Грэм Грин - The Comedians

'And so you took over?'

'He would have been very happy to know of it. My dear, you can't imagine how much he detested his wife. A big fat negress without education. She could never have run the place properly. Of course after his death I had to alter my will — your father, if he is still alive, might have been next of kin. By the way, I have left the fathers of the Visitation my rosary and my missal. I was never quite happy about the manner in which I treated them, but I was very pressed for money at the time. Your father was a bit of a swine, God rest his soul.'

'Then he is dead?'

'I have every reason to believe it, but no proof. People live so long nowadays. Poor man.'

'I've been talking to your doctor.'

'Doctor Magiot? I wish I had met him when he was younger. He's quite a man, isn't he?'

'He says if you keep quiet …'

'Here I am lying flat in bed,' she exclaimed with a knowing and pleading smile. 'I can do no more to please him, can I? Do you know the dear man asked me if I would like to see a priest? I said to him, 'But surely, doctor, a long confession would be a little too exciting for me now — with such memories to recall?' Would you mind going to the door, dear, and opening it a little way?'

I obeyed her. The passage was empty. From below came a chink of cutlery and a voice saying, 'Oh, Chick, do you really think I could?'

'Thank you, dear. I just wanted to be quite certain … While you are up, would you give me my brush? Thank you again. So much. How nice it is for an old woman to have a son around …' She paused. I think she expected me courteously, like a gigolo, to contradict the fact of her age. 'I wanted to speak to you about my will,' she went on in a tone of slight disappointment, as she brushed and brushed her improbable and abundant hair.

'Oughtn't you to rest now? The doctor told me not to stay long.'

'They have given you a nice room, I hope? Some of the rooms remain a little bare. For want of ready cash.'

'I left my bags at El Rancho.'

'Oh, but you must stay here, my dear. El Rancho — it wouldn't do — to advertise that joint,' she used the American expression. 'After all — it was what I had to tell you — this hotel will be yours one day. Only I wanted to explain — the law is so complicated, one must take precautions — that it's in the form of shares, and I have left to Marcel a third interest. He will be very useful if you treat him right, and I had to do something for the boy, hadn't I? He has been rather more than a mere manager. You understand? You are my son, so of course you understand.'

'I understand.'

'I'm so glad you are here. I didn't want any little slip … Never underestimate a Haitian lawyer, when it comes to a testament … I'll tell Marcel that you'll take over the actual direction immediately. Only be tactful, that's a good boy. Marcel is very sensitive.'

'And you, mother, rest quiet. If you can, don't think any more about business. Try to sleep.'

'They say that to be dead is about as quiet as you can get. I don't see any point in my anticipating death. It lasts a long time.'

I put my lips again against the whitewashed wall. She closed her eyes in an artificial gesture of love, and I tiptoed away from her to the door. When I opened it very softly so as not to disturb her I heard a giggle from the bed. 'You really are a son of mine,' she said. 'What part are you playing now?' Those were the last words she ever said to me, and I am not sure to this day what exactly she meant by them.

I took a taxi to El Rancho and stayed there for dinner. The place was crowded, a buffet of Haitian food carefully adapted to American tastes was laid by the swimmining-pool, a bony man in a conical hat performed lightning taps upon a Haitian drum, and it was then, on my first evening, I think, that the ambition was born in me to make the Trianon successful. For the moment it was too obviously a hotel of the second class. I could imagine the small tourists' agents who included it in their round-trip programmes. I doubted whether the profits could possibly satisfy both Marcel and myself. I was determined to succeed, in the biggest possible way; I would have the delight one day of sending the surplus guests uphill to El Rancho with my recommendation. And the strange thing was that my dream did come true for a short time. In three seasons I was able to transform the shabby place into the bizarre high spot of Port-au-Prince, and through three seasons I watched it die again, until now there were only the Smiths upstairs in the John Barrymore suite and Monsieur le Ministre dead in the bathing pool.

I paid my bill and took a taxi back down the hill and entered what I had already begun to regard as my sole property. Tomorrow I would go through the accounts with Marcel, I would interview the staff, I would take control. I was already planning how best to buy Marcel out, but that would have to wait until my mother had gone on to her further destiny. They had given me a big room on the same landing as hers. The furniture, she said, had all been paid for, but the floorboards needed renewal, they bent and creaked under my feet, and the only thing of value in the room was the bed, a fine large Victorian bed — my mother had an eye for beds — with big brass knobs. It was the first time I could remember that I had lain down to sleep in a bed I had not paid for with breakfast included — or had not been in debt for, as was the case at the College of the Visitation. The sensation was an oddly luxurious one and I slept well — until a jangling hysterical old-fashioned bell woke me, while I was dreaming — God knows why — of the Boxer Rebellion.

It rang and rang, and now I was reminded of a fire-alarm. I put on my dressing-gown and opened my door. Another door opened at the same moment from the same landing and I saw Marcel emerge, with a half-asleep look on his wide flat negro face. He wore a pair of bright scarlet silk pyjamas and he hesitated just long enough for me to see the monogram over the pocket: an M interlaced with a Y. I wondered what the Y stood for, until I remembered that my mother's Christian name was Yvette. Were the pyjamas a sentimental gift? I doubted that. More likely the monogram was an act of defiance on my mother's part. She had very good taste, and Marcel had a fine figure to swathe in scarlet silk, and she wasn't petty enough to mind what her second-rate tourists thought.

He saw me watching him and he said in a tone of apology, 'She wants me.' Then he went slowly, with what seemed reluctance, to her door. I noticed that he didn't knock before he went in.

I had an odd dream when I got back to sleep — odder than the Boxer Rebellion. I was walking by the side of a lake in the moonlight and I was dressed like an altar-boy — I felt the magnetism of the still quiet water, so that every step I took was nearer to the verge, until the uppers of my black boots were submerged. Then a wind blew and the surge rose over the lake, like a small tidal wave, but instead of coming towards me, it went in the opposite direction, raising the water in a long retreat, so that I found I walked on dry pebbles and that the lake existed only as a gleam on the far horizon of the desert of small stones, which wounded me through a hole in my boots. I woke to an agitation that shook the stairs and floors throughout the hotel. Madame la Comtesse, my mother, was dead.

I was travelling light, my European suit was too hot to wear, and I had only a choice of gaudy sports-shirts to put on for the chamber of death. The one which I chose I had bought in Jamaica; it was scarlet and covered with print taken from an eighteenth-century book on the economy of the islands. They had tidied my mother up by that time, and she lay on her back in a pink diaphanous nightdress wearing an ambiguous smile of secret or even sensual satisfaction. But her powder had caked a little in the heat, and I couldn't bring myself to kiss the hard flakes. Marcel stood by the bed, dressed correctly in black, and his face dripped with tears like a black roof in storm. I had thought of him simply as my mother's last extravagance, but it was no gigolo who said to me in a tone of anguish, 'It was not my fault, sir. I said to her again and again, "No, you're not strong enough. Wait just a little. It will be all better if you wait".'