The Strong Man Read online

  THE STRONG MAN

  H. R. F. Keating

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  PART FIVE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  PART SIX

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Prologue

  His obituary took up only five lines in The Times. When I first saw it I was filled again with all my old rage against the injustices which are done and past repairing. Then I thought: No, they are right. Five lines is what he merited. Name, date and place of death, age and one short descriptive sentence. It ran something like: ‘He played a prominent part in the struggle that led to the overthrow of Rolph Mylchraine, the former self-styled Grand Master of Oceana.’

  Yet he might so easily have rated the really full treatment, say a solid column under the heading ‘The Strong Man of Oceana’. And with the fact of his death in obscurity confronting me I found I wanted to spell out just once the whole truth.

  Eventually I cast my account in the form of fiction because the after-effects of what I had to describe are still part of the living tissue, as it were, of a certain small nation. To make this fiction carry the same weight as the true reality I discovered that I had to invent a good many purely imaginary details. None of them in any way affects the central truth.

  Part One

  1

  I saw him first in chains. It was at the very start of my only visit to Oceana since I had left the island for England. That visit itself is a good many years ago now but I still remember him there as vividly as if it was yesterday. And not only because of the chains.

  I saw him just as I set foot in Lesneven again, stepping down from the quaint little train—unchanged even to its absurd nineteenth-century twirls and trimmings since I had left by it ten years earlier off to the deep-water harbour at Portharnel and a wider world.

  The station is in a somewhat out of the way part of the little capital, down by the stretch of muddy foreshore they call the Strand. And, taking a long look round as I stepped down on to the wooden platform, the first thing that struck my eye was a gang of men at work near a lighter anchored in a foot or two of water off the rubbish-strewn mudflat. The sight of the chain-gang—the men linked together in threes with short heavy chains round their ankles—checked my leisurely survey as if some alarm-mechanism had been suddenly triggered off. Here was something new in Oceana.

  And, as soon as I had begun to look, I saw the one man in the two dozen who stood out like a beacon. It was not only because of his physique, though even under the shapeless coarse grey blouse the sheer oak-tree muscularity of the shortish body was startlingly evident. But there was noticeably something else. It may have been simply the unfailing confident ease of his movements. Or it may have been, even at a distance too great clearly to distinguish his features, something about his whole personality. Whatever it was, in the ragged line of chained and stooping men shifting blocks of roughly dressed stone into the waiting lighter he stood marked out, unbrutalized by the brutal toil.

  He carried his share of the heavy stone blocks—destined, I guessed, for the big sprawling house I had seen from the approaching steamer rising on the crown of the low islet about a mile offshore from the town—with a sort of lack of excess, neither weighed down nor flaunting his ability to lift easily burdens which the other men staggered under. It was a thought-provoking sight.

  Had I then had some intimation of how involved I was to become with that strong man, of how much his strength, and not by any means his physical strength only, was going to come to mean to me and what a tearing-apart dilemma it would one day present me with, would I have acted as I later did? Had I been able to foresee that curious conversation I was to have with him about Lord Acton, had I seen all the misery ahead, had I known about the people I was to become linked to in friendship and to see die because of him, would I still have done what I did? I think I probably would not; I am still grateful always that I did.

  But this was my first moment in Lesneven after my self-imposed exile, and I felt there must be a lot more to see. I set off after the handful of other passengers—there were never very many travellers in or out of Oceana—along the dully reverberant length of the platform.

  I got a taxi, a sedate old bull-nosed Morris, asked to go the long way round to my old home just beyond the centre of the town and sat back, sinking a little into the soft leather upholstery, to see what changes had been made. But, except that everything seemed rather smaller and a good deal shabbier, there appeared to be little new beyond some fresh housing on the outskirts, a shopfront here and there that had been modernized a bit and decidedly fewer horse-drawn vehicles than formerly.

  I would evidently need to look into things a little more deeply, I thought, if I was to get any real grasp of what had happened in the island.

  And that was what I had come to do. I had actually somewhat over-persuaded my paper to let me make the trip.

  ‘You know,’ the Foreign Editor had said, ‘there’s only a fairly limited interest in your Mr Mylchraine, genuine old despot though he may be.’

  I did know. I had had to explain too often about Oceana, the narrow mountain-spined North Atlantic island called till the late eighteenth century sometimes Lesnay, by its peasants, and sometimes Westward Island, by its proprietor class. I had had to tell people too often how far south of Ireland and west of France it lies to be under any illusions about how much it impinged on the world-imagination.

  But I still felt a half-reluctant loyalty to my native place, and the paper owed me a bit of a jaunt. So I persisted. And now I had to produce some sort of story, a decent whack of brutal-heel-of-the-dictator stuff to give our liberal readership something to fret about in the newsless dog-days. The chained convicts would work up into a nice dramatic intro, but I would have to find a few more hard facts if the whole thing was to stand up reasonably.

