Beggar's Feast (22 page)

A dreamless week later, Sam was walking around the widower's walauwa as if its walls would fall on him if he stopped. Robert, who'd already decided that he had to decide the black beast vehicle and road itself were the only bloody murderers this time, asked Sam what he thought should be done with the villagers who had gone to Dambulla. Sam asked what they'd said about it so far. Told that they would say nothing, Sam said having to stay in the village the rest of their lives would be punishment enough. Robert agreed. Sam said he had to return to the city and Robert proposed the children stay at the walauwa and that Sam would come when he could. Which, over four fat war years, he did, after first finding a new driver, a Trinco-born Tamil named Joseph, and getting himself a new vehicle, a 1938 Morris Eight, painted cricket ball red. Some in the village called it a darker shade.

In recent months, Sam himself began to see bloodred when he came home. It was on sheets hanging from an RAF laundry line in the inner courtyard of the walauwa, where old Latha ordered the washerwoman to dry them because if they were taken down to the laundry rocks the villagers would start marriage talk about Hyacinth. But at fourteen his daughter was still a little girl whose father gave her dolls, who spent most of her days folded into her late mother's almirah, waiting for nothing. The boy, though, was otherwise; the bled sheets were his, from nosebleeds he seemed to sleep through. Thick, hairy, all belly and jangle, George Kandy at fourteen was far hungrier, readier, understanding of hunger than his father had been at thirty. The year before, two seventeen-yearold girls had been bathing and only turned their backs and cinched their water cloths and stopped smiling to scream blue murder when one saw the other's mother suddenly standing behind George, who had been watching them, one hand upon the man-sized boulder that marked the laneway to the village water-spout. After Robert and then Sam were informed, Robert had slapped his grandson for shaming the walauwa and Sam had come from Colombo with American cigarettes for the fathers of both bathers, cookware for the mothers, and a Meccano set to be divided between the brothers without care to match wheel for wheel or hooks with string. (The trading market for the pieces between the two houses, inevitably vicious, ended relations between the families. Both girls were then approached by older brothers who promised protection if they would only vamp past the walauwa to the water-spout one last time: fat George Kandy must have had stacks of Meccano sets in there, and meanwhile the rest of the world had three-wheeled cars and cranes that could carry nothing from nothing. The girls refused, having already been given Nestlé chocolate and also nylon stockings that were promptly, ravenously confiscated by their mothers, who would never wear them.)

Six months later George tried again, this time using his own sister's Duke and Duchess of Windsor paper doll collection. A girl had come to the back stairs of the walauwa with mending that her mother had done. George put aside the bundle and led her down to the stone sluice that ran the length of the walauwa, which in dry times was filled with brown coffee flowers and monkey droppings, dung beetles and once-bitten, too sour fruits. There, George offered her the dolls if she would press and hold her hand as he wanted her to. Latha came down looking for the girl. How dare she leave the Ralahami's mending on dirt itself! She screamed to see George demonstrating his request and never fed him by hand again. And so again Sam had had to come from Colombo with more cigarettes and cookware, this time both for Latha and for the girl's parents. He brought Bayko house blocks for this one's brothers, and (because suddenly there were no nylons to be had anywhere upon the earth) he brought bars of white chocolate, which disappointed, looking like little more than lumpy milk. He also brought a new paper doll collection for Hyacinth and another for the nearly ruined girl, which was duly, ravenously mother-taken and forever after wiped and dusted.

Father, grandfather, and uncle agreed that something had to be done with the boy before something really had to be done for a girl and her family. Colombo was decided against and the temple was decided against. There was nothing else but for George to be sent abroad for his schooling, only a long-term arrangement had to be arranged before he went. A car would be hired and Arthur and Robert would take the boy on a bride tour of surrounding villages. Sam would be notified when a suitable match had been found. In the meantime, Sam was to see about where in fact George could be sent for school in wartime, one of the things he could have been doing in Colombo these past few days instead of waiting around for Mountbatten.

Enough. He had to go. But just before he abandoned the orchid house, Sam saw two men approaching in crisp tan uniform, their sleeves cuffed above the elbow, clearly Englishmen from their straight spines and murmuring mouths, their bougainvillea cheeks. The taller one was walking as if his body was itself a standard going before a reviewing stand. Mountbatten. Sam lit up and stretched, then arranged himself into the angly receiving pose he'd been lately using at the harbour with the wartime British. These last two years, officers had been coming to see him and Curzon at off-hours, with requests that they get down still more rubber tappers from Cochin, and also with assurances that their fulfillment of said requests— if accomplished without drawing undue attention to the rubber tappers' arrivals from troublemaking Colombo labour men, who couldn't meet the demand anyway—meant that once a week, back doors would be left open for them. And so came Sam Kandy's first great wartime discovery, the stacked kingdom come that was the quartermaster's dockside warehouse. His second, its perfect match: the allowance that the State Council had started giving all workers in the city for their sugar and flour and rice. But who spends free money on sugar and flour and more rice? What Sam did not sell to the thriving foreign-goods syndicates in Pettah and did not have to split with Curzon, he brought to the village and gave to Robert and Arthur and Hyacinth and to George, who, it seemed, had been giving it on his own terms.

“Sir, may I present Mr. Sam Kandy, of Colombo harbour, a friend of our war efforts.”

