by Brian Aldiss
‘You must think I’m a fool,’ Soames said. ‘Of course you were spying. Come on, I’ll show you back to your rickshaw.’
As he went over to the Hindu, a little knife appeared in the other’s hand. Soames paused thoughtfully.
‘Forgive that I accidentally am bringing a kitchen blade with me,’ Turdilal said evenly. ‘Sometimes where I walk are snakes. Am not liking to make any bloody old trouble, sir. Goodnight, sir.’
With that, he was gone. He took a few paces into the night and vanished. Soames felt quite certain he could not be far away. Not being particularly anxious to be seen entering Picket’s home, for fear of again incurring royal disapproval if the matter were reported back to the palace, Soames accordingly skirted the area, looking for a rear entrance to the bungalow.
The ground to one side of the Picket home was rocky, studded with pot-holes and low bushes; to cross it in the dark was a slow, painful business, but Soames finally reached the wooden fence which marked the boundary of the back garden. He attempted to climb the fence. As he straddled it, a ghastly indeterminate thing descended all over him, and a heavy object struck him on the temple. Pitching forward, he sprawled full length into a garden bed, while the world receded from him.
It receded to a distance which he blurrily estimated as about five miles. There, on its tiny surface, three figures ran about with tiny shrieks; after some gesticulation, they picked up a slumped object, which they carried between them into a building. Light and sound were bad; Soames could make no sense of what was happening; it was like watching a television play the minute before the cathode ray tube explodes.
Gradually, however, he began to identify himself with the object dragged into the building. This process was assisted by their both having similar pains in the head and right kneecap. The other figures, too, grew more comprehensible. One in particular, stuck in the foreground, had him on a bed and was massaging his limbs with a certain amount of personal satisfaction. It was a man. The realisation dawned on Soames that it was Alastair Picket; what he could not understand was why Picket seemed to be repeating the word ‘baboon’ over and over.
‘Eh?’ Soames gasped at last, breaking surface as the world returned to its proper distance. The syllable cleared his head and vanquished the last of the cotton wool. M’Grassi should be informed of this instance of the power of words; it would interest him.
‘I said I was very sorry that this happened to you of all people, my dear boy,’ Picket replied, looking into Soames’ face and continuing to rub, ‘but unfortunately you ran into one of our baboon traps. The cursed creatures get into the garden and pinch all the fruit, don’t you know? Great big baboons, can’t keep them out. You are actually the first one we’ve captured. You got a net and an old flat iron on top of you.’
He rubbed his hands in satisfaction and said, ‘Not too badly hurt are you? You’re beginning to look better.’
‘I don’t know,’ Soames said thickly, ‘but I’d be obliged if you’d keep your hands off me, thank you.’
‘No offence meant,’ Picket said blandly. ‘No offence meant at all. You surely don’t think –’ He chuckled throatily without completing the sentence.
Grace came forward with a tray of tea which she set down on the edge of the bed. Seating herself on the bedside chair, she poured Soames out a steaming cup. When she offered it to him, her hand trembled slightly. Her face was set in doggy lines; Soames feared to meet her eyes, but when he did so it was to find none of the shame he had expected; the shame was in his own eyes and she, immediately comprehending it, dropped her gaze with a tiny moue of vexation.
‘How’s the tea?’ she asked flatly.
‘Splendid,’ he said, drinking in frequent tiny sips to cover a surprising disinclination ever to speak again. He supposed the suppressed feeling in the air was causing a neutral bloc.
Bringing another generous load of silence with her, Mrs Picket entered the room. Her little plump face seemed to hold all the chubby dustiness of a puff-ball; if anything, she looked sicker than before. Soames instinctively tried to move his legs to allow her to perch on the bed, there being no more chairs available, but a flash of pain in his knee-cap warned him to keep still.
‘We thought it was a baboon,’ Mrs Picket said faintly.
