Island (3 page)

And there had been other reasons which he preferred not to mention. Newspapers were only one of Lord Aldehyde’s interests. In another manifestation he was the Southeast Asia Petroleum Company, he was Imperial and Foreign Copper Limited. Officially, Will had come to Rendang to sniff the death in its militarized air; but he had also been commissioned to find out what the dictator felt about foreign capital, what tax rebates he was prepared to offer, what guarantees against nationalization. And how much of the profits would be exportable? How many native technicians and administrators would have to be employed? A whole battery of questions. But Colonel Dipa had been most affable and co-operative. Hence that hair-raising drive, with Murugan at the wheel, to the copper mines. “Primitive, my dear Farnaby, primitive. Urgently in need, as you can see for yourself, of modern equipment.” Another meeting had been arranged—arranged, Will now remembered, for this very morning. He visualized the Colonel at his desk. A report from the chief of police. “Mr. Farnaby was last seen sailing a small boat singlehanded into the Pala Strait. Two hours later a storm of great violence…Presumed dead…” Instead of which, here he was, alive and kicking, on the forbidden island.

“They’ll never give you a visa,” Joe Aldehyde had said at their last interview. “But perhaps you could sneak ashore in disguise. Wear a burnous or something, like Lawrence of Arabia.”

With a straight face, “I’ll try,” Will had promised.

“Anyhow, if you ever do manage to land in Pala, make a beeline for the palace. The Rani—that’s their Queen Mother—is an old friend of mine. Met her for the first time six years ago at Lugano. She was staying there with old Voegeli, the investment banker. His girl friend is interested in spiritualism and they staged a séance for me. A trumpet medium, genuine Direct Voice—only unfortunately it was all in German. Well, after the lights were turned on, I had a long talk with her.”

“With the trumpet?”

“No, no. With the Rani. She’s a remarkable woman. You know, the Crusade of the Spirit.”

“Was that
her
invention?”

“Absolutely. And personally I prefer it to Moral Rearmament. It goes down better in Asia. We had a long talk about it that evening. And after that we talked about oil. Pala’s full of oil. Southeast Asia Petroleum has been trying to get in on it for years. So have all the other companies. Nothing doing. No oil concessions to anyone. It’s their fixed policy. But the Rani doesn’t agree with it. She wants to see the oil doing some good in the world. Financing the Crusade of the Spirit, for example. So, as I say, if ever you get to Pala, make a beeline for the palace. Talk to her. Get the inside story about the men who make the decisions. Find out if there’s a pro-oil minority and ask how we could help them to carry on the good work.” And he had ended by promising Will a handsome bonus if his efforts should be crowned with success. Enough to give him a full year of freedom. “No more reporting. Nothing but High Art, Art, A-ART.” And he had uttered a scatalogical laugh as though the word had an
s
at the end of it and not a
t
. Unspeakable creature! But all the same he wrote for the unspeakable creature’s vile papers and was ready, for a bribe, to do the vile creature’s dirty work. And now, incredibly, here he was on Palanese soil. As luck would have it, Providence had been on his side—for the express
purpose, evidently, of perpetrating one of those sinister practical jokes which are Providence’s specialty.

He was called back to present reality by the sound of Mary Sarojini’s shrill voice. “Here we are!”

Will raised his head again. The little procession had turned off the highway and was passing through an opening in a white stuccoed wall. To the left, on a rising succession of terraces, stood lines of low buildings shaped by peepul trees. Straight ahead an avenue of tall palms sloped down to a lotus pool, on the further side of which sat a huge stone Buddha. Turning to the left, they climbed between flowering trees and through blending perfumes to the first terrace. Behind a fence, motionless except for his ruminating jaws, stood a snow-white humped bull, godlike in his serene and mindless beauty. Europa’s lover receded into the past, and here were a brace of Juno’s birds trailing their feathers over the grass. Mary Sarojini unlatched the gate of a small garden.

“My bungalow,” said Dr. MacPhail, and turning to Murugan, “Let me help you to negotiate the steps.”

