Island of Demons (27 page)

“I was going through that pile of letters about the museum that I had left unopened and found this one. There was another from Temp who had heard from Hub who met Garbo after the funeral in Berlin.” He sighed and suddenly gripped his knees in a spasm of anguish. The cockatoo complained and flapped away to a tree. “He always told me I was the love of his life. When someone says that it's like a curse and when they say it as you are leaving them it's a determination to make their whole life a tragedy out of spite. And when your first love dies it's like a little taste of your own death.”

As usual, I did not know what to say but all he needed was someone he could talk to frankly and without dissimulation, someone who would not be shocked by the sort of emotions of which he would speak. “Did
you
love
him
?” I asked.

“Of course. In fact I still do. That he is dead makes no difference. In fact, some people are easier to love when they are dead than when they were alive.”

“Where is Conrad?” I asked somewhat desperately.

“Oh,” he batted the question away. “We had a young lady visitor, some friend of Claudette Colbert. He has taken her off to an
odalan
festival at Tampaksiring.”

I had noticed that, nowadays, Conrad always took the ladies, Walter the men. This household was becoming totally an economy of seduction. I sat down awkwardly and took his hand. He seized mine and gripped with cold flesh.

“He always told me his money was safe in Switzerland, so I don't know … When I knew him he didn't have two extras to rub together. You know that during the war he was a pilot and went up on a reconnaissance mission. From up there, the whole world looked like hell except for Switzerland where all was peace and quiet, no tracks even to be seen in the snow, like in a silent film, so he landed there with a tale of mechanical and compass malfunction and they interned him in a nice chalet till the end of the war. He was supposed to come here this year. He was sick of Hollywood, had fallen out with Fox. Like Nosferatu, he wanted a place where he could step out into the light and just be himself. I told him Bali was that place. He had bought a yacht and even named it ‘Bali'. If only he hadn't made that last stupid film first.”

“What was that?”

He wiped snot on the back of his hand and dried his eyes with his sleeve like a little boy. It was no good, every instinct made me desperately want to mother him.

“It was called ‘Tabu', some silly romance about tragic love and magic in a South Seas paradise, lots of tits and bums and palm trees.” It sounded rather like one of Walter's films. At the end of “Island of Demons” they had even inserted two scenes of male and female nude bathing that included the boys from the house. They had screamed with embarrassment when Walter showed them the stills. I held out the letter and he took it back with a shaking hand and stowed it away. “He had two of my paintings. I wonder if I could get them back.” Already, he was thinking like an artist.

“What were the unusual circumstances?” He looked blank. “In the letter. It says something about unusual circumstances?”

Walter cleared his throat and swallowed, straightened up and smiled, as if for a closeup. “He was killed on the way to the premier of that damn film. Aristotelian tragedy and so on, undone by own
hubris
. He was in one of those big cabrioletts the Americans like, with the roof down – it was a clear sunny day – and was thrown out when it hit a lanternpole.”

I frowned. “A lamppost? How come it hit a lamppost? Was he drunk?”

“That's not clear, though with Plumpe you can bet he'd had a drink or two. When I first knew him I was very young and innocent and thought he was very wise and sophisticated, then I realised he was just drunk all the time. I was with him the last time they dried him out and you could tell it didn't take. You can't make someone give it up till they are ready – and he wasn't. Hub says Garbo told him Plumpe wasn't even at the wheel but the studio are hushing it up. It seems he had a young Filipino valet.
He
was at the wheel and Plumpe's head was, for some unimaginable reason, beneath the instrumentboard.”

I thought about it. “Do you suppose …?” We were both grinning. Walter rested his forehead hotly against mine. I smoothed his hair and rubbed his ears like a cat's. It just seemed the right thing to do.

“Let us hope so, Bonnetchen. Simultaneity of symbolisms and so on. Corny I know, but the critics love it. Like in one of his films. All comes together in the end. He would have liked that.”

9

“Of course, I have no formal qualifications in music,” said Walter, executing a particularly difficult arabesque, “as I told Leo Stokowski when he was here – but then neither have the Balinese. You might say,” he twinkled, “that, as musicians, they are an unqualified success.” All this going down well enough with guests Colin McPhee and wife Jane Belo, both formally degreed up to the ears and taking Walter's remarks as deference not the dismissal I was sure they were. They had met the Covarrubiases in Paris, seen the Balinese show at the Colonial Exhibition and just embarked on a hymn of praise to Sayers, the artist who had executed the murals – “though, of course, they, themselves, had no formal qualifications in art”.

