As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  “Oh! Well, don’t let me keep you.” Erroll sounded offended at being cut off in his skilled recital.

  Remembering the many weeks ahead, if not the many years behind, Hamo sought to appease him.

  “It’s all this intolerable shilly-shallying and hanging about in this frightful town when we could be finding out what Magic hasn’t done. All these generalities and mutual self-congratulations! These ghastly speeches from officials in country after country. One expected it, of course . . . but I couldn’t gauge how it would affect me. It makes me antipathetic to the human voice. I disgracefully failed in my attention today to a really excellent piece of work at the University here. You must come with me tomorrow and meet this young chap. He’s working on hormone stimulation of some of the green manures. My suspicion is he’s held up by lack of equipment. His structural analysis rate is horribly slow. In terms of weeks. And he’s got so much material to hand.”

  “Analyser?” Erroll asked.

  “Archaic really, though he’s made ingenious improvements. But enough of that now. I just feel like walking it all off. And I’ve no intention of taking account of your assignation in the length of my peregrination.”

  He sought for a less pompous word, but his attention was confused, because the youth, misunderstanding his gesturing perhaps, appeared to be returning towards them, towards the lamplight and the braziers. Ludicrously, as he knew, he sought to motion him away into the mysterious darkness with a flapping of his hands that he hoped might seem justified by a few flying ants feebly circling one of the sparse street lamps some hundred yards ahead. The gesture’s success was partial; Beauty halted, and began deliciously to dawdle; Erroll seemed to take the gesture for a general hysteria brought about by the events of the day.

  “Oh, Christ! Trust me to cut capers at the wrong moment. Watton, you’ve ballsed it all up. I hesitated whether to tell you earlier, Chief. But I felt a bit jokey, so I didn’t say anything tonight. I was playing Water Rat along. Not to worry. It’s all in the bag. You saw those two saloon-bar type blokes I was chatting up in the University courtyard. Executive types in the Ceylon Tourist Service. I’ve fixed it all up. A Chevrolet and I’ll do the driving. No need for official cars and Mr. da Silva can go and pleasure someone else. And as to Water Rat, we can tell him tomorrow just where he can put his long, bare tail. Now don’t say . . .”

  But Hamo could say nothing. His wild gesture had drawn towards him two of the kite hirers surrounded by a small mob of older blazered schoolboys anxious to see what this eccentric, middle-aged tourist giant would do with the black bat Night on the end of his string. Distracted by listening to the comforting words of his loyal, efficient assistant, by keeping in view the uncertainly hovering idyllic swathed-bummed figure, and dismissing the absurd, mistaken offer of a kite, he turned sharply to recognize, as for a moment it seemed, in the two vendors’ mock-obsequious smiling, the Danish uncle and another en travestie surrounded by a knot of grinning nephews. He reeled back from the malice, caught his foot on a kite string, felt another wind round his ankle, then another round his waist, and more and more, until he realized that he was properly parcelled. A sudden heave brought him to the ground, to lie at last a Gulliver, bound and helpless. Pinched and pummelled by boyish fingers pretending aid, mocked by dark eyes that, lit in the brazier light, were no longer liquid and caressing but snakelike and cunning, confused by alien chatter, Hamo would have felt no surprise, though much dread, if he had been brought (intrusive stranger in this Lilliputian island) before a diminutive yet terrible Jonkheer with crown and sceptre. But he had (and he remembered it with shame as he ached in bed that night in the air-conditioned chill) reckoned without his faithful Erroll who with a ready shove and a well-placed kick and “Come on there. Out of it!” soon had his employer on his feet again, and had dragooned a couple or so of motley bystanders to support the tall figure, bruised and cut, back to the safe unmocking caverns of the spacious prosaic hotel.

  Hamo’s body did indeed feel to him a Man Mountain’s when he woke the next morning; acres of bruised flesh and jarred bones floated into his consciousness like an endless flat landscape. He exerted every strained muscle, every strained nerve to put behind him present pains with last night’s lusts. Two vigorous if painful lengths of the swimming pool did much to help. If they were to stay here many days more, he must make enquiries about squash.

