‘No, I’ll start where Joe did, at that Institute,’ I said, though I’d not really thought about it. ‘Dr What’s-it, director of personnel, might not know anything about him, but somebody else there might.’ And then, I don’t know why, I took out that sheet of paper Isabel had given me, the one with the names scribbled on, and said: ‘You could probably have this copied, couldn’t you, while I’m ringing up for a taxi to the station? I don’t want the copy; you keep it. I’ll have the original sheet back.’
We talked about travellers’ cheques and visas while the copy was being made and the taxi was on its way. I told him, so that he could pass it on to Isabel, that as soon as I had all the things I had to have, I’d be on my way to look for Joe. The taxi arrived within a minute of my having Isabel’s precious bit of paper back in my possession. Sturge was solemn as we shook hands.
‘I needn’t tell you that your cousin hasn’t long to live,’ he said. ‘She’ll never learn what happened to her husband. But when you’re about to start, let me know, tell me where I can reach you if necessary, and, if and when you do find him, tell me about that too. I can’t help feeling curious,’ he added, almost shamefaced. ‘We can get to anywhere almost in a day or two, these days, if we have the money, though that doesn’t mean we’re all on a conducted tour. I’ve had to tell poor Mrs Farne not to indulge in peculiar morbid fancies – for a sick woman worrying about a vanished husband is capable of imagining anything – but now I’ll tell you, Mr Bedford, that the world’s still a big place, and sicker and madder than ever it used to be, so anything might happen in it. Good luck to you. Take care of yourself.’
At the station I found I had quarter of an hour to wait for the next train to London, so I went into the Refreshment Room. After a few minutes, I was joined at the counter by a longish thinnish man somewhere in his forties. He had a lined, brown-ochre face, which had seen plenty of sun somewhere, and burnt-umber eyes that looked sleepy and weren’t. We had the usual grumbling sort of chat until the train was ready for us, and then he kept on talking, as we went along the platform, so that although I didn’t want company, preferring to do some thinking, I found myself in the same carriage with him. He told me, without being asked, that his name was Mitchell, that he’d originally come from New Zealand, that he’d been in shipping but was now looking for what he called ‘a good new opening’. As he seemed to expect it, I told him I was Tim Bedford, a painter by profession, and that I’d nothing to do with Cambridge but had been visiting a relative who was very ill. He didn’t explain what good new openings he had hoped to find in Cambridge, but then my manner wasn’t encouraging. We were sitting opposite to each other, not having the compartment to ourselves but sharing it with one of those indignant elderly couples you find all over England now. They glared at Mitchell and me; they glared at each other; they glared past us at the corridor outside; and very soon, I gathered, they’d be glaring at some actors. The four of us went rattling on through rain and darkness. It was a good time to start imagining what Peru might be like.
After breaking off talk with Mitchell, who began to read an evening paper, I did what I’d been wanting to do for some time. I took out that page of her letter which Isabel had given me, and began to examine the scribbles on it. Some of them I couldn’t make out at all. I wondered what Sturge’s typist had made out of them. However, several names, apparently both of people and places, could be deciphered: Gen. Giddings – V. Melnikov – von Emmerick – Steglitz – Something-Smith – Old Astrologer on the mountain? – Osparas and Emerald L. – Charoke, Vic.? – Blue Mtns? – high back Brisbane? – Semple, Rother, Barsac? – fig. 8 above wavy l. – Why Sat.? I have put these down exactly as Joe Farne had written them, queries and all. What they meant, of course, I hadn’t the least notion. But of one thing I was certain, after staring at that page for ten minutes or so, and that was that Joe Farne, by temperament and training a methodical fellow, had been in a devil of a hurry when he’d scrawled those names as fast as he could remember them. There hadn’t been time to put them in any sensible order. Probably he didn’t know what some of them, perhaps most of them, meant; but he’d jerked them out of his memory at top speed to get his letter finished and sealed up in its envelope. Something had happened, I felt, after he’d written at some length, probably taking his time, telling Isabel what she’d wanted to know about their relationship; and whatever it was, it had compelled him to scribble down as many of these names as he could recollect. They weren’t really part of the letter to her; they were meant for anybody who might wonder what had happened to him, who might begin to look for him. So now they were meant for me. One of these names, a person or a place, might lead me to him. Joe Farne was among those scrawls somewhere.
