Graham Greene

I

It was cheap in August : the essential sun, the coral reefs, the bamboo-bar and the calypsos – they were all of them at cut-prices, like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale. Great groups arrived periodically from Philadelphia in the manner of school-treats and departed with less bruit after an exact exhausting week when the picnic was over. Perhaps for twenty-four hours the swimming-pool and the bar were almost deserted, and then another school-treat would arrive, this time from St Louis. Everyone knew everyone else : they had bussed together to an airport, they had flown together, together they had faced an alien customs; they would separate during the day and greet each other noisily and happily after dark, exchanging impressions of  ‘shooting the rapids’, the botanic gardens, the Spanish fort. ‘We are doing that tomorrow.’

Mary Watson wrote to her husband in Europe : ‘I had to get away for a bit and it’s so cheap in August.’ They had been married ten years and they had only been separated three times. He wrote to her every day and the letters arrived twice a week in little bundles. She arranged them like newspapers by the date and read them in the correct order. They were tender and precise; what with his research, with preparing lectures and writing letters he had little time to see Europe – he insisted on calling it ‘your Europe’ as though to assure her that he had not forgotten the sacrifice which she must have made by marrying an American professor from New England, but sometimes little criticisms of ‘her Europe’ escaped him – the food was too rich, cigarettes too expensive, wine too often served, and milk very difficult to obtain at lunchtime – which might indicate that, after all, she ought not to exaggerate her sacrifice. Perhaps it would have been a good thing if James Thompson, who was his special study at the moment, had written The Seasons in America – an American autumn, she had to admit, was more beautiful than an English one.

Mary Watson wrote to him every other day, but sometimes a postcard only, and she was apt to forget if she had repeated the postcard. She wrote in the shade of the bamboo-bar where she could see everyone who passed on the way to the swimming pool. She wrote truthfully, ‘It’s so cheap in August; the hotel is not half full, and the heat and the humidity are very tiring. But, of course, it’s a change.’ She had no wish to appear extravagant; the salary, which to her European eyes had seemed astronomically large for a professor of literature, had long dwindled to its proper proportions, relative to the price of steaks and salads – she must justify with a little enthusiasm the money she was spending in his absence. So she wrote also about the flowers in the botanic gardens – she had ventured that far on one occasion – and with less truth of the beneficial changes wrought by the sun and the lazy life on her friend Margaret who from ‘her England’ had written and demanded her company : a Margaret, she admitted frankly to herself, who was not visible to any eye but the eye of faith. But then Charlie had complete faith. Even good qualities become with the erosion of time a reproach. After ten years of being happily married, she thought, one undervalues security and tranquillity.

She read Charlie’s letters with great attention. She longed to find in them one ambiguity, one evasion, one time-gap which he had ill-explained. Even an unusually strong expression of love would have pleased her, for its strength might have been there to counterweigh a sense of guilt. But she couldn’t deceive herself that there was any sense of guilt in Charlie’s facile flowing informative script. She calculated that if he had been one of the poets he was now so closely studying, he would have completed already a standard-sized epic during his first two months in ‘her Europe’, and the letters, after all, were only a spare-time occupation. They filled up the vacant hours, and certainly they could have left no room for any other occupation. ‘It is ten o’clock at night, it is raining outside and the temperature is rather cool for August, not above fifty-six degrees. When I have said goodnight to you, dear one, I shall go happily to bed with the thought of you. I have a long day tomorrow at the museum and dinner in the evening with the Henry Wilkinsons who are passing through on their way from Athens – you remember the Henry Wilkinsons, don’t you?’ (Didn’t she just?) She had wondered whether, when Charlie returned, she might perhaps detect some small unfamiliar note in his love-making which would indicate that a stranger had passed that way. Now she disbelieved in the possibility, and anyway the evidence would arrive too late – it was no good to her now that she might be justified later. She wanted her justification immediately, a justification not alas! for any act that she had committed but only for an intention, for the intention of betraying Charlie, of having, like so many of her friends, a holiday affair (the idea had come to her immediately the dean’s wife had said, ‘It’s so cheap in Jamaica in August’).

The trouble was that, after three weeks of calypsos in the humid evening, the rum punches (for which she could no longer disguise from herself a repugnance), the warm martinis, the interminable red snappers, and tomatoes with everything, there had been no affair, not even the hint of one. She had discovered with disappointment the essential morality of a holiday-resort in the cheap season; there were no opportunities for infidelity, only for writing post-cards – with great brilliant blue skies and seas – to Charlie. Once a woman from St Louis had taken too obvious pity on her, when she sat alone in the bar writing postcards, and invited her to join their party which was about to visit the botanic gardens – ‘We are an awfully jolly bunch,’ she had said with a big turnip smile. Mary exaggerated her English accent to repel her better and said that she didn’t much care for flowers. It had shocked the woman as deeply as if she had said she did not care for television. From the motion of the heads at the other end of the bar, the agitated clinking of the Coca-Cola glasses, she could tell that her words were being repeated from one to another. Afterwards until the jolly bunch had taken the airport-limousine on the way back to St Louis she was aware of averted heads. She was English, she had taken a superior attitude to flowers, and, as she preferred even warm martinis to Coca-Cola, she was probably in their eyes an alcoholic.

