“Oh, that blue one? Yes, it is different, isn’t it?”
“You notice that it has ‘Suomi’ painted on its side.”
“So it has.”
“‘Suomi’ means ‘Finland’.”
“Oh yes?”
“It is ‘Finland’ in the Finnish language.”
“That’s interesting.”
“It is curious how that ship comes to be here.”
“Yes.” Bowen made a great business of taking out his packet of 20-20-20 miniature cigars: nearly as nice as his Dutch favourites and 8d. for twenty. Afilhado waited politely until he had lit one, then continued:
“Since a year the crew of this ship murdered their captain. The ship was sailing from a port in Morocco. The crew joined together in a conspiracy and carried out this, murder. Then they sailed the ship here and surrendered themselves to the authorities, confessing what they had done. They were taken from here to Lisbon so that it was decided what must become of them. The ship remained here and they were taken back to Finland by land. There they experienced a trial for the murder. I cannot say what happened to them.”
“Were they hung?” David and Mark seemed to ask at once.
“I cannot say. I suppose they were imprisoned. But, as you see, Mr. Bowen, the ship remains here even now. The captain’s father received the ship by the will of the captain. He made the journey here from Finland, because he wished to sell the ship and here there was nobody who might sell the ship for him. In Finland, you know, the ship would be worth much money. But here it is of no use. It is of the wrong shape for the fishing of sardines and so the captain’s father cannot sell it. He did not know of this when he came. And he has no money with which to pay the men who should sail it back to Finland for him, and he has no money with which to make his own journey back to Finland. So he remains here, and he has made of the ship his home. He does this for almost a year.”
Bowen said: “Why did the crew murder the captain?”
“I cannot say. But it seems that he was a very bad captain. Look, Mr. Bowen. You can see the captain’s father now.”
A fat pig-faced man with thin white hair was walking along the deck of Suomi, which they were now passing at a distance of a few yards. He wore a white singlet and shapeless blue trousers, but he reminded Bowen of Mr. Binns, the prosperous grocer he saw in the pub at home. The captain’s father began gathering over his arm some underclothes which had been hung over a stay to dry. Then the sail of their own boat hid him from view.
“What does he do for a living?” Bowen asked.
“At first he was employed on one of the sardine ships. But he could not learn how to perform that job. And so he is now employed in the fish-market.”
A powerful, useless thrill ran through Bowen. Here was a marvellous story for someone, but not, unfortunately, for him. Only a rather worse or much older writer than himself could tackle it satisfactorily. W. Somerset Maugham (on grounds of age, not lack of merit) was the kind of chap. “I have a notion that men are seldom what they seem.” Or “Lars Ericssen”—something like that, anyway—”was the skipper of a small Finnish cargo vessel. He was big bronzed man who never looked you directly in the eye. One hot summer off Tangier …” Mm. A rather worse or much older writer. Well, just say a writer, instead of a man who was supposed to be a writer. That would get it.
They landed soon after that and Bowen stopped halfway up the beach to get the sand off his feet and put on his socks and shoes. Afilhado stepped without fuss into a pair of wet plimsolls—they somehow yielded a plausible harmony with his military-style jacket and clerical. collar—and told Bowen a story to tide him over this otherwise rather unrewarding interval.
“So the Father says to his servant, ‘José, because you are my old trusty servant I will tell you how I can disappear from the street. In that street lives my little lady-friend, but I am the Father and so I cannot knock at her front door. So when I visit her I make like a dog “owr, owr-owr” and she throws from her window a rope which I climb. Now, José, you understand.’ Then the next evening the Father goes to the street and he makes ‘owr, owr-owr’ as he always does. But when he expects the rope to come from the window he hears instead of this someone who makes ‘rrrrrrrUH, rrrrrrrUH.’ So the poor Father calls out, ‘José, you ungrateful man. Only yesterday I am teaching you how to bark, and now you wish to bite me.’”
Bowen laughed a great deal. He watched while Afilhado, who felt perhaps that the grown-ups had had things their own way for too long, cracked a successful joke with the boys, using that special sedate affectionate-ness that priests and nuns always seemed to go in for.
It was a pity that the depth and duration of his acquaintance with Afilhado were necessarily so limited. He had felt rather the same way about de Sousa and Bachixa, now evermore sundered from him, and even—a far more arresting achievement—about Carlos Joaquim Cordeiro Oates. Things had had to pile up a good deal to bring Bowen to the point of announcing to that man that their association must terminate: a forty-eight-hour boycott by Barbara, a further slackening of domestic routine, an intimation from Marchant that Oates was charging half as much again as the Pensão Internacional, a qualitative change for the worse in the Oates lavatory, the Bannions’ offer of their chalet. Even these might not have sufficed without the sight of Oates riding in after work with a brand-new windshield fixed to his ginger-coloured motorbike. Filling in time by working out how many bottles of disinfectant that windshield was
