The Human Factor Part 2

'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 sn.o.b 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d.'

'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 Lourenco 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 he 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.

I.

'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.

'Not many pheasants,' Daintry said, 'but otherwise very fine.'

'Harry,' she called over his shoulder, 'd.i.c.ky' and then 'Where's Dodo? Is he lost?' n.o.body called Daintry by his first name because n.o.body knew it. With a sense of loneliness he watched the graceful elongated figure of his hostess limp down the stone steps to greet 'Harry' with a kiss on both cheeks. Daintry went on alone into the dining-room where the drinks stood waiting on the buffet.

A little stout rosy man in tweeds whom he thought he had seen somewhere before was mixing himself a dry martini. He wore silver-rimmed spectacles which glinted in the sunlight. 'Add one for me,' Daintry said, 'if you are making them really dry.'

'Ten to one,' the little man said. 'A whiff of the cork, eh? Always use a scent spray myself. You are Daintry, aren't you? You've forgotten me. I'm Percival. I took your blood pressure once.'

'Oh yes. Doctor Percival. We're in the same firm more or less, aren't we?'

'That's right. C wanted us to get together quietly-no need for all that nonsense with scramblers here. I can never make mine work, can you? The trouble is, though, that I don't shoot. I only fish. This your first time here?'

'Yes. When did you arrive?'

'A bit early. Around midday. I'm a Jaguar fiend. Can't go at less than a hundred.'

Daintry looked at the table. A bottle of beer stood by every place. He didn't like beer, but for some reason beer seemed always to be regarded as suitable for a shoot. Perhaps it went with the boyishness of the occasion like ginger beer at Lord's. Daintry was not boyish. A shoot to him was an exercise of strict compet.i.tive skill-he had once been runner-up for the King's Cup. Now down the centre of the table stood small silver sweet bowls which he saw contained his Maltesers. He had been a little embarra.s.sed the night before when he had presented almost a crate of them to Lady Hargreaves; she obviously hadn't an idea what they were or what to do with them. He felt that he had been deliberately fooled by that man Castle. He was glad to see they looked more sophisticated in silver bowls than they had done in plastic bags.

'Do you like beer?' he asked Percival.

'I like anything alcoholic,' Percival said, 'except Fernet-Branca,' and then the boys burst boisterously in Buffy and Dodo, Harry and d.i.c.ky and all; the silver and the gla.s.ses vibrated with joviality. Daintry was glad Percival was there, for n.o.body seemed to know Percival's first name either.

Unfortunately he was separated from him at table. Percival had quickly finished his first bottle of beer and begun on a second. Daintry felt betrayed, for Percival seemed to be getting on with his neighbours as easily as if they had been members of the old firm too. He had begun to tell a fishing story which had made the man called d.i.c.ky laugh. Daintry was sitting between the fellow he took to be Buffy and a lean elderly man with a lawyer's face. He had introduced himself, and his surname was familiar. He was either the Attorney-General or the Solicitor-General, but Daintry couldn't remember which; his uncertainty inhibited conversation.

Buffy said suddenly, 'My G.o.d, if those are not Maltesers!'

'You know Maltesers?' Daintry asked.

'Haven't tasted one for donkey's years. Always bought them at the movies when I was a kid. Taste wonderful. There's no movie house around here surely?'

'As a matter of fact I brought them from London.'

'You go to the movies? Haven't been to one in ten years. So they still sell Maltesers?'

'You can buy them in shops too.'

'I never knew that. Where did you find them?'

'In an ABC.'

'ABC?'.

Daintry repeated dubiously what Castle had said, 'Aerated Bread Company.'

'Extraordinary! What's aerated bread?'

'I don't know,' Daintry said.

'The things they do invent nowadays. I wouldn't be surprised, would you, if their loaves were made by computers?' He leant forward and took a Malteser and crackled it at his ear like a cigar.

Lady Hargreaves called down the table, 'Buffy! Not before the steak-and-kidney pie.'

