The Dutch Wife (10 page)

He reached the third floor and pressed the buzzer beside the glass door. From a speaker beside it, that same attractive voice he had heard on the phone asked him to identify himself. Then the door automatically opened. From her desk, Jeggard’s secretary, the woman with the voice, greeted him. She was a scrawny woman with wire glasses and sparse hair. Thomas tried not to notice the huge goitre that protruded from the right side of her neck, like a third breast. He did, however, see a man wearing a bowler hat sitting in the corner of the waiting room, reading a magazine.

The secretary said Jeggard would see Thomas right away. She opened a frosted glass door for him and shut it softly behind him.

The man at the desk, working with some papers, pushed them aside, stood up and put out his hand. He was tall, tough-looking, with cropped grey hair and seamed face.

They sat down and Jeggard talked. But apart from the occasional direct glance at Thomas, he talked as though he were addressing someone sitting a few feet to the left of his visitor.

“We’ve come up with something in our search,” he said, “more by good luck than anything else.” He smiled confidently to the invisible third person, then glanced at Thomas. “That’s often how things turn up in this business: when you’re not really searching you get the best results.”

One of his agents in San Francisco, working on a shipping insurance matter, had been interviewing the Captain of a freighter just back from an extended voyage. This agent had the poster of Rowland Vanderlinden on his wall—it was based on the photograph Thomas had supplied.

The Captain of the freighter had told Jeggard’s agent that the face was somehow familiar. Questions were asked, conclusions were reached.

“I arranged for the Captain to come here,” said Jeggard. “You ought to hear for yourself what he has to say.” He pressed a button on the intercom on his desk. “Bring him in,” he said.

The office door opened again and this time the secretary ushered in the man Thomas had seen in the waiting area. He was about sixty, ruddy-faced, wearing a dark-blue business suit that seemed a little tight. He was still wearing the bowler hat. He ambled slowly into the office and took his hat off. He had only a lick of hair on his freckled skull.

“This is Captain Jay Jonson,” said Jeggard, not looking at either of them.

Jonson nodded to Thomas and sat down. He took a long time to settle in his chair, pulling up the knees of his pants, carefully crossing and recrossing his legs, placing his bowler hat on the edge of Jeggard’s desk. He was clearly a very methodical man.

“Now, Captain,” said Jeggard, “tell us what you know about the man in the poster.”

“Well.” Captain Jonson sighed, collected his thoughts, joined his hands and cleared his throat. “I recognized the face all right. Though when I met him, he was a lot older. But I knew it was him. I ran into him more than a year ago.” He nodded. “Yes, just over a year ago.”

The Captain was obviously not a man to be rushed. In a slow, thorough manner, he told Jeggard and Thomas about the meeting. He said his ship, the
Medea,
had unloaded a cargo of farm machinery and spare parts in Sydney, Australia. On the voyage back to San Francisco, they’d called in at the Motamua Archipelago, hoping to pick up a load of copra.

“Yes,” said Jeggard, trying to hurry him.

“Company policy, you see,” Jonson went on. “The owners don’t think much of a skipper who brings home a ship with an empty hold.”

“Yes, yes,” said Jeggard.

Captain Jonson couldn’t be hurried. He said that at Vatua, the main island of the archipelago, he couldn’t find any copra. But a shipping agent there recommended he should try Manu, a few hours away to the north. So he upped anchor and went there. Unfortunately, as the
Medea
was coming through the narrow entrance in the reef round Manu, the right propeller struck an outcrop of coral, bending the shaft. She would have to lay up for repairs. Captain Jonson beached the ship at high tide so that the engineer could get to work on the shaft.

As Jonson talked in his slow way about the incident, Jeggard had begun drumming a pencil on his desk impatiently. Now he could stand it no longer. “To the point, please,” he said. He was looking directly at Thomas though he was speaking to Jonson.

The Captain smiled. He didn’t seem offended, nor did he seem like a man who’d ever be rushed. He sighed and thought for a while. “The point?” he said. “Well, I suppose the point is that while we were stranded in Manu, I stayed at the Equator Hotel.” He told them that though the place was called a hotel—and it was the only hotel on the island—it was really less a hotel than a collection of thatched huts along the lagoon. Since there was nothing for his crew to do while the ship was beached, they’d been given shore leave. None of them stayed at the hotel: they were off elsewhere, drinking and womanizing. The Captain was glad of that, for the walls of the hotel were of bamboo and it would have been too easy to hear what was going on in the adjacent huts. At least he’d have his rest.

