PART THREE

 

CHAPTER I

(I)

 

 

It was nearly a fortnight after Pyle’s death before I saw Vigot again. I was going up the Boulevard Charner when his voice called to me from Le Club. It was the restaurant most favoured in those days by members of the Surete, who, as a kind of defiant gesture to those who hated them, would lunch and drink on the ground-floor while the general public fed upstairs out of the reach of a partisan with a hand-grenade. I joined him and he ordered me a vermouth cassis. “Play for it?”

“If you like” and I took out my dice for the ritual game of Quatre Vingt-et-un. How those figures and the sight of dice bring back to mind the war-years in Indo-China. Anywhere in the world when I see two men dicing I am back in the streets of Hanoi or Saigon or among the blasted buildings of Phat Diem, I see the parachutists, protected like caterpillars by their strange markings, patrolling by the canals, I hear the sound of the mortars closing in, and perhaps I see a dead child.

“Sans Vaseline,” Vigot said, throwing a four-two-one. He pushed the last match towards me. The sexual jargon of the game was common to all the Surete; perhaps it had been invented by Vigot and taken up by his junior officers, who hadn’t however taken up Pascal. “Sous-Lieutenant.” Every game you lost raised you a rank-you played till one or other became a captain or a commandant. He won the second game as well and while he counted out the matches, he said, “We’ve found Pyle’s dog.” “Yes?”

“I suppose it had refused to leave the body. Anyway they cut its throat. It was in the mud fifty yards away. Perhaps it dragged itself that far.” “Are you still interested?”

“The American Minister keeps bothering us. We don’t have the same trouble, thank God, when a Frenchman is killed. But then those cases don’t have rarity value.”

We played for the division of matches and then the real game started. It was uncanny how quickly Vigot threw a four-two-one. He reduced his matches to three and I threw the lowest score possible. “Nanette,” Vigot said, pushing me over two matches. When he had got rid of his last match he said, “Capitaine,” and I called the waiter for drinks. “Does anybody ever beat you?” I asked. “Not often. Do you want your revenge?” “Another time. What a gambler you could be, Vigot. Do you play any other game of chance?”

He smiled miserably, and for some reason I thought of that blond wife of his who was said to betray him with his junior officers.

“Oh well,” he said, “there’s always the biggest of all.” “The biggest?”

“Let us weigh the gain and loss,’ he quoted, ‘in wagering that God is, let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.’ “I quoted Pascal back at him-it was the only passage

I remembered. “ ‘Both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault. They are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.’ “

“Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked.’ You don’t follow your own principles) Fowlair. You’re engage, like the rest of us.” “Not in religion.”

“I wasn’t talking about religion. As a matter of fact,” he said, “I was thinking about Pyle’s dog.” “Oh”

“Do you remember what you said to me-about finding clues on its paws, analysing the dirt and so on?” “And you said you weren’t Maigret or Lecoq.” “I’ve not done so badly after all,” he said. “Pyle usually took the dog with him when he went out) didn’t he?” “I suppose so.”

“It was too valuable to let it stray by itself?” “It wouldn’t be very safe. They eat chows, don’t they, in this country?” He began to put dice in his pocket. “My dice, Vigot.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I was thinking. . .” “Why did you say I was engaged?” “When did you last see Pyle’s dog. Fowlair?” “God knows. I don’t keep an engagement-book for dogs.”

“When are you due to go home?”

“I don’t know exactly.” I never like giving information to the police. It saves them trouble.

“I’d like-tonight-to drop in and see you. At ten? If you will be alone.” “I’ll send Phuong to the cinema.” “Things all right with you again-with her?” “Yes.”

“Strange. I got the impression that you are-well- unhappy.”

“Surely there are plenty of possible reasons for that, Vigot.” I added bluntly, “You should know.” “Me?”

“You’re not a very happy man yourself.” “Oh, I’ve nothing to complain about. ‘A ruined house is not miserable.’” “What’s that?”

“Pascal again. It’s an argument for being proud of misery. ‘A tree is not miserable.” “What made you into a policemen, Vigot?” “There were a number of factors. The need to earn a living, a curiosity about people, and-yes, even that. A love of Gaboriau.”

“Perhaps you ought to have been a priest.” “I didn’t read the right authors for that-in those days.” “You still suspect me, don’t you, of being concerned?” He rose and drank what was left of his vermouth cassis. “I’d like to talk to you, that’s all.”

I thought after he had turned and gone that he had looked at me with compassion, as he might have looked at some prisoner for whose capture he was responsible undergoing his sentence for life.

 

 

(2)

 

 

I had been punished. It was as though Pyle, when he left my flat, had sentenced me, to so many weeks of uncertainty. Every time that I returned home it was with the expectation of disaster. Sometimes Phuong would not be there, and I found it impossible to settle to any work till she returned, for I always wondered whether she would ever return. I would ask her where she had been (trying to keep anxiety or suspicion out of my voice) and sometimes she would reply the market or the shops and produce her piece of evidence (even her readiness to confirm her story seemed at that period unnatural), and sometimes it was the cinema, and the stub of her ticket was there to prove it, and sometimes it was her sister’s-that was where I believed she met Pyle. I made love to her in those days savagely as though I hated her, but what I hated was the future. Loneliness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my arms at night. She didn’t change; she cooked for me, she made my pipes, she gently and sweetly laid out her body for my pleasure (but it was no longer a pleasure), and just as in those early days I wanted her mind, now I wanted to read her thoughts, but they were hidden away in a language I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to question her. I didn’t want to make her lie (as long as no lie was spoken openly I could pretend that we were the same to each other as we had always been), but suddenly my anxiety would speak for me; and I said, “When did you last see Pyle?”

She hesitated-or was it that she was really thinking back? “When he came here,” she said.

I began-almost unconsciously-to run down everything that was American. My conversation was full of the poverty of American literature, the scandals of American politics, the beastliness of American children. It was as though she were being taken away from me by a nation rather than by a man. Nothing that America could do was right. I became a bore on the subject of America, even with my French friends who were ready enough to share my antipathies. It was as if I had been betrayed, but one is not betrayed by an enemy.

It was just at that time that the incident occurred of the bicycle-bombs. Coming back from the Imperial Bar to an empty flat (was she at the cinema or with her sister?)

I found that a note had been pushed under the door. it was from Dominguez. He apologised for being still sick and asked me to be outside the big store at the corner of the Boulevard Charner around ten-thirty the next morning. He was writing at the request of Mr. Chou, but I suspected that Mr. Heng was the more likely to require my presence.

The whole affair, as it turned out, was not worth more than a paragraph, and a humorous paragraph at that. It bore no relation to the sad and heavy war in the north, those canals in Phat Diem choked with the grey days-old bodies, the pounding of the mortars, the white glare of napalm. I had been waiting for about a quarter of an hour by a stall of flowers when a truck-load of police drove up with a grinding of brakes and a squeal of rubber from the direction of the Surete Headquarters in the rue Catinat: the men disembarked and ran for the store, as though they were charging a mob, but there was no mob-only a zareba of bicycles. Every large building in Saigon is fenced in by them-no university city in the West contains so many bicycle-owners. Before I had time to adjust my camera the comic and inexplicable action had been accomplished. The police had forced their way among the bicycles and emerged with three which they carried over their heads into the boulevard and dropped into the decorative fountain. Before I could intercept a single policeman they were back in their truck and driving hard down the Boulevard Bonnard.

“Operation Bicyclette,” a voice said. It was Mr. Heng. “What is it?” I asked, “A practice? For what?” “Wait a while longer,” Mr. Heng said. A few idlers began to approach the fountain, where one wheel stuck up like a buoy as though to warn shipping away from the wrecks below: a policeman crossed the road shouting and waving his hands.

“Let’s have a look.” I said.

“Better not,” Mr. Heng said, and examined his watch. The hands stood at four minutes past eleven. “You’re fast” I said.

“It always gains.” And at that moment the fountain exploded over the pavement. A bit of decorative coping struck a window and the glass fell like the water in a bright shower. Nobody was hurt. We shook the water and glass from our clothes. A bicycle wheel hummed like a top in the road, staggered and collapsed. “It must be just eleven,” Mr. Heng said.

“What on earth . . .?”

“I thought you would be interested,” Mr. Heng said. “I hope you were interested.” “Come and have a drink?”

“No I am sorry. I must go back to Mr. Chou’s, but first let me show you something.” He led me to the bicycle park and unlocked his own machine. “Look carefully.” “A Raleigh,” I said.

“No look at the pump. Does it remind you of anything?” He smiled patronisingly at my mystification and pushed off. Once he turned and waved his hand, pedalling towards Cholon and the warehouse of junk. At the Surete I went for information, I realised what he meant. The mould I had seen in his warehouse had been shaped like a half-section of a bicycle-pump. That day all over Saigon innocent bicycle-pumps had proved to be plastic bombs and gone off at the stroke of eleven, except where the police, acting on information which I suspect emanated from Mr. Heng, had been able to anticipate the explosions. It was all quite trivial-ten explosions, six people slightly injured, and God knows how many bicycles. My colleagues-except for the correspondent of the Extreme-Orient, who called it an “outrage” -knew they could only get space by making fun of the affair. “Bicycle Bombs” made a good headline. All of them blamed the Communists. I was the only one to write that the bombs were a demonstration on the part of General The, and my account was altered in the office. The General wasn’t news. You couldn’t waste space by identifying him. I sent a message of regret through Dominguez to Mr. Heng-I had done my best. Mr. Heng sent a polite verbal reply. It seemed to me then that he-or his Vietminh committee-had been unduly sensitive; no one held the affair seriously against the Communists. Indeed, if anything were capable of doing so, it would have given them the reputation for a sense of humour. “What’ll they think of next?” people said at parties, and the whole absurd affair was symbolised for me too in the bicycle-wheel gaily spinning like a top in the middle of the boulevard. I never even mentioned to Pyle what I had heard of his connection with the General. Let him play harmlessly with plastic: it might keep his mind off Phuong. All the same, because I happened to be in the neighbourhood one evening, because I had nothing better to do, I called in at Mr. Muoi’s garage.

