Saturn Over the Water

by J. B. Priestley

  The first course, cold hors d’œuvre stuff, was already there in front of us. When we’d done, a waitress cleared away these plates. But then the next and main course came from the kitchen with some ceremony. It was brought in by three dark-faced men wearing short white jackets, and of course I had a good view of their entrance. The first two were so dark and leathery-skinned that they may have come from the Aurocanian Indians in the south. The third man carrying a loaded tray looked nearly as dark and had a close-cropped beard and moustache. But he hadn’t come from the south and the Aurocanian Indians. He’d come from the north, first from the Arnaldos Institute, and before that from the biochemical lab in Tenniscourt Street, Cambridge.

  I’d found Joe Farne.

  11

  I don’t think I made any kind of noise. I just stared, though of course my eyes may have been half out of my head. But when Joe – and I was dead certain it was Joe – passed out of my sight and I looked across the table, I saw that both von Emmerick and Merlan-Smith were watching me. There was a bottle of Chilean red in front of me, and I spilt some of it, filling my glass. I’ll admit, I was shaken all right. And it wasn’t only seeing Joe Farne turned into an Indian waiter. It was also the hard long looks that came across the table from those two cold clever bastards, like frozen sneers at Joe, at me, at any kind of life we simple cods wanted to live. I felt like chucking my wine in their faces, but of course I didn’t, I drank it instead, and then gave them some sort of grin.

  Joe didn’t serve any food on my side but I watched him across the table, both then and a little later, and I tried, without being too obvious, to catch his eye. But there wasn’t really an eye to catch. It was Joe Farne all right – I hadn’t the slightest doubt about that – but the Joe Farne I’d known wasn’t really there, he’d been lost somewhere between the Arnaldos Institute and that kitchen, so there couldn’t be any genuine eye-catching. I had to give it up. Yet Joe had written that letter to Isabel from somewhere round here, and had scribbled that list of names which clever Sir Reginald had had pinched while entertaining me, that list which I now carried in my head – one thing clever Reg Merlan-Smith didn’t know. I drank more wine. In fact, I drank rather too much.

  If I’d had less, after being rattled so badly, I wouldn’t have behaved as I did after we broke up for coffee. Merlan-Smith – I’m tired of calling him Sir Reginald – came over to me, pulling at a big cigar as if he were doing it a favour. Now I’d noticed before that there’s one thing goes wrong with these smooth false types, always acting a part, when they feel they’re right on top of everybody and everything. They allow a sort of insolent contempt, which they probably feel inside all the time, to begin to show. They can’t resist letting some of it out. And of course by this time, like me, he couldn’t help playing up to all the drinks he’d had.

  ‘Well, Bedford,’ he began, ‘looks like being rather dull for you here, doesn’t it? I’m afraid you’ll find our friend von Emmerick monopolises Nadia, and there’s nobody else you know here, is there?’

  ‘Well, there’s you of course,’ I told him. ‘We could talk about that night when you asked me to dinner so that somebody could break into my studio. Nice gentlemanly job.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh come off it, Merlan-Smith. You were all so clumsy, right from the time Mitchell picked me up at Cambridge station. Everything stuck out a mile. You were intended to come into possession of that list of course, just to show you how you were slipping. If the people in our division were as slap-happy as you seem to be – I don’t mean just you but all of you – the whole organisation would be in danger.’

  He didn’t know what to say. While he muttered: ‘Still don’t know what you mean. What organisation?’ his eyes were already asking more searching questions.

  ‘Come over here and I’ll show you,’ I said, hardly moving my lips. In point of fact where we were standing was just as good as the place I moved him to, a few yards away, but it’s no use half-doing the dramatic. ‘Now look at what I’m holding – quickly – and keep quiet.’ I opened my hand, only a few inches from his nose, and let him see the gold badge of the Wavy Eight that Danelli had made for me.

  I had my money’s worth. If they’d shaken me with Joe Farne, now it was my turn. I thought for a moment he was about to choke. Then, as I put the badge back into my pocket, he began: ‘But – my God – Bedford – ’

  ‘Shut up,’ I told him in a sharp whisper. ‘And now stop being a dam’ fool. I’m here to find out how much Farne knows. What use is he to me serving meat and vegetables? You clowns between you may have ruined months of hard work.’

