by Angus Wilson
Exactly, and Langmuir-Malcolm’s main idea, it seemed, was to be around a good deal, have a look at what people were doing, particularly, if they could bear it, drop in on the Jayasekeres themselves for a run-over of various blue-prints, “talking the thing through” would perhaps be the way one could put it (it was certainly the way Sir Alec would have put it). If he could browse about a bit among the Dugong publications, familiarize himself with them, so that he could put the best possible case to the University and to the Minister when he did eventually make his arrival public—but browse here in their lovely home, not at the publishing house if Mr. Jayasekere would not mind leaving a representative selection of publications here at his house. He feared he was sounding sybaritic but this was a working holiday, if that expression could be used, and just to relax, say in this attractive lounge or under this beautiful creeper, to come and go without fuss, was that taking a terrible liberty? (Mr. Dissawardene spoke from his attentive maître d’hôtel position by the patio door—“So you are going to snoop, Doctor Malcolm.” “For heaven’s sake, Father, this is a business talk.” Sadly the old man went upstairs as though to convey a complaint to the chef.) Mrs. Jayasekere really mustn’t give a thought to his being there, to seek to entertain him or anything of that kind or he wouldn’t consent to come; the boy could see to his wants, which were simply told. In any case the last thing his beautiful hostess would wish was to bother her head with all this business.
As soon as he had said it he realized that his role-playing had run away with him . . . Sure enough the shapely mouth that had followed his every word with open delight now closed in tight chagrin, the wide sparkling dark eyes went small, and tears trembled on the long eye-lashes. And out at last it came—from a sob-trembling Mrs. Jayasekere, and from her worried but now defiant husband, with occasional excited glosses from her Matron Mother.
At first he was doubtful, definitely doubtful, so deeply had he sunk into his other self. After all, if Mrs. Jayasekere were to be visiting England, how could he be making sudden descents upon this island where only Muthu was beautiful? But then the reality of the situation came to him. And really it did seem an impossible situation for a young and elegant woman—no possibility of leaving the country except on business or pilgrimage, and the Buddha’s birthplace so far from Harrods. Indeed particularly unfair that her Roman Catholic friends should window-shop the whole length of the Brompton Road simply because some cretinous peasant girl had suffered from religious delusion at Lourdes. Of course, such a deprivation was not comparable with the hopeless cases, the hopeless lands, the dispossessed, and they were no doubt, as all told him, a mere handful beside the teeming urban derelicts that he would see if he visited Calcutta or Bombay. Probably some economic purist would show a justifying connection, some point about scarcity of foreign exchange, but he distrusted such bureaucratic red tape, he had never permitted the Sir Alecs of England to disrupt his work, why should a Singhalese Sir Alec impose his priggish nonsense upon this harmless, elegant woman?
“Imagine, Doctor Malcolm! What can it do harm for Ceylon if my daughter visits Harrods? Harrods is such a beautiful place. I was there in 1937.”
And really it seemed a sound point—his own mother, he remembered, had laid great store by her Harrods account, and, although that was hardly a recommendation, his father had started the account for her so that it must be the thing to do.
“Perhaps, Doctor Malcolm, eh, you think that the publishing chaps in the U.K. won’t like to deal with a pretty woman? That won’t be the British way. But I can promise you that Jayantha has a very good head for business.”
And here Langmuir-Malcolm surprised himself with his sociological knowledge, for he told them that, on the contrary, the greater part of publisher’s representatives, at any rate the leading executives in the major firms, were indeed young women. As he said it, the claim seemed not improbable, for certainly he found no wish to associate what must be so very dreary an activity with the magic words “young men”. Finally, then, all was concluded, or rather left pending, on the happiest of notes.