It was a small, untidy place, not unlike a junk warehouse itself, in the Boulevard de la Somme. A car was packed up in the middle of the floor with its bonnet open, gaping like the cast of some prehistoric animal in a provincial museum which nobody ever visits. I don’t believe anyone remembered it was there. The floor was littered with scraps of iron and old boxes-the Vietnamese don’t like throwing anything away, any more than a Chinese cook partitioning a duck into seven courses will dispense with so much as a claw. I wondered why anybody had so wastefully disposed of the empty drums and the damaged mould-perhaps it was a theft by an employee making a few piastres, perhaps somebody had been bribed by the ingenious Mr. Heng.

Nobody seemed about, so I went in. Perhaps, I thought, they are keeping away for a while in case the police call. It was possible that Mr. Heng had some contact in the Surete, but even then it was unlikely that the police would act. It was better from their point of view to let people assume that the bombs were Communist.

Apart from the car and the junk strewn over the concrete floor there was nothing to be seen. It was difficult to picture how the bombs could have been manufactured at Mr. Muoi’s. I was very vague about how one turned the white dust I had seen in the drum into plastic, but surely the process was too complex to be carried out here, where even the two petrol pumps in the street seemed to be suffering from neglect. I stood in the entrance and looked out into the street. Under the trees in the centre of the boulevard the barbers were at work: a scrap of mirror nailed to a tree-trunk caught the flash of the sun. A girl went by at a trot under her mollusc hat carrying two baskets slung on a pole. The fortune-teller squatting against the wall of Simon Freres had found a customer: an old man with a wisp of beard like Ho Chi Minh’s who watched impassively the shuffling and turning of the ancient cards. What possible future had he got that was worth a piastre? In the Boulevard de la Somme you lived in the open: everybody here knew all about Mr. Muoi, but the police had no key which would unlock their confidence. This was the level of life where everything was known, but you couldn’t step down to that level as you could step into the street. I remembered the old women gossiping on our landing beside the communal lavatory: they heard everything too, but I didn’t know what they knew. I went back into the garage and entered a small office at the back: there was the usual Chinese commercial calendar a littered desk-price-lists and a bottle of gum and an adding-machine, some paper-clips, a teapot and three cups and a lot of unsharpened pencils, and for some reason an unwritten picture-postcard of the Eiffel Tower. York Harding might write in graphic abstractions about the Third Force, but this was what it came down to-this was It. There was a door in the back wall: it was locked, but the key was on the desk among the pencils. I opened the door and went through.

I was in a small shed about the size of the garage. It contained one piece of machinery that at first sight seemed like a cage of rods and wires furnished with innumerable perches to hold some wingless adult bird-it gave the impression of being tied up with old rags, but the rags had probably been used for cleaning when Mr. Muoi and his assistants had been called away. I found the name of a manufacturer-somebody in Lyons and a patent number- patenting what? I switched on the current and the old machine came alive: the rods had a purpose-the contraption was like an old man gathering his last vital force, pounding down his fist, pounding down... This thing was still a press, though in its own sphere it must have belonged to the same era as the nickelodeon, but I suppose that in this country where nothing was ever wasted, and where everything might be expected to come one day to finish its career (I remember seeing that ancient movie The Great Robbery jerking its way across a screen, giving entertainment, in a back-street in Nam Dinh), the press was still employable.

I examined the press more closely: there were traces of a white powder. Diolacton, I thought, something in common with milk. There was no sign of a drum or a mould. I went back into the office and into the garage. I felt like giving the old car a pat on the mudguard: it had a long wait ahead of it. perhaps; but it too one day... Mr. Muoi and his assistants were probably by this time somewhere among the rice fields on the way to the sacred mountain where General The had his headquarters. When now at last I raised my voice and called “Monsieur Muoi!” I could imagine I was far away from the garage and the boulevard and the barbers, back among those fields where I had taken refuge on the road to Tanyin. “Monsieur Muoi!” I could see a man turn his head among the stalks of rice.

I walked home and up on my landing the old women burst into their twitter of the hedges which I could understand no more than the gossip of the birds. Phuong was not in-only a note to say that she was with her sister. I lay down on the bed-I still tired easily-and fell asleep. When I woke I saw the illuminated dial of my alarm pointing to one twenty-five and I turned my head expecting to find Phuong asleep beside me. But the pillow was undented. She must have changed the sheet that day-it carried the coldness of the laundry. I got up and opened the drawer where she kept her scarves, and they were not there. I went to the bookshelf-the pictorial Life of the Royal Family had gone too. She had taken her dowry with her.

In the moment of shock there is little pain: pain began about three a.m. when I began to plan the life I had still somehow to live and to remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them. Happy memories are the worst, and I tried to remember the unhappy. I was practised. I had lived all this before. I knew I could do what was necessary, but I was so much older-I felt I had little energy left to reconstruct.

 

 

(3)    

 

I went to the American Legation and asked for Pyle. It was necessary to fill in a form at the door and give it to a military policeman. He said, “You haven’t put the purpose of the visit.” “He’ll know” I said. “You’re by appointment, then?” “You can put it that way if you like.” “Seems silly to you, I guess, but we have to be very careful. Some strange types come around here.”

 

“So I’ve heard.” He shifted his chewing-gum to another side and entered the lift. I waited. I had no idea what to say to Pyle. This was a scene I had never played before. The policeman returned. He said grudgingly. “I guess you can go up. Room ISA. First floor.”

When I entered the room I saw that Pyle wasn’t there. Joe sat behind the desk: the Economic Attache: I still couldn’t remember his surname, Phuong’s sister watched me from behind a typing desk. Was it triumph that I read in those brown acquisitive eyes?

“Come in, come in, Tom,” Joe called boisterously. “Glad to see you. How’s your leg? We don’t often get a visit from you to our little outfit. Pull up a chair. Tell me how you think the new offensive’s going. Saw Granger last night at the Continental. He’s for the north again. That boy’s keen. Where there’s news there’s Granger. Have a cigarette. Help yourself. You know Miss Hei? Can’t remember all these names-too hard for an old fellow like me. I call her ‘Hi, there”-she likes it. None of this stuffy colonialism. What’s the gossip of the market, Tom? You fellows certainly do keep your ears to the ground. Sorry to hear about your leg. Alden told me. . .” “Where’s Pyle?”

“Oh, Alden’s not in the office this morning. Guess he’s at home. Does a lot of his work at home.” “I know what he does at home.” “That boy’s keen. Eh, what’s that you said?” “Anyway, I know one of the things he does at home.” “I don’t catch on, Tom. Slow Joe-that’s me. Always was. Always will be.”

“He sleeps with my girl-your typist’s sister.” “I don’t know what you mean.” “Ask her. She fixed it. Pyle’s taken my girl.” “Look here, Fowlair, I thought you’d come here on business. We can’t have scenes in the office, you know.” “I came here to see Pyle, but I suppose he’s hiding.” “Now, you’re the very last man who ought to make a remark like that. After what Alden did for you.”

“Oh yes, yes, of course. He saved my life, didn’t he? But I never asked him to.”

“At great danger to himself. That boy’s got guts.” “I don’t care a damn about his guts. There are other parts of his body that are more a-propos.”

“Now we can’t have any innuendoes like that, Fowlair, with a lady in the room.”

“The lady and I know each other well. She failed to get her rake-off from me, but she’s getting it from Pyle. All right. I know I’m behaving badly, and I’m going to go on behaving badly. This is a situation where people do behave badly.”

“We’ve got a lot of work to do. There’s a report on the rubber output-“

“Don’t worry. I’m going. But just tell Pyle if he phones that I called. He might think it polite to return the visit.”

 

I said to Phuong’s sister, “I hope you’ve had the settlement witnessed by the notary public and the American Consul and the Church of Christ Scientist.”

I went into the passage. There was a door opposite me marked Men. I went in and locked the door and sitting with my bead against the cold wall I cried. I hadn’t cried until now. Even their lavatories were air-conditioned, and presently the temperate tempered air dried my tears as it dries the spit in your mouth and the seed in your body.

 

 

(4)

 

 

I left affairs in the hands of Dominguez and went north. At Haiphong I had friends in the Squadron Gascogne, and I would spend hours in the bar up at airport, or playing bowls on the gravel-path outside. Officially I was at the front: I could qualify for keenness with Granger, but it was of on more value to my paper than had been my excursion to Phat Diem. But if one writes about war, self-respect demands that occasionally one share the risks,

It wasn’t easy to share them for even the most limited period, since orders had gone out from Hanoi that I was to be allowed only on horizontal raids-raids in this war as safe as a journey by bus, for we flew above the range of the heavy machine-gun: we were safe from anything but a pilot’s error or a fault in the engine. We went out by time-table and came home by time-table: the cargoes of bombs sailed diagonally down and the spiral of smoke blew up from the road-junction or the bridge, and then we cruised back for the hour of the aperitif and drove our iron bowls across the gravel.

One morning in the mess in the town, as I drank brandies and sodas with a young officer who had a passionate desire to visit Southend Pier, orders for a mission came in. “Like to come?” I said yes. Even a horizontal raid would be a way of killing time and killing thought. Driving out to the airport he remarked, “This is a vertical raid.” “I thought I was forbidden. . .”

