After looking at the map I broke out of the foreign conversation book. ‘The best bet seems to be a place called Gembanella,’ I said. ‘It’s about fifty miles further on, in the direction of Albury. Of course I don’t know whether we can find beds there. But if we’re not going to drive all night – and at a pinch we could, taking it in turns to drive – then Gembanella looks about as far as we dare go. Though of course they may be all turning in there now. The Gembanellans may be asleep by nine-thirty and then rise at dawn.’
No silvery girl’s laugh greeted those final remarks. Though we were doing a good sixty again, I was apparently being driven by a Castilian duchess about eighty years of age. ‘Very well,’ she said loftily. ‘We will try that place. I don’t want to drive all night, and Mr Mitchell advised me against it. But you will have to tell me how to find this – Gembanella.’ She pronounced the name contemptuously, as if it was some wretched little thing I’d made for her. I returned to the foreign conversation book and said I would be glad to give her the necessary directions.
A lot of Victoria, with ghostly trees looking ghostlier than ever, rushed past us before we spoke again. Then, on an easy level stretch, she said: ‘You understand why I am doing this. I’m against those horrible people – especially that mad conceited Steglitz. I was already making plans with Mr Mitchell, who guessed I was against them – he is very clever – before you came. Then he said tonight that this would be the best thing I could do. So that is why I am here.’ She wasn’t an eighty-year-old duchess now but she was still a long way from being young Rosalia Arnaldos. About fifty perhaps, the manageress of something fairly important.
‘My dear Miss Arnaldos,’ I began, and even that takes some doing in a big car travelling fast at night, ‘I do understand. You’re here because, fortunately for me, we’re on the same side. Pleased as I am with myself, partly because of my stuffy painting, partly because of my success with women – ’
‘Oh – shut up.’
‘Certainly. But slow down a bit – we turn right very soon.’
During the next ten miles or so I thought I heard some sniffy noises but I couldn’t tell whether they came out of disgust or distress. Then we began to pass a few cars, there were lights somewhere below us, and finally we turned a corner, the road falling fairly steeply, and I said: ‘This must be Gembanella. What there is of it.’
There was a lay-by, overlooking the town, and she turned in there and stopped. Then, to my surprise, she laughed, sounding like the girl I’d been with in the Garlettas’ villa. ‘What if there’s only one bed down there?’
‘I can sleep in the bath, if there’s a bath, or on the billiards table, if they have one. Not to worry, ducky – ’
‘Oh – don’t.’ She started crying.
Hardly knowing what I was doing I pulled her from behind the wheel, put my arms round her, and began kissing her. It was damp, salty and glorious.
‘Oh – Tim – ’
‘What, ducky?’
‘I don’t care now if you don’t love me – yes, I do – but you know what I mean – ’
‘No, I don’t. And how do you know I don’t love you?’
‘But you never looked as if you loved me – ’
‘My God, girl – have a heart. There you were – one of that lot, Miss Southern Hemisphere – just giving me one short hard look and then nothing – telling Steglitz I was just a – ’
‘I had to – that was all part of it – and anyhow you looked as if you hated me – ’
‘Hated you? Didn’t I go back to Lima as soon as I was on my feet again after Osparas? Didn’t I ring up Uramba asking for you – and when Mrs Candamo told me you’d gone to Australia, didn’t I come here by the first boat?’
‘Kiss me.’
We stayed that night in Gembanella as Mr and Mrs Nateby (after our friend in New York, Marina Nateby), of Melbourne and on their way to Sydney. At the last moment, after the woman in the hotel had said she had a room, I suddenly remembered that Mrs Nateby ought to be wearing a plain ring on her third finger. I glanced down, and not only was she wearing it, she was displaying it. Our eyes met, and it would be nice if I could add that she blushed and then hastily looked away, but it wouldn’t be true. Not the faintest flicker of embarrassment was to be seen. She was young Mrs Nateby glad to have found a bed after a long day’s driving. (What good actresses most girls are – if they’re not on the stage.) But we exchanged a few words about that ring when we got upstairs. I didn’t tease her about having it in her bag, ready for an emergency; but I did say it might save me a bit of money if and when we married, to which she replied fiercely that this ring wouldn’t do at all and that I would have to buy her one, however little it cost. It was only about half-an-hour since she’d stopped the car, on the hill above the town, but as lovers we’d come a long way.
