Island of Demons (37 page)

“Fluent Malay, even a little English, reads and writes in all languages including Balinese. Comes with the highest possible recommendation from Colin and provides entrées to the very best musical families. Honest, hardworking, charming and – as you see- very easy on the eye.”

Made Tantra, no fool, had immediately homed in on Rosa as the key to advancement and was batting his long – very long – eyelashes at her with instant, panting puppy love.

“Puppy love. Several weeks before, I had come to the house – I nearly said ‘came home' – to find a puppy tied by the front door. It was adorable. Huge eyes, feet and ears and, of course, I bent down and patted it and it leapt up and licked my face, ready to give its love for a mere kind word or a tidbit. At last Walter was getting a sensible pet, a welcome change from snakes and birds and lizards and those confounded hooligan monkeys. But when I asked about it he replied.

“Oh, it's not mine. It's the priest's. He's round the back preparing an offering for displaced demons so we can break the soil for the new house.” Only later did I discover that the offering
was
the puppy as Walter well knew. The experience was, to me, strangely upsetting. I had formed a relationship with the little creature and felt myself to have betrayed it. For an emotional, artistic man, Walter was strangely unsentimental in such situations. I realised suddenly that, if I were ever to suffer a long, lingering disease, he would plausibly turn up at my house, pull out a great, long gun and shoot me out of sheer dispassionate kindness – unless, of course, Sampih had already done it out of rage.

“Will he,” I asked casually, nodding at desperately bobbing, incredibly handsome Made Tantra, “be living here?” There was a shout from outside, Walter's name. He rose from the table, screwing up his napkin – napkins! – and went to the verandah. The foreman was looking up, stroking his moustache and making helpless gestures in the face of – God help us – a white, ceramic toilet such as you might find in central Haarlem or Harlem.

“Time for a little cultural contribution,” adjudged Walter and soon we were all looking down on him and Miguel, out there astride the thing, miming, blowing raspberry lip-farts, holding their noses with the workers falling about screaming in laughter, then Miguel sticking out and waggling his prodigious rump as Walter, head averted in stage horror, elaborately wiped it with his handkerchief.

Rosa came up beside me and smiled in a tender, almost motherly, way. “He's really needed this,” she said. “We've not had a moment's peace since we were here and he got the idea of the book. You can't imagine how good it is to see him back doing some serious work again at last.”

It was a time of incredible busyness. I brought my wood- and stone-carving chicks to see the new house, to design elements of it and execute them, so that it grew daily in beauty. Miguel took to instructing the Pita Maha painters in the techniques of caricature and, naturally, they devoted their new skills, gigglingly, not to the guying of his arse but to that of my face and forgot everything I had painfully taught them about naturalism. It was fortunate that Rosa's Malay was still elementary as she lectured my aristocratic chicks for hours on the advantages of workers' control of factories but perhaps it mattered little since few had any Malay, themselves, and none had any idea at all what a factory was. Miguel's book researches drove Walter to rediscover his slumbering interests in archaeology and ethnography, thrusting him out into mountain and forest. In the hills, he explored an unknown lake, ink-black and brooding, had a great raft built and lived upon it in a tent for weeks, painting delicate miniatures of water-creatures plucked from its depths, until his interest flagged. Visitors came in battalions, notably a Mrs Corrigan and entourage, the sort of eccentric millionairess Walter adored. Despite her millions, she had no fixed abode but wandered the planet dishing out handfuls of fresh, young dollars from her luggage to anyone, or any cause, she approved of. She approved greatly of Walter and his struggling museum and bestowed largesse upon both, so that he was able to rage around the island, the Whippet stupefied with expensive gasoline, buying up anything that took his fancy – gold, silver, ancient carvings and scattering them between the new house and the burgeoning museum collection, for the two were really one. One of her companions was the French Duc de la Rochefoucald, whose ancestor so eloquently preached the universality of self-interest and who had invited Charlie to visit his chateau, obliging him to foxhunt. Since Charlie had never mounted a horse in his life, he had recounted the event to us with hilarious exaggeration, acting out his panic, the bolting horse, the loss of his hat, his empathy with the departing fox. The Duc, we were gratified to hear from his own account, had noticed nothing of all that. Then, English lords, haughty and disdainful, expensively shod and baggaged but with scarecrow holes in their frayed shirts and socks, publicly displayed with amusement and poking fingers by the boys on the washing lines. Then two pipe-puffing, sheep-jawed, botany professors from Sydney and an elongated expert on snails, with matted hair. Walter treasured such contacts with the world of higher learning, loved the arcane, musty smell of academe and briefly, during their excursions, affected a briar himself. His all time favourite had been a Dutch zoologist whose expertise lay in excreta, working his way slowly towards a general classification of the ways in which the anus functioned as a pelletisation device and the shape of animal droppings was conditioned by height of release, consistency and weight, as demonstrated by graphs. Then, the Neuhaus brothers, Hans and Rolf. I distrusted them from the first. There was always something – well – fishy about them.