When I suddenly looked up I was just too quick for Mitchell, who was staring hard at me above his evening paper. ‘You caught me,’ he said. ‘Know why I was staring at you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But you certainly were, weren’t you?’
‘I think I’ve a good memory,’ he said. ‘I was trying to decide where I’d seen you before. Ever been in Australia?’
‘No. France, Italy, Spain, that’s all.’ It occurred to me then that I was still holding a page of squiggles that might refer to Australia among other places – Blue Mtns? and high back Brisbane?, for instance – and now I put it back in my inside pocket.
‘I was miles out then,’ Mitchell said. ‘I’d more or less decided I’d seen you in the Oriental Hotel, Melbourne.’
I could have told him that I’d more or less decided he was lying, but there didn’t seem any point in it. Some men start lying just to amuse themselves when there’s nothing much else to do. Mitchell didn’t look the type; but apparently he was. A pity because I’d rather liked the look of that long brown face of his. When we finally arrived at Liverpool Street, he offered to give me a lift, saying he had to have a taxi, but by that time I preferred my own company. Somewhere underground, roughly halfway between Liverpool Street and South Kensington, my own company suddenly turned sour on me, asking me what the hell I thought I was doing, promising a dying woman and then signing a solicitor’s letter, to say nothing of taking their money, all in aid of a wild goose chase on a global scale, needle-hunting in a haystack thousands of miles long. I looked at my jogging reflection in the window of the underground train: Tim Bedford going round the bend.
2
The whole idea didn’t seem much more reasonable next morning, but even so I tore into the business of getting visas and talking to the bank and clearing up the studio, before trying to sub-let it; and so on and so forth. After a long wearing sort of day I decided to give myself a drink or two, and possibly some food, at the Arts Club. Now here I ran into a coincidence. It was only a little one, hardly worth calling a coincidence at all, but it has to be mentioned because I’m trying to tell this story as honestly as I can. And this is the point – as I go on telling it we’ll soon run smack into what look like ridiculous coincidences, altogether too big and steep, and I give warning here and now that in actual fact they aren’t coincidences at all. But this one at the club was, and all it amounted to was that I happened to see an industrial designer called Semple about to call for a drink, and I stood him a pink gin. While we were talking about nothing I remembered that Semple was one of the names on the list that Joe Farne had sent from Chile.
‘Am I wrong,’ I said, firing into the dark, ‘or did you have a brother?’
Obviously it wasn’t a question he liked. ‘I had a brother,’ he said, about as curt as a man can be to a fellow who’s just provided him with a drink. ‘Physicist. He was at Harwell, then left and after a lot of fuss he took a job in Peru.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, trying not to sound excited at this mention of Peru. ‘I must have read about it somewhere. What happened to him?’
‘His wife went out and brought him back. He’d had a nervous breakdown. Never recovered properly – died soon afterwards.’ Having disposed of his brother, clearly a painful topic, he
now warmed up a bit. ‘Odd you should ask because I was just about to ring up my sister-in-law. I promised to look her up tonight and now I find I can’t.’ He swallowed the rest of his gin, and it must have washed away another barrier between us. ‘I’ve been putting off telephoning because I’m glad I can’t go and I have to sound sorry. You know how it is with some people, Bedford. I don’t like the woman, never did. On the other hand, there she is – lonely, miserable, bitter as hell. I’m genuinely sorry for her but hate going to see her and listening to her complaints, and of course she knows it. Have another? I’m going to have one.’
‘Thanks. But just a minute. Was it the Arnaldos Institute in Peru?’
‘Where my brother went? Sounds like it. Why?’
‘I have a cousin whose husband went out there, and she’s worried about him.’ I was very offhand, just a fellow in a club. ‘Would it be all right if I called on your sister-in-law? Tonight, I mean. Where is she?’
