The Rain Forest

by Olivia Manning

  He whispered urgently to Ambrose: ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘In a minute.’ Ambrose was sitting stiffly, waiting for Gurgur’s departure. The man began to go at last and as he went, Lomax placed a hand on his arm and held to him a second or two. It was a gesture that showed Hugh the understanding between them.

  Ambrose bridled slightly, preparing to say his say. When he spoke, he did so with dignified restraint: ‘If you have no interest in the project, then there is nothing to keep me here. I came to see my old mother and I’ve stayed longer than I had intended. I have other matters in hand. I’d better not say too much at the moment but . . . well, a literary friend of some importance has invited me to edit a new edition of a major poet. I am tempted. I am greatly tempted.’

  To Hugh’s surprise, Lomax was moved by the threat implicit in Ambrose’s claim. He looked uneasy and said: ‘We might take a drive to Morgo’s Bay.’

  This concession was not enough. Ambrose showed his contempt for it by getting himself off the banquette. He said in a lofty tone: ‘You’d better think about it and give me a ring.’

  Lomax, feeling a need to excuse himself, said ‘After all, it’s not a cheap project.’

  ‘Do you want a cheap project? You’ve made your money, God knows how, and now you want a cut-price salvation.’

  Lomax began to speak but Ambrose would hear no more. Calling Hugh to follow, he went with a haughty strut to the hall where he was brought up short by finding the door locked. When Hugh reached him, he was flinging his weight against it, then hammering it and bellowing in frustrated rage. The manager came running to open it and Ambrose strode out with Hugh hurrying after. At the first rise of the road, Ambrose came to a stop, breathing heavily and mopping his face.

  ‘What a bore that man is!’ he said. ‘In London, I was invited everywhere. Here I waste my time with a fellow like that! What is he? A wheeler-dealer, a speculator, an extortioner, a bloody usurer. The only thing he ever reads is a balance sheet. He’s disliked and he doesn’t know why. He belongs nowhere. And he’s an insomniac. He’ll sit there drinking till his chauffeur goes in and gets him.’

  ‘Perhaps he is to be pitied?’

  ‘I did pity him.’ Ambrose sniffed and trudged on, grumbling to himself. A taxi, hooting up from the harbour, caused him to sidestep like an irate whale and he stopped again, shouting, ‘I saw his need and I pitied him. This is the thanks I get for it.’ He trudged on again.

  Hugh, with the road swaying about him, stood for a while, watching Ambrose who came again to a stop and then put his head against a tree. Hugh, managing to reach him, found he was striking the bark with his fists and crying: ‘I want to go back to my old stamping ground.’

  Hugh, his eyes wet with sleep, joined Ambrose against the tree; Ambrose’s distress reminded him of his own: ‘You’re a free man, but I’ve got a wife. My wife can do what I can’t do. She writes books. She never thought of it till she saw me doing it, and now she’s better than I am.’

  Ambrose, sobering a moment, said: ‘She writes, does she? Under the name of Foster?’

  ‘No. She’s Christine Middleton.’

  ‘Really? I’ve reviewed her. She’s good.’

  ‘Feminine stuff.’

  ‘You could say that about Jane Austen.’

  Finding no consolation in Ambrose, Hugh put his arms round the tree trunk, feeling the wood softening and enfolding him as he slid to the ground. Pulling him up by the arms and slinging him like a sack over his back, Ambrose trudged on, too absorbed in his own discontent to be aware of his burden. He was surprised to find the Daisy still awake. Going round to the garden door, he saw, through the bead curtain, that Mrs Gunner was at her pianoforte.

  He dropped Hugh into a garden chair and Hugh, awakening, asked ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘She’s having a sing-song.’

  They listened to ‘Daisy, Daisy’ sung in a quavering stridor.

  Hugh, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, looked in through the curtain and saw that the chairs and tables had been pushed back to give Mrs Gunner a stage. The upright piano had been pulled into the middle of the room and Mrs Gunner was perched on a stool, wound up so high that she hung over the keyboard like a red paroquet on a play-ring. As she sang, she tossed her head about and at the end of each verse she flourished her hands in the air. The audience watched her glumly.

