Грэм Грин - The Comedians

'Madame Pineda,' he said, 'a German lady.'

'I don't like Germans,' I said with disappointment.

'Nor do I.'

'Who is the fat man?'

'Her husband — the ambassador.' He named some small South American state, but I forgot it the next moment. I used to be able to distinguish one South American republic from another by the postage stamps, but I had left my collection behind at the College of the Visitation, as a gift to the boy whom I considered my greatest friend (I have long forgotten his name).

'I don't like ambassadors much either,' I told the cashier.

'They are a necessary evil,' he replied, counting out my dollar notes.

'You believe that evil is necessary? Then you're a Manichean like myself.' Our theological discussion could go no further, for he had not been educated at the College of the Visitation, and in any case the girl's voice interrupted us. 'Husbands too.'

'What about husbands?'

'A necessary evil,' she said, putting down her tokens on the cashier's desk.

We admire the qualities which are beyond our reach; so I admired loyalty, and at that moment I nearly walked away from her for ever. I don't know what restrained me. Perhaps detected in her voice another quality which I find admirable — the quality of desperation. Desperation and truth are closely akin — the desperate confession can usually be trusted, and just as it is not given to everyone to make a deathbed confession, so the capacity for desperation is granted to very few, and I was not one of them. But she had it and it excused her in my eyes. I would have done better to have followed my first thought and walked away, for I would have walked away from a lot of unhappiness. Instead I waited for her at the door of the salle while she picked up her winnings.

She was the same age as the woman I had known in Monte Carlo, but time had reversed our ages. The first woman had been old enough to be my mother, and now I was old enough, to be this stranger's father. She was very dark and small and nervous — I would never have taken her for a German. She came towards me counting her dollars, to hide her timidity. She had made a desperate cast, and now she didn't know what to do with the bite at the end of her line.

I asked, 'Where's your husband?'

'In the car,' she said and looking out I noticed for the first time the Peugeot car with the C.D. plates. In the front seat beside the wheel the big man sat smoking his long cigar. His shoulders were wide and flat. You could have hung a poster on them. They looked like a wall closing a cul-de-sac.

'When can I see you again?'

'Here. Outside in the car park. I can't come to your hotel.'

'You know who I am?'

'I ask questions too,' she said.

'Tomorrow night?'

'At ten. I must be back at one.'

'And now — will he want to know what's kept you?'

'He has infinite patience,' she said. 'It is a diplomatic quality. He waits to speak till the political situation is ripe.'

'Then why must you be back at one?'

'I have a child. He always wakes around one and calls for me. It's a habit — a bad habit. He has nightmares. About a robber in the house.'

'Your only child?'

'Yes.'

She touched my arm and at that moment the ambassador in the car put out his right hand and sounded the horn, twice but not too impatiently. He didn't even turn his head or he would have seen us.

'You're summoned back,' I said, and with my first claim on her the shadow of other claims fell on me.

'I suppose it's nearly one.' She added quickly, 'I knew your mother. I liked her. She was real.' She went out to the car. Her husband opened the door for her without turning, and she got behind the wheel: the end of his cigar glowed beside her cheek, like a warning lamp at the edge of a road under repair.

I went back to the hotel and Joseph met me on the steps. He said that Marcel had come back half an hour before and asked for a room for the night.

'Only for tonight?'

'He say he go tomorrow.'

He had paid in advance, putting down the sum which he knew to be correct, he had ordered two bottles of rum to be sent up, and he asked if he might have the room of Madame la Comtesse.

'He could have had his old room.' But then I remembered that the new guest — an American professor — was there.

I wasn't unduly troubled. In a way I was touched. I was glad that my mother had been so liked by her lover, and by the woman in the casino whose first name I had forgotten to ask. I would have liked her myself perhaps if she had given me half a chance. Perhaps I had in mind the hope that her likeability might have been passed on to me — a great advantage in business — as well as two-thirds of her hotel.

4

I was nearly half an hour late when I found the car with the C.D. sign outside the casino. There had been a great deal to keep me, and I was not really in the humour to come at all. I couldn't pretend to myself that I was in love with Madame Pineda. A bit of lust and a bit of curiosity was all I thought I felt, and driving into town I remembered everything in the register against her, that she was a German, that she had made the first move, that she was an ambassador's wife. (I would certainly hear the chandeliers and the cocktail glasses tinkle in her conversation.)

She opened the car door for me. 'I nearly gave you up,' she said.

'I'm sorry. A lot of things have happened.'

'Now you are here, we had better drive away. Our colleagues begin to arrive after eleven when the official dinners are over.'

She backed the car out. 'Where are we going?' I asked.

'I don't know.'

'What made you speak to me last night?'

'I don't know.'

'You followed my luck?'

'Yes. I suppose I was curious to see what your mother's son was like. Nothing new ever happens here.'

Ahead of us the port lay in a wash of temporary floodlights. Two cargo-ships were being unloaded. There was a long procession of bowed figures under sacks. She swung the car round in a half-circle and brought it into a deep patch of shadow close to the white statue of Columbus. 'None of our kind come here at night,' she said, 'and so no beggars come either.'

'What about the police?'

'The C.D. plate has some value.'

I wondered which of us was using the other. I had not made love to a woman for some months and she — she had obviously reached the dead-end of most marriages. But I was crippled by the events of the day and I wished I had not come and I couldn't help remembering she was German, even though she was too young to bear any guilt herself. There was only one reason for us both to be here and yet we did nothing. We sat and stared at the statue which stared at America.

To escape from the absurdity I put my hand on her knee. The skin felt cold; she wore no stockings. I said, 'What's your name?'

'Martha.' She turned as she answered and I kissed her clumsily and missed her mouth.

She said, 'We needn't, you know. We're grown-up people,' and suddenly I was back in the Hфtel de Paris and powerless, and no bird came to save me on white wings.

'I only want to talk,' she lied to me gently.

'I would have thought you had plenty to talk about at the embassy.'

'Last night — would it have been all right, if I could have come to your hotel?'

'Thank God, you didn't,' I said. 'There was trouble enough there.'

'What kind of trouble?'

'Don't let's talk about it now.' Again, to disguise my lack of feeling, I acted crudely. I pulled her body out from under the wheel and thrust her across my thighs, scraping her leg on the radio-set, so that she exclaimed with pain.

'I'm sorry.'

'It was nothing.'

She settled herself more easily, she put her lips against my neck, but I felt nothing: nothing moved in me, and I wondered how long she would put up with her disappointment, if she were disappointed. Then for a long moment I forgot all about her. I was back in the midday heat knocking at the door of what had been my mother's room and getting no response. I knocked and knocked, thinking that Marcel was in a drunken sleep.