'Come on now, Conway,' said Mrs Flagg sternly. 'No resistance now. No going back, eh?' She swooped with her big soft, rural hand transformed to a buzzard's claw, and thrust his brandy at him. He drank nervously. She began undoing his trousers.
In later years, in his most dismal and drunken dreams, Conway would see Mrs Flagg, blown to the dimensions of an ogre hanging over him with an awful determined smile on her face, like a demented hospital matron. He half lay across the couch like some accident victim, his eyes swelling, his smile iron‑set, a deathly shivering setting into his fibres and cells where the warmth had been. He was afraid of Mrs Flagg.
She pulled his trousers away from his waist, his buttocks. and his legs with a terrible efficiency keeping her face fixed on his all through the three distinct movements. 'Up!' she ordered when she had to pull them from under his behind, and Conway arched himself obediently up on the palms of his hands while she swooped the garment away from him. She drew away his shoes and socks with the same powerful pull.
'Good, very good,' she said, looking down at him as though examining the progress of a wound. He looked down at himself and was astonished to see that he had a primary erection thrusting up inside his underpants making them like a small alp. For once his manliness frightened him. Mrs Flagg was terrorizing him and he still had an erection! Could he, after all, be a latent masochist?
Mrs Flagg peeled off his pants, crimson in the face now with determination and crude pleasure. It occurred to the petrified Conway that he had never before been undressed first. He had never been in a defenceless state when the woman was all covered. She seemed now quite oblivious of him, uncaring about his feelings, or his participation in the event. Then, all at once and with a terrible realization it came to him that he was not important, that this was no sex for two. She leaned over him and caressed him, making still more hospital noises, soothing but remote, looking closely at his lower half, examining him.
'I've changed my mind,' said Conway shivering.
'I haven't,' said Mrs Flagg evenly. She put a glowing hand on his stomach and held him flat. He did not attempt to push or struggle. He had the trembling feeling that even if he did so it would be useless. She would overpower him to do terrible things to him. He remained leaning back, her hands working over him.
'I'll try to enjoy it,' he promised himself as an easy way out. But he was still with apprehension. There was a mad look on her face as she bent and went on working away. He could see the sweat streaming like rain from her red face. Her fair Saxon hair was in wet tails and trails across her forehead. She was moulding away at him like a potter at a wheel. The alcohol, that coward, had run away from his brain and his body. He was helplessly sober.
She stopped and straightened up, puffed with her handiwork. She looked from his lower half to his face. 'I've no experience with white men. This is the first occasion,' she mentioned.
'Well, perhaps another time,' suggested Conway. He began to push himself up, but she fixed him with her powerful, hot look again, her cheerfully bowed lips making blowing movements at him as though to puff him back. Her hands pinned his stomach again. Somehow he could not fight, there was no move of which he seemed capable.
Mrs Flagg shook her blonde head like a Wagner heroine. 'No other time like the present,' she intoned. 'Remain still, Conway. I'll get the ointment.'
Conway almost screamed. 'Ointment!' She thrust her face down at him. 'The ointment,' she repeated threateningly. 'It is essential.'
'The ointment,' he croaked pitifully. 'Yes, of course. You must get the ointment.' He had a plan to leap up and run through the door into the garden as soon as she had stepped away. But she did not go far enough. She merely backed to a small cabinet across the carpet, her eyes never going from his face, pinning him back like a stake, and from the cabinet took a paint tin, pint‑sized emulsion, with the end of a brush projecting from its open top.
'What colour?' he asked tragically.
'The ointment is colourless,' she assured him, advancing again. 'On St Mark's it is obtained from the sap of the poisoning yalla tree. It sets hard on application.' Conway closed his eyes. He felt her painting him with the cheap hairy brush, and a sort of paralysis setting in in his groin regions.
