The Captain and the Enemy (13 page)

It was a good many years since I had last seen the Captain, and I felt as though I were waiting for a stranger or indeed a character existing only on the pages of that youthful manuscript of mine, on which I am still working. He existed there better on paper than in memory. For example if I tried to remember the occasions when he had taken me to a cinema it was only
King Kong
which came
to
my mind because I had recorded that memory in writing. When I thought of his previous arrivals after a long absence – only too frequent during our life together – it was the unexpected one with a bearded face which I saw in my mind’s eye, because I had described it in words, or the stranger talking to the headmaster, the one who had afterwards fed me with smoked salmon. It was again because I had tried to recreate this character in my sorry attempt to become a ‘real writer’.

So now, when the door of the room opened, I felt myself back in the Swan Inn and I was watching for a much younger man who would ask for his suitcase containing two bricks to be sent up to his room. I would not have been in the least surprised to learn that the suitcase which he planted heavily down on his bed contained similar bricks: what surprised me was the age of the Captain – the worn pleated old man’s face. He wore neither a beard nor a moustache, and their absence seemed to give more room for the deep criss-cross lines in the skin, and the hair on his head was grey where it wasn’t white.

‘Why, Jim,’ he said holding out an obviously shy hand, ‘it’s good to see you again after all this time, but I wish you weren’t here alone.’ He almost echoed my own thoughts when he said, ‘What a lot older you look.’ He added, ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, that Liza’s not here to make us a cup of tea, but then I suppose the time has come now when you’ll be wanting something stronger. Whisky? Gin?’

‘Your friend Mr Quigly has been teaching me to drink Pisco Sours, but I would prefer whisky.’ (Remembering the long ago past I nearly said ‘gin and tonic’.)

The Captain went to the bar. ‘Quigly is an acquaintance,’ he told me, ‘he’s hardly what I’d call a friend,’ and as he prepared the two whiskies, he asked with his back turned to me, perhaps in order that I should not see the anxiety in his eyes, ‘How’s Liza?’

I don’t think anyone can really blame me for not replying then with the simple truth, ‘She’s dead’, and it was perhaps at that precise moment I dangerously decided to delay telling him of her death as long as I could.

After all I owed him nothing. Hadn’t his only interest in me lain in his desire to give Liza what she couldn’t otherwise have – a child? But I realized very well what difficulties remained for me to face. I had no idea of how often she was in the habit of writing to him and how could I explain her complete silence? I knew that inevitably, sooner or later, the truth was bound to come out, but somehow I had to establish myself first safely in this strange world before he knew that I had lied to him.

I said, ‘Not too well.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She had a small accident. Knocked down. On the way to the baker’s. She had to go to hospital.’

‘What sort of accident?’

I gave him a modified version of the truth without the sequel.

‘And you’ve come here, leaving her alone in hospital …?’

I nearly told him, ‘She’s used to being alone,’ but I stopped in time when he added, ‘You are the only companion she has.’ I remembered that she had never written to tell him of my desertion, for fear of worrying him, nor would she have wanted to bring any pressure on him to
return
. So I continued to lie carefully. ‘She urged me to come. She gave me the money for the fare because she couldn’t come herself. She plans to follow me. As soon as the doctors give the OK.’ The lies and the evasions began to multiply and I found it impossible to check them.

‘But I wasn’t expecting her to come. I wrote to her not to come yet. To wait a little longer. Because of difficulties.’

‘She thought I might be of help to you.’

‘I hate the thought of her staying there in hospital – ill and alone.’

‘She’s probably back home by this time.’

‘Yes. Home as you call it. In that dreary basement.’

‘She was happy there. In her own way. Waiting for you to return.’

‘Thank God she had you, but now … If only I could take the next plane back to Europe, but I can’t. I’ve promised … In a month perhaps I’ll be free, I’m almost sure of that, but a month is a hell of a long time for someone who is sick and alone.’

He took a long drink at his whisky. ‘You always used to get the bread for her. Where were you when the accident happened?’

‘I was working.’

