The Man Who Knew Everything

by Tom Stacey

  He was lying curled up right under the rim of the cable drum, to hide himself. He tried to sleep, but could not. After their initial panic the crabs ignored him and he could see them diligently pushing up little cones of sand as they excavated their burrows. Romy used to bait the crabs, dashing round to cut off their flight to the sea; they would stop and raise their claws in readiness for combat and she would imitate them, sparring with them. She was an ardent chaser and provoker of counter-pursuit, absurdly puppyish for her role in the community and her age. He would seldom let her catch him, yet he would always catch her: it struck him now that – of course – this was not because he could still outrun her but because she allowed him to catch her. When he caught her (if they were alone) as like as not they would make love, for something in the movement of her body in evasion prompted the assault of love. His energy for her never faltered: they loved like twenty-year-olds. Even at the time he wondered at it, this radical vigour. After Romy, he never wanted another woman. The need of women had gone out of him.

  If she returned now, just as she was, would she have the power to kindle and blaze the primal energy? Early one morning – it cannot have been long after dawn – Jones woke to find her gone. He rolls out of their bunk, wraps his sarong around him, puts on his canvas hat and emerges from their palm-frond hut in the dunes just inland from the dig. Her Land Rover stands alongside. The excavation is well under way. The first sun is striking the sea.

  It is low tide. The barge with the lifting gear is anchored just offshore, the crewmen still asleep. Wavelets break on the sand. Suddenly he sees her down the beach with wild fair hair flying, performing an outlandish war-dance in a petticoat. She is scampering along the waterline at a great rate, then turning to face up the beach with legs bent and feet apart like a desperate goalie, and her arms spread and hands turned into claws. He can hear her across the silence like a Samurai in combat, ‘Hai! Hai!’

  It is a crab-bait.

  As soon as she sees him approach he too threatens her with arms raised like the crabs. She responds by fleeing from him, provoking him into pursuit, every now and then turning to challenge him with mock claws. He chases her into the shallows where he almost catches her, but she ducks away and he loses his hat. Then up the beach and into the dunes where he seems to have outpaced her, trapping her on her back in a hollow. They are both panting.

  She looks up into his eyes with utter mischief.

  ‘You’re a poor old gentleman, Mister Jones,’ she quavers.

  Jones has her pinned to the sand by her wrists. He snarls wickedly.

  ‘You’re a poor . . .’ she repeats, but he has begun to close her mouth with his. Her body makes one final and futile attempt to wriggle free but her mouth has turned traitor and in a moment all of her is lost to him.

  Suddenly the sound of an approaching vehicle. Jones leaps to his feet.

  ‘It’s the Emir!’

  Quick as fire she doubles back down towards the sea and out of sight of the intruders, and then beneath the lip of the dunes to the hut.

  Jones brushes the sand from his sarong and forearms, and moves towards the approaching Land Rover, bumping over the rough track through the dunes. It is brand-new and flies the island’s flag. The Emir sits beside the driver, with six-year-old Hatim on his knee. Two askaris, bodyguards, are in the back.

  Jones welcomes the visitors gravely. The Emir announces, ‘I have come to see the history Miss Romy has been digging from the ground. Miss Romy is here?’

  Jones scans round, mock-puzzled. ‘She was here a moment ago, Highness. She seems to have gone to ground.’

  Everyone knew of the Emir’s practice of rising early to tour his domain.

  ‘Miss Romy will show me the history,’ he announces.

  Jones must play for time. He instructs the Land Rover with its passengers to follow, and processes ahead along the remains of the track, detouring first for one of his sandals, then for another, and then down to the beach below the hut, where he makes another puzzling detour, this time to retrieve his canvas hat from the sea.

  Only as they turn towards the hut does Romy herself emerge, her familiar fatigues drawn in at the waist with a belt, her hair pinned up under her desert hat. Removing her shades with her left hand she holds out the right in a ladylike way for the Emir to take, for all the world as if she had been expecting this very visit.