  And then I wondered how easy it was going to be to get those facts. Something about the muddy Strand I had not properly taken in came into my mind: there had been no one at all about. In the past this had been a great playground for the poorer children of the town, little encouraged by the respectable citizenry in Lesneven’s one public park. There ought to have been a game or two going of the triangular form of baseball-cum-cricket the island children play. But there had not been a soul in sight. Even the other passengers from the train had hurried off along the platform, leaving me a lone conspicuous figure.

  Plainly the people of Lesneven knew what went on when a lighter had to be loaded with granite blocks for the big new house out on the little island they called, from its oval shape inside the shell of Lesneven Bay, the Kernel. They knew and kept well away.

  Well, I thought, at least I ought to be able to get something out of John.

  John is my brother, five years younger, and the one who was content to go back to O
ceana after college in Dublin to join our doctor father’s practice and to stay on after the old man’s death.

  John ought to know about things, I thought. I’ll get a few nuggets of fact out of him.

  The old house was one of the many that had not changed by as much as a hairsbreadth. The same smooth white plaster walls, the same solid granite window-surrounds, the same thick, dark grey slates on the sharply pitched roof. Even my father’s old brass plate was still there: P. M. J. QUINE M.B., the P for Peter, his name, M for the Michael I had inherited, J for John. Only the path round to the surgery looked less well-trodden than it used to.

  Disconcertingly, the maid who came to the door was a young girl I had never seen before and I found myself having to explain on the threshold of the house that had been my home from birth just who I was.

  Nor was that the only disturbing thing. The girl had scarcely apologized for herself with a desperate blush when suddenly she darted past me out on to the steps.

  ‘Oh, lord, there’s the letterman,’ she broke out. ‘Excuse me, sir.’

  She began waving vigorously at a small navy-blue closed horsevan which had just turned into the street. I recognized it—with a fresh onset of that odd sense of returning familiarity—as from the island Letter Service. Sitting up on the high driving seat were two men. One, a youth of twenty or so in civilian clothes, would have been a boy when I had left but the other, a grey sidewhiskered man in the old blue letterman’s uniform, seemed to be a figure I had known, though I could not for the moment place him.

  In response to the excited shrieks of the servant-girl he pulled up the single staid horse between the van’s shafts. The girl ran out, the short broad ribbons of her large white apron streaming.

  ‘The master said I was to look for you,’ she blurted out. ‘You are coming from the steamer, aren’t you? There was a packet he wanted urgent. From London via Dublin, it was.’

  The old man turned and opened the top flap of the van.

  ‘I dare say we’ll be able to get that,’ he said. ‘If it’s got English stamps on it it shouldn’t be that hard to find.’

  He hauled up a blue-coloured, close-woven sack and began to pile the letters and packets from it on to the seat beside him. The young man next to him moved along, with rather bad grace. When about half the sack’s contents had been piled out the old man suddenly looked across and gave me a beaming smile. At once I recognized him. For years he had been our morning letter-man.

  ‘I seem to have a letter for you here, Master Michael,’ he called out. ‘Arriving by the same steamer as you, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘It must have done,’ I said. ‘Though I can’t think who’d have written so soon.’

  I went down and held out my hand to take the letter from him.

  ‘Just a minute.’

  It was the young man in civilian clothes.

  He reached forward and whisked the letter out of the letter-man’s knobbly brown fingers.

  I was too startled to do more than stare up at his pale glistening face.

  Looking back with a grin of sheer impudence, he prized up the envelope flap and took out the letter. I recognized it then as from a girl in London, a fool of a creature who would write as soon as I had left.

  The pale-faced young man opened out the single sheet and began to read. I found my voice.

  ‘What the devil are you doing?’

  ‘It’s all right, matey. It’s only a love-letter.’

  He crammed the sheet of wildly scrawled-upon paper back into the envelope and flipped it down to me. I returned to the attack.

  ‘Now, look here, I don’t know who you are—’

  ‘Wait a minute, Master Michael.’ The old letterman leant down. ‘That’s just about it, sir,’ he said. ‘You don’t know who this gentleman is.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘He’s from Mr Mylchraine’s office. Comes with me to collect Mr Mylchraine’s own personal letters. I think it’d be better, sir, if you just let the matter be.’

  He looked at me with his face devoid now of the least twinkle of good humour.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘if you think so.’

  The letterman buried his head once more in his sack and after a few moments located my brother’s packet. I followed the maid into the house.

  The effusiveness of my brother’s welcome swamped the uneasiness I felt. In the upstairs drawing-room he offered me in quick succession a chair, a drink, the window shut, the window open. I hardly found time to wonder why such warmth should be shown to one who had done no more towards keeping the family together than send a card each Christmas.

  Come to that, I thought, John had done equally little about me when I was five hundred miles away in London.

