‘Well,’ I said, ‘what do you want, you happy shepherd boy?’
He shook his head. ‘Oh, she’s a wonder, your auntie. No one ever talk to Wordsworth like that befo. Why, she come right up to me in the street outside the movie palace an she say, clear the day, “Thou child of joy.” Ar love your auntie, Mr Pullen. Ar ready to die for her any time she raise a finger an say, “Wordsworth, you go die.”’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, ‘that’s fine, but what are you doing barricaded in my cabin?’
‘Ar come for the picture,’ he said.
‘Couldn’t you wait till we get ashore?’
‘Your auntie say bring that picture safe, Wordsworth, double quick or you no come here no more.’
A suspicion returned to me. Could the frame like the candle be made of gold? Or did the photograph cover some notes of a very high denomination? Neither seemed likely, but neither was impossible with my aunt.
‘Ar got friends in customs,’ Wordsworth said, ‘they no humbug me, but, Mr Pullen, you a stranger here.’
‘It’s only a photograph of Freetown Harbour.’
‘Ya’as, Mr Pullen. But your auntie say …’
‘All right. Take it then. Where are you sleeping?’
Wordsworth jerked his thumb at the floor. ‘Ar more comfortable down below there, Mr Pullen. The folks thar they sing and dance an have good time. They don wear no carats an they no don go wash befo meals. Ar don like soap with my chop.’
‘Have a cigarette, Wordsworth.’
‘If you don mine, Mr Pullen, I smoke this here.’
He pulled a ragged reconstructed cigarette out of a crumpled pocket.
‘Still on pot, Wordsworth?’
‘Well, it’s a sort of medicine, Mr Pullen. Arm not too well these days. Ar got a lot o’ worry.’
‘Worry about what?’
‘Your auntie, Mr Pullen. She allays safe with old Wordsworth. Ar no cost her nothing. But she got a fellah now – he cost her plenty plenty. And he too old for her, Mr Pullen. Your auntie no chicken. She need a young fellah.’
‘You aren’t exactly young yourself, Wordsworth.’
‘Ar no got ma big feet in no tomb, Mr Pullen, lak that one. Ar no trust that fellah. When we come here he plenty sick. He say, “Please Wordsworth, please Wordsworth,” and he mak all the sugar in the world melt in his mouth. He live in low-class hotel, but he aint got no money. They go to turn him out an, man, he were plenty scared to go. When your auntie came he cry like a lil bebi. He no man, sure he no man, but he plenty plenty mean. He say sweet things alright alright, but he allays act mean. What wan she leave Wordsworth for a mean man like him? Tell me that, man, tell me that.’ He let his great bulk down on my bed and he began to weep. It was like a spring forcing its hard way to the surface, spilling out of the crevices of a rock.
‘Wordsworth,’ I said, ‘are you jealous of Aunt Augusta?’
‘Man,’ he said, ‘she war my bebi gel. Now she gon bust ma heart in bits.’
‘Poor Wordsworth.’ There was nothing more I could say.
‘She wan me quit,’ Wordsworth said. ‘She wan me for come bring you, and then she wan me quit. She say, “I give you biggest CTC you ever saw, you go back Freetown and find a gel,” but I no wan her money, Mr Pullen, I no wan Freetown no more, and I no wan any gel. I love your auntie. I wan for to stay with her like the song say: “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens: oh with me abide … Tears have not bitterness,” but man, these tears are bitter, tha’s for sure.’
‘Wherever did you learn that hymn, Wordsworth?’
‘We allays sang that in St George’s cathedral in Freetown. “Fast falls the eventide.” Plenty sad songs like that we sang there, an they all mak me think now of my bebi gel. “Here lingrin still we ask for nought but simply worship thee.” Man, it’s true. But now she wan me to quit, an go right away an never see her no more.’
‘Who is this man she’s with, Wordsworth?’
‘I won spik his name. My tongue turn up if I spik his name. Oh, man, I bin faithful to your auntie long time now.’
It was to distract him from his misery and not to reproach him that I said, ‘You remember that girl in Paris?’
‘That one who wan do jig-jig?’
