Saturn Over the Water (32 page)

In the car, for we lost no time getting to it and starting off, we told each other what had happened. A few minutes after I’d left, the barman had come from the hotel to say she was wanted on the telephone, and as he knew her name, she was sure I must be ringing her about something urgent. He had taken her to that private sitting-room, where Steglitz was waiting, and he threatened to be very rough with her if she made any attempt to get out. Steglitz was trying to persuade her that we hadn’t a chance. He said that Major Jorvis had arrived, vowing he would have me arrested within the next few hours, for he had the full co-operation of the local police. ‘Was that all Steglitz said?’ I asked. ‘It was all I listened to, darling,’ said Rosalia, who was driving. ‘I was mad with him and called him a lot of nasty names – though some of the best he could not understand because they are special for Peru – not even Spanish. Even when I was angry with you in my studio I did not call you these disgusting names. But then you came bursting in, my darling. It was wonderful – you looked so big and angry. I knew you might be just the man for me,’ she added dreamily. It’s not easy to appear dreamy while driving a car at a fair lick with plenty of traffic around, but Rosalia can do it. ‘I mean, that morning in the studio when you shook me. That’s why I had to take you to the Garlettas’ villa to make sure. And now I’m so sure I don’t have to think about it. Oh – Tim – have you the map? I haven’t. And I think we turn away from the sea somewhere here.’

I had the map and we did turn away from the sea, leaving it for the hills. It was now after four and it seemed to me, after working it out on Mitchell’s map, that we had at least eighty miles to go, some of them, taking the short cut he’d indicated, on a minor road probably twisting and climbing among the foothills. The country hadn’t the grey dusty look I’d noticed so often further south. They had rain here and the tropics didn’t seem too far away. Rosalia kept crying out at the sight of some tree or bush on fire with blossom or strangely-coloured leaves. Sometimes we passed clumps of trees with bare straight trunks that went up and up out of sight. But the clear blue of the morning had vanished. The sky that was thickening and darkening above us now was a mixture of sepia and light ochre and dark ochre and a sinister metallic violet.

The minor road was cut for most of its length into the side of a treeless hill, and when we had zigzagged some way along it, we could see most of the road below us. For some minutes I watched two cars that kept close together always at about the same distance behind us. I told Rosalia they might be following us. She said she had felt for some time we were being followed. We agreed that our best chance of dodging them was to do what Mitchell had suggested – to leave the car under the trees and make our way through the rain forest. This ought to be about ten miles away, on the major road we joined just over the hill.

As soon as we reached the major road, which had very little traffic on it, Rosalia put her foot down and kept us going flat out, to gain time for us to ditch our car without being seen. But when we reached the top of a rise I looked back and down and saw the two cars keeping pace with us. And we were all out and they were probably just cruising along, if they were police cars. Only the light, which was murky now, as if the ochre and violet had been mixed into a dirty mess, was in our favour, so long as it didn’t try a darker shade while we were in the rain forest. When we reached the entrance we found there was space for a dozen cars in the inky shadow of the trees, but only two others were there and no people to be seen at all. Rosalia ran the car as deep into the dark as she could, hastily locked it, and then we made for the entrance to the forest. We even trotted the first fifty yards or so of the path, where it was fairly wide and still easy to see. But after that we might have been picking our way through some Amazonian jungle. The path kept branching off and we had to make sure we always kept to the right, as Mitchell told us to do, otherwise we might be wandering round there all night, half barmy. As we went down, towards the sound of falling water, it grew darker and darker. We’d no torch and when we were in doubt about the path I had to keep striking matches. We seemed to be among giant ferns and all manner of antediluvian stuff. It smelt like a hothouse and was nearly as warm. We came to a bridge, over the roar and spray at the bottom, and stayed there a moment or two.

‘I wish we hadn’t come this way, darling,’ said Rosalia. ‘I’m frightened.’

So was I, but this wasn’t the time to admit it. ‘Nothing to worry about, ducky,’ I told her. ‘Except I’m in a hell of a sweat.’

‘Oh – look – they’re coming down.’ She was right. There were torches flashing about up there, the way we’d come, and I thought I could hear some shouting.

