The Three Sentinels

by Geoffrey Household

‘Birenfield lost his nerve. Or his wife did. Resigned and cleared out.’

  ‘Who’s in command at the moment?’

  ‘Gateson, the Field Manager. Afraid of nothing when it’s a technical question, but no knack of handling men.’

  ‘Birenfield and Gateson were on the right track,’ Sir Dave insisted. ‘The men are only foreigners. Some of ’em as black as my hat! On the other hand, Colonel Darlow, a Company which is a model employer with—ah—prominent figures on its Board cannot risk open bloodshed and unfavourable publicity.’

  Steady now! When the Chairman of the Compañía Petrolífera Cabo Desierto had been inspired by heaven and Henry Constantinides to drop the end of all misery into one’s lap it wouldn’t do to tell him that he stank. And, anyway, not a quarter of the story had come out yet. The Company, too, had a case. It was exasperating to have so housed and contented your men that they refused to leave.

  ‘What would the Board offer?’

  ‘Ten thousand and a year’s contract.’

  ‘Anything afterwards?’

  ‘A directorship,’ said Sir Dave, ‘would not be beyond the bounds of possibility.’

  Lord, and half an hour before he could only remember that he was an unwanted fifty-two and that anyone could see his suit was old.

  ‘I’d prefer it to be well within them.’

  ‘Frankly I doubt if it would be,’ Henry said, again cutting through Dave Gunner’s evasions. ‘You’re not a business man, Mat. You never were. Don’t regret it! You’ve had a lot of fun by not being. Take your ten thousand and another ten—the accountants can cook it to be tax free—if you set the oil flowing and don’t get us in Dutch with the Government! Your lawyer and ours will have to put that into some sort of form, but we both know what I mean.’

  ‘When do you want me to leave?’

  ‘Early next week if you can. Fly to Barranquilla and then on down the coast. You’ve no attachments?’

  None. For the past two years he had bitterly congratulated himself that there were none. But now the implication of that kindly enquiry shattered the unison of his personal flourish of trumpets. Good God, he couldn’t even produce an illegitimate daughter, say, to whom half his salary should be paid! His life had been rich in meetings and partings and good fellowship; but all the scattered men and women for whom he had deep affection, probably returned, seemed at any given moment to be absent in time or place.

  ‘No,’ he answered casually, ‘no attachments.’

  Chapter Three

  It was in a sense a home-coming, though Mat was far from feeling any spiritual honeysuckle round the door. The first sight of Cabo Desierto was more like the dream of early youth, familiar surely to every man, in which he finds himself, with all his adult experience, confusedly doing his best at school or in his first job. The haze of sun and friendliness, of romance and ambition which had once transfigured for him that prehistorically arid coast had vanished; but the plain facts stood firm and were unexpectedly familiar.

  ‘It hasn’t much changed,’ he said.

  The Master of the Company’s launch, standing formally at the wheel since he was about to enter the Company’s port, looked down from the grating almost with tenderness. He claimed to have known Mr. Darlow twenty-five years before. It was likely. Mat had no idea which of the band of black, brown or whitish children this sympathetic seaman had been, but it was easy to pretend a solid image within the cloud of so many common memories.

  ‘It is we who have changed,’ the skipper replied.

  That elegiac note sounding all the way from Spain. How they loved, these Latin-Americans, a resounding commonplace! And always it made speaker and hearer conscious of their bond of humanity.

  No, Cabo Desierto had not changed—lost its untidy air of pioneering, of course, and lost its youth in the process like the rest of them. The forest of derricks bailing and pumping away on the second ridge of the hills so that one could hear the thudding of beams and engines two miles off shore was now silent and looked vaguely derelict, outmoded as a cluster of windmills with all its timber food for the termites. Between the sea and the escarpment of the first ridge, where in early days had been waterless desert, twelve hundred acres of cultivated land extended northwards. The green ribbon tying up such overpowering, colourless immensity emphasised more than ever the islanded quality of the place.