“So long as you write nothing about it. It will show you a piece of country up near the Chinese border you will not have seen before. Near Lai Chau.” “I thought all was quiet there-and in French hands?” “It was. They captured this place two days ago. Our parachutists are only a few hours away. We want to keep the Viets head down in their holes until we have recaptured the post. It means low diving and machine-gunning. We can only spare two planes-one’s on the job now. Ever dive-bombed before?” “No.”

“It is a little uncomfortable when you are not used to it.”

The Gascogne Squadron possessed only small B26 bombers-the French called them prostitutes because with their short wing-span they had no visible means of support. I was crammed on to a little metal pad the size of a bicycle seat with my knees against the navigator’s back. We came up the Red River, slowly climbing, and the Red River at this hour was really red. It was as though one had gone far back in time and saw it with the old geographer’s eyes who had named it first, at just such an hour when the late sun filled it from bank to bank; then we turned away at 9,000 feet towards the Riack River, really black, full of shadows, missing the angle of the light, and the huge majestic scenery of gorge and cliff and jungle wheeled around and stood upright below us. You could have dropped a squadron into those fields of green and grey and left no more trace than a few coins in a harvest-field. Far

 ahead of us a small plane moved like a midge. We were taking over.

We circled twice above the tower and the green encircled village, then corkscrewed up into the dazzling air. The pilot-who was called Trouin-turned to me and winked: on his wheel were the studs that controlled the gun and the bomb-chamber; I had that loosening of the bowels as we came into position for the dive that accompanies any new experience-the first dance, the first dinner-party, the first love. I was reminded of the Great Racer at the Wembley Exhibition when it came to the top of the rise-there was no way to get out: you were trapped with your experience. On the dial I had just time to read 3,000 metres when we drove down. All was feeling now, nothing was sight. I was forced up against the navigator’s back: it was as though something of enormous weight were pressing on my chest. I wasn’t aware of the moment when the bombs were released; then the gun chattered and the cockpit was full of the smell of cordite, and the weight was off my chest as we rose, and it was the stomach that fell away, spiralling down like a suicide to the ground we had left. For forty seconds Pyle had not existed: even loneliness hadn’t existed. As we climbed in a great arc I could see the smoke through the side window pointing at me. Before the second dive I felt fear-fear of humiliation, fear of vomiting over the navigator’s back, fear that my aging lungs would not stand the pressure. After the tenth dive I was aware only of irritation-the affair had gone on too long, it was time to go home. And again we shot steeply up out of machine-gun range and swerved away and the smoke pointed. The village was surrounded on all sides by mountains. Every time we had to make the same approach, through the same gap. There was no way to vary our attack. As we dived for the fourteenth time I thought, now that I was free from the fear of humiliation, “They have only to fix one machine-gun into position.” We lifted our nose again into the safe air-perhaps they didn’t even have a gun. The forty minutes of the patrol had seemed interminable, but it had been free from the discomfort of personal thought. The sun was sinking as we turned for home: the geographer’s moment had passed: the Black River was no longer black. and the Red River was only gold.

 

Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected rice fields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks: we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive. but climbed and made for home. I thought again as I had thought when I saw the dead child at Phat Diem, ‘I hate war.” There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey-we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.

I put on my earphones for Captain Trouin to speak to me. He said, “We will make a little detour. The sunset is wonderful on the calcaire. You must not miss it,” he added kindly, like a host who is showing the beauty of his estate, and for a hundred miles we trailed the sunset over the Baie d’Along. The helmeted Martian face looked wistfully out, down the golden groves among the great humps and arches of porous stone, and the wound of murder ceased to bleed.

 

 

(5)

 

Captain Trouin insisted that night on being my host in the opium-house, though he would not smoke himself. He liked the smell, he said, he liked the sense of quiet at the end of the day, but in his profession relaxation could go no further. There were officers who smoked, but they were Army men-he had to have his sleep. We lay in a small cubicle in a row of cubicles like a dormitory at school, and the Chinese proprietor prepared my pipes. I hadn’t smoked since Phuong left me. Across the way a metisse with long and lovely legs lay coiled after her smoke reading a glossy woman’s paper, and in the cubicle next to her two middle-aged Chinese transacted business, sipping tea, their pipes laid aside.

I said, “That sampan-this evening-was it doing any harm?”

Trouin said, “Who knows? In those reaches of the river we have orders to shoot up anything in sight.”

I smoked my first pipe. I tried not to think of all the pipes I had smoked at home. Trouin said, “Today’s affair- that is not the worst for someone like myself. Over the village they could have shot us down. Our risk was as great as theirs. What I detest is napalm bombing. From 3,000 feet, in safety.” He made a hopeless gesture. “You see the forest catching fire. God knows what you would see from the ground. The poor devils are burnt alive, the flames go over them like water. They are wet through with fire.” He said with anger against a whole world that didn’t understand, “I’m not fighting a colonial war. Do you think I’d do these things for the planters of Terre Rouge? I’d rather be court-martialled. We are fighting all of your wars, but you leave us the guilt.” “That sampan,” I said.

“Yes, that sampan too.” He watched me as I stretched out for my second pipe. “I envy you your means of escape.”

“You don’t know what I’m escaping from. It’s not from the war. That’s no concern of mine. I’m not involved.” “You will all be. One day.”

“Not me.” “You are still limping.”

“They had the right to shoot at me, but they weren’t even doing that. They were knocking down a tower. One should always avoid demolition squads. Even in Piccadilly.”

“One day something will happen. You will take a side.” “No, I’m going back to England.” “That photograph you showed me once. . .” “Oh, I’ve torn that one up. She left me.” “I’m sorry.”

“It’s the way things happen. One leaves people oneself, and then the tide turns. It almost makes me believe in justice.”

“I do. The first time I dropped napalm I thought, this is the village where I was born. That is where M. Dubois, my father’s old friend, lives. The baker-I was very fond of the baker when I was a child-is running away down there in the flames I’ve thrown. The men of Vichy did not bomb their own country. I felt worse than them.” “But you still go on.”

“Those are moods. They come only with the napalm. The rest of the time I think that I am defending Europe. And you know those others-they do some monstrous things also. When they were driven out of Hanoi in I946 they left terrible relics among their own people-people they thought had helped us. There was one girl in the mortuary-they had not only cut off her breasts, they had mutilated her lover and stuffed his. . .” “That’s why I won’t be involved.”

“It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love-they have always been compared.” He looked sadly across the dormitory to where the metisse sprawled in her great temporary peace. He said, “I would not have it otherwise. There is a girl who was involved by her parents-what is her future when this port falls? France is only half her home. . .” “Will it fall?”

“You are a journalist. You know better than I do that we can’t win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night. You know we lose one class of St. Cyr every year. We were nearly beaten in ‘50. De Lattre has given us two years of grace-that’s all. But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.” His ugly face which had winked at me before the dive wore a kind of professional brutality like a Christmas mask from which a child’s eyes peer through the holes in the paper. “You would not understand the nonsense. Fowlair. You are not one of us.”

“There are other things in one’s life which make nonsense of the years.”

 

He put his hand on my knee with an odd protective gesture as though he were the older man. “Take her home,” he said. “That is better than a pipe.” “How do you know she would come?” “I have slept with her myself, and Lieutenant Perrin. Five hundred piastres.” “Expensive.”

“I expect she would go for three hundred, hut under the circumstances one does not care to bargain.”

But his advice did not prove sound. A mail’s body is limited in the acts which it can perform and mine was frozen by memory. What my hands touched that night might be more beautiful than I was used to, but we are not trapped only by beauty. She used the same perfume,

and suddenly at the moment of entry the ghost of what I’d lost proved more powerful than the body stretched at my disposal. I moved away and lay on my back and desire drained out of me.

‘I am sorry,” I said, and lied, “I don’t know what is the matter with me.”

She said with great sweetness and misunderstanding, “Don’t worry. It often happens that way. It is the opium.” “Yes,” I said, “the opium.” And I wished to heaven that it had been.

 

 

CHAPTER II

 

 

(I)

 

It was strange, this first return to Saigon with nobody to welcome me. At the airport I wished there were somewhere else to which I could direct my taxi than the rue Catinat. I thought to myself: Is the pain a little less than when I went away?’ and tried to persuade myself that it was so. When I reached the landing I saw that the door was open, and I became breathless with an unreasonable hope. I walked very slowly towards the door. Until I reached the door hope would remain alive. I heard a chair creak, and when I came to the door I could see a pair of shoes, but they were not a woman’s shoes. I \vent quickly in, and it was Pyle who lifted his awkward weight from the chair Phuong used to use. He said, “Hullo, Thomas.” “Hullo, Pyle. How did you get in?”

“I met Dominguez. He was bringing your mail. I asked him to let me stay.” “Has Phuong forgotten something?”

“Oh no, but Joe told me you’d been to the Legation. I thought it would be easier to talk here.” “What about?”

He gave a lost gesture, like a boy put up to speak at some school function who cannot find the grown up words. “You’ve been away?” “Yes. And you?” “Oh, I’ve been travelling around.” “Still playing with plastics?”

He grinned unhappily. He said, “Your letters are over there.”

I could see at a glance there was nothing which could interest me now: there was one from my office in London and several that looked like bills, and one from my bank. I said, “How’s Phuong?”

His face lit up automatically like one of those electric toys which respond to a particular sound. “Oh, she’s fine,” he said, and then clamped his lips together as though he’d gone too far.

“Sit down, Pyle,” I said. “Excuse me while I look at this. it’s from my office.”

I opened it. How inopportunely the unexpected can occur. The editor wrote that he had considered my last letter and that in view of the confused situation in Indo-China. following the death of General de Lattre and retreat from Hoa Binib, he was in agreement with my suggestion. He had appointed a temporary foreign editor and would like me to stay on in Indo-China for at least another year. “We shall keep the chair warm for you,” he reassured me with complete incomprehension. He believed I cared about the job, and the paper.

