Olura (10 page)

She said just that. I replied that in any room of hers my imagination would be so fully occupied that I wouldn’t care if devils danced in it all night. She received this confession with
one of her steadfast looks which might have meant that she knew it already and approved, or that she was searching, with some difficulty, for the right file in which to put so coarse and clumsy a
remark.

And so next morning, July 24th, I got out early from that room to say good-bye to them. Gonzalez knew his job. He refused to allow either of them to say where they were going and he would not
let Mgwana book his flight in advance, assuring him that the Spanish Government—who only wished that more notice could have been given them of his distinguished arrival—would see that
he got a seat on any plane which suited him. It was another slight indication that Gonzalez’s superiors suspected a possible source of danger, though I was then far from guessing in what
direction their fantasies would develop.

I was hurt that Olura should choose to say good-bye to me in the lounge while Mgwana was paying his bill.

‘You’re not moving on as soon as we leave?’ she asked.

Well, no I wasn’t. Neither my personal charms nor my political opinions were likely to tempt anyone to invade the privacy of my bathroom. So I proposed to stay out a second week at the
Hostal de las Olas, and then to continue my linguistic explorations from one village to another.

‘Don’t try to make Calais in less than three days,’ I said. ‘You’re still too tired.’

‘Oh, I’m not going home yet. The house is shut up, and I’m not expected.’

‘What are your plans?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not coming back here, Philip. Suppose you took me out to lunch at the prawn place for a start?’

So began the most radiant, the most undeserved days of happiness. What cause is there? How does a mere biological compulsion become such unity?

Genes? Bilge! My genes, if in fact they do control my behaviour, have been delightfully compatible with those of thoroughly unsuitable partners too many times for me to have any trust in them at
all. Shall I fall back on similarity of acquired characteristics? But Olura’s social upbringing was very different to mine. Our view of life? But my acceptance of human depravity is
hopelessly opposed to her insistence that it can be reformed. Our values, then? Different in all non-essentials. I see that begs the question and gives a pointer to the right answer. In essentials
our values are the same.

Still, that only offers a base for unity. It does not explain how I can say
I am we
. Values and culture have nothing to do with it. There is no more devoted mate than a gander. Another
pointer, perhaps. Could it be that so entire a love descends from high antiquity and is now a rare survival among civilised men and women like the compass sense of direction?

Rare? But all lovers think their experience unique! And reasonably enough at the age of twenty. But you, my good Philip, are thirty-four. I know I am, and so I have standards of comparison. When
paradise is paradise, I recognise it; and that’s more than you can say for most people.

Well, let it go! Memory, I fear, tends to exaggerate when there is little hope of paradise regained. I will leave this unscholarly speculation and continue to record the facts.

After Olura had seen off Leopold Mgwana, she said good-bye to Pedro Gonzalez—having at last decided, I gathered, that he was an endurable policeman, though a secret one—and drove
hard for Maya. She arrived in front of the inn a little after two, looking more carefree and irresponsible than I had ever seen her, car and expensive baggage giving the usual impression of an
elusive fastidiousness rather than outright wealth.

After lunch Elena and her husband showed us over their inn, which was larger than I had thought, with half a dozen clean and simple bedrooms and a recently built, very showy bathroom which did
not open on a shaft. In fact it was excellently placed over the kitchen, where the effects of Spanish plumbing, always more optimistic than orthodox, were entirely overwhelmed by appetising
odours.

There was a room free on the first floor, with a window looking up the twisting river to the cloudy mountains of Alava. I did not dare suggest it, having no idea what simplicities were
acceptable to Olura, and what were not. The answer, I have since discovered, is any and all, provided she approves of herself.

She took the room joyfully. I was careful not to enquire for another, since I was reluctant to force myself upon her. My apparent lack of enterprise was perhaps common sense. To set one’s
hopes on mere proximity is to show distrust of all else. In any case by the end of that day such irrelevancies as trust and distrust had ceased to exist.

