The Dark of the Sun - Smith Wilbur. Страница 9

blue metal. "But look what they hold now!" Bruce stirred irritably.

He had not wanted to provoke another bout of Mike Haig's soul-searching.

Damn the old fool - why must he always start this, he knew as well as

anyone that in the mercenary army of Katanga there was a taboo upon the

past. It did not exist. "Ruffy," Bruce snapped, aren't you going to feed

your boys?"

"Right now, boss." Ruffy opened another beer and handed it to Bruce.

"Hold that - it will keep your mind off food while I rustle it up." He

lumbered off along the root of

the coach still singing.

"Three years ago, it seems like all eternity," Mike went on as though

Bruce had not interrupted. "Three years ago I was a surgeon and now

this.-The desolation had spread to his eyes, and Bruce felt his pity for

the man deep down where he kept it imprisoned with all his other

emotions.

"I was good. I was one of the best. Royal College.

Harley Street. Guy's." Mike laughed without humour, with bitterness.

"Can you imagine my being driven in my Rolls to address the College on

my advanced technique of cholecystectorny?"

"What happened?" The question was out before he could stop it, and Bruce

realized how near to the surface he had let his pity rise. "No, don't

tell me. It's your business. I don't want to know."

"But I'll tell you, Bruce, I want to. It helps somehow, talking about

it." At first, thought Bruce, I wanted to talk also, to try and wash the

pain away with words.

Mike was silent for a few seconds. Below them the singing rose

and fell, and the train ran on through the forest.

"It had taken me ten hard years to get there, but at last I had done it.

A fine practice; doing the work I loved with skill, earning

the rewards I deserved. A wife that any man would have been proud of, a

lovely home, many friends, too many friends perhaps; for success breeds

friends the way a dirty kitchen breeds cockroaches." Mike pulled out a

handkerchief and dried the back of his neck where the wind could not

reach.

"Those sort of friends mean parties," he went on. "Parties when you've

worked all day and you're tired; when you need the lift that you

can get so easily from a bottle. You don't know if you have the

weakness for the stuff until it's too late; until you have a bottle in

the drawer of your desk; until suddenly your practice isn't so good any

more." Mike twisted the handkerchief around his fingers as he ploughed

doggedly on. "Then you know it suddenly. You know it when your hands

dance in the morning and all you want for breakfast is that, when you

can't wait until lunchtime because you have to operate and that's the

only way you can keep your hands steady. But you know it finally and

utterly when the knife turns in your hand and the artery starts to spurt

and you watch it paralysed - you watch it hosing red over your gown and

forming pools on the theatre floor." Mike's voice dried up then and he

tapped a cigarette from his pack and lit it. His shoulders were hunched

forward and his eyes were full of shadows of his guilt.

Then he straightened up and his voice was stronger.

"You must have read about it. I was headlines for a few days, all the

papers But my name wasn" Haig in those days.

I got that name off a label on a bottle in a bar-room.

"Gladys stayed with me, of course, she was that type. We came out to

Africa. I had enough saved from the wreck for a down payment on a

tobacco farm in the Centenary block outside Salisbury. Two good seasons

and I was off the bottle.

Gladys was having our first baby, we had both wanted one so badly.

It was all coming right again." Mike stuffed the handkerchief back in

his pocket, and his voice lost its strength again, turned dry and husky.

"Then one day I took the truck into the village and on the way home I

stopped at the club. I had been there often before, but this time they

threw me out at closing time and when I got back to the farm

I had a case of Scotch on the seat beside me." Bruce wanted to stop

him; he knew what was coming and he didn't want to hear it.

"The first rains started that night and the rivers came down in

flood. The telephone lines were knocked out and we were cut off. In the

morning--" Mike stopped again and turned to Bruce.

"I suppose it was the shock of seeing me like that again, but in the

morning Gladys went into labour. It was her first, and she wasn't so

young any more. She was still in labour the

next day, but by then she was too weak to scream. I remember how

peaceful it was without her screaming and pleading with me to help.

You see she knew I had all the instruments I needed. She begged me to

help. I can remember that; her voice through the fog of whisky. I

think I hated her then. I think I remember hating her, it was all so

confused, so mixed up with the screaming and the liquor.

But at last she was quiet. I don't think I realized she was dead.

I was simply glad she was quiet and I could have peace." He dropped his

eyes from Bruce's face.

"I was too drunk to go to the funeral. Then I met a man in a bar-room, I

can't remember how long after it was, I can't even remember where. it

must have been on the Copperbelt. He was recruiting for

Tshombe's army and I signed up; there didn't seem anything else to do."

Neither of them spoke again until a gendarme brought food to them, hunks

of brown bread spread with tinned butter and filled with bully beet and

pickled onions. They ate in silence listening, to the singing, and Bruce

said at last: "You needn't have told me."

"I know."

"Mike-" Bruce paused.

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry, if that's any comfort."

"It is," Mike said.

"It helps to have - not to be completely alone. I like you, Bruce." He

blurted out the last sentence and Bruce recoiled as though Mike had spat

in his face.

You fool, he rebuked himself savagely, you were wide open then.

You nearly let one of them in again.

Remorselessly he crushed down his sympathy, shocked at the effort it

required, and when he picked up the radio the gentleness had gone from

his eyes.

"Hendry," he spoke into the set, "don't talk so much. I put you up front

to watch the tracks." From the leading truck Wally Hendry looked round

and forked two fingers at Bruce in a casual obscenity, but he turned

back and faced ahead.

"You'd better go and take over from Hendry," Bruce told Mike.

"Send him back here." Mike Haig stood up and looked down at Bruce.

"What are you afraid of?" his voice softly puzzled.

"I gave you an order, Haig."

"Yes, I'm on my way."

The aircraft found them in the late afternoon. It was a Vampire

jet of the Indian Air Force and it came from the north.

They heard the soft rumble of it across the sky and then saw it glint

like a speck of mica in the sunlight above the storm clouds ahead of

them.

"I bet you a thousand francs to a handful of dung that this Bucko don't

know about us," said Hendry with anticipation, watching the jet turn off

its course towards them.

"Well, he does now," said Bruce.

Swiftly he surveyed the rain clouds in front of them.