‘Atomic submarines don’t need fuel.’
Quite right, old man, quite right. But wars always start a little behind the times. Have to be prepared for conventional weapons too. Then there’s economic intelligence -sugar, coffee, tobacco.’
‘You can find all that in the Government year-books.’ ‘We don’t trust them, old man. Then political intelligence. With your cleaners you’ve got the entre everywhere.’
‘Do you expect me to analyse the fluff?’
‘It may seem a joke to you, old man, but the main source of the French intelligence at the time of Dreyfus was a charwoman who collected the scraps out of the waste-paper baskets at the German Embassy.’ ‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘Hawthorne.’
‘But who are you?’
‘Well, you might say I’m setting up the Caribbean network. One moment.
Someone’s coming. I’ll wash. You slip into a closet. Mustn’t be seen together.’
‘We have been seen together.’
‘Passing encounter. Fellow-countrymen.’ He thrust Wormold into the compartment as he had thrust him into the lavatory, ‘It’s the drill, you know,’ and then there was silence except for the running tap. Wormold sat down. There was nothing else to do. When he was seated his legs still showed under the half door. A handle turned. Feet crossed the tiled floor towards the pissoir. Water went on running. Wormold felt an enormous bewilderment. He wondered why he had not stopped all this nonsense at the beginning. No wonder Mary had left him. He remembered one of their quarrels. ‘Why don’t you do something, act some way, any way at all? You just stand there…’ At least, he thought, this time I’m not standing, I’m sitting. But in any case what could he have said? He hadn’t been given time to get a word in. Minutes passed. What enormous bladders Cubans had, and how clean Hawthorne’s hands must be getting by this time. The water stopped running. Presumably he was drying his hands, but Wormold remembered there were no towels. That was another problem for Hawthorne but he would be up to it. All part of the drill. At last the feet passed towards the door. The door closed. ‘Can I come out?’ Wormold asked. It was like a surrender. He was under orders now.
He heard Hawthorne tiptoeing near. ‘Give me a few minutes to get away, old man. Do you know who that was? The policeman. A bit suspicious, eh?’ ‘He may have recognized my legs under the door. Do you think we ought to change trousers?’
‘Wouldn’t look natural’ Hawthorne said, ‘but you are getting the idea. I’m leaving the key of my room in the basin. Fifth floor Seville Biltmore. Just walk up. Ten tonight. Things to discuss. Money and so on. Sordid issues. Don’t ask for me at the desk.’
‘Don’t you need your key?’
‘Got a pass key. I’ll be seeing you.’
Wormold stood up in time to see the door close behind the elegant figure and the appalling slang. The key was there in the washbasin -Room 501.
At half-past nine Wormold went to Milly’s room to say good night. Here, where the duenna was in charge, everything was in order the candle had been lit before the statue of St Seraphina, the honey-coloured missal lay beside the bed, the clothes were eliminated as though they had never existed, and a faint smell of eau-de-Cologne blew about like incense.
‘You’ve got something on your mind,’ Milly said. ‘You aren’t still worrying, are you, about Captain Segura?’
‘You never pull my leg, do you, Milly?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Everybody else seems to.’
‘Did Mother?’
‘I suppose so. In the early days.’
‘Does Dr Hasselbacher?’
He remembered the Negro limping slowly by.
He said, ‘Perhaps. Sometimes.’
‘It’s a sign of affection, isn’t it?’
‘Not always. I remember at school -‘ He stopped.
‘What do you remember, Father?’
‘Oh, a lot of things.’
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it. But somehow, through no virtue of his own, he had never taken that course. Lack of character perhaps. Schools were said to construct character by chipping off the edges. His edges had been chipped, but the result had not, he thought, been character only shapelessness, like an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art. ‘Are you happy, Milly?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes.’
‘At school too?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Nobody pulls your hair now?’
‘Of course not.’
‘And you don’t set anyone on fire?’
‘That was when I was thirteen,’ she said with scorn. ‘What’s worrying you, Father?’
She sat up in bed, wearing a white nylon dressing-gown. He loved her when the duenna was there, and he loved her even more when the duenna was absent: he couldn’t afford the time not to love. It was as if he had come with her a little way on a journey that she would finish alone. The separating years approached them both, like a station down the line, all gain for her and all loss for him. That evening hour was real, but not Hawthorne, mysterious and absurd, not the cruelties of police-stations and governments, the scientists who tested the new H-bomb on Christmas Island, Khrushchev who wrote notes: these seemed less real to him than the inefficient tortures of a school-dormitory. The small boy with the damp towel whom he had just remembered -where was he now? The cruel come and go like cities and thrones and powers, leaving their ruins behind them. They had no permanence. But the clown whom he had seen last year with Milly at the circus that clown was permanent, for his act never changed. That was the way to live; the clown was unaffected by the vagaries of public men and the enormous discoveries of the great.
Wormold began to make faces in the glass.
‘What on earth are you doing, Father?’
‘I wanted to make myself laugh.’
Milly giggled. ‘I thought you were being sad and serious.’ ‘That’s why I wanted to laugh. Do you remember the clown last year, Milly?’
‘He walked off the end of a ladder and fell in a bucket of whitewash.’ ‘He falls in it every night at ten o’clock. We should all be clowns, Milly. Don’t ever learn from experience.’
‘Reverend Mother says..
‘Don’t pay any attention to her. God doesn’t learn from experience, does He, or how could He hope anything of man? It’s the scientists who add the digits and make the same sum who cause the trouble. Newton discovering gravity he learned from experience and after that…’
‘I thought it was from an apple.’
‘It’s the same thing. It was only a matter of time before Lord
Rutherford went and split the atom. He had learned from experience too, and so did the men of Hiroshima. If only we had been born clowns, nothing bad would happen to us except a few bruises and a smear of whitewash. Don’t learn from experience, Milly. It ruins our peace and our lives.’
‘What are you doing now?’
‘I’m trying to waggle my ears. I used to be able to do it. But the trick doesn’t work any longer.’
‘Are you still unhappy about Mother?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Are you still in love with her?’
‘Perhaps. Now and then.’
‘I suppose she was very beautiful when she was young.’
‘She can’t be old now. Thirty-six.’
‘That’s pretty old.’
‘Don’t you remember her at all?’
‘Not very well. She was away a lot, wasn’t she?’
‘A good deal.’
‘Of course I pray for her.’
‘What do you pray? That she’ll come back?’
‘Oh no, not that. We can do without her. I pray that she’ll be a good Catholic again.’
‘I’m not a good Catholic.’
‘Oh, that’s different. You are invincibly ignorant.’