Fellow Passenger (25 page)

I pulled it down and let it snap back again. I had not seen Salvador Queiroz since I was seventeen and he a precocious fifteen. We were never close friends, but he used to admire from a respectful distance my exciting reputation.

‘What are you doing in London?’ I asked.

‘I? Honorary attaché at the Embassy. It’s not worth travelling in these days except as a diplomat.’

I was disappointed. There were a hundred Ecuadoreans of family - for we all knew each other - who could be of more use to me. Though unpaid and irresponsible, Salvador was a man of honour. It was unthinkable that he would connive at my escape.

‘What do they believe about me?’

‘My dearest friend, communism - well, isn’t it a little sad, a little laborious? To those who know you, you are more likely to be a curate than a communist.’

‘My mother,’ I answered, ‘intended me for the Church.’

‘Wherefore, perhaps, your little flirtation with its opposite? Claudio, what the devil
were
you doing on that Russian ship?’

‘Trying to get out of the country. It was the only way.’

‘They really believed you had been after atomic secrets?’

‘Of course they did,’ I replied. ‘I told them so.’

He seemed to find that funny. I don’t know why. You cannot expect a communist, after all his training, to recognize truth and falsehood. It was far harder for me to persuade Stoffel that I was a threat to his domestic peace.

‘What were you really doing at Moreton Intrinseca?’ he asked. ‘There was mention of women’s bedrooms.’

‘Trying to make some money.’

He remarked that it had to be one or the other - a coarse and unjust remark, but I was in no position to resent it - and then slapped me on the back and asked me if I had ever heard of a man called Harry Cole. I had not.

‘You didn’t know your father used to send him money through the Consulate?’

We heard steps outside - undoubtedly Rundel or a waiter coming to see what was delaying me. After this precious moment of relaxation, I could not recover myself. I looked at Salvador in panic. He was equal to the emergency.

‘Quick!’ he whispered. ‘Lie down! You’re drunk!’

It was Rundel. He found me collapsed on my bed with Salvador leaning over me. I rolled over to conceal my hand, stuck a finger down my throat and with a violent effort was sick. I would have taken less drastic action if I had remembered my long beard.

Salvador was magnificent. He introduced himself with true dignity, and in English that was worse than my Quechua.

‘Salvador Queiroz, honorary attaché to the Embassy of the Republic of Ecuador, and convited to your deener by His Excellency the Ambassador of Argentina.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Rundel impatiently. ‘I know. We met at the door.’

‘I go out to vash my ‘ands. I hear a cry. The Filipino, e falls! I peek him up. Too much wine, not true? And so I put him to bed.’

‘I say, Faiz Ullah, I
am
sorry!’ Rundel exclaimed. ‘I ought to have known you couldn’t be in training for a show of this sort.’

‘Go back to your guests, old boy!’ I said huskily. ‘Tell ‘em truth! Too much hoshpi-hoshpitality. Just want to go to sleep.’

That made, after all, a thoroughly artistic ending to the evening, and I think Rundel saw it. His stray Filipino, needing wine to give of his best, had collapsed under the strain. He went out, promising to return later. Salvador followed him, holding up a finger to me as a gesture that I had not heard the last of him.

I locked the door, and scrubbed my detested beard, congratulating myself on having had the courage to break out of my safe but objectless food-gathering and face the open. It was a big risk which had achieved, I thought, a middling sort of reward. That sounds ungrateful, but the hopes of a fugitive are unreasonably high. What I had vaguely wanted from my bold appearance among men of my own kind was a contact with the shipping world or a meeting with some learned and cunning soul like Sir Alexander Romilly who could be persuaded of my innocence and advise me. Salvador Queiroz was hardly more than entertainment. His Harry Cole I put down unhesitatingly as a plain-clothes detective who had pretended to know my father in order to get on the trail of my possible contacts.

