a A MA -
THE HONEST COVE
by Maurice Rowdon
GEORGES BORCHARDT, INC.
LITERARY AGENCY
145 EAST 52ND STREET
NEWYORK, N.Y. 10022
PLAZA 3-5785
ES :


THE HONEST COVE
A Short Story
MAURICE ROWDON
GEORGES BORCHARDT, INC.
LITERARY AGENCY
145 EAST 52ND STREET
NEW YORK, N. Y. 10022
PLAZA 3-5785


I An honest sort of cove'. They said that about me
to my face. It was my insignia at the office.
An open
face, an honest delivery.
'He couldn't lie if he tried'.
And some amusement goes with that, as if lying and tricking
were essential in the world we live in---particularly the
world I work in.
It takes me to all too many places, all
too fast.
I seem to live in aircraft.
And now I've come
to need it. Three days without that invigorating take-off
is one day too many for me. I get a really phenomenal
amount of work done at airports, and between plastic meals
in the air.
I have my little black case on my knee, and
'open my office' with a nice comfortable feeling every
time, to read letters of introduction to the next sales
headquarters in Las Palmas, Mexico City, Khartoum, Sidney.
My favourite trip of all was (for a time) Portugal.
It came round about once every two months.
A car whisked
mestraight from the airport to a villa sitting in its own
garden (palm trees and a swimming pool, within the soughing
sound of the sea), just eighty-five kilometres outside
Lisbon.
There my suitcases were out ofthe boot and in
my own balconied, sun-dazzled suite before you could say
jumbo jet.
Those cases went up to the suite like I did--
in a steel lift, and the house only had two floors. I


think my hosts had that lift put in just to complete the
husphed, streamline rhythm in which the household moved--
from the multiple pussy-footing servants to the revolving
sunsoaker lielows round the swimming pool.
There was
nothing hushed or streamlined about the owners, though--
eighteen of themyall, counting the third-generation kids.
They were the noisiest and untidiest crowd I ever got
caught up with.
And I loved it. I know about noige,
having kipped down in first-class echo-trapping hotels in
Tokyo and Saigon. Now this Portuguese noise was special.
You didn't hear it so much as absorb it.
And you began to
need it. The moment I arrived from the airport this fair-
ground uproar took hold of me, and made jet-engines sound
like a whisper.
It consisted of children's noises (all
ages), servants mistaking orders and cooks chopping and beef-
bashing in the kitchen, coffee-grinders and waste-disposal
units and water-puming engines, and splashings with screams
from the Bwimming pool, and the arrival and departure of
cars with their silensers trimmed to 'sound good'.
And
above all the family 'talking'.
Of all the words to describe
what that family did,'talking' was just about the most feeble
I could think of. It wasn't simply that they yelled,
slapped the table, cleared their throats like mechanical
saws starting up. They E yelled, slapped and throat-
cleared together.
How they ever got to know each other I
cannot say, because they never listened.
It was a fantastic
eighteen-part chorus that only closed down (with an extra-
ordinary abruptness like a film stopping in the middle of
the story) around midnight.
Now I am on the whole rather
talkfative, at least my associates say so. I mean I never


hide my feelings, unless of course it will lose me a sale.
But at that house I could never get a word in edgeways.
I became as silent as a Trappist.
I just sat there, at
the dining table, at the pool, in the smoking lounge, on
the sun terrace, with a seventh-heaven smile all over my
face.
And no one seemed to work.
Since papa was a million-
aire I suppose they didn't have to.
Carlo, the only son,
went to the office sometimes but it wasn't what I call work.
It consisted of being whisked off to an air-conditioned
business apartment at about eleven in the morning, to pass
a few minutes at the telephone making arrangements for
lunch at one of Lisbon's most expensive restaurants, and
talking to the latest date.
In an upholstered swivel
chair too.
I adored Carlo.
He was everything I wanted to
be. And every girl who clapped eyes on him seemed to agree.
He had gorgeous black hair and an olive skin (still has no
doubt), and tapering fingers that made the girls think he
being
was sensitive as well as, Lisbon's fastest charmer.
The business was a family concern.
But this is a poor
way of describing one of the biggest finance corporations in
the world, with its pie-seeking fingers in everything from
car-hire to kitchen detergents.
As for papa, he never
went to the office.
He controlled everything from his home
telephone.
He had about three offices in the house.
There
was a cabin with a desk and armchair and two phones by the
pool.
There was a leather-insulated annex to his bedroom.
And in case a business call came through while he was eating,
the dining room had a little annex too, soundproofed of couse.
As I say, I was as happy as a sandboy in all this, especially