As soon as we’d crossed the bridge and started climbing, thunder began growling at us. It was darker than ever and soon we had an argument about whether we’d missed a turning to the right. I thought we hadn’t and Rosalia thought we had, and when we went back, only a few paces, it was proved very conclusively she’d been right. Nature, another female, did it, for after a terrific clap of thunder the whole forest glared with quivering lilac light. The rain couldn’t get through as easily but in the few places where it could, it hit us with solid rods of water. Getting a match alight was now something of a highly-skilled performance. Once we turned to the right on a path that wasn’t there, and found ourselves walking into a wall of leaves. If Rosalia had burst into tears at that moment, I think I’d have burst into them with her. However, she didn’t, being a great-hearted lass, but cursed and blinded along with me. And then, as so often happens, just when we felt we’d never make it, we made it. We were out, back on the blessed road again. The lights of a car winked at us through the jiggling rods of rain. We climbed in just as the thunder began growling again, as if something was baulked of its prey.

‘You’re a bit late,’ said Mitchell. ‘We’re in for a storm. Now for the old man on the mountain.’

19

I don’t know quite what I’d expected to find up there, but I felt at once I hadn’t found it. The first half-hour or so seemed nothing but a letdown. Of course there was nothing to see outside the bungalow. It was dark before we got there, and the storm still rolled and rumbled around. I felt I was high up, that’s all. The big back room into which Mitchell took us was warm and comfortable – and we needed the warmth because we’d both got soaked in the rain forest and had begun to feel cold and rather shivery in the car with Mitchell – but it might have been any back room, part kitchen and storehouse, part living-room, in this type of bungalow. Pat Dailey was there, looking exactly as he’d done in the morning, except that he wasn’t sweating now and was wearing an old grey cardigan. It had a lot of holes and burns from sparks and hot ashes dropped from his pipe, which he was smoking now in that careless volcanic way some old men have. While Rosalia and I dried ourselves by the big wood fire, Mitchell made some coffee and cut some sandwiches for us. The old man still had a bottle of whisky by his side. He amused himself teasing Rosalia, perhaps because she’d not been able to hide her disappointment, even disgust, at the first sight of him.

‘Why would ye want to know all about this Saturn over the
Water?’ he asked her, with obvious mockery in his deep but wheezy
voice. ‘Are ye hoping to save the world?’

‘I’d like to help if I can,’ said Rosalia. ‘And of course I’m curious.’

‘Is that all now, m’dear?’

‘No, it isn’t. I don’t want my husband to go running off – ’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, now. Ye have no husband – except for the night in odd motels, maybe – ’

Scarlet-cheeked, Rosalia glared at him. ‘I was talking about Tim.
I won’t have him entangled all the time in this Saturn over the Water. We must have a life of our own. I won’t have him – ’

But the old rogue broke in again. ‘Ye won’t have him this – ye won’t have him that – now wait, wait, wait, m’dear. Let an old man tell ye something, young woman. A husband who does exactly what ye tell him to do and nothing else, that’ll be a husband ye soon won’t be wanting at all. Did ye take to this young man here because ye could tell him what to do? Ye did not. Did ye now?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Suppose we drop this, Mr Dailey,’ I said. ‘Are you willing to tell us, if you can, what we want to know?’

‘I’m willing to tell ye what I think ye
ought
to know – to give ye what we might call your allowance – your ration – of knowledge. There’s never been a greater mistake made on this earth, young man, than supposing that everybody’s entitled to any kind of knowledge, no matter the state of mind and soul. Would ye say a child of four should know how to make dynamite? Ye would not. Yet what else has been happening?’

‘I get the point,’ I said. ‘We’ll only ask for our ration. But one thing puzzles me, Mr Dailey. Do you see many people up here?’

‘I certainly do not, young man.’

‘Then why should we be allowed to come up here and see you? Especially me. After all, Rosalia does own the Institute now and can take it away from them. But I don’t own anything. And really I haven’t done anything.’

‘Ye haven’t – no. Except to tell an old man to drop it when he was trying to amuse himself.’ He said this quite good-humouredly, though. ‘Maybe your friend Mitchell can explain while he’s giving ye something to eat and to drink. I’m going in the other room and will see ye there later.’ And he shuffled out.

‘I can’t bear him,’ said Rosalia. ‘And I don’t see how he can tell us anything worth knowing.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ said Mitchell as we joined him at the table.

