with atropine three times a day!” Julia said. “But you said tapes—there were sound-tapes too, were there, to record the coughing and wheezing?”

  “Yes—in fact that machine was a brand-new Jap one, that records sound along with the film. Marques’ dogs-body told me all about it in Lisbon.”

  “Poor Major Fernandez!” Julia said laughing. “Oh, what happened in Lisbon? Of course I haven’t seen you since.”

  “Oh, there was a tremendous pow-wow. They got Terence over to give evidence; that let you out—that, and the fact that the two Spanish boys had made a full confession.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Imprisonment for life— and there won’t be any remissions for good conduct!”

  “Imprisonment where?”

  “In Portugal—they were caught red-handed, spying on Portuguese soil. The Spanish and the Portuguese see pretty much eye to eye over Communists, so there was no trouble with the Dons over that. No, the people who were a bit nasty were our own high-ups; they made it clear that they thought the authorities in Madeira had been a bit casual.”

  “In what way? You can’t stop trawlers prowling, can you?”

  “No, of course not; our own fishing-fleets can hardly move for Russian trawlers round the Orkneys and so on! But you needn’t let them put people ashore in strength to poison sheep, and no questions asked!—nor make their accomplices welcome guests!”

  “Poor Maderenses! I still don’t see quite what they ought to have done” Julia said.

  “Well, you said yourself that you’d seen the trawler inside the three-mile limit; they could have kept their eyes a bit wider open, and reported her to Lisbon. And letting those ten types land was a major howler. I expect they’ll tighten things up a good bit now—in fact I know they’re going to.”

  “And were the Portuguese Government ever told about Sir Percy coming out, and the cofrezinho?”

  “Sir Percy, yes—he came to Lisbon himself, and brought the tapes with him. But so far as I know he kept the cofrezinho under his hat. After all, the Russians aren’t proposing to attack Portugal with gas—not with this gas, anyhow, because the climate is all wrong; it’s much drier than Madeira.”

  “There is just one thing” Julia said thoughtfully, as they turned up into the azalea glen—“If the North Koreans could board the Pueblo and imprison her crew, why couldn’t the Ports impound the trawler?”

  “Because the Pueblo was a naval vessel, and the Yanks were at war with North Korea; these bloody trawlers the Russians send out are technically civilian fishing-boats, and pretend to be unarmed.”

  “What nonsense it all is!” Julia said. “Let’s sit” she added, as they came to one of the
wooden seats above the stream in the little side glen.

  As they sat down—“This is the very seat we were sitting on when I asked you to go to the Bank in Geneva and see about Ag’s grandfather’s numbered account, I do believe” Colin said.

  “So it is.”

  “The azaleas were in bloom then” he said.

  “They’re pretty now” Julia replied, pulling off one of the pale yellow and pale pink leaves which covered the bushes—“And do you notice the scent?”

  Colin sniffed.

  “Yes I do; not strong, but it’s there. Can there be some flowers still out?—a second blooming?”

  “No, it must be from the plants themselves. I’ve often noticed it.” She turned towards him, twisting the leaf round her finger. “Colin dear, don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but I’d love to know how Aglaia is—well, getting on.”

  “I do want to” he said, putting his arm round her shoulders in his old easy fashion. “It’s all going ever so much better. Whatever old Urquhart said to her, it made a terrific impression; she’s trying tremendously hard to be sensible and unexacting. I’m trying hard, too” he said, smiling a little shyly at her.

  “To do what?”

  “Actually to follow de Carvalho’s advice—he told me I was being self-indulgent about her, and frightened, really. So now if she does start being silly, I stand up to her. He was very sharp, was our doctor.”

  “He seems to have been a great one for dishing out advice” Julia said, smiling too.

  “Gosh, did he have the nerve to advise you? What on earth about?”

  “How to occupy myself, now that I’m on my own” Julia said slowly. “He said it would be frightfully bad for the Philipino if I concentrated all my time and energies on him—and I’m pretty sure he’s right about that.”

  “Could be, I suppose. So what did he suggest?”

  “That I should take a job.”

  “Did he have the nerve to suggest what sort of job?”

  “Yes. He thought I should work regularly for Intelligence, on a salaried basis.”

  “Good gracious! And how were you to set about getting such a job? Had he got bright ideas about that, too?” Colin asked, almost indignantly.

  “Don’t be nasty about him—it was really very sweet of him to worry about us at all” Julia said.

  “More sweet to worry about me than about you!—but you’re right, really. I’m sorry.”

  “Anyhow he didn’t make any suggestions about that—I just said I’d think about it, and he let it go. But when I was down in London clearing out Gray’s Inn I rang up Major Hartley to ask if the Office would like any of my Philip’s maps and tropical kit, and so on—I thought they might be useful to some impoverished young agent being sent abroad—and he asked me to dinner, and did offer me a job.”

  “Good God! What sort of job?”

  “I thought he might have told you. Tangier for a bit, because I know it. Perhaps Casablanca later on.”

  “Good God!” Colin said again. “What’s your cover-job to be?” he asked then.

  “We didn’t get as far as that—I said I’d think it over. I wanted to talk to you about it first. You see he said they would want me to put in a few weeks in the Office to learn about the way they work at this end, and to be taught the drill generally. But I wondered if it would upset Aglaia to have me working there?—with you in the Office too, I mean” Julia said, her ready ripe-apricot blush appearing. “I wouldn’t like her to be upset, just when everything’s going so well, on the new lines.”

  He turned and faced her fully.

