Saturn Over the Water (34 page)

Rosalia said she wanted some more coffee now and perhaps another sandwich, so we returned to the back room, which had a cheerful kitchen atmosphere and wasn’t associated in our minds with projections and visions and duels of mysterious forces and wills. Sitting round the table again, we found it easy to talk freely to Mitchell.

‘I wish you’d tell us who
you
are,’ Rosalia said to him.

‘I have told you, both of you,’ he replied, grinning. ‘I used to be in the shipping business – ’

‘Oh – shucks!’ Rosalia drank her coffee, then looked at him again. ‘Did you – either of you – give Lord Randlong that pain he had?’

‘No. That was his heart. He shouldn’t have come up here. But of course that struggle we had didn’t help. But we’re not killers – we don’t work that way.’

‘Then you didn’t make Nadia Slatina send that car off the road – to kill Merlan-Smith and Giddings?’

‘No. She did it herself. She didn’t care any more. This is the weakness of the Saturnian method – all control and authority. Where there’s no love, there’s no loyalty.’

‘What about Major Jorvis?’ I asked. ‘Are we through with him? And if so, is it because something decisive happened in that struggle of wills? Or is it because of what Rosalia said to him afterwards?’

‘I didn’t know what I was talking about – really,’ said Rosalia.

‘It was both. A challenge on two different levels,’ said Mitchell. ‘But of course the Jorvis who defied Dailey – you saw him – wasn’t really Jorvis at all. We hadn’t expected that. But they do it, we do it.’

‘What happened to Steglitz,’ I said, ‘when he suddenly began shouting at Jorvis?’

‘Just reacting after a defeat,’ said Mitchell, ‘though he didn’t really know exactly what had happened. He couldn’t blame his masters so he turned on Jorvis. But they’ve done with Steglitz, I think. I thought so at Charoke. His is the kind of cleverness that won’t let a man have any humility. He’s been suffering badly from
hubris
– ’

‘And I’ll bet that’s a word used every day in New Zealand shipping circles,’ I said. Mitchell only grinned.

Rosalia stood up. ‘I want to smell some fresh air before I go to bed. Oh – gosh – I’ve just remembered. Our bags are miles away – in that car we left by the rain forest. I’ve nothing to wear.’

‘You’ll have to wear me.’ But I muttered this close to her ear as we all went to the door.

The storm had rolled everything away but the stars. There were millions of them, from low-hung distinct twinkling lights to the illimitable arch of silver dust. The air was cool and fresh. Rosalia and I stood close together, our hands tightly clasped. Mitchell leant against the doorpost.

‘If you want to stay out for a while,’ said Mitchell in his most casual manner, ‘then I’d better tell you now that if you go through that door to the right, in the back room, you’ll find somewhere to sleep – there’s even something that looks nearly like a bathroom. Now about that message to you that Dailey mentioned – you remember? Well, it’s like this. Now you know more than most people do – all but a few of us – about Saturn over the Water. You’ve some notion of the size and strength of it. This country isn’t important now. But think of South America. Think of Africa – where I’m going soon. Now I know – I’ve heard you on the subject – you’re in love, you want some ordinary life together. We can’t pull you out of it. We don’t work like that. But Dailey says – it’s his message, remember – you both have something, and you’ve been told roughly what it amounts to, that we can use again.’

He waited a moment. I could feel Rosalia pressing her nails into my palm, as if she was warning me against anything else Mitchell might say.

‘And he told me to tell you – for he can see images of possibilities sometimes, because they already exist in their own place – that if, wherever you might be, a tall black man wearing a pink headdress comes to see you – he might be an emir or chief from Northern Nigeria – then you’ll know, without being told, we believe you could help us again. That was Dailey’s message. It doesn’t need any reply. Just remember, that’s all. Good night.’

We didn’t stay out very long; the night turned cold on us. We exchanged whispers about what had happened, both of us still haunted by those images – the desolated continents, the dying hemisphere – the turning globe with its Saturnian chains of fire, its red pulsating wounds. We stood there wondering, close to the edge of the invisible, the unknown, and so half afraid, half jubilant. Two people not sure of anything, but hopeful. Two on a mountain somewhere, we didn’t quite know where. But it was in starlight.

