Who gets the houses, Louisa? Who gets the land, swimming pools and tennis courts and hand-clipped hedges and plastic Christmas reindeer courtesy of the Company? Louisa, Louisa, tell us how to raise revenue, cut costs, milk the gringos’ sacred cow! We want it now, Louisa! Now while we’re in power, now while the foreign bidders are courting us, now before those dewy-eyed ecologists start preaching at us about their precious rainforests.
Whisperings of payoffs, manoeuvrings, secret deals, echoing down the corridors. The Canal will be modernised, widened to accommodate bigger shipping… they are planning new locks… multinational contractors are offering huge sums for consultancy, influence, commissions, contracts… And meanwhile: new files Louisa isn’t allowed to handle and new bosses who stop talking when she walks into any room except Delgado’s: her poor, decent, honourable Ernesto with his broom, vainly sweeping at the tide of their insatiable greed.
‘I’m too damn young!’ she yelled. ‘I’m too young and too alive to see my childhood trashed before my eyes!’
She sat up with a jump. Her head must have rolled onto Pendel’s uncollaborative shoulder.
‘What did I say?’ she demanded anxiously.
She had said nothing. It was diplomatic Mr Osnard from the back who had spoken. In his infinite politeness he was enquiring whether Louisa enjoyed watching the Panamanians taking over the Canal.
In Gamboa harbour Mark showed Mr Osnard how you got the tarpaulin off the motorboat and started the engine all by yourself. Harry took the helm long enough to navigate the wake of the Canal traffic, but it was Mark who beached the boat and made it fast, unloaded the luggage and, with a lot of help from jolly Mr Osnard, lit the barbecue.
Who is this glossy young man, so young, so handsome-ugly, so sensual, so amusing, so polite? What is this sensual man to my husband and what is my husband to him? Why is this sensual man like a new life for us – although Harry, having foisted him on us, seems to wish he never had? How come he knows so much about us, is so at ease with us, so family, talks so knowledgeably about the shop and Marta and Abraxas and Delgado and all the people in our lives, just because his father was a friend of Mr Braithwaite?
Why do I like him so much better than Harry does? He’s Harry’s friend, not mine. Why are my children all over him while Harry scowls and keeps his back turned and refuses to laugh at Mr Osnard’s many jokes?
Her first thought was that Harry was jealous, and that pleased her. Her second thought was at once a nightmare and a terrible, shameful exultation: oh Jesus, oh mother and father, Harry wants me to fall in love with Mr Osnard so that we’re even.
Pendel and Hannah cooking spare ribs. Mark preparing fishing rods. Louisa handing out beer and apple juice and watching her childhood chug away between the buoys. Mr Osnard asking her about Panamanian students – did she know any, were they militant? – and about people who lived the other side of the bridge.
‘Well, we do have the rice farm,’ says Louisa winsomely. ‘But I don’t think we know any people there!’
Harry and Mark sitting back to back on the boat. The fish, to quote Mr Osnard, giving themselves up in a spirit of voluntary euthanasia. Hannah lying on her tummy in the shade of the Anytime house, ostentatiously turning the expensive pages of the book on ponies that Mr Osnard has brought her for her birthday. And Louisa, under the influence of his gentle prompting and a secretive slug of vodka, regaling him with the story of her life this far, in the flirtatious language of her whore-sister Emily when she did her Scarlett O’Hara number before falling on her back.
‘My problem – and I have to say this – is it really okay if I call you Andy? I’m Lou – though I love him dearly in so many ways, my problem – and thank God I only have the one, because almost every girl I know in Panama has a problem for every day of the week – my problem has to be my father.’