And that’s what happened: In a minute, all the party was gone. I lay there absolutely stunned.

  “Come on, grumble guts, we’re got to get out of here before they come back and search the place,” Hammer said, scrambling over me and climbing from under the table. “They’ll send us to the land just because we work for old Jordill. Get moving!”

  I climbed out and stood staring at him miserably.

  “You go,” I said.

  “Too true I’m going - and if you’ve got any sense, you’ll get sparking too, Orphanage!” He was running round wildly. He had seized a clothes bag, and was stuffing various articles of value into it. I saw that March Jordill had stood the Manskin idol on a side ledge during his argument with the difficult customer (who had no doubt been planted by the patrollers); Hammer seized the idol and pushed it into his bag.

  At the door, he paused and regarded me.

  “Coming, Knowle?”

  “Soon, I suppose.”

  “Shake out of it, patient! The old boy’s gone for good, you know that. See me - right from now, I’m free and grown up. I’m going to make my own way. Why not come along?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Thumbs, then!” Lifting his thumb in salute, he left, the bag slung across one shoulder.

  There was nothing in me. I went over to the dusty window and peered out. In a minute, Hammer appeared under the dim street lamp, for it was now dusk. As he stepped into the street, a uniformed man who had been watching the building came out of the shadows and grabbed him by the arm, twisting it and marching him off. Thus ended Hammer’s period of being free and grown up.

  Now it was safe for me to make a getaway. But before leaving I stood there in tears, the first I had shed since orphanage days, tears for my solitude, tears for the darkness coming in like sludge, tears for my master, having his long and clever head punched far below, tears for things I would never know.

  When, several years later, I became a landsman myself, I met Hammer again, now a guard, rough, crude, surviving. Throughout the years, I hoped that I would meet March Jordill again. It never happened. Instead, I found myself confronting, one particular hot day in Walvis Bay, the man called Peter Mercator, whom I had long known and loathed as “The Farmer”.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  The surprise robbed me of the disadvantage I had. Yet perhaps what I did then surprised him more than anything else I could have thought of. I took off my dark glasses, folded them into a pocket, and said simply: “I’m Knowle Noland. You wanted to speak to me.”

  He got up and came forward. With his white hair and black eyebrows, his face was very striking. I saw his eyes active under the eyebrows, searching me, summing me up.

  “Certainly I want to speak to you. Let’s go and sit down over by the window.”

  As I walked into the room, I saw that he had another man with him, a small and old man with a flabby face and restless hands that sought each other’s company. From his clothes and businesslike air, I guessed he was a professional man rather than a gunman - I was on the watch for trouble.

  Mercator confirmed my guess by turning to the little man and saying: “I’d like you to leave us for a while, Doctor.”

  The doctor hesitated. “Remember what I say. Drugs aren’t everything. You must rest more, or I won’t answer for the consequences.”

  With quiet desperation (was it that?) Mercator said: “In two days’ time, Doctor, I will try to do as you bid, if we are still here.”

  At that the doctor bowed stiffly and withdrew.

  From the cushioned seats by the window, I could see down through the Venetian blinds on to the promenade. In the brilliant afternoon’s sun, several people were strolling there, and I thought the place looked to be growing more crowded. It was a long way to the ground; I had forgotten for a while that this hotel room was seventeen storeys up.

  “You are causing me a little trouble, Mr. Noland,” Mercator said, seating himself so that he could scrutinize me as he had once done in an anonymous office, many years earlier. “I have no idea what whim drove you to walk in here like this, but I cannot allow you to walk out again a free man, at least until tomorrow night, when the fireworks are over and I am on my way back to England.”

  “I have come to explain how innocently I am involved in your affairs. What you are doing here is of no interest to me, except in as much as it concerns Justine Smith.”

  He raised an eyebrow, saying almost wistfully: “Justine...”

  “Yes, Justine - your mistress!”

  His face was more haggard than I recalled it. In the way he held himself, too, he looked not only older but ill. Deep lines ran down from his nose to his jaw. The lines accentuated themselves now as he said: “Certainly I am prepared to believe that you know very little about my organization if you believe that. Justine is not, in the sense you mean it, my mistress; nor could she be. She is a virgin. And in that sense, I also am a virgin.”

  Angrily, I said: “You needn’t try to be funny.”

  “I suppose you may find it funny, for I observe you are a pleb, but I am speaking of a matter of personal conviction; and on that conviction rests this present perilous enterprise. Justine!”

  He called, and Justine herself came through from a side room. She looked as beautiful and as cool as ever. Her cheekbones, I noticed for the first time, were high, with shadows under them; and I wondered, with a flush of love, what nationality, or what mixture of nationalities, she might be. She went and stood by Mercator, who had risen, without touching him.

