Granger had got his news: he began to write. "I am sorry," the colonel said, "that is not for printing: that is for background."*
"But, colonel," Granger protested, "that's news. We can help you there." "No, it is a matter for the diplomats." "What harm can it do?"
The French correspondents were at a loss: they could speak very little English. The colonel had broken the rules. They muttered angrily together.
"lam no judge," the colonel said. "Perhaps the American newspapers would say, 'Oh, the French are always complaining, always begging.' And in Paris the Communists would accuse, 'The French are spilling their blood for America and America will not even send a second-hand helicopter.' It does no good. At the end of it we should still have HO
helicopters, and the enemy would still be there, fifty miles from Hanoi."
"At least I can print that, can't I, that you need helicopters bad?"
"You can say," the colonel said, "that six months ago we had three helicopters and now we have one. One," he repeated with a kind of amazed bitterness. "You can say that if a man is wounded in this fighting, not seriously wounded, just wounded, he knows that he is probably a dead man. Twelve hours, twenty-four hours perhaps, on a stretcher to the ambulance, then bad tracks, a breakdown, perhaps an ambush, gangrene. It is better to be killed outright." The French correspondents leant forward, trying to understand. "You can write that," he said, looking all the more venomous for his physical beauty.
"Interpretez,"* he ordered, and walked out of the room, leaving the captain the unfamiliar task of translating from English into French.
"Got him on the raw," said Granger with satisfaction, and he went into a Corner by the bar to write his telegram. Mine didn't take long: there was nothing I could write from Phat Diem that the censors would pass. If the story had
seemed good enough I could have flown to Hong Kong and sent it from there, but was any news good enough to risk expulsion? I doubted it. Expulsion meant the end of a whole life: it meant the victory of Pyle, and there, when I returned to my hotel, waiting in my pigeon-hole, was in fact his vie-tory, the end-the congratulatory telegram of promotion. Dante* never thought up that turn of the screw* for his condemned lovers. Paolo was never promoted to the Purga-torio*
I went upstairs to my bare room and the dripping cold-water tap (there was no hot water in Hanoi) and sat on the edge of my bed with the bundle of the mosquito-net like a swollen cloud overhead. I was to be the new foreign editor, arriving every afternoon at half past three, at that grim Victorian building* near Blackfriars station* with a plaque of Erord Salisbury by the lift. They had sent the good news on from Saigon, and I wondered whether it had already reached Phuong's ears. I was to be a reporter no longer: I was to have opinions, and in return for that empty privilege I was-deprived of my last hope in the contest with Pyle. I had experience to match his virginity, age was as good a card to play in the sexual game as youth, but now I hadn't even the limited future of twelve more months to offer, and a future was trumps. I envied the most homesick officer condemned to the chance of death. I would have liked to weep, but the ducts were as dry as the hotwater pipes. Oh, they could have home-1 only wanted my room in the rue Catinat. It was cold after dark in Hanoi and the lights were lower than those of Saigon, more suited to the darker clothes of the women and the fact of war. I walked up the rue Gambetta* to the Paix Bar*-1 didn't want to drink in the Met-ropole with the senior French officers, their wives and their girls, and as I reached the bar I was aware of the distant drumming of the guns out towards Hoa Binh. In the day they were drowned in trafficnoises, but everything was quiet now except for the tring of 'bicycle-bells where the trishaw-drivers plied for hire. Pietri sat in his usual place. He had an odd elongated skull which sat on his shoulders like a pear on a dish; he was a Surete officer and was married to a pretty Tonkinese who owned the Paix Bar. He was another man who had no particular desire to go home. He was a Corsican, but he preferred Marseilles,* and to Marseilles he preferred any day his seat on the pavement in the rue Gambetta. I wondered whether he already knew the contents of my telegram. "Quatre Vingt-et-un?" he asked.
"Why not?"
We began to throw and it seemed impossible to me that I could ever have a life again, away from the rue Gambetta and the rue Catinat, the flat taste of vermouth cassis, the homely click of dice, and the gunfire travelling like a clock-hand around the horizon. I said, "I'm going back."
"Home?" Pietri asked, throwing a four-two-one.* "No. England." PART TWO
CHAPTER I
Pyle had invited himself for what he called a drink, but siftoew very well he didn't really drink. After the passage of weeks that fantastic meeting in Phat Diem seemed hardly believable: even the details of the conversation were less clear. They were like the missing letters on a Roman tomb and I the archaeologist filling in the gaps according to the bias of my scholarship.* It even occurred to me that he had been pulling my leg, and that the conversation had been an elalaborate and humorous disguise for his real purpose, for it .was already the gossip of Saigon that he was engaged in one of those services so ineptly called secret. Perhaps he was arranging American arms for a Third Force-the Bishop's brass band, all that was left of his young scared unpaid levies. The telegram that had awaited me in Hanoi I kept in my pocket. There was no point in telling Phuong, for that would be to poison the few months we had left with tears and quarrels. I wouldn't even go for my exit-permit till the last moment in case she had a relation in the immigration-office. I told her, "Pyle's coming at six."
"I will go and see lay sister," she said. "I expect he'd like to see you."
"He does not like me or my family. When you were away he did not come once to my sister, although she had invited him. She was very hurt." "You needn't go out."
"If he wanted to see me, he would have asked us to the Majestic. He wants to talk to you privately-about business." "What is his business?"
"People say he imports a great many things." "What things?" "Drugs, medicines..."
"Those are for the trachoma teams in the north." "Perhaps. The Customs* must not open them. They are diplomatic parcels. But once there was a mistake-the man was discharged. The First Secretary threatened to stop all imports." "What was in the case?" "Plastic."*
I said idly, "What did they want plastic for?" When Phuong had gone, I wrote home. A man from Renter's* was leaving for Hong Kong in a few days and he could mail my letter from there. I knew my appeal was hopeless, but I was not going to reproach myself later for not taking every possible measure. I wrote to the Managing Editor that this was the wrong moment to change their correspondent. General de Lattre was dying in Paris: the French were about to withdraw altogether from Hoa Binh: the north had never been in greater danger. I wasn't suitable, I told him, for a foreign editor-1 was a reporter, I had no real opinions about anything. On the last page I even appealed to him on personal grounds, although it was unlikely that any human sympathy could survive under the strip-light,* among the green eye-shades and the stereotyped phrases-"the good of the paper,"
"the situation de-mands..."
I wrote: "For private reasons I am very unhappy at he-ing moved from Vietnam. I don't think I can do my best work in England, where there will be not only financial but family strains. Indeed, if I could afford it I would resign rather than return to the U. K. I only mention this as showing the strength of my objection. I don't think you have found me a bad correspondent, and this is the first favour I have ever asked of you." Then I looked over my article on the battle of Phat Diem, so that I could send it out to be posted under a Hong Kong date-line. The French would not seriously object now-the siege had been raised: a defeat could be played as a victory. Then I tore up the last page of my letter to the editor: it was no use-the 'private reasons' would become only the subject of sly jokes. Every correspondent, it was assumed, had his local girl. The editor would joke to the night-editor,* who would take the envious thought back to his semi-detached villa at Streatham* and climb into bed with it beside the faithful wife he had carried with him years back from Glasgow. I could see so well the