Free The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene Page B

in cheap journalism, reports of trivial occasions for a newspaper which I at heart despise, is almost unreadable.
    There had been a period in my youth when I had nursed the vain ambition to become what I thought of as a ‘real writer’ and I suppose it was then that I began this fragment. Perhaps I had chosen the form because I knew so little of the outside world which could possibly have any interest for others. I must have left this draft – of what? – when I abruptly and shamefacedly abandoned my basement life, taking the opportunity during one of Liza’s rare absences, and with me went a little of the money which I found in her bedroom – there was enough left, I told myself, to last her till the next instalment from the Captain arrived. He had never failed her yet, and I thought the small contribution I had extorted was fair enough. She would certainly have spent much more on me in the months that followed and now I was gone she would have the next draft all to herself to play with – not that she ever played with money.
    Liza, it was evident, had read my manuscript (I was glad to find when I went through it that it contained no wounding criticism of her maternal care), for she had scrawled on the last page, in her not very literary hand, what might well have served as a conventional epitaph on the Captain’s tombstone, or perhaps she intended it to be a final reply to all the police officers who had come and worried her with questions: ‘All the same whatever you say about him the Captain was very good to both of us. He was’ (the ‘was’ had been crossed out) ‘he is a very good man.’ Characteristically she made no use of that mysterious term ‘love’; there remained for the tombstone only this defiant recognition of the Captain’s virtue. Had physical love (I wondered if that was the meaning behind my question-mark?) ever existed between these two odd people whom as a child I had less than half known?
    I felt it very strange to find myself all alone, in the shabby basement in that rundown street in Camden Town, reading a document which I had composed so many years before, and afterwards, one by one, I glanced through the hitherto unseen letters from the Captain, all of them preserved in their envelopes bearing foreign stamps. I soon discovered it was much against the Captain’s will that he had continued to address them to the house in Camden Town. The Captain had at least been good to both of us in his intention. During all his absences he had written with some regularity, though seldom with an address more exact than a poste restante. The last disappearance of which I had been a witness occurred a short while before the visit of yet another plain-clothes officer. Afterwards a small parcel would arrive at intervals of two or three months, sometimes containing a letter, sometimes not, but always money or valuables. The parcel would be thrust through the letterbox by a strange hand which had first rung the coded signal on the bell.
    ‘I don’t like it. I can’t bear it,’ Liza once remarked to me. ‘It’s not fair. That was a secret between him and me. When it rings I think … perhaps this time … and it never is. Sometimes that code seems now the only thing we ever really shared.’ She added dutifully, ‘Except you of course.’
    Then for months the money ceased to come, and no letter either. Luckily the owner of the house was refused permission to pull it down as he wanted to do, and three of the rooms upstairs had been unwillingly rented furnished, so that there were a number of tips and extras for Liza to earn. Otherwise we would have had to survive rather than live on what Liza gained from her caretaking.
    As I turned the letters over I remembered how out of the unknown one at last arrived bearing a Spanish stamp with the postmark of some place on the Costa Brava. It contained a far more important sum than he had ever sent before – a cheque for three thousand pounds drawn on a bank