Fellow Passenger (24 page)

‘But you were educated in England,’ he went on. ‘And surely, if I am not mistaken, at one of our universities? Perhaps my own?’

I let myself go with the tide of his wine. I knew his type, or thought I did. He would be so delighted by a high fantastical manner that he would pick it up and leave me alone.

‘At a co-educational establishment in Croydon,’ I answered, ‘from which I was expelled owing to the fact that my religion did not permit me to shave. A fine beard upon a youth of school age was too patent a criticism of the basic principles of co-education.’

He laughed and made some fitting and witty reply which I have forgotten. Then, for the rest of lunch, he courteously entertained me with some utterly neutral subject - the Nabob in English literature I think it was.

‘I’m off after lunch and shall be in Oxford to-night,’ he said. ‘But do stay here. You need it and no one will disturb you.’

I had forgotten that men of his type had spent as much of their adult life in the Army as in the Senior Common Room. He had learned to recognize unbearable strain at sight. When I protested at so much kindness to a stranger who refused to account for himself, he answered gaily that learning was its own passport.

That afternoon and night alone in his cottage were heaven. I had at last perfect privacy - privacy to have a bath without fear that someone might be peeking through wall or keyhole, privacy to sit before a fire and read. The Englishman in me revelled in peace, regarding with well-bred amazement the predative and noisy Latin who could stagger from crisis to crisis and retain a balance.

Both of them, however, had the sense to look up the Philippines in an encyclopaedia. My Stratford American, in connecting Spanish tunes with an oriental appearance, had made a really excellent guess. Unless I ran into another American authority, it would be most difficult for anything I said about my island to be flatly denied. There were seven thousand of them, and a whole riot of languages. Better still, there was a community of Mohammedans, called Moros, who had been there since the fourteenth century. Presumably they spoke a corrupt Arabic or Malay, but there seemed no earthly reason why a few families of them should not speak whatever I chose.

I had finished a lazy breakfast and the morning papers when Thomas Rundel turned up, his health and learning reduced to a more common level of humanity by a slight hangover. I thanked him warmly and prepared for the road.

‘First,’ he said, going to the cupboard, ‘we will take a little gin. I’m not going to bother you with any more questions, Faiz Ullah, but I wonder if you would fall in with a plan of mine?’

I replied that of course I would, if it were at all possible; and he explained that he was honorary secretary of a dining club whose members met every quarter to extend their general knowledge in any tempting and original direction, and to commemorate the founder - a bachelor cavalry colonel with half a dozen learned hobbies, who had left
£
200 a year for the purpose.

‘Quite informal,’ he assured me. ‘A few dons and diplomatists. Some proconsuls and men of letters and archaeologists. And among the guests anything from politicians up. All good fellows. Would you come and play to us?’

‘I’m not good enough,’ I said.

‘Quite good enough for us, my dear Faiz Ullah,’ he replied politely. ‘It’s not a Wigmore Hall guitarist we are after. For example, once we had a Swaziland chief to recite. Some of us wanted to see if we could take down his speech in phonetic notation and read it back intelligibly. And another time we had some early Byzantine music played to us by a French violinist to see what he made of it, and by a Turk to see what
he
made of it. My idea was that we should be entertained by your Songs of the Spanish Indies and allowed to speculate.’

This was to expose myself most dangerously. Yet it might lead somewhere, whereas my present minstrelling, with the chills of November little more than six weeks away, could very well end in police station or hospital.

Seeing me hesitate, he added diffidently:

‘I’ve been making some enquiries about the Philippines, and it would seem that your people must be Moros. Your Arab ancestors gave Spain its distinctive music. And it is at least conceivable that when their descendants heard it again, they easily adopted it. That’s one theory. The other is that a Spanish prisoner, for example, married on your island and stayed there and amused himself with these translations.’

He seemed to me to be jumping to conclusions a little too readily for true scholarship; but as my own researches coincided with his I could only accept them.