I remained at the Hostal de las Olas, for there was no other accommodation readily available in Maya. I did not waste time looking for it. Our Hero and Leander act had a delicacy which suited
the flowering of Olura, and it never occurred to either of us to try to improve upon perfection.

Every morning I walked the mile along the beach to the edge of the water which separated us. Sometimes it would be she who swam or waded across opposite the inn, sometimes I. On other days I
would see red cloak or white cape already far up the estuary and turn south over the powdery sand until we stood facing each other with the deep, transparent ribbon of the tide between. Then we
would solemnly exchange our good-mornings and endearments until one or the other, overwhelmed by this half-deliberate frustration of the sense of touch, dived in and swam across. For all that week
the sun shone, and our privacy in the miniature coves and bays of the river was never disturbed.

This exquisite girl was so full of sheer goodness. True, it sometimes displayed itself as goodi-goodiness. Her human sympathy was genuine, soundly based in character and training, but guilt at
possessing so much wealth tended to exaggerate the expression of it. She was so determined to find opportunities for service that she could dig them up when they didn’t exist or were
completely worthless.

I think, too, that guilt formerly extended to her own physical beauty, as if she had no private right to it. I write ‘formerly’ because idiocy of that sort goes up in flame. When a
woman sees that her lover is intoxicated by her beauty to a point of tears and poetry, she can hardly go on thinking that she ought not to have it. But I admit that I do not really understand such
an oddity in my adorable and passionate Olura. It is somehow connected with that air of being chosen for a sacrifice, which, when I first saw her in the hotel, gave me the impression that she
lacked vitality.

As I rejoiced in her day after day, I felt—carefully hugging the secret to myself—that she was returning to what nature intended her to be: a gay, robust, sensuous creature, for whom
world politics would not be half as important as what she was going to have for dinner. She had not anywhere near reached that point, nor ever will, nor would I wish her to, but she was coming
along nicely.

We had, I remember, one furious row over her idol, Prebendary Cyril Flanders, who made far too many appearances in her conversation. I have only seen that anarchistically-minded churchman
smirking and evasive upon the television screen. I felt that he had the furtive single-mindedness of a tycoon, making it his business to corner the market of protest whenever an excitable minority
could be persuaded that the Government should take some action which it was manifestly impossible for any government to take.

Something of the sort, being made overbold by lunch, I mentioned to Olura one afternoon when we were leaning upon her window sill, idly picking out among the wooded headlands and scoured
sand-banks exactly where our hidden beaches lay.

‘Philip, can’t you ever admit that any serious thinking goes on outside Senior Common Rooms?’ she asked.

‘By God, I do! Far too serious! Which means that it’s generally more emotional than exact.’

‘Sometimes the people can only get their way by direct action.’

I said that when the people thought they knew what they wanted, politicians were only too delighted to give it them at any cost. That was how elections were won.

‘Then what’s wrong with making them realise what they want?’

‘Nothing—so long as it isn’t just what Prebendary Flanders wants. What does he?’

‘Everything which is fine and generous. Justice for political prisoners, nuclear disarmament, sympathy and help for the coloured peoples.’

I said that I could see no one principle in all that, and that I myself would much rather be governed by a benevolent Mgwana than alternating juntas of incompetent conservatives and ignorant
socialists.

‘But if British police and administrators were as efficient as Leopold Mgwana,’ I went on, ‘you would all be lying down in the streets from Trafalgar Square to
Hammersmith.’

‘Leopold doesn’t like it,’ she insisted. ‘For the moment he has to.’

‘And no countries like threatening the rest with atom bombs. They have to.’

‘If everybody refused to obey …’ she began.

‘But they won’t. I remember my mother asking what would happen if everybody wiped their noses on their coat sleeves.’

‘At least Cyril is ready to suffer for what he believes!’

‘I’m sure he is. With relish.’

