A Burnt Out Case (5 page)

‘I came by truck.’

‘You were fortunate to get through. You must stay a night at my place on your way home.’

‘I have to get back to the leproserie.’

‘They can do without you. They’ll have to do without you. After last night’s rain there’ll be too much water for the ferry. Why are you waiting here?’

‘I only wanted some
haricots verts
and some . . .’

‘Boy! Some
haricots verts
for this master. You know you have to shout at them a little. They understand nothing else. The only alternative to staying with us is to remain here till the water goes down, and I can assure you, you won’t like the hotel. This is a very provincial town. Nothing here to interest a man like you. You are
the
Querry, aren’t you?’ and Rycker’s mouth shut trapwise, while his eyes gleamed roguishly like a detective’s.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘We don’t all live quite out of the world like the fathers and our dubious friend the doctor. Of course this is a bit of a desert, but all the same one manages – somehow – to keep in touch. Two dozen lagers, boy, and make it quick. Of course I shall respect your incognito. I will say nothing. You can trust me not to betray a guest. You’ll be far safer at my place than at the hotel. Only myself and my wife. As a matter of fact it was my wife who said to me, “Do you suppose he can possibly be
the
Querry?”’

‘You’ve made a mistake.’

‘Oh no, I haven’t. I can show you a photograph when you come to my house – in one of the papers that lie around in case they may prove useful. Useful! This one certainly has, hasn’t it, because otherwise we would have thought you were only a relation of Querry’s or that the name was pure coincidence, for who would expect to find
the
Querry holed up in a leproserie in the bush? I have to admit I am somewhat curious. But you can trust me, trust me all the way. I have serious enough problems of my own, so I can sympathize with those of another man. I’ve buried myself too. We’d better go outside, for in a little town like this even the walls have ears.’

‘I’m afraid . . . they are expecting me to return . . .’

‘God rules the weather. I assure you, M. Querry, you have no choice.’

CHAPTER 2

House and factory overlooked the ferry; no situation could have been better chosen for a man with Rycker’s devouring curiosity. It was impossible for anyone to use the road that led from the town to the interior without passing the two wide windows which were like the lenses of a pair of binoculars trained on the river. They drove under the deep blue shadows of the palm trees towards the river; Rycker’s chauffeur and Deo Gratias followed in Querry’s lorry.

‘You see, M. Querry, how it is. The river’s far too high. Not a chance to pass tonight. Who knows whether even tomorrow . . . ? So we have time for some interesting talks, you and I.’

As they drove through the yard of the factory, among the huge boilers abandoned to rust, a smell like stale margarine lay heavily around them. A blast of hot air struck from an open doorway, and the reflection of a furnace billowed into the waning light. ‘To you, of course,’ Rycker said, ‘accustomed to the factories of the West, this must appear a bit ramshackle. Though I can’t remember whether you ever were closely concerned with any factories.’

‘No.’

‘There were so many spheres in which
the
Querry led the way.’

He recurred again and again to the word ‘the’ as though it were a title of nobility.

‘The place functions,’ he said as the car bumped among the boilers, ‘it functions in its ugly way. We waste nothing. When we finish with the nut there’s nothing left. Nothing. We’ve crushed out the oil,’ he said with relish rolling the r, ‘and as for the husk – into the furnace with it. We don’t need any other fuel to keep the furnaces alive.’

They left the two cars in the yard and walked over to the house. ‘Marie, Marie,’ Rycker called, scraping the mud off his shoes, stamping across the veranda. ‘Marie.’

A girl in blue jeans with a pretty unformed face came quickly round the corner in answer to his call. Querry was on the point of asking ‘Your daughter?’ when Rycker forestalled him. ‘My wife,’ he said. ‘And here,
chérie
, is
the
Querry. He tried to deny it, but I told him we had a photograph.’

‘I am very glad to meet you,’ she said. ‘We will try to make you comfortable.’ Querry had the impression that she had learnt such occasional speeches by heart from her governess or from a book of etiquette. Now she had said her piece she disappeared as suddenly as she had come; perhaps the school-bell had rung for class.

‘Sit down,’ Rycker said. ‘Marie is fixing the drinks. You can see I’ve trained her to know what a man needs.’