I heard the noisy break-up of the dinner, and soon afterwards Rundel came up to my room and paid me my five guineas and expenses. I let him find me ashamed of myself and dripping with cold water from the basin. I did not want him to think I was in need of any further attention. He invited me to call on him at his College or his Chipping Camden retreat whenever I felt like it, and whether I were willing or not to answer questions about myself and my language. It is on my conscience that I grossly abused his warmth and kindness. I can only hope that he and his club were rewarded by the amusement and the speculations I provided.

Three notes were left downstairs for Faiz Ullah: one asking if I would sing at some meeting of orientalists, one written in three outlandish scripts with a request that I would let the writer know if I could read any or all of them, and one just stating: 11.30
tomoro. Statue Pitapan.

The rendezvous sounded like one of Bolivar’s more obscure battles. With my mind tuned to Latin America it took me a few seconds to recognize Salvador’s spelling of Peter Pan. No doubt he had found the statue in Kensington Gardens good neutral ground for the avoiding of husbands.

In the morning I left my guitar at the
Three Feathers
, and tried to think myself into the part of a poor but honest Indian student. But I was continually uneasy in London streets. My ancient gamekeeperish tweed coat, to which I had stuck because it inspired confidence in the country, was all wrong in town. I could not meet or ignore the eyes of passing constables as casually as I wished.

I strolled up and down at a safe distance from Peter Pan, meditating the profound philosophies of the East. Salvador was of course quarter of an hour late, and I added another ten minutes to be sure that he was not followed. We occupied two chairs under a plane tree in the open park where no one could overhear our conversation.

We were both less generous than the night before. For one thing, it was morning; for another, there was no humour in the situation. I begged him to get me, somehow, without compromising himself, on a boat for South America. But it was as I feared. He could do nothing for me except to put me in touch with Harry Cole.

‘But he’s some damned police agent,’ I protested.

‘I do not think so. After your first escape, this Cole came round to the Consulate and swore you were telling the truth when you said in court that you were treasure-hunting. The consul found him sympathetic. A real little Englishman with guts. He would not explain, and he wouldn’t go to the police. He just said that if any of your friends knew where you were, he wanted to be taken to you. The clerk knew him. It is a fact that he received remittances from your father.’

‘And you didn’t send him to the police?’

‘We told him he ought to go to them. Man, we’re always correct! But it was none of our business to see that he did. Besides, we have been enjoying the newspapers. An office sweepstake even, on how long you could remain at large! And one isn’t sorry to see the famous British efficiency made dust. As a nation, you are too patronizing, Claudio.’

‘Somebody has to set the standards,’ I protested.

‘But do you like them?’

‘I treat them,’ I answered, ‘with respect. For example, I much prefer to be ceremoniously hanged for High Treason after due process of Law than to be stuck up against a wall and shot with rifles which were not cleaned since Monday morning.’

‘You were always over-fastidious, Claudio,’ he retorted, ‘in everything but your morals.’

I did not consider that a boy of fifteen - his age when we last met - was capable of forming any opinion of my morals and, still less, of my tastes. I nearly told him so. I suppose that I was so weary of making calculated use of every human contact that to speak my mind was a barely resistible pleasure. However, I pulled myself together and became eloquent upon the joyous society of my second homeland, and even its soldiery.

‘Don’t you see? You are one of us, Claudio, whatever your passport says,’ he responded generously. ‘That is why I am helping you. You have no idea how much trouble it cost me to get hold of this Harry Cole’s file while pretending to look for another. Here is his address!’

He handed me a scrap of paper. Harry Cole kept an inn on the edge of the New Forest - I shall call it
The Tracehorse
- near Brockenhurst.

I thanked him warmly, and he wished me luck. There was no more to be said. Each of us had so very obviously to keep his mouth tight shut about the other that we might have been meeting in a better and more understanding world where one presumes - though a bitter shock it will be for the clergy — that speech becomes unnecessary.