‘Oh yes, of course. You got that job on a paper. She wrote to me how glad she was that you weren’t hanging around all day. It was something she enjoyed, looking forward to the evening when you came home.’

I had never thought before of quite how far he had been deceived by both of us. Together we had dug a hole which would hide the truth deeper than any grave. But there was one truth which sooner or later had to be unearthed – the
truth
of her death. She couldn’t remain credibly silent to his letters for ever. I drank, but the whisky didn’t help me to unravel that riddle.

The Captain poured himself a second glass of whisky. ‘I don’t drink tea any more,’ he said, ‘not that I ever really liked it. Tea for me belongs to only one place in the world, her place.’ He was, I think, trying to ease the tension between us which he probably attributed to our different anxieties, perhaps even a change in our relationship. We were no longer a man and a boy – he was a much older man and I had altogether ceased to be a boy. He asked, ‘What did you think of the man Quigly?’

‘I couldn’t make him out. I wondered why you sent him to meet me.’

‘Pablo knows very little English, and I thought your Spanish – well, we never got very far with that, did we? At least Quigly would be able to explain things a bit to you.’

‘He explained nothing.’

‘I just meant about the hotel, this room, how you should put things on account, and what’s best to eat in this benighted city. I wasn’t able to meet you. I was on an important job. I was badly needed.’

‘Not by the police?’ I asked, meaning only to make light of that ambiguous past which Liza and I had shared with him.

‘Oh no, it’s not the police I have difficulties with now.’

‘But there are still difficulties?’

‘There always are. I don’t mind difficulties. Life wouldn’t be worth living without them. I’m afraid you’ve only got that sofa there for a bed now that I’m back.’

‘I got used to a sofa in Camden Town. And it wasn’t as comfortable as the one here.’

‘I suppose this time you’ve got a pair of pyjamas?’

I was glad that his thoughts too were going back to that far past about which I had written. In the past there were no traps to be avoided, and each could talk freely to the other. ‘They are not orange ones, thank God,’ I said.

‘But you put up with the orange ones the first night.’

‘As soon as the house was quiet I took them off and went to sleep naked.’

‘And rumpled them up I suppose so that Liza wouldn’t notice?’

‘I managed to tear them badly. In case I would have to wear them again after a wash.’

‘Yes, I remember Liza was furious because I had to pay for another pair. I wasn’t the only one with a double life, and you began yours even younger than I did.’

‘But you’ve continued to live one,’ I said. ‘What
is
your job?’

‘I’m not sure it’s quite safe for you to know as yet.’

‘Safe for whom?’

‘For both of us.’

‘Does Mr Quigly know?’

I was reluctant to leave out the title Mister when I spoke of Quigly. It seemed to distance me from the man. It was almost like an adjective of contempt.

‘Oh, he’d like to know, but you can never trust a journalist if that’s what he is.’

‘I was a journalist a week ago.’

‘Not a journalist of Quigly’s kind, I hope.’

‘What
is
Mr Quigly’s kind?’

‘He calls himself a financial correspondent, but he’s hungry for all kinds of copy. I’m not sure that he always uses it for his paper. He’s a man you have to watch.’

‘Do you want
me
to watch him? Is that the job you have in mind for me?’

‘Perhaps. It might be. Who knows? Anyway it’s too late to talk now and we’re tired. Let’s have one more whisky and then go to sleep. At least
you
can sleep. I want to write first to Liza and tell her you’ve arrived safely.’

For a moment I could have believed that he was testing me, to see how long I would continue with my lie that she was alive, but of course it was not the case. He added, ‘I always try to write to her before I sleep, even if I don’t always send the letter. When the day is finished I can forget the difficulties and think only of her,’ and it was to the sound of his pen on paper that I eventually fell asleep.

(3)

It was a chance, or so I thought it to be at the time, that I fell in with Mr Quigly the very next morning. When I woke the Captain’s bed was empty, and on the chair beside it lay the letter to Liza still unsealed and unstamped, perhaps because he meant to continue it after his work – what work? – the next evening or not send it at all. I was only momentarily tempted to read it – I had read so many of his letters recently that I could almost guess the contents of this one. It would surely contain the same unconvincing sentimentalities. All the same I felt a little proud of myself for refraining. It seemed to reduce a little my sense of guilt for my great lie.

