Tango (21 page)

Box dropped them by the golf course. The sun was still not visible but its rays reddened the undersides of the clouds. The sea was leaden and a damp wind scythed off it. William led the way to
the beach, thinking there was enough light to see where to tread, but he slipped on a bit of driftwood. His glasses didn’t help in poor light. Theresa put her arm in his and they walked by
the sullen waves, staring at the brightening horizon. Her face was wet with what he at first thought was spray. When the sun rose, partially concealed by cloud, it reddened the sea. The colour was
reflected faintly in her features. She kept her eyes on the horizon.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want to go back?’

‘No. Keep walking. It’s beautiful.’

It became light enough for him to see properly. The sand and shingle beach was littered with driftwood, tins and bits of plastic. A long line of breaking surf curved around the bend by
Señor
Finn’s hut. Her hand on his arm made him feel that all his nerves were concentrated on that point. He kept noticing, then forgetting, then again noticing the beauty of
her face.

They walked in silence. She wept continuously, without sound, without grimacing, the tears dripping unhindered from her chin. The fur of her collar was wet where the wind flapped it against her
face.

‘You know I would marry you,’ he said. ‘I meant it.’

She nodded.

‘Even after Carlos and everything. It makes no difference. It’s you.’

‘You cannot marry me. You are married.’

‘I can get divorced.’

‘You cannot.’

‘Why not? I’m not a Catholic. Neither is Sally.’

‘It is wrong to leave your wife.’

‘I’ll do it nonetheless.’ He spoke more confidently than he felt.

‘I could not like you if you did.’

The outline of
Señor
Finn’s hut looked unfamiliar. William supposed it was because he was approaching from an unusual angle but as they got closer he saw that the
corrugated roof was hanging down and that one whole side, which had been made of a door and assorted driftwood, was missing. The sagging roof creaked in the wind and the surrounding grass and
rushes had been trampled. For a few moments he nearly convinced himself that there had been gales in the night but he recalled Manuel Herrera’s black Mercedes reversing towards the hut, and
the doors opening. He recalled also
Señor
Finn’s red-faced chuckles at having told Manuel that William was a beggar. He remembered giving
Señor
Finn money.

‘Where are we going?’

‘This is where my friend lives.’

She stared at the litter of trampled grass and scattered wood. ‘Your friend?’

There was a hole in the upturned boat, the pots and pans lay amidst the ashes of the fire, the earth was churned, the table was on its side and the chair on its back. Inside the hut a mattress
and blankets were strewn in confusion. The wind had fastened a sheet of newspaper against the splintered prow of the boat.

‘You have a friend who lives here?’

‘Lived.’

What looked at first like a crumpled rag turned out to be the terrier. It had a dark hole in the side of its head and its lips were drawn back over its teeth.

She put her hand through his arm again. ‘Who was he?’

‘I didn’t know his name. He just lived here, that’s all.’

‘He was a vagrant?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘It is against the new law. They will have taken him to a home.’

‘This was his home.’

He began to feel as if he were no longer the centre of his own world. All his concerns, his future, his marriage, his desires, were peripheral not the main thing. There was something else. It
was like realising that throughout his life there had been another person in the house, for years unnoticed but now, once seen, forever present, in every room, at every meal. Unawareness was no
longer possible. Henceforward, he would be living for something or against it, no longer floating but swimming. A gust of wind tore the newspaper from the boat and sent it fluttering out of
sight.

She tugged at his arm. ‘There is nothing you can do.’

‘It was partly my fault. It was because I spoke to him. I gave him money so they probably thought he was spying for me, or something. It was Manuel Herrera who did it.’

‘You can do nothing now.’

‘We must get rid of them, Herrera and the others.’

‘That’s what we are doing.’

‘But now it’s serious.’

‘It wasn’t before?’

‘It didn’t feel serious. Did it for you?’

She shrugged. They walked back towards the golf course. ‘Are you cold?’ he asked.

‘A bit.’

‘Are you a fatalist?’

She smiled. ‘God is a fatalist.’

‘If we go to the covered market, will God permit breakfast?’

‘He might.’

‘Arthur Box says you can be paid for the work you are doing – the spying work.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘He will pay me for it?’