  ‘But – look here, Bedford – ’

  ‘Good night!’ He tried to stop me but I pushed past him, on my way out. I know it wasn’t clever. I’d risked pulling a big bluff, which could be called any time, just for the pleasure of wiping that insolent grin off his face. And I’d had to go and do it when at last, at the end of a long road, I’d found Joe Farne. No, it wasn’t clever. The fact is, that Chilean red wine, which seems fairly light and easy, can hit you hard if you drink too much too quickly.

  It was only just after nine, and I hadn’t to meet Nadia until quarter-past. There was a side door in the corridor leading to the hall, which was already buzzing with people waiting for the music. Having the corridor to myself, I slipped out of this side door, then dodged back in a sort of yard, to peep through the uncovered windows of the kitchen department in the hope of seeing Joe Farne. There were about half-a-dozen people at work there, including the two Indian types in the short white coats, but I couldn’t see Joe. They weren’t using any Cambridge bio-chemists for the washing-up.

  After a noisy session with some garbage pails, I managed to work my way back round the outside of the whole building. I had a minute or two to wait outside the guest house, where the lighting, fortunately, wasn’t very good. The hall was now a blaze of light, so that the entrance to the guest house seemed almost in shadow. Although this was the Chilean summer, we were now far south and high up, and the night had a nip in it. Like a fool I’d left my warm raincoat with my two suitcases at Petrohué. I was shivering a bit when Nadia came out, wearing a fur coat.

  ‘You are cold,’ she said.

  ‘Cold – and angry.’

  ‘With me?’

  ‘No, no. With myself – and with von Emmerick and your Sir Reginald. Let’s move at a brisk pace, if you don’t mind. Where do we go?’

  ‘We will cross here, to keep away from the Great Hall. Listen, they are beginning their music. Wagner, of course. Now we shall go up the hill and soon will be away from everybody. This Osparas place is quite wide, stretching along the road below, but it has no depth and ends in a kind of little park up here – you will see.’ She had taken my arm now, and she must have been wearing walking shoes, for she kept up a good pace. ‘You feel warmer now – Tim? I call you Tim, that is all right?’

  ‘Why not, Nadia?’

  She squeezed my arm. ‘Because I think you must know how I deceived you that night at Sir Reginald’s. Though when we kissed and I asked you where you were going to be, that was not part of the deception, you know, Tim. I did that for myself, not for Sir Reginald and my salary and expenses. He thinks you are a fool and never saw through what he had done – ’

  ‘He’s not thinking that now – ’

  ‘I warned him, and so, next day, did Mitchell, who had been to see you – ’

  ‘Tell me about this chap Mitchell.’

  ‘I can’t because I don’t know, All I know is that he does some work for Sir Reginald – and the Eight, as I call them – ’

  ‘Why did you call them the Eight, Nadia?’

  ‘There has to be some name – and several times I have heard this number eight mentioned – ’

  ‘What do you think it means?’

  ‘I don’t know, Tim. There is some kind of big secret organisation, that is all I really know. I think it has to do with South America – and Austral
ia – perhaps Africa, though I am not sure about that. I have heard Sir Reginald say he has nothing to do with Africa – has never even been there.’

  ‘Twice I’ve been told – first by a man who worked for a time for the Arnaldos Institute, then by a man here in Chile who’s probably a Soviet agent – that it’s really a kind of revived Nazi setup. But I can’t accept that. It doesn’t fit a few of the facts I know.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ She was very emphatic. ‘You can be sure about that, Tim. The Germans I know in this organisation I call Eight – like von Emmerick or Steglitz – they are very very German but they were never Nazis and hated them. There are some old Nazis in Argentina – I have seen some of them – but they are not with the Eight. It is not a German organisation, I think, though I feel there is something very German in it somewhere. Now we can stop here. Look at Osparas.’

