Saturn Over the Water (26 page)

‘You’re madder than he could ever have been,’ I cried harshly.

His smile had gone. ‘We are the servants of the great design,’ he began shouting.

‘Who are your masters?’ I cut in, shouting too. I didn’t know what I meant. It just came.

‘Our masters – ’

He stopped because he couldn’t go on. Somebody, something, outside his own will and control, shut him up. I hadn’t the least doubt about it. For the first time, during all the tangle and runaround there’d been ever since I’d left Isabel Farne’s bedside at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, somebody or something moved into the scene from an unknown direction, as if we were open and vulnerable on a side we didn’t know was there. At that moment, in a sense, the whole story changed, taking on another dimension. I felt then what I’ve never stopped feeling since. I knew the action was being worked out on more than one level.

‘I have talked too much,’ said Steglitz, recovering. ‘I am forgetting we must eat.’ He went to ring a bell. Everybody stirred and then got up, as people do at the end of any session that has kept them still and quiet. I tried to move across to say something either lofty or plain nasty to Rosalia, but I found Mitchell in my way. Two of the other men listened in, curious about me.

‘Drive here, Bedford?’ Mitchell asked, still with that glimmer of amusement in his eye.

‘Does it matter?’ I didn’t feel I had to take Mitchell any longer. A lot too much had happened since he sat in my studio and gave me some of his mystery-man advice.

‘It might,’ he said.

‘Well, then, if it’ll make you happy, I hired an oldish black Buick in Melbourne – I’ll tell you from what garage if it’ll make you any happier – ’

‘Why not? What garage?’

I told him, in a tone of obvious disgust. ‘And I left the Buick just outside the entrance, not knowing how long I’d be here.’

‘D’you like Australia?’

‘I wouldn’t know yet.’

‘Good answer.’ He gave me a slow wink but all he got from me in return was a blank stare. Then I turned to give Miss Arnaldos that verbal slap across the jaw she seemed to be in need of, but by this time two women had spread a lot of cold food between us. And Steglitz, with two stooges for chorus, was entertaining her. Also, I realised that I was hungry. I helped myself to some fish, then to meat and salad, without talking to anybody. The only sketch of a plan I had for myself now was to get the hell out of the place – though not before making at least one remark to Miss Arnaldos, our cool observer from Peru, our spokesman for the arts and personal life – and this might mean driving a long time, though I didn’t know where, so I made the best of what wasn’t a bad cold supper.

I was just washing away the memory of a poor cheese with some South Australian red wine that had nothing wrong with it at all, when Major Jorvis marched in, followed by Long Neck, my Melbourne follower. Major Jorvis, his eyes, cheeks, moustache, in Technicolor, shook hands enthusiastically with Steglitz, who was giving a performance as an anxious and keenly anti-Communist New Australian. Long Neck recognised me at once and without hesitation, out of at least eight people, and began moving in my direction even before Major Jorvis spoke.

‘I’m placing you under arrest, Bedford,’ said Major Jorvis. ‘And you know why. But there’s a warrant coming, if you want to be technical.’

What was wrong with Major Jorvis that night, as I realised afterwards, was that he was dazzled and dazed by his own splendour. He’d been given a helicopter, to fly here from Melbourne and then on to somewhere else, and what with that, and a lot of short wave transmission, and people and places being warned he was on his way, he was living the life of a Security Officer in a TV serial, and was half out of his mind. As Long Neck took me out of the room, I overheard the major assuring that rich good-looking Miss Arnaldos that she needn’t be anxious about the Commies while he was looking after Australia. As I passed Steglitz, he gave me a last smile. It said that he knew and I knew, that he knew I knew he knew, that I knew he knew and the rest of it, that Major Jorvis and Long Neck were a pair of zombies and I couldn’t do a thing about it. I felt he was right.

The arrangements were better than those at Osparas. At least I wasn’t knocked out and then dumped into what was more or less a concrete cell. Under the guidance of one of Steglitz’s assistants, and with some support by another police type, probably the helicopter pilot, Long Neck marched me to the opposite end of the main building, into a room that contained two single beds, two small chests of drawers, two chairs, one rug, and looked as if it had been borrowed from a Y.M.C.A. hostel. Before the other two left us, Long Neck had me tied to the chair I sat in, the idea – and I could see no flaw in it – being that long before I’d hopped across the room still in the chair, or had wrestled successfully with the knots at the back, Long Neck would have his gun out, ready to blow half my foot off or something of that sort.