‘And was it?’ Soames would have liked to ask. Instead, he kept silent, sipping his tea and thinking, ‘It now only needs Pawli to complete the gay family circle. How the other half lives …’
‘Well, nice to see you, anyway, old man,’ Picket said abruptly. Perhaps he could no longer bear the noise of Soames’ sipping. ‘Forgive the unconventional style of greeting, eh?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Soames said. He could not bring himself to make the effort of explaining why he had been climbing over their fence, nor did they seem very curious about the matter. He changed the subject. ‘Mr Picket, isn’t there some British authority you could approach out here who would arrange for you all to have a free passage home to England?’
It was Mrs Picket who answered.
‘They think we’re dead,’ she said, wandering out of the bedroom as if she was going to see whether they really were.
‘Dora’s right,’ Picket conceded. ‘I told you – The Times announced that we were dead twenty-seven years ago. I’ve been through all this, Noyes …’
‘But surely –’ Soames began.
‘Besides,’ Picket interrupted. ‘What the hell do you imagine an old man who has acquired a taste for black boys would do in England?’
A look of bitter weariness passed over his face, speaking volumes, saying nothing. He got up and blundered from the room, exclaiming indistinctly as he went, ‘It’s only for Grace I’m interested …’
Soames’ dismay at this outburst was keen; he sensed that – for the first time in his sheltered life – he was witnessing the disintegration of a man. Then a hand touched his wrist and Grace said, ‘Don’t be too upset, Soames; I’ve heard father deliver that line a dozen times, I should think. It satisfies both his sense of guilt and his sense of the dramatic …’
The loathing in her voice silted up the end of the sentences. Soames experienced the selfishly intense desire to run a mile. In an urge to get the visit over as soon as possible, he said, ‘I actually came about a bowler hat.’
Then he burst into wild laughter. He hooted with merriment at the incongruity of bowler hats and steamy emotions – and when he turned to look at Grace, she was quietly crying without spilling a tear.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, searching herself hopelessly for a handkerchief. ‘Obviously, you can’t be expected to appreciate how – how howlingly ghastly existence here is, or you’d never laugh.’
Ashamed of his outburst, Soames fished out his handkerchief and obligingly mopped her dry cheeks. She had the rare ability of looking attractive when dishevelled. By the time he had dried her face (for at his touch, she had summoned a few real tears), he discovered, with surprise and some admiration, that Grace was now lying on the bed beside him. It was basically the same tactic she had worked on him in the convertible the night they had first met. Now, as then, Soames could not refuse. The point of refusal was a slippery thing which he never grasped; in the new warmth flooding them so invitingly, it slipped constantly away and was lost entirely. Not even the cries of an irritable knee-cap could call it back. So it was that Soames and Grace underwent that curious and revelatory experience often represented typographically in novels as …
Finally, Soames sat up. Again his fastidiousness, his moral code, had let him down; he began to worry about it at once. He could not even argue that he had done what he had done on humanitarian grounds, for Grace’s sake. He had done it for sheer enjoyment – and that was surely wrong. When he turned to look at her, the expression of peaceful pleasure on her face banished many of his doubts. She gave a long, greedy groan of delight.
‘Snuggle down here with me and let’s talk about bowler hats,’ she suggested.
For Soames, however, it was over.
He sat primly on the side of the bed, patting her hand absently, trying to dismiss the idea that her previous practices had contaminated him, wondering at the obscure spiritual link he had with Pawli.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just can’t work things out. Perhaps I missed learning something as a kid I should have learnt. I don’t seem to get things right. No, that’s not quite it. It’s just – well, there seem to be two standards to everything – to every aspect of everything. I mean, what’s just happened with us: was it good or was it bad? I’d say it was good – almost unreservedly. But lots of people – people you’d think should know – would say it was bad. And then again, is it important or unimportant? There, I can’t even tell which I think it is. It ought to be a natural, spontaneous expression of something – youth or good will or something – and yet at the same time, well just at present anyway, it feels a cardinal event in my life … No, not quite that, (is there any tea left, darling?) but what I mean is, well, we did transfer something to each other. A sort of cloud of ripeness, of hope. My father and mother were very different people. Perhaps it’s the mixture of them in me that makes me always feel two standards, my father is horrified at what I’ve done, my mother’s delighted.’
