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At this cue Curl stood up. ‘I’ll say goodnight, Mr President.’ He put the prompt cards into his pocket. There were many more things to say but this was not a good time to get the President’s assent to anything at all. Curl was disturbed by the way the meeting had gone. It had almost come to an argument. Until tonight he’d not realized how deeply disturbed the President was by the polls that showed his steadily decreasing popularity. In that state of mind, the chief might make a very bad error of judgement. It was Curl’s job to make sure the right things were done, even at times like this when the chief was unable to think straight. When happy times were here again, Curl would get his rightful share of praise. The old man was very fair about giving credit where credit was due. Sometimes he’d even admit to being wrong. That was one of the reasons why they all liked him so much.
‘Nothing else, was there, John?’
‘Nothing that can’t wait, Mr President.’ As Curl walked to the door there came a sound like a pistol shot. It was the President cracking the binding as he squashed the opened report flat to read it. He treated books roughly, as if taking revenge upon them.
3
LINCOLN’S INN, LONDON.
‘I knew you’d be crossing the water.’
Ralph Lucas was forty-five years old and every year of his active life had left a mark on him. His hair was grey, his eyes slightly misaligned. This gave his face a rakish look, as does the tilted hat of a boulevardier. He was short, with a straight spine, keen blue eyes and that sort of square-ended moustache – also grey – that had enabled generations of British officers to be distinguished as such in mufti.
Most of his native Australian vowels had been replaced by the hard classless articulation of men whose shouted orders have to be understood. His attitude to the world was derisive, like that of a conjuror welcoming to the stage some innocent from the audience.
Ralph grew up in Brisbane, Queensland. He was a bright child who, together with his sister Serena, responded well to the coaching their ambitious mother provided. In 1945 his father had come home from the war a young staff sergeant. Confident and energetic, he’d found a job in the construction business. He’d done well from the post-war boom. But Ralph Lucas’ family did not grow up in one of the new houses that his father had built. They bought an old house with a view across the bay to Mud Island. From his bedroom, on a clear day; young Ralph could see South Passage out there between the islands, where sometimes he went sailing with his cousins. When Ralph scored high marks in his exams his mother went back to school-teaching and so provided enough money for Ralph to study and eventually become a physician. But if his parents thought they’d see their son married and settled, with a general practice in some prosperous suburb, they were to be disappointed. His years as a student had left him restless and frustrated. His admiration for his father was deeply rooted. As soon as his training ended, Ralph joined the Australian army in time to go to the Vietnam war with an infantry regiment.
His mother felt betrayed. She’d given her husband to the army for five long years and then lost her son to it too. She was bitter about what that jungle war did to him. Her husband had remained comparatively untouched by whatever he experienced in the European campaign, but Vietnam was different. Her son suffered. She said a cheerful young man went to war and an old one returned on that first leave. She never said that to her son of course. Ralph’s mother believed in positive thinking.
Ralph’s time in Vietnam was something he seldom spoke about. His parents knew only that he ended up as a front-line doctor with a special unit that fought through the tunnels. It was a dirty remorseless war but he was never injured. Neither did he ever suffer the psychological horrors that came to so many of the men who spent twelve or fifteen hours a day trying to patch and pull together the shattered bodies of young men. Major Ralph Lucas got a commendation and a US medal. A few weeks before his service was up, he was made a colonel. But anyone who expected this decorated warrior and physician to be a conventional supporter of the establishment was in for a shock.
It was in the bars and officers’ clubs of Saigon that Lucas suffered the wounds from which he never recovered. He began to think that the vicious war that so appalled him was no more than a slugging match to occupy the innocents, while crooks of every rank and colour wallowed in a multi-billion-dollar trough of profits and corruption. Asked to comment afterwards he liked to describe himself as ‘a political eunuch’. But within Lucas there remained a terrible anger and a cynical bitterness that could border on despair.
His time in Vietnam was not without benefit to him and to others. While treating combat casualties he improvised his ‘Lucas bag’. A plastic ration container, ingeniously glued together, became a bag with which transfusions could be made without exposing blood to the open air, and thus to bacterial infection. It was cheap, unbreakable and expendable. Lucas was amazed that no one had thought of it before.
