Suddenly his nightmares multiplied unreasonably. The butane, he thought. Christ, the butane! While the boys were preparing the boat, he had glimpsed two cylinders stowed in the front hold beside the water-tanks, presumably for cooking Luigi's lobsters. Fool that he was, he had made nothing of them till now. He worked it out. Butane is heavier than air. All cylinders leak. It's just a question of degree. With this sea pounding the bows they leak faster, and the escaped gas will now be lying in the bilge about two feet from the spark of the engine, with a nice blend of oxygen to assist combustion. Lizzie had slipped from his grasp and stood astern. The sea was suddenly crowded. Out of nowhere, a fleet of fishing junks had gathered, and she was gazing at them earnestly. Grabbing her arm he hauled her back to the cover of the cabin.
'Where do you think you are?' he shouted. 'Bloody Cowes?
She studied him a moment, then gently kissed him, then kissed him again.
'You calm down,' she warned. She kissed him a third time, muttered 'Yes,' as if her expectations had been fulfilled, then sat quiet for a while, looking at the deck but keeping hold of his hand.
Jerry reckoned they were making five knots into the wind. A small plane zoomed overhead. Holding her out of sight he looked up sharply, but was too late to read the markings.
'And good morning to you,' he thought.
They were rounding the last point, tossing and groaning in the spray. Once, the propellers lifted clean out of the water with a roar. As they hit the sea again, the engine faltered, choked, but decided to stay alive. Touching Lizzie's shoulder Jerry pointed ahead of them to where the bare, steep island of Po Toi loomed like a cutout against the cloud-torn sky: two peaks, sheer from the water, the larger to the south, and a saddle between. The sea had turned iron blue and the wind ripped over it, slapping the breath from their mouths and hurling spray at them like hail. On the port bow lay Beaufort Island: a lighthouse, a jetty, no inhabitants. The wind dropped as though it had never been. Not a breeze greeted them as they entered the unruffled water of the island's lee. The sun's heat was direct and harsh. Ahead of them, perhaps a mile, lay the mouth of Po Toi's main bay, and behind it, the low brown ghosts of China's islands. Soon they could make out a whole untidy fleet of junks and cruise boats jamming the bay, as the first jingle of drums and cymbals and uncoordinated chanting floated to them across the water. On the hill behind lay the shanty village, its tin roofs twinkling, and on its own small headland stood one solid building, the temple of Tin Hau, with a bamboo scaffold lashed round it in a rudimentary grandstand, and a large crowd with a pall of smoke hanging over it and dabs of gold between.
'Which side was it?' he asked her.
'I don't know. We climbed to a house and walked from there.'
Each time he spoke to her he looked at her, but now she avoided his gaze. Tapping the coxswain on the shoulder he pointed the course he wanted him to take. The boy at once began protesting. Squaring to him, Jerry showed him a bunch of money, pretty well all he had left. With an ill grace, the boy swung across the mouth of the harbour; weaving between the boats toward a small granite headland where a tumbledown jetty offered a risky landing. The din of the festival was much louder. They could smell charcoal and suckling pig, and hear concerted bursts of laughter, but for the time being the crowd was out of sight to them, as they were to the crowd.
'Here!' he yelled. 'Put in here. Now! Now!'
The jetty leaned drunkenly as they clambered on to it. They had not even reached land before their boat had turned for home. Nobody said goodbye. They climbed up the rock, hand in hand, and walked straight into a money game that was being watched by a large and laughing crowd. At the centre stood a clownish old man with a bag of coins and he was throwing them down the rock one by one while barefooted boys hurled themselves after them, pushing each other almost to the cliff-edge in their zeal.
'They took a boat,' Guillam said. 'Rockhurst has interviewed the proprietor. The proprietor is a friend of Westerby, and yes it was Westerby and a beautiful girl, and they wanted to go to Po Toi for Tin Hau.'
'And how did Rockhurst play that?' Smiley asked.
'Said in that case it wasn't the couple he was looking for. Bowed out. Disappointed. The harbour police have also belatedly reported sighting it on a course for the festival.'
'Want us to put up a spotter plane, George?' Martello asked nervously. 'Navy int. have all sorts standing by.'
Murphy had a bright suggestion. 'Why don't we just go right in with choppers and scoop Nelson off that end junk?' he demanded.
'Murphy, shut up,' Martello said.
'They're making for the island,' Smiley said firmly. 'We know they are. I don't think we need aircover to prove it.'
Martello was not satisfied. 'Then maybe we should send a couple of people out to that island, George. Maybe we ought to do a little interfering finally.'
Fawn was standing stock still. Even his fists had stopped working.
'No,' said Smiley.
At Martello's side Sam Collins's grin grew a little thinner.
