by Jane Gardam
Eddie, put to bed, raved for three days. Loss moved into the Missions to Seamen and watched a scorpion hanging from a rafter, ate mangoes and played cards with anyone who would give him a game.
The Missions to Seamen medical man was troubled by Eddie. “How old is he?” he asked Loss. “Your friend. The other evacuee—a schoolfriend?”
“I am not an evacuee,” said Loss. “I am travelling home to pursue my life. Feathers is a young friend of mine, no; for I only met him on the Breath o’Dunoon. He is an unwilling evacuee. His father sent for him to return to Malaya. He wanted to stay and Do His Bit.”
“Did he? Well, now he’s yelling and ranting about dead pilots and the Battle of Britain.”
“That’s over,” said Loss. “I expect he’s lost best friends. There are those with best friends. I avoid such. He’ll be OK. He needed to blow up.”
The doctor looked dubious.
But by the time the Portuguese freighter arrived a fortnight later to carry them on, a gaunt, monosyllabic (but not stammering) Feathers was allowed to continue his journey.
“He’s strong,” said the Purser. “There’s those get malaria soon as they get to Freetown. He’s not had that. There’s blackwater fever if you so much as look at the swamp. He’s not had that. Just the guts. The guts and the brains. He’ll recover.”
“He drank palm-beer from a bad bottle,” said Loss, tightlipped as a Methodist.
“Maybe, lad, it saved his life.” The Purser was the only Englishman on the new ship, and spoke Portuguese. He had avoided the call-up, he said, because of flat feet. “I dare say the bugger’ll live,” he said. “He’s walking.”
But as they sailed—their neutral flag flying or rather hanging limp on the mast—down the bulge of Africa and at last out upon the hot-plate of the Indian Ocean, day after day, day after day, Eddie lay prone in the sick bay, hardly eating, drinking only lime juice, not talking but muttering and yelling in his sleep. Loss, three flights down in the noisome, sweaty bilges, sat on his bunk and wrote up his log book. He also sat with Eddie several hours a day thinking his Hakkar thoughts. In the night he went on deck and sat about learning Portuguese from the crew. He watched each morning the raising of the neutral flag to ensure that the sea and the sky and the sea-birds (there were few now) and the enemy submarines (there were none) knew that this was a craft on peaceful business.
In time, Eddie got up and began to wander on deck, sit against the davits, lean over the rails. He felt so alien and remote from anything that had happened to him before that tears of weakness filled his eyes and reflected the tremendous starlight. He was hollow, a shell on a beach—but safe at last. I could be OK now, he thought, if I could stay here for my life on the circle of the sea.
Loss watched him and considered the ranting he’d heard in the sick bay and risked saying, once, when they were sitting on the creaking deck under the moon, “Tell me about Ma Didds. Go on. You’ll have to tell somebody, some day.”
But Eddie froze to stone.
Breezily on another occasion, the crew eating fish stew, Eddie crumbling bread, Loss said, “I suppose you know that there are those who believe that endurance of cruelty as a child can feed genius?”
“I have no genius,” said Eddie, “and never would have had.”
“Bad luck,” said Loss. “It is perhaps a pity that I wasn’t sent to Ma Didds.”
“She would have broken even you.”
But this conversation was a turning point, and Eddie seemed to relax. As the heat grew ever stronger, the sea a shimmering disc wherever you looked, and the two boys shrunk into any patch of shadow under the life-boats; and as the engines chuntered on, and the wake behind them curdled the water, and the sea beneath held its mysteries, and as time ceased, Eddie began to sleep again at night and exist, and often sleep peacefully again in the day. Once or twice his old self broke through. He wondered about his father and whatever the two of them would do in Kotakinakulu—or Singapore or Penang, or wherever his father was now—but soon he dismissed all thoughts of the future and the past, and lazily watched Loss dealing out the cards.
“Do you smell something?” asked Loss. “Do you smell land?” Eddie sniffed.
“We’re still too far out.”