as the family-firm accounted for quite a large slice of
my business. My headquarters in L.A. (Los Angeles to you)
were as bucked as billy goats when they saw the Lisbon orders
flowing into London in an unprecedented escalation.
And
they'd always thought the English didn't work.
'The young
ones must be different', they said---before calling London
to suggest giving me a raise.
I am still trying to recover from the abrupt end of
that dream. If only papa had eased his orders off grad-
ually. I mean after I was no longer persona grata at the
house.
But he didn't.
He cut them off from one day to
the next.
He transferred his credit with more than tele-
graphic speed.
'What the hell did you do to him', L.A.
asked over the long-distance, 'rape his daughter?'
wish I had done. I mean, anything better than what I
actually did do.
Which was next to nothing.
You see,
all I did was be an honest cove.
I never saw much of papa.
He was always disappearing
into a doorway inside a cloud of cigar smoke, on his way
to the aitport or the golf-course or to his Lisbon apart-
ment where he kept a bird.
His approval or otherwsie was
the seal on everything the family did. He had approved of
me, that morning three years ago when I happened to be in
his son Carlo's office talking him into an account.
'Come and have a swim at my place', papa had said. 'My
chauffeur'll pick you up in a couple of minutes'.
It was
my honest expression that did it, I suppose.
In less than
an hour I was lying flat-out by the pool, and a frosted dry
Martini was waiting for me on a little table by my lie-
low.
Tempting aromas of lunch drifted between the palm


trees.
After a week of this I could hardly remember my
own name. Even my own wife I could hardly remember.
Even my ten-months-old child.
Papa had white hair hair round the temples and a smoothly
bronzed face, spare and lazily placid, with sharp black eyes
that suddenly fixed themselves on you if you said something
that touched on business in any way. . Like Carlo he spoke
well-nigh perfect English. If anything it was better than
my own.
And they certainly knew their Shakespeare better.
Papa rarely smiled---never laughed.
After two or three days
at the house I began to realise why. He yearned for a grand-
son, and wanted to get Carlo married off as soon as possible.
The only thping was that Carlo couldn't find the right girl,
or rather papa couldn't find her for him. Hardly a Lisbon
girl under twenty-five wouldn't have given ten. years of her
life to marry him. A dark male befaty with a fortune bejind
him, and flashing white teeth, and those hands, and the way
he handled a car, not to mention other things!
But his
wife had to be out of the top drawer.
She had to be akood
son-giver.
She had to combine so many things, this future
mother of the future heir, that you could scour the whole of
nubile Lisbon without finding her.
Apparently papa had
always had a thing about sons. I don't know if this is
Portugese, or just him. But he felt rotten about only having
gthem
one son, instead of an armyt He said to me quite frankly,
with Carlo in the room, that he was always worried that
Carlo might kill himself in his car ot get some awful disease,
'one son gives you lots of anxieties'.
And Carlo agreed.
He nodded solemnly.
It seemed he wanted the son as much
as his father did.


Not that he did much about it. I mean Carlo.
and I set the town alight most evenings of the week. We
would purr our way towards Lisbon in his Mazzerati-Citroen,
around dusk, passing every vehicle on the road and narrowly
missing most of them. I marvelled at Carlo's driving.
It was like the family talked---without listening.
How
other drivers got out of the way as fast as they did I shall
never know.
But I never felt the slightest fear.
I knew
that a special providence hovered round this twenty-year-
old scion of Portugal's greabest money-spinning house.
I basked in the glow---and shared the girls.
We usually
got back home round one or two in the morning, and papa's
amused and condoning eyes would be waiting for us in the
lounge, and a glass or two of cognac. We reminded him of
his own pre-marital escapades, I supppose. Now he had
lovers on a more soberly organised basis.
It was, I came
to see more and more, a good life.
And then Carlo goes and falls in love.
And I find
myself playing the respectable English friend at his
fiancée's apartment, evening after evening, instead of
chucking some beautiful black-haired mouse under the chin
in a night spot along the coast.
It happened on my third
visit.
He stopped knocking on the door of my suite at
about six each evening, to ask me, 'Coming for a ride?',
with that lazy yet brilliant smile that made the distaff
side of Lisbon weak in the knees. Now I found myself
sharing my evenings with the family, trying to make out
what the television was saying behind the household uproar,
and it was in a foreign language anyway.
Or I went to
the night spot alone, at tremendous expense to myself,


