Authors: Emma Smith
“Everyone’s always getting born or dying, over and over, on and on,” said Amy, gently rubbing the snout of the lamb, who bleated for milk, not rubbing.
“Well, of course they are—what do you expect?”
“What I mean is, it takes such a long time when it’s happening, but afterwards when people talk about it, like you’ve been doing now, it all seems so quick, and it doesn’t even seem to matter very much because there’s always more things coming undone the whole time, like a streamer. I think that’s what Granny was meaning when she said it doesn’t do to dwell on the past. Though I think the past’s interesting—specially if it’s somebody else’s past, because then it sounds the same as a story.”
“You didn’t let me finish. I got to the part where your mother died and your father sold Dintirion to my grand-dad. Well, so then he went off to Australia, your father, and bought a sheep farm out there and married a second wife and had a lot more children.”
“Oh, Ivor, how can you be so silly!—as if I didn’t know that part for myself without you telling me. And it wasn’t a lot more children, it was only three. They’re my brothers and my sister and I’ve never seen them.”
Mrs Bowen came into the room with a tray.
“Ivor—you’d better take that little creature back to its mother now. It’s been away from her long enough.”
“Yes, it has—it wants its supper as well,” said Amy. “It was trying to suck my fingers for milk. But you’re to come back again directly after, Ivor, because there’s still something I want to ask you.”
“Oh, Amy—I think you’ve had enough company for today,” said Mrs Bowen. “I don’t want you to get overtired when you’re only just beginning to be on the mend.”
“I shan’t get tired, Granny—I don’t feel tired a bit. Just weak, that’s all, same as that lamb is. It’s good for me, talking to Ivor—I’m hungry now and I wasn’t before. So can he come back?”
“Well, we’ll see,” said Mrs Bowen.
She put the tray on Amy’s knees and went over to the window.
“The rain’s stopped at last—that’s a good job. It’s going to be a fine clear night. We could do with a bit of sunshine tomorrow to dry the ground up, and it looks as though we might be getting it. I must say, there’s been quite a touch of spring in the air, these last few days, and evenings are getting longer too. And yet, my goodness, how the snow does linger on—it’ll stay by those hedges and there’ll be patches of it up on the hills, white, for days yet, just to remind us, I suppose, of what’s been.”
“I don’t think I shall need any reminding, Granny—will you?”
“Well no, maybe not. Though I can’t say I mean to let it worry me any. What’s done’s over.”
“Bartolomeo’s coming here when he’s out of hospital, Ray told me.”
“Oh, he told you that, did he?”
“Yes—and I’m glad. I was hoping I’d see him again. And Ray says the Ambassador said that I’m to teach Bartolomeo to speak English.”
“I see. He has been busy with his tongue, that boy.”
“He just happened to mention it.”
“And did they any of them happen to mention about how the Ambassador’s been on the ’phonefrom London every day since you’ve been ill, asking after you?”
“No—has he?” said Amy, pleased.
“Every day,” said Mrs Bowen. There was something constrained in her manner, as though she were debating with herself whether or not to say more. She left the window and came across to the bedside and stood looking down intently at Amy’s face.
“What is it, Granny?”
“I was wondering whether maybe you were well enough now for a letter that came for you a few days back.”
“A letter? For me? Oh, Granny!—who’s it from?”
“Now Amy, you’re to lie still and you’re not to get flustered.”
“Yes, I will—I’m not.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken so soon. But I was thinking if I didn’t one of those boys would go and let it out, the way their tongues wag.”
“Who wrote it?”
“Well, it’s from that Ambassador, Amy. He’s a nice man. I liked him,” said Mrs Bowen. “We got along together fine, him and me. He’s someone you know where you are with—not one of these people who say one thing and mean another.”
“I liked him too,” said Amy.
“He liked you. Though that’s not really what it’s all about. He says you did a service to his country, Amy. He wants you to know how grateful he is, and his country is. That’s what he’s written in that letter. Mind—I haven’t opened it—of course I haven’t. I haven’t read it, but—but that’s what it is,” finished Mrs Bowen, lamely.
More and more Amy was puzzled by her grandmother’s manner: it was as though she were going downhill on a bicycle with both brakes jammed hard on and finding the slope steeper than she had expected.
“Can I have my letter?” said Amy.
Almost reluctantly Mrs Bowen took it out of her apron pocket and handed it to Amy.
“Oh, look!—it’s been done on the typewriter:
Miss Amy Bowen.