An hour crawled by, one of the most tedious I ever remember. The trouble was that not only did Long Neck dislike me, but that he refused to engage in any talk at all. Perhaps he was afraid I might convert him to whatever brand of Communism I was supposed to be representing. Moreover, it became increasingly irksome, in fact downright unpleasant, being tied to that damned chair. But the idiotic silence, which Long Neck insisted upon, even to the point of threatening to shut me up very violently, was the worst feature. I might have been sharing a room with a sick kangaroo. It was desperately boring, and I felt a fool.

At a guess it was getting on for nine o’clock when somebody knocked. Long Neck unlocked and opened the door. The man who came in, before Long Neck could stop him, looked half a joke and half something out of a nightmare. He was wearing one of those old-fashioned masks, completely hiding the face, that are shiny and coloured the flesh pink that no living flesh has ever been. In his left hand, which he held up, a similar mask was dandling from its elastic. It must have been this mask business that confused Long Neck and slowed him up. He’d only time to ask what the idea was and begin reaching for his gun before he was neatly knocked out by whatever the masked caller was holding in his right hand, the one poor Long Neck wasn’t looking at. A minute later we’d turned the key on him from the outside and were walking along the corridor, two shiny pink-faced monsters now.

‘Keep moving,’ I was told, ‘but don’t rush it. There’s a dance on tonight – and the lads are wearing these things. The girls come from outside – and this is a joke on them.’

‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘Not to the dance, I hope.’

‘A car’s waiting. And don’t worry about your gear. I moved it from the Buick. And I’ll see the Buick gets back to Melbourne. That’s why I asked you those questions.’

‘You’re very sharp, Mitchell.’ I thought I’d recognised his build and his clothes, and of course when he spoke I was sure who it was. ‘But I thought you were on their side.’

‘You thought wrong. That’s what they think. And thanks to this false face, I haven’t given myself away yet, though I’ve got you out. I’m not coming with you. I’ve still something to do here. But this car has a driver. Now let’s stop talking.’

We threaded our way between the cars all round the entrance, cars that must have brought girls to the dance, until we finally came to one standing alone, well placed for getting away. There wasn’t much light out there but enough to show me that I wouldn’t be rattling through the night in any small tinny job. This looked a solid and powerful car, probably a Mercedes. I got in while Mitchell, after whipping off his mask, talked through the driver’s window.

‘You won’t make Albury now,’ he was saying. ‘Not unless you drive most of the night. And I don’t advise that. Make good time for the next hour and a half. Then put up wherever you can. Tomorrow night, stay somewhere outside Sydney, then ring Barsac and fix a meeting. Don’t use your own names anywhere. And keep out of Sydney. I may see you in the north. All the best.’

‘And thanks, Mitchell,’ I cried across the driver. ‘Sorry I had the wrong idea about you.’

‘That’s not important,’ said the driver severely. Then she changed her tone. ‘Thank you, Mr Mitchell. Be seeing you.
Hasta la vista
.’

But of course I’d known for the last two minutes it was Rosalia Arnoldos.

16

Believe it or not, we didn’t exchange a single word for half an hour. But then she was driving very fast – first for some miles down the road I’d come on, then, after a left turn, along a minor road, narrow and with a poor surface – and I didn’t want to disturb her concentration. If we ran into any trouble, I might find myself listening to Major Jorvis and looking at Long Neck again. Not that I was worried. That road between Uramba and Lima had given her plenty of practice in this sort of driving, and the car – I’d guessed right, a Mercedes – was a beauty. We must have put at least thirty miles between us and Charoke before we said anything.

It was map business that started us talking. It wasn’t real talk then, only stiff unnatural stuff, like the dialogue in foreign conversation books. She said she wasn’t sure of the best way from now on so that I’d better hold the road map. I said I would be glad to hold the road map. She said we ought to aim at reaching a town of some kind within the next hour. I said that if she thought it safe to stop and turn on the lights I would try to find some such town on the map. She said she would slow down and then I could examine the map. I said that was all right.

