The Captain and the Enemy (6 page)

‘The Devil,’ I exclaimed before I could stop myself.

My father was a white-bearded burly man with a fine set of teeth for his age, but perhaps they were capped. They flashed their double row at me now in quite a genial fashion. ‘May the Devil come in?’ he asked, and I stood aside for him.

‘Liza,’ he called, ‘Liza,’ looking up the stairs.

‘She’s in the basement,’ I told him, and he picked his way down carefully step by step, for the stairs were narrow and his feet were big.

‘So it’s you,’ Liza said. She stood by the kitchen table with a carving-knife in her hand, but that was only because she had been in the middle of washing up. ‘How did you know?’

‘I got a picture postcard from Roger.’

‘Roger?’

‘It was a picture of Bruges cathedral. He asked me to look you both up in case you needed help because he’d been away a long time.’

‘Who’s Roger?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I forgot. He likes to call himself the Captain, doesn’t he?’ He turned on me. ‘You’ve been causing quite a bit of trouble, Victor.’

The name angered me. I said, ‘I’m Jim now.’

‘Well, it’s your mother who chose Victor. I never liked the name. It sounded a bit like boasting. I think it was because you were born on May something or other when we celebrate the day the Germans surrendered.’

‘I wasn’t. I was born in September.’

‘Oh, then there must have been another reason. Perhaps she thought to have you at all was
her
victory. Over me. I wasn’t so keen on a child.’

‘Well, I’m Jim now.’

‘Jim’s a shade better, but it’s still a bit on the common side.’

‘We don’t need any help from you,’ Liza said.

‘I wish that silly fellow had told me earlier where you were both hiding. It would have saved me a lot of bother about Victor. Oh, all right, Jim, if you like it better. There was first your aunt, and then a fool called Bates. He wrote me an extraordinary letter. Said he was your headmaster. Never heard of him till then. I always paid the bills to a man they called the bursar. But your aunt was the worst of the lot. How are you, old girl?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘No more trouble with your insides?’

‘No.’

‘What’s happening with Roger – I mean the Captain?’

‘He’s looking after us. You don’t need to worry. I tell you he’s looking after us fine.’

‘From Bruges?’

‘Work takes him away now and then.’

‘Work? The Captain? Don’t make me laugh.’ He looked all around him at the kitchen. ‘You won’t offer me a cup of tea, Liza, for old time’s sake?’

‘Sit down then if you must.’

I could see that he wasn’t in the least daunted by her reluctance. ‘I suppose he’s in trouble again.’

‘You might as well take off your coat if you are going to have a cup of tea.’

‘No, no. I won’t stay long. I’m only a bird of passage,
Liza
. But your Captain went a bit far when he kidnapped the boy. No wonder he’s hiding in Bruges.’

‘He isn’t hiding in Bruges. And he didn’t kidnap him. He won him off you. Fair and square at backgammon. You can’t cheat at backgammon.’

‘There’s never been a game invented yet at which you can’t find a way to cheat. Anyway it was chess we played not backgammon. It’s difficult to cheat at backgammon, but chess – especially after a drink or two. One of you gets a bit tired. The attention wanders. You switch a piece and, lo and behold, checkmate it is. Roger, you know, has a way of getting his details a little wrong. Even that name Captain which you call him. He was a sergeant not a captain when the Germans were supposed to have nabbed him, and I doubt if they promoted him to an officer in captivity. If he ever was in captivity – that sort of captivity. He has a lot of imagination.’

‘I don’t believe you. You were always jealous of him.’

‘It doesn’t really matter anyway, does it? If he wants to be a captain … though it
was
a bit dangerous nabbing the boy.’

‘He didn’t nab him. You know very well – he won him at backgammon.’

‘I told you it was chess we played and he didn’t even win at that without cheating.’

‘You wrote a letter for him to the headmaster, saying he could take him away.’

‘Yes, for an afternoon – to give him lunch and a movie. Oh well, we won’t quarrel about little details like that, Liza. But what on earth made him do it?’

‘He didn’t want me to be lonely, that’s why. He thinks of others.’

‘Perhaps you are right. It’s a real shame you couldn’t have a child of your own.’

‘And that’s your fault.’

