Island of Demons (34 page)

***

The Hotel des Indes had not greatly changed. At this hour of the afternoon, it was still overswept and - polished, overstaffed and doubtless still overcharged. The marble-tiled vestibule echoed with the clicking heels of those busily engaged in the world economy from which I had seceded. Theirs was a sphere of rustling Dutch banknotes, mine one of chinking Chinese
cash
. I started at a strange sound, then remembered – the shrilling of a telephone. I could no longer afford to stay here myself and had taken lodgings with a respectable widow near the Protestant Church, conveniently near the
Lapangan Gambir
, where, in the shadow of the railway station, occurred those nocturnal activities traditional to a town square in the Indies. The news stand snarled with the concerns of a wider world. Adolf Hitler had become chancellor in Germany. Paraguay and Bolivia had clashed. Peru and Columbia were at war. The Japanese were still in Shanghai and quailing before threatening Western powers. Nothing to do with me. Off to one side, three willowy, becummerbunded Eurasians were playing something syncopated and South American – possibly Peruvian – with excessively martial maracas. Exhibitions in those days were organised mostly by little circles of art-lovers, principally Dutch ladies of a certain age. I had spent the last week in a desert of small-talk and stolid food. My guts and ears were clogged with stodge. Yesterday, I had given the circle a talk on Rembrandt, to a packed sitting-room, that had indeed led on to a vigorous discussion, but unfortunately about the perennial problem of mildew in the tropics. I deserved a little treat and made my way to the bar where the golden glow of the sun through the shades gave light without heat and the overhead fans rustled the leaves of the palms like the wind in distant Bali. Another brief moment of shock at so many white faces together, then, behind the bar, at which I took my place, was a delightful brown face, a new barman, sharp-featured, a fine nose but with huge, dark eyes … I heard myself groan.

“Tuan?”

“
Bir
.” It came cold and frothy-headed, in a glass like a vase, on a neat coaster and delivered with a smile. It was the beer you dream about on a hot, sultry night in Ubud. I smiled back and held his eye just a little too long for normal politeness and feigned bored, time-rich idleness. I was ashamed of myself, with a sad foreknowledge of self-disgust, but the anonymity of a relatively strange town spurred on my excitement.

“How long have you been here?”

He arranged his little dishes behind the raised bartop. “A month.”

“How is it?”

He seesawed with his hands. “So-so.” I sipped, affecting leisurely chatter.

“Where are you from?”

“Semarang.”

“A pig … fine town, Semarang. I have friends there.” The politenesses were dealt with. Now to business. “You are married?”

He blushed though there was nothing irregular in my asking the question in the Indies. When people as dark-skinned as him blush it is a thing not of colour but of heat.

“
Belum
– not yet. And you?”

I was ten years older than him, an explanation was necessary, at my age, for my singularity. “No. I am a bachelor.” I paused with simulated brooding significance. “I like the company of other bachelors.” The line sounded ridiculous even to myself. I looked at him. Did he get my drift? Oh yes. He got it all right and was smiling down at his hands. I leaned forward to ask what time his shift finished. I must remember to ask his name. A hand fell on my shoulder.

“Bonnetchen. Leave him alone. He is young enough to be your cousin.”

My hand spasmed and sent beer flying, clutched at my wobbling glass, caught it back in the nick of time.

“Walter. What? How?”

He raised an eyebrow at the barman. “Another please, Adi.”

Adi smiled. “Yes Tuan Walter.” He mopped at my mess with distaste and served Walter with a bow that expressed what an unutterable pleasure and honour it was.

“Agog for your news Bonnetchen. Oh, all right, two gogs but that's my final offer. How goes the exhibition?”

“What exhibition? Oh that. The usual. Down the road at Dreckers, the book shop. We've shifted quite a few. Little Sobrat has done particularly well and has a nice sum coming. Even I have nearly sold out of my market women.” A man looked up at me from a neighbouring table and frowned. Scanning the room, I saw only white linen suits. “Are you here alone?”

“Not exactly. We all came together.” His face lit up. “
We flew
, Bonnetchen, from that airfield down by the beach at Kuta, actually flew! Oh, you can't imagine how marvellous it is! Now I understand Elli. The exhilaration and sense of freedom! And the luxury of it all! Hot coffee served to you from a vacuum flask as Gunung Agung glides underneath your wicker chair. You can look right down into the crater, just like looking up the skirts of the gods. It is amazing, up in the clouds just like a bird. And then you fly down the entire chain of volcanoes the length of Java and swoop down over the whole, sprawling city. Marvellous!”