“Lanka,” said Loss, “was said by the poet to be the Scented Isle, the Aromatic Eden, the last outpost of civilisation. We’ve half a day’s sailing ahead. We should be sensing it now.”
“What—flowers? Wafted over the sea?”
“Yes. You can always smell them. It gives a lift to the heart.”
After a time Eddie said, “I do smell something. Not flowers. Something rather vile. I was wondering if there was engine trouble.”
“I have noted it, too,” said Loss, and went to the rail and stared hard into the Eastern dazzle on the sea.
“It’s smeary,” said Eddie, joining him. “The sky’s smeary.”
In half an hour the smears had turned to clouds black as oil and soot, lying all along and high above the curved horizon. The ship’s engines were slowing down.
Then they stopped and fell silent, the wake hushed, and the crew called to each other, gathered along the rail to stare.
Then a torrent of excited Portuguese splattered out from the tannoy on the bridge.
“I’ll find the Purser,” said Loss. “But I know what it is.” He listened. “There’s been a signal. There has been a signal from Colombo. Singapore has fallen to the Japanese!”
“The Japanese? What have they to do with us?”
“We have seen no newspapers. We have heard no news since Christmas. We have been nearly four months aboard.”
“Singapore is impregnable.”
“It seems not.”
After dark, very slowly, the ship began to move on towards Colombo, though whether, said the Purser, they would get their refuelling slot was uncertain. Black smoke covered all the hills. The rubber plantations were all on fire. The dawn seemed never to come as they sailed nearer and nearer the murk.
And they were all at once one of a great fleet of battered craft, most of them limping towards harbour, a macabre regatta, their decks packed with the bandaged and the lame.
“They’re wearing red flowers in their hats,” said Eddie. “Most of them.”
“It’s blood,” said Loss.
Some of the bandaged waved weakly and uncertainly put up their thumbs and, as the boats reached harbour, there came feeble cheering and scraps of patriotic songs. “They’re singing,” said Eddie. But There’ll always be an England trailed away when the refugees on board were near enough to see the whole port of Colombo crammed with other English trying to get away.
“They look numb,” said Loss.
“They look withered,” said Eddie. “Like they’ve been days in water. Shrivelled. Hey—you don’t think Singapore can really have gone?”
Loss said nothing.
Then, “Look ashore,” he said, and pointed at the thousand fluttering Japanese flags that were flaming on every harbourside roof and window.
“I don’t think that they will be any safer here,” said Eddie.
“Nor will any of us,” said Loss.
All at once, high above the Fragrant Isle and to the South, there was a startling scatter of light. Several groups of tiny daylight stars, triangles of silver and scarlet that the sun caught for a moment before they were lost in the smoke. Aeroplanes.
“Like pen nibs,” said Eddie. “Dipped in red ink.”
“Japs,” said Loss.
The British Army was everywhere on the quays, top brass striding, the Governor with his little cane, the refugees being welcomed but too dazed to understand. A procession of stretchers. Eddie saw one old woman on a crutch asking courteously if anyone had seen her sister, Vera; then collapsing. Crowds hung over the rails of the Customs and Excise who were unhurriedly examining credentials even of the stretcher cases.
“What will happen to us?” said Eddie. “We’ll vanish in all that. The bombing here will start any
time.”
“We’re to refuel and turn round,” said Loss—he had found the Chief Engineer. “It’ll be quite a time before we’re refuelled though, and we’ll be taking on refugees.”
“Turn back?” said Eddie. “To Sierra Leone again?”
“No. Back to England. All the way. Probably via Cadiz.”
“I must get a message to my father.”
“If you send a message, it will have to be in Japanese.”
The ship somehow sidled into the madhouse harbour, the engines shuddered loudly, then stopped, and they were tied up and the first gangplank let down. Loss and Eddie stood above it, side by side, like lamp-post and bollard. Loss, now that Eddie looked down, had with him his suitcase and haversack.
“Feathers, I’m staying.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m staying here. D’you want to come with me?”
“You can’t stay. You’ve no money. You’ll be on your own.”