I’ve never seen my name like that before—typed. Doesn’t it look nice? It makes me feel I’m someone else.”
Glancing up she noticed that her grandmother was tense with a mysterious expectancy; her eyes were bright and she was smiling.
Amy opened the envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper covered in black type with a signature in ink, very flourishing and big, at the bottom. Fastened to the top of the page with paperclips was what appeared to be a long narrow strip of pasteboard. Amy fumbled weakly with the clips but they were too tight to come off; only the pasteboard slipped a little sideways, and she saw that it was a thin sort of a book and that there was another one underneath. Amy stared at them, confused, suddenly defeated—were they something to do with lessons?
“What are they, Granny?” she said. “I don’t understand. What does the letter say? You read it to me. My eyes aren’t so good for reading yet.”
“Well, I expect he says thank you very much for everything you did,” said Mrs Bowen in a strained voice, not attempting to take the letter from Amy. “I expect that’s what those things at the top are for—to say thank you very much.”
“Is that what they are? What are they, Granny?”
Mrs Bowen picked up Amy’s limp hand and held it closely. “They’re tickets, Amy, for you to go on an aeroplane—for you to go to Australia. It’s so as you can see your father at last, and he can see you.”
“Australia? Me?”
Mrs Bowen nodded. There was a long silence. Then Amy said:
“But why are there two tickets?”
“Well, there’s one for going and one for coming back, I suppose.”
“Is that what it says on them? See what it says.”
Obediently Mrs Bowen freed the tickets and bent her head and examined them.
“What does it say?” cried Amy, watching her face. “What is it, Granny? Read it out.”
“It says here that one’s for a child, and one’s for—one’s for an adult.”
“That’s you, Granny.”
They looked at each other.
“Both of us!” said Amy.
“I’m glad you got a prize as well,” said Amy to Ivor who was lying stretched at ease across the foot of the bed. Mrs Bowen had been persuaded to allow them an extra twenty minutes of each other’s company before Amy was tucked up for the night. “After all, if you hadn’t been so clever, Ivor, and trapped Inspector Catcher it wouldn’t have mattered what anyone else had done.”
“Why do you keep on calling him Inspector Catcher? And you still call Harris wrong as well.”
“It’s because that’s the way I think of them—I always shall: Inspector Catcher and Mr Nabb. I knew them before you did, Ivor,” said Amy, with a touch of dignity.
Ivor yawned. The discussion of good news had had a soporific effect on him. “’Tisn’t a prize, either,” he said. “It’s a reward.”
“I don’t see the difference.”
“Well, they are different.”
“I don’t see it, and prize sounds nicer.”
“That’s because you’re a girl,” said Ivor. “As a matter of fact, my dad didn’t want me to have it at first.”
“Didn’t he? Why not?”
“He didn’t like the notion of me taking money. That’s what he said. But then the Ambassador wrote him this long letter, all about how there were lots of farms in his land that might have been spoilt by war if it hadn’t been for me, and one day I was going to want to buy a farm of my own, and the money could go towards getting it for me, and that was only fair. So then Dad said all right. But it’s my money. I don’t have to use it for buying a farm with if I don’t want to.”
“Why, Ivor—what else would you use it for?”
“Oh, I don’t know. By the time I grow up I might have some other ideas, mightn’t I? I might decide to go to Peru. The Ambassador said I could stay with his family any time I wanted. They’ve got farms out there too. I’d like to see how they manage. I don’t suppose even their tractors look the same as ours.”
“Ivor,” said Amy, reminded of her reason earlier in asking for Ivor to be sent back, “what
was
it all about? You said you’d tell me sometime, and I want to know now. Why would the farms in Peru have got spoilt by war if you hadn’t done what you did do? I don’t understand.”
“’Tisn’t very easy to explain,” said Ivor. The mere thought of the effort involved in explanation caused him to yawn again.
“But try!” she urged him, and as an antidote to yawning she directed a sharp kick towards the foot of the bed.
Ivor sighed, and rolled over, and propped himself up on his elbows.
“Well, you see, there’s this big organization,” he began, cautiously, “and Vigers is the head of it—
was
the head of it, I mean. The Ambassador said that it was like a sort of a business Vigers ran—he took on jobs, and people who wanted to make money paid him money so they could make more money.”
They both considered this statement critically for a while. Then Amy said;
“I don’t see there’s anything wrong with that. It’s the same as your father does when he pays Neville Evans to come and spread lime on his fields with his spreader so as he can get a better crop of hay.”
