Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  In the event he had had to buy Minou a pair of sandals. How exciting that had been! She had pranced around the shop, making it clear from her chatter that he had picked her up off the street, that he was lecherous. ‘What about these yummy green ones?’ she had asked, as if she were already his mistress. A sales girl had sniggered at them, and he had known suddenly that he had the courage of despair. As they stepped out into a cascade of spring sunshine he had felt as if the world had been made new, and delightful, in half an hour.

  The speed of the rest of it had created distrust in Minou. She would say, ‘If you were so quick in throwing over Hilary for me …’ No amount of logical explanation could extinguish her jealousy.

  While he flirted with Judith, Hobday noted the flick of Minou’s eyes and wondered if the bosomy Mrs Wilkes were aware of it also. She had condemned the Thaipusam festival with nervous, passionate denouncements, had been talking too much and to him, exclusively. Minou had remarked ‘Ouf, Tamils’, wrinkled her nose and had given her attention to the bamboo containers of steaming food being wheeled past the tables in a peak-hour jam of trolleys. The vast late-Empire restaurant – gold dragons raced snorting up red columns in their eternal pursuit of flaming pearls – was filled with the barnyard racket of several hundred Chinese feasting on dim sum.

  ‘The Indian impulse is to fast, the Chinese to gourmandize,’ Hobday said. ‘Famine was the historical stimulus for both races, but the Chinese response is straightforward and optimistic, while the Indians’ is subtle and pessimistic. Jesuitical, one could say.’ He raised his eyebrows at Judith to indicate that the subject was closed and turning to Minou, offered her from his chopsticks a prawn wrapped in translucent pastry. She averted her head with drooping sulky lips.

  Nonplussed for a moment he turned back to Judith to warn her with a look that she must start paying court to Minou. But the Australian woman was glancing around the restaurant, looking for a familiar face.

  In the two days since he had first briefed Judith she had, he noted, lost the bold, careerist air which, combined with her untidy appearance, had given her the appeal of incongruity – of being both single-minded and undisciplined. Hobday now found her disoriented and vulnerable. It unsettled him, particularly since Minou was observing her with calculating spite, and he sighed.

  It was glorious, this dangerous course he had chosen, but it demanded unflagging attention. He quailed sometimes before the poison in Minou’s system and was appalled that he had allowed her to intoxicate him as well. For she did; a man and wife could not remain immune to each others’ illnesses of spirit. On some unperceived level, they languished together. And here she was, intensely jealous now of the Wilkes girl, planning some savage joke on her into which he, inevitably, would be drawn. Worse, it was his fault, for flirting with the girl.

  Hobday watched malice sharpening Minou’s eyes.

  As the limousine turned in the gate they all saw the pale-blue High Commission Holden blocking the Residence porchway.

  ‘Trouble,’ Hobday said ruefully, ‘And on Sunday.’

  He had managed a temporary conciliation between Minou and Judith after breakfast. He had suggested window shopping and in Batu Road had bought Minou a.jade bracelet. She had queened it for the next hour and was still chatting gaily as they turned in the drive. The Australian had taken this well, herself contented by extravagant gifts she had bought for her children.

  The duty officer, Terry Donleavy, ambled towards the limousine and slapped a hand flat on the car’s roof, grinning with friendly stupidity. ‘Some urgent cables, Boss. And something for Lady Hobday,’ he said.

  They had wound down the windows, letting midday steam, like a breath from a furnace, rush into the car. Hobday shivered, his body reacting contrarily to the climate. In Donleavy’s hand there was an airletter defaced by multiple addresses.

  ‘Came in the bag last night. A letter from Ho Chi Minh City,’ he said. ‘Posted in Hanoi.’

  So, it had happened at last. For a second Hobday felt relief, then his head began to ache, low down near his hair line behind his left ear. It was the old weak spot, damaged in a football tackle thirty-five years ago, when he had felt his head was being torn from his shoulders. Minou would massage it later. He pressed the spot but her hand did not cup warmly over his own.

  She was sitting bolt upright in the seat behind him. She took the letter from him wordlessly.

  ‘I think,’ Hobday said to Judith as they entered the cool, airy house, ‘that we should let Minou go off and read her letter.’ The pain behind his ear was acute, reaching its peak. It would be gone in a moment, leaving a low, stubborn ache. ‘And I’ll show you the garden.’ He added this quickly; the pain had lifted.

