But all the way back to Stockholm, he wondered what had happened to Andrew Craig.
It was nearly 4.30 in the afternoon when Count Bertil Jacobsson had the answer to his mystery.
Alone of the members of the reception committee, to which a Foreign Office attaché had now been added, he had been impatient during the slow lunch for the Garretts in the Grand Hotel. His anxiety centred on returning to his office at Sturegatan 14, and commanding the telephone, and locating the missing Nobel laureate.
Now, driving his cane nervously into the green carpet of the Foundation reception corridor, he made his way to his telephone. The muffled thud of the cane heralded his arrival, and his secretary, Astrid Steen, materialized in the doorway of the reception office. She held aloft an envelope.
‘Telegram for you, sir.’
He took it from her, tore it open, and held the message before him. The origin, he saw at once, was Copenhagen.
He read the message:
DUE TO CIRCUMSTANCES BEYOND CONTROL HAVE CANCELLED FLIGHT TO STOCKHOLM STOP MUST REMAIN IN THIS CITY ENTIRE DAY STOP AM TAKING NORD EXPRESS TONIGHT AND WILL ARRIVE WITH MY SISTER IN LAW AT EIGHT FORTY FIVE TOMORROW MORNING STOP SORRY IF I HAVE INCONVENIENCED YOU STOP BEST REGARDS ANDREW CRAIG
He heard Mrs. Steen’s inquiry. ‘Anything wrong, sir?’
‘No-no-nothing. Mr. Craig has been delayed. He’ll be with us in the morning.’
He went on into his office, removed his overcoat, and forgot to greet old King Gustaf on the wall.
He settled in the swivel chair behind his desk, flattened the telegram on the ink blotter, and read it again. The mystery had been solved, and yet it was not solved at all. ‘Circumstances beyond control’ had made Andrew Craig cancel his flight. What circumstances? And what kind that were beyond control?
What in the devil had happened to Andrew Craig, anyway?
Count Bertil Jacobsson had the uneasy, indefinable feeling that things were not going as evenly this year as the last or, for that matter, the year before. The programme had not yet begun, and already it was out of line. Jacobsson did not like it. He did not like it at all.
3
THE telegram that Count Bertil Jacobsson read in Stockholm at 4.30 had been sent almost five hours earlier, at 11.43 in the morning, from a Danish modern bedroom on the sixth floor of the Tre Falke Hotel in Copenhagen. Although it was signed by Andrew Craig, he had had no part in its creation. It was written and dispatched by Leah Decker, his sister-in-law.
What awakened Andrew Craig from his slumber was Leah’s intense, high-pitched voice, in another room, reading the telegram aloud to someone unknown. She read the contents for approval, and the contents were approved. Eventually, Craig would deduce that the person unknown was Mr. Gates, the First Secretary of the United States Embassy in Copenhagen.
Fully aroused from his sleep, Craig tried to familiarize himself with his surroundings. He lay on the black quilt of a divan, his feet dangling over the edge, in a strange, overwhelmingly citron-coloured room, surrounded by severely angled, teakwood furniture, obviously produced in a factory teeming with cubists. The room was efficient, spotlessly clean, lifeless. His suit jacket, he realized, had been removed, and his shoes, also. His head throbbed, and his tongue had the leathery consistency of the tongue of a hunting boot. He had been drunk, he supposed, and now he was not quite sober, but sobering badly, and he was thirsty.
He listened to the two voices that came to him through the abbreviated hall connecting the next room.
A page arrived, and was given the telegram, and instructed to send it off posthaste. Leah worried that, having cancelled the flight, they might not obtain a train reservation. Mr. Gates assured her that the train reservation would be forthcoming, and if it was not, there was always another flight. Leah did not want to risk another flight. It was too quick. It would not give her brother-in-law time to rest. He required rest above all else. She implored Mr. Gates to try the Central Railway Station again, and Mr. Gates obliged her. He reminded the reservation desk that he was a representative of the American Embassy, and that two compartments on the Nord Express were sorely needed. There were several pauses, half-uttered phrases, and then it appeared that the compartments had been obtained.
