by Alec Waugh
It was his custom to pay a final visit to his chief every evening at half-past five. He rang through to the personal secretary, a pert dapper little minx whom Purvis considered highly unsuitable for so confidential a position.
“O.K.,” she said. “His nibs is ready.”
The Minister looked up with his quick automatic smile.
“Any trouble this evening, Purvis?”
“A report from the Governor of Santa Marta, sir.”
“Fine. What’s he got on his mind?”
“He considers the island ready for the new constitution.”
“Excellent, that’s one problem settled.”
“There’s a covering letter.”
“Oh,” the Minister frowned. He wished people would not complicate his position by resorting to a personal basis of communication. Questions were asked him in the House which required cut and dried answers. He needed to quote from a Governor’s report, not from a private letter.
“What does it say?”
“I think you’d better read it, sir.”
“Right, let’s see it then.”
He read it quickly. Why on earth did the old man have to write this rigmarole about a local law case. Had he any idea how many papers a Minister had to read? It might amuse Jimmy Templeton with time upon his hands to write letters home, but he might consider the busy people who had to read them.
“There doesn’t appear to be anything that concerns us here,” he said.
“I thought you might like to make some inquiries about this Mr. Fleury.”
The minister smiled. The indefatigable Purvis. There he went again. Leaving no stone unturned. No wonder it took such a long time to get an answer from the Treasury. One mustn’t discourage him.
“I’ll be very grateful for anything you can find out,” he said. “Now, there’s a question coming up next week about a tribesman in North Borneo …”
2
The Marshes were giving a cocktail party that evening. Marsh had promised to be home on time, but he had no intention of being so. In the days when he had been in Opposition, he had performed his duties as a host punctiliously. But now as quarter-past six became half-past six, he liked to picture Marjorie welcoming her guests with that fussed frown of hers.
“I must apologize for Robert. He promised to be here on time, but you know how it is.”
Beneath the assumed anxiety in her voice there would be a smug complacent purr at having a husband with a legitimate excuse for unpunctuality. That purr was the greatest reward that office had brought him. He was devoted to Marjorie, and he enjoyed their life together. A little while ago he had had anxious moments. They had been married fifteen years and there had been danger signals. She was getting restless. The purr in her voice was reassuring. She liked being the wife of a senior Minister. It was all right now. Big Ben struck half-past six. Time to be on his way.
His house was in Brompton Square. He arrived there at quarter to seven. The party was in full swing. At the start of a party Marjorie turned on the radio to make people raise their voices and give to a three-quarters empty room a sense, through volume of sound, of its being full. The radio was now switched off. Marsh stood in the doorway, looking round him, waiting for Marjorie to notice him. He wanted to make an entrance, and he needed her help to make it. He had not long to wait. Her eye was always on the door till his arrival.
“Darling,” she called, and ran across to him.
“Your host at last,” she said.
She raised her voice; it was not a large room and conversation ceased. She made quite a thing of it. She slipped her arm through his. “Don’t you pity me with a husband who can never be at home on time?”
She addressed the room at large. In her voice was that soft smug purr. He pressed her arm and she looked up and smiled. Success had brought them close.
“Settled the affairs of state satisfactorily?” said a man beside her.
There was a tinge of envy in his voice. It pleased Marsh as much as the purr had done. Its owner, a contemporary, and a banker, had been prominent in immediate postwar years on several economic missions, and had tended to patronize the Opposition M.P. who had no access either to an expense account or top secret files.
“Darling,” Marjorie was saying. “There’s a young man whom you should meet. Frank Lambert. The London correspondent of the New York Sun. Matilda brought him. Here he is.”
Two paces away stood a tall sandy open-faced young man.
“I’m certainly glad you’ve made it, sir,” he said. “I was just getting ready to check out. My weekly article goes in tomorrow; I’ve got to tap a pipeline or two before I hit the hay.”
“In that case let’s see if I can’t give you material for a paragraph that will justify your staying here half an hour longer.”
During the war Marsh had worked in the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Many top secret files had passed his way. He had acquired a nose for what was really confidential and what could be safely told. He liked to help a journalist when he could. It usually paid dividends. He ran his mind over the last three days: Malaya and Rhodesia were dynamite. Borneo was too parochial. But the Caribbean was an American sphere of interest.
“This might be of interest to you,” he said. “I had a report tonight from the Governor of Santa Marta. I expect you know more about the island than I do.”
“I wouldn’t say that, but I have been there.”
“I’ll bet you have. That’s the great advantage you fellows have over us; you know places by sight; we know them only from a dossier; but about Santa Marta, they’re being given a new constitution. They’ve already got universal suffrage, now they’ll have a majority of elected members in the council, a practical application of the Point Four principle; encouragement of backward peoples. There might be something there, I think?”
“There might indeed, sir, I’m most grateful.”