  ‘You’ve timed it perfectly for breakfast, Your Highness,’ she drawls.

  Soon they are all gathered as equals on groundsheets eating creek fish and flat bread with their fingers. Tea stews over a fire of driftwood. The men from the barge have joined them, and Romy has explained to the Emir the outline of the submerged prehistoric harbour and how they are to lift with the pulley gear big hewn stones that formed the ancient quay.

  A while later the Emir says, ‘Your father has abandoned us to the wolves, Miss Romy.’ He would collect English idioms like little artefacts of a distant culture.

  She replies that that was not so at all. Her father thought of the Emir every day. Nowadays, the Emir could telephone him any time he wished.

  ‘A Wazir in retirement in Gloss-estershire,’ the Emir objects, ‘is not a Wazir. There are no wolves in Gloss-estershire.’

  ‘There are no wolves here either,’ Romy observes.

  ‘Not here, but they are walking around.’ The Emir makes a circling lope with a dangling fishbone.

  ‘Jones is something of a wolf,’ she adds.

  The Emir frowns. ‘You and Jonas should be married. I have said this before.’ He has indeed. All women needed children. For years the Emir tried to marry her off to Richard Fenton, who courted her with etiolated hopelessness, first as her father’s Second Secretary, then from his successive Middle Eastern postings.

  ‘Jones is married already,’ she says.

  ‘You should become a Muslim, Jonas. I have said this before, also.’

  Jones explains that he and his wife have agreed on desertion. It took three years, and there was one to go.

  ‘Look how old is this Jonas already.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ says Romy.

  The Emir turns to him. ‘Then you will carry Miss Romy back to England. But we wish for you to stay, Jonas. You give the news for the Morning Post and the different papers. You can explain for me the policies of the world, Jonas. Amrika and Russia. The strings they are pulling. And you, Miss Romy: you make the history for the day before yesterday.’

  Not long after, her father unexpectedly died. Already by then Jones had slipped into the role of confidant of the Emir. Romy flew to London for her father’s memorial service in the crypt of St Paul’s and while she was away from him she miscarried, very early, the baby they had not intended, though would have kept it with joy. What was it telling them, that little loss of what they did not yet have?

  The tide was going out now and it would soon be difficult even for a shallow-draughted boum to ride the bar at the mouth of the creek. He felt in his shirt pocket for the scrap of paper bearing the Emir’s handwriting: it was not there. In the darkness he peered at the sand beside him, then scanned the space round about with his lighter. He found McCulloch’s note. He opened the pages of his passport in case it was caught between them.

  He searched his three trouser pockets. He wondered whether it might have slipped out when he was letting the air out of his tyres. He felt sure he had put it in his shirt not his trousers: he hadn’t wanted to put it in his back pocket with the wallet in case he sat on it.

  He hadn’t the strength to go back for it, he knew that.

  He questioned himself narrowly as to whether he cared what happened to the island. The politics of mankind would go its way irrespective of this or that. As for the Emir himself, indeed Jones cared for him; but did the old man truly wish to be restored to power? Now that all this had taken place, his shoulder ripped, and his days anyway few, wouldn’t he now rather join his old friend Jonas in obliteration? Wouldn’t that now be the counsel Jones would privately v
ouchsafe him – to be done with the world and secure as tranquil a passing as the caprice of it all would allow?

  Now that he had lost the paper, he would sleep. It was the same now, whether the boat came or not. There was no purpose in his being here – no purpose in his being anywhere. In the past he supposed life had a purpose, some supreme justice to which the pain and waste were obscure but essential contributors. He now saw that the secret of life was that it had no secret. Perceiving this paradox was what he had over Hatim and Al-Bakr, and those smart-alec journalists in the Darwish.

  Did they suppose they could dismiss him, the whippersnappers, run rings round him? But he had out-compassed them all, he was gone already, self-diffused, nothing left of the past, nothing to come.