  We were now above the place, on a walk overshadowed by trees, and could see Osparas mapped in twinkling lights. It looked bigger and more impressive than I had imagined it to be, though the electricity produced by the mountain streams must have been cheap enough, and the lights may easily have been more extensive than the streets and buildings. ‘It’s quite a place for the back of beyond. Tell me about it, Nadia.’

  ‘Later, my dear. Kiss me.’

  Well, we repeated that fine performance in Merlan-Smith’s library. But though we were closer in mind than we’d been then, for I felt now she was ready to tell me all she knew, and though she seemed just as beautiful and subtly desirable as she’d done before, for some reason that I couldn’t discover, my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t really want her as I’d wanted her in London, even though I now liked her better. She didn’t spot this, and I wasn’t surprised. Women like Nadia are well supplied with intuition, but either it doesn’t work or they turn it off on occasions like this, when they want to be involved.

  ‘Will you come to my room tonight?’ she whispered. ‘It is room number two at the end of the landing at the top of the first stairs. I will go back now and tell von Emmerick I have a headache or something, to make sure he keeps away.’

  ‘Like that, is it?’

  ‘Like that – yes. Always like that. Hold me close – make me feel you are looking after me – like a real man with a real woman.’ Very quietly she began crying. ‘I am a whore and he treats me like one. He does not really want a woman in his life any more than Sir Reginald does. Just a nice change from these fat little German girls he has. It is more amusing to be brutal with a woman like me. I think they hate or despise woman herself, all of them, these Eight men as I call them. I feel you are quite different, Tim.’

  ‘I hope so, ducky. And I’m certainly against ’em, whatever they’re trying to do. We artists and women – we’ll have to form a league against ’em. We’ll start tonight. But how did you get into this setup? Why do you have to go trailing round with Merlan-Smith, who’s obviously as queer as they make ’em, and to offer midnight entertainment to a type like von Emmerick?’

  This at least stopped her crying. She leant against me while I leant against a tree trunk, the strange stars of southern Chile blotted out by the leaves above us, Wavy Eight’s new town glittering below us. ‘I am still married to a man who will not divorce me and gives me no money. I am used to luxury and rich living, which can be a terrible trap to a woman. Whole countries have been betrayed because some women could not live without everything de luxe. And when you believe in nothing, when you feel everything will come to an end very soon, you cannot endure shabby clothes and crowded trains and greasy food in dirty rooms. With a man who loves you – yes – or you are no longer a real woman, just a whore – but these men are harder and harder to find, especially where everything is de luxe. So I meet Sir Reginald in New York, where I still wear good clothes and am very gay and charming and sophisticated, though I am now in debt and have perhaps ten dollars. I am a real countess. I speak five languages. I have lived in eight, nine, ten capitals. So he needs a social secretary and hostess, all the more because he must hide his real tastes and seem to have a fine mistress. He is always travelling, and I am good at making these arrangements. Also, a good-looking woman can often obtain useful information from men late at night – or keep a man from returning too soon to his studio, you remember – all things like that – and of course certain important friends, who know what he is really like and cater for his tastes – you saw that young man tonight – well, these friends can be amused by Nadia. That is how it is, my dear.’

  ‘I see. This means, I hope, that now you don’t like Merlan-Smith any more than I do?’

  ‘Like him? I loathe his bloody guts.’ Her harsh tone was even more surprising than the words, and I laughed. ‘Let us go back. I must do my face before anybody sees me. We can talk as we go, though there will be plenty of time for talking, I hope, later tonight. Come to me about half-past eleven – don’t forget, it is room two at the end – and if you find the door is locked, give three quick little taps, then wait, then another three little taps. Now tell me this,’ she went on, taking my arm as we began walking down. ‘Do you think of me just as a nice woman to have – or do you trust me now?’

  ‘I’m ready to trust you, Nadia. But I haven’t much to trust you with, not yet. There’s this, though, and it ought to prove I’m ready to trust you. There’s a big reddish rock, on the right of the road about halfway between here and Peulla, on the Emerald Lake. Did you come here that way?’

  ‘No, we came through Argentina. But I can find a big red rock, if I have to. And if you will tell me why I should find it.’