And now Muthu’s touch as he covertly stroked Hamo’s arm felt listless, suggested boredom. Hamo himself was aware of rumblings in his stomach and of extreme heat after all that food and the anxiety of all this role-playing. A tightness of his abdomen that told him he should defer more feasting to another day. He could leave now with the prospect of days of exciting and probing experiment—a week at least, he hoped, until the inevitable (but really rather irrelevant) intrusion of this no doubt upright (he would judge no one unheard) but surely bumbling administrator. (“Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine,” he remembered his father to have sung in the bath—a singing he had inherited.) Himself he need never, thank heaven, shake hands with his double or put to the test how bumbling his conduct of this tedious affair might eventually be, for he was due to leave Ceylon, to see the effects of Magic in the paddy-fields of India, in ten days’ time. If, as now seemed likely, his inspection of the working of his Magic in this island’s fields might well have to be curtailed by the demands of this new chivalric errand—for he fully determined that the Fairest Youth should not be left in such unseemly servitude when he departed—he knew that he was secretly relieved at a respite from any further discovery of how often the great white intentions of his Magic seemed to have worked the blackest of spells upon so many beneficiaries. He said good evening to them all, with a smile of courteous thanks to the boy for his service, and particularly enjoined upon them to keep the news of his arrival a close secret for the next few days.
The good-byes among the white Datura trumpets opened to the clearest moonlight by the garden gate were as warm as the hot night air. Mrs. Jayasekere in her delight found a touching, unaffected directness that was winningly incongruous with her glamour.
“Kirsti, I do not think I have ever been so happy. I shall go to Maisie’s now and I shall be nice to everyone because I am so happy. And I shall not make you come there, Doctor Malcolm, because I think you are a shy man. Imagine, Mother, the great Doctor Malcolm is shy. And I think you are shy of women, too. But do not worry when you come to the house, you will never see us. It will be like in the houses of the Muslims,” and she laughed at the absurdity, “we shall be there to look after you, either Mother or I, but you will never see us.”
And Mrs. Dissawardene, giggling now, with real girlish happiness for her daughter, said, “I shall be no more than a lizard on the wall. A very big lizard you are thinking. But I can be very quiet, Doctor Malcolm, even more quiet than a lizard. And like a lizard I shall see everything. Is the boy giving Doctor Malcolm what he wants? I shall see.”
Here, indeed, as his delights and hopes crumbled before him, was a facer! Yet, driven on by the tantalizing near-farness of the taste of perfection, Hamo’s brain worked with a rapidity that he had not known since the last stages of Magic in what now seemed years ago. What were the essentials that would bring the experiment at last to consummation? Propinquity, distraction, darkness, absorption. He would rely on Muthu for the ravishing rest. In that momentary intuitive flash, which is so often the culmination of a hidden but no doubt severe series of logical deductions, he saw that, with a little judicious preparation, he could still enjoy if not the week’s leisurely browsing he had hoped for, then at least an hour’s greedy gobble that, he hoped, would slake his lustful thirst for ever. The new scheme, too, as it formed in his mind, had the additional advantage of giving satisfaction to the faithful and shamefully neglected Erroll Watton.
He turned to the Jayasekeres.
“You know,” he said, “I am a little concerned that I shall have so little opportunity of knowing the arguments that will be used against the reintroduction of our London degrees . . .”
*
Roger Sudbury stood in the corner of this elegantly furnished 264 salon (a little too “smart” for his old-fashioned bachelor taste) and made himself as unobtrusive as his exceptional height allowed him. He felt most beholden to his cha
nce travelling companion, Charlie Keaton (the name worried him a little), for securing an invitation for him, a simple tourist, to this charming Singhalese home—hardly typical of Ceylon as a whole, of course; but, no doubt, representative of the lives of a privileged few. He could not say that the prospect of Keaton’s cinematic showing appealed to him, although in all politeness he had said otherwise. He was not a great cinema-goer, not indeed a cinema-goer at all. But still the chap was clearly master of his art and the subject, being world travel, especially Ceylon, would help to round off, possibly to sharpen his own impressions of the island during his all too short stay.
