by Alec Waugh
A baby moon had already sunk below the horizon, but the sky was cloudless and starlight lit the road. His foot was pressed on the accelerator. Half the cars that came towards him failed to dim their lights. Half the cyclists had no rear lights. The road was a raised causeway across the flooded rice-fields. There was no room to avoid an accident if a reckless driver tried to cut in against incoming traffic. It was surprising there were not more accidents and heaven knew there were enough; but he did not decrease his speed. What was the point? He was sober and clearheaded. And did it matter so much what happened to him? What purpose was he serving in the world?
He arrived home shortly after nine. He had telephoned early in the afternoon that he might not be back for dinner. His father would have finished his meal by now. He was not hungry; a sandwich and a glass of beer were all he needed. He had expected to find his father in the library, but the room was dark except for a single reading-lamp shining on the chess-board that was set beside his father’s chair. This chess again. Something turned upon this chess. Was not that the piece of information that had made Reynolds start, that had caught Forrester’s attention. The pieces told him nothing. How could he expect them to? He called the number one boy.
‘When did my father go to bed?’
‘At half past seven, master.’
‘Did he have any dinner?’
‘No, master.’
‘Was he well?’
‘He no say he ill.’
‘I see.’
He tiptoed up the stairs. He stood outside his father’s bedroom. So that the air could pass freely under the ceiling, the walls were set several inches short of it. He could hear his father’s breathing, heavy, stertorous but steady; asleep. He tiptoed back into the library. ‘Some bread,’ he said, ‘some cheese and the decanters.’
If his father had been there, a glass of beer would have sufficed, but alone, he felt the need for alcohol. He had not drunk anything during the three hours that he had waited in his flat. He had not wanted to blunt the acuteness of his responses; but now with his day ruined, with his head heavy, he wanted the release of a deep, rich distilled force that would seep along his veins and calm his nerves. He cut himself a crust of bread, buttered it and laid on it a thick slice of Cheddar, like a Danish sandwich. He filled a tumbler with ice and poured the whisky on it. He took a long, slow sip; smoky and rich and sweet; how good it was. He sat back in his chair, bit at the open sandwich. The jungle noises ebbed and swelled around him. The screech of a monkey cut through the rattle of the crickets. He sipped again. The undiluted liquor warmed his blood, reassuring him, giving him courage, lending him resolution. He was a man, wasn’t he? A man’s job lay to hand. He remembered how his heart had glowed as he approached his future sovereign. He must concentrate on that: forget his weakness, remember where his duty lay.
He sat in a half-trance, munching at the bread and cheese, sipping at the whisky. He lifted the glass and the melting ice cubes were cold against his upper lip. He put his hand across the top of the glass and turning it over poured the watered dregs into the ice bowl. He poured another measure from the decanter. Once again the liquor was clean and strong. His resolution mounted. He looked at the chess-board. There lay the answer to everything, if he could unravel it. Strange that a man’s life, that many men’s lives, were dependent upon the arrangement of those pieces. A secret lay there; and in the mind of his father, sleeping heavily upstairs. If only he could read his father’s thoughts for half an hour. It all lay in his father’s brain, if he could disentangle it.
He took another long deep sip. How it cleared the mind, sweeping away the unessential, Lila and all that went with Lila. How could she count against his duty to the King, to his future King? First things first. That chess-board held the answer; but other places must hold it also. It couldn’t all be on that board and in his father’s head; there must be files, there must be papers; lists that to Forrester would have significance. Where would they be kept? There was no safe in the house; there was no need for a special strong-box where jewels could be shut away; but there must be a locked drawer in the desk in his father’s study. If he could ransack that drawer he might find the answer to the Colonel’s problems.
Once again the ice cubes were cold and hard against his upper lip. Once again he turned the glass over above the ice bowl, letting the dregs flow between his fingers. This time he picked a handful of fresh cubes out of the bowl before he poured the whisky over it. Once again the whisky was cold and strong and fragrant; he looked at the chess-board: he thought of his father heavily asleep; thought of that desk in the small annex off his father’s room where any secrets that his father might have must be concealed.
He tiptoed up the stairs, listened outside the door; the same heavy breathing. He moved down the passage; the study annex which opened off his father’s bedroom opened also on to the passage. He tried the door; it was locked; but the locks were old and weak. He had learnt as a boy how a door could be opened if you adjusted your weight against its pivot. He bent down, put his shoulder beside the lock, pushed, gently at first, with a steadily increasing pressure, just as he had done as a schoolboy: he felt the door yield: it moved a quarter-inch; he increased the pressure and it gave.
He took off his shoes and stepped into the room. The room was dark but he knew the exact position of each piece of furniture. He waited till his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. His heart was thudding; this was the craziest thing that he had ever done. How could his father fail to see that his papers had been tampered with? His father would never forgive him. How could he forgive him? It was unforgivable. Better go back downstairs and have another whisky. But his blood was warmed with whisky; and his nerves were still on edge after the long frustration of the afternoon. The need was strong upon him to wipe out the record of that humiliation. He might have been a pusillanimous creature as he paced the floor of his flat, waiting for a trivial woman: but he was not pusillanimous now when a man’s job waited him. The need to justify himself in his own eyes spurred him on.