T
OM
K
RISHNA AND
M
ARY
S
AROJINI HAD GONE TO TAKE THEIR
siesta with the gardener’s children next door. In her darkened living room Susila MacPhail sat alone with her memories of past happiness and the present pain of her bereavement. The clock in the kitchen struck the half hour. It was time for her to go. With a sigh she rose, put on her sandals and walked out into the tremendous glare of the tropical afternoon. She looked up at the sky. Over the volcanoes enormous clouds were climbing towards the zenith. In an hour it would be raining. Moving from one pool of shadow to the next, she made her way along the tree-lined path. With a sudden rattle of quills a flock of pigeons broke out of one of the towering peepul trees. Green-winged and coral-billed, their breasts changing color in the light like mother-of-pearl, they flew off towards the forest. How beautiful they were, how unutterably lovely! Susila was on the point of turning to catch the expression of delight on Dugald’s upturned face; then, checking herself, she looked down at the ground. There was no Dugald any more; there was only this pain, like the pain of the phantom limb that goes on haunting the imagination,
haunting even the perceptions of those who have undergone an amputation. “Amputation,” she whispered to herself, “amputation…” Feeling her eyes fill with tears, she broke off. Amputation was no excuse for self-pity and, for all that Dugald was dead, the birds were as beautiful as ever and her children, all the other children, had as much need to be loved and helped and taught. If his absence was so constantly present, that was to remind her that henceforward she must love for two, live for two, take thought for two, must perceive and understand not merely with her own eyes and mind but with the mind and eyes that had been his and, before the catastrophe, hers too in a communion of delight and intelligence.

But here was the doctor’s bungalow. She mounted the steps, crossed the veranda and walked into the living room. Her father-in-law was seated near the window, sipping cold tea from an earthenware mug and reading the
Revue de Mycologie
. He looked up as she approached, and gave her a welcoming smile.

“Susila, my dear! I’m so glad you were able to come.”

She bent down and kissed his stubbly cheek.

“What’s all this I hear from Mary Sarojini?” she asked. “Is it true she found a castaway?”

“From England—but via China, Rendang, and a shipwreck. A journalist.”

“What’s he like?”

“The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve endings and his cleverness won’t allow it.”

“So I suppose he’s very unhappy.”

“So unhappy that he has to laugh like a hyena.”

“Does he know he laughs like a hyena?”

“Knows and is rather proud of it. Even makes epigrams about it. ‘I’m the man who won’t take yes for an answer.’”

“Is he badly hurt?” she asked.

“Not badly. But he’s running a temperature. I’ve started him on antibiotics. Now it’s up to you to raise his resistance and give the
vis medicatrix naturae
a chance.”

“I’ll do my best.” Then, after a silence, “I went to see Lakshmi,” she said, “on my way back from school.”

“How did you find her?”

“About the same. No, perhaps a little weaker than yesterday.”

“That’s what I felt when I saw her this morning.”

“Luckily the pain doesn’t seem to get any worse. We can still handle it psychologically. And today we worked on the nausea. She was able to drink something. I don’t think there’ll be any more need for intravenous fluids.”

“Thank goodness!” he said. “Those IV’s were a torture. Such enormous courage in the face of every real danger; but whenever it was a question of a hypodermic or a needle in a vein, the most abject and irrational terror.”

He thought of the time, in the early days of their marriage, when he had lost his temper and called her a coward for making such a fuss. Lakshmi had cried and, having submitted to her martyrdom, had heaped coals of fire upon his head by begging to be forgiven. “Lakshmi, Lakshmi…” And now in a few days she would be dead. After thirty-seven years. “What did you talk about?” he asked aloud.