Frankly, however, the gathering itself was of more interest to him. It appeared from what this chap Jayasekere had said of himself—extraordinarily kind of him to allow an unimportant passing tourist like himself to tag along with the evening’s notability!—that he was rather a distinguished fellow in both the business and the cultural worlds of Colombo. The guests were an interesting crowd: made up it appeared of all sorts of people who were by no means friendly to British, indeed to European influence. Buddhists, gentle fanatics so one was told, with a sincere belief that they had a way of life to offer to the world far more harmonious than the restless technologies of the West; some poets, dramatists, and chaps of that sort, who wanted to go back to their own deep roots, their own fascinating legends, to free their thoughts and sensibilities from what they saw as the distorting medium of the English language that colonialism had imposed on them; some who were not so hostile to Western thought of another kind—chaps who looked to Moscow—but perhaps only as a means of cutting their Western cables, of rendering Asian what the Kremlin crowd had to teach them, as Peking perhaps had done, indeed Jayasekere had hinted that there were not a few who had visited the Celestial City at Mao’s invitation (for foreign travel for the Singhalese was difficult in the ordinary way); and then, predominantly, no doubt, chaps like the smooth-faced stout man dressed in some sort of national dress, though not the Buddhist monk’s saffron, softly but firmly making his points to a respectful little group by sweeping gesticulations of his glass of orange juice—nationalists, for whom—and however little we had succeeded in leaving behind that impression, this was surely what the best of our colonial men had intended—things Singhalese were as vital and revered as the English way of life still was to a dwindling crowd of fogies like himself at home. (Sudbury was becoming much easier to find than Malcolm had been.) Not probably the easiest crowd for a shy Englishman to meet. He envied his travelling companion, Keaton, whose cheery Cockney voice he could already hear across the room, ribbing the men a little and giving the ladies a little heart’s flutter.
“No, no, ta all the same, but I use hand-shots a lot, you know, so I have to keep off the booze, can’t afford to have the shakes.”
Surely he was growing more traditionally Cockney as the days went by. To their hostess it was clearly all unintelligible, but something in her distinguished guest’s look clearly appealed to her—or was it the way he had said “hand-shots”—it was to be hoped not.
“I’m afraid I have no beautiful movie stars for you, Mr. Keaton,” she said.
“That’s all right, darling. I’m not choosey.”
Which wasn’t even true—ah well! He could not suppress satisfaction that his voluble Cockney companion should be playing his part with such total and pleased self-absorption when all the while he, the author, was not only acting—better perhaps because less accustomedly—but directing as well. Surely it would have delighted Perry and Zoe, such unguessed-at powers; Perry certainly, Zoe perhaps not with her puritan conscience. There were no scientists present, he understood from Jayasekere, unless it were one of these doctors who practised native medicines which had found their way now even into the University curriculum. Frankly, it had surprised him that so Western a chap as Jayasekere should have known so many people eminent in the anti-Western camp; but his host had explained that, politics being so unstable in the island, it was necessary to maintain a foot in all camps. Business, he said, was business. Nor, it seemed, were many of these apparently most vociferous opponents of the West entirely closed to similar considerations.
The tall tourist felt his mouth grimace in dislike. He smoothed his small moustache to hide his expression, for his host’s mother-in-law, a handsome, still youngish lady dressed to kill, was bearing down upon him.
“Why have you not got some buffalo curd? I said to Jayantha I will take him some buffalo curd. I know we are not to take great notice of him. That is quite forbidden. But some buffalo curd cannot hurt. And with lots of djagaree, isn’t it? We remember how he was eating the other night . . . Oh my goodness!”
The lady’s olive neck was suffused with pink embarrassment. She looked in alarm to see if her daughter or son-in-law were near enough to have heard her gaffe. She felt her mistake too greatly even to make good her offer of food to her visitor, apart from spilling a little of the golden brown djagaree at his feet.
He knew a moment’s vexation, for, to tell the truth, his hosts were observing the imposed neglect of him so rigidly as to make him very ready for the offer of some food and another whisky. He pushed his annoyance aside in a determined effort to master this new personality, for he must soon, however much a second fiddle to his cinematic fellow traveller, come in for some introductions to these improbable people, else the Jayasekeres would think it odd. He must be ready to meet all as the undistinguished tourist they expected to be bored with. He felt a certain affection for this new personation, increasingly proud of a creation so near to his heart and yet so touched with decent comedy (he could not help thinking how Leslie would have applauded him, or would he? “Kid’s games, love, and at your age.”) He felt warm towards himself as he had not for a long time. So untouched by Dr. Malcolm’s unattractive leaven of Sir Alec’s large talk, Sudbury, he felt, was a cleansing wind to blow away many layers of dirt that had accumulated in the last months.
