by Brian Aldiss
They entered what Soames soon found was the palace laundry; Ping Ah was in charge of it. The multitude who had scuttled into hiding had made an excellent job of it; nobody, as they walked through into Ping Ah’s inner sanctum, was visible but his wife, whom he addressed as Rosie, pronouncing it Lousy. She came forward smiling through her rimless glasses, shaking her head, bowing, a little plump woman with dimples and a magnificent coiffure. She had no English.
‘In Liverpool, she was always indoors, washing, ironing, seeing nobody, eh, Rosie?’ said Ping Ah affectionately. She bobbed in answer.
They seated themselves round a scrubbed, bare table. Ping Ah clapped his hands, whereupon a girl hurried out to throw a pretty cloth over the white wood and lay out the paraphernalia for tea. As she did so, the Chinese talked.
‘Anything you have for wash or clean,’ he said, ‘you bring down here, Mr Noyes, and we will attend to with greatest attention and lowest cost. No article is too small or too big for us. All notions of cleanliness admiringly observed.’
Was this pantomime, Soames wondered, just to solicit his custom? If so, very nice, very elegant. He felt suddenly indulgent as he covertly watched the girl preparing the table. To straighten a fold in the cloth, she had leant close to him; he had caught a tiny fragrance, at once soothing and exciting. She was dressed in green candy-stripe pyjamas; her figure and features were good. Soames became anxious to see her eyes, but she never looked at him. For a little while, Ping Ah talked on unheeded.
Now the girl brought in the tea things and a plate of diminutive cakes. Ping Ah poured Soames a shallow cup of sweet-smelling jasmine tea.
‘And now let us talk of you, Mr Noyes,’ he said, ‘for the tales of travellers are always instructive. You have brought an interesting machine to Umbalathorp, but I fear it is too big and will not be used often.’
Soames, to whom this reflection had often occurred, carefully withheld agreement.
‘Many disused things have similarly been brought here by our improvident King,’ Ping Ah continued. ‘Waste of money is cause for grief. Disused things fall to rust. Take more tea please, Mr Noyes. Pour, Rosie. I have many calculations to make for my work. I own not only this poor laundry but many stores in Goya. Each has one or two clerks calculating the books, making a mistake always. All waste of time and money, much grief. Your machine do all sums, hey presto, in no time.’
‘A good idea,’ Soames said. ‘I’m sure King Landor would come to an agreement with you.’
‘No, no, Mr Noyes!’ exclaimed Ping Ah, slopping his tea. ‘You do not understand the situation. The King is against me because I do not pay him squeeze. The Portuguese men pay him much squeeze. They can afford to do because they are big smugglers and rob the population. They are my enemies. Mr Soares particularly bad man. I am only honest trader.’
The Chinese paused here, looking searchingly at Soames over the cup he held between his two palms. Soames, saying nothing, took another sip of the fragrant tea; it was good, but he would have preferred a little sugar with it.
‘In this republic is altogether too much intriguing,’ Ping Ah continued. ‘You would hardly imagine, coming from the peaceful cities of Britain. Because I do not have favourites, I am the victim of victimisation. Perhaps one day the Portuguese arrange for me to be killed.’
He paused again for so long that Soames was forced to say, conventionally, ‘I am sorry to hear things are so bad.’
‘You can fix help for me, Mr Noyes,’ the victim of victimisation said. ‘If you can arrange for me to have copies of all problems and answers going through your machine, then I can be forewarned. Nobody need know, only you and this person. You understand the machine, Mr Noyes. You rule her. You can fix.’
‘I’m only here a fortnight, Ping Ah.’
‘Still you could fix.’
‘Sorry, Ping Ah. It’s none of my business.’
‘Please, Mr Noyes, you can fix.’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you,’ Soames said. He was not annoyed; he had expected some such request. To soothe him, too, was the sight of the Chinese girl, who had seated herself on a low wicker chair near to them. She rested her head gently on her hand, her elbow on the chair arm, so that Soames, peeping down at her, could see framed between black hair and golden arm one subtle, appealing breast.
