Tremor of Intent (16 page)

‘I don't want to hope,' sniffed Mrs Walters over her Irish coffee. ‘I want to face facts, even though they
are
painful.'

‘
You
were being a bit ghoulish, weren't you?' said Hillier to Alan. ‘That business of the Union Jack, I mean.'

‘It's different,' said Alan. ‘More like heroism. The death of Nelson I was thinking of.'

Hillier ate his dish of asparagus with cold hollandaise. ‘Any help I can give,' he said. ‘Any help at all.' The difficulty would be getting the genuine corpse overboard. He'd need help. Wriste? Some plausible story to Wriste about that swine Theodorescu stealing his passport and he just had to get into Yarylyuk to see a man about a Cyrillic typewriter. It would mean a thousand dollars or so. Better not. He could do it on his own, prising the coffin open and fireman's lifting the groaning cadaver to the nearest taffrail. Man overboard. He'd have to go over with dead Mr Walters so that there should be someone live to be rescued. But the corpse would float perhaps. Lead weights? Hillier groaned as he fancied that corpse would groan.

The Walters boy and woman prepared to leave. ‘Are you going to the sickbay now?' asked Hillier. He was; she was going to have a
large brandy in the bar, needing it, she said, the strain terrible. ‘A nice present, was it?' said Hillier to Alan. ‘From Mr Theodorescu, I mean.'

‘It's all right,' said Alan. ‘Just what I needed.' They went. Hillier had some pears porcupine. Then some Lancashire cheese and a bit of bread. Then some coffee and a stinger. He felt he needed to build himself up.

He had no hesitation about going to Clara Walters's cabin, displaying to all the world the innocence of his purpose. He listened at the door before knocking. A sort of sobbing was going on in there, he thought. When he gently knocked, with a steward's discreetness, the voice that bade him enter was denasalised by crying. Going in, he found her just sitting up from using the whole length of the bunk for grief, knuckling an eye dry with one hand, roughly smoothing her hair with the other. ‘It's only me,' said Hillier. ‘I've brought this. You left it in the dining-saloon.' She raised her face to him, all young and blubbered, taking the stole in distracted thanks. ‘And,' he said, ‘forgive me for seeming so callous. Eating like that, I mean. With such appetite, that is. I couldn't really help being hungry though, could I?'

‘I know,' she said, rubbing her cheek against the stole. ‘He's not
your
father.'

‘A cigarette?' He always kept a caseful for offering to ladies. Men had to be content with his coarse Brazilian cigars.

‘I don't smoke.'

‘Very wise,' said Hillier, pocketing the case. ‘I had a father though, like everybody else. I know what it's like. But his death didn't affect me right away. I was fourteen when it happened. A month after the funeral I was afflicted with a very peculiar ailment, one that didn't seem to have anything to do with filial grief.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. It was spermatorrhea. Have you ever heard of that?'

Interest glowed faintly. ‘It sounds sexual,' she said without pudeur.

‘Well, it happened in sleep but without dreams. It was seed-spilling functioning in a void. Night after night, sometimes five or six times a night. It always woke me up. I felt guilty, of course, but the guilt seemed to be the end, not the by-product. Is there anything about that in any of your books?' He went towards the bunk, so as to read the titles of the little library she had ranged on the shelf just above it:
Priapus-A Study of the Male Impulse; Varieties of the Orgasm; Pleasures of the Torture Chamber; Mechanical Refinements in Coition; A Dictionary of Sex; Clinical Studies in Sexual Inversion; The Sign of Sodom; Infant Eros
–And so on and so on. Dear dear dear. A paperback on her bunkside table – a blonde in underwear and her own blood – would have been provocative to a man less satyromaniacal than Hillier; these books were more like fighting pledges of her purity, archangels guarding her terrible innocence. Hillier sat on the bunk beside her.

‘Look some time for me,' he said. ‘You're evidently more learned in sexual matters than I am. But the psychiatrist I went to told me that it was an unconscious assertion of the progenitive impulse, something like that. Mimesis was a word he used. I was acting out my father but turning him into an archetype. Whatever that means,' he added.

She had listened to him with her lips slightly parted. Now she clamped them together and turned their corners down, frowning, dissatisfied. ‘I don't know anything,' she said. ‘It's all big words. I've tried to understand but I can't.'

