‘But why did he hit the policeman?’ Sancha had demanded.
‘Because they shaved somebody’s head,’ Judith had replied wearily. Sancha had snorted.
‘I imagine it was his petite amie.’ Grim satisfaction had inflated her like yeast in dough. She had stalked out of the hospital lobby with Judith, mowing down with a glance the stares of the curious, dull herd waiting in casualty. Hobday had sent his limousine to the hospital to collect Judith. They had halted beside it, Sancha saying ‘He only married me for my money. We’ll see about that in future.’
From the car window Judith had asked, ‘You’ll turn the tables on him?’
It had been weird to see a smile from Sancha not given in obedience to social convention but springing from internal pleasure. ‘I hope so, Judith. I hope so,’ she’d replied.
Judith had forced her eyes to stay open during the ride from the hospital to the Residence. When she closed them the images and noises of the aeon that she and Minou had spent on that perfect, hot blue sea, with Ralph raving at the sky and arching his back as if the point of a knife were forcing him to, all came back, imprinted on the inner surface of her eyelids. The helicopter ride did, too. That had been exciting for a few minutes, as she had looked down and seen Minou and the crowd growing smaller, the womens’ headscarves blowing off in the rotor’s gale. Then a dull composure had set in: Ralph would die before they got him to KL and into hospital and she would be sitting alone with a corpse, while the pilots chatted and joked and concentrated on their instrument panel.
She had so accustomed herself to this idea that when Ralph had startled into life again, talking nonsense, she’d not felt relieved but angry that he was still alive, and she’d told him to shut up.
22
‘She’s got the other two into hospital in Kuala Trengganu,’ Hobday said. An expression of pride softened his face. ‘It wasn’t easy, apparently. They don’t like admitting the boat people. The hospital is small, there’s the problem of who will pay for their treatment, and security …’ He looked at Judith challengingly, an eyebrow asking, Could you do as well as Minou?
‘She was amazing on the boat,’ Judith said. ‘Ralph was conscious for a while and she just kept talking to him quietly, telling him that Lan, his girlfriend, would be all right, that it was only a problem of losing face. She ran up to the temple and spoke to Lan before we left Bidong. The police had shaved Lan’s head only last night. She’d been running a card game, using the money she’d made out of black marketeering as her bank. Minou says she’s a real crook.’
‘I’ll see to it that she doesn’t get to Australia.’ He studied the emu-and-kangaroo crest on his wine-glass. ‘You’ll keep that to yourself, of course? Young Hamilton is going to be in no condition for disappointments for some weeks. If he survives tonight.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘The senior medical officer told me that by midnight they should have some news of his condition. Could you join me in a second bottle?’
They sat in silence as the servant uncorked and poured more wine. The table stretched metres away into the dark. With only two places and the candles set at one end, they felt oppressed by space and huddled close to the orange flames and to each other. The servants, as usual, were distant while technically present.
Judith said, ‘Lan wanted to open a restaurant in Australia. She was probably trying to raise capital for it through the card game.’ Hobday’s sad, bent head made her defence trail off, discouraged. It shamed him that this careerist young woman had, for the moment at least, a moral authority, a greater compassion than he. It was based on ignorance, of course: she did not know that Lan had shot her husband.
‘You have become soft-hearted, Judith,’ he said. His tone suggested irony. ‘That first morning I met you, you put it to me that Australia was accepting a lot of undesirable riffraff – blackmarketeers and hookers, you said.’
‘I was only trying to get a quote out of you.’
He smiled, tolerant of her single-mindedness: that interview had been a background briefing only and she had known it. But now she was making it clear that what he had told her would appear in print – perhaps, to keep some faith, attributed to ‘a senior official’. It fascinated him that she apparently had no idea that her ruthlessness could work against her. It was as if there were a gap in her head. Probably, he thought, the gap left in her life when the more foolish teachings of her Church had become vulnerable to her common sense and she had rejected everything, good and bad, finding nothing with which to replace it except her women’s dogma. So that a hot sense of injustice and resentment against the powerful now served her for morality. For the weak – women, children, animals, the poor and so forth – she was probably capable even of heroism, but towards those whom she defined as powerful she was without conscience or tolerance. Or even the consideration owed by one life to another, good manners. How she’d boasted to him of the slathering in print she would give the decadent Malay princes who had been her hosts. And that outburst, ‘Muslim men are so blinded by sexism that they don’t know when a woman is beating them in an argument. They listen to you indulgently, as though you were performing a trick, like playing the piano cross-handed. I loathe Muslim men.’ There had been a pause, the sort of emptiness that follows a statement which has been a half-truth.
She disliked all men, he guessed, and not for the reasons that she acknowledged – unjustifiable male power – but from the deeper, inchoate perception of injury, the suppression of her male side. In very primitive peoples the men and women were alike; you could not distinguish from their faces, their hands, feet and limbs which was male, which was female. But in the course of civilization a dichotomy occurred so that a Caucasian, like her, looked not only of a different sex, but a different race from the male. The soft, hairless skin and small hands and feet. Women’s very bone structure and skin texture had altered through centuries of selective breeding and conditioning. In court cultures, where most effort had been spent on breeding a distinct female type, the ladies looked a different species from the males. He had met Javanese and Vietnamese imperial courtesans who were not recognizably human, they were so fastidiously made. You feared to touch them, like gardenia petals. And, of course, in time, they threw weakling sons. Women subconsciously understood their breeding-out of maleness, in each generation. Freud called it penis envy. People hate people who have what they envy.
