As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  But the Jonkheer was too big a man to be influenced by such flattery from mischief-makers.

  “No, no, von Langenbeck. We are proud to have with us a man whose rice hybrid has made so many Asian landlords and farmers wealthy enough to profit from all the many services we have to offer them whether in the sale of consumer goods or of technical advice. Where you have walked, Mr. Langmuir, sowing your seeds of prosperity, we have, I assure you, not been slow to reap with our commerce. You will, I hope, eat exactly what you like.”

  He summoned one of the servants with a clap of the hands and gave an order for special food to be brought to Hamo.

  “And I am sure that any member of the club will be glad to offer you some more of the tender national specialities if you will choose.” He waved his hand towards the other end of the table.

  “I’m afraid they are all a bit too tender for me.” Hamo feared that if icy courtesy could not carry him through this uninviting occasion, the unfortunate adventure might end in distasteful incivilities, even physical dangers in this hidden, high retreat.

  “Oh, now we can see,” said von Langenbeck, “why you do not eat the torte. You wish to keep a boy’s figure for your tough friends.”

  Looking about him, Hamo was conscious of real dislike, almost hostility in the eyes of his hosts; and, indeed, they practised their own precepts, for in their worship of the truly boyish they had rid themselves of every conceivable trace of vestigial youth—skins were leathery, necks bulging, stomachs vast, everything aimed towards a geriatric magnificence; even Mr. Derek Lacey’s thirty-five-year-old face and body were disguised under layers and layers of carefully acquired corpulence. In this company, Hamo was aware that his disciplined, lean figure was an ephebic insult.

  “I have no taste for the tough. That I can promise you.”

  “Oh, come, Langmuir, that was a pretty hoary, not to say hairy specimen you had your eyes on at the rest-house,” the second English uncle told him.

  It looked to Hamo as though the birthday cake was acting like alcohol in releasing an ever-increasing coarseness among his hosts. He shuddered at the adjectives.

  “A smooth nineteen,” he said sharply.

  There were sneers at these incompatible words, as a company of sceptics might greet the paradoxes by which religious devotees seek to express their mysteries.

  But the Jonkheer, grim though he looked, persisted in his courtesies. “Perhaps somewhere in the compound something can be found to accommodate your tastes, Mr. Langmuir,” he said loftily, “I will make enquiries.”

  At such graciousness, the French uncle was driven to cry aloud, “Mais c’est tout ce qu’il y a de plus chic.”

  And the Commander said, “I hope you realize, Langmuir, that the Jonkheer’s being more than decent about all this.”

  But once again the Jonkheer’s essential breeding sought to lead them away from the impropriety of Hamo’s presence. “Before we give ourselves up wholly to fundamental joys, I must intrude upon your gaiety with a small matter of club business. Our good friend Iito Hashawabi, or more exactly, no doubt, I should say, Hashawabi Iito san, has asked to be allowed to attend our next dinner. As an observer, or a participating observer, rather than a member. I must add that Hashawabi has said—and it is an amusing conjecture, but perhaps not wholly jest—that in three years’ time he is hopeful, or should I say hopefully in three years’ time?” he bowed to the American uncle, “he may bring with him our first guest of a paler colour—Master Australia.”

  The two British uncles looked unashamedly aghast. Even the American uncle said sadly, “I don’t know. It seems just yesterday that one bar of candy from the P.X. could buy you a whole Japanese high school.”

  But the French uncle quickly intervened: “How depressing to find this Anglo-Saxon obsession with the past standing in the way of an increased pleasure.”

  The Jonkheer said decisively, “I must confess, gentlemen, that to invite a Japanese uncle to this sort of probationary membership seems to me exactly to fit what we all know in our hearts may be so necessary in the years to come.”

  And his words, however chilly the future they implied, swayed the majority opinion.

  “So I am empowered to invite Hashawabi Iito san in—shall we say?—a proto-avuncular role. And if he tames us a little Koala bear, so much the better for the widening of the fundamental Asia of tomorrow.”

