At which his head fell forward and he pleaded with her like an old beggar on the doorstep.
‘Old Braithwaite made suits for Andy’s dad, Lou, I used to tag along and hold the tape.’
Hannah wanted to go to the rice farm for her birthday. And so, for different reasons, did Louisa, because she couldn’t understand why the rice farm had disappeared from Harry’s conversational repertoire. In her worst moments she convinced herself he had installed a woman there – that greasy Angel would pimp for anyone. But as soon as she suggested the farm Harry turned all haughty and said big changes were afoot up there, best leave it to the lawyers till the deal was set.
So instead they rode in the four-track to Anytime, which was a house without walls perched like a wooden bandstand on its own round hazy island sixty yards across, in a vast sweltering flooded valley called Lake Gatún twenty miles inland from the Atlantic at the summit of the Canal’s course, which is marked by a curling avenue of coloured buoys disappearing in pairs into the dripping haze. The island lay at the lake’s western edge in a jigsaw of steaming jungle bays and inlets and mangrove swamps and other islands, of which Barro Colorado was the largest, and the least significant was Anytime, so named by the Pendel children after Paddington Bear’s marmalade and rented by Louisa’s father from his employers for a few forgotten dollars every year and now bequeathed to her in charity.
The Canal smouldered to the left of them and the mist coiled over it like an eternal dew. Pelicans dived through the mist and the air inside the car smelled of ship’s oil and nothing in the world had changed or ever would, Amen. The same boats that had passed here when Louisa was Hannah’s age passed now, the same black figures propped their bare elbows on the sweating railings, the same wet flags drooped from their masts and nobody in the world knew what they meant – her father used to joke – except for one blind old pirate in Portobelo. Pendel, strangely ill at ease in Mr Osnard’s presence, drove in sulky silence. Louisa lounged beside him, which was what Mr Osnard had insisted upon, he swore he preferred it in the back.
Mr Osnard, she repeated drowsily to herself. Portly Mr Osnard. Ten years my junior at least, yet I’ll never be able to call you Andy. She had forgotten, if she had ever known, how disarmingly polite an English gentleman could be when he put his insincere mind to it. Humour and politeness together, her mother used to warn her, make a dangerous heap of charm. So does being a good listener, Louisa reflected as she lay with her head back, smiling at the way Hannah pointed out the sights to him as if she owned them, and Mark letting her because it was her birthday – and besides, Mark in his way was quite as besotted by their guest as Hannah was.
One of the old lighthouses came into sight.
‘Now why would anybody be such a silly ass as to paint a lighthouse black on one side and white on t’other,’ Mr Osnard asked, having listened endlessly to Hannah on the horrendous appetite of alligators.
‘Hannah, you’re to be respectful to Mr Osnard now,’ Louisa warned when Hannah hooted and told him he was a lemon.
‘Tell her about old Braithwaite, Andy,’ Harry suggested grudgingly. ‘Tell her your childhood memories of him. She’d like that.’
He’s showing him off to me, she thought. Why’s he doing that?
But already she was slipping back into the mists of her own childhood, which was what she did whenever they drove to Anytime, an out-of-body experience: back into the deadly predictability of Zonian life from day to day, into the crematorium sweetness bequeathed to us by our dreaming forefathers, nothing left for us to do but drift amid the all-year-round flowers that the Company grows for us and the always-green lawns that the Company mows for us, and swim in the Company pools and hate our beautiful sisters and read the Company newspapers and fantasise about being a perfected society of early United States Socialists, part-settlers, part-colonisers, part-preachers to the godless natives in the World Beyond the Zone, while never actually rising above our petty arguments and jealousies that are the lot of any foreign garrison, never questioning the Company’s assumptions whether ethnic, sexual or social, never presuming to step outside the confinement allotted to us, but progressing obediently and inexorably, level by level, up and down the tideless narrow avenue of our pre-ordained rut in life, knowing that every lock and lake and gully, every tunnel, robot, dam and every shaped and ordered hill on either side of them is the immutable achievement of the dead, and that our bounden duty here on earth is to praise God and the Company, steer a straight line between the walls, cultivate our faith and chastity in defiance of our promiscuous sister, masturbate ourselves to death and polish the brass on the Eighth Wonder of its Day.