Sam straightened and bowed from the shoulders. He knew the British were worse than temple monks for waiting on ceremony, at least in the official hours. And this Englishman's eyebrows were church-arched. The sort for whom there were only official hours.

“Mr. Kandy, this is Lord Commander Mountbatten,” said the office man Sam had daily visited, who was smiling like he'd just won a bet by baking a cake in a helmet.

Sam bowed again.

“Kandy, is it?” Mountbatten asked, amused and curious, cutting and English.

“Yes.” Knowing he'd only half answered. More than a minute passed in silence, the Englishmen's smiles inexorably thinning. He knew what they were waiting for, that they would wait until Tojo himself was strolling through this garden if they had to, and Sam had to see about George and get back to Colombo.

“Yes, sir. “Indeed,” Mountbatten continued, his lips returning. “May I enquire, was that your father's name as well?”

“No, it was not. Sir. My, my father—”

“Of course. Well, I suppose no man is ever born Charlemagne, is he.”

“May I enquire, sir, as to why I was asked to come here?”

“Yes. Good English, incidentally. English that comes from dealing with Englishmen, I can tell, and not from just listening to them go on in an Oxford lecture hall. As to your question. First, let me say I understand that you have been the very portrait of patience while I have been detained in London. It's exactly this virtue in you and your fellow islanders, and also your support in this our great shared cause, that disposes me all the more to Ceylon's claim for greater rights from the Crown. And let me further say that while so much of Asia waits on our next endeavour, this matter between us, Kandy, is at the very top of things I must resolve. Let's step into this flower-house.” Sam nodded and followed, leaving behind Mountbatten's baker, who, glum faced, considered the sudden violet clouds.

“I cannot tell you, Kandy, how many teas one has taken in London in just such perfume,” Mountbatten murmured, the air inside the steaming orchid house so blooming sweet.

“It smells to me like an elephant hold, sir.”

Mountbatten smiled. Were anyone else present he would have had the fellow thrashed for impertinence. “And you say that without having met any of the hostesses in question. Do you think any of these will object to our clearing the air a little?” He gestured at the orchids, took two cigars from a hip pocket, cut them, and tossed the stubs into the potted field. Wave upon wave of hard-pinning rain began to fall, like a company of snare drummers in need of more drilling.

“Thank you, sir,” Sam said, slipping the cigar into his coat pocket and lighting a cigarette. “I will save this for an auspicious occasion.”

“I should say this
is
an auspicious occasion, Kandy. It's not every day a native businessman is given such an opportunity to help the effort.” Bloody wasted cigar. Mountbatten wondered if it'd be chopped up and sold at the Colombo bazaar. He was fairly certain, from recent inspection, that someone, whether one of the Americans or a native coolie, had been shaving curls of wood from his caravan desk, no doubt to sell on the relic market.

Opportunity to help the effort
. And earlier,
Our great shared cause
. There would be no money. But there had to be something. “As to the purpose of this meeting, sir.”

“Yes. Well.” Mountbatten paused, considering the aspect of something, his eyes squinting in little pulses. “Are you familiar, Kandy, with our prisoner camp at Trincomalee?”

“Yes, I've heard of it, sir. My driver—”

“Oh is he? Very good. It is, by all accounts, a model operation. Italians. A few fancy themselves gardeners, it seems. They have been trading tomatoes for cigarettes with the guards, serenading the servant girls, that sort of thing. Docile as milking cows. And it's my intention to keep them that way.” He took a letter from his other hip pocket and scanned it, his eyes pulsing again. “One of our ships is to dock at Colombo harbour shortly, in fact very shortly if the lanes remain clear. I understand that you know your way around the harbour, rather too well by most standards, perhaps, but this is a time of war. Would that ours was a world where every soldier was an English gentleman, but this is not the case of course and for victory to be at hand”—here he spoke louder, as if at a reviewing stand, the pouring rain applause—“sometimes we need fists, and sometimes we need firm handshakes, and sometimes, Kandy, we need dirty fingernails.”

Sam brushed his jacket.

“Good. The ship in question is the
Neptune
, a cruiser carrying New Zealand troops home from Tripoli and also, six ‘special case' prisoners captured with other Italian forces when we took Tunis.” He cleared his throat. These weren't his words. “‘Who are to be disembarked in Ceylon and kept in extreme isolation and utmost secrecy until war's end.'” Mountbatten slapped his leg with the letter. He had to win back Asia and they'd already sent him an American, that bantam cock Sitwell, as his second, and now they were sending him these fellows. Ethiopians. What could Rommel have been using them for? “They are coming, six of them, and I'm not about to have them disrupt our operation at Trincomalee. Now I understand that in addition to your being well-placed about Colombo harbour, Kandy, you're well-placed in a village close to this command. How are you with a padlock and key?”

“You, the British army, would like me to keep war prisoners for you?”

“Special cases, remember. Only six. This is a rare opportunity to help the effort.”

“Yes it is, sir.”

“So we're agreed—”

“Sir, I have need of a secretary.”

“Not one of our Wrens.”

“No, I believe she's a Burgher girl, sir. She works in your office.”

“Second desk?”

“Yes. And—”

“Really? Really.
And?
”

“It's like this. I have a son, sir.”

“Ah. Of course you do. Leave the particulars with my aide before you leave for Colombo. Good day and Godspeed, Kandy.” Mountbatten smiled at his pocket-watch. Half past gin. In Norfolk, in Delhi, here, at home, he thought, they always had sons.