  He was glad that he was coming in by sea. The Company’s managerial plane had been at the airport on his arrival in the Capital. At the end of a day of champagne, offices and futility the Ministry had advised him not to take it. Accidents, they whispered, could so easily be arranged. He didn’t believe it, and would have taken the plane as a first profession of faith if the unsuspecting pilot had not vanished into the mountains with a girl. Good luck to him! The right way to enter Cabo Desierto was the public way—swept in by the unperturbed Pacific, not descending from heaven to a sacred airfield like a London Wall Elijah.

  The launch entered the gateway of brown stone and creaming backwash. Two breakwaters there were now. A tanker could suck up her cargo in any weather. What an amazing place it was, with no economic need of road or railway! A prison, yes, but their isolation, their excited hunting and spearing of the hills used to produce such comradeship between oil engineers and their gunbearers that when the gas and black blood gushed from a lucky stab of the earth they had been as close in triumph as a band of pygmies inside an elephant.

  To what had they been loyal in all that orgy? To the Company? To the exploration itself? Most probably to the easily visible achievement. Whatever it was, the solidarity still held, though now it was not directed towards anything; it was directed against. Against the Company.

  ‘Remember you are back at home, Don Mateo!’ said the skipper.

  That word of hospitable encouragement was just what he needed, and the Spanish form of his name gave him an unaccountable lift of morale. Mat Darlow was a failure and employed on a job that no one else would look at; but Don Mateo was a free man whose power to take action was scarcely limited by London and not at all by Cabo Desierto.

  The inshore end of the breakwater was crowded with idle workers, some unashamedly curious, some pretending to be fishing. Mat met their eyes impassively and instantly asked himself what the hell Don Mateo thought he was about. He raised his somewhat theatrical Panama hat in a genial salute and wished them a very good afternoon.

  At the landing stage the faces had a standardised smile on them, welcoming but decently conscious of emergency—a string of masks which in a week’s time would have sorted themselves out into lively features of friends and enemies. On the quay a separate group, loitering with detached insolence, looked like the Boycott Committee. Was his reception to be unpleasant? But of course not! Hostility was seldom an excuse for bad manners. It was macabre to the English way of thinking that a man should be capable of apologising to you before cutting your throat, yet the gesture did add a gentlemanly ease to the proceedings.

  He climbed the steps and shook hands with the chief executives of the Company. Then Gateson, the Field Manager, properly observing protocol, introduced the Mayor, the Captain of Police, the Harbourmaster and minor civil authorities. Mat had not expected to see behind the port a street of shops shaded by a colonnade with a public building at the far end of it; in his day there had been a sandy road between shacks of timber. The removal of citizens from—well, one could now call it a town—was not so reasonable as it had seemed in London. On an impulse he said he would like to greet the men’s leaders if they were present. Those introductions, too, went smoothly except, he observed, for the Field Manager. His spirits rose. He wasn’t doing too badly for an old horse of no value to anyone but the knackers.

  His own car and chauffeur waited by the quay. The glossy length was incongruous when the farthest possible drive was not more than seven miles; they used to lurch around Cabo Desierto in anything which had four wheels and the strength to carry a load. Gateson got in with him, and they drove up the sweeping hairpins of
the road to the top of the first ridge, three hundred feet above the sea. Away to the right, above the tank farm on one side and a golf course on the other, were the three concrete sheds of 97, 98 and 98A. Low, square and uncompromising, they looked like pill-boxes commanding the harbour.

  ‘Before I meet anyone else,’ Mat said, ‘introduce me to the Three Sentinels.’

  ‘The bastards won’t let you near them.’

  ‘One can but try. And they’ll enjoy a chance to look me over. Why are they guarding them?’

  ‘They think that between us we could fill a tanker. How the hell are we going to when they control the port?’

  The car stopped short of 97. There were half a dozen toughs outside the pill-box. Three of them continued to play cards with an indifference that was deliberately contemptuous. The other three lounged over to the car and ordered the driver to turn round and clear out. Arms were apparently in short supply. The leader had drawn a well-oiled, first-war bayonet from its sheath. The rest had only machetes and steel bars.

