“Funny,” said Costard. “You’re a Christian name man. I shouldn’t have thought that. I’ve never found it easy to call a man by his Christian name, except my brothers, of course. It’s public school training, I suppose.” He looked at Crabbe suspiciously. “What was your school, if I may ask?”
“You wouldn’t know it,” said Crabbe. “It was a rather obscure grammar school in the north of England.”
“You a ’Varsity man?”
“Oh yes.” And he named his red-brick university.
“Oxford, me,” said Costard. “The House. I took a first in Greats. You wouldn’t think that to look at me, would you? Perhaps you wonder why I came out here at all. It’s rather an interesting story, really. Look,” he said urgently, “twenty minutes is nearly up, and you haven’t finished your beer. That boy of mine’s a walking clock.” He examined his watch narrowly. “One minute to go. Time.” Sure enough, the Tamil boy smugly reappeared, bearing another large bottle. And then Parry’s anthem finished triumphantly. There was the muffled fall of a new record, a click, and the sound of Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet, half-buried under surface noise, swam sweetly forth. “We ought to have bets on it,” suggested Costard. “I bet you five dollars the next record will be more Beethoven.”
“I can’t bet,” said Crabbe. “I just don’t know what records you’ve got.”
“No more do I,” said Costard cheerfully. “That’s the fun of it. Some of these records down there on the floor—why, I haven’t seen them for years. When we were packing up to leave Negri Duabelas my boy discovered stacks of them in the place under the stairs where I kept the Christmas decorations. What time would you like lunch?”
“Any time that suits you,” said Crabbe.
“I thought you’d say that. I normally have lunch about four. Dinner at any time after midnight. Except when I have lady guests. You must stay for dinner.”
“I really ought to go and see this woman,” said Crabbe. “And then get back.”
“Nonsense,” said Costard warmly. “It’s a real stroke of luck, you dropping in like this. You can tell me the set-up in this state, and who the important people are, and what the local Cold Storage is like. And I can tell you my story, which is pretty interesting, really.”
“But I really came down to see this woman,” said Crabbe.
“You can’t speak Tamil, can you? No. Well, I can. I’ll get the dope from her and send it on in an official letter. And I don’t suppose you can walk very far with that foot of yours.”
“It’s not painful now. It’s just a bit numb.”
“Ah. Well, when I left Oxford, I wondered for a long time what to do. The family has money, of course, so there was no immediate urgency. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. You want to know why I didn’t go straight into the army. But, you see, I joined up in my first year at Oxford, and finished my degree after the war. Were you in the Forces, by any chance?”
“Army too?”
“What rank?” Crabbe told him. “I,” said Costard, “didn’t do too badly, all things considered. Captain at twenty-one isn’t too bad, is it? No. I wasn’t all that heroic, though they were good enough to mention me in dispatches. Anyway, after the war, I went back to Oxford and did pretty well, on the whole. A first in Greats and a Rugger Blue. Soccer’s your game, I take it?”
“No.”
“Ah,” beamed Costard, as the record changed. “What did I tell you? Beethoven. That’s the Hammerklavier. I knew a girl who played that marvellously. A fragile little thing, to look at, but the strength in those wrists.” His face grew dark. “Poor, poor girl. Poor, poor, poor little thing. But I’ll come to her in due course. She’s part of the story.”
“Not if it makes you sad,” said Crabbe.
“Oh, it’s life. We all get over these things. We’ve got to, else life just couldn’t go on. But she meant a lot, a hell of a lot. Perhaps, really, I’d better not speak about her. I mean, to a stranger. And I’m used to keeping it bottled up. There was never really anybody I could tell. I just couldn’t. My mother was always strait-laced. Don’t get me wrong; I adore her, but there were some things she could never understand.” He sighed. “Adultery.” He sighed again. “That’s a hard word. And yet it never seemed as though we were doing wrong. I don’t know why I’m telling you these things. It seemed rather as though her marriage was all wrong. He was to blame, not us.”
“On the whole,” said Crabbe in swift embarrassment, “this isn’t too bad a state to be in. The Sultan’s go-ahead, modern in some of his views. There aren’t so many British left now, of course, and the British Adviser’s gone. But if you’re a club man you’ll find plenty of Asians to drink with, and there’s even a sort of Rugger Club.”
