Island (2 page)

S
UDDENLY THE BIRD CEASED TO BE ARTICULATE AND STARTED TO
scream. A small shrill human voice said, “Mynah!” and then added something in a language that Will did not understand. There was a sound of footsteps on dry leaves. Then a little cry of alarm. Then silence. Will opened his eyes and saw two exquisite children looking down at him, their eyes wide with astonishment and a fascinated horror. The smaller of them was a tiny boy of five, perhaps, or six, dressed only in a green loincloth. Beside him, carrying a basket of fruit on her head, stood a little girl some four or five years older. She wore a full crimson skirt that reached almost to her ankles; but above the waist she was naked. In the sunlight her skin glowed like pale copper flushed with rose. Will looked from one child to the other. How beautiful they were, and how faultless, how extraordinarily elegant! Like two little thoroughbreds. A round and sturdy thoroughbred, with a face like a cherub’s—that was the boy. And the girl was another kind of thoroughbred, fine-drawn, with a rather long, grave little face framed between braids of dark hair.

There was another burst of screaming. On its perch in the dead tree the bird was turning nervously this way and that; then,
with a final screech, it dived into the air. Without taking her eyes from Will’s face, the girl held out her hand invitingly. The bird fluttered, settled, flapped wildly, found its balance, then folded its wings and immediately started to hiccup. Will looked on without surprise. Anything was possible now—anything. Even talking birds that would perch on a child’s finger. Will tried to smile at them; but his lips were still trembling, and what was meant to be a sign of friendliness must have seemed like a frightening grimace. The little boy took cover behind his sister.

The bird stopped hiccuping and began to repeat a word that Will did not understand. “Runa”—was that it? No, “
karuna
.” Definitely “
karuna
.”

He raised a trembling hand and pointed at the fruit in the round basket. Mangoes, bananas…His dry mouth was watering.

“Hungry,” he said. Then, feeling that in these exotic circumstances the child might understand him better if he put on an imitation of a musical-comedy Chinaman, “Me velly hungly,” he elaborated.

“Do you want to eat?” the child asked in perfect English.

“Yes—eat,” he repeated, “eat.”

“Fly away, mynah!” She shook her hand. The bird uttered a protesting squawk and returned to its perch on the dead tree. Lifting her thin little arms in a gesture that was like a dancer’s, the child raised the basket from her head, then lowered it to the ground. She selected a banana, peeled it and, torn between fear and compassion, advanced towards the stranger. In his incomprehensible language the little boy uttered a cry of warning and clutched at her skirt. With a reassuring word, the girl halted, well out of danger, and held up the fruit.

“Do you want it?” she asked.

Still trembling, Will Farnaby stretched out his hand. Very cautiously, she edged forward, then halted again and, crouching down, peered at him intently.

“Quick,” he said in an agony of impatience.

But the little girl was taking no chances. Eyeing his hand for the least sign of a suspicious movement, she leaned forward, she cautiously extended her arm.

“For God’s sake,” he implored.

“God?” the child repeated with sudden interest. “Which god?” she asked. “There are such a lot of them.”

“Any damned god you like,” he answered impatiently.

“I don’t really like any of them,” she answered. “I like the Compassionate One.”

“Then be compassionate to me,” he begged. “Give me that banana.”

Her expression changed. “I’m sorry,” she said apologetically. Rising to her full height, she took a quick step forward and dropped the fruit into his shaking hand.

“There,” she said and, like a little animal avoiding a trap, she jumped back, out of reach.

The small boy clapped his hands and laughed aloud. She turned and said something to him. He nodded his round head, and saying “Okay, boss,” trotted away, through a barrage of blue and sulphur butterflies, into the forest shadows on the further side of the glade.

“I told Tom Krishna to go and fetch someone,” she explained.

Will finished his banana and asked for another, and then for a third. As the urgency of his hunger diminished, he felt a need to satisfy his curiosity.

“How is it that you speak such good English?” he asked.

“Because everybody speaks English,” the child answered.

“Everybody?”

“I mean, when they’re not speaking Palanese.” Finding the subject uninteresting, she turned, waved a small brown hand and whistled.

“Here and now, boys,” the bird repeated yet once more, then
fluttered down from its perch on the dead tree and settled on her shoulder. The child peeled another banana, gave two-thirds of it to Will and offered what remained to the mynah.

“Is that your bird?” Will asked.

She shook her head.

“Mynahs are like the electric light,” she said. “They don’t belong to anybody.”