‘Have you been married long?’

‘Two years. I brought her out after my last leave. In a post like this it’s necessary to have a companion. You married?’

‘Yes – that is to say I have been married.’

‘Of course I know you are thinking that she is very young for me. But I look ahead. If you believe in marriage you have to look to the future. I’ve still got twenty years of – let’s call it active life ahead of me, and what would a woman of thirty be like in twenty years? A man keeps better in the tropics. Don’t you agree?’

‘I’ve never thought about it. And I don’t yet know the tropics.’

‘There are enough problems without sex I can assure you. St Paul wrote, didn’t he, that it was better to marry than burn. Marie will stay young long enough to save me from the furnace.’ He added quickly, ‘Of course I’m only joking. We have to joke, don’t we, about serious things. At the bottom of my heart I believe very profoundly in love.’ He made the claim as some men might claim to believe in fairies.

The steward came along the veranda carrying a tray and Mme Rycker followed him. Querry took a glass and Mme Rycker stood at his elbow while the steward poised the syphon – a division of duties. ‘Will you tell me how much soda?’ Mme Rycker asked.

‘And now, my dear, you’ll change into a proper dress,’ Rycker said.

Over the whisky he turned again to what he called ‘Your case.’ He had now less the manner of a detective than of a counsel who by the nature of his profession is an accomplice after the fact. ‘Why are you here, Querry?’

‘One must be somewhere.’

‘All the same, as I said this morning, no one would expect to find you working in a leproserie.’

‘I am not working.’

‘When I drove over some weeks ago, the fathers said that you were at the hospital.’

‘I was watching the doctor work. I stand around, that’s all. There’s nothing I can do.’

‘It seems a waste of talent.’

‘I have no talent.’

Rycker said, ‘You mustn’t despise us poor provincials.’

When they had gone into dinner, and after Rycker had said a short grace, Querry’s hostess spoke again. She said, ‘I hope you will be comfortable,’ and, ‘Do you care for salad?’ Her fair hair was streaked and darkened with sweat and he saw her eyes widen with apprehension when a black-and-white moth, with the wing-spread of a bat, swooped across the table. ‘You must make yourself at home here,’ she said, her gaze following the moth as it settled like a piece of lichen on the wall. He wondered whether she had ever felt at home herself. She said, ‘We don’t have many visitors,’ and he was reminded of a child forced to entertain a caller until her mother returns. She had changed, between the whisky and the dinner, into a cotton frock covered with a pattern of autumnal leaves which was like a memory of Europe.

‘Not a visitor like
the
Querry anyway,’ Rycker interrupted her. It was as though he had turned off a knob on a radio-set which had been tuned in to a lesson in deportment after he had listened enough. The sound of the voice was shut off the air, but still, behind the shy and wary eyes, the phrases were going on for no one to hear. ‘The weather has been a little hot lately, hasn’t it? I hope you had a good flight from Europe.’

Querry said, ‘Do you like the life here?’ The question startled her; perhaps the answer wasn’t in her phrase-book. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘yes. It’s very interesting,’ staring over his shoulder through the window to where the boilers stood like modern statues in the floodlit yard; then she shifted her eyes back to the moth on the wall and the gecko pointing at his prey.

‘Fetch that photograph, dear,’ Rycker said.

‘What photograph?’

‘The photograph of our guest.’

She trailed reluctantly out, making a detour to avoid the wall where the moth rested and the lizard pointed, and returned soon with an ancient copy of
Time
. Querry remembered the ten years younger face upon the cover (the issue had coincided with his first visit to New York). The artist, drawing from a photograph, had romanticized his features. It wasn’t the face he saw when he shaved, but a kind of distant cousin. It reflected emotions, thoughts, hopes, profundities that he had certainly expressed to no reporter. The background of the portrait was a building of glass and steel which might have been taken for a concert-hall, or perhaps even for an
orangerie
, if a great cross planted outside the door had not indicated it was a church.

‘So you see,’ Rycker said, ‘we know all.’

‘I don’t remember that the article was very accurate.’

‘I suppose the Government – or the Church – have commissioned you to do something out here?’

‘No. I’ve retired.’

‘I thought a man of your kind never retired.’

