The Comedians by Graham Greene

Marcel.’ To Marcel he gave no bow at all. I noticed that even Petit Pierre let him go by without greeting or question. I was ashamed at the thought that I had suggested to a man of his quality a second opinion.
    Marcel said, ‘Will you come upstairs, Mr Brown?’
    I followed him. The walls were hung with pictures by Haitian artists: forms caught in wooden gestures among bright and heavy colours – a cock-fight, a Voodoo ceremony, black clouds over Kenscoff, banana-trees of stormy green, the blue spears of the sugar-cane, golden maize. Marcel opened the door and I went in to the shock of my mother’s hair spread over the pillow, a Haitian red which had never existed in nature. It flowed abundantly on either side of her across the great double bed.
    â€˜My dear,’ she said, as though I had come to see her from the other side of town, ‘how nice of you to look in.’ I kissed her wide brow like a whitewashed wall and a little of the white came off on my lips. I was aware of Marcel watching. ‘And how is England?’ she asked as though she were inquiring after a distant daughter-in-law, for whom she did not greatly care.
    â€˜It was raining when I left.’
    â€˜Your father could never stand his own climate,’ she remarked.
    She might have passed anywhere for a woman in her late forties, and I could see nothing of an invalid about her except a tension of the skin around her mouth which I noticed years later in the case of the pharmaceutical traveller.
    â€˜Marcel, a chair for my son.’ He reluctantly drew one from the wall, but, when I sat in it, I was as far from her as ever because of the width of the bed. It was a shameless bed built for one purpose only, with a gilt curlicued footboard more suitable to a courtesan in a historical romance than to an old woman dying.
    I asked her, ‘And is there really a count, mother?’
    She gave me a knowing smile. ‘He belongs to a distant past,’ she said, and I could not be certain whether she intended the phrase to be his epitaph or not. ‘Marcel,’ she added, ‘silly boy, you can safely leave us alone. I told you. He is my son.’ When the door closed, she said with complacency, ‘He is absurdly jealous.’
    â€˜Who is he?’
    â€˜He helps me to manage the hotel.’
    â€˜He isn’t the count by any chance?’
    â€˜ Méchant ,’ she replied mechanically. She had really caught from the bed – or was it from the count? – an easy enlightened eighteenth-century air.
    â€˜Why should he be jealous then?’
    â€˜Perhaps he thinks you’re not really my son.’
    â€˜You mean he is your lover?’ I wondered what my unknown father, whose name – or so I understood – was Brown, would have thought of his negro successor.
    â€˜Why are you smiling, my dear?’
    â€˜You are a wonderful woman, mother.’
    â€˜A little luck has come my way at the end.’
    â€˜You mean Marcel?’
    â€˜Oh, no. He’s a good boy – that’s all. I meant the hotel. It is the first real property I have ever possessed. I own it completely. There is no mortgage. Even the furniture is paid for.’
    â€˜And the pictures?’
    â€˜They are for sale, of course. I take a commission.’
    â€˜Was it alimony from the count which allowed you . . . ?’
    â€˜Oh, no, nothing like that. I gained nothing from the count except his title, and I have never checked in the Almanac de Gotha to see whether it exists. No, this was a little piece of pure good fortune. A certain Monsieur Dechaux who lived in Port-au-Prince was anxious about his taxes, and as I was working for him at the time in a secretarial capacity I allowed him to put this hotel under my name. Of course I left him the place in my will and as I was over sixty and he was thirty-five the arrangement seemed to him quite a secure one.’
    â€˜He trusted