This hotel at Gembanella was really a kind of big beer house at the crossroads. It was a wooden shanty on an enormous scale, sprouting into verandahs and balconies, with hardly anything inside but blistered wood, some very slow old electric fans, and a mixed smell of beer and greasy frying-pans. Our bedroom, which was very long and high, was mostly dim space round a brass bedstead, a small and rickety chest of drawers, a gigantic and useless electric fan, one dimmish bulb, and a group photograph of 1902 characters with great sad moustaches. To get to the bathroom, which had obviously been installed by one of the 1902 characters, you had to go a creaky walk to the other end of the balcony. Nobody else was staying there; in fact I didn’t believe anybody had stayed there since about 1936, when the woman who showed us our bedroom probably realised that life was one long series of defeats. I told Rosalia that if I’d been there alone I’d have bought or stolen a bottle of whisky and knocked myself out with it. She said she just couldn’t have stayed there alone and would have gone on driving all night. As it was, we were in love, we were doing some good clowning as Mr and Mrs Nateby, and spent a night that was even better than the one we’d had at the Garlettas’ place. But most of it doesn’t come into the Wavy Eight story.
As far as that story’s concerned, it’s better to lump together that night in Gembanella, the four-hundred-mile drive we had next day, and the night we spent, as Mr and Mrs S. (for ‘Stuffy’) Painter from Adelaide, in the new motel on the edge of the Blue Mountains, not very far from Sydney. Because of course we talked for hours and hours and hours, every word bright with magic. I had to tell her everything that had happened to me in Chile – though I touched very lightly on the encounter with Nadia, too lightly for Rosalia, who wanted to know more about this woman she’d met and loathed – and what had happened on the Yarrabonga and in Melbourne. She told me how, after she’d run away from me at the Garlettas’ house that Sunday morning, she’d gone back to Uramba and, because of our talk the night before about the Wavy Eight organisation, had tried to get closer to her grandfather. She was in fact genuinely devoted to him as a person – she’d often behaved stupidly, perhaps downright badly, just because she’d felt so frustrated all round, a useless girl – but she thought that all that money and power and certain ideas he’s always believed in had unbalanced him, so that in his own way he was as mad as the others. She’d begged him to explain to her what they were trying to do. He said he was only able to tell her a little, but what he did tell her, and what she repeated to me, did throw a new light on the whole mysterious Wavy Eight business. Old Arnaldos, it appeared, believed that our whole civilisation – and Capitalism and Communism were only two different aspects of it – would have to be destroyed to make room for a new and better one, which would not be concerned with material benefits for vast urban masses, would never again build enormous cities, would reject all the political and social ideas of our time, and would create some kind of religious-authoritarian system rather like that of the Incas, except of course that it would make use of science and technology. This was to happen, he told her, chiefly in South America and Africa and Australia.
Rosalia had then begged him to send her to Austral
ia, on a sort of Wavy Eight mission to Steglitz at Charoke. She said she knew by this time that some of the people on the staff at the Institute, Osparas and Charoke, were quite aware they were working for the Wavy Eight set-up, although they were not like her grandfather and his friends, directors or members or initiates or whatever they might be, in the secret inner ring. She persuaded her grandfather she wanted to be one of these trusted workers for the cause, in the hope of one day being admitted to the directing inner circle, even though she was a woman. So the old man gave her a letter to Steglitz, and off she flew to Australia. This is where I came in, she said. She’d made up her mind, after the Garletta night, that it was to be all or nothing between us, that if I didn’t come to Australia then I didn’t want her and that was that, she’d try to forget me. It was because he began talking about me that she and Mitchell became friendly. He soon discovered where her sympathies were, and finally he admitted that under cover of being an agent of the organisation, originally employed by Merlan-Smith, he was in fact working against it.
