I remained at the Hostal de las Olas, for there was no other accommodation readily available in Maya. I did not waste time looking for it. Our Hero and Leander act had a delicacy which suited the flowering of Olura, and it never occurred to either of us to try to improve upon perfection.
Every morning I walked the mile along the beach to the edge of the water which separated us. Sometimes it would be she who swam or waded across opposite the inn, sometimes I. On other days I would see red cloak or white cape already far up the estuary and turn south over the powdery sand until we stood facing each other with the deep, transparent ribbon of the tide between. Then we would solemnly exchange our good-mornings and endearments until one or the other, overwhelmed by this half-deliberate frustration of the sense of touch, dived in and swam across. For all that week the sun shone, and our privacy in the miniature coves and bays of the river was never disturbed.
This exquisite girl was so full of sheer goodness. True, it sometimes displayed itself as goodi-goodiness. Her human sympathy was genuine, soundly based in character and training, but guilt at possessing so much wealth tended to exaggerate the expression of it. She was so determined to find opportunities for service that she could dig them up when they didn’t exist or were completely worthless.
I think, too, that guilt formerly extended to her own physical beauty, as if she had no private right to it. I write ‘formerly’ because idiocy of that sort goes up in flame. When a woman sees that her lover is intoxicated by her beauty to a point of tears and poetry, she can hardly go on thinking that she ought not to have it. But I admit that I do not really understand such an oddity in my adorable and passionate Olura. It is somehow connected with that air of being chosen for a sacrifice, which, when I first saw her in the hotel, gave me the impression that she lacked vitality.
As I rejoiced in her day after day, I felt—carefully hugging the secret to myself—that she was returning to what nature intended her to be: a gay, robust, sensuous creature, for whom world politics would not be half as important as what she was going to have for dinner. She had not anywhere near reached that point, nor ever will, nor would I wish her to, but she was coming along nicely.
We had, I remember, one furious row over her idol, Prebendary Cyril Flanders, who made far too many appearances in her conversation. I have only seen that anarchistically-minded churchman smirking and evasive upon the television screen. I felt that he had the furtive single-mindedness of a tycoon, making it his business to corner the market of protest whenever an excitable minority could be persuaded that the Government should take some action which it was manifestly impossible for any government to take.
Something of the sort, being made overbold by lunch, I mentioned to Olura one afternoon when we were leaning upon her window sill, idly picking out among the wooded headlands and scoured sand-banks exactly where our hidden beaches lay.
‘Philip, can’t you ever admit that any serious thinking goes on outside Senior Common Rooms?’ she asked.
‘By God, I do! Far too serious! Which means that it’s generally more emotional than exact.’
‘Sometimes the people can only get their way by direct action.’
I said that when the people thought they knew what they wanted, politicians were only too delighted to give it them at any cost. That was how elections were won.
‘Then what’s wrong with making them realise what they want?’
‘Nothing—so long as it isn’t just what Prebendary Flanders wants. What does he?’
‘Everything which is fine and generous. Justice for political prisoners, nuclear disarmament, sympathy and help for the coloured peoples.’
I said that I could see no one principle in all that, and that I myself would much rather be governed by a benevolent Mgwana than alternating juntas of incompetent conservatives and ignorant socialists.
‘But if British police and administrators were as efficient as Leopold Mgwana,’ I went on, ‘you would all be lying down in the streets from Trafalgar Square to Hammersmith.’
‘Leopold doesn’t like it,’ she insisted. ‘For the moment he has to.’
‘And no countries like threatening the rest with atom bombs. They have to.’
‘If everybody refused to obey …’ she began.
‘But they won’t. I remember my mother asking what would happen if everybody wiped their noses on their coat sleeves.’
‘At least Cyril is ready to suffer for what he believes!’
‘I’m sure he is. With relish.’