“Why does he say those things?”

“Because somebody taught him,” she answered patiently. What an ass! her tone seemed to imply.

“But why did they teach him
those
things? Why ‘Attention’? Why ‘Here and now’?”

“Well…” She searched for the right words in which to explain the self-evident to this strange imbecile. “That’s what you always forget, isn’t it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now.”

“And the mynahs fly about reminding you—is that it?”

She nodded. That, of course, was it. There was a silence.

“What’s your name?” she inquired.

Will introduced himself.

“My name’s Mary Sarojini MacPhail.”

“MacPhail?” It was too implausible.

“MacPhail,” she assured him.

“And your little brother is called Tom Krishna?” She nodded. “Well, I’m damned!”

“Did you come to Pala by the airplane?”

“I came out of the sea.”

“Out of the sea? Do you have a boat?”

“I did have one.” With his mind’s eye Will saw the waves breaking over the stranded hulk, heard with his inner ear the crash of their impact. Under her questioning he told her what had happened. The storm, the beaching of the boat, the long
nightmare of the climb, the snakes, the horror of falling…He began to tremble again, more violently than ever.

Mary Sarojini listened attentively and without comment. Then, as his voice faltered and finally broke, she stepped forward and, the bird still perched on her shoulder, kneeled down beside him.

“Listen, Will,” she said, laying a hand on his forehead. “We’ve got to get rid of this.” Her tone was professional and calmly authoritative.

“I wish I knew how,” he said between chattering teeth.

“How?” she repeated. “But in the usual way, of course. Tell me again about those snakes and how you fell down.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to.”

“Of course you don’t want to,” she said. “But you’ve got to. Listen to what the mynah’s saying.”

“Here and now, boys,” the bird was still exhorting. “Here and now, boys.”

“You can’t be here and now,” she went on, “until you’ve got rid of those snakes. Tell me.”

“I don’t want to, I don’t want to.” He was almost in tears.

“Then you’ll never get rid of them. They’ll be crawling about inside your head forever. And serve you right,” Mary Sarojini added severely.

He tried to control the trembling; but his body had ceased to belong to him. Someone else was in charge, someone malevolently determined to humiliate him, to make him suffer.

“Remember what happened when you were a little boy,” Mary Sarojini was saying. “What did your mother do when you hurt yourself?”

She had taken him in her arms, had said, “My poor baby, my poor little baby.”

“She did
that
?” The child spoke in a tone of shocked amazement. “But that’s awful! That’s the way to rub it in. ‘My poor
baby,’” she repeated derisively, “it must have gone on hurting for hours. And you’d never forget it.”

Will Farnaby made no comment, but lay there in silence, shaken by irrepressible shudderings.

“Well, if you won’t do it yourself, I’ll have to do it for you. Listen, Will: there was a snake, a big green snake, and you almost stepped on him. You almost stepped on him, and it gave you such a fright that you lost your balance, you fell. Now say it yourself—say it!”

“I almost stepped on him,” he whispered obediently. “And then I…” He couldn’t say it. “Then I fell,” he brought out at last, almost inaudibly.

All the horror of it came back to him—the nausea of fear, the panic start that had made him lose his balance, and then worse fear and the ghastly certainty that it was the end.

“Say it again.”

“I almost stepped on him. And then…”

He heard himself whimpering.

“That’s right, Will. Cry—cry!”

The whimpering became a moaning. Ashamed, he clenched his teeth, and the moaning stopped.

“No, don’t do that,” she cried. “Let it come out if it wants to. Remember that snake, Will. Remember how you fell.”

The moaning broke out again and he began to shudder more violently than ever.

“Now tell me what happened.”

“I could see its eyes, I could see its tongue going in and out.”

“Yes, you could see his tongue. And what happened then?”

“I lost my balance, I fell.”

“Say it again, Will.” He was sobbing now. “Say it again,” she insisted.

“I fell.”

“Again.”

It was tearing him to pieces, but he said it. “I fell.”

“Again, Will.” She was implacable. “Again.”

“I fell, I fell. I fell…”

Gradually the sobbing died down. The words came more easily and the memories they aroused were less painful.

“I fell,” he repeated for the hundredth time.

“But you didn’t fall very far,” Mary Sarojini now said.

“No, I didn’t fall very far,” he agreed.

“So what’s all the fuss about?” the child inquired.