‘No, no, not that one. The young girl on the train.’
‘Oh ya’as. Sure, I member her.’
‘You gave her pot,’ I said.
‘Sure. Why not? Very good medicine. You don think I do anytin bad with her? Why, man, she was the ship that gone by one day. She too young for old Wordsworth.’
‘Her father’s on the boat now.’
He looked at me with astonishment. ‘You don say!’
‘He was asking me about you. He saw us on shore.’
‘What he look lak?’
‘He’s as tall as you but very thin. He looks unhappy and worried and he wears a tweed sportscoat.’
‘Oh, God Almighty! I know him. I seen him plenty in Asunción. You got to be bloody careful of him.’
‘He says he’s doing social research work.’
‘What that mean?’
‘He investigates things.’
‘Oh, man, you’re right there. I tell you sometin. Your auntie’s fellah – he don like that man around.’
I had meant to distract him, and I had certainly succeeded. He pressed my hand hard when he left me, carrying the picture concealed under his shirt. He said, ‘Man, you know what you are to Wordsworth. You help of the helpless, Mr Pullen. O abide with me.’
4
WHEN I went up on deck after breakfast we were already approaching Asunción. Red cliffs were honeycombed with caves. Half-ruined huts stood at the very edge of the cliff and naked children with the pot-bellies of malnutrition stared down on us as the boat passed, moving like an overfed man who picks his slow way home after a heavy meal, giving little belches on the siren. Above the huts, like a medieval castle dominating some wretched village of mud and wattle, stood the great white bastions of Shell.
O’Toole came and stood beside me as the immigration officers arrived on board. He asked, ‘Can I be of any help? Give you a lift or anything?’
‘Thank you very much, but I think I shall be met.’
The steerage passengers were going ashore. He said, ‘If you want any help at any time … I know most of the ropes. You’ll find me at the embassy. They call me a second secretary. It’s convenient.’
‘You’re very kind.’
‘You are a friend of Lucinda …’ he said. ‘Katmandu seems the hell of a long way off. Maybe some mail will have come in.’
‘Is she a good correspondent?’
‘She writes me picture postcards,’ he said. He leant forward on the rail. ‘Isn’t that your friend?’ he asked.
‘What friend?’
I looked at the steerage queue on the gangway and saw Wordsworth.
‘The man who spoke to you onshore.’
I said, ‘All coloured men look very much alike to me at that distance.’
‘It’s not often you see an African here,’ he said. ‘I guess it’s your friend.’
When at last the formalities were over and I stood beside my luggage on the corner of a street named after Benjamin Constant, I looked around awhile in vain for Wordsworth. Families exchanged greetings and drove away in cars. The Czech plastics manfacturer offered me a lift in his taxi. A small boy wanted to clean my shoes and another tried to sell me American cigarettes. A long colonnaded street, which sloped uphill in front of me, was full of liquor shops, and old women sat against the wall with baskets of bread and fruit. In spite of the dirt and fumes of old cars the air was sweet with orange blossom.
Somebody whistled and I turned to see Wordsworth getting out of a taxi. He lifted my two heavy suitcases as though they were empty cardboard boxes. ‘Ar look for friend,’ he said, ‘too plenty humbug here.’ I had never before been driven in quite such a decrepit taxi. The lining was torn and the stuffing leaked out of the seat. Words
worth punched at it to make it more comfortable. Then he made motions to the driver which the man seemed to understand. ‘We drive around a bit,’ Wordsworth said. ‘Ar wan to see if they lef us alone.’ He looked out of the window, while the taxi ground and shook. All the other taxis which passed us were smart enough, and sometimes the drivers shouted what I took to be insults to our old man who had a white moustache and a hat without a crown.
‘Suppose we’re not left alone,’ I said, ‘what do we do?’
‘We tak bloody good care,’ Wordsworth said vaguely.
‘You seem to have chosen the oldest taxi.’
Soldiers were goose-stepping in front of the cathedral, and a very early tank stood on a plinth up on the greensward. The orange trees were everywhere, some in fruit and some in blossom.
‘He good friend of mine.’
