He thought: after all, a man likes to be welcomed.
He walked up to his bungalow; it was distinguished from the others which lay along the bank by a tiled roof, a flag-post without a flag, a plate on the door with the title ‘Central American Banana Company’. Two hammocks were strung up on the veranda, but there was nobody about. Captain Fellows knew where to find his wife. He burst boisterously through a door and shouted, ‘Daddy’s home.’ A scared thin face peeked at him through a mosquito-net; his boots ground peace into the floor; Mrs Fellows flinched away into the white muslin tent. He said, ‘Pleased to see me, Trix?’ and she drew rapidly on her face the outline of her frightened welcome. It was like a trick you do with a blackboard. Draw a dog in one line without lifting the chalk – and the answer, of course, is a sausage.
‘I’m glad to be home,’ Captain Fellows said, and he believed it. It was his one firm conviction – that he really felt the correct emotions of love and joy and grief and hate. He had always been a good man at zero hour.
‘All well at the office?’
‘Fine,’ Fellows said, ‘fine.’
‘I had a bit of fever yesterday.’
‘Ah, you need looking after. You’ll be all right now,’ he said vaguely, ‘that I’m home.’ He shied merrily away from the subject of fever – clapping his hands, a big laugh, while she trembled in her tent. ‘Where’s Coral?’
‘She’s with the policeman,’ Mrs Fellows said.
‘I hoped she’d meet me,’ he said, roaming aimlessly about the little interior room, full of boot-trees, while his brain caught up with her. ‘Policeman? What policeman?’
‘He came last night and Coral let him sleep on the veranda. He’s looking for somebody, she says.’
‘What an extraordinary thing. Here?’
‘He’s not an ordinary policeman. He’s an officer. He left his men in the village – Coral says.’
‘I do think you ought to be up,’ he said. ‘I mean – these fellows, you can’t trust them.’ He felt no conviction when he added, ‘She’s just a kid.’
‘I tell you I had fever,’ Mrs Fellows wailed, ‘I felt so terribly ill.’
‘You’ll be all right. Just a touch of the sun. You’ll see – now I’m home.’
‘I had such a headache. I couldn’t read or sew. And then this man . . .’
Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it – in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo – death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big above-ground tomb.
He said, ‘I suppose I ought to go and see the man.’ He sat down on the bed and put his hand upon her arm. They had something in common – a kind of diffidence. He said absent-mindedly, ‘That dago secretary of the boss has gone.’
‘Where?’
‘West.’ He could feel her arm go stiff: she strained away from him towards the wall. He had touched the taboo – the bond was broken, he couldn’t tell why. ‘Headache, darling?’
‘Hadn’t you better see the man?’
‘Oh yes, yes. I’ll be off.’ But he didn’t stir: it was the child who came to him.
She stood in the doorway watching them with a look of immense responsibility. Before her serious gaze they became a boy you couldn’t trust and a ghost you could almost puff away, a piece of frightened air. She was very young – about thirteen – and at that age you are not afraid of many things, age and death, all the things which may turn up, snake-bite and fever and rats and a bad smell. Life hadn’t got at her yet; she had a false air of impregnability. But she had been reduced already, as it were, to the smallest terms – everything was there but on the thinnest lines. That was what the sun did to a child, reduced it to a framework. The gold bangle on the bony wrist was like a padlock on a canvas door which a fist could break. She said, ‘I told the policeman you were home.’
‘Oh yes, yes,’ Captain Fellows said. ‘Got a kiss for your old dad?’
She came solemnly across the room and kissed him formally upon the forehead – he could feel the lack of meaning. She had other things to think about. She said, ‘I told cook that Mother would not be getting up for dinner.’
‘I think you ought to make the effort, dear,’ Captain Fellows said.
‘Why?’ Coral asked.
‘Oh, well . . .’
Coral said, ‘I want to talk to you alone.’ Mrs Fellows shifted inside her tent. Common sense was a horrifying quality she had never possessed: it was common sense which said, ‘The dead can’t hear’ or ‘She can’t know now’ or ‘Tin flowers are more practical’.
