He began trying to tell Mallory about Caroline. Mallory was coughing and spitting into his drink, hissing, ‘Well out of it, old boy! Well out of it! Sounds like a bed-and-breakfast girl.’ Somewhere close by a baby began a scratchy shriek, followed by other babies, all beginning to howl together with the instinct of dogs barking. Mallory was banging the bar for more drinks. Neil said slowly, trying to get the words out as if they were plums in his mouth, ‘She’s getting married on Saturday morning to a racing-motorist.’
‘Good! You’re all right, old boy. You skip your first marriage — get on with your second when you’re forty.’
Down in the departure hall a group of CRS were grappling with a burly middle-aged man with grey hair and dark glasses. They had him by both arms, swinging him round with his legs splayed out absurdly behind him, as they began dragging him over to the airport police offices.
The ash-blonde airhostess came out from behind the departure desk and trotted over to a glass partition in the Garderie d’Enfants. Neil watched her mistily, miserably, imagining the brass bedstead and flowered wallpaper in a Paris hotel: her slim body crisp as celery, wearing nothing but seamless stockings. Harmless sex fantasies of an English intellectual about to die. ‘Drink up!’ croaked Mallory, clinking glasses: two glasses, four, eight, multiplying and dividing, and Neil murmured, ‘Do you like sleeping with girls wearing only stockings?’
‘Don’t mind. With or without.’ Mallory looked at his watch. ‘I’ll have to go soon, old boy. Got to file copy.’
Neil felt a griping panic, a terror of being left alone among these thousands of destitute helpless people. He knew suddenly that he was going to die. Mallory was finishing his drink, saying, ‘By the way, I heard you had a nice little bird in your room last week?’
Neil stared at nothing. Mallory went on, ‘There was a funny rumour going round. I don’t know where it started — there’s a lot of gossip in the hotel. Receptionists don’t miss much.’
Neil was trying to exercise his stiffening face muscles, while Mallory gave him a rusty leer, speaking now with a crafty look in his eyes: ‘Only hearsay, old boy, but the rumour got around. Those bloody receptionists. You want to know what it was?’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘The girl you had up in your room.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘D’ye know what they’ve been saying?’
‘Who?’
‘In the hotel. People in the hotel. Gossip, old boy. Evil gossip.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Somebody heard that the girl was the stepdaughter —’ He broke off with a violent bout of coughing that seemed to send bits of his face flying off in all directions, his whole physiognomy breaking up like a jigsaw puzzle.
‘Stepdaughter?’ said Neil.
‘Stepdaughter of none other than the illustrious Colonel Pierre Broussard.’
Mallory’s two purple faces quickly elided. Neil blinked, swallowed drily, tried to think. Mallory was saying, ‘Who is she? It would be a bloody magnificent story if it was true.’
Neil held on to the edge of the bar. It made sense: she had been in Broussard’s flat, she had been on friendly terms with Le Hir, she had known all about Athos. And she had tried to warn him that night in the hotel; then later, in Le Hir’s flat, she had refused to talk about anything. She would have known what was going to happen: the plan for the flashed headlamps and the mortars in the mountains.
Mallory said again, ‘Who was she, you randy old lecher?’
‘I don’t know. Some girl from the Secret Army. She had supper with me. Very innocent.’
Mallory made a gurgling noise: ‘There was an American in Leopoldville who managed to lay one of Lumumba’s Belgian lady advisers, so-called.’
Neil wondered: if it were true would it make things better or worse? Would she believe that he had betrayed Guérin? Perhaps it didn’t matter in the long run. Distantly, through layers of numb brain tissue, he heard a girl’s voice calling to him: ‘Air France annonce le depart de leur premier vol vers Paris —’
The atmosphere suddenly intensified. From the main hall came a surging sound like the sea. Mallory was tugging at Neil’s elbow, calling for the barman: ‘Come on, you’re off!’
Neil slid from the stool and felt the floor lurch under him like the deck of a fast ship. He walked carefully, with a slight keel to port, down the shallow stairs behind Mallory, listening to the girl’s voice all round him: ‘Tons les passagers munis de cartes de police numerotées l’un jusqu’au quatre-vingt-douze doivent se présenter au Guichet Zéro!’
Numbers One to Four — Twenties-and-Twelve. Ninety-two. And he had number Fifty-seven. It was like the incantation of some sinister lottery.
Across the main hall the crowds were stirring with restless anticipation. Those who were among the lucky numbers were hurrying, pushing, shouting, scrambling to get into the untidy column forming outside Guichet Zéro. An illuminated board had flashed on above the head of a bull-necked CRS with horn-rimmed sunglasses: ‘DEPART ORLY 1900 H.’
At the far end of the hall, beyond the main entrance, Neil caught a glimpse of more crowds, and cars jammed three abreast along the dual-carriageway into the city, with motorcycle escorts droning up and down beside them in the dusty heat. Like an August Bank Holiday, he thought, with guns.
Now that he was standing up he realized that he was very drunk indeed, but with no sense of elation or release — only a giddy nausea, accentuated by the feverish sobriety all round him.
Since they had no luggage, they found themselves near the head of the swelling queue which edged slowly, under growing pressure, towards the departure desk. Here the passengers were being examined by three CRS. The first studied each passport, checking names against a list of Secret Army suspects; the