Civilized women’s faces were such mysteries, he thought, looking at hers. A civilized man’s face, even at her age, was already a record of behaviour and experience, but a woman’s life could be hidden behind her face. Was it because all of them were forced at some age to an awareness of the importance of their appearance and used their faces constantly, like television sets projecting messages that were not truthful but were simply signals, that they had, by an unconscious but calculating process, decided that camouflage would be to their advantage? As she is doing now with that fraudulent submissiveness, that big-eyed look of anticipation, waiting to hear me speak, pretending to be afraid that I’m going to rebuke her. And that other thing they do, painting out their faces in a way that focuses attention only on their eyes and mouth – these, too, made theatrical, unreal in colour and size – so that really you are mesmerized and see nothing. Minou looks just a child, boy or girl, unpainted. And this one?
‘I enjoy looking at you,’ Hobday said.
Later Judith cajoled, ‘Do we have to move outside?’
The servant was swaying from foot to foot, waiting for them to follow the proper course and take their coffee and liqueurs on the terrace where he had already lit the mosquito coils and put out an ashtray for Hobday’s cigar.
‘Certainly not. We’ll have it in here.’ He gestured to the servant whose face registered a look of enforced obedience to a wrongful act. When the man returned with the trolley of coffee things Hobday said, ‘We’ll serve ourselves, Ahmad. You may go, and so may the others. I’ll shut the windows.’
Judith spilt some of her second glass of Cointreau
on her hand and licked it off. Hobday grinned. It was such a childish gesture, the sort of thing Minou would do, anywhere, at the Palace. But there was a difference. Minou made those gaffes to shock, consciously; they were symbols of aggression. But this one usually had that aware restraint in all her movements that girls develop, oh, around ten or eleven years old, and just now, licking her hand, she had simply had a moment of forgetfulness. She was a boozer and carried her drink well, considering how much of it she took, whereas Minou would be drunk and uncontrollable on three glasses of wine. She was tipsy now, all the tension of the day gone, relaxed, idly fingering things, the candles. He wondered. Her new gestures looked unconscious, too. When Minou did that at a dinner party, ran her fingers gently down a candle, it was a game between them, and so was the effort to continue one’s conversation without allowing one’s expression to change or one’s eyes to linger on her fingers.
‘What’s amusing?’Judith said. There was a bridling tone to the question.
It was now or not at all, though he did not have time to think that clearly, the knowledge came swifter than reason. There was the merest tremor of resistance from her, the tiny leap the body gives when the cells rebel against invasion and the will crushes their objections. Her lips were small, like Hilary’s. She felt both familiar and strange, for Minou’s mouth was Asian and much bigger than his own.
When they stood up Hobday said, ‘Let’s take the bottle. Let’s take two bottles. I’ll stick with the brandy.’ She had a look of fright and excitement and her eyes were so bright she could have been on the verge of tears. He licked a finger and thumb and pinched out a candle. When he kissed her again a luxurious dizziness flowed between them.
And then, there was a sickening jolt. It was as if he’d seen the water in a vase of flowers begin to rock, and the furniture move – the appalling, freakish surprise an earth tremor causes.
Her face, her body, her very hair was tensed.
Hobday stepped back. ‘What’s wrong?’ His hand was reaching for the other candle. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’d prefer you not to do that,’ she whispered.
Hobday felt the silence stinging in his ears. ‘Of course, my dear. Do forgive me … You looked so … appealing. Please.’ They’d moved a metre apart from each other. ‘I’m so sorry. I misunderstood.’
Her voice came back. ‘Oh, look, it’s all right. I’m sorry too.’
They stood there in the sumptuous gloom, then began saying things like, ‘Well, let’s go and sit down’ and ‘I wouldn’t mind another drink, actually.’
The reception room seemed to be watching them as they trod carefully across it – suddenly its floor rugs were a camouflaged trap of weals and furrows to trip their feet. ‘Careful,’ Hobday said. All its chairs looked occupied. ‘Well, here?’ Hobday suggested. They sat on a linen-covered settee, with the edge of their bottoms.
He had lipstick on his mouth. Judith concentrated on his forehead.
‘You know, I have a theory,’ Hobday began, then had to stop. It was so hard, after these years of practised reticence, to speak up. He reached for the cognac and poured some into his glass. Perhaps the truth he believed he had discovered was not the pearl, but merely its core of irritating grit, and its nacre was of his own, slow making? People acquired theories from a chance remark or out of the air, like germs, and embedded them in their beings. Over the years they collected material to enclose the inflammation so that in time it swelled and hardened from an idea to a fact, a truth. You could observe the process in politics and foreign policy, in any social change. The whole of a war – Vietnam, for instance – could grow from a prick of irritation to a huge, mesmerizing lump about which millions of people knew the truth: ‘We must destroy that village to save it.’