Not a great deal though, Lambert reflected, as he moved away, his audience finished. He remembered Santa Marta clearly. He had spent a day there, on a pleasure cruise: they had done fifteen islands in three weeks. They had docked at Jamestown before lunch and sailed at seven. Someone on board knew someone on the island and there had been a party. They had had rum punches on a beach; there had been plenty of sandwiches and afterward no one felt like lunch; so they had driven round the island; he had been drowsy after all those punches and had fallen asleep, to find when he awoke his head on the shoulder of a quite pretty girl, a Mavis somebody, who’d been very amusing about the incident. They’d bathed again and gone back to the club for swizzles; and he and that Mavis Somebody had stood on the veranda looking out over the sea, waiting for the sun to sink, watching for the green ray, and suddenly he had found that they were holding hands and there’s been something about her, he couldn’t quite say what, something malleable and tender, yes, malleable was the word, a need to be taken charge of and be molded; something that had made him think, Why not stay on, let the boat sail, see what she’s really like. Hop a plane back later. Why not, he’d asked himself. And then there’d been someone shouting, If we’re going to make that boat we’d better hurry. They’d faced one another, he and that Mavis Somebody, and her eyes had said, It would be nice if you could stay on here but of course you can’t. And the impulse had been very strong to counter back, Why shouldn’t I? I’m a free man aren’t I? But there was that voice insisting, We must go now. Where is young Lambert. Hell, he had thought, I can’t do things like this. I’m a journalist. I’ve got to see all I can.
That had been Santa Marta: not so very different, in essentials, from the other islands, Antigua, St. Kitts, St. Lucia: he only remembered Santa Marta so vividly because of that Mavis Somebody and that wasn’t a good enough reason to devote twenty lines of his weekly column to its new constitution. He’d better go, he thought. There was another cocktail party on his circuit; then he’d dine at Bolton’s, a small intimate club frequented by politicians; if he kept his ears open there, he might hear something. H
e’d look in at his office afterward and see if there were any cables; then he’d go back and do his piece and wake fresh in the morning to revise it.
He was planning a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes of London life showing the variety of its different interests and strata, and how they were knit into homogeneity by the news, by the public events that made of seven million scattered Londoners one corporate body. It was an ambitious idea. He wanted to get it right. He’d better go.
He turned toward the door, but as he did, he saw at the head of the stairway something that made him check. She was, he guessed, in the middle twenties; she was of medium height. She was not plump but one day she might be fat. She wore a tight-fitting green dress. She was pale skinned, and had what it was contemporary to describe as “a pushed-in face.” She moved smoothly. She was not a girl that men would turn round to look at in the streets, but she was a type he liked. Their eyes met and he checked his stride. Her impression was not so much sulky as lowering: if anyone annoyed her she would smack his face, The look excited him. He walked across to her.
“I was going to leave,” he said, “but I’ve changed my mind. You’re the most attractive girl I’ve seen in a long time.”
She blinked, and her expression changed. He had accurately diagnosed her mood. She had had a bad day, starting with a headache, and an account rendered bill from a shop where she had planned to buy a new hat that morning. At her Whitehall office, she had been snapped at by the D.A.G.’s secretary. Finally she had been stood up at lunch by a man whom she had recognized for quite a long time now as a bad bet. This healthy looking young American presented a pleasantly wholesome contrast to all that.
“Do you know what I told myself as you came up the stairs?” he asked.
“You tell me what you told yourself.”
“That there’s a girl who puts a ‘no’ to all that talk about Englishwomen not knowing how to dress.”
Her eyes were hazel and they sparkled. She could use a line like this.
“You can fetch me a martini, then you can tell me some more about myself,” she said.
Eight hours later Frank Lambert paid off a taxi outside his flat in Westminster. No pipelines had been tapped, no cable had been studied. His head was light and his heart was singing. His typewriter faced him accusingly. He waved his hand to it. “Bide your time, my friend.” He set his alarm for ten. His lunch date was for one. He had to be punctual. She only got an hour off. He wanted to look in at a jeweler’s on the way. The kaleidoscope piece could wait. He could beat out some routine stuff round that idea of Marsh’s; the West Indies, Santa Marta, Truman’s Point Four. My, but life was good and unexpected. How little he’d thought last night when he’d started out for that cocktail party that he wouldn’t be back here for nine hours, and in this mood.
3
Lambert’s article on Santa Marta was snipped from the New York Sun by a sub-editor on the Baltimore Evening Star and sent up to his chief’s secretary with the comment, “In view of W.R.’s recent trip, this may interest.”
It interested but it irritated Wilson Romer. This should have appeared in his own paper. Why hadn’t it? It was a reflection on his own power of intuition. He had heard rumors of this new constitution, had indeed discussed it with Mr. Fleury, but he had no idea that its implementation was immediate. Why hadn’t he got on to it? Was he losing his grip? He felt angry with himself, and sought an outlet for his irritation. It was the Governor’s fault far more than his. The Governor should have told him. He had appeared to be taking his guest into his confidence. Why should that confidence have stopped halfway? That was the trouble with the English. You never knew where you were with them. They had so many layers of reserve. You thought you had got to know them but you never had. Their real selves lay under yet another layer. Damn them and their diplomacy. This settled it. Bradshaw should go down there.
