by Brian Aldiss
‘Do not worry,’ she said. ‘After tomorrow are other days for more choosing. No? Your contracts will not forbid you being versatile.’
Soames ate a pensive supper, retired to his room, smoked, emerged to have a bath, returned to his room, thought, dithered.
At a quarter to ten, a clerk knocked at his door, asked him in broken French if he could yet name the Chosen Virgin, and was sharply dismissed. Soames went down to see M’Grassi.
‘In a few minutes,’ he said, without many preliminaries, ‘I’m supposed to be ringing up Mayor Wabe and communicating my decision to him. The truth is, I haven’t yet decided. I’m sorry to be so slow about this, but I want a little more time. Would it be all right if I postponed telling him till later?’
‘It would be all right in a legal sense,’ M’Grassi replied, ‘or at least it could be arranged. But I doubt if it would be right from your personal point of view. You will condemn yourself to a sleepless night, which would not be good. Can you not make a snap decision? You must have some idea …’
‘No idea,’ Soames said firmly.
The king sighed and rose to pour them drinks.
‘You know I enjoy talking to you like what you would term a “Dutch uncle”,’ he said, ‘and you constantly tempt me to do it again. Let me, just this time, restrain myself, and point out merely that one woman is very like another. The servant girl, the Hollywood film star: much the same in bed.’
‘“It is not in our stars but in ourselves” the difference lies,’ Soames said. ‘I’m sorry to be silly about this, M’Grassi, but if you could get on to Mayor Wabe, I should much appreciate it.’
‘Here’s your drink,’ M’Grassi said resignedly, and went over to the phone. In a short time, he was connected to the Mayor’s Parlour and speaking to the Mayor. They conversed in Goyese. As he replaced the receiver, M’Grassi turned to Soames with a slight smile.
‘He says you can have your wish; he will go home to bed,’ the king said. ‘You need not tell him your choice of Virgin till you actually get on to the field at dawn. All the interested females will be there anyway, so the selected one can immediately be – ah, pressed into service. Nor will the people care a hang about this change in protocol provided the essential part of the entertainment goes forth as planned.’
‘That’s very good of you,’ Soames said relievedly. ‘I really will make up my mind soon.’
‘Not at all. I only wish I could take your place on the field,’ M’Grassi said cordially. He raised his glass. ‘To the lucky woman!’
‘“To whosoe’er she be, That not impossible she”,’ Soames quoted. With a slight shiver, he drank.
Ten o’clock chimed. Eight hours till dawn.
‘If you will excuse me, I think I’ll go back up to my room,’ Soames said apologetically.
He sat on the edge of his bed, swinging one leg nervously, looking at the six names on a little piece of paper.
Amalia
Isidora (the two Portuguese girls)
Maria Soares
Grace
Roedi, the Galla girl
Betty Noktrauma
Surely he could cross one of them off? No, instead he added a seventh name, ‘Ping Hwa’. For all her obtuseness, he might have settled for her straight away, were it not that Soames foresaw her father making a considerable nuisance of himself: Ping Ah could not be kept from the palace, as José Soares could be, because he already lived in the palace.
‘God, you’ve no passion, man!’ Soames addressed himself furiously when he had stared at this bit of paper for half an hour. ‘Your trouble is not that you fancy them all but that you don’t fancy any of them enough.’
But the truth was more than that, he realised. He had to choose someone who would be suitable not only for himself but for the whole ceremony. This was a symbolic act, an investiture; at the same time, it was for Soames a divestment: he was getting rid of his old English character. Here was his great chance to become someone newer, bigger, his opportunity to renounce his childhood.
He grew more and more uneasy as time passed.
‘Inside me is all the apparatus for making a decision, yet I cannot decide,’ he grumbled. ‘How apt that I should bear the name Noyes! One half of me says No, one half says Yes. Pull devil, pull baker, I shall never agree with myself.’
He smote his forehead, and attempted to smoke a cigarette without thinking at all. The attempt failed.
