The Death of William Posters: A Novel (The William Posters Trilogy Book 1)

by Alan Sillitoe

Their room was the largest in the hotel, the bed a rough frame nailed together, with bedding neatly and skilfully laid on top. There were two old basket chairs, and a small table for books, cigarettes, matches, tangerines and make-up. A sink in one corner had no plug, and one had to keep the faucet pressed to get water – as on a ship. Frank shaped a plug out of a cork, rather, he said, than give up washing. There were two huge coat pegs on the blue wall, and a small piece of Moroccan artisanry for matting on the floor. A single window looked onto a dim alley-street, so that even in daytime they needed the light on. The hotel was on its last legs, and so was more expensive than many others.

  They lay at night listening to Moorish music that came from café radios and permeated the whole building, Frank feeling as if he were in the chill-middle of Arabia. Myra warmed him, her belly a stove, kisses still tasting of spice from Moslem food eaten on their day’s wanderings through the winding alleyways of the medina, or of mint and sugar from the innumerable glasses of tea drunk before coming to bed. Frank had bought a spirit stove and cooked-up his own brand of Arab tea at night and morning. They lived in the room a fortnight, and revelled in the refurbishing powers of retreat, a calm hideout in a medieval walled town.

  They were strangers there and knew no one, walked up the steep Rue des Siaghines and into, the flower-filled market at the top that smelled of mimosa and cloves. They went on into the new town, along the boulevards and among modern blocks of flats, then got a bus through the suburb of the Dradeb. They climbed up to a point overlooking the straits, with Spain a definite coast only thirteen miles away. A mule track led along the clifftops to Cape Spartel, the shoulder of Africa where Hercules was said to have shaped millstones in his solitary wave-bashed cave. The track climbed above the sea, up then down, from one headland to another, a violent Atlantic wind spitting at the prominent arbutus-horn of Africa. Jebel Kebir was forested, and they turned up into its shelter, a subtle mixture of juniper and eucalyptus smells, laurel and cedar and pine, a moving sky that drew their eyes during rest, as if up there a blacksmith were reshaping clouds that a storm had raged out from its own belly, the wind moving leaves and branches in an inspired concord of smells and shapes.

  They made love under the trees (‘He should find his way out without too much bother when the time comes,’ Frank joked on the way back), gently going into her, as if savouring it because a farewell was imminent. Flames from all her limbs leapt to the middle of her as if to greet the guest that slid so ceremoniously in, an unexpected climax far in front of his own. They hadn’t come to her so easily of late, Myra believing that the enlarging animal processes of pregnancy held them back, compensating by the almost visionary light it threw on what was happening to her. Frank lived on the extremity of this influence, the man whom she loved and who, in his own way, looked after her well, out of his own sort of love. But during this mechanism of change he was the person closest to her, and what she dreaded most was the emerging fact that he would soon be removed from this intimate nearness. In calmer moments she realized that this was bound to happen when a child was born, a thought which toned off the sharper edges of her vision. Yet an uneasiness lingered through her dreams, dreams which, since pregnant, she could never remember.

  The green hills of Tangier in winter were drenched and heavy. On walking back skyscraper blocks appeared white and pink between olive groves. It was enchanting and new, a fitting scenery in which to change gear and come back to life. Myra puzzled him by her unwillingness or inability to show more of what was going on in her own mind. She drifted uncomplaining, almost happily, enjoying new sights, physical love, the sensual effects of food and travel. He could put it down to pregnancy, but he knew better, wondered instead whether she didn’t resent all that had happened to her since they met, blame him for some unwanted foreign upheaval that his appearance had caused. A sharp pride prevented him asking anything, and he thought maybe she hardly knew herself yet.

  At the Place de France a rainstorm burst on them, a leaden throwdown of water that seemed to be trying to stamp all animal life back into the asphalt. The gutters burst, overflowed, and water drove in sheets along the roadway, traffic fighting against it and hardly able to see, trees by the French consulate buckling before the wind. They sat in a café till the storm was spent, watching through the windows, the air heavy with smoke and coffee steam. He ordered brandy, and tea for Myra. ‘We just made it. What an end to the day.’