  Erroll was already seated in the stately dining-room, relaxed and sated in a cloud of delicious tea scent, when Hamo, painfully refusing himself an easing limp, came to their table.

  “What, no pawpaw? You’re making a mistake. That’s one thing about all this East of Suez—funny how you can’t help thinking of it that way even though we’ve come to it through the Rising Sun—everything not only looks bloody marvellous but tastes it. Everything not human, that is. How are you this morning, Chief? Sure you oughtn’t to see someone? Could be there’s a British doctor if we rattled our bones at the Embassy.”

  Hamo waved aside the solicitude and countered with enquiry about the delights of Room 49. Erroll, with tact and compassion, played it down.

  “Oh, fair to middling. Not bad at all.” Then bursting into a grin of sated contentment, “In fact, bloody good.”

  “By the way,” he went on, “I got talking to a bloke last night in the bar. While I was waiting, you know. Some sort of Scandinavian in the agricultural machinery racket. Seems one has to keep away from the front at night. They’re a shocking lot of bastards apparently. Some old boy from Germany, professor or something, was trying to cut a caper with something that had taken his fancy. They lured the poor old thing down to some cave in the rocks. Knocked him about badly. Took all his lolly and his clothes. There he was stark naked knocking on the hotel door at two in the morning. Better in this climate than at Southend, but still it took some explaining, I dare say.”

  So the uncles, perhaps, were fairy godmothers, protective guardians—if it had been the uncles, for by the time Hamo had been able to distinguish the real stars of that magnificent sky from the fictive stars of concussion, Erroll’s righteous wrath had driven the kite vendors from Galle Face Green. Good uncles, then, or so it might have seemed but for the events of a few evenings later.

  *

  Hamo hardly remembered his bruised thigh and compressed ankle, hardly thought to limp, so delicious was the cooling evening, so happily did the Flame of the Forests above them supply all those hot colours which tropical lands need in order to replace the burning sun when it is going down, so cool was the contentment he could gauge in Erroll, so burning the excitement that he knew in his other companion, Mohan Wickramanayake, so pleased was he in his sense of something useful promised. It was hard to believe that the sheer inchoate ugliness of Colombo lay beyond this delightful park through which they were strolling after seeing in detail the young man’s lab work—they to their hotel, he to—where did these innumerable professors and students and government officials in all Asian countries go when at last they left their ill-paid labours to return home? What might be disagreeable in the conjecture was happily on this occasion banished by the automatic amino-acid analyser which he had promised to raise heaven and earth (Sir Alec and the Rapson) to get for this clever post-graduate, a promise so splendidly suggested by Erroll, so happily made by himself, so delightedly (no, overwhelmedly) accepted by the young man. Happiness, indeed, had loosened his tongue and he had chattered with captivating coyness far beyond the bounds of his immediate research, so that Hamo found himself listening intently to an account of the contrasting nutritional needs of the highland soils and the lowland soils of the island.

  “Of course, Mr. Langmuir, Magic has transformed much of this. Nevertheless education is slow and it is wiser to make issues of phosphate to the wet zone farmers, and of nitrogen and potash to the dry, highland farmers only in conjunction with the traditional green manures. And, you know, these old chaps are not always wrong. For example those wild varieties of grass allied to the oryzas which the new young farme
rs, who are reared on the transformation created by your Magic—ischaemnon ragosum, for example, or fimbristylis milacea—see as pernicious weeds, the village doctors use them for medicine, and remember we have two universities teaching that very same Ayurvedic medicine.” The young man giggled, then changed, as so often, to an earnest tone, “And again, they are very valuable in fish rearing. And perhaps in the flooded paddy-fields the protein of fish . . . But these things only apply to the hopeless cases—lands too minutely divided by some old legal customs or farmed by remote temple landlords. Much of our land is, of course, of this kind. It is difficult to educate where the peasant has no concern. And again some hopeless areas . . .”

  “Hopeless areas?” Hamo questioned so sharply that Erroll thought, hullo, the maniac’s got on his wick. By their names you can tell them. And truth to tell, though the bloke had constructed some beautiful instruments for himself, this history of bloody farming was a bit too much for a quiet stroll home. He must come to the old boy’s rescue. But he couldn’t break into the flow.