She moved away from him again and then he felt her massive return. Her hands again and then the round bandages of the banana leaves. He moaned sullenly, keeping his eyes tight. Mrs Flagg went about her task with dedication and distinction, wrapping and binding, puffing with intense gratification as she did so. Eventually he knew she had finished. He had the sensation of having a large stone rest‑ing on his stomach. Fearfully he opened his eyes and saw it, as he had feared, lying there like a prehistoric caterpillar, eyeing him with a single hole at the point of its head. That was one question answered, anyway.
He looked up at Mrs Flagg and he was shocked to see her staggering away from him like a crewless ship before a current. She half turned and stared at him as though she were a murderer and he the victim. Her large breasts were rolling like waves and her face sweat‑soaked. She moved with her hands in an ineffectual sort of way and mumbled, shaking her head. It was as though she had been brought from a trance into the horror of reality. She wiped at her face and her tongue came out and licked around her sagging mouth.
'Mr Conway,' she began, the syllables coming out wet and thick. 'I hardly know what to say...'
The liquid silence that filled the room was solidified by the slamming of a car door. 'Oh my heavens!' exclaimed the woman. 'Mr Flagg!'
Conway had faced emergencies before with the unexpected return of husbands, but never in a situation to equal this. He moved quickly, however, despite his horrid encumbrance. It swung outwards like the jib of a crane as he jumped from the couch. He swooped upon his trousers, his underpants, his shoes and socks, and limped from the door into the dark garden. As he went he heard Mr Flagg coming through the hall at the front of the house. Conway stood a few yards from the door among some trees and contrived to replace his trousers. The solid trunk he now carried made it impossible for him to zip them or secure them in any reasonable way. Only the legs fitted. He hobbled into them and pulled them around him. The banana monstrosity swelled up and over the top. Mr Flagg now entered the room. Conway heard him kiss his wife resoundingly. 'Earlier than I thought, dear,' he said. 'All over in an hour, sacrifice, ritual, everything. Positively fascinating. They really do get up to some quaint tricks, these tribesmen.'
Fortunately Sexagesima was full of its night desertion. Keeping to the more robust shadows, and hiding when he heard a noise, Conway made his way back to the Hilton Hotel. There was only a hundred feet of open street to risk, and he got across safely and swiftly running like a rugby three‑quarter clutching the ball to his stomach. He bolted through the downstairs hall which was empty and dimly lit at that hour. Like a warring animal he went up the stairs and charged into his room.
He leaned on the bed, panting, moaning with anger and embarrassment. It took him three hours twenty minutes to get the contraption off, soak‑ing it in a bucket of tepid water and using a scout knife.
The operation was so painful it brought shocked tears to his eyes. When he eventually got into his bed, sore and shivering, it was daylight. The Chinese shopkeeper across the road threw fifty firecrackers into the road at six o'clock that ‑norning to celebrate his birthday, but Conway did not care.
Ten
After two weeks of plodding search through the webbed jungle of St Peter's Island the men from Sexagesima had ,still not found an Unknown Soldier. The hours spent recutting tracks overrun by the avid growth of the rainy season, the uncomfortable casualties through falling into concealed pools and inky bogs, and all the million red insect bites suffered by the patrols were fruitless.
'Och,' grumbled Rob Roy English at the end of the day of searching. 'Ye'd think that aboot enough o' the brave lads were slaughtered here in 1944 to leave a few bones lyin' aboot.'
On several days Dayies went with the patrols, glad of the
companionship, eccentric though it was, and with the intention at the start of merely filling time. There was little for him to do in Sexagesima during the hot days waiting for the return of The Baffin Bay and his return to Trellis and Jones of Circular Quay, Sydney.
