A Burnt Out Case (20 page)

They drove a few more kilometres without words. Then she asked, ‘Why did you come here and not some other place?’

‘Because it is a long way off.’

‘Other places are a long way off. The South Pole.’

‘When I was at the airport there was no plane leaving for the South Pole.’ She giggled. It was easy to amuse the young, even the unhappy young. ‘There was one going to Tokyo,’ he added, ‘but somehow this place seemed a lot farther off. And I was not interested in geishas or cherry-blossom.’

‘You don’t mean you really didn’t know where . . . ?’

‘One of the advantages of having a credit card is that you don’t need to make up your mind where you are going till the last moment.’

‘Haven’t you any family to leave?’

‘Not a family. There was someone, but she was better off without me.’

‘Poor her.’

‘Oh no. She’s lost nothing of value. It’s hard for a woman to live with a man who doesn’t love her.’

‘Yes.’

‘There are always the times of day when one ceases to pretend.’

‘Yes.’ They were silent again until darkness began to fall and he switched the headlights on. They shone on a human effigy with a coconut-head, sitting on a rickety chair. She gave a gasp of fright and pressed against his shoulder. She said, ‘I’m scared of things I don’t understand.’

‘Then you must be frightened of a great deal.’

‘I am.’

He put his arm round her shoulders to reassure her. She said, ‘Did you say good-bye to her?’

‘No.’

‘But she must have seen you packing.’

‘No. I travel light too.’

‘You came away without anything?’

‘I had a razor and a toothbrush and a letter of credit from a bank in America.’

‘Do you really mean you didn’t know where you were going?’

‘I had no idea. So it wasn’t any good taking clothes.’

The track was rough and he needed both hands on the wheel. He had never before scrutinized his own behaviour. It had seemed to him at the time the only logical thing to do. He had eaten a larger breakfast than usual because he could not be certain of the hour of his next meal, and then he had taken a taxi. His journey began in the great all-but-empty airport built for a world-exhibition which had closed a long time ago. One could walk a mile through the corridors without seeing more than a scattering of human beings. In an immense hall people sat apart waiting for the plane to Tokyo. They looked like statues in an art gallery. He had asked for a seat to Tokyo before he noticed an indicator with African names.

He had said, ‘Is there a seat on that plane too?’

‘Yes, but there’s no connection to Tokyo after Rome.’

‘I shall go the whole way.’ He gave the man his credit card.

‘Where is your luggage?’

‘I have no luggage.’

He supposed now that his conduct must have seemed a little odd. He said to the clerk, ‘Mark my ticket with my surname only, please. On the passenger list too. I don’t want to be bothered by the Press.’ It was one of the few advantages which fame brought a man that he was not automatically regarded with suspicion because of unusual behaviour. Thus simply he had thought to cover his tracks, but he had not entirely succeeded or the letter signed
toute à toi
could never have reached him. Perhaps she had been to the airport herself to make inquiries. The man there must have had quite a story to tell her. Even so, at his destination, no one had known him, and at the small hotel he went to – without air-conditioning and with a shower which didn’t work – no one knew his name. So it could have been no one but Rycker who had betrayed his whereabouts; the ripple of Rycker’s interest had gone out across half the world like radio-waves, reaching the international Press. He said abruptly, ‘How I wish I’d never met your husband.’

‘So do I.’

‘It’s done you no harm, surely?’

‘I mean – I wish I hadn’t met him either.’ The headlamps caught the wooden poles of a cage high in the air. She said, ‘I hate this place. I want to go home.’

‘We’ve come too far to turn back now.’

‘That’s not home,’ she said. ‘That’s the factory.’

He knew very well what she expected him to say, but he refused to speak. You uttered a few words of sympathy – however false and conventional – and experience taught him what nearly always followed. Unhappiness was like a hungry animal waiting beside the track for any victim. He said, ‘Have you friends in Luc to put you up?’

‘We have no friends there. I’ll go with you to the hotel.’

‘Did you leave a note for your husband?’

