Island of Demons (42 page)

“Thank you Walter.” Margaret was showing all the signs of exercising a very great patience. She scribbled again and drew another thick line in her pad. “Jane, the basket of objects.”

Jane rose to her feet and went over to the side of the house, pulled away a sheet and revealed a hamper of mixed goods, bought from the market – knives, spoons, crockery, tools of all descriptions. She brought them over and dumped them down before long-suffering Resem.

“Go!”

Once more, instead of sorting like with like, he shared them out, forming five or six neat piles, bigger objects at the base, smaller on top, hesitated, swopped items back and forth and then settled back on his heels.

Walter came over and whispered, nodding. “This pile,” he touched, “is what you would need to gut and cook a fish. This one is most of what you need to roll a wad of chewing betel. The mat and the
kris
are together because, at marriage, the groom has to pierce such a mat with the tip of his weapon as a sign of the unflowering of the bride.”

Margaret sat crumpled on her chair, cut to the quick, betrayed by science, letting her notebook droop by her side in nicotine-stained fingers. Everyone looked at her as the boys muttered and giggled at this strange and unsatisfactory new form of divination. Then she stirred and it was suddenly as if a dull cinder had burst back into flame. She rekindled herself.

“Okaaay,” she drawled, sitting up, shoulders thrust back as if in school. “Change of plan.” She turned to address Walter. “The other day, Walter, we were at your aquarium where there is an art shop.” What was this? “I could not help noticing that several of the artists paint in a number of different styles, with far more variation than would ever occur with individual European artists. I wonder whether the reason could be that Balinese feel no need to maintain a consistent personality, that they can run several different personalities without integration. If so …” she leaped to her feet and smiled up at Greg, “then we have shifted the notion of what constitutes an acceptable personality from the universal to the culturally specific and that would solve all our problems and fit the data we have elicited this afternoon. Painting then becomes a mere local symptom of lack of cultural homogeneity at the personal level.”

“Well done old girl!” Greg enthusing down on her. “What a corker!” She glowing up at him. Both radiating a kind of intellectual excitement that manifested as sexual and physical heat. List or not, I could see what they would be doing tonight in a far from listless fashion. I had a swift prophetic vision of Greg, thrusting sweatily away under the mosquito net, Margaret moaning as he brought his mouth somehow to her ear, despite the awkward disparity of height, and orgasmically gasped, not sexual endearments, but words like “interference of extraneous cultural patterns” and “shift from the universal to the culturally specific”.

“That, Margaret,” said Walter in tones of ringing sincerity, “ is an idea that would never have occurred to me. Is that really what I have been doing all these years when I thought I was painting?”

***

“Rosa and Miguel have written a book.” Walter waved his copy of
The Island of Bali
at me in proof, or rather, in evidence, since it was the final printed version that he brandished, not a proof copy, and stuffed, like an overfilled American sandwich, with cuttings from the New York press. It had come hot from the US, published by Kroeber's, elaborated with Miguel's zingy drawings and Rosa's indifferent photographs. “They have been most kind about me in it. Miguel is doing very well out of the whole thing – commissions, reviews, etc. – and has even installed a Balinese exhibition of sorts in the shop window of an American department store. Inside, you can watch his film footage and buy in leisurewear out of cloth he has based on Balinese designs. What is leisurewear?”

“I think it means clothes that don't involve a tie. What you are wearing would be leisurewear.”

“Really?” He looked down at himself in astonishment, like Monsieur Jourdain being told that, all his life, what he had been speaking was prose. “The cuttings say the clothes are ‘gay and abandoned'.” He frowned,
stirnrunzelnd
. “Is that what I am?”

I looked inside the covers and saw the handwritten dedication with its elegant curlicues. “It says here you are generous and hospitable.”

“Then that is what I must be though, according to some words I put in my dictionary the other day, I rather think I am batty and catty and ratty. Still … Vicki wrote a book. Margaret and Gregory will certainly write a book – maybe a whole shelfful of books. Jane is writing articles that will become a book, Colin has published his Balinese symphony and it has been conducted by Stokowski. Now I too shall write a book.”