‘There's plenty of time. You're still very young.'

‘That's what they keep telling me. That's what they told me in America. But Alan's younger than me and he was on one of those big quiz shows and he knew all the answers. I'm ignorant. I've not been properly educated.'

She seemed, bouncing on the bunk in petulance, to bounce herself nearer to Hillier. It would be so easy, he thought, to put my arm round her now and say: ‘There there there.' And she was ready for crying on the shoulder of a mature and understanding man. But
the books above him shouted their battle-slogans:
Yoni and Lingam; Sex and Death among the Aztecs
. ‘What were you doing in America?' he asked.

‘It was what they called New Milling Techniques. Mother was dead and they said he ought to get us away for a time. But he thought it would be sinful to take a holiday just then, with her hardly cold in her grave as he put it, and so we went for the New Milling Techniques.'

‘And were the New Milling Techniques all right?'

‘That's where he met
her
,' she said. ‘This one. In America but she's not American. She'd been married to an American, in Kansas it was, and he'd divorced her and he said, my father said, she was a breath of home.'

‘So she married him?'

‘That was it.
She
married
him
. For his money.'

‘Have you any uncles or aunts or cousins or things?'

‘Things,' she said. ‘There are some
things
. That's all you can call them. And they all went to Auckland, wherever that is. And they do something with kauri pine, whatever that is. There's something called a fossil gum.' For some reason, she got ready to cry on this last term, and now Hillier had to put his arm gently about her in what he thought of as a schoolmasterly way. ‘They export it,' she now frankly wept. Hillier asked himself what it ought to be. The other arm round, a gentle kiss on the rather low forehead (a protection against too much knowledge, not female animality), then the wet cheek, then the unrouged mouth-corner? No, he could not. He caught a picture of the father snoring towards his death in the sickbay. He felt sickened. Always ready to use people as if they were
things
, that's all you can call them, and they all went to Auckland. ‘Auckland's in New Zealand,' he said. ‘It's said to be rather nice there.' That made her cry worse. ‘Listen,' he said. ‘You and your brother come and have tea with me in my cabin. We'll have a good tea. You've both eaten so little. About half-past four. Would you like
that? I have things to tell you, interesting things.' She looked at him with brown eyes awash. He marvelled at himself, Uncle Hillier inviting youngsters to tea. And this delicious grief of hers could so easily be coaxed towards the gentlest and most comforting of initiations. He would not do it; she was not a nubile girl now but a tearful daughter. ‘Tell Alan, will you? Tell him I want to let you both into a secret. It seems to me that you're people to be trusted.' Was he one to be trusted, though? The books thought not:
The Perfumed Garden
had sharp suspicious eyes peering through the flowers. ‘So you'll come, will you?' She nodded several times. ‘And now I've got to go.' He essayed a chaste kiss on her frontal lobes; she did not turn away. Like dogs the books snarled at him as he left.

He went to the sickbay. He told the orderly on duty there that he'd broken his hypodermic. ‘I'm diabetic,' he said. ‘Perhaps I could buy one from you.' But he was given one with the fine generosity of a ship at sea. ‘How is the old man?' he whispered. No real change, he was told; he might last a long time yet. ‘As far as Yarylyuk?' Quite possibly. They could get him ashore. Russian hospitals were good. ‘He may live then?' You never could tell. Hillier was relieved at that: one fantastic scheme could be crossed off. There would have to be some playing by ear. Engage first, strategise after. Back in his cabin he restored, with much pain, his face to the face of Hillier. It was the expression more than the physiognomy that was adjusted. Jagger was the name of a function rather than a person. But he must keep the pseudonym. Jagger for the journey, Hillier for home. Home for the elderly, home for inebriates, home for retired spies. As for ‘home'
tout court
, he had still to puzzle out a meaning.

‘You've changed the colour of your eyes,' marvelled Clara. She had changed her clothes – cotton tartan slacks with a plain green
T-shirt. Alan was still in his newspaper shirt: a headline –
THIS MAN MAY KILL POLICE WARN
– looked sternly at Hillier. ‘You've got rid of that grey moustache,' approved the boy. ‘Better. A lot better.' He folded his arms, obscuring the headline. Hillier, as tea-mother, poured. Lemon for both of them: highly sophisticated. He himself took cream and sugar. Wriste had wheeled in a fair variety of tea-foods – sandwiches, Kunzle pastries, scones, crumpets in a hot dish, a chocolate Swiss roll and a Fuller's walnut cake. ‘A sandwich,' Hillier offered. ‘Gentleman's Relish. Salmon. Tomato and sardine. Cucumber.'

