I promise nothing.
We only want to ask her a few questions, Sergeant Sparrow said. Theres no charge against her.
Im glad to hear it.
It is even possible, Inspector Woodrow said, that she might be in serious personal danger. From her unfortunate associations.
Particularly from that viper Visconti, Sergeant Sparrow chimed in.
We only want to ask her a few questions, Sergeant Sparrow said. Theres no charge against her.
Im glad to hear it.
It is even possible, Inspector Woodrow said, that she might be in serious personal danger. From her unfortunate associations.
Particularly from that viper Visconti, Sergeant Sparrow chimed in.
Why do you keep on calling him a viper?
Sergeant Sparrow said, Its the only description Interpol has given us. They havent so much as a passport photo. But he was once described as a viper by the Chief of Police in Rome in 1945. All their war records were destroyed, the chiefs dead, and we dont know now whether viper was a physical description or what you might call a moral judgement.
At least, the inspector said, we now have a postcard from Panama.
Its something for the files, Detective-Sergeant Sparrow explained to me.
When I double-locked the door and followed them, I was left with the sad impression that my aunt might be dead and the most interesting part of my life might be over. I had waited a long while for it to arrive, and it had not lasted very long.
Part II
Chapter 1
While the ship was tugged out into the yellow tidal rush and the untidy skyscrapers and the castellated customs house jerked away, as though they rather than the ship were at the end of the rope, I thought of that distant days depression and of how wrong my fears had proved. It was eight on a July morning and the sea-birds wailed like the cats in Latimer Road and the clouds were heavy with coming rain. There was one break of sunlight over La Plata which gave the dull river a single silver streak, but the brightest spot in the sombre scape of water and shore was the flames from gas pipes flapping against the black sky. There were four days ahead of me, up the Plata, the Parana and the Paraguay, before I joined my aunt, and I left the Argentine winter for my overheated cabin and began to hang up my clothes and arrange my books and papers into a semblance of home.
More than half a year passed after my encounter with the detectives before I received any news of my aunt. I had become convinced of her death by that time, and once in a dream I was badly frightened by a creature crawling across the floor towards me with broken legs which swung like a snakes tail. It was going to pull me down within reach of its teeth, and I was paralysed with terror like a bird before a snake. When I woke I remembered Mr. Visconti, though I believe it is a cobra and not a viper which is supposed to paralyse birds.
During that empty time I received one more letter from Miss Keene. She wrote in her own hand, for a clumsy servant had broken the keyboard of her typewriter. I was just going to write, she said, how stupid and clumsy these blacks are, and then I remembered how you and my father had discussed racialism one night at dinner and I felt as though I were betraying our old house in Southwood and the companionship of those days. Sometimes I fear that I am going to be quite assimilated. In Koffiefontein the Prime Minister no longer seems the monster we thought him at home: indeed hes criticized here sometimes as an old-fashioned liberal. I find myself when I meet a tourist from England explaining apartheid so convincingly. I dont want to be assimilated, and yet if I am to make my life here The broken sentence sounded like an appeal which she was too shy to make clear. There followed the gossip of the farm: a dinner party to neighbours who lived more than a hundred miles away, and then one paragraph which I found a little disturbing: I have met a Mr. Hughes, a land surveyor, and he wants to marry me (please dont laugh at me). He is a kind man in his late fifties, a widower with a teen-age daughter whom I like well enough. I dont know what to do. It would be the final assimilation, wouldnt it? Ive always had a silly dream of one day coming back to Southwood and finding the old house empty (how I miss that dark rhododendron walk) and beginning my life all over again. I am afraid of talking to anyone here about Mr. Hughes they would all be too encouraging. I wish you were not so far away, for I know you would counsel me wisely.
Was I wrong to read an appeal in that last sentence, a desperate appeal in spite of its calm wording, an appeal for some decisive telegram come back to Southwood and marry me? Who knows whether I might not have sent one in my loneliness if a letter had not arrived which drove poor Miss Keene right out of my mind?
It was from my aunt, written on stiff aristocratic notepaper bearing simply a scarlet rose and the name Lancaster with no address, like the title of a noble family. Only when I read a little way into the letter did I realize that Lancaster was the name of an hotel. My aunt made no appeal; she simply issued a command, and there was no explanation of her long silence. I have decided, she wrote, not to return to Europe and I am giving up my apartment over the Crown and Anchor at the end of the next quarter. I would be glad if you would pack what clothes there may be there and dispose of all the furniture. On second thoughts, however, keep the photograph of Freetown harbour for me as a memento of dear Wordsworth and bring it with you. (She had not even told me where to come at that point of the letter or asked me if it were possible.) Preserve it in its frame, which has great sentimental value because it was given me by Mr. V. I enclose a cheque on my account at the Credit Suisse, Berne[234], which will be sufficient for a first-class ticket to Buenos Aires. Come as soon as you can, for I get no younger. I do not suffer from gout like an old friend whom I met the other day on a packet boat, but I feel nonetheless a certain stiffness in the joints. I want very much to have with me a member of my family whom I can trust in this rather bizarre country, not the less bizarre for having a shop called Harrods[235] round the corner from the hotel, though it is less well stocked, I fear, than in the Brompton Road.