  ‘It’s only four o’clock.’

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘A bit. I feel good after our walk. I like Tangier, which is just as well, I suppose.’

  ‘It is, since we’ll be here for a while.’ Yet he hoped not, thought not, but finally couldn’t say. It was hard, if not impossible to stop moving when movement was the only thing that at the moment seemed to be keeping him alive.

  22

  In youth Shelley had been tender at the lungs, and though that passing phase seemed only to have made him tougher in the end than the average person, he still paid them the homage of maximum protection. Thin and raddled after a week in the whorehouses of Palma, he followed his luggage down the gangplank, his grey overcoat well-buttoned against the damaging wet winds of a Catalonian winter. He looked forward to pouring himself a shot of hot cognac in one of the wilder bars of Barcelona, sliding it in to his favourite toast of ‘Hemingway, I hate you!’

  His luggage would stay in the consigna until he found a hotel. Fatigue focused his eyes on the fading labels of his oldest trunk. Since pressing the ejector seat of his job on Madison Avenue he had travelled to many places, and a flaking discoloured label could bring back to him the smell of many a hotel hall from those early days, humidity and mothballs and the fruity reek of an Amazonian forest as he opened the window and wondered once more why the hell he’d stopped in this particular place, parrot-cries and dilapidated streets mouldering into the vast area of shimmering river. Craving the impossible, an ambitious decadent shaped and fired by the fevers of desk-dreams, he took a long time to re-cross the boundary into reality. He’d envisaged a heaven somewhere, a small collapsing corporate state in a back corner of South America whose economy was on the crash – that razor’s edge of heaven between a fabulous exchange rate for dollar-tourists, and a revolutionary upheaval from within – a matter of a few weeks perhaps in which the local currency stood at a thousand pesos to the dollar, with full board at the Grand Hotel Esplendido for ten cents, and the having of some worthy bourgeois beauty for as little as five. He’d never found it, quite, and the search died hard.

  He’d wandered around the first two years, an exponent of positive negativism in his desire to forget the past and create his future by recording it as a travel book. These were his own phrases, wicked, sardonic and empty. Not empty, he thought. Emptiness is when you’re full of something that can’t be put to use, or that you cannot define. That’s not me. It was, but not now. The mud and destitution of La Paz, and a proletarian riot in which a police baton had smashed onto his head, had been the blinding light of his Damascus that made him ‘the man at the door with the gun’. He looked old before his time, but with a freshness and naïvety that suggested he might not be able to take advantage of it. He travelled over frontiers, forbidden pamphlets in the false bottom of his trunk when moving legally; panniers of dynamite filched from the copper mines of the Andes when crossing by unfenced jungle towards some hide-out of co-revolutionaries never expecting him but always glad of his loot delivered after enormous risks that they would never take.

  South America was a big place, but not, eventually, big enough. Cuba came and went. His favourite books were those works on guerilla warfare, by Mao Tse Tung, Ngoyen Giap, and Che Guevara – authors who for him had taken their places in world literature even before Shakespeare and Tolstoy. Shelley lived by the principles of guerilla warfare. The enduring Maxim of Sun Tzu: ‘Uproar in the East, strike in the West’ was the basis of exercises which combined intellect and imagination whenever there was time to kill before catching boat or train
. Walking the streets he staged uprisings in that particular town; on the train he laid ambushes in the passing terrain; pacing the beach he planned clandestine landings. ‘Life is war, but guerilla war, not the old artificial war that the world’s lived with up to now. One of the deepest instincts of Man is to conquer by stealth, to create an uproar at one point while striking with deadly effect at another.’ His one unalterable dream was to see Madison Avenue and its thousand commerces erupt into smoke and flame.

  A wall of noise roared by his face like cold sandpaper: trams and buses, taxis and handwheeled carts. After a journey of brandy and sweat and sleeplessness, his legs were moving once more, a surge of life backing into him. Barcelona was noisy, good to get to in the early morning. He’d rather go a roundabout way to a city simply to reach it in the morning. To arrive in the afternoon was a corroding experience: twilight savaged you like an octopus in slow motion, made you wish you were anywhere else but on earth. It was all right once darkness fell, for Man had lights to show as proof of his victory over the dark.