  ‘What about your cables?’ Judith said.

  ‘Oh, yes. I’ll look at them now.’

  Minou was beside them but not with them: she had become a sleepwalker. Hobday had to push her gently to wake her up. ‘Go upstairs and lie down,’ he said. ‘Send Aunt for me when you want me to come up.’

  He nodded at the Black and White amah who had opened the door for them and who now took Minou’s arm and led her towards the staircase.

  Judith followed Hobday through to a cluster of armchairs and a settee beneath one of the ceiling fans in the main reception room. He sighed heavily again, as he had in the restaurant.

  ‘Minou is, ah, highly strung,’ he said. ‘You must forgive her excesses. She is the victim of…’ A regretting smile overtook him; Judith thought he was going to leave the sentence unfinished.

  ‘A useless tampering with history.’ He took reading spectacles from the inside pocket of his cream bushjacket – his casual clothes announced the taste of a woman in her twenties, not a knight in his fifties. ‘A senseless misunderstanding of the loyalties and blood-feuds that rule Indo-China and which …’ He was reading the cables in his lap now: Judith could see red TOP SECRET stamps on the paper. He looked up, his eyes mournfully enlarged behind the fishtanks of lenses. She did not have to read the cables to know that they announced disaster.

  ‘Is there going to be a war? Between China and Vietnam?’ she asked.

  Hobday adopted his ambassador’s tone. ‘I think we’ll have some tea,’ he said.

  ‘What does that mean for the refugee situation?’ she persisted. ‘What about Kampuchea? And Thailand? What will the Russians do if the Chinese overrun Vietnam? What will the Americans do if the Russians …?’

  He lay back on the settee, amused by her importunity. ‘I don’t know, I doubt that anybody knows. The only evident fact is that we are entering a period of intense danger.’ He tossed a cable across to her. It read ‘TEHERAN: THE AYATOLLAH KHOMEINY HAS ORDERED …’

  ‘I used to think – when I was a young man – that these catastrophes could be diverted by people of goodwill, behaving intelligently. Now I know that it is impossible. The enemy is rooted in our inner beings.’ He watched her attending him minutely, leaning forward, suddenly becoming aware of the intimacy of their knees and moving back with one of those quick, unconscious movements that signal a whole life-pattern. Hilary had that same rejecting tic.

  ‘Anger,’ Hobday added. ‘The great gods of anger and war – Zeus, Mars, Siva, the Old Testament God, the Prophet Muhammad. Anger is an imperial human emotion, which we acknowledged once, and which summons our energies in a way that nothing else can. Anger that crops are ruined, anger at death, at unjust systems, anger at a universe indifferent to man: it has dragged us forward from the caves. And the paradox is that anger, a source of creative change, is also the source of destruction. We Westerners have done ourselves a disservice by banishing the principle of anger, the irate Jehovah, and replacing it with an ideal of love, making the prophet Jesus serve as god. When we are angry now we have no explanation for our behaviour, no deity inciting us to destruction and, inevitably, we feel ashamed when the anger has passed. You know, the word “enthusiasm” means “possessed by god”. Don’t you ever believe that men hate war. They love it. It arouses
our highest excitements. Siva, you know, is both the god of destruction and the god of sexuality; Venus and Mars were lovers. I went several times on bombing missions, when I was posted to Saigon …’ He lent back, embarrassed by himself.

  ‘I’d agree with the unjust systems,’ Judith said cautiously. What he had just said had in fact made little impression on her. She was thinking that his outer shell of formal sang-froid was as fragile as a cicada chrysalis, that he was a shy man who had chosen, from God-knows-what need for self-mastery, a career which every day exposed his shyness to jabbing. It made, at last, some sense of his liaison with Minou, extrovert, flamboyant and vulgar as she was. His complement.

  What of me and Richard? she thought. Nothing more than egotism à deux: I’ll help you get on, you help me. But it had not always been like that. We’d been in love. Then love had vanished.

  Hobday saw that her attention was no longer on him. ‘Come on, I’ll show you my lilies,’ he said.

  As they rose the old servant, whose legs were so short that her gait was a rocking hobble, came into the room. ‘Master, you go up now.’