Sometimes he painted, in the town, trying to draw from its deep light, the great crawling shadows early, and the slim shadows of noon, the ponderous movement of its day, the dry houses and the dry people and the sun always striking at it as though it were the only open target in the whole of the world. Early mornings were quiet and dustless., and the town seemed to go about its life with renewed hope, sight, and energy, like a man temporarily recovered from an illness. But noon would come with all its choking heat and the town would sweat and cough the dust from its gullet, and drink and sweat again, and finally surrender and hide in the darker places until the burning of the sun had receded again, leaving the settlement like a well‑browned pie hot from the oven.
So Davies went with the patrols to look for the Unknown Soldier. They would set out from the South Seas Hilton bar at eight, a dozen or more each time, parading in an array of guerrilla outfits, bush jackets, floppy hats, cricket flannels, tough mountain boots, neckerchiefs for the sweat, sandwiches, boiled sweets to suck on the way, bottles of beer, field glasses, knives, machettes, and guns. They took the guns because, they said, there was always a chance of wild animals, and because the guns made them feel good. Each day they would troop from the hotel like some determined rescue party from a war a century ago. With Rob Roy English at the van, in tartan trews and a Highland Light Infantry bush jacket, they would trudge, as though already weary but brave, as if they were returning from a battle in fact, along the main street. They did not look at the people who peered from the houses and shops but marched solidly like desperate men who have fought to all but the last of their blood and are ready to fight again and die.
Davies, armed with a walking stick borrowed from Seamus, was always towards the rear of the heroic column. He noticed how all the men before him seemed to fall naturally into the part of soldiers, that trudge, that dry stare into the fatal distance. When Mr Hassey went with them he would break line sometimes to pat the heads of little children sitting on the pavements sag‑mouthed in wonder at the grim men', pat them as if to say 'We may die, but the world will be a better place for you, my dears'. A man who lived on the outskirts of the town and who had been in the New Zealand Navy during the war turned up for one patrol in his white tropical naval uniform with ammunition boots and several medals. Rob Roy sent him home because he said he was making a laughing stock of the whole venture.
Conway never went with the men. He was spending a lot of time over on St Paul's island, ascertaining the natives, as he explained. and helping Joseph of Arimathea and his elders to build a new grandstand and crush barriers for Ascension Day. But on the mornings when he was not visiting the other island he would sit in his window at the Hilton, directly over the street, beer in hand, held like a urine specimen, and call encouragement and jeers to the patrol as it set out. 'Boots, Boots, Boots ...' he would sing or 'Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you'. Dahlia would be there with him some mornings for they found his room more restful than hers, and she would blow extravagant kisses to Davies and once threw a coloured streamer at him from the window.
Depending on which part of the jungle they were going to survey that day, the file would march north or east from the town. Men they went north they would pass Bird's shop and she and those customers who were not trapped under hairdriers would crowd to the doors to see the spectacle. The older women were either tolerantly amused or scathing, although none of their remarks ever reached the marching men, but Bird stood, fresh in her hairdresser's smock, watching solemnly. Davies always looked towards her and she always smiled.
Once they left the town the dust road began to crawl upwards and the sun came face on, when they were going east, and worked around to the backs of their necks when they were moving north. They began to puff and pant and out came the little jars of boded sweets. This was the most difficult part of the journey, much of it was through rocky, open areas, where there was no shade, and it was too early to occupy themselves in the business of looking for a skeleton. After they had made two such journeys, Mr English began whistling Scots airs through his teeth and the others, taking heart, tramped and whistled to their boots in the best musical tradition of the British soldier.
It took an hour to reach the skirts of the upland jungle. It was a place of deep tangles and thick growth that thickened with each rainy season. It was a solemnly quiet place too, like a temple, with the sun cutting down through the higher trees, but only in columns and shafts, because overhead the leaves and branches were often sufficient to roof the place and keep the rays away. The floor was either glutted with growth, generations of it, too thick, too powerful to ever penetrate, or spread with a secondary tangle that could be cut away, or sometimes, quite miraculously, clear with all the sweetness of a fairy glen.