  Mat’s swift first impression was that the power behind the boycott was moral rather than material and thus all the more formidable. Obviously this picket could not stand against determined attack by the police or the military, but any attempt to dislodge it would be the signal for all Cabo Desierto to erupt. The determination up there echoed the calm confidence of the leaders who had shaken hands with him. The Company, they knew, was helpless. As for the State, it could not regain control without adding another pile of corpses to those of eighteen women, five children and two men. The politicians in the Capital had made it very clear to him that they were too humane for that—or too afraid. Under all their noble eloquence he had detected an uncertainty whether the troops would in fact obey the order to fire.

  Mat left the car and exchanged normal politenesses with the three guards who confronted him.

  ‘And good evening to you, Mr. Manager! What is it that you want?’

  ‘Only to say good evening also to the Sentinel since I have come all the way from London to see him.’

  ‘He is the same as any other.’

  ‘You think so? But neither you nor I are the same as any other.’

  That at least got him a smile. The leader could not as yet replace his bayonet in its sheath but at least he laid it across his other arm.

  ‘And you can see that I come to pay my respects with not so much as a spanner or a screwdriver. In this heat one is barely decent.’

  His white suit was all dark and transparent with sweat. He was aware that it was due to the last hour of tension as much as to long absence from the fury of the sun, and hoped that no one else could suspect it.

  ‘Give me your matches and cigarettes!’

  Mat handed them over and was escorted into 97 by the whole guard, curious to see the two powers confront each other.

  Inside its housing of heavy, removable, concrete panels the Christmas Tree emerged from the temporary floor of planks which had been fitted over the well cellar. Its name was apt, for the branching pipes were decorated by star-like wheels controlling the valves; however, the only tree to which it had any resemblance was a mangrove, since the steel branches themselves sprouted shoots upwards and downwards. The pattern of quadrilaterals repressed and channelled the pressure of the advancing Andes upon the oil sands thirteen thousand feet below.

  Recovering matches and cigarettes, he returned to the car and a Gateson whose face was white and set with anger.

  The bloody ignorant fools! They’re terrified even with all chokes shut down. They could light a bonfire round it so long as they didn’t cut the tubing. And if they did, I’d have it under control a couple of hours after they ran away—those of them who weren’t cooked or gassed on the spot.’

  ‘Ah, but no smoking sounded efficient, you see. Now, tell me—suppose you let a monkey loose in there to twiddle any valves he liked, a monkey with my box of matches?’

  ‘He couldn’t do much harm—at least nothing spectacular,’ Gateson replied. ‘But if he twiddled at random and then went down to the casing-head gasoline plant with your matches, we’d need a new plant.’

  ‘And a new monkey?’

  ‘Quite certainly.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what they were thinking of.’

  ‘They don’t know any more than …’

  Mat mentally finished the sentence for him. Than you, he was going to say. Lord love a duck, a nasty temper and jealous too! Mr. Gateson’s speciality was evidently minerals rather than men.

  ‘What were you producing up to the boycott?’

  ‘Nearly a thousand tons a day from 97 and 98. 98A was closed down as soon as we brought it in. From all three we could do six thousand tons a day and go on for a generation, but what’s the use till London has solved the marketing problems?’

  Good God, and only eighteen months ago it had been just a hobby for a financier like Henry Constantinides—an innocent little field selling the produce of its shallow wells up and down the Pacific coast as easily as coal, cement or any other bulk commodity! Cabo Desierto was not prepared for the gargantuan vomitings of the Three Sentinels with only a twopenny refinery, two good old tankers and one new. Henry’s intention was to sell the whole damned field to one of the major oil companies which could afford to keep it on the ice till it was needed. But just what was its value so long as the boycott lasted?

  They drove down the shallow valley between the first and second ridges where the barren gravel had been redeemed from original sin by the bungalows, lawns and messes of the executive staff, all angelically set among the flowers and giant shrubs of an equatorial coast. At the end of the avenue of neat company palms a road ran half way up the second ridge to the General Manager’s house. Mat’s impression was one of magnificent emptiness. That was because the house stood alone in the middle of a terraced garden with windows looking west to the arc of the Pacific and south over the roofs and greenery towards the Three Sentinels.

