He had taken off his silk scarf and was wiping his face with it, and I wondered what he was going to do now that he’d caught up with me. I watched him remove his parka, and then • he was sitting there in a thick woollen bush shirt buttoned at the wrist, staring at nothing. He looked desperately tired, the high cheekbones staring through the sallow, tight-drawn skin and the shadows deep under the eyes.
‘Have you told Lands I’m here?’ I asked him, and my voice sounded dry and hoarse.
‘No.’ He reached into the pocket of his parka and produced a packet of cigarettes and offered it to me. It was an automatic gesture and when I shook my head, he put a cigarette in his mouth and sat there, staring at the floor, as though too tired to light it. ‘I wanted to talk to you first,’ he said. And then after a while he reached into his trouser pocket for a match and struck it with a flick of his thumb nail against the head. The flare of it as he lit the cigarette momentarily softened the contours of his face and showed me the eyes withdrawn into some secret pocket of thought. His hands trembled slightly and he drew the smoke into his lungs as though his nerves were crying out for it. And then, abruptly, he said, ‘Why did you jump that plane and come up here? Didn’t you believe what I told you?’ He was still staring at the floor.
I didn’t say anything and silence hung over the room so that the metallic ticking of the alarm clock sounded unnaturally loud and I could hear the murmur of breathing from the next room. The stillness of the world outside seemed to creep in through the flimsy wooden walls, and all the time I was wondering why he hadn’t told Lands, why he had needed to see me first.
‘Why didn’t you believe me?’ he demanded sharply, as though the silence were getting on his nerves. ‘You didn’t believe, did you?’
‘It’s not a question of whether I believed you or not,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘No, I guess not.’ His hands gripped the silk scarf as though he wanted to tear it in shreds. And then he muttered something that sounded like ‘Fate’ and shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe it’s true,’ he breathed. ‘That old man’s son, sitting there at his radio, listening to the reports, waiting for it to happen.’
‘Do you mean my father?’
But he didn’t seem to hear. ‘It’s like a nightmare,’ he whispered. And then he turned his head, looking straight at me, and said, ‘I suppose you think I killed them or something?’ He gave a quick, harsh laugh.
It wasn’t said jokingly, but with sudden violence, and the harshness of that laugh shocked me as much as the words.
‘Because my name is Laroche, eh?’ he added, and there was bitterness in his voice. ‘Oh, you needn’t look so startled,’ he said. ‘I knew what your father had been thinking as soon as I read Ledder’s report.’ He dropped the scarf, reached forward and gripped hold of my wrist, speaking very earnestly. ‘You must believe this. I’m not responsible for their death. That’s the truth. It’s nothing to do with me.’ And he repeated it. ‘I’m not responsible.’
‘It never occurred to me you were.’ I was staring at him, appalled that he’d found it necessary to make such a declaration.
‘No?’ He stared at me, his eyes searching my face. ‘Then why are you here? Why, when nobody believes you, do you tell Paule that I’m a liar and that her father is still alive. Man Dieu!
And then to say you are employed by Staffen and come up the line when you are booked out to Montreal… Do you think I don’t know what’s been planted in your mind? C’est incroya-ble!’ he breathed, and he reached out to the table between the beds and stubbed his cigarette out viciously in the tobacco tin that served as an ash tray.
He picked up his silk scarf and wiped his face again. I think he was sweating as much with exhaustion as the heat of the room. ‘It would have been better if you’d told Mack the truth this afternoon,’ he said wearily. ‘Then we could have had it out, there in that office, just the three of us. If you’d told him the reason you were here …’
‘But I did tell him,’ I said. Surely he couldn’t have sat there in that office and not heard a word I was saying? ‘I came because my father picked up a message from Briffe and I — ‘
‘That’s not the reason.’ He said it impatiently, brushing my explanation aside with an angry movement of his hand.
‘But it is the reason,’ I insisted.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ he cried. ‘I’m not a fool. You couldn’t be that much concerned about a man you’d never met before. How old are you?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Twenty-three,’ I fold him.
‘And I bet you’ve never been out of England before in your life.’
‘Yes, I have,’ I said. ‘Once. A holiday in Belgium.’
‘A holiday in Belgium!’ He repeated it in a way that made me feel small, remembering that he must have flown thousands of miles over unmapped territory. ‘And you expect me to believe that you hitched a ride in a trans-Atlantic flight and came all the way over to Canada, where you don’t know a soul, just because of a man you’d never met, never even heard of till your father told you about him. You’d reported the matter to the authorities. You’d have left it at that if you hadn’t been driven by something more personal.’
‘But if they’re still alive — ‘
They’re dead.’ He said it harshly.
‘Then how could my father have picked up that transmission?’
But he didn’t seem interested in the fact that Briffe had made contact with the outside world. ‘Why did you lie to him?’ he demanded.
‘Lie to him?’
‘Yes, to McGovern.’
‘But I didn’t lie to him,’ I cried. ‘I told him the truth. My father died because — ‘
‘You lied to him,’ he almost shouted at me. ‘You told him you didn’t know the name of the man who’d accompanied your grandfather.’
‘Well, it’s true,’ I said. ‘I’d never heard of the Ferguson Expedition until I talked to Ledder at Goose.’
‘You’d never heard of it!’ He stared at me as though I’d said the earth was flat. ‘But that’s absurd. You’ve admitted your father was obsessed by Labrador. You couldn’t have grown up not knowing the reason for that obsession. And then, when you heard about that transmission — you must have known the reason he invented it otherwise you’d never have come all this way…’
‘He didn’t invent it,’ I declared hotly.
‘Well, imagined it then.’
‘He didn’t imagine it either.’ I was suddenly trembling with anger. Couldn’t he understand that this was real, so real that it had brought about my father’s death? ‘He picked up a transmission and recorded it in his log. And that transmission was from Briffe. I don’t care what you or anybody else says — ‘
‘He couldn’t have.’ His voice was pitched suddenly higher. ‘The radio was in the aircraft when it sank. I told you that before. He couldn’t possibly have transmitted.’ It was almost as though he were trying to convince himself, and I stared at him, the sweat suddenly cold on my body. He hadn’t said because Briffe was dead. He’d simply said that the radio was in the plane when it sank. ‘And what about Briffe?’ I said.
But he only repeated what he’d said already. ‘He couldn’t have transmitted that message.’ It was said softly this time, to himself. He was so wrought up that he hadn’t even understood the significance of my question. And then his mind switched abruptly back to the Ferguson Expedition. It seemed to worry him that I hadn’t known about it. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he murmured. ‘You couldn’t possibly have grown up not knowing about your grandfather and what happened to him.’
‘Well, I did,’ I said. It seemed so unimportant. ‘What difference does it make anyway? All I’m concerned about — ‘
‘What difference does it make?’ He was staring at me and the perspiration was gathering on his forehead again. ‘It means …’ He shook his head. ‘It’s not possible,’ he murmured. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence.’ And then he looked at me and said, ‘Why didn’t they tell you?’ He seemed unable to leave the subject alone.
And for some reason it seemed to me important at that moment to convince him. ‘I think it was my mother,’ I said. And I told him how she’d tried to keep the final log book from me. ‘She was afraid of Labrador. I think she didn’t want me involved and made my father promise — ‘