Once a year, and always on his tour, Wormold wrote to his younger sister who lived in Northampton. (Perhaps writing to Mary momentarily healed the loneliness he felt at being away from Milly.) Invariably too he included the latest Cuban postage stamps for his nephew. The boy had begun to collect at the age of six and somehow, with the quick jog-trot of time, it slipped Wormold’s memory that his nephew was now long past seventeen and had probably given up his collection years ago. In any case he must have been too old for the kind of note Wormold folded around the stamps; it was too juvenile even for Milly, and his nephew was her senior by several years.
‘Dear Mark,’ Wormold wrote, ‘here are some stamps for your collection. It must be quite a big collection by now. I’m afraid these ones are not very interesting. I wish we had birds or beasts or butterflies in Cuba like the nice ones you showed me from Guatemala. Your affectionate uncle. P. S. I am sitting looking at the sea and it is very hot.’
To his sister he wrote more explicitly, ‘I am sitting by the bay in
Cienfuegos and the temperature is over ninety, though the sun has been down for an hour. They are showing Marilyn Monroe at the cinema, and there is one boat in the harbour called, oddly enough, the Juan Belmonte. (Do you remember that winter in Madrid when we went to the bullfight?) The Chief -I think he’s the Chief is sitting at the next table drinking Spanish brandy. There’s nothing else for him to do except go to the cinema. This must be one of the quietest ports in the world. Just the pink and yellow street and a few cantinas and the big chimney of a sugar refinery and at the end of a weed-grown path the Juan Belmonte. Somehow I wish I could be sailing in it with Milly, but I don’t know. Vacuum cleaners are not selling well electric current is too uncertain in these troubled days. Last night at Matanzas the lights all went out three times -the first time I was in my bath. These are silly things to write all the way to Northampton.
‘Don’t think I am unhappy. There is a lot to be said for where we are.
Sometimes I fear going home to Boots and Woolworths and cafeterias, and I’d be a stranger now even in the White Horse. The Chief has got a girl with him -I expect he has a girl in Matanzas too: he’s pouring brandy down her throat as you give a cat medicine. The light here is wonderful just before the sun goes down: a long trickle of gold and the seabirds are dark patches on the pewter swell. The big white statue in the Paseo which looks in daylight like Queen Victoria is a lump of ectoplasm now. The bootblacks have all packed up their boxes under the arm-chairs in the pink colonnade: you sit high above the pavement as though on library-steps and rest your feet on the back of two little sea-horses in bronze that might have been brought here by a Phoenician. Why am I so nostalgic? I suppose because I have a little money tucked away and soon I must decide to go away for ever. I wonder if Milly will be able to settle down in a secretarial-training college in a grey street in north London. ‘How is Aunt Alice and the famous wax in her ears? And how is Uncle Edward? or is he dead? I’ve reached the time of life when relatives die unnoticed.’
He paid his bill and asked for the name of the Chief Engineer -it had struck him that he must have a few names checked when he got home, to justify his expenses.
In Santa Clara his old Hillman lay down beneath him like a tired mule. Something was seriously wrong with its innards; only Milly would have known what. The man at the garage said that the repairs would take several days, and Wormold decided to go on to Santiago by coach. Perhaps in any case it was quicker and safer that way, for in the Oriente Province, where the usual rebels held the mountains and Government troops the roads and cities, blocks were frequent and buses were less liable to delay than private cars.
He arrived at Santiago in the evening, the empty dangerous hours of the unofficial curfew. All the shops in the piazza built against the Cathedral facade were closed. A single couple hurried across in front of the hotel; the night was hot and humid, and the greenery hung dark and heavy in the pallid light of half strength lamps. In the reception office they greeted him with suspicion as though they assumed him to be a spy of one kind or another. He felt like an impostor, for this was a hotel of real spies, real police-informers and real rebel agents. A drunk man talked endlessly in the drab bar, as though he were saying in the style of Gertrude Stein ‘Cuba is Cuba is Cuba’. Wormold had for his dinner a dry flat omelette, stained and dog-eared like an old manuscript, and drank some sour wine. While he ate he wrote on a picture-postcard a few lines to Dr Hasselbacher. Whenever he left Havana he dispatched to Milly and Dr Hasselbacher and sometimes even to Lopez bad pictures of bad hotels with a cross against one window like the cross in a detective story which indicates where the crime has been committed. ‘Car broken down. Everything very quiet. Hope to be back Thursday.’ A picture-postcard is a symptom of loneliness.
At nine o’clock Wormold set out to find his retailer. He had forgotten how abandoned the streets of Santiago were after dark. Shutters were closed behind the iron grills, and as in an occupied city the houses turned their backs on the passer-by. A cinema cast a little light, but no customer went in; by law it had to remain open, but no one except a soldier or a policeman was likely to visit it after dark. Down a side-street Wormold saw a military patrol go by. Wormold sat with the retailer in a small hot room. An open door gave on to a patio, a palm tree and a well-head of wrought iron, but the air outside was as hot as the air within. They sat opposite each other in rocking-chairs, rocking towards each other and rocking away, making little currents of air. Trade was bad rock rock nobody was buying electrical goods in Santiago -rock rock what was the good? rock rock. As though to illustrate the point the electric light went out and they rocked in darkness. Losing the rhythm their heads came into gentle collision.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘My fault.’
Rock rock rock.
Somebody scraped a chair in the patio.
‘Your wife?’ asked Wormold.
‘No. Nobody at all. We are quite alone.’
Wormold rocked forward, rocked back, rocked forward again, listening to the furtive movements in the patio.
‘Of course.’ This was Santiago. Any house might contain a man on the run. It was best to hear nothing, and to see nothing was no problem, even when the light came half heartedly back with a tiny yellow glow on the filament. On his way to the hotel he was stopped by two policemen. They wanted to know what he was doing out so late.
‘It’s only ten o’clock,’ he said.
‘What are you doing in this street at ten o’clock?’
‘There’s no curfew, is there?’
Suddenly, without warning, one of the policemen slapped his face. He felt shock rather than anger. He belonged to the law-abiding class; the police were his natural protectors. He put his hand to his cheek and said, ‘What in God’s name do you think…?’ The other policeman with a blow in the back sent him stumbling along the pavement. His hat fell off into the filth of the gutter. He said, ‘Give me my hat,’ and felt himself pushed again. He began to say something about the British Consul and they swung him sideways across the road and sent him reeling. This time he landed inside a doorway in front of a desk where a man slept with his head on his arms. He woke up and shouted at Wormold his mildest expression was ‘pig’.