The Captain and the Enemy (8 page)

‘You told me he cheated.’

‘Of course he cheated, Muriel. So did I. Women,’ he appealed to the Captain, ‘don’t understand the point of a game like chess. Anyway I’ve explained to her that legally I have custody of the boy and that I’ve given my permission to Liza …’

‘My sister asked me on her deathbed to look after …’

‘Oh yes, and I consented at the time, but that’s a long while ago. You said yourself last year that you were tired of the responsibility.’

‘I was not too tired to do my duty. It’s time you did your duty too.’ She turned on Liza. ‘The boy’s not receiving any education. There are laws about that.’

‘You certainly have a good detective, Miriam,’ the Devil said.

‘Muriel! You ought to know my name after all these years.’

‘Sorry, Muriel. Muriel and Miriam always sound so much alike to me.’

‘I don’t see the likeness.’

‘Jim’s having lessons at home,’ Liza said.

‘You’ll have to satisfy the local education authority.’

‘What would he know about it?’

‘He’ll know all there is to know after I’ve seen him. Who’s teaching Victor?’

‘I am,’ the Captain said. ‘I’m teaching him geography and history. I leave religion to Liza. He’s already learned to add, subtract and multiply. It’s all anyone needs. I don’t suppose you know much algebra yourself.’

‘What are your qualifications, Mr … Mr …?’

‘Call me Captain, ma’am. Everyone else does.’

‘What’s the capital of Italy, Victor?’

‘Modern geography doesn’t deal with names, ma’am. All that’s old hat. Geography deals with landscapes. Geography teaches you how to travel about the world. You tell her, Jim, how to get from Germany to Spain.’

‘I go to Belgium first, then Liège. I take a train there to Paris, and from Paris I take another train to Tarbes.’

‘Where on earth is Tarbes?’

‘There, you see, ma’am. You don’t know names either, but Jim, he knows how to go from Tarbes. Go on, Jim.’

‘After Tarbes I’d walk across the Pyrenees. By night.’

‘It’s a lot of nonsense. What do you mean “walk across by night”?’

‘Listening for the sound of German boots squish-squashing in the snow.’

That sentence, I suspect, was the end of my private education. A few weeks later I found myself at a local school. I wasn’t unhappy there, for I wasn’t an Amalekite. I felt a sense of freedom as I walked through the London streets alone, as though, like the men who passed by me, I was on my way to an office and a job. The lessons
were
not as interesting as the Captain’s had been, but I had already learnt that I could not trust the Captain for any regular lessons even in geography.

I THINK IT
was two years or more after I started school that the longest separation we had known came about. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was free from school. Liza was out buying bread and for once she had left me alone with my lesson books. Then the bell rang. It wasn’t the Captain’s code, nor was it my father’s. This was a ring, quiet, reassuring, even friendly. The ringer waited what seemed to be a polite time before he rang again, and the ring still remained unurgent, undemanding. I knew that Liza would never have opened the door willingly to any ring but the Captain’s, but I was in charge now.

I called through the door, ‘Who’s there?’ And a voice answered, ‘Please open the door. I’m a police officer.’ I felt excited and proud at my first social contact with a force which I had sometimes dreamed of one day joining, so I let him in.

He didn’t look like a police officer; he wasn’t in uniform and I was a little disappointed at that. Indeed in an odd way he reminded me of the Captain. Both wore ordinary clothes like a disguise, and I wondered if perhaps this might not be an unknown brother turning up. He said, ‘I wanted to speak to your father.’

‘He doesn’t live here,’ I told him without lying, because of course I thought that he meant the Devil.

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘She’s out buying bread.’

‘I think I had better stay until she returns.’

He sat down in the one easy chair and looked more than ever like a relative on a visit. ‘You a truthful boy?’ he asked.

I thought it best to be accurate as I was speaking to one of the police. ‘Sometimes,’ I said.

‘Where does your father live when he’s not here?’

‘He’s never here,’ I said.

‘Never?’

‘Oh, he’s been here once or twice.’

‘Once or twice? When was that?’

‘The last about two years ago.’

‘Not much of a father then?’