  And now Hamo’s special food made its appearance: a hundred dishes—a curry to which every nation of South-East Asia and the Peninsula had contributed—burning white curries, sweeter brown, bamboos and mangoes, brinjals and popadams, chupattis, chillies, string hoppers, egg hoppers, and all the many rices that made so appropriate a tribute. For the next half hour, Hamo’s palate was so scorched and tortured and his nostrils so assailed by acrid and forceful scents that he was in a semi-trance. Through it he could hear alternate snatches of grown-up conversation about currency deals and customs evasions, and excited boyish exchanges over the relative merits of the cricket and football teams of the Queen’s College, the Lycée Pascal, St. Wilfrid’s, St. Aloysius’s and the Mandela High.

  At last the first and divided step of the celebratory dance came to a close, and the two ends of the table began to mix. The Jonkheer, noting, with his usual sensibility, the eagerness of his members to follow a more abandoned measure, gave the call to engage with a double-entendre so drolly pronounced that no one felt any further difficulty in releasing all his avuncular feelings.

  “Our aims are simple. We offer Asia expansion and, more gentle than our ancestors, peaceful penetration.”

  At once there began an excited and noisy pulling of crackers, and generally a pulling. Here the Danish uncle, the most light-hearted and childish of the elders, was in his element. Above his heavy body, his head, alone of all the uncles, had kept a certain youthful spareness; his green eyes slanted below his white-blond hair and above his pouting goat lip. He gave the proceedings a satyr note, a note of monkey mischief. He was lucky enough to secure from his cracker a whistle which, when blown, sounded piercingly, and shot forth a long scarlet tongue tipped with a purple feather. With this, setting off squeals with as high a note as the whistle, he tickled nostrils and any other openings he could find. The party might have turned permanently into a riot had not the Jonkheer, always conscious of the educative role that the uncles offered in exchange for their nephews’ favours, insisted upon the whole company sitting down to a game of Monopoly. If there was one thing he believed that the uncles should hand on, it was skill in the money market. Nor were his efforts wasted: many of the boys showed a remarkable talent in all matters concerning profit. Not surprisingly the victor was Master Hong Kong, and most appropriately for it was his birthday.

  But now the same lessons of commercial skill were turned a little more to adult advantage in an increasingly riotous game of strip poker.

  Through it all Hamo was in too much of a curry stupor to be aware of how much his failure to participate was a cause of offence. Straight-backed, he dozed and snoozed, so that the colonial cane-woven rocking-chair moved him backwards into sleep and forwards into wakefulness. He was woken by a nudge from the Commander.

  “Wakey, wakey,” he said in a tone made more vulgar by the delights of an hour’s strip poker. “We’re going to play forfeits. And here’s A Ma Rang. The Jonkheer says you can go as far as you like with him.”

  The older youth stood grinning beside the Commander; he indeed resembled a meringue in that he was of an extreme pasty off-whiteness, that he had a very hard-surfaced skin, and that, wherever possible, at the chin, the neck, the stomach, the hips, the buttocks and the thighs, he bulged with fat like a meringue over-filled with cream. The Jonkheer had tried to use imagination as well as tolerance in pandering to his distinguished guest’s indelicate tastes.

  The game began. Some protégés were called out, not always by their official uncles, to perform forfeits which did not allow of their return. At last, since Hamo showed no disposition to move, t
he usual role was reversed and A Ma Rang was sent out of the room. He speedily entered again and, wobbling with excitement, chose “new English uncle to pay the penalties”. Outside on the veranda, Hamo did not wait for the youth’s giggles to subside and his own forfeit to be announced. On the contrary, taking advantage of the Jonkheer’s suggestion, he went as far as he liked. He gave A Ma Rang a friendly pinch on his vast bum, and fled under the blazing sun into the shade of the garden trees, almost falling over a cable-thick banyan root in his hurry to get away.