  Lying here in the dark he recognised all of life to be bits brought fortuitously together, perhaps attaining momentary coherence, and falling away. Shaping and vanishing. Lives weren’t grand opera justified by the whole cast in a tutti fortissimo finale. It was the same whether one had a state funeral or drifted away unnoticed against an abandoned cable drum.

  Already he could hardly remember what might have so possessed him as to have brought him to this spot.

  When he was a boy in Shropshire, the family’s bull-terrier caught an old fox, brought it right into the front hall: it died there, on the flooring by the raincoats and shooting-sticks, its mouth stretching as it fought for breath from its pierced lung. Jones had thrown the body out into the woods behind the azaleas, wondering if he ought to have buried it. A few days later – oh, only three or four days – he had come across the carcase and already it was all but gone, a smudge of sandy fur among the weeds. Here the sand and the crabs and the light waves at high tide would take him in just as swiftly.

  The sea’s noise had retreated. He could hear fine music which he knew came from his head.

  He slept crookedly against the cable drum with his bottle of water as a pillow until the sun was well up, then awoke and looked out on the entrance to the open sea. There was no boum, no boat of any kind. It was already 7 a.m. and with each minute of growing daylight the likelihood of the boat’s putting in diminished. They would leave him here to die in peace. He wanted to go on sleeping; only his thirst stopped him, and all the water had escaped from the bottle while he slept because the thread was gone on the stopper. Moreover, flies had come with the rising heat – it was they that had woken him, guzzling the lacerations of his ankles, reopening the wounds with their fangs. He struggled dizzily to his feet and several crabs skeltered for the waves. He could ask for water at the huts five hundred yards up the creek. Then he could lie down again. He felt so faint and uncertain of himself.

  A derelict earth structure, once whitewashed, stood back from the beach half-way to the fishermen’s huts. It was a tiny mosque, now abandoned, which had been in occasional use at the time of Romy’s excavations, and this was as far as Jones could drag himself along the cruel glaring beach. He pushed open the palm- wood door. The roof of russet mangrove poles and palm thatch was still mostly intact. A complex woven fish-trap occupied one end. Jones settled into the qibla niche recessed into the western wall. A skirmish of flies had followed him and began to feed on his sores again. He tried to cover the sores with little piles of sand, but the sand was so fine it flowed off his ankles and not enough stuck to the moist abrasions to pack them in. On a ledge beside the qibla lay a few dusty sheets of a Koran, once upon a time devoutly handwritten, which he folded round his ankles and tucked into the tops of his canvas shoes to keep them in place. Propped into the qibla again he fell into a confused sleep, wondering how long a holy place held its holiness after it was abandoned. He would prefer to die in a sanctified place. But for two or three blades of vicious sunlight, the roof still contained the shade: it was the sun, surely, that burned out the good djinns. Only a little new sand had leaked in through cracks in the walls and under the door.

  As to the face of God – face or no face – he wasn’t fussy. The Emir chose to take him as a species of Christian and had accommodated Jones’s infidelism by describing him ‘a man of the Book’, although the only Christian church the devout old Muslim had permitted on his island was in the compound of the American Embassy. It was built in inter-denominational concrete with deal chairs and vibro organ and a terrible lack of mystery. Jones would rather die here with the local deity and the flies, at Romy’s last place.

  6

  Romy, so experienced a skin-diver. It is Romy who has taught Jones.

  It is afternoon, right here, in high summer, after the midday break, in blazing sun. Jones comes out from the shade of the palm-thatched hut. He is alone on the beach, with his canvas hat on, the sand too hot for his feet. He can hear his name being called from the barge by the Arab winchman, no urgency in the summons, the voice apologetic at disturbing his peace. He saunters down the beach, and cups his hand behind an ear to catch what the winchman is saying. Man and barge are only twenty-five yards from the water’s edge where the wavelets lap.

  ‘Excusey-me . . . our lady, may be she is too much down.’

  The fellow taps his big wristwatch and grins. Jones focuses on him. He can see the winch drawing up a slack hawzer and a moment later the net breaks surface – a great rent in it. The winchman grins again sheepishly.

