‘He attempted to hang himself in the orangery,’ replied Lady Moping, ‘in front of the Chester-Martins.’
‘I don’t mean Papa. I mean Mr Loveday.’
‘I don’t think I know him.’
‘Yes, the looney they have put to look after Papa.’
‘Your father’s secretary. A very decent sort of man, I thought, and eminently suited to his work.’
Angela left the question for the time, but returned to it again at luncheon on the following day.
‘Mums, what does one have to do to get people out of the bin?’
‘The bin? Good gracious, child, I hope that you do not anticipate your father’s return here.’
‘No, no. Mr Loveday.’
‘Angela, you seem to me to be totally bemused. I see it was a mistake to take you with me on our little visit yesterday.’
After luncheon Angela disappeared to the library and was soon immersed in the lunacy laws as represented in the encyclopedia.
She did not re-open the subject with her mother, but a fortnight later, when there was a question of taking some pheasants over to her father for his eleventh Certification Party she showed an unusual willingness to run over with them. Her mother was occupied with other interests and noticed nothing suspicious.
Angela drove her small car to the asylum, and after delivering the game, asked for Mr Loveday. He was busy at the time making a crown for one of his companions who expected hourly to be anointed Emperor of Brazil, but he left his work and enjoyed several minutes’ conversation with her. They spoke about her father’s health and spirits. After a time Angela remarked, ‘Don’t you ever want to get away?’
Mr Loveday looked at her with his gentle, blue-grey eyes. ‘I’ve got very well used to the life, miss. I’m fond of the poor people here, and I think that several of them are quite fond of me. At least, I think they would miss me if I were to go.’
‘But don’t you ever think of being free again?’
‘Oh yes, miss, I think of it – almost all the time I think of it.’
‘What would you do if you got out? There must be something you would sooner do than stay here.’
The old man fidgeted uneasily. ‘Well, miss, it sounds ungrateful, but I can’t deny I should welcome a little outing, once, before I get too old to enjoy it. I expect we all have our secret ambitions, and there is one thing I often wish I could do. You mustn’t ask me what. … It wouldn’t take long. But I do feel that if I had done it, just for a day, an afternoon even, then I would die quiet. I could settle down again easier, and devote myself to the poor crazed people here with a better heart. Yes, I do feel that.’
There were tears in Angela’s eyes that afternoon as she drove away. ‘He shall have his little outing, bless him,’ she said.
3
From that day onwards for many weeks Angela had a new purpose in life. She moved about the ordinary routine of her home with an abstracted air and an unfamiliar, reserved courtesy which greatly disconcerted Lady Moping.
‘I believe the child’s in love. I only pray that it isn’t that uncouth Egbertson boy.’
She read a great deal in the library, she cross-examined any guests who had pretensions to legal or medical knowledge, she showed extreme goodwill to old Sir Roderick Lane-Foscote, their Member. The names ‘alienist’, ‘barrister’ or ‘government official’ now had for her the glamour that formerly surrounded film actors and professional wrestlers. She was a woman with a cause, and before the end of the hunting season she had triumphed. Mr Loveday achieved his liberty.
The doctor at the asylum showed reluctance but no real opposition. Sir Roderick wrote to the Home Office. The necessary papers were signed, and at last the day came when Mr Loveday took leave of the home where he had spent such long and useful years.
His departure was marked by some ceremony. Angela and Sir Roderick Lane-Foscote sat with the doctors on the stage of the gymnasium. Below them were assembled everyone in the institution who was thought to be stable enough to endure the excitement.
Lord Moping, with a few suitable expressions of regret, presented Mr Loveday on behalf of the wealthier lunatics with a gold cigarette case; those who supposed themselves to be emperors showered him with decorations and titles of honour. The warders gave him a silver watch and many of the non-paying inmates were in tears on the day of the presentation.
The doctor made the main speech of the afternoon. ‘Remember,’ he remarked, ‘that you leave behind you nothing but our warmest good wishes. You are bound to us by ties that none will forget. Time will only deepen our sense of debt to you. If at any time in the future you should grow tired of your life in the world, there will always be a welcome for you here. Your post will be open.’