“What do you mean—‘sort of?”
“They don’t find it easy to get anybody to play with. They just meet and drink beer and sing songs. But they talk about rugger: most of them were educated in England.”
“Asians, you say?” Costard looked darkly. “No,” he said. “That’s not really my line. The Asians are all right in their place, I suppose, but I don’t think they ought to do that sort of thing. After all, it is an English game. And you mean to say that they sing, ‘If I were a marrying maid which thank the Lord I’m not, sir’? That’s a kind of desecration. Oh, I know you’ll probably think me stupidly conservative, and all that sort of rot, but that’s the way I was brought up. I can’t help it.” The record changed. They were now treated to Clara Butt singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. She sang through a thick mist of scratches. Costard began to swing his beer-mug gently in time. Then he looked at his watch. “I say,” he said, “you are slow. Tambi will be here in …” He computed carefully. “…in exactly twenty seconds.” And, lo, Tambi appeared at that very moment. “He’s a bit too early,” said Costard. “Still, it’s a fault on the right side. I’m always punctual to a fault, personally. It’s a family tradition. The old man used to knock hell out of me if I was ever late for anything. He was right, I see that now. I’ve always insisted on punctuality in my own underlings. It’s no good their saying they haven’t got watches or their watches stopped or something. Where there’s a will there’s a way.” Beer was poured for Costard and his guest. His feet flapping gently on the parquet, Tambi returned to his kitchen. There was a silent space, during which Dame Clara Butt, with brass behind her, was able to boom her climax to two conventionally grave, lonely, moved, head-drooping exiles. The Edwardian expansionist prayer came to an end. “I suppose I am a bit old-fashioned, really,” admitted Costard. “But I’m enough of a realist to know that those days are over. The Empire’s cracking up, they say. Well, some of us must keep the traditions alive. That’s the meaning of Conservatism, as I see it. Some of us have got to conserve.”
“But you’re not an Empire-builder,” said Crabbe. “You’re a rubber-planter. You’re a commercial man.” A new record started—a dance of clean dainty shepherdesses by Edward German. Costard looked at Crabbe with beetled brows and a pout of distaste.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “Do you think the money matters to me? I’m in this game to keep something alive that’s very, very beautiful. The feudal tradition, the enlightened patriarchal principle. You people have been throwing it all away, educating them to revolt against us. They won’t be happy, any of them. It’s only on the estates now that the old ideas can be preserved. I’m the father of these people. They can look up to me, bring me their troubles and let me participate in their joys. Don’t you think that’s good and beautiful? They’re my children, all of them. I correct them, I cherish them, I show them the way that they should go. Of course, you could say that it’s more than just an ideological matter with me. I suppose I’m really the paternal type.” He looked it, big and dark and comely, his large knees comfortable stools for climbing brats lisping “Daddy.”
“And yet you’ve never married,” said Crabbe. “You’ve no children of your own.”
“How about you?”
“Oh yes, married. No children, though. But I’ve been a schoolmaster for a long time. That’s satisfied and finally cured any paternal instinct in me.” The Tamil boy had entered again, without a tray. Crabbe said: “Something’s gone wrong with your human clock.”
Costard smiled with infinite complacency. “That boy’s marvellous. He’s counted the number of records. Now he’s going to change them.” And indeed the boy lifted the pile of worn discs tenderly from the turntable and, at random, picked up a new pile—dusty ten-inchers. And now for some reason Crabbe felt a strange uneasiness in his stomach.