‘All things and circumstances can be fixed in the world,’ murmured Ping Ah, as if he were talking to himself. ‘Men must be practical to gain their desires, else is no hope. For friendship sake I could fix my daughter Hwa to be anyone’s room girl. Hwa!’
The girl stood up and looked at Soames. A python could hardly have done a better job of hypnotism.
‘This daughter is a very good girl, Mr Noyes,’ said Ping Ah. ‘Very soft and gentle, also speak a little English. Address Mr Noyes, Hwa.’
‘I can be useful in your room, sir,’ the girl said seriously. ‘Do all things. Good. Clean. Willing.’
Soames swallowed. He had no wish to be involved in local politics but he knew a bargain when he saw it; for Ping Hwa one might do wilder things than entering politics.
‘Can make bed,’ the girl continued. ‘Make tasty dish. Show scenery. Also sing Canton song from opera, you like. Perhaps you also teach piece English poor girl.’
‘You’re getting your meaning over well already,’ Soames told her earnestly, jerking at his collar. He was at a loss to think why he did not clinch the deal straight away; he could not imagine that the information passing through the Apostle would be particularly valuable. ‘Who taught you English, Hwa? Your father, I suppose?’
‘Father too busy work.’ She lowered her eyes and said softly. ‘Picket teach. He bad man. Daughter Picket also bad.’
‘I keep hearing about this man Picket,’ Soames said, faintly disgruntled that the only other Englishman in Goya should get so consistently bad a press. ‘Nobody has a good word to say for him. What’s he done?’
‘Disgraceful thing best not to talk about. Enough said, nearly mended,’ Ping Ah replied, patting his daughter’s bottom gently, appetisingly.
Soames found the power to stand up.
‘I’ll think about what you say, Ping Ah,’ he told the Chinese, who thereupon also rose, ‘and let you know my decision in the morning. Thank you for the offer, thank you for the tea. Goodnight, Hwa.’
He felt nothing but a fool as he left the laundry and made his way up to his room. A stranger called him, placing a detaining arm on his sleeve, but Soames shook it off. He could not be too sure which scruples had made him refuse the offer. Ping Ah, as he had claimed, was an honest trader; the bargain had been attractive. Awakened lust bubbled in him like frying toadstools.
Moodily, he kicked open the door of his room and switched the light on.
Upon his bed, on the bright rug, sat a young, alert negress with eyes like a fawn. Her slender figure with its new breasts was startlingly black against the white wall. She wore two strings of beads and a scent of musk: a simple but effective costume. M’Grassi Landor had kept his promise.
‘I suppose Picket taught you English too,’ Soames snapped. It was, in truth, the only thing he could think of to say.
‘How you know that?’ the girl asked in astonishment, uncoiling slightly; her voice was soft and fluting.
‘Picket must hold some interesting classes,’ Soames said vulgarly, closing the door behind him.
Some long while later, Soames strolled on to the stone balcony outside his bedroom window. The cool sound of the Uiui came to him, and the cry of a night-bird. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. It was after midnight, but time no longer mattered. Unstrapping the watch, Soames threw it back into the darkened room behind him and heard it land on the now empty bed. Time was a European invention – or rather, Europeans had invented the idea of chopping it into busy minutes and seconds (what Powys calls ‘turdlings of time’) and tethering them on to the wrist. In Africa one need only live; as Princess Cherry had observed, there were no autumns – and with these larger punctuat
ions of the year had gone the tiny ones, the seconds and minutes.
‘Coitala,’ Soames said aloud, savouring the name. The black girl had been aptly christened. At first he had been almost in awe of her, then he had not cared, then finally the awe had returned. He lay gazing at the burnished blackness of her. Seen so close, Coitala was a whole country, hills, valleys, plains, embankments, tumuli, every inch of it flawless. Soames touched the magnificent landscape with his fingers, with his tongue, marvelling. He found himself thinking, as he had done long ago before the plane crash, that this was another planet, that the creature beside him was of another species, quite alien. The only thing they had in common was a difference of sex.