‘Hampstead. I’ll give you her address. I’ll ring up and ask her, as soon as I’ve got our drinks. Makes it easier for me, anyhow. Incidentally, she paints a bit, but I warn you she’s no good.’
He brought the drinks, then went off to telephone. He looked happier when he returned. ‘That’s fixed. And I’ve written down the address – here it is. Belsize Park, really. About nine o’clock, I suggested. But don’t expect to enjoy yourself. And be careful what you say – she hasn’t got over Frank yet, not by a long way. Well – cheers!’
There’s a range of colours, purple madder and magenta to mauve and violet alizarin, that I like to keep away from, and they seemed to be all there, in Mrs Semple’s sitting-room. She was up on the second floor, having invested all her money in the house, which was large, solid and horrible; and she had four students in bed-sitting-rooms above her, and substantial citizens renting what she called ‘maisonettes’ on the two floors below. She told me all this in the first few minutes I was there, for no particular reason I could discover. She was a biggish sagging woman, probably in her later forties, and she had the bulgy sort of very pale blue eyes that I always find disagreeable. Her dress was a cobalt violet shade that was all wrong for her. The various still lifes on the walls, obviously her work, weren’t badly drawn and put together but they all came out of a muddy palette. Even before she had finished explaining how she ran the house, I had come to the conclusion she was one of those people without a colour sense. She seemed glad to see me, probably glad to see anybody, but behind her welcoming air was a peculiar manner, perhaps her usual one, that was half-lost, half-angry, as if it might be touch-and-go whether she burst into tears or kicked you on the shins. She gave me a whisky and I got the impression she’d already had several herself.
I didn’t tell her that Joe Farne had disappeared, only that his wife was worried about him. I tried to suggest that I was just mildly curious about the Arnaldos Institute.
‘I remember Joe Farne,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t see much of him. I think he and Frank, my husband, had had some disagreement, but I never understood what it was. He lived in the bachelor quarters and Frank and I had one of the bungalows. And we didn’t see many people because when I got out there Frank was already on the edge of a nervous breakdown.’ She looked hard at me, as if challenging me to make any reply, and then looked away. I didn’t know what to say, so I drank some whisky rather slowly. She gulped down most of hers, rather defiantly, as if Scotch might be prohibited in Belsize Park.
‘What about this Arnaldos Institute?’ This was after an uncomfortable silence, and the room was beginning to get me down.
‘Yes, what about it?’ she said, quite indignantly, staring at me as if I were partly responsible for the place. ‘That’s what I’ve asked myself over and over and over again. My God – yes! That bloody Institute!’
She had exploded into silence again. This time I didn’t ask a question but murmured something about its being run by an old oil multi-millionaire, just to give her a chance to tell me something without getting too excited.
‘Yes, old Arnaldos runs it as a kind of hobby,’ she said, quiet and sensible now. ‘Though he made all his money in Venezuela, he’s a Peruvian – part Indian, some people say. He wants to discover what the best scientific research can do for Peru. That’s all right. And indeed when Frank first arrived there, he was very enthusiastic about the whole project. He wrote and told me it was all wonderful. I only met the old man once – he’s not always there, y’know – and I didn’t like him and I don’t think he liked me.’
She helped herself a bit shakily to some more whisky and motioned me to do the same. She wasn’t tight but the whisky she’d already had, I felt, was mixing badly with a lot of emotion that was churning up inside her. Another thing was that she had enormous legs and though I hadn’t the least desire to stare at them, it was becoming more and more difficult to ignore them.
‘Mrs Semple,’ I said, beginning to feel desperate, ‘what was wrong with him – and the place? There was something, wasn’t there?’
She looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘Something? My dear man, how can you talk like that? Look – do give yourself another drink. I can’t keep beckoning.’
She waited until I had re-filled my glass at the table by her side, and then, before I could move away she grabbed my left hand with both of hers, squeezing it hard and not letting go, and looking up at me, her eyes bigger and paler than ever behind huge gathering tears. ‘Don’t you know – hasn’t anybody told you – that after I brought him back my husband went out of his mind – and killed himself?’ She released my hand, and as I moved away I expected to hear a storm of sobbing. But by the time I’d settled in my chair again, she was almost in complete control of herself, though she seemed to sag more than ever.