since without him I didn't get the royal discount.
That's
the rich all over---they don't even have to pay their bills.
It wasn't that I minded going to Maria Teresina Bianca's
place in Lisbon's best district to drink coffee and listen
to pop records.
I liked Maria.
But I had an ugly feeling
she didn't like me.
She had a way of cutting with her tongue
that could have sliced a bar of steel.
And it was done in a
New England accent---she had colleged at Brynmawr.
She stood caf
slightly taller than Carlo, and had a fine golden neck and
bold eyes, her skin so perfect you couldn't believe it even
while you were staring at it, a porous amalgam of sea and sun
and the finest food money could buy. I suppose I was a little
in love with her myself.
But I didn't like her being one or
two centimetres taller than my friend.
It was somehow like a
surrender on his part. On the other hand, one look below her
chin-line and you could understand his point of view. She had
the most provocatively superb boson I had ever seen, at least
for the moment I was looking at it.
But I don't think even
this was what made him put the engagement ring on her finger---
after all, he' had seen bosoms enough. It was papa.
And the
city's
fact that she had some of the/bluest blood in her veins.
That was what made Carlo say he had fallen in love with her.
Some love! I could see thatby midnight of the last day of
his honeymoon he would be back in his Malhorafe-citroen purring
down the Lisbon highway on his way to another bird (I hoped
with. me). Once he'd popped a little son in the oven.
Her voice was husky and deliberate and bold like her
eyes.
She meant to get her man. - And no one was going to
stand in her way. You could see it written in the points of
her lovely eyes.
Also, she never said the kind of things


that most of the other Lisbon girls said. I mean frankly
they were provincial-minded and she wasn't.
She'd been
around.
She'd even been married!
I simply couldn't under-
stand how a devout catholichike papa could stomach Carlo
marrying a divorced woman, until I discovered that she not
only had blue blood, her father was one of Lisbon's super-
market kings. And there hadn't been a divorce.
Her marriage
had been annulled, after her father had made a number of char-
itable endowments to the local monastery, and it had been found
that the marriage had never been 'consummated', a most unlikely
thing, in view of her appearance, unless her husband was a
monk, and even then a very old one. I noticed time and again
that Carlo just didn't want to know the truth about Maria,
even the fact that she stood a centimetre taller in her
stockings.
I swear I would have been putty in her fingers too, had
she wanted me. Maria Teresina was EXCITING!
A dark, fertile
warmth poured out of her. I realised just how fertile when
Carlo told me she was two-months pregnant. He let me into
the secret while doing 150 kilometres am hour along the Lisbon
highway. And did papa know? I asked him.
Sure! Sure
papa knew!
I began to donder whose child it was. But I
didn't dare ask.
Even the catholic church couldn't have
called Maria's first marriage unconsummated with that kind
of evidence behind the oven doors.
It looked to me as if
Carlo, the poor sap, was being taken for the longest ride
in the history of the Iberian peninsula, by his own
father!
I wouldn't have been surprised to hear that Maria
was one of his father's birds.
In fact, that was quite a


good idea. I mean, what better way of trying out future
wives for his son? And if the child was his, why, it was
still an heir!
But I smarted for Carlo.
We'd had such
good nights together. No wonder she gave him an anxious
look every time he and I walked down to his car together,
on the way home. I think she felt how much I was against
mamage And
t tell, being an honest sort of cove, I found it difficult
to hide what I felt.
She must have seen the blame in my
eyes, when I inwardly accused her of putting a stop to those
Summar
lovely kong nights roaming the seacoast with her future
husband, laden or unladen with birds as the mood took us.
Yes, I had enjoyed those easy gours of darkness within
sound of the sea more than anything I could remember in my while
life! A cool drink in one hand and a cool girl in the other,
while Carlo talked on half in English and half in rapid
Portuguese, punctuating what he said with his bArer cascading
laugh that made me as well as the girls giddy with excitement.
And we had plenty to talk about apart from the girls too.
He knew London and most other cities like the back of his
hand, he'd been to Harvardfor a year, he knew hop to fly.
He was the finest friend I ever had. Oh I'd had friends
but it wasn't the same. Carlo and I shared everything.
One night we drove across to Spain and spent all night in
an army headquarters with ear-splitting maneouvres going on
all round us. The brigadier in charge was a relative of
his on his mother's side. Then we drove down to Granada,
where we had a bath and a huge breakfast and a dip in the
pool at a fabulous house belonging to the brigadier's dister.
Then we went up the hills on donket back, and lunched on
onions and goat cheese.
We slept in a sheep-pen in