Their introduction to Walter was, bizarrely, the world's largest private collection of painted and varnished plaster sea creatures, cast from life. This they had compiled themselves during their stay in Java, engaged in “the import-export business”. Walter had always had a little boy's enthusiasm for collections and coins, cigarette cards, train numbers were to him a prefiguring of museums in general, yet there was something unhealthy in the wonder with which he regarded these, to me, appalling objects. “They're so
solid
,” he would say pathetically, turning them in his hands – he the painter in two dimensions. “They're so
real
” – he the artist of imagined worlds. The brothers were both big and fair, blue-eyed and hairy-chested, with a haze of permanent beer sweat about them. They looked like twins and were always and everywhere together, though I gathered they were not actual twins. In Bali, twins are bad news, rendering the whole area in which they are born unclean. Their parents are driven away, their house burned. It was the reaction provoked by the Neuhaus brothers – they made the Balinese' hair stand on end – that would lead Jane to write a major anthropological paper on the theme. Their sexuality was – I was almost sure – turned in on themselves. That, too, was appropriate to Balinese twinship.

“They are building an aquarium – he always pronounced it
akvarioom
–in Sanur. It will be fantastic. They will make a fortune.” Walter was hopelessly optimistic in financial matters. He would believe you if you told him you could get rich by selling the Balinese bicycle clips. We were seated on the verandah, looking down. The pool was finally complete, neat stone steps, flanked by two carved stone demons clutching phallic clubs, water plants softening the edges, a real live stork washing its feet in there.

“Walter,” I laughed. “No one,
ever
, made a fortune from an aquarium. You would make more money by letting people bathe in the tanks as a swimming pool.”

He paused and considered. “A marvellous idea – perhaps later, but I think the
akvarioom
should come first.”

A terrible realisation set in.

“Walter. Don't tell me you've invested money in it.”

He shrugged and pouted. “Ja … well … I put in a little and they put in a little … not so much. The fish and the water we get free! The tourists will pay to come in and be sold fish food and so pay to feed our fish and then we sell them the fish on the way out! It is not simply a matter of economics. There is an aesthetic beauty there. Maybe even locals will come – special reduction for Balinese!” He slapped his knee. His eyes were gleaming. He could see it all. In his fevered brain, he was probably busy designing the fancy uniforms the staff would wear. “The Neuhaus Brothers know everything about the technicalities. The collection of plaster casts will be a sensation. We will have a whalefish of a time. People will come from everywhere to see it – in buses. Then there will be a place where they can drink a little coffee and have cake and cold orange crush. I should like very much to drink cold orange crush.” I had a vision of Walter's “profits” being drunk away in an orgy of cold orange crush. “Later a zoo. Then only maybe your swimming pool idea or maybe the best fish restaurant in the whole of the Indies. We must be practical, Bonnetchen.” He was, I could see, hopelessly hooked. Would there be sharks? In Sanur? I shuddered.