  No doubt it had been a convivial evening but now the glasses were empty and the safragis had retired. Everyone, except Mrs Gunner, had had enough. Some of the men lay open-mouthed, asleep in their chairs: the rest had the strained gaze of those who endure too much. And, Hugh supposed, they must endure to the end, for the Daisy was the best the island could offer an official who had to make do on a government salary.

  He asked Ambrose ‘Does this happen often?’

  ‘No. Once in a while she feels she must let off steam. Now, watch this.’

  Mrs Gunner had slid down from the stool and was standing with arms outstretched. She announced: ‘I’m going to do m’cart-wheels.’ She fluttered her hands at those near to her, requiring them to move back. She pointed her foot at the shrimp-pink man: ‘Get back there, Superscale Simpson.’ Her manner was humorously domineering but was beginning to verge on to something less pleasant. Her voice was very hoarse. As the guests began a weary pushing back of chairs, she urged them sharply: ‘Go on back, the lot of you.’

  Satisfied at last, she stood with arms and legs spread, and said: ‘Any blighter thinks he can beat me at this game, he’s welcome to try.’ Having spoken, she dropped down on one hand and flashed round the room, a scarlet Catherine-wheel. There was applause when she finished but instead of responding, she stood with one hand over her eyes and the other pressed to her side.

  Ambrose caught his breath, anxious inquiry creasing his face. Inside the room, the guests had risen in alarm and Simpson hurried to her. She pushed him aside and looked about her, all humour gone: ‘The show’s over, so clear off. If you don’t have to work tomorrow, I do.’

  The guests, without argument, followed each other up the stairs and Mrs Gunner lit a cigarette. With the cigarette hanging from her lips, she lifted a loaded ash-tray, saying loudly: ‘Look at them fag-ends. Filthy lot. Place stinks. Makes you sick.’ She came towards the bead curtain and Ambrose jumped away from it, showing an emotion deeper and less explicable than fear. To the consternation of both the men, she put her head through the curtain.

  ‘You can come in now,’ she said. ‘Lucky the others didn’t see you. A nice thing on your first night, Mr Foster, coming home sloshed. Here, you,’ she ordered Ambrose, ‘get him upstairs.’

  Ambrose pulled Hugh up and taking him under the arm, helped him to the upper floor. As they went, they heard Mrs Gunner bolting the garden door and slamming the bar grille into place.

  One door stood ajar on the landing and Ambrose whispered into it: ‘Mrs Foster?’ Kristy at once switched on the bedside light. Ambrose dropped Hugh on to the bed and went before questions could be asked.

  Kristy put her questions to Hugh who was blinking at her and trying to rise: ‘What were you doing till two in the morning? How did you get in this state?’

  ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘Asleep, with that row going on downstairs?’

  Hugh, giving up the struggle to rise, dropped down and closed his eyes. Kristy, furious at his unconcern, shook him, demanding to be told where he had been. When he did not reply, she struck him across the face. The blow roused him. Suddenly excited, he swung his feet to the floor, pulled off his clothes and threw himself naked on to the bed. He rolled on top of her.

  She pushed him away: ‘I don’t want you. I’m tired. Leave me alone.’

  ‘You hit me. D’you remember? You hit me.’

  As she fought against him, he slapped her angrily and she replied by catching his ear-lobe between her teeth. She bit so fiercely, he could scarcely stifle his cry of pain. Tugging at her hair, he forced her to release him then, covering her mouth with his own
, he held her beneath him. For the first time in years, they made love with an ardour they thought had gone for ever.

  3

  Down in the main room which Mrs Gunner called the Salon, Ambrose stood by the open pianoforte and touched a single note. He touched it tenderly, feeling rather than hearing the sound. The piano was a Bechstein and well maintained by a Negro tuner who understood the instrument.