She handed him a cup of lukewarm tea.
‘There are probably more than two standards for everything,’ she said. ‘As long as you are quite clear what you feel about it yourself, you must not let the rest matter.’
He was about to ask her how she felt, but an unusual wisdom warned him of the instability beneath her surface calm. He told himself thankfully that he had got off lightly so far, and the best thing was to beat a hasty retreat. Such a reflection, if it was typical of Soames, was not one over which he had a monopoly.
‘About the bowler hat,’ he said. ‘Did your father ever have one?’
Grace’s eyes narrowed at mention of her father, but she said merely, consigning the subject of love regretfully to silence, ‘He had one, but got rid of it when he turned heathen. I’ve heard him tell how he gave it to Dumayami when he sold his cassocks and stuff. Apparently Dumayami went off wearing it, proud as punch. Why are you so obsessed with bowler hats this evening?’
‘I just wanted to know,’ Soames said evasively, testing his leg and finding it good.
A quarter of an hour later he was walking fast and alone down Stranger’s Hill. Once more, he told himself that he had got off very lightly.
Chapter Fourteen
‘… warm days will never cease.’
One major difference between life as lived direct and life as sampled through books, which are perhaps the most vital way of retransmitting experience, is that while literature can at best show us only a pair or a group of people at the centre of the stage at one time, in reality everyone has star billing, or so it must appear to them. This is the great fault of an undiluted diet of art, that it insensibly foists upon us the illusion that we are more centrally important than is actually so; which is why dilettanti, or undergraduates first coming into full contact with Great Authors, are at such pains constantly to emote: they are trying to live up to that consciousness which doth make Hamlets of us all.
The more balanced of us, however, remind ourselves, or are painfully reminded, that in this lurid pickle called ‘real life’ we are, to everyone else, attendant lords merely, extras hanging about in the wings of their progress. Whatever happens to us, the world goes on. Say we should die, will even those whom we made laugh find time to cry?
Though this inescapable contrast between art and nature was apparent to Soames, he had forgotten it as he walked back through Umbalathorp to the palace, his head being too full of his recent scene with Grace Picket to contain much else. He was dimly aware, it is true, of turbulent crowds in the market place, of the sound of drums from the kraal, of an old man scraping down a poster saying JIMPO FOR PRESIDENT, but these registered simply as irritations: it never occurred to him that he might be as irrelevant to their mood as they were to his, that for them he did not exist, even as an extra waiting in the wings.
He was fully aware only of the fact that, in doing something Grace had set great store by, he had acted spontaneously, rather than performing a duty for which she should be beholden to him. The pleasure he felt about this was nullified by the perception that it was partly pleasure in his own responsiveness, for whenever Soames detected virtue in himself he became uneasy, condemned himself for conceit; though this was not to say by any means that he was not conceited. Unease also filled him when he reflected that he had gone to the Picket place without any conscious intention of seeing Grace at all; for now a small voice, whose source he could not trace, told him that the subconscious motive for his visit all the time had been, simply if not purely, to take what Grace had already offered him. This, of course – because he was a painfully conscientious creature – led him to call his whole nature into question.
‘You’ve no self-discipline,’ he muttered. It had been a favourite phrase of his father’s.
It was not surprising that, in this muddled state of mind, Soames could not sleep when he went to bed. Long after midnight, he was still awake, so that the tap at his door was a welcome distraction. He sat up eagerly.
‘Come in,’ he called, suddenly remembering Ping Hwa, and wondering what he should do about it if it were she.
But the figure which entered had at least three times the mass of the Chinese girl. It was Queen Louise. She bore a small oil lamp, which she set down on the bedside table after closing the door. Around her bulky body, like the ice round Everest, was wrapped an enormous white crêpe-de-chine shawl, which seemed as if it went on forever, in the manner of saris and Mobius strips.
‘Now I have found you,’ she said. ‘Before, no one is finding you, and this is a great relief.’