She said ‘I hate you!’ and went out and slammed the door. I was in that detestable state of uncontrollably twitching lips because one feels like crying and wants to laugh, when she opened it again and told me that Prebendary Flanders was a Saint. She then slammed the door once more. But the partition walls of small Spanish inns are not built for displays of emotion from young women trained in violence by lacrosse practice before breakfast. The door frame fell out in a cloud of plaster, and she collapsed into my arms, at first slightly hysterical, then rippling with laughter.
Slapstick she could not resist. And she could hand out, with effective quietness, the verbal slapstick of wit. Humour—well, it depended on what one was refusing to take seriously. At any rate, it was not hard to encourage the habit of laughter to grow. I hope she never forgets again, whatever my own fate is, the gaiety which is natural to her.
It was eleven in the morning of August 1st. I had left Olura before dawn and was just setting out to meet her on the banks of our river when the telephone announced a gentleman to see me. Might he perhaps go up to my room? It was the manager himself speaking; the inflections of his voice sounded as if he were personally introducing some banker or real estate agent. The unexpected visitor was obviously known and respectable, so I did not hesitate to ask him up. It was astonishing how clean my happily-engaged conscience had become.
It felt instantly loaded with guilt as soon as the district chief of police entered my room. I knew him well enough to nod to. The fact that he had not announced himself under his own name was worrying. It looked as if he wanted to observe my face when he walked in on me without warning.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all,’ he said soothingly as soon as I had given him a chair and exchanged the usual compliments. ‘A very simple question. What were you doing in Miss Manoli’s car on the night of July 21st?’
The hell of a simple question! I had never thought out an answer to it. And which was the 21st? The first attempt or the second?
‘Which day of the week?’ I asked to gain time. ‘On holiday one loses count of dates.’
‘Wednesday. Or, more strictly, early on Thursday morning.’
‘She asked me to find out what was wrong with it.’
‘And what was?’
‘Nothing but damp on the plugs,’ I replied, and added hastily: ‘The fact is, I couldn’t sleep. So I thought I would see to the car. But I didn’t check the petrol.’
‘You asked the Pair of the Guardia to send some out to you?’
‘Yes, I did.’
He shot straight at me, not allowing me a moment to anticipate the question:
‘Have you ever known a man called Livetti?’
But my imagination had played with that possible enquiry, and come up with an answer which would conform to the reaction of perfect innocence.
‘Livetti? Now, let me see! Yes. Wasn’t that the Roumanian who was interested in gipsy dialects? I’m afraid a scholar cannot avoid all contacts behind the Iron Curtain, Chief. But I assure you I have no political affiliations.’
‘The man I mean was Italian.’
‘I don’t think he was.’
‘A press photographer.’
‘No, Chief. Something in Bucharest University.’
‘His body was washed up on the beach at Pobeña.’
He waited for comment. I wasn’t giving it. I could not decide whether I ought or ought not to know where Pobeña was. I say ‘decide’ but my brain was unrecognisable. Swamped with ad
renalin, it was working as fast as a computer, rejecting, accepting and producing the answer without thinking in words at all.
‘He had been swimming?’ I asked.
‘He appears to have been killed at least twenty-four hours before entering the water.’
I made some conventional remark, and waited for worse.
‘Close to the point where you ran out of petrol, Livetti’s passport was found by the side of the road.’
So that was the only connection with me! I prayed that my face had not shown relief. His passport must have dropped out of his pocket while I was carrying him back to the car. The usual carelessness of the panic-stricken criminal!
‘What a curious coincidence!’ I said. ‘I don’t wonder that you wanted to interview me.’
‘You didn’t see or hear anything suspicious?’
‘A cry for help, you mean? No. Anyway the Pair were patrolling the road. If there was anything to hear, they would have heard it.’
He seemed to be perfectly satisfied, and left me with many apologies and thanks. But I was far from happy. It was natural enough that when the passport was found, the police should call for a report from the Civil Guard; and that had involved me. But how far had investigations gone before somebody decided that I ought to be grilled? It occurred to me that this visiting cop had dragged Pobeña into the conversation abruptly and had been watching me closely.