‘Yes, if you want it for your family or whatever – if you like.’

‘I would like it very much. It’s better than the other work.’

He smiled. ‘That’s good.’

‘Can you come now?’

Nightingale’s tone was peremptory. William held the telephone away from his ear. ‘As I said, it’s a bit awkward. I’ve only just got into the office. I’m late myself
and there’s no one else here. I ought to stay until there is.’

‘It is urgent. We’ve got to get something off.’

‘I’m pretty tired and there’s a lot here I should be getting on with. I’ve been up all night.’

‘I know you have. It’s about that.’

‘All right. It may take me some time to reach the embassy, though. I’ve lost my car.’

‘We’ll send you one.’

Nightingale met him beneath the chandelier. He seemed hurried and distracted. His spotted bow-tie was loose and lopsided.

‘Awfully nice of you to come. The car will take you back again. It’s about this business of your friend – your secret friend, you know, the little funny – and what he
wants us to send to London for him. He left a message and then disappeared and now we can’t find him. We’re not very happy about his message and Peter suggested we seek confirmation
from you. Feather thinks we should just tear it up and forget it.’ Nightingale relaxed enough to smile as they went upstairs. ‘But that was first thing this morning and Feather’s
early-morning reactions are sometimes a little – well, briskly decisive. I’m a hopeless prevaricator and Peter’s a natural compromiser, so we thought we’d call you to make
up our minds for us.’

Nightingale’s coffee was a help. The ambassador was as good-naturedly miserable as on the other occasions when William had met him. It seemed that the wrinkles would be smoothed and the
furrows lifted from the man’s face if only someone would tell him he need no longer be ambassador.

‘Sorry to drag you in,’ he said. ‘Can’t find your friend anywhere. We had various names to ring at the hotel but no one answered any of them. Then we discovered
they’d all checked out first thing. Who were they, anyway – agents of his?’

‘They were all him, I think.’

‘Well, he or they have gone to earth good and proper now, leaving us with a tidy problem.’ The ambassador handed William several sheets of dense black handwriting. ‘I say
it’s a bit of a problem, Nightingale says it’s a crisis, Feather says it’s a disaster.’ He laughed uneasily. ‘You seem to have had an eventful night of it,
anyhow.’

‘More coffee?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Please.’ William sat down to read Box’s notes.

‘Where’s Feather?’ the ambassador asked Nightingale.

‘In his bath, the brute. He’s got his brandy so he won’t be long. Then we’ll see a new man.’

Box’s crabbed, precise handwriting summarised the night’s events as he knew them. The major part dealt with the scheme to entrap the president’s advisors. Paragraphs were
headed: ‘The Situation’, ‘The Proposal’ and ‘The Way Ahead’. The final one was entitled ‘Back Up’. It comprised a request for immediate diplomatic
recognition of the new government whenever it was declared, a statement of support for the president from the City, an announcement of substantial low-interest development aid to be provided by
merchant banks, and a request for a pair of frigates as a ‘demonstration of intent’. The message ended on a personal note: ‘Why no answer to my last? Please send soon. Wooding
doing well but needs encouragement. Self ditto. Allowances just adequate. EEC transmissions fine. Weather cool.’

‘All a bit far-fetched, I thought,’ ventured the ambassador. William said nothing. The ambassador hurried on, ‘Perhaps it’s not, though, perhaps you’re right and
it’s all rather . . . you know, serious . . .’ He trailed off, looking at Nightingale.

‘Out of the question,’ said Nightingale. ‘We can’t set about undermining our host government. After all, we’re here to get on with them, not to get rid of
them.’

‘And things aren’t that bad.’ The ambassador stressed the two last words. ‘Are they? Perhaps they are, I don’t know.’ He scratched his head.

William remembered his conversation with Max, Sally’s boss. ‘The American embassy seems to think they are. They’re expecting to be expelled.’

‘Oh, the
Americans
,’ said Nightingale.

The ambassador smiled. ‘Very alarmist, I always thought.’

William persisted. ‘People have started disappearing.’

‘Really? Who?’ Nightingale asked.

‘Well, I don’t know them all, of course, except one. A chap who used to live in a hut on the beach.’

‘Ah.’