sleeping bags.
There's nothing like friendship.
I mean
the adventure. The kind of safe feeling you get in marriage
doesn't come up to it, and anyway I don't know if the opposite
sexes can be friends like that.
Carlo and I even shared our
girls.
It seemed the natural thing to do. The girls
didn't seem to mind either.
It was a great life, without
jealousy or pettiness or back-looking.
I hoped it would
last for ever. And Maria Teresina Bianca comes along and
spoils it all. I tell you, being with Carlo was like living
a legend.
Until then I just didn't know what life was
capable of. And I'd already seen some, done some---from
sleeping in an ice-igloo to duck-shooting in the Pennsylvanian
marshes. But Carlo hadn't been there.
One evening---it was August and the sun was just going
down, bringing the first cool breeze of the day---Carlo knocked
on my door and said huskily, with his usual wink, 'Come on'.
I had just taken a bath, and I quickly threw
E on a
dark-blue shirt with polka dots and a featherweight white suit
I had picked up in Rome the previous week.
In less than
ten minutes we were licking the hell out of the highway on
the way to Maria's, not to a night spot as I had thought and
hoped from the sound of his voice. He had a questionto ask
me, he said.
What did I really think about their marrying?
And he looked me full in the face, sideways, leaving the car
to look after itself for a few hair-raising seconds.
was just the question I had been waiting for.
And I had the
answer ready.
'As a matter of fact, I'd advise against it,
Carlo, I mean you're going to Goa for a couple of years,
you'll find a lot of girls there and by the time you get back
to civilian life you'f have changed, I mean your tastes.'


It was an argument that had come to me out of the blue. I
was amazed it had never occurred to me before.
He was due
to go int the army as a conscript, and everyone knew he would
be doing two years' station duty in India.
But all he said
was,"You mean you don't think she's beautiful?'
lovely!' 'And intelligent?' he asked, going on to answer his
own question, 'She's got a degree, she reads books, she paints
and she plays the piano---'
'Yes,' Isaid, 'she's certainly
a very clever girl'.
'You don't think she'd make a good
mother?'
'I think she'd make a marvellous mother'.
'Then
you've answered my question,' he said, and accelerated from
a mere 140 kilometres an hour to 190.
I wasn't fooled by the speed. It was clear to me that
he felt some uncertainty about the whole thing. Otherwise
why should he ask me? I decided it was necessary for me to
save him.
Perhaps that was what he was really asking me to
do! I should talk to papa maybe, put a sober point of view,
that of an outsider!
I realised all of sudden that Carlo
was my ideal of the unmarried friend.
Once spliced, the
first thing he'd do would be to drive safely.
Bit by bit
fall lo dust,
his personality would +-
She'd pick him up from
the office in the family car in the evening, with the kids.
He'd even have to work.
It was the end of a dream.
And,
since it was my dream, I intended to see it didn't happen.
This was a special night.
It wasn't exactly an engage-
ment party. The ring had gone on her finger long ago.
It was just for close friends, to announce their marriage.
In a week's time.
Before he pushed off to Goa.
And there
was I thinking that papa had bought him exemption from
military service for at least another six months!
His


disappearnce to Goa was the lesser of two evils by far,
especially as I was often enough in India myself and would
be able to see him almost as frequently as I did now. But
marriage in a week's time! No wonder his voice had been
husky.
There were flowers all over the apartment, and the
smell of flowering jasmine from the balcony-gardens outside,
and extra servants with white gloves, and a buffet supper,
and soft music, and low lights, and a handful of unattached
lovely females for unattached lovely males like me: it was
just how you'd expect Maria Tersina to organise things.
I began to see that these little parties of hers would go
on during his two years' absence.
I mean, it seemed obvious..
She was just that sort of girl.
I'm not saying she was a
whore.
She was much too clever for that.
She chose her
targets in the upper income brackets, and shot her arrows
with unfailing accuracy.
You could see the calculation
shining in her eye, and at first you took it for a faraway
look.
But imagine my surprise when all of a sudden she moved
over towards me like a Sixth Fleet cruiser on Mediterranean
manoeuvres---glittering and hushed and leaving a cool frothy
wake behind her.
Glass in hand. Earrings tinkling.
'Well, hullo', she said, then pressed my hand and placed all
of herself very close to all of me: 'Listen, I'd like a quiet
talk. Come with me'. And she linked arms in such a way
she
that I could feel her besom, andydrew me out of the lounge,
with its carrots-carrots murmur of talk, to a little dressing-
room with a divan bed and plenty of cushions and no light at
all as far as I could see, only open french windows looking