  “I speak of the exceptions, of course. But now that our population is rising—unwisely in my opinion—Magic produces its own problems of prosperity . . . You will excuse my ironies . . . the contrasts are very great between bad lands and good for those who work them. Some of the wetlands really are not capable of adequate irrigation. Flooding is too frequent, salinity is too great, the monsoons too uncertain. And many of the highlands, I must say, for I come from these parts, are ill-adapted for rice, too little soil, too close to the rock. You must persuade your people to be more British, Dr. Langmuir, please. America, Europe—these orientations make for too much coffee drinking. And we have too much tea. ‘What about a cuppa?’ I have read.” Giggling again for some reason, as they all did.

  “You mean then that you’re trying to farm lands where Magic can’t be cultivated?”

  “Bad lands. Marsh or desert. Hopeless lands. Hopeless people, I’m afraid. But these are social questions . . .”

  His words were drowned in a sudden high shrieking and a violent clattering in the air as fifty or more bunches of fruit came alive on the trees of the little island in the park lake’s centre. Above them, and in all directions, the great bunches turned to flapping black leathery wings, red furry bodies, beady eyes, greedy mouths—hanging grapes had turned to flying foxes. No one in the park looked up. Mohan Wickramanayake merely raised his voice.

  “There are too many pressure groups . . .”

  Hamo and Erroll both followed the last black shadow into the far distance over the town. Hamo muttered and looked down at the ground, as though he had been personally responsible for the shame of this hideous flight. Erroll determined to throw off his discomfiture.

  “Oh Christ! and I haven’t got my bloody Zoom with me. What a perfect kick in the pants for Bela Lugosi. Just look at it. Off they go, thirsty for the slender necks of a hundred blonde virgins. And then look at that old lady over there, or those kids playing football, no bloody notice at all. Virgins come cheap in these spicy isles. Hammer Productions (Inc.) Ceylon must have come under the hammer years ago.”

  “They go for the evening’s feast upon the fruit and vegetable crops. I am afraid that these are more important to us than virgins.”

  “Jesus! Why don’t you poison the brutes? Or there’s the old remedy of a silver sword through the heart at the crossroads. Complicated and messy but guaranteed effective.”

  “We are Buddhist people, Mr. Watton.”

  The Chief tried to paper over the crack with some question about some weed or other; or was it tact? or was it madness? Because for the next five minutes of so, he seemed to go crackers, with his questions about green manuring. It seems there was a pith plant, eesti something aspera that would grow in standing water—well, that was the news they’d all been waiting for. And now it was weed control; and harrowing which “Dr. Langmuir, you know, is very beneficial for it strengthens the tillering”; a whole fucking Farmers’ Hour, as if they hadn’t seen enough of paddy-fields in the last months to choke your guts up. At last it appeared to be getting on the little maniac’s wick, too, for his words came more hesitantly, his giggling ever more irrelevant.

  “I am afraid all this bores Mr. Watton and I owe him so much.” “Oh, don’t worry about Erroll. It’s just his evening thirst coming on.”

  They turned into a main road. The sight of the usual bundles of rags preparing for sleep in the doorways of the closing shops came to Erroll as a heaven-sent opportunity to relieve his feelings, on his behalf, on behalf of these poor bloody down and outs, probably untouchables or some such crap.

  “Funny country this,” he said, “the bloody bats take off for a feed just as these poor bastards settle for empty bellies and a night’s kip on the sidewalk. Always seem to choose the corners by the main road, too. Must make for a noisy night with all that traffic. You’d think they’d go for those leafy quiet streets among the desirable residences of the Cinnamon what’s it Quarter. But there you are—these are social questions.”

  He had truly not intended it, but the last sentence came out as an exact imitation of the voice of the Maniac Wick. Oh, well, if he got a two-column Piez and Morris out of them, he hadn’t much bellyache coming. And because, after all, in for a penny, in for a pound, he went across to where an old woman and two small kids were settling down in their rags and handed out a chunk of lolly all round.