The conversation next door was indistinct, and Craig did not strain to hear it. Suddenly, he heard light footsteps-Leah’s, he guessed-and he made an instant decision. He turned his face to the wall, closed his eyes tight, and feigned sleep. As a touch of realism, he simulated laboured breathing. Momentarily, he was aware of Leah’s unseen presence above him. He heard her sniff twice, clear her throat, and at last, he heard her leave.
When the voices in the next room resumed, this time more distinctly, he opened his eyes once more and listened again.
‘He’s out cold,’ Leah was saying. ‘He’ll be out for hours.’
‘Then we can go?’
‘I’m sure it’s safe.’
‘Very well. We’ll pick up the tickets at the Central Station. Then we’ll lunch at Oskar Davidsen’s. If there’s time, we can drive out to Elsinore. It’s no more than two hours round trip. You’re sure Mr. Craig wouldn’t want to come along?’
‘He’s got to sleep this off. Nothing else concerns me. This afternoon, and tonight on the train, will hardly be enough. I just hope the Nobel Foundation won’t be put off by the delay.’
‘They’ll be delighted to have you both at any time.’
‘I hope so.’
There was more indistinct talk, and finally movement, and the sound of the door opening and closing.
Andrew Craig lay still. He would give them plenty of time to leave, he decided. Besides, he was too enervated to rise. He wanted the beating in his temples to cease. Given time, it would. Of course, the thirst was distressing. Nevertheless, he would display willpower. He would wait ten minutes. He tried to moisten his tongue against the roof of his mouth, but that was no good, and at last he did so by rubbing his tongue along the inner lining of his cheeks. Ten minutes. He waited.
The couple of weeks in Miller’s Dam, before departure, were difficult to recall. The Nobel notification had caught him at the outset of his cycle. After Harriet’s death, when he had been recuperating, he had not drunk heavily, no more heavily than when she had lived. It was afterwards-all dressed up and no place to go-wasn’t that the old expression?-that whisky had made each day possible. In the first year, he had drunk blindly, all the time. When the pain had been replaced by conscious emptiness, he had fallen into the cycle. Lucius Mack had told him that it was a cycle. Or had it been Leah? Two weeks drunk and two weeks sober, well, mostly sober. In the last year, it had been three weeks drunk and one week sober, and he had added no more than twenty pages to the meagre pile that was entitled Return to Ithaca. He had been on his three-week drunk when the notification had come, and he was still on it, he guessed.
It was impossible to recapture more than fragments of the past, no matter how recent, when you had been steadily drinking. The whisky bottle was the all-inclusive holdall. Into it you could stuff writing, and sex, and hope, and memory, and soak and dissolve them beyond recognition. From the night of the telegram to the morning when he had been driven to Chicago, he could remember almost nothing. Somehow, certain faces were visible, those of Lucius Mack and Jake Binninger, buffers between himself and the outside press; that of Leah, fussing, nursing, complaining; that of Professor Alex Inglis, down from Joliet College, mutely worshipful, mutely imploring.
Yesterday morning-yes, yesterday-Lucius Mack had driven them to Chicago in his station-wagon. Leah had been in the best of spirits. She had worn a moss-green jersey suit, new, and the black broadcloth coat, new, that Craig had given her as a bon voyage gift and her due. (He had not actually bought it himself, but sat in a Milwaukee tavern while Lucius did the shopping and even laid out the money, an advance against the Nobel cheque.) Not the least of her good cheer was the promise Leah had extracted from Craig the night before, the promise that he would not drink, except socially, until the Nobel Ceremony was ended. These gifts, and the excitement, had served to relax Leah’s clenched, Slavic face, and her inflexible body. Her aspect was more feminine, and her pride in him-in the past he had resented it as a subtle pressure-gave him fleeting pride in himself, briefly, briefly, in the way that Harriet had so often given it to him.