  Jones knows at once. Under the burning sun his entire universe – horizon to horizon – shrivels to nothing. He blunders into the shallow waters, dives without equipment, is hauled back on board the barge, struggles into his diving gear blind with despair, goes down again. The other Arab crewmen lazily awake from their siesta.

  Later he is squatting on the edge of the dunes, the overhang above the beach. The three crewmen are carrying Romy’s body past the cable drum up the beach. Slowly, with ridiculous care. Jones is not looking directly at that tiny corte`ge, but towards the waves breaking and breathing. He knows how she is, her body still sealed in the black skin of the diving-suit and her head free and fair for death.

  In those few minutes he has become an old man.

  *

  He lay as if he had been flung down. A grizzled and leathery gnome of a man and an ageless Moor, ugly and of great strength, were bending over the prone form. The gnome put out a brown hand to touch him.

  ‘Misterr Jonas.’

  The inert body did not respond. The newcomers could see he had urinated in his trousers. Suddenly the body was gripped by a convulsive inner force. A mumbled cry escaped him, ‘Ro –!’ and the newcomers recoiled.

  ‘Misterr Jonas?’

  Jones woke in alarm, crying ‘Oh . . . oh!’ He tried at once to stand, propped against the mosque wall, pulling his hat on, but he toppled sideways. His hat fell off.

  The grizzled gnome said, ‘Come,’ which was one of his dozen words of English. The other man, a muscular black Moor, raised the Englishman to his feet so that he was leaning on him, and thus drew him out of the little mosque. All Jones’s weight was supported by this Moor; and as the three of them moved down the beach towards a dory drawn up on the sand, the grizzled gnome, who was carrying Jones’s radio and hat, picked up two leaves torn from a Koran which the long body of the Englishman seemed to have shed. After a few yards the Moor, though a good foot shorter than Jones, picked him up and carried him like a baby. Men and children emerged from the palm-frond huts up the creek to watch, a wise distance from strange events.

  They manhandled Jones from the dory aboard the boum riding at anchor beyond the fish-traps. They could not make out whether or not he was aware of what was taking place. At times he spoke quite clearly, pushing them aside, gruffly establishing his right to master his own actions. Yet if they let him go he fell or floundered. They propped him up in shadow below, on a palliasse.

  That some part of his body had ceased to function properly, he himself could have said. His low rage at the discontinuation of control was a low rage directed at himself, in that, by greater effort or circumspection he presumed he could have died completely, not just in some function. He ha
d approached the house of death not by the front entrance but by a side-door and had entered only to find that the net of corridors gave no access to the main building. So he must find his way out again and re-enter by the front door. He could not achieve this by conscious but only by unconscious effort. These men had intruded upon his effort.

  In the rolling darkness below deck he could resume the effort, but began to be troubled by fine music. He could have been borne away by this fine music as on King Arthur’s barque but there was a distraction pulling against tranquil abandonment. It was a work for full choir and organ he had sung as a boy, the Messiah of Handel: it seemed a wonder that so small a boat could accommodate so vast a chorus and so mighty an organ. What snagged the marvel was that his solo part was approaching. Of course he knew the music, had known it all his life. Yet he hadn’t rehearsed it for years and wasn’t sure when he was to come in: he had not got his score, and chorus and organist were oblivious of this as they swept on. Moreover he was unkempt and dirty and in his anxiety at his solo he had passed water in his trousers which he could smell as well as the musk of qat on the palliasse.

  When he opened an eye he could see the swarthy crewman squatting beside him with a platter of dates and a drink he knew to be goat’s milk with honey. The man chewed qat as he waited to feed him. As soon as Jones raised his head, this black man put the tumbler of sweetened milk to his lips. Jones sipped and choked, and resumed sipping, taking the glass from the black hand. The rhythm of the organ had become the beat of the engine. There was no music now, only the stinging wetness of his own urine down his trouser leg.