The Human Factor (3 page)

‘Darling, I didn't hear you. I was talking to Doctor Barker.'

Doctor Barker followed her – a middle-aged man with a flaming strawberry mark on his left cheek, dressed in dusty grey, with two fountain-pens in his breast pocket; or perhaps one of them was a pocket torch for peering into throats.

‘Is anything wrong?'

‘Sam's got measles, darling.'

‘He'll do all right,' Doctor Barker said. ‘Just keep him quiet. Not too much light.'

‘Will you have a whisky, Doctor?'

‘No, thank you. I still have two more visits to make and I'm late for dinner as it is.'

‘Where could he have caught it?'

‘Oh, there's quite an epidemic. You needn't worry. It's only a light attack.'

When the doctor had gone Castle kissed his wife. He ran his hand over her black resistant hair; he touched her high cheekbones. He felt the black contours of her face as a man might who has picked out one piece of achieved sculpture from all the hack carvings littering the steps of an hotel for white tourists; he was reassuring himself that what he valued most in life was still safe. By the end of a day he always felt as though he had been gone for years leaving her defenceless. Yet no one here minded her African blood. There was no law here to menace their life together. They were secure – or as secure as they would ever be.

‘What's the matter?' she asked.

‘I was worried. Everything seemed at sixes and sevens tonight when I came in. You weren't here. Not even the whisky . . .'

‘What a creature of habit you are.'

He began to unpack his briefcase while she prepared the whisky. ‘Is there really nothing to worry about?' Castle asked. ‘I never like the way doctors speak, especially when they are reassuring.'

‘Nothing.'

‘Can I go and see him?'

‘He's asleep now. Better not wake him. I gave him an aspirin.'

He put Volume One of
Clarissa Harlowe
back in the bookcase.

‘Finished it?'

‘No, I doubt whether I ever shall now. Life's a bit too short.'

‘But I thought you always liked long books.'

‘Perhaps I'll have a go at
War and Peace
before it's too late.'

‘We haven't got it.'

‘I'm going to buy a copy tomorrow.'

She had carefully measured out a quadruple whisky by English pub standards, and now she brought it to him and closed the glass in his hand, as though it were a message no one else must read. Indeed, the degree of his drinking was known only to them: he usually drank nothing stronger than beer when he was with a colleague or even with a stranger in a bar. Any touch of alcoholism might always be regarded in his profession with suspicion. Only Davis had the indifference to knock the drinks back with a fine abandon, not caring who saw him, but then he had the audacity which comes from a sense of complete innocence. Castle had lost both audacity and innocence for ever in South Africa while he was waiting for the blow to fall.

‘You don't mind, do you,' Sarah asked, ‘if it's a cold meal tonight? I was busy with Sam all evening.'

‘Of course not.'

He put his arm round her. The depth of their love was as secret as the quadruple measure of whisky. To speak of it to others would invite danger. Love was a total risk. Literature had always so proclaimed it. Tristan, Anna Karenina, even the lust of Lovelace – he had glanced at the last volume of
Clarissa
. ‘I like my wife' was the most he had ever said even to Davis.

‘I wonder what I would do without you,' Castle said.

‘Much the same as you are doing now. Two doubles before dinner at eight.'

‘When I arrived and you weren't here with the whisky, I was scared.'

‘Scared of what?'

‘Of being left alone. Poor Davis,' he added, ‘going home to nothing.'

‘Perhaps he has a lot more fun.'

‘This is my fun,' he said. ‘A sense of security.'

‘Is life outside as dangerous as all that?' She sipped from his glass and touched his mouth with lips which were wet with J. & B. He always bought J. & B. because of its colour – a large whisky and soda looked no stronger than a weak one of another brand.

The telephone rang from the table by the sofa. He lifted the receiver and said ‘Hello,' but no one replied. ‘Hello.' He silently counted four, then put the receiver down when he heard the connection break.

‘Nobody?'

‘I expect it was a wrong number.'

‘It's happened three times this month. Always when you are late at the office. You don't think it could be a burglar checking up to see if we are at home?'

‘There's nothing worth a burglary here.'

‘One reads such horrible stories, darling – men with stockings over their faces. I hate the time after sunset before you come home.'

‘That's why I bought you Buller. Where
is
Buller?'

‘He's in the garden eating grass. Something has upset him. Anyway, you know what he's like with strangers. He fawns on them.'

‘He might object to a stocking mask all the same.'

‘He would think it was put on to please him. You remember at Christmas . . . with the paper hats . . .'

‘I'd always thought before we got him that boxers were fierce dogs.'

‘They are – with cats.'

The door creaked and Castle turned quickly: the square black muzzle of Buller pushed the door fully open, and then he launched his body like a sack of potatoes at Castle's flies. Castle fended him off. ‘Down, Buller, down.' A long ribbon of spittle descended Castle's trouser leg. He said, ‘If that's fawning, any burglar would run a mile.' Buller began to bark spasmodically and wriggle his haunches, like a dog with worms, moving backwards towards the door.

‘Be quiet, Buller.'

‘He only wants a walk.'

‘At this hour? I thought you said he was ill.'

‘He seems to have eaten enough grass.'

‘Be quiet, Buller, damn you. No walk.'

Buller slumped heavily down and dribbled onto the parquet to comfort himself.

‘The meter man was scared of him this morning, but Buller only meant to be friendly.'

‘But the meter man knows him.'

‘This one was new.'

‘New. Why?'

‘Oh, our usual man has got the flu.'

‘You asked to see his card?'

‘Of course. Darling, are
you
getting scared of burglars now? Stop it, Buller. Stop.' Buller was licking his private parts with the gusto of an alderman drinking soup.

Castle stepped over him and went into the hall. He examined the meter carefully, but there seemed nothing unusual about it, and he returned.

