Saturn Over the Water Read online

  ‘I’d like to try, though I’ve only brought sketching stuff – gouaches.’

  ‘We have everything you could require here – canvases, boards, easels, brushes and paint of every kind. My granddaughter is here with me – she has been studying to paint in Paris – and she has ordered for herself everything a painter – or several painters – could require. You will not meet her until tonight. She has gone for the day – to paint – also, I am afraid, to swim in the sea – though she knows it is dangerous. I had hoped to show you some of her work. I should like your truthful opinion of it. But she has locked the door of her studio. Tomorrow perhaps. Ah – luncheon is ready for us. I must go and sit down. Dr Guevara,’ he called, ‘please make Mr Bedford known to our other guests.’

  Dr Guevara was a tall thin Latin American who peered dubiously through thick glasses. He was the director of the Institute. He handed me over to a swarthy and energetic fellow of about my own age, called Ribera, who was secretary of the Institute, really its chief administrator on the non-scientific side. He introduced me to Dr Soultz, the director of personnel, who was of course the man who replied to Isabel’s letter about Joe. Far away in Cambridge I’d guessed he was a cold fish. Now I knew I’d been right. He was a thick slab of middle-aged manhood but with a pinched nose and mouth and pale eyes, about the shade of melting snow. He and a smaller and darker type, who was introduced as Dr Schneider without any mention of what he did there, were equally hard to place; they might have been German, they might have been French, or perhaps they were both Alsatians; and they both spoke English very well but as if they disliked it. There were also three or even four other men whose names and faces I’ve forgotten now. I know they all worked at the Institute, and that I was the only guest from outside. Every Thursday morning, I was told, there was some kind of Institute meeting, presided over by Arnaldos, and all these men were lunching here because they’d attended the meeting.

  Because I was his own guest, I suppose, Arnaldos put me on his right, told me about the Institute, mostly repeating what I’d already heard in Lima, and then, when we were about half way through, asked me to excuse him because he had business to discuss with Dr Guevara, the director, sitting on his other side. That left me with Soultz, who was on my right.

  ‘You had heard of our Institute in London, Mr Bedford?’

  ‘Something. Not much,’ I said, thinking hard. ‘The brother of a man I know, a club acquaintance, came here.’

  ‘An Englishman, of course?’

  ‘Yes – and some kind of scientist.’ I was so casual I was hardly alive. It wouldn’t have taken in Mitchell.

  This offered Soultz a good chance to drop the subject. But he pressed on, making me wonder if he was up to anything. ‘So! An English scientist? Perhaps it was a man called Farne.’

  I had another sip of the Chilean white wine, and hoped I didn’t do it shakily. ‘Very pleasant, this Chilean wine,’ I said, perhaps coolly and perhaps not. ‘His name couldn’t have been Farne, because his brother, the one I know at my club, is called Semple.’ And I was turning to look at him as I brought out the name.

  I don’t suppose Soultz’s face had shown anything like real surprise since about 1937. Nevertheless, I knew I’d caught him off guard for just a second. ‘Ah – yes – of course – Semple, the physicist. One of our few bad mistakes, I’m afraid. You knew what happened to him, Mr Bedford?’

  ‘All I know is that his wife took him back to London, that a Dr Magorious treated him, and that he killed himself.’ I thought that if I put it brutally like that, I might shake Soultz again. I was wrong.

  ‘Yes, it was very sad,’ he said smoothly. ‘And we must accept some of the blame. His appointment here was made too hastily, and we should have sent him back at once. Dr Schneider, who is head of our medical section, was doubtful from the first, but we took no action. Semple was suffering from a deep neurosis – possibly a psychosis – and when his wife came out here, she did not improve matters for him. You know Mrs Semple?’

  ‘I met her just once,’ I said, as if I could hardly remember the occasion. ‘Queer woman, I thought.’

  ‘Quite so. Highly neurotic also. She made him worse, as Dr Schneider will tell you, so he had to go. Afterwards we had a sad report on him from Dr Magorious, who had been treating him at the request of the Institute.’

  ‘You know Dr Magorious?’

