Saturn Over the Water

by J. B. Priestley

  Valancourt are to be congratulated on this reissue alongside The Magicians (1954), The Thirty-First of June (1961), The Shapes of Sleep (1962), Salt is Leaving (1966), and Priestley’s excellent 1953 collection of short stories entitled The Other Place. Saturn Over the Water is no masterpiece – but who wants to read only masterpieces? It’s a marvellously eccentric jeu d’esprit but with an undertow of atomic age fatalism. You may read better books this year, but you’re unlikely to read anything as entertaining.

  DAVID COLLARD

  November 1, 2013

  DAVID COLLARD is a writer and reviewer based in London, England.

  SATURN OVER THE WATER

  For Diana and John Collins,

  Best of Campaigners,

  This Tale,

  With Affection

  Author’s Note

  This is entirely a work of fiction. It contains no references to living persons or actual institutions, and although many real places are described, any resemblance to or suggestion of such persons or institutions is accidental. And as long as every reader accepts this assurance, no harm can be done to anybody.

  J.B.P.

  Prologue

  SPOKEN BY HENRY SULGRAVE

  Well, here it is, the whole thing, about ninety thousand words, I imagine. Yes, I know you hate reading manuscripts. So do I. But there are special circumstances here, as I suggested on the telephone. To begin with, I know you bought a picture by Tim Bedford not long ago. I saw it. Powerful thing – coast of Peru. Now the man who wrote this manuscript is this same Tim Bedford, the painter, and if you read it you’ll understand how he came to travel as far as Peru – and other places. And remember, he’s a painter not a writer. He says – and I believe him – he wouldn’t know how to begin writing fiction. This is his account, as accurate as an exceptionally good memory can make it, of what actually happened to him.

  During one of the last talks I had with him, I said that you and I had known each other a long time, so then and there he made me promise to bring this manuscript to you, as soon as I thought it was in readable shape. He’d a special reason for wanting you to read it early, and I think I know what it was. But we needn’t go into that now. I’ll just add that that reason had nothing to do with getting the work published or persuading you to write an introduction. Tim’s not that type.

  Oh, I came into the thing by pure chance. When I’m trying to put the final polish on a book, something I can do away from libraries, I like to stay at a very good little pub I’ve known for years, between Burford and Bibury. So there I went with the book I was working on, my Victorian Mythology. Now Tim Bedford was living in a house he’d rented furnished, about a mile away, and he used my pub as his local. I liked the look of him – he’s a biggish, rugged sort of chap, in his late thirties, with something very attractive about him – and we soon became friendly. His wife was away, so he was feeling a bit lonely. Also, he soon discovered I was a writer, and he needed some advice.

  Finally, after reading what he’d been giving his spare time to for the last six months, I agreed to edit it for him. I warned him that I’m a social historian and not used to handling this kind of direct narrative. In point of fact, all I’ve done is to tidy it up for him, cutting out some unnecessary repetitions and, here and here, going over some parts with him, challenging his recollection, so to speak, just to make his narrative clearer. I haven’t added a word except where sense or grammar demanded it. And I haven’t bothered too much about syntax or tried to turn his own rough-and-ready painter’s style into the sort of mandarin English I have to write professionally. I wanted to keep his own language, his own tone of voice. Remember, it’s Tim Bedford’s account of what actually happened to him.

  Don’t let the title worry you. Tim didn’t invent Saturn Over the Water. It was created for him, as you’ll see. And when I’d read it, I had to agree with him that he could hardly call this adventure of his anything else. By the way, I’m sorry there are no proper chapters, only numbered sections. But he was quite obstinate about that.

  Another thing he was obstinate about was the question of a final section, to round off the narrative. Nothing I said would move him. He argued that he wasn’t trying to tell the story of his life, he was describing this one adventurous and very strange episode, and that where he ended was the right place to end. But he said that if I wanted to add anything, rounding it off, he’d no objection so long as it was obvious that this last bit was mine, not his. And I think you’ll agree with me, when you’ve finished reading this, that I’ll have to do something. Meanwhile, of course, I can tell you most of it when I come to collect the manuscript – this same time on Friday, isn’t it? Good.