She said ‘I hate you!’ and went out and slammed the door. I was in that detestable state of uncontrollably twitching lips because one feels like crying and wants to laugh, when she
opened it again and told me that Prebendary Flanders was a Saint. She then slammed the door once more. But the partition walls of small Spanish inns are not built for displays of emotion from young
women trained in violence by lacrosse practice before breakfast. The door frame fell out in a cloud of plaster, and she collapsed into my arms, at first slightly hysterical, then rippling with
laughter.

Slapstick she could not resist. And she could hand out, with effective quietness, the verbal slapstick of wit. Humour—well, it depended on what one was refusing to take seriously. At any
rate, it was not hard to encourage the habit of laughter to grow. I hope she never forgets again, whatever my own fate is, the gaiety which is natural to her.

It was eleven in the morning of August 1st. I had left Olura before dawn and was just setting out to meet her on the banks of our river when the telephone announced a gentleman to see me. Might
he perhaps go up to my room? It was the manager himself speaking; the inflections of his voice sounded as if he were personally introducing some banker or real estate agent. The unexpected visitor
was obviously known and respectable, so I did not hesitate to ask him up. It was astonishing how clean my happily-engaged conscience had become.

It felt instantly loaded with guilt as soon as the district chief of police entered my room. I knew him well enough to nod to. The fact that he had not announced himself under his own name was
worrying. It looked as if he wanted to observe my face when he walked in on me without warning.

‘Nothing. Nothing at all,’ he said soothingly as soon as I had given him a chair and exchanged the usual compliments. ‘A very simple question. What were you doing in Miss
Manoli’s car on the night of July 21st?’

The hell of a simple question! I had never thought out an answer to it. And which was the 21st? The first attempt or the second?

‘Which day of the week?’ I asked to gain time. ‘On holiday one loses count of dates.’

‘Wednesday. Or, more strictly, early on Thursday morning.’

‘She asked me to find out what was wrong with it.’

‘And what was?’

‘Nothing but damp on the plugs,’ I replied, and added hastily: ‘The fact is, I couldn’t sleep. So I thought I would see to the car. But I didn’t check the
petrol.’

‘You asked the Pair of the Guardia to send some out to you?’

‘Yes, I did.’

He shot straight at me, not allowing me a moment to anticipate the question:

‘Have you ever known a man called Livetti?’

But my imagination had played with that possible enquiry, and come up with an answer which would conform to the reaction of perfect innocence.

‘Livetti? Now, let me see! Yes. Wasn’t that the Roumanian who was interested in gipsy dialects? I’m afraid a scholar cannot avoid all contacts behind the Iron Curtain, Chief.
But I assure you I have no political affiliations.’

‘The man I mean was Italian.’

‘I don’t think he was.’

‘A press photographer.’

‘No, Chief. Something in Bucharest University.’

‘His body was washed up on the beach at Pobeña.’

He waited for comment. I wasn’t giving it. I could not decide whether I ought or ought not to know where Pobeña was. I say ‘decide’ but my brain was unrecognisable.
Swamped with adrenalin, it was working as fast as a computer, rejecting, accepting and producing the answer without thinking in words at all.

‘He had been swimming?’ I asked.

‘He appears to have been killed at least twenty-four hours before entering the water.’

I made some conventional remark, and waited for worse.

‘Close to the point where you ran out of petrol, Livetti’s passport was found by the side of the road.’

So that was the only connection with me! I prayed that my face had not shown relief. His passport must have dropped out of his pocket while I was carrying him back to the car. The usual
carelessness of the panic-stricken criminal!

‘What a curious coincidence!’ I said. ‘I don’t wonder that you wanted to interview me.’

‘You didn’t see or hear anything suspicious?’

‘A cry for help, you mean? No. Anyway the Pair were patrolling the road. If there was anything to hear, they would have heard it.’

He seemed to be perfectly satisfied, and left me with many apologies and thanks. But I was far from happy. It was natural enough that when the passport was found, the police should call for a
report from the Civil Guard; and that had involved me. But how far had investigations gone before somebody decided that I ought to be grilled? It occurred to me that this visiting cop had dragged
Pobeña into the conversation abruptly and had been watching me closely.