A gentle wonder at what he had done filled Soames. It would have been unthinkable a week ago. Not only time and colour changed as one yielded up to the arms of the equator, but life itself, and one’s attitude to life. Here, no withholding was possible. In the heat, the pores of the heart opened. One was an organism, involved in all the organisms around; the ability to be aloof was lost in Africa.
He saw the depths of Africa full of eyes and flowers and genitals and lizards and mouths and corn and mammals and leaves, going on for ever – individuals changing, types unchanging, parts fading, the whole always bright, something too rich to be grasped, a pattern of fecundity making the rest of the world a desert by comparison, a moon of a place with craters for breasts.
For their refreshment, King Landor had sent Coitala upstairs with a bottle of Portuguese wine. Slightly intoxicated with love and drink, Soames inhaled a great breath of air. It was laden with sweet and strange smells, even as Coitala had been. In her, Soames told himself – ah, tonight, now, now, he knew absolutely all that living implied! – in Coitala he had perceived not only the mystery of Africa but the greater mystery of womanhood. Right under the noses of men – even under their carcasses – women carried on their secret existence, their ambitions not man’s, their responses not his. They were a captive race, for ever in bondage, a Chosen People whose superiority man dared only acknowledge singly, in secret. They were wonderful, in that word’s literal meaning.
His thoughts grew as woolly as the clouds darkly gathering overhead. They shifted and spread until even Soames forgot about them, drifting through the embrasures of his brain, complete in themselves, patterns with a life of their own. Gradually, almost reluctantly, they formed round a memory of Sheila Thurston, and claimed Soames’ attention again.
Sheila had been his great love. He had met her a decade ago, when he was twenty, a youth hamstrung by shyness and the sense of his own inadequacy. He had adored her, she had loved him; but inevitably she had been swept away by a brasher young man with a better line of talk; for he had scarcely talked at all. Soames now faced the fact that, at thirty, he would never love again with such whole-heartedness. This was something to regret, but it was after all only natural: the divine madness burns most strongly at the age we are given the vote; what he more seriously regretted was not that he could never love anyone as he had loved Sheila, but that he had not loved Sheila with the proper style, that whenever he looked back at that cynosure in his life it would be to see it badly flawed, and to wince at the timorousness which still dogged him.
He was down to earth again and it had started to rain. He went back into his room, undressing without putting on the light.
Chapter Six
‘And sometimes like a gleaner …’
On the following afternoon, while most of Umbalathorp enjoyed siesta, the mortal remains of Wally Brewer, the engineer from Birmingham, and the pilot of the crashed plane were decently interred in a quiet grove near the palace.
‘They were good lads,’ Timpleton told Soames over lunch, in the voice of one reading from a tombstone. ‘Real good lads. I’m proud to have known them. Wally Brewer was a proper bastard.’
Sucking a hollow tooth, he thought for a moment and then added, ‘Old Wally would have enjoyed himself with me last night. I did a tour of the town with a friend – well, it was that Portuguese, Soares, if you must know.’
‘Interesting?’ asked Soames.
‘I’m watching out I don’t get the old akkabaksi pox, mate. I tell you! You must come down with us one night. Honest, the girls are okay, but the shacks they live in … lousy with cockroaches. One of them crawled over my bare arse. I’m fussy about that sort of thing, I am. It didn’t ought to be allowed. It puts you right off your stroke. Now back in England a place like that would be properly disinfected and cleaned every day.’
‘And closed,’ Soames added.
Timpleton looked at him reflectively.
‘What did you do last night?’
‘Oh, I went to bed early,’ Soames said.
‘Not much of a one for the women, are you really?’ Timpleton said sympathetically.
‘They’re all right on the whole.’
‘After you with the hole,’ Timpleton said.
‘Excuse me, I must go and get ready for the funeral,’ Soames said, rising from the table.
Lustful conversation was not what he wanted just then. It gave him too strong a feeling of life flowing remorselessly on. Although he cared little for the dead, he wanted to care for their sakes, shut away as they now were from all sun and flowers and flesh. Forgetting the way in which these elements were beginning to work on him, and little knowing how crowded his day would be, Soames resolved to preserve a proper mourning spirit until tomorrow, in honour of his defunct fellow countrymen. Thus pompously pious, he prepared for the funeral.