She said there really were courses on salesmanship and personnel management at Charoke, enough of them to pay the running costs of the place and to prevent anybody from being suspicious about its activities. Steglitz in fact was very well in with the various Australian authorities – he must have just finished telephoning Major Jorvis that I was there, when I went into his office – but he admitted to people like Rosalia and Mitchell that he thought Major Jorvis and his superiors and inferiors naïve and stupid to the point of imbecility. But Rosalia had never before seen and heard Steglitz in the queer mood that possessed him the night I was there. Actually she hadn’t spent much time at Charoke, because Steglitz had asked her to begin moving in top circles in Melbourne and Sydney, as part of her job. I might as well add here that Rosalia had taken a violent dislike, which I could do nothing about, not only to these top circles but to Australian life on most levels. All she wanted was to get out from down under, and this partly explains why from now on we began to rush things.
As Mrs Painter from Adelaide, she was still very sleepy that morning we woke up in the motel near the Blue Mountains. She’d telephoned Barsac the night before, and he’d said he’d meet us at the motel about eleven this morning. He’d have liked to have made it earlier but he had to come out from Sydney and he’d no car. But just when she ought to have been getting up, the idle wench, wearing nothing but a fat sleepy smile, began dozing off again. (Mr Painter had collected Mrs Painter’s breakfast and taken it to their room, thereby creating a precedent for the Bedfords.) So I met Barsac and we sat not far from our cabin, on a seat between two magnificent golden poplars.
People you’ve heard about but not met, I’ve discovered, are either exactly what you expect or completely and astonishingly different. Barsac wasn’t like my idea of a French scientist at all. He was tall and thin and big-boned – his cheekbones were among the widest and largest I’ve ever seen – and he had white hair, a deeply-furrowed face, and a general air of romantic melancholy. He’d have looked just right as a concert pianist specialising in Chopin. He was eager to talk but as he soon asked me about Rother, I had to explain what had happened at Osparas. When I told him what Rother had said about expecting life to be reasonable and then finding himself ever afterwards at the mercy of madmen, Barsac couldn’t be silent any longer.
‘My poor Rother – how I can imagine him saying that! Wait – I will tell you.’ He lit another cigarette, for he seemed to smoke all the time and his shabby old suit had a lot of ash on it. ‘We think we know – I was the same at one time – and we know nothing. We are so busy experimenting with matter, we think only that is important. We don’t know who or what we are – what we are doing here – what forces, what intelligences perhaps, make use of us. Now I think sometimes we are the stupidest people who ever lived. But I remind you of something, my friend. What is it?’
I tried to remember exactly what Mrs Semple had said, just before I left her, about looking the wrong way and not knowing where else to look. I told Barsac how I’d gone to see her, right at the beginning, before I understood what was happening at all.
‘She was right,’ said Barsac sadly. ‘But too late for her to keep Semple and her hold on life. She was one of those women who have a talent only for misfortune. Now this Miss Arnaldos. I have seen photographs – very attractive – in the idiot newspapers here. You share a cabin – so you are making love to her. Are you in love with her? Of course – I see you are. You are fortunate. I have almost forgotten there are two sexes – not because I am too old – I am not so old – not because I am thinking about other things, though I am – but because there is something against sex and the life of the senses in the atmosphere here. So the men are monks without God, with only beer, picnic baskets and tennis rackets. The girls are handsome but puzzled. They look at themselves, give a sigh, and bake another cake. So you are fortunate with your South American girl. But no doubt you deserve to be. You have done more than anyone, even our friend Mitchell, so far against these devils – for that is what they are.’
‘No, I haven’t.’ And this wasn’t mock-modesty, I haven’t any. ‘I’m a fraud. I’ve done nothing but go blundering round, never being clever and always saying too much, and then always having to be helped out by somebody else. I haven’t even done what I set out to do – found Joe Farne and given him his wife’s message.’