  A coastal sun brewed warmth between wet clouds. Shelley smoked a cigarette, walked with his portable typewriter on one hand, and a straw travelling-basket on the other. Even the taxi drivers and hotel touts clammering at the dock hadn’t broken his good temper:

  ‘Barcelona, here I come,

  Right back where I started from.…’

  and he’d find a hotel along the Boqueria, sleep until lunch time, and look up Maricarmen in afternoon.

  At the Columbus Statue he turned up the maindrag of the Rambla. None of the hotels along the Boqueria had vacant rooms, which was strange at this time of the year. At the fourth hotel, up steps and along a corridor, he stopped at the counter: ‘Buenos dias! Hay habitation para dos o tres dias?’

  The duena said she had a room vacant, and asked if he’d be needing meals. Shelley told her he would be eating out, as he was a tourist and wanted to see the sights. Two men were by his side. One pulled a huge steel-and-Technicolor badge from his pocket and said he’d like to see his passport. Shelley gave it to the man, who walked away with it to the other end of the hall, leaving his friend on guard in case anyone tried to run. When they didn’t ask where he’d come from Shelley realized they’d followed him from the dock, a couple of detectives in hats and gaberdines who might have stepped but of some Hollywood B picture if they hadn’t been so underfed.

  Shelley acted on the principle that caution was unnecessary in a fascist country. Where the guilty were taken with the innocent everyone was guilty and it was up to you to bluff your way out of it if caught. The man came back and asked if he had any other means of identification. Shelley gave him an old carte de séjour which he had collected in the south of France.

  He played the tourist: it’s no use getting annoyed. They want to check up. That’s their job. Maybe they’re looking for anarchists, bomb-throwers whose activities are just as likely to endanger tourists like me as anyone else. He was told to come to the police station, and to bring his typewriter and travelling bag.

  They walked through the streets. When stunned by the baton in La Paz he had thought, on waking up in a nearby café: ‘Shall I phone the U S consulate, and complain?’ No, he told himself, and later felt that to be the most important decision of his life. They assured him it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Shelley talked like a rubberneck, though his good Spanish betrayed him, asked in which direction was the cathedral and the Tibidabo, said that Barcelona was a fine city and that there was none so fine in South America – glad that his passport had recently been changed and that other evidence of Spanish visits wasn’t on the present one.

  The police station was a barracks, armed guards at the entrance. They climbed two flights of stairs and walked along a corridor, uniformed and plainclothes men inside little offices smoking, talking, or hovering over typewriters. With so many stairs and corridors he saw that a criminal would have a tough time trying to get out. They went into an office. Shelley was asked to sit down, which he did willingly, feeling tireder than ever. They took his passport and French identity card, and left him there alone.

  It was a small room, with a coloured portrait of General Franco on one wall, and a plan of Barcelona opposite. The only desk held a typewriter, blotting pad, trough of pens and some paperclips. Glued to another wall were photographs of criminals whom they had not yet succeeded in capturing.

  Shelley, engrossed in the city plan, was trying to bring a complex of street battles into one unified action. A convent had been sacked and fortified, thoroughfares blocked and certain houses sandbagged, but no central command had yet been set up, though underground leaders were at last moving in because, according to news from the rest of Spain, the revolt had a chance of becoming decisive. He was itching for a pencil with which to make squares and circles on the map.

  The detectives came back with an elderly white-haired man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, a kindly person who looked like a philosophic cobbler caught in the wrong job. He said that Shelley’s passport was forged. Shelley replied that it was issued in London, and properly visaed by the Spanish consul in Gibraltar, so how could it be? The elderly man lifted his typewriter from the floor and asked him to open it. Shelley did so, and was about to show him how it worked, when the old man nodded thoughtfully and told him to close it.

  ‘Why are you in Spain?’ asked a detective.