  ‘You haven’t to – unless you don’t see me around tomorrow morning. Between eleven and half-past, in the morning, I’m due to meet a man there – the man who brought me here – he’s a very fat Chilean Communist called Jones.’

  ‘Are you a Communist, Tim?’

  ‘No. I don’t like countries where politicians tell painters how and what to paint. But I rather like this Jones. And if by any chance I don’t seem to be around in the morning, if I’m not on my way to that rock before eleven, then just remember that Jones will be waiting there.’

  ‘I’ll remember. What else can you tell me, Tim?’

  ‘I’ve seen the man I came looking for – Farne. He was serving in the dining-room. He didn’t recognise me. I doubt if he’d have recognised his mother. He was doped-up in some way. All too easy here, I suppose. They do manufacture and sell drugs, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes. It is a legitimate business, and they are beginning to make a profit. I know because Sir Reginald and some of his friends in Argentina helped to finance it. And don’t think they make cocaine or heroin. They are too clever to be in that kind of racket. They have some very good German chemists working here, discovering new useful drugs. One of the best chemists is a strange unhappy little man I rather like, who used to be at Arnaldos’s Institute – ’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Rother.’ She pronounced it the German way. ‘R.o.t.h.e.r. You should talk to him. I could arrange it.’

  Then of course I remembered the three names that were together on Joe’s list. ‘Semple, Rother, Barsac,’ I cried. ‘Three scientists. Semple, I know, died in London – ’

  ‘And I can tell you about Barsac,’ she cried, catching my excitement. ‘Just before I came here last year, Barsac had disappeared – nobody knew where he had gone – and von Emmerick was very angry. But Rother is still here. I think he has nothing to do with the Eight side of it – the conspiracy, whatever it is. And of course that is why von Emmerick is here. He is not a chemist.’

  ‘I know that. He’s just running the place on a semi-military basis. But why? What does he really do? What’s the conspiracy about, for God’s sake? Surely you must have picked up something, Nadia?’

  We were now nearly back to what you might call von Emmerick-platz, and there were more lights and a few people to be seen. Nadia took a firmer grip of my arm, and began to whisper. ‘I will try to tell you all I know, later tonight. I
will try to remember every little thing for you, Tim. But don’t expect too much. All I know for certain is that there is some kind of great secret conspiracy – with a big rich organisation that uses places like this – for meetings and for training people to make propaganda – and that behind it all is some kind of strange belief – about what I do not know – but I do know, because he once told me, that it is the only thing Sir Reginald is really serious about. It is not Nazi – but I feel it is somehow very very German – probably quite mad. Listen!’

  We were now quite close to the hall, and through its tall uncurtained windows, open at the top, there was coming the sound of a record that must have been stupendously amplified. We stopped to listen. It was the funeral march from Götterdämmerung. The vast blare of the brass and the terrible drums were bringing cities to dust, crumbling mountains into the sea, breaking the very ribs of the world. Nadia came closer, trembling against me. ‘You hear it? That is what is deepest inside the German imagination. Götter-dämmerung. Ragnarök. The end of the world. And sometimes I have thought that is what those Eight men want – and they are always men, no women – they want the end of the world.’

  She was silent a moment, then she hastily touched my cheek. ‘I must hurry to do my face. You wait a little while here, then go to your room – until half-past eleven, when I will be waiting for you, my darling.’ I watched her hurry down towards the guest house. I felt the exact opposite of what I’d felt about her when we first met in London, when she’d roused in me a faintly corrupt kind of sexual excitement, not even honest lust. Now I found myself liking her as a person, wishing to be her friend, but no longer wanting her as a woman, flesh to flesh. I was ready now to talk to her for hours, but for some reason – and I knew it had nothing to do with von Emmerick or any other men who’d had her – I didn’t want to make love to her. In fact I wasn’t looking forward to this visit to her room, though I didn’t see how I could get out of it now. As I smoked a pipe, pacing up and down outside the entrance to the hall, to keep warm, I thought of the thousand nights when the idea of this fabulous dream puss waiting to welcome me into her bed would have put a torch to my imagination. And now here I was, a victim of the old irony department, almost dreading the visit.