‘Mary?’
She had locked her hands together on the table before her but found herself still unable to prevent her arms and shoulders from trembling.
‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ Cy said. ‘You seem to have the deciding vote.’
Her heart was thumping outrageously, worse even than when he was on top of her, inside her. She brushed the intrusive image away with an impatient movement of her hand, which Mrs Rose interpreted as being aimed at Cy.
‘Give me a moment,’ Mary said. She knew perfectly well that a month ago she would have voted with Colonel Savary. She had never felt comfortable with so much donated money being used as it had been. ‘This is, I suppose,’ she said carefully, ‘an opportunity to review the situation.’
‘I’m sorry, Mary. We’re taking the vote. For or against?’ Cy’s voice was soft, insistent, not pleading, though Mary knew that if she voted with Savary it would be the end of Cy’s presidency.
‘In favour,’ she said with a rush of colour to her cheeks. ‘I vote for Cy’s proposal.’
Mrs Rose sideglanced her almost savagely. Colonel Savary closed the folder before him with an air of finality. Cy rose from his place. His eye caught Mary’s for the briefest moment. ‘The proposal is carried,’ he said. He turned his attention to George Savary, fighting to keep the triumph from his voice. ‘I think I can speak for all of us when I say we’re sorry to lose you, George.’
Savary lifted his eyes to Cy. His jaw was set. ‘I’m not resigning, Mr President.’
‘Perhaps I misunderstood,’ Cy said. ‘I thought you spoke of a resignation issue.’
‘I did.’ Savary’s lips were set. ‘But when I spoke of a resignation I meant yours. Not mine.’
‘You’re staying on despite your disagreement with trust policy?’
‘Because of it,’ Savary said. ‘I see it as my duty to fight you on this.’
‘Even though the majority of this committee is clearly against you?’
‘A majority of one.’ Savary looked at Mary and then back to Cy. ‘I understand that Philip Rose’s original constitution laid down an annual election for president.’
‘It did,’ Mrs Rose said firmly.
‘And this clause has been adhered to?’ Savary asked, his glance passing round the table.
Oliver Digweed cleared his throat. ‘I think I can honestly answer yes to that question. Since Cy became president it’s true that the annual vote passed on the nod, so to speak. But at each Christmas Eve meeting it has been a recorded vote.’
‘I see,’ Savary said slowly. ‘Christmas Eve you say.’
‘What are you getting at?’ Cy said.
‘I’m simply giving fair warning that at this coming Christmas meeting, the election for president will not pass through on the nod.’
Cy sat back. ‘Frankly, colonel, I would have said the honourable move would have been to step down.’
Savary’s face was white. ‘I suspected for some time, Mr Stevenson,’ he said, ‘that you and I are likely to disagree on what the honourable move might be. I repeat, I don’t plan to step out of the ring. I’m going to persuade the trustees here today that your policy is deeply wrong. And at the Christmas election I’m going to call for your resignation.’ He paused. ‘And furthermore I think I’m going to get it.’
Chapter Nineteen
‘Aspirin and boiled water,’ the French priest said. ‘Not an extensive armoury with which to fight disease, but it’s all we have.’
‘Did you train in Paris?’ Max asked him.
‘As a priest. Not as a doctor. But I’m tolerated here for the little hit and miss medical knowledge I’ve acquired along the way.’ In the bright second-floor room cooled by a slowly moving wooden ceiling fan, Max lay back in clean rough linen sheets, his head slowly clearing. As the priest moved towards the door, he raised himself on his elbow.
‘When I get back to London, is there anything I can send you?’ The priest shook his head. ‘Nothing that would reach me. All modern medical supplies are allocated to the military. And to our masters.’ He crossed to the side of the bed and held out his hand. ‘I have to go up-country tomorrow. Goodbye, Mr Benning.’
‘Thank you again for what you’ve done, Father.’ Max shook his hand.
The priest smiled down at him. ‘In such fevers,’ he said, ‘nursing assumes more importance than the efforts of a priest turned doctor.’
The fever was now subsiding as quickly as it had come upon him. When the priest left Max pulled himself up in the wide iron bed. Feeling his cheeks and forehead for a feverish dampness he found his skin now dry and cool. He got out of bed and opened the briefcase Hal Bolson had brought across from the hotel. He registered that the case seemed unusually heavy and that his legs shook. But his head felt steady, his mind clear.
He considered for a moment going across to the courtroom for the sentencing. Bolson had said it would probably consist of a two-or three-hour abject plea from Quatch before he received the court’s judgement. Most likely, the newsmen thought, a long spell in a hard labour reconstruction camp. Or death.
Max sat on the side of his bed and thought about opening the briefcase of notes. But the wave of fatigue that came across him was dissuasive enough. Changing his mind he swung his legs back on to the bed.
He awoke from a deep sleep to hear the commotion out on the square. Voices in English were raised; angry Vietnamese voices rose above them.
Max pulled back the sheet and stood up beside the bed. His cotton pyjamas were dry and his face cool. But the earlier weakness in the legs was still there. He felt, somehow, always on the edge of another surge of fever.
He stepped forward two or three paces and stood by the long open window. Below in the square Vietnamese police, thirty or forty of them, were holding back the newsmen. Among shouts of outrage the Westerners were trying to push close enough to the courtroom doors to point their cameras.
Running footsteps along the stone corridor outside made Max turn from the window. Before the door burst open he knew it was Nan Luc. She stopped just inside the door, tears streaming down her face. Then she moved quickly across to the window and looked down.
‘Nan, what is it for God’s sake?’
She was trembling as violently as he had been earlier. She pointed down to the courtroom steps. Quatch was emerging from the darkened hall.
‘The court,’ Nan Luc hissed in hatred, ‘have found Quatch not guilty.’
Chapter Twenty
She was ashamed to be so utterly inexperienced, so utterly inhibited in her lovemaking.
‘The East,’ Cy said, ‘takes these things seriously. They see nothing wrong with the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake.’ The day after the Meyerick Fund meeting they had lunched together on the covered terrace behind Cy’s house. Sunny, gardener, and their new maid Mrs Hammet were away all day, Cy assured Mary.
She had drunk a lot. A lot for her, perhaps the best part of a whole bottle of champagne. In the warm sunlight they had danced on the terrace and kissed and fondled until he drew her by the hand, into the house and up the stairs.
She had no qualms about rolling half naked on Sunny’s bed. All that was far behind her now. After only two or three sessions of lovemaking she had come to realise she had fewer and fewer qualms about anything.
Did she love him? Not uncritically, she told herself. She was still aware of something almost piratical about him, something far from her own, and Meyerick County’s, way of looking at the world.
‘Relax,’ he was whispering, ‘relax and enjoy it.’ He was kneeling over her, pressing himself forward.
‘I’ve never, never in my life…’