  When Ambrose came back to the Daisy, nearly eighteen months before, he had spent his days playing the piano. The noise had disturbed the pension and guests complained. His music was not their music, nor was it Mrs Gunner’s music and, he suspected, she did not want a rival performer in the house. She said ‘That’s enough of that’ and ordered him to play no more.

  Remembering how she had put her hand to her heart, he thought, ‘She’s growing old at last’, not that anyone would believe it. Simpson, when he first arrived from some collapsed Crown colony, had opened his eyes in astonishment when Mrs Gunner turned cartwheels and nudging Ambrose, had said: ‘We’d have to shed a few years before we could do that.’

  Ambrose had been upset but later decided that Simpson, the old fool, was trying to flatter Mrs Gunner. They all flattered her but their flattery, Ambrose felt, covered contempt. Axelrod with his ‘Mrs G., you’re blooming’ and Prince, a Dickens addict, who called her ‘Heart’s Delight’, and Simpson with his ‘I’d ask you to marry me if I thought you’d have me’, all provoked the same throaty falsetto come-back: ‘Do you moi-nd!’ The rebuke reassured them. She might be in control, but socially she was below their level. Every word she said, proved it. She had once been Daisy Plimpton, part of a song and dance act called ‘Daisy and May’. She and her sister May had been performing on South Parade pier, Southsea, when she met her future husband, Lieutenant-Commander George Gunner.

  Ambrose had made sure of one thing: they did not flatter him. They had thought they knew just where they were with Mrs Gunner but the appearance of Ambrose had disconcerted them. His voice, his physique, his stately manners, dumbfounded the lot of them. Had he deferred to them, buttered them up, acted the servitor, they would, no doubt, have extended their patronage to him. He thought: ‘Not for me.’ Later, when they realized that he counted for nothing in the pension, they ignored him.

  This did not worry him. Mrs Gunner, who could be tyrant or entertainer as she chose, enjoyed playing the goat for them, but Ambrose had known greatness. He had been head boy at Tuffington and gained a scholarship to Kings. He had taken a double first.

  Bemused by these memories, he forgot Mrs Gunner’s ban on his playing and winding down the stool, seated himself before the keys. He intended a little Mozart, a passage from the Piano Concerto K467, a calm subtle passage that would assuage his longing for a different world. Bending close to the keyboard, he began quietly enough but, carried away by the music, he ran into fury.

  Mrs Gunner’s door opened and one eye showed through.

  ‘Stop that, Ambrose.’

  Ambrose stopped. He threw down the lid. As he rose, the front door-bell rang. He took himself into the pension office and half shutting the door, watched through it as the Egyptian safragi, Hassan, hastened out of the kitchen quarters, dressing as he came.

  Mrs Gunner had been expecting a couple called Ogden who were arriving on the helicopter from Réunion. Having sold their villa before going on home leave, they had decided to spend their final year at the Daisy. He listened as Hassan opened the door and heard Ogden addressing him with amiable superiority: ‘Sorry to get you up. We had helicopter trouble. Hope there’s a room ready for us.’

  Hassan, gaping at Ogden’s six foot four, said, ‘Best room. Best room for you and sayyidah.’

  Closing the office door, Ambrose muttered ‘Opinionated ass. Best room, indeed!’ He looked at the place allotted him: the office, cluttered with his bed and all his possessions: ‘And here I am, her only son: crammed into a cuddy no bigger than a jakes!’

  Hassan opened a door on the upper landing and put on a light. He stood aside to let the Ogdens see the splendour of the room and the Ogdens looked at Hugh and Kristy wrapped together on the bed. Ogden ushered his wife out and switched off the light. He motioned Hassan to come quietly, and quietly closed the door.

  The slight sounds that reached Hugh lifted him a little out of sleep. Someone, he thought, had tried to signal him. Someone, somewhere, was about to tell him the nature of the place in which he found himself.

  The place had been familiar to him since his adolescence. In early years he had felt himself hopelessly immersed in it then, gradually, he found he could move through it. What he had never discovered was, how to get out of it. The substance of the place was congested about him. He could feel it but he could see nothing. When he was young the sense of total impasse terrified him: he would fight himself awake. If his stepmother heard him cry out and came to ask what the trouble was, he would say they had been smothering him. But who had been smothering him? she would ask.

