Road To The Coast

by John Harris

  His eyes flashed angrily again and she realized that the distant and disliked Willowgreen had become for him some sort of symbol of injustice.

  She looked up at him, suddenly pitying him. ‘Did you love her?’ she asked softly, and he had a feeling she knew all about love. Her figure, meant for people who liked curves, belonged to someone who knew all about love – all kinds of love, for children, animals, men, life itself. He guessed she was sentimental about it too, and he took a malicious delight in disappointing her.

  ‘Not really,’ he said with a laugh, and she looked up startled.

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘Not me. Love makes chaps go weak in the noggin. Love ’em and leave ’em, I used to say, and damn the expense.’

  ‘You must have made her think you loved her.’

  ‘It was a case of opportunity knocks. She’d got the dough and I hadn’t. Makes a difference. Couldn’t argue.’

  He stared at her blandly, without a termor of conscience on his facial muscles, and she saw him for the first time as the graceless scamp he really was. He reminded her momentarily of all the gay young bloods who’d ever tried to pick her up for a joke or a bet, beardless young men with big cars who’d thought she’d be an easy subject for their attention, and she realized he’d never grown out of the phase.

  ‘It sounds to me as though she’s well out of it,’ she commented severely. ‘There wouldn’t be much change in it for her. A woman needs security and you wouldn’t have much to offer her.’

  He laughed. ‘Everybody to their own taste. There were times when I thought she’d drive me up the wall. Dinner with Daddy. Tea with Mummy. Drinks with the neighbours. And Willowgreen hanging around all the time with his tongue hanging out. Sometimes I said things that made them look at me as though I’d got a button undone on my trousers, I got so browned off. And that grisly job!’

  ‘What was wrong with it?’

  ‘Eight-thirty to five-thirty with an hour for lunch. Nose to the old grindstone eight hours a day. “Work hard and there’s an opening for you, my boy, if you’ve got ambition”.’

  Caught by the mysterious magnetism of a rogue, Grace was trying hard but not entirely successfully to look disapproving. ‘Lots of men would have given their right arm for an opportunity like that,’ she said.

  ‘They’re welcome to.’ He brushed her criticism aside indifferently.

  ‘You could have made something of it.’

  ‘With an old clown like that in charge? Set the staff a good example. At the desk before you’re awake. Scrubbed, polished and wearing a shining morning face. Excreta tauri cerebrum vincit. Bull baffles brains. God, and you know how it is after a night out at the club with the boys. I used to roll up with a mind creaking like a pair of old stays. I was glad in the end when I lost my temper enough to tell the old fart what I thought of him. Particularly as I’d happened to meet Duffy in a bar off Piccadilly the previous day.’

  Grace said nothing, knowing – even if he didn’t – that she was listening to a breezy sort of self-delusion, a high-handed effort to lay the blame elsewhere for a restless lack of concentration and an inability to face facts.

  ‘I knew Duffy during the war in Italy,’ he went on, full of enthusiasm and with no trace of shame. ‘Old chums, we were. He was running a racket, even then.’

  ‘And he sent for you?’

  ‘He had a business here and he wanted somebody he could trust, to stave off unwelcome visitors. Somebody to do the dirty work and go out in the rain when he didn’t want to. Plenty of expenses and plenty of time off to spend ’em. It sounded like a piece of cake to me. I could speak the language. Learned it in Gib. during the war when I was nancying round a Spanish girl. I snatched his hand off.’

  He seemed to realize she wasn’t entirely in sympathy with him and he broke off. He raised his eyes and grinned at her, frank and friendly, looking more like a mischievous boy than ever. ‘Plenty of room for bums in this country at the moment,’ he said. ‘It’s full of ’em.’

  ‘I know. I know all about bums. I’ve met ’em often.’

  ‘Where? Here?’