‘No.’

‘It would have been better.’

‘Did you leave a note behind before you caught the plane?’

‘That was different. I was not returning.’

She said, ‘Would you lend me money for a ticket home – I mean, to Europe?’

‘No.’

‘I was afraid you wouldn’t.’ As if that settled everything and there was nothing more to do about it, she fell asleep. He thought rashly: poor frightened beast – this one was too young to be a great danger. It was only when they were fully grown you couldn’t trust them with your pity.

II

It was nearly eleven at night before they drove into Luc past the little river-port. The Bishop’s boat was lying at her moorings. A cat stopped halfway up the gang-plank and regarded them, and Querry swerved to avoid a dead piedog stretched in their track waiting for the morning vulture. The hotel across the square from the Governor’s house was decked out with the relics of gaiety. Perhaps the directors of the local brewery had been giving their annual party or some official, who thought himself lucky, had been celebrating his recall home. In the bar there were mauve and pink paper-chains hanging over the tubular steel chairs that gave the whole place the cheerless and functional look of an engine-room; shades which represented the man in the moon beamed down from the light-brackets.

There was no air-conditioning in the rooms upstairs, and the walls stopped short of the ceiling so that any privacy was impossible. Every movement was audible from the neighbouring room, and Querry could follow every stage of the girl’s retirement – the zipping of the all-night bag, the clatter of a coat-hanger, the tinkle of a glass bottle on a porcelain basin. Shoes were dropped on bare boards, and water ran. He sat and wondered what he ought to do to comfort her if the doctor told her in the morning that she was pregnant. He was reminded of his long night’s vigil with Deo Gratias. It had been fear then too that he had contended with. He heard the bed creak.

He took a bottle of whisky from his sack and poured himself a glass. Now it was his turn to tinkle, run water, clatter; he was like a prisoner in a cell answering by code the signals of a fellow-convict. An odd sound reached him through the wall – it sounded to him as though she were crying. He felt no pity, only irritation. She had forced herself on him and she was threatening now to spoil his night’s sleep. He had not yet undressed. He took the bottle of whisky with him and knocked on her door.

He saw at once that he had been wrong. She was sitting up in bed reading a paper-back – she must have had time to stow that away too in the Sabena bag. He said, ‘I’m sorry – I thought I heard you crying.’

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I was laughing.’ He saw that it was a popular novel dealing with the life in Paris of an English major. ‘It’s terribly funny.’

‘I brought this along in case you needed comfort.’

‘Whisky? I’ve never drunk it.’

‘You can begin. But you probably won’t like it.’ He washed her toothmug out and poured her a weak drink.

‘You don’t like it?’

She said, ‘I like the idea. Drinking whisky at midnight in a room of my own.’

‘It’s not midnight yet.’

‘You know what I mean. And reading in bed. My husband doesn’t like me reading in bed. Especially a book like this.’

‘What’s wrong with the book?’

‘It’s not serious. It’s not about God. Of course,’ she said, ‘he has good reason. I’m not properly educated. The nuns did their best, but it simply didn’t stick.’

‘I’m glad you’re not worrying about tomorrow.’

‘There may be good news. I’ve got a bit of a stomach-ache at this moment. It can’t be the whisky yet, can it? and it might be the curse.’ The hostess-phrases had gone to limbo where the nuns’ learning lay, and she had reverted to the school dormitory. It was absurd to consider that anyone so immature could be in any way a danger.

He asked, ‘Were you happy when you were at school?’

‘It was bliss.’ She bunched her knees higher and said, ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘It’s quite time you were asleep.’ He found it impossible not to treat her as a child. Rycker, instead of rupturing her virginity, had sealed it safely down once and for all.

She said, ‘What are you going to do? When the hospital’s finished, I mean?’ That was the question they were all asking him, but this time he did not evade it: there was a theory that one should always tell the direct truth to the young.

He said, ‘I am going to stay. I am never going back.’

‘You’ll have to – sometime – on leave.’

‘The others perhaps, but not me.’