“I’ve a bit of money and I won’t be alone. I’ve a couple of uncles. Attorneys. Everyone’s an attorney in Colombo. I shall be an attorney one day. So will you, I can tell. I’ll be safe from the Japanese. I’m not British. Not white. Come with me. My relatives are resourceful.”
“What about the customs?”
“Oh, I am adept at slithering through.”
“Loss, you’ll disappear. The Japs’ll be here in a week. After they’ve bombed Colombo into the sea. If you don’t get killed by a bomb, they’ll dispose of you and no one will know.”
“I tell you, Feathers, I am lucky. I am The Albat Ross. I’ll give you my pack of cards. An Albat Ross feather. A feather to Feathers. Here you are. Oh, could you give me your watch? For emergencies?”
“It’s my father’s.”
“I may need it.”
The masked face. The humourless, cunning, dwarf’s eyes . . .
“Yes, of course.” Eddie took it off and put it in Loss’s outstretched hand.
“See,” said Loss. “You’ll be safe. Just look—,” and he pointed up behind Eddie at the mast-head “—an albatross. You don’t often get them this far South.”
Eddie looked and saw nothing. He turned back and Loss had gone.
THE DONHEADS
Cracks like shots and a roar followed by heavy black smoke emerged from the region of the bonfire, just off-stage from Filth’s sun-lounge, and Garbutt, looking older now, went rebelliously by with yet another load of leaves.
I don’t know what’s the matter with the man. He knows how I feel. It’s too soon to burn. The stuff hasn’t died down. He’s not normal.
Garbutt came back, past him again, a fork over the barrow for the next load. Each time he passed his jaw was thrust out further, his eyes more determinedly set full ahead.
He’s a pyro—pyro. Pyro-technic? Pyrocanthus? Pyrowhatever (words keep leaving me). He’s destructive as old Queen Mary. Pyro—pyro? How can I get on here?
And to whom could he complain now old Veneering was gone?
He was amazed at his regret for Veneering. It was genuine grief. Veneering the arch-enemy had become the familiar and close friend. The twice-a-week chess had become the comforting note in an empty diary. There had been visits to the White Hart for lunch, once even for dinner, in Salisbury. Once they had taken a car to Wilton to look at the Vari Dycks. Veneering turned out to be keen on painting and music and Old Filth, trying to hide his total ignorance of both, had accompanied him. Veneering read books. Filth had not been a reader. Veneering had introduced him to various writers. “Only of the higher journalism,” he’d said. “We won’t tax our addled brains. Patrick O’Brian. You were a sea-faring man, Filth, weren’t you? In the War?”
“I hate the sea,” said Filth, putting down O’Brian.
“I’d quite like a cruise,” said Veneering, but saw Filth look aghast. “I’d not have even thought of a cruise once,” said Veneering. “I was beyond cruising before you came round that Christmas Day.”
“Yes,” said Filth with some pride. “You were in dry dock.”
Muffled up, the two of them walked sometimes round the lanes, Filth instructing Veneering in ornithology.
“You are full of surprises,” said Veneering.
“My prep school Headmaster,” said Filth. “He went off to America in the War and I suppose he died there. He didn’t keep up with any of us. He’d done his duty by us.”
“Very wise.”
“I tried to find him when I came back from my abortive attempt at being an evacuee. We had to turn for Home, you know. Took three months. Four months, going out. Singapore fell before we got there. My father was there. He died in Changi.”
“I’d heard something of the sort.”
“I used to make a joke of it. Dinner parties. All the way to Singapore, and about turn, back again.”
“It can’t have been a great joke.”
“No. The journey home was worse than going out. We were stacked with casualties. They kept dying. There was none of the Prayer Book and committal to the deep and Abide with Me and so forth. They were just shovelled over. I hung on. I kept imagining Sir—my Headmaster—would be waiting for me at Cadiz. Or my Auntie May.”
“I had not thought you the type for an Auntie May.”
“Missionary. Wonderful woman. There was another missionary on the boat. A Miss Robertson. She died of gangrene and they shovelled her off, too.”