McPhee might not be impressed by Walter's playing – he was, after all, a concert virtuoso himself, as well as a recognised composer of the modernist school – but he was by the dropping of Stokowski's name. His enemies, of course, maintained that the mercurial conductor and showman was born pedestrian Leonard Stokes in London and had confected his exotic accent, leonine mane and exuberant mannerisms from scratch. The disdaining of the normal baton and the arrangement of concert-hall lights to focus on his hands and the dramatic shadows they threw had come about after his experience of the Balinese shadow play. He had also made a speciality of bedding Garbo and marrying an heiress. McPhee had followed him in that. It was Belo's family money that had subsidised this pelagic excursion.

McPhee, pale, Canadian, red-haired and weakly handsome, very pink, exhibiting the first signs of what Walter would term “porculence”, about thirty in – of all things – a suit . Belo, of the same age, even paler, strawlike blond hair cropped boyishly short, very thin with a wealth of nervous mannerisms and wearing a simple cotton shift like a nightgown, as if she had been snatched from a sanatorium in the middle of the night. The pair, freshly married but uncovarrubiously distant, living as in parallel but never touching.

Conrad had been present at dinner, looked her over in silence and clearly decided that – as an intellectual – she was Walter's patch rather than his. He had left to go to the village where he claimed, as so often nowadays, to have a lesson in Balinese. Possibly, but – if so – then the improvement in linguistic skill did not match the time and effort he was putting in. I suspected a love interest. And why not? He was young and undeviant.

But what was striking now was the blatant buzz of sexual transmission between McPhee and Walter to which she and I remained resolutely deaf. It was, if nothing else, embarrassingly rude to his bride. Pert little Resem had just served coffee with great grace, patting the cups into perfect alignment with delicate fingertips as only the Balinese do and McPhee had given him a look that virtually ripped the sarong from his loins. I felt a flare of paternal outrage over such molestation.

Jane had told me that she was here to work on trance in ritual and performance, that she was a trained cinematographer hoping to make some films, but that her deeper mission was the “exploration of herself and her key sexual configurations”. I detected resonances of years of psychoanalysis, just the thing that has led Americans to see themselves as particularly deep and interesting, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. It was only my blushes that stifled my yawns. I took it that she had been early introduced into the lesbic-leaning sororities of the Ivy League and was now having doubts. These expressed themselves in the usual anthropological form of the conflict between nature and nurture, that would allow her to discover a totally fictitious “real” her, to which she could henceforth be true. Marriage to McPhee – it seemed obvious to me – had been the clearest possible way of situating herself in a heavily defended sexual no-man's land. Temp, I could not help thinking, might have been a more suitable spouse, a marriage made – if not I heaven – at least at Harvard. Her talk that night was all girlish gush of her mentor, Ruth Benedict, and a book she was writing which, she assured me, would reshape the entire subject. I don't believe I ever heard of it again.

“So tell me, Walter, what do the Balinese make of Western music?” Walter stopped playing and turned on his stool, slid out from behind the piano and began walking up and down. An academic audience was as good as a musical one.

“That's an interesting question, Colin. Jazz interests them. After
gamelan
practice once, I played them some records of Ted Lewis, you know New Orleans style, and they nodded along and said that was fun – so everybody
was
happy. Then I played them some Beethoven, one of the piano sonatas. They said it was too busy, too many tunes at the same time, that man needed to sit down and think a bit more and decide what he wanted. So then I gave them a Chopin prelude and some light Mendelssohn. They didn't think much of those. Just like the Opera Stamboul they said – you know – the Malay opera, all screeching and syrupy melodies – the kind of thing the Chinese love to sit around listening to in torn vests. So then I banged out a Bach prelude and they just sat there entranced. Now,
that
, they said was real music.”

McPhee laughed and slid behind the keyboard himself, began to allow something slender and Debussyish to flow from his fingertips. Debussy – himself inspired by the music of the Indies at a previous colonial exposition, but Javanese, the sort that was so vapid it sent Balinese to sleep.