‘We’ll pay you or not, just as you like,’ he said. ‘And either way you will be my guest.’

I had no intention of being drawn into a sort of philological B.B.C. quiz, so I told him frankly that I would not dine with him - too shabby, for one thing - but that I would gladly play if he would first give me something to eat and drink in an ante-room or elsewhere.

‘And no questions?’ he asked, disappointed.

‘Didn’t you want to speculate? Besides, I don’t know the answers.’

‘You know a lot more than you have told me, my dear Faiz Ullah,’ he said, ‘except the origin of your songs. Very well, I’ll keep you a mystery. More fun that way. But may I say definitely that your language is Indian?’

‘You may,’ I assured him.

The club dinner, Rundel said, would be on the top floor of the
Three Feathers
in Marylebone. Fee, five guineas. Travelling expenses to be paid. I was to be there before nine p.m. or as early as I liked on the 25th September, and the pub would put me up for the night.

For the next fortnight I wandered through Gloucestershire into Somerset, paying my way but making no profit. I was eager to hit on some form of employment which would render it unnecessary to turn up at this dangerous dinner. Once I hired a village hall for my songs of the Spanish Indies and sold shilling tickets. I would have done well if I had not worked up such an all-consuming thirst. I even lectured to a Women’s Institute on the Philippines. All tropics are much the same. I was really talking about the jungle coast of Colombia.

Again I was in the newspapers. Poor Chris Emmassin had died of food poisoning while attending some youth league conference in East Berlin. The press, of course, suggested that his death was not an accident. Certainly he would have been an easy man to poison. Chris fussed so much about hygiene and processing and flies that he had lost his natural taste. If you had put a lump of Thames mud in cellophane printed with a guarantee of vitamin-content, he’d have eaten it. But I do not think his employers put him away. He was their show-piece. In my opinion - though I hate to think I was responsible - it was suicide. The Howard-Wolferstan affair, coming no doubt on top of others, had shown him that bureaucrats were as incompetent in Russia as anywhere else, and that he might just as well have stayed in the Foreign Office.

Either way I was the villain of the piece. If you paid 1½d. for your paper, Chris had a simple British heart of gold and had never realized that such men as Howard-Wolferstan could be employed. If you paid 4d., he got the regretful obituary of a brilliant crank, who had had the misfortune to fall under the influence of international opportunists - meaning me again. He came in for a good deal of charitable judgment. It had been bottled up for so long. When you are alive, it is most un-English to be a commissar or a cardinal or a really outstanding crook; but when you are dead the pride of the nation in your achievement may reasonably be shown.

By September 25th nothing - except another damned circus - had offered itself, so I took a train from Bristol to London and turned up at the
Three Feathers
after buying a couple of new strings for the guitar. I recognized the wife of the landlord at once. She must have enjoyed the club’s quarterly dinners as much as the guests; in her youth and mine she had been known to all Oxford as a famous cook of traditional English dishes. The place smelt of onions and spices. A noble array of bottles was prepared. I had less misgivings. By the time bellies were full and the feast of reason and music about to begin, comment, though brilliant and imaginative, was not likely to be up to Scotland Yard standards of exactitude.

I had a bath and brushed and repaired my clothes and whiskers. My blue pugaree, frayed and dirty, was getting beyond such first-aid as could be rendered by cleaning fluid and a needle and cotton. Shabbiness, however, would be expected if Rundel told his fellow members - and he was certain to make a good story of it - how he had picked me up off the road.

He arrived soon after seven, dinner-jacketed and in a state of hospitable fuss. We had a drink together and he showed me the
Three Feathers
dining-room, which stretched the full width of the first floor. Places were laid for some thirty guests - ten at a high table and a similar number on each of the wings. At the bottom of the room was a piano on a dais a little higher than the floor. Curtains, looped back, formed wings just wide enough for a performer to take a quick drink or change his properties. There was altogether too much top lighting for my comfort, and I suggested that we should turn it out and use two candles stuck in bottles. Between them I would sit and play, cross-legged upon a cushion. That gave a composite atmosphere of East and West.