He was not very happy, then, when Mr. Jayasekere advanced upon him winking broadly.
“All on your own, Mr. Sudbury? That will never do. You must see a bit of Colombo society while you are here. Well,” he went on, in low, conspiratorial tones, as he jovially splashed whisky into his guest’s glass, “how have I done, eh? It was pretty short notice, you know. I said to my wife, this chap Malcolm is mustard, he expects his people to work magic. But that’s good for us. It keeps us on our toes. It’s what we need in Ceylon. I was straight on the blower, I can tell you. You can imagine their surprise. ‘Jayasekere! Good Lord! That materialist, that capitalist lackey, that westernized bastard! What does he want me at his house for?’ But they’ve all come. ‘What is there in it for me?’ Isn’t it? That’s the way of the world. Anyhow all we chaps at the top in Ceylon, left and right, we were at school together, you know. Besides, most of them are damned glad to be published by the wicked Dugong. Remember that, when you sound them out. By the way that chap Keaton’s quite a genius with the camera. What a scoop for Dugong if we could get him to illustrate some of our textbooks. I told Jayantha, ‘That’s what the big man has in mind.’ Was I right?”
Delighted though Hamo was by this part of his scheme (where would it end?) Sudbury-Malcolm had time only for the quickest smile of approval, which he turned to a silencing frown, as the gentleman in the maize-coloured robe bore down upon them. Though he wore no monkish saffron, his manner, Hamo thought, was indefinably clerical—soft, humbly self-pleased, rosy-viewed, yet not hearty. All these people! The necessity of observing them! However, these purgations must be borne, these dragons fought, these monsters met—but, oh, beautiful youth, little do you know the trials, the perils! And just for a moment, rather sharply, Hamo thought, “Beautiful youth, you’d better be good after all this.”
“Has this gentleman also come to bring us the latest culture of the West?”
Suppressing without too much regret two of his identities, Sudbury said, “A mere tourist, I’m afraid. Enjoying the beauties of your lovely country.”
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“Mr. Sudbury. Chandraranthera Thera. Or do I say Dr. Chandraranthera? At any rate he’s the chap who keeps our culture pure. Superintendent of Monuments. Superintendent of Religious Education. Representative for us all at the world’s great cultural congresses.”
Dr. Chandraranthera stood back to let a few of these credits flash on to the screen, then he waved them to one side.
“Oh, Jayasekere, stop all this nonsense. Don’t worry the poor man. W. R. Chandraranthera. That’s enough. Now may I ask you again, Sir, why you say ‘mere’ tourist? You see, for me a tourist is a very fine person, a very special person. Understand, of course, that I didn’t always think so. Oh no, when I was young, I was still susceptible to the British teaching. I made a trip to Europe—St. Peter’s, Westminster Abbey, Michelangelo, the Eiffel Tower—all marvels! The highest expressions of man’s achievement. It was the phrase of one of our Professors here—Professor Martindale—a very fine British gentleman. Then I changed. I was travelling in Europe on my country’s business. I saw again these buildings. Monuments of man’s folly I found them. A hardness of will, an expression of egoism that produced only vain beauty. I was then still young, arrogant. Now I think differently. All have something to say, if we listen and if we hear the voices as part of a great symphony—yes, even the voices of cut stones. That is why I tell you don’t be ashamed to be a tourist. A humble tourist who truly seeks something beyond himself in all the great monuments is a fine man. Poor Mr. Tourist. Let him hold up his head. Are you afraid of rats, Sir?”
At the far end of the room a young man was intent in conversation with a student-like girl—the ugly, earnest face struck a note of sympathetic memory in Hamo. And then as he saw it more clearly, he knew that there were things he feared more than rats—young plant physiologists in search of laser beam equipment, for example, Wickramanayakes. Trying to make his cursed height small behind the bulk of W. R. Chandraranthera, he answered crouchingly.