Flames Coming out of the Top (4 page)

It was Mrs. Barton who interrupted them. She came back into the room with the expression of a sensible woman who hopes that nothing foolish has happened since she went away. She darted a quick glance at both of them before she sat down.

There was a pause, and then Kay went over and sat on the arm of her chair. “Look what Harold's given me,” she said.

“A ring,” exclaimed Mrs. Barton sharply.

“It's only an ordinary ring,” Kay explained with a laugh. “We're not engaged or anything like that, if that's what you're worried about.” She held out her hand to show on what finger she was wearing the stone.

Mrs. Barton looked from one to the other and pursed her lips still tighter. She did not approve of the gift. “There's a meal ready,” was all she said.

It was Kay who suggested that they should read their fortunes afterwards: there was a note of daring in her voice as she said it, as though she expected to see black flags and gallows in the cards. She didn't believe in it herself, she told them, but she knew plenty of people who did. Mrs. Barton assented eagerly; she seemed to derive some special consolation from drawing-room necromancy, and picked her cards first. But when Kay looked there was nothing in them to justify her hopes—only the vague familiar hints of expectations and distant legacies.

With Kay herself the signs were far clearer. There were wedding bells and a bridegroom: that meant that it was this year, she explained. She looked meaningly at Dunnett as she said it and Mrs. Barton turned away.

Then Dunnett chose a hand. Kay became quite excited.

“That's a ship,” she said. “And that's you, and that's where you're going.”

“It looks all right to me,” he said rather sheepishly: at heart Pie was rather embarrassed by this kind of silliness.

“And now I'll show you something else,” she said. She shuffled his cards and looked at them again. But her face fell and she returned the hand to its owner.

“What's the matter?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” she said.

“But I'm sure it's something.”

“Well, it's all wrong,” she admitted. “That way there ought to be another ship bringing you home again and there isn't anything; only a lot of-”

“A lot of what?” he persisted.

“Oh, dark women and danger and that sort of thing,” she said despondently. She gathered the cards up and stuffed them back into the pack. “Anyhow, it's only a game,” she added. “I don't believe in it.”

As it was getting late, Mrs. Barton left them. Kay came over and sat beside him.

“What's your boat like?” she asked.

He told her again. He had told her half a dozen times
already. “It's big,” he added. “It's over ten thousand tons.”

“That's something,” she said.

But her tone worried him. “I still don't believe you want me to go really,” he exclaimed.

She did not reply for a moment: she just sat there playing with the fringe on the cushion. “I do,” she said. “But I'm nervous. I can't help it. I just am.”

“But there's nothing to be nervous about,” he said. “It's just like going anywhere else on business.”

“I know,” she said. “It's just me. I'm being silly.”

He put his arm round her and kissed her. She was very willing and lay pressed up against him.

“I wish you weren't going away,” she said.

“I'll be back soon,” he promised. “Before you know I've gone you'll be coming to meet me.” He paused and kissed her again. “Why shouldn't we get engaged properly?” he asked.

The question irritated her. “Oh, please don't start that now,” she said. “You know why as well as I do. It's mother.”

“You'd like to, wouldn't you?”

“Of course I'd like to.”

“But you won't.”

“I can't. Not till I'm twenty-one.”

They sat quite still for some moments and then she turned to him. “Is it really safe?” she asked suddenly. “Safe enough to be sure of?”

“Is what safe?” he asked.

“Where you're going,” she replied. “Bolivia or wherever you're going. Isn't there a war on or something?”

“Of course it's safe. There are dozens of English people out there all the time.”

“I suppose the office wouldn't send you if it wasn't safe,” she remarked at length.

“They don't think anything of it,” he assured her. “They are sending men out every other day.”

“But don't they carry guns and that sort of thing out there?” she asked him.

“Carry guns …” he began, and stopped short; he remembered Mr. Verking's massive engine of destruction that lay still wrapped in its wash-leather covering in his dressing-table drawer. “You're imagining things,” he told her.