I retired to a deserted coffee-room, where the same meal and the same wines were served to me as to the guests. I did myself well, for if you are not a conscious artist the next best thing is to be utterly unselfconscious - and my instrument, played as I played it, demanded alcohol to drive the thumb. When the time came for me to face my distinguished audience, my only worry was how long I could sit cross-legged.

I bowed to the tables and looked over the guests while they generously clapped my appearance. There was some whispering between a few proconsular-looking diners, and I guessed that they were assuring each other that I was neither Sikh, Hindu, Pakistani or any well-known type of oriental. It seemed best to slam these finicking speculations out of court at once, so I laid into that guitar fortissimo and gave them ten minutes of non-stop
flamenco
in Quechua.

So long as that stuff has the proper fire no Anglo-Saxon can help applauding it, at any rate after dinner. I retired behind the curtain, where I had laid down half a bottle of Burgundy, and listened to the comment.

A high voice at the top table remarked genially:

‘Of course it’s one of Rundel’s hoaxes!’

So far as I could tell, he did not get much support - for there could be no doubt that I was giving an honest Spanish programme and that the language in which I sang was real and flexible, though very obscure. I might be one of Rundel’s colleagues in a false beard, but it was at least as likely that I was a Moro from the Philippines. Two voices of authority boomed through the cigar smoke; one ruled out the Indo-European and Semitic groups; the other, Basque and Malay.

The second part of my programme was less noisy - a few Galician songs of the sixteenth century. I would not have dared to sing the originals for I had forgotten many of the words. That, however, made translation the more simple. The audience listened intently, since it was easier to distinguish the phonetics of the language. One of them began to make me uneasy, for he leaned forwards from his seat half-way down the left-hand table and stared at me. He was about my own age, dark-haired and elegant, and he could very well be a Latin American.

After a bit, he began to grin with obvious private enjoyment and once he laughed outright. Without a doubt he knew my language. It was quite beyond me to translate the delicate nuances of romantic love, and I had used for the ultimate object of the lover’s longing - it gave me an excellent rhyme - an extremely coarse and factual Quechua word. I found it comic. So did he.

I was for it. There were only two courses open: to bolt or to bluff it out. I was prepared to defend a Quechua-speaking community in the Philippines — arriving on Kon-Tiki raft or stolen Spanish galleon - but it was too dangerous. The moment somebody mentioned Ecuador, the game was up. No normal man, conditioned by columns and columns of newspaper tripe, could ever again think of Ecuador without remembering Howard-Wolferstan.

There was a short third session to come; but as soon as I had taken my bow I nipped off-stage to grab my pack from my bedroom and go. In the passage I hesitated for a moment, wondering how I could get hold of Rundel and my five guineas. Half a dozen of the diners slipped out, too, among them the man who had laughed. I made for the stairs casually but fast. He came after me.

When we were alone on the landing, he said softly in Spanish:

‘You are Claudio, aren’t you? Don’t be afraid. I won’t give you away.’

I did not answer him. I pretended not to understand.

‘We haven’t seen each other for twenty years,’ he said, ‘or you would remember me. Salvador Queiroz Ortega, at your service.’

‘Salvador!’ I cried and embraced him. ‘But how did you guess it was me?’

‘Who else,’ he asked, ‘would have the effrontery to sing in such appalling Quechua? That word, Claudio, is only used by the lower class of mestizo miners - and you a descendant of the Incas! And what man of birth ever had such a convincing and completely vulgar style on the guitar?’

I dragged him into my room and shut the door. There I embraced him again with tears in my eyes. I had felt myself, under this continual harrying, growing so old and dull and English.

‘Your beard,’ he said, ‘smells of elephants. What admirable attention to detail! And how the devil did you manage to grow such a thing in seven weeks?’