He thrust his wheel-chair towards us with deft movements of his strong hands. A jerk of his head I took to indicate that we should seat ourselves on the uncomfortable gilt chairs. Beads of sweat glistened on his lined forehead. Sharp pale eyes beneath sandy eyebrows suggested that he was no fool and I found difficulty in suppressing a feeling of suspicion.
As though in answer to an unspoken query of mine, he said, ‘I suppose you are wondering why I have asked you here tonight?’ He pushed a box of cigarettes across to us. It was a wooden box, the top inlaid with a picture of Vesuvius. ‘Help yourselves,’ he said, and then called ‘Anna!’
The woman who answered his call was as typically Neapolitan as the furniture. She had probably been beautiful only a few years ago. Neapolitan girls are at their best between the ages of sixteen and twenty. She was about twenty-five now — heavy, raddled and slatternly. Only the eyes were still beautiful. They were big and dark, and they watched him like a bitch watching its master. Her legs, though sheathed in silk, were too fat in the calf and she stood with them slightly apart. Her hips were wide and her body heavy. Her breasts, which no doubt had once been firm, were like two great sacks that not even an Italian brassiere could support in decency below the low-cut satin dress. Her fleshy features were framed in an untidy mop of jet black hair.
‘Bring some drink in,’ our host ordered. He was massaging the grime from his neck with the tips of his fingers abstractedly, as though considering the line he was going to take with us.
When the woman had brought glasses and a bottle of whisky and he had poured all of us, including Monique, a nearly neat drink, he said, ‘Yes, I think you must be wondering why I asked you to come. You, Cunningham, are also probably wondering why I gave Monique the papers and passport she needed and which you could not get for her.’
I did not say anything, but waited for him to go on. The liquor, which was real Scotch, was fiery in the heat of the room.
‘It’s not out of friendship,’ he snarled, suddenly darting his slight body forward at me and gripping the wheels of his chair so hard that the backs of his brown hands were almost white. ‘Nor is it out of sympathy for the jam you’re in. You’re an officer — or you were. You represent everything I hate about Britain. Do you think I’ve enjoyed living in exile all these years? I was born at Ballachulish in the Western Highlands. I’ve forgotten my native dialect. I’ve almost forgotten how to speak ordinary English. You and your type put me where I am.’ He leaned back, suddenly relaxed. The sweat was streaming down the sides of his face. He mopped it off with a dirty handkerchief.
‘I didn’t ask you here to gloat,’ he added softly. ‘I asked you here because I need your help.’
He leaned forward and poured Boyd and myself another stiff tot. ‘There’s a lot wrong with your type of world, Cunningham. But I’ll give ‘em this — they’ll drive men to death in the capitalist wars or in the sweat shops from which they get their money, but they’ll always see that they’re buried decently. And that’s what I want you to do for me.’ He snickered. It was a sound that might have appeared foolish if it had not been so full of bitterness.
‘I don’t quite follow you,’ I said.
His lips twisted back from brown rotting teeth. ‘I’m not asking favours, Cunningham,’ he said. ‘You and your kind won’t get that final satisfaction.’ He leaned quickly forward again. ‘I’m not wanting your charity. I’ve been in Wales. I’ve worked in the anthracite pits, where men die of silicosis because the owners won’t take steps to install modern machinery to keep the dust down. I’ve seen how charity works. I became a communist then. Now I’m a realist. But I still remember. And if you’ve got a conscience, I’m not going to help you salve it. Mine is a straight business deal. You help me and I’ll help you. Boyd here told me how you were fixed this afternoon. I know something that you don’t know. And in exchange for that information you’re going to swear to do something for me.’
He began to cough then, quietly and chokingly till his whole frame was aflame and the veins on his forehead stood out in ridges.
At length the spasm passed and he sat back weakly. He reached for his glass, drained the neat whisky at a gulp and poured himself another. ‘I guess it shakes your sense of decency that a nice girl like Monique knows any one like me.’ He laughed quietly to himself. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps she shouldn’t have known me. She used to come and sit here for hours watching me paint when she lived next door with the Gallianis. I wasn’t in this bloody chair then. I don’t know why she came. Probably because she was lost and lonely and a stray. If there had been no war and she had lived with her revoltingly bourgeois family, she would never have come anywhere near me. As it was we were both strays, and I suppose that is what we had in common.’
He propelled his chair over to the far corner of the room and returned with a medium-sized canvas. It was a portrait of Monique — very sweet and placid and at ease. ‘That’s the best portrait I ever did. I’m not a very good artist. My notes are all right, but my pictures are not good. Except this one — it’s got all the longing for my youth and the innocence of first love and the nice clean straight things of life. At least that’s what I think. Anyway, that’s why I liked having her around. One remembers sometimes. And the last four years are not good company in one’s thoughts.’
He poured out more Scotch, filling his own glass almost to the brim with neat whisky. ‘Mostly I try to forget,’ he went on, raising his glass with a sardonic smile. ‘But Monique was like a breath of fresh air in a stale room. When she was here I felt young again, forgot that I was a rotting outcast and remembered my youth and what I might in different circumstances have made of my life.’
‘What do you want me to do? I asked. ‘And what is the information you are willing to trade?’
‘Not so fast,’ he said. The liquor was making his speech very difficult to follow. ‘You’re down and out. And I’m the only person who can help you. That’s never happened to me before. You can sit there with a sneer on your face drinking my whisky — all right, I am gloating. But you’re going to stay sitting there whilst I tell you just what you and your sort have done for me. I’m going to tell you the sort of dirty bastard you’ve made me.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve never told a soul. Nobody knows who I am. Here they all think I’m a Swiss from one of the French cantons. I’m Signor Buisson.’ He looked across at Monique and the bitterness of his face softened momentarily. ‘I’ve told her more about myself than I’ve told any other living soul,’ he said.
He leaned forward to pour out more liquor. Both Boyd and I refused. We hadn’t finished our last glass. ‘So I’m not good enough to drink with, eh?’ He filled our glasses to the brim. ‘Well, you’re bloody going to drink with me. And you’re going to listen.’ His voice dropped as suddenly as it had been raised.
‘My mother still lives in Ballachulish. She’d be about seventy now. I write to her regularly. She thinks I have a flourishing little business here in Naples and that I’m married to an Italian girl and have a kid. Well, it’s all got a basis of truth. This business flourishes all right. And I’ve got this woman and the kid who is a bastard of hers and nothing to do with me. Whatever else I’ll do, I’d never give a slut like that-‘ and he nodded in the direction of the door through which the woman had appeared — ‘a child, the way I am. I’m going to stop writing to my mother now. I’ll be dead soon anyway. My mother is about the only happy memory I have left and I don’t want her ever to know what her son was really like — what he did and how he lived. It would break her heart, for my father is dead and I was her only child. That’s what I want you to do for me. She’s always asking me in her letters when I am coming home to see her. I shall never go, of course.’