  I must give you a warning, though. If you’ve stopped believing Tim by the time you’ve finished reading about his adventure, what I propose to tell you on Friday, based on my experience and not his, may give you a nasty surprise. The same time, then. I’ll leave you to it. By the way, I’m very fond of something that dear old John Cowper Powys said about a friend of his in the Autobiography. This is it. He combined scepticism of everything with credulity about everything; and I am convinced this is the true Shakespearean way wherewith to take life. Read Tim Bedford’s manuscript in that spirit, my dear fellow.

  1

  It all began with a call I had from Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where my cousin Isabel was dying of leukæmia. The Hospital didn’t say she was dying of course – they never do – but I knew she was and she knew she was. The scientists who enjoy playing about with these filthy bombs tell us it’s all quite safe and have figures to prove it; but before these bombs came along I’d never known anybody who had died of leukæmia, whereas now my cousin Isabel was the fourth person I’d known who had died of it. The Royal Society was underrating itself. Isabel and I were never very close, but we’d seen plenty of each other when we were children, and had kept in touch after we grew up, chiefly I think because Isabel was interested in painting. She’d married an amiable dullish chap called Joe Farne, a Cambridge bio-chemist. The only other cousins we had between us were in Canada and, as her parents and mine were all dead, I was in fact her nearest next-of-kin on the spot. I thought this was the reason why I’d been hurriedly called to Cambridge; but it wasn’t as simple as that, as I soon discovered. When I’m not painting, not up to my neck in my own professional problems, I always tend to think life is simpler than it turns out to be. But then if I didn’t, probably I’d go round the bend.

  It was a grim trip. I don’t much like Cambridge, for all its Backs and courts and King’s College Chapel, and Addenbrooke’s looked a hell of a place to be dying in. I was told to make my stay as short as possible and not to excite Mrs Farne, and they made me feel I hadn’t been sent for but had pushed my way in, probably trying to hire out television sets. But they left me alone with Isabel for about ten minutes or so. I’d often thought her pathetic when nothing much was wrong with her, but now when she was close to dying she was quite different. She was calm and assured, but a long way off, as if belonging to another country. It wasn’t easy for her to talk and we hadn’t much time, so she didn’t waste any words.

  ‘Tim,’ she said, ‘I want you to do something for me. I want you to find Joe. No, just listen, please, Tim. I know something’s happened to him. If he hasn’t come back, it’s because he can’t. When he took that job in Peru, I didn’t go with him because it looked as if we were breaking up. Then I knew it was all right between us. But when I wrote to tell him so, my letters were returned by the Institute. I’m not going to talk about all that because Mr Sturge will explain. He’s my solicitor – look, here’s his address – and if you agree to try to find Joe – and you must, Tim dear, you must – then you can see Mr Sturge as soon as you leave here – and he’ll explain. I mean, about the Institute, and then about money and everything.’

  She stopped, not expecting me to reply but so that she could take a deep breath or two while she rummaged in her bag. She found a four-page letter that looked as if
she’d handled it a lot. She asked me to tear off the last page and keep it. ‘That’s for you. The rest is about Joe and me, and it proves he felt it was all right between us again too – he still loved me, Tim. But it’s obvious something went badly wrong. He doesn’t say what it was. I feel somehow he wanted to but he couldn’t.’ Tears filled her eyes and began rolling down heavily. She couldn’t talk properly, and all I caught was something about its all being strange and mad. Not Joe. He was still her Joe. Then she pulled herself together in a heart-breaking sort of way, even producing a smile.

  ‘You used to like reading detective stories, Tim. Private eyes, weren’t they? Then you’ll have to be a private eye, and I’m your client. Please, Tim, find Joe for me, and tell him how I was just about to go and look for him when this happened and I couldn’t go anywhere again. Will you, Tim?’

