"Is it a game?" I asked.
"I don't trust him with the gun," Pyle said, "if they are coming."
"Ever used a sten?" "No."
"That's fine. Nor have 1. I hope it's loaded-we wouldn't know how to reload." The guards had quietly accepted the loss of the gun. The one lowered his rifle and laid it across his things; the other slumped against the wall and shut his eyes as though like a child he believed himself invisible in the dark. Perhaps he was glad to have no more responsibility. Somewhere far away the bren started again-three bursts and
then silence. The second guard screwed his eyes closer shut.
"They don't know we can't use it," Pyle said. "They are supposed to be on our side." "I thought you didn't have a side." "Touche,"* I said. "I wish the Viets knew it." "What's happening out there?"
I quoted again tomorrow's Extreme-Orient: "A post fifty kilometres outside Saigon was attacked and temporarily captured last night by Vietminh irregulars." "Do you think it would be safer in the fields?" "It would be terribly wet." "You don't seem worried," Pyle said. "I'm scared stiff-but things are better tha^ they might be. They don't usually attack more than three posts in a night. Our chances have improved." "What's that?" It was the sound of a heavy car coming up the road, driving towards Saigon. I went to the rifle slit and looked down, just as a tank went by.
"The patrol," I said. The gun in the turret shifted now to this side, now to that. I wanted to call out to them, but what was the good? They hadn't room on board for two useless civilians. The earth floor shook a Irttle as they passed, and they had gone. I looked at my watch-eight fifty-one, and waited, straining to read* when the light flapped. It was like judging the distance of lightning by the delay before the thunder. It was nearly four minutes before the gun opened up. Once I thought I detected a bazooka replying, then all was quiet again.
"When they come back," Pyle said, "we could signal them for a lift to the camp." An explosion set the floor shaking. "If they come back," I said. "That sounded like a mine." When I looked at my
watch again it had passed nine fifteen and the tank had not returned. There had been no more firing.
I sat down beside Pyle and stretched out my legs. "We'd better try to sleep," I said.
"There's nothing else we can do." "I'm not happy about the guards," Pyle said. "They are all right so long as the Viets don't turn up. Put the sten under your leg for safety." I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself somewhere else-sitting up in one of the fourth-class compartments the German railways ran before Hitler came to power, in the days when one was young and sat up all night without melancholy, when waking dreams were full of hope and not of fear. This was the hour when Phuong always set about preparing my evening pipes. I wondered whether a letter was waiting for me-1 hoped not, for I knew what a letter would contain, and so long as none arrived I could day-dream of the impossible. "Are you asleep?" Pyle asked. "No."
"Don't you think we ought to pull up the ladder?" "I begin to understand why they don't. It's the only way out."
"I wish that tank would come back." "It won't now."
I tried not to look at my watch except at long intervals, and the intervals were never as long as they had seemed. Nine forty, ten five, ten twelve, ten thirty-two, ten forty-one.
"You awake?" I said to Pyle. "Yes."
"What are you thinking about?" He hesitated. "Phuong," he said. "Yes?" "I was just wondering what she was doing."
"I can tell you that. She'll have decided that I'm spending the night at Tanyin-it won't be the first time. She'll be lying on the bed with a joss stick burning to keep away the mosquitoes and she'll be looking at the pictures in an old Paris-Match. Like the French she has a passion for the Royal Family"
He said wistfully, "It must be wonderful to know exactly," and I could imagine his soft dog's eyes in the dark. They ought to have called him Fido,* not Alden.
"I don't really know-but it's probably true. There's no good in being jealous when you can't do anything about it. 'No barricade for a belly.' "*
"Sometimes I hate the way you talk, Thomas. Do you know how she seems to me?-she seems fresh, like a flower."
"Poor flower," I said. "There are a lot of weeds around." "Where did you meet her?" "She was dancing at the Grand Monde." "Dancing," he exclaimed, as though the idea were painful.
"It's a perfectly respectable profession," I said. "Don't worry."
"You have such an awful lot of experience, Thomas." "I have an awful lot of years. When you reach my age.. "
"I've never had a girl," he said, "not properly. Not what you'd call a real experience."
"A lot of energy with your people seems to go into whistling."
"I've never told anybody else." "You're young. It's nothing to be ashamed of." "Have you had a lot of women. Fowler?" "I don't know what a lot means. Not more than four women have had any importance to me-or me to them.
The other forty-odd-one wonders why one does it. A notion of hygiene, of one's social obligations, both mistaken." "You think they arc mistaken?"
"I wish I could have those nights back. I'm still in love, Pyle, and I'm a wasting asset.*
Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too."
"You don't think there's anything wrong with me, do you, Thomas?" "No, Pyle."
"It doesn't mean I don't need it, Thomas, like everybody else. I'm not-odd."
"Not one of us needs it as much as we say. There's an awful lot of self-hypnosis around. Now I know I need nobody-except Phuong. But that's athing one learns with time. I could go a year without one restless night if she wasn't there."
"But she is there," he said in a voice I could hardly catch.
"One starts promiscuous and ends like one's grandfather, faithful to one woman."
"I suppose it seems pretty naive to start that way. . ." "No."
"It's not in the Kinsey Report."* "That's why it's not naive."
"You know, Thomas, it's pretty good being here, talking to you like this. Somehow it doesn't seem dangerous any more."
"We used to feel that in the blitz" I said, "when a lull came. But they always returned."
"If somebody asked you what your deepest sexual experience had been, what would you say?" I knew the answer to that. "Lying in bed early one