Acts of Mutiny

by Derek Beaven

  ‘He was born a Hindu then?’

  ‘In India. But far away, in the North. Ceylon was supposed to be the kingdom of enchanters and all manner of wicked spirits.’

  What were they after all but a pair of momentary sightseers? Here they touched so lightly, once more knowing nothing about the place they were passing through. The English again floating by, holding, bleeding dry, but never encountering. Surely always the worst kind of tourists. The greatest empire the world has ever known. He looked around at the extraordinary, exotic scene in which he sat. It was incomprehensible. He was adrift and almost held on to his chair.

  ‘The king of Lanka abducted Sita away in his flying chariot, you see. And afterwards when Ram had crossed Adam’s Bridge with an army of monkeys to rescue her …’

  It could not have happened without overwhelming violence. Where, he asked himself, did you see the scars? How did one ask a polite hostess about that?

  And Penny looked such a stranger, incomprehensible female flesh by the sea, in her trim blouse and printed cotton skirt sitting there with her cup of tea chatting about who knew what. She wore a blue belt. He felt the weight of that great book across his chest, and remembered the Roman examples, the strange atmosphere of his schoolroom Latin.

  ‘But the Buddha renounced his renunciation, in a way?’

  ‘In a way he did. One tries not to do cruel or hurtful things, to others, or to oneself I suppose. You are right. I suppose that is a way of putting it, yes. So as not to be reborn too often …’

  He had turned to the schoolroom science that had determined his career. He had been at home nowhere, like the English; now he would somehow drag Penny too into perpetual homelessness. He felt the weight of the invisible stars, his work.

  ‘And though she was restored to her true husband’s love, Sita knew she had been dishonoured, and could do nothing but give herself to the flames.’

  48

  But it passed. Seated once more in the car, he knew the mood had passed and that he loved her – and that they must and would go on.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Haven’t said much. I was thinking. I hope I wasn’t rude. It’s all right now.’

  Back on board the Armorica they made their consummation. They went to her cabin, turned the key in the lock, and there they were: the moment had come. They say the drowning man sees his life flash in front of him; Robert spun and whirred and found himself conscious as never before. She was naked in front of him.

  ‘It’s all right, darling,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

  The curious thing was that she actually seemed to be pleased with him. How beautiful she was. How delicate, gentle and vulnerable. How disgusting intimacy might be.

  ‘You do understand it’s you I want, Robert. You do understand that, don’t you?’

  He nodded blindly.

  ‘It’s not just any man, Robert, but you. Precisely and exclusively you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s …’

  ‘And that means whatever you do or are, or will be.’

  Lovemaking was a thing entirely unexpected and on its own terms. No one could have anticipated that. He discovered the saltiness of her skin, her sweat, the odours of her body, her intimate irregularities, her moles, an abrasion, a cut, the individuality of every strand of hair. He found his own strength against hers. She pulled him to her and filled his ear, until his brain felt like a tactile cavern of happiness, with the splashings of her voice and tongue. She embraced him with her legs, strained him to her with her arms, breathed him with her lungs. It was a contract. She nodded and kissed him back, again and again.

  So the world flooded over them, until they lay panting in the lower bunk, sprawled one over the other, tangled in an exchange of limbs. It was as she had said it would be, wonderful; and yet, strangely, nothing out of the ordinary – because they were lovers, and that was what they did.

  Australia, of course, was altered for ever; it was not what it had been. Who could consign himself now to the desert? Who could imagine, now, that endless futility of brandishing and spear-throwing, that exhaustion of the heart to which he had committed himself? Lying in Penny’s arms he remembered Ceylon. His mind was like the flapping of a butterfly’s wing, lovely and erratic. He remembered the colours, the profusion, all now past. He remembered the parting from Mrs Piyadasa at the edge of the harbour; and, curiously, the boy Ralph, who shared the same return launch. His thoughts came back to Penny. But when they had finished their kisses, and he was drifting to sleep in her arms, the thing he had unconsciously noticed nudged into his head. ‘Poor kid. He must have lost his little suitcase, forgotten it somewhere. He came back without it. You know Chaunteyman’s getting off next stop. That’s one thing I shan’t be sorry about.’

  ‘Is he really, darling,’ Penny murmured.

  49

  The open-air swimming-pool was filled with sea water. It looked like a normal pool but tasted quite different. To port and starboard its sides had blue tiles. Fore and aft there were close-set bars running vertically the whole depth. The water was in a cage. The sea was taken up through one end; and slowly given back by the other – but the apertures in the grilles were too narrow and the regions beyond too dark to see how the whole system worked.

  I used to worry, especially as I lay in bed, that we would hoover up a shark one day. The idea tempted me to prayer and I thought of the Leviathan. I needed to reassure myself whenever I swam that the bars were solid and in place after the night, and that the pool contained no camouflaged man-eater waiting on the bottom particularly for me.