  He still could not answer that question. Later, when he found he could move, he imagined that movement gave him enough air to sustain life and he was less afraid. He began to realize he was occluded not, as he had thought, by a malleable substance but by objects that were unwilling to yield yet were not entirely obdurate. By struggling, he managed to make a way through them. Then the question arose: where was he going? Having no knowledge of the place and no known objective, he could not tell back from forward, and it came to him that there was nowhere to go. The place, compacted and unchanging, could go on for ever.

  As the door clicked closed, he opened his eyes, expecting a revelation, but there was only darkness. He knew no more than he had ever known. In that night-time dark, he thought the place was infinity and his presence in it was a damnation.

  Next morning, when he pulled aside the bamboo blind and saw the outside world hidden by a tropical downpour, panic came over him. His head ached and he pressed it into his hands.

  Kristy said accusingly: ‘You’ve had that dream again.’

  He said: ‘I haven’t’ and going into the bathroom, he locked the door against her.

  Rain had flattened the garden plants and the lawn was a lake. An awning protected the guests on their way to breakfast. Inside the tent, the sodden canvas was black and the rain, drumming on it, made it blacker. The inner air felt tangible with heat and moisture. Scarcely able to see each other through the gloom, the Fosters did not speak until a lemur jumped on to their table and stared at Kristy, confident that she would feed it. At the sight of it, she gave a cry of joy and putting her hands on its fawn-coloured, woolly coat, she managed to hold it a moment before it leapt away from her. Once out of reach, it stopped again and waited for food.

  She said ‘The little hands’ and offered it a piece of bacon. It showed no interest.

  Ambrose, watching from his table, said: ‘Try giving it fruit.’

  She cut a piece of pineapple and the hands reached out and gently took it.

  She asked ‘Does it belong to you?’

  ‘No. It lives in the garden. Lemurs are nocturnal creatures and on days like this, they’re not sure if it’s night or day.’

  After Kristy had fed the lemur, Ambrose chose a suitable moment to remind her that he had reviewed one of her books. She raised her dark eyes, that were full of delight in the lemur, and looked at him with equal delight: ‘So you are the Ambrose Gunner who used to review in the Sunday Times?’

  Hugh sighed. He was despondent, knowing he must soon set out to find the Government Offices and face the boredom of a routine job. Ambrose, trying to keep him in the conversation, asked him why he had written only one novel. When did he intend to write another?

  ‘Never,’ Hugh said despondently. ‘One loses the creative habit.’

  ‘But why let it go?’

  ‘It went of itself. My novel was sold to a film company. They asked me to write the script and the script turned out better than the book. Then they asked me to write another script. I’d written and re
written the novel three times and made three hundred pounds plus two thousand for the film rights. I got five thousand for writing the script and for the second script they offered me seven thousand. The third script I did brought in twelve thousand. I was good at script-writing and all I had to do was bang the stuff out on the typewriter. No effort at all. I became so slick, I was asking, and getting, fifteen thousand before the end. The story of my downfall. I never had time to write another novel. And now I must take myself to work.’

  He was in no hurry, he simply wanted to get away from the subject of writing, whether his own or Kristy’s. In the salon, he saw Akbar leaning against an alcove that separated the room from the kitchen doorway. Akbar was waiting for him and without changing his nonchalant attitude, said: ‘Sayyidah wan’ you.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  Akbar waved a hand towards the door of Mrs Gunner’s room. Hugh knocked on it and entered to find Mrs Gunner lying amid cushions on a long bamboo chair. She put her hand to her brow and said peevishly: ‘It’s my quiet time; meaning it’s the only time I get to be quiet, not that you’d call it quiet.’

  The room, small and ill-lit, looked on to a courtyard and across the courtyard was the kitchen window from which came the clatter of dish-washing and the voices of the servants.

  She said: ‘I should have had m’quiet time before that started but it’s been one thing after another this morning.’