It was a feature common to most of these jolly bunches that they contained no male attachment, and perhaps that was why the attempt to look attractive was completely abandoned. Huge buttocks were exposed in their full horror in tight large-patterned Bermuda shorts. Heads were bound in scarves to cover to cover curling rolls which were not removed even by lunchtime – they stuck out like small mole-hills. Daily she watched the bums lurch by like hippos on the way to the water. Only in the evening would the women change from the monstrous shorts into monstrous cotton frocks, covered with mauve or scarlet flowers, in order to take dinner on the terrace where formality was demanded in the book of rules, and the few men who appeared were forced to wear jackets and ties though the thermometer stood at close on eighty degrees after sunset. The market in femininity being such, how could one hope to see any male foragers? Only old and broken husbands were sometimes to be seen towed towards an Issa store advertising free-port prices.

She had been encouraged during the first week by the sight of three young men with crew-cuts who went past the bar towards the swimming-pool wearing male bikinis. They were far too young for her, but in her present mood she would have welcomed altruistically the sight of another’s romance. Romance is said to be contagious, and if in the candle-lit evenings the ‘informal’ coffee-tavern had contained a few young amorous couples, who could say what men of maturer years might not eventually arrive to catch the infection? But her hopes dwindled. The young men came and went without a glance at the Bermuda shorts or the pinned hair. Why should they stay? They were certainly more beautiful than any girl there and they knew it.

By nine o’clock most evenings Mary Watson was on her way to bed. A few evenings of calypsos, of quaint false impromptus and the hideous jangle of rattles had been enough. Outside the closed windows of the hotel-annexe the boxes of the air-conditioners made a continuous rumble in the starry palmy night like over-fed hotel guests. Her room was full of dried air which bore no more resemblance to fresh air than the dried figs to the newly picked fruit. When she looked in the glass to brush her hair she often regretted her lack of charity to the jolly bunch from St Louis. It was true she did not wear Bermuda shorts nor coil her hair in rollers, but her hair was streaky none the less with heat and the mirror reflected more plainly than it seemed to do at home her thirty-nine years. If she had not paid an advance for a four weeks pension on her individual round-trip tour, with tickets exchangeable for a variety of excursions, she would have turned tail and returned to the campus. Next year, she thought, when I am forty, I must feel grateful that I have preserved the love of a good man.

She was a woman given to self-analysis, and perhaps because it is a great deal easier to direct questions to a particular face rather than to a void (one has the right to expect some kind of a response even from eyes one sees many times a day in a compact), she posed the questions to herself with a belligerent direct stare into the looking-glass. She was an honest woman, and for that reason the questions were all the cruder. She would say to herself : I have slept with no one other than Charlie (she wouldn’t admit as sexual experiences the small exciting half-way points that she had reached before marriage); why am I now seeking to find a strange body, which will probably give me less pleasure than the body I already know? It had been more than a month before Charlie brought her real pleasure. Pleasure, she learnt, grew with habit, so that if it were not really pleasure that she looked for, what was it? The answer could only be the unfamiliar. She had friends, even on the respectable campus, who had admitted to her, in the frank admirable American way, their adventures. These had usually been in Europe – a momentary marital absence had given the opportunity for a momentary excitement, and then with what a sigh of relief they had found themselves again safely at home. All the same they felt afterwards that they had enlarged their experience; they understood something that their husbands did not really understand – the real character of a French-man, an Italian, even – there were such cases – of an Englishman.

Mary Watson was painfully aware, as an Englishwoman, that her experience was confined to one American. They all, on the campus, believed her to be European, but all she knew was confined to one man and he was a citizen of Boston who had no curiosity for the great Western regions. In a sense she was more American by choice than he was by birth. Perhaps she was less European even than the wife of the Professor of Romance Languages who had confided to her that once – overwhelmingly – in Antibes… it had happened only once because the sabbatical year was over… her husband was up in Paris checking manuscripts before they flew home…

Had she herself, Mary Watson sometimes wondered, been just such a European adventure which Charlie mistakenly had domesticated? (She couldn’t pretend to be a tigress in a cage, but they kept smaller creatures in cages, white mice, love-birds.) And to be fair Charlie too was her adventure, her American adventure, the kind of man whom at twenty-seven she had not before encountered in frowsy London. Henry James had described the type, and at that moment in her history she had been reading a great deal of Henry James : ‘A man of intellect whose body was not much to him and its senses and appetites not importunate.’ All the same for a while she had made the appetites importunate.

That was her private conquest of the American continent, and when the Professor’s wife had spoken of the dancer of Antibes (no, that was a Roman inscription – the man had been a marchand de vin) she had thought : the lover I know and admire is American and I am proud of it. But afterwards came the thought: American or New England? Yet to know a country must one know every region sexually?

