Olura (28 page)

Beyond uttering each other’s names I doubt if we ever spoke. We clung together like the two last seals on earth, herded up by nature to reproduce from desolation a happiness of the sea.
How did you get here? How did you know?
—I believe that some time I must have asked those questions and received some incoherent reply of Elena and the stars. But speech has so little
to do with ecstasy.

‘Take me to the Ermita, Philip,’ she said at last. ‘I couldn’t find a place to land.’

It was only then that I realised there might not be one. Something of the sort had passed through my head before I dived in, but that had been no moment for caution. Together we swam to the
landing rock, keeping such close contact that often we went under and rose laughing. A sensuous journey, easier for furry flanks and pulsing tails. But perhaps seals cannot laugh.

No lonely swimmer could ever get ashore unhurt on the Ermita except in dead calm and at the top of a spring tide. The landing rock, falling sheer to deep water and the restless Atlantic, was out
of reach. But we felt absurdly sure that two could do what one could not, and we were right. Round to the south we explored a dark fissure, sheltered from the direct battering of the waves, where a
patch of foam-flecked water heaved sullenly up and down. I hung on to the weed while Olura stood on my shoulders and pulled herself up to a wide ledge. From there two long legs with frog flippers
on the end of them—which I had not even noticed before—came down to me, and we were on the Ermita.

I led her to such hospitality as I could offer—a dry and filthy coat, the heather and Allarte’s gift of wine. We kept each other warm as she told her story.

She said that on the night I was in the house she herself had been at the inn, taking a late supper after driving her godfather as far as the frontier. She was not allowed to cross it, but
otherwise was free to do what she pleased. In the middle of her lonely meal she felt a sudden compulsion to run back to the villa and turn off the light over the front door. She reminded herself
firmly that she couldn’t turn it off. It had been burning day and night since Friday.

Feeling more desolate than usual, she had sought out Elena for the inarticulate warmth of her comfort and together they had gone up to her former room. While looking out into the night they had
seen, as they thought, one of Allarte’s crew go aboard by swimming. At the sight of such masculine folly they stopped crying and cheered up. There was nothing out of character in a Basque
fisherman, after a heavy evening’s drinking, impulsively taking a swim with all his clothes on to clear his head. Elena accepted it quite naturally, described by vivid gestures the quirks of
the indomitable drunks of her country and merely remarked that she hoped he had a warm sweater on board.

When Olura returned to the villa, the Pair were in possession and insisting that somebody had been in the house. She replied that the fellow who claimed to have seen her in the garden must have
seen her ghost, for she was always in two places at once. She giggled happily in my arms remembering her effort to express this obscure thought first in pidgin Spanish, then in French which one of
the Pair vaguely understood.

After searching the house and apologising profusely, they tried to mend for her the wayward bulb over the front door, blew the fuse twice and left, promising to order an electrician in the name
of the law to pay Olura a visit. It was clear that they had been enchanted by the English Terrorist.

When they had gone, she found the cloak and put two and two together. Next morning she harried Elena to get hold of Allarte as soon as he returned on the evening tide. The two cornered him in a
private room and wore down his denials by threats and supplications. The threats at any rate worked. He could not stand up to Olura’s bluff when she swore she would tell the police
immediately if he didn’t confess what he had done with me. She must have reduced him to pulp with an obstinate determination to be understood.

Allarte, however, had refused to take her out to the Ermita. Everybody would notice it, he said. Everybody would want to know what he was doing. And the tide was anyway too low to put her
ashore.

That much Elena confirmed, and Olura had to accept it. But she managed to persuade herself that a swimmer could go where a boat could not. Except for a low cave or a very narrow entrance I
cannot imagine such a place, for timber is less breakable than bone. The night was comparatively calm, and a couple of miles in her frog feet were well within her powers.

Horrified by her recklessness, I exclaimed that she could have missed the island altogether in the dark.

‘No, I couldn’t,’ she replied casually. ‘Through all those long nights wondering where you were I had time to notice so much. There was a great star low down on the
horizon which I called yours. And it used to disappear behind the top of the Ermita. So I knew that if I kept the lights of Maya behind me and couldn’t see the star I must reach the
island.’

