Saturn Over the Water

by J. B. Priestley

  He held out a big meaty hand. ‘Gimme, boy. I’ll take a look at ’em through a reading glass. I’ve had to cope with some terrible writing in my time. So hand it over.’

  ‘I can’t, Sam. I haven’t the one Joe originally wrote. It was stolen while I was out at a dinner party given by a man I didn’t know, who asked me at the last minute. And it’s my belief I was asked so they could be sure I wasn’t at home that night.’ And now I told him about Sir Reginald Merlan-Smith and how Nadia Slatina kept me on, probably because they weren’t sure then the job had been pulled off. ‘And then when Merlan-Smith did talk to me, he’d nothing much to say and obviously wanted to get rid of me. I couldn’t understand it at the time, naturally, but afterwards I felt certain he’d heard, probably over the phone, that they had Joe’s list, so there was no point in detaining me any longer. And a man called Mitchell comes into it somewhere.’ And then I explained about Mitchell.

  ‘It’s a hell of a note,’ said Sam, grinning. ‘You walked into something, Tim, but I wouldn’t know what.’

  ‘Yes, but this is what I wanted to say, Sam. Last night, you remember, General Giddings was mentioned – and I asked you about him afterwards. And his was the first name on the list. The next seems to be a Russian – V. Melnikov – I don’t know anything about him. But next to him, the third name, is von Emmerick. Now I met a von Emmerick – a German General Staff type if I ever saw one – this afternoon at Mrs Tengleton’s. And though he pays fairly regular visits to New York, he’s living in South America, where I’m going tomorrow. Now this may be all a coincidence – or a series of coincidences – ’

  ‘No, Tim boy, I don’t buy that. When old Sam Harnberg finds himself stuck with too many coincidences, he begins to smell something. There’s a setup here somewhere. What about the places – didn’t you say some places were on the list?’

  ‘One might be in South America – Chile, perhaps. The other three seem to be in Australia, a devil of a long way from anywhere else. And if there’s a setup of some sort, as you suggest, how could Australia come into the picture?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. By the way, some good painting is coming out of there, Tim. I’ve been surprised lately. No, don’t tell me we’re not talking about painting. I’m only spitballing while I try to think. Not that there’s much to think about, when you get down to it, just the idea of a possible setup. To do what – how – and where, I couldn’t even start guessing, and if you’ll take my advice, fella, you’ll let it ride till you know more. There’s two things I’d like to say though, Tim.’ He looked old and wise as he wagged a finger at me. I often remembered him afterwards as he was at this moment, one hand up and the other trying to brush the cigar ash off his lapels, something he was for ever trying to do: his great raw-sienna beak of a nose, his purplish thick underlip, his saurian eyes dark with speculative thought.

  ‘London – New York – Peru – Australia,’ he began slowly. ‘Don’t let distance fool you, Tim. If the money’s there – and this setup smells like money – distance don’t mean a thing these days. By this time tomorrow, with any luck, you’ll already have been in Lima a few hours. By the middle of the week you could be in Greenland or West Africa. That’s the kind of world we live in now, boy. So if anything has to be spread around – and there might be good reasons for doing just that – all you have to do is to buy tickets. Dead easy. And the other thing is this. I’m not Walter Lippmann, just an old man trying to sell good pictures, but I’ll tell you this much, boy – this world where you can go anywhere in a day or so or can’t go at all, it’s the most goddam crazy world ever known, nothing like it in the history books. If you’ve walked into something, Tim – and it’s my guess you have, and to hell with coincidences – don’t go kidding yourself that something can’t be happening because it doesn’t seem to make sense. It hasn’t to make sense, not as we used to understand things making sense, not any more. There are fellas up top now, making big decisions, that would have been locked in padded cells when I was young. And nothing’s firm under the feet or solidly nailed down any more. It’s all melting, dissolving, slipping down the side, turning into liquid and bubbles. Talk about flying saucers! We’re in one. I swear to God only pictures keep me sane and in one piece. And even then half the new talent’s nutty. Maybe you are for leaving your work to go slewfooting in South America – ’

  ‘I’ve wondered myself, Sam. But I made a promise, and agreed to take the money. Also, they’ve got me involved now, these mystery types who have my studio burgled.’

