22

Eight o’clock the next evening found Ingham where he had been the evening before, as far as Ina was concerned. She had enjoyed Sfax, had read about its eleventh-century mosque and the Roman mosaics in his Guide Bleu, but he sensed a reserve in her which took away some of his initiative, or enthusiasm. Ingham found a present for Joey, a blue leather case with loops inside to hold pencils or brushes. They had hired a rather heavy rowboat, and Ingham had rowed around a bit with her. They had gone swimming and lain in the sun.

Ingham had wanted to ask her what kind of church she was going to in Brooklyn. It wouldn’t be Catholic, he was pretty sure. Her family was vaguely Protestant. But he could not get the question out. In Sfax, he had bought smoked fish, black olives and some good French wine, and he invited Ina to have dinner with him at home.

Jensen had a drink with them, but declined to stay for dinner. By now, Ingham had more dinner plates and three knives and forks. His salt was still the coarse variety, bought in haste one day, and now it was in a saucer, damp. Ingham had two candles stuck in wine bottles on the table.

He laughed. ‘Romantic candlelight, and it’s so damned hot we have to push them to the very edge of the table!’ He pinched one candle out, took a swallow of the good red wine, and said, ‘Ina, shall we go to Paris together?’

‘When?’ she asked, a little surprised.

‘Tomorrow. Or the next day, anyway. Spend the last part of your vacation there.—Darling, I want to marry you. I want to be with you. I don’t want you to go away from me even for a week.’

Ina smiled. She was pleased, happy, Ingham was sure of that.

‘You know, we could be married in Paris. Surprise everyone when we get to New York.’

‘Didn’t you want to finish your book here?’

‘Oh, that! I’m almost finished. I know I keep saying that, but I’m always slow at the end of a book. It’s as if I didn’t want to end it. But I know the end. Dennison goes to prison for a bit, gets psychiatric treatment, and he’ll come out and do the same thing again.—That’s no problem.’ He got up and put his arm about her shoulder. ‘Would you marry me, darling? In Paris?’

‘Can I have a few minutes?’

Ingham released her. ‘Of course.’ He was surprised and vaguely disappointed. He felt he had to fill in the silence. ‘You know—I deliberately never talked to you about John. I didn’t talk much, I hope. Because I didn’t think you wanted to. Isn’t that true?’

1 suppose that’s true. I said it was a mistake, and a mistake it certainly was.’

Ingham’s brain seemed to be turning somersaults, turning over facts, choosing none. He felt whatever he might say was of great importance, and he did not want to say the wrong thing. ‘Do you still love him—or something?’

‘No, of course not.’

Ingham shrugged, embarrassed, but she might not have seen the shrug, because she was looking down at the table.

“Then what is it?—Or do you want to wait until tomorrow to talk?’

‘No, I don’t have to wait until tomorrow.’

Ingham sat down in his place again.

‘I feel that you’ve changed,’ she said.

‘How?’

‘You’re—a little bit tough somehow. Like —’ She looked up towards Jensen’s rooms. ‘He seems to have had such an influence on you, and he’s—well, the next thing to a beatnik.’ She was not whispering, because they both knew Jensen had gone out.

Ingham felt she was hedging from what she really wanted to say. ‘No, that he isn’t. He doesn’t come from that kind of family.’

‘Does that ever matter?’

‘My darling Ina, I haven’t known Anders very long, and I probably won’t ever see him again—after a few days.’

‘Will you tell me exactly what happened the night that Arab — Well, what did he do, try to come into your house? The bungalow?’

Ingham looked away from her. He wiped his mouth with his napkin, which was a dish-towel. ‘I could kick Francis Adams from here to Connecticut,’ Ingham said. ‘Meddling bastard. Nothing else to do but yack.’

Ina was saying nothing, watching him.

A very inward anger made Ingham silent, too. The stupidity of something like this bothering them, after all the worse things they had weathered, the John Castlewood business, his moping over Lotte which had nearly finished him even after meeting Ina—all that overcome, and now this! And Ingham was now tired of statements, speeches. He said nothing. But he realized that what Ina had said was an ultimatum. It was as if she said, ‘Unless you tell me what happened, or that you killed him, if you did, I won’t marry you.’ Ingham smiled at the bizarreness of it. What did the Arab matter?

He did not go up to her hotel room with her that night. And at home, he couldn’t sleep. He didn’t mind. In fact he got up and reheated the coffee. Jensen had come in around ten o’clock, said hello and good night to them, and had gone upstairs. His light was now off. It was just after one o’clock.

Ingham lay on his bed. What if he told Ina the truth? She wouldn’t necessarily tell OWL. It would annoy Ingham, if she did. But hadn’t he decided, days ago, not ever to tell her? But if he didn’t tell her—and obviously she suspected already that he had killed the man—he would lose her, and that gave Ingham a feeling of terror. When he imagined himself without Ina, Ingham felt his morale gone, his ambition, even his self-respect somehow.