After Vietnam he spent his discharge leave with his family. By that time his mother was dead, and his father was sick and being nursed by his sister Serena. Lucas felt bad about deserting them but he needed the wider horizons that a job in England would provide. Once there he fell in love with a pretty Scottish nurse and got married. He got a job in the Webley–Hockley research laboratory in London. The Director of Research engaged him. He thought a Vietnam veteran would know about tropical medicine. But that medical experience had been almost entirely of trauma and of attendant traumatic neuroses. ‘Men, not test-tubes,’ as he said in one outburst. He was hopeless at laboratory work and his unhappiness showed in eruptions of bad temper. Under other circumstances his marriage might have held together, but the cramped apartment, and small salary, became too much for him when the baby came. It was a miserable time. His wife took their tiny daughter to live with her mother in Edinburgh. Two days after she left, Lucas got the phone call from his sister. Dad had died.
Lucas would have gone back to Australia except for the occasional visits to see his daughter, and the friendship he struck up with an elderly laboratory assistant named Fred Dunstable. Fred was a natural engineer, a widower who spent his spare time repairing broken household machines brought to him by his neighbours. It was in Fred’s garage workshop that the two men perfected the design of the Lucas bag, and designed the aseptic assembly process that was needed for bulk manufacture.
Armed with a prototype Lucas bag, and that fluent Aussie charm to which even the most sceptical Pom is vulnerable, Lucas persuaded the board of the Webley–Hockley Medical Foundation to provide enough cash to manufacture a trial run of one thousand bags. They sent them to hospital casualty departments. The device came at a time when traumatic wounds and emergency outdoor transfusions were on the rise. Plane crashes, earthquakes and wars brought the Lucas bag into use throughout the world. The Foundation got their investment back and more. The tiny royalty he split with his partner soon provided Fred with a comfortable retirement and Lucas with enough money to bring his sister over from Australia, and send his daughter to a good private school.
His daughter had done a lot to encourage the wonderful reconciliation. With his ex-wife, Lucas found happiness he’d never before known. He did all those things they’d talked about so long ago. They bought an old house and a new car and went to Kashmir on a second honeymoon. It was in the Vale of Kashmir that she died. A motor accident brought seven wonderful months to a ghastly end. He’d never stopped reproaching himself; not only for the accident but also for all those wasted years.
It was during that first terrible time of grieving that Ralph Lucas was invited to advise the Webley–Hockley Foundation. During almost eighty years of charitable work it had fed the tropical starving, housed the tropical homeless and financed a body of tropical research. The research achievements were outshone by other bodies, such as the Wellcome, but the Webley–Hockley had done more than any other European charity for ‘preventive medicine in tropical regions’.
Ralph’s invention and the nominal contribution it made to the Foundation’s funds did not make him eligible for full membership of the Board. He was described as its ‘medical adviser’ but he’d been told to speak at parity with the august board. It was a privilege of which he availed himself to the utmost. ‘Find just one,’ he said in response to a careless remark by a board member. ‘Find just one completely healthy native in the whole of Spanish Guiana and then come back and argue.’
Through the window he could see the afternoon sunlight on the trees of Lincoln’s Inn. London provided the gentlest of climates; it was difficult to recall Vietnam and the sort of tropical jungle of which they spoke. His words had been chosen to annoy. Now he felt the ripple of irritation from everyone round the polished table. It never ceased to amaze Lucas that such eminent men became children at these meetings.
A socialist peer – iconoclast, guru and TV panel game celebrity – rose to the bait. He tapped his coffee spoon against his cup before heaping two large spoons of Barbados sugar into it. ‘That’s just balls, Lucas old boy, if you don’t mind me saying so.’ He was a plump fleshy fellow with a plummy voice too deep and considered to be natural. ‘Balls!’ He prided himself that his kind of plain speaking was the hallmark of a great mind. He fixed the chairman with his eyes to demand support.
‘Yes,’ said the chairman, although it came out as not much more than a clearing of the throat.