“Have you written about all this?”
“Certainly not. Old Barrister’s memoirs are all deadly. Don’t you think?”
“Yes. But maybe you’d have surprised us.”
“I’ve grown my image, Veneering. Took some doing. I’m not going to upset it now.”
“You mean upset yourself?”
“Yes. Probably. Have some more hock.”
But Veneering gone—ridiculous to have taken a cruise at his age—Filth’s loneliness for the old enemy was extraordinary, his mourning for him entirely different and sharper than his mourning for Betty. He’d told Veneering more than he’d ever told Betty—though never about Ma Didds. He’d even told Veneering about the buttermilk girl. Veneering had cackled. He’d told him about Loss. “Did you tell me about that before?” asked Veneering. “It rings a bell. Did I know him?”
“You’re wandering,” said Filth. They were playing chess.
“Not far,” said Veneering, taking his queen.
I suppose Memoirs might be in the order of things, he thought, with Veneering dead and his house next door torn apart, windows flung wide, a family with children shouting, crying, laughing, breaking through his hedge; the parents growing vegetables and offering him lettuces. Once a child from Veneering’s house had landed at his feet like a football as he sat in the garden reading the Minutes of a new Temple Benchtable. He wanted to throw the child back over the hedge. “Sorry,” the child said.
“I suppose you want your ball back.”
“I haven’t got a ball.”
“Well, what’s that in your hand?”
“Just some old beads.”
Giggles from the bushes.
“I found them in that flower-bed.”
He vanished.
Bloody self-confident, thought Filth. I don’t understand children now. Sir would have flayed him. Then: What am I talking about? Acting the Blimp. Sir wouldn’t have flayed him. He’d have lectured him on birds.
But, too late for that, he thought.
He sat to his desk and attempted a Memoir, but found it impossible. Opinions, judgements had made him famous, but how to write without opinion or judgement? Statement of facts—easy. But how to decide which were the facts? He shrank from the tremendous, essential burden of seeing himself through other people’s eyes. Only God could do it. It seemed blasphemous even to try. Such a multitude of impressions, such a magnitude of emotion. Where was truth to be found?
“Why did you become an advocate, Filth?” Veneering used to ask. “Don’t tell me you wanted to promote the truth.”
“Justice
. It interested me.”
“And we know that justice is not the truth.”
“Certainly not.”
“But it’s some sort of step towards it?”
“Not even that. Do you agree?”
“I agree,” Veneering had said, busy with his ghastly jigsaw. “The Law is nevertheless an instinct. A good instinct. A framework for behaviour. And a safeguard (good—bit of the church roof) in time of trouble. Parlement of Foules—Chaucer.”
“Rooks have a parliament,” said Filth, keeping his end up.
But though his Memoirs went on endlessly, and rather impressively as he thought them through in the small hours of the night, sometimes to the accompaniment of his beating heart and too much whiskey, when it came to getting them upon paper they would not come. They made him feel so foolish. He felt Betty looking over his shoulder and saying kindly, “jolly good.” He sat in the sun-lounge each morning, defeated, and Garbutt went tramping by. Oh, how could one concentrate? And, oh great heaven! Here came that Chloe in lacy mauve and a perm, round the back of the house and waving a cake. To think he had once . . .
He deliberately arose, holding his tartan blanket round him and shuffled to the other side of the table to sit with his back to her, facing the door to the sitting-room which immediately opened and in came the cleaning lady, Mrs.-er, with a cup of tea.
Decisions came fast to Filth, all decisions except what to include in his Memoirs. Mrs.-er put down the cup and saucer, talking the while, saying that that Chloe from the church was wanting to give him another sponge.
“Mrs.-er,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I am going away.”
“Away? Oh, yes?”
“Yes. I am going to Malmesbury.”
“Malmesbury? Down Gloucester?”
“Yes. I was there in the Army during the War. Just for a look round.”
“If it’s hotels, be careful. There’ll be steps and stairs you don’t know. Remember poor Judge Veneering.”
“It is not a ship. I’ll leave my address.”