‘And they announced on the radio this morning that they’ve suppressed the newspapers – they’ve all got to reapply for licences except the government one.’

The door opened as William was speaking. ‘Which makes this the same as half the other countries in the world,’ said Feather. ‘No change except a little for the worse.’ He
went straight to the coffee. He was a big man and gave the impression of moving slowly while covering a lot of ground. His haggard, handsome face looked unhealthy when scrubbed. ‘Everything
and everyone ends in disaster,’ he continued. ‘No reason why this place should be different. Your attempt to alter history’s decline into barbarism can only hasten the undesired
end. This is no place for improvers.’ He gulped his coffee, poured another and in two long strides reached and reclined full-length on the ambassador’s sofa.

The ambassador smiled at William. ‘That doesn’t mean you haven’t done jolly well.’

Feather insisted from his recumbent position that it was no good, it wouldn’t do, they couldn’t send nonsense like that to London. London would think they were barmy. Nightingale
regretted that the office no longer had any influence over the funnies now that the funnies were privatised, though the office still had to act as a channel of communication for them. Was it
permissible to refuse to transmit material they didn’t agree with? No one knew. Feather thought the main thing was to prevent that lunatic Box from doing or saying anything more.

‘Box is not a lunatic. At least he’s trying to do something. You may not agree with it but at least he – he –’ William sought to avoid the caring cliche –
‘he is concerned about things.’ He felt like someone who had mistimed his leap over a puddle.

Feather lit a cigar.

‘Perhaps the answer,’ the ambassador said tentatively, ‘is to send the thing as it is and for us to send a – a – you know . . .’

‘A dissenting telegram,’ said Nightingale, as if he had been waiting a long time. ‘What a brilliant idea, Peter.’

The ambassador beamed at William. ‘Yes, perhaps that’s the answer.’

‘What did you need me for?’ William asked.

‘Oh, well, we needed you to – to . . .’

‘To put you in the picture,’ said Nightingale.

‘Exactly, exactly so.’ The ambassador stood. ‘Thank you so much for coming, Mr Wooding. A most useful mind-clearing exercise.’ He looked at the others.

Feather raised himself and turned towards William. ‘The real point,’ he said slowly, ‘is the futility of ever doing anything. Things happen, but we don’t
do
them. Whenever we try, they go wrong. The temptation to action must always be resisted.’ He lay back and put his cigar in his mouth. ‘It is the one temptation I have always been able to
resist.’

Nightingale giggled and the ambassador smiled unhappily as William closed the door.

The two girls were at the shop by the time the embassy car dropped William. As he suspected, they had been delayed by the bus strike but that was now over, they said. The
government had ordered the strikers back to work and had issued a proclamation: strikes were not illegal but because the government governed for the people any strike against it – which this
one had been – was an act against the people, and acts against the people were treason. There had been some arrests.

The girls competed almost breathlessly with each other as if to show how well they had learned the message. They seemed pleased and excited. William wondered why they weren’t worried. He
gazed at the orange-seller, hunched beside his stall. There was less breeze now and the sun was warmer but the man still dressed as if against a chill wind. So far as William knew, Box remained the
only customer. Presumably the oranges were changed sometimes.

‘Possibly our strike will be finished,’ he said to the girls.

They were round-eyed and serious. ‘Our strike? We do not make a strike,
señor.
’

‘At the factory, I mean. Our strike at the factory.’

‘The factory, yes, yes.’ The girls nodded.

The factory was nothing to do with them; he wasn’t sure that they had ever understood its connection with the shop. ‘But maybe that is not a strike against the government,’ he
added with a smile. ‘Not treason.’

‘No,
señor
, not treason.’

As he went upstairs, he heard them whispering and laughing.

There was a telex from London that morning, the first since he had sent his lengthy report on the strike. It asked what progress he had made in resolving it. His description of the political
situation and his points about his own impotence to intervene under the new laws and about the government attitude towards foreign-owned companies had all been ignored. He could imagine the remarks
being made in London about failure to get a grip, about things going downhill and about the need for radical surgery. This meant a senior visitor from head office with a kill-or-cure brief. There
would also be staff restaurant gossip about his going native like his predecessors. There would be rumours of a bar girl, quite without foundation and only coincidentally true.