did not reply immediately. She led him into the drawing-room and they both sat down. ‘Would you like tea, Ralph?’
‘Have you caught this appalling English habit of drinking tea all day?’
‘Clients expect it.’
‘And you read the tea-leaves.’
‘You know perfectly well that I do not. Tea relaxes them. The English become far more human when they have a hot cup of tea in their hand.’
‘Do they? I shall bear that in mind,’ said Ralph. ‘You’ll meet Jennifer then?’
His sister and daughter did not enjoy a warm relationship but he knew Serena would not refuse. They had grown up in a warm congenial family atmosphere where they did things for one another. She took a tiny notebook from her handbag and turned it to the appropriate page. ‘I have nothing I cannot rearrange. What time is the plane arriving?’
‘London–Heathrow at five.’
‘Wednesday is not an auspicious day for travelling, Ralph,’ she said.
‘Perhaps not, but we can’t consult you every time anyone wants to go somewhere.’
She sighed.
Ralph said, ‘I wish Jennifer had chosen a college somewhere in the south.’
‘You fuss over her too much, Ralph. She is nineteen. Some women have a family and a job too at that age.’ Serena took a small antique silver case from her handbag and produced a cigarette. She lit it with a series of rapid movements and breathed out the smoke with a sigh of exasperation. ‘You should think of yourself more. You are still young. You should meet people and think about getting married again. Instead you bury yourself in that wretched house in the country and finance every whim your daughter thinks up.’ She extended a hand above her head and flapped it in a curious gesture. Ralph decided that it was an attempt to wave away the smoke.
‘That’s not true, Serena. She never asks for extra money. If I bury myself in the country it’s because I’m in the workshop finishing the portable high-voltage electrophoresis machine. It could save a lot of lives eventually.’ He smiled. ‘And I thought you liked my house.’
‘I do, Ralph.’ He’d discovered the ramshackle clapboard cottage on the Suffolk coast, and purchased it against the advice of everyone, from his sister to his bank manager. It was now a welcoming and attractive home. Ralph had done most of the building work with his own hands.
Sitting here with his sister – so far from the home in which they’d grown up – Ralph Lucas wondered at the way both of them had changed. They had both become English. His sister had embraced the English ways enthusiastically, but for Ralph Lucas change had come slowly. Yet even his resistance and objections to English things had been in the manner that the English themselves rebelled. Nowadays he found himself saying ‘old boy’ and ‘old chap’ and wearing the clothes and doing all kinds of things done by the sort of upper-class English twit he’d once despised. England did this to its admirers and to its enemies.
‘South America,’ said Ralph to break the silence.
‘I knew you’d be crossing the water, Ralph,’ she said.
‘Do you make it three weeks or a month?’ he asked with raised eyebrow.
‘Oh, I know you’ve never believed in me.’
‘Now that’s not true, Serena. I admit you’ve surprised me more than once.’
Encouraged she added, ‘And you will meet someone …’
‘A certain someone? Miss Right?’ He chuckled. She never gave up on arranging a wife for him: a semi-retired tennis champion from California, an Australian stockbroker and a widow with a flashy country club that needed a manager. Her ideas never worked out.
She leaned forward and took his hand. She’d never done anything like that before. For a moment he thought she was going to read his palm but she just held his hand as a lover – or a loving sister – might. He recognized this as a sign of one of her premonitions.
‘Chin up! I’m only teasing, old girl. Don’t be upset. I didn’t mean anything by it.’
‘You must take care of yourself, Ralph. You are all I have.’
He didn’t quite know how to respond to her in this kind of mood. ‘Now! Now! Remember when I came back from Vietnam? Remember admitting the countless times you had seen a vision of me lying dead in the jungle, a gun in my hand and a comrade at my side?’
She nodded but continued to stare down at their clasped hands for a long time, as if imprinting something on to her memory. Then she looked up and smiled at him. It was better to say no more.
4
TEPILO, SPANISH GUIANA. ‘A Yankee newspaper.’
Ralph Lucas did not much like flying and he detested airlines and everything connected with them. He dreaded the plastic smiles and reheated food, their ghastly blurred movies, their condescending manner and second-rate service. He had not enjoyed his ‘first-class’ transatlantic flight from London to Caracas via New York. Waiting at Caracas, he was not pleased to hear that the connecting flight to Tepilo was going to be even more uncomfortable. After a long delay he flew onwards in a ten-seater Fokker which had República Internacional painted shakily on the side. He shared the passenger compartment with six old men in deep mourning and six huge wreaths.
The flight was long and tedious. He looked down at the fever-racked coastal plain and the shark-infested ocean and remembered the joke about President de Gaulle choosing France’s missile launching site in nearby French Guiana. It was not sited there because at the Equator the spinning earth would provide extra thrust, but because ‘If you are a missile there, you’d go anywhere.’
Neither the runway nor the electronics at Tepilo airport were suited to big jets. A Boeing 707 with a bold pilot could get in on a clear day; and out provided it was judiciously loaded for take-off. Such an aviator had brought in an ancient Portuguese 707 that Lucas saw unloading cases of champagne and brandy into the bonded warehouse as he landed. There were other planes there: some privately owned Moranes, Cessnas and a beautifully painted Learjet Longhorn 55 that was owned by the American ambassador. There was a hut with ‘Aereo-Club’ on its tin roof so that visiting pilots would see it. Now alas, windows broken, it was strangled under weeds.
The main airport building – like the sole remaining steel-framed hangar – provided nostalgic recognition to passengers who had encountered the US Army Air Forces in World War Two. Little changed, these were the temporary buildings that the Americans had erected here, alongside this same runway, and the subterranean fuel store. Tepilo (or Clarence Johnson field as it was then named) was built as an emergency landing field for bombers being ferried to Europe by the southern route.
Upon emerging from immigration, Lucas looked round. The mourners with whom he’d travelled were being greeted by a dozen equally doleful men clutching orchids. All of them were dressed in three-piece black suits and shiny boots. Stoically enduring the stifling heat was an aspect of their tribute. All the airport benches – and the floor around them – were occupied by families of Indians in carefully laundered shirts and pants, and colourful cotton dresses. Their wide-eyed faces, and their hands, revealed that they were agricultural workers on a rare visit to the big city. Most of them were guarding their shopping: some pairs of shoes, a tyre, a doll and, for one excited little boy, a battery-powered toy bulldozer.
‘Mr Lucas?’
‘Yes, that’s me.’
She smiled at his obvious discomposure. ‘My name is Inez Cassidy. I am directed to take care of you.’
Lucas couldn’t conceal his surprise. It wasn’t just that the MAMista contact proved to be female that disconcerted him, it was that she was not at all the type he expected. She was slim and dark, her complexion set off by the shade of her brown shirt-style dress, whose simplicity belied its price. She wore pearls