  The bungalow’s shrubbery, so long neglected, soon gave way to scrub and then to jungle: the glowing colours of hibiscus, the clinging scent of frangipani straggled into a shapeless, dusty, undergrowth in which the dull green was relieved only here and there by the white bracts and golden flowers of mussaendi—tiny by the sides of the huge cultivated trumpets, as the wild is always stunted by the nurtured. Beyond the low scrub soared the great trees—canaria, Grevillea, pittospora—which shut out the sky in the near distance. But Hamo knew that not far behind them again was a sheer rock-side drop of several hundred feet to the flat, flooded marshland below where a few peasants still waded for a living in land too hopeless to enjoy the prosperity of a Magic crop.

  Knew, because, as in Lacey’s estate car they had zigzagged up to the then horn-giving prospect of the feast, the second English uncle had mused in his best house-colours sort of way about their rendezvous. “Trust the Jonkheer to find it. Can’t be seen. Can hardly be got at. The natives won’t come near it because they believe some devil or other lives here. Shaped like a lion, you see. Or so they say, I can’t see it myself. But I don’t fancy things easily. Unless it’s male, in shorts and just reached puberty, that is. But there may be something in it. Most chaps who’ve been out here for long believe these things. I’d look into it a bit myself, if I wasn’t so bloody busy. And if it wasn’t such a bore!” He had peered at Hamo, hoping that this second line, with its weary worldly overtones, might draw a friendly response from him. It was clear that Hamo heard all that he was saying, but he had only replied, “If this was Africa, I should say that was oryza glaberrima that we passed a moment ago. These grasses really are very confusing.” “Ah? Well, I’m a rubber chap as you know. But anyhow the place is like a bloody fortress. And it gets cut off by floods from time to time. Not regular monsoon time either, some tidal freak of the river. One hundred and twenty days of it last time, I believe. But not to worry. The Jonkheer’s got it all fixed. Provisions of every kind for as long as you want. And delicacies too! I don’t know how much your mouth’s watered at the little hamper I’ve brought on the back seat, and remember that like all nice little parcels, you’ll get some surprises when we cut the string and see inside. But alas, whatever you think of my little contribution, I’m afraid it’ll be the poor man’s end of the banquet. The Jonkheer will produce the dish to end all dishes. He’s a sort of genius in his own way. What he’s done for the club! When I first came out here the whole thing was run by a Portuguese chap from Goa. I doubt if he was wholly Portuguese myself—Fernando. Anyway it was a pretty shocking show. More like a dockside brothel. But of course the Jonkheer’s terrifically cultivated. Superb collection of Chinese bronzes . . .” The head-boy praises of the housemaster had gushed on in genuine, stuttering hero-worship, but Hamo had been too conscious of the hamper behind, who, awakened from a healthy boyish, if faintly dribbling slumber, was now tickling the back of his driver-uncle’s neck with a peacock feather. To a historian of English culture this combination of footer shorts and peacocks—emblems of the two rival factions of the Edwardian puerile muse—might have given erudite delight. It had passed Hamo by. He had become increasingly alarmed, as the English uncle became more and more excited, at the serpentine ascent before them, and the infernal depths beneath. Only by concentrating on the instructive spectacle of nature’s near recapture of a marginal paddy-field had he been able to control rising fright, or to avoid giving a sharp nursery word to Master Java that might spoil the fun.

  Seeking now for a pathway out of the ruined estate garden, he thought of those perilous heights, of cobras, of Russell’s vipers, of whip-snakes and tarantulas, of Lacey’s “I believe a leopard made a nasty mess of a lad round here recently,” perhaps most of all of floods and the sinister possibilities of the Jonkheer’s fertile ferocity at the end of another one hundred and twenty days. The stillness, above all, made him remember, with a desperation that shocked him, how much work he still had to do, how much of that work needed now rethinking, and surely, too, there must be some hope of pleasures undiscovered before death closed in. He broke a stout branch from a bush and began with an officerly gesture to beat out a path of escape from the high tangle-wood. Immediately the silence was broken. A chattering stream of jade flowed fast and sheer from the highest tree-tops hundreds of feet down into the valley below. Scurryings, gruntings, cracklings of branches spread out from his feet in waves into the undergrowth. The grinding and clacking crake of a great billed bird (some hornbill?) came now from this depth, now from that. But drowning all other noises, a hollow boom echoed continuously above his head. Looking up, he saw for a moment four or five large impassive black faces wreathed with magisterial grey dundrearies gazing judicially down upon him, and then at once the whole society of langur monkeys were bounding off away through the tree-tops, putting a decent distance between themselves and him. The message of all alike, large and small—parakeets, hornbills, mongooses, wild pigs, monkeys—told him to go back to his own kind. Somewhere behind him, however, he could hear whoops of joy, and boyish giggles; his fear was greater to evade them. Rigidly controlling panic, so that his limbs seemed hung weights from their tautened muscles, swinging his stick from side to side, sword-sharp grass and cleaving thorn thigh-high to his tall body, he made his stately, independent, civilized and rational way from confusion towards some hoped-for clearing, some surely inevitable decently roomy view-point where he might consider so much afresh.