A dozen or so variously afflicted lunatics hopped and skipped after him down the drive until the iron gates opened and Mr Loveday stepped into his freedom. His small trunk had already gone to the station; he elected to walk. He had been reticent about his plans, but he was well provided with money, and the general impression was that he would go to London and enjoy himself a little before visiting his step-sister in Plymouth.
It was to the surprise of all that he returned within two hours of his liberation. He was smiling whimsically, a gentle, self-regarding smile of reminiscence.
‘I have come back,’ he informed the doctor. ‘I think that now I shall be here for good.’
‘But, Loveday, what a short holiday. I’m afraid that you have hardly enjoyed yourself at all.’
‘Oh yes, sir, thank you, sir, I’ve enjoyed myself very much. I’d been promising myself one little treat, all these years. It was short, sir, but most enjoyable. Now I shall be able to settle down again to my work here without any regrets.’
Half a mile up the road from the asylum gates, they later discovered an abandoned bicycle. It was a lady’s machine of some antiquity. Quite near it in the ditch lay the strangled body of a young woman, who, riding home to her tea, had chanced to overtake Mr Loveday, as he strode along, musing on his opportunities.
Graham Greene
ACROSS THE BRIDGE
‘THEY say he’s worth a million,’ Lucia said. He sat there in the little hot damp Mexican square, a dog at his feet, with an air of immense and forlorn patience. The dog attracted your attention at once; for it was very nearly an English setter, only something had gone wrong with the tail and the feathering. Palms wilted over his head, it was all shade and stuffiness round the bandstand, radios talked loudly in Spanish from the little wooden sheds where they changed your pesos into dollars at a loss. I could tell he didn’t understand a word from the way he read his newspaper – as I did myself picking out the words which were like English ones. ‘He’s been here a month,’ Lucia said. ‘They turned him out of Guatemala and Honduras.’
You couldn’t keep any secrets for five hours in this border town. Lucia had only been twenty-four hours in the place, but she knew all about Mr Joseph Calloway. The only reason I didn’t know about him (and I’d been in the place two weeks) was because I couldn’t talk the language any more than Mr Calloway could. There wasn’t another soul in the place who didn’t know the story – the whole story of the Halling Investment Trust and the proceedings for extradition. Any man doing dusty business in any of the wooden booths in the town is better fitted by long observation to tell Mr Calloway’s tale than I am, except that I was in – literally – at the finish. They all watched the drama proceed with immense interest, sympathy and respect. For, after all, he had a million.
Every once in a while through the long steamy day, a boy came and cleaned Mr Calloway’s shoes: he hadn’t the right words to resist them – they pretended not to know his English. He must have had his shoes cleaned the day Lucia and I watched him at least half a dozen times. At midday he took a stroll across the square to the Antonio Bar and had a bottle of beer, the setter sticking to heel as if they were out for a country walk in England (he had, you may remember, one of the biggest estates in Norfolk). After his bottl
e of beer, he would walk down between the money changers’ huts to the Rio Grande and look across the bridge into the United States: people came and went constantly in cars. Then back to the square till lunch-time. He was staying in the best hotel, but you don’t get good hotels in this border town: nobody stays in them more than a night. The good hotels were on the other side of the bridge: you could see their electric signs twenty storeys high from the little square at night, like lighthouses marking the United States.
You may ask what I’d been doing in so drab a spot for a fortnight. There was no interest in the place for anyone; it was just damp and dust and poverty, a kind of shabby replica of the town across the river: both had squares in the same spots; both had the same number of cinemas. One was cleaner than the other, that was all, and more expensive, much more expensive. I’d stayed across there a couple of nights waiting for a man a tourist bureau said was driving down from Detroit to Yucatán and would sell a place in his car for some fantastically small figure – twenty dollars, I think it was. I don’t know if he existed or was invented by the optimistic half-caste in the agency; anyway, he never turned up and so I waited, not much caring, on the cheap side of the river. It didn’t much matter; I was living. One day I meant to give up the man from Detroit and go home or go south, but it was easier not to decide anything in a hurry. Lucia was just waiting for a car going the other way, but she didn’t have to wait so long. We waited together and watched Mr Calloway waiting – for God knows what.