‘I believe we are all hermaphrodites,’ he said to Judith.
She nodded politely. It was an idea enjoying currency these days, yet he had brought it out with the conviction that people reserve for their most profound superstitions.
He went on quickly, ‘You see, when I first met Minou I realized she was my other half. It’s like the lilies I showed you – they are half-male, half-female. The male has only white flowers; the female only red, then they cross-fertilize and become patterned. In Java, where I first saw them, the word for man is “half a woman” and for woman “half a man”. They know that our souls are broken in two and that we must, if we are ever to find completeness, discover …’
Judith was alert, frowning with attentiveness. ‘I’ve read that theory.’
He was off the settee with an exaggerated display of energy. ‘Now where is that damned thing? I know!’ He went striding off towards her suite. Judith rose, hesitated, then trailed after him, wondering, What the hell now?
There were bookshelves filling one wall of her bedroom, beside the desk. He stood with his hands on his hips, leaning backwards as he scanned the titles. A shirt tail had somehow come adrift from inside his trousers.
‘Here we are!’ he announced. He had pulled out a paperback with a white cover, bordered in brown, and was leafing through it impatiently. Judith sat down on her bed.
Without his spectacles, he had to hold the book at arm’s length to read. ‘Listen. “Each of us then is the mere broken tally of a man … and each of us is perpetually in search of his corresponding tally … The reason is that this was our primitive condition when we were wholes, and love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole”.’
‘Aristophanes’ speech at The Symposium,’ Judith said. She had been able to read the title on the cover, and had plucked Aristophanes out of the honeycomb of memory. (Richard had made her drop philosophy and take economics, she also recalled.)
Hobday was incredulous, even disappointed. ‘That concept has been the lodestar of my life,’ he said sombrely, and abruptly sat down in an armchair.
The suite’s airconditioning had been running for some hours and the room was deliciously cool and antiseptic. Hobday slouched brooding over his book and after a few minutes Judith said brightly, ‘I’ll fetch your drink. Don’t move.’
She brought the glasses in from the main room and excused herself: she was bursting to have a pee.
Minou had re-decorated the guest bathroom, making it into a fun parlour of mirrors and voguish objets – including some antique Chinese bowls of the type other people displayed in their drawing rooms on little rosewood stands. Judith ran the taps loudly as she was urinating, not from modesty, but to conceal her giggling. Bugger Charles Darwin and the descent of man. She remembered the whole theory now, how humans had once had four arms and legs, were rounded, and moved about by cartwheeling. She had a vision of Hobday and Minou, glued back to back, cartwheeling around the reception room. This woman-man, this pushmi-pullyu, got Australia into the Vietnam war! In the looking glass twenty of her laughed.
Then, as she sobered herself, the question that had been a flickering suspicion, like the fear that a shark is beneath your keel, swerved up and revealed itself: what will happen with Kanan?
When she emerged from the bathroom she was irritated to find that Hobday, relaxed now, and with his legs stretched out, was anxious to go on talking about the desire and pursuit of the whole. She perched on the bed.
After a while he asked reproachfully, ‘Am I boring you?’
‘Not at all. I’m fascinated. But I’ve been worrying about Ralph. It’s past midnight. We should ring the hospital.’
The old creature was standing there in the dark. Perhaps she had been there for some time, listening to the voices from the guest suite, or perhaps she had just arrived on those silent, square feet of hers.
‘Good evening, Aunt,’ Hobday said.
‘Master.’ There was no acknowledgment for Judith. It might as well have been Minou herself standing near the downstairs telephone, catching them together coming out of Judith’s room. They had, both of them, jumped backwards when they had first seen her, but it was only after she had moved off towards the kitchen that thei
r eyes had met. Hobday’s were round and alarmed.
‘You leave windows open, Master. Oily man come,’ Aunt called without looking back.
They stared at her, then saw she had a cleaver in her hand.
‘Oh Lord!’ Hobday said. He muttered to Judith, ‘I’ll find out in the morning. I hope she hasn’t … Oh Lord!’ He was suddenly aware of his untucked shirt.
The news that Ralph was in a satisfactory condition, could not receive visitors and would be in hospital for another two or three weeks, was not just an anti-climax; it was a maddening distraction now to their central concern.
‘I’d better say goodnight,’ Judith muttered.
He nodded vigorously. Judith did not have time to remind him that she probably would not see him in the morning, that she was getting a lift back to Trengganu in the helicopter at eight o’clock and would be leaving the house at 7.15. He had turned and was stalking off across the reception area towards the stairs. As the sound of his footsteps faded Judith heard the Black and White muttering horribly from some dark corner of the room.
‘Shit,’ she said aloud. She thought she should summon the servant to tell her to turn down the bed, to prove their innocence, but when she called, ‘Aunt, Aunt,’ there was no reply.
23
A hornbill slid along above the valley in front of them and the Malay pilots, authentic fly-boys, chased it for a kilometre or so until it swerved down into the jungle canopy and they shouted ‘Wah!’ and turned round to watch Judith with great, white grins.
Turtle Beach Page 23