Siege at the Villa Lipp by Eric Ambler Read Free Book Online

in Chief Tebuke, our symbol of both legitimacy and self-determination. In order to control him I must retain his trust and affection. In the islands, trust and affection are based on the strict observance of certain social rules, which you might choose to call etiquette but which I prefer to call a code of manners. I am not the Chief, but an adviser. Therefore, I must live in a lesser place. He happens to be impressed by the Hilton. So, I must not live in Claridge’s where heads of state are known to stay. I could live on a lower floor of the Hilton, of course, but the less I see of him the better. This is well out of his way. What’s the matter with it anyhow? I’ve lived in worse hotels and so have you. You’re getting soft, Paul.’
    That one had been rather more long-winded than usual, probably because he had thought it necessary to mix some falsehood in with the truth; but, apart from that, you could call it a typically sanctimonious Mat reproof.
    It has been said that the vision of the apocalyptic horsemen reveals only that St John must have had poor eyesight. Just four horsemen? For heaven’s sake! Listen man, even twenty-four would have been too few.
    The suggestion is, of course, that the consequences of war are of infinite variety and by no means always evil. Like many other platitudes, this one, too, has an element of truth in it.
    Among the consequences of World War II in the Pacific, for example, the accident of Mathew Williamson’s exposure to the world Boy Scout movement, and subsequently to the works and philosophy of Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell, would probably be accounted by most right-thinking persons a good thing; and if there are those, more familiar perhaps with the ideological content of the works, who feel inclined to question that verdict, let them keep their thoughts to themselves. One thing is virtually certain: without the benefit of the Chief Scout’s teachings, Mat - he was given a Christian name and baptized at the Methodist mission while he was in Fiji - would never have become the extraordinary businessman he is.
    In view of the kind of businessman he is, that may seem odd; but I doubt if the author of Life’s Snags and How to Meet Them, Sport in War, Scouting for Boys and Lessons from the Varsity of Life could ever, even in one of his least humourless moments, have envisaged the effects that his homespun pragmatism might have upon the mind of a lad of Mat’s peculiar antecedents, natural talents and disposition. His books were, in a sense, gospels, but they were not designed to withstand interpretation by a half-caste Melanesian sorcerer.
    Mat’s father was an Australian sea captain named Williamson, his mother the daughter of a village headman in one of the Gilbert Islands. There is no record of the pair ever having been married. She had lived on board Williamson’s ship, a freighter owned by one of the phosphate companies, and Mat, whom she called Tuakana because it meant ‘eldest’, was born in the company dispensary on Placid Island. She had, though, no more children after him.
    When he first told me about Placid we were sitting on the verandah of a hotel in the New Hebrides’ capital, Port Vila, having breakfast. He was in his middle thirties then, an imposingly handsome, dark-skinned man with russet hair. I had assumed that the hair colour was a product of his mixed blood, but found later that in some of the islands it was quite common. However, eyes as blue as his were not. I found them disconcerting. They have had the same effect on others I could name.
    I was not too disconcerted to ask questions, though. That, after all, was what I was there for, to ask questions. So, I asked him where he came from and so received the first of many lectures.
    ‘As we were taught at the mission school,’ he began, ‘the great Captain James Cook gave English names to many of the places he discovered or explored in the wide Pacific Ocean. So good of him, so kind.’
    It was said in a