‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, nothing in particular. Sometimes I think you treat your agents like lay figures, people in a book. It’s a real man up there -isn’t it?’ ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say about me.’
‘Oh, forget it. Tell me about someone you really care about. Your wife.
Tell me about her.’
‘She was pretty.’
‘Do you miss her?’
‘Of course. When I think of her.’
‘I don’t miss Peter.’
‘Peter?’
‘My husband. The UNESCO man.’
‘You’re lucky then. You’re free.’ He looked at his watch and the sky.
‘He should be over Matanzas by now. Unless he’s been delayed.’
‘Have you sent him that way?’
‘Oh, of course he decides his own route.’
‘And his own end?’
Something in her voice a kind of enmity -startled him again. Was it possible she had begun to suspect him already? He walked quickly on. They passed the Carmen Bar and the Cha Cha Club bright signs painted on the old shutters of the eighteenth-century facade. Lovely faces looked out of dim interiors, brown eyes, dark hair, Spanish and high yellow: beautiful buttocks leant against the bars, waiting for any life to come along the sea wet street. To live in Havana was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor-belt. He didn’t want beauty. He stopped under a lamp and looked directly back at the direct eyes. He wanted honesty. ‘Where are we going?’ ‘Don’t you know? Isn’t it all planned like Raul’s flight?’
‘I was just walking.’
‘Don’t you want to sit beside the radio? Rudy’s on duty.’
‘We won’t have any news before the early morning.’
‘You haven’t planned a late message then the crash at Santiago?’ His lips were dry with salt and apprehension. It seemed to him that she must have guessed everything. Would she report him to Hawthorne? What would be ‘their’ next move? They had no legal remedy, but he supposed they could stop him ever returning to England. He thought: She will go back by the next plane, life will be the same as before, and, of course, it was better that way; his life belonged to Milly. He said, ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’ A great wave had broken against the sea-wall of the Avenida, and now it rose like a Christmas tree covered with plastic frost. Then it sank out of sight, and another tree rose further down the driveway towards the Nacional. He said, ‘You’ve been strange all the evening.’ There was no point in delay; if the game were coming to an end, it was better to close it quickly. He said, ‘What are you hinting at?’ ‘You mean there isn’t to be a crash at the airport -or on the way?’
‘How do you expect me to know?’
‘You’ve been behaving all the evening as if you did. You haven’t spoken about him as though he were a living man. You’ve been writing his elegy like a bad novelist preparing an effect.’
The wind knocked them together. She said, ‘Aren’t you ever tired of other people taking risks? For what? For a Boys’ Own Paper game?’ ‘You play the game.’
‘I don’t believe in it like Hawthorne does.’ She said furiously, ‘I’d rather be a crook than a simpleton or an adolescent. Don’t you earn enough with your vacuum cleaners to keep out of all this?’
‘No. There’s Milly.’
‘Suppose Hawthorne hadn’t walked in on you?’
He joked miserably, ‘Perhaps I’d have married again for money.’
‘Would you ever marry again?’ She seemed determined to be serious. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know that I would. Milly wouldn’t consider it a marriage, and one can’t shock one’s own child. Shall we go home and listen to the radio?’
‘But you don’t expect a message, do you? You said so.’ He said evasively, ‘Not for another three hours. But I expect he’ll radio before he lands.’ The odd thing was he began to feel the tension. He almost hoped for some message to reach him out of the windy sky. She said, ‘Will you promise me that you haven’t arranged anything?’ He avoided answering, turning back towards the President’s palace with the dark windows where the President had never slept since the last attempt on his life, and there, coming down the pavement with head bent to avoid the spray, was Dr Hasselbacher. He was probably on his way home from the Wonder Bar. ‘Dr Hasselbacher,’ Wormold called to him.
The old man looked up. For a moment Wormold thought he was going to turn tail without a word. ‘What’s the matter, Hasselbacher?’ ‘Oh, it’s you, Mr Wormold. I was just thinking of you. Talk of the devil,’ he said, making a joke of it, but Wormold could have sworn that the devil had scared him.
‘You remember Mrs Severn, my secretary?’
‘The birthday party, yes, and the siphon. What are you doing up so late, Mr Wormold?’
‘We’ve been out to supper… a walk… and you?’
‘The same thing.’
Out of the vast tossing sky the sound of an engine came spasmodically down, increased, faded again, died out into the noise of wind and sea. Dr Hasselbacher said, ‘The plane from Santiago, but it’s very late. The weather must be bad in Oriente.’
‘Are you expecting anyone?’ Wormold asked.
‘No. No. Not expecting. Would you and Mrs Severn care to have a drink at my apartment?’
Violence had come and gone. The pictures were back in place, the tubular chairs stood around like awkward guests. The apartment had been reconstructed like a man for burial. Dr Hasselbacher poured out the whisky. ‘It is nice for Mr Wormold to have a secretary,’ he said. ‘Such a short time ago you were worried, I remember. Business was not so good. That new cleaner…’
‘Things change for no reason.’
He noticed for the first time the photograph of a young Dr Hasselbacher in the dated uniform of an officer in the First World War; perhaps it had been one of the pictures the intruders had taken off the wall. ‘I never knew you had been in the army, Hasselbacher.’
‘I had not finished my medical training, Mr Wormold, when the war came. It struck me as a very silly business curing men so that they could be killed sooner. One wanted to cure people so that they could live longer.’ ‘When did you leave Germany, Dr Hasselbacher?’ Beatrice asked. ‘In 1934. So I can plead not guilty, young lady, to what you are wondering.’
‘That was not what I meant.’
‘You must forgive me then. Ask Mr Wormold there was a time when I was not so suspicious. Shall we have some music?’
He put on a record of Tristan. Wormold thought of his wife; she was even less real than Raul. She had nothing to do with love and death, only with the Woman’s Home Journal, a diamond engagement ring, twilight-sleep. He looked across the room at Beatrice Severn, and she seemed to him to belong to the same world as the fatal drink, the hopeless journey from Ireland, the surrender in the forest. Abruptly Dr Hasselbacher stood up and pulled the plug from the wall. He said, ‘Forgive me. I am expecting a call. The music is too loud.’
‘A sick call?’
‘Not exactly.’ He poured out more whisky.
‘Have you started your experiments again, Hasselbacher?’ ‘No.’ He looked despairingly around. ‘I am sorry. There is no more soda water.’
‘I like it straight,’ Beatrice said. She went to the bookshelf. ‘Do you read anything but medical books, Dr Hasselbacher?’ ‘Very little. Heine, Goethe. All German. Do you read German, Mrs Severn?’
‘No. But you have a few English books.’
‘They were given me by a patient instead of a fee. I’m afraid I haven’t read them. Here is your whisky, Mrs Severn.’
She came away from the bookcase and took the whisky. ‘Is that your home, Dr Hasselbacher?’ She was looking at a Victorian coloured lithograph hanging beside young Captain Hasselbacher’s portrait.
‘I was born there. Yes. It is a very small town, some old walls, a castle in ruins..
‘I’ve been there,’ Beatrice said, ‘before the war. My father took us.