“It may sound like that,” said Ivor, “but it’s not like that. I was trying to put it so as you could understand it. I told you it was going to be hard.”
“You had it explained to you, Ivor—just tell it to me however it was you heard it.”
So Ivor took a breath and knotted his brow and tried again.
“Well, for one thing it isn’t just small money, it’s millions and billions of pounds they’re after; and for another thing they make it out of making trouble for people. The way Vigers first came to start up in his business was years ago when he happened to know someone who manufactured guns, and this person wanted to sell his guns, but he couldn’t. So he paid Vigers to put round stories that weren’t true in some part of the world that was far enough off for the rest of the world not to give it too much attention.”
“Go on,” said Amy, encouragingly.
“I was trying to remember where the place was, but I can’t, and it doesn’t matter for what I’m saying at the moment. Vigers was so clever he got the tribes out there, wherever it was, to believe these lies about each other, and so they started fighting each other—which they wouldn’t have done if they’d been left alone, and then it turned into a war, and a lot of people got killed who never should have got killed, and the man who made guns sold thousands and thousands of them, and of course he made a lot of money, and so did Vigers. That’s not the same as my dad paying Neville Evans to spread lime.”
“No, that’s not the same,” agreed Amy.
“And ever since then people who wanted trouble stirred up so as they could get money out of it for themselves, or so as they could get power out of it, or something like that, something bad—they got hold of Vigers and paid him and he stirred it up.”
“I see,” said Amy.
“Well, this job Vigers had taken on this time was arranging for some President of another country to be killed—assassinated—while he was on a visit to Peru, and then to put the blame for it on the wrong people. Only as it happened old Luis Alvarez heard of what was being planned, and he wrote to his cousin in London and told him, because his cousin was the Ambassador there.”
“I know,” said Amy.
“I know you know. I’m only saying it because it’s important, because if he’d been just any old cousin it wouldn’t have been much use to tell him. But being an Ambassador he was the right person to tell anyway. The worst part of it was that at that time there wasn’t enough to tell. It wasn’t much above a rumour—no facts, and you have to have facts to be able to act against them. So Luis Alvarez said he’d stop on in Peru and find out the names of the people in the plot, and when it was meant to happen, and where, and all about it. And he did find out all about it too, but the pity of it was he got caught by some of Vigers’ men only a few minutes before he was intending to get on an aeroplane to fly to London to tell his cousin this information he’d found out.”
“Oh, that
was
a pity,” said Amy. “If he’d only managed to get to the aeroplane just a little bit sooner he’d have been all right, probably.”
“You can say
if only
about anything,” replied Ivor, impatient at such a point of view.
“If only
means what didn’t happen, that’s all. But it’s what did happen you have to go by.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Amy, regretfully. “But when things have very nearly happened differently—that’s when I can’t help thinking
if only
.”
“Well anyway, they caught him,” said Ivor, brushing aside Amy’s interruption in his haste to continue; for by now his imagination had been seized by the tale he was telling and his yawns were forgotten. “They caught him, but somehow or other, I don’t know how, he gave them the slip, and he got on board a cargo boat that was sailing to Cardiff. Of course he was a stowaway, and so he was locked up, but quite comfortably in a cabin because of being old, and ill as well. It seems that this cargo-boat came from Finland—it was a tramp-steamer—and only one other person on board could speak the same language as Luis and that was Bartolomeo, and he’d signed on for the trip at the very last moment when one of the regular crew went sick. So the captain gave Bartolomeo the task of looking after the stowaway and taking him his food and that. So of course they came to be friends, as was bound to happen. And Luis told Bartolomeo everything he knew about the assassination plot, and who he was meaning to tell it to in England, and how he’d been caught, and how he’d escaped. Well, they got to Cardiff at last—I don’t know how long the voyage took them. It was late at night by the time they’d tied up at the docks, and when the rest of the crew had gone ashore Bartolomeo let Luis off the boat very secretly, so as he could ’phone his cousin the Ambassador in London—Bartolomeo went with him. And he did ‘phone, but he didn’t want to say too much on the ‘phone—he just said that he was alive, and where he was, and how he’d got there, and that Bartolomeo had been a good friend to him. Well, the Ambassador told his cousin Luis that he’d come at once, and that Luis was to go straight back on board the steamer to wait for him there—it was the safest place for him to be, locked up in that cabin. But on their way back to the boat they were set upon by three of Vigers’ men and I’m sorry to say in the fight and the scuffle poor old Luis—well, I’m sorry to say, Amy, that was the end of him.”