He pushed his hand through his hair and glanced up at me. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ His voice was agitated. ‘There was nothing I could do. The boat sunk away into a trough and then he was in the water. I saw him reach up to catch hold of the side and a wave came and he disappeared. I threw the lifebelt to him. I think he got hold of it. I don’t know. It was dark. The moon had set. It took me a long time to go about single-handed and I didn’t see him again, though I sailed round and round that area till dawn and for a long time after.’
He lay back, exhausted. ‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘That’s how it happened. There was nothing I could do…’ His voice trailed away. His eyes closed and he drifted into unconsciousness again, or maybe it was sleep. His face was relaxed, his breathing easier and more regular.
Youssef came back then with four wine bottles filled with hot water. I got some underclothes from my suitcase, wrapped them round the bottles and slipped them into the bed. Then we got Kavan stripped and I washed his body with hot water, rubbing hard with a towel to restore the circulation. His back and buttocks were covered with salt water sores, little nodules of suppuration that bled when I rubbed them. Patches of white, scabrous skin flaked away and his feet and hands were soft and wrinkled with long immersion.
‘Is going to die?’ Youssef asked.
‘Of course not.’ I spoke sharply, conscious of the Arab’s fascination at the white European body lying naked and hurt and helpless. We got him on to the bed and I piled the blankets on top of him and then I sent Youssef for a doctor I had known, a Frenchman who had lived just across the Boulevard Pasteur.
Then at last I was free to slip out of my own damp clothes. I put on a dressing-gown and lit a cigarette. I would have liked a bath, but the hotel was inexpensive and Spanish and its occupants were expected to use the public baths or go without. I sat on the bed, thinking of the girl and their meeting on the beach. Of course, they had recognised each other. That was why he had collapsed. It was the shock of recognising her. He had said he was Wade and then she had turned away and disappeared. There was no longer any doubt in my mind. This man lying on my bed really was Jan Kavan. But why had he said he was Wade? That was the thing I couldn’t understand. And he’d been scared of the police. Why?
I dragged myself to my feet and went over to the chair where my clothes lay. Both his letters were in my wallet — his original application and his note saying that he would be sailing with Wade on Gay Juliet.
Youssef returned as I was getting out my wallet. The French doctor had moved. Nobody seemed to know where he now lived. I looked at Kavan lying there on the farther side of the big double bed. His eyes were closed and he was breathing peacefully. It was sleep he needed more than a doctor. I let it go at that and paid Youssef off with two hundred peseta notes. Then I switched on the bedside lamp and checked through the letters.
It was the one in which he had applied for the post of doctor to the Mission that chiefly interested me. I knew it all, of course, but I was hoping that perhaps there was something I had missed, some little point that would now prove significant. I ran through it quickly…
I will be quite frank. I am 38 years old and I have not looked at a medical book since I obtained my degree. Nor have I at any time practised as a doctor. I studied at Prague, Berlin and Paris. My father was a specialist in diseases of the heart, and it was for him I passed my examinations. Already I was primarily interested in physics. All my life since then has been devoted to scientific research.
Normally I would not think of applying for a position as doctor, but I gather from your advertisement that you are in desperate need of one, that you can pay very little and that your Mission is in a remote area amongst backward people. I am a man of some brilliance. I do not think I should let you down or prove inadequate for the task. I am a Czech refugee and for personal reasons I wish to get out of England. I have the need to lose myself in work quite remote …
I folded the letter up and put it back in my wallet. He was a Czech refugee. He had been a scientist. He had personal reasons for wanting to leave England.
There was nothing there I had missed.
He had cabled acceptance of my offer. The final letter had merely announced that the French had given him a visa to work as a doctor in Morocco and that he would be sailing with Wade in the fifteen-ton ketch, Gay Juliet, leaving Falmouth on 24 November, and arriving Tangier by 14 December, all being well. He hadn’t mentioned his wife, or even the fact that he was married. He hadn’t explained his reasons for wanting such remote and out-of-the-way employment and he hadn’t haggled over the ridiculously small salary which was all I had been able to offer him.
Then I remembered the oilskin bag. The answer to some, at any rate, of the things that were puzzling me might lie in the documents he’d salvaged. It’s not a very nice thing to go prying into another man’s papers, but in this case, I felt it was justified. I got up and began searching through the bedclothes. But I couldn’t find it and I was afraid of waking him.
I didn’t persist in the search. It was very cold in the room. North African hotels, with their bare, plaster walls and tiled floors are designed for the summer heat. Also I was tired. It could wait till morning. There was no point in trying to work it out for myself. When he was rested, he’d be able to explain the whole thing. I lay back again and switched off the light, pulling the blankets up round me. The moonlight cast the pattern of the window in a long, sloping rectangle on the opposite wall. I yawned and closed my eyes and was instantly asleep.
But it was only my body that was tired and probably this accounts for the fact that I awoke with such startling suddenness at the sound of movement in the room. The moonlight showed me a figure stooped over the couch at the foot of the bed. ‘Who’s that?’ I called out.
The figure started up. It was one of the Arab hotel boys. I switched on the light. ‘What are you doing in here?’ I asked him in Spanish. ‘I didn’t send for you.’
‘No, senor.’ He looked scared and his rather too thick lips trembled slightly. He looked as though he had negro blood in him; so many of them did who came from the south. ‘The patrone sent me to collect the clothes that are wet.’ He held up some of Kavan’s sodden garments. ‘They are to be made dry.’
‘Why didn’t you knock and switch on the light?’
‘I do not wish to disturb you, senor.’ He said it quickly as though it were something he had expected to have to say, and then added, ‘May I take them please?’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘And you can take my jacket. That needs drying, too.’ I got out of bed and emptied the pockets. Then I ran through Kavan’s things. I thought he might have his wallet in one of the pockets of his windbreaker, but there was nothing but a jack-knife, an old briar, matches — the usual odds and ends of a man sailing a boat. ‘Thank the patrone for me, will you?’ The boy nodded and scurried out of the room. The door closed with a slam.
‘Who was that? What is it?’
I turned quickly towards the bed and saw that Kavan was sitting bolt upright, a startled look on his face. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It was one of the hotel boys. He came for your wet things.’
Relief showed on his face and his head sank back against the pillows. ‘I thought I was back on the boat,’ he murmured. Though he was utterly exhausted, his mind still controlled his body, forcing it to react to unusual sounds, as though he were still at the yacht’s helm. I thought of how it must have been at night out there in the Atlantic after Wade had gone overboard, and I crossed over to the window to draw the curtains and shut out the moonlight.