They parted with mutual jocularity on the steps of the club. The doorman hailed a taxi for Goole to go back to Mrs. Goole in Holland Park.
“One last thing,” said the FO man by the taxi door. “Not a word to anyone else about this. I’ll have to file it, well classified, at the department, but otherwise it remains just between you and us at the FO.”
“Of course,” said Manson.
“I’m very grateful you saw fit to tell me all this. You have no idea how much easier it makes our job on the economic side to know what’s going on. I’ll keep a quiet eye on Zangaro, and if there should be any change in the political scene there, you’ll be the first to know. Good night.”
Sir James Manson watched the taxi head down the road and signaled to his Rolls-Royce waiting up the street.
“You’ll be the first to know,” he mimicked. “Too bloody right I will, boy. ’Cause I’m going to start it.”
He leaned through the passenger-side window and observed to Craddock, his chauffeur, “If pisswilly little buggers like that had been in charge of building our empire, Craddock, we might by now just about have colonized the Isle of Wight.”
“You’re absolutely right, Sir James,” said Craddock.
When his employer had climbed into the rear, the chauffeur slid open the communicating panel. “Gloucestershire, Sir James?”
“Gloucestershire, Craddock.”
It was starting to drizzle again as the sleek limousine swished down Piccadilly and up Park Lane, heading for the A40 and the West Country, carrying Sir James Manson toward his ten-bedroom mansion bought three years earlier for him by a grateful company for £250,000. It also contained his wife and nineteen-year-old daughter, but these he had won himself.
An hour later Gordon Chalmers lay beside his wife, tired and angry from the row they had had for the past two hours. Peggy Chalmers lay on her back, looking up at the ceiling.
“I can’t do it,” Chalmers said for the umpteenth time. “I can’t just go and falsify a mining report to help James Bloody Manson make more money.”
There was a long silence. They had been over it all a score of times since Peggy had read Manson’s letter to his banker and heard from her husband the conditions of future financial security.
“What does it matter?” she said in a low voice from the darkness beside him. “When all’s said and done, what does it matter? Whether he gets the concession, or the Russians, or no one. Whether the price rises or falls. What does it matter? It’s all pieces of rock and grains of metal.”
Peggy Chalmers swung herself across her husband’s torso and stared at the dim outline of his face. Outside, the night wind rattled the branches of the old elm close to which they had built the new house with the special fittings for their crippled daughter.
When Peggy Chalmers spoke again it was with passionate urgency. “But Margaret is not a piece of rock, and I am not a few grains of metal. We need that money, Gordon. We need it now and for the next ten years. Please, darling, please just one time forget the idea of a nice letter to Tribune or Private Eye and do what he wants.”
Gordon Chalmers continued to stare at the slit of window between the curtains, which was half open to let in a breath of air.
“All right,” he said at length.
“You’ll do it?” she asked.
“Yes, I’ll bloody do it.”
“You swear it, darling? You give me your word?”
There was another long pause. “You have my word,” said the low voice from the face above her.
She pillowed her head in the hair of his chest. “Thank you, darling. Don’t worry about it. Please don’t worry. You’ll forget it in a month. You’ll see.”
Ten minutes later she was asleep, exhausted by the nightly struggle to get Margaret bathed and into bed, and by the unaccustomed quarrel with her husband.
Gordon Chalmers continued to stare into the darkness. “They always win,” he said softly and bitterly after a while. “The bastards, they always bloody win.”
The following day, Saturday, he drove the five miles to the laboratory and wrote out a completely new report for the republic of Zangaro. Then he burned his notes and the original report and trundled the core samples over to the scrap heap, where a local builder would remove them for concrete and garden paths. He mailed the fresh report, registered, to Sir James Manson at the head office, went home, and tried to forget it.
On Monday the report was received in London, and the instructions to the bankers in Chalmers’ favor were mailed. The report was sent down to Overseas Contracts for Willoughby and Bryant to read, and Bryant was told to leave the next day and take it to the Minister of Natural Resources in Clarence. A letter from the company would be attached, expressing the appropriate regret.
On Tuesday evening Richard Bryant found himself in Number One Building at London’s Heathrow Airport, waiting for a BEA flight to Paris, where he could get the appropriate visa and make a connecting flight by Air Afrique. Five hundred yards away, in Three Building, Jack Mulrooney humped his bag through Passport Control to catch the BOAC overnight Jumbo to Nairobi. He w
as not unhappy. He had had enough of London. Ahead lay Kenya, sun, bush, and the chance of a lion.