The Sons of Adam (38 page)

‘Good Lord, haven’t we been through this?’

‘Goddamn boiler not wanting any more down,’ said Ahmed helpfully. ‘Lousy useless damn-fool bugger.’

‘Down,’ said Alan decisively. ‘George, look up at the flags there. What do you see?’

‘I see an oilfield at eleven hundred to two thousand feet in depth. There’s no sense in going deeper.’

Alan nodded. ‘That’s what I’ve always seen too. That’s why I was so sure we had to move the well. But maybe we’ve been seeing the wrong thing all along. Maybe the valley is giving us the clue we need and we’ve been too blind to see it.’

Reynolds grunted. He didn’t like detective novels. He didn’t see that there were any two ways about it.

Alan used his flatbread to point at the left-handmost flag. ‘That flag is at least four miles from us and I got a real whiff of oil from that site.’ Then he pointed right, far up the valley. The line of calico flags tapered out of sight as the valley curved. ‘That way, the field stretches for another three miles at least. I imagine the field goes further still, I just couldn’t get to it because of rockfalls from higher up.’

Reynolds nodded. This was baby stuff. He knew it all.

‘So what do you see? What are the flags telling us?’ Alan asked.

‘That there’s an oilfield between eleven hundred –’

‘But what size of oilfield? Big or small?’

‘Lord’s sake, lad, if we ever hit the damn thing, it’ll be enormous. What, seven miles long, by Lord knows how many wide! I didn’t leave a comfortable berth in London just to find any old tiddler.’

Alan nodded. ‘Pre
cise
ly. Ex
act
ly. The field – if it exists – is enormous. It shouldn’t make a blind bit of difference where we stick our well. If there’s oil here at all, it’s beneath our feet right now.’

He spoke in a voice of absolute authority. It was a voice he’d acquired as a leader of men on the battlefields of France and Flanders. Nobody who’d ever heard him use that tone had disagreed. Nobody was going to today. Alan took another bite of his flatbread and tossed the rest aside.

‘We go on down.’

How many times and with how many women had Tom had sex in his life?

He didn’t know. The answer was a lot, of course, but he’d always felt it would be contemptible, ungentlemanly in him to count.

His first girl had been Susan Risinghurst, an apple-cheeked farmer’s daughter in Whitcombe. His most regular lover had been Laura Cole, a shop girl that he’d become close to in London before the war. His first foreign conquest had been a French woman, Amélie, about whom he remembered virtually nothing. His most disastrous one had been with Alan’s Lisette, that awful August morning in Saint Tess.

But of all the pretty, laughing, dimpled crew, there was only one girl who regularly entered Tom’s dreams at night and his imagination during the day. Only one: and one of the very few that Tom had never even tried to have sex with.

Rebecca.

He couldn’t get her out of his head. He loathed the thought of her profession. He remembered being infuriated by her intense stare and intrusive questions. What was more, to put the matter at its very lowest, he wasn’t even sure he found her attractive: with her narrow chest, overdefinite nose, and deep-set eyes.

But that wasn’t the point. The simple fact was that he couldn’t get her out of his head. One day in early spring, he handed the well over to the Duster, walked down to the railroad depot and caught a train out to Wyoming.

He was determined to find her. It felt nearly as important as finding oil.

When he arrived there, nothing had changed. Downstairs, the bakery still ran its business. Upstairs, the door still needed a coat of paint. A ribbon of linoleum still peeled away from the wall.

Tom knocked.

No answer.

It was still early. She wouldn’t – thank God – still have any clients at this hour, but there was no chance that she was already up, dressed and gone out. Tom knocked again, long enough and hard enough to wake anyone inside.

No answer.

He leaned against the door and felt it bulge against the frame. He tested the weight and strength of it, then crashed into it with his shoulder. The door bowed in the middle and sprang open.

The room was empty. Not just empty of
her,
but empty. There was a table there, a couple of chairs, and the bed, stripped of all its linen and looking more than ever like a great brass beetle in the corner. Even the smells were gone. The room didn’t smell of Rebecca any more, it just smelled of old carpet and stale air.

For fully two minutes, Tom stood like a block, frozen.

The tiny kitchen and shower room were both empty. There was nothing in the place at all: not so much as a coffee cup. Dazed, Tom was about to leave. Then, on a sudden impulse he dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. A cheap suitcase lay on the floor, shoved away against the wall. Tom reached in and dragged it out.

As he pulled the case out into the light, something fell from its top surface: a paper-bound exercise book. Tom opened it. Two columns of figures straggled down the pages, marked in pencil. Each row was neatly labelled with a word, written in Polish, or simply a date.

Tom tried to read the Polish, but didn’t get far. Of the two twins, Alan had been the linguist, not Tom. The figures were no more comprehensible. The first column seemed to contain random amounts, some of them marked by a minus sign, the others apparently positive. The column on the right was marked
‘Dlug’.
The number in the
dlug
column started out large at the top of page one, then fell gradually, ending up at zero on the ninth page of the book. The figure zero was ringed twice in red. All the following pages had been left blank.