I had hardly left the hotel, with no other purpose than to pass the time, when Mr Quigly appeared walking
towards
me. As the four banks were within a hundred yards the coincidence was easily explicable – in fact it was explained in just that way by Mr Quigly. ‘Been drawing some expenses in red ink,’ he said, ‘and I’ve included you among them.’

‘Me? I don’t understand.’

‘I would like to pay you a very small advance.’

‘For what?’

‘You can be of help with a news story I’m writing for my paper.’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘As one journalist to another.’

‘Has this something to do with’ (I hesitated at the name) ‘Mr Smith?’

‘Not directly.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I told him, ‘I can’t help you,’ and I walked away in a thoroughly bad mood without taking his money.

(4)

As I write this account I begin to realize that there is one great gap in my story. Surely I should have felt some grief for Liza’s death. She had played her role as substitute mother very correctly over all the years after my unexpected arrival with the Captain – with what had seemed a natural affection and even a natural irritation on occasion – and with far more skill than my aunt had ever shown. I could make no complaints of the life I had led with her. The Captain believed she had needed a child to complete her happiness and to ease the loneliness he
assumed
she must feel during his many absences. Perhaps he had done wrong – perhaps he had only added a responsibility. How can one ever be sure of what another feels? Certainly she had never been possessive and even as a child I may have appreciated that, if only half consciously. It was this attitude of hers which enabled me to cut loose without scruples when my time for independence came, though I continued to play the comedy of a dutiful son by visiting her once a week – if nothing more attractive presented itself. Now I have to face the truth of that gap in my story. When they told me at the hospital that she was dead I felt no more emotion than when I had left her behind after a weekly visit to go to my bed-sitting-room in Soho. If there was any emotion it was the emotion of relief, a duty finished.

One object she did abandon in the hospital – it was a letter addressed only with the name of the Captain, for she had probably forgotten the Apt number which neither of us understood. I nearly opened it, but a cold sort of reason prevented me. I was going to the Captain: I couldn’t present him with an open letter and I thought that handing the letter to him might be a way of breaking the news of her death and even excusing my use of his cheque to join him. But it was too late now and I had torn it up unread and put the scraps into a dustbin outside the hospital.

(5)

It was rash of me to have dismissed Mr Quigly so abruptly, for I was bored with my long solitary days in
this
city to which I was a stranger. I would even have welcomed the return of Pablo and, if the Captain was supposed by the mysterious Colonel Martínez to have taken the office of my guardian, why was he now absent so soon after his return? Anyway what on earth was the purpose of a bodyguard? I could feel no danger among the international banks when I changed a little of my money at one of them – or rather the remains of Liza’s. Bodyguards and banks didn’t seem to belong to the same world as mine or the Captain’s. Perhaps only Mr Quigly would be at home among them both.

As it happened I wasn’t to be left alone for very long. The Captain even apologized for his absence when he walked into our room. ‘There were a few problems to be solved,’ he told me. ‘Now we can enjoy ourselves with a free mind and I will show you some of the beauties of Panama.’

‘Please not the banks. Not the slums. I’ve seen too much of both. Are there any beauties?’

‘The beauty of ruins,’ he told me. ‘They do teach us a lesson.’

‘What lesson?’

‘To tell you the truth – I’m not quite sure what.’ The phrase ‘to tell you the truth’ was a key phrase with the Captain. How often Liza and I had exchanged ironic looks at the sound of it, for truth and the Captain were not easily paired. All the same, perhaps in this case he
was
looking for a true answer, since he stood a long while in respectful silence among the seaside ruins of the old city which Sir Henry Morgan had destroyed more than three hundred years before.

‘You call these beautiful,’ I said to break the silence.
‘What
are they but a lot of broken stones?’ I had never before known him to be as silent as this.

‘What did you say?’