  ‘At home. I run a hotel.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘What do you mean? – ah!’ She was staring at him. Faintly indignant.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ He couldn’t say that after all this time, he’d managed to fix at last where he’d seen that same competence before, the same confidence, the same boldness and the same maternal kindliness. It had been worrying him for some time but he hadn’t been able to place it. Now that he knew, he felt better and satisfied. Having spent the greater part of his adult life in hotels, he could have written a book on the women who worked in them. His contacts with barmaids, receptionists, and all the rest of them had been warm, friendly, and on occasion embarrassing, and he probably knew more about them than any other class of women.

  Grace was still watching him, still faintly annoyed. ‘You and your ahs,’ she said. ‘It’s a good hotel, even if it isn’t very big. ‘It’s safe and it’s certain. My grandfather started it and my father took it over from him. I took it on when he died.’

  He showed no enthusiasm and his next words reflected what he was thinking. He tossed another stick on the fire before looking up at her. ‘Sounds as dull as Willowgreen’s exports,’ he commented.

  ‘It’s a damn sight safer than selling tricks and parlour games and atomic underpants.’

  ‘That’s why it sounds so dull. It’ll be there today, tomorrow and every day.’

  ‘I’ll never starve. It’ll provide for my old age.’

  ‘Old age? You?’ He laughed. ‘You’ll never grow old. You’re not the type.’

  ‘Well’ – her anger with him slowly dispersed as she was pleased and flattered by his words – ‘well, that sounds pretty nice!’

  ‘Help yourself.’ He looked up. ‘What about you? You on business here or something?’

  ‘Nope.’ Immediately, her guard came up again. ‘Just making a trip.’

  ‘Some trip. Takes a lot of money to make a trip like that.’ There was a trace of envy in his voice.

  ‘Not when you visit relatives,’ she said.

  ‘Relatives? Here?’

  ‘Why not? People do marry people from other countries. I was once nearly a GI bride myself. Besides, I saved the money. I earned it honestly. I borrowed a bit, mind,’ she added. ‘Fred helped.’

  ‘Who’s Fred? Your husband?’

  ‘No. He’s a friend.’ She saw him watching her and she became cautious once more. ‘Look, we weren’t talking about me. We were talking about you. Go on.’

  ‘Not much more to tell,’ he said. ‘I’ve done all right since I came here.’

  ‘And now you’re going home?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll find something. I’m the type who survives. Wars. Peaces. Riots. Revolutions. The lot. If there isn’t one I’ll start one. I’m the dose of dynamite the world needs to stop it dying of fatty degeneration.’

  Grace didn’t respond to his enthusiasm. ‘Don’t you kid youself,’ she said. ‘Your type was never the sort who kept the world turning. If you ask me you needed a few good larrupings when you were a kid.’

  ‘Or probably a good woman when I grew up. How about taking the job on?’

  As she looked at him, the friendliness changed at once to scorn. ‘God forbid,’ she said firmly. ‘I wouldn’t get hitched up to you if you were the last man on earth. Give me somebody who’ll do a decent day’s work.’

  He shrugged, untroubled by conscience. He had been living too long on hope and the next bright idea just round the corner for that. He glanced at her thoughtfully. There wasn’t much that fooled her, he felt, but he knew she still managed to believe in goodness and truth in spite of it, and to ignore that eleventh commandment that he had come to know so well – Thou shalt not get copped. He grinned as he realized she was watching him closely.

  ‘Don’t you ever get scared?
’ she asked.

  ‘Scared?’ He stared at her. ‘Scared?’ he repeated and she knew at once that he was so wrapped up in the conviction of his own invincibility that he rarely experienced fear – either physical or otherwise. ‘What should I be scared of?’ he asked.

  ‘Of getting caught, I suppose. You said you were trying to get out of the place.’

  ‘Oh, that! They have to get up early to catch Harry Ash.’

  He stood up, feeling tired, as though the effort of talking had exhausted him. The child was still sleeping in the back of the car, shuffling uncomfortably.

  ‘Makes you wish you were young again sometimes, doesn’t it?’ he said, staring at her. ‘Life’s more straight-forward when you’re young.