  Since Aden the place had become a social focus, of course, and began to occupy a great part of each day’s agenda, particularly for the families with children. The week before Colombo had taken on a bright, half-dressed seaside quality. But after the resumption of our passage eastward the first excitements of exchanging English winter for Equatorial summer began to wear off; and for the children swimming fell away as the prime activity. Not all of them really liked the taste, or the way the water would sting the eyes and blister the very fair skins with salt. And always for parents and children alike there was the danger, day after day under this high unaccustomed sun, of bad burns cruelly delayed until the pleasure was over and the damage done. The pool was deceptive, leaving its marks.

  Sometimes too the water-level would be sunken well away from the rail, for reasons I could never explain; and since there was no shallow end, then only good swimmers could hope to do anything more than cling to the ladders, or drift helplessly in water-wings and rubber lifebelts. But I could swim like a fish, and took more and more to the pool as I was included less with the others. I stayed in beyond the children’s official times and swam with the adults. Mr Chaunteyman bought me a face mask so that I could save my eyes and peer into the secret places of the grilles.

  Barnwell’s aircrew continued to enjoy the pool, and liked to swim in a group. Just after the children’s time, while afternoon tea was being served, they would roister out of the Verandah bar and take the pool over, diving and shouting. They were given a wide berth, and there were comments about the apes of Gibraltar. But I held my course, and they did not bother me, with their guffaws and horseplay; nor I them – it was only the fez and so on that had set them off before. For my part, I believed they frightened the shark. They ignored me. And when all five got out at once, as if by some signal to go off to sunbathe, the pool area was left sometimes quite empty, and I would be free to survey my kingdom.

  It was water from nowhere, water that for all I knew had never touched a human being before. An immense outside was sucked in and contained in our small pond, permitting us to occupy it for only the briefest while.

  So when not troubled about the shark, I amused myself with various speculations: that while swimming forward, I might actually be swimming faster than the ship. Or that we were not moving at all, but the earth was rotating under us and sluicing a continuous wave up through the dark body of the hull for me to ride its crest. Or tha
t the people who stood around the pool were somehow looking out to sea when they watched me. Sometimes I was a ship within a ship, and the Leviathan lay concentrated inside me. Sometimes I was Jonah, or Geppetto, or the sailor in the Just So story who had forced a grating into the Armorica’s throat.

  I thought to myself how all water was joined up. We were far, far from the murky green stuff I had bathed in at Brighton, or the toxic tide which slunk past Woolwich, yet there was a fluid chain. Out here the only thing which might have contact with my home was the sea, caged but not caged.

  I considered the shape of those scoops in the ship’s belly by which the sea must be caught; and how the great ducts might rear up so high through its body. What were they made of and how were they shaped so as to form into the cave behind the gratings? If I inadvertently drank, did I take up plankton? Phosphorescence? Would I die horribly of dehydration? What did my shipmates add to the sea before sending it back? I queried, too, whether the water we had sported in went straight down to the smaller pool used by the ten-pound emigrants behind the drop of the steel wall, almost out of earshot, almost out of mind.

  At other, more sensuous times, I simply allowed myself to float, and have the wavelets of my own making lap back over my chest from their reflection against the sides. Or I would lie face down for as long as I could hold my breath and wonder how it would feel to have been born a pearl fisher, to spend a life of bursting lungs amid the rocks and rays and giant clams. I would dive to the bottom of the pool and come up holding an imaginary shell, which would contain the longed-for pearl. I should perhaps give it to Penny. Or to Robert to give to Penny.

  And whenever I looked down again it would strike me how clear the Indian Ocean was within these tiles, while all round the ship it lapped so thick a blue. I could make no sense of that. The water held me for mockery; then when I came up it laughed and sparkled. I made it my friend and wore it next to my skin like a dolphin.

  A day or so out of Colombo, a new buzz started to replace the indignation at Robert and Penny’s brazen love. I did not encounter it myself until the Sunday morning. By then its alarm had widened out, and built up – into something quite substantial enough to place alongside and even overtake a sexual scandal now several days old.

  My memory, fishing for meaning, locates its source in the pool, or near it, where a couple of Barnwell’s aircrew, maybe, loosened by drink one afternoon, perhaps, gave the game away: should I say set a live shark among us, wriggling, slashing, showing its rows of teeth and growing by the minute. The talk ran from bar to lounge, from deck to deck, from cabin to cabin quicker than flames, almost more immediate than a tannoy announcement.

  We were carrying the bomb.

  It was not just a sensationalist rumour – as put like that it must sound. For who would believe such a story? What sense would it make? So bald, so ready-made a fantasy, so simplistic an extravagance could amount to no more than the foolish imaginings of children, from whom it would inevitably have come. And who would have listened to children in those days? That nonsense of the squid!

  No, it came quite otherwise than that. It came in such a detailed and comprehensive form, and fitted in so well with certain undeniable features of the voyage, that it was either a brilliantly insane forgery or the absolute truth. No child could have dreamed it up. Why, it promised to ruin our whole enterprise. Of course it had versions, some conflicting, some silly. If you will, like the varieties of shark: nurse, tiger, hammerhead, whale, carpet, wobbegong and the rest of their kin. They are all still identifiably shark. I heard all the rumours. I did not understand them – children’s minds do not jump to adult conclusions. I summarise:

  That we were helping to run a massive stockpile into Malaya, contrary to explicit parliamentary assurances to the Tunku. That moreover, despite the new Testing Moratorium, there were assemblies and materials to be slipped into Australia for continuing experiments at Maralinga, this time without the knowledge of the Canberra Assembly. That the Armorica was therefore being used to get round the official diplomatic position and killing two fabulous birds with one stone.