‘Jupiter,’ I remarked pedantically.

The planet blazing in the north-east sky had been my companion for many lonely hours, but I had not paid much attention to it. My rainbow’s end was the tail of the Milky Way hanging over
Maya in the west.

‘Is it?’ she answered with feminine indifference towards giving a name to something which was too important to need one. ‘Well, I think my navigation was pretty
scientific.’

It was. She had hit the target bang in the centre, below the savage crag on the southern side. Then she had swum round, looking for any place where Allarte could possibly have landed me and
calling out. But since she was so close under the cliffs and out of breath I never heard her until she stubbed her toe on the reef of the whale-back and came out to rest.

‘Does anyone know where you are?’ I asked.

‘Nobody. My godfather went to Paris this morning.’

‘And the police?’

She chuckled happily as if they had suddenly become a mere casual annoyance.

‘I was very careful. If they miss me tomorrow, they’ll think I made another bolt for the frontier.’

I left the details of my own story for next day, for I did not know whether she had heard that I was wanted for murder. I refused to spoil the hours of unity by a description of violence which I
believed was bound to shock and repel her.

The sun was clear of the ocean clouds before we awoke. She sat up and yawned like a newly created Eve, exploring with little-girl eyes her immediate surroundings.

‘What a lovely place!’ she exclaimed.

That certainly was not how I myself would have described the Ermita. After the black water and waving weed of the night, our patch of green probably looked to her eyes more like a sunken alpine
garden than a rock cap pickled in salt and the wind. I said that I might appreciate it more if we had a full picnic basket.

‘It will do you good,’ she retorted. ‘You’ll have time to pay some attention to me.’

That gay, ironical jealousy of a mere thought! I thanked God in all humility that it was I who had worked the change in her—not that I was in any way responsible for her content of joyous
femininity, but at least I had unwrapped the parcel right side up.

However, I was not to see her for the first time in that maternal mood which everyone else—her touchy young Africans, her Group and even Leopold Mgwana—considered the natural
expression of her character. While we lay in the sun and ate the last of Allarte’s sardines, I perceived that she knew far more than I ever suspected and that I had not been as clever as I
thought in avoiding all detail. It was she who had refused to encourage me.

I gave her the whole story of my rash visit to Zarauz and the attempt to remove me. Livetti and his death had to come in. She told me rather distantly and formally how and when she had met him.
I got the impression that after so much cross-examination by an incredulous Gonzalez—and perhaps an incredulous guardian?—the whole episode had become unreal to her.

It was not her fault that she had inspired a muddle-headed decency in the man which had cost him his life, but I feared that, with her readiness to accept guilt, she might think it was. Not a
bit of it! Livetti was a thing in a wheelbarrow, a thing which threatened her lover who could do no wrong, a thing which had led to the humiliating exposure of an intimate and difficult folly. It
was by exaggerating all this resentment, I suspect, that she protected herself from any feeling of responsibility.

When my story arrived at the end of Duyker, it was my turn to be reticent. I skated over the struggle, just saying that I had inevitably knocked him about but that I could not understand what
had caused his death.

‘You drove his false teeth down his threat,’ she said, ‘and he suffocated.’

A macabre and faintly comic end for that bully of the open spaces. Civilisation had caught up with him at last. Olura’s voice had an edge of hysteria. She too must have sensed the contrast
between the man and his death. She pictured, of course, a nasty smack in the mouth, not the savage effect of the sjambok. I did not disillusion her.

‘It was my only weapon,’ I said.

‘But he meant to kill you! And you really fired that shot at your feet?’

‘Well, yes. I had to get away.’

‘You had no right to expose yourself like that! Suppose he had gone on shooting?’

I replied that it was dark and that he was hardly in a state to aim accurately. I was almost apologetic. Don’t women have any constant principles at all? I had expected to be a pariah for
indulging in bestial violence, and there I was being gently rebuked for not killing Duyker when I had the chance and preferring to take a very slight risk with my own life.