There was no malice or irony in her tone, not the slightest implication of blame. She was just asking a simple, straightforward question that called for a simple, straightforward answer. Yes, what
was
all the fuss about? The snake hadn’t bitten him; he hadn’t broken his neck. And anyhow it had all happened yesterday. Today there were these butterflies, this bird that called one to attention, this strange child who talked to one like a Dutch uncle, looked like an angel out of some unfamiliar mythology and within five degrees of the equator was called, believe it or not, MacPhail. Will Farnaby laughed aloud.

The little girl clapped her hands and laughed too. A moment later the bird on her shoulder joined in with peal upon peal of loud demonic laughter that filled the glade and echoed among the trees, so that the whole universe seemed to be fairly splitting its sides over the enormous joke of existence.

“W
ELL
, I’
M GLAD IT’S ALL SO AMUSING
,”
A DEEP VOICE SUDDENLY
commented.

Will Farnaby turned and saw, smiling down at him, a small spare man dressed in European clothes and carrying a black bag. A man, he judged, in his late fifties. Under the wide straw hat the hair was thick and white, and what a strange beaky nose! And the eyes—how incongruously blue in the dark face!

“Grandfather!” he heard Mary Sarojini exclaiming.

The stranger turned from Will to the child.

“What was so funny?” he asked.

“Well,” Mary Sarojini began, and paused for a moment to marshal her thoughts. “Well, you see, he was in a boat and there was that storm yesterday and he got wrecked—somewhere down there. So he had to climb up the cliff. And there were some snakes, and he fell down. But luckily there was a tree, so he only had a fright. Which was why he was shivering so hard, so I gave him some bananas and I made him go through it a million times. And then all of a sudden he saw that it wasn’t anything to worry about. I mean, it’s all over and done with. And that made him
laugh. And when he laughed, I laughed. And then the mynah bird laughed.”

“Very good,” said her grandfather approvingly. “And now,” he added, turning back to Will Farnaby, “after the psychological first aid, let’s see what can be done for poor old Brother Ass. I’m Dr. Robert MacPhail, by the way. Who are you?”

“His name’s Will,” said Mary Sarojini before the young man could answer. “And his other name is Far-something.”

“Farnaby, to be precise. William Asquith Farnaby. My father, as you might guess, was an ardent Liberal. Even when he was drunk. Especially when he was drunk.” He gave vent to a harsh derisive laugh strangely unlike the full-throated merriment which had greeted his discovery that there was really nothing to make a fuss about.

“Didn’t you like your father?” Mary Sarojini asked with concern.

“Not as much as I might have,” Will answered.

“What he means,” Dr. MacPhail explained to the child, “is that he hated his father. A lot of them do,” he added parenthetically.

Squatting down on his haunches, he began to undo the straps of his black bag.

“One of our ex-imperialists, I assume,” he said over his shoulder to the young man.

“Born in Bloomsbury,” Will confirmed.

“Upper class,” the doctor diagnosed, “but not a member of the military or county subspecies.”

“Correct. My father was a barrister and political journalist. That is, when he wasn’t too busy being an alcoholic. My mother, incredible as it may seem, was the daughter of an archdeacon. An
archdeacon
,” he repeated, and laughed again as he had laughed over his father’s taste for brandy.

Dr. MacPhail looked at him for a moment, then turned his attention once more to the straps.

“When you laugh like that,” he remarked in a tone of scientific detachment, “your face becomes curiously ugly.”

Taken aback, Will tried to cover his embarrassment with a piece of facetiousness. “It’s always ugly,” he said.

“On the contrary, in a Baudelairean sort of way it’s rather beautiful. Except when you choose to make noises like a hyena. Why do you make those noises?”

“I’m a journalist,” Will explained. “Our Special Correspondent, paid to travel about the world and report on the current horrors. What other kind of noise do you expect me to make? Coo-coo? Blah-blah? Marx-Marx?” He laughed again, then brought out one of his well-tried witticisms. “I’m the man who won’t take yes for an answer.”

“Pretty,” said Dr. MacPhail. “Very pretty. But now let’s get down to business.” Taking a pair of scissors out of his bag, he started to cut away the torn and bloodstained trouser leg that covered Will’s injured knee.

Will Farnaby looked up at him and wondered, as he looked, how much of this improbable Highlander was still Scottish and how much Palanese. About the blue eyes and the jutting nose there could be no doubt. But the brown skin, the delicate hands, the grace of movement—these surely came from somewhere considerably south of the Tweed.