“So,” said Walter, rubbing his hands, suddenly businesslike, “tomorrow we can get you started on the musical tour, bamboo
gamelans
, iron
gamelans
, north versus south, old versus new. I can introduce you to the major musicians and dancers. There's so much going on at the moment. The only problem is petrol. Up here it's worth its weight in gold …” He looked off into space theatrically and chewed his lip as though in thought.

I recognised the opening manoeuvres to reel them in and get them to pay up in advance. So, he was broke again. Murnau's money – referred to in the house as “the American royalties” – had yet to plump up his account. The signs had been there in the incoherent dinner, the vegetable course being my own contribution from the palace, the rest all stuff from the garden packed out with cheap buys in the market, the whole masked as an amusing introduction to local exotica. Oleg came in with
brem
, rice spirit, a present from one of the neighbours. The whisky must have all been used up. To coos of appreciation, Walter passed round rustic Balinese cigarettes wrapped in corn husk and a wind of string.

Oleg had grown, and – it must be said – grown ugly. Under the impact of Walter's kitchen, he had put on weight, one of the few Balinese who would look better in a shirt. Yet he remained as sweet-natured as ever and enjoyed the favours of a very pretty girl down in the village where he now passed the night. And he moved in a very Balinese way that belied his weight. For a Westerner of his build to dance could only be a comic thing, yet Oleg still moved with grace and assurance, at ease with his own form. You could imagine him stamping out a creditable
baris
. I commented on it, then managed to corner Walter, appropriately, in a corner, nudging and whispering. “Moreover,” I finished, “if you value your domestic tranquillity you should make sure Oleg – rather than Resem – looks after McPhee. He's trouble.” He nodded. Was he really listening? “This is not,” I added, “a matter of jealousy as you will doubtless pretend. It is out of concern for Resem's innocence. He is surely unaware of what such men are capable of.”

“Mmm. You are right. About the way Oleg moves – how would you say that in English, in German something like
körperliche Gelassenheit
?”

“Grace?” I suggested. “No. Wait. Poise. He has exquisite poise.”

McPhee looked up sharply, an old bloodhound picking up a distant scent borne on the wind. The corners of his mouth contracted into a shark's rictus.

“Boys?” he asked breathily. He had been knocking back the
brem
and his speech was slurred. “Did somebody say ‘exquisite boys'?”

***

Walter raged around the island with the McPhees, showing, introducing, explaining, leading them off the beaten track to places and experiences they would never have found for themselves. It always refreshed him to show
off his
Bali, drawing strength from the admiration and pleasure of others. There was nothing jealous or proprietorial about Walter. One of his friends was Nyoman Kaler, inventor of the
oleg
dance, another Mario, inventor of the flashy
kebyiar duduk
that was a sort of gobbet compilation, a moving
rijstafel
of difficult dance moves and, of course, Limbak of the new, improved
kecak
. He shared them all unselfishly, as a good boy does his sweets. Walter was always very firm in the view that Balinese theatre and dance did not merely entertain but showed the young how they should best behave.

TheMcPhees settled in a damp house in Kedaton, near Nyoman Kaler, where McPhee worked like a European – not a Balinese – demon, recording and transcribing music, banging out the basic tunes on an old tropicalised upright piano. Of course, in those days we had, as yet, no way of recording sound in the field so it must all be done by hand. The Balinese, themselves, had no system for noting down anything but the most basic melodies so that McPhee had to drag it all out of their heads and memories as passed down from nameless ancestral composers. Communal art as described by Miguel, except, of course, that it could be owned and one hamlet might well capitalistically buy a new tune and the secrets of its performance from another, lock, stock and barrel. The McPhee choice of residence, just across from the shelter in which the hamlet's orchestra practised, might have been seen as the triumph of duty over domestic quiet, had it not also allowed ready access to Nyoman's young and comely nephew, Made Tantra, whom – it soon became clear – McPhee was assiduously, but not monogamously, courting. He was a striking boy, with long, straight hair that he always decorated with great style. Sometimes, it was a flower tucked behind the ear, or a poignantly unopened budlet woven into his crisp forelock. On one occasion, at an evening festival, it was flashing fireflies tied into his hair with tiny threads.