  ‘I’d feel the same. At least I would have done at your age. And remember what I say about the way the world’s going. Don’t walk away from anything just because it doesn’t seem sensible. We’re not in that sort of world any more. But why am I talking? Hell – you’ve hardly known anything else. And when you have a kid, he’ll expect to see creatures from other planets playing in the park – if there is a park.’

  Well, he was right about one thing. After lolling a few hours in a wide white armchair, talking to my neighbour, an American mining engineer, on his way to the high Andes, and taking turns to pay for drinks in the airports of Washington, Miami, Panama City, I arrived the next evening at Lima.

  5

  The guidebook I was given, with the compliments of the Banco de Crédito del Perú, describing Lima in the ‘magnificent days of the Viceroys’, went on to say that ‘Pirates and earthquakes were looked upon as the two discordant notes in that picture of order and ceremony carried to the extreme’. There were no pirates and earthquakes during the two days and three nights I spent in Lima; there was also not much left of that picture of order and ceremony. The ornate old façade of the Palacio Arzobispal, in the huge Plaza de Armas, looked down all day on hundreds of big American cars parked in row after row. What was left of the old city the Spaniards built, sometimes just a glimpse of something Moorish in a courtyard between a garage and a radio shop, was often exquisite; and the second morning I was there I managed to do a quick and not too bad gouache sketch, which I used afterwards for a biggish oil picture, of the pink villa once owned by the Viceroy’s mistress, a wicked wench known as La Perricholi. The book from the Bank said she ‘could be both clever and wanton in a subtle way’. I was there two hundred years too late to have a chance at any of this; but that didn’t worry me. What did was the peculiar climate of Lima. As Mrs Semple said, it had warmth without sunlight, so that when I sweated, which I did all day because it was humid as well as hot, there was no sun to dry the sweat. The first morning, when I called at the British Embassy, I walked there, thinking I needed the exercise. I arrived wet through. By the second afternoon I was already buying more cotton vests and underpants; I kept changing my clothes all day long, like a leader of fashion, but only in the hope of feeling dry for half an hour. The city was covered with a grey blanket of cloud, but it was an electric blanket on at full.

  I learnt nothing about Joe from the Embassy, and the British Council man, Jelks, had never even heard of him. I ran into Jelks because I was fascinated by the rambling old mansion where the British Council had its office. He was a pleasant helpful chap, and, later that first afternoon, he managed to unpark his car to take me round and about the city. Just outside there was a hill bristling with little shacks, all put up and occupied by Indian squatters, who were there because where they had come from there’d been no work, no food. The contrast between this squatters’ town, with no water, no sanitation, no anything, and Lima itself, with the big cars roaring everywhere and the expensive bars where the double martinis and pisco sours were being served, seemed to me a bit sinister. But nobody else – and I talked to a fair number of English and Americans in those bars, where I drank a lot of beer after so much sweating – seemed to be worried about all those Indians up there or about Indians anywhere. Two of the English invited me out to their homes, fine bungalows on the outskirts blazing with flowers, a super Hampstead Garden Suburb with the temperature permanently raised. Any strange thoughts I had about Lima and Peru in g
eneral seemed ridiculous in this company, so I kept them to myself.

  There was no point in hiding the fact that I was hoping to have an invitation from old Arnaldos to visit his Institute, and I talked about it freely, so I was able to gather some information about the place. It was about a hundred miles south of Lima, on the coast. There was nothing but desert down there, running right down to the sea, but Arnaldos had built the Institute, at Uramba, where whaling ships had anchored regularly at one time, because he knew there was a large underground supply of fresh water, sufficient when electric power and pumps and pipelines had been laid on to supply a small town. The idea of the Institute, I was told, was special research, directed by some first-class scientists drawn from everywhere, for the benefit of Peru. Old Arnaldos was not only a multi-millionaire but a Peruvian patriot, determined to outdo the Incas or at least to encourage his successors to outdo them, probably, it was hinted, because of the Indian strain in him. There was too much desert, he argued, that needn’t be there; and he was hiring the best possible brains to work on the problem. A fine job, everybody agreed. And if he invited me to stay there, I was told, I could consider myself lucky.