‘Liza and I don’t like having him around.’

‘Who’s Liza?’

‘My mother.’ I remembered again that I was expected to be truthful. ‘Well, sort of,’ I added.

‘What do you mean – sort of?’

‘My mother’s dead.’

He gave a sigh. ‘Do you mean Liza’s dead?’

‘No, of course she isn’t. I told you. She’s at the baker’s.’

‘My God, you’re a difficult child to understand. I wish your “sort of mother” would come back. I’ve got questions I want to ask her. If your father doesn’t live here where does he live?’

‘I think my aunt told me once it was a place called Newcastle, but my aunt – she lives in Richmond,’ (I went on talking and giving him all the information I could in order to show my goodwill) ‘and they don’t get on all that well together. She calls him the Devil.’

‘Perhaps about that,’ he said, ‘judging from what you say, she may not be far wrong,’ and at the same moment
the
door above opened and I heard Liza’s footsteps on the stairs.

Something made me call out, ‘Liza, there’s a policeman here.’

‘I could have told her that myself,’ he said.

Liza came belligerently in, holding a loaf of bread like a brick that she was prepared to launch. ‘A policeman?’

He tried to reassure her. ‘I just wanted to ask you a few questions, ma’am. It won’t take a moment. I think you may be able to give us a little help.’

‘I won’t help a policeman and that’s that.’

‘We are trying to trace a gentleman who goes by the name of Colonel Claridge.’

‘I don’t know any Colonel Claridge. I don’t mix with Colonels. I’ve never known a Colonel. Can you see a Colonel coming into a kitchen like this? Just look at the stove there. A Colonel wouldn’t be seen dead with a stove like that.’

‘Sometimes, ma’am, he goes by other names. Victor for instance.’

‘I tell you I don’t know any Colonels or any Victors. You’ll get nothing out of me.’

I have always wondered what might have happened after that visit and what it was that had happened before to cause it. Several years were to pass before I saw the Captain again. His visits then were short and I was not always there. Sometimes when I returned from school I would notice only a half-empty teacup.

Did I miss him? I have no memory of any emotion unless it was the occasional wild desire for something interesting to happen. Had I grown to love the Captain, this putative father who was now as distant from me as
my
real parent? Did I love Liza who looked after me, gave me the right food, dispatched me at the correct hour to school and welcomed me back with an impatient kiss? Did I love anyone? Did I know what love was? Do I know it now years later or is love something which I have read about in books? The Captain returned of course, he always seemed eventually to return.

Now that I have left Liza and abandoned what I had learned to call home, I only know of his absences at second-hand when I visit Liza. Sometimes a year has gone by, sometimes two. I have never heard her complain. I always use the same code on the bell, for otherwise I am sure that she would never let me in. I think she hopes always that it is he and not I who rings. Only three times have my visits coincided with one of his and I was well aware that he thought I was still living in the house. ‘Been out shopping?’ he asked on one occasion in a friendly and uninterested way, and another time he inquired perfunctorily about my work as a journalist. ‘Doesn’t keep you out too late?’ he asked. ‘You know how Liza hates the dark.’ Liza appealed to me on that occasion when he happened to be the first to leave. ‘Don’t you ever say you aren’t living here now. I don’t want him to worry about me. He has enough worries.’

Why had I gone off and left her? Perhaps I had become too impatient at the comedy which Liza played more and more frequently during the long absences of the Captain. I felt that she played it to protect him from reproach, and I only bore it as long as he seemed likely to return one day and settle with us. I wasn’t used to motherhood. What I had known before was aunthood which I hated, and perhaps I had begun to regard Liza as a substitute aunt
more
than as a substitute mother. I could put up with her as long as the Captain was around. The Captain never attempted to play the father. He was an adventurer, he belonged to that world of Valparaiso which I had dreamt about as a child, and like most boys I responded, I suppose, to the attraction of mystery, uncertainty, the absence of monotony, the worst feature of family life.