The Captain smiled at Thomas: “The hotel had the only real restaurant on Manu.” As was the usual thing in the islands, the meals on the hotel’s menu consisted mainly of canned meat. Yet shoals of fish swam undisturbed in the lagoon. “I had to pay extra to get the cook to catch some fresh fish for my meals.” He said this to Jeggard, who immediately looked away, so he told Thomas: “The islanders with any money generally prefer cans of corned beef to the fresh natural foods they used to eat before. The missionaries tell them their own food’s uncivilized.”

Jeggard was shifting restlessly in his chair. “Please, Captain,” he said earnestly, looking at the wall behind Thomas, “Mr. Vanderlinden and I are busy men.”

The Captain sighed patiently, uncrossed his legs and recrossed them, again carefully plucking the rather tight trousers away from his thighs. “After a week,” he said, “the engineer got the shaft straightened out and told me we’d be able to leave on the next afternoon’s high tide. So that was to be my final night in the hotel. And that was when I met the man in your poster.”

AT SUNDOWN, AS USUAL,
he went into the small hut with the raised floor that served as a restaurant. On this occasion, there was another diner—an elderly white man. They chatted and drank gin slings as they waited for the fish to be cooked.

The elderly man was quite talkative. He said he’d lived in Manu for many years and that he came down from the Highlands only three or four times a year when the mail boat arrived, bringing with it accumulated copies of the
The Pacific Times.
He’d always stay at the Equator Hotel for one week. He’d sort the newspapers into chronological order and read them from start to finish. He had the sensation of being in a different dimension of time from the rest of the world. He was frequently tempted to jump ahead in his reading, to see what had developed in some impending crisis. But he never gave in to the temptation—even when the threat of global warfare was in the news.

Why was he in the hotel now? He’d heard that a ship had come into the lagoon and assumed it was the mail boat, a little early. He’d made his journey down and discovered, of course, that it was the
Medea
. He didn’t mind the mistake too much. He always enjoyed chance meetings with travellers. He was from Canada originally and wondered if the Captain had ever been there on his voyages. Captain Jonson said no.

They ate dinner then went out to the verandah overlooking the lagoon. They sat there for hours, drinking two bottles of palm wine, swatting away mosquitoes and fruit bats and talking about world affairs. Captain Jonson was not the kind of man to pry into another’s private life, so all he ever found out about this stranger was that he lived in the mountains and studied tribal customs.

Around two in the morning, they parted and went to their huts.

The Captain didn’t get up till lunch the next day. The owner of the Equator told him that his dinner companion had checked out not long after sunrise.

“THAT’S ABOUT ALL THERE IS TO IT,”
said Captain Jonson. “It was over a year ago. There was no reason for me to remember the details.”

Jeggard frowned at that. “I think we can safely say you’ve given us more than enough detail,” he said to the wall. “Now what about his name? Do you remember that? Did he give you his name?”

“It was so long ago,” said the Captain. “I only heard it once. It might have been Rowland Something-or-Other. You know, like the name on your poster.”

“How old do you think he was?” said Jeggard.

“The climate down there ages people a lot, so it’s hard to be sure,” said Captain Jonson. “He must have been at least in his seventies.” He took the poster from Jeggard’s desk and looked at it again. “That’s him, all right,” he said.

Jeggard was satisfied. He stood up to indicate that Jonson was no longer required, but Jonson remained seated. So Jeggard rang a bell on his desk. “My wife will see you out,” he said, looking at the wall beside Jonson.

His secretary came in, her goitre quivering. So she was his wife, Thomas thought. Perhaps, with Jeggard’s oblique way of looking at people, he scarcely noticed her blemish at all.

The Captain slowly got up, smoothed his tight trousers and picked up his bowler hat. “I hope I’ve been of some help,” he said to Thomas. Then he ambled out of the office, as though balancing himself on a swaying deck.

Jeggard, after the door closed, said that if Thomas was in agreement, he would act on the Captain’s information. Radio messages would be sent, and, if necessary, letters would be written, embassies contacted—everything possible to verify that it was indeed Rowland Vanderlinden the Captain had met.