'Any reason?' Martello asked.
'Right up to the last minute, Ko has one sanction. He can signal his brother not to come ashore,' Smiley said. 'The merest hint of a disturbance on the island could persuade him to do that.'
Martello gave a nervous, angry sigh. He had put aside the pipe he sometimes smoked and was drawing heavily on Sam's supply of brown cigarettes, which seemed to be endless.
'George, what does this man want?' he demanded in exasperation. 'Is this a blackmail thing now, a disruption? I don't see a category here.' A dreadful thought struck him. His voice dropped and he pointed with the full length of his arm across the room. 'Now just don't tell me we got one of these new ones on our hands, for Christ's sakes! Don't tell me he's one of those cold-war converts with a middle-aged mission to wash his soul in public. Because if he is, and we are going to read this guy's frank life story in The Washington Post next week, George, I personally am going to put the whole Fifth Fleet on that island, if that's what it takes to hold him down.' He turned to Murphy. 'I have contingencies, right?'
'Right.'
'George, I want a landing party on standby. You guys can come aboard or stay home. Please yourselves.'
Smiley stared at Martello, then at Guillam with his strapped and, useless arm, then at Fawn, who was poised like a diver at the end of a springboard, eyes half closed and heels together, while he lifted himself slowly up and down on his toes.
'Fawn and Collins,' Smiley said at last.
'You two boys take them down to the aircraft carrier and hand them right over to the people there. Murphy comes back.'
A smoke-cloud marked the place where Collins had been sitting. Where Fawn had stood, two squash balls slowly rolled a distance before coming to a halt.
'God help us all,' somebody murmured fervently. It was Guillam, but Smiley ignored him.
The lion was three-men long and the crowd was laughing because it nipped at them and because self-appointed picadors were prodding it with sticks while it lolloped in dance-steps down the narrow path; to the clatter of the drums and cymbals. Reaching the headland, the procession slowly turned itself and started to retrace its steps, and at this point Jerry drew Lizzie quickly into the middle of it, bending low in order to make less of his height. The track was mud and full of puddles. Soon the dance was leading them past the temple and down concrete steps toward a sand beach where the suckling pigs were being roasted.
'Which way?' he asked her.
She guided him quickly left, out of the dance, along the back of a shanty village and over a wooden bridge across an inlet. They climbed along a fringe of cypress trees, Lizzie leading, until they were alone again, standing over the perfect horseshoe bay, looking down on Ko's Admiral Nelson where she lay at the very centre, like a grand lady among the hundreds of pleasure boats and junks around her. There was nobody visible on deck, not even crew. A clutch of grey police boats, five or six of them, was anchored further out to sea.
And why not, thought Jerry, since this was a festival? She had let go his hand and, when he turned to her, she was still staring at Ko's launch and he saw the shadow of confusion in her face.
'Is this really the way he brought you?' he asked.
It was the way, she said, and turned to him to look, to confirm or weigh things in her mind. Then with her forefinger she gravely traced his lips, at the centre of them where she had kissed them. 'Jesus,' she said, and as gravely shook her head.
They started climbing again. Glancing up, Jerry saw the brown island peak deceptively near, and on the hillside, groups of rice terraces gone to ruin. They entered a small village populated by nothing but surly dogs, and the bay vanished from sight. The school house was open and empty. Through the doorway, they saw charts of fighting aircraft. Washing jars stood on the step. Cupping her hands, Lizzie rinsed her face. The huts were slung with wire and brick to anchor them against typhoons. The path turned to sand and the going grew harder.
'Still right?' he asked.
'It's just up,' she said, as if she were sick of telling him. 'It's just up, and then the house, and bingo. I mean, Christ, what do you think I am, a bloody nitwit?'
'I won't say a thing,' said Jerry. He put his arm round her and she pressed in to him, giving herself exactly as she had done on the dancing floor.
They heard a blare of music from the temple as somebody tested the loudspeakers, and after it the wail of a slow tune. The bay was in view again. A crowd had gathered on the shore. Jerry saw more puffs of smoke and, in the windless heat of this side of the island, caught a whiff of joss. The water was blue and clear and calm. Round it, white lights burned on poles. The Ko launch had not stirred, nor had the police.
'See him?' he asked.
She was studying the crowd. She shook her head.
'Probably having a kip after lunch,' she said carelessly.
The beating of the sun was ferocious. When they entered the shadow of the hillside it was like a sudden dusk, and when they reached the sunlight it stung their faces like the heat of a close fire. The air was alive with dragonflies, the hillside strewn with big boulder, but where bushes grew they wound and straggled everywhere, producing rich trumpets, red and white and yellow. Old picnic cans lay in profusion.
'And that's the house you meant?'
'I told you,' she said.