‘I don’t understand,’ Captain Fellows said uneasily, ‘why your mother shouldn’t hear.’
‘She wouldn’t want to. It would only scare her.’
Coral – he was accustomed to it by now – had an answer to everything. She never spoke without deliberation; she was prepared – but sometimes the answers she had prepared seemed to him of a wildness . . . They were based on the only life she could remember, the swamp and vultures and no children anywhere, except a few in the village with bellies swollen by worms who ate dirt from the bank, inhumanly. A child is said to draw parents together, and certainly he felt an immense unwillingness to entrust himself to this child. Her answers might carry him anywhere. He felt through the net for his wife’s hand, secretively: they were adults together. This was the stranger in their house. He said boisterously, ‘You’re frightening us.’
‘I don’t think,’ the child said, with care, ‘that you’ll be frightened.’
He said weakly, pressing his wife’s hand, ‘Well, my dear, our daughter seems to have decided . . .’
‘First you must see the policeman. I want him to go. I don’t like him.’
‘Then he must go, of course,’ Captain Fellows said, with a hollow unconfident laugh.
‘I told him that. I said we couldn’t refuse him a hammock for the night when he arrived so late. But now he must go.’
‘And he disobeyed you?’
‘He said he wanted to speak to you.’
‘He little knew,’ Captain Fellows said, ‘he little knew.’ Irony was his only defence, but it was not understood; nothing was understood which was not clear – like an alphabet or a simple sum or a date in history. He relinquished his wife’s hand and allowed himself to be led unwillingly into the afternoon sun. The police officer stood in front of the veranda, a motionless olive figure; he wouldn’t stir a foot to meet Captain Fellows.
‘Well, lieutenant?’ Captain Fellows said breezily. It occurred to him that Coral had more in common with the policeman than with himself.
‘I am looking for a man,’ the lieutenant said. ‘He has been reported in this district.’
‘He can’t be here.’
‘Your daughter tells me the same.’
‘She knows.’
‘He is wanted on a very serious charge.’
‘Murder?’
‘No. Treason.’
‘Oh, treason,’ Captain Fellows said, all his interest dropping; there was so much treason everywhere – it was like petty larceny in a barracks.
‘He is a priest. I trust you will report at once if he is seen.’ The lieutenant paused. ‘You are a foreigner living under the protection of our laws. We expect you to make a proper return for our hospitality. You are not a Catholic?’
‘No.’
‘Then I can trust you to report?’ the lieutenant said.
‘I suppose so.’
The lieutenant stood there like a little dark menacing question-mark in the sun: his attitude seemed to indicate that he wouldn’t even accept the benefit of shade from a foreigner. But he had used a hammock; that, Captain Fellows supposed, he must have regarded as a requisition. ‘Have a glass of gaseosa?’
‘No. No, thank you.’
‘Well,’ Captain Fellows said, ‘I can
’t offer you anything else, can I? It’s treason to drink spirits.’
The lieutenant suddenly turned on his heel as if he could no longer bear the sight of them and strode away along the path which led to the village: his gaiters and his pistol-holster winked in the sunlight. When he had gone some way they could see him pause and spit; he had not been discourteous, he had waited till he supposed that they no longer watched him before he got rid of his hatred and contempt for a different way of life, for ease, safety, toleration, and complacency.
‘I wouldn’t want to be up against him,’ Captain Fellows said.
‘Of course he doesn’t trust us.’
‘They don’t trust anyone.’
‘I think,’ Coral said, ‘he smelt a rat.’
‘They smell them everywhere.’
‘You see, I wouldn’t let him search the place.’
‘Why ever not?’ Captain Fellows asked, and then his vague mind went off at a tangent. ‘How did you stop him?’
‘I said I’d loose the dogs on him – and complain to the Minister. He hadn’t any right . . .’