“Nothing in particular,” Susila answered. But the truth was that they had talked about Dugald and that she couldn’t bring herself to repeat what had passed between them. “My first baby,” the dying woman had whispered. “I didn’t know that babies could be so beautiful.” In their skull-deep, skull-dark sockets the eyes had brightened, the bloodless lips had smiled. “Such tiny, tiny hands,” the faint hoarse voice went on, “such a
greedy little mouth!” And an almost fleshless hand tremblingly touched the place where, before last year’s operation, her breast had been. “I never knew,” she repeated. And, before the event, how could she have known? It had been a revelation, an apocalypse of touch and love. “Do you know what I mean?” And Susila had nodded. Of course she knew—had known it in relation to her own two children, known it, in those other apocalypses of touch and love, with the man that little Dugald of the tiny hands and greedy mouth had grown into. “I used to be afraid for him,” the dying woman had whispered. “He was so strong, such a tyrant, he could have hurt and bullied and destroyed. If he’d married another woman…I’m so thankful it was you!” From the place where the breast had been the fleshless hand moved out and came to rest on Susila’s arm. She had bent her head and kissed it. They were both crying.

Dr. MacPhail sighed, looked up and, like a man who has climbed out of the water, gave himself a little shake. “The castaway’s name is Farnaby,” he said. “Will Farnaby.”

“Will Farnaby,” Susila repeated. “Well, I’d better go and see what I can do for him.” She turned and walked away.

Dr. MacPhail looked after her, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He thought of his son, he thought of his wife—of Lakshmi slowly wasting to extinction, of Dugald like a bright fiery flame suddenly snuffed out. Thought of the incomeprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny. “Poor girl,” he said to himself, remembering the look on Susila’s face when he had told her of what had happened to Dugald, “poor girl!” Meanwhile there was this article on Hallucinogenic mushrooms in the
Revue de Mycologie
. That was another of the irrelevancies that somehow took its place in the pattern. The words of one of the old Raja’s queer little poems came to his mind.

The door creaked, and an instant later Will heard light footsteps and the rustle of skirts. Then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a woman’s voice, low-pitched and musical, asked him how he was feeling.

“I’m feeling miserable,” he answered without opening his eyes.

There was no self-pity in his tone, no appeal for sympathy—only the angry matter-of-factness of a Stoic who has finally grown sick of the long farce of impassibility and is resentfully blurting out the truth.

“I’m feeling miserable.”

The hand touched him again. “I’m Susila MacPhail,” said the voice “Mary Sarojini’s mother.”

Reluctantly Will turned his head and opened his eyes. An adult, darker version of Mary Sarojini was sitting there beside the bed, smiling at him with friendly solicitude. To smile back at her would have cost him too great an effort; he contented himself with saying “How do you do,” then pulled the sheet a little higher and closed his eyes again.

Susila looked down at him in silence—at the bony shoulders, at the cage of ribs under a skin whose Nordic pallor made him seem, to her Palanese eyes, so strangely frail and vulnerable, at the sunburnt face, emphatically featured like a carving intended to be seen at a distance—emphatic and yet sensitive, the quivering, more than naked face, she found herself thinking, of a man who has been flayed and left to suffer.

“I hear you’re from England,” she said at last.

“I don’t care where I’m from,” Will muttered irritably. “Nor where I’m going.
From
hell
to
hell.”

“I was in England just after the war,” she went on. “As a student.”

He tried not to listen; but ears have no lids; there was no escape from that intruding voice.

“There was a girl in my psychology class,” it was saying: “her people lived at Wells. She asked me to stay with them for the first month of the summer vacation. Do you know Wells?”

Of course he knew Wells. Why did she pester him with her silly reminiscences?

“I used to love walking there by the water,” Susila went on, “looking across the moat at the cathedral”—and thinking, while she looked at the cathedral, of Dugald under the palm trees on the beach, of Dugald giving her her first lesson in rock climbing. “You’re on the rope. You’re perfectly safe. You can’t possibly fall…” Can’t possibly fall, she repeated bitterly—and then remembered here and now, remembered that she had a job to do, remembered, as she looked again at the flayed emphatic face, that here was a human being in pain. “How lovely it was,” she went on, “and how marvelously peaceful!”

The voice, it seemed to Will Farnaby, had become more musical and in some strange way more remote. Perhaps that was why he no longer resented its intrusion.