After looking at the map I broke out of the foreign conversation book. ‘The best bet seems to be a place called Gembanella,’ I said. ‘It’s about fifty miles further on, in the direction of Albury. Of course I don’t know whether we can find beds there. But if we’re not going to drive all night – and at a pinch we could, taking it in turns to drive – then Gembanella looks about as far as we dare go. Though of course they may be all turning in there now. The Gembanellans may be asleep by nine-thirty and then rise at dawn.’

No silvery girl’s laugh greeted those final remarks. Though we were doing a good sixty again, I was apparently being driven by a Castilian duchess about eighty years of age. ‘Very well,’ she said loftily. ‘We will try that place. I don’t want to drive all night, and Mr Mitchell advised me against it. But you will have to tell me how to find this – Gembanella.’ She pronounced the name contemptuously, as if it was some wretched little thing I’d made for her. I returned to the foreign conversation book and said I would be glad to give her the necessary directions.

A lot of Victoria, with ghostly trees looking ghostlier than ever, rushed past us before we spoke again. Then, on an easy level stretch, she said: ‘You understand why I am doing this. I’m against those horrible people – especially that mad conceited Steglitz. I was already making plans with Mr Mitchell, who guessed I was against them – he is very clever – before you came. Then he said tonight that this would be the best thing I could do. So that is why I am here.’ She wasn’t an eighty-year-old duchess now but she was still a long way from being young Rosalia Arnaldos. About fifty perhaps, the manageress of something fairly important.

‘My dear Miss Arnaldos,’ I began, and even that takes some doing in a big car travelling fast at night, ‘I do understand. You’re here because, fortunately for me, we’re on the same side. Pleased as I am with myself, partly because of my stuffy painting, partly because of my success with women – ’

‘Oh – shut up.’

‘Certainly. But slow down a bit – we turn right very soon.’

During the next ten miles or so I thought I heard some sniffy noises but I couldn’t tell whether they came out of disgust or distress. Then we began to pass a few cars, there were lights somewhere below us, and finally we turned a corner, the road falling fairly steeply, and I said: ‘This must be Gembanella. What there is of it.’

There was a lay-by, overlooking the town, and she turned in there and stopped. Then, to my surprise, she laughed, sounding like the girl I’d been with in the Garlettas’ villa. ‘What if there’s only one bed down there?’

‘I can sleep in the bath, if there’s a bath, or on the billiards table, if they have one. Not to worry, ducky – ’

‘Oh – don’t.’ She started crying.

Hardly knowing what I was doing I pulled her from behind the wheel, put my arms round her, and began kissing her. It was damp, salty and glorious.

‘Oh – Tim – ’

‘What, ducky?’

‘I don’t care now if you don’t love me – yes, I do – but you know what I mean – ’

‘No, I don’t. And how do you
know
I don’t love you?’

‘But you never
looked
as if you loved me – ’

‘My God, girl – have a heart. There you were – one of that lot, Miss Southern Hemisphere – just giving me one short hard look and then nothing – telling Steglitz I was just a – ’

‘I
had
to – that was all part of it – and anyhow you looked as if you hated me – ’

‘Hated you? Didn’t I go back to Lima as soon as I was on my feet again after Osparas? Didn’t I ring up Uramba asking for you – and when Mrs Candamo told me you’d gone to Australia, didn’t I come here by the first boat?’

‘Kiss me.’

We stayed that night in Gembanella as Mr and Mrs Nateby (after our friend in New York, Marina Nateby), of Melbourne and on their way to Sydney. At the last moment, after the woman in the hotel had said she had a room, I suddenly remembered that Mrs Nateby ought to be wearing a plain ring on her third finger. I glanced down, and not only was she wearing it, she was displaying it. Our eyes met, and it would be nice if I could add that she blushed and then hastily looked away, but it wouldn’t be true. Not the faintest flicker of embarrassment was to be seen. She was young Mrs Nateby glad to have found a bed after a long day’s driving. (What good actresses most girls are – if they’re not on the stage.) But we exchanged a few words about that ring when we got upstairs. I didn’t tease her about having it in her bag, ready for an emergency; but I did say it might save me a bit of money if and when we married, to which she replied fiercely that this ring wouldn’t do at all and that I would have to buy her one, however little it cost. It was only about half-an-hour since she’d stopped the car, on the hill above the town, but as lovers we’d come a long way.