It was absurd at thirty-nine not to be content. She had her man. The book on James Thomson would be published by the University Press, and Charlie had the intention afterwards of making a revolutionary break from the romantic poetry of the eighteenth century into a study of the American image in European literature – it was to be called ‘The Double Reflection’ : the effect of Fenimore Cooper on the European scene : the image of America presented by Mrs Trollope – the details were not yet worked out. The study might possibly end with the first arrival of Dylan Thomas on the shores of America – at the Cunard quay or at Idlewild? That was a point for later research. She examined herself again closely in the glass – the new decade of the forties stared frankly back at her – an Englander who had become a New Englander. After all she hadn’t travelled very far – Kent to Connecticut. This was not just the physical restlessness of middle-age she argued – it was the universal desire to see a little bit further, before one surrendered to old age and the blank certitude of death.

II

Next day she picked up her courage and went as far as the swimming-pool. A strong wind blew and whipped the waves up in the almost land-girt harbour – the hurricane season would soon be here. All the world creaked around her : the wooden struts of the shabby harbour, the jalousies of the small hopeless houses which looked as though they had been knocked together from a make-it-yourself kit, the branches of the palms – a long, weary, worn-out creaking. Even the water of the swimming-pool imitated in miniature the waves of the harbour.

She was glad that she was alone in the swimming-pool, at least for all practical purposes alone, for the old man splashing water over himself, like an elephant, in the shallow end hardly counted. He was a solitary elephant and not one of the hippo band. They would have called her with merry cries to join them – and it’s difficult to be stand-offish in a swimming-pool which is common to all as a table is not. They might even in their resentment have ducked her – pretending like schoolchildren that it was all a merry game : there was nothing she put beyond those thick thighs, whether they were encased in bikinis or Bermuda shorts. As she floated in the pool her ears were alert for their approach. At the first sound she would get well away from the water, but today they were probably making an excursion to Tower Isle on the other side of the island, or had they done that yesterday? Only the old man watched her, pouring water over his head to keep away sun-stroke. She was safely alone, which was the next best thing to the adventure she had come here to find. All the same, as she sat on the rim of the pool, and let the sun and the wind dry her, she realized the extent of her solitude. She had spoken to no one but black waiters and Syrian receptionists for more than two weeks. Soon, she thought, I shall even begin to miss Charlie – it would be an ignoble finish to what she had intended to be an adventure.

A voice from the water said to her, ‘My name’s Hickslaughter – Henry Hickslaughter.’ She couldn’t have sworn to the name in court, but that was how it had sounded at the time and he never repeated it. She looked down at a polished mahogany crown surrounded by white hair; perhaps he resembled Neptune more than an elephant. Neptune was always outsize, and as he had pulled himself a little out of the water, she could see the rolls of the fat folding over the blue bathing slip with tough hair lying like weeds along the ditches. She replied with amusement, ‘My name is Watson. Mary Watson.’

‘You’re English?’

‘My husband’s American,’ she said in extenuation.

‘I haven’t seen him around, have I?’

‘He’s in England,’ she said with a small sigh, for the geographical and national situations seemed too complicated for casual explanation.

‘You like it here?’ he asked and lifting a hand-cup of water he distributed it over his bald head.

‘So so.’

‘Got the time on you?’

She looked in her bag and told him, ‘eleven fifteen’.

‘I’ve had my half hour,’ he said and trod heavily away towards the ladder at the shallow end.

An hour later, staring at her lukewarm martini with its great green unappetizing olive, she saw him looming down at her from the other end of the bamboo-bar. He wore an ordinary shirt open at the neck and a brown leather belt; his type of shoes in her childhood had been known as co-respondent, but one seldom saw them today. She wondered what Charlie would think of her pick-up; unquestionably she had landed him, rather as an angler struggling with a heavy catch finds that he has hooked nothing better than an old boot. She was no angler; she didn’t know whether a boot could put an ordinary hook out of action altogether, but she knew that her hook could be irremediably damaged. No one would approach her if she were in his company. She drained the martini in one gulp and even attacked the olive so as to have no excuse to linger in the bar.

‘Would you do me the honour,’ Mr Hickslaughter asked, ‘of having a drink with me?’ His manner was completely changed; on dry land he seemed unsure of himself and spoke with an old-fashioned propriety.

‘I’m afraid I’ve only just finished one. I have to be off.’ Inside the gross form she thought she saw a tousled child with disappointed eyes. ‘I’m having lunch early today.’ She got up and added rather stupidly, for the bar was quite empty, ‘You can have my table.’

‘I don’t need a drink that much,’ he said solemnly. ‘I was just after company.’

She knew that he was watching her as she moved to the adjoining coffee tavern, and she thought with guilt, at least I’ve got the old boot off the hook. She refused the shrimp cocktail with tomato ketchup and fell back as was usual with her grapefruit, with grilled trout to follow. ‘Please no tomato with the trout,’ she implored, but the black waiter obviously didn’t understand her. While she waited she began with amusement to picture a scene between Charlie and Mr Hickslaughter, who happened for the purpose of her story to be crossing the campus. ‘This is Henry Hickslaughter, Charlie. We used to go bathing together when I was in Jamaica.’ Charlie, who always wore English clothes, was very tall, very thin, very concave. It was a satisfaction to know that he would never lose his figure – his nerves would see to that and his extreme sensibility. He hated anything gross; there was no grossness in The Seasons, not even in the lines on spring.