They all looked at Lucas, who took his time in drinking a little coffee. ‘Filthy coffee,’ he said reasonably. ‘Remarkable china but filthy coffee. Could a complaint about the coffee go into the minutes?’ He turned to his opponent. ‘But I do mind, my dear fellow. I mind very much.’ He fixed his opponent with a hard stare and a blank expression.
‘Well,’ said the peer, uncertain how to continue. He made a movement of his hand to encourage the investments man to say something. When investments decided to drink coffee, the peer’s objections shifted: ‘I’d like to know who this anonymous donor is.’
‘You saw the letter from the bank,’ said the chairman.
‘I mean exactly who it is. Not the name of some bank acting for a client.’ He looked around, but when it seemed that no one had understood, added, ‘Suppose it was some communist organization. The Pentagon or the CIA. Or some big business conglomerate with South American interests.’ It was a list of what most horrified the socialist peer.
‘My God,’ said the chairman softly. Lucas looked at him, not sure whether he was being flippant or devout.
The peer nodded and drank his coffee. He shuddered at the taste of the sugar. He hated the taste of sugar in coffee; especially when he knew it was Barbados sugar.
The secretary looked up from the rough projections of the accountant and said, ‘Communists, fascists, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh: does it matter? I don’t have to tell you that the fluctuations of both currency and markets have played havoc with our investments. We shall be lucky to end the year with our capital intact.’
‘Umm,’ said the peer and wrote on his notepad.
The lawyer, a bird-like old man with heavily starched collar and regimental tie, felt the reputation of the legal profession was in jeopardy. ‘The donor is anonymous but I would have thought it enough that the letter comes from the most reputable firm of solicitors in England.’
‘Really,’ said Lucas. ‘I thought that yours was the most reputable.’
The lawyer gave him a prim smile to show that he refused to be provoked. ‘What we need to know is how badly the money is needed in Spanish Guiana. That means a reliable on-the-spot report.’ He had suggested this at the very beginning.
The industrialist polished his glasses and fretted. He had to go home to Birmingham. He put on his glasses and looked at the skeleton clock on the mantelpiece. Three-forty, and they were only halfway through the agenda. His role was to advise the board on technical matters and production, but he couldn’t remember the last time that such a question arose. It wasn’t as if the people on the board were paid a fee. Even the fares were not reimbursed. Sometimes he was ready to believe that paying substantial fees and expenses might provide people who were more competent than these illustrious time-wasters.
The peer pushed his coffee away and, remembering Lucas’ remark said, ‘Not one healthy native? None of us would last twenty-four hours in the jungle, Colonel, and you know it. Are we healthy?’
‘You are talking about adaptation,’ said Lucas.
‘I agree with Colonel Lucas,’ said the lawyer. ‘During my time in Malaya I saw young soldiers from industrial cities like Leeds adapt to hellish conditions.’
The research trustee groaned. There were too many people with war experiences on this damned board. If the lawyer started talking about the way he’d won his Military Cross in ‘the Malayan emergency’ they would never get away. He coughed. ‘Can we get back to the question again …?’
The peer would not tolerate such interruptions. ‘The real question is: one …’ he raised a finger. ‘… Is this board indifferent to the political implications that might later arise …’
Lucas did not wait for two. ‘Surely the question is entirely medical …’
The lawyer held up his gold pencil in a cautionary gesture. It irritated him that Lucas should come here in tweed sports jacket, and canary-coloured sweater, when everyone else wore dark suits. ‘It is not entirely medical. We could lay this board open to charges of financing a highly organized and disciplined army that has the declared aim of overthrowing by force the legal government of Spanish Guiana.’
There was a shocked silence as they digested this. Then the investments man stopped doodling on his notepad to wave a hand. His voice was toneless and bored. ‘If, on the other hand, we refuse to send medical supplies to these starving people in the south, we could be described as suppressing that popular movement by means of disease.’
‘I’m going to ask you to withdraw that,’ said the peer, losing his studied calm. ‘I won’t allow that to go on the minutes of this meeting.’
Without looking up from his doodling the investment man calmly said, ‘Well, I don’t withdraw it and you can go to hell and take the minutes with you.’