  ‘Not well,’ said Soultz. ‘You will have some fruit, Mr Bedford? It has been grown here at Uramba, where fifteen years ago there was only a desert. I had only one meeting with Dr Magorious, and that was in New York a few years ago.’

  We ate some fruit. Then I chanced it. ‘What about this other Englishman – what’s his name – Farne? Is he still here? If so, he might like to look me up and have a chat.’

  ‘No, he left the Institute, by mutual agreement, last year. He is a bio-chemist, and though he came to us from a famous research laboratory, at Cambridge, Dr Guevara was not satisfied with the work he was doing here, and we did not find him very co-operative. He had had some domestic difficulties, I believe. When he left us, he did not tell us where he was going and never wrote afterwards. Farne and Semple are the only two English scientists we have had here, Mr Bedford, and we have not been fortunate in our choice, as you see. But Dr Magorious, in a letter he wrote not long ago to Dr Schneider, stated his belief that the English national character has suffered a complete change during the last ten years or so. He is preparing a monograph on the subject. It should be extremely interesting.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Dr Soultz.’ I was getting a bit tired of him by this time. ‘I’m just a painter.’

  ‘And you think you will find some promising subjects for pictures here at the Institute?’

  ‘Frankly, no. Though I hope to do a sketch of it. What fascinates me is this desert running into the sea.’

  And to prove it I asked to be excused from a tour of the place that afternoon, so that I could go off and try my hand at the wild stuff. The conditions were terrible. Just carrying my knapsack of paints, brushes, water, and a biggish sketching board with a supply of dark David Cox paper, only a mile or so, was murderous. I was dissolving into sweat before I started work. The gouache paint hardened so fast under that sun, becoming unworkable within half a minute, that soon I had to use it straight from the tubes. I was thirsty as hell and hadn’t brought anything to drink. But I’d a wonderful afternoon. Above the changing water, the hard stretches of foreshore, the burning cliffs and mountains, the sky worked miracles for me. Just after I began, low clouds that seemed to be made of rose and ochre dust blotted out the distant peaks, but the sky above and beyond them ranged from the purest manganese blue to the palest emerald green; and then later, when I was doing the last of my three sketches, great angry clouds, dark lilac and violet, went sweeping up, above cliffs that still caught the sun and were orange and scarlet lake. All that was puzzled and suspicious and angry in me went out to meet, and then lose itself in, this prismatic panorama of sea and rock and air. I worked like a demon but didn’t feel like one. When I packed up, the afternoon dying all round me, I felt better than I’d done at any time since I’d sat by poor Isabel’s bedside.

  The way I went back took me through what there was of Uramba village, and as I was too dry even to talk to myself I called at a place that was a half-hearted mixture of drink shop and bar. A fat woman served me with a beer. It was already dark in there and the lights they had turned on weren’t bright. Somewhere at the back a radio or an old gramophone seemed to be grinding out one of those too-yearning Spanish love songs. Out of a group that I never took in properly a young man came uncertainly across to me at the counter. He had sun-bleached yellow hair, with a beard that wasn’t as successful, a foolish face, and a shirt and pair of pants that were too far gone even for a jazz festival.

  ‘You English?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yeh. Only one round here. How’d you like to stand me a pisco? I’m broke, chum.’ He was one
of those sad types who want to be bouncy and tough and can never quite make it. I told him to go ahead and order what he wanted and I’d have another beer. The fat woman, who’d been looking sourly at him, brought a tumbler half-filled with neat spirit, and he drank most of it, strong raw stuff, at one shuddering go. If he wasn’t a complete alcoholic, he was well on his way.

  ‘Name’s Freece. Percy Freece. Live in Acton when I’m at home.’ Putting his speech down like this is flattering him, because he didn’t bother much about consonants, just puking his words out, and he wasn’t easy to understand. ‘What about you, chum?’

  I told him who and what I was, and where I was staying.

  ‘All bloody posh!’ This was a sneer. He finished his drink, then pushed his silly face at me. ‘I don’t think another of these would break you, would it, chum?’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t, Freece. But it doesn’t mean you’ve only got to ask like that. And don’t breathe on me – I don’t like it. Stand back.’

  ‘Oo – sorry, mister!’ He was abject now. ‘Had a run of bad luck just lately – nothing come right, honest. I need another of these if you could manage it.’