out on the lights of the city.
'Now I'm going to get you
a drink', she said as I sat myself down, and the tone of her
voice suggestedpolite rape.
In a jiffy a maid with a white
apron had put iced drinks down on the coffee table before us,
and Maria Teresina had rendered up her empty glass.
She sat
ivoly-
down close at my side. She opened anyinlaid box of cigarettes
and offered me one. I lit hers with a golfball lighter
(solid gold?) that I found on the table, and we leaned back
with comfortable sighs. I swore she knew I was dying to be
next door with those unattached lovelies, and she determined
to make up for that desire with some instant squeezery. In
just a little less than a thousandth of a second she had me
consigning the next-door lovelies to hell.
She drew my arm
round her, and nestled towards me so that what little of her
had hitherto been covered was now uncovered.
I could see
there was nothing like her.
'Listen', she said, 'you could help me a lot'.
I was
all ears. 'I hear you've been advising Carlo not to marry
me,' she went on, 'and I think you're dead right'.
You
could have pitched me out of the french windows with a
feather.
I could do no more than stutter silently.
'You
do?' I managed to get out in a cracked voice.
Isettled
down to the squeezing with pleasure, and gave her a big smile
in the darkness, our noses almost touching.
'First of all',
she said, 'I'm not going to sit here for two years watting
for him to come back from Goa.
What's the point of getting
married and then separating for two years?'
'You couldn't
be less wrong,' I said.
'He might come back with completely.
changed ideas.
And your ideas might change too,' I added,
'remember that'.
'Listen', she said, gettingas close as


she could without actually sitting on me, 'I think you've
got the wrong angle on all this.
It's Carlo's idea, all
this marriage-stuff, not mine. I mean I like him, he's
a great guy to go out with and all that but, God, I've only
just got out of one marriage, I don't want to be pushed into
another!'
I was beginning to like Maria Teresina. More and more.
And I was also beginning to realise why Carlo had squeezed
a 3000-dollar ring on her finger.
She was irresistible:
With her on your side you could get any place you wanted to.
'I'd like to tell you something really private,' she said,
glancing round the door to see no one was there.
Music
came drifting through from the other room. A couple was
talking on the balcony.
'But first of all can I trust you?'
she asked.
'Of course you can'.
'You promise not to tell
a soul?'
'Of course I promise', I said.
'Well', she
said, 'you can't see yet, but I'm pregnant. I spent most
of the summer with a man. He's much older than Carlo, in
fact twice as old. He's a Jewish business-man. He isn't
P8rtuguese. It was abroad, you see. I went abroad to
forget my first husband.
And it's his child---'
'Your
husband's?' I asked with alarm. 'No, no, this Jewish business-
And I suppose I'm in love with him. I've thought
about it for a long time. But I need someone his age.
I'm not after bis money or anything, though he is a very
rich man. It's just that he makes me feel secure in every
way and Carlo doesn't.
So now you know everything.'
And
she leaned all her softness on me. When she turned her
head and whispered, 'Well, what do you think of me?' there
was only one things to say, 'I think you're marvellous'.


I could feel her beeath on my cheek.
Her lips almost
touched me.. 'I'd tell Carlo myself,' she said, 'but my
reputation here coudun't stand it. At least, not until I'm
safely married again. I haven't even dared to tell my
father.
You know, it's pretty provincial hete.'
a. problem,' she went on with a kind of soft gloom that was
deliciously in need of consolation.
'What do you suggest?'
'I think you've got to tell Carlo that the thing's off.
Tell him you think I'm right, and you both should wait until
he gets back from Goa.
That'll let him down lightly. Once
he's out there he'll find plenty of girls to keep him amused.'
She shifted, turning her whole weight round to look me
straight in the eyes.
'You think he will?' she asked, her voice suddenly louder
than before.
'Do I think so, I know. so!' I said.
'They come running
at a snap of his fingers.'
'But how do you know?'
'I've spent weeks with him, haven't I, doing the clubs?
It's a job to keep them off sometimes.
He's like one of
those. pilot fish.
He's always got a trail behind him.'
'And you'll be seeing him in Goa, do you think?'
'Oh sure!
Listen, you leave it to me. If there's
a female Goan under forty who goes to clubs, he'll know her.'
'I can so well imagine the two of you together,' she
said.
She kissed me lightly, letting the very edges of
her lips linger on my cheek while she added,' 'I dare say
there are very few Lisbon girls you two haven'epried, one
way or another'.
'Well,' I said, turning so that my lips were fully on