‘How do you know so much?’ I asked.

‘Gonzalez. He has been keeping my godfather informed.’

That sounded very hopeful. It might, I said, be impossible ever to prove Vigny’s account of the murder of Livetti, but there could be no doubt that the rest of my story was true. I could
describe the house, the room behind the kitchen, the car, the journey, everything.

‘It’s much worse than that, Philip.’

The car and the body had been discovered in the morning by a passing farmer. When the police got in touch with Vigny, he must have brilliantly played dismay and ignorance. He took the offensive
at once, stating regretfully that I had called at the villa to accuse him of killing Livetti and planting the body in a bathroom window of the Hostal de las Olas. I had apparently persuaded myself
into an
idée fixe
that he was responsible, ever since he and Duyker had happened to pass Miss Manoli’s car on the road. I became excited and violent and even picked up a
vermouth bottle with the intention of smashing General Sauche. Damn him! Of course my fingerprints would have been found on it, and wrong way up.

They were unwilling to cause annoyance and scandal, of which they had had quite enough already, so they put me under temporary restraint and did not send for the police. They even wished me to
have a chance to continue, as they thought, my escape. Very wrong, but it would be understood that they had a sporting sympathy for any fugitive. So Duyker kindly took me up into the mountains and
turned me loose. I must have grabbed some weapon and killed him.

This was appalling. I could not see any answer. It was quite as good a story as the truth. The Algerian would swear whatever he was told to swear. Nobody could ever prove that he was in the car
that night with Duyker.

‘There was just one shot?’ Olura asked.

‘Yes. Why?’

‘I was thinking of Vigny,’ she said vaguely. ‘I saw something. Wait a minute! Yes, what Vigny would believe. It would never occur to him that you wouldn’t take life when
you could.’

Her opinion of me was romantic. If I could have got the muzzle of the revolver to point at Duyker instead of my feet, I am sure I would have tried to pull the trigger. My life was at stake and I
was very frightened.

‘What difference does it make?’

‘It means that Vigny thinks you never had control of the gun, and that Duyker fired the shot. He could have killed you.’

‘No body. No evidence.’

‘Duyker bled all over you. Philip. You left that out. Those revolting clothes of yours over there—you don’t spill wine. Tell me the truth! Wouldn’t the police have found
blood all over the place?’

I admitted reluctantly that it was a common result of deep face wounds.

‘And where you hid to watch the Algerian?’

Plenty. I remember trying to wipe some of it off with leaves.’

‘It would look as if you had been hit.’

‘Not to the police. They don’t know there was any gun.’

She exclaimed against the stupidity of police. It wasn’t them, she said, she was thinking of.

‘It’s Vigny, Philip, Vigny!’ she insisted. ‘He must have been taken by police to look at the ground. I wonder if we couldn’t persuade him that you crawled off to
die.’

I still could not catch up with all these jumps which were more instinct than thought. Justice, police, evidence—one is accustomed to consider crime in those terms. Olura, however,
despised the lot as a sort of game which the participants treated very seriously but had nothing to do with essential truth. Take Civil Disobedience, for example! She would expect her Prebendary
Flanders to be acquitted on the grounds of his excellent character and idealistic motives however many statutory offences he had wilfully committed. Her contempt for the majesty of the law was now
working the other way round. She saw nothing whatever wrong in faking evidence against the guilty.

She was feeling her way to what lay on the other side of the hill through people, not through facts. The maddeningly feminine way of influencing events! Still, she was on to something. Vigny,
puzzling out the Algerian’s report, must indeed find the struggle difficult to reconstruct. If Duyker always retained possession of the gun, why hadn’t he fired again and again? If it
was I who had control of it, why didn’t I kill him while he was still very much alive? Anything might have happened, but certainly the possibility existed that I had been hard hit, not worth
another shot, yet managing to crawl off while Duyker was choking. The police, since they did not know there had been any gun, would not look for my body. And Vigny dared not be caught hunting for
it.