I trotted off along the sands, upset at being late for our daily rendezvous. When delight is of unknown duration, to lose five minutes of it is to lose a year. But there was no Olura, for which I was illogically thankful. A little later I saw Lieutenant Gonzalez leave the inn and drive off. Then I watched her hurrying upstream along the Maya side of the estuary, hugging my joy, uneasy though I was, at the rare blend of grace and determination in her movements.
When I had swum across, it was a rather still and statuesque Olura who greeted me. She told me that Gonzalez had been most friendly, excusing his sudden call by explaining that he had to compile his official report on Mgwana’s short visit. He had, however, asked her one question: what was I doing with her car on the Wednesday night?
‘Oh, my God!’ I exclaimed. ‘What did you say?’
‘That I didn’t know you had taken it out. I pretended that I thought they wanted you for stealing it, and said that I’d given you leave to use it whenever you liked.’
Brilliant! That didn’t clash with my own story. I told her how I too had been asked the same question at the same time, and assured her that we should get away with the mischance of the dropped passport and hear no more. I am not sure how far I really believed it; but I was not standing any further interference from Livetti. He had done his duty in bringing us together.
I should have remembered—if I hadn’t been too enchanted by the present to worry about the future—that Livetti was a foreigner and connected, however disreputably, with the press; that meant that his case would be ruthlessly investigated. When a country gets half its foreign exchange from tourists, it is more sensitive to a foreign than a native corpse.
Gonzalez, as I knew, was not normally employed on criminal investigation; but Leopold Mgwana and Olura were V.I.P.s and called for tactful handling. Since Gonzalez was personally known to us and himself a witness to oddities in our behaviour, he was the obvious choice to put us through a preliminary interrogation.
He was on our tails again in the evening, which showed very clearly that we were under surveillance, though I had not noticed a following car or a plain-clothes cop. I doubt if anything less than an armoured troop-carrier on either side of us would have distracted my attention from Olura. I had taken her out to dinner in Santurce at the entrance to Bilbao Harbour. When we left the restaurant, Gonzalez bobbed up.
He had the decency to express surprise at meeting us. Since it was so, could we give him five minutes of our time? Wherever we liked, of course. But the offices of the Port Police were close and very comfortable.
They were, and conveniently empty except for the night duty staff. When Gonzalez had provided us with coffee and cigarettes, and polished his French by a few courtesies to Olura, he said how sorry he was that we were being unnecessarily bothered by this affair of Livetti but—just to clear it all up—what had we been doing in Pobeña on the night of July 22nd after we left him in Amorebieta?
There was a shocking guilty silence from which Olura was the first to recover.
‘Have I got to say?’ she asked with a charming helplessness straight out of drawing-room comedy.
This was the devil. I couldn’t even start to guess how much they knew. The disturbance in the quarry on the night before the body was washed up would certainly have been reported by local police; but how could investigation of it lead to us? Anyway, the legal pathologists had established that Livetti had been dead for at least a day.
‘It would be as well.’ Gonzalez recommended.
‘M. Ardower was being very difficult.’
‘But, excuse me, Mademoiselle,’ he murmured in some embarrassment, ‘you meet daily and appear to be on intimate terms.’
‘We were not then on such good terms, lieutenant.’
‘And what made you choose Pobeña?’ he asked me.
I put down these questions and answers verbatim, for it is the easiest and most concise way to give you a clear picture of what I have been asked, what I have admitted, and when and why I have deliberately misled the police. Me, too, it assists—for the hardest task of a suspect is to keep tab of his own lies.
‘I knew there was a tourist hotel where one might find a room,’ I answered.
‘And did you?’
‘But no and no!’ Olura interrupted indignantly. ‘I told M. Ardower that if he was not prepared to treat me with respect he could walk home.’
‘And you started to do so?’
‘I took a stroll round to let her cool off.’
‘What shoes were you wearing?’