  “Mr. Noland has called on us, Justine.”

  “I told you he promised to do so.”

  “Justine!” I exclaimed. “You remember what I said to you - and you told me that you were Mercator’s prisoner. You lied to me!”

  She said, frowning slightly: “You are very far from understanding this situation in which you flounder. Nor is it true that I told you I was Peter’s prisoner. If I said I was a prisoner, I was speaking metaphorically and meant merely a prisoner of necessity. What are we going to do with him, Peter?”

  The glance they gave each other! Though both looked sick and harassed, there was complete trust in that look, a trust that inevitably excluded me, and I could not bear to see it.

  I jumped up and faced Mercator.

  “You do not recognize me,” I told him. “Why should you? We met only briefly many years ago, and then I was so stunned by long imprisonment and interrogation that to you I was just one of the many miserable landsmen dragged before you! To me you were then the Farmer, and I was too lowly even to know your real name. Now I am before you again, and in my right mind, and am not going to be fobbed off with the spoonful of scorn I was before!”

  He sat down again. He put his brow against his hand, resting his elbow on his knee.

  “How often I dreamed that nemesis would take the shape of a landsman...” he said, mainly to himself. “Noland, Noland ... yes, weren’t you the man who gave evidence about the Traveller, Gipsy Jess?”

  After all those years, my face burnt at the mention of that disgraceful night. Reading the affirmative he sought, Mercator continued: “And did you really think I treated you with scorn? Why, I did what I could for you! I saved you from the police cells. Didn’t I get you some sort of job?”

  “You got me on to the Trieste Star as a bit of super-numerary human crew. I worked my way up to Captain long after you had forgotten all about me. I’ve come here to tell you that yesterday I had the pleasure of piling up that rotten ship of yours on to the shore not a dozen miles from here!”

  He shook his head, looking at Justine as if for sympathy as he answered me. “I sold my interest in the Star Line freighters five years ago; most of my capital these days is tied up in the anti-gravity industry. That’s the up-and-coming thing; if you’ve saved any money, Noland, I’d advise you to put it in anti-gravity. Unless there’s a world war, of course.”

  At that, he and Justine smiled wearily at each other.

  “I’m offering the advice now, Mercator - I’ve suffered too much from you in the past.”

  He rose and said: “I’ve no interest in past suffering. I’m too occupied with the present. I can’t let you go out of here, Noland. You obviously have a chip on your shoulder and aren’t entirely responsible for your own actions. Would you like a drink, and perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me how you got mixed up with von Vanderhoot?”

  Let me not say here how I hated this man who lived so easily, who enjoyed his power so easily, who turned aside my wrath so easily. Not only did I loathe what I thought was his attitude to life - I envied all the things and qualities he had that I had never found myself heir to.

  “I’m explaining nothing, Mercator - kill me if you will. I told Justine what little I know and I’m not repeating myself. No doubt she repeated it to you. Nor will I have a drink with you.” Even as I spoke, to my added fury, my stomach rumbled loudly, reminding me how hungry I was.

  He walked over to a cabinet and poured drinks for himself and Justine. Though he said nothing more, I saw with satisfaction that his hand trembled. Justine stood looking down at me. I could not interpret her dark gaze; my rough life had brought me nobody like Justine.

  She said quietly: “You behave so strangely. You are ill in some sort of way, aren’t you? Would it help you if you understood what we are doing here?”

  I burst into angry laughter.

  “It’s a pleasure to hear you talk, Justine, whatever you say!”

  She turned and walked into the next room. Mercator gave her a warning glance and a shake of the head, but she ignored him. I followed her. Mercator came meekly enough after her, handed her a drink in a slender glass and went out again, though he left the door open behind him.

  Her voice when she spoke was low and conspiratorial. It was also husky with accusation. How hard it is to bear the contempt of a beautiful woman, even when your stomach grumbles its emptiness aloud!

  “You are impossible with him, Knowle! Try - try and use some understanding of how others feel. Peter is a proud man, just like you - how can you expect any sort of agreement between you when you can speak to him the way you do?”

  “Agreement? I can reach no agreement with him! He’s one of the men who have made my life a misery. But for him, I’d be-”

  “You’re making feeble excuses. I heard you in there! Really, Knowle, I took you for something better. Have you no creed? Have your relations with other people always been such a mess?”

  All the knocks I have received in times past do not rankle as much as did those words. I did not then know how she condemned me from her particular narrow religious viewpoint, as I had no idea of her beliefs apart from the hint Mercator had dropped; but I felt immediately that her barb came poisoned with truth: my relationships with others mainly ended in failure or betrayal. What surer signpost is there to the failure of one’s own personality?

