‘Good,’ I said, ‘except that through some strange fluke I’m dying of thirst.’
He laughed, heartily, and slapped me on the back: ‘They all say that. Come into my office and get out of that coat. It’s warm for the time of the year. How do you like Switzerland?’
I went before him, ignoring his inane question, and he shut the door, when it suddenly occurred to me that he was waiting for the magic-password phrase which would absolutely establish my credentials. ‘I’ve got some good news about Sir Jack Leningrad. He’s much better. And he sends his fondest wishes.’
‘Ah,’ he replied, with a deadpan businesslike face. ‘I last met Mr Leningrad in Canterbury.’
‘All right, then,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake help me off with this coat.’
Underneath, I was as wet as if I’d been dipped into a vat of warm water, soaked from my suit down to underwear and skin. He opened a cupboard and took out an identical mackintosh coat to the one I’d been wearing except that it had no inside pockets. ‘Put this on, you’ll catch cold. We lost one traveller like that a few years ago — he died of pneumonia. We don’t want to lose you, because according to Mr Leningrad they have high hopes of you. You’re one of their promising young gentlemen.’ I wrapped myself up and drank another paper cup of water. ‘What I suggest now,’ he said, ‘is that you go by taxi to your hotel and take a hot bath. It usually makes quite a difference.’
It was a small room, looking out on rooftops and pigeons. I hung up my suit to dry, then got into the bed and didn’t wake up for four hours, by which time it was dark, and I was hungry. The fact that I’d just earned three hundred pounds cheered me up no end, and I went downstairs to the dining-room to celebrate with an elaborate dinner and a bottle of rosy wine. Sitting alone, feeling relaxed and haggard, I hoped I looked interesting to the other people in the room. I hung on in the pleasant atmosphere after the meal and chewed through a few long cigars. I went to sleep that night musing on how pleasant life could be if only one had money. Nothing else seemed to matter except money, and though this came as a slow and pleasant revelation, I knew, at the same time, that I’d always known it, right from birth. I wondered if any bastard had ever wanted anything more than that. I wasn’t completely rotten (not by any means) in that I wanted power as well as money. Nothing like that. I only wanted money, a desire that could do no harm to anyone, and I’d do anything and go to great lengths to get it. To want power seemed to me vile, but to want money was noble.
The desire — not that I’d needed to make it plain by thinking about it — lit a new light inside me, and, in my mind’s eye, a halo around my head. I had the idea that if I kept this picture of myself clean and uncompromised, I’d never have any trouble carrying my little bits of gold through the customs. The pure of heart shall inherit the earth, and what could be more pure of heart than a simple good-natured desire for money and an easy life that would harm none of my fellow men? The wish to acquire money without working for it was a virtue that few people shared with me. They worked for it, and by this got power over others. If they didn’t get power over others, then at least they got power over themselves, and I didn’t want even this. For if I got power over myself it might break my innocence, put a look back in my face that would be spotted a mile off by any customs man — something which clicks within them because they can’t help having it themselves.
After breakfast in my room, the telephone rang, and a girl asked to speak to me. It took a few moments to realize it was Polly Moggerhanger. Either there was something wrong with my memory or I wasn’t the sort of person I thought I was. Since leaving her at the airport she had not come once into my mind, and now that she was speaking brightly into my ear I was so shocked and surprised to hear her that I didn’t know whether or not I was pleased about it. She told me she’d had the most boring time yesterday with her friend and her family, and that if she didn’t get out of it she’d go crazy and scream. It was a nice picture, but I couldn’t let her do it, so I invited her to lunch.
I didn’t know of any good restaurants in Geneva, so eating on the hotel premises might give her the idea that I did, but that I was merely being idle or pressed for time. I could hardly remember her from the desperate haze of yesterday, and thought that when I saw her maybe I wouldn’t want to spend more time with her than lunch. There was a strong feeling in me to be on my own for a while in these strange surroundings — which seemed stranger the longer I was in them. It was as if yesterday’s trip had taken me across an important borderline, and as usual, though I felt this strongly, I didn’t quite know what the consequences would be. In fact I didn’t know, in any way, at all, but when I saw Polly walking into the hotel lounge I realized that I no longer wanted to be alone for the next couple of days.
It came out over lunch that she was very unhappy, and didn’t know what to do with her life — which seemed to prove that her despair wasn’t monumentally serious. But when I said that unhappiness was the spice of life, and that if you weren’t unhappy you were dead, she became a lot more cheerful. ‘I’ve had an ideal life,’ she told me, ‘being the daughter of someone like my father, as you can imagine. He doted on me, and gave me everything I wanted, which suited me fine. It certainly kept me very content for a long time. But when I first started having men friends, he got meaner, though he didn’t make too open a row about it. It got so I thought I was doing something wrong when I had it in somebody’s flat or on the back seat of a car, and it stopped me getting all my thrills out of it for a year or two. Parents think they own you, just because they brought you up.’
‘I hope it’s different now,’ I said, dipping into my water ice. ‘Not for my sake, but for yours.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said.
‘I won’t,’ I answered. ‘It’s not my problem, is it? But where shall we go this afternoon?’ When she had no idea I said we ought to bus along the lake to the castle of Chillon, and when I went on about Bonivard and Byron’s poem, she thought it an exciting plan, because though she’d heard of it herself, she was more than pleasantly surprised to find that I was no stranger to it, imagining perhaps that a born smuggler like me could never know of things like that. I didn’t really, but had read of it in a tourist hand-out from the hotel only that morning. Yet I was able to tell her, truthfully and with an offhand candour, about Byron’s pad at Newstead where I’d been a time or two on a bus in my childhood and youth — on one occasion with my mother who was visiting a tubercular friend in the nearby sanatorium. It gave us something to talk about, with which to break through to the comfort of more private things, whispering sugar-nothings into a sweet ear of corn as we sat on the bus, the lake glinting in our eyes at every new bend. When I ran out of topics I asked her what she wanted from life, and she said that she didn’t know. ‘I haven’t been brought up to want anything, because I had everything I wanted.’