‘It’s this cursed indecisiveness!’ he said aloud. ‘It runs through me … I can actually feel it – like wildfire. Or ivy. Or rust. Right down inside. It splits me in two. How can I ever be or make myself a whole man when half of me is Mother and half of me is Father? Even this boils down to sex: that you have to have male and female to make another generation – so no wonder if the generation’s a mixture, half pulling one way, half the other. Why was I not brought forth by parthenogenesis, a bastard on the divine scale? Hell’s blood, the business of existence is too much for one man!’
Jumping up, he kicked over a wicker chair and stood with his back to the wall, drumming his fists against it.
‘You think you’re one person, and then your situation and surroundings change – and you’re not, you’re someone else. Then in another place or another time, you’re someone else again. This damned uncertain bisexual way of building a character insures its instability, as far as I can see. I mean, who am I now? Which part of me do I owe allegiance to? How can I tell? What can help me to tell? – not the religious training I had as a kid; not the laisser faire I learnt at the university; not the cautious humanism I had fallen into recently. They applied once, but they are all about as relevant as Ancient Rome to me – now in Umbalathorp …’
He fell to thinking of Sheila Thurston, calming himself somewhat. Though he had lost touch with her recently, he knew she had not married; that he would have heard about. He had certainly gained both courage and knowledge since coming to Goya; could he not go away, even at this eleventh hour, go back home, and with his new strength seek Sheila out again?
‘Mere escapism!’ Soames scoffed. And yet the idea of leaving Goya – was not that sound? He could sneak out here and now, get a boat down river.
‘Crippen! Crippen!’ a bird jeered at his window. Soames ran on to the balcony and shooed it away.
It would not be cowardice to leave. Obscurely, he was aware of the grip Goya was taking on him, perhaps because he was not a sufficiently strong character to withstand it. If he were to retain his old self – selves –? He could do no better than go now.
What had Mrs Picket said? ‘This is the Country of the Powers of Darkness; now they are about to gather you in.’ It seemed more feasible at this muddy time of night than it had at tea-time. Soames lay on the bed, trying to straighten it out. He flinched from the sort of terms he imagined Mrs Picket would use, but what it all came to was that he was either throwing his soul away or trying, in a fashion just beyond his comprehension, to save it.
‘Which brings us back to women again,’ Soames breathed, ‘because …’
But everything grew more muddled than ever and took him along on a tide of sleep. Outside, the Crippen bird called unheeded.
Chapter Eighteen
‘Or on a half-reap’d furrow …’
Dawn over Goya was no meagre thing. Instead of sneaking in like a belated reveller, daylight leapt into the sky to do battle with the night – and discovered a vast crowd already gathered upon the Defloration Field. It was a gay-coloured crowd, silent in anticipation.
The ranks of the local inhabitants had been swollen by sightseers from the far corners of Goya, all eager to see their new white President prove himself. In addition, a newsreel camera team and representatives from several newspapers, including the London Daily Excess, had arrived, much to M’Grassi’s pleasure.
The entire ceremony was conducted almost without a hitch, which was fortunate, considering there had been no undress rehearsal. The Presidential candidate, looking rather pale, arrived upon the scen
e only a few minutes late, garbed resplendently in the official defloration robes. When he had taken up his stance before the couch, he was divested of his apparel, though still retaining his brown suede shoes, as the regulations permitted. He was seen to look anxiously about, searching the faces of the crowd, where undoubtedly he could recognise everyone he had ever met in Goya.
Finally, he pointed at one of the women he saw among the throng. She hung back momentarily as officials hurried up, prepared her for her part, and laid her upon the couch in readiness. A murmur of interest rose from all sides at the President’s choice.
The first defloration call was sounded on a drum. Without any hesitation, the President walked forward, bent over his choice, and said a few words to her. At the second call, he went smoothly into the next and vital stage of the ceremony. Absolute silence fell round the field except for the whir of the movie cameras.
The defloration successfully accomplished, Mayor Wabe made his inspection, took the President’s wrist and held his hand high in the air. A spontaneous round of applause burst from the thronged onlookers. As both President and Virgin dressed, the Umbalathorp Guards’ Brass Band burst into a lively rendition of that stirring tune, ‘Kiss the Boys Goodbye’, which, by possessing the sheet music of nothing else, they had made so peculiarly their own.