‘You know well enough you didn’t want the one you lost, Liza. Blame that clumsy doctor, not me.’

‘I didn’t want any child
you
had fathered – that’s true enough.’

Their argument was quite beyond me in those days and it remained a mystery for many years, so that it was an argument meaningless to me then which I am trying to reproduce, and what I am writing now has to be based on my later knowledge. At that moment all that worried me was Liza’s suppressed anger. I could see that she was hurt and that it was the Devil who had hurt her. There was no doubt at all in my mind which of them was to blame. ‘Why don’t you go?’ I said to the Devil, and putting into my voice all the courage I possessed I added, ‘You are not wanted here.’

‘Look who’s talking. I’m your father, boy.’

‘And she’s my mother,’ I said, getting the word out with a sense of confidence and triumph for the first time.

‘Bravo,’ the Devil said, ‘bravo.’

‘There’s your tea. Drink it,’ Liza told him.

‘If I could have another lump of sugar. You’ve forgotten, Liza, that I have a very sweet tooth.’

‘I don’t want to remember anything about you. There’s the sugar basin. Take as much as you want.’

‘Perhaps you ought to forget the Captain too, if you want to forget me. After all you wouldn’t have met him without me.’

‘That’s true and I’ll say thank you for that, but for nothing else in the world.’

‘Oh come. I wasn’t as bad to you as all that, was I?’

‘You made me have a dead child, and he’s given me Jim.’

‘I only hope you’ll be able to keep your Jim.’

‘Oh, I don’t need any money from you. The Captain …’

‘I wasn’t meaning money, Liza, but I warn you that his aunt’s on the track. She’s even talking of a private detective.’

‘And I suppose you’ll tell her where we are?’

‘Do you really think I’m all that of a devil, Liza? No, I promise you I’ll tell his aunt nothing, nothing. She reminds me too much of my wife – but the sister’s much worse. I’m sure you’ll look after the boy a lot better than she’s ever done.’

He finished his tea and stared into his cup as though he were telling a fortune. He said, ‘You won’t believe me, Liza, but I’d like to help.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘And yet you believe
him
.’

‘I’ve good reason to.’

‘Oh he’s been telling you a lot of stories. I used to believe them myself. He’s not what I’d call a very truthful man. Even his moustache … What colour does he fancy now?’

(1)

BUT HIS MOUSTACHE
had quite gone some weeks later, after I had run upstairs and opened the door because the bell had sounded the correct, the safe and the longed-for code. I think perhaps a kind of affection for each other had grown a little in both of us during the Captain’s absence. I was beginning to be quite fond of Liza, but it was still with the easily transferable affection of a child, and her affection may well have been an almost automatic response to my own and could have been cut off just as readily. But it was the Captain who occupied our thoughts and our conversation. ‘The Captain always says …’ ‘You know the Captain told me once that when he was a prisoner …’

And yet it was not the same Captain that we had known who stood waiting outside the door. A Captain he might still be, but a tall bearded sea captain with no stick across his shoulder like a rifle, but a stick carried in his fist like a weapon against pirates. I gaped at him and didn’t move for a moment to let him in, and behind him beside the pavement was a car. A car!

‘Is that yours?’ I asked him.

‘Of course it’s mine,’ he snapped at me. ‘Where’s Liza? Is Liza all right?’

He pushed me aside and went down the stairs two at a time. I saw them greet each other. She had taken a pace or two to meet him, but they halted a foot apart. They didn’t
kiss
: they didn’t even touch. It was as though they were frightened of each other after the months of absence. She said, ‘You’ve grown a beard.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘It seemed a bit wiser.’ He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re all right, Liza?’

‘I’m all right, but you …’

‘Nothing to worry about.’

They kissed each other at last – not the kind of passionate kiss which I had seen only once on the screen at
King Kong
and remembered ever after, but a small timorous kiss on either cheek, as though even that gesture was something which could be dangerous to the loved one, like an infection. I turned away to close and lock the door with a second look at the car and a sense of disappointment, and when I joined them in the kitchen she was busy making the inevitable pot of tea, which I knew now that he only drank to please her.

‘So the old Devil turned up,’ the Captain remarked.

‘He sat where you are sitting now.’

The Captain shifted uneasily back and forth on the hard chair as if he could still feel the warmth left there by my father’s body and resented it.