  His only worry was that the Chief would blow his top. “Manners makyth man”—that it seems was the old school motto. And he never forgot what they’d taught him at school, didn’t the Chief. But hearing the well-known voice, all officer, “I don’t think that’s necessary, you know, Watton,” he suddenly thought bugger that for a lark. Walking farther up the street to where an old man was spreading a threadbare blanket on a step, he handed out more money. Even remembering things that brought tears to the eyes, he added, “How’s it going, Dad?” Turning back for his expected rocket, he saw at once that he’d properly got on the maniac’s wick, for the dark, calf’s eyes blazed at him for a moment—maniacally, as you might say. But no Chief!

  “Where’s Mr. Langmuir?”

  “He also has the tourists’ preoccupation with the beggars of Asia, I think.”

  And sure enough there across the road was the Chief’s tall figure bent over a youth who stood at the door of an ancient Humber parked outside a grocer’s store. Christ! he’d have to watch their steps or Maniac Wick would put too many twos together.

  “Unfortunately the boy is a servant and not a beggar. But all alike will seem very poor to a Great English scientist. So, Mr. Watton,” and Mr. Wickramanayake bowed, “unfortunately, I have to go to my home. Postgraduate students do not live in the rich Cinnamon Quarter. You will say good-bye to Dr. Langmuir for me, please.”

  Erroll felt repentant. “Look,” he said, “the Chief doesn’t praise work easily but what you’re doing’s really excited him. I’m only a technician so don’t bother with me. But I can promise you this that if he says you’ll get a new analyser, you’ll . . . well, he’ll bloody well see that you get one with three analysis panels running at once. That’s Rothschild stuff.”

  Why was he wooing the young bugger?

  The young man bowed.

  “I wish it were as easy for us to accept gifts as for you to present them. Luckily our bureaucracy protects our pride. It will be a decision of the interdepartmental scientific committee of the Universities. Whether we can accept, I intend to say. The Chairman is Professor Samarasinghe. A very fine scientist and a proud patriot. So we must hope for the best. He will no doubt make the decision known to Dr. Langmuir.”

  Behind the young Singhalese graduate’s retreating back, Erroll could find no more to make than the two-finger sign. “Up you, mate,” he said.

  *

  “Look, Mr. Wickramanayake, please don’t take any notice of Watton’s failure of taste,” Hamo had said earlier when Erroll had so embarrassingly departed on his tour of largesse.

  “
Mr. Watton is generous. He is moved by the poverty of our country.”

  “Look here, you know you don’t really feel that. The management of your society is your affair. All we can do is to put such skills and resources as we have at your service. But this sort of tourist vulgar gesture . . .

  “Charity is a well-established function of Buddhist life . . .”

  “Yes, no doubt your own. But not this sort of thing. I can only say that Erroll’s intention is good. Or at least I think so.”

  “Most people from the U.K. think this.”

  “Yes, it’s exactly that that I want . . .”

  But Hamo could not really tell what he wanted, except that he knew that what he had just said had been welling up in him during these last weeks. That and lust. Yet really to burden this unfortunate, able young man with the explosion of his emotional tensions was hardly . . .

  He said, “You must excuse me . . .” Then, on the other side of the road, an old Humber had drawn up. A noise, an event, something that allowed him to look the other way while he recovered his thoughts and found some way of soothing the young man’s hurt pride without any further embarrassing intimacy. And He got out . . . there had been so many perfect visions in the last months, visions that once seen, had vanished. It seemed strange, then, to encounter a true repeat, a verification. Here was the Fairest Youth he had Ever Seen: 5’9” in height, waist 24, hips 35, chest 30, all that went without saying; but then too, long shapely but strong legs boldly outlined, as he stepped down to the pavement, through the close shape of the sarong, so white, so clean, it was an advertisement for the tight firm buttocks it enclosed, but no flaunting poster, no tasteless television cliché, nor again anything furtive, no “well-built lad seeks fatherly guidance”, rather (this damnable itching lust knew no limits of absurd juxtaposition) a Times column insertion, modest, direct—“well-shaped buttocks with every accompanying elegance, including exceptionally finely moulded, unusual and intriguing face. View any time after six in the evening.”