A few minutes later, the two chief participants in this dramatic and significant ceremony drove off with the royal party. The remainder of the day, for most of Goya’s inhabitants, was spent in rejoicing, the eating of sweet cakes and the drinking of sweet wine.
‘It was the nicest choice, this I am sure,’ Queen Louise said, kissing Soames resoundingly and crying down his cheeks. ‘All of us are mightily touched. We are proud of you both.’
The royal parlour was packed with people, all laughing, crying and drinking. Soames himself hardly knew what he was doing, and when someone said, ‘Here is the Daily Excess reporter to interview you,’ he turned and stared at Sheila Thurston for some time without realising it was she.
‘Can’t we go somewhere quiet?’ she shouted.
‘Like England you mean?’ Soames asked. ‘No, I’m staying right here. This is my wonderful country!’
‘Soames, however have you managed to get yourself into a scrape like this? I must have a story!’
‘Let me alone! I’m a conqueror, can’t you see?’ Soames exclaimed, riding along on the crest of reaction. ‘There’s no story!’
‘Of course there is. Darling, you’ve changed so! Can’t we go somewhere quiet, just for a minute?’
‘You don’t want me to repeat my performance on the playing field with you, do you?’
‘Soames, you’re drunk, you horror!’
‘Ha! Bloody funny. How do you expect me to act? Come here, and make it quick! The President deigns to spare you two precious minutes.’
Bellowing, laughing uproariously, he snatched a bottle from Princess Cherry, seized Sheila’s wrist, and dragged her through the milling bodies into the quiet of M’Grassi’s study. There he locked the door, turned and kissed her vigorously.
‘First time you’ve ever been kissed by a President,’ he said. ‘How long have you been working for the Excess, as if I cared now ?’
‘Over two years. Soames, what’s the matter? Have you gone crazy? That business out on the field – it was horrible! How could you – how could anyone bring themselves to do it – I mean, there in full daylight, in front of everyone … You used to be so reserved.’
‘Yes!’ he said, so loudly she flinched. He poured a tumbler full of port, jerked it back and drank it himself when she refused it. ‘Yes, I was reserved. Don’t ask me why. Until today, even after all these years, I think I was still half in love with you. Don’t, again, ask me why. Because all we had on each other was a freezing effect!’
‘That’s not true,’ Sheila said freezingly. ‘Besides, you’ve no right to talk about it; it was all over long ago as far as I’m concerned. You don’t mean a thing to me.’
‘Good,’ Soames said equably. ‘I wish I could say the same; but at least I realise now that for all the external rigmarole that people put up – the front they present to the world – they also have a subterranean something. And if your subterranean somethings don’t chime, it’s no good going on, no matter how infatuated or well-meaning or whatever you may be. M’Grassi told me that in different words, and I can see now that he was right. Have a drink, Sheila! Come on, woman, relax!’
‘No, thank you. I’m waiting to hear something I can put in my paper.’
‘Then hold on tight, because here it comes. I’m staying right out here in Umbalathorp, because this place has got more of this subterranean feeling than anywhere else I know. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘And I suppose you were in touch with this – subterranean something during that beastly rite?’ Sheila asked. She had a pencil and notebook out now, looking very efficient, holding herself prim and trim.
Soames did a tipsy little dance and ended it by sitting heavily on the desk. He felt the need to pretend he was drunk because he had suddenly gone cold sober.
‘That beastly little rite meant something, whether you like it or not,’ he said. ‘What I did out there on that field was an act of authority, a token of fitness. I know it, and everyone else here knows it.’
Sheila made no comment. Turning her back to him, she asked, ‘And I suppose you wouldn’t have any shame in telling me about this little black girl, Coitala, you – performed with?’
‘No, no shame,’ Soames agreed. ‘Until I got on to that field, I honestly didn’t know who to pick. It might have been one of several girls. And then I felt this radiation bounding off the crowd. I’ve felt it before here. I felt it one night when there was a spot of trouble and I walked through a big kraal after dark. I felt it another night in jail – oh, there’s a big spread of muck here for Excess readers, Sheila!’
