Island of Demons (5 page)

Other figures began to appear, inevitable Dutch planters in crumpled alpaca suits, faded wives, plump and pushy administrators, a young pig-faced Lieutenant van Gennep of the sappers. All were swiftly and jealously appraised for a touch of the tarbrush and spontaneously sifted themselves into a rigid colonial hierarchy of race. The ship itself was a model of empire in miniature: stern-faced white officers; unseen helots, Chinese and Indian, toiling below; and trim, cool Javanese as the acceptable face of the East. The problem of a large but wealthy Eurasian family, the Niemeyers, always in white and displaying a beautiful chromatic range squeezed from the burnt sienna tube, was tactfully defused by allotting them their own dining table “to keep the family together”. As whiter than Cremnitz white and direct from the homeland, I was able to delude myself that I had opted out of any such classification – a citizen of the world. As a bachelor, I fell as prize to the shipboard spinsters, the Van Tonk sisters of Haarlem or tortoise-necked Miss Timms, on her way to rejoin her brother's clerical vocation in Singapore following a little home leave in a missionary house in Stoke Newington. Endless games of deck quoits, bridge and sticky foxtrots were my penance, interspersed with coy jokes of romance: “I'm setting my cap at you Mr Bonnet”, “The ladies trump you again with their fluttering hearts, young man”, “A game of table tennis, Mr Bonnet, unless you are afraid of losing to love?” and so on. It was the most sustainedly athletic period of my life and I was glad to be accepted as part of this brave little community, to be assumed to be just another element of the normal world. Meanwhile, the real face of normality, Lieutenant van Gennep, sat at a corner table and sipped endless gins, crotch visibly bulging, as he appraised the Eurasian girls with hot, frustrated eyes and eased his tight colonial collar.

We were to take the Cape route via South Africa and steamed slowly down the west coast, calling briefly at some of the minor ports – Dakar, Takouradi, Lagos, Fernando Poo – to embark deck cargo and a mass of seething steerage passengers. At the time, it was considered more healthy than the route via Suez, allowing a more gentle acclimatisation, as the thermostat was slowly turned up by divine hand and a plague of flies buzzed in from the armpit of Africa to crouch thickly on every surface. Having tired of jokes about Biblical plagues with Miss Timms, I sat in my cabin, or on the foredeck, batting the flies away and practising my Malay vocabulary with the stewards.

“
Lalat
, ‘fly'?” I pointed questioning at a huge bluebottle.

“
Lalat!
” confirmed dark-eyed, smiling Hamid with a flick of a flyswat, plucked from his waistband, that sent it tumbling to the deck.

As we eased towards Cape Town a sudden cold mist descended and as the sun burned it off the flies evaporated with it, revealing a deep and peaceful harbour and a town of neat Dutch buildings and tree-lined streets strung out along the foot of Table Mountain laid with its cloth of white cloud. Miss Timms and the Van Tonks embarked in an open horsedrawn cab on a tour of the cathedral and lesser places of worship, climaxing in tea at the Mount Nelson Hotel. I had intended to escort them but was surprised, at the last minute, to be waylaid by Lieutenant van Gennep who was waiting at the bottom of the gangway at the wheel of a large and disreputable Buick convertible, its engine already throbbing.

“Quick Bonnet!” he hissed. “Before the old girls see you.” The door was thrown invitingly open and, without thinking, I got in. It was one of the more unusual days of my life.

I had expected to be driven round the town centre, the little squares, the grandiloquent buildings of national identity, the odd monument to some person of inflated local importance before going somewhere dark and cool to taste the local wine. It was not to be.

Van Gennep skirted all such temptations and headed inland with a purposeful look, crunching gears in the overworked gearbox. Over the roar of the engine, communication was difficult but there could be no doubt where we were heading – Table Mountain. He drew up and applied the handbrake with relish, as a man might apply sauce to a sausage and nodded at a sign indicating a hiking trail.

“We've been sitting around too damned much, Bonnet. Now we can get the stiffness out of our legs.” He set off at a cracking pace, leaving me no alternative but to follow, panting after him. Dressed as I was for visiting cathedrals, it was not an enjoyable experience. My thin-soled shoes slipped and skidded in the dust, I had no hat, my tie blew in the chill wind coming off the sea. At one moment my legs went from under me entirely and it was only by seizing a prickly plant with my bare hands that I avoided a nasty, possibly fatal, fall. My cries and protests went unheard or at least unheeded. Everywhere, nameless things slithered and scuttled and stones from Van Gennep's feet showered my head and face. After some two and a half hours, I emerged, sweaty, cold, thirsty, filthy and whimpering, at the peak or rather the plateau. Van Gennep was standing one foot comfortably raised on a rock, as on a barrail, hands thrust in pockets, puffing a cheroot and savouring the salt-spiced view, a vast vista of land and glittering sea.