Through his brain echoed the King’s voice saying, ‘My son will have need of friends.’ He pictured the Crown Prince and his bride in their ceremonial robes, kneeling forward, their hands stretched out, the water dripping through their fingers. Did not his loyalty to the throne precede all other loyalties? He was not the feeble pawn that Lila took him for. He tiptoed towards the desk; tried the top drawer: it was locked; he tried the others. The second, the third, the bottom drawer all opened easily. The top one then; he knelt beside it. He had learnt as a schoolboy how to force a simple lock. He had a clasp knife in his pocket. The little blade was strong: he inserted it, worked it round, found the catch and pressed on it, turned it down and over. The drawer came open as easily as the lower ones had done. He pushed his hand inside. A litter of papers and of notebooks. He began to stuff them in his pockets; he would take them down below; sort them out at leisure, retain anything that might seem important, putting back what was not. His father might not find out; might imagine when he found the drawer unlocked that he had forgotten to lock it. He scooped up the papers quickly: there were not so many. He leant forward, passing the palm of his hand over the bottom of the drawer, to make sure that he had not missed anything. His heart was thudding. If Lila could see him now.
His fingers closed over the last envelope; he was about to rise when suddenly a gleam of light shone into the drawer; he spun round, startled, standing up: the beam of an electric torch dazzled him, just as the headlights of the approaching cars had done. The light which had fallen into the drawer, was now on his chest. He could not see what lay behind the light, but beside the head of the torch he could see, held in another hand, the muzzle of an automatic pistol. The pistol throbbed. He scarcely heard the sound. He felt no pain: it was like the taps a doctor gave your chest; but he felt he had been pushed, hard. He went down upon his knees. ‘Angus.’ His father’s voice. The light was now full on him. He looked down at his shirt; round his waist there w
as a spreading stain. Am I going to die? He had read as a schoolboy of soldiers shot through the heart in the middle of a charge, continuing to fight on for several minutes. Was that going to happen to him now? He still felt no pain. ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Telephone for a doctor right away.’ How soon before the doctor came?
Chapter Twenty-three
Next morning Charles Keable returned to lunch early, looking serious. ‘Where’s Shelagh?’
‘Out with Julia.’
‘Is she coming back for lunch?’
‘I presume so, why?’
‘I’ve bad news for her. Young Macartney’s hurt.’
‘Badly?’
‘Yes.’
‘A motor smash?’
‘No, he’s been shot.’
‘Where, how?’
‘In his home, by his father, by mistake. Nobody knows quite how it happened.’
‘Is he very bad?’
‘I gather so.’
‘Going to die?’
‘It’s early yet to say, but nowadays if a man doesn’t die in the first two hours he usually survives.’
‘How do you think Shelagh’s going to take this?’
Her father shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. You are as much in her confidence as I am. What do you think?’
‘Five weeks ago I’d have had no doubt, but these last few days she has seemed more excited about that young A.D.C.’s visit here.’
A time-worn Chevrolet drew up outside the bungalow.
‘That’s they,’ he said.
Shelagh and Julia came in laughing: they had been at the pool and were carrying beach baskets. Her gaiety hurt him. It might be a long time before she looked as gay again.
‘I’m afraid I’ve bad news for you,’ he said.
He watched her as he told it. ‘Poor Angus,’ she said.
Poor Angus, but what about herself? Her face told him nothing.
Poor Angus and poor Lila, Shelagh thought. She had a momentary surge of pity, but her predominant reaction was a selfish irritation at being dragged into this. What role had she to play? Was she expected to be broken-hearted? Would she be an object of universal sympathy? How on earth had she let herself be involved in this absurd situation? One thing at least she could do.
‘I’ll call Lila right away,’ she said.
Lila was in.
‘I was expecting you to call. I wondered how soon you’d hear. If you hadn’t called, I was going to ring you after dinner.’
‘How bad is he?’
‘It’s hard to tell. He’s in the hospital.’
‘Conscious?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is he seeing visitors?’
‘They’d let him see you, I expect.’
‘Do you think I should come in?’
‘It would look better, wouldn’t it?’
‘It’s terrible for you.’
‘Oh, well.’
‘I suppose I should come in at once.’
‘It would be nice to have you here.’
‘I’ll come in this afternoon.’
It was a bore, an infernal bore, but at any rate she would not be subjected to camp gossip. She returned to the living-room.
‘He’s in hospital,’ she said. ‘Lila seems to think he can see visitors. She suggested I should go in straight away.’
‘There isn’t anything to stop you.’
‘That’s what I thought. I’ll go in after tea, if there’s a car.’