  ‘All right, Isabel, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘It’s all I want now. Bless you, Tim! Now I don’t understand anything that Joe scribbled on the last sheet of his letter, the one I’ve given you. It’s just a lot of names that don’t mean anything. But I know they’re important, Tim. I feel sure Joe was in a desperate hurry then, when he’d finished saying what he wanted to say to me. He’d just time to scribble down these names. What they mean, how they’re connected with him and what’s happened to him, you’ll have to find out. And apart from the Institute, that’s all you have, Tim, just those names, so that sheet of paper is precious.’

  ‘And so is your nice afternoon rest, Mrs Farne,’ said the nurse, who’d probably been waiting outside for a neat line for her entrance.

  ‘Tim, you’ve promised, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Isabel, I’ve promised.’

  ‘And you’ll go straight to Mr Sturge? He’s expecting you, Tim.’

  ‘How did he know I’d agree?’

  ‘He didn’t – but I did. Yes, nurse, I know he has to go. Bend down, Tim.’ She gave me the ghost of a kiss. ‘Tell Joe he made me feel happy again, with that letter.’

  ‘I’ll tell him that, Isabel.’ I never saw her again; she died about ten days later, and I didn’t even attend her funeral. But then she would have been the first to agree that I’d a good reason for not being there.

  The afternoon waiting for me outside the hospital was cold, wet and dark – it was early in January – and I hated the sight and feel of it. I wasn’t in a very good temper when I reached Mr Sturge’s office. He was an elderly man, who looked canny and rosy, with the highlights on his face as crisp as his voice. He might have been a Raeburn portrait: it’s a type you only find now among lawyers and a few old doctors.

  ‘So you’ve promised Mrs Farne you’ll look for her husband – eh, Mr Bedford?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t make much sense to me. The truth is, I’d have promised anything in that room.’

  ‘Quite so. But you may rest assured you’ve taken a great weight off her mind, Mr Bedford. And I’m here to make as much sense out of her request as I can. This is what we know for certain.’ He opened a folder as he went on talking. ‘Her husband, Joseph Farne, a bio-chemist by profession, entered into a three-year contract with the Arnaldos Institute in Peru. This is an institute of scientific research financed by a man called Arnaldos, an old man now, who made an enormous fortune out of the Venezuelan oil-fields. As you may have gathered from Mrs Farne, she and her husband were separating – indeed, I may tell you in confidence there was even some talk of divorce – and this explains, I think, why he went out there and why she didn’t go with him. But after a few months she began to feel better disposed towards him, felt that it had been as much her fault as his, and wrote to him at the Arnaldos Institute to tell him so, and offering to join him there. This letter was returned unopened, her name and address being on it. She then wrote to the Institute, and received this reply.’

  He handed me a typewritten letter, headed Arnaldos Institute, Uramba, Peru: Director of Personnel. It was signed by a Dr Soultz, who wrote that Farne’s contract with the Institute had been terminated by mutual agreement, that Farne had left without telling anybody where he was going, that no forwarding address had been received from him, and that in these circumstances Dr Soultz found himself unable to answer any questions about Farne. And if Dr Soultz wasn’t a cold fish, he was giving a good imitation of one, as I told Mr Sturge.

  ‘I think we may assume,’ he said, ‘that Mr Farne had some sharp disagreement with the Institute, and that this explains the unsympathetic tone of that letter. Mrs Farne then came to me, and on her behalf I wrote to the British Embassy in Lima. They of course were much more helpful – I have their letters here if you wish to see them – and after making inquiries they discovered that Mr Farne, on leaving the Institute, had gone to Chile. But a further inquiry, through our consulate in Santiago, Chile, produced no result whatever. Mr Farne had not been in touch with any of our representatives in Chile. But then, as you probably know, Mrs Farne received a letter from him – ’

  ‘That’s the one I have a piece of – with various names scribbled on it,’ I told him. ‘I haven’t looked at it properly yet, but she thinks it’s very important.’