“Damn and blast you, Van Gennep!” I cursed. “You could have got me killed.”

He turned in astonishment. “Now what way is that for an artist to talk? Just look at the panorama, old man. I should have thought you'd show more interest. Still,” he shrugged as one greatly miffed, “if that's how you feel perhaps we'd better just go back down.”

He turned and retraced our steps at least twice as fast as before, crying out with joy at each headlong skid towards the edge. I abandoned all pretence of dignity and performed most of the descent on my backside. When I arrived at the bottom, dithering with rage and fear, he was dozing comfortably at the wheel. He tipped back his hat and looked me over.

“Righty-ho. I see things of the spirit are not your thing, Bonnet. Time for the flesh.”

We drove in broody silence due south, or at least as much silence as could make itself heard over the roar of the engine, but the landscape thawed our mood. On our right lay the ocean, curling surf on sand and rock, on our left a softly, undulating valley, neatly combed into vineyards. Smiling black faces peered out at us. The air was scrubbed clean and cool by fresh rain. I began to turn it into tableaux in my mind, curling vine tendrils, capturing the spray off the surf, worrying over the shine on nose and cheekbones of black faces, easy enough to render in oils but what would be the best technique in charcoal or pastels? Mile after mile lay behind us. A sign urged us on to Constantia. We passed small
dorps
with bales of wire and barrels outside wooden stores and glimpsed white, step-gabled Dutch houses in the distance. Finally, we turned through wrought-iron gates and crunched up gravel to an imposing building set back from the road and shaded by old trees.

A smiling coffee-coloured face appeared and a delightful young man bowed us in and waved us to a table set in an arbour. Van Gennep ordered a bottle of the local white and it was brought, proffered for inspection and delicately poured. The cool taste of gooseberry and cinnamon, overtones of lime. It seemed to me that the waiter smiled over his shoulder as he walked away.

“You have been here before?” I offered appreciatively.

“Not at all.” He sipped and leant back with a sigh. “The recommendation of Van Hunks, a fellow officer, a Cape Boer.
This
,” he leant forward again for emphasis, “is the best house in the whole province.”

I looked around. It was a nice house, old, solid, certainly comforting, but was it the
best
house? I decided to keep my reservations to myself.

After a while the waiter appeared again, still smiling. He really was a very handsome young man. Perhaps, he invited, the gentlemen would care to the see the stock of the house. I was quickly on my feet. As I say, I have always delighted in wine-cellars, the long ranges of barrels stretching away in the gloom, the peace, the still time. He led us across the garden and through a French door. I froze, my jaw dropped.

Arranged around the walls of an elegant room, on a variety of chaises and sofas were sprawled young men of colour, all in very white underdrawers. The air was a musky, velvety exhalation. They smiled and stretched, demonstrating the muscular perfection of their limbs. One leant forward and gently stroked the back of my hand. He looked up, huge brown eyes, from under long lashes and asked, in a husky voice, “So … you want to taste the African banana?”

Blood thundered in my ears, sweat gushed over my whole body, a huge erection drained the blood from my brain so that world turned and swivelled in greyness. “I … I …” Dimly, I perceived, a “house” was a house of ill repute – though this was a house of ill repute of high repute. “I … I …” Then Van Gennep was there behind me.

“What the fuck? Out, Bonnet! Out!” I felt strong hands grab me and was dragged, in zombie trance, legs left-and-righting like a mechanical toy and thrown into the car.

“I … I …” I dimly heard the engine revving, shouts, giggles and suddenly I came to to the sound of Van Gennep's own hysterical laughter as we hit the road and fish-tailed back towards the city, plumes of dust twisting behind us.

“I'll get the bastard,” he chortled, slapping his thigh. “Good one though. Fancy Van Hunks sending us to a
male
whorehouse! He must have laughed himself silly. Wait till I get back to the mess. Thank God we got away before they got stuck into their pitch. Could have turned nasty. The evil bastard. If we were happy to settle for that, after all, we could have just given the steward a poke.”

I shook my head. “What? How?”