  “Let’s get this straight at once” he said firmly. “The basis of what you call the ’new lines’ is precisely that Ag is dropping all that nonsense of being jealous of you because you can do things, with me and for me, that she can’t. Old Urquhart had all that out with her—she told me about it. He actually said to her that where that sort of capacity was concerned, you were the millionairess.”

  “Good gracious!” was all Julia found to say.

  “Yes—and she has accepted that. So forget about it. Certainly go ahead and take this job if you’re sure you’d like to. Would you like to?”

  “I think I’d like to have a stab at it. I’m fairly sure it would be better for the child, and Edina says they could keep him and Nannie Mack up here, where he’s not the only pebble on the beach.”

  “Does she know about this plan, then?”

  “No—she said I could leave him here when I had to make a snap decision about letting Gray’s Inn for two years. But that would leave me free to go abroad when the Office wanted me to. I told Major Hartley I couldn’t take on anything whole-time— only come and go, like Bonnecourt does.”

  “Both based on Glentoran!” Colin said, laughing a little.

  “Well, no one could have a lovelier base” Julia said, looking down the pink-and-yellow vista of the little glen, where the azalea-bushes overhung the water.

  “Where shall you live while you’re in London?” he asked. “Stay with us?”

  “No, I don’t think so. When Mrs. H. comes back I think I’d probably stay with her; Edina and I agree that she oughtn’t to be too much alone now.”

  “And till then?”

  “Oh, there’s always my Club. But I rather thought of suggesting to Mrs. H. that I might move in and keep the flat warm for her beforehand. I always suspect those old maids of hers of profiteering—drinking her Burgundy and selling the dripping!”

  “So you’ll take the job on?”

  “Yes, I think so. I must go down and see the Major again and hear a bit more about it, but I expect I shall.”

  “Well, good luck to you, darling! I’m sure you’ll do it superbly, whatever it is. Let’s go back and ring up Hartley before tea.”

  “And I’ll write tonight to Mrs. H. and ask about staying in the flat—then the letter can go on the early bus tomorrow. Oh, how much can I tell her?”

  “Say you’re going to work in the Foreign Office—that’s what one says to everyone.”

  “Won’t she guess?”

  “With Mrs. H. it doesn’t matter if she does” Colin replied.

  A few days later it was Colin who drove the Daimler down to meet Julia at the small airport on her return from London. In the car—“Well?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s all settled. I go down and start next week, and probably go out to Morocco just after Christmas. I told Major Hartley I wanted Christmas up here, with the child, and he was so nice about it. I do think he’s a nice man” Julia said. “I’m sure I shall like working for him; he’s so—so accommodating.”

  Colin burst out laughing. “That’s the last thing most people would say about Hartley! I expect you’ve mopped him up, as usual.”

  “Nonsense!” Julia said, vexed—her blush appeared again. “Don’t be so silly, Colin.”

  “Sorry” he said, putting an appeasing hand on her arm. “Go on—tell me why you call him accommodating?”

  “Well, actually that had to do with what you vulgarly call ’mopping-up’, as well as about Christmas” Julia said, still blushing a little. “At one point he said— ‘I’m sure after all this time you must know quite a lot of the people in the Office fairly well. Is there anyone you’d rather not work under, while you’re learning the ropes?’ Now that was what I call considerate.”

  “Very percipient, anyhow” Colin said, grinning.

  “No, considerate” Julia persisted.

  “Have it your own way. And what did you say?”

  “I said yes, that there were two” Julia said, laughing a little herself.

  “Me and Torrens, I suppose?”

  “No, Torrens and someone else. I’m not going to tell you, so you needn’t ask!” (If Colin had not realised all the misery about John Antrobus in Switzerland, long ago as it was, she was certainly not going to inform him.) “But I’ll send him a postcard telling him to add you to the list!” she added briskly.

  “Well, I’m very glad you like him,
and I’m sure he’ll be delighted to have got you right into the Service at last” Colin said. “You know he always calls you ’the wonder-girl’? And so you are, darling.”

  She was silent for a moment. At last—“I think really he is chiefly glad to give me a chance to try and carry on, a little bit, where Philip left off” she said slowly. “He did say—” she paused.

  “Yes?” Colin asked.

  “He said that in Madeira we had brought the Central Asia trip to a successful conclusion” she said, turning to him, her eyes full of tears.

  “Oh darling!”

  “Yes. And he said he was sure I would do a lot more frightfully valuable work.”

  They had reached the Glentoran gate—Colin swung the car into it and up the drive; by the big beeches near the turning down to the saw-mill he pulled up.

  “Let’s finish talking here” he said. “There’s no hurry. And after Christmas is it to be Tangier?”

  “Probably. He asked if I still knew people there, since the takeover by Morocco, and of course I do; old Lady Tracy and Madame la Besse are still there, I know. But there’s just a chance it might be Portugal. Either would be heaven!”

  “You really are like the war-horse in the Bible, hearing the trumpets and shouting Ha-ha!” Colin said, shaking her elbow affectionately.

  “Well, I do like those sunshiny places, and being on a job” Julia admitted. “Have you told Aglaia I’m going to work in the Office, and take a job in the F.O. after?”

  “Yes, and she was tremendously pleased. Oh, we’ve got a bit of news for you, too. She’s started another baby.”

  “Has she? Oh, how splendid.”

  “Yes—and Nannie Mack is helping her to knit every single thing for it herself! By the way, have you heard from Mrs. H. about occupying her flat?—because if not, Ag would love you to come to us.”

  “There’s hardly been time for a letter, but in fact I telephoned to her, and it’s all right—she’d like me to stay there.”

  “Telephoned?” Colin was startled; it was not like Julia to be needlessly extravagant.