The Three Sentinels (5 page)

‘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.

Mrs. Gateson was delightfully hospitable and hard as nails—more like a practised army wife, he thought, than an oil wife. She talked London. She knew the Gunners and was cautiously amusing
at their expense. Then she brought up the nervous Mrs. Birenfield who had been such a dear, close friend. Mat was aware of being summed up as a possible collaborator.

‘What did you think of your chauffeur?’ she asked.

It was a curious question. He couldn’t have any worthwhile impression as yet. He had only shaken Lorenzo’s hand and passed a few cordial remarks. His driver was a pure Indian of the
round-headed, rather Mongolian type, as imposingly correct as a hired butler and a lot more silent. At a guess, he was not intelligent; on the other hand, judging by his appearance and that of the
managerial car, he was very conscientious.

‘Makes me feel like a millionaire,’ Mat said.

She let that go, revealing nothing of her own opinion if she had one, and turned him over to Pilar Alvarez—charming, efficient and perhaps a Ministry spy. But never mind that! He was glad
she was a woman of the country, not a machine import.

With the coffee the rush started. Faces, faces. Shaking hands and trying to say the right thing—a different right thing—to everybody. After an hour of it he was let off, to be driven
home by Lorenzo. The man could be talked at for a year and still leave little impression. Yet Mrs. Gateson must have had some reason for mentioning him. She was a much cleverer person than her
husband.

The police post at his gate at least showed its presence and saluted. There was no sign of the machine gun. It was probably sited behind a low wall from which an appetising smell of fish stew
was wafted into the car. A typically bloody fool place commanding only the approach to the house. Anyone who chose to crawl down from the hillside and into the cover of a higher terrace
could—if merciful—plug one neat shot into the stew pot and the fight would be over.

Pepe hovered hospitably. His wife Amelia—and Don Mateo’s cook very much at his service—would like to know what he preferred for breakfast. Coffee, he replied, and fresh rolls
and—could there be a papaya in the larder? Pepe did not know but pronounced that there would certainly be iced papaya on the table at 8 a.m. Through the weary years of London papaya had
become a symbol of sun and birds and the fresh heat of morning. It gave him immense pleasure that there would be papaya. The General Manager admitted that Mat had never quite grown up.

He did not go to bed, knowing that sleep would be impossible until his brain began to drift away from the problems of this community which depended on him. With all lights out, he rested in a
deck chair on the verandah, enfolded by the soft darkness in which so many of his nights had been passed, the benevolent successor of the heat. Dream and daydream became hardly distinguishable.
Closed eyes or open eyes, one was back—didn’t they say?—in the womb. And a damned nice place it would be, too, very like a moonless tropic night with stars—the stars that
were to be—covered by sea mist or monsoon cloud.

The silence was absolute. The first ridge cut off the sound of the surf and such night noises as there might be in the town—a traditional little town, not at all badly done by architects
who stuck to the old ways. Dave Gunner’s home from home. Wonder what he would make of it, especially if a cockroach dropped down his collar from the roof of the colonnade. Probably he’d
have the whole place replanned in little boxes to save such humiliation for Labour.

Yes, there was that noise again. A faint, neat plop. There must have been an earlier, half-noticed plop which put the image of Sir Dave into his head. Rats? Lizards? But they scuttered; they
didn’t plop. Scorpions? Well, you might get one falling off the terrace, but not a procession. Seagull roosting? Could be, but it must be pretty constipated. Plop!

He got up very quietly and looked over the rail of the verandah at the dark masses of the unfamiliar garden. Again he heard the sound and saw dimly a little spurt of silver. So one of the small,
open places was a pool. Fish jumping for mosquitoes? But wrong noise. Fish splashed.

He crossed the stretch of lawn below the house with a caution which seemed absurd when he was merely satisfying curiosity. Whatever the alarmists thought, he was sure there would be no attempt
to intimidate him while the field was still doubtful of his character and intentions. Still, it was always wiser to see without being seen.

At the edge of the pool a small boy lay on his belly with a hand in the water, utterly absorbed. He quickly withdrew his hand, examined the fish he had caught and tossed it back. Mat crept on
till there was only a large fern between him and the boy’s heels. He tried to remember the Spanish for ‘tickling trout’ and came to the conclusion that he had never known. Not
that these were trout. They were some globular and decorative little fish. Fascinated, he continued to watch, then stepped accidentally on a loose stone and showed himself at once.

‘Don’t be afraid!’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter so long as you put them back.’

The child jumped to his feet, standing still as a boy of bronze at the edge of the pool. Defiant, too, as any little animal which hadn’t a chance of escape and knew it. His hand clutched
the pocket of his dirty trousers.

‘It wouldn’t stay alive in your pocket,’ Mat said.

But perhaps he was hungry. No, that wouldn’t do. The fish looked inedible; and any way he had been catching them and throwing them back.

‘Do you come here often?’

‘No.’

‘Just to play with the fish?’

‘I was waiting,’ the boy replied indignantly, as if play were quite out of the question.

‘For whom?’

‘No one.’

Odd! He looked as guilty as if he had just walked off with all the silver. Waiting for an accomplice, perhaps. Small boys were often used for unlawful entry.

‘Listen, little friend! Let me see what you have there!’