I looked at him doubtfully. “Walter, it takes weeks, months, years to write a book. A book is not a painting. Painters are flashy sprinters – one gasp of creativity, all over in a couple of minutes, at most a couple of days – writers are long-distance runners who just keep putting one foot in front of the other when they have long since forgotten why they ever started.”

“If things had been a little different, I should already have a book.” Oh God. Here it was again. The book that got away, his drawings
of lamaks
, altar decorations of palm leaf. “You know that Jane took my collection of drawings with her to America, hoping to find a publisher. It was only because she showed them to Margaret that she and Greg ended up here at all. No one would take it. Not commercial, they said. Then Kroeber's said they would do it if I would pay in $500. $500! I did not have 500 cents. Yet they took Miguel's book.” He pouted. I pointed him hastily in a different direction.

“So what is the subject matter of this work to be? Dragonflies perhaps, a work of natural history then. Or maybe your biography. That would have to be unnatural history wouldn't it?” Nasty that. Why was I being so bitchy? Too much to drink, perhaps. Or maybe I was just tired of everything. Or maybe it was because of where we were. We were at Manxi's, a new place down on the beach that Greg found more congenial than the “tight-arsed” Bali Hotel. But he was not here tonight. He would be up in the hills at Bayung Gede, pounding away at a typewriter, writing up his notes, Made's notes, Margaret's notes or maybe developing films as Margaret typed up his notes. There would be plenty of film to develop. In the course of an hour, one afternoon sitting on his porch, I had seen him fire off three rolls. Manxi's was a collection of cheap shacks of bamboo and rattan that caught the night breeze and where, in the moonlight, the ocean was reduced to a series of parallel frothy lines and a rhythmic roar beneath the tinny dance music. It was
louche
, or as near to that as Denpasar ever got, and the backbone of its dissipation was the bored, young airmen from the base next door, their sleepless hormones zithering in the tropic heat. Youthful enough to know themselves immortal – mere airboys really – and briskly omnifutuant in their tight uniforms, they danced and sported with Manxi's girls, many of whom were male beneath the silky packaging – but no questions, no packdrill, any port in a storm, one orifice as good as any other in the magic of moon- and flickering candlelight. It was certain that all this had not passed unnoticed by the authorities but was provisionally tolerated as a necessary flexibility of civilian rectitude to bring comforts to the military, although it had caused a certain dislocation of trade from the
lapangan kota
and it was mildly embarrassing to be so well known and publicly greeted by its overflow at Manxi's. The muscled Javanese barman was twinkling at me conspiratorially over Walter's shoulder as if … Had we? If so when? Manxi, it should be explained, was a gruesome buxom woman from the Isle of Man, allegedly the mistress of one of the minor princelings and simultaneously enjoyed by an expansive Dutch planter, only intermittently present, from Java. To overcome the Balinese prejudice against red hair she had dyed hers jet black, cut it Cleopatra fashion and looked unnervingly like an exhibit in a museum of Egyptology. Walter lived in terror of her. Once she had shown him her paintings which were of a saccharine sweetness and technical incompetence that he had compared unfavourably even to my own. I could hear her laughing somewhere out on the beach. Appropriate to the darkness, she had a laugh like a screech owl. She would go on, of course, to become a radio propagandist for the Japanese and later enjoy a certain brief notoriety as “Surabaya Sue”, broadcasting against the Allies during the Revolution. But I anticipate.

“Dance,” said Walter so that I thought momentarily that he was inviting me to foxtrot. “It will be a book,
the
book, about Balinese dance.” Two airmen were pawing at the same kohl-eyed he/she over by the bar, forming a sort of rhythmically rutting sandwich, bent at the knees but firmly locked at the groin, hands gripping beer bottles from which they occasionally swigged. “Dance on Bali is unique, not merely a highly evolved aesthetic exercise but an integral part of religious and social life.” Each had his tongue in one of his/her ears which provoked loud tripartite giggling as they shimmied approximately to the shellac music. The boys' backs were wet with a Y of sweat. “Dance here is a matter of the greatest seriousness and it must be captured, explained, got down on the page for the benefit of the whole world.” The he/she drew back and the two airboys kissed tenderly and then transferred their kisses laughingly to his/ her cheeks.