‘Oh, one comes to an end, just as soldiers do and bank managers.’

When the dinner was over the girl left, like a child after the dessert. ‘I expect she’s gone to write up her journal,’ Rycker said. ‘This is a red-letter day for her, meeting
the
Querry. She’ll have plenty to put down in it.’

‘Does she find much to write?’

‘I wouldn’t know. At the beginning I used to take a quiet look, but she discovered that, and now she locks it up. I expect I teased her a little too much. I remember one entry: “Letter from mother. Poor Maxime has had five puppies.” It was the day I was decorated by the Governor, but she forgot to put anything about the ceremony.’

‘It must be a lonely life at her age.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. There are a lot of household duties even in the bush. To be quite frank, I think it’s a good deal more lonely for me. She’s hardly – you can see it for yourself – an intellectual companion. That’s one of the disadvantages of marrying a young wife. If I want to talk about things which really interest me, I have to drive over to the fathers. A long way to go for a conversation. Living in the way I do, one has a lot of time to think things over. I’m a good Catholic, I hope, but that doesn’t prevent me from having spiritual problems. A lot of people take their religion lightly, but I had six years when I was a young man with the Jesuits. If a novice master had been less unfair you wouldn’t have found me here. I gathered from that article in
Time
that you are a Catholic too.’

‘I’ve retired,’ Querry said for the second time.

‘Oh come now, one hardly retires from
that
.’

The gecko on the wall leapt at the moth, missed and lay motionless again, the tiny paws spread on the wall like ferns.

‘To tell you the truth,’ Rycker said, ‘I find those fathers at the leproserie an unsatisfactory lot. They are more interested in electricity and building than in questions of faith. Ever since I heard you were here I’ve looked forward to a conversation with an intellectual Catholic.’

‘I wouldn’t call myself that.’

‘In the long years I’ve been out here I’ve been thrown back on my own thoughts. Some men can manage, I suppose, with clock-golf. I can’t. I’ve read a great deal on the subject of love.’

‘Love?’

‘The love of God. Agape not Eros.’

‘I’m not qualified to talk about that.’

‘You underrate yourself,’ Rycker replied. He went to the sideboard and fetched a tray of liqueurs, disturbing the gecko who disappeared behind a reproduction of some primitive
Flight into Egypt
. ‘A glass of Cointreau,’ Rycker said, ‘or would you prefer a Van Der Hum?’ Beyond the veranda Querry saw a thin figure in a gold-leafed dress move towards the river. Perhaps out of doors the moths had lost their terror.

‘In the seminary I formed the habit of thinking more than most men,’ Rycker said. ‘A faith like ours, when profoundly understood, sets us many problems. For instance – no, it’s not a mere instance, I’m jumping to the heart of what really troubles me, I don’t believe my wife understands the true nature of Christian marriage.’

Out in the darkness there was a plop-plop-plop. She must be throwing small pieces of wood into the river.

‘It sometimes seems to me,’ Rycker said, ‘that she’s ignorant of almost everything. I find myself wondering whether the nuns taught her at all. You saw for yourself – she doesn’t even cross herself at meals when I say grace. Ignorance, you know, beyond a certain point might even invalidate a marriage in canon law. That’s one of the matters I have tried in vain to discuss with the fathers. They would much prefer to talk about turbines. Now you are here . . .’

‘I’m not competent to discuss it,’ Querry said. In the moments of silence he could hear the river flooding down.

‘At least you listen. The fathers would already have started talking about the new well they propose to dig. A well, Querry, a well against a human soul.’ He drank down his Van Der Hum and poured himself another. ‘They don’t realize . . . just suppose that we weren’t properly married, she could leave me at any time, Querry.’

‘It’s easy to leave what you call a proper marriage, too.’

‘No, no. It’s much more difficult. There are social pressures – particularly here.’

‘If she loves you . . .’

‘That’s no protection. We are men of the world, Querry, you and I. A love like that doesn’t last. I tried to teach her the importance of loving God. Because if she loved Him, she wouldn’t want to offend Him, would she? And that would be some security. I have tried to get her to pray, but I don’t think she knows any prayers except the
Pater Noster
and the
Ave Maria
. What prayers do you use, Querry?’