The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene

Author:Graham Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448128891
Publisher: Vintage Classics

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I cashed the cheque after some trouble (I think they must have telephoned Panama and seven hours’ difference in time can’t have helped). I had a certain sense of guilt but one which was small enough to fade quickly after I paid my father his fifty pounds. I even treated myself on the strength of my new wealth to smoked salmon and a dry Bordeaux at a Soho restaurant which I couldn’t normally have afforded, but all the same I found that I didn’t enjoy my solitary meal as much as I had hoped. It was not because of the money; I believe it was the realization that I hadn’t even yet written to the Captain to tell him that Liza was ill, probably dying.

Soon after this little celebration of mine another letter arrived marked Express. It was delivered just as I was sitting down to my breakfast of toast and tea, and I neither ate nor drank until I had read it twice over.

‘My dearest Liza, perhaps after all you shouldn’t come out here yet. There are difficulties – troubles – and I don’t want you to feel any sort of unease. I hope that you’ve cashed the cheque that I sent because I can’t send any more to you for the moment because of these difficulties. I’ll be writing to you again as soon as I can and it won’t be very long, I swear. Tell Jim not to worry either. The mules are on the way all right, but there are a few pot-holes on the route. Unexpected and sometimes deep pot-holes. I wish to God this wasn’t such a business kind of letter, when all I want to write is how much I miss you. I miss you every hour of the day. But, Liza, it won’t be long now, I’m sure it won’t be long. Your Captain.’ And then there was the inevitable postscript: ‘Before you go to bed give me a thought.’ He had written first, ‘when you go to bed’ and then changed ‘when’ into ‘before’ for some mysterious reason unless perhaps he was avoiding a sexual connotation. ‘Together we were not often unhappy, were we?’ It was a very modest claim, I thought, for a lover to make. If indeed he was a lover. This wasn’t the sort of language that I associated with love. Perhaps they were the easy lies of a man bent on keeping a woman quiet and at a distance.

A comparison came to my mind and I took out from a file on my desk the rough draft of a letter which I had written a year ago. I always made a rough draft of a love letter, and this one was addressed to a girl I thought I loved at the time called Clara: I wondered – wondered again – whether the Captain had the habit too of making rough drafts and perhaps had sent the wrong version, for his letter read very much like a first effort which was not intended to be seen.

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