‘Oh, right,’ Captain Fellows said. ‘They carry their right on their hips. It wouldn’t have done any harm to let him look.’
‘I gave him my word.’ She was as inflexible as the lieutenant: small and black and out of place among the banana groves. Her candour made allowances for nobody: the future, full of compromises, anxieties, and shame, lay outside. But at any moment now a word, a gesture, the most trivial act might be her sesame – to what? Captain Fellows was touched with fear; he was aware of an inordinate love which robbed him of authority. You cannot control what you love – you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead. He closed his eyes – he was a happy man – and hummed a tune.
Coral said, ‘I shouldn’t have liked a man like that to catch me out – lying, I mean.’
‘Lying? Good God,’ Captain Fellows said, ‘you don’t mean he’s here.’
‘Of course he’s here,’ Coral said.
‘Where?’
‘In the big barn,’ she explained gently. ‘We couldn’t let them catch him.’
‘Does your mother know about this?’
She said with devastating honesty, ‘Oh no. I couldn’t trust her.’ She was independent of both of them: they belonged together in the past. In forty years’ time they would be dead as last year’s dog. He said, ‘You’d better show me.’
He walked slowly; happiness drained out of him more quickly and completely than out of an unhappy man: an unhappy man is always prepared. As she walked in front of him, her two meagre tails of hair bleaching in the sunlight, it occurred to him for the first time that she was of an age when Mexican girls were ready for their first man. What was to happen? He flinched away from problems which he had never dared to confront. As they passed the window of his bedroom he caught sight of a thin shape lying bunched and bony and alone in a mosquito-net. He remembered with self-pity and nostalgia his happiness on the river, doing a man’s job without thinking of other people. If I had never married. . . . He wailed like a child at the merciless immature back, ‘We’ve no business interfering with politics.’
‘This isn’t politics,’ she said gently. ‘I know about politics. Mother and I are doing the Reform Bill.’ She took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the big barn in which they stored bananas before sending them down the river to the port. It was very dark inside after the glare. There was a scuffle in a corner. Captain Fellows picked up an electric torch and shone it on somebody in a torn dark suit – a small man who blinked and needed a shave.
‘Quién es usted?’ Captain Fellows said.
‘I speak English.’ He clutched a small attaché case to his side, as if he were waiting to catch a train he must on no account miss.
‘You’ve no business here.’
‘No,’ the man said, ‘no.’
‘It’s nothing to do with us,’ Captain Fellows said. ‘We are foreigners.’
The man said, ‘Of course. I will go.’ He stood with his head a little bent like a man in an orderly-room listening to an officer’s decision. Captain Fellows relented a little. He said, ‘You’d better wait till dark. You don’t want to be caught.’
‘No.’
‘Hungry?’
‘A little. It does not matter.’ He said with a rather repulsive humility, ‘If you would do me a favour . . .’
‘What?’
‘A little brandy.’
‘I’m breaking the law enough for you as it is,’ Captain Fellows said. He strode out of the barn, feeling twice the size, leaving the small bowed figure in the darkness among the bananas. Coral locked the door and followed him. ‘What a religion,’ Captain Fellows said. ‘Begging for brandy. Shameless.’
‘But you drink it sometimes.’
‘My dear,’ Captain Fellows said, ‘when you are older you’ll understand the difference between drinking a little brandy after dinner and – well, needing it.’
‘Can I take him some beer?’
‘You won’t take him anything.’
‘The servants wouldn’t be safe.’
He was powerless and furious. He said, ‘You see what a hole you’ve put us in.’ He stumped back into the house and into his bedroom, roaming aimlessly among the boot-trees. Mrs Fellows slept uneasily, dreaming of weddings. Once she said aloud, ‘My train. Be careful of my train.’
‘What’s that?’ he asked petulantly. ‘What’s that?’
Dark fell like a curtain: one moment the sun was there, the next it had gone. Mrs Fellows woke to another night. ‘Did you speak, dear?’
