Saturn Over the Water by J. B. Priestley, J.B. Priestley

went sweeping up, above cliffs that still caught the sun and were orange and scarlet lake. All that was puzzled and suspicious and angry in me went out to meet, and then lose itself in, this prismatic panorama of sea and rock and air. I worked like a demon but didn’t feel like one. When I packed up, the afternoon dying all round me, I felt better than I’d done at any time since I’d sat by poor Isabel’s bedside.
    The way I went back took me through what there was of Uramba village, and as I was too dry even to talk to myself I called at a place that was a half-hearted mixture of drink shop and bar. A fat woman served me with a beer. It was already dark in there and the lights they had turned on weren’t bright. Somewhere at the back a radio or an old gramophone seemed to be grinding out one of those too-yearning Spanish love songs. Out of a group that I never took in properly a young man came uncertainly across to me at the counter. He had sun-bleached yellow hair, with a beard that wasn’t as successful, a foolish face, and a shirt and pair of pants that were too far gone even for a jazz festival.
    ‘You English?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Are you?’
    ‘Yeh. Only one round here. How’d you like to stand me a pisco ? I’m broke, chum.’ He was one of those sad types who want to be bouncy and tough and can never quite make it. I told him to go ahead and order what he wanted and I’d have another beer. The fat woman, who’d been looking sourly at him, brought a tumbler half-filled with neat spirit, and he drank most of it, strong raw stuff, at one shuddering go. If he wasn’t a complete alcoholic, he was well on his way.
    ‘Name’s Freece. Percy Freece. Live in Acton when I’m at home.’ Putting his speech down like this is flattering him, because he didn’t bother much about consonants, just puking his words out, and he wasn’t easy to understand. ‘What about you, chum?’
    I told him who and what I was, and where I was staying.
    ‘All bloody posh!’ This was a sneer. He finished his drink, then pushed his silly face at me. ‘I don’t think another of these would break you, would it, chum?’
    ‘No, it wouldn’t, Freece. But it doesn’t mean you’ve only got to ask like that. And don’t breathe on me – I don’t like it. Stand back.’
    ‘Oo – sorry, mister!’ He was abject now. ‘Had a run of bad luck just lately – nothing come right, honest. I need another of these if you could manage it.’
    So I bought him another hefty dose, and he began telling me how he’d been a wireless operator on a ship that called at Callao, where he’d gone on a blind with a girl he’d picked up, and his ship had sailed without him. After hanging about in Lima, he’d managed to get himself a job – how he didn’t say – at the Institute, but then he’d started drinking hard again and had been fired. Since then he’d just managed to keep himself alive doing odd jobs at the little radio shop round the corner. This didn’t come out as a straight narrative but in bits and pieces and with mysterious blanks here and there, hints at extraordinary adventures, the way fellows like him always tell their tales. I cut him short finally because now I was beginning to feel stiff and chilly after all that sweating. He didn’t ask me for any money, as I’d expected him to, so I pushed some sols or whatever they were into his hand. ‘Find me in here most nights,’ he said. ‘Glad any time to have a natter. An’ you haven’t heard nothing yet, chum. Get me started and I could tell you a thing or two about this bloody Institute that’ud surprise you – honest, I could.’
    As I lumbered up the hill to the big house, feeling tired as well as stiff, I dismissed Percy Freece as one of the most useless characters I’d met for some time. Unlike so many people, I’ve often been wrong, and I was wrong again then about Freece.
    In the entrance hall of the house, not very well lit by some adapted old hanging