Fuel for the Flame Read online

  Fuel for the Flame

  By

  ALEC WAUGH

  Contents

  Chapter one

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter One

  He noticed her the moment he came in. She was wearing a white cashmere sweater that matched her ash-blonde hair, her pale cheeks and the bright carmine of her lipstick. She was wearing long black earrings, she looked about twenty-two, she was sitting in the corner of a sofa. From the way the jacket fell, he guessed that her figure would be full and firm. He watched her across the cocktail party as he was moved by his host from one group to another; when the man beside her rose, taking her glass with him, he went across to her, carrying a Martini.

  ‘That man mustn’t be allowed to monopolize you. It was a Martini, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was.’

  He sat beside her. The earrings had silver figures in their centres.

  ‘Who gave you those?’ he said.

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Because they are made in Thailand, that’s near my home.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Karak. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Indeed I have. There’s a racing motorist from there.’

  ‘Can you remember who?’

  ‘Prince somebody.’

  ‘That sounds like me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I am Prince Rhya.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘I’ve never met a prince before.’

  ‘It’s nothing very grand, not nearly as grand as being an English earl.’

  ‘It’s something, though. It’s better than plain Mr.’

  ‘Is that what you are?’

  ‘Is that what I am what?’

  ‘Just plain Miss Something.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And Miss, not Mrs.?’

  ‘Miss Annetta Marsh.’

  ‘Tell me about yourself.’

  ‘There isn’t much to tell.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘How do you mean, what do I do?’

  ‘You work in some office somewhere, I suppose.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t do any work.’

  ‘I thought all the young women in England worked these days.’

  ‘All except me. I get jobs but lose them. I arrive after the boss and take two hours off for lunch. I was born thirty years too late. I should have been a poor little rich girl in the nineteen-twenties. Except that I wouldn’t have thought of myself as poor. It would have been the life for me.’

  He laughed. She was fun. She was frank and direct, with an unself-conscious sense of humour. It was a characteristic of English women that he liked, and there were a great many things he liked about English women. He had heard them called stiff and cold, and perhaps they were with their fellow countrymen. Living on their bleak northern island, breathing the same chill air, English men and women had become like brothers and sisters to each other. They had ceased to be electric for one another. But an Englishman was quite different when he was abroad, and Englishwomen were very different with foreigners. No diplomat complained when he was posted to the Court of St. James.

  He looked at the girl beside him, then made up his mind. ‘I’d like to persuade you to dine with me tonight.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to try very hard.’

  ‘Then I shan’t need this.’ He pulled a small envelope from his pocket and tore it in half.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A ticket for Drury Lane.’

  ‘For My Fair Lady?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And for tonight?’

  He nodded. ‘When I go to a cocktail party, I buy a single seat for a theatre; if I don’t meet anyone amusing at the party, then I’ve got my evening taken care of. If I do, I tear the ticket up.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘I hope you’re going to find me worth it!’

  When they got up to go, he saw that she was nearly five feet ten. ‘I’d no idea you were so tall.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  He had a furnished flat in Curzon Street, over a fashionable restaurant where the head waiter always kept a table for him until nine o’clock.

  He handed her the menu, but she shook her head.

  ‘I’d like to drink champagne. Order what you think goes best with it. I haven’t any allergies. I’m rather hungry.’

  She leant back in her chair. ‘It’s your eyebrows, that’s what it is,’ she said.

  ‘What do I take that to mean?’

  ‘Your being diabolique. That’s the first thing I thought when I saw you across the room. Diabolique. I thought it was your being dark and your hair shining. But it’s not. Your eyebrows go up at the end, that’s why it is.’

  The orchestra was playing a slow foxtrot. ‘I’d like to dance this,’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t it embarrass you, dancing with somebody so tall?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  She had developed her own technique of dancing. She let her right arm hang loose, against her side, she turned her left side against his right, so that they formed a right angle. Their steps fitted well. ‘Most medium-sized men are embarrassed dancing with me,’ she said. ‘It’s quite a nuisance. I like dancing, and it’s hard to find enough tall men whom I like.’

  ‘Perhaps you should dance with very short men. I’m shorter than nearly every girl I meet. I’m so used to looking up to women that it doesn’t make much difference whether I’m looking up three inches or seven.’

  ‘What a pity I didn’t wear high heels. I much prefer them.’

  Except when they were eating, they danced all the time. When the band packed away its instruments, he said, ‘I don’t think I mentioned it, but I live here. What about a final drink upstairs?’

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  An hour and a half later she stretched back luxuriously, her arms behind her head. ‘I do hope that you found me worth it. It was fine by me.’

  Chapter Two

  In Karak, nine thousand miles away, Prince Rhya was being discussed on the following morning by the British political agent, Kenneth Studholme, at the conference of local notables which he convened once a month to discuss the island’s problems.