hers for a moment, 'you could count them on one hand.
Are
you jealous?'
'No', she whispered, kissing me again, just the tips of
her lips, 'just very expectant.'
Then she stireed and
whispered again,'Don't you think we'd better join the others?'
The next-door lorelies could have been a thousand miles
away for all I cared.
I only had eyes for Maria Teresina.
het
I expectedjto move over to Carlo and begin spilling the beans
to him.
But she didn't.
She let him kiss her, she looked
right into his eyes with what I could have sworn was a happy
smile. Not once did I let her out of my sight.
It began
to worry me. If she didn't tell him, someone else would
have to!
And that someone else would be me. I wasn't
going to let my best friend walk into that blindfolded!
But then she smiled across at me, and it felt different.
A magnum of champagne was opened, and we began to collect
our platefuls of food from the buffet table. I felt
definitely good: I'd been proved right.
And I'd found
a marvellous girl for when Carlo was away in the army!
Was
claor
Yes! - The whole thing/suddenly
tome! She was
Yo me!
transferring her loyaltyk I didn't believe in the Jewish
baainess-man, and maybe even the baby wasn't true!
She
just wanted me to keep her warm while Carlo was away!
And
I would.
After Carlo had been put in the picture.
wouldn't be the first girl we'd shared, after all.
The
champagne swam round my head, after the hard liquor that
had gone before.
Really I didn't know what to think.
I couldn't sort it all out. All I knew was that she seemed
to need me, and I certainly needed her.


It was a wonderful evening.
The last wonderful
evening, as a matter of fact, that I spent in Lisbon or even
Portugal.
Carlo and I drove backas tight as owls, and
arribed in the gravel courtyard singing. Papa was waiting
in the lounge with his usual benign smile and a couple of
brandies.
It didn't matter that we woke the whole household.
That was our male prerogative.
We settled into our armchairs,
laughing.
Then I realised that there was nothing, for the
moment,to laugh about, and that I had a duty to perform.
At first I thought, let it go, leave it to fate.
And after
all I'd promised her notto say a word. But honest-cove
feelings welled up in me. How could I
a permit my
friend to go on deluding himself?
Or papa either, for that
matter? And I suddenly found myself talking. I told them
about the Jewish business-man first.
Then about how he
was the father of her child.
They sat. listening to me in
silence.
Encouraged by this attention I told them more or
less everything she had said, down to where she'd given me
the glad eye and our lips had brushed.
After all, I was
talking to men.
Papa gazed long and steadily at his son,
his expression fixed and unchanging, giving nothing away.
They left their brandies untouched.
I realised what a
shock it all was. I felt as sorry as they obviously were,
and I joined in their silence.
It sounded like a memorial
service, without singing.
I told them how she hoped to marry the Jewish friend,
and planned to do So while Carlo was away in Goa.
She was
going to let him down lightly, I said, by suggesting a post-
ponement---'so be prepared to hear her say she'd - 1 like
time to think it over', I added to Carlo, looking right in


his eyes.
Again a long silence.
Neither of them moved.
You could have heard a ghost walking.
And little wonder.
But I felt better for it.
The truth, I thought, does you
good---it sets the blood flowing again.
'And who told you all this,' papa asked in a very slight
voice, putting the tips of his fingers together.
'Why of course, she did'.
'This evening?'
She asked me to say noghing naturally.
But
I've got my duty to Carlo'.
'And she has her duty to the Jewish father of her
child, no doubt,' papa said with a really frost-bitten smile
towards his son.
Carlo jumped up---with a really athletic bound that
placed him in a kind of military posture, to attention.
'We'd better get to bed,' he said.
I said good night to papa and he simply nodded.
Carlo and I walked upstairs slowly.
Outside my bedroom he stood and looked at me.
'Of course you're joking aren't you?' he said, not
troubling to lower his voice.
'I wish I was. Listen', I said, 'she's just another
girl.
Think of her like that!'
I smiled.
'I tell you
what, I'll even keep her warm for you while you're away in
He stood staring at me, quite still, not a flicker on
his face. Then he said, 'You will, will you?' And he
walked away to his bedroom down the corridor.
Well, I hadn't expected him to dance with joy. I
heard papa talking to the servants below in what sounded to