  Sitting at last on the faded blue-silk, vaguely eighteenth-century rail-backed sofa, I looked up at this brother of mine.

  He would now be just thirty and he was unmarried, unless he had never bothered to let me know. He appeared to be a person who did himself pretty well. He had certainly put on a fair amount of weight and there was a floridness in his face that spoke of gourmandizing meals and a good deal of drink.

  I had noticed in fact that the whiskey he had insisted on at this comparatively early hour had come from a bottle of Irish and not from one of the decanters in their locked tantalus standing, as in my father’s day, on the glass-fronted mahogany bookcase. Evidently the need for alcohol had become too frequent to allow of the old pleasant ritual of unlocking the tantalus’s wooden bar.

  ‘Your letter was very reticent,’ John said, standing in front of the empty fireplace and looking down at me.

  He sounded disapproving, as if he had now shovelled past the loose shale of his welcome and come to sterner bedrock.

  There didn’t seem to be much point in telling you all my news since I was going to see you,’ I replied.

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  He gave me a sudden sharp look.

  ‘Is this—er—what you might call a professional visit?’ he said.

  The incident outside the house had made me jumpily wary. I stalled.

  ‘No, I had some holiday due and suddenly decided I’d take it here. It’s nice to see things don’t seem to have changed.’

  ‘They have and they haven’t,’ John replied solemnly.

  He was always one for taking life seriously, and I abruptly felt I couldn’t stomach the lecture I saw coming.

  ‘I’ll amuse myself spotting what’s new then,’ I said. ‘But tell me about yourself. How’s the practice?’

  It was a pretty duff question. In a stick-in-the-mud place like Lesneven, for all that it is the capital of an independent nation, a general practitioner’s life is not going to change dramatically from one decade to the next.

  But the remark seemed to upset John.

  ‘Oh, things are all right, quite all right,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘Have you moved the surgery?’ I asked. ‘The path round to the side looked as if it wasn’t so much used.’

  ‘The pattern of the practice has rather changed.’

  ‘That interests me,’ I said. ‘You mean that even in Oceana change takes place in such a thing as a doctor’s practice?’

  ‘I’ve become a specialist, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘A specialist? In Oceana? When the whole island hasn’t got a population of as much as a hundred thousand? What do you specialize in?’

  The paler Parts of John’s fattish florid face darkened up.

  ‘I specialize in skin complaints,’ he said. ‘I’ve been fascinated by them ever since I was at Trinity.’

  ‘And Oceana is rife with skin troubles? There’s something new.’

  John gave me a purely furious look.

  ‘Skin-disease is not rife in Oceana,’ he said. ‘It just so happens that one person in Particular has a complaint that needs very specialized treatment.’

  ‘One person? Who on earth ...?’

  My voice trailed away. There was only one conceivable
person in Oceana wealthy enough to keep a medical specialist for himself alone. Mr Mylchraine.

  If you can afford to build a grandiose mansion on a small isle awkwardly cut-off from the mainland, if your word is law in a whole country, if you have gradually acquired half the wealth the place produces, then you can have your personal skin physician. And Mr Mylchraine was all of these.

  I blessed the caution that had stopped me telling John the actual purpose of my visit.

  ‘I suppose you don’t approve of such an exclusive connection?’ he said into the silence I had left.

  But before I could answer he strode abruptly to the open window, put a hand on each of the brass hooks on the lower frame and brought it swishing down. The growing sound of stumblingly marching feet, which had just impinged on my senses, was sharply cut off.

  2

  The devil of contrariness, which had lurked all through my talk with John, shot up. I pushed myself off the old sofa and went to the window that had been so abruptly shut. If there was something Mr Mylchraine’s personal skin physician did not want me to see, I found I was determined to have a good look.

  Down in the street I saw at once the convicts I had watched loading stone for Mr Mylchraine’s new house over on the Kernel. The man I had been so impressed by was in the centre of one of the short chain-linked ranks. His head was held up, not with any air of bravado, but simply and naturally. And again I was struck by the oaken width of his chest.

  But now I noticed as well another aspect of the little procession, evidently tramping back to the old town gaol for the midday meal: the uniform of the two guards, tight dark-green tweed jackets and breeches and high-crowned hats sporting stiff bunches of pheasant’s feathers. One of the two carried a shotgun, lightly tucked under his arm as if at any moment he might let fly with a left and a right as a covey whirred up from the street ahead. His companion swung a riding-crop, whacking it from time to time against his gaitered leg.

  I turned to John.

  ‘Who are those fellows?’ I asked.

  ‘Fellows? What fellows?’

  ‘The ones in charge of that little procession of convicts you wanted to keep away from my tender eyes. I imagine they’ve been loading stone for your Mr Mylchraine’s new house. One of the sailors on the steamer pointed it out.’