‘What is?’
‘This one. Ours. Everything we’ve done has paid off. The children. Us. We’re hunkydory.’
‘As long as you’re happy, Harry.’
Pendel decides that the moment is ripe to approach his great design.
‘I heard a funny story in the shop the other day,’ he says in a tone of amused reminiscence. ‘About the Canal. That old Japanese plan that used to be talked about is back on the table, they tell me. I don’t know if it’s come your way at the Commission at all.’
‘What Japanese plan?’
‘A new cut. At sea level. Using the Caimito estuary. A figure of a hundred billion dollars is being bandied about, I don’t know if I’m right.’
Louisa is not pleased. ‘Harry, I do not understand why you bring me to the top of a hill in order to repeat rumours about a new Japanese canal. It’s an immoral, ecologically destructive plan, it is anti-American and anti-Treaty. So I hope very much that you will go back to whoever told you this nonsense and advise them not to propagate rumours designed to make the future of our Canal even more difficult to adjust to.’
For a second a terrible sense of failure overtakes Pendel and he almost weeps. It is followed by indignation. I was trying to take her with me and she wouldn’t come. She preferred her little rut. Doesn’t she realise marriage is a two-way thing? Either you support someone or you fall over. He adopts a haughty tone.
‘It’s all highly hush-hush this time round, according to what I’m told, so it doesn’t surprise me particularly that you haven’t heard about it. There’s top Panamanian brass involved, but they’re keeping shtumm and meeting on the sly. Those Japs won’t listen to argument, not where the Canal is concerned. Your very own Ernie Delgado’s in on it too, they say, which doesn’t surprise me quite as much as it ought, I expect. I never did manage to warm to Ernie the way you do. And Pres is in it up to his elbows. It’s what his missing hours were all about on his Far Eastern tour.’
A long pause. One of her longest. At first he presumes that she is contemplating the enormity of his information.
‘Pres?’ she repeats.
‘The President.’
‘Of Panama?’
‘Well, it’s not the President of the United States, is it, dear?’
‘Why do you call him Pres? That’s what Mr Osnard calls him. Harry, I do not understand why you are imitating Mr Osnard.’
‘She’s on the brink,’ Pendel reported by telephone the same night, speaking very quietly in case the line was tapped. ‘It’s big. She’s asking, is she up to it? There’s things out there she doesn’t want to know.’
‘What sort o’ things?’
‘She’s not saying, Andy. She’s deciding. She’s worried about Ernie.’
‘Afraid he’ll rumble her?’
‘Afraid she’ll rumble him. Ernie’s got his hand out like the rest of them, Andy. That Mr Clean image of his is all a façade. “There’s a side of me would rather not look,” she told me. Her words. She’s getting up her courage.’
The next night, in line with Osnard’s advice, he took her to La Casa del Marisco for dinner, table by the window. She ordered lobster thermidor which astonished him.
‘Harry, I am not made of stone. I have moods. I change. I am a sentient human being. Do you wish me to eat prawns and halibut?’
‘Lou, I wish you to expand in every way that’s comfortable for you.’
She’s ready, he decided, watching her tuck into her lobster. She’s grown into the part.
‘Mr Osnard, sir, I’m very pleased to say I’ve got that second suit you’ve been hankering after,’ Pendel announced next morning, telephoning this time from his cutting room. ‘All folded and boxed up and wrapped in tissue paper, as long as it stays one to one. I shall be expecting your cheque shortly.’
‘Great. When can we all get together? Adore to try it on.’
‘We can’t, I’m afraid, sir. Or not all of us. It isn’t on offer. Like I said. I measure, I cut, I fit, I do it all myself personally.’
‘Hell does that mean?’