  ‘Prince Rhya as heir to the throne constitutes,’ he was saying, ‘the chief obstacle to our peace of mind. During his father’s lifetime, we have no cause for worry; afterwards, anything may happen.’

  He paused and looked slowly round him. He had been here now half a year, and these meetings were his innovation. They were attended by ten to a dozen men of prominence, British in terms of passport, but half of them racially mixed—Indian, Malay, Chinese—as befitted an island south-west of Borneo. Each one made a special contribution to his own general picture, but he relied chiefly on three men—Colonel Forreste
r, adviser to the C.I.D., Charles Keable, the general manager of the Pearl Oil Company’s installations at the far end of the island, at Kassaya, and Angus Macartney, whose father owned the chief rubber estate—the island’s relative prosperity being based on oil and rubber.

  Studholme was in the middle forties. He was tall and spare with grey thinning hair; he had tired eyes, but he gave the impression of capacity, intelligence and vigour.

  ‘The King,’ he was continuing, ‘has been the friend of Britain all his life. His grandfather had signed a treaty with Britain before he was born. He was taught in childhood that British rule had brought order and prosperity to his people. He accepted that teaching and its implications. During the Japanese occupation, he was loyal to the spirit of his treaty with us. He believed we would return. He has always trusted us. In his lifetime we have no cause for worry, but his son—there is a very different matter.’

  If he doesn’t come to the point soon, thought Forrester, I’ll fall asleep. Forrester was nearly sixty. He had expected to retire this year, but his record in the Middle East had been so impressive that Studholme, who had been stationed in Cairo during the war, had pulled strings to secure his appointment here. Forrester was short, bald, wrinkled like a walnut, shrivelled by tropic suns. Half the time he looked as though he had just woken up or were about to go to sleep. There had been a Masonic banquet on the previous evening and he had retired late. If only his nibs were less verbose, he thought.

  ‘His son … How shall I put it?’ Studholme was continuing. ‘Prince Rhya, because of his father’s respect for all things English, was sent to Eton. I am an Etonian myself. I consider Eton the greatest school in the world. It is more than a school, more even than a club, as some have called it, it is a way of life. But even so, I do not fail to recognize that it has produced, in addition to some of the finest Englishmen in history, a very small minority of the very worst. There are those for whom its atmosphere is too heady. It makes playboys of them, and the most tiresome kind of playboy. From all I hear—I have not myself met him— Eton has had that effect upon Prince Rhya.’

  Angus Macartney shifted in his chair. In spite of his Scottish name, he looked half East Indian. He had smooth black hair, very dark brown eyes, pale, colourless cheeks, a short straight nose, rather thin but delicately chiselled lips. He was tall and slim. He was twenty-six years old. His father was an invalid who each month left more and more of the direction of the business to his son.

  Angus was bored. He was also impatient. He was playing cricket that afternoon, and he wanted to practise at the nets. There also might be a message waiting for him at his office that would require the replanning of his day. Keable had come into town in the Pearl Company’s aeroplane. It was very possible that Blanche Pawling, the wife of one of the Pearl employees, had come in with him. For the last few months she had taken every opportunity of making the trip. When she did, she visited him in the small flat he maintained above his office. She never knew till the last moment whether she could come or not. She could not ring him up from Kassaya. He had to be ready to rearrange his schedule at a moment’s notice. That was fine on ordinary week-days. He rarely had any luncheon appointment that he could not cancel. But Saturday was different. Cricket in the afternoon. He liked to take the morning quietly, in preparation, with half an hour at the nets to get loosened up. Why on earth did the old boy have these meetings on a Saturday? Because it did not interfere with the routine of a working week, presumably. Saturday was a slack day in offices. He might have remembered that for younger ones Saturday was a playing day and sacrosanct. Not that you could expect a man of his age to consider that, particularly a man like Studholme. It was hard to realize that he’d ever been young. He seemed to have been born middle-aged. You couldn’t imagine him proposing to a woman. How had he ever done it? To an attractive woman, too. Perhaps she’d proposed to him; a widow, after all. What had that first husband of hers been like, the one who’d been shot down over Dunkerque? Very different from H.E., presumably. There was nothing wrong about the daughter.

  Was his wife faithful to him? Angus wondered. Out here she had to be discreet, for here there was no privacy. But back in London, that was another thing. If I’d met her in London two years ago, he thought, I’d have a try. She was very much his type, or rather had been his type, little and dark and plump: and he had liked women older than himself. He had lacked experience and responded to it. But now his tastes were changing; now … his thoughts followed a separate trail.