‘If the army in the south have money enough for guns and bombs, they have money enough for medical supplies,’ said the man from Birmingham.
‘Ten divisions complete with tanks and aircraft,’ said the secretary.
‘Who told you that?’ asked Lucas.
‘It was a documentary on BBC Television,’ said the secretary.
‘What about all the money they are getting from growing drugs?’ said the man from Birmingham.
‘I saw the same TV programme,’ said the lawyer. ‘Are you sure that was Spanish Guiana? I thought that was Peru.’
‘You can’t believe all that BBC propaganda,’ said the investments man. ‘That TV programme was a repeat. If my memory serves me, it was originally shown back in the Eighties before the Wall came down.’
The chairman watched them but said nothing.
What a circus! If it was always like this, thought Lucas, it would be worth the journey up to town every month.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the lawyer in a tone he normally reserved for consulting counsel. ‘While I wouldn’t agree with Colonel Lucas that this is entirely a medical question, I believe we are all beginning to see that we need more medical information before we can make a decision. After all’ – he looked at them and smiled archly before reminding them how important they were – ‘we are dealing with a great deal of money.’
Clever the way he can do that, thought Lucas. They were clucking away happily now, like a lot of contented hens.
‘What’s the form then?’ said the man from Birmingham in an effort to move things along.
‘An on-the-spot report,’ said the lawyer. He had the infinite patience that the law’s bounty and unhurried pace provide. He gave no sign that this was the fourth time he’d said it.
‘In any case, we all agreed that the antibiotics should be sent,’ said the investments man, although no one had agreed to it, and someone had specifically advised against that course of action. ‘Let’s send that immediately, shall we?’
The lawyer did not respond to the suggestion, knowing that putting it to the vote would start new arguments. Thankful that the dispute about the anonymous donor now seemed to have faded, he picked up a pile of paper and tapped it on the table to align the edges. He did it to attract their attention: it was a trick he’d learned from his partner. As they looked round he said, ‘Getting someone to Guiana and back shouldn’t delay us more than a week or two. Then, if we decide to go ahead, we can airfreight the urgent supplies.’
‘If we decide to go ahead,’ said the peer. The lawyer smiled and nodded.
The secretary said, ‘I think I might be able to arrange the air freight at cost or even free through one of our benefactors.’
‘Excellent,’ said the research man.
Bloody fool, thought Lucas, but he modified the thought: ‘Much better to buy locally whenever possible. Cash transfer. Ship it from Florida perhaps.’
The lawyer gave an audible exhalation. ‘We must be careful. Graft is second nature in these countries.’
‘Easier to protect money than stop pilfering of drugs and medicines,’ said Lucas. ‘In fact we should look at the idea of flying it right down to the southern provinces where it’s needed.’
‘And of course there will be customs and duty and tariffs,’ said the lawyer. It would be a nightmare and he was determined to dump it into someone else’s lap if he could.
‘That should be arranged in advance,’ said Lucas. ‘World Health Organization people must put the pressure on the central government. It would be absurd to pay duty on medical supplies that are a gift to their own people.’
‘Well, that will be your problem,’ said the lawyer.
Lucas looked at him and eventually nodded.
The chairman picked up the agenda and said, ‘Item four …’
‘Hold on. I don’t understand exactly what we have decided,’ said the investments man.
The lawyer said, ‘Colonel Lucas will fly out to Spanish Guiana to decide what medical aid should be given to people in the southern provinces.’
‘The Marxist guerrillas,’ said the man from Birmingham.
‘The people in the southern provinces,’ repeated the chairman firmly. He didn’t say much but he knew what he wanted the minutes to record.
The lawyer said, ‘The donor has offered to arrange for a guide, interpreter and all expenses.’
They looked at Lucas and it amused him to see in their faces how pleased they were to be rid of him. It was not true to say that Lucas nodded without thinking about it. He had no great desire to visit Spanish Guiana, but the medical implications of a large organized community living isolated deep in the jungle could be far-reaching. There was no telling what he might learn: and Lucas loved to learn. More immediately; he was the medical adviser to the board. They’d expect him to go. It would give him a change of scenery and he had no family responsibilities to consider. And there was the unarguable fact that he could report on the situation better than any man round this table. In fact better than any man they could get hold of at short notice.