She heard slow footsteps coming up behind her and nearly panicked. ‘May I share your table?’ Mr Hickslaughter asked. He had recovered his terrestrial politeness, but only so far as speech was concerned, for he sat firmly down without waiting for her reply. The chair was too small for him; his thighs overlapped like a double mattress on a single bed. He began to study the menu.

‘They copy American food; it’s worse than the reality,’ Mary Watson said.

‘You don’t like American food?’

‘Tomatoes even with the trout!’

‘Tomatoes? Oh, you mean tomatoes,’ he said, correcting her accent. ‘I’m fond of tomatoes myself.’

‘And fresh pineapple in the salad.’

‘There’s a lot of vitamins in fresh pineapple.’ Almost as if he wished to emphasize their disagreement he ordered shrimp cocktail, grilled trout and a sweet salad. Of course when the trout arrived, the tomatoes were there. ‘You can have mine if you want to,’ she said and he accepted with pleasure. ‘You are very kind. You are really very kind.’ He held out his plate like Oliver Twist.

She began to feel oddly at ease with the old man. She would have been less at ease, she was certain, with a possible adventure : she would have been wondering about her effect on him, while now she could be sure that she gave him pleasure – with the tomatoes. He was perhaps less the old anonymous boot than an old shoe comfortable to wear. And curiously enough, in spite of his first approach and in spite of his correcting her over the pronunciation of tomatoes, it was not really an old American shoe of which she was reminded. Charlie wore English clothes over his English figure, he studied English eighteenth-century literature, his book would be published in England by the Cambridge University Press who would buy sheets, but she had the impression that he was far more fashioned as an American shoe than Hickslaughter. Even Charlie, whose manners were perfect, if they had met for the first time today at the swimming pool, would have interrogated her more closely. Interrogation had always seemed to her a principal part of American social life – an inheritance perhaps from the Indian smoke-fires : ‘Where are you from? Do you know the so and so’s? Have you been to the botanic gardens?’ It came over her that Mr Hickslaughter, if that were really his name, was perhaps an American reject – not necessarily more flawed than the pottery rejects of famous firms you find in bargain basements.

She found herself questioning him, with circumlocutions while he savoured the tomatoes. ‘I was born in London. I couldn’t have been born more than 400 miles from there without drowning, could I? But you belong to a continent thousands of miles wide and long. Where were you born?’ (She remembered a character in a Western movie directed by John Ford who asked, ‘Where do you hail from, stranger?’ The question was more frankly put than hers.)

He said, ‘St Louis.’

‘Oh, then there are lots of your people here – you are not alone.’ She felt a slight disappointment that he might belong to the jolly bunch.

‘I’m alone,’ he said. ‘Room 63.’ It was in her own corridor on the third floor of the annexe. He spoke firmly as though he were imparting information for future use. ‘Five doors down from you.’

‘Oh.’

‘I saw you come out your first day.’

‘I never noticed you.’

‘I keep to myself unless I see someone I like.’

‘Didn’t you see anyone you liked from St Louis?’

‘I’m not all that fond of St Louis, and St Louis can do without me. I’m not a favourite son.’

‘Do you come here often?’

‘In August. It’s cheap in August. He kept on surprising her. First there was his lack of local patriotism, and now his frankness about money or rather about the lack of it, a frankness that could almost be classed as an un-American activity.

‘Yes.’

‘I have to go where it’s reasonable,’ he said, as though he were exposing his bad hand to a partner at gin.

‘You’ve retired?’

‘Well – I’ve been retired.’ He added. ‘You ought to take salad… It’s good for you.’

‘I feel quite well without it.’

‘You could do with more weight.’ He added appraisingly, ‘A couple of pounds.’ She was tempted to tell him that he could do with less. They had both seen each other exposed.

‘Were you in business?’ She was being driven to interrogate. He hadn’t asked her a personal question since his first at the pool.

‘In a way,’ he said. She had a sense that he was supremely uninterested in his own doings; she was certainly discovering an America which she had not known existed.

She said, ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me…’

‘Aren’t you taking any dessert?’

‘No, I’m a light luncher.’

‘It’s all included in the price. You ought to eat some fruit.’ He was looking at her under his white eyebrows with an air of disappointment which touched her.

‘I don’t care much for fruit and I want a nap. I always have a nap in the afternoon.’

Perhaps, after all, she thought, as she moved away through the formal dining room, he is disappointed only because I’m not taking full advantage of the cheap rate.

She passed his room going to her own : the door was open and a big white-haired mammy was making the bed. The room was exactly like her own; the same pair of double beds, the same wardrobe, the same dressing-table in the same position, the same heavy breathing of the air-conditioner. In her own room she looked in vain for the thermos of iced-water; then she rang the bell and waited for several minutes. You couldn’t expect good service in August.

She went down the passage; Mr Hickslaughter’s door was still open and she went in to find the maid. The door of the bathroom was open too and a wet cloth lay on the tiles.