  Such an open prospect came before he had even time clearly to be sure that it was fresh air, wide horizons, broad vistas that he was seeking. Striking with his branch at the brutal spiked arm of a huge thorn-bush that barred his way, he broke both the monster and his weapon. The two parts of his stick flew one away from him and one towards him, and, avoiding a blow across his eyes, he stumbled on a half buried rock and fell, arse over tip, deep into a stone hollow. Then, with his breath for a moment beaten from him, he rolled over painfully two or three times, suddenly, strangely to feel the firmness, the smoothness of another human body beside him. He opened his eyes to see two wide frightened dark eyes turned towards him with jungle alertness. There beside him on the sun-baked rock lay what seemed to him the most perfect, the most desirable youth he had ever encountered. Chest 30, hips 35. The measurements and lineaments of Hamo’s ideal are sufficiently well known. But what crowned this extraordinary encounter was that when the large black eyes had looked out for a moment above the smooth creamy skin tight drawn across the bones of the cheeks, they closed again behind their long eye-lashed grille, and the youth returned to a gently breathing, kitten-purring sleep. Only two or three large tears rolled down his face to form little dew ponds in the declivities at each end of his small, cunningly curved mouth. He sighed as he nuzzled back into sleep, and his firm but slender arms met round Hamo’s long rigid neck in a loose but determined embrace.

  What Hamo might have been in the boy’s dream, he did not speculate. He was too overwhelmed with amazement that a dream which he had so frequently created to warm himself during the last weeks in the polar air-conditioned solitude of modern Asian hotel bedrooms, should now draw him in, to cherish him and his sore limbs after their heavy and painful fall. Looking at his surroundings, he realized that they lay—he and his amber wonder—in a crumbling limestone pool, three feet in depth perhaps, but six or seven wide, its sides indented to make the petals of a lotus flower—relic of what forgotten age: an Edwardian planter’s suburban exoticism? Recent Buddhist piety? An an
cient civilization inbuilt with the Master’s teaching?—whatever it was, now dead, devoid of content, empty of water, empty of flora, empty of fauna save two basking lizards, a six-foot English plant breeder in a ruined tropical linen suit, and a perfect native youth with a bare glistening chest and shabby, faded, torn, pale blue sarong. A blood-stained sarong.

  His first feeling was of æsthetic self-disgust that in his clownish clumsiness he had spoiled a perfect object. And then admiration for the wounded youth’s stoicism—his own most esteemed virtue—came to muddy the clear water of his sensual pleasure with a sudden weakening sensation of tenderness. He raised himself gently, took off his coat, carefully with his nail scissors cut off the left sleeve of his cream silk shirt, and, lifting the youth’s sarong, instead of a wound, saw two perfect thighs. It was then that he realized, with the disgust of fastidiousness, that it was himself who was bleeding. The raising of the sarong had brought the boy to inquisitive, giggling life, but Hamo, rolling up his trouser-leg, was now seeking fruitlessly to pull the many small black leeches from his hairy calves down which blood was pouring profusely. The youth, unrolling what appeared to be his sole possession, a fresh sarong, took with grave pride a small cake of soap and, sharply rubbing Hamo’s flesh, watched with delight this giant stranger’s pleasure as, one by one, the withered leeches fell from the leg.