‘We don't eat bread,' they duetted in canon.

‘Yes, I knew about that. You ought to try some. A new experience. A
nouveau frisson
. Go on, be devils.' But they wouldn't risk it; they chose sweet things, nibbling. ‘The decline of a civilisation,' taught Hillier, ‘is figured in the decline of its bread. English bread is uneatable. Some of the London wealthy have a bread airlift from France. Did you know that? No. The bread on ships is baked properly, not boiled. One has an image of civilisation being maintained on little ships plying from nowhere to nowhere.'

‘They'd still have to have our flour,' said Alan.

‘How is he?' asked Hillier.

‘Plying from nowhere to nowhere. No change.
She
,' said Alan bitterly, ‘has quarrelled with that wop type man. A kind of Norwegian type man has been teaching her to dive. Golden muscles and that.'

‘Fond of men, is she?'

‘She's got this one back home. That's her steady one. And Dad pretended to know nothing about it. He feels he needs to trust somebody. A wife is a person you trust.'

‘Have you a wife?' asked Clara.

‘No,' answered Alan. ‘Nor children. He's on his own. Going around in disguises and then taking them off. That man Theodorescu told me all about you,' he said to Hillier.

‘Did he?' said Hillier without fear.

‘He called you a womaniser.' Clara looked interested. ‘He gave me a camera as a present,' said Alan. ‘A new Japanese type. A Myonichi, it's called. He said it would make an amusing hobby for me to go round recording you womanising.'

‘Perhaps he's jealous,' said Hillier. ‘He can't do any womanising.'

‘No,' said Alan. He shifted on his chair as in slight pain. ‘Or won't.' He turned to his sister in sudden contempt, ‘You and your books about Sodom. Sex on paper instead of a bed.'

‘It's the safest kind of sex,' said Hillier. ‘Did Mr Theodorescu say anything else about me?'

‘He didn't have much time for talking. He had to helicopter off to a takeover bid or something. But he didn't have to tell me anything really, because I know you're a spy.'

‘That always seems a dirty word,' said Hillier, pouring more tea. ‘I much prefer “secret agent”.'

‘That's what you are then?' said Clara.

‘Yes. That. It's a job like any other. It's supposed to call for the finest qualities in a man. You know – bravery, skill, cunning, supreme patriotism.'

‘And womanising,' added Alan.

‘Sometimes.'

‘Why are you telling us?' asked Clara.

‘He had to sooner or later. Me, anyway. He knew I knew. So,' said Alan, ‘you're throwing yourself into our hands.'

‘In a way, yes. I need friends. That man Theodorescu has wirelessed the Soviet police. My cover has been blown sky-high, as they say. Whatever disguise I assume I can be identified by an ineffaceable mark on my body.'

‘A birthmark?' asked Clara.

‘A deathmark, rather. I was most cruelly branded. It was one of my many adventures,' said Hillier modestly. He ate a cucumber sandwich.

‘Wait,' said Alan. He went to the door and peered out. ‘Nobody eavesdropping.' He came back. ‘You're being careless. Are you sure this cabin isn't bugged?'

‘Pretty sure. But it doesn't matter. I've got to land in Yarylyuk whatever happens. It means contriving something when we get there. What I mean is that I'm expected. But they know I know I'm expected. They expect me to be among the passengers, but they don't expect me to go ashore. They know I'm not a fool and they know that I know that they're not fools either. My danger will be on this ship. That's why I'm going ashore.'

‘But,' said Alan, ‘they will know that too. I mean, they'll always be one jump ahead.' And then: ‘I always knew that Theodorescu man wasn't to be trusted. A queer smell came off his body. This ship seems to be full of spies.'

‘Not
full
exactly.'

‘But one thing we don't know,' said Alan, ‘is who you're spying for. How do we know that you're not spying for the other side and that the danger comes from spies on our side who are disguised as spies on their side? Or police. Or something.' He accepted a Kunzle cake. ‘That you're trying to get back to Russia with secret information and somebody working for our side is already waiting to come aboard and get rid of you?'