How bare the bedroom was. At least she had taken the trouble to add a few flowers, a photograph and half a dozen books on a bedside table which gave her room a lived-in air. Beside his bed there was only a literary digest lying open and face down; she turned it over to see what he was reading – as she might have expected it was something to do with calories and proteins. He had begun writing a letter at his dressing-table and with the simple unscrupulousness of an intellectual she began to read it with her ears cocked for any sound in the passage.

‘Dear Joe,’ she read, ‘the draft was two weeks late last month and I was in real difficulties. I had to borrow from a Syrian who runs the tourist junk-shop in Curaçoa and pay him interest. You owe me a hundred dollars for the interest. It’s your own fault. Mum never gave us lessons on how to live with an empty stomach. Please add it to the next draft and be sure to do that, you wouldn’t want me coming back to collect. I’ll be here till the end of August. It’s cheap in August, and a man gets tired of nothing but Dutch, Dutch, Dutch. Give my love to Sis.’

The letter broke off unfinished. Anyway she would have had no opportunity to read more because someone was approaching down the passage. She went to the door in time to see Mr Hickslaughter on the threshold. He said, ‘You looking for me?’

‘I was looking for the maid. She was in here a minute ago.’

‘Come in and sit down.’

He looked through the bathroom-door and then at the room in general. Perhaps it was only an uneasy conscience which made her think that his eyes strayed a moment to the unfinished letter.

‘She’s forgotten my iced-water.’

‘You can have mine if it’s filled.’ He shook his thermos and handed it to her.

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘When you’ve had your sleep,’ he began and looked away from her. Was he looking at the letter?

‘Yes?’

‘We might have a drink.’

She was, in a sense, trapped. She said, ‘Yes.’

‘Give me a ring when you wake up.’

She found it difficult to sleep : the old fat man had become an individual now that she had read his letter. She couldn’t help comparing his style with Charlie’s. ‘When I have said goodnight to you, my dear one, I shall go happily to bed with the thought of you.’ In Mr Hickslaughter’s there was an ambiguity, a hint of menace. Was it possible that the old man could be dangerous?

At half past five she rang up room 63. It was not the kind of adventure she had planned, but it was an adventure none the less. ‘I’m awake,’ she said.

‘You coming for a drink?’ he asked.

‘I’ll meet you in the bar.’

‘Not the bar,’ he said. ‘Not at the prices they charge for bourbon. I’ve got all we need here.’ She felt as though she were being brought back to the scene of a crime, and she needed a little courage to knock on the door.

He had everything prepared : a bottle of Old Walker, a bucket of ice, two bottles of soda. Like books, drinks can make a room inhabited. She saw him as a man fighting in his own fashion against the sense of solitude.

‘Siddown,’ he said, ‘make yourself comfortable,’ like a character in a movie. He began to pour out two highballs.

She said, ‘I’ve got an awful sense of guilt. I did come in here for iced-water, but I was curious too. I read your letter.’

‘I knew someone had touched it,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Who cares? It was only to my brother.’

‘I had no business…’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘if I came into your room and found a letter open I’d read it, wouldn’t I? Only your letter would be more interesting.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t write love letters. Never did and I’m too old now.’ He sat down on a bed – she had the only easy chair. His belly hung in heavy folds under his sports-shirt, and his flies were a little open. Why was it always fat men who left them unbuttoned? He said, ‘This is good bourbon,’ taking a drain of it. ‘What does your husband do?’ he asked – it was his first personal question since the pool and it took her by surprise.

‘He writes about literature. Eighteenth-century poetry,’ she added, rather inanely under the circumstances.

‘Oh.’

‘What did you do? I mean when you worked.’

‘This and that.’

‘And now?’

‘I watch what goes on. Sometimes I talk to someone like you. Well, no, I don’t suppose I’ve ever talked to anyone like you before.’ It might have seemed a compliment if he had not added, ‘A professor’s wife.’

‘And you read the Digest?’

‘Ye-eh. They make books too long – I haven’t the patience. Eighteenth-century poetry. So they wrote poetry back in those days, did they?’

She said, ‘Yes,’ not sure whether or not he was mocking her.

‘There was a poem I liked at school. The only one that ever stuck in my head. By Longfellow, I think. You ever read Longfellow?’

‘Not really. They don’t read him much in school any longer.’

‘Something about “Spanish sailors with bearded lips and the something and mystery of the ships and the something of the sea”. It hasn’t stuck all that well, after all, but I suppose I learned that sixty years ago and even more. Those were the days.’

‘The 1900s?’

‘No, no. I meant pirates, Kidd and Bluebeard and those fellows. This was their stamping ground, wasn’t it? The Caribbean. It makes you kind of sick to see those women going around in their shorts here.’ His tongue had been tingled into activity by the bourbon.

It occurred to her that she had never really been curious about another human being; she had been in love with Charlie, but he hadn’t aroused her curiosity except sexually, and she had satisfied that only too quickly. She asked him, ‘Do you love your sister?’

‘Yes, of course, why? How do you know I’ve got a sister?’

‘And Joe?’

‘You certainly read my letter. Oh, he’s O.K.’

‘O.K.?’