“Good,” said Costard, settling himself anew, listening to a boy soprano of the nineteen-thirties singing ‘Oh, for the wings of a dove’. Crabbe’s uneasiness passed: it was pure breakfastlessness, he decided, hearing a comforting rumble from the pit. Costard insisted on silence for the creamy Mendelssohn. And then, as the march from Aida struck up—Sunday school outing trumpets and a smell of orange-peel—he big-drummed the air with his fist, lalling the square tune vigorously. “Come on,” he paused to invite, “join in. Grand stuff, this.” Crabbe smiled with the corners of his lips, and then sought an alibi in his tankard. “Good man,” said Costard. “You couldn’t have timed that better.” For there again was Tambi with beer. And then the record changed, a piano pinking high a Poulenc-like theme. Crabbe heard absently, then listened incredulously. And Costard also was listening in a kind of stupid horrified wonder. “No,” he said. “No. That was lost. That was lost in Negri.” The piano slid in grotesque arpeggio to the bass register: a comic fugato, the left hand occasionally leaping up to pink a discord in the high treble. Crabbe saw the hand doing it, the sweep of the bare arm. He was on his feet. The stung foot, now quite nerveless, gave way under him, and he clung to the table. “Where did you get that?” he asked breathlessly. “Who gave you that? You bloody thief, you stole it.”
The Tamil boy stood looking, bewildered, a dog prepared for a whipping for no crime he knew of. “Utundu povay!” cried Costard, also on his feet. “Where was it? Why didn’t you tell me?” The boy cringed. “Ni ennai vansiththup-podday!” yelled Costard.
“What’s going on?” cried Crabbe. “Where did you get it? Who gave you that?”
Costard made a hitting gesture. The boy, understanding nothing of this wrath, this agitation, shambled off like an ape. The two Englishmen faced each other, breathing heavily.
“There was only one of those,” said Crabbe. “She only made one. She said she’d lost it.” The music tinkled on, a gay brief satire on Scarlatti or Galuppi. “You stole it, you stole it from her!”
Costard gazed at Crabbe, his plump English face a mask of loathing. “So it was you, was it?” he said. “You were the man. You the bloody murderer.”
“What do you know about it? What’s it to do with you?”
“You saved your own bloody skin, didn’t you? You let her drown. I know it all, I know the whole filthy story. You wanted to be rid of her, didn’t you? Why couldn’t you tell her like a man? I wanted her. I wanted her, do you hear?”
“No,” said Crabbe. “No, no, no. It’s not true. It can’t be true. She would have told me. There weren’t any secrets.”
“Oh yes, there was one. That she loathed your guts. That she was going to be with me. With me. For ever, do you hear? Only a week after that happened. I know it all, you bloody murderer. You came home once a fortnight. You’d no particular wish to be with her, but you wouldn’t let her go.”
“There was no room there. It was after the war. The housing shortage. I had to be where my job was. It was the only thing I could do. I didn’t mean it. God knows I didn’t mean it. I tried to save her.”
“Driving like a bloody lunatic on an icy road.”
“I know, I know, I know. It was an accident. An accident. I lost control, the car went over, into the river. I tried to save her. I’ve suffered enough. Christ, I’ve suffered enough.”
“Only a week after that we were going to go away. We were going to be together.” The merry piano tinklings were gone. Scratchings, a soft click, then the ‘Hebrides’ Overture started. Costard sat down lumpily. “Oh, I know it’s all over,” he said. “Nearly ten years.”
“I never knew. She never told me.”
“We kept our secret well. I never even came for her in the car. We always met in town.” He sat, his pudgy hands clasped, tears in his eyes, the corners of his mouth drooping, the large brown schoolboy knees grotesquely irrelevant, almost indecent in this context of mature anguish. “I loved her.” Then Costard murmured her name.
“How dare you!” cried Crabbe. Feebly, tottering on his numb foot, he made for Costard, a hand up for slapping. Costard gripped Crabbe’s wrist powerfully. “No, you don’t,” said Costard. “You’re a liar and a coward and a murderer. You wouldn’t even tell me your real name.” His grip loosened and his hand dropped. “Yes, that was his name. She always said Victor. And she said she wouldn’t have to change her monogram. Poor girl. Poor, poor little girl.”
“You,” said Crabbe, standing with limp arms at his sides. “It’s all lies. She loved me. There was never anybody else. You’re making it all up. You’ve dreamed it all. None of it’s true.”
Costard looked up gravely. “It’s true,” he said. “And to think that it had to be here, eight thousand miles away. Eight thousand miles and the first man I meet in this bloody place. You’ve poisoned it for me. Poisoned it for me on my first day. My second day,” he amended, then put his heavy head into cupped hands. “Oh, God, God.”