“Were you born here?” he asked.

The doctor nodded affirmatively. “At Shivapuram, on the day of Queen Victoria’s funeral.”

There was a final click of the scissors, and the trouser leg fell away, exposing the knee. “Messy,” was Dr. MacPhail’s verdict after a first intent scrutiny. “But I don’t think there’s anything too serious.” He turned to his granddaughter. “I’d like you to run back to the station and ask Vijaya to come here with one of the other men. Tell them to pick up a stretcher at the infirmary.”

Mary Sarojini nodded and, without a word, rose to her feet and hurried away across the glade.

Will looked after the small figure as it receded—the red skirt swinging from side to side, the smooth skin of the torso glowing rosily golden in the sunlight.

“You have a very remarkable granddaughter,” he said to Dr. MacPhail.

“Mary Sarojini’s father,” said the doctor after a little silence, “was my eldest son. He died four months ago—a mountain-climbing accident.”

Will mumbled his sympathy, and there was another silence.

Dr. MacPhail uncorked a bottle of alcohol and swabbed his hands.

“This is going to hurt a bit,” he warned. “I’d suggest that you listen to that bird.” He waved a hand in the direction of the dead tree, to which, after Mary Sarojini’s departure, the mynah had returned.

“Listen to him closely, listen discriminatingly. It’ll keep your mind off the discomfort.”

Will Farnaby listened. The mynah had gone back to its first theme.

“Attention,” the articulate oboe was calling. “Attention.”

“Attention to what?” he asked, in the hope of eliciting a more enlightening answer than the one he had received from Mary Sarojini.

“To attention,” said Dr. MacPhail.

“Attention to attention?”

“Of course.”

“Attention,” the mynah chanted in ironical confirmation.

“Do you have many of these talking birds?”

“There must be at least a thousand of them flying about the island. It was the Old Raja’s idea. He thought it would do people good. Maybe it does, though it seems rather unfair to the poor mynahs. Fortunately, however, birds don’t understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis’. Just imagine,” he went on, “preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and
chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to
him
? And now,” he added in another tone, “you’d better start listening to our friend in the tree. I’m going to clean this thing up.”

“Attention.”

“Here goes.”

The young man winced and bit his lip.

“Attention. Attention. Attention.”

Yes, it was quite true. If you listened intently enough, the pain wasn’t so bad.

“Attention. Attention…”

“How you ever contrived to get up that cliff,” said Dr. MacPhail, as he reached for the bandage, “I cannot conceive.”

Will managed to laugh. “Remember the beginning of
Erewhon
,” he said. “‘As luck would have it, Providence was on my side.’”

From the further side of the glade came the sound of voices. Will turned his head and saw Mary Sarojini emerging from between the trees, her red skirt swinging as she skipped along. Behind her, naked to the waist and carrying over his shoulder the bamboo poles and rolled-up canvas of a light stretcher, walked a huge bronze statue of a man, and behind the giant came a slender, dark-skinned adolescent in white shorts.

“This is Vijaya Bhattacharya,” said Dr. MacPhail as the bronze statue approached. “Vijaya is my assistant.”

“In the hospital?”

Dr. MacPhail shook his head. “Except in emergencies,” he said, “I don’t practice any more. Vijaya and I work together at the Agricultural Experimental Station. And Murugan Mailendra” (he waved his hand in the direction of the dark-skinned boy) “is with us temporarily, studying soil science and plant breeding.”

Vijaya stepped aside and, laying a large hand on his companion’s shoulder, pushed him forward. Looking up into that beau
tiful, sulky young face, Will suddenly recognized, with a start of surprise, the elegantly tailored youth he had met, five days before, at Rendang-Lobo, had driven with in Colonel Dipa’s white Mercedes all over the island. He smiled, he opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself. Almost imperceptibly but quite unmistakenly, the boy had shaken his head. In his eyes Will saw an expression of anguished pleading. His lips moved soundlessly. “Please,” he seemed to be saying, “please…” Will readjusted his face.

“How do you do, Mr. Mailendra,” he said in a tone of casual formality.

Murugan looked enormously relieved. “How do you do,” he said, and made a little bow.