'Sorry, my dear. Couldn't resist. Haven't tasted one since I was a kid.' He said to Daintry, 'Extraordinary things computers. I paid 'em a fiver once to find me a wife.'

'You aren't married?' Daintry asked, looking at the gold ring Buffy wore.

'No. Always keep that on for protection. Wasn't really serious, you know. Like to try out new gadgets. Filled up a form as long as your arm. Qualifications, interests, profession, what have you.' He took another Malteser. 'Sweet tooth,' he said. 'Always had it.'

'And did you get any applicants?'

'They sent me along a girl. Girl! Thirty-five if a day. I had to give her tea. Haven't had tea since my mum died. I said, "My dear, do you mind if we make it a whisky? I know the waiter here. He'll slip us one!" She said she didn't drink. Didn't drink!'

'The computer had slipped up?'

'She had a degree in Economics at London University. And big spectacles. Flat-chested. She said she was a good cook. I said I always took my meals at White's.'

'Did you ever see her again?'

'Not to speak to, but once she waved to me from a bus as I was coming down the club steps. Embarra.s.sing! Because I was with d.i.c.ky at the time. That's what happened when they let buses go up St James's Street. No one was safe.'

After the steak-and-kidney pie came a treacle tart and a big Stilton cheese and Sir John Hargreaves circulated the port. There was a faint feeling of unrest at the table as though the holidays had been going on too long. People began to glance through the windows at the grey sky: in a few hours the light would fail. They drank their port rapidly as if with a sense of guilt-they were not really there for idle pleasure-except Percival who wasn't concerned. He was telling another fishing story and had four empty bottles of beer beside him.

The Solicitor-General-or was it the Attorney General?-said heavily, 'We ought to be moving. The sun's going down.' He certainly was not here for enjoyment, only for execution, and Daintry sympathised with his anxiety. Hargreaves really ought to make a move, but Hargreaves was almost asleep. After years in the Colonial Service-he had once been a young District Commissioner on what was then the Gold Coast he had acquired the knack of s.n.a.t.c.hing his siesta in the most unfavourable circ.u.mstances, even surrounded by quarrelling chiefs, who used to make more noise than Buffy.

'John,' Lady Hargreaves called down the table, 'wake up.'

He opened blue serene unshockable eyes and said, 'A cat-nap.' It was said that as a young man somewhere in Ashanti he had inadvertently eaten human flesh, but his digestion had not been impaired. According to the story he had told the Governor, I couldn't really complain, sir. They were doing me a great honour by inviting me to take pot luck.'

'Well, Daintry,' he said, 'I suppose it's time we got on with the ma.s.sacre.'

He unrolled himself from the table and yawned. 'Your steak-and-kidney pie, dear, is too good.'

Daintry watched him with envy. He envied him in the first place for his position. He was one of the very few men outside the services ever to have been appointed C. No one in the firm knew why he had been chosen all kinds of recondite influences had been surmised, for his only experience of intelligence had been gained in Africa during the war. Daintry also envied him his wife; she was so rich, so decorative, so impeccably American. An American marriage, it seemed, could not be cla.s.sified as a foreign marriage: to marry a foreigner special permission had to be obtained and it was often refused, but to marry an American was perhaps to confirm the special relationship. He wondered all the same whether Lady Hargreaves had been positively vetted by MI5 and been pa.s.sed by the FBI.

'Tonight,' Hargreaves said, 'we'll have a chat, Daintry, won't we? You and I and Percival. When this crowd has gone home.'

2.

Sir John Hargreaves limped round, handing out cigars, pouring out whiskies, poking the fire. I don't enjoy shooting much myself,' he said. 'Never used to shoot in Africa, except with a camera, but my wife likes all the old English customs. If you have land, she says, you must have birds. I'm afraid there weren't enough pheasants, Daintry.'

'I had a very good day,' Daintry said, 'all in all.'

'I wish you ran to a trout stream,' Doctor Percival said.