  Now, at a maturer age, I can see that the health of character is securely tied to the health of an age; dissolution produces dissolution, betrayal betrayal, and trust is no neighbour for fear. But at that time, I still nourished a belief in the idea that personalities shape history, rather than vice versa, and my hurt at Justine’s words was the greater.

  I remember dropping my eyes and shuffling away from her.

  “Keep quiet about it, Justine - that side of it is none of your business. Perhaps you don’t know his past. It’s men like him who are ruining England, with their awful system of exploiting men and land alike. You would understand nothing about that.”

  Her manner remained irritatingly patient.

  “Don’t be condescending. I have been to England, and Peter and I have no secrets from each other - we are both of the same faith.”

  “Never mind your faith! I’m saying you have no idea of what he did to me personally.”

  “I know he saved you from the land. He said so, and he never lies. Besides, England is finished, worn out, ruined, just like all the other rotten little states of Europe, yes, and of Russia and China, and what was known as the United States, in which I was born. You know nothing of the world picture - you are just a pleb. Africa is the only place with fight left in it, in its men and territories. Why do you think the other poor tottering countries like yours and mine have made treaties and alliances with the various African States? Why, so that they can get assistance from them - as you were getting sand-”

  “Sand! Sand! My God, Justine, there’s generosity on the African States’ part. How good of them to spare England a few holdsfull of their sand! But you know we have to pay for it - and yet they could produce enough from their stinking Skeleton Coast alone to drown all England in sand. I bet your pal next door gets his cut out of the deal somewhere, doesn’t he? Tell me what he’s doing here if he’s not after some financial deal or other.”

  “We are here for other reasons.” Now my words had hurt her. She swung her hand and slapped me across the cheek. “Reasons you would not grasp! Don’t you understand how we hate your kind? And aren’t your kind with their petty little rightousness - their materialist pride - engulfing the world? Millions upon millions of them, gorging up the earth’s supplies with their narrow beliefs!”

  Hurt though I was, my pride most of all, I said: “Okay, Justine, you’re a little aristocrat and you hate the common people. Your kind has enjoyed the ascendancy throughout most of history. But I’m as good as you. I can read as well as you can, and I’m not so puffed up! My belly rumbles disgustingly in front of you because I’m hungry, yet you can talk about my gorging myself on the world’s supplies. That’s what your kind does!”

  She turned on her heel and walked to the far wall.

  “Your beliefs and mine are absolutely opposed; I was a fool to argue with you,” she said. Her anger had gone the moment she saw me rubbing my cheek. “I did not realize how unreasonable you were. The current regime throughout the world remains almost unchallenged because there is nobody left who holds clear ideas about the nature of man and the universal character of the human condition. It arose because not enough people could command a metaphysical view of human nature. We are spiritually and agriculturally bankrupt - perhaps the two must always go together.”

  This Justine said rather awkwardly, and it occurred to me that she was parroting something Mercator had said to her. At the same time, there was enough of a defensive note in her voice to suggest she was perhaps trying to offer an explanation for her own touchy behaviour. Sharp desire like sexual longing seized me; I wished to know and understand her. And yet, being contradictory, I refused to let what she had said seem to mollify me.

  “I don’t understand what you are talking about, and it’s irrelevant anyway.”

  “No doubt you’ll find this irrelevant too.”

  She placed a tape on a turntable, and set it spinning. Voices came forth, and I recognized them. They were voices I had often listened to on board the Trieste Star, only to turn them off in boredom. They were the English-speaking radio stations of the various most powerful African States: Algeria, New Angola, Waterberg, West Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Goya, Nigeria. Their world attitude, as I knew, was tough and energetic, and not without its hints of aggression towards Europe and America, or more than a hint towards each other.

  “I don’t want to hear that bloody stuff!” I shouted, for she kept turning the volume higher.

  “Listen to them, Knowle, my tough bully boy - don’t they frighten you with their greedy demands?”

  “Turn them off, Justine!”

  “They sound just like the European nations a couple of centuries ago, Knowle; did you know that? They all want the same thing - more land!”

  “I said I don’t want to hear them. Switch ‘em off!”

  “And you know that only one man can keep them all peaceable together at this time? In this whole continent, only one man has a chance of securing ultimate peace among the African nations - President el Mahasset.” Still she turned the volume higher. The thick voices blared out at us, their words by now indistinguishable.

  “TURN IT OFF, WOMAN !”

  “...AND PETER MERCATOR AND I ARE GOING TO KILL THE PRESIDENT TOMORROW !”

  Suddenly I was free from the spell that meeting had thrown over me, and the idea of action returned.

  As I sprang to the door, Mercator reached it from the other side. Without pausing to think, I hit him hard on the jaw. While he was still reeling back, I crossed the room and ran out through the hall to the corridor.

  Justine’s shouted words still raced through my mind. They convinced me that she and Mercator were in a conspiracy of madness.