Crabbe stood limp, his numb foot somehow bearing him. The blood of realisation of what all this meant had not yet flowed into his arteries. “I’d better go,” he said.
“Yes, go, go!”
“But I still can’t understand.”
“Get out, go on, get out!”
“I mean, I was bound to have suspected. She just didn’t do that sort of thing. And with a man like you.”
Costard looked up. “A man like me,” he said slowly. “What do you mean?”
“She couldn’t. It’s just impossible.”
Costard rose. “A man who could give her a bit of love. A man who was straight and honest. Not a dithering bloody would-be intellectual. You’re cheap. Cheap education, cheap ideas, a half-baked bloody nobody. You didn’t deserve her. Go on, get out before I throw you out. Get back to bloody town.” Crabbe picked up his stick from the side of the chair. His bag was in the hall. “A man with a body. A man with blood. A man with something to give. Get out.” Slowly Crabbe traversed the half-acre of parquet floor. “A man with an education. A man with a bloody family background,” Costard was shouting. “Go on. Get to that bloody launch. They’ll take you back. Tambi! Tambi!” he called. “I’ll get those bloody boatmen.” Crabbe moved on, still many yards from the door. “You don’t know what love means!” called Costard, in a voice like a loud-hailer. “Your type never do!” Crabbe reached the hall. With some difficulty he inched down the steps, hearing Costard calling still and, feeble behind the manly voice, the voice of the pack-leader, a hundred wind and strings playing the Tannhäuser Overture.
In the open air, under the afternoon blast furnace in the empty blue, Crabbe stood, saying quietly: “She just couldn’t do that. It’s all a trick. He’s mad, that’s it. That wasn’t her piece on the gramophone. It was something like it. We’re talking of two different people. I’ll go back and we’ll talk quietly and everything will come right.” He turned, thought of the weary stairs, the miles of parquet. It was too far. Too far for this foot. He moved on over lawn, past swimming-pool, orderly trees and flowerbeds. Tamil gardeners showed him friendly teeth. The path turned, past wilder trees, towards the landing-stage.
Vythilingam saw a white man coming and hid himself. There were plenty of bushes. He had not been to see the cattle and the goats and the chickens. He had been sitting, his black bag at his side, trying to think, looking at the river, wondering if that jungle beyond could really take him, wondering if that jungle really held
his duty. With only the mildest interest he saw Crabbe approach the waiting launch. There was nobody else about. Crabbe looked left and right, leaning on his stick. Jungle, river and sky.
Vythilingam saw Crabbe try to board the launch. He put his foot clumsily on the gunwale. The foot seemed to crumple underneath him. Still carrying his stick and his bag, he faltered in the air for an instant and fell. Vythilingam saw water, green and white, shoot up long fingers of protest as a weight crashed the surface. He heard faint human noises, and then animal noises, and, hearing the animal noises, he rose to his feet in compassion. He stood undecided. And then, as noise subsided and the river settled and the launch moved in again, he sat down on the grass once more. Human lives were not his professional concern. Humanity? Yes, humanity, but humanity was altogether a different matter. He sat for a time thinking about humanity, seeing the great abstractions move and wave in the fronds of the jungle over the river.
10
MR. LIVERSEDGE ALWAYS chewed gum quietly and imperceptibly on the bench. If anyone in court did perceive that gentle rolling of the jaws, they might well take it for an easing-in of new dentures or a symptom of mild tropical neurasthenia. In any case, it didn’t matter. This was the East, where much was allowed that would be inadmissible in the Antipodes. Mr. Liversedge, born in Toowoomba, educated in Brisbane, was a tough common-sensical Queenslander who saw the whole ridiculous Oriental susah in true proportion. Here men would murder for five dollars, here men would seek divorce because their wives sighed at the handsomeness of the film star P. Ramlee, here the very night-roaming dogs screamed blue murder if another dog bit their little toe. Mr. Liversedge chewed, nodding at the lucid exposition of Mr. Lim from Penang, though contemning inwardly the Pommie accent, chewing more roundly with a twitch of the nose at the rhetoric of the Tamils, especially that Tamil with a voice like a bloody sheila, and the clipped incoherencies of the police. He gave swift judgment.
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