“Such an extraordinary sense of peace.
Shanti, shanti, shanti
. The peace that passes understanding.”

The voice was almost chanting now—chanting, it seemed, out of some other world.

“I can shut my eyes,” it chanted on, “can shut my eyes and see it all so clearly. Can see the church—and it’s enormous, much taller than the huge trees round the bishop’s palace. Can see the green grass and the water and the golden sunlight on the stones and the slanting shadows between the buttresses. And lis
ten! I can hear the bells. The bells and the jackdaws. The jackdaws in the tower—can you hear the jackdaws?”

Yes, he could hear the jackdaws, could hear them almost as clearly as he now heard those parrots in the trees outside his window. He was here and at the same time he was there—here in this dark, sweltering room near the equator, but also there, outdoors in that cool hollow at the edge of the Mendips, with the jackdaws calling from the cathedral tower and the sound of the bells dying away into the green silence.

“And there are white clouds,” the voice was saying, “and the blue sky between them is so pale, so delicate, so exquisitely tender.”

Tender, he repeated, the tender blue sky of that April weekend he had spent there, before the disaster of their marriage, with Molly. There were daisies in the grass and dandelions, and across the water towered up the huge church, challenging the wildness of those soft April clouds with its austere geometry. Challenging the wildness, and at the same time complementing it, coming to terms with it in perfect reconciliation. That was how it should have been with himself and Molly—how it had been then.

“And the swans,” he now heard the voice dreamily chanting, “the swans…”

Yes, the swans. White swans moving across a mirror of jade and jet—a breathing mirror that heaved and trembled, so that their silvery images were forever breaking and coming together again, disintegrating and being made whole.

“Like the inventions of heraldry. Romantic, impossibly beautiful. And yet there they are—real birds in a real place. So near to me now that I can almost touch them—and yet so far away, thousands of miles away. Far away on that smooth water, moving as if by magic, softly, majestically…”

Majestically, moving majestically, with the dark water lifting and parting as the curved white breasts advanced—lifting, parting, sliding back in ripples that widened in a gleaming arrowhead
behind them. He could see them moving across their dark mirror, could hear the jackdaws in the tower, could catch, through this nearer mingling of disinfectants and gardenias, the cold, flat, weedy smell of that Gothic moat in the faraway green valley.

“Effortlessly floating.”

“Effortlessly floating.” The words gave him a deep satisfaction.

“I’d sit there,” she was saying, “I’d sit there looking and looking, and in a little while
I
’d be floating too. I’d be floating with the swans on that smooth surface between the darkness below and the pale tender sky above. Floating at the same time on that other surface between here and far away, between then and now.” And between remembered happiness, she was thinking, and this insistent, excruciating presence of an absence. “Floating,” she said aloud, “on the surface between the real and the imagined, between what comes to us from the outside and what comes to us from within, from deep, deep down in here.”

She laid her hand on his forehead, and suddenly the words transformed themselves into the things and events for which they stood; the images turned into facts. He actually
was
floating.

“Floating,” the voice softly insisted. “Floating like a white bird on the water. Floating on a great river of life—a great smooth silent river that flows so still, so still, you might almost think it was asleep. A sleeping river. But it flows irresistibly.

“Life flowing silently and irresistibly into ever fuller life, into a living peace all the more profound, all the richer and stronger and more complete because it knows all your pain and unhappiness, knows them and takes them into itself and makes them one with its own substance. And it’s into that peace that you’re floating now, floating on this smooth silent river that sleeps and is yet irresistible, and is irresistible precisely because it’s sleeping. And I’m floating with it.” She was speaking for the stranger. She was speaking on another level for herself. “Effortlessly floating. Not having to do anything at all. Just letting go, just allowing myself
to be carried along, just asking this irresistible sleeping river of life to take me where it’s going—and knowing all the time that where it’s going is where I want to go, where I have to go: into more life, into living peace. Along the sleeping river, irresistibly, into the wholeness of reconciliation.”