He sat up, bothered by the fact that if he told her the truth, he would be in the position of having lied, looking her straight in the eye, for the past several days. He hadn’t quite succeeded with his lie, or she wouldn’t still be questioning him, but he had succeeded enough to make himself a coward, and dishonest. It was a dilemma. No matter how much Jensen said, ‘What does the bastard matter?’ the situation had come to matter quite a bit.

Or was it the lateness of the hour? He was tired.

Try to think of it objectively, he told himself. He imagined watching himself in the dark bungalow that night, being scared by the opening of his door (in fact he imagined somebody else, anybody else, being scared), having been annoyed and alarmed by a previous theft from the bungalow. Wouldn’t any man have picked something up and thrown it? And then he imagined the Arab alive, flesh and bones, a person known to other people, and morally and legally speaking as important as—President Kennedy. Ingham was ninety per cent sure he had killed the Arab. He had been trying to brush that aside, or minimise it by believing the Arab deserved it, or hadn’t been worth anything, but suppose he had killed a Negro or a white man in the same circumstances in the States, a man with a long record of housebreaking, for instance? Something would have happened to him. A short trial or hearing and an acquittal of a charge of manslaughter, perhaps, but not just nothing like here. He couldn’t expect to find, in America, a few convenient people to whisk the body away and not mention it.

In spite of the shame of it, Ingham supposed he would have to tell Ina the truth. He would tell her his fear, also his hatred that night. He would not attempt to excuse himself for having lied. He imagined her shocked at first, but finally understanding why it had happened and excusing him, if in fact she would blame him at all. It seemed possible to Ingham that she wouldn’t blame him, and that she only wanted to be satisfied that she knew the true story.

Ingham put on the light and lit a cigarette. He turned on his transistor and explored the dial for music or a human voice, and got a baritone American voice saying c… peace towards all\ The tone was soothing. ‘America is a land that has always extended the hand of friendship and good will to all peoples—of whatever colour or creed—the hand of help to any peoples who might need it—to ward off oppression—to help them to help themselves—win their battles against poverty….’ Ingham thought in disgust, All right, then give the land back to the Indians! What a splendid beginning, right at home! Not a piece of lousy desert you don’t want, but decent land with some value to it. Like Texas, for instance. (But no, my God, America had already taken Texas from the Mexicans!) Ohio, then. After all, the Indians had given the state its name, from the river there. ‘…what every man in the uniform of the American Army, Navy and Air Force knows—that with his privilege to fight for the United States of America goes a responsibility to uphold the sanctity of human justice, on whatever shores he may be….’ Ingham turned the thing off so viciously that the knob came off in his hand. He hurled it to the brick floor, where it bounced and disappeared somewhere. It wasn’t OWL, that steak-and-martini-filled employee of the Voice of America, or maybe the American Forces Network, but the words could have been OWL’s. Did anybody fall for it, Ingham wondered. Of course not. It was just a lot of bland tripe drifting past indifferent ears, which perhaps made some Americans in Europe chuckle a little, something that people endured until the next dance record. Yet the thing must have some influence or they wouldn’t keep on with it, therefore some people must be swallowing it. This was a profoundly disturbing thought to Ingham at two-twenty-five. He thought of OWL, just a mile away, dreaming up the same stuff and actually sending it, being paid for it—OWL wouldn’t lie about that. And paid by the Russians. Maybe OWL got as little as ten dollars a month for it. Ingham squirmed in his bed, and felt he was in a madhouse world, and that he might not be sane himself.

The memory of his first minute on Tunisian soil returned to him. At the airport. The sudden, shocking warmth of the air. Half a dozen Arab grease monkeys staring at the passengers, at him, under brows that Ingham had felt to be lowering and hostile, though later he had realized that that was how many Arabs’ brows looked normally. Ingham had felt conspicuously, disgustingly pale, and for a few unpleasant seconds had thought, ‘They must hate us, these darker people. It’s their continent, and what are we doing here? They know us, and not in a nice way, because the white man has been to Africa before.’ For a second or two, he had actually experienced physical fear, almost like terror. Tunisia, that tiny country, on the map not too far below Marseilles (and yet how different!), which Bourguiba had described as a mere postage stamp on the vast package of Africa.

Ingham realized he was in a curiously delicate condition.

Suddenly, he had a thought: speak to Mokta before he spoke to Ina. He couldn’t ask Jensen to do it. It might be useless, and yet Mokta might by this time tell him the truth, the fact-if it was a fact-that Abdullah had been killed that night. Why, Ingham thought, should he tell Ina he’d killed him if he hadn’t?