‘Of course there’ll be a car, and I do hope you realize …’ He checked. The fact that she was going, meant that it was serious for her. How serious he did not know. There was no means of knowing. There was nothing that he could say. He could only stand ready to help pick up the pieces. He walked across to Shelagh, put his arm round her shoulder, pressing it. She looked up at him and smiled. What a miserable hypocrite she was. Never again would she get into a mess like this.
‘It’s time I was picking Basil up,’ said Julia.
She was two minutes late. Basil was standing in the doorway.
‘I’m sorry, but I was held up by today’s hot news.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Haven’t you heard? About Angus Macartney.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Been shot.’
‘Shot?’
‘In his home last night.’
As they drove back to the bungalow, she told him all she knew.
‘Poor Shelagh’s terribly upset. She’s going in to Kuala Prang after tea.’
‘He’s well enough then to see visitors?’
‘So it seems.’
He slowed down the machine. He could not trust himself to drive at his normal pace. ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ he adjured himself. ‘Why should you think that this has anything to do with the Indian who is pestering you? You’ve got this Indian on your brain. You relate everything to it. You’re going off your head.’ And if he was, was it so surprising? Hadn’t he enough to drive a man off his head? He’d got to get out of this. He had to use any weapon that lay to hand. Could he not exert on someone else the kind of pressure to which he was himself exposed? There must be someone to whom he could be as much a nuisance, as much a menace as that Indian was to him, so that that person would be as anxious to get rid of him as he was to go.
He drove in silence, then he changed the subject. ‘I wonder if the old man is jealous of Barbara?’ he said.
‘What a thing to wonder. He doesn’t seem to be.’
‘Has she never hinted at it?’
‘She wouldn’t, would she?’
‘She might to you.’
‘It’s something that’s never come up.’
‘But wouldn’t you expect him to be jealous? He’s twenty years older than she is. He’s had one wife walk out on him. If Barbara did, life wouldn’t have much more to offer him, at his age. You can make a second start, but not a third. He must be afraid of that.’
‘Perhaps he is, he doesn’t show it.’
‘She was pretty wild, wasn’t she, as a débutante?’
‘I’ve no idea; she’d never said anything to me about it.’
‘I bet the two of you got up to some mischief in those early days.’
‘We were too young.’
‘But I bet you talked about it. I know what young men are like. I don’t suppose that girls are very different.’
‘Talking needn’t lead to anything. Have you forgotten what we were saying on that picnic?’
‘But she had four years by herself after you got married. Four years alone is a long time. Suppose you hadn’t married right away, suppose you had been a deb and then an ex-deb, I don’t think somebody like you would have sat twiddling her thumbs all that time.’
‘Barbara might have.’
‘I bet she didn’t. I bet that a few things happened during those four years that the old man wouldn’t like to hear.’
‘A man’s very foolish to worry about what a woman did before she met him.’
‘I’m not so sure of that. She’s the same person still. What she did once she might do again. I reckon that there are two or three things that happened in that time that she’d give a good deal to have him not know.’
If he knew what they were, he could exert the same pressure on her that this Indian did on him. If only Julia could give him a clue to those early escapades. But even if she couldn’t, there might be someone else who could. If only he could find the screw.
They had reached the bungalow. He pulled on the brake. ‘Who are we playing golf with this afternoon?’ he asked.
‘The Sinclairs.’
‘I wonder what they’ll quarrel about today.’
2
Iris Sinclair was a temperamental golfer. When she was in the mood she could play a compact, neat game. She knew what she could do and what she could not do. She kept on the course and played short when it seemed prudent. But on her off days she would attempt impossible carries, use a wooden club
in the rough and take a No. 1 iron off a close lie on the fairway. Her off days usually coincided with the occasions when she was her husband’s partner in a foursome or was playing against him in an ordinary domestic round. He was a nervous player, impatient of delays; he loathed hunting for a ball in the rough, and he hated waving people through. It put him off his game and he lost his temper. ‘Can’t you keep on the course?’ he’d grumble.
‘I’m doing my best. Do you think I enjoy scratching my ankles against high grass?’
‘I’m not so sure of that.’
‘Rex, that’s ridiculous.’
But all the same she did derive a guilty pleasure out of his ill humour. Before the game began, she would promise herself that she would not spoil Rex’s afternoon; what fun was it for her to have a grumpy ill-tempered husband on her hands? Keep your eye on the ball, swing slowly, point your chin, left elbow straight, she would admonish herself as she stood on the first tee. She would start with the best intentions, but then tip would go her head, and crack, there it went, a prodigious slice, curving away into the valley. But her heart did not sink in the way it should as she watched the white ball against the blue sky achieving its fatal arc. On the contrary, she felt light-hearted, jubilant. ‘What can you expect with an open stance like that?’ Rex grumbled. He was big and strong and heavy. He could batter her into a jelly with one hand tied behind his waist. Yet she, too, had her weapons.