End of Tim Bedford
’
s Story

Epilogue

SPOKEN BY HENRY SULGRAVE

Well, now that you’ve read it you’ll understand what I meant, the other day, when I said how obstinate he’d been, refusing to write a final section to round off the narrative. You remember I said I’d have to do something about it, more or less along these lines. They drove back to Sydney, where Rosalia persuaded Joe Farne and Barsac to return to Uramba and take charge of the Institute. Tim deducted the fare back to England from what he had left of Isabel’s money, then insisted upon Joe’s taking the rest of it. Tim and Rosalia took a big jet plane from Sydney and then ran straight into trouble – personal, not air trouble. I’ve never made that kind of journey but apparently it doesn’t lend itself to making up quarrels properly. They had
words
, as people say, at Fiji. At Canton Island, both hot and sticky and irritable, they really lost their tempers. They were cool and polite at Honolulu, wasting an enormous moon, and Tim drank rather too much and Rosalia went off and cried in the ladies’ lavatory. In San Francisco, even cooler and politer, Rosalia said she must see some friends and Tim said he must visit a waterfront bar he’d been told about. But fortunately, as she explained afterwards, Rosalia’s friends almost dragged her to this same waterfront bar, where she was able to pull a rather tight and truculent Tim out of a dangerous disagreement with three sailors. Seeing that he was in such an ugly mood, as she also explained afterwards, she allowed him to force her into a taxi and then into a motel – though each had booked an hotel room elsewhere – where they spent a wakeful night as Mr and Mrs Pink of Surfers’ Paradise, and Tim, in the longest and most eloquent speech he’d ever made to her, told her exactly why he couldn’t live without her and why he couldn’t marry her, even pretending for about ten idiotic minutes that he was married already. This was what the quarrel had been about, of course.

After she’d agreed with him that he wasn’t the sort of man who could be expected to marry all those oil wells, refineries, tankers, millions of dollars, they flew to New York. There, after astonishing arrangements he never did understand, they got married, attended by Sam Harnberg and Marina Nateby, two people I’d like to have met again in his story. You may remember that when I first got to know Tim, his wife was away, but she came back before I’d left my Cotswold pub and I spent a good deal of time with them both. Rosalia’s a splendid girl – magnificent to look at and full of life and fire and fun – and I’d say on the whole far more attractive and lovable than he makes her appear to be. But she told me, in front of him, laughing at him but not without a touch of seriousness, that because he’s English and she’s a foreigner, and he’d been writing to be read by other English, he leaves out all his advances to her and just puts in all her advances to him, as if he was just letting himself be chased, and that even when he was shaking her in her studio, pretending to despise her, she
knew
then, otherwise she’d never have taken him to that villa outside Lima. She’s certainly a very sensible girl. She takes from her fortune every year the exact equivalent of what he makes from his painting. All the rest is spent either on the Institute at Uramba or the new Arnaldos Art Foundation, for which she buys – Tim often tells her – a good deal of charlatanry and messy junk. They still quarrel about painting, and I gathered there are still times when he shakes her as he shouts at her. What I never heard them mention was Saturn over the Water.

Well, this brings me to the surprise I promised you – remember? After doing what I had to do with his manuscript and promising to show it to you, I brought it up to town along with my own manuscript, at the beginning of last week. You were still away, then. Last Friday I suddenly decided I’d spend the week-end at my Cotswold pub and perhaps clear up a few points with Tim. On Saturday morning I walked over to the house, only to find they’d gone. The local woman, who’d done their cleaning, was still around, and she told me what had happened. On Wednesday afternoon, she said, an enormous black man had come to the door. She’d answered his ring herself, and there he was, nearly frightening her out of her life, in a kind of fancy native dress with a beautiful piece of pink stuff on his head. He’d gone in and talked to them for two hours, then they’d started packing, and next morning, Thursday, they were off. They were very sorry, they told her, but they just had to go.

When I got back to my pub, there was a hired Rolls standing outside, and having a drink inside was a man with white hair, a big nose, and eyes that didn’t seem to focus properly. I didn’t know him, yet somehow I felt that I ought to. ‘Now sir,’ said my landlord, ‘here’s a gentleman who’ll tell you about Mr Bedford. Great friends, they are. Aren’t you, Mr Sulgrave?’ I told the stranger that if he was looking for Tim Bedford, he was out of luck, because Tim wasn’t there. ‘Could you tell me where he’s gone?’ he said. ‘It’s rather urgent because I have to return to East Africa shortly. My name’s Magorious – Dr Magorious.’

And that’s not all, though I didn’t know this when I promised you a surprise the other day. It happened just before I came along here. A man rang me up, apologised for bothering me, but said he knew Tim and Rosalia Bedford and wanted to talk to me about Tim’s manuscript. I told him I was coming along here to collect it from you, so we arranged he should come and see me tomorrow morning. I had to tell him I was rather astonished he should know about the manuscript because Tim had told me he was keeping it secret. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ he said in a rather dry manner. ‘And I’ll be round in the morning. By the way – my name’s Mitchell.’