I had been wearing rope-soled alpargatas which do not slip on wet turf or rock. But he might not have noticed what the soles were made of, for on that hasty journey to Amorebieta his professional attention was fixed on the more distant surroundings of Mgwana, and my unimportant feet were generally out of sight in the front of the car or under the table.
‘I don’t remember,’ I replied, ‘but you should. You must have seen them when we were together.’
He let that pass, to my infinite relief.
‘What time did you arrive in Pobeña?’
Olura answered for me that it was about 2 a.m., as it was.
‘What had you been doing since leaving Amorebieta?’
‘I think you had better ask him that,’ she replied, as if some disgust at my behaviour still remained.
‘Just going from place to place,’ I said, ‘until she threw me out.’
‘I see. Now, M. Ardower, what was the reason why you persuaded a taxi-driver named Echeverría to block the passage of a black Seat car which was parked alongside the café?’
I had given no thought at all to Echeverría. Mgwana told me that on the way back from Amorebieta to the hotel the taxi-driver and Gonzalez had chatted amicably together, and that he hadn’t understood what they were saying. It was improbable that Echeverría would then have gone into any details, for he was not the type to chatter about the private business of someone he considered to be practically a fellow Basque. So it looked as if he had since been forced to make an official statement.
Gonzalez therefore knew that my sudden departure with Olura had been deliberately plotted. But an ardent lover, when on holiday and unaccountable to anyone, might be expected to indulge in eccentricities. It was quite believable that I had tried to get Olura away from some former and jealous admirer and to prevent him following.
So I took a chance that Vigny had in fact been in the black Seat. My story could then be made to fit, more or less, into the vague and preposterous yarn I had told Echeverría.
‘Mlle Manoli had made another conquest in the h
otel,’ I said, ‘a Frenchman called Vigny. He was very determined that I should not be alone with her.’
Gonzalez nodded approvingly, as if to say that he was glad I had told some of the truth. Then to my alarm he switched the conversation into Spanish which Olura did not understand.
‘Don Felipe, if you are not what you appear to be, it would naturally be a help to tell me.’
‘No, there’s no mystery about me,’ I replied, wondering what on earth he was getting at.
I knew there might be some distrust. Any foreigner who speaks Catalan or Euzkadi inevitably hears a good deal of wild separatist talk from his friends. It is, in fact, mere talk, for no one has any intention of renewing violence. But the police like to keep an eye on foreigners who might not be aware that the Civil War is over.
‘Perhaps we should have been working together,’ he hinted.
‘But I am not in any way in your business.’
‘In England we know it is organised differently.’
The reputation of our older universities! It all started, I suppose, with Hogarth and Lawrence in the first war and gathered force in the second, when the Government very sensibly stuffed its intelligence services with dons. Naturally they made efficient and imaginative staff officers, but I have never read that higher education contributed anything notable to the arts of security. However, once a legend, always a legend.
‘Who on earth gave you that idea?’
I got some of it out of him. He had certainly been asking a lot of questions before he tackled us direct. One of his informants was Miss Mary Blasted Deighton-Flagg. Well, I had only myself to blame there. Then Arizmendi had confirmed that I stuck closely to Mgwana, and was always popping up where I wasn’t expected. Gonzalez hinted at yet another source of misinformation. Possibly Vigny himself? The French can never rid themselves of the vice of seeing British agents under their beds.
It occurred to me that our safety was far too critically in the hands of the occupants of the black Seat, whom I had never expected to hear of again. Gonzalez must have memorised the number of the car when the driver overtook us and suspiciously changed his mind about stopping. Echeverría would have repeated the same number. So it was a fair bet that the sunburnt man in the café had been identified and interviewed, and probably Vigny too. True, they did not dare tell whatever the truth was, but their frightened lies were unpredictable and sure to be ingenious. And they might well wonder why I was conveniently on the spot, and so ready to protect Mgwana and Olura.
Olura Page 8