‘No, I didn’t know, Mrs Semple. Your brother-in-law ought to have told me. I’m sorry. And if you’d rather not talk about the Institute – ’ I left it in the air.
‘Let me tell you something about my husband first,’ she said, quite eagerly. ‘To try to make you understand. He was a nuclear physicist, y’know, but he refused to work on the H-bomb – ’
‘I’m glad to hear it – ’
‘So was I. But the strange thing is this, Mr Bedford. When he got worse – towards the end – and didn’t know what he was saying, he couldn’t stop talking about H-bombs and what they were going to do. He began describing frightful scenes. Yet his conscience was quite clear. He couldn’t have been repressing any feelings of guilt. It was something that happened at the Institute, before I got there, that began all the trouble. But I don’t know what it was. It’s not that he wouldn’t tell me, he couldn’t tell me. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. Something he saw or heard or read, while he was there at the Institute, before I went there, took hold of his mind and shook it to pieces. He was a big strong man, Mr Bedford. And though he’d had some trouble here before he went to Peru, he went out there feeling perfectly well. And it wasn’t the climate or anything like that. Uramba, where the Institute is, down the coast, isn’t like Lima, which has a nasty climate – warm without sunlight, damp and sticky. Uramba’s dry and sunny. A lovely climate. We both adored it, even though I soon hated the Institute itself.’
‘What was wrong with it?’
‘I don’t know.’ She almost shouted it at me. ‘My God – do you think if I did know, I’d just sit here, collecting rents and sending for plumbers? Yes, and sometimes drinking too much whisky while I wonder what’s become of the friends we used to have. And painting pictures you can’t bring yourself to mention – no, don’t try to be polite about them. A useless woman – no husband, no children, no friends, not even caring any more for the damned science I used to teach.’
If I showed any sympathy, she might go on and on like that, and I wouldn’t learn anything. So I asked her what her husband’s job was.
This calmed her down. ‘He wouldn’t tell me in his letters. He’d given an undertaking not to write and talk about his work. That’s not unusual with resea
rch work. But from what he let drop when I was there, he’d been working on fall-out for them. He knew a lot about fall-out. And what he knew, he didn’t like. But that couldn’t have sent him out of his mind.’
‘I suppose they couldn’t be planning to make a few H-bombs themselves at that Institute?’
‘Of course not! Ridiculous! You can’t have the least idea what it takes to manufacture even the smallest atomic bomb. The only plant they have there is for making electricity and pumping water. It’s not big even as a research institute. Just a few labs, offices, conference rooms, and so forth, and of course living quarters and bungalows – and a little palace for old Emperor Arnaldos.’
‘What about Dr Soultz?’
She stared at me. ‘How do you know about him?’
‘My cousin had a letter from him. Not very sympathetic, I thought.’
‘There are three or four of them there – ’ She broke off to take a drink. ‘They’re all in key jobs, like Soultz, and they’re all the same sort of men. I don’t mean they look alike – or even talk in the same way. But they all belong to something that you don’t belong to – or you belong to something they don’t belong to – put it either way. They’re not – not with you. You can’t imagine yourself being friends with one of them. And I felt just the same when I met Dr Magorious here in London. He’s the psychiatrist that Soultz told me to take Frank to – he’s very expensive but it didn’t cost us a penny, the Institute paid his bill – and though he’s here and not over there, I felt just the same about him, though I’m not saying he didn’t do all he could for Frank.’
There was a lot more along these lines, but it didn’t seem to me to mean very much, and I began to feel I was wasting my time. She was trying to blame the Institute for her husband’s breakdown but she had nothing that began to look like evidence against it. Probably Frank Semple had started quietly going round the bend while he was at Harwell or even before that. I didn’t feel I could question her about what happened to him at the end, leading up to his suicide, because she might easily have lost all control. She could have been a bit barmy herself. And yet, when I got up to go and she clung on to my hand again, she said something I often thought about afterwards.
Saturn Over the Water Page 3