For a few seconds, Tom stared.

Then, in a moment, it all fell into place.
Dlug
meant debt. Rebecca had kept accounts to track the money she earned and the money she still owed. When the money had been paid, her job was over.

Tom reached for the suitcase, but he already knew what he would find: Rebecca’s working clothes. He broke the lock on the case. There were a couple of dark red dresses, with their low-scooped necklines. There was a black lace choker, a tube of lipstick, some stockings, a glimpse of more dark lace. Tom slammed the case shut and stood up abruptly. He felt an odd mixture of sexual excitement, loss, confusion and anger. More than ever, Tom felt the urgency of his desire to find Rebecca. The urgency and the uselessness.

Tom kicked the suitcase away from him back under the bed. Then, hating the idea that anyone else might find it and get a kick out of it, Tom crawled back down on his knees to lug it out again. He’d take it down by the railroad track, cover it with kerosene and do the job properly.

But not the book.

Tom needed a memento of the woman he wanted. The clothes represented the part he’d always been ashamed of. The book represented … Well, what the hell did it represent? Rebecca must have been the only whore in the continental United States to use double-entry bookkeeping. He flicked back through the pages, taking pleasure in the sight of Rebecca’s handwriting. As he flicked, some dates caught his eye. For instance, 17 December 1919 was followed by the sum of nine dollars fifty cents in the first column and a corresponding reduction in debt in the second. Income. Tom was looking at Rebecca’s records of income.

The sight sickened him again. He was about to throw the book into the suitcase and leave it to join the rest of the prostitute trash on a trackside fire, when something caught his eye: 24 December 1919. A long line had been drawn across the page, and both columns had been left blank. December 24 was Christmas Eve, the day Tom had asked her to sell whiskey for him.

He’d offended her deeply that night, but the long line told a story. She hadn’t made one red cent of income that night, her big brass bed had had only one occupant.

Tom quickly flicked to the other dates when, as far as he could remember, he’d enjoyed a bottle of wine with her. On each occasion, there was the same thing. A long line drawn across the page and not one penny of income earned. Tom breathed out with a sigh. So he wasn’t alone in feeling something for her. She too had felt something for him.

Tom looked up, startled by a sudden feeling of emptiness.

He was standing in the exact spot where she had kissed him that one time, when he’d burst back into her room to ask her to leave. He remembered the surprise of that kiss and the intense joy it had given him. He had returned today to ask her again to leave with him. Leave as man and wife. This time, he’d have given her time, he’d have done it properly, not been rushing off to catch a train.

He’d have done a lot of things, if only he’d been in time to catch up with her.

Would have.

Would have.

The most useless words in English.

Summer 1921.

The Persian sun baked the sky to brittle whiteness, while the burning earth turned to dust beneath it. The camp had mostly emptied of people now, and the bare dozen that remained worked like dogs from first light to well beyond the last lick of fire on the western horizon.

Since Alan had decided not to move the derrick, progress had been desperately slow. It was far too late to undo the decision – money was running through their hands all the time – but their disappointment was as bitter as the wind-blown dust that entered their clothes, their food and their bedding.

The Ameri No. 2 now stood at two thousand seven hundred feet. As Ahmed had predicted the lousy goddamn boiler didn’t want to go down any further, and breakdowns and stoppages were now an all but daily occurrence. On many days they made no progress at all. On other days they went five feet, sometimes ten feet, once and only once seventeen feet. Alan and Reynolds had stopped their meticulous sample collection. If they hit oil, they hit oil. If they missed, they missed. Things were
inshallah
– in the will of Allah – and rock samples wouldn’t help them much either way.

The shortage of money made economy increasingly essential. Kerosene lamps were permitted only for matters directly related to work. Food was now restricted to rice, flat breads and vegetables, except once a week when a couple of chickens would be shared among everyone. Fuel prices in Shiraz had risen because of bandit activity in the mountains, and fuel was desperately needed up at camp.

Nobody spoke the word, but they all knew that failure was creeping closer by the day.

Alan shifted his weight and grimaced. His hands were blistered where the boiler had scalded him, and his legs and back seemed to be fused in a permanent ache these days. He tweaked back the tent flap to encourage cool air to flow inside the baking canvas, but it was a fond hope. He turned back to his figures. Whichever way he did them, the answer was that they’d have to quit drilling in twenty-six days.

Reynolds’ heavy tread came along the little path leading to Alan’s tent. Reynolds puffed as he walked these days, and when he was sitting alone, his face often looked sad.

‘Evening, laddie. I’m not disturbing you?’

Alan reached for his cigarettes, gave one to Reynolds and lit one of his own. He drew deeply on the blessed tobacco and waved his papers. ‘Doing my sums.’ The tobacco was bad for his war-damaged lung, but he allowed himself the pleasure all the same.

‘Got the right answer yet?’