‘I have been out,’ Soames replied. ‘Do sit down.’
She sank heavily on to the bed. Soames moved his foot just in time, wondering what all this might be about, but too polite to ask; Queen Louise was overpowering, but he respected her unconventionality.
‘This moment, I feel, is made for you,’ she said.
‘Blimey!’ Soames exclaimed to himself.
‘The climate of Umbalathorp is good,’ she said.
‘Admirable,’ agreed Soames, ‘except for the heat and rain.’
‘Except for some heat and some rain,’ agreed the Queen comfortably.
She paused. She seemed to gather herself together like a tatty old windjammer before the hurricane bursts upon it.
‘I will not thrash round the bushes with you, Mr Soames,’ she said. ‘That is not attractive for me. For people like us of intelligence, plain speech is the alternative. Only this difficulty of language barrier please excuse for making my talking less than natural. This is what I must say that my husband and I feel affectionate for you. Despite misconstructions of no consequence, we grasp you absolutely in our esteem.’
‘Even after that awful speech I made today?’ Soames enquired, turning cold at the memory.
‘Most especially after that,’ the Queen said. ‘For this we ask each other, “Who excepting Mr Soames will rise at this boastful moment and instead for boasting at his mighty machine to make all apologies for it?” And we answer each other, “Nobody: for nobody has this modesty; though he does not make a good speech, he makes a good impression.” Therefore, now this great sadness has happened, I think at once of the part for you to play in days immediately to come.’
‘That’s very handsome of you, Queen, but what great sadness are you referring to?’ Soames enquired.
‘You do not hear already? My dear, I am sorry; then I tell you wretchedly that the Prince Deal Jimpo is dead.’
‘Oh no …’ Soames groaned. ‘Jimpo … he was a great chap … and he was only a youngster.’ He recalled the hubbub in the market as he returned from Picket’s, and realised now what it had been about. ‘I’m terribly sorry about this, Queen Louise; Jimpo, you know – I felt he was a real friend, and indirectly I am to bla
me for all this.’
‘That is not to be said. Circumstances are always more entangled than we realise, as to make blame something nobody can distribute. Jimpo was Jimpo, making his end self-contained, as all our ends are self-contained. This is why I come to you. Somewhere at your target centre, not meaning to be personal, you have not committed yourself. You are a man undecided of his true role in life. Now we ask you to do this decision in our favour.’
‘Er … I don’t quite see …’
‘Mr Soames, to the gap left by Jimpo, you can fill it. You would be a steady man for my husband, as Jimpo would be. Stay in Umbalathorp, that is what we – I – beg you to do. All you need shall be able to be found for you, in the nature of all interest and security, as far as it is in our power.’
Soames propped himself against the wall in the semidarkness. He knew all too well what she meant by saying he was not committed; and an unreasoning fear of committing himself rose at once in his breast; what we want is always what we fear. The Queen seemed to sense something of this.
‘Think without forcing, sleep,’ she said, rising. ‘Stay five years, three years here; only think well about it. Be assured you are welcome.’
‘Yes,’ Soames said. ‘You’ve been so frightfully good to me, Queen Louise. I’m very grateful …’
‘If you stay, we are grateful.’ There was a note of disappointment in her voice, perhaps because he had not at once taken up her proposal. She returned to the door, a crêpe-de-chine mountain which had just visited Mahomet without profit.
‘Wait,’ Soames said. ‘What’s going to happen here now? – I mean, the Apostle was unfortunately wrong about Jimpo; it slipped up on this prediction and Dumayami has won the contest. No doubt many people will be impressed by that. How is that going to affect local affairs?’
‘For once Dumayami has put his feet wrong,’ the Queen said, with satisfaction. ‘This has not added to his power but subtracted. Dear Jimpo had mighty popularity, especially in the city. Now our people think, “The witch doctor said he will die and he has died; therefore the witch doctor make this happen.” Therefore they have wrath against Dumayami, for this is the way our people reason. Dumayami is very unpopular tonight. But …’