  ‘Not unreasonably, I think,’ he said. ‘I agree with her in assuming that this letter was finished in a great hurry, possibly in rather queer circumstances. But I don’t imagine, as she seems to do, that her husband may have found himself threatened in some way. My own view – and now I’m being more frank with you than I could be with poor Mrs Farne – is that he was probably drunk when he wrote that letter.’

  ‘It’s a point, Mr Sturge. Though I must say that Joe Farne never did much drinking when I knew him. He struck me as being one of these careful we-all-have-to-be-up-in-the-morning types.’

  ‘Quite so. But we have to remember he’d quarrelled with his wife, uprooted himself and gone as far as Peru, tried to work and live alone in a new and strange environment.’ He looked at me solemnly but somehow still twinkling; more a Raeburn than ever. ‘Once on the other side of the world, a man can often change completely. It brings out the other side of him, so to speak. My own view is that Farne took to drinking hard and probably got himself involved with a woman. She took him to Chile – or he followed her there – and something happened to make him regret the whole wretched business, so he wrote to his wife. The letter bears no address, but the envelope proves that it was written and posted in Chile. And there he is, I think, somewhere in Chile.’ He made a little sniffing noise, as if taking invisible snuff.

  ‘Isn’t Chile that long thin place, thousands of miles of it? What a hope I’d have!’

  ‘Unless they’re deliberately hiding, people are easier to find than you might imagine,’ said Mr Sturge. ‘But perhaps you don’t intend to keep your promise to Mrs Farne.’ He gave me a very sharp look.

  ‘I’d hate to rat on her, but you must understand we were only allowed to talk for a few minutes. I’m a painter, and though I could find the time, if it’s not a question of taking slow boats, I doubt if I could find the money – certainly not for fast air travel, which I imagine costs a packet.’

  ‘It does indeed, Mr Bedford. But I have a letter here – and this is my idea, not Mrs Farne’s – and once you’ve signed it I have the authority from Mrs Farne to pay you the sum of eighteen hundred pounds – ’

  ‘Eighteen hundred pounds! I never knew Isabel had – ’

  He cut in sharply: ‘Mrs Farne is far from being a rich woman, if that’s what you mean. After these eighteen hundred pounds have gone, there will only be a few hundreds left for small bequests and various expenses. She wants you to find her husband, Mr Bedford, and is therefore determined to provide you with the necessary funds. I may add that this money is hers, not his, because when he left for Peru they had already divided up their money. Farne himself of course may possibly be in need of money now, but if he was – ’

  ‘Then I’d give him all that was left out of the eighteen hundred, naturally,’ I said. ‘But what worries me is that
for this kind of money she could have professionals looking for him – ’

  ‘But what could they say to him, if and when they found him?’ Mr Sturge replied to himself by making a face as if he had just bitten into a lemon. ‘And suppose he’s in trouble – which is what Mrs Farne believes, not drink-and-women trouble but some other kind – what would your professionals do to help him? No, Mr Bedford, if somebody has to look for him and if you’re available, then I agree with her in thinking that you’re the man to do it. And what a chance to see the world! You’re not married, I gather; you have no ties, no responsibilities. You’re an artist – you must want to see new strange country – um?’

  ‘It doesn’t follow, Mr Sturge. That’s a photographer’s point of view. A good painter – or one who’s trying to be good – is always seeing new strange country. Still, I could do with a break in my work, and of course I’d like the chance of looking at South America. But the really important thing whether it all makes sense or not, is that I’ve promised Isabel, and now I can’t let her down. So if you want me to sign anything, Mr Sturge, I’ll sign it now.’

  He produced the letter out of the same folder. It was brief and formal, simply committing me to undertake the search for Joseph Farne, spending a minimum of six months on it if he hadn’t been found before that. I hadn’t to account for the eighteen hundred pounds. I could do what I liked with it so long as I kept on looking for Joe. Sturge then handed me a cheque for the full amount. He also gave me the letters from the Institute and the embassies at Lima and Santiago, Chile. ‘I have copies of them,’ he said, ‘and it’s better that you should have the originals. Though I imagine you might prefer to bypass the Institute.’