Free Saint Jack by Paul Theroux

Paradise Gardens would not have existed? That I had
plans?
    I hated him most when he said, with a concern that was contemptuous patronage, “How do you manage?”
    My elbows were on the bar, my head in my hands. Far off on a green ocean I saw a yacht speeding toward me with its pennants snapping in the breeze. A man in a swivel chair on the afterdeck had his feet braced on the gunwales and was pulling at a bending rod. Just behind him a lovely girl in a swimsuit stood with a tray of drinks and—I knew—club sandwiches, fresh olives, dishes of rollmop herring, and caviar spread on yellow crackers. The fish leaped, a tall silver thing turning in the sun, whipping the line out of the water. The yacht was close and I could see the man now. It was not me; it was no one I knew. I released my fingers from my eyes.
    â€œFlowers,” said Leigh. Why was he smiling? “How about a drink at the club?”
    My girls were fairly well known at the Bandung—“Jack’s fruit flies,” Yardley called them—but no one there had any knowledge of my club work, and how I came straight from the Churchill Room or the Raffles Grill to the Bandung like an unfaithful husband home from his beguiling mistress’s arms. I tried to whisper, “Maybe later.”
    Leigh looked beyond me to the others. “Does this establishment,” he said, “have a toilet?”
    â€œIn the kitchen,” said Coony, glad for a chance to say it.
    Wally pointed the way.
    â€œDoes this establishment have a toilet?” said Smale. He guffawed. I wondered if Leigh could hear.
    â€œCalls it a toilet,” said Yardley. “He knows it’s a crapper, but he calls it a toilet. That’s breeding, you understand.”
    Frogget went yuck-yuck.
    â€œWhat’s this club he’s talking about?” asked Yardley suspiciously.
    I said I didn’t have the remotest idea.
    â€œYou sound more like him every day,” said Yardley.
    â€œKnock it off,” I said.
    â€œDon’t be narked,” said Smale. “He’s your mate, ain’t he?”
    â€œHe hasn’t bought anyone a drink yet,” said Coony. “I could tell he was a mean bastard.”
    â€œDid you hear him rabbiting on?” asked Smale.
    â€œI liked the part about him having tea in the pasture,” said Frogget. “That shows he’s around the twist.”
    They had heard. They had been talking the whole time but they had caught what Leigh had said about Elmview—a distorted version of it. I had whispered, confiding my hopes; they could not have heard me. But why had I weakened and told Leigh? And who would
he
tell? He was out of the room; I wanted him to stay out, never to come back, and for his engine to gripe and stop his mouth.
    â€œHe’s a pain in the neck,” I said, at last.
    â€œBeen in the bog a little while,” said Smale. “What do you suppose he’s doing in there?”
    â€œProbably tossing himself off,” said Frogget.
    â€œYou’re a delicate little feller,” I said.
    No one said anything for a little while, but it was not what I had said to Frogget that caused the silence. We were waiting for the flush, which you could hear in the bar. The only sounds were the fans on the ceiling and the murmuring of Wally’s transistor. We were drinking without speaking, and looking around in the way fellers do when they have just come into a bar; Leigh might have crept back without pulling the chain.
    â€œSo he’s doing your
towkay
’s accounts,” said Yardley. It was a meaningless remark, but for Yardley an extraordinary tone of voice: he whispered it.
    â€œIt’s a very fiddly sort of job,” said Yates after a moment. “You really have to know what’s what.”
    â€œTakes ages to do those sums,” said Smale. “Our accountant told me some days he looks at all those numbers and feels like cutting his