The boy, too proud to be searched, pulled out a stick of toffee wrapped in grease-proof paper. Mat took it from him. Toffee be damned! It was a half pound stick of gelignite.

He ran his hands over the two cotton garments and discovered nothing else but a box of matches. Inexplicable! Who the devil would send a child out with half a pound of explosives and
matches—in the same pocket, too? Answer: nobody. It was the little monkey’s own plan, own mischief.

‘Why are you carrying this about with you?’

‘Because I am a man.’

‘That can be seen,’ Mat replied courteously. ‘But what were you waiting for?’

‘I saw the fish on my way.’

Very natural to be distracted by fish in a pool at seven or eight or whatever he was.

‘On your way to where?’

‘To you.’

Desperation. Enmity. What stuff to find in this innocent, sharp voice! Nothing made sense. But, yes, it did! Thought a bomb was like a firework. He was going to light his stick and throw it.

‘You would just have burned yourself horribly. It wouldn’t have gone off.’

‘Why not?’

‘I will show you. Then you can blow me up better next time.’

‘You are not calling for the police?’

‘There is no need for the police between
valientes.
^’

‘That is what my father says.’

‘Who is your father?’

‘Rafael Garay.’

The blackish leader of the boycott with whom he had shaken hands that very evening. The name had stuck in memory, for he had read it in reports at the London office and heard it again at the
Ministry. The man and his dead wife both seemed to be remarkable characters.

‘What’s he going to say about this?’

Silence.

‘You thought he would be pleased?’

‘That has nothing to do with you.’

‘No. No, it hasn’t, son. You are right.’

It passed through his mind that Rafael Garay could have sent the boy. But that was unthinkable. The little idiot had stolen his stick of gelignite somewhere and set off on his heroic adventure
with ridiculous ideas of his own on how it should be used.

‘You must wash your hands at once,’ he said. ‘Then you can stick your finger up your nose.’

‘I did not!’

‘It’s of no importance. There are grown men who do it.’

‘My mother said there are not.’

No arguing with that! Mother’s word was considered as coming down from Sinai.

‘At Cabo Desierto there are not. But in Europe there are very respectable men who rabbit around in their noses.’

‘It is a dirty habit,’ the boy quoted solemnly.

‘You are right. It is a dirty habit.’

‘I do it when I think.’

‘Come and wash your hands quickly and your nose too! If you don’t, that stuff could give you an awful headache.’

He put a light hand on the boy’s arm so that he could not run away and led him to the bathroom, motioning to him to be quiet. Taps and shower and steaming water made the small amateur
assassin very tense—like a man entering some sinister, ultra-modern surgery, Mat supposed. But he obediently washed hands and nostrils.

‘And now are you ready for the lesson?’ Mat asked, leading him back to the garden.

‘It is enough.’

‘Don’t you want to learn how to make a bang safely?’

‘No, I don’t want to. I know what lesson you are going to teach me.’

It seemed unnatural for a boy to refuse and to be so frightened. One must use a bit of imagination and put oneself in his place. Man from the moon. Out of another world. Why didn’t you
beat him up or send for the police? Got it! Because you’re going to teach him a lesson yourself. Throw a bomb at me, would you? Right! So we’ll see how you like it when that stick is
under your backside.

‘You think I’m going to blow you to blazes, son? Have some sense and remember I too was a child!’

‘True?’ he asked with as much amazement as if the General Manager claimed to have been born from a boiled egg.

‘True as I stand here. And also I did not have a mother very long.’

‘Did you have a father like mine?’

‘It could be. Yes.’

He was surprised by his own sincere answer. What the hell was there in common between a militant black carpenter at Cabo Desierto and an earnest, kindly Fabian in Hampstead who wouldn’t
hurt a fly? Perhaps Rafael Garay also walked over hills with his son and talked to him as if he were an equal.

‘Why did the Company kill my mother?’

‘I have heard that your mother gave her life for other women.’

‘My father says it was the Company.’

‘That is a manner of speaking. If you had killed me, it could be said that the Company did.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘The Company made your father angry. Your father made you angry. So you took vengeance on me. So it is the fault of the Company which sent me here.’

‘Then everything is the fault of the whole world.’

‘Very true.’

‘But my mother is dead!’

This was utterly unexpected. He had an overstrained, weeping child on his hands instead of a desperado. Only one thing to do. Who was it said that the young of every mammal, due to a common
softness of face, signalled for help to every other mammal? Probably got it wrong somewhere. Certainly not true for hyaenas and lambs. Well, an arm round his shoulders seemed to work here. Poor,
little blighter! Rafael Garay was a lucky devil. And the boy had such command over his own terrified spirit, both while crawling through the darkness and when caught by this foreigner with an
infinite power for evil.

‘What time do you go to bed?’

‘When I like.’

‘So your father will say nothing?’

‘He will ask where I have been.’

‘Well, you must never tell him a lie. Say that you came up here to have a look at me and stopped to play with the fish, which is true. Go away as you came and not past the police at the
gate! Until we see each other again, and with God!’

The child slipped instantly into the night. Nobody could vanish quicker than a small boy who had been unexpectedly let off, and quite right too. Get the hell out before the boss changes his
mind! Mat strolled back to the pool and buried the stick of jelly under a damp stone. Then he had a go at the fish himself. Couldn’t catch one! Cunning little hands were much nearer to nature
than General Manager’s.