‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can hear McCone laying awake all night worrying whether Skip and I have lost a beautiful friendship.’
‘Oh, I can understand that,’ said Jean. ‘It’s well worth a little trouble to see that valuable contacts are not lost when a little trouble could preserve them.’
‘I’m still not convinced. Skip would have no difficulty in closing the questioning. He’s never had any trouble with a “no” in his life.’
‘That’s true,’ said Dalby. ‘If he’d been just a little more parsimonious with his “no’s” he’d be a lieutenant-general by now.’
I wondered if this meant that Dalby had said a clear unequivocal ‘yes’ to Ross’s offer of the Gumhuria file. I tried to catch Dalby’s eye, but if it was intended as a hint he was doing nothing to confirm it. Dalby was giving all his attention to landing a waiter, and in so doing succeeded.
‘Well, folks, what’s it gonna be?’ The young muscular army steward rested his hands gently on the table top. ‘We have a really nice porter-house on the menu tonight; there’s a fresh lobster salad all frozen and flown out from the mainland. OK then, three porter-house steaks it is, one rare, two medium. How you folks gonna start? A Collins, Rob Roy or Mint Julep, or how about one of the Bar Specialities – a “Manhattan Project” or a “Tokwe Twist”?’
‘You wouldn’t kid me would you?’ I asked.
‘No, sir,’ said the young waiter. ‘They are two really fine drinks, and we have another called “Greenback”3 and another …’
‘Enough of these complexities of modern living,’ said Dalby. ‘We will have a simple gin and vermouth combination called, if my memory serves me well, a martini.’
The waiter clawed his way back into the crowd and smoke. The vibration of a plane coming over the main runway told me the wind had swung round to SSE. One or two of the women army officers had been persuaded to dance, and after a decent interval, some of the civilian girl secretaries would condescend a slow gyrating movement.
The laughs were louder now, and our waiter used his elbows skilfully in protection of our martinis. Dalby had half-turned in his seat and was watching the room in a casual way of business. The waiter put down the large glasses heavily; the huge green olives rolled like eyes. ‘Like t’pay for the drinks, folks?’
I had the wallet open and reached my fingers for the fresh dollar bills. ‘One twenty-five.’ My fingers touched the hard plastic edge of my security card as I paid him.
I sipped the icy drink. In spite of the air-conditioning the club was getting quite warm. More couples were dancing now and I was idly watching a dark girl in a translucent chiffon gown. She was teaching me things of which Arthur Murray never dreamed. Her partner was several inches shorter than she was. As she leaned forward to listen to something he said I caught sight of Barney Barnes through the crowd.
Skip had let me infer that Barney was still Stateside, and Barney wasn’t the sort of man it was possible to miss on a small island. The music had stopped now and the couples were dissolving away. Barney was holding a handbag, while the girl he was with slipped out of a red and gold Thai-silk evening coat. The pink-faced boy took the coat over his arm and showed them both to a table under the vast map mural with the rotund cherubims blowing winds upon golden galleons.
‘Barney Barnes – Skip Henderson’s friend – him I must see.’ Jean lifted a beautifully manicured eyebrow at me round the edge of an enamel compact with Tutankhamen’s tomb pictured on it in gilt.
Dalby said, although I hadn’t once seen him look in that direction, ‘The lieutenant in uniform sitting under Australia.’
‘I didn’t know he was a Negro,’ Jean said. ‘You do mean the tall Negro with a crew-cut. The one sitting with the Statistics captain?’
Statistics, I thought. There are an awful lot of Stats people on this atoll. I began to wonder if Carswell hadn’t had something after all, and whether it didn’t all connect up. ‘You know her?’ I asked Jean.
‘She was attached to the Tokyo Embassy last year and went to just about every party there ever was. She was on the verge of marrying somebody mostly.’
‘Can I get you a saucer of milk?’
‘But it’s true and you should tell your friend Barney Barnes if you really are a friend of his,’ said Jean.
‘Listen Jeannie, Barney has done all right for a number of years and has never needed any help of the sort that I would be able to give, so take your elbow out of his friend’s eye.’
‘If I wait any longer for this steak,’ Dalby joined the conversation.
‘Hey there, welcome back to the human race,’ I said. ‘I thought we’d left you way back there taking orders from Lt-General Skip Henderson.’
‘The next table but one has emptied and filled up twice while we’ve been sitting here drinking this terrible gin that’s probably distilled by some avaricious procurement corporal in one of the battery huts.’
‘Stop getting excited,’ Jean said. When off duty, she had a knack of reverting to a domineering feminine role in life without being noticeably insubordinate. ‘You know there’s just nothing you would be doing if we’d finished dining except arguing with the waiter that the brandy isn’t what you’re used to back at the castle.’
‘I’ll be dashed if I’ve ever encountered a more mordant pair.’
‘You can’t say “dashed” in an Hawaiian shirt,’ I said to Dalby.
‘Most especially not out of the side of a mouth ninety per cent occupied by a twenty-five-cent black cheroot,’ said Jean.
‘But since the waiter is having trouble getting the cows to stand still I’ll dive across for a word with Barney – about stats.’
‘You just sit still where you are. Social life can come to a standstill till I’ve eaten.’ I knew Dalby by now, and I could recognize moods in his voice. He wasn’t kidding and he hadn’t enjoyed us fooling with him. To make Dalby happy you had to listen to and commiserate with him, just every little thing that marred his day and then make with the feet to rectify things. By Dalby’s understanding of life I should be standing in the kitchen now making sure that only the finest fermented wine vinegar went into his salad-dressing. It doesn’t take much to make the daily round with one’s employer work smoothly. A couple of ‘yessirs’ when you know that ‘not on your life’ is the thing to say. A few expressions of doubt about things you’ve spent your life perfecting. Forgetting to make use of the information that negates his hastily formed but deliciously convenient theories. It doesn’t take much but it takes about 98.5 per cent more than I’ve ever considered giving.
‘Be back in a minute,’ I said, and edged past a red-faced colonel who was saying to a waiter, ‘You just tell your officer that this young lady here says that none of these Camembert cheeses are ripe, she knows what she’s talking about. Yes, sir, and just as long as I’m paying the bill around here I just don’t intend to have any more arguments …’
I didn’t look back at Dalby but I imagined that Jean was trying to placate him in some way.
A long bar filled one end of the restaurant. The lighting was low and arranged to shimmer translucently through the bottles of drink that stood back to back with their reflections across the mirror wall. At the far end, the ‘Parisian décor’ was completed with the largest size