The New Collected Short Stories (35 page)

‘Oh Lion, why not when it can be so sweet?’

He shook his head and reached up for his pyjamas, a sultan’s gift. It was presents all the time in these days. His gambling debts were settled through the secretary, and if he needed anything, or was thought to need it, something or other appeared. He had ceased to protest and now accepted indiscriminately. He could trade away the worst of the junk later on – some impossible jewelry for instance which one couldn’t be seen dead in. He did wish, though, that he could have given presents in return, for he was anything but a sponger. He had made an attempt two nights previously, with dubious results. ‘I seem always taking and never giving,’ he had said. ‘Is there nothing of mine you’d fancy? I’d be so glad if there was.’ To receive the reply: ‘Yes. Your hairbrush’ 
–
 ‘My
hairbrush
?’ – and he was not keen on parting with this particular object, for it had been a coming-of-age gift from Isabel. His hesitation brought tears to the eyes, so he had to give in. ‘You’re welcome to my humble brush if you want it, of course. I’ll just comb it out for you first’ – ‘No, no, as it is uncombed,’ and it was snatched away fanatically. Almost like a vulture snatching. Odd little things like this did happen occasionally, m’m m’m m’ms he called them, for they reminded him of oddities on the other boat. They did no one any harm, so why worry? Enjoy yourself while you can. He lolled at his ease and let the gifts rain on him as they would – a Viking at a Byzantine court, spoiled, adored and not yet bored.

This was certainly the life, and sitting on one chair with his feet on another he prepared for their usual talk, which might be long or short but was certainly the life. When Cocoanut got going it was fascinating. For all the day he had slipped around the ship, discovering people’s weaknesses. More than that, he and his cronies were cognizant of financial possibilities that do not appear in the City columns, and could teach one how to get rich if one thought it worth while. More than that, he had a vein of fantasy. In the midst of something ribald and scandalous – the discovery of Lady Manning, for instance: Lady Manning of all people in the cabin of the Second Engineer – he imagined the discovery being made by a flying fish who had popped through the Engineer’s porthole, and he indicated the expression on the fish’s face.

Yes, this was the life, and one that he had never experienced in his austere apprenticeship: luxury, gaiety, kindness, unusualness, and delicacy that did not exclude brutal pleasure. Hitherto he had been ashamed of being built like a brute: his preceptors had condemned carnality or had dismissed it as a waste of time, and his mother had ignored its existence in him and all her children; being hers, they had to be pure.

What to talk about this pleasurable evening? How about the passport scandal? For Cocoanut possessed two passports, not one like most people, and they confirmed a growing suspicion that he might not be altogether straight. In England Lionel would have sheered off at once from such a subject, but since Gibraltar they had become so intimate and morally so relaxed that he experienced nothing but friendly curiosity. The information on the passports was conflicting, so that it was impossible to tell the twister’s age, or where he had been born or indeed what his name was. ‘You could get into serious trouble over this,’ Lionel had warned him, to be answered by irresponsible giggles. ‘You could, you know. However, you’re no better than a monkey, and I suppose a monkey can’t be expected to know it’s own name.’ To which the reply had been ‘Lion, he don’t know nothing at all. Monkey’s got to come along to tell a Lion he’s alive.’ It was never easy to score. He had picked up his education, if that was the word for it, in London, and his financial beginnings in Amsterdam, one of the passports was Portuguese, the other Danish, and half the blood must be Asiatic, unless a drop was Negro.

‘Now come along, tell me the truth and nothing but the truth for a change,’ he began. ‘Ah, that reminds me I’ve at last got off that letter to the Mater. She adores news. It was a bit difficult to think of anything to interest her, however I filled it up with tripe about the Arbuthnots, and threw you in at the end as a sort of makeweight.’

‘To make what sort of weight?’

‘Well, naturally I didn’t say what we do. I’m not stark staring raving mad. I merely mentioned I’d run into you in the London office, and got a cabin through you, that is to say single-berth one. I threw dust in her eyes all right.’

‘Dear Lionel, you don’t know how to throw dust or even where it is. Of mud you know a little, good, but not dust. Why bring me into the matter at all?’