They concentrated on the penetrable areas, where they could make progress and where the battles of long ago would have logically been fought. They discovered a machine gun one morning, and army mess tins with a mould of food within on another day. Another afternoon, just as they were about to call a halt to the search and return to Sexagesima, Mr Hassey found a Japanese steel helmet and there was a great fanned‑out operation looking for the head that might have worn it, but with no success.
Davies found a strange change happening to him as he tramped with the men. He began to get the feel of the place. Of the jungle, of the hills, of the island, the archipelago, and of the Pacific. He found the silence filling him with rest, the shadows full of comfort after the heat. He did not even resent the heat itself. He let it sink into his body, he let the sun assault his face and arms.
All the more he enjoyed the gulps of beer when they rested before going to search again, all the more he enjoyed the late returns when the sun was moving away. He enjoyed too the sudden rustles of small animals and the occasional flight of coloured birds that tore the jungle silence. And he enjoyed the sudden breakthrough, when they would emerge from the trees at mountain level and be confronted with the green body of the island spread below, the tracks and the little watercourses that were the veins, the small patches of cultivated land around the villages, the brown of the villages themselves, their quiet smoke in the air, the beaches, the necklace of the reef, and the great, shining, swinging sweep of the ocean that seemed to occupy the rest of the world.
But he enjoyed most the company of the men. Odd they were. and narrow and strange, but in them, in their talk and their lives, he discovered something that had not been apparent to him before. These were the brave, the explorers, the colonists, the conquestors, even. These funny, odd‑shaped little men, with their burnt faces, their prejudices, their suburban fears, their narrow lives, their hopeless dreams, their hate and their deep love for their homeland so far away from these islands ‑ these were the Empire Builders, the last of them too, not the rugged, romantic 149
imperious figures from the imagination of history books. For what Empires were worth, these were those who made them and preserved them, working under fans in oppressive offices, counting up little additions in notebooks in warehouses and stores, going home in the rain, worrying about their health and their wives, sending their children ten thousand miles to school so that they lost them for ever. These were the pioneers. They couldn't even send for a gunboat, because there wasn't one.
When they sat under trees and ate their sandwiches he listened to their talk, talk of the islands, people they had known, how they came there in the first place, their ridiculous plans for putting St Peter's and the whole of the Apostles on the true map. Getting tourists and industry, getting their voice shouting down the tombs of Whitehall. 'Wait until the Queen arrives,' they said. 'We'll show them who and what we are. Wait until she arrives.'
But to Davies it was most touching when they spoke oftheir homeland. It was a
s though they spoke of some foreign place that had long ceased to be familiar. Therewere arguments as to whether Manchester was two hundred or four hundred miles from London, whether the first snow fell on the Western Highlands in November, who was
the present captain of England at cricket, the extent of the
area ruled by the Thames Conservancy Board. Some be‑
lieved that trams still ran along the Victoria Embankment.
Some thought that Croydon was London Airport. Davies
listened in wonder and pity. They were like blind men play‑
ing a guessing game. Not many took their leave in Britain,
it was a habit that died away after a few years. The news‑
papers were always two months old. George Turtle at the
radio station usually managed to hear Radio Fiji news
bulletins and if something tremendous happened in the
world he would report to the rest of them at the Hilton or at
the British Legion Club. The Governor always received his
private intelligences but they knew nothing of them, nor did
they care. George Turtle's news had to be exceptional to be
taken to them as they talked their talk of the islands. He
usually judged whether something was of interest or not.
Quite often he would go for two weeks without breaking anything to them. His predecessor at the radio station, a man called Melville who had been found dead with the earphones still on, had not even bothered to tell the people of the Apostles about the Cuba crisis. The assassination of President Kennedy was talked about for some twenty minutes and then forgotten because the volcano on St Barnabas Island began to show signs of erupting for the first time in fifty‑three years. As Seamus at the Hilton had said, no world disaster ever struck the Apostles. By the time they heard it was always far too late.
The Love Beach Page 15