‘Otherwise the Embassy seems a rather happy spot these days,’ Maltby resumed as they strode out towards the next trench. ‘Barring Paddy’s cough and poor old Phoebe.’ Phoebe, his wife, neither so poor nor so old.
Maltby was unshaven. A ratty grey pullover, soaked through, hung from his upper body like a suit of chain-mail of which he had mislaid the trousers. Why doesn’t the bloody man treat himself to a set of waterproofs? Stormont marvelled as more rain seeped down his own neck.
‘Phoebe’s never happy,’ Maltby was saying. ‘I can’t think why she came back. I loathe her. She loathes me. The children loathe us both. There seems absolutely no point in any of it. We haven’t screwed for simply years, thank God.’
Stormont preserved an appalled silence. Not once in the eighteen months that they had known each other had Maltby confided in him. Now suddenly, for reasons unknown, there was no limit to their frightful intimacy.
‘You got divorced all right,’ Maltby complained. ‘Yours was quite a public sort of thing too, if I remember. But you got over it. Your children speak to you. The Office didn’t chuck you out.’
‘Not quite.’
‘Well, I do wish you’d have a word with Phoebe about it. Do her the world of good. Tell her you’ve been through it and it’s not as bad as its reputation. She doesn’t talk to people properly, that’s part of the problem. Prefers to boss them about.’
‘Perhaps it would be better if Paddy talked to her,’ Stormont said.
Maltby was teeing up. He did this, Stormont noticed, without bending his knees. He simply folded himself in two, then unfolded himself, talking all the while.
‘No, I think you should do it, quite honestly,’ he went on while he addressed the ball with menacing feints. ‘She worries about me, you see. She knows she can get on alone. But she thinks I’ll be on the phone all the time asking her how to boil an egg. I wouldn’t do any such thing. I’d move in a gorgeous girl and boil eggs for her all day long.’ He drove and the ball shot upward, beyond the salvation of the trench. For a while it seemed content with its straight path. Then it changed its mind, turned left and disappeared into walls of rain.
‘Oh fart,’ said the Ambassador, revealing depths of language that Stormont had never guessed at.
The deluge became absurd. Leaving the ball to fend for itself, they repaired to a regimental bandstand set before a crescent of married officers’ mansions. But the old caddie didn’t like the bandstand. He preferred the dubious shelter of a cluster of palm trees, where he stood with the torrent streaming off his hat.
‘Otherwise,’ said Maltby, ‘as far as I know, we’re rather a jolly crowd. No feuds, everyone chipper, our stock in Panama never higher, fascinating intelligence pouring in from all directions. What more can our masters ask? one wonders.’
‘Why? What are they asking?’
But Maltby would not be hurried. He preferred his own strange path of indirection.
‘Long chats with all sorts of people last night on Osnard’s secret telephone,’ he announced in a tone of fond reminiscence. ‘Have you had a go on it?’
‘I can’t say I have,’ said Stormont.
‘Hideous red affair, wired up to a Boer War washing machine. You can say anything you like on it. I was terribly impressed. Such nice chaps too. Not that one has ever met them. But they sounded nice. A conference call. One spent one’s entire time apologising for interrupting. A man called Luxmore is on his way to us. A Scottish person. We’re to call him Mellors. I’m not supposed to tell you, so naturally I shall. Luxmore-Mellors will bring us life-altering news.’
The rain had stopped dead but Maltby didn’t seem to have noticed. The caddie was still huddled under the palm trees, where he was smoking a fat roll of marijuana leaves.
‘Perhaps you should stand that chap down,’ Stormont suggested. ‘If you’re not playing any more,’
So they put some wet dollars together and sent the caddie back to the clubhouse with Maltby’s clubs, and sat themselves on a dry bench at the edge of the bandstand and watched a swollen stream racing through Eden, and the sun like God’s glory breaking out on every leaf and flower.