Alistair MacLean - When Eight Bells Toll

"This is a dressing-gown," I explained. "I've three suits and all three are soaked and ruined. Any luck, sir?" Uncle Arthur had just come in to the wheelhouse.

"One of them passed out." Uncle Arthur wasn't looking very pleased with himself. "The other kept moaning so loudly that I couldn't make myself heard. Well, Calvert, the story."

"The story, air? I was just going to bed. I've told you the story."

"Half a dozen quick sentences that I couldn't hear above their damned caterwauling," he said coldly. "The whole story, Calvert."

"I'm feeling weak, sir."

"I've rarely known a time when you weren't feeling weak, Calvert. You know where the whisky is."

Hutchinson coughed respectfully. "I wonder if the admiral would permit — "

"Certainty, certainly," Uncle Arthur said in a quite different tone. "Of course, my boy." The boy was a clear foot taller than Uncle Arthur. "And while you're at it, Calvert, you might bring one for me, too, a normal-sized one." He had his nasty side to him, had Uncle Arthur.

I said "good night" five minutes later. Uncle Arthur wasn't too pleased, I'd the feeling he thought I'd missed out on the suspense and fancy descriptions, but I was as tired as the old man with the scythe after Hiroshima. I looked in on Charlotte Skouras, she was sleeping like the dead. I wondered about that chemist back in Torbay, he'd been three parts asleep, myopic as a barn owl and crowding eighty. He could have made a mistake. He could have had only a minimal experience in the prescribing of steep-inducing drugs for those who lived in the land of the Hebridean prayer: "Would that the peats might cut themselves and the fish jump on the shore, that I upon my bed might lie, and sleep for ever more."

But I'd done the old boy an injustice. After what was, to me, our miraculous arrival in Craigmore's apology for a harbour it had taken me no more than a minute to shake Charlotte into something resembling wakefulness. I told her to get dressed — a cunning move this to make her think I didn't know she was still dressed — and come ashore. Fifteen minutes after that we were all inside Hutchinson's house and fifteen minutes still later, when Uncle Arthur and I had roughly splinted the prisoners' fractures and locked them in a room illuminated only by a skylight that would have taken Houdini all his time to wriggle through, I was in bed in another tiny box-room that was obviously the sleeping-quarters of the chairman of the Craigmore's an gallery selection committee, for he'd kept all the best exhibits to himself. I was just dropping off to sleep, thinking that if the universities ever got around to awarding Ph.D.s to house agents, the first degree would surely go to the first man who sold a Hebridean hut within sniffing distance of a flensing shed, when the door opened and the lights came on. I blinked open exhausted eyes and saw Charlotte Skouras softly closing the door behind her. "Go away," I said. "I'm sleeping."

"May I come in?" she asked. She gazed around the art gallery and her lips moved in what could have been the beginnings of a smile. "I would have thought you would have gone to sleep with the lights on to-night."

"You should see the ones behind the wardrobe doors," I boasted. I slowly opened my eyes as far as I could without mechanical aid. "Sorry, I'm tired. What can I do? I'm not at my best receiving lady callers in the middle of the night."

"Uncle Arthur's next door. You can always scream for help if you want to," She looked at a moth-eaten armchair. "May I sit down?"

She sat down. She still wore that uncrushable white dress and her hair was neatly combed, but that was about all you could say for her. Attempts at humour there might have been in her voice, but there was none in her face and none in her eyes. Those brown, wise, knowing eyes, eyes that knew all about living and loving and laughter, the eyes that had once made her the most sought-after actress of her time now held only sadness and despair. And fear. Now that she had escaped from her husband and his accomplices, there should have been no need for fear. But it was there, half-buried in the tired brown eyes, but there. Fear was an expression I knew. The lines round the eyes and mouth that looked so right, so inevitable, when she smiled or laughed — in the days when she had smiled and laughed — looked as if they had been etched by time and suffering and sorrow and despair into a face that had never known laughter and love. Charlotte Skouras's face, without the Charlotte Meiner of old behind it, no longer looked as if it belonged to her. A worn, a weary and an alien face. She must have been about thirty-five, I guessed, but she looked a deal older. And yet when she sat in that chair, almost huddled in that chair, the Craigmore art gallery no longer existed.

She said flatly: "You don't trust me, Philip."

"What on earth makes you say that? Why shouldn't I?"

"You tell me. You are evasive, you will not answer questions. No, that is wrong, you will and you do answer questions, but I know enough of men to know that the answers you give me are the ones you want to give me and not the ones I should hear. Why should this be, Philip? What have I done that you should not trust me?"

"So the truth is not in me? Well, I suppose I do stretch it a bit at times, I may even occasionally tell a lie. Strictly in the line of business, of course. I wouldn't lie to a person like you." I meant it and intended not to — unless I had to do it for her sake, which was different.

"Why should you not lie to a person like me?"

"I don't know how to say it. I could say I don't usually lie to lovely and attractive women for whom I have a high regard, and then you'd cynically say I was stretching the truth till it snapped, and you'd be wrong because it is the truth, if truth lies in the eye of the beholder. I don't know if that sounds like an insult, it's never meant to be. I could say it's because I hate to see you sitting there all washed up and with no place to go and no one to turn to at the one time in your life you need some place to go and someone to turn to, but I suppose again that might sound like an insult. I could say I don't lie to my friends, but that again would be an insult, the Charlotte Skourases of this world don't make friends with government hirelings who kill for their wages. It's no good. I don't know what to say, Charlotte, except that it doesn't matter whether you believe me or not as long as you believe that no harm will come to you from me and, as long as I’m near you, no harm will come to you from anyone else either. Maybe you don't believe that either, maybe your feminine intuition has stopped working."

"It is working — what you say? — overtime. Very hard indeed." The brown eyes were still and the face without expression. "I do think I could place my life in your hands."

"You might not get it back again."

"If s not worth all that much. I might not want it back."

She looked at me for a long moment when there was no fear in her eyes, then stated down at her folded hands. She gazed at them so long that I finally looked in the same direction myself, but there was nothing wrong with her hands that I could see. Finally she looked up with an almost timid half-smile that didn't belong to her at all.

"You are wondering why I came," she asked.

"No. You've told me. You want me to tell you a story. Especially the beginning and end of the story."

She nodded. "When I began as a stage actress, I played very small parts, but I knew what the play was all about. In this real-life play, I'm still playing a very small part. Only, I no longer know what the play is all about. I come on for three minutes in Act 2, but I have no idea what has gone before, I'm back for another minute in Act 4, but I've no idea in the world what's happened between Acts 2 and 4. And I cannot begin to imagine how it will all end." She half-lifted her arms, turning the palms upwards. "You cannot imagine how frustrating this can be for a woman."