When Mrs. Barton came in she was very firm. She reminded him that he had to be up early in the morning. But she shook hands with him very nicely, and told him to take care of himself. She appeared to have forgiven the incident of the ring.

Dunnett said good-bye to Kay downstairs in the long narrow hall. She was crying. In the darkness she clung to him. She began to shiver because the dress she was wearing was thin and because everything inside her had grown suddenly cold. “Don't go,” she said almost in a whisper. “Don't go and I'll marry you at once.”

But he reached up and disentangled the arms which were holding him: she was offering him something that he could not accept. “I'll soon be back,” he promised. “You're everything in the world to me, my darling.”

With that he kissed her for the last time and was gone. He pulled the front door to after him and left Kay standing there in the darkness alone. He was surprised to find that he was nearly crying, himself. Why did women have to make difficult things so much more difficult? It was a way they had of torturing themselves and other people. But five months was nothing. It would pass in a succession of crowded, arduous days. It would seem like to-morrow, or at most the day after, when he would be back again, ringing the Bartons' front door bell for Kay to come down to him. But no; she would be waiting for him on the platform.

The thought stirred and braced him; as he turned the corner of Fairfax Gardens he was whistling.

Next morning there was no time for remorse. The taxi that was to take him to the station was waiting at the door at seven-fifteen. He saw his two trunks and the suitcase go down the stairs with an air of purposeful finality. There
could be no backing out of it now, and he stood alone in the small front room ready for anything that the other side of the world might have to offer. With a sudden feeling of irritation he remembered Mr. Verking's revolver which still lay in the dressing-table drawer. He had hesitated too long. There was nothing for it but to take the absurd weapon with him and drop it overboard on the way. He picked it up and packed it gingerly into his private attaché case. It lay there beside the confidential papers of Govern and Fryze and the studio portrait of Kay which she had given him for his birthday. Then, shutting the door after him, he went down and said good-bye to his landlady. In many ways she was sorry to lose him; he was the ideal single gentleman. But at that moment she gloated over him: he was her little bit of sensation, someone to whom something exciting had actually happened.

Just as the taxi was leaving, Dunnett leant forward and changed the directions. He told the driver to take him down Alexandra Terrace for, at that moment, he cherished the idiotic belief that Kay might, by some miracle of understanding, be waiting at the window to see him go by. But the blinds were still down and Kay was sleeping. The street looked grey and empty in the cold September dawn, and only milkmen and paper-boys were about. There was no one at all to see him off as he set out for El Dorado by way of Cannon Street.

The Ship that he was now in was very different from the
Isabella Flores
. The liner herself had not been large. She had not been new or fast or particularly comfortable; her passengers were carried as a scarcely paying complement to the cargo, and they were housed accordingly. But in the eyes of Mr. Govern, who had arranged the passage, she had one outstanding virtue: she transported a man from Tilbury to the Pacific at a cut-rate for ocean travel. And compared with the
Viña del Mar
she was a ship built on the noble scale, a ten-thousand-ton palace fit for princes.

The
Isabella Flores
had come no further than Guayaquil. Dunnett had looked back with an envious longing from the
cubierta
of the
Viña del Mar
, which was carrying him down to Amricante, to where the
Flores
was anchored against the quayside, her striped funnels now devoid of the dense gritty smoke which had blown caressingly across the restricted passenger deck for most of the five thousand miles out. She seemed, as she lay there, to be the last tenuous link with the sort of life which he had always known; and he now remembered her long, ugly deck, broken with every kind of winch and hatch and capstan cover which the ingenuity of nautical engineering could devise, with a new-born respect. She may not have been beautiful but at least she had been useful. She plied across the Southern Atlantic and through the Caribbean Sea and the Canal with the regularity of a tramcar; her Captain, a Scotsman, in his unusually soiled service uniform, was a figure to excite admiration simply from his unpretentious ordinariness. He seemed of a different species from the little smooth-haired gigolo—it was one of the native lines which Harold had taken: they were cheaper—with the three
festoons of gold lace on his cuffs who pranced up and down the ornate bridge of his trifling little steamboat. And the latter's seamanship was far from impeccable. There was a romantic flavour to his manœuvrings that endangered the safety of neighbouring shipping. He brought them into Callao at full steam as though he had been sent to capture the place. The high, single smoke-stack throwing out its plumes of coloured cloud was reminiscent of the fighting
Temeraire
as he swept furiously across the path of larger and more imposing craft. The whole performance was in its way a token of the fact that they were in a part of the world that was not entirely ruled over by the phlegm of the Anglo-Saxon temperament.