  He went immediately.

  Judith was left standing, stared up at by the servant, who had the face of a gargoyle. The woman’s eyes, which were almost as small as the black beans used for sauces, travelled from Judith to the cables which Hobday had abandoned on the settee, and back again.

  ‘Piss off,’Judith murmured. She was sure there was something in the cables about Vietnam and the refugees. The amah was trying to hypnotize her out of reading them.

  ‘We wanted tea,’ Judith said, moved to the settee and picked up the cables. A hand crushed her fingers together and there was a horrible noise, a cackle made low in the throat.

  ‘Bad girl,’ the amah said. She extracted the cables from Judith’s hold, refolded them and stuffed them back into the manilla envelope in which they had been delivered.

  ‘Any journalist would have done the same,’ Judith said. She didn’t expect the woman would understand her, but it helped decrease the fire she felt in her face. The amah said nothing but waddled off, with the cables, towards what Judith supposed was the kitchen. ‘Duck-arse,’ she muttered after her.

  Any journalist would have done the same, she assured herself sullenly. Hobday had, after all, given her one top secret cable to read. She tried to work herself into a righteous rage with the amah but no full-bloodied emotion would come, just a whip-lick of irritation.

  God, what’s come over me? she thought. I’ve been in the Treasurer’s office when he was called away, leaving a pile of secret papers on his desk and I didn’t touch them. And when I told Richard later he said, ‘Commendable, but naive, my love.’

  The Black and White returned with tea, but there was no sign of Hobday.

  Eventually, Judith retired to the ground-floor guest suite and spent the rest of the afternoon alternately typing up interview questions and brooding about Richard and the divorce. Each time the telephone rang and was answered by the servants she rested her hands on the keys, waiting to be summoned. She had given her new telephone number to the desk staff at the Malaya, and a twenty-dollar tip.

  None of the calls was for her.

  17

  When he entered the bedroom Hobday saw how beautiful Minou had been, years ago, as a child, before she was sold as a concubine to the provincial governor. Laughter poured out of that thin, supple body as carelessly as music flowed from a magpie. Her whole being was carolling, sitting there cross-legged on the bed with her sandals and handbag and sunglasses strewn all over the place and the air-letter smoothed over the peak of a knee.

  ‘They’re coming! They’ve got the money and found a boat! A good boat – an iron boat.’

  Her raised arms beckoned him and in an instant his head was being embraced. Joyous kisses were sucking at his forehead, his eyes, nose, mouth – a warm, gladdened puppy snuffled his face with an abundance of love. He thought, Half of them perish at sea; she’ll go mad – and pushed his face into her hair. Perhaps, if it’s an iron boat, not one of those flimsy river barges … One wife dead, one mad.

  He was near swooning as he knelt there at the edge of the bed, stupefied by the sensation of lips on his skin, the smell of her hair, his own response. Her slender, intelligent hands were already reaching down his belly. He thought, If I could die now, move through to the other plane and not see her as she must become … how? Turned inwards, with dull eyes?

  Now he was sitting on the bed, untying his shoelaces, standing to unbutton his shirt. Only half of them die at sea. Or from the pirates. He was smiling into her smiling eyes, saying with his, It’ll be all right. I’ll protect you, I’ll protect that other part of you – them. She was unknotting her webbing belt – very French, her choice of dresses. She did everything with style. You survived. You hitched a ride on a bomber, somehow, at Tan Son Nhut during that shameful panic – the ‘bugout’, as the Americans called it – and jumped out at Bangkok with a thousand dollars in your hand. A gift, you said, ‘from a screwball Southerner’. And your only piece of luggage that wretched fortune-telling book, a gift from Mama. The dress billows over your head and flies across the room, a collapsed parachute. ‘War reparations, honey,’ the American had said. You bought a ticket to Sydney and got a job – like that – teaching French. And played the flute in the school orchestra. You’ve worn a bra today, for mass. It’s a lacy white thing, flying in a tall arc, missing the chair. Teaching French, and carrying placards in demonstrations on behalf of homosexual schoolteachers, in bare feet. If you could survive all that. The belt has left a red mark around your small, small waist. Afterwards, will you be mine again, ever? Three sons to look after. Won’t you spend all your time with them? Making up to them for the four years you left them?

