Beatrice said, ‘What a lot of photographs you had tucked away -of her.’ ‘I used to feel it was like killing someone to tear up a photograph. Of course I know now that it’s quite different.’
‘What’s this red box?’
‘She gave me some cuff-links once. They were stolen, but I kept the box.
I don’t know why. In a way I’m glad to see all this stuff go.’
‘The end of a life.’
‘Of two lives.’
‘What’s this?’
‘An old programme.’
‘Not so old. The Tropicana. May I keep it?’
‘You are too young to keep things,’ Wormold said. ‘They accumulate too much. Soon you find you have nowhere left to live among the junk-boxes.’ ‘I’ll risk it. That was a wonderful evening.’
Milly and Wormold saw her off at the airport. Rudy disappeared unobtrusively following the man with the enormous suitcase. It was a hot afternoon and people stood around drinking daiquiri’s. Even since Captain Segura’s proposal of marriage Milly’s duenna had disappeared, but after her disappearance the child, whom he had hoped to see again, who had set fire to Thomas Earl Parkman, junior, had not returned. It was as though Milly had outgrown both characters simultaneously. She said with grown-up tact, ‘I want to find some magazines for Beatrice,’ and busied herself at a bookstall with her back turned.
‘I’m sorry,’ Wormold said. ‘I’ll tell them when I get back that you know nothing. I wonder where you’ll be sent next.’
‘The Persian Gulf perhaps. Basra.’
‘Why the Persian Gulf?’
‘It’s their idea of purgatory. Regeneration through sweat and tears. Do Phastkleaners have an agency at Basra?’
‘I’m afraid Phastkleaners won’t keep me on.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’ve got enough, thanks to poor Raul, for Milly’s year in Switzerland.
After that I don’t know.’
‘You could open one of those practical joke shops -you know, the bloodstained thumb and the spilt ink and the fly on the lump of sugar. How ghastly goings-away are. Please don’t wait any longer.’ ‘Shall I see you again?’
‘I’ll try not to go to Basra. I’ll try to stay in the typists’ pool with
Angelica and Ethel and Miss Jenkinson. When I’m lucky I shall be off at six and we could meet at the Corner House for a cheap snack and go to the movies. It’s one of those ghastly lives, isn’t it, like UNESCO and modern writers in conference? It’s been fun here with you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Now go away.’
He went to the magazine stall and found Milly. ‘We’re off,’ he said.
‘But, Beatrice -she hasn’t got her magazines.’
‘She doesn’t want them.’
‘I didn’t say good-bye.’
‘Too late. She’s passed the emigration now. You’ll see her in London.
Perhaps.’
It was as if they spent all their remaining time in airports. Now it was the K. L. M. flight and it was three in the morning and the sky was pink with the reflection of neon-lighted stands and landing-flares, and it was Captain Segura who was doing the ‘seeing off’. He tried to make the official occasion seem as private as possible, but it was still a little like a deportation. Segura said reproachfully, ‘You drove me to this.’
‘Your methods are gentler than Carter’s or Dr Braun’s. What are you doing about Dr Braun?’
‘He finds it necessary to return to Switzerland on a matter to do with his precision instruments.’
‘With a passage booked on to Moscow?’
‘Not necessarily. Perhaps Bonn. Or Washington. Or even Bucharest. I don’t know. Whoever they are they are pleased, I believe, with your drawings.’ ‘Drawings?’
‘Of the constructions in Oriente. He will also take the credit for getting rid of a dangerous agent.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. Cuba will be a little quieter without you both, but I shall miss
Milly.’
‘Milly would never have married you, Segura. She doesn’t really like cigarette-cases made of human skin.’
‘Did you ever hear whose skin?’
‘No.’
‘A police-officer who tortured my father to death. You see, he was a poor man. He belonged to the torturable class.’
Milly joined them, carrying Time, Life, Paris-Match and Quick. It was nearly 3.15 and there was a band of grey in the sky over the flare-path where the false dawn had begun. The pilots moved out to the plane and the air-hostesses followed. He knew the three of them by sight; they had sat with Beatrice at the Tropicana weeks ago. A loudspeaker announced in English and Spanish the departure of flight 396 to Montreal and Amsterdam. ‘I have a present for each of you,’ Segura said. He gave them two little packets. They opened them while the plane wheeled over Havana; the chain of lights along the marine parade swung out of sight and the sea fell like a curtain on all that past. In Wormold’s packet was a miniature bottle of Grant’s Standfast, and a bullet which had been fired from a police-gun. In Milly’s was a small silver horseshoe inscribed with her initials.
‘Why the bullet?’ Milly asked.
‘Oh, a joke in rather doubtful taste. All the same, he wasn’t a bad chap,’ Wormold said.
‘But not right for a husband,’ the grown-up Milly replied.
They had looked at him curiously when he gave his name, and then they had put him into a lift and taken him, a little to his surprise, down and not up. Now he sat in a long basement-corridor watching a red light over a door; when it turned green, they had told him, he could go in, but not before. People who paid no attention to the light went in and went out; some of them carried papers and some of them brief-cases, and one was in uniform, a colonel. Nobody looked at him; he felt that he embarrassed them. They ignored him as one ignores a malformed man. But presumably it was not his limp.
Hawthorne came down the passage from the lift. He looked rumpled as though he had slept in his clothes; perhaps he had been on an all night plane from Jamaica. He too would have ignored Wormold if Wormold had not spoken. ‘Hullo, Hawthorne.’
‘Oh, you, Wormold.’
‘Did Beatrice arrive safely?’
‘Yes. Naturally.’
‘Where is she, Hawthorne?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘What’s happening here? It looks like a court martial.’
‘It is a court-martial,’ Hawthorne said frostily and went into the room with the light. The clock stood at 11.25. He had been summoned for eleven. He wondered whether there was anything they could do to him beyond sacking him, which presumably they had already done. That was probably what they were trying to decide in there. They could hardly charge him under the Official Secrets Act. He had invented secrets, he hadn’t given them away. Presumably they could make it difficult for him if he tried to find a job abroad, and jobs at home were not easy to come by at his age, but he had no intention of giving them back their money. That was for Milly; he felt now as though he had earned it in his capacity as a target for Carter’s poison and Carter’s bullet. At 11.35 the Colonel came out; he looked hot and angry as he strode towards the lift. There goes a hanging judge, thought Wormold. A man in a tweed jacket emerged next. He had blue eyes very deeply sunk and he needed no uniform to mark him as a sailor. He looked at Wormold accidentally and looked quickly away again like a man of integrity. He called out ‘Wait for me, Colonel’ and went down the passage with a very slight roll as though he were back on a bridge in rough weather. Hawthorne came next, in conversation with a very young man, and then Wormold was suddenly breathless because the light was green and Beatrice was there.
‘You are to go in,’ she said.
‘What’s the verdict?’
‘I can’t speak to you now. Where are you staying?’
He told her.
‘I’ll come to you at six. If I can.’
‘Am I to be shot at dawn?’
‘Don’t worry. Go in now. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’