‘I expect it’s just dirty stories. Tell.’
‘No, really, girls – I mean it.’
‘Why do they call you Curly?’ D. asked.
Currie blushed again.
‘Introduce us to the fascinating stranger,’ a fat girl said.
‘No, no. It’s impossible. Absolutely no go.’
Two men in mackintoshes pushed open the door and looked into the recreation room. One of them said, ‘Is there anybody here called . . . ?’
Captain Currie said, ‘Thank God, are you the police?’
They watched him from the door. One of them said, ‘That’s right.’
‘Here’s your man.’
‘Are you D. ?’ one of them said.
‘Yes.’ D. stood up.
‘We have a warrant for your arrest on the charge of . . .’
‘Never mind,’ D. said. ‘I know what it’s all about.’
‘Anything you say . . .’
‘Yes. Yes. Let’s go.’ He said to the girls who stood gaping by the table, ‘You can have Curly now.’
‘This way,’ the detective said. ‘We’ve a car at the gate.’
‘No handcuffs?’
‘I don’t think they’ll be needed,’ the man said with a heavy smile. ‘Come on. Get moving.’
One of them took him by the arm, unobtrusively. They might have been friends leaving after a few drinks. The English law, he thought, was remarkably tactful: everybody in this country hated a scene. The night embraced them. Floodlights drowned the stars in favour of Mr Forbes’s fantastic hobby. Far out at sea a light burned. Perhaps that was the ship in which he was supposed to leave – leave this country free from his infection and his friends free from embarrassment, from the dangerous disclosure and the untimely reticence. He wondered what Mr Forbes would say when he read the morning papers and found he hadn’t gone.
‘Come on,’ the detective said. ‘We’ve not got all night.’
They led him out past the neon lights, saluting the clerk with a flick of the hand as they went. After all, the charge of leaving without paying his bill would not be added to the other misdemeanours. The car was up on the grass verge with the lights discreetly out. It would not have been good for the hotel, he supposed, if a police car had been too prominently on view. The taxpayer in this country was always protected. A third man sat at the wheel. He started up as soon as they appeared and switched on the lights. D. got into the back between the two others. They swerved out on to the road and drove down towards Southcrawl.
One of the men in the back began to wipe his forehead. ‘God damn!’ he said.
They swerved left down a by-road from Southcrawl. He said, ‘When they told me you were being taken care of, you could’ve knocked me down with a feather.’
‘You’re not detectives?’ He felt no elation: everything was starting all over again.
‘Of course we’re not detectives. You gave me a turn in there. I thought you were going to ask for my warrant. Haven’t you any sense?’
‘You see, detectives are on the way.’
‘Step on it, Joe.’
They ricocheted down the rough path towards the sound of the sea. It came more boisterously up at them now every minute: the noise of surf beating on the rocks. ‘You a good sailor?’ one of the men asked.
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘You need to be. It’s a fierce night – and it’ll be worse in the Bay.’
The car drew up. The headlights illuminated for a few feet a rough red chalk track and then ploughed on into nothing. They were at the edge of a low cliff. ‘Come on,’ the man said, ‘we’ve got to hurry. It won’t take them long to tumble to things.’
‘Surely they can stop the ship – somehow.’
‘Oh, they’ll send us a wire or two. We radio back that we haven’t seen you. You don’t think they’ll turn out the Navy, do you? You aren’t all that important.’
They led the way down the steps cut in the cliff. In the little cove below a motor-boat bobbed at the end of a chain. ‘What about the car?’ D. asked.
‘Never mind the car.’
‘Won’t it be traced?’
‘I dare say – back to the shop it was bought at this morning – for twenty pounds. Anyone who likes is welcome to it. I wouldn’t drive a car like that again, not for a fortune.’ But it seemed likely that a small fortune had been spent already, by Mr Forbes. They puttered out of the cove and immediately met the force of the sea. It smashed at them deliberately like an enemy. It was not like an impersonal force riding in long regular breakers: it was like a madman with a pickaxe, smashing at them now on this side, now on the other. They would be lured, into a calm trough, and then the blows would come one after another in rapid succession: then calm again. There wasn’t much time or chance to look back; only once, as they bobbed up on what seemed the top of the world, D. caught a glimpse of the floodlit hotel foundering in the far distance, as the moon swept up the sky.
It took them more than an hour to reach the ship, a dingy black coaster of about three thousand tons flying a Dutch flag. D. came up the side like a piece of cargo and was immediately shipped below. An officer in an old jumper and dirty grey flannel trousers said, ‘You keep below for an hour or two. It is better so.’
The cabin was tiny and close to the engine-room. Somebody had had the forethought to lay out an old pair of trousers and a waterproof: he was wet through. The port-hole was battened down, and a cockroach moved rapidly up the steel wall by the bunk. Well, he thought, I am nearly home. I am safe . . . if it was possible to think in terms of safety at all. He was safe from one danger and going back to another.
He sat on the edge of his bunk: he felt dizzy. After all, he thought, I am a bit old for this kind of life. He felt a sensation of pity for Mr K., who had dreamed in vain of a quiet life in a university far behind the lines – well, at least he hadn’t died in an Entrenationo cubicle in the presence of some sharp oriental like Mr Li, who would resent the interruption of a lesson he had paid for in advance. And there was Else – the terror was over: she was secure from all the worse things which might have happened to her. The dead were to be envied. It was the living who had to suffer from loneliness and distrust. He got up; he needed air.
The deck was uncovered, and the wind whipped the sharp spray against his mouth. He leant over the side and saw the great creamy tops rise up against the galley lights and surge away down into some invisible abyss. Somewhere far off a light went on and off – Land’s End? No, they couldn’t be as far as that yet from London and Mr Forbes driving through the dark and Rose waiting – or Sally.
A voice he knew said, ‘That’ll be Plymouth.’
He didn’t turn: he didn’t know what to say. His heart had missed a beat like a young man’s; he was afraid. He said, ‘Mr Forbes . . .’
‘Oh, Furt,’ she said, ‘Furt turned me down.’ He remembered the tears on Western Avenue, the look of hate on the hill above Southcrawl. ‘He’s sentimental,’ she said, ‘he preferred a gesture. Poor old Furt.’ In a phrase she dismissed him; he moved back into the salty and noisy dark at ten knots.
He said, ‘I’m an old man.’
‘If I don’t care,’ she said, ‘what does it matter what you are? Oh, I know you’re faithful – but I’ve told you I shan’t go on loving a dead man.’ He took a quick look at her; her hair was lank with spray. She looked older than he had ever seen her yet – plain. It was as if she were assuring him that glamour didn’t enter into this business. She said, ‘When you are dead, she can have you. I can’t compete then, and we’ll all be dead a long, long time.’
The light went by astern: ahead there was only the splash, the long withdrawal, and the dark. She said, ‘You’ll be dead very soon: you needn’t tell me that, but now . . .’
THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE
The famous American publisher Alfred A. Knopf (1892–1984) founded Vintage Books in the United States in 1954 as a paperback home for the authors published by his company. Vintage was laun
ched in the United Kingdom in 1990 and works independently from the American imprint although both are part of the international publishinggroup, Random House.
Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback editions of books acquired by the prestigious hardback imprints in the Random House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later William Heinemann, Secker & Warburgand The Harvill Press. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage has expanded and the list now includes great authors of the past – who are published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most influential authors of the present.
For a full list of the books Vintage publishes, please visit our website
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Graham Greene, The Confidential Agent
(Series: # )
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