He found that the sad business had its amusing side.
The capital of Goya boasted a Christian priest, a Portuguese, but as a staunch Roman Catholic he refused to traffic with Protestant corpses. President Landor therefore took charge of the ceremony.
‘Don’t ask me to comprehend your religion,’ the President exclaimed to Soames; he cheerfully announced himself to be of the heathen persuasion. ‘With the mazes of politics I can, as a pragmatist, cope – but the mazes of religion – it is too much! If only the wretched Picket … However, never mind that; in the circumstances, as Head of State, I shall be delighted to read the last rites over these three servants of Unilateral.’
Soames attended the ceremony with Deal Jimpo and Prince Shappy; Timpleton, eager to get on with the job of assembling the Apostle Mk II, was not present. The only other people present were half a dozen blacks with nothing better to do, Tanuana, carrying his bicycle and smiling all the while to indicate his personal interest in the proceedings, and an aged Frenchman called Jules Michel – ‘a Communist’, Jimpo whispered importantly to Soames.
Despite this sparse audience, the President, resplendent under a tasselled umbrella held by two of his followers, did the honours thoroughly and, as the poor parcels of bones were lowered into the puddingy earth, broke into a valedictory oration over them.
‘Let us not forget that speed brought these men to their untimely deaths,’ he said in French. ‘Speed is all that aeroplanes have to offer. To travel in them is to gain time and lose other more precious things. Any sensitive person is depressed by the draughty flatness of an aerodrome, and by its concomitants, the hours of delay, the yattering loudspeakers, the customs officials. To fly is to become denationalised; the thought revolving in our head in Durban is still there at Dar es Salaam; the tune we whistle at Leopoldville is still on our lips when we arrive at Marrakesh. We are always unprepared. These three men, my people, were unprepared.
‘In the days of our fathers, their fate would have been different. They would have sailed from their northern island in a ship, with our red computer in the hold of the ship. The ship would have had great sails that would be steel blue by dawn light, grey by day, blood red by sunset; it would have seen many days on its journey here, and these unfortunate men would have had time to prepare. They would have understood then that this earth has only one sunrise which trails for ever and ever round the continents, from former ages into the future, and only one sunset, which trails after th
e sunrise like a dog after its master. Then these unfortunate men would come to understand how it follows from this that in all creation there is only one day; one day only, and however fast they travel back or forth, they can squeeze no more days, for there are no more days; time is indivisible and cannot be saved except by spending it in a leisurely way.
‘According to the tenets of the religion of these unfortunate men, they are now enjoying another sort of life which goes on forever elsewhere. Those of you who have had the task of picking their festering bones and gristle from the smashed plane may doubt this. I doubt it too. I feel therefore that as fellow human beings who will some day be reduced to roughly the same regrettable state, we should hope charitably in our hearts that these three unfortunate men, during their lifetimes, interfered with their neighbours as little as might be expected and found leisure enough to relax, laugh, make others laugh, drink and enjoy. And let us hope further, for our own sakes as well as theirs, that if this hypothetical future life exists, it contains none of this world’s sorrows and all of its pleasures, which are good pleasures indeed. Amen. No clapping please.’
The President, having finished his oration, accepted a fizzy raspberryade from one of his attendants and climbed into the Dodge which, with a wilting circlet of flowers draped over its bonnet, was doing duty as state carriage.
Soames turned to Jimpo.
‘An ingenious speech your father made,’ he said, since ingenious was the adjective he used for anything the point of which to some extent eluded him.
‘One would never think to hear him,’ Jimpo said, with a sad, abstract air, ‘that he had never been up in an aeroplane.’
‘That says all the more for the acuteness of his perceptions,’ replied Soames, ‘for there is much truth in what he says. Flying solves nobody’s problems – it is merely taking refuge in flight.’
They stood silently together, watching the two black gravediggers enthusiastically belabouring the black earth flat with their spades, until Jimpo asked, ‘You think my father speaks truth?’