‘Well you know how it is with brothers. I’m the eldest in my family. There was one that died. My sister’s twenty years younger than I am. Joe’s got the means. He looks after her.’

‘You haven’t got the means?’

‘I had the means. I wasn’t good at managing them though. We aren’t here to talk about myself.’

‘I’m curious. That’s why I read your letter?’

‘You? Curious about me?’

‘It could be, couldn’t it?’

She had confused him, and now that she had the upper hand, she felt that she was out of the trap; she was free, she could come and go as she pleased, and if she chose to stay a little longer, it was her own choice.

‘Have another bourbon?’ he said. ‘But you’re English. Maybe you’d prefer Scotch?’

‘Better not mix.’

‘No.’ He poured her another glass. He said, ‘I was wondering sometimes I want to get away from this joint for a little. What about having dinner down the road?’

‘It would be stupid,’ she said. ‘We’ve both paid our pension here, haven’t we? And it would be the same dinner in the end. Red Snapper. Tomatoes.’

‘I don’t know what you have against tomatoes,’ but he did not deny the good sense of her economic reasoning: he was the first unsuccessful American she had ever had a drink with. One must have seen them in the street… But even the young men who came to the house were not yet unsuccessful. The Professor of Romance Languages had perhaps hoped to be head of a university – success is relative, but it remains success.

He poured out another glass. She said, ‘I’m drinking all your bourbon.’

‘It’s in a good cause.’

She was a little drunk by now and things – which only seemed relevant – came to her mind. She said, ‘That thing of Longfellow’s. It went on – something about “the thoughts of youth are long long thoughts”. I must have read it somewhere. That was the refrain, wasn’t it?’

‘Maybe. I don’t remember?’

‘Did you want to be a pirate when you were a boy?’

He gave an almost happy grin. He said, ‘I succeeded. That’s what Joe called me once – “pirate”.’

‘But you haven’t any buried treasure?’

He said, ‘He knows me well enough not to send me a hundred dollars. But if he feels scared enough that I’ll come back – he might send fifty. And the interest was only twenty-five. He’s not mean, but he’s stupid.’

‘How?’

‘He ought to know I wouldn’t go back. I wouldn’t do one bloody thing to hurt Sis.’

‘Would it be any good if I asked you to have dinner with me?’ No. It wouldn’t be right. In some ways he was obviously very conservative.

‘It’s as you said – you don’t want to go throwing money about.’ When the bottle of Old Walker was half empty, he said, ‘You’d better have some food even if it is Red Snapper and tomatoes.’

‘Is your name really Hickslaughter?’

‘Something like that.’

They went downstairs, following rather carefully in each other’s footsteps like ducks. In the formal restaurant open to all the heat of the evening, the men sat and sweated in their jackets and ties. They passed, the two of them, through the bamboo-bar into the coffee-tavern, which was lit by candles that increased the heat. Two young men with crew cuts sat at the next table – they weren’t the same young men she had seen before, but they came out of the same series. One of them said, ‘I’m not denying that he has a certain style, but even if you adore Tennessee Williams…’

‘Why did he call you a pirate?’

‘It was just one of those things.’

When it came to the decision there seemed nothing to choose except Red Snapper and tomatoes, and again she offered him her tomatoes; perhaps he had grown to expect it and already she was chained by custom. He was an old man, he had made no pass which she could reasonably reject – how could a man of his age make a pass to a woman of hers? and yet all the same she had a sense that she had landed on a conveyor belt… The future was not in her hands, and she was a little scared. She would have been more frightened if it had not been for her unusual consumption of bourbon.

‘It was good bourbon,’ she commented for something to say, and immediately regretted it. It gave him an opening.

‘We’ll take another glass before bed.’

‘I think I’ve drunk enough.’

‘A good bourbon won’t hurt you. You’ll sleep well.’

‘I always sleep well.’ It was a lie – the kind of unimportant lie one tells tells a husband or a lover in order to keep some privacy. The young man who had been talking about Tennessee Williams rose from his table. He was very tall and thin and he wore a skin-tight black sweater; his small elegant buttocks were outlined in skin tight trousers. It was easy to imagine him a degree more naked. Would he have looked at her, she wondered, with any interest if she had not been sitting there in the company of a fat old man so horribly clothed? It was unlikely; his body was not designed for a woman’s caress.

‘I don’t.’

‘You don’t what?’

‘I don’t sleep well.’ The unexpected self-disclosure after all his reticences came as a shock. It was as though he had put out one of his square brick-like hands and pulled her to him. He had been aloof, he had evaded her personal questions, he had lulled her into a sense of security, but now every time she opened her mouth, she seemed doomed to commit an error, to invite him nearer. Even her harmless remark about the bourbon… She said stupidly, ‘Perhaps it’s the change of climate.’

‘What change of climate?’

‘Between here and… and…’

‘Curaçoa? I guess there’s no great difference. I don’t sleep there either?’

‘I’ve got some very good pills… ‘ she said rashly.

‘I thought you said you slept well.’

‘Oh, there are always times. It’s sometimes just a question of digestion.’