  All this made me feel like a Peruvian who, after lying awake at night inventing the most fantastic intrigues, arrives in London believing that something sinister is going on at the Medical Research Council’s place at Mill Hill. I began to feel a fool. What the hell was I doing there? I had to keep telling myself, in between listening to this chat, drinking cold beers, and trying to find a dry shirt and underpants, that something had happened to Joe Farne and somebody had broken into my studio to pinch his list of names, and so on and so forth. But everything I’d told Sam Harnberg, who was hardly more substantial and part of this world than von Emmerick and Mrs Tengleton, the damp and delicate Angel and the agreeable Marina Nateby, began to seem utterly daft during these two days and three nights in Lima. To tell the truth, I was always hoping that suddenly, out of nowhere, appearing from behind the waiter carrying the new round of pisco sours, Mitchell would turn up again. I didn’t know whose side he was on, if there were any sides, but in spite of his unaccountable appearances and disappearances, he was a solid fellow; and if he popped up, it would prove something, even if I didn’t know quite what. But of course he didn’t, as I’d known, in the largest and best-lit part of my mind, he wouldn’t. What did arrive, however, towards the end of my second day, was a message from Arnaldos’s secretary, telling me that a car would call for me and my baggage, at ten-thirty the next morning, to take me to Uramba. And that night, not wanting to lie awake in what seemed like a cubicle in an orchid house, I gave myself for once a sleeping pill.

  The car was the largest station wagon I’ve ever seen; you could have run a bus service with it. The inside was crammed with stuff the driver must have been shopping for, and I sat in front with him. In the guide book was a photograph of a monochrome ceramic, of the Mochica Culture, representing a warrior in ambush; and this driver looked like one of his descendants, done in mahogany. His response to the few remarks I tried on him suggested that either he didn’t understand English or preferred to drive in silence. He also drove very fast and carelessly, and the few people we went blinding by must have cursed us for the dust we raised. After half-an-hour or so well out of the city, the landscape appeared to be made out of this dust, held together in the background, away from the sea, by enormous rocks, deep cadmium yellow to chrome orange, chinese vermilion to indigo and sepia. It was no good to anybody but a painter, and the only one in the district was rushing through it at a mile a minute. The sun blazed out of a cobalt sky. Except when we cut through rocks piled high on both sides or went roaring and hooting through some startled village, we had the Pacific smiling and dimpling on our right all the way, and sometimes I thought it winked at me. This suggests I was in better spirits than I’d been in Lima; and so I was. The fast movement, the multi-coloured rocks and desert, the sight of the sea, the feeling of going somewhere and getting on with something even if I didn’t know what, combined to give me a lift I badly needed. I felt in fact – though I’ve felt it before and it’s let me down – that something tremendous was going to happen.

  After the dust and the walls of rock, trembling in the harsh glare of noon, Uramba and the Institute seemed wonderful, almost unbelievable. Among the tiled roofs and white adobe walls were palm trees, already tall, blossoming shrubs, flower borders, glimpses of lawns and the blue glitter of bathing pools. (Although the sea was almost all round the place, which occupied a small headland, there was little bathing in it because of sharks and other unpleasant things.) Arnaldos and his engineers, architects and contractors, had conjured both an oasis and what amounted to a new little town out of that underground lake. I was driven without any hesitation to what I remembered Mrs Semple describing as the ‘little palace for old Emperor Arnaldos’, actually a long low house in the Spanish Colonial style, very well done. A biggish woman – she had a plain dark face, rather fine, and wore a dress the same grey as her hair – met me in the doorway, and said she was Mrs Candamo, Mr Arnaldos’s personal secretary.