I sat down opposite Pyle and re-read the letter which had come too late. For a moment I had felt elation as on the instant of waking before one remembers.

“Bad news?” Pyle asked.

“No,” I told myself that it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway: a reprieve for one year couldn’t stand up against a marriage settlement. “Are you married yet?” I asked.

“No.” He blushed-he had a great facility in blushing. “As a matter of fact I’m hoping to get special leave. Then we could get married at home-properly.” “Is it more proper when it happens at home?” “Well, I thought-it’s difficult to say these things to you, you are so darned cynical, Thomas, but it’s a mark of respect. My father and mother would be there-she’d kind of enter the family. It’s important in view of the past.” “The past?”

“You know what I mean. I wouldn’t want to leave her behind there with any stigma. . .” “Would you leave her behind?”

“I guess so. My mother’s a wonderful woman-she’d take her around, introduce her, you know, kind of fit her in. She’d help her to get a home ready for me.”

I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for Phuong or not- she had looked forward so to the skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty, but she had so little idea of all they would involve. Professor and Mrs. Pyle, the women’s lunch clubs; would they teach her Canasta? I thought of her that first night in the Grand Monde, in her white dress, moving so exquisitely on her eighteen-year-old feet, and I thought of her a month ago, bargaining over meat at the butcher’s stores in the Boulevard de la Somme., Would she like those bright clean little New England grocery stores where even the celery was wrapped in cellophane? Perhaps she would. I couldn’t tell. Strangely I found myself saying as Pyle might have done a month ago, “Go easy with her, Pyle. Don’t force things. She can be hurt like you or me.” “Of course, of course, Thomas.”

“She looks so small and breakable and unlike our women, but don’t think of her as... as an ornament.”

“It’s funny, Thomas, how differently things work out. I’d been dreading this talk. I thought you’d be tough.”

“I’ve had time to think, up in the north. There was a woman there ... perhaps I saw what you saw at that whorehouse. It’s a good thing she went away with you. I might one day have left her behind with someone like Granger. A bit of tail.” “And we can remain friends, Thomas?” “Yes, of course. Only I’d rather not see Phuong. There’s quite enough of her around here as it is. I must find another flat-when I’ve got time.”

He unwound his legs and stood up. “I’m so glad, Thomas. I can’t tell you how; glad I am. I’ve said it before, I know, but I do really wish it hadn’t been you.”

“I’m glad it’s you, Pyle.” The interview had not been the way I had foreseen: under the superficial angry schemes, at some deeper level, the genuine plan of action must have been formed. Ail the time that his innocence had angered me, some judge within myself had summed up in his favour, had compared his idealism, his half-baked ideas founded on the works of York Harding, with my cynicism. Oh, I was right about the facts, but wasn’t he right too to be young and mistaken, and wasn’t he perhaps a better man for a girl to spend her life with?

We shook hands perfunctorily, but some half-formulated fear made me follow him out to the head of the stairs and call after him. Perhaps there is a prophet as well as a judge in those interior courts where our true decisions are made. “Pyle, don’t trust too much to York Harding.”

“York!” He stared up at me from the first landing. “We are the old colonial peoples, Pyle, but we’ve learned a bit of reality, we’ve learned not to play with matches. This Third Force-it comes out of a book, that’s all. General The’s only a bandit with a few thousand men: he’s not a national democracy.”

It was as if he had been staring at me through a letter-box to see who was there and now, letting the flap fall, had shut out the unwelcome intruder. His eyes were out of sight. “I don’t know what you mean, Thomas.”

“Those bicycle bombs. They were a good joke, even though one man did lose a foot. But, Pyle, you can’t trust men like The. They aren’t going to save the East from Communism. We know their kind.” “We?” “The old colonialists.” “I thought you took no sides.”

“I don’t Pyle, but if someone has got to make a mess of things in your outfit, leave it to Joe. Go home with Phuong. Forget the Third Force.”

“Of course I always value your advice, Thomas,” he said formally. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.” “I suppose so.”

 

 

(2)

 

The weeks moved on, but somehow I hadn’t yet found myself a new flat. It wasn’t that I hadn’t time. The annual crisis of the war had passed again: the hot wet crachin had settled on the north: the French were out of Hoa Binh, the rice-campaign was over in Tonkin and the opium-campaign in Laos. Dominguez could cover easily all that was needed in the south. At last I did drag myself to see one apartment in a so-called modern building (Paris Exhibition I934?) up at the other end of the rue Catinat beyond the Continental Hotel. It was the Saigon pied-a-terre of a rubber planter who was going home. He wanted to sell it lock, stock and barrel I have always wondered what the barrels contain: as for the stock) there were a large number of engravings from the Paris Salon between I880 and I900. Their highest common factor was a big-bosomed woman with an extraordinary hair-do and gauzy draperies which somehow always exposed the great cleft buttocks and hid the field of battle. In the bathroom the planter had been rather more daring with his reproductions of Rops.

“You like art?” I asked and he smirked back at me like a fellow conspirator. He was fat with a little black moustache and insufficient hair.

“My best pictures are in Paris,” he said. There was an extraordinary tall ash-tray in the living-room made like a naked woman with a bowl in her hair) and there were china ornaments of naked girls embracing tigers, and one very odd one of a girl stripped to the waist riding a bicycle. In the bedroom facing his enormous bed was a great glazed oil painting of two girls sleeping together. I asked him the price of his apartment without his collection, but he would not agree to separate the two. “You are not a collector?” he asked. “Well, no.”

“I have some books also” he said, “which I would throw in, though I intended to take these back to France.” He unlocked a glass-fronted bookcase and showed me his library-there were expensive illustrated editions of Aphrodite and Nona, there was La Garfonne and even several Paul de Kocks. I was tempted to ask him whether he would sell himself with his collection: he went with them: he was period too. He said, “If you live alone in the tropics a collection is company.”

I thought of Phuong just because of her complete absence. So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

“I don’t think my paper would allow me to buy an art-collection.”

He said, “It would not, of course, appear on the receipt.” I was glad Pyle had not seen him: the man might have lent his own features to Pyle’s imaginary “old colonialist” who was repulsive enough without him. When I came out it was nearly half past eleven and I went down as far as the Pavilion for a glass of iced beer. The Pavilion was a coffee centre for European and American women and I was confident that I would not see Phuong there. Indeed I knew exactly where she would be at this time of day-she was not a girl to break her habits, and so, coming from the planter’s apartment, I had crossed the road to avoid the milk-bar where at this time of day she had her chocolate malt. Two young American girls sat at the next table, neat and clean in the heat, scooping up ice-cream. They each had a bag slung on the left shoulder and the bags were identical, with brass eagle badges. Their legs were identical too, long and slender, and their noses, just a shade tilted, and they were eating their ice-cream with concentration as though they were making an experiment in the college laboratory. I wondered whether they were Pyle’s colleagues: they were charming, and I wanted to send them home, too. They finished their ices and one looked at her watch. “We’d better be going,” she said, “to be on the safe side.” I wondered idly what appointment they had.

“Warren said we mustn’t stay later than eleven-twenty-five” “It’s past that now.”

“It would be exciting to stay. I don’t know what it’s all about, do you?”

“Not exactly, but Warren said better not.” “Do you think it’s a demonstration?” “I’ve seen so many demonstrations,” the other said wearily, like a tourist glutted with churches. She rose and laid on their table the money for the ices. Before going she looked around the cafe, and the mirrors caught her profile at every freckled angle. There was only myself left and a dowdy middle-aged Frenchwoman who was carefully and uselessly making up her face. Those two hardly needed make-up, the quick dash of a lipstick, a comb through the hair. For a moment her glance had rested on me-it was not like a woman’s glance, but a man’s, very straightforward, speculating on some course of action. Then she turned quickly to her companion. “We’d better be off.” I watched them idly as they went out side by side into the sun-splintered street. It was impossible to conceive either of them a prey to untidy passion: they did not belong to rumpled sheets and the sweat of sex. Did they take deodorants to bed with them? I found myself for a moment envying them their sterilized world, so different from this world that I inhabited-which suddenly inexplicably broke in pieces. Two of the mirrors on the wall flew at me and collapsed half-way. The dowdy Frenchwoman was on her knees in a wreckage of chairs and tables. Her compact lay open and unhurt in my lap and oddly enough I sat exactly where I had sat before, although my table had joined the wreckage around the Frenchwoman. A curious garden-sound filled the cafe: the regular drip of a fountain, and looking at the bar I saw rows of smashed bottles which let out their contents in a multi-coloured stream-the red of porto; the orange of cointreau, the green of chartreuse, the cloudy yellow of pastis. across the floor of the cafe. The Frenchwoman sat up and calmly looked around for her compact. I gave it her and she thanked me formally, sitting on the floor. I realised that I didn’t hear her very well. The explosion had been so close that my ear-drums had still to recover from the pressure.

I thought rather petulantly, ‘Another joke with plastics: what does Mr. Heng expect me to write now?’ but when I got into the Place Gamier, I realised by the heavy clouds of smoke that this was no joke. The smoke came from the cars burning in the car-park in front of the national theatre, bits of cars were scattered over the square, and a man without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the ornamental gardens. People were crowding in from the rue Catinat, from the Boulevard Bonnard. The sirens of police-cars, the bells of the ambulances and fire-engines came at one remove to my shocked ear-drums. For one moment I had forgotten that Phuong must have been in the milkbar on the other side of the square. The smoke lay between. I couldn’t see through.