‘Yes, digestion. You’re right there. A bourbon will be good for that. If you’ve finished dinner…’

She looked across the coffee-tavern to the bamboo-bar, where the young man stood dehanché, holding a glass of creme-de-menthe between his face and his companion’s like an exotically coloured monocle.

Mr Hickslaughter said in a shocked voice, ‘You don’t care for that type, do you?’

‘They’re often good conversationalists.’

‘Oh, conversation… If that’s what you want?’ It was a though she had expressed an un-American liking for snails or frogs’ legs.

‘Shall we have our bourbon in the bar? It’s a little cooler tonight.’

‘And listen to their chatter? No, we’ll go upstairs.’

He swung back again in the direction of old-fashioned courtesy and came behind her to pull her chair – even Charlie was not so polite, but was it politeness or the determination to block her way of escape to the bar?

They entered the lift together. The black attendant had a radio turned on, and from the small brown box came the voice of a preacher talking about the Blood of the Lamb. Perhaps it was a Sunday – and that would explain the temporary void around them – between one jolly bunch and another. They stepped out into the empty corridor like undesirables marooned. The boy followed them out and sat down upon a chair beside the elevator to wait for another signal, while the voice continued to talk about the Blood of the Lamb. What was she afraid of? Mr Hickslaughter began to unlock his door. He was much older than her father would have been if he had been still alive; he could be her grandfather – the excuse, ‘What will the boy think?’ was inadmissable – it was even shocking, for his manner had never ceased to be correct. He might be old, but what right had she to think of him as ‘dirty’?

‘Damn the hotel-key…’ he said. ‘It won’t open.’

She turned the handle for him. ‘The door wasn’t locked.’

‘I can sure do with a bourbon after those nancies…’

But now she had her excuse ready on the lips. ‘I’ve had one too many already, I’m afraid. I’ve got to sleep it off.’ She put her hand on his arm.

‘Thank you so much… It was a lovely evening.’ She was aware how insulting her English accent sounded as she walked quickly down the corridor leaving it behind her like a mocking presence, mocking all the things she liked best in him : his ambiguous character, his memory of Longfellow, his having to make ends meet.

She looked back when she reached her room : he was standing in the passage as though he couldn’t make up his mind to go in. She was reminded of an old man whom she had passed one day on the campus leaning on his broom among the unswept autumn leaves.

IV

In her room she picked up a book and tried to read. It was Thompson’s Seasons. She had carried it with her, so that she could understand any reference to his work that Charlie might make in a letter. This was the first time she had opened it, and she was not held.

‘And now the mounting Sun dispels the Fog;
The rigid Hoar-Frost melts before his Beam;
And hung on every Spray, on every Blade
Of Grass, the myriad Dew-Drops twinkle round.’

If she could be so cowardly, she thought, with a harmless old man like that, how could she have faced the real decisiveness of an adventure? One was not, at her age, ‘swept off the feet’. Charlie had been proved just as sadly right to trust her as she was right to trust Charlie. Now with the difference in time he would be leaving the Museum, or rather, if this were a Sunday as the Blood of the Lamb seemed to indicate, he would probably have just quit writing in his hotel-room. After a successful day’s work he always resembled an advertisement for a new shaving cream : a kind of glow… She found it irritating, like living with a halo. Even his voice had a different timbre and he would call her ‘Old girl’ and pat her bottom patronizingly. She preferred him when he was touchy with failure: only temporary failure, of course, the failure of an idea which hadn’t worked out, the touchiness of a child’s disappointment at a party which has not come up to his expectations, not the failure of the old man – the rusted framework of a ship transfixed once and for all upon the rock where it had struck.

She felt ignoble. What earthly risk could the old man represent to justify refusing him half an hour’s companionship? He could no more assault her than the boat could detach itself from the rock and steam out to sea for the Fortunate Islands. She pictured him sitting alone with his half-empty bottle of bourbon seeking unconsciousness. Or was he perhaps finishing that crude blackmailing letter to his brother? What a story she would make of it one day, she thought with self-disgust as she took off her dress, her evening with a blackmailer and ‘pirate’.

There was one thing she could do for him : she could give him her bottle of pills. She put on her dressing-gown and retrod the corridor, room by room, until she arrived at 63. His voice told her to come in. She opened the door and in the light of the bedside lamp saw him sitting on the edge of the bed wearing a crumpled pair of cotton pyjamas with broad mauve stripes. She began, ‘I’ve brought you…’ and then she saw to her amazement that he had been crying.

His eyes were red and the evening darkness of his cheeks sparkled with points like dew. She had only once before seen a man cry – Charlie, when the University Press had decided against his first volume of literary essays.

‘I thought you were the maid,’ he said. ‘I rang for her.’

‘What did you want?’

‘I thought she might take a glass of bourbon,’ he said.

‘Did you want so much…? I’ll take a glass.’ The bottle was still on the dressing-table where they had left it and the two glasses – she identified hers by the smear of lipstick. ‘Here you are,’ she said, ‘drink it up. It will make you sleep.’

He said, ‘I’m not an alcoholic.’

‘Of course you aren’t.’

She sat on the bed beside him and took his left hand in hers. It was cracked and dry, and she wanted to clean back the cuticle until she remembered that was something she did for Charlie.