  ‘She’s not a bad kid,’ he went on gently, completely reconciled to Teresa’s presence at last and touched by a faint nostalgic longing, as though he felt for the first time that in that life of his which he thought was so good there might be something missing after all. ‘You’re lucky to have a kid like that.’

  She looked up at him, surprised.

  ‘Have you been thinking all the time that she’s mine?’ she asked.

  He stared at her. ‘Well, isn’t she?’

  Grace laughed, ‘Mine? Of course she’s not,’ she said. ‘I’m not even married.’

  Six

  Ash had straightened up and was frowning at her.

  She was looking back at him, a faint, cheerful smile on her face, as though surprised that he hadn’t been aware all along of what had seemed obvious to her. She had intended long since to make everything clear but she realized now that so much had happened she had forgotten. In the silence they heard the gobble of wild turkey somewhere in the darkness, sharp against the high rasping of the cicadas.

  ‘What did you say?’ he asked slowly, as though he didn’t trust his ears.

  ‘I said she’s not my child.’

  Her smile was fading now and she looked a little scared at his changing expression.

  ‘You said she was when we first met,’ he accused her.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she retorted. ‘I made a point of not doing. I said she was with me. That’s all.’

  Ash groped back into his mind, trying to recall their conversation.

  ‘You said you were English?’ he said slowly.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Well, what about her father? Where’s he?’

  ‘God knows at the moment. Up-country somewhere.’

  ‘Is he from this side of the Atlantic?’ he asked, treading cautiously among the questions, careful not to put a foot wrong a second time. A Wop or something?’

  ‘Wop?’

  ‘Dago. Greaser.’

  ‘Oh!’ She stared angrily back at him, incensed by his contemptuous superiority and the peremptoriness of his questions. ‘He came from BA originally.’

  Ash studied her for a moment, irritated as the feeling of having had something loaded on to him began to grow in him. She had been cheating from the start, he know, and now it seemed there was more. ‘Then he is a Wop,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Then what the hell am I doing, looking after her?’

  Her expression became set as though she were mustering her reserves of courage to face this new and unexpected hostility.

  ‘You said you would,’ she pointed out. ‘I heard you distinctly.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ he exploded. ‘I said I’d help you. Then you produced the kid and I’d got no option. I thought she was yours. What the hell are you doing with her if she’s not yours?’

  ‘I happen to be looking after her. That’s all.’

  ‘Looking after her!’ Ash’s voice grew thin and strained. ‘Looking after her? You came all this way out here just to look after’ – he stopped dead and gripped her arm, towering over her – ‘Whose kid is she, then?’

  She struggled to free herself, her eyes on his and unafraid. ‘You’re hurting. Let go.’

  ‘Whose kid is she, I said.’ His fingers were on the soft flesh of her upper arm, digging angrily in like great claws, so that she almost cried out with the pain.

  ‘Her mother’s dead,’ she said, still not giving anything away.

  ‘What about her father then? Why isn’t he looking after her?’

  Her eyes were fixed firmly on his, defiant and angry.

  ‘Because I’m looking after her. That’s why.’

  Her stubbornness, her inability to trust him completely, suddenly infuriated him.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, grabbing her arms again in his great fists. ‘You’re hiding something from me. You have been all the time. Whose kid is she? What’s her name? What’s her father’s name? All of it.’

  Her resistance collapsed at last – not because she was afraid, but because she’d decided it would be wiser to be frank. ‘Alvarado,’ she said. ‘Almirio Alvarado.’

  His face fell and all the anger went out of it as it became blank and unbelieving.

  ‘Almirio Alvarado? Not the police Alvarado?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘God, did he ever love anybody enough to produce a child?’ Ash glared at Grace and thrust her away savagely so that she stumbled. ‘I could wallop you,’ he said, fervently and calmly. ‘I could really. I could give you a bonk on the conk to make your knees give way. Here’ – he swung her round roughly to face him again – ‘do you know they’re looking for Alvarado?’ He flung an arm out in the direction of the river. ‘That shower with the guns, I mean. They’re looking for him for what he did to their chums after the last uprising in June. They’d give their right hands to find Alvarado. They’d let Big Brother go and willing, to get rid of him, but not him.’