  Charles Keable also was finding it hard to concentrate his attention upon Studholme’s speech. He was impatient to get down to the docks, where a car—a first anniversary present to his new wife—was being landed. Tall, heavily built, a man of forty-eight, he had worked for Pearl all his life, for most of the time overseas, and all this was familiar ground to him. It was true enough, of course. But why did Studholme have to tell them what they knew already? Did he feel that a meeting had to last an hour, and that it might be over in half an hour if it was confined to the essential business?

  ‘I hope,’ Studholme was saying, ‘that we shall have the King with us for very many years, but his health is not good, though he is barely sixty. We have to be on our guard, and I have received a letter this week from the security authorities in London warning me that we are faced with a very serious danger of Communist infiltration.’

  There was a start from everyone except Forrester. Forrester had already studied the report, and had known that Studholme was to make it the chief topic of the morning’s talk; for that reason he was able to respect the more the employment of surprise with which his chief had introduced it. It was a method that he himself adopted in his interrogations of a suspect. He would talk and talk, boring the man across the table, convincing him that he was dealing with a blockhead, then suddenly he would shoot his question. Studholme might get nothing out of this meeting with his notables, but there was a hundred to one chance he might. He was playing it the right way, anyhow.

  ‘I would like to know,’ he was continuing, ‘whether any of you have seen any signs of this infiltration in your offices and factories. Angus, have you seen anything?’

  Angus was taken off his guard. His thoughts had been far away. He replied at random. ‘There is a great deal of Communism in India, sir. We have a great many Indians in our factory. They keep in touch with their relatives in India.’

  ‘What about your Chinese employees?’

  ‘We have not very many Chinese. The Chinese prefer to work on their own, in shops, laundries, restaurants or as market gardeners.’

  ‘How many Chinese work for you?’

  ‘I could find out, sir.’

  ‘I’d be grateful if you would. And there is one other question I’d like to ask. Have you noticed any change in the Indians themselves since India was granted independence? Twenty years ago their relatives in Bombay and Calcutta were British subjects, as they were themselves, but today those relatives are independent citizens. Has that made a difference to them?’

  ‘It’s given them a pride in being Indians, sir.’

  ‘As Indians, apart from being British subjects?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Do you think that they might therefore come to think of themselves as Indians first and as British subjects secondly?’

  ‘I think they might, sir.’

  The Chinese must feel the same, thought Studholme. They might be anti-Communist, but they are proud of China’s power.

  ‘So you think they are more receptive now to ideas coming to them from India?’ he continued. ‘What I am getting at is this. You have reminded us that there is a great deal of Communism in India. It is possible, isn’t it, that the Communist Party in Calcutta might see an opportunity of infiltration? Gentlemen,’ he turned from Angus and addressed the table at large, ‘what we have been told by Angus Macartney is, to me, very illuminating. It does show why there may be a particular danger to this community. There is now a direct channel of communication throug
h India, and perhaps through China, to Soviet Russia. I would like to ask Colonel Forrester whether he thinks we should take any special precautions in this matter.’

  Forrester sat upright, as though he were a soldier called to attention on parade. ‘I am a spider, sir, sitting at the centre of a web,’ he said. ‘I have spread my net. The meshes are drawn as close as the forces at my disposal permit. I watch the port and airport. I watch the exchange of cables; to a more limited extent I watch other channels. A small fly could get through the meshes of my web if it was lucky, but a big fly would, I believe, hit a mesh. If anything unusual happened, I should, I trust, become aware of it. In the case of danger I should need to tighten my web, but I could only do that if I had more means at my disposal.’

  He spoke in a slow, almost drawled voice. He had a manner that nettled certain people. It nettled Studholme.

  ‘You do not see the need, Colonel, in view of this letter from Whitehall, for taking additional precautions?’

  ‘I have taken, sir, all the precautions possible in terms of the forces at my disposal. I have many responsibilities. I have to maintain order, to safeguard property and persons. The individual resident, as a taxpayer, has a right to be protected. If additional precautions are required, I should need additional funds and personnel.’

  ‘Do you consider there is a need for that?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘In spite of this letter from Whitehall?’

  ‘Because of that letter from Whitehall. If the police force were to be increased, the guilty would be warned. I believe in letting sleeping dogs lie, sir.’

  ‘Are you telling us that as far as you can see there is no Communist infiltration here?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that; there have been times in this last two months when I have suspected that one or perhaps two very small flies have got through my net.’

  The answer came without hesitation. Studholme looked at him thoughtfully. Had Forrester said that to cover himself, or had he really seen danger signs? There was no way of guessing. You could never know exactly where you were with the boys in counter-espionage. They had to justify their jobs. They had to prove that there was a need for them. They could not perpetually send in nil returns. This report from Whitehall might be the result of an idle officer finding occupation for a wet afternoon, wondering where there was likely to be trouble next, deciding that Karak was as vulnerable as anywhere, and working out a fictional menace. He did not want to appear an alarmist before his ‘notables’.