‘As a matter of fact, ducky, he did say several things to you – ’

‘I’m not talking about those things. And he could have guessed.’

‘He could but he didn’t,’ said Mitchell. ‘Now about you, Bedford. That afternoon your cousin, Mrs Farne, talked to you in the hospital at Cambridge, I was trying to see her myself. But I was told she was allowed only one visitor – and she’d sent for you. So I followed you on to that solicitor’s office and then on to the station. It was I who suggested to Merlan-Smith that he had you to dinner while somebody – not me, I was telling you the truth when I told you it wasn’t me – stole that last page of Farne’s letter. I wanted them to have that. I wanted them to start wondering and worrying how much you knew. We wanted you
in
there – whatever you thought you were doing – because power could follow you in, Bedford. You may have done very little directly, as you say yourself, but more or less
through
you, a whale of a lot’s been done. Enough to tear the organisation apart – I mean of course this section of it, from Merlan-Smith and Magorious in London right down to Steglitz in Charoke. We couldn’t focus the destructive force from inside. We tried at the Uramba Institute with Semple, Farne, Rother and Barsac. We needed somebody from outside, coming from an unexpected direction, to use as a penetrating focus point. And when I was looking at you in that train from Cambridge – you remember, Bedford? – I was deciding it ought to be you.’

‘You talk as if Tim was just a sort of – of puppet,’ said Rosalia indignantly.

‘Then I’m giving you the wrong idea,’ said Mitchell. He looked at her steadily, gravely. ‘If we’ve minds and wills of our own – and most people haven’t – we’re never just puppets. But we’re never entirely free agents either – on any level.’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said. ‘And the way things fell out, I can see how this power might work. I just thought I was lucky, that’s all. Somebody did something for me at the right moment. Now I see it might have been worked, though I don’t know how. Who made the arrangements? Who turned the power on, so to speak?’

‘Mostly’ – and Mitchell jerked a thumb at the door – ‘he did.’

‘
That
man?’ Rosalia couldn’t believe it.

‘That man. And now I’ll see if he’s ready for us. If you want some more food or coffee, help yourself. But we haven’t too much time.’

‘I hope
we
weren’t just part of their arrangements,’ Rosalia said as soon as Mitchell had left us. ‘And I hope this is the last of this anti-Saturn life. What I want is some
ordinary
life with you, darling. Where we know where we are. I don’t feel this place is anywhere. We might be in outer space or somewhere. What’s that?’

‘Thunder again. Rolling around these mountains.’

‘It sounds creepy. Kiss me before he comes back.’

The room where the old man was sitting was very different from the one we’d just left. It was big and three of its walls had shelves from floor to ceiling. The remaining wall, where the windows must have been, was covered with curtains that appeared to be made of black velvet. But there was no light at that end of the room, and when we sat facing it, in deep armchairs close beside the old man, we seemed to be staring into complete darkness. There was some light above our heads, not bright but enough to let us see one another’s faces. The thunder hadn’t gone but it sounded very remote in here, and we hadn’t to raise our voices. But before he told us anything, before we saw anything, while we were just sitting waiting for something to happen, I found I was in a most peculiar state of mind. (Rosalia felt exactly the same, she told me afterwards.) Part of me seemed to be drifting away, as if I might be about to fall asleep, yet in the centre of this drift and dreaminess another part of me seemed tremendously alert, intent on missing nothing that might happen.

‘I’ve already warned ye,’ Dailey began, rather sleepily, ‘that ye can’t be told everything ye may want to know. But ask a question – then I’ll see what I can do for ye.’

‘The Charoke place has gone,’ I said. ‘Rosalia has the Institute. Do you know what’ll happen to Osparas?’

‘I do. And I’ll show ye if ye’ll just keep still and quiet for a minute. Look straight ahead as hard as ye can.’

I stared until my eyes began to ache, and then, just as I was about to pack it up, I saw the Emerald Lake again, not steadily and clearly but in confused flashes, like a film shot anyhow and not properly cut, and then Osorno erupting, the terrible flow of lava, the buildings crumbling and vanishing, people trying to escape, the earth swaying and opening. There was no sound, just these flashing and sometimes flickering glimpses, but I knew beyond any doubt and question that I was seeing what would happen, what was already happening in some different time order.