“Please go ahead,” said Thomas.

“I’ll contact our man down there right away.” Jeggard confided to the wall near Thomas: “We have agents in many parts of the world.”

Their business was over.

“Please convey my best wishes to Doctor Webber,” Jeggard said as they parted.

“I shall,” said Thomas.

“He’s sent me many medical insurance cases over the years,” Jeggard said. “He asked me to make a special effort in this instance.” As they shook hands, Jeggard’s eyes squinted briefly at Thomas. “When we have confirmation, we’ll contact you,” he said.

– 3 –

THOMAS VANDERLINDEN ARRIVED
back in Camberloo four hours later. He had just opened his apartment door when the phone rang.

It was Jeggard’s wife. “It’s confirmed,” she said. Her attractive voice was now a little contaminated by Thomas’s memory of the goitre. “Mr. Jeggard just received a telegraph from the Motamuas. Rowland Vanderlinden is alive and well and his habitation is known. Should we send our agent to talk to him?”

“I’ll check with my mother first. I’ll call you back later,” Thomas said.

“Mr. Jeggard says he’ll await your orders,” said Jeggard’s wife.

THOMAS WENT STRAIGHT TO
Rachel’s house.

She was sitting alone by the fireplace in the library. Her long grey hair had been braided into a pigtail that hung over her shoulder. Thomas kissed her on the cheek. Her green eyes, behind her silver-framed glasses, were deeply recessed in her skull, giving her the look of some sharp-eyed creature peering from the depths of its cave.

“So?” she said. “What do you have to tell me?”

“They’ve found Rowland. He’s in one of the most remote places you could imagine—down on an island in the Pacific. He’s been there for many years, it seems,” said Thomas.

Her eyes became little points. “All right,” she said. “Go and get him. Bring him here. I want to see him.”

“But Jeggard already has a man down there,” Thomas said. “He can take Rowland any message you wish.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You go. He won’t pay attention to anyone else. If you go, he’ll come back with you.”

“Come back with me?” said Thomas. “Why don’t you just send a letter and ask him what you want to know? Surely there’s no need for him to come all this way just to talk to you. He’s an old man.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve things I want to ask him, face to face. If he needs persuading, you can persuade him.”

Thomas tried again. “But what if he can’t come?” he said. “What if he isn’t able to travel? After all, he’s old and it’s so far away.” He felt this was surely reasonable.

But she just shook her head. “Go to him,” she said. “He once told me that if ever I needed him, he’d come. Remind him of that if you have to. Ask him to come back with you. Tell him I need him now.”

That was that. There was no more to be said.

Thomas, accordingly, consulted once more with Jeggard, made travel arrangements and packed his bag. Two days later he set out for one of the most distant corners of the world.

– 4 –

THOMAS VANDERLINDEN,
who’d always been an enthusiastic mental traveller, was not at all keen on real travelling.
“People’s lives would be much simpler if they never left their own houses”:
that was what one of his favourite authors had written, and Thomas agreed with him. Yet here he was, on a journey to the other side of the earth, in spite of everything.

To begin with, it wasn’t too bad. The train west was comfortable enough for a few days, in spite of the smell of stale smoke in his little compartment. The Great Lakes were pleasing to view. The prairies were indeed flat. The mountains, when they appeared, were impressive enough to begin with, but after a while monotonous as bookcase after bookcase full of the same flashy book. They actually made Thomas nostalgic for the prairies, made him feel perhaps there might have been some deeper significance to all that flatness if he’d only had the mental toughness to penetrate it.

None too soon, the train steamed into Vancouver. The oppressive bulk of the mountains made the city seem to Thomas like a precarious heap of rubble ready to slide into the deep. The rain was constant, the people scuttling between buildings like beetles with carapaces of umbrellas.

He had to stay there three days, but he didn’t go out much. He spent most of each day in the damp bedroom of his small hotel by the docks, sitting by the window. The frame was warped, the white paint peeling. He alternated reading with watching the rusty freighters anchored out in the harbour, small boats coming from them like animals being born. Each night, the rain seemed to get heavier. The sound of it lashing against the window made his sleep uneasy. The old grandfather clock in the hotel lobby would strike midnight as though from another world.