Free The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene Page A

otherwise I am sure that she would never let me in. I think she hopes always that it is he and not I who rings. Only three times have my visits coincided with one of his and I was well aware that he thought I was still living in the house. ‘Been out shopping?’ he asked on one occasion in a friendly and uninterested way, and another time he inquired perfunctorily about my work as a journalist. ‘Doesn’t keep you out too late?’ he asked. ‘You know how Liza hates the dark.’ Liza appealed to me on that occasion when he happened to be the first to leave. ‘Don’t you ever say you aren’t living here now. I don’t want him to worry about me. He has enough worries.’
    Why had I gone off and left her? Perhaps I had become too impatient at the comedy which Liza played more and more frequently during the long absences of the Captain. I felt that she played it to protect him from reproach, and I only bore it as long as he seemed likely to return one day and settle with us. I wasn’t used to motherhood. What I had known before was aunthood which I hated, and perhaps I had begun to regard Liza as a substitute aunt more than as a substitute mother. I could put up with her as long as the Captain was around. The Captain never attempted to play the father. He was an adventurer, he belonged to that world of Valparaiso which I had dreamt about as a child, and like most boys I responded, I suppose, to the attraction of mystery, uncertainty, the absence of monotony, the worst feature of family life.
    I refuse to feel guilt at leaving her. I am sure that he sends her money, while he is away, and in a curious fashion I feel that they are growing old together without me, even though now he seldom seems to be there. I have always wondered if perhaps …

PART
II

7
    (1)
    ‘I HAVE ALWAYS wondered.’ What was it that I ‘always wondered’, I ask myself as I read this account of our life together, an account which I had begun to write years before but had abandoned when I left home. I found no answer to my question in it.
    I had heard of Liza’s grave state in hospital from the police and so I came to what I still reluctantly called my home to do all the tiresome things which are required when one prepares for the death of a parent. There was no real next of kin to whom I could pass the disagreeable task. Liza had been nearly killed in a stupid road accident as she crossed the street from the baker’s where it had always been my duty years before to fetch the bread. The police found a letter for me in her pocket, a letter in which she typically reminded me to get vaccinated against the coming flu, and her near death gave me a passing sense of guilt at having left her, for otherwise it would have been I who had gone to fetch the bread and the accident would never have happened.
    At the hospital, speaking with difficulty, she told me to destroy a lot of letters which she didn’t want strangers to read. ‘Why I kept them I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He always writes a lot of nonsense.’ She added, ‘Don’t let the Captain know that I’m here.’
    ‘But if he turns up …’
    ‘He won’t. In his last letter he spoke about next year or the next …’ She added, ‘Be kind to him. He’s always been kind to us.’
    I brought up the forbidden word. ‘Does he love you?’
    ‘Oh, love. They are always saying God loves us. If that’s love I’d rather have a bit of kindness.’
    I was prepared for his letters, but I was taken a little by surprise when I came on this unfinished story – fiction, autobiography? – which I have written here. It lay under several piles of letters preserved by Liza, neatly stacked and tied with rubber bands, in the kitchen drawer which was otherwise devoted to napkins and queer useless objects known in far-off days as doilies.
    I didn’t even recognize at first my own handwriting, so legible had it been in the past. My handwriting now after the passage of years and all the hasty work involved