“Weren't you frightened?”

“Of what. They guarantee that, no matter how high they take you, you will ultimately get back to the ground. And now we go to Bangkok and Angkor Wat, all by air! Of course Bärbli is paying for everything. It is understood that Bärbli always pays.” He sipped beer and winked at Adi who winked back as if to say that, yes, he too, understood that Bärbli always paid. These beers, here, for instance, Bärbli would pay. But I had not forgiven Walter for that remark about Resem and the cloth.

“But she must be very demanding” I smirked. “I understand that she requires the most complete service and what Bärbli wants, Bärbli gets.”

He looked puzzled. “You mean? … Oh no,” he laughed. “You're wide of the mark there, Bonnetchen. That's all taken care of.”

On cue, the doors of brass and chrome were flung open and an extraordinary figure strode through and up to the bar in a waft of hot, spiced Batavian air, seized Walter's hand and spouted fluent Russian. He was tall and muscular, thick black hair and a bounder's moustache, a panama in his hand and – God help us – spats with parti-coloured shoes. A silk handkerchief flared from his elegantly tailored breast pocket, arranged with the care that a Balinese would expend on his headcloth. Light sparkled from his teeth. This was the first time I had encountered Hollywood capped teeth and the hand he finally extended was a work of art, professionally buffed and manicured, worthy of being drawn by my chicks.

“May I introduce His Highness Prince Alexis Mdivani, Bärbli's fiancé.”

“Oh Walja,” he giggled. “The title is only for formal occasions.” To me. “We reactivated it after the Revolution. My father says he is the only man alive to inherit a title from his sons.” He slapped my arm archly with kid gloves – to Walter “handshoes” to the Javanese “handvests” – held in the left hand, as if for the issuing of challenges to duels, and laughed. It was a dreadful noise, as though someone were giggling down a musical scale. If he and Barbara ever both heard something hysterically funny in the same room, it would be hard on the ears.

“Excuse me.” I was distracted. “Is that a gold bracelet you're wearing? I don't believe I have ever seen one on a man before.”

He adjusted it, not in the least abashed. “From my wife … ex-wife; when ladies like to buy you things it is your duty to cultivate needs other men do not have.”

He exuded the smell of Russian leather, a nostalgic mix of the covers of the bibles in the Sunday school of my childhood and the seats of WWI railway carriages. For some reason, it made me want to cry. Walter eyebrowed Adi across and more beer was brought. Now we received nuts, too. With Alexis, our stock was rising by the minute. The white linen suits were all staring as he settled into an elegant, Côte d'Azur, pose, arranging the pleats in his trousers.

“Your ex-wife?”

“My new ex-wife, Louise van Alen – American Fur Company. It is quite in order. It has been arranged that she is to marry my brother.” I was fascinated to see the expensive commercial edition of whatever it was Walter was the rough-edged, amateur version of. “I confess when I flew here, I was a little concerned about my bride and this terrible man, Walter, who had apparently supplanted me.” They looked at each other and laughed. “But now, as you see, we are the best of friends. We plan to marry in Bangkok – Barbara and I, not Walja and I – and I have asked and Walja has consented, to be my best man.”

“Where is Barbara?”

He sipped beer and immediately blotted his upper lip with a second-line silk handkerchief drawn from a side pocket. The white suits had their heads together and were sniggering through curled lips. I somewhere heard the word “Poodlefaker”.

“Shopping. Where else? Which reminds me. I must dash. I have to order more white lilies for the suite, to lift it a little. So glooomy! They are to be the theme of our wedding. Women like those little touches.” He rose and bowed, took his time to arrange all his accessories before strolling back across the floor, hefted the heavy door open with his own fair hands, turned, fixed Adi with his eye and pointed at the table with cocked wrist. “For Miss Barbara Hutton's bill, 601.”

Adi nodded, bowed, smiled, clutched the bill to his chest and looked at us in something like triumph. The name “Hutton” had the unreality of a film star glimpsed in the street and the white suits went into a frenzy of outraged whispering and strained neckwork as Walter drained his beer coolly and signalled for more with the innocence of a little boy left with a large banknote in a sweet shop.

