The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown
Read The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown Online
Authors: Geoffrey Household
FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY
BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT
FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS
NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY
The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown
Geoffrey Household
Contents
Zita
He spoke tenderly of the youth he had been as if there were no connection through the navel string of the years, as if age had come upon him in a sudden access. This painstaking description of a former self grew night by night from the hotel terrace like some lusty shrub forcing up the paving slab laid over its roots.
‘This wasn’t a hotel then,’ he said. ‘Fifty years ago it was the villa of—well, a poor widow I suppose one might call her.’
It was difficult to imagine Bernardo Brown in the nineteen twenties. So little evidence was left beyond laughter in the eyes. His body must always have been strong and stocky; now it had become a bit roly-poly, but then it would have bounced upright when it hit the ground. Features, precise and clean-cut, could not be resurrected; to prophesy how a young face will change is far easier than to guess what an old face once was. Subtraction helped. Take away the bags under the eyes, the spaniel jowls under the cheeks, and it was possible to see the deep hollows where a few white bristles escaped the razor as fine lines on a pale tan which had soon deepened to mahogany and at last reverted to the present sandiness of colour and texture. Yes, he could have been a very good-looking boy of more than middle height with dark brown, wavy hair. No doubt the full, mobile mouth was then alive with that inner amusement which the grey eyes still retained.
Guesswork could reach no farther, but always he must have
held the promise of the highly civilised European he was. He looked like a fine type of business man from the Basque Provinces, cunning, candid and kind. One could not tell whether he was British or Spanish till he spoke. Then his English—a rather old-fashioned, careful English—left no doubt that it was his native language.
‘What beat me was that anyone could think I mattered,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more patrician than royalty, nothing more plebeian than police—yet both alike in being self-confident and after me, a plain, respectable shipping clerk. Contented, or near it. Who the devil is ever contented under the age of thirty? One wants more money for less work, and some sort of freedom which one can’t put a name to. Still, I was far from wanting freedom to travel over half Europe with no more than small change in my pocket and all of them intent on talking to me.’
His father had been a bowler-hatted foreman at the big Bilbao shipyard: one of the skilled emigrants common in days when Glasgow, Belfast and Newcastle were still considered to be the world’s nurseries of craftsmen. In order to marry the daughter of a deep-sea fishing skipper he turned Catholic—or at any rate sufficiently Catholic for the port of Bilbao. The sole result of the union was Bernardo.
He was educated by Jesuits who saw in him a possible theologian, for he had a precocious interest in doctrine and languages, ancient or modern. They had already begun to add Hebrew to his Greek and Latin when they decided that scholar he might be, but priest never. In fact he was being punctiliously diseducated by his father once a week or so. Pious responses during the day. Wellsian machine-socialism at home. This disconcerting process gave him the ironical detachment of a mature actor under cover of which he could build his own morality. Looking back, he didn’t think it was wholly beneficial; he felt too much of an observer, set apart from his fellows. But it was by no means bad training for an outlaw.
His education was completed by a business course in London and a desk at a shipping office so that the lines of his future career were more or less settled when in 1918 his parents, eager to see him again, were offered free passage on a newly built ship being delivered to the British Government. She was extinguished by two torpedoes in the Western Approaches. Bernardo, now that both of them had gone, could never quite accept his father’s country as his only home. He returned to Bilbao as Number Two of his firm’s local agency. Not bad, he said, at the age of twenty-four.
So there he was in July 1925, a shipping agent with good prospects and bilingual—or rather better if one counts fluent French and a classical education—but without any special interests except girls, the sea and the mountains. He was inclined to underestimate the young Brown. Tastes have to start from somewhere and be formed.
It was on a Sunday, after sunset, that he found himself at Lequeitio, having walked twenty-three miles across country from Bilbao alone and sometimes singing his way over the hill turf—no doubt bilingually. He intended to return by an an elderly bus which left at ten, God willing and assuming that prospective passengers could be routed out from the taverns. He never did return, at least not from Lequeitio.
‘The beach below this terrace was just as it is,’ he said, ‘except a lot cleaner. No ice-cream cartons. No desolate French letters. Close under the wall would have been a very private place to take your girl if there had been any. In those days in the north of Spain no girl would have been out after dusk with a man. And look at them now!’