‘You’ll get sick in the end if you stay.’

‘I’m very tough. Anyway what do I care? We all sooner or later get the same sickness, age. Do you see those brown marks on the backs of my hands – my mother used to call them grave-marks.’

‘They are only freckles,’ she said.

‘Oh no, freckles come from the sunlight. These come from the darkness.’

‘You are very morbid,’ she said, speaking like the head of the school. ‘I don’t really understand you. I have to stay here, but my God if I were free like you . . .’

‘I will tell you a story,’ he said and poured himself out a second treble Scotch.

‘That’s a very large whisky. You aren’t a heavy drinker, are you? My husband is.’

‘I’m only a steady one. This one is to help me with the story. I’m not used to telling stories. How does one begin?’ He drank slowly. ‘Once upon a time.’

‘Really,’ she said, ‘you and I are much too old for fairy stories.’

‘Yes. That in a way
is
the story as you’ll see. Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in the deep country.’

‘Were you the boy?’

‘No, you mustn’t draw close parallels. They always say a novelist chooses from his general experience of life, not from special facts. I have never lived out of cities until now.’

‘Go on.’

‘This boy lived with his parents on a farm – not a very large farm, but it was big enough for them and two servants and six labourers, a dog, a cat, a cow . . . I suppose there was a pig. I don’t know much about farms.’

‘There seems to be an awful lot of characters. I shall fall asleep if I try to remember them all.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to make you do. His parents used to tell the boy stories about the King who lived in a city a hundred miles away – about the distance of the furthest star.’

‘That’s nonsense. A star is billions and billions . . .’

‘Yes, but the boy
thought
the star was a hundred miles away. He knew nothing about light-years. He had no idea that the star he was watching had probably been dead and dark before the world was made. They told him that, even though the King was far away, he was watching everything that went on everywhere. When a pig littered, the King knew of it, or when a moth died against a lamp. When a man and woman married, he knew that too. He was pleased by their marriage because when
they
came to litter it would increase the number of his subjects; so he rewarded them – you couldn’t see the reward, for the woman frequently died in childbirth and the child was sometimes born deaf or blind, but, after all, you cannot see the air – and yet it exists according to those who know. When a servant slept with another servant in a haystack the King punished them. You couldn’t always see the punishment – the man found a better job and the girl was more beautiful with her virginity gone and afterwards married the foreman, but that was only because the punishment was postponed. Sometimes it was postponed until the end of life, but that made no difference because the King was the King of the dead too and you couldn’t tell what terrible things he might do to them in the grave.

‘The boy grew up. He married properly and was rewarded by the King, although his only child died and he made no progress in his profession – he had always wanted to carve statues, as large and important as the Sphinx. After his child’s death he quarrelled with his wife and he was punished by the King for it. Of course you couldn’t have seen the punishment any more than you could the reward: you had to take both on trust. He became in time a famous jeweller, for one of the women whom he had satisfied gave him money for his training, and he made many beautiful things in honour of his mistress and of course the King. Lots of rewards began to come his way. Money too. From the King. Everyone agreed that it all came from the King. He left his wife and his mistress, he left a lot of women, but he always had a great deal of fun with them first. They called it love and so did he, he broke all the rules he could think of, and he must surely have been punished for breaking them, but you couldn’t see the punishment nor could he. He grew richer and richer and he made better and better jewellery, and women were kinder and kinder to him. He had, everyone agreed, a wonderful time. The only trouble was that he became bored, more and more bored. Nobody ever seemed to say no to him. Nobody ever made him suffer – it was always other people who suffered. Sometimes just for a change he would have welcomed feeling the pain of the punishment that the King must all the time have been inflicting on him. He could travel wherever he chose and after a while it seemed to him that he had gone much further than the hundred miles that separated him from the King, further than the furthest star, but wherever he went he always came to the same place where the same things happened: articles in the papers praised his jewellery, women cheated their husbands and went to bed with him, and servants of the King acclaimed him as a loyal and faithful subject.