me rather harsh tones.
Then I went to bed. I gazed out
at the Atlantic from my pillows, and drifted off into an easy
sleep.
The sleep didn't last long.
Just before dawn came
through I was woken with a start by the white-haired butler.
He was standing at the foot of my bed. I asked him what
the trouble was, and he said, 'I have instructions to pack
your bags sir'.
He simply moved towards the wardrobe and startedf packing.
Then the phone rang. I picked up the receiver, grappling
with it in a dazed way from my bed.
It was the chauffeur.
He said he had instructions to take me to a hotel or the
airport right away, whichever I preferred.
I said, 'Neither,
I want to see Mr Carlo.'
Apparently neither Carlo nor
papa was available.
They had 'gone away'.
And the car
was waiting in the courtyard.
I lay there feeling as if
the whole world was sitting on my face. I bathed and dressed
slowly while my bags went downstairs. No breakfast appeared.
Not even a cup of coffee.
I began to tell myself that
after all I had a wife and kid and a nice home, what was I
to worry about?
I'd told the truth, and these people didn't
like the truth. So they could stuff themselves.
Words
to that effect.
But I felt bad. I felt like a depth-
charge without the fuse, just sinking and sinking to the
bottom of the sea with nothing to say for itself except
air-bubbles.
When I got downstairs it seemed that the house had all
of a sudden lost its occupants.
Of course it was rather
early still.
But there wasn't even a cook in the kitchen.


The cases were already in the boot.
Then I was whisked
away---I'd decided on the Hotel Metropole, for just one
night, while I sorted out my thoughts and booked a flight
to my next port of call, Amsterdam.
I could imagine how
all this was going to affect my business in Lisbon too.
In a matter of hours papa had withdrawn his account.
I felt that L.A. was a place to keep away from for a few
months, while I built up credit somewhere else.
I knew
teould do it. That wasn't really what worried.
It was
the thought that I'd lost the best friend I ever had.
A couple of hours later, while I am breakfasting in
my hotel room, a note arrives from Carlo advising me to
hold my liquor better in the future.
And next time I
wanted to suggest that his future wife was a whore, would I
mind not inventing a Jew as her lover, as both he and papa
happened to detest Jews?
I might like to know, too, that
he and Maria Teresina Bianca were marrying in a week from
now, and that E soutt
even
if I was the last person on the
globe I wouldn't be invited.
He was
'real. sorry' for what had happened but the whole thing had
been 'too distasteful to be considered a joke'. It was
papa, he said, who had insisted on throwing me out of the
house---in fact he had reported all my 'filthy stories'
to Maria Teresina and forbidden either of them further contact
with me. As for my promising to keep Maria Teresina warm
for him for two years it wouldn't benecessary as they would
be setting up home in Goa, as they had planned all along.
He said he was sure I would see the reason for their distress,
once I'd thought about it 'in the cold light of day'.
Also,


'a real man' didn't tell a friend's wife about all the girls
he'd had.
'Although I'd still like to call you my friend
I know, I can't because you have no honour.'
And that was that.
Oh, and I got a note from Maria
was
Teresina too.
She just wanted to say how appalled she rat
b to hear from Carlo's father about all 'the filthy stories'
I had been telling about her. Shewas writing this note to
assure/ (that she was the proud mother of Carlo's child, and
that she had never loved a man as she loved Carlo, and that
it seemed to her that Carlo had ridded himself of a dangerous
friend just in time.
They did marry.
The child was born. A son, as they
had hoped.
Looking the spitten image of Carlo.
Grand
festivities at the house.
Maria Teresina did go to Goa
with him. I heard it all from the guy who took over my
P,rtuguese file. I told headquarters exactly what had
happened---there was no point in beating about the bush---
and there were some laughs.
They came to the conclusion
that Maria Teresina was a very clever girl well worth
marrying.
They advised me, since I was such an honest chap,
to go home and tell my wife the whole story. I
didn't have to.
Carlo did.
In a long letter.
About
all the girls we'd had too. 'An honest cove like me,' I I
thought rather bitterly.