‘You
are
worried about something?'

‘It's nothing really. Something happened at the office. A new security man throwing his weight about. It irritated me – I've been more than thirty years in the firm, and I ought to be trusted by this time. They'll be searching our pockets next when we leave for lunch. He
did
look in my briefcase.'

‘Be fair, darling. It's not their fault. It's the fault of the job.'

‘It's too late to change that now.'

‘Nothing's ever too late,' she said, and he wished he could believe her. She kissed him again as she went past him to the kitchen to fetch the cold meat.

When they were sitting down and he had taken another whisky, she said, ‘Joking apart, you
are
drinking too much.'

‘Only at home. No one sees me but you.'

‘I didn't mean for the job. I meant for your health. I don't care a damn about the job.'

‘No?'

‘A department of the Foreign Office. Everyone knows what that means, but you have to go around with your mouth shut like a criminal. If you told me – me, your wife – what you'd done today, they'd sack you. I wish they would sack you. What
have
you done today?'

‘I've gossiped with Davis, I've made notes on a few cards, I sent off one telegram – oh, and I've been interviewed by that new security officer. He knew my cousin when he was at Corpus.'

‘Which cousin?'

‘Roger.'

‘That snob in the Treasury?'

‘Yes.'

On the way to bed, he said, ‘Could I look in on Sam?'

‘Of course. But he'll be fast asleep by now.'

Buller followed them and laid a bit of spittle like a bonbon on the bedclothes.

‘Oh, Buller.'

He wagged what remained of his tail as though he had been praised. For a boxer he was not intelligent. He had cost a lot of money and perhaps his pedigree was a little too perfect.

The boy lay asleep diagonally in his teak bunk with his head on a box of lead soldiers instead of a pillow. One black foot hung out of the blankets altogether and an officer of the Tank Corps was wedged between his toes. Castle watched Sarah rearrange him, picking out the officer and digging out a parachutist from under a thigh. She handled his body with the carelessness of an expert, and the child slept solidly on.

‘He looks very hot and dry,' Castle said.

‘So would you if you had a temperature of 103.' He looked more African than his mother, and the memory of a famine photograph came to Castle's mind – a small corpse spread-eagled on desert sand, watched by a vulture.

‘Surely that's very high.'

‘Not for a child.'

He was always amazed by her confidence: she could make a new dish without referring to any cookery book, and nothing ever came to pieces in her hands. Now she rolled the boy roughly on his side and firmly tucked him in, without making an eyelid stir.

‘He's a good sleeper.'

‘Except for nightmares.'

‘Has he had another?'

‘Always the same one. We both of us go off by train and he's left alone. On the platform someone – he doesn't know who – grips his arm. It's nothing to worry about. He's at the age for nightmares. I read somewhere that they come when school begins to threaten. I wish he hadn't got to go to prep school. He may have trouble. Sometimes I almost wish you had apartheid here too.'

‘He's a good runner. In England there's no trouble if you are good at any sort of games.'

In bed that night she woke from her first sleep and said, as though the thought had occurred to her in a dream, ‘It's strange isn't it, your being so fond of Sam.'

‘Of course I am. Why not? I thought you were asleep.'

‘There's no “of course” about it. A little bastard.'

‘That's what Davis always calls him.'

‘Davis? He doesn't know?' she asked with fear. ‘Surely he doesn't know?'

‘No, don't worry. It's the word he uses for any child.'

‘I'm glad his father's six feet underground,' she said.

‘Yes. So am I, poor devil. He might have married you in the end.'

‘No. I was in love with you all the time. Even when I started Sam I was in love with you. He's more your child than his. I tried to think of you when he made love. He was a tepid sort of fish. At the University they called him an Uncle Tom. Sam won't be tepid, will he? Hot or cold, but not tepid.'

‘Why are we talking about all that ancient history?'

‘Because Sam's ill. And because you are worried. When I don't feel secure I remember what it felt like when I knew I had to tell you about him. That first night across the border in Lourenço Marques. The Hotel Polana. I thought, “He'll put on his clothes again and go away for ever.” But you didn't. You stayed. And we made love in spite of Sam inside.'

They lay quietly together, all these years later, only a shoulder touching a shoulder. He wondered whether this was how the happiness of old age, which he had sometimes seen on a stranger's face, might come about, but he would be dead long before she reached old age. Old age was something they would never be able to share.

‘Aren't you ever sad,' she asked, ‘that we haven't made a child?'

‘Sam's enough of a responsibility.'

‘I'm not joking. Wouldn't you have liked a child of ours?'

This time he knew that the question was one of those which couldn't be evaded.

‘No,' he said.

‘Why not?'

‘You want to look under stones too much, Sarah. I love Sam because he's yours. Because he's not mine. Because I don't have to see anything of myself there when I look at him. I see only something of you. I don't want to go on and on for ever. I want the buck to stop here.'

CHAPTER III

1

‘A
GOOD
morning's sport,' Colonel Daintry remarked half-heartedly to Lady Hargreaves as he stamped the mud off his boots before entering the house. ‘The birds were going over well.' His fellow guests piled out of cars behind him, with the forced joviality of a football team trying to show their keen sporting enjoyment and not how cold and muddy they really felt.

‘Drinks are waiting,' Lady Hargreaves said. ‘Help yourselves. Lunch in ten minutes.'

Another car was climbing the hill through the park, a long way off. Somebody bellowed with laughter in the cold wet air, and someone cried, ‘Here's Buffy at last. In time for lunch, of course.'

‘And your famous steak-and-kidney pudding?' Daintry asked. ‘I've heard so much about it.'

‘My pie, you mean. Did you really have a good morning, Colonel?' Her voice had a faint American accent – the more agreeable for being faint, like the tang of an expensive perfume.