Read The Captain and the Enemy Online
Authors: Graham Greene
The Captain and the Enemy
About the Book
A young boy, Victor, is collected from school by a stranger in a bowler hat - the stranger says he has won Victor in a game of backgammon with Victor’s father. The stranger, known as the Captain, takes Victor to live with the sweet but withdrawn Lisa, where he serves as her conduit to the outside world. From mysterious beginnings, Graham Greene’s final novel becomes a twisting thriller of smuggling, jewel theft and international espionage which culminates in a dramatic showdown in Panama.
Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on
The Times
. He established his reputation with his fourth novel,
Stamboul Train
. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in
Journey Without Maps
, and on his return was appointed film critic of the
Spectator
. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote
The Lawless Roads
and, later, his famous novel
The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock
was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the
Spectator
. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel
The Heart of the Matter
, set in West Africa.
As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography –
A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape
and
A World of My Own
(published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections
Reflections
and
Mornings in the Dark
. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and
The Third Man
was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.
ALSO BY GRAHAM GREENE
Novels
The Man Within
It’s a Battlefield
A Gun for Sale
The Confidential Agent
The Ministry of Fear
The Thid Man
The End of the Affair
The Quiet American
A Burnt-Out Case
Travels With My Aunt
Dr Fischer of Geneva or
The Bomb Party
The Tenth Man
Stamboul Train
England Made Me
Brighton Rock
The Power and the Glory
The Heart of the Matter
The Fallen Idol
Loser Takes All
Our Man in Havana
The Comedians
The Human Factor
Monsignor Quixote
The Honorary Consul
Short Stories
Collected Stories
The Last Word and Other Stories
May We Borrow Your Husband?
Twenty-One Stories
Travel
The Lawless Roads
Journey Without Maps
In Search of a Character
Getting to Know the General
Essays
Collected Essays
Yours etc
.
Reflections
Mornings in the Dark
Plays
Collected Plays
Autobiography
A Sort of Life
Ways of Escape
Fragments of an Autobiography
World of my Own
Biography
Lord Rochester’s Monkey
An Impossible Woman
Children’s Books
The Little Train
The Little Horse-Bus
The Little Steamroller
The Little Fire Engine
Graham Greene’s backlist titles are now available as ebooks.
Please visit
www.randomhouse.co.uk
to find out more.
For Y
with all the memories
we share of nearly thirty
years
GRAHAM GREENE
the Enemy
‘Will you be sure to know
the good side from the bad,
the Captain from the enemy?’
George A. Birmingham
I
1
(1)
I AM NOW
in my twenty-second year and yet the only birthday which I can clearly distinguish among all the rest is my twelfth, for it was on that damp and misty day in September I met the Captain for the first time. I can still remember the wetness of the gravel under my gym shoes in the school quad and how the blown leaves made the cloisters by the chapel slippery as I ran recklessly to escape from my enemies between one class and the next. I slithered and came to an abrupt halt while my pursuers went whistling away, because there in the middle of the quad stood our formidable headmaster talking to a tall man in a bowler hat, a rare sight already at that date, so that he looked a little like an actor in costume – an impression not so far wrong, for I never saw him in a bowler hat again. He carried a walking-stick over his shoulder at the slope like a soldier with a rifle. I had no idea who he might be, nor, of course, did I know how he had won me the previous night, or so he was to claim, in a backgammon game with my father.
I slid so far that I landed on my knees at the two men’s feet, and when I picked myself up the headmaster was glaring at me from under his heavy eyebrows. I heard him say, ‘I
think
this is the one you want – Baxter Three. Are you Baxter Three?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
The man, whom I would never come to know by any
more
permanent name than the Captain, said, ‘What does Three indicate?’
‘He is the youngest of three Baxters,’ the headmaster said, ‘but not one of them is related by blood.’
‘That puts me in a bit of a quandary,’ the Captain said. ‘For which of them is the Baxter I want? The Christian name, unlikely as it may sound, is Victor. Victor Baxter – the names don’t pair very well.’
‘We have little occasion here for Christian names. Are you called Victor Baxter?’ the headmaster inquired of me sharply.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said after some hesitation, for I was reluctant to admit to a name which I had tried unsuccessfully to conceal from my fellows. I knew very well that Victor for some obscure reason was one of the unacceptable names, like Vincent or Marmaduke.