  So I bought him another hefty dose, and he began telling me how he’d been a wireless operator on a ship that called at Callao, where he’d gone on a blind with a girl he’d picked up, and his ship had sailed without him. After hanging about in Lima, he’d managed to get himself a job – how he didn’t say – at the Institute, but then he’d started drinking hard again and had been fired. Since then he’d just managed to keep himself alive doing odd jobs at the little radio shop round the corner. This didn’t come out as a straight narrative but in bits and pieces and with mysterious blanks here and there, hints at extraordinary adventures, the way fellows like him always tell their tales. I cut him short finally because now I was beginning to feel stiff and chilly after all that sweating. He didn’t ask me for any money, as I’d expected him to, so I pushed some sols or whatever they were into his hand. ‘Find me in here most nights,’ he said. ‘Glad any time to have a natter. An’ you haven’t heard nothing yet, chum. Get me started and I could tell you a thing or two about this bloody Institute that’ud surprise you – honest, I could.’

  As I lumbered up the hill to the big house, feeling tired as well as stiff, I dismissed Percy Freece as one of the most useless characters I’d met for some time. Unlike so many people, I’ve often been wrong, and I was wrong again then about Freece.

  In the entrance hall of the house, not very well lit by some adapted old hanging lamps, a dark and glowering girl seemed to be waiting for me not very patiently. ‘You’re Mr Bedford, aren’t you? I’m Rosalia Arnaldos.’ She had a slight American accent. ‘Would you care for a drink?’

  ‘No, thank you, Miss Arnaldos. What I need now is a bath and a change of clothes.’

  ‘I believe you. Well, there’ll be cocktails along there about eight. My grandfather asked me to tell you. Dinner about half-past eight.’

  That was all. I’d obviously been out sketching, but she didn’t care. I couldn’t catch even the beginning of a smile. I began to see what Mrs Candamo had meant. However, some kind soul, a long way removed from Rosalia, had put a bottle of Scotch in my room, and I took an inch of it neat while my bath was filling, and then felt better. While I was lying in the bath, with plenty of time to spare, I had a last long look at the copy of Joe Farne’s list, until I found I’d memorised it. And now, with the typist’s additions, I knew it like this: Gen. Giddings – V. Melnikov – von Emmerich – Steglitz – Magorious – Slatina – Merlan-Smith – Old Astrologer on the mountain? – Osparas and Emerald L. – Charoke, Vic.? – Blue Mtns? – high back Brisbane? – Semple, Rother, Barsac? – fig. 8 above wavy l. – Why Sat.? Before I got dressed I tore the list into small pieces and flushed it down the lav. Nobody was going to steal that one. Then after I was dressed, suddenly going into a panic, I had to test my memory again, but found I could rattle off the whole meaningless thing with ease. Not that I believed by this time that it really was meaningless – after all, I’d met three of them in London, and one, von Emmerick, in America, already, and I knew something about two more, Semple and Giddings – but of course all of it from Old Astrologer on the mountain? to Why Sat.? still seemed as whacky as it had done on the train from Cambridge.

  In the far corner of the long sitting-room, where some fine old Indian pots in black and red and yellow were on display, I found Rosalia alone with the drinks. The lighting was better than it had been in the hall and she had tidied herself up a bit, though she hadn’t worked very hard at it. The general effect was still dark, for her hair was almost black and so were her rather thick straight eyebrows, and her face, neck and arms were deeply tanned. She was wearing a very dark red dress. But to my surprise and pleasure, her eyes, when she finally let me see them properly, turned out not to be black or brown but a deep blue, somewhere between ultramarine and indigo. She had a rather broad face, with plenty of mouth and not much nose, and was a squarely-built girl, not bony and not lumpy but too substantial to be taken on anywhere as a model. She didn’t really look very bad-tempered but she still seemed to be sulking and glowering.

  However, she asked me what I would have, and when I mentioned a dry martini, she asked me not unpleasantly if I’d make it myself. ‘There are only four of us for dinner. Grandfather has another guest, and he warned me they wouldn’t be down before half-past. I don’t like him – the guest, I mean.’

