I reached the office door and turned out the lights in the garden. I heard Mr Smith say, 'Look there, dear. That white house with the dome. That must be the palace.'
Martha said, 'A beggar asleep in the pool?'
'It does happen.'
'I never noticed him. What are you looking for?'
'My paper-weight. Why should anyone take my paper-weight?'
'What did it look like?'
'A little coffin with R.J.P. stamped on it. I used it for non-urgent mail.'
She laughed and held me still and kissed me. I responded as well as I could, but the corpse in the pool seemed to turn our preoccupations into comedy. The corpse of Doctor Philipot belonged to a more tragic theme; we were only a sub-plot affording a little light relief. I heard Joseph move in the bar and called to him, 'What are you doing?' Apparently Mrs Smith had explained their needs to him: two cups, two spoons, a bottle of hot water.
'Add a blanket,' I said, 'and then get moving to the town.'
'When shall I see you again?' Martha asked.
'The
same
place,
the same time.'
'Nothing has changed, has it?' she asked me with anxiety.
'No, nothing,' but my tone had an edge to it, which she noticed.
'I'm sorry, but all the same you've come back.'
When at last she drove away with Joseph I went back to the pool and sat on its edge in the dark. I was afraid the Smiths might come downstairs and make conversation, but I had been waiting only a few minutes by the pool when I saw the lights go out in the John Barrymore suite. They must have taken the Yeastrel and the Barmene and they had now lain down to their untroubled sleep. Last night the festivities had kept them up late, and it had been a long day. I wondered what had happened to Jones. He had expressed his intention of staying in the Trianon. I thought too of Mr Fernandez and his mysterious tears. Anything rather than think of the Secretary for Social Welfare coiled up under the diving-board.
Far up in the mountains beyond Kenscoff a drum beat, marking the spot of a Voodoo tonnelle. It was not often one heard the drums now under Papa Doc's rule. Something padded through the dark, and when I turned on my torch I saw a thin starved dog poised by the diving-board. It looked at me with dripping eyes and wagged a hopeless tail, as though it were asking my permission to jump down and lick the blood. I shooed it away. A few years ago I had employed three gardeners, two cooks, Joseph, an extra barman, four boys, two girls, a chauffeur, and in the season - it was not yet the end of the season - I would have taken on extra help. Tonight by the pool there would have been a cabaret, and in the intervals of the music I would have heard the perpetual murmur of the distant streets, like a busy hive. Now, even though the curfew had been lifted, there was not a sound, and without a moon not even a dog barked. It was as though my success had gone out of earshot too. I had not known it for very long, but I could hardly complain. There were two guests in the Hotel Trianon, I had found my mistress again, and unlike Monsieur le Ministre I was still alive. I settled myself as comfortably as I could on the edge of the pool and began my long wait for Doctor Magiot.
CHAPTER III
1
FROM time to time in my life I had found it necessary to provide a curriculum vitae. It usually began something like this. Born 1906 at Monte Carlo of British parents. Educated at the Jesuit College of the Visitation. Many prizes for Latin verse and Latin prose composition. Embarked early on a business career … Of course I varied the details of that career according to the recipient of the curriculum.
What a lot too was left out or was of doubtful truth in even those opening statements. My mother was certainly not British, and to this day I am uncertain whether she was French - perhaps she was a rare Monegasque. The man she had chosen for my father left Monte Carlo before my birth. Perhaps his name was Brown. There is a ring of truth in the name Brown - she wasn't usually so modest in her choice. The last time I saw her, when she was dying in Port-au-Prince, she bore the name of the Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers. She had left Monte Carlo (and incidentally her son) hurriedly, soon after the Armistice of 1918, with my bills at the college unsettled. But the Society of Jesus is used to unsettled bills; it works assiduously on the fringe of the aristocracy where returned cheques are almost as common as adulteries, and so the college continued to support me. I was a prize pupil, and it was half expected that I would prove in time to have a vocation. I even believed it myself; the sense of vocation hung around me like the grippe, a miasma of unreality, at a temperature below normal in the cool rational morning but a fever-heat at night. As other boys fought with the demon of masturbation, I fought with faith. I find it strange to think now of my Latin verses and compositions - all that knowledge has vanished as completely as my father. Only one line has obstinately stuck in my head - a memory of the old dreams and ambitions: ' Exegi monumentum aere perennius …' I said it to myself nearly forty years later when I stood, on the day of my mother's death, by the bathing-pool of the Hotel Trianon in Pйtionville and looked up at the fantastic tracery of woodwork against the palms and the inky storm-clouds blowing over Kenscoff. I more than half-owned the place and knew that soon I would own it all. I was already in possession, a man of property. I remember thinking, 'I am going to make this the most popular tourist hotel in the Caribbean,' and perhaps I might have succeeded if a mad doctor had not come to power and filled our nights with the discords of violence instead of jazz.
The career of an hфtelier was not, as I have indicated, the one which the Jesuits had expected me to follow. That had been finally wrecked by a college performance of Romeo and Juliet in its very staid French translation. I was given the part of the aged Friar Lawrence, and some of the lines I had to learn have remained with me to this day, I don't know why. They hardly have the ring of poetry. ' Accorde-moi de discuter sur ton йtat.' Frиre Laurent had the power of making even the tragedy of the star-crossed lovers prosaic.
' J'apprends que tu dois, et rien ne peut le reculer, Etre mariйe а ce comte jeudi prochain.'
The part must have seemed to the good fathers a suitable one under the circumstances and not too exciting or exacting, but I think my vocational grippe was already very nearly over, and the interminable rehearsals, the continual presence of the lovers and the sensuality of their passion, however muted by the French translator, led me to my breakout. I looked a good deal older than my age, and the dramatic director, if he could not make me an actor, had at least taught me adequately enough the secrets of make-up. I
'borrowed' the passport of a young lay professor of English literature and bluffed my way one afternoon into the Casino. There, in the surprising space of forty-five minutes, due to an unlikely run of nineteens and zeros, I gained the equivalent of three hundred pounds, and only an hour later I was losing my virginity, inexpertly and unexpectedly, in a bedroom of the Hфtel de Paris.
My instructress was at least fifteen years older than myself, but in my mind she has remained always the same age, and it is I who have grown older. We met in the Casino where, seeing that I was pursued by good fortune - I had been making the bets over her shoulder - she began to lay her tokens alongside mine. If I gained that afternoon more than three hundred pounds, perhaps she gained nearly a hundred, and at that point she stopped me, counselling prudence. I am certain there was no thought of seduction in her mind. It is true that she invited me to have tea with her at the hotel, but she had seen through my disguise better than the officials of the Casino, and on the steps she turned to me like a fellow-conspirator and whispered, 'How did you get in?' I was no more to her, I am sure, at that moment than an adventurous child who had amused her.