  ‘Oooh, la,’ Minou said, ‘It’s gone down.’

  He stretched on his back on the bed. ‘I’ll come back.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She looked both composed and mischievous now, for this was her métier.

  He lay passively, submitting to her skill, perhaps a gift rather than a skill, a gift of the body to communicate with another body, bypassing the mind, forming an alliance of the flesh to be presented to the mind as an invulnerable pact. Little pyramid breasts, too small for a bra. Smaller than my daughter’s when she was eleven years old. I touched them once, when she was sitting on my knee; I could see Hilary’s hair stiffen on her head. She said ‘Adrian! Elizabeth is growing up! You mustn’t!’ Elizabeth jumped off my knee and never sat on it again, nor held my hand when we crossed the street. And such polite, cold little kisses she gave me: ‘Goodnight, Daddy’ – rigid jab of lips on my cheek. And you, now, stoppering my mouth with your tongue that winds on mine, slowly, two bodies rolling together in a hot pool. Forget about the others. They’re dead already. They’re corpses rolling in the South China Sea. I can hold you up so easily. Lying on my back I could hold you at arm’s length above me if I wanted to.

  ‘You’re my wife, Minou.’ My woman-side. They’re dead already. The sea is calm here now, but up north it’s violent, you know. They’re drowning every day. The letter didn’t come.

  But, of course, the letter had come.

  Minou sat up and straightened her hair by flicking the backs of her hands through it, then offered to translate the letter. She looked even more beautiful now – rosy and tousled. It hurt him to look at her. I could never bring that depth to your eyes. Sometimes your face softens, and you laugh often, but there’s always that reserve behind your irises. I used to think it was a trick of oriental features, or pigmentation.

  Hobday folded his arms over his chest. It was tanned to a colour darker than Minou’s but it was withered these days and he wondered, looking at the flaccid pleats of skin beneath a mist of hair, if sometimes he repulsed her, if she came to him unwillingly, moved only by a whore’s self-discipline. The provincial military governor, the man she had first served, would be seventy by now had the Vietcong not stabbed him and thrown him under t
he durian tree. If that were true. If any of it were true. As if the details mattered! The crimes needed no elaboration – they were there, stored up behind her irises.

  He looked at the ceiling, where transparent lizards stalked insect prey, tirelessly. They never seemed to sleep, and when frightened they self-amputated, dropping their tails. Perhaps their nervous systems were too primitive to need oblivion or to register the pain of dismemberment.

  You’re using your concubine’s soft, patient voice.

  Mama had received one letter in 1975 and knew Minou was in Australia, but then she had heard nothing more for three years. She and the boys had moved house many times; they were no longer in Cholon, and Quoc Quang, who was now almost fourteen, had been sent papers for military training. ‘Letters from me started arriving again in 1978, saying I was going to Malaysia with my… husband. Mama wrote often to Malaysia, asking for money for a boat, but – well I didn’t get them, did I? Then Quoc Quang made friends with a boy who has a relation working in the Australian mission in Hanoi, and this boy promised to ask his relation, who was a car-driver, to ask his boss to put the letter in the diplomatic bag. So Mama is praying that the boy has kept his promise and that the relation could be persuaded, and that the boss, who has a soft spot for his driver and has bought him a wrist-watch …

  ‘And then she says that Uncle Tommy – that’s not his name but the Americans called him Tommy – died a few months ago. His factory had been confiscated but he had been allowed to keep his house. Then Aunt Cam Binh fell ill. The government has made a law that ageing exploitative capitalists … oh, well, Aunt Cam Binh died too. But before she died she told Mama “ask the goddess for a boat”. Mama suspected there was gold hidden somewhere in Aunt’s house. They searched under the floor and took bricks out of the wall. Then she was desperate. She read the hexagrams and they said, “the wise man will think the unthinkable”. And she took the hammer they’d been using to pull the nails out of the floor boards, and smashed the goddess. She was full of gold! Fifty taels! Mama is praying that no ill luck comes because she smashed up the goddess, and has made a vow … oh, la. That’s not interesting for you. Quoc Quang is back in Ho Chi Minh City now and has arranged a boat which will leave sometime in February or March. An iron boat, which will take two hundred passengers. And there’s a lavatory – Mama has a shy bottom, you know, but as she says, she will only be at sea three days.’