  There were several replies to that, but I preferred to say nothing. I turned and raised my glass, gave her what I hoped was a smile though it was probably a grin, and tried my martini, finding it excellent. But I still said nothing.

  This produced an outburst. ‘Why did you come here – to pass judgment on my pictures – to tell my grandfather whether I could paint or not?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘Miss Arnaldos, I never even knew of your existence before this morning.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said angrily.

  I went across to the table and took a few nuts, ate one or two and examined the Indian pots. After a few moments she was asking the back of my neck if I was always so bad-mannered.

  As I stepped round, she stepped back, still angry. ‘You said you didn’t believe me,’ I said. ‘That means you think I’m lying. Well then, there’s no point in our going on with this conversation. However, I’ll have one more try. I know an art dealer in New York called Sam Harnberg – I was staying with him this last week-end – and he wrote to Mr Arnaldos telling him I was coming to Peru. So your grandfather asked me to stay here for a few days.’

  ‘If that’s true, I still don’t understand it,’ she said, not glowering but looking at me very doubtfully. ‘Why did you accept his invitation? Did you think you could sell him some pictures?’

  ‘I can always do with some money,’ I said, trying not to lose my temper, ‘but I haven’t started hawking my pictures yet. Not many reputable painters do, y’know. You could have found that out in Paris and New York – ’

  ‘Oh – stop being sarcastic. It’s so boring – and old.’

  ‘I’ll bet. Well, you go on just being exciting and young. And please could I make myself another martini?’

  ‘Yes – and make me one too.’ It wasn’t a request, it was an order. I looked at her, and if my look didn’t tell her I thought she was a sulky spoilt rich girl, then it wasn’t doing its work. She frowned, then turned away. By the time I had poured out the martinis for us, Arnaldos had arrived with his other guest.

  ‘I am sorry if we have kept you waiting,’ the old man said. ‘Mr Bedford – Dr Steglitz.’

  I don’t think I actually jumped at the sound of the fourth name on the list. Probably I just stared like an idiot. But perhaps Dr Steglitz was used to it. He looked like the original of all eggheads. He was Humpty-Dumpty after being out in the sun a long time. He had an enormous brown bald head, a body both long and fat, and short bowed legs. H
is English was very fluent but it had an odd accent that didn’t seem to have come from anywhere I’d been. Rosalia was polite to him, making an effort for her grandfather’s sake, but it was obvious she disliked him even more than she disliked me.

  ‘So this is how it is,’ Steglitz began, after we’d sat down to dinner. It was his favourite phrase. ‘Mr Bedford, you are an artist – a painter – like our pretty Rosalia here.’ She looked at him in disgust. ‘And so you paint for us your inner world. But what do you show us? Ah – yes, this excellent fish you have here – I have not forgotten it, you see, Mr Arnaldos.’ He took what seemed to me more than his share. Then he turned his attention to me again. ‘I say, what do you show us? Disaster and disintegration, fear and horror. You offer us in paint what the poets and novelists and dramatists offer us in words. No faith, no hope, the end of our species. So this is how it is. You agree, Mr Arnaldos? But of course you do. We live in a world, Mr Bedford, where everything is being adulterated, watered down, falsified, to please the foolish masses – and the few who do not belong to these masses – the artists – can only show us the terror and despair of their inner world, which has already faced destruction, the ruin of all mankind’s belief and hope. So there we are, Mr Bedford – and you too, Rosalia, if you are not tired of hearing me talk – and what can you offer us – to bring us even a little satisfaction, a glimpse of beauty and joy, new insight? Very little, I am afraid. And that is how it is.’ He emptied his glass of white wine. Arnaldos looked at him with almost affectionate approval. When I turned my head I saw that Rosalia was looking at me, as if she expected me to say something.

  ‘I know what you mean, Dr Steglitz,’ I said, ‘though I don’t have to agree with you. Obviously you don’t know my work – why should you? – so I must ask you to believe me when I say it isn’t quite like that. I try to make it a kind of bridge between what I see outside and what I feel inside. And what’s inside isn’t always screaming with horror.’ I didn’t look at her but I knew Rosalia was still staring at me, though of course by this time it might be in disgust.