  ‘You are to be his guest,’ she said with a smile, ‘so you are staying here, not in the Institute guest house. Mr Arnaldos sends his apologies for not welcoming you here himself but this has been a busy morning for him. You will meet him at one o’clock. And now I will take you to your room.’

  It was up a short flight of stairs at the end of a long cool corridor. Both windows looked down on pink paths among flower beds, some palms bending and rattling in the breeze, and, beyond a steeply shelving shore of scrub and sand, the green tide racing and foaming along the inlet. The off-white walls of the room set off a series of pictures all by the same man, Machado: tremendously vigorous, with slashes of lemon yellow, hard greens, vermilion and scarlet, against blue-dark shadows.

  ‘You like these paintings?’ said Mrs Candamo, who had lingered on, to make sure I’d no objection to the room.

  ‘Very much, though of course I haven’t taken them in yet. Who is this Machado?’

  ‘He is a Brazilian, of part Indian descent,’ she said. ‘He has stayed here too. Mr Arnaldos is a great collector of pictures and he is specially interested in South American art.’ She hesitated a moment, then closed the door and looked at me appealingly. ‘Mr Bedford, there is something I wish to say to you, and this may be the best opportunity, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Candamo.’ I found I’d dropped my voice too. ‘Please go ahead.’

  She came nearer. ‘One reason why Mr Arnaldos is glad to welcome you here, Mr Bedford, is because of his granddaughter, Miss Rosalia Arnaldos. He had three sons. One is in the government, here in Peru. One is with the oil company in Venezuela. The third, who was the favourite, died – his wife too – in an airplane crash, ten years ago. Miss Rosalia is their only child, and Mr Arnaldos is deeply devoted to her. He allowed her to go to Paris, to study painting, and then after two years she left and lived for a time in New York. Now she is here again.’ She sighed, closed her eyes, then after some hesitation she decided to tell me more. ‘She is still young – only twenty-four – but without parents to guide her there have been difficulties. I think, Mr Bedford, she is a good girl at heart, but just now she is not easy to understand and help. I know Mr Arnaldos is going to ask you to look at her painting – I have been with him for many years now, you understand, Mr Bedford, and I have his confidence. He will ask you what you think. If Miss Arnaldos knows – and I believe she does – there may be some difficulties. She will not make a good impression upon you, I am afraid. Now this is what I ask, Mr Bedford. Will you please try not to be too harsh in your judgment – both of her and her painting?’

  ‘What about her mother – was she a Latin American?’

  ‘No, she was from the United States, an Irish American actually. She was very beautiful. Rosalia could be beautiful too, if she wished, but you may not believe this. Mr Bedford, you will not tell Mr Arnaldos I have spoken to you about Rosali
a – please!’

  I said I wouldn’t, and she left me to unpack and clean up. One thing that worried me – and I wasn’t thinking about my appearance, just my comfort – was that the lightest coat and pants I had with me weren’t right for this place, certainly not in the middle of the day. However, out of the sun it wouldn’t be too bad, for down here they had one of the driest climates in the world. The other thing that worried me was that I hadn’t come here to give marks for Rosalia’s painting but to find out what had happened to Joe Farne and all the rest of it. And as to how I set about turning myself into a private investigator, I hadn’t a notion.

  Arnaldos was a tiny old man, not unlike a Latin-American version of Bernhard Berenson. He seemed nothing but parchment and chicken bone held together by will and intelligence. His English must have been perfect at one time, but now in his eighties he was beginning to forget it, so he spoke slowly and used as few words as possible. We met in a long room where some big Picassos were mixed with some interesting South American Indian stuff. There were several men having a drink before lunch; but Arnaldos took me away from the group.

  ‘I am very grateful to our friend Harnberg,’ he said. He had a short white beard but rather a full moustache, hiding anything but the widest grin, so I couldn’t discover if a smile was there. But his voice and the look in his dark old eyes were cordial enough.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to have me here, Mr Arnaldos. I’m fascinated already by this landscape.’

  ‘You think you would like to paint, Mr Bedford?’