Over the next few months, I took a malicious pleasure in seeing myself proved right and Walter proved wrong as each visit by the Neuhaus Brothers brought new exactions. For the construction of the tanks, vast sheets of expensive toughened glass had to be brought from Java, by road and at the owner's risk. Many did not survive. The water might be free, but to move it required a special pump from Batavia and it needed electricity to make it work. To save on glass, the tanks only used it on one side, which meant that they must now be lit from the rear with electricity, shielded from corrosive seawater with costly lead. The arguments for the undertaking no longer dwelt on the huge profits to be made but the prodigious sums already invested, that would be entirely lost, were it not to continue to completion. Walter's attaché case must be looking pretty windswept by now. I searched for, and easily detected, signs of economy. Walter decided that it was cruel to keep the horses so much shut up since there were no dry fields to graze them in and flooded land rotted their hooves. They were sold. Then, wine disappeared as swiftly as it had come, since, Walter announced, he was conducting extensive, comparative research into the qualities of different kinds of
brem
of diverse origins and only that would now be served. After the flash flood of cash, we were swinging back to drought and pinched normality.

And then, quite suddenly, it was done. We drove over one afternoon in the Whippet and there, hard by the beach, stood a solid white-stuccoed installation, shaded by palm trees, a big sign announcing it as an “akvarioom” and a bedsheet slung between two treetrunks, declaring today a grand opening. Dutch flags were waving everywhere, like alibis, and somewhere a military band oompahed a soundtrack of imperial respectability. As we climbed out of the car, the wind whipped a spray of fine grains off the sand dunes and lightly scoured our faces. I knew that, for Walter, these occasions were a martyrdom and he had increased his sufferings by squeezing into his Bärbli finery so that he was constantly easing his tight collar with an angry finger. This must all be the work of the Neuhaus Brothers and there they were, identically dressed and wearing the same smirk on the same sweaty face, oleaginating over white guests with handkissing and heel-clicking. Only a few brown faces, mostly honorary whites because of their high rank, the rest smiling, bowing staff, all suspiciously handsome and obviously chosen for their looks. The guests already had a couple of glasses of wine in them and were mellowing nicely, quick to refill, with a thirst born not of the climate but a sense of exile. Father Scruple was there, murmuring fervently in the ear of a short Balinese, presumably offering to slip him a quick Bible round the back. Smits was there, gripping a frosty beer with one chilled hand and ball-juggling with the warmed other. He saw me and leaned over to whisper something to his wife – mean mouth, parsimonious breasts, Christian faith borne like an affliction – who glared hot disapproval and crossed her arms over her chest. Probably, then, something like, “There's that dirty bugger who paints tits.” Miguel and Rosa tried in vain to merge into the background, for they humbled the Dutch by the elegance of their clothes. At any moment, it seemed, they would burst into a tango and the crowd would part and fall back to make space for them to stalk and strut. They twinkled the briefest of waves. It was not entirely clear to me why they had moved back to their own quarters in Belaluan. Perhaps it was simply a matter of economy but at least Walter no longer crept around the house wall-eyed, like a Muslim in a bacon-factory, waiting for the inevitable sound of Miguel's voice. “Oh Walter! Is that you? I have a list of questions about the historical division of irrigation water in Gianyar villages.”

I must admit that the tanks, under woven awnings, looked magnificent, each window some two meters high and three long, giving swirly green views onto recreated tropical reefs, swarming with multi-coloured fish, elaborate devices bubbling aeration, floors strewn with swept sand where lobsters and the more energetic shellfish scuttled. Many species were crowded together, as though, living in peace or only modest predation, they wished to set an example to the races of mankind. There were, I noted with relief, no sharks. Each window was gratifyingly crowded with pointing oohers and aahers and even the appalling plaster casts were going down well, especially with the few Balinese guests. As usual, Walter had been completely in tune with local sensibilities and Cokorda Agung was there crying “
Luar biasa!
Extraordinary! Are they for sale?” and swiftly pocketing up several without further formality. Walter's face lit up.

“Of course! An art shop! Another outlet for Pita Maha. Our Sanur members can do seascapes, still-lifes of fish. How could I have missed it? Why,” he cried, staring irrelevantly up at the sky, “have I never painted the sea?” I had no answer to that.