  Grace stared back at him, unmoved by his rage, but scared by the implication of what he was saying.

  ‘I’m looking after the child,’ she said slowly. ‘That’s the only thing that concerns me.’

  She released herself from his hands and stood waiting with a quiet confidence that set his teeth on edge.

  ‘Why?’ he demanded, all sorts of new suspicions about her and the distant Alvarado leaping to his mind, the wildness of them, their sheer improbability, never occurring to him. ‘Because he daren’t?’

  ‘I was going to take her home,’ she retorted. ‘I said I would. I gave my word of honour.’

  Ash snorted. ‘Word of honour,’ he said. ‘All I know about word of honour is that all the bods who have word of honour seemed to end up carrying the can for everybody else. Willowgreen had word of honour. I don’t go in for word of honour.’

  ‘That’s obvious to anybody,’ she snapped.

  He glared at her for a moment. ‘My God,’ he exploded. ‘Do you know what would happen if they caught that kid? They’d use her as a hostage to make him give himself up.’

  ‘They’d be disappointed,’ she said firmly. ‘He wouldn’t dream of it. He’s not the type. He didn’t believe much in honour either.’

  Ash didn’t seem to hear her. ‘Do you know what’d happen to you,’ he said, ‘if they found you helping him like this? They’d put the kid under guard somewhere and shove you in clink. And what’s worse, probably me too. That’d be fine. That’s just what I want. I have sympathetic vibrations for people who want to do that to me.’

  He stamped to the fire then whirled round on her, huge against the flames that touched his hair with gold and seemed to set it alight. ‘You must be nuts if you think you can saddle me with this lot,’ he said. ‘I like kids as much as the next man, but this one’s dynamite.’

  ‘You’ve made it very clear.’

  ‘By God,’ he said indignantly. ‘I bet you knew all the time what might happen to us if anybody recognized her.’

  ‘Of course I did. And I knew what might happen to her in the name of politics. I’ve got eyes. I can read. I can hear what people tell me. It could sear her mind for the rest of her life.’

  Even now there was no trace of fear about her. ‘I suppose now you know all this,’ she said, ‘y
ou’ll drop us like a couple of hot bricks and leave us to fend for ourselves.’

  Ash said nothing as she turned away, frustrated by her calmness, uncertain how to deal with her. He wanted to bring it all out into the open now and find out what there was between her and Alvarado, but she was making no effort to help him. She watched him, his expression telling her what was going on in his mind, and she sniffed disgustedly. He looked up quickly at the sound, remembering Elvira’s dodge at times like this, when she wanted her own way.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘Waterworks?’

  ‘Waterworks?’ From her expression he knew at once he’d guessed wrong.

  ‘Waterworks?’ she said again, staring at him coldly. ‘Do you mean, am I going to cry or something?’

  He found himself thrown on to the defensive. She seemed able to destroy at will all that arrogance of his and make him feel stupidly schoolboyish and ineffectual, and he took refuge in sarcasm.

  ‘The properly constituted female usually sobs out her sorrows on the sturdy male shirt front about this stage in the proceedings, doesn’t she?’ he said.

  She stared back at him contemptuously and he knew she was never the sort of women who could be reduced to tears by goading.

  She moved slowly back to the fire before she looked round at him.

  ‘You’re flattering yourself, Buster,’ she said, ‘if you think you can make me bust into tears.’

  She was holding her head high but she looked tired suddenly, and he felt anger, annoyance and hostility drain away from him, leaving only an emptiness an uneasy unfamiliar awareness, rare in him, that he had behaved like a lout.

  He knew she’d believed he could help her and would help her. She’d trusted him because she’d thought there was enough decency in him to see her through without asking questions.

  ‘Look,’ he said, trying to put friendliness back into his voice, ‘you don’t know what I’d be up against. If there’s one chum they’re after, it’s him. There’s not much I can do about that.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Are you afraid or something?’

  ‘Afraid?’ He laughed shortly, indignantly. ‘Me? Afraid?’