‘Now you promised that that would be a little secret between the two of us,’ H.K. said in a mock stern voice, and he pinched Charly’s bottom.
‘That’s an un-American activity,’ said Charly.
‘Oh no,’ said H.K., ‘we still got a couple of things that have to be done by hand.’
Outside, the waves were tripping over, crashing on to and falling through the foamy, hissing scar-tissue of their predecessors. I wondered how long before we would begin doing the same.
15 Reaction in the market
It was another hot sunny day on Monday. I stayed behind in the house, which Charly described as ‘just cosy’. I said I thought that she had her hands full of H.K. and Giorgio and she said how did I know it wasn’t the other way about. I didn’t. Charly borrowed my comb, fixed her hair and returned the comb within one minute and a half. We walked down to the market place. She had established terms of easy familiarity with the men while not alienating the women. She spoke Portuguese with a natural fluency, even knowing the local names for some of the vegetables and fish. The women saw in her the emancipation they all sought, while the men watched her and wondered if she was something they could deal with over either table or pillow.
She wore a pale-pink sleeveless dress that made her arms look very tanned. Her hair was an unbleached white, the colour of Portland stone. She paused to pat a dog that sat in the middle of the hot road. She whistled after the gas man, and the vegetable boy let her work the shredding machine, piling cabbage into heaps of wire wool and sending razor-blades of carrots and pumpkin to join the hairpins of beans.
She cleaved the yellow hands of bananas with a jab of the knife, criticized the garlic, prodded the tomatoes and put nail marks into the beans. They liked her.
We walked through the fish market. The flat concrete benches were ashine with bream and gilt-head, pilchards, sardines and mackerel. Outside, the sun reflected off the sea with a million flashing pinpoints of light, as though every bird was sitting there on the ocean top flashing angry white wings.
The painted fishing boats were drawn up high from the water’s edge and packed as densely as the finish line at Ford’s. Most of them were a vivid ultramarine-blue inside. Outside were bands of light green, faded pink, black, and white. On the prows signs were painted: an eye, a horse or a name. Some carried a big mop of animal hair for luck. The boats that had been out in the rain on Sunday night now, their headsails slackly raised, made an encampment of pointed canvas shapes. Here and there were men checking the nets for holes or rearranging them under the hot sun.
As we left the fish market the little bell clanged for the tax assessor. In the sunlight moray eel was drying, and on the cobblestones a man in a shirt either dark-blue with light-blue patches or vice versa was scrubbing the big wooden fish-weighing machine. Charly asked him if he had sold out. He said ‘yes’, and when she called him a moderately rude Portuguese name he ran off to fetch the spider crabs that he was pretending he hadn’t saved for her.
Even the policeman hitched up his patent-leather belt and smiled, and Charly’s stock went even higher. No one had seen him smile before.
Each year the building with the bell is painted a mustard colour and the bar next door a deep tomato red, but the sun bleaches them lighter every day until the colour all but disappears. Inside the bar the star-patterned tiled floor joins the star-patterned tiled walls. The sunlight that lies inside the doors like two white mats reflects coolly among the marble-topped tables and crippled blue chairs, and framed colour pictures of Glamis, the Tower of London and the Queen with Salazar. In happy co-existence is a big sleepy ginger cat and a noisy white cockerel named Francois. The sailors were calling, ‘Sing, Francis’ to make it crow for Charly when Joe MacIntosh came in. He said, ‘We’ve raised one canister — are you coming?’
Fernie came into the bar just as we were leaving. He watched us with unblinking gaze.
16 One too many
The window shutters were closed. In the dark front room Giorgio was sitting waiting for us. Singleton was tidying the boat and gear. He’d be back any moment.
Joe said, ‘We decided to wait for you, sir.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, like I was taking the helm of the
Over the newspaper-covered table the 60-watt bulb shone on to the green steel canister. The edges and corners were rounded and sealing compound joined two equal-shaped sides.
I told Joe to get the Polaroid Land camera. He brought it complete with flash and a green filter to give us a maximum detail in the green paintwork. He took six shots. The prints were satisfactory.
Joe took a small pair of pliers and applied himself to the canister until it creaked open on its ancient hinges. None of us, I think, was expecting much, but we did expect something a little more rewarding. There were a couple of handfuls of chalky cotton wool, not very good quality, a tattered piece of canvas about as large as a man’s handkerchief, some torn pieces of white paper, and a twenty-dollar bill, crumpled and dirty. Charly reached across for the twenty-dollar bill, but as she picked it up the racket of a two-stroke motor cycle became louder, until it cut immediately under the shuttered window.
Charly mouthed the word ‘Fernie’, and sewed a frown in hasty tacks across her forehead.
It didn’t matter, of course, we merely hid the canister before letting Fernie in, then took him to the kitchen for coffee. He accepted a cup in his polite laconic manner, smiled pleasantly and said he was bearing ‘a message of a confidential nature from the first citizen of the region’.
I asked him who the first citizen of the region was. Fernie answered, ‘Senhor Manuel Gambeta do Rosario da Cunha, a very great gentleman if you will allow me to tell you, sir.’
I heard Singleton’s voice from the balcony calling, ‘So what was in it?’
‘I have a principle, Senhor Fernandes Tomas, of allowing anyone to tell me anything at any time.’
‘Me too, sir,’ he said. He gave no sign of having heard Singleton, then he gave me an address to which I was invited at 5 p.m. to ‘learn something to advantage’.
‘I shall meet you there.’ He picked up his black trilby from the marble hallstand and kicked up his bike. He sped past the narrow whitewashed walls of the cobbled street. He didn’t look back.
Inside the house I found everyone sitting around looking at
‘Two,’ I said. ‘I thought there was only one in the container.’
‘There was,’ Joe said. ‘Charly brought in its twin brother out of the dirty-linen cupboard.’
I looked at Charly.
‘It was in the pocket of one of Harry Kondit’s dirty shirts,’ she said lamely. ‘I’d offered to wash them for him.’
I said nothing.
‘Not all his shirts, just the synthetic fibres,’ she said.
‘O.K.,’ I told her, ‘but don’t get so friendly that you’ll miss him if he suddenly disappears.’
17 Da Cunha lays it down
West of Albufeira there is a view across gently sloping fields of ash-grey fig and vines to the blue sea three kilometres away.
A patio rings with the voices of fishermen and shopkeepers of Albufeira. On the sun-bleached wooden tables are plates of black cuttlefish and moray dried in the sun and fried crisp. The new crop of wine is drunk and discussed and drunk and discussed until the next crop appears. Pressed in the old Moorish fashion (while still in the