I don’t know how to treat this story – it was a tragedy for Mr Calloway, it was poetic retribution, I suppose, in the eyes of the shareholders he’d ruined with his bogus transactions, and to Lucia and me, at this stage, it was pure comedy – except when he kicked the dog. I’m not a sentimentalist about dogs, I prefer people to be cruel to animals rather than to human beings, but I couldn’t help being revolted at the way he’d kick that animal – with a hint of cold-blooded venom, not in anger but as if he were getting even for some trick it had played him a long while ago. That generally happened when he returned from the bridge: it was the only sign of anything resembling emotion he showed. Otherwise he looked a small, set, gentle creature with silver hair and a silver moustache, and gold-rimmed glasses, and one gold tooth like a flaw in character.
Lucia hadn’t been accurate when she said he’d been turned out of Guatemala and Honduras; he’d left voluntarily when the extradition proceedings seemed likely to go through and moved north. Mexico is still not a very centralized state, and it is possible to get round governors as you can’t get round cabinet ministers or judges. And so he waited there on the border for the next move. That earlier part of the story is, I suppose, dramatic, but I didn’t watch it and I can’t invent what I haven’t seen – the long waiting in ante-rooms, the bribes taken and refused, the growing fear of arrest, and then the flight – in gold-rimmed glasses – covering his tracks as well as he could, but this wasn’t finance and he was an amateur at escape. And so he’d washed up here, under my eyes and Lucia’s eyes, sitting all day under the bandstand, nothing to read but a Mexican paper, nothing to do but look across the river at the United States, quite unaware, I suppose, that everyone knew everything about him, once a day kicking his dog. Perhaps in its semi-setter way it reminded him too much of the Norfolk estate – though that, too, I suppose, was the reason he kept it.
And the next act again was pure comedy. I hesitate to think what this man worth a million was costing his country as they edged him out from this land and that. Perhaps somebody was getting tired of the business, and careless; anyway, they sent across two detectives, with an old photograph. He’d grown his silvery moustache since that had been taken, and he’d aged a lot, and they couldn’t catch sight of him. They hadn’t been across the bridge two hours when everybody knew that there were two foreign detectives in town looking for Mr Calloway-everybody knew, that is to say, except Mr Calloway, who couldn’t talk Spanish. There were plenty of people who could have told him in English, but they didn’t. It wasn’t cruelty, it was a sort of awe and respect: like a bull, he was on show, sitting mournfully in the plaza with his dog, a magnificent spectacle for which we all had ring-side seats.
I ran into one of the policemen in the Bar Antonio. He was disgusted; he had had some idea that when he crossed the bridge life was going to be different, so much more colour and sun, and – I suspect – love, and all he found were wide mud streets where the nocturnal rain lay in pools, and mangy dogs, smells and cockroaches in his bedroom, and the nearest to love, the open door of the Academia Comercial, where pretty mestizo girls sat all the morning learning to typewrite. Tip-tap-tip-tap-tip – perhaps they had a dream, too – jobs on the other side of the bridge, where life was going to be so much more luxurious, refined and amusing.
We got into conversation; he seemed surprised that I knew who they both were and what they wanted. He said, ‘We’ve got information this man Calloway’s in town.’
‘He’s knocking around somewhere,’ I said.
‘Could you point him out?’
‘Oh, I don’t know him by sight,’ I said.
He drank his beer and thought a while. ‘I’ll go out and sit in the plaza. He’s sure to pass sometime.’