On his return to Baltimore he had reconsidered his decision. The Caribbean had seemed important when he was actually there, among people whose horizon was bounded by it, but back home there was so much else important. Why waste a man down there? He had half changed his mind. This article sent him back to his first intention. No titled Governor was going to hoodwink Wilson P. Romer. If there was any news in that trumpery little place, he would be the first with it: and if any of that news was hot, he’d know how to make it hotter.
4
Romer’s cable to the Governor read: “Sending Santa Marta-ward senior reporter Carl Bradshaw leave absence stop rest cure not assignment stop appreciate your help.”
The Governor chuckled. The gentleman did protest too much. Did Romer think he was a fool because he was a soldier. He handed the cable to his A.D.C.
“This is your pigeon. Show him everything. Invite him to dinner his first evening here; but bear in mind that everything you say will be cabled back to Baltimore; behave as though you didn’t know it would.”
Archer had not been to America. But he had read many American novels and seen a great many American films, among others The Front Page. He knew what to expect of an American journalist. Bradshaw would be untidy; he would wear a battered hat indoors; he would shave at night; his pockets would be filled with packs of cigarettes; he would breakfast off a two finger shot of bourbon. As his day began so would it continue; yet he would never appear the worse for liquor. He would have a way with dames.
Carl Bradshaw was not at all like that. Bald, cherubic, rosy-cheeked, shiny with soap and redolent of eau de Cologne, he wore a freshly pressed brown and white striped rayon suit; his bow tie was narrow-ended and neatly knotted. He spoke in a high-pitched voice, with a Boston accent, his large hold-all type bag was new. A portable typewriter was the only indication of his calling.
He arrived at half-past three in the afternoon. “I expect you’re thirsty after your trip,” said Archer. He had a bottle of Canadian Club whisky in the car.
“I am. I should enjoy a cup of tea,” was the unexpected answer.
Archer had booked him a room at the Continental.
“H.E. wanted to invite you to G.H. at any rate for the first few days, but as you are here for a rest cure he thought you might prefer to be on your own. H.E. has to do a good deal of official entertaining you might have found exhausting. But if later on …”
“I appreciate His Excellency’s concern, but as you say I am run down. I shall be better on my own.”
“At the same time H.E. very much hopes that you will be able to dine with him tonight: not a large party; half a dozen or so representative people whom he thought it would be of interest to you to meet. It won’t be a late evening, but if you don’t feel up to it …”
“I normally take a rest between five and six. With that refreshment I find myself able to stay up till two or three in the morning.”
“You won’t find many people ready to stay up with you that long. People pack up soon after dinner; they take their exercise between five and six.”
“In that case I shall have to adjust my schedule. Ah, here’s the tea. Sandwiches, but no cakes. I wonder if they have any eclairs. Would they send out for some?”
He put three spoonfuls of sugar in his tea. After one sip he put in another.
“I’m surprised that your sugar isn’t sweeter. Perhaps it’s exported in a more concentrated form.”
“Would you like to look over the sugar factory?”
“Not particularly.”
The reply surprised Archer and impressed him. He was used to visitors who let themselves be victimized and patiently inspected housing projects that must surely bore them. This man was at least original.
“You’re very wise,” he said, “and we realize, of course, that you are on a rest cure. At the same time H.E. would like you to take back an overall picture of our life here. We were wondering, by the way, we should know of course, but we don’t see the American papers as often as we’d like, what kind of article do you write.”
“Feature articles.”
That didn’t help Archer
much.
“Is there anything you’d particularly like to know about?” he asked.
“I’m a little curious about the religious life.”
That was another surprise for Archer. “In what way curious?” he asked.
“The island was, I believe, French originally. That usually means a strong Roman Catholic element.”
“About ninety per cent of the peasants are Roman Catholic.”
“But officially the island is—what is your English phrase for it—Episcopalian?”
“They call themselves Anglo-Catholics.”
“That means high church?”
“Incense and all that, yes. Red robes for the choir. You know how Africans love dressing up.”
“Do you have a bishop here?”
“No, only an archdeacon. There aren’t enough churches for a bishop. There’s a bishop in Antigua. We’re in his diocese, and in Jamaica there’s an archbishop for the whole British West Indies.”
“Are the congregations large?”
“Very.”
“That’s very interesting. Yes, most interesting.”
He really did seem interested too. This was better copy than Archer had dared to hope. He rose to his feet.
“I’ll leave you to unpack,” he said, “and to your siesta. I’ll call for you at a quarter to eight. Black tie.”
Back at G.H., Archer slowed his pace as he passed the secretariat. He glanced into the room, and his spirits lifted. Margot was alone. Her presence within fifty yards of him for eight hours of the day was proving a considerable strain. He kept making excuses to cross the courtyard, to see if she was by herself. She seldom was. He quickened his pace toward her door.
She looked up with a casual smile as he laid a package on her desk. It contained a length of yellow silk that he had bought on the way to the airport at the Syrian Bazaar.
“You might be able to make yourself a dress with this,” he said.