This hotel at Gembanella was really a kind of big beer house at the crossroads. It was a wooden shanty on an enormous scale, sprouting into verandahs and balconies, with hardly anything inside but blistered wood, some very slow old electric fans, and a mixed smell of beer and greasy frying-pans. Our bedroom, which was very long and high, was mostly dim space round a brass bedstead, a small and rickety chest of drawers, a gigantic and useless electric fan, one dimmish bulb, and a group photograph of
1902
characters with great sad moustaches. To get to the bathroom, which had obviously been installed by one of the
1902
characters, you had to go a creaky walk to the other end of the balcony. Nobody else was staying there; in fact I didn’t believe anybody had stayed there since about
1936
, when the woman who showed us our bedroom probably realised that life was one long series of defeats. I told Rosalia that if I’d been there alone I’d have bought or stolen a bottle of whisky and knocked myself out with it. She said she just
couldn
’
t
have stayed there alone and would have gone on driving all night. As it was, we were in love, we were doing some good clowning as Mr and Mrs Nateby, and spent a night that was even better than the one we’d had at the Garlettas’ place. But most of it doesn’t come into the Wavy Eight story.

As far as that story’s concerned, it’s better to lump together that night in Gembanella, the four-hundred-mile drive we had next day, and the night we spent, as Mr and Mrs S. (for ‘Stuffy’) Painter from Adelaide, in the new motel on the edge of the Blue Mountains, not very far from Sydney. Because of course we talked for hours and hours and hours, every word bright with magic. I had to tell her everything that had happened to me in Chile – though I touched very lightly on the encounter with Nadia, too lightly for Rosalia, who wanted to know more about this woman she’d met and loathed – and what had happened on the
Yarrabonga
and in Melbourne. She told me how, after she’d run away from me at the Garlettas’ house that Sunday morning, she’d gone back to Uramba and, because of our talk the night before about the Wavy Eight organisation, had tried to get closer to her grandfather. She was in fact genuinely devoted to him as a person – she’d often behaved stupidly, perhaps downright badly, just because she’d felt so frustrated all round, a useless girl – but she thought that all that money and power and certain ideas he’s always believed in had unbalanced him, so that in his own way he was as mad as the others. She’d begged him to explain to her what they were trying to do. He said he was only able to tell her a little, but what he did tell her, and what she repeated to me, did throw a new light on the whole mysterious Wavy Eight business. Old Arnaldos, it appeared, believed that our whole civilisation – and Capitalism and Communism were only two different aspects of it – would have to be destroyed to make room for a new and better one, which would not be concerned with material benefits for vast urban masses, would never again build enormous cities, would reject all the political and social ideas of our time, and would create some kind of religious-authoritarian system rather like that of the Incas, except of course that it would make use of science and technology. This was to happen, he told her, chiefly in South America and Africa and Australia.

Rosalia had then begged him to send her to Australia, on a sort of Wavy Eight mission to Steglitz at Charoke. She said she knew by this time that some of the people on the staff at the Institute, Osparas and Charoke, were quite aware they were working for the Wavy Eight set-up, although they were not like her grandfather and his friends, directors or members or initiates or whatever they might be, in the secret inner ring. She persuaded her grandfather she wanted to be one of these trusted workers for the cause, in the hope of one day being admitted to the directing inner circle, even though she was a woman. So the old man gave her a letter to Steglitz, and off she flew to Australia. This is where I came in, she said. She’d made up her mind, after the Garletta night, that it was to be all or nothing between us, that if I didn’t come to Australia then I didn’t want her and that was that, she’d try to forget me. It was because he began talking about me that she and Mitchell became friendly. He soon discovered where her sympathies were, and finally he admitted that under cover of being an agent of the organisation, originally employed by Merlan-Smith, he was in fact working against it.