‘It was you who spoke,’ he said. ‘Something about trains.’
‘I must have been dreaming.’
‘It will be a long time before they have trains here,’ he said, with gloomy satisfaction. He came and sat on the bed, keeping away from the window; out of sight, out of mind. The crickets were beginning to chatter and beyond the mosquito wire fireflies moved like globes. He put his heavy, cheery, needing-to-be-reassured hand on the shape under the sheet and said, ‘It’s not such a bad life, Trixy. Is it now? Not a bad life?’ But he could feel her stiffen: the word ‘life’ was taboo: it reminded you of death. She turned her face away from him towards the wall and then hopelessly back again – the phrase ‘turn to the wall’ was taboo too. She lay panic-stricken, while the boundaries of her fear widened to include every relationship and the whole world of inanimate things: it was like an infection. You could look at nothing for long without becoming aware that it, too, carried the germ . . . the word ‘sheet’ even. She threw the sheet off her and said, ‘It’s so hot, it’s so hot.’ The usually happy and the always unhappy one watched the night thicken from the bed with distrust. They were companions cut off from all the world: there was no meaning anywhere outside their own hearts: they were carried like children in a coach through the huge spaces without any knowledge of their destination. He began to hum with desperate cheerfulness a song of the war years; he wouldn’t listen to the footfall in the yard outside, going in the direction of the barn.
Coral put down the chicken legs and tortillas on the ground and unlocked the door. She carried a bottle of Cerveza Moctezuma under her arm. There was the same scuffle in the dark: the noise of a frightened man. She said, ‘It’s me,’ to quieten him, but she didn’t turn on the torch. She said, ‘There’s a bottle of beer here, and some food.’
‘Thank you. Thank you.’
‘The police have gone from the village – south. You had better go north.’
He said nothing.
She asked, with the cold curiosity of a child, ‘What would they do to you if they found you?’
‘Shoot me.’
‘You must be very frightened,’ she said with interest.
He felt his way across the barn towards the door and the pale starlight. He said, ‘I am frightened,’ and stumbled on a bunch of bananas.
‘Can’t you escape fr
om here?’
‘I tried. A month ago. The boat was leaving and then I was summoned.’
‘Somebody needed you?’
‘She didn’t need me,’ he said bitterly. She could just see his face now, as the world swung among the stars: what her father would call an untrustworthy face. He said, ‘You see how unworthy I am. Talking like this.’
‘Unworthy of what?’
He clasped his little attaché case closely and said, ‘Could you tell me what month it is. Is it still February?’
‘No. It’s the seventh of March.’
‘I don’t often meet people who know. That means another month – six weeks – before the rains.’ He went on, ‘When the rains come I am nearly safe. You see, the police can’t get about.’
‘The rains are best for you?’ she asked: she had a keen desire to learn. The Reform Bill and Senlac and a little French lay like treasure-trove in her brain. She expected answers to every question, and she absorbed them hungrily.
‘Oh no, no. They mean another six months living like this.’ He tore at a chicken leg. She could smell his breath: it was disagreeable, like something which has lain about too long in the heat. He said, ‘I’d rather be caught.’
‘But can’t you,’ she said logically, ‘just give yourself up?’
He had answers as plain and understandable as her questions. He said, ‘There’s the pain. To choose pain like that – it’s not possible. And it’s my duty not to be caught. You see, my bishop is no longer here.’ Curious pedantries moved him. ‘This is my parish.’ He found a tortilla and began to eat ravenously.
She said solemnly, ‘It’s a problem.’ She could hear a gurgle as he drank out of the bottle. He said, ‘I try to remember how happy I was once.’ A firefly lit his face like a torch and then went out – a tramp’s face: what could ever have made it happy? He said, ‘In Mexico City now they are saying Benediction. The Bishop’s there. . . . Do you imagine he ever thinks . . . ? They don’t even know I’m alive.’
She said, ‘Of course you could – renounce.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Renounce your faith,’ she explained, using the words of her European History.