He was pulled from his mosquito-net next morning and questioned by American detectives, but he was too innocent for any blame to be laid on him. The astuteness that enabled him to see what was going on in South Vietnam also persuaded him to keep his mouth shut when speaking to people or being interviewed, as he was now, by two intelligent numskulls. He answered slowly and reasonably, as if to comprehend yet stay out of trouble merely showed an absence of passion. While talking he dimly sensed that he would acquire this passion only when he had lost both these talents. He was blessed with the good sense of a young man with a conventional upbringing suddenly out on a limb and doing something unusual — he reflected while travelling deck-class to Hong Kong. The rusting steamer slid through oily blue water under a sun that blistered down for six days. After a few hours he found it necessary to escape from the overcrowded decks, and the only way to do this was by taking refuge in himself. He knew what the boat must look like from shore or passing ship, having seen one once going down the Saigon river — a dilapidated steamer of four thousand tons whose decks, funnels and superstructure were completely hidden by human beings. Nothing else could be seen, not an air-vent, porthole, or derrick.
He gave English lessons in Hong Kong and caught a mild venereal disease from one of his earnest and beautiful slit-skirted pupils who only wanted to learn phrases of endearment for her work with those American advisers recuperating from their assistance to South Vietnam. He regretted that the lessons had taken such a practical turn, but was able to get his ailment cured in Japan, the next stop on his world tour, where he got respectable work lecturing on English literature at certain universities. He waited there for a visa that would allow him to pass through America on his way home, the whole journey having taken a year out of his life.
Leaning over the parapet of the bridge with Mandy he still hadn’t sorted out his impressions, even though a year had passed and he had reached the ripe age of twenty-five. The sheer built-up sides of the river had been left mildewed by the outgone tide, its water licking fitfully way out in the sand of Boston Deeps. Traffic stifled the air with fumes and thunder, and a coastal barge worked itself towards a quay downstream. Mandy had forgotten the fight with her father at home, being with Ralph and trying to talk to him, break her way through into that set face gazing along the river.
‘I told you we shouldn’t see each other again,’ he said, without turning round.
‘You were waiting for me.’
‘I happened to be here.’
She looked at him, glad he was turned away so that she could do so without starting a fight. ‘If you can stand it, I can. If you think you’re going to make me talk about love you’re mistaken. It doesn’t make me happy to go on like this, but it seems to satisfy you. I suppose hanging around for weeks is the only way you’ll make up your mind.’
His long sallow face became indignant at her accuracy. ‘You’re talking a lot of rubbish as usual. You’ll be threatening to put your head in the gas-oven next, if I’m not careful and don’t humour you.’
‘You’re marvellous when you say things like that,’ she laughed. ‘I feel you really mean it, so it’s the only time you look properly alive — except when we’re making love.’
‘It’s a pity you’re so young,’ he said. ‘Otherwise you’d have walked off instead of laughing.’ He was determined to get his own way, but was so strong in it that she never knew what it was. Neither, in fact, did he, and the force of this subterranean desire was sapping his life before he had even started to live. His trip around the world had thrown him so basically off balance that he was unable to make up his mind concerning a career, or even on taking another trip round the world, which he often wanted to do.
They went into a fish-bar, but neither was hungry. She split open the batter and ate some of the white flesh. Ralph drank thirstily at his cup of rotten tea. ‘Will you still come away with me?’
‘Yes,’ she said readily. ‘But I wouldn’t mind knowing where.’
‘Neither would I. The old man wants me to go to agricultural college and learn the trade of raping the earth. But it’s not in me, though I toyed with the idea just to please him.’
‘It doesn’t sound your style.’
‘What is my style?’
‘Not that.’
He pushed his plate away. ‘A lot of help you are.’
‘As much as you want me to be. You’re afraid of me helping you in case it should show that I love you. But I don’t anyway. Never have, never will, and never could.’ She stood up and fastened her coat. He took her elbow and opened the door, her shoulder against his chest as they went through.
They walked into the country invigorated by a forceful moist breeze coming from the sea. ‘What I really want to do,’ he said with an enthusiasm that irritated her, ‘is to get a house in Lincolnshire and fill it with books. Live on my own, I think, perhaps work as a teacher at some local school. It’s the only thing that appeals to me at the moment.’
It amazed and distressed her that he might after all know what he wanted, and that this might well be it. The life he drew appealed to her as well, and for this reason it seemed horrible, decadent, corrupting, a way of dying before you really started to live. She listened to him talking about gardens, dogs, a couple of guns to go shooting now and again, the rubbish-bin of his father’s already fulfilled and deadened desires. He’d furnish the house from auctions at market-towns round about so as to get beautiful antique furniture. She knew that if he really set his heart on it his ageing daddy might buy him a house simply to get rid of him.
‘That trip round the world knocked holes in you,’ she said.
‘It showed me what I wanted.’
‘When you know that you’re finished.’ They walked quickly, open country on either side, keeping well in to avoid traffic.
‘That sounds like another of your father’s sayings,’ he said. ‘I like his paintings, but I don’t like the way he justifies them.’
‘If you want to be with it,’ she said, ‘stop knowing what you want. Dad couldn’t have told me that.’
‘I’d still like to have one of his pictures, anyway,’ he said. She’d once taken him to the studio to see Handley’s work, about the time all the fuss had started. When he said he’d like to have one for his own room, she’d retorted that he should have thought of that a year ago when he could have chosen anything for a few quid.
‘I thought you were set on having a house? You can’t have both.’ Perhaps, he thought, but realised that it would be morally wrong, if not actually degenerate, not to try and get all he wanted while still young enough to remember what it was he had wanted in the first place.
‘I could,’ he suggested, ‘if you persuaded him to give me one. He hates my guts after what happened last year, but I don’t think he’d bear a grudge all his life.’
She laughed, showing her fine even teeth, before a cigarette went between her lips. ‘He wouldn’t give a pencil stroke away any more.’
He cupped his large hands and passed a light over. They were pale and smooth after the long recuperation from his trip, for he hadn’t even helped on his father’s farm, she thought, since coming back. ‘He’s got a trunk full of notebooks, that he’s written ideas in for the last twenty years. An American university offered him a fat sum for them, but he wouldn’t part. Keeping them for a rainy day, I suppose.’