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wholly according to rank in the Company. Dangerous self-confidence, if so. There were half a dozen couples
in all, the odd woman being his own private secretary, Pilar Alvarez, who came of an old and aristocratic family and looked it.
    Mrs. Gateson was delightfully hospitable and hard as nails—more like a practised army wife, he thought, than an oil wife. She talked London. She knew the Gunners and was cautiously amusing
at their expense. Then she brought up the nervous Mrs. Birenfield who had been such a dear, close friend. Mat was aware of being summed up as a possible collaborator.
    ‘What did you think of your chauffeur?’ she asked.
    It was a curious question. He couldn’t have any worthwhile impression as yet. He had only shaken Lorenzo’s hand and passed a few cordial remarks. His driver was a pure Indian of the
round-headed, rather Mongolian type, as imposingly correct as a hired butler and a lot more silent. At a guess, he was not intelligent; on the other hand, judging by his appearance and that of the
managerial car, he was very conscientious.
    ‘Makes me feel like a millionaire,’ Mat said.
    She let that go, revealing nothing of her own opinion if she had one, and turned him over to Pilar Alvarez—charming, efficient and perhaps a Ministry spy. But never mind that! He was glad
she was a woman of the country, not a machine import.
    With the coffee the rush started. Faces, faces. Shaking hands and trying to say the right thing—a different right thing—to everybody. After an hour of it he was let off, to be driven
home by Lorenzo. The man could be talked at for a year and still leave little impression. Yet Mrs. Gateson must have had some reason for mentioning him. She was a much cleverer person than her
husband.
    The police post at his gate at least showed its presence and saluted. There was no sign of the machine gun. It was probably sited behind a low wall from which an appetising smell of fish stew
was wafted into the car. A typically bloody fool place commanding only the approach to the house. Anyone who chose to crawl down from the hillside and into the cover of a higher terrace
could—if merciful—plug one neat shot into the stew pot and the fight would be over.
    Pepe hovered hospitably. His wife Amelia—and Don Mateo’s cook very much at his service—would like to know what he preferred for breakfast. Coffee, he replied, and fresh rolls
and—could there be a papaya in the larder? Pepe did not know but pronounced that there would certainly be iced papaya on the table at 8 a.m. Through the weary years of London papaya had
become a symbol of sun and birds and the fresh heat of morning. It gave him immense pleasure that there would be papaya. The General Manager admitted that Mat had never quite grown up.
    He did not go to bed, knowing that sleep would be impossible until his brain began to drift away from the problems of this community which depended on him. With all lights out, he rested in a
deck chair on the verandah, enfolded by the soft darkness in which so many of his nights had been passed, the benevolent successor of the heat. Dream and daydream became hardly distinguishable.
Closed eyes or open eyes, one was back—didn’t they say?—in the womb. And a damned nice place it would be, too, very like a moonless tropic night with stars—the stars that
were to be—covered by sea mist or monsoon cloud.
    The silence was absolute. The first ridge cut off the sound of the surf and such night noises as there might be in the town—a traditional little town, not at all badly done by architects
who stuck to the old ways. Dave Gunner’s home from home. Wonder what he would make of it, especially if a cockroach dropped down his collar from the roof of the colonnade. Probably he’d
have the whole place replanned in little boxes to save such humiliation for Labour.
    Yes, there was that noise again. A faint, neat plop. There must have been an earlier, half-noticed plop which put the