There was a change, too, in Dunnett himself. He felt oddly carefree on this little craft with the design of swans and myrtle leaves around her bows. He just sat back and let other people amuse him. The orchestra of three, in particular, were desperately eager to please. They played during mealtimes in the small red-and-gold saloon and kept on as late at night as there remained anyone to listen to them, going round at the end of each performance to collect from their audience. It was as though the whole thing were simply a costly and over-ambitious pleasure trip.

Even the presence of two Chileno officers bringing back with them in chains an escaped murderer, a native, who had contrived to make his way from Valparaiso to Panama, did nothing to destroy the holiday atmosphere. The poor fellow squatted by day on his haunches in the forepart of the ship securely padlocked to a stanchion; he still seemed a little dazed by the misfortune of his capture and either scratched languidly in obscure places or sat looking out straight ahead of him without moving. His two tormentors in military uniform, looking like dignified bandmasters on parade, walked up and down the deck deep in conversation, occasionally stepping in front of him as though to assure themselves that he was still there. Their whole attitude was rather that of a first and second footman taking a very expensive dog out for its daily airing. It was impossible to believe that
it was anything other than a stage execution to which they were leading him.

In a measure, Dunnett felt that he could now understand the imperfect behaviour of Señor Muras: it was something that was in key with the flamboyant landscape and the dazzling climate. Perhaps it was the heat that was responsible. For six hours a day, a ceaseless, searing flood of hot light descended on them, scorching and blinding. While it lasted there was nothing to do but sit about under awnings, drinking endless gin-fizzes, while the
Viña del Mar
crept painfully across the vast plain of liquid fire.

In the evening, things became different. Cabin doors opened on scenes of indescribable, feminine confusion and mysterious dark-haired creatures in shawls emerged to walk the deck, usually in pairs, leaving heavy clouds of scent behind them as they went. Dunnett found himself following them with his eyes as they passed. It seemed that, in a world devoid of hours and obligations, women—even the plainest of them—came into their own. He went down often to his cabin and unpacked Kay's photograph merely to comfort himself with the sight of those smiling, candid eyes and the bright hair; they made life seem so secure and uncomplicated. To be secretly engaged was a heaven-sent protection in this world of women.

The Captain was intensely aware of the female side of his passenger list. He stood on the little bridge, gazing down at the two processions on the deck, one of women and the other of men ceaselessly and politely trailing the women, and kept turning his head this way and that so that any women who wanted to do so might catch a glimpse of him in profile as he paced up and down behind the thin strip of ornamental brass like a bedrail. Plenty of the women accepted the invitation. There was the very young wife of an Arica merchant; she was fascinated. It was almost her honeymoon, she was heard to explain, and she was going down to Moliendo to see her mother who was dying. She suitably spent most of her time in the cabin; but the sounds of shrill giggles and little playful
slaps which penetrated as far as the promenade deck suggested that love had found a way of distracting her from the imminent and distressing prospect of the deathbed. She would emerge every evening about dinner time—her husband was a very hearty eater—and holding her little hands up to her breast would gaze at the familiar shoreline, and sigh. It worked every time, and was sufficient to bring every unattached male, as well as a brocade of officers, clustering round her where she stood. And there was a tall, tigerish-looking woman from Mexico City, who was reputed to be a dancer, now on her way to fulfil some unthinkable professional engagement in the South. She drank nothing, sat for hours in her deck-chair staring unblinkingly under painted eyelids at whatever man happened to be within sight, and travelled accompanied by a shifting mountain of small suitcases: the quayside had looked like an open air cloakroom when she was ready to come aboard.