I was right to distrust London. When I returned to the
Three Feathers
to pick up my pack and guitar, I found that the police had been making enquiries about this enigmatic Faiz Ullah who had registered as British.

‘What did you tell them?’ I asked the landlady - that excellent soul who had cooked the club’s quarterly dinner.

‘I told ‘im of course you was one of Mr Rundel’s young gentlemen, and no more of a South Sea Islands Rajah than what I am.’

Astonishing how complexities suddenly straighten themselves out into a simple path of lunacy!

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that was a wonderful dinner. And now I must go home and wash the black off my face.’

I took a train to Brockenhurst, guitar and all, and walked through the Forest - or rather over bare heath which had once been forest — to
The Tracehorse.
It was a small Free House of old red brick, set back from the road at the side of a green or clearing, and looked as if it would provide a decent, unambitious living for its owner. Why my father had wanted to make a pensioner of Henry Cole, Licensed to Sell Beer, Wine, Spirits and Tobacco, I could not imagine; but the pub had that air of growing out of the soil which an exile remembers all his life. In old days I should have written him a description of it that he might enjoy by proxy his lost - yet contentedly lost - England, and told him how I wished we could both have sat with our tankards under the turning oak leaves on a golden evening. As the sign of
The Tracehorse
creaked in the light wind, he seemed very close to me — a dear, welcoming ghost reluctant to leave his enjoyment of earth for such austere choices as bliss or damnation.

It was just on six, and I waited outside until Harry Cole opened the door. He was a lightly built old man, weather-twisted like a thorn on high ground. He might have been an ex-jockey, except that his knees were straight and his feet solidly planted. I followed him into the bar, and he looked at me from behind it with a closed face - disapproving in principle of the presence of Asia in the New Forest. No, he said, he couldn’t put me up, but there was a cottage a quarter of a mile down the road where they did bed-and-breakfasts. He thawed a little after he had seen me put down a double whisky, and asked what part of India I came from. I gave him my old line of being born in England to Indian parents.

‘Playin’ in concerts?’ he asked, nodding to the guitar.

‘No, just for a living.’

‘Ah, we ‘ad a sort of German down ere once,’ he said. ‘Used to fiddle in the woods, e did, and get the birds to answer ‘im.’

His small, bloodshot, brown eyes watched me from a mesh of wrinkles. My speech puzzled him, and he was trying to find out if I hadn’t a more respectable purpose than merely playing for pennies.

‘They wouldn’t answer the guitar,’ I told him. ‘It’s too human.’

I ordered another whisky and asked him what he would take.

‘Well, I will ‘ave a small one meself with you,’ he replied in a voice that expressed his astonishment at finding himself committed to drink with so strange a visitor.

‘You ain’t played that for a living all your life,’ he said.

‘No. But I’ve played it for fun. I learned it in Ecuador.’

He didn’t bat an eyelid.

‘Where’s that?’ he asked ‘Coast of India, ain’t it?’

A most heartening reply! He could not help knowing that Ecuador was in South America, though he might be vague as to its exact whereabouts. His cautiousness could only mean that he was on his guard against questions.

‘Mr Cole, did you ever call at the Consulate of Ecuador?’

‘And what if I did?’

‘Have you anything you would like to tell me?’

‘Not if you’re a rozzer, I ‘aven’t.’

‘Suppose I was M.I.5? You’ll know what that is from your Sunday papers.’

‘Then I’d tell yer,’ he answered sturdily, ‘that ye’re wastin of my muckin’ income tax chasin after spies what isn’t.’

‘But if you can clear Howard-Wolferstan, why don’t you?’

‘I’ll clear ‘im in my own time,’ he said. ‘And it’s only ‘im what I’ll talk to and without any of you listening either. If you pick ‘im up, you send for me.’

‘I have reason to suppose that Howard-Wolferstan is under your roof at this moment, Mr Cole.’

He contemptuously hoicked up an old man’s ever ready phlegm, and then suddenly got the implication.