Lucas nodded.
‘Bravo, Colonel,’ said the man from Birmingham.
The peer smiled. The jungle was the best place for the little Australian peasant.
‘Item four then,’ said the chairman. ‘This is the grant for the inoculation scheme in Zambia. We now have the estimates for the serum …’
Lucas remembered that he was supposed to meet his daughter next week. Perhaps his sister would meet her instead. He’d drop in on her as soon as this meeting ended. She’d question him about his trip to South America and then claim to have divined it in the stars. Oh well. Perhaps it would have been better if she had got married, but she’d chosen instead to look after his ailing parents. He felt guilty about that. He’d never given any of the family anything to compare with the love and devotion they had given him. Too late now: he’d take his guilt to the grave.
He’d tell her what he knew himself and that wasn’t much. He looked down at the pad in front of him. He’d drawn a jungle of prehensile trees, each leaf an open hand. On second thoughts he’d tell her little or nothing. He’d only be away three weeks, a month at the most.
Serena Lucas, his unmarried sister, lived in a smart little house in Marylebone. Ralph could never enter it without feeling self-conscious. The polished brass plate on the railings was as discreet as any lawyer’s shingle. Only the symbol beneath her name told the initiated that here lived a clairvoyant.
A disembodied voice came in response to the bellpush. ‘It’s Ralph,’ he said into the microphone. A buzzer sounded and he opened the door.
The short narrow hall immediately gave on to a staircase. These houses were damned small: he would not like to live in one. But it was immaculately kept. The carpeting and the furnishings were good quality and carefully chosen. On the wall he saw a new lithograph: a seascape by a fashionable artist. He guessed it had been payment for some shrewd piece of advice. She encouraged her clients to give her such gifts and usually got generously overpaid. The old witch was clever, there was no doubt about that, whatever one thought about the supernatural.
‘That’s a fine print,’ said Ralph as his sister came out of her study to greet him.
They kissed as they always did. She offered each cheek in turn and he avoided disturbing her make-up. Madame Serena was an attractive woman four years younger than Ralph. She was slim and dark with a pale complexion and wonderful luminous eyes that were both penetrating and sympathetic. Perhaps such colouring fulfilled her clients’ expectations of Bohemian blood, but the tailored suit, gold earrings and expensive shoes were another dimension of her personality. The fringed handbag with its beadwork was the only hint of the Gypsy.
‘What a lovely surprise to see you, Ralph.’ She pronounced it ‘Rafe’ as one of her well-bred clients had once done. Her voice had no trace of the Queensland twang.
‘I was passing. I hope you’re not too busy.’
‘The day before yesterday I had a senior Cabinet minister here,’ she said. She had to tell him the moment he got inside the door. She was still the little sister wanting his approval and admiration.
‘Not the Home Secretary trying to find a way out of that hospital scandal?’
She didn’t acknowledge his joke. ‘Ralph. You know I never gossip about clients.’ And yet in her manner she was able to imply that she had been consulted on some vital matter of government policy.
‘I’m sent to South America, Serena. Just a week or so. I wonder if you would meet Jennifer next Wednesday afternoon? If not, I will see if I can contact her and change the arrangements.’
She did not reply immediately. She led him into the drawing-room and they both sat down. ‘Would you like tea, Ralph?’
‘Have you caught this appalling English habit of drinking tea all day?’
‘Clients expect it.’
‘And you read the tea-leaves.’
‘You know perfectly well that I do not. Tea relaxes them. The English become far more human when they have a hot cup of tea in their hand.’
‘Do they? I shall bear that in mind,’ said Ralph. ‘You’ll meet Jennifer then?’
His sister and daughter did not enjoy a warm relationship but he knew Serena would not refuse. They had grown up in a warm congenial family atmosphere where they did things for one another. She took a tiny notebook from her handbag and turned it to the appropriate page. ‘I have nothing I cannot rearrange. What time is the plane arriving?’