Will looked round to see if the others had noticed what had happened. Mary Sarojini and Vijaya, he saw, were busy with the stretcher and the doctor was repacking his black bag. The little comedy had been played without an audience. Young Murugan evidently had his reasons for not wanting it to be known that he had been in Rendang. Boys will be boys. Boys will even be girls. Colonel Dipa had been more than fatherly towards his young protégé, and towards the Colonel, Murugan had been a good deal more than filial—he had been positively adoring. Was it merely hero worship, merely a schoolboy’s admiration for the strong man who had carried out a successful revolution, liquidated the opposition, and installed himself as dictator? Or were other feelings involved? Was Murugan playing Antinoüs to this black-mustached Hadrian? Well, if that was how he felt about middle-aged military gangsters, that was his privilege. And if the gangster liked pretty boys, that was
his
. And perhaps, Will went on to reflect, that was why Colonel Dipa had refrained from making a formal introduction. “This is Muru” was all he had said when the boy was ushered into the presidential office. “My young friend Muru,” and he had risen, had put his arm around the boy’s shoulders, had led him to the sofa and sat down beside
him. “May I drive the Mercedes?” Murugan had asked. The dictator had smiled indulgently and nodded his sleek black head. And that was another reason for thinking that more than mere friendliness was involved in that curious relationship. At the wheel of the Colonel’s sports car Murugan was a maniac. Only an infatuated lover would have entrusted himself, not to mention his guest, to such a chauffeur. On the flat between Rendang-Lobo and the oil fields the speedometer had twice touched a hundred and ten; and worse, much worse, was to follow on the mountain road from the oil fields to the copper mines. Chasms yawned, tires screeched round corners, water buffaloes emerged from bamboo thickets a few feet ahead of the car, ten-ton lorries came roaring down on the wrong side of the road. “Aren’t you a little nervous?” Will had ventured to ask. But the gangster was pious as well as infatuated. “If one knows that one is doing the will of Allah—and I
do
know it, Mr. Farnaby—there is no excuse for nervousness. In those circumstances, nervousness would be blasphemy.” And as Murugan swerved to avoid yet another buffalo, he opened his gold cigarette case and offered Will a Balkan Sobranje.

“Ready,” Vijaya called.

Will turned his head and saw the stretcher lying on the ground beside him.

“Good!” said Dr. MacPhail. “Let’s lift him onto it. Carefully. Carefully…”

A minute later the little procession was winding its way up the narrow path between the trees. Mary Sarojini was in the van, her grandfather brought up the rear and, between them, came Murugan and Vijaya at either end of the stretcher.

From his moving bed Will Farnaby looked up through the green darkness as though from the floor of a living sea. Far overhead, near the surface, there was a rustling among the leaves, a noise of monkeys. And now it was a dozen hornbills hopping,
like the figments of a disordered imagination, through a cloud of orchids.

“Are you comfortable?” Vijaya asked, bending solicitously to look into his face.

Will smiled back at him.

“Luxuriously comfortable,” he said.

“It isn’t far,” the other went on reassuringly. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Where’s ‘there’?”

“The Experimental Station. It’s like Rothamsted. Did you ever go to Rothamsted when you were in England?”

Will had heard of it, of course, but never seen the place.

“It’s been going for more than a hundred years,” Vijaya went on.

“A hundred and eighteen, to be precise,” said Dr. MacPhail. “Lawes and Gilbert started their work on fertilizers in 1843. One of their pupils came out here in the early fifties to help my grandfather get our station going. Rothamsted in the tropics—that was the idea.
In
the tropics and
for
the tropics.”

There was a lightening of the green gloom and a moment later the litter emerged from the forest into the full glare of tropical sunshine. Will raised his head and looked about him. They were not far from the floor of an immense amphitheater. Five hundred feet below stretched a wide plain, checkered with fields, dotted with clumps of trees and clustered houses. In the other direction the slopes climbed up and up, thousands of feet towards a semicircle of mountains. Terrace above green or golden terrace, from the plain to the crenelated wall of peaks, the rice paddies followed the contour lines, emphasizing every swell and recession of the slope with what seemed a deliberate and artful intention. Nature here was no longer merely natural; the landscape had been composed, had been reduced to its geometrical essences, and rendered, by what in a painter would have
been a miracle of virtuosity, in terms of these sinuous lines, these streaks of pure bright color.

“What were you doing in Rendang?” Dr. Robert asked, breaking a long silence.

“Collecting materials for a piece on the new regime.”

“I wouldn’t have thought the Colonel was newsworthy.”

“You’re mistaken. He’s a
military
dictator. That means there’s death in the offing. And death is always news. Even the remote smell of death is news.” He laughed. “That’s why I was told to drop in on my way back from China.”