I refuse to feel guilt at leaving her. I am sure that he sends her money, while he is away, and in a curious fashion I feel that they are growing old together without me, even though now he seldom seems to be there. I have always wondered if perhaps …

(1)

‘I HAVE ALWAYS
wondered.’ What was it that I ‘always wondered’, I ask myself as I read this account of our life together, an account which I had begun to write years before but had abandoned when I left home. I found no answer to my question in it.

I had heard of Liza’s grave state in hospital from the police and so I came to what I still reluctantly called my home to do all the tiresome things which are required when one prepares for the death of a parent. There was no real next of kin to whom I could pass the disagreeable task. Liza had been nearly killed in a stupid road accident as she crossed the street from the baker’s where it had always been my duty years before to fetch the bread. The police found a letter for me in her pocket, a letter in which she typically reminded me to get vaccinated against the coming flu, and her near death gave me a passing sense of guilt at having left her, for otherwise it would have been I who had gone to fetch the bread and the accident would never have happened.

At the hospital, speaking with difficulty, she told me to destroy a lot of letters which she didn’t want strangers to read. ‘Why I kept them I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He always writes a lot of nonsense.’ She added, ‘Don’t let the Captain know that I’m here.’

‘But if he turns up …’

‘He won’t. In his last letter he spoke about next year or
the
next …’ She added, ‘Be kind to him. He’s always been kind to us.’

I brought up the forbidden word. ‘Does he love you?’

‘Oh, love. They are always saying God loves us. If that’s love I’d rather have a bit of kindness.’

I was prepared for his letters, but I was taken a little by surprise when I came on this unfinished story – fiction, autobiography? – which I have written here. It lay under several piles of letters preserved by Liza, neatly stacked and tied with rubber bands, in the kitchen drawer which was otherwise devoted to napkins and queer useless objects known in far-off days as doilies.

I didn’t even recognize at first my own handwriting, so legible had it been in the past. My handwriting now after the passage of years and all the hasty work involved in cheap journalism, reports of trivial occasions for a newspaper which I at heart despise, is almost unreadable.

There had been a period in my youth when I had nursed the vain ambition to become what I thought of as a ‘real writer’ and I suppose it was then that I began this fragment. Perhaps I had chosen the form because I knew so little of the outside world which could possibly have any interest for others. I must have left this draft – of what? – when I abruptly and shamefacedly abandoned my basement life, taking the opportunity during one of Liza’s rare absences, and with me went a little of the money which I found in her bedroom – there was enough left, I told myself, to last her till the next instalment from the Captain arrived. He had never failed her yet, and I thought the small contribution I had extorted was fair enough. She would certainly have spent much more on me in the months that followed and now I was gone she
would
have the next draft all to herself to play with – not that she ever played with money.

Liza, it was evident, had read my manuscript (I was glad to find when I went through it that it contained no wounding criticism of her maternal care), for she had scrawled on the last page, in her not very literary hand, what might well have served as a conventional epitaph on the Captain’s tombstone, or perhaps she intended it to be a final reply to all the police officers who had come and worried her with questions: ‘All the same whatever you say about him the Captain was very good to both of us. He was’ (the ‘was’ had been crossed out) ‘he is a very good man.’ Characteristically she made no use of that mysterious term ‘love’; there remained for the tombstone only this defiant recognition of the Captain’s virtue. Had physical love (I wondered if that was the meaning behind my question-mark?) ever existed between these two odd people whom as a child I had less than half known?

I felt it very strange to find myself all alone, in the shabby basement in that rundown street in Camden Town, reading a document which I had composed so many years before, and afterwards, one by one, I glanced through the hitherto unseen letters from the Captain, all of them preserved in their envelopes bearing foreign stamps. I soon discovered it was much against the Captain’s will that he had continued to address them to the house in Camden Town. The Captain had at least been good to both of us in his intention. During all his absences he had written with some regularity, though seldom with an address more exact than a poste restante. The last disappearance of which I had been a witness occurred a short while before the visit of yet another
plain-clothes
officer. Afterwards a small parcel would arrive at intervals of two or three months, sometimes containing a letter, sometimes not, but always money or valuables. The parcel would be thrust through the letterbox by a strange hand which had first rung the coded signal on the bell.