  Everyone was preoccupied at the evening dance. The following day’s housey-housey was abandoned. For report furnished detail: even such precise code-names as Rats, Kittens, Vixens and the like; or the fact that if you stored a nuclear device disassembled of its trigger then it did not count as what it was, and that was how Parliament …

  But even if all this were very well, none of our business and what you never know can never hurt you, yet the rumours said that there had actually been some sort of accident during the storm. That a sealed container had broken loose somewhere in the bowels of the ship, got up speed and ruptured a duct or pipe. That sea water was extremely corrosive. That a small leakage of one – or a considerable flood of the other – had occurred which, because of its extremely sensitive nature, had only just been able to be repaired.

  This accounted for the presence of Barnwell’s aircrew, who had come on board at Gib to make good the damage; and it also explained the ship’s unseemly haste. Yet even there it did not end. There was worse to come: the suspicion of contamination. Which had been covered up – naturally. Whoever would dare admit to it? Ha ha! – and people did emit grim chuckles at first. But, to compound the whole intricate and lunatic suggestion, Mr Barnwell, who it turned out had been the link, the person responsible, the voyage-long minder as it were, had said that persons affected by contamination were to be covertly monitored in Australia, since this was exactly the kind of data which no one could legitimately get, and if there were to be a nuclear war, the more we knew, the more effectively … You could at first not help laughing.

  The voyage was transformed. The legend rose fully-formed, yes, out of the pool – by some indiscretion, some overhearing, some camaraderie – who knows how exactly. Suffice to say it rose, without warning. And even as it thrashed and snapped it remained, contrary to the regular habit of rumours, curiously intact and self-consistent – for we had plenty of leisure for examining the detail, for going on to cross-check with what so-and-so had heard, for arguing and talking it through. And further, as time went on it somehow refused to drop away; rather hung on grimly.

  Which was the more surprising, since it could not possibly be true. It was a damned lie. For who could imagine the government allowing such a deception in the first place? Who could ever believe that those entrusted with the duty of care, the maintenance of standards, the upholding of decency, the pilotage and welfare of the future, would ever contrive to do such a thing against their own, and against their allies?

  So the whole company of the ship in the first class section – which is to say the vast majority of the vessel’s population – were thrown into surges of alternating belief and incredulity. For two days they endured in a torment. Denial – the refusal to submit to inconvenient nonsense – was plagued by anxiety over what might be safe to eat, to drink, even to touch. Acceptance was mocked by the general reluctance actually to broach the matter with the authorities, as if that would be the ultimate breach of decency, even though if the rumour were true there was clearly not a second to lose. Children’s lives were at risk. Everyone’s life was at risk.

  And yet no one was doing anything. Surely they secretly prayed for some counter-story to begin: that it was all a hoax, that some Lascar had gone mad and floated the whole tale for a grudge against the English, that it was actually a parlour game – like a murder mystery – arranged by the quartermaster as part of the entertainment. That like that War of the Worlds broadcast by Orson Welles before the war, it was just something that had gone wrong at the outset and got horribly out of hand. That the wretched thing would lie still and die.

  50

  A thousand miles out from the Bay of Bengal, the sea lay mysteriously flat and oily, heaving fractionally in places like glass made flexible. Only where the Armorica was sluicing her way through did it assume its normal character of wave with spray thrown off; though the water itself lacked clarity, as if
an invisible weed grew below. On deck there was always a breeze, of course, because of our movement; but no natural wind lay beyond us.

  In addition it had become very hot; the air seemed to have been baking for days above the stale surface. Such oppressive conditions filled the ship with a stifling tension, though I steeled myself to that and sat apart in the improvised classroom, the better to apprehend any secret codes or messages contained in Mr Tingay’s lesson.

  The Sunday school had been moved to the little ones’ play room. Mr Tingay’s general text related as usual to how lucky we were. He told us the story of Abraham and Isaac. I did not know it – or had never attended when they had us read it in the religious instruction class at Bostall Lane. I was struck, and moved, by the hint of bleating that entered his voice as he read the passage:

  ‘And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together. And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him upon the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.

  ‘You see,’ said Mr Tingay, ‘Abraham desperately loved his son, but he also loved God.’

  MrTingay continued with a discourse on the promised land, which I now saw formed some kind of overarching theme to his lessons. God’s chosen were always on the run, leaving something unspeakable behind, some Moloch or other. God’s chosen wore the mark of their bargain with him, a mark in the soul as well as upon the body. Some hint of recognition flickered in me, of the mark that left no mark, no scar. By whom had I been chosen? I was thrown into agitation. Mr Tingay knew.