“Oh come on Bonnet, for Christ's sake.” He accelerated viciously. “When were you born? Everyone knows that any KPM steward is happy to oblige a passenger for a couple of florins. It should be on the ticket – a sort of right of passage.”

I gaped, then … “But shouldn't we perhaps go back and … er … perhaps we should at least offer to pay for the wine?”

Van Gennep snorted. “This is no time to play the gentleman, Bonnet. Filthy buggers. Serves them right. Lucky I didn't give them a good thrashing.” Blood suffused his piggy face. His hands tightened on the wheel as if strangling it.

“What he said … about the African banana …”

Van Gennep laughed again. “Yes. Now, that was good. Never heard that line before. Tasting the African banana! There are two ways you can take that!”

“Actually,” I said dreamily, “I can think of at least three.”

***

My parents back in Holland, to whom I wrote gushing postcards of the natural beauties of South Africa and my pencil itching to do its work, did not know. Miss Timms clearly did not know and had not the mental categories to make knowing possible. The Eurasian paterfamilias, Niemeyer, did know and curled his lip whenever he saw me, taking pains to gather his brood more closely about him as though against a pollution. The ordinary stewards all knew and no longer bantered with me in Malay. The head steward, chubby, smirking and deeply unattractive, most particularly knew and came to my cabin at all hours of the day and night with fresh towels and offers to pose for me. Van Gennep knew, of course, but to him it was nothing, simply part of a soldier making the best of a bad billet and living off the land.

But then it was all his fault. Those lightly spoken words of the accommodating nature of stewards had led me, heart pounding, to pluck up my courage and place my hand quite firmly on handsome Hamid's equally firm buttocks one morning as he bent across my bed with the breakfast tray. It had been an act of genuine attraction, liking, even respect. The result had been spilled coffee, shock, horror, manly tears and the display of photographs of his wife and children as proof that he did not, could not, and the takeover of his post by the chief steward with the cynical eyes and the breast-pocket always gaping for a tip. I had felt shame, guilt, self-disgust and anger in equal measure, the responses I had been conditioned since my childhood to feel towards my own tenderest emotions. I was well in advance of the age in learning to dismiss attraction and desire as mere allotropes of cultural oppression. My crime somehow communicated itself galvanically through the very metal of the hull, reaching all parts of the ship, including – I was sure – the engine room that I had never visited. The vibrations in the air were subtle. No one was openly rude or offensive. The captain did not cut me dead. But suddenly I was no longer part of the group. The Miss van Tonkses of Haarlem ceased to tease me, now a walking dirty joke, with offers of romance. I was no longer sought out for bridge and table tennis. Van Gennep, I saw, had quietly sidled into my place and seized the opportunity to move in on the Niemeyers, swapping bluff jokes with the father, telling stories of military life as he let his eyes rest on the vanilla-scented eldest daughter.

I took pains to be absent from the cabin when the chief steward made the bed. He responded by twisting and folding the towels into swans, roses, and then more directly anatomical expressions of thwarted interest that were left propped on my pillows as a dog might have cocked its leg. And so, most mornings, I sat alone on the foredeck, practising my Malay now without the help of the stewards, as the little ship ploughed across the ocean towards Colombo. Hamid, occasionally on duty there, would serve me coffee with the averted eyes of cold professionalism and I would tip him too lavishly. I had devalued the currency of our friendly relations, converted the gold of simple humanity to the dross of rutting bodies. Sometimes, I would draw the hands of fellow-passengers at the dinner table, or their feet on the dancefloor. Whole people seemed, for the moment, beyond me.

One morning, after the visit of the chief steward, I drew my own face in the looking glass. I still have it. A self-portrait is always a taking of stock. Remember those appallingly dispassionate self-portraits by Rembrandt – born incidentally just across the road from me though some time before, as I tell the young – executed at various stages of his life and charting his descent from youthful enthusiasm to senile dismay. In the mirror, I saw before me a man of some thirty-three years, tall, blondish hair still thick and cut short. The individual features were well enough though each flawed – the nose a little long, the cheeks a trifle too shallow, the neck somewhat scrawny, the weak blue eyes honest but small, imprisoned behind wire-rimmed spectacles – yet somehow they did not go together to make a satisfactory face. The fault lay, perhaps, principally in the mouth – small, thin-lipped, inescapably prissy and ungiven to the expression of joy. It is a cold, blank face, not radiant with innocence and yet lacking in self-confidence – worse – lacking in self-liking and spontaneity. There is something in it of a disillusioned undertaker.