Youre very kind.
You are a friend of Lucinda he said. Katmandu seems a hell of a long way off. Maybe some mail will have come in.
Is she a good correspondent?
She writes me picture postcards, he said. He leant forward on the rail. Isnt that your friend? he asked.
What friend?
I looked at the steerage queue on the gangway and saw Wordsworth.
The man who spoke to you on shore.
I said, All coloured men look very much alike to me at that distance.
Its not often you see an African here, he said. I guess its your friend.
When at last the formalities were over and I stood beside my luggage on the corner of a street named after Benjamin Constant[262], I looked around awhile in vain for Wordsworth. Families exchanged greetings and drove away in cars. The Czech plastics manufacturer offered me a lift in his taxi. A small boy wanted to clean my shoes and another tried to sell me American cigarettes. A long colonnaded street, which sloped uphill in front of me, was full of liquor shops, and old women sat against the wall with baskets of bread and fruit. In spite of the dirt and fumes of old cars, the air was sweet with orange blossom.
Somebody whistled, and I turned to see Wordsworth getting out of a taxi. He lifted my two heavy suitcases as though they were empty cardboard boxes. Ar look for friend, he said, too plenty humbug here. I had never before been driven in quite such a decrepit taxi[263]. The lining was torn and the stuffing leaked out of the seat. Wordsworth punched at it to make it more comfortable. Then he made motions to the driver which the man seemed to understand. We drive aroun a bit, Wordsworth said. Ar wan to see if they lef us alone. He looked out of the window, while the taxi ground and shook. All the other taxis which passed us were smart enough, and sometimes the drivers shouted what I took to be insults to our old man, who had a white moustache and a hat without a crown.
Suppose were not left alone, I said, what do we do?
We tak bloody good care, Wordsworth said vaguely. You seem to have chosen the oldest taxi. Soldiers were goose-stepping[264] in front of the cathedral, and a very early tank stood on a plinth up on the greensward. The orange trees were everywhere, some in fruit and some in blossom. He good friend of mine.
You talk Spanish? I asked.
No. He don know no Spanish.
What does he talk?
He talk Indian lingo.
How do you make him understand?
Ar give him smokes, Wordsworth said. He lak pot. Except for the skyscraper of a new hotel, it was a very Victorian town. One soon ceased to notice the cars they were an anachronism; there were mule carts and sometimes men on horses, there was a little white castellated Baptist church, a college built like a neo-Gothic abbey, and when we reached the residential quarter I saw big stone houses with bosky gardens and pillared porticos above stone steps which reminded me of the oldest part of Southwood, but in Southwood the houses would have been split into flats and the grey stone would have been whitewashed and the roofs would have bristled with television masts. In place of the orange and banana trees, I would have seen neglected rhododendrons and threadbare lawns.
What is the name of my aunts friend, Wordsworth? I asked.
Ar don remember, Wordsworth said. Ar don wanta remember. Ar wanta forget.
A little crumbling house with corinthian pillars and broken windows was called SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE on a board which had been split by the seasons, but, however tumbledown the houses, the flowers were everywhere. A bush of jasmine blossomed with white and blue flowers on the same bush.
We stop here, Wordsworth said and he shook the drivers shoulder.
It was an enormous house with a great untidy lawn which ended in a dark green fuzz of trees, a small wood of banana, orange, lemon, grapefruit, lapacho. On the two sides visible to me through the gates wide stone steps led up to separate entrances. The walls were blotched with lichen and were four stories high.
Its a millionaires house, I said.
You jus wait[265], Wordsworth replied.
The iron gates were rusty and padlocked. Worn pineapples were carved on the gateposts, but the gates, draped with barbed wire, had lost their dignity. A millionaire may once have lived there, I thought, but no longer.
Wordsworth led me round the corner of the street and we approached the house from the back through a little door which he locked behind him and through the grove of sweet-smelling trees and bushes. Hi! he called to the great square block of stone, hi! and got no response. The house in its solidity and its silence reminded me of the great family tombs in the cemetery at Boulogne. This was a journeys end too.
Your auntie she got a bit deaf, Wordsworth said. She no young no more, no more. He spoke regretfully, as though he had known her as a girl, and yet she had been over seventy when she picked him up outside the Grenada Palace. We went up one flight of stone steps and into the hall of the house.
Paved with cracked marble, the big hall was unfurnished. The windows had been shuttered and the only light came from a bare globe in the ceiling. There was no chair, no table, no sofa, no pictures. The one sign of human occupation was a mop which leant against one wall, but it might have been left there a generation ago by someone hired to tidy up after the furniture-removers had departed.