I finished my beer and went quickly off and found Lucia. I said, ‘Hurry, we’re going to see an arrest.’ We didn’t care a thing about Mr Calloway, he was just an elderly man who kicked his dog and swindled the poor, and who deserved anything he got. So we made for the plaza; we knew Calloway would be there, but it had never occurred to either of us that the detectives wouldn’t recognize him. There was quite a surge of people round the place; all the fruit-sellers and bootblacks in town seemed to have arrived together; we had to force our way through, and there in the little green stuffy centre of the place, sitting on adjoining seats, were the two plain-clothes men and Mr Calloway. I’ve never known the place so silent; everybody was on tiptoe, and the plain-clothes men were staring at the crowd looking for Mr Calloway, and Mr Calloway sat on his usual seat staring out over the money-changing booths at the United States.
‘It can’t go on. It just can’t,’ Lucia said. But it did. It got more fantastic still. Somebody ought to write a play about it. We sat as close as we dared. We were afraid all the time we were going to laugh. The semi-setter scratched for fleas and Mr Calloway watched the U.S.A. The two detectives watched the crowd, and the crowd watched the show with solemn satisfaction. Then one of the detectives got up and went over to Mr Calloway. That’s the end, I thought. But it wasn’t, it was the beginning. For some reason they had eliminated him from their list of suspects. I shall never know why. The man said:
‘You speak English?’
‘I am English,’ Mr Calloway said.
Even that didn’t tear it, and the strangest thing of all was the way Mr Calloway came alive. I don’t think anybody had spoken to him like that for weeks. The Mexicans were too respectful-he was a man with a million – and it had never occurred to Lucia and me to treat him casually like a human being; even in our eyes he had been magnified by the colossal theft and the world-wide pursuit.
He said, ‘This is rather a dreadful place, don’t you think?”
‘It is,’ the policeman said.
‘I can’t think what brings anybody across the bridge.’
‘Duty,’ the policeman said gloomily. ‘I suppose you are passing through.’
‘Yes,’ Mr Calloway said.
‘I’d have expected over here there’d have been – you know what I mean – life. You read things about Mexico.’
‘Oh, life,’ Mr Calloway said. He spoke firmly and precisely, as if to a committee of shareholders. ‘That begins on the other side.’
‘You don’t appreciate your own country until you leave it.’
‘That’s very true,’ Mr Calloway said. ‘Very true.’
At first it was difficult not to laugh, and then after a while there didn’t seem to be much to laugh at; an old man imagining all the fine things going on b
eyond the international bridge. I think he thought of the town opposite as a combination of London and Norfolk – theatres and cocktail bars, a little shooting and a walk round the field at evening with the dog – that miserable imitation of a setter – poking the ditches. He’d never been across, he couldn’t know that it was just the same thing over again – even the same layout; only the streets were paved and the hotels had ten more storeys, and life was more expensive, and everything was a little bit cleaner. There wasn’t anything Mr Calloway would have called living – no galleries, no book-shops, just Film Fun and the local paper, and Click and Focus and the tabloids.
‘Well,’ said Mr Calloway, ‘I think I’ll take a stroll before lunch. You need an appetite to swallow the food here. I generally go down and look at the bridge about now. Care to come, too?’
The detective shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m on duty. I’m looking for a fellow.’ And that, of course, gave him away. As far as Mr Calloway could understand, there was only one ‘fellow’ in the world anyone was looking for – his brain had eliminated friends who were seeking their friends, husbands who might be waiting for their wives, all objectives of any search but just the one. The power of elimination was what had made him a financier – he could forget the people behind the shares.
That was the last we saw of him for a while. We didn’t see him going into the Botica Paris to get his aspirin, or walking back from the bridge with his dog. He simply disappeared, and when he disappeared, people began to talk, and the detectives heard the talk. They looked silly enough, and they got busy after the very man they’d been sitting next to in the garden. Then they, too, disappeared. They, as well as Mr Calloway, had gone to the state capital to see the Governor and the Chief of Police, and it must have been an amusing sight there, too, as they bumped into Mr Calloway and sat with him in the waiting-rooms. I suspect Mr Calloway was generally shown in first, for everyone knew he was worth a million. Only in Europe is it possible for a man to be a criminal as well as a rich man.
The Penguin Book of English Short Stories Page 32