She said there really were courses on salesmanship and personnel management at Charoke, enough of them to pay the running costs of the place and to prevent anybody from being suspicious about its activities. Steglitz in fact was very well in with the various Australian authorities – he must have just finished telephoning Major Jorvis that I was there, when I went into his office – but he admitted to people like Rosalia and Mitchell that he thought Major Jorvis and his superiors and inferiors naïve and stupid to the point of imbecility. But Rosalia had never before seen and heard Steglitz in the queer mood that possessed him the night I was there. Actually she hadn’t spent much time at Charoke, because Steglitz had asked her to begin moving in top circles in Melbourne and Sydney, as part of her job. I might as well add here that Rosalia had taken a violent dislike, which I could do nothing about, not only to these top circles but to Australian life on most levels. All she wanted was to get out from down under, and this partly explains why from now on we began to rush things.

As Mrs Painter from Adelaide, she was still very sleepy that morning we woke up in the motel near the Blue Mountains. She’d telephoned Barsac the night before, and he’d said he’d meet us at the motel about eleven this morning. He’d have liked to have made it earlier but he had to come out from Sydney and he’d no car. But just when she ought to have been getting up, the idle wench, wearing nothing but a fat sleepy smile, began dozing off again. (Mr Painter had collected Mrs Painter’s breakfast and taken it to their room, thereby creating a precedent for the Bedfords.) So I met Barsac and we sat not far from our cabin, on a seat between two magnificent golden poplars.

People you’ve heard about but not met, I’ve discovered, are either exactly what you expect or completely and astonishingly different. Barsac wasn’t like my idea of a French scientist at all. He was tall and thin and big-boned – his cheekbones were among the widest and largest I’ve ever seen – and he had white hair, a deeply-furrowed face, and a general air of romantic melancholy. He’d have looked just right as a concert pianist specialising in Chopin. He was eager to talk but as he soon asked me about Rother, I had to explain what had happened at Osparas. When I told him what Rother had said about expecting life to be reasonable and then finding himself ever afterwards at the mercy of madmen, Barsac couldn’t be silent any longer.

‘My poor Rother – how I can imagine him saying that! Wait – I will tell you.’ He lit another cigarette, for he seemed to smoke all the time and his shabby old suit had a lot of ash on it. ‘We think we know – I was the same at one time – and we know nothing. We are so busy experimenting with matter, we think only that is important. We don’t know who or what we are – what we are doing here – what forces, what intelligences perhaps, make use of us. Now I think sometimes we are the stupidest people who ever lived. But I remind you of something, my friend. What is it?’

I tried to remember exactly what Mrs Semple had said, just before I left her, about looking the wrong way and not knowing where else to look. I told Barsac how I’d gone to see her, right at the beginning, before I understood what was happening at all.

‘She was right,’ said Barsac sadly. ‘But too late for her to keep Semple and her hold on life. She was one of those women who have a talent only for misfortune. Now this Miss Arnaldos. I have seen photographs – very attractive – in the idiot newspapers here. You share a cabin – so you are making love to her. Are you in love with her? Of course – I see you are. You are fortunate. I have almost forgotten there are two sexes – not because I am too old – I am not so old – not because I am thinking about other things, though I am – but because there is something against sex and the life of the senses in the atmosphere here. So the men are monks without God, with only beer, picnic baskets and tennis rackets. The girls are handsome but puzzled. They look at themselves, give a sigh, and bake another cake. So you are fortunate with your South American girl. But no doubt you deserve to be. You have done more than anyone, even our friend Mitchell, so far against these devils – for that is what they are.’

‘No, I haven’t.’ And this wasn’t mock-modesty, I haven’t any. ‘I’m a fraud. I’ve done nothing but go blundering round, never being clever and always saying too much, and then always having to be helped out by somebody else. I haven’t even done what I set out to do – found Joe Farne and given him his wife’s message.’

He dismissed this with a wave of his cigarette. ‘You have acted as a catalyst, my friend, that is what is so important. I know this – so does my sister and her friend, the clairvoyant, where we are going later today – and so I think does Mitchell. When you promised this dying woman you would go to look for her husband, the catalyst was dropped into the solution waiting for it. Now everything moves – you will see.’