  Inside, too, was emptiness. The Company’s excellent furniture was formally arranged. The Company’s houseman greeted him with exactly the right degree of respectful cordiality. But there was no sign, not even a dirty ashtray, of the last or any occupants. The swept house emphasised his loneliness. Nothing belonged to him but the two suitcases which the houseman had just placed in his bedroom. If only one of the cases had been a woman’s, she’d have made enough mess in five minutes to create the appearance of a home.

  ‘Don’t go yet,’ he said to Gateson. ‘Stick around while I change if you’re not too thirsty!’

  ‘Pepe can deal with that,’ the Field Manager replied. ‘We put enough stores in the cellar to carry you through for a week or two.’

  Who were ‘we’ he wondered with a sudden collapse of self-confidence, and what had been the anxious, half patronising gossip before his arrival? But Pepe, white-jacketed, was already hovering over the cocktail cabinet. Luxury in this loneliness at any rate. The energy of the General Manager was not to be expended in the handling of drinks himself.

  ‘A long whisky please, Pepe.’ Gateson said.

  ‘I’ll have a quick shower and then join you.’

  When he had returned to the living-room and downed the first tall glass of the tropical evening he felt the Darlow of ten years earlier. It was absurd to blame his temporary home for emptiness when from a window you could see or think you saw the curve of the globe.

  ‘My wife and I hoped you would dine with us. We’ll just have a few people in afterwards and an early night. You must be tired.’

  Nothing for it but to accept gratefully. Well-spaced alcohol would see him through.

  ‘And one other thing—I’ve arranged a police guard after what happened.’

  Mat was not going to admit that there was something the Board had not chosen to tell him. He had put down the sudden resignation of his predecessor to nervous exhaustion and had never asked any direct question about his private reasons.

  ‘I know the facts, of course,’ he said cautio
usly, ‘but not the details.’

  There aren’t any. He was shot at twice sitting in the window where I am now.’

  ‘Kind of you.’

  ‘Oh, they wouldn’t risk it again. There’s a machine gun covering the gate.’

  ‘Will it fire?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Then I’ll have it removed. Machine guns demoralise me when I can’t see where they are pointing. What happened after they missed him?’

  It was a fair bet that they had. Henry and Sir Dave would have been in honour bound to mention it if the General Manager had been wounded. But if there had merely been some irresponsible shooting—or what they could reasonably consider as such—why be alarmist?

  ‘His wife, I am afraid, insisted that he should go.’

  ‘Anything in particular which upset the field?’

  ‘It’s said it was because he offered compensation to the men who had lost their families.’

  ‘Sorry your missus was such a damn fool as to get killed. Here’s fifty quid to buy yourself another.’

  ‘While emphasising that the Company accepted no legal obligation,’ added Gateson, staring at him.

  ‘Now, tell me—I see domestic staff is not on strike. What’s the position?’

  ‘The men refuse us any oil except to the power station. Otherwise life is normal.’

  ‘And who knows everybody’s names and faces?’

  ‘Ray Thorpe, the Superintendent.’

  Mat asked what sort of man he was, remembering that he had led the rescue party.

  ‘Inclined to have a foot in both camps—not what one would expect from a chap who won a Military Cross in the D day landings. Had the luck to be seen, I suppose.’

  Yes, and probably the first person to admit it. Evidently Thorpe was the man whose confidence must be won, on whose view of the situation a temporary opinion might be based until he had one of his own.

  Mat went off to Gateson’s damned dinner—unfair, that! Kind and very correct dinner—looking forward to Thorpe who wasn’t there. He sensed that the guests had been chosen from the Gatesons’ intimate friends of their own upper middle class background, not wholly according to rank in the Company. Dangerous self-confidence, if so. There were half a dozen couples in all, the odd woman being his own private secretary, Pilar Alvarez, who came of an old and aristocratic family and looked it.