“You can bet the flowers will go on her bill too,” he smiled in mitigation. “Did you know she bought Kinnerley a Bentley? I told her my own sister was called Mercedes. Yesterday we went to see a marvellous film,
Gold Diggers of 1933
. Busby Berkeley. So original, so rich. I expected it to be about hairy miners but it was not. You should go.” And when beer-carrying Adi came, Walter slipped a large tip in his top pocket, patted his rump with chaste affection and ordered another glass for me too. Such spontaneous generosity with someone else's money, remembering all the little people, is the mark of the true gentleman. I looked at Mdivani's beer, lavishly abandoned after a single sip. I could never do that.

***

McPhee was sweaty and red-faced and – I suspected – not entirely sober. He was running rapidly to fat and had the seedy and apologetic look of a man staggering home after an ill-advised night on the tiles. We were on the terrace of the Bali Hotel, nighttime moths fluttering around us, reminding me that I might be elsewhere.

“Coffee?” I suggested. He shrugged. I ordered. It would do him good.

“Bit of trouble at the old homestead,” he confided ruefully. “Jane gets odd ideas in her head at times. She is not always stable.” He looked across the table to see how all this was going down. I said nothing. He lit a clove cigarette with a shaky match and put the used residue back in the box – a very annoying habit.

“I've been away at Kuta, you see, arse-end of the universe. You know Lotring, the musician?” I nodded. I knew him, a regular visitor to Walter, thin, birdlike, a composer martyred by his art whose music came to him in tortured dreams that seemed to devour him like demons. “He brought me to Bali. I heard a recording of the old Kuta
gamelan
when I was in New York, one of his works, and couldn't get it out of my head. I listened to it over and over, drove Jane crazy. ‘Balinese
gamelan
is the only thing that can save Western music from the dead end it's stuck in,' I told her. And I was right. Then, when I got here, I found the group had had a big fight over a chicken or a goat or something and broken up. Lotring and I had this plan. We revived the group, bought out the old members, recruited new players, regilded and retuned the instruments, got the big gong back from the government pawnshop. To save the orchestra and Western music cost me $150. We had a big shed under a great old tree down on the beach where no one goes. I would go down there for a week or two at a time, work with the men, Lotring composing in his dreams, them rehearsing, all of us playing together. The Dutch would never allow that in public, a white man sitting at the feet of a Balinese as his pupil but who cares. You can't imagine what it was like, being absorbed into the orchestra, that great, breathing, living, ancient creature – feeling its rhythms pounding in your body and its blood flowing along with yours. It was like a dream for me too. We got up every morning to the smell of the ocean, threw open the doors and stepped into the sea. A woman from the village brought us fresh coffee, made on an open fire, porridge and fruit. Some of the boys came along to make notes. Every evening there was the greatest sunset in the world, like a huge pink flower just opening up and the swallows swooping and diving with the blush of it on their wings. And then we'd play again far into the night.” The coffee arrived – not brought by a village woman moving to ancient rhythms but a waiter choking in his tight tunic – and with all the usual unnecessary complexity of china and silverware, trays and fussy chits. “At first Jane didn't mind. She had her own work and the house. She loves that garden Walter got started for her. Then she began to feel neglected and wanted to come with me and of course that ruined it for everyone. So I stopped going for a while. Lotring would creep round the back of the house every couple of weeks and keep me informed or I'd send one of the boys on the bicycle. Then Sampih turned up.”

I dispensed coffee, milk, sugar like a chemist.

“Who is Sampih?”

A haunted truculence settled at the corners of his mouth. “Sampih is my friend.” He seemed to expect me to challenge him. I said nothing. It is often the best way to get people to talk – not that I cared much either way. It was getting late. I had other fish to fry. I was still a young man. The fires on which I would fry those fish still burnt hot in those days. “You know the river at the bottom of the hill? A nasty, dangerous river, prone to flash floods if there's rainfall up in the mountains. I was down there one day and suddenly the level started rising. I made the mistake of trying to get back across and found myself stranded in the middle on a rock with this great roaring sound coming from upstream. I thought I was a goner when this little kid popped up, leapt across and grabbed me by the hand and led me over, showing me where the stepping stones were under the water. Seconds later, this great wall of water came round the corner and crashed down right where I'd been standing. I looked for the kid to say thank you but he's just run off. That was Sampih.” He sipped coffee, choked, went into a coughing fit and soothed it with another cigarette. “I looked for him, asked around. You know the way, here, that boys run around in gangs and feed where they can like flocks of birds. Well, finally they directed me to this little shack down on a poor scrap of land where his family lived. You can't imagine the filth and poverty of the place.”