“Walter, no one knows more about Balinese dance than you but you lack the application and …” more kindly, “… the time.”

He looked at me, bright-eyed. “Oh, someone else would have to do the actual writing. It was never intended that I should do the writing.”

“Me? I'm sorry Walter …”

He shook his head. “No, Bonnetchen. Not
you
. Beryl. Beryl de Zoete.”

“Who?”

He pointed. Two of the most bizarre women on the island were coming through the door towards us. Manxi's leisurewear dress appeared to have been inspired by one of Margaret's own maternity smocks but cut from material of gross patterns and loud contrasts. I wondered how she would have fared with the schizophrenia tests. With her, was a painfully thin woman in her fifties, in height appropriate to be Greg's partner, but clad in a sort of superannuated flapper's outfit of beige tule and wearing a look of constipated discomfort on her face and a huge ring on each finger of both hands. It struck me immediately as the sort of gesture that resulted not from mere bad taste, unlike Manxi's frock, but a deliberate determination to confront. Her hair was bobbed in what was by then an old-fashioned style.

“'Allo Walter. Me and Beryl's been 'avin' a luvverly chat. I din't know you two was such old friends.” Walter smiled happily. I had never actually spoke to Manxi before and realised that I was already judging, disliking, disapproving and preparing to condemn. It was not immediately obvious that hers was a voice that would go on to charm the airwaves.

“Do you remember my friend Rudi?”

Manxi giggled. “Oh yes. Everyone 'ere knows Rudi from that bit of rough field over the other side of town. Likes a bit of rough our Rudi …” I grasped her hand and, intending to shut her mouth, somehow shut my own by stupidly kissing it, catching a whiff of onion smell as she shrieked, “Ooh inne a gent?”

“Bonnetchen, this is Beryl de Zoete.” Having performed one act of hand-kissing, I was now obliged to perform another but for Beryl it was somehow appropriate. In response, she etched the briefest ghost of a smile and swooned ectoplasmically into a chair. “Beryl and I are friends from my student days in Hellerau. She is one of the world's premier eurhymicists.” Across the room, the two airmen had simultaneously inserted the necks of their beer bottles in their companion's mouth and watched, with awe, as they were dribblingly drained and licked. Manxi was over there in a flash, spoiling the moment, demonstrating their emptiness, demanding they buy more drink, shouting for more animated music.

Premier eurhythmicists? Where had that come from? “What,” I heard myself ask, suddenly wooden-tongued, “is a eurhythmicist?”

She regarded me with pity and batted tired eyelashes. “It is a system devised by my teacher Monsieur Delcroze. He was a genius. It brings us into contact with our bodies and our bodies into a greater musical response through a series of visceral gymnastic exercises that harmonise us into immediate enraptured improvisation of dance.” Right, so it was clear I would never know what eurhythmics was. I could live with that. The voice was spoken as though through an extended sigh of disappointment as though its owner could not bear to finish the sentence.

“Beryl is going to stay with me for a while. We shall have such fun! We must tour the whole island, show her every single kind of dance for our book. There are so many.”

“Are you married, Beryl?” I was becoming very Balinese in my bold use of personal questions. A brave look slid over the pained one. I gestured waggishly at her hands. “Or perhaps, from all those rings, you already have eight husbands.” The brave look was displaced by an even more pained one and she inhaled the frail smoke of a “Passing Clouds” and blew it, unheeding, in my face as Balinese gods are said to extract the essence from temple offerings and return the coarse matter to their worshippers.

“I once entered into what was to be a chaste and vegetarian union with a man but, unfortunately, he developed a brutish taste for beer, beefsteak and breasts, creating a rock on which shattered the fragile barque of our tryst.” Goodness. Fragile barque, no less. “I have always felt that unions of the soul are more enduring than those of the flesh. My most moving act of consummation was perhaps that with an ardent young man, of a similarly poetic disposition, in my youth. We slaked our passion by removing our clothes in the moonlight, climbing two pliant poplars, side by side, and allowing our quivering leaves to gently interpenetrate.”