I stepped out into the square and a policeman stopped me. They had formed a cordon round the edge to prevent the crowd increasing, and already the stretchers were beginning to emerge. I implored the policeman in front of me, “Let me across. I have a friend. . .” “Stand back,” he said. “Everyone here has friends.” He stood on one side to let a priest through, and I tried to follow the priest, but he pulled me back. I said, “I am the Press,” and searched in vain for the wallet in which I had my card, but I couldn’t find it: had I come out that day without it? I said, “At least tell me what happened to the milkbar”: the smoke was clearing and I tried to see, but the crowd between was too great. He said something I didn’t catch. “What did you say?”

He repeated, “I don’t know. Stand back. You are blocking the stretchers.”

:’ Could I have dropped my wallet in the Pavilion? I turned to go back and there was Pyle. He exclaimed, ’Thomas.”

“Pyle,” I said, “for Christ’s sake, where’s your Legation pass? We’ve got to get across. Phuong’s in the milkbar.” “No, no,” he said.

“Pyle, she is. She always goes there. At eleven thirty. We’ve got to find her.” “She isn’t there, Thomas.” “How do you know? Where’s your card?” “I warned her not to go.”

I turned back to the policeman, meaning to throw him to one side and make a run for it across the square: he might shoot: I didn’t care-and then the word ‘warn’ reached my consciousness. I took Pyle by the arm. “Warn?” I said. “What do you mean ‘warn’?” “I told her to keep away this morning.” The pieces fell together in my mind. “And Warren?” I said. “Who’s Warren? He warned those girls too.” “I don’t understand.”

“There mustn’t be any American casualties, must there?” An ambulance forced its way up the rue Catinat into the square, and the policeman who had stopped me moved to one side to let it through. The policeman beside him was engaged in an argument. I pushed Pyle forward and ahead of me into the square before we could be stopped.

We were among a congregation of mourners. The police could prevent others entering the square; they were powerless to clear the square of the survivors and the first-comers. The doctors were too busy to attend to the dead, and so the dead were left to their owners, for one can own the dead as one owns a chair, A woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat.

She was still and silent, and what struck me most in the square was the silence. It was like a church I had once visited during Mass-the only sounds came from those who served, except where here and there the Europeans wept and implored and fell silent again as though shamed by the modesty, patience and propriety of the East. The legless torso at the edge of the garden still twitched, like a chicken which has lost its head. From the man’s shirt, he had probably been a trishaw-driver.

Pyle said, “It’s awful.” He looked at the wet on his shoes and said in a sick voice, “What’s that?” “Blood,” I said. “Haven’t you ever seen it before?” He said, “I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister.” I don’t think he knew what he was saying. He was seeing a real war for the first time: he had punted down into Phat Diem in a kind of schoolboy dream, and anyway in his eyes soldiers didn’t count.

“You see what a drum of Diolacton can do,” I said, “in the wrong hands.” I forced him, with my hand on his shoulder, to look around. I said, “This is the hour when the place is always full of women and children-it’s the shopping hour. Why choose that of all hours?” He said weakly, “There was to have been a parade.” “And you hoped to catch a few colonels. But the parade was cancelled yesterday, Pyle.” “I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know!” I pushed him into a patch of blood where a stretcher had lain. “You ought to be better informed.”

“I was out of town,” he said, looking down at his shoes. “They should have called it off.”

“And missed the fun?” I asked him. “Do you expect General The to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren’t, in a war. This will hit the world’s press. You’ve put General The on the map all right, Pyle. You’ve got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe. Go home to Phuong and tell her about your heroic deed-there are a few dozen less of her country people to worry about.”

A small fat priest scampered by, carrying something on a dish under a napkin. Pyle had been silent a long while, and I had nothing more to say. Indeed I had said too much. He looked white and beaten and ready to faint, and I thought, ‘What’s the good? he’ll always he innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. Ail you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.’

He said, “The wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure he wouldn’t. Somebody deceived him. The Communists...”

He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance, I left him standing in the square and went on up the rue Catinat to where the hideous pink Cathedral blocked the way. Already people were flocking in: it must have been a comfort to them to be able to pray for the dead to the dead.

Unlike them, I had reason for thankfulness, for wasn’t Phuong alive? Hadn’t Phuong been ‘warned’? But what I remembered was the torso in the square, the baby on its mother’s lap. They had not been warned: they had not been sufficiently important. And if the parade had taken place would they not have been there just the same, out of curiosity, to see the soldiers, and hear the speakers, and throw, the flowers? A two-hundred-pound bomb does not discriminate. How many dead colonels justify a child’s or a trishaw-driver’s death when you are building a national democratic front? I stopped a motor-trishaw and told the driver to take me to the Quai Mytho.

 

 

PART FOUR

 

 

CHAPTER I

 

I had given Phuong money to take her sister to the cinema so that she would be safely out of the way. I went out to dinner myself with Dominguez and was back in my room waiting when Vigot called sharp on ten. He apologised for not taking a drink-he said he was too tired and a drink might send him to sleep. It had been a very long day.

“Murder and sudden death?”

“No. Petty thefts. And a few suicides. These people love to gamble and when they have lost everything they kill themselves. Perhaps I would not have become a policeman if I had known how much time I would have to spend in mortuaries. I do not like the smell of ammonia. Perhaps after all I will have a beer.” “I haven’t a refrigerator, I’m afraid.” “Unlike the mortuary. A little English whisky, then?” I remembered the night I had gone down to the mortuary with him and they had slid out Pyle’s body like a tray of ice-cubes.

“So you are not going home?” he asked. “You’ve been checking up?” “Yes.”

I held the whisky out to him, so that he could see how calm my nerves were. “Vigot, I wish you’d tell me why you think I was concerned in Pyle’s death. Is it a question of motive? That I wanted Phuong back? Or do you imagine it was revenge for losing her?”

“No. I’m not so stupid. One doesn’t take one’s enemy’s book as a souvenir. There it is on your shelf. The Role of the West. Who is this York Harding?”

“He’s the man you are looking for, Vigot. He killed Pyle-at long range.” “I don’t understand.”

“He’s a superior sort of journalist-they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea. Pyle came out here full of York Harding’s idea. Harding had been here once for a week on his way from Bangkok to Tokyo. Pyle made the mistake of putting his idea into practice. Harding wrote about a Third Force. Pyle formed one-a shoddy little bandit with two thousand men and a couple of tame tigers. He got mixed up.” “You never do, do you?” “I’ve tried not to be.”

“But you failed. Fowlair.” For some reason I thought of Captain Trouin and that night which seemed to have happened years ago in the Haiphong opium-house. What was it he had said? something about all of us getting involved sooner or later in a moment of emotion. I said, “You would have made a good priest, Vigot. What is it about you that would make it so easy to confess-if there were anything to confess?” “I have never wanted any confessions.”

“But you’ve received them?” “From time to time.”

“Is it because like a priest it’s your job not to be shocked, but to be sympathetic? ‘M. Flic, I must tell you exactly why I battered in the old lady’s skull.’ ‘Yes, Gustave, take your time and tell me why it was.’ “

“You have a whimsical imagination. Aren’t you drinking, Fowlair?”

“Surely it’s unwise for a criminal to drink with a police officer?”

“I have never said you were a criminal.” “But suppose the drink unlocked even in me the desire to confess? There are no secrets of the confessional in your profession.”

“Secrecy is seldom important to a man who confesses: even when it’s to a priest. He has other motives.” “To cleanse himself?”

“Not always. Sometimes he only wants to see himself clearly as he is. Sometimes he is just weary of deception. You are not a criminal. Fowlair, but I would like to know why you lied to me. You saw Pyle the night he died.” “What gives you that idea?”

“I don’t for a moment think you killed him. You would hardly have used a rusty bayonet.” “Rusty?”

“Those are the kind of details we get from an autopsy. I told you, though, that was not the cause of death. Dakow mud.” He held out his glass for another whisky. “Let me see now. You had a drink at the Continental at six ten?” “Yes.”

“And at six forty-five you were talking to another journalist at the door of the Majestic?”

“Yes, Wilkins. I told you all this, Vigot, before. That night.”

“Yes. I’ve checked up since then. It’s wonderful how you carry such petty details in your head.” “I’m a reporter, Vigot.”

“Perhaps the times are not quite accurate, but nobody could blame you, could they, if you were a quarter of an hour out here and ten minutes out there. You had no reason to think the times important. Indeed how suspicious it would be if you had been completely accurate.” “Haven’t I been?”

“Not quite. It was at five to seven that you talked to Wilkins.” “Another ten minutes.”

“Of course. As I said. And it had only just struck six when you arrived at the Continental.”

“My watch is always a little fast,” I said. “What time do you make it now?” “Ten eight.”

“Ten eighteen by mine. You see.”

He didn’t bother to look. He said, “Then the time you said you talked to Wilkins was twenty-five minutes out-by your watch. That’s quite a mistake, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps I re-adjusted the time in my mind. Perhaps I’d corrected my watch that day. I sometimes do.”

“What interests me,” Vigot said, “(could I have a little more soda?-you have made this rather strong) is that you are not at all angry with me. It is not very nice to be questioned as I am questioning you.”

“I find it interesting, like a detective-story. And, after all, you know I didn’t kill Pyle-you’ve said so.” Vigot said, “I know you were not present at his murder.” “I don’t know what you hope to prove by showing that I was ten minutes out here and five there.” “It gives a little space,” Vigot said, “a little gap in time.” “Space for what?” “For Pyle to come and see you.”’ “Why do you want so much to prove that?” “Because of the dog,” Vigot said. “And the mud between its toes?”

“It wasn’t mud. It was cement. You see, somewhere that night, when it was following Pyle, it stepped into wet cement. I remembered that on the ground floor of the apartment there are builders at work-they are still at work. I passed them tonight as I came in. They work long hours in this country.”