‘I doubt if they would be as interested as you think,’ Sheila said, ‘but do go on.’
‘Perhaps you were always as sharp as this, and I just didn’t notice,’ Soames said. ‘Anyhow, as I was saying. There was this thing – quite indefinable really – which comes up and hits you in the bowels. I felt it several times, but most strongly when I slept with Coitala. Unfortunately, the second time she came to me, I scared her off and she wouldn’t come again.’
He stopped, staring out of the window, lost in speculation. Soames had been a closed man: now he was open and receptive. What he had heard had been the throb of a gigantic appetite, but to explain it – above all to explain it to this stranger – was impossible.
‘So whatever you feel out here is personified in this girl Coitala, is that it?’ Sheila asked concisely.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ Soames admitted, worried to find himself agreeing with her. She made it sound very little …
‘No, that isn’t quite it,’ he corrected himself. He paused, confused, and consequently between anger and deflation, struggling with a realisation that whatever had happened to him since he came to Umbalathorp was something which did not go into a neat definition, as Sheila would have it go. He wanted to explain it to her. Yet at the same time he saw that there is a mystery in every human act beyond explanations; your theologians, your psychologists – now even your biochemists – provide explanations: which only postpone the mystery by one step.
‘I think we can put this all into something quite reasonable,’ Sheila said, without looking at him, scribbling busily on her pad, ‘without hurting any feelings anywhere. Page Four stuff.’
‘I must go back next door now,’ Soames announced, suddenly anxious to get out of this room. Sheila paused.
‘Just one question, in which I know our readers would be interested,’ she said. ‘How do you reconcile your pagan behaviour with the fact that you are a Christian?’
‘I’m not a Christian,’ Soames told her. ‘It just happened I was born in a Christian country and conformed almost automatically to the traditions. Now I’m out of the cou
ntry, I suppose the traditions just drop away. I was an agnostic, I’m still an agnostic.’
‘I see … Which presumably means you don’t regret a thing you’ve done?’
‘Regret? Here, drink some of this, Sheila! Nobody who discovers his way of living fully could ever regret it! Perhaps that’s the vital difference between Christian and agnostic: the Christian spends his time regretting what he’s done, the agnostic what he hasn’t done.’
He watched her write something down, stared at her, sought to break her professional composure.
‘And I’d blank Coitala in public again tomorrow,’ he said, ‘if it were necessary.’
‘There have been – er, cases like yours before,’ she said hurriedly, her cheeks colouring. ‘I’m sure you’ll regret what you’re doing shortly, Soames. I came with a spare seat in the plane, thinking I might be able to rescue you and take you back home. You are certain you still wouldn’t like it?’
‘Absolutely certain,’ he said doubtfully.
‘In that case then –’
‘Hang on!’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s a girl here called Grace Picket. Perhaps at bottom you two might have quite a bit in common … You can do me a favour and take her with you.’
He opened the door. The volume of sound hit him; he launched himself into it like a retriever taking to water. All round him were grinning black faces, shouting, laughing, toasting him. ‘Bakkuds!’ Soames bellowed genially, boring among them all, swimming in success, already feeling drunk again. When he saw Coitala smiling unreservedly at him from a corner, he entirely lost the last of that cool, sane feeling in his stomach and head.
Ten days later, Soames and Coitala started on a sort of honeymoon tour of Goya, in a big Ford bought from de Duidos for the purpose. The crimson, scarlet and black colours of Goya fluttered from the pennant on the bonnet.
‘It’s a wonderful, wonderful country!’ Soames exclaimed expansively, as they drove along the bumpy tracks. The gazelle-eyed Coitala made pleasant company; the amount of English she had picked up already was extraordinary. ‘You know that English reporter girl, Sheila?’ he said, putting an arm round her. ‘I should have told her that I could never leave Africa because, on the very first day I got to Umbalathorp, old Dumayami predicted I would stay here for ever!’