‘I wanted company,’ he said.

‘I’m here.’

‘You’d better turn off the bell-light or the maid will come.’

‘She’ll never know what she missed in the way of Old Walker.’

When she returned from the door he was lying back against the pillows in an odd twisted position, and she thought again of the ship broken-backed upon the rocks. She tried to pick up his feet to lay them on the bed, but they were like heavy stones at the bottom of a quarry.

‘Lie down,’ she said, ‘you’ll never be sleepy that way. What do you do for company in Curaçoa?’

‘I manage,’ he said.

‘You’ve finished the bourbon. Let me put out the lights.’

‘It’s no good pretending to you,’ he said.

‘Pretending?’

‘I’m afraid of the dark.’

She thought: I’ll smile later when I think of who it was I feared. She said, ‘Do the old pirates you fought come back to haunt you?’

‘I’ve done some bad things,’ he said, ‘in my time.’

‘Haven’t we all?’

‘Nothing extraditable,’ he explained as though that were an extenuation.

‘If you take one of my pills…’

‘You won’t go – not yet?’

‘No, no. I’ll stay till you’re sleepy.’

‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you for days?’

‘I’m glad you did.’

‘Would you believe it – I hadn’t got the nerve.’ If she had shut her eyes it might have been a very young man speaking. ‘I don’t know your sort.’

‘Don’t you have my sort in Curaçoa?’

‘You haven’t taken the pill yet.’

‘I’m afraid of not waking up.’

‘Have you so much to do tomorrow?’

‘I mean ever.’ He put out his hand and touched her knee, searchingly, without sensuality as if he needed support from the bone. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong. You’re a stranger, so I can tell you. I’m afraid of dying with nobody around, in the dark.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t see doctors. I don’t like doctors.’

‘But why should you think…’

‘I’m over seventy. The Bible age. It could happen any day now.’

‘You’ll live to a hundred,’ she said with an odd conviction.

‘Then I’ll have to live with fear the hell of a long time.’

‘Was that why you were crying?’

‘No. I thought you were going to stay awhile, and then suddenly you went. I guess was disappointed.’

‘Are you never alone in Curaçoa?’

‘I pay not to be alone.’

‘As you’d have paid the maid?’

‘Ye-eh. Sort of.’

It was as though she were discovering for the first time the interior of the enormous continent on which she had elected to live. America had been Charlie, it had been New England; through books and movies she had been aware of the wonders of nature like some great cineramic film with Lowell Thomas cheapening the Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon with his clichés. There had been no mystery anywhere from Miami to Niagara Falls, from Cape Cod to the Pacific Palisades; tomatoes were served on every plate and Coca-Cola in every glass. Nobody anywhere admitted failure or fear; they were like ‘sins hushed up’ – worse perhaps than sins, for sins have glamour –  they were bad taste. But here stretched on the bed, dressed in striped pyjamas which Brooks Brothers would have disowned, failure and fear talked to her without shame, and in an American accent. It was as though she were living in the remote future, after God knew what catastrophe.

She said, ‘I wasn’t for sale? There was only the Old Walker to tempt me.’

He raised his antique Neptune head a little way from the pillow and said, ‘I’m not afraid of death. Not sudden death. Believe me, I’ve looked for it here and there. It’s this certain-sure business, closing in on you, like tax inspectors…’

She said, ‘Sleep now.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Yes, you can.’

‘If you’d stay with me awhile…’

‘I’ll stay with vou. Relax.’ She lay down on the bed beside him on the outside of the sheet. In a few minutes he was deeply asleep and she turned off the light. He grunted several times and spoke only once, when he said, ‘You’ve got me wrong,’ and after that he became for a little while like a dead man in his immobility and his silence, so that during that period she fell asleep. When she woke she was aware from his breathing that he was awake too. He was lying away from her so that their bodies wouldn’t touch. She put out her hand and felt no repulsion at all at his excitement. It was as though she had spent many nights beside him in the one bed, and when he made love to her, silently and abruptly in the darkness, she gave a sigh of satisfaction. There was no guilt : she would be going back in a few days, resigned and tender, to Charlie and Charlie’s loving skill, and she wept a little, but not seriously, at the temporary nature of this meeting.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. Nothing. I wish I could stay.’

‘Stay a little longer. Stay till its light.’ That would not be very long. Already they could distinguish the grey masses of the furniture standing around them like Carribean tombs.

‘Oh yes, I’ll stay till it’s light. That wasn’t what I meant.’ His body began to slip out of her, and it was as though he were carrying away her unknown child, away in the direction of Curaçoa, and she tried to hold him back, the fat old frightened man whom she almost loved.

He said, ‘I never had this in mind.’

‘I know. Don’t say it. I understand.’

‘I guess after all we’ve got a lot in common,’ he said and she agreed in order to quieten him. He was fast asleep by the time the light came back, so she got off the bed without waking him and went to her room. She locked the door and began with resolution to pack her bag: it was time for her to leave, it was time for term to start again. She wondered afterwards, when she thought of him, what it was they could have had in common, except the fact, of course, that for both of them Jamaica was cheap in August.
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Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.