“I wonder how many houses have builders in them- and wet cement. Did any of them remember the dog?”

“Of course I asked them that. But if they had they would not have told me. I am the police.” He stopped talking and leant back in his chair, staring at his glass. I had a sense that some analogy had struck him and he was miles away in thought. A fly crawled over the back of his hand and he did not brush it away-any more than Dominguez would have done. I had the feeling of some force immobile and profound. For all I knew, he might have been praying.

I rose and went through the curtains into the bedroom. There was nothing I wanted there, except to get away for a moment from that silence sitting in a chair. Phuong’s picture-books were back on the shelf. She had stuck a telegram for me up among the cosmetics-.some message or other from the London office. I wasn’t in the mood to open it. Everything was as it had been before Pyle came. Rooms don’t change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays.

I returned to the sitting-room and Vigot put the glass to his lips. I said, “I’ve got nothing to tell you. Nothing at all”

 

“Then I’ll be going,” he said. “I don’t suppose I’ll trouble you again.”

At the door he turned as though he were unwilling to abandon hope-his hope or mine. “That was a strange picture for you to go and see that night. I wouldn’t have thought you cared for costume drama. What was it? Robin Hood?”

“Scaramouche I think. I had to kill time. And I needed distraction.” “Distraction?”

“We all have our private worries, Vigot,” I carefully explained.

When Vigot was gone there was still an hour to wait for Phuong and living company. It was strange how disturbed I had been by Vigot’s visit. It was as though a poet had brought me his work to criticise and through some careless action I had destroyed it. I was a man without a vocation- one cannot seriously consider journalism as a vocation, but I could recognise a vocation in another. Now that Vigot was gone to close his uncompleted file, I wished I had the courage to call him back and say, “You are right. I did see Pyle the night he died.”

 

 

CHAPTER II

 

 

(I)

 

On the way to the Quai Mytho I passed several ambulances driving out of Cholon heading for the Place Gamier. One could almost reckon the pace of rumour from the expression of the faces in the street, which at first ‘turned on someone like myself coming from the direction of the place with looks of expectancy and speculation. By the time I entered Cholon I had outstripped the news: life was busy, normal, uninterrupted: nobody knew.

I found Mr. Chou’s godown and mounted to Mr. Chou’s house. Nothing had changed since my last visit. The cat and the dog moved from floor to cardboard box to suitcase, like a couple of chess knights who cannot get to grips. The baby crawled on the floor, and the two old men were still playing mah jongg. Only the young people were absent. As soon as I appeared in the doorway one of the women began to pour out tea. The old lady sat on the .bed and looked at her feet.

“M. Heng,” I asked. I shook my head at the tea: I wasn’t in the mood to begin another long course of that trivial bitter brew. “II faut absolument que je voie M. Heng.” It seemed impossible to convey to them the urgency of my request, but perhaps the very abruptness of my refusal of tea caused some disquiet. Or perhaps like Pyle I had blood on my shoes. Anyway after a short delay one of the women led me out and down the stairs, along two bustling bannered streets and left me before what they would have called I suppose in Pyle’s country a “funeral parlour”, full of stone jars in which the resurrected bones of the Chinese dead are eventually placed. “M. Heng,” I said to an old Chinese in the doorway. “M. Heng.” It seemed a suitable halting place on a day which had begun with the planter’s erotic collection and continued with the murdered bodies in the square. Somebody called from an inner room and the Chinese stepped aside and let me in.

Mr. Heng himself came cordially forward and ushered me into a little inner room lined with the black carved uncomfortable chairs you find in every Chinese ante-room, unused, unwelcoming. But I had the sense that on this occasion the chairs had been employed, for there were five little tea-cups on the table, and two were not empty. “I have interrupted a meeting,” I said.

“A matter of business,” Mr. Heng said evasively, “of no importance. I am always glad to see you, Mr. Fowlair.” “I’ve come from the Place Gamier,” I said. “I thought that was it.” “You’ve heard.. “

“Someone telephoned to me. It was thought best that I keep away from Mr. Chou’s for a while. The police will be very active today.” “But you had nothing to do with it.” “It is the business of the police to find a culprit.” “It was Pyle again,” I said. “Yes.”

“It was a terrible thing to do.”

“General The is not a very controlled character.” “And plastic isn’t for boys from Boston. Who is Pyle’s chief, Heng?”

“I have the impression that Mr. Pyle is very much his own master.” “What is he? O.S.S.?” “The initial letters are not very important.” “What can I do, Heng? He’s got to be stopped.” “You can publish the truth. Or perhaps you cannot?” “My paper’s not interested in General The. They are only interested in your people, Heng.” “You really want Mr. Pyle stopped, Mr. Fowlair?” “If you’d -see him, Heng. He stood there and said it was all a sad mistake, there should have been a parade. He said he’d have to get his shoes cleaned before he saw the Minister.”

“Of course, you could tell what you know to the police.” “They aren’t interested in The either. And do you think they would dare to touch an American? He has diplomatic privileges. He’s a graduate of Harvard. The Minister’s very fond of Pyle. Heng, there was a woman there whose baby- she kept it covered under her straw hat. I can’t get it out of my head. And there was another in Phat Diem.” “You must try to be calm, Mr. Fowlair.” “What’ll he do next, Heng? How many bombs and dead children can you get out of a drum of Diolacton?” “Would you be prepared to help us, Mr. Fowlair?” “He comes blundering in and people have to die for his mistakes. I wish your people had got him on the river from Nam Dinh. It would have made a lot of difference to a lot of lives”

“I agree with you, Mr. Fowlair. He has to be restrained. I have a suggestion to make.” Somebody coughed delicately behind the door, then noisily spat. He said, “If you would invite him to dinner tonight at the Vieux Moulin. Between eight-thirty and nine-thirty.” “What good...?”

“We would talk to him on the way,”’ Heng said. “He may be engaged.”

“Perhaps it would be better if you asked him to call on you-at six-thirty. He will be free then: he will certainly come. If he is able to have dinner with you, take a book to your window as though you want to catch the light.” “Why the Vieux Moulin?”

“It is by the bridge to Dakow-I think we shall be able to find a spot and talk undisturbed.” “What will you do?”

“You do not want to know that, Mr. Fowlair. But I promise you we will act as gently as the situation allows.”

The unseen friends of Heng shifted like rats behind the wall. “Will you do this for us, Mr. Fowlair?” “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.” “Sooner or later,” Heng said, and I was reminded of

Captain Trouin speaking in the opium-house, “one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”

 

 

(2)

 

I left a note at the Legation asking Pyle to come and then I went up the street to the Continental for a drink. The wreckage was ail cleared away; the fire-brigade had hosed the square. I had no idea then how the time and the place would become important. I even thought of sitting there throughout the evening and breaking my appointment. Then I thought that perhaps I could frighten Pyle into inactivity by warning him of his danger-whatever his danger was, and so I finished my beer and went home, and when I reached home I began to hope that Pyle would not come. I tried to read, but there was nothing on my shelves to hold the attention. Perhaps I should have smoked, but there was no one to prepare my pipe. I listened unwillingly for footsteps and at last they came. Somebody knocked. I opened the door, but it was only Dominguez. I said, “What do you want, Dominguez?” He looked at me with an air of surprise. “Want?” He looked at his watch. “This is the time I always come. Have you any cables?” “I’m sorry-I’d forgotten. No.”

“But a follow-up on the bomb? Don’t you want something filed?”

“Oh, work one out for me, Dominguez. I don’t know how it is-being there on the spot, perhaps I got a bit shocked. I can’t think of the thing in terms of a cable.” I hit out at a mosquito which came droning at my ear and saw Dominguez wince instinctively at my blow. “It’s all right, Dominguez, I missed it.” He grinned miserably. He could not justify this reluctance to take life: after all he was a Christian—one of those who had learnt from Nero how to make human bodies into candles.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked. He didn’t drink, he didn’t eat meat, he didn’t kill-I envied him the gentleness of his mind.

“No, Dominguez. Just leave me alone tonight.” I watched him from the window, going away across the rue Catinat. A trishaw-driver had parked beside the pavement opposite my window: Dominguez tried to engage him but the man shook his head. Presumably he was waiting for a client in one of the shops, for this was not a parking place for trishaws. When I looked at my watch it was strange to see that I had been waiting for little more than ten minutes, and, when Pyle knocked, I hadn’t even heard his step.

“Come in.” But as usual it was the dog that came in first.

“I was glad to get your note, Thomas. This morning I thought you were mad at me.” “Perhaps I was. It wasn’t a pretty sight.” “You know so much now, it won’t hurt to tell you a bit more. I saw The this afternoon.”

“Saw him? Is he in Saigon? I suppose he came to see how his bomb worked.”

“That’s in confidence, Thomas. I dealt with him very severely.” He spoke like the captain of a school-team who has found one of his boys breaking his training. All the same I asked him with a certain hope, “Have you thrown him over?”

“I told him that if he made another uncontrolled demonstration we would have no more to do with him.”

“But haven’t you finished with him already Pyle?” I pushed impatiently at his dog which was nosing around my ankles. “I can’t. (Sit down. Duke.) In the long run he’s the only hope we have. If he came to power with our help, we could rely on him. . .”

“How many people have to die before you realise...?” But I could tell that it was a hopeless argument. “Realise what, Thomas?”

“That there’s no such thing as gratitude in politics.” “At least they won’t hate us like they hate the French.” “Are you sure? Sometimes we have a kind of love for our enemies and sometimes we feel hate for our friends.”

“You talk like a European, Thomas. These people aren’t complicated.”

“Is that what you’ve learned in a few months? You’ll be calling them childlike next.” “Well in away.”

“Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.” But what good was it to talk to him? There was an unreality in both our arguments. I was becoming a leader-writer before my time. I got up and went to the bookshelf.

“What are you looking for, Thomas?” “Oh, just a passage i used to be fond of. Can you have dinner with me, Pyle?”

“I’d love to, Thomas, I’m so glad you aren’t mad any longer, I know you disagree with me, but we can disagree, can’t we, and be friends?” “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“After all, Phuong was much more important than this.”

“Do you really believe that, Pyle?”

“Why, she’s the most important thing there is. To me. And to you, Thomas.” “Not to me any longer.” “It was a terrible shock today. Thomas, but in a week, you’ll see, we’ll have forgotten it. We are looking after the relatives too.’ “We?”

“We’ve wired to Washington. We’ll get permission to use some of our funds.”

I interrupted him. “The Vieux Moulin? Between nine and nine-thirty?”

“Where you like, Thomas.” I went to the window. The sun had sunk below the roofs. The trishaw-driver still waited for his fare. I looked down at him and he raised his face to me.

“Are you waiting for someone, Thomas?” “No. There was just a piece I was looking for.” To cover my action I read, holding the book up to the last light:

“I drive through the streets and I care not a damn, The people they stare, and they ask who I am; And if I should chance to run over a cad, I can pay for the damage if ever so bad. So pleasant it is to have money, height ho! So pleasant it is to have money.”

“That’s a funny kind of poem,” Pyle said with a note of disapproval.

“He was an adult poet in the nineteenth century. There weren’t so many of them.” I looked down into the street again. The trishaw-driver had moved away. “Have you run out of drink? Pyle asked. “No, but I thought you didn’t.”

“Perhaps I’m beginning to loosen up,” Pyle said. “Your influence. I guess you’re good for me, Thomas.”

I got the bottle and glasses-I forgot one of them the first journey and then I had to go back for water. Everything that I did that evening took a long time. He said, “You know, I’ve got a wonderful family, but maybe they were a bit on the strict side. We have one of those old houses in Chestnut Street, as you go up the hill on the right-hand side. My mother collects glass, and my father-when he’s not eroding his old cliffs-picks up all the Darwin manuscripts and association-copies he can. You see, they live in the past. Maybe that’s why York made such an impression on me. He seemed kind of open to modern conditions. My father’s an isolationist.”

“Perhaps I would like your father,” I said. “I’m an isolationist too.”

For a quiet man Pyle that night was in a talking mood. I didn’t hear all that he said, for my mind was elsewhere. I tried to persuade myself that Mr. Heng had other means at his disposal but the crude and obvious one. But in a war like this, I knew, there is no time to hesitate: one uses the weapon to hand-the French the napalm bomb, Mr. Heng the bullet or the knife. I told myself too late that I wasn’t made to be a judge-I would let Pyle talk awhile and then I would warn him. He could spend the night at my house. They would hardly break in there. I think he was speaking of the old nurse he had had-“She really meant more to me than my mother, and the blueberry pies she used to make!” when I interrupted him. “Do you carry a gun now - since that night?” “No. We have orders in the Legation.. .” “But you’re on special duties?”

“It wouldn’t do any good-if they wanted to get me, they always could. Anyway I’m as blind as a coot. At college they called me Bat - because I could see in the dark as well as they could. Once when we were fooling around...” He was off again. I returned to the window.

A trishaw-driver waited opposite. I wasn’t sure—they look so much alike, but I thought he was a different one. Perhaps he really had a client. It occurred to me that Pyle would be safest at the Legation. They must have laid plans, since my signal, for later in the evening: something that involved the Dakow bridge. I couldn’t understand why or how: surely he would not be so foolish as to drive through Dakow after sunset and our side of the bridge was always guarded by armed police.

“I’m doing all the talking,” Pyle said. “I don’t know how it is, but somehow this evening. . .”

“Go on,” I said, “I’m in a quiet mood, that’s all. Perhaps we’d better cancel that dinner.”

“No, don’t do that. I’ve felt cut off from you, since well...”

“Since you saved my life,” I said and couldn’t disguise the bitterness of my self-inflicted wound.

“No, I didn’t mean that. All the same how we talked, didn’t we, that night? As if it was going to be our last. I learned a lot about you, Thomas. I don’t agree with you, mind, but for you maybe it’s right-not being involved. You kept it up all right, even after your leg was smashed you stayed neutral.”

“There’s always a point of change,” I said. “Some moment of emotion...”

 

“You haven’t reached it yet. I doubt if you ever will. And I’m not likely to change either-except with death,” he added merrily.

“Not even with this morning? Mightn’t change a man’s views?”

“They were only war casualties,” he said. “It was a pity, but you can’t always hit your target. Anyway they died in the right cause.”

“Would you have said the same if it had been your old nurse with her blueberry pie?”

He ignored my facile point. “In a way you could say they died for Democracy,” lie said-            ,

“I wouldn’t know how to translate that into Vietnamese.” I was suddenly very tired. I wanted him to go away quickly and die. Then I could start life again-at the point before he came in.

“You’ll never take me seriously, will you, Thomas?” he complained, with that schoolboy gaiety which he seemed to have kept up his sleeve for this night of all nights. “I tell you what-Phuong’s at the cinema-what about you and me spending the whole evening together? I’ve nothing to do now.” It was as though someone from outside were directing him how to choose his words in order to rob me of any possible excuse. He went on, “Why don’t we go to the Chalet? I haven’t been there since that night. The food is just as good as the Vieux Moulin, and there’s music.”’

I said, “I’d rather not remember that night.” “I’m sorry. I’m a dumb fool sometimes, Thomas. What about a Chinese dinner in Cholon?”

“To get a good one you have to order in advance. Are you scared of the Vieux Moulin. Pyle? It’s well wired and there are always police on the bridge. And you wouldn’t be such a fool, would you, as to drive through Dakow?”

“It wasn’t that. I just thought it would be fun tonight to make a long evening of it.”

He made a movement and upset his glass, which smashed upon the floor. “Good luck,” he said mechanically. “I’m sorry, Thomas.” I began to pick up the pieces and pack them into the ash-tray. “What about it, Thomas?” The smashed glass reminded me of the bottles in the Pavilion. bar dripping their contents. “I warned Phuong I might be out with you.” How badly chosen was the word ‘warn’. I picked up the last piece of glass. “I have got an engagement at the Majestic,” I said, “and I can’t manage before nine.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to go back to the office. Only I’m always afraid of getting caught.”

There was no harm in giving him that one chance. “Don’t mind being late,” I said. “If you do get caught, look in here later. I’ll come back at ten, if you can’t make dinner, and wait for you.” “I’ll let you know.”

“Don’t bother. Just come to the Vieux Moulin-or meet me here.” I handed back the decision to that somebody in whom I didn’t believe: you can intervene if you want to: a telegram on his desk: a message from the Minister. You cannot exist unless you have the power to alter the future. “Go away now, Pyle. There are things I have to do.” I felt a strange exhaustion, hearing him go away and the pad of his dog’s paws.

 

 

(3)

 

There were no trishaw-drivers nearer than the Rue d’Ormay when I went out. I walked down to the Majestic and stood awhile watching the unloading of the American bombers. The sun had gone and they worked by the light of arc-lamps. I had no idea of creating an alibi, but I had told Pyle I was going to the Majestic and I felt an unreasoning dislike of telling more lies than were needed. “Evening, Fowlair.” It was Wilkins. “Evening.” “How’s the leg?” “No trouble now.” “Got a good story filed?” “I left it to Dominguez.” “Oh, they told me you were there.”

“Yes, I was. But space is tight these days. They won’t want much.”

“The spice has gone out of the dish, hasn’t it?” Wilkins said. “We ought to have lived in the days of Russell and the old Times. Dispatches by balloon. Why, he’d even have made a column out of this. The luxury hotel, the bombers, night falling. Night never falls nowadays, does it, at so many piastres a word.” From far up in the sky you could faintly hear the noise of laughter: somebody broke a glass as Pyle had done. The sound fell on us like icicles. “The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men,” Wilkins malevolently quoted. “Doing anything tonight, Fowlair? Care for a spot of dinner?”

“I’m dining as it is. At the Vieux Moulin.” “I wish you joy. Granger will be there. They ought to advertise special Granger nights. For those who like background noise.”

I said good-night to him and went into the cinema next door-Errol Flynn or it may have been Tyrone Power (I don’t know how to distinguish them in tights), swung on ropes and leapt from balconies and rode bareback into technicolor dawns. He rescued a girl and killed his enemy and led a charmed life. It was what they call a film for boys, but the sight of Oedipus emerging with his bleeding eyeballs from the palace at Thebes would surely give a better training for life today. No life is charmed. Luck had been with Pyle at Phat Diem and on the road from Tanyin, but luck doesn’t last, and they had two hours to see that no charm worked. A French soldier sat beside me with his hand in a girl’s lap, and I envied the simplicity of his happiness or his misery, whichever it might be. I left before the film was over and took a trishaw to the Vieux Moulin.

The restaurant was wired in against grenades and two armed policemen were on duty at the end of the bridge. The patron, who had grown fat on his own rich Burgundian cooking, let me through the wire himself. The place smelt of capons and melting butter in the heavy evening heat.

“Are you joining the party of M. Granjair?” he asked me. “No.”

“A table for one?” It was then for the first time that I thought of the future and the questions I might have to answer. “For one,” I said, and it was almost as though I had said aloud that Pyle was dead.

