2

‘Well,’ Druce said, ‘I’m afraid well have to get to work now.’

‘One more glass,’ the captain of the Esperança said. ‘Not if we are going to release you before the boom closes.

       See you later, Scobie.’ When the door of the cabin closed the captain said breathlessly, ‘I am still here.’

       ‘So I see. I told you there are often mistakes - minutes go to the wrong place, files are lost.’

       ‘I believe none of that,’ the captain said. ‘I believe you helped me.’ He dripped gently with sweat in the stuffy cabin. He added, ‘I pray for you at Mass, and I have brought you this. It was all that I could find for you in Lobito. She is a very obscure saint,’ and he slid across the table between them a holy medal the size of a nickel piece. ‘Santa - I don’t remember her name. She had something to do with Angola I think,’ the captain explained.

       ‘Thank you,’ Scobie said. The package in his pocket seemed to him to weigh as heavily as a gun against his thigh. He let the last drops of port settle in the well of his glass and then drained them. He said, ‘This time I have something for you.’ A terrible reluctance cramped his fingers.

       ‘For me?’

       ‘Yes.’

       How light the little package actually was now that it was on the table between them. What had weighed like a gun in the pocket might now have contained little more than fifty cigarettes. He said, ‘Someone who comes on board with the pilot at Lisbon will ask you if you have any American cigarettes. You will give him this package.’

       ‘Is this Government business?’

       ‘No. The Government would never pay as well as this.’ He laid a packet of notes upon the table.

       ‘This surprises me,’ the captain said with an odd note of disappointment. ‘You have put yourself in my hands.’

       ‘You were in mine,’ Scobie said.

       ‘I don’t forget. Nor will my daughter. She is married outside the Church, but she has faith. She prays for you too.’

       ‘The prayers we pray then don’t count, surely?’

       ‘No, but when the moment of Grace returns they rise,’ the captain raised his fat arms in an absurd and touching gesture, ‘all at once together like a flock of birds.’

       ‘I shall be glad of them,’ Scobie said.

       ‘You can trust me, of course.’

       ‘Of course. Now I must search your cabin.’

       ‘You do not trust me very far.’

       ‘That package,’ Scobie said, ‘has nothing to do with the war.’

       ‘Are you sure?’

       ‘I am nearly sure.’

       He began his search. Once, pausing by a mirror, he saw poised over his own shoulder a stranger’s face, a fat, sweating, unreliable face. Momentarily he wondered: who can that be? before he realized that it was only this new unfamiliar look of pity which made it strange to him. He thought: am I really one of those whom people pity?