‘What did he have to say?’

‘He said he wanted to help me.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘I said I didn’t need any help from him.’

The Captain continued to shift uneasily in his chair. ‘Perhaps that wasn’t wise, Liza.’

‘I don’t
want
his help.’

‘And I don’t suppose he trusts
me
either.’

‘Oh, that’s for sure he doesn’t.’

‘A bit of regular money for you all the same – even from him – it would save you a lot of anxiety. I can’t always be around.’

‘We’ve managed all right so far.’

I don’t pretend that I can remember correctly the details of this conversation. There are certain words which I do remember, but I invent far more of them, in order to fill in the gaps between their words, because I want so much to hear in my ears again the tone of their two voices. Above all I want to understand the only two people in whom I could recognize what I suppose can be described as a kind of love, a kind which to this day I have certainly never felt in myself. Of one thing I am almost sure at least, that I heard him, after a long pause, ask her, ‘Did he make you unhappy again?’ and her quick reply, ‘He can’t. Not any longer.’

Did the Captain stay with us that night? By the nature of things I would never have known that – they were far too discreet. When I went to bed I tried to keep awake as long as I could hear voices below, to reassure me that I wasn’t alone. I listened too for the sound of a car going away, but I went to sleep before the voices had ceased. I only know that next morning he was there at breakfast and I remember that detail because for the first time the question of my schooling was raised.

I think it came about because I asked him the moment that I joined them about his car. ‘It’s really yours?’

‘Of course it’s mine.’

‘What kind is it?’

‘A Morris Minor.’

‘Is that a good car?’

‘It’s not a Rolls. It’s good enough as things are.’

‘Will you teach me to drive it?’

‘No. At your age it’s against the law. And talking about the law,’ he added to Liza, ‘I think there are laws about schooling, but I’m damned if I know what they are. Jim can read and he can write – whatever else does a boy need? The rest just comes with living. Anyway there are things which I can teach him better than any schoolmaster.’

‘Science?’

‘Oh, I don’t know very much about science. But I can’t see Jim ever being a scientist.’

‘Religion?’

‘That’s more of a woman’s job. Your job.’

‘I don’t know a lot about religion either.’

‘Give him a Bible and let him read it for himself. You can’t force religion on a boy, Liza. One learns it as one goes along or one doesn’t.’

‘You never did, I suppose.’

‘Then you suppose too much. I’ve told you before that, when I walked down off the Pyrenees after I escaped, I found a monastery. They didn’t ask for any papers, they didn’t go to the police – what I saw going on was all a lot of nonsense, of course, but they were good men, at least they were good to me. When you are not a good man yourself you respect a good man. I would prefer to die with a good man around. A good man teaches a lot of nonsense and a bad man teaches truth, but what the hell is the difference when you come to die? I’m not the one to teach the boy nonsense. Let him read the Bible and learn to judge it for himself. I’ll teach him geography.’

‘And then there’s always languages. I wouldn’t want a
boy
of mine to be more ignorant than others.’

‘Good for you, Liza. You’ve said it.’

‘Said what?’

‘You’ve never said it before. “A boy of mine.”’

‘Well, in a sort of way I suppose he is now …’

‘As for languages – no problem there, Liza. You can buy him gramophone records – German Self-Taught, Spanish … And as it happens I’ve got a smattering of both – and you know why. I can sort of help him along the path …’

So it was that I happily escaped school for the time being and began with what one might call a private education. The lessons were not very regular: they depended on the availability of the Captain who was very often absent. They were in a way secretive – which made them more enjoyable, for the neighbours would see me going off at the right time for school and they never saw my quick and furtive return for the lessons held in my room. Otherwise rumours would have certainly reached the authorities. So without exactly knowing it I was, in my small way, already following in the Captain’s illegal tracks.

I remember little of the language classes; I have only an impression that the Captain was a good deal more at ease in German than he was in Spanish, perhaps because, if what he told me was true, he had spent far more time as a prisoner in Germany than as an escaped prisoner in Spain. This too affected his geography lessons. They were lessons drawn from the experience of a traveller in rather unusual circumstances and perhaps they were more vivid than the superficial second-hand knowledge of a school teacher.