So he had been by himself, wandering along the beach below the villa which was now a hotel. It was at the bottom of a roughly rectangular bay. The left or western side was occupied by the little town and its fishing quays, with the narrow entrance to the harbour in the north-west corner. The eastern side was closed by an old causeway, covered at half tide and nearly awash at low, which led to a sparsely wooded
island. Beyond the causeway was the river running out into the Atlantic over a sand bar.
The shore along which Bernardo Brown had been walking was empty except for a dinghy moored in the angle of the causeway and the beach. He supposed that somebody was shrimping or searching for clams. He ought to have considered, he said, that anyone engaged in so lowly an occupation would not have possessed a boat with an engine in it. But why give the boat a thought at all? The night was softly overcast and velvet black. He was silently padding over the sand, dreamily content between his hills and the sea. A pity he had not been singing.
When he was nearly beneath the villa, he heard a shout, running and a scuffle above him. A suitcase was dropped over the wall, instantly followed by somebody who picked it up and ran for the moored dinghy. Somebody else on the terrace fired shots into the darkness. One seemed to hit the fugitive who staggered and recovered; another passed very close to Bernardo’s ear, destroying all possibilities of calm calculation.
He dropped flat on the beach and heard the dinghy begin to putt-putt off into the night. It was challenged from somewhere beyond the causeway. When there was no reply and no attempt to return, a fusillade of rifle fire was aimed—presumably—in its general direction, sending an occasional ricochet howling down the beach.
What Bernardo did then was, he admitted, the act of a terrified lunatic. He could have boldly shouted at the top of his voice that he was on the beach and that people should look out where they were firing; he could have stayed where he was, crouching under cover of the terrace wall until the excitement died down, or run along the beach and up to the nearby town square. He instantaneously rejected the lot. Whether he stayed or ran, he risked being grabbed as an accomplice and compelled to spend a night in the police station.
The trigger-happy Pair of the Civil Guard—he had recognised
their challenge—had now stopped spraying the water around the sunken causeway with their carbines and were probably closing in on him. Civil Guards pullulated around the slums of Baracaldo where the Bilbao steelworkers lived and plotted their republic, but had little business among the seaside villas of the well-to-do; so the Pair must, he thought, have been lying in wait for a gang of smugglers or burglars.
He wriggled quickly down to the edge of the sea, tied his shoes round his neck and took to the water careful not to make a splash. A dripping squelching passenger on the last bus would arouse only laughter. Someone with a skinful of the dark Rioja wine always fell in off the quay.
There he stayed with a toe on the bottom, trying to decide from lights within the villa and lights moving towards it when it was safe to swim for the nearest steps. He wondered what the man in the dinghy was up to. If he had not been caught at his work, whatever it was, he must have intended to chug straight out of the harbour and into the freedom of the Bay of Biscay. He might still be able to manage it. Telephone communication with the harbourmaster or coastguards was bound to be slow.
Bernardo was congratulating himself on having done the right thing in an emergency—always a satisfying experience for youth—when a powerful acetylene lamp fizzed on the terrace and threw a beam across the water which picked up his face before he could dip it under. Someone yelled:
‘There he is!’
And there he was. Nobody bothered to fire at him from the terrace. He was caught. He could count on reception committees on the beach, at the shore end of the causeway and the quayside. His only chance was to swim straight for the island and hope to reach it before any boats put out after him.
‘I meant to run across the island and dive into open sea on the other side,’ he said. ‘God, I was in a stew! I was much more frightened of wading ashore with my hands up than all the unknown risks of surf and currents.’
So he struck out for the island, swimming under water whenever the beam looked like picking him up. His plan seemed futile as soon as he was committed to it. A boatload of police could cross the narrow harbour entrance and arrive on the western shore of the island before he could reach the southern.
Still, these things take time, especially on a Sunday night. When he landed he had the island to himself. In the darkness it appeared sufficiently overgrown to conceal him, but then he remembered how small it really was. His best bet was to try to get clear away along the sand bar at the river mouth wading or swimming through the edge of the surf. What absurdly worried him, now that he had broken contact, was that he would be late at the office.