There was only one room and Granger’s party occupied a large table at the back; the patron gave me a small one closest to the wire. There were no window-panes, for fear of splintered glass. I recognised a few of the people Granger was entertaining, and I bowed to them before I sat down: Granger himself looked away. I hadn’t seen him for months-only once since the night Pyle fell in love. Perhaps some offensive remark I bad made that evening had . penetrated the alcoholic fog, for he sat scowling at the head of the table while Mme. Desprez, the wife of a public-relations officer, and Captain Duparc of the Press Liaison Service nodded and becked. There was a big man who I think was a hotelier from Pnom Penh and a French girl I’d never seen before and two or three other faces that I had only observed in bars. It seemed for once to be a quiet party.

I ordered a pastis because I wanted to give Pyle time to come-plans go awry and so long as I did not begin to eat my dinner it was as though I still had time to hope. And then I wondered what I hoped for. Good luck to the O.S.S. or whatever his gang were called? Long life to plastic bombs and General The? Or did I-I of all people-hope for some kind of miracle: a method of discussion arranged by Mr. Heng which wasn’t simply death? How much easier it would have been if we had both been killed on the road from Tanyin. I sat for twenty minutes over my pastis and then I ordered dinner. It would soon be half past nine: he wouldn’t come now.

Against my will I listened: for what? a scream? A shot? Some movement by the police outside? But in any case I would probably hear nothing, for Granger’s party was warming up. The hotelier, who had a pleasant untrained voice, began to sing and as a new champagne cork popped others joined in, but not Granger. He sat there with raw eyes glaring across the room at me. I wondered if there would be a fight: I was no match for Granger.

They were singing a sentimental song, and as I sat hungerless over my apology for a Chapon due Charles I thought, for the first time since I had known that she was safe, of Phuong. I remembered how Pyle, sitting on the floor waiting for the Viets, had said, “She seems fresh like a flower,” and I had flippantly replied, “Poor flower.” She would never see New England now or learn the secrets of Canasta. Perhaps she would never know security: what right had I to value her less than the dead bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist in terms of quantity and I had betrayed my own principle; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again. I looked at my watch and it was nearly a quarter to ten. Perhaps, after all, he had been caught; perhaps that ‘someone” in whom he believed had acted on his behalf and he sat now in his Legation room fretting at a telegram to decode, and soon he would come stamping up the stairs to my room in the rue Catinat. I thought. If he does I shall tell him everything.’

Granger suddenly got up from his table and came at me. He didn’t even see the chair in his way and he stumbled and laid his hand on the edge of my table. “Fowlair,” he said, “come outside.” I laid enough notes down and followed him. I was in no mood to fight with him, but at that moment I would not have minded if he had beaten me unconscious. We have so few ways in which to assuage the sense of guilt.

He leant on the parapet of the bridge and the two policemen watched him from a distance. He said, “I’ve got to talk to you. Fowlair.”

I came within striking distance and waited. He didn’t move. He was like an emblematic statue of all I thought I hated in America-as ill-designed as the Statue of Liberty and as meaningless. He said without moving, “You think I’m pissed. You’re wrong.” “What’s up, Granger?”

“I got to talk to you. Fowlair. I don’t want to sit there with those Frogs tonight. I don’t like you. Fowlair, but you talk English. A kind of English.” He leant there, bulky and shapeless in the half-light, an unexplored continent. “What do you want Granger?”

“I don’t like Limies,” Granger said. “I don’t know why Pyle stomachs you. Maybe it’s because he’s Boston. I’m Pittsburgh and proud of it.” “Why not?”

“There you are again.” He made a feeble attempt to mock my accent. “You all talk like poufs. You’re so damned superior. You think you know everything.” “Good-night, Granger. I’ve got an appointment.” “Don’t go, Fowlair. Haven’t you got a heart? I can’t talk to those Froggies.” “You’re drunk.”

“I’ve had two glasses of champagne, that’s all, and wouldn’t you be drunk in my place? I’ve got to go north.” “What’s wrong in that?”

“Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I keep on thinking everyone knows. I got a cable this morning from my wife.” “Yes?”

“My son’s got polio. He’s bad.” “I’m sorry.”

“You needn’t be. It’s not your kid.” “Can’t you fly home?”

“I can’t. They want a story about some damned mopping-up operations near Hanoi and Connolly’s sick.” (Connolly was his assistant.) “I’m sorry. Granger. I wish I could help.” “It’s his birthday tonight. He’s eight at half past ten our time. That’s why I laid on a party with champagne before I knew. I had to tell someone, Fowlair, and I can’t tell these Froggies.”

“They can do a lot for polio nowadays.” “I don’t mind if he’s crippled, Fowlair. Not if he lives. Me, I’d be no good crippled, but he’s got brains. Do you know what I’ve been doing in there while that bastard was singing? I was praying. I thought maybe if God wanted a life he could take mine,” “Do you believe in a God, then?”

“I wish I did,” Granger said. He passed his whole hand across his face as though his head ached, but the motion was meant to disguise the fact that he was wiping tears away.

“I’d get drunk if I were you,” I said. “Oh no, I’ve got to stay sober. I don’t want to think afterwards I was stinking drunk the night my boy died. My wife can’t drink, can she?” “Can’t you tell your paper. . .?”

“Connolly’s not really sick. He’s off after a bit of tail in Singapore. I’ve got to cover for him. He’d be sacked if they knew.” He gathered his shapeless body together. “Sorry I kept you, Fowlair. I just had to tell someone. Got to go in now and start the toasts. Funny it happened to be you, and hate my guts.”

“I’d do your story for you. I could pretend it was Connolly.”

“You wouldn’t get the accent right.” “I don’t dislike you, Granger. I’ve been blind to a lot of things...”

“Oh, you and me, we’re cat: and dog. But thanks for the sympathy.”

Was I so different from Pyle, I wondered? Must I too have my foot thrust in the mess of life before I saw the pain? Granger went inside and I could hear the voices rising to greet him. I found a trishaw and was pedalled home. There was nobody there, and I sat and waited till midnight. Then I went down into the street without hope and found Phuong there.

 

 

CHAPTER II

 

 

 

“Has M. Vigot been to see you?” Phuong asked. “Yes. He left a quarter of an hour ago. Was the film good?” She had already laid out the tray in the bedroom and now she was lighting the lamp. “It was very sad,” she said, “but the colours were lovely.

What did M. Vigot want?” “He wanted to ask me some questions.” “What about?”

“This and that. I don’t think he will bother me again.” “I like films with happy endings best,” Phuong said.

“Are you ready to smoke?”

“Yes.” I lay down on the bed and Phuong set to work with her needle. She said, “They cut off the girl’s head.” “What a strange thing to do.” “It was in the French Revolution.” “Oh. Historical. I see.” “It was very sad all the same.” “I can’t worry much about people in history.” “And her lover-he went back to his garret-and he was miserable and he wrote a song-you see, he was a poet, and soon all people who had cut off the head of his girl were singing his song. It was the Marseillaise.” “It doesn’t sound very historical,” I said. “He stood there at the edge of the crowd while they were singing, and he looked very bitter and when he smiled you knew he was even more bitter and that he was thinking of her. I cried a lot and so did my sister.” “Your sister? I can’t believe it.”

“She is very sensitive. That horrid man Granger was there. He was drunk and he kept on laughing. But it was not funny at all. It was sad.”

“I don’t blame him,” I said. “He has something to celebrate. His son’s out of danger. I heard today at the Continental. I like happy endings too.”

After I had smoked two pipes I lay back with my neck on the leather pillow and rested my hand in Pbuong’s lap. “Are you happy?”

“Of course,” she said carelessly. I hadn’t deserved a more considerate answer. “li’s like it used to be,” I lied, “a year ago.” “Yes”

“You haven’t bought a scarf for a long time. Why don’t you go shopping tomorrow?” “It is a feast day.” “Oh yes, of course, I forgot.”

“You haven’t opened your telegram,” Phuong said. “No, I’d forgotten that too. I don’t want to think about work tonight. And it’s too late to file anything now. Tel] me more about the film.”

“Well, her lover tried to rescue her from prison. He smuggled in boy’s clothes and a man’s cap like the one the goaler wore, but just as she was passing the gate all her hair fell down and they called out ‘Une aristocrate, une aristocrate.’ I think that was a mistake in the story. They ought to have let her escape. Then they would both have made a lot of money with his song and they would have gone abroad to America-or England,” she added with what she thought was cunning.

“I’d better read the telegram,” I said. “I hope to God I don’t have to go north tomorrow. I want to be quiet with you.”

She loosed the envelope from among the pots of cream and gave it to me. I opened it and read: “Have thought over your letter again stop am acting irrationally as you hoped stop have told my lawyer start divorce proceedings grounds desertion stop God bless you affectionately Helen.” “Do you have to go?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t have to go. I’ll read it to you. Here’s your happy ending.”

She jumped from the bed. “But it is wonderful. I must go and tell my sister. She’ll be so pleased. I will say to her, ‘Do you know who I am? I am the second Mrs. Fowlaire.’ “

Opposite me in the bookcase The Role of the West stood out like a cabinet portrait-of a young man with a crew-cut and a black dog at his heels. He could harm no one any more. I said to Phuong, “Do you miss him much?” “Who?”

“Pyle.” Strange how even now, even to her, it was impossible to use his first name.

“Can I go, please? My sister will be so excited.” “You spoke his name once in your sleep.” “I never remember my dreams.”

“There was so much you could have done together. He was young.” “You are not old.”

“The skyscrapers. The Empire State Building.” She said with a small hesitation, “I want to see the Cheddar Gorge.”

“It isn’t the Grand Canyon.” I pulled her down on to the bed. “I’m sorry, Phuong.”

“What are you sorry for? It is a wonderful telegram. My sister. -.”

“Yes, go and tell your sister. Kiss me first.” Her excited mouth skated over my face, and she was gone.

I thought of the first day and Pyle sitting beside me at the Continental, with his eye on the soda-fountain across the way. Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.

 

March I952-Jane I955,