He dismissed this with a wave of his cigarette. ‘You have acted as a catalyst, my friend, that is what is so important. I know this – so does my sister and her friend, the clairvoyant, where we are going later today – and so I think does Mitchell. When you promised this dying woman you would go to look for her husband, the catalyst was dropped into the solution waiting for it. Now everything moves – you will see.’
I was still staring at him. ‘How do you know I promised my cousin Isabel I would look for Joe?’ Because so far I’d never mentioned it, and though Mitchell might have guessed something, he couldn’t be certain.
‘I know,’ Barsac replied carelessly, ‘because I have had the scene described to me. Up there, in the Blue Mountains, thousands and thousands of miles away from London.’
‘It happened in Cambridge, not London.’ And then, still wondering how anybody could have described my visit to Isabel, I told him how it all began and how important the list of names Joe scribbled had soon become. I was just about through when Rosalia arrived, sleek and dark and smiling, wearing a silk shirt, pale Chinese vermilion, I’d never seen before. After she’d greeted Barsac, whose sunken eyes glowed with approval, she said: ‘I’ve packed, Tim darling. And you haven’t, and I daren’t do it for you, not after you told me yesterday you always wanted to do it yourself.’
‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘Every man should do his own packing. But I didn’t know we were going.’
‘I think you must,’ said Barsac gravely. ‘I am taking you to my sister’s bungalow in these mountains. This is important – not a social call. And you may not be able to come back here.’
‘Then I’ll pack and put all our stuff into the car.’ I paid the bill too while I was on the job, and it was well after twelve when I returned to the seat between the poplars. Rosalia and Barsac were now going full speed in French, sounding shrewd and witty as people always do in that deceptive language. Talking to a good-looking girl in his own tongue had taken about ten years off Barsac. As for Rosalia, I’d never seen her before in this particular role, as a social charmer, and I thought she was surprising and delicious.
They’d made a plan about lunch. Rosalia had started it, by declaring she couldn’t eat any more steak and eggs with tomato sauce, but really I think she wanted to give Barsac a treat. Two or three miles away, on the road to the Blue Mountains, Sydney’s most chi-chi restaurant had just opened a small branch establishment, and there, Rosalia decided, we must go. We drove up there about one. It was a corner place, just out of the paint pots, in mimosa yellow and dark grey, and not very big. All the tables in the main room wer
e either occupied or reserved, so we were taken to a smaller room upstairs, which we had to ourselves except for one or two ladies tripping to and from their Powder Room in the corner. The windows overlooked the entrance, and I was idly staring down, while drinking a martini, when I saw two cars arrive. Out of the first, with a chauffeur at the wheel, came Magorious and Lord Randlong. Out of the second, which she had been driving, came Nadia, Sir Reginald Merlan-Smith and General Giddings. Before Rosalia and Barsac, who heard me cry out, could see for themselves, the five of them had vanished, heading for their reserved table below.
‘They cannot know we are here,’ said Rosalia. ‘But that bitch of a countess may come up to powder her beautiful nose. And from what Tim does not tell me,’ she said to Barsac, ‘I think she wants him for herself. She doesn’t have him, not for two minutes.’
We sat down as a waiter came up with menus that might have been full scores of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. I said that anything that hadn’t been near tomato sauce would do me, but nobody listened. Rosalia and Barsac stared so long at their menus that the waiter began translating its French for them, all with a strong Hungarian accent. Then when he left with our orders, somebody else came up the stairs. It was Nadia.
My impression of that encounter is that during the first twenty-five seconds of smiles, greetings and the introduction of Barsac, war between Rosalia and Nadia was declared again, was fought, was ended by an armistice. Then I took over. ‘I saw you arrive, Nadia. Four of ’em downstairs. You only need Steglitz.’
‘And he flies here this afternoon,’ said Nadia wearily. ‘He telephoned Sir Reginald this morning. Something important – and very bad – has happened at Charoke. But I do not know what it is. I am not told things now. What happened to the nice little German – Rother – who escaped with you from Osparas, Tim?’
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