‘You talk Spanish?’ I asked.
‘No. He don know no Spanish.’
‘What does he talk?’
‘He talk Indian lingo.’
‘How do you make him understand?’
‘I give him smokes,’ Wordsworth said. ‘He lak pot.’
Except for the skyscraper of a new hotel it was a very Victorian town. One soon ceased to notice the cars – they were an anachronism; there were mule carts and sometimes men on horses, there was a little white castellated Baptist church, a college built like a neo-Gothic abbey, and when we reached the residential quarter I saw big stone houses with bosky gardens and pillared porticos above stone steps which reminded me of the oldest part of Southwood, but in Southwood the houses would have been split into flats and the grey stone would have been whitewashed and the roofs would have bristled with television masts. In place of the orange and banana trees, I would have seen neglected rhododendrons and threadbare lawns.
‘What is the name of my aunt’s friend, Wordsworth?’ I asked.
‘I don remember,’ Wordsworth said. ‘I don wanta remember. Ar wanta forget.’
A little crumbling house with corinthian pillars and broken windows was called School of Architecture on a board which had been split by the seasons, but, however tumbledown the houses, the flowers were everywhere. A bush of jasmine blossomed with white and blue flowers on the same bush.
‘We stop here,’ Wordsworth said and he shook the driver’s shoulder.
It was an enormous house with a great untidy lawn which ended in a dark green fuzz of trees, a small wood of banana, orange, lemon, grapefruit, lapacho. On the two sides visible to me through the gates wide stone steps led up to separate entrances. The walls were blotched with lichen and were four storeys high.
‘It’s a millionaire’s house,’ I said.
‘You jus wait,’ Wordsworth replied.
The iron gates were rusty and padlocked. Worn pineapples were carved on the gateposts, but the gates, draped with barbed wire, had lost their dignity. A millionaire may once have lived there, I thought, but no longer.
Wordsworth led me round the corner of the street and we approached the house from the back through a little door which he locked behind him and through the grove of sweet-smelling trees and bushes. ‘Hi!’ he called to the great square block of stone, ‘hi!’ and got no response. The house in its solidity and its silence reminded me of the great family tombs in the cemetery at Boulogne. This was a journey’s end too.
‘Your auntie she got a bit deaf,’ Wordsworth said, ‘she no young no more, no more.’ He spoke regretfully, as though he had known her as a girl, and yet she had been over seventy when she picked him up outside the Grenada Palace. We went up one flight of stone steps and into the hall of the house.
Paved with cracked marble, the big hall was unfurnished. The windows had been shuttered and the only light came from a bare globe in the ceiling. There was no chair, no table, no sofa, no pictures. The one sign of human occupation was a mop which leant against one wall, but it might have been left there a generation ago by someone hired to tidy up after the furniture-removers had departed.
‘Hi!’ Wordsworth shouted. ‘Hi! Mr Pullen be here,’ and I heard the click of high heels along a passage overhead. A flight of pink marble stairs rose to the first floor, and at the head of them my aunt appeared. The light was too dim to see her clearly, and it may have been my imagination which read into her voice an older, more tremulous tone than I had remembered. ‘Why, Henry,’ she said, ‘you are welcome home.’ She came slowly down the stairs, and perhaps it was the bad light which caused her to clutch the banister. ‘I am so sorry’, she said, ‘that Mr Visconti is not here to greet you. I had expected him yesterday.’
‘Mr Visconti?’
‘Yes,’ my aunt said, ‘Mr Visconti. We are happily reunited. Did you bring the picture safely?’
‘Ar got it,’ Wordsworth said, holding up his new suitcase.
‘Mr Visconti will be relieved. He was afraid of the customs. You look well, Henry,’ she said, kissing my cheek and leaving on the air a smell of lavender. ‘Come, let me show you your room.’ She led me up to the first landing which was as bare as the hall and opened a door. This room at least contained a bed and a chair and a cupboard, though nothing else. My aunt may have thought some explanation was needed, for she said, ‘The furniture will be arriving any day now.’ I opened another door and saw a room which was empty except for two mattresses laid together on the floor and a dressing-table and stool that looked new. ‘I have given you the bed,’ my aunt said, ‘but I couldn’t do without my dressing-table.’