‘Well then, I suppose that this is the Baxter you want, sir. Your face needs washing, boy.’
The stern morality of the school prevented me from telling the headmaster that it had been quite clean until my enemies had splashed it with ink. I saw the Captain regarding me with brown, friendly and what I came to learn later from hearsay, unreliable eyes. He had such deep black hair that it might well have been dyed and a long thin nose which reminded me of a pair of scissors left partly ajar, as though his nose was preparing to trim the military moustache just below it. I thought that he winked at me, but I could hardly believe it. In my experience grown-ups did not wink, except at each other.
‘This gentleman is an old boy, Baxter,’ the headmaster said, ‘a contemporary of your father’s he tells me.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘He has asked permission to take you out this afternoon. He has brought me a note from your father, and as today is a half holiday, I see no reason why I shouldn’t give my consent, but you must be back at your house by six. He understands that.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You can go now.’
I turned my back and began to make for the classroom where I was overdue.
‘I meant go with this gentleman, Baxter Three. What class do you miss?’
‘Divvers, sir.’
‘He means Divinity,’ the headmaster told the Captain. He glared at the door across the quad from which wild sounds were emerging, and he swept his black gown back over his shoulder. ‘From what I can hear you will miss little by not attending.’ He began to make great muffled strides towards the door. His boots – he always wore boots – made no more sound than carpet slippers.
‘What’s going on in there?’ the Captain asked.
‘I think they are slaying the Amalekites,’ I said.
‘Are you an Amalekite?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then we’d better be off.’
He was a stranger, but I felt no fear of him at all. Strangers were not dangerous. They had no such power as the headmaster or my fellow pupils. A stranger is not a permanency. One can easily shed a stranger. My mother had died a few years back – I could not even then have said how long before; time treads at quite a different pace when one is a child. I had seen her on her deathbed, pale and calm, like a figure on a tomb, and when she hadn’t
responded
to my formal kiss on her forehead, I realized with no great shock of grief that she had gone to join the angels. At that time, before I went to school, my only fear was of my father who, according to what my mother told me, had long since attached himself to the opposing party up there where she had gone. ‘Your father is a devil,’ she was very fond of telling me, and her eyes would lose their habitual boredom and light suddenly up for a moment like a gas cooker.
My father, I do remember that, came to the funeral dressed top to toe in black; he had a beard which went well with the suit, and I looked for the tail under his coat, but I couldn’t perceive one, although this did little to reassure me. I had not seen him very often before the day of the funeral, nor after, for he seldom came to my home, if you could call the flat in a semidetached house named The Laurels near Richmond Park where I began to live after my mother’s death, a home. It was at the buffet party which followed the funeral that I now believe he plied my mother’s sister with sherry until she promised to provide a shelter for me during the school holidays.
My aunt was quite an agreeable but very boring woman and understandably she had never married. She too referred to my father as the Devil on the few occasions when she spoke of him, and I began to feel a distinct respect for him, even though I feared him, for to have a devil in the family was after all a kind of distinction. An angel one had to take on trust, but the Devil in the words of my prayer book ‘roamed the world like a raging lion’, which made me think that perhaps it was for that reason my father spent so much more time in Africa than in Richmond. Now after so many years have passed
I
begin to wonder whether he was not quite a good man in his own way, something which I would hesitate to say of the Captain who had won me from him at backgammon, or so he said.
‘Where shall we go now?’ the Captain asked me. ‘I hadn’t expected you to be released as easily as all that. I thought there would be a lot of papers to sign – there are nearly always papers to be signed in my experience. It’s too early for lunch,’ he added.
‘It’s nearly twelve,’ I said. Bread, jam and tea at eight always left me hungry.
‘My appetite only begins at one, but my thirst is always there at least half an hour before – however twelve is good enough for me – but you are too young to take into a bar.’ He looked me up and down. ‘You would certainly never pass. Why, you are even small for your age.’
‘We could go for a walk,’ I suggested without enthusiasm because walks were a compulsory feature of school life on Sundays and often entailed the slaughter of some Amalekites.