  ‘Because I like the country. I like the people.’

  ‘You sound like a communist.’

  ‘I’m a tourist. There are lots of art treasures here.’

  ‘But why did you come on a forged passport?’

  He said they should check with the American consulate, finding it unfair to mention this, but impossible not to because it would be the reaction of the ordinary American traveller. The old man said the passport was obviously forged because the stamp wasn’t pressed far enough into the photograph.

  ‘Have you any money?’ the detective asked. Shelley reached for his back pocket, but the detective said that he didn’t want to see it. He asked where he got his income. Shelley said he had money invested on Wall Street, which impressed them. ‘I have share certificates on me to prove it,’ he said, but the detective wasn’t interested in them, either, asked instead to see the contents of his travelling basket. Shelley took out a bottle of wine and a bottle of brandy. He offered them a drink, which was refused. There was a Blue Guide to Spain, a book of poetry, and a bundle of decomposing sandwiches. ‘Put it back,’ the old man said.

  All three went out of the room, this time leaving a man on guard at the door. Shelley went back to the plan of Barcelona. The insurrectionary forces tended to concentrate west of the maindrag, fortifying the lanes between there and the Rond San Antonio. Some streets to the east were also in their possession, and workers from the northern suburbs were moving in. But Government troops were gathering under the hill of Montjuich and preparing to clear the city centre. Which was fine, because workers from the factories of Sans were already filtering behind the hill of Montjuich for an attack in the rear as soon as the army made a move. ‘Uproar in the East, strike in the West.’ It couldn’t fail. Badalona and other suburbs were mobilizing their workers. The uprising in Madrid had failed, but Valencia was in insurrectionist hands. Street names were being changed, and paving stones put back. Workers’ representatives were talking to the sailors at Cartagena. Malaga had gone completely over to the rebels, and was already being strafed by American Sabre-jets. Russia had protested, and Chinese technicians had started flying in from Peking.…

  They’d been gone half an hour, and it seemed that the man at the door kept observing Shelley for any sign of nervousness or guilt. ‘Kafka, I love you,’ he thought, taking several drinks at the bottle of brandy and thinking that if they didn’t come back soon he’d be either dead drunk or asleep.

  In the meantime the guns had opened up from Montjuich, and soldiers of the loyal garrison were coming down the hill with flamethrowers. Agitators were talking to them th
rough loudspeakers, and one had already gone over to them. A woman with a red bandera had blown another to pieces with a handgrenade and a whole street was burning.

  Bad news came, that Valencia had surrendered. The sailors at Cartagena had scuttled their ships. Malaga alone remained, and the whole fascist spite had been turned (as usual) against it. Shelley wondered whether there were a map of Spain in the desk on which to plan a guerilla campaign in the mountains, so that the insurgents could withdraw and carry on resistance from there.

  ‘It’s a beautiful city, Barcelona,’ one of the plainclothes men remarked pleasantly, handing him his passport. He apologized for having detained him, but said that many people were going around with forged papers. Shelley smiled, understood that he had his work to do. The policeman thought he should be more angry than he was, so apologized again, and this time Shelley didn’t look too pleased, a gruff response that blew away all suspicion from the policeman’s narrow and infantile mind.

  The policeman took him back to the street. They shook hands, and he pointed the direction to his hotel. Shelley walked in the sunshine, feeling no malice towards any man or being, as he called a taxi and ordered it to the docks, where he would get out his luggage and head for Tangier. To contact Maricarmen would put her in danger as well. He’d shuttle through Valencia and Granada without delay in case any other autonomous Gestapo unit pulled him in for no reason and decided this time to keep him. He was puzzled and disturbed. Why should they arrest me? I’m guilty, after all. These bastards usually get the wrong ones, though. It’s not cricket, as that swish piece from London said when I laid her in Malaga.

  A week later he was in Tangier, at a café in the Place de France thinking about his next excursion south. A date had been fixed, lorry and supplies assembling, but he wanted another head and pair of hands. A face came in from the rain which he knew, and he called out the name that belonged to it.