‘Is this your room?’
‘Sometimes I miss my Venetian glass, but when the curtains go up and the furniture arrives … You must be hungry, Henry. Wordsworth will bring your bags. I have a little meal prepared.’
I could no longer be surprised by the furnishing of the dining-room – an immense room which had been lit once by three chandeliers; the wires sprouted like weeds out of holes in the ceiling. There was a table but no cloth, and the chairs were packing-cases. ‘It’s all a little rough,’ my aunt said, ‘but when Mr Visconti returns you will see how soon we shall get things in order.’ The meal came out of tins, and there was a sweet red wine of local origin which tasted like an evil medicine of childhood. I thought of my first-class ticket on the boat with shame.
‘When Mr Visconti is back,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘we plan to give you a party. A house like this is made for parties. We shall have a barbecue with an ox roasted whole in the garden, and there will be coloured lights in the trees, and music, of course, for dancing. A harp and a guitar – that is the fashion here. The polka and the gallop are the national dances. I shall invite the Chief of Police, the Jesuit Provincial (for his conversation of course), the British Ambassador and his wife. The Italian Ambassador, no – it would not be tactful. We must find some pretty girls for you, Henry.’ A splinter from the packing-case scratched my thigh.
I said, ‘You will need a little furniture first, Aunt Augusta.’
‘That goes without saying. I regret that I cannot ask the Italian Ambassadaor – he is such a handsome man, but under the circumstances … I shall have to tell you something, Henry, that only Wordsworth knows …’
‘Where is Wordsworth now?’
‘In the kitchen. Mr Visconti prefers us to eat alone. As I was going to say, Henry, when you interrupted me, Mr Visconti has taken to an Argentine passport and he is known here as Mr Izquierdo.’
‘I am not altogether surprised, Aunt Augusta.’ I told her how the two detectives had searched her flat.
‘General Abdul is dead by the way.’
‘I rather expected that. Did they take anything away?’
‘Nothing except a picture postcard from Panama.’
‘Why did they want that?’
‘They thought it might have something to do with Mr Visconti.’
‘How absurd the police always seem to be. The card must have been sent by Monsieur Dambreuse. I met him on the boat going out to Buenos Aires. Poor man, he had aged a great deal. I didn’t even recognize him until he began to tell me about hi
s metallurgical company and his family in Toulouse.’
‘And he hadn’t recognized you?’
‘That is not so surprising. In those days, when we were living at the St James and Albany, I had black hair, not red. Red was Mr Visconti’s favourite colour. I kept red especially for him.’
‘The police were acting for Interpol,’ I said.
‘It’s absurd of them to treat Mr Visconti like a common war criminal. There are lots of such men hidden around here. Martin Bormann is just across the border in Brazil and the unspeakable Dr Mengele of Auschwitz is said to be with the army near the Bolivian border. Why doesn’t Interpol do anything about them? Mr Visconti was always very kind to Jews. Even when he had those dealings with Saudi Arabia. Why should he be chased out of the Argentine where he was doing quite well in the antique business? There was an American in Buenos Aires who made the most impertinent enquiries, Mr Visconti told me. Mr Visconti had sold a picture to a private purchaser in the States, and this American, who claimed to be a representative of the Metropolitan Museum, said the picture had been looted …’
‘Was the man’s name O’Toole by any chance?’
‘It was.’
‘He’s here in Asunción now.’
‘Yes, I know that. But he is not finding people so cooperative here. After all the General has German blood.’
‘He was with me on the boat and he told me he was doing social research.’
‘That’s quite untrue. Like the Metropolitan Museum. He’s in the CIA.’
‘He’s Tooley’s father.’
‘Tooley?’
‘The girl on the Orient Express.’
‘How very interesting. I wonder if that could be of any use to us,’ my aunt reflected. ‘You say he was on the boat with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘He may have been following you. Such a fuss about a few pictures. I seem to remember that you and his daughter became great friends on the train. And there was all that business of the pregnancy …’