‘Oh, for the sake of something to say.’

‘Did you say I too was on board?’

‘I did in passing,’ he said irritably, for he now realized he had better not have. ‘I was writing that damned epistle, not you, and I had to fill it up. Don’t worry – she’s forgotten your very existence by this time.’

The other was certain she hadn’t. If he had foreseen this meeting and had worked towards it through dreams, why should not an anxious parent have foreseen it too? She had valid reasons for anxiety, for things had actually started on that other boat. A trivial collision between children had alerted them towards each other as men. Thence had their present happiness sprung, thither might it wither, for the children had been disturbed. That vengeful onswishing of skirts . . . ! ‘What trick can I think of this time that will keep him from her? I love him, I am clever, I have money. I will try.’ The first step was to contrive his exit from the Army. The second step was to dispose of that English girl in India, called Isabel, about whom too little was known. Marriage or virginity or concubinage for Isabel? He had no scruples at perverting Lionel’s instincts in order to gratify his own, or at endangering his prospects of paternity. All that mattered was their happiness, and he thought he knew what that was. Much depended on the next few days: he had to work hard and to work with the stars. His mind played round approaching problems, combining them, retreating from them, and aware all the time of a further problem, of something in the beloved which he did not understand. He half-closed his eyes and watched, and listened through half-closed ears. By not being too much on the spot and sacrificing shrewdness to vision he sometimes opened a door. And sure enough Lionel said, ‘As a matter of fact the Mater never liked you,’ and a door opened, slowly.

‘Man, how should she? Oh, when the chalk went from the hand of the sailor round the feet of the lady and she could not move and we all knew it, and oh man how we mocked her.’

‘I don’t remember – well, I do a little. It begins to come back to me and does sound like the sort of thing that would put her off. She certainly went on about you after we landed, and complained that you made things interesting when they weren’t, funny thing to say, still the Mater is pretty funny. So we put our heads together as children sometimes do——’

‘Do they? Oh yes.’

‘– and Olive who’s pretty bossy herself decreed we shouldn’t mention you again as it seemed to worry her extra and she had just had a lot of worry. He actually – I hadn’t meant to tell you this, it’s a dead secret.’

‘It shall be. I swear. By all that is without me and within me I swear.’ He became incomprehensible in his excitement and uttered words in that unknown tongue. Nearly all tongues were unknown to Lionel, and he was impressed.

‘Well, he actually——’

‘Man, of whom do you now speak?’

‘Oh yes, the Mater’s husband, my Dad. He was in the Army too, in fact he attained the rank of major, but a quite unspeakable thing happened – he went native somewhere out East and got cashiered – deserted his wife and left her with five young children to bring up, and no money. She was taking us all away from him when you met us and still had a faint hope that he might pull himself together and follow her. Not he. He never even wrote – remember, this is absolutely secret.’

‘Yes, yes,’ but he thought the secret a very tame one: how else should a middle-aged husband behave? ‘But, Lionel, one question to you the more. For whom did the Major desert the Mater?’

‘He went native.’

‘With a girl or with a boy?’

‘A boy? Good God! Well, I mean to say, with a girl, naturally – I mean, it was somewhere right away in the depths of Burma.’

‘Even in Burma there are boys. At least I once heard so. But the Dad went native with a girl. Ver’ well. Might not therefore there be offspring?’

‘If there were, they’d be half-castes. Pretty depressing prospect. Well, you know what I mean. My family – Dad’s, that’s to say – can trace itself back nearly two hundred years, and the Mater’s goes back to the War of the Roses. It’s really pretty awful, Cocoa.’

The half-caste smiled as the warrior floundered. Indeed he valued him most when he fell full length. And the whole conversation – so unimportant in itself – gave him a sense of approaching victory which he had not so far entertained. He had a feeling that Lionel knew that he was in the net or almost in it, and did not mind. Cross-question him further! Quick! Rattle him! ‘Is Dad dead?’ he snapped.

‘I couldn’t very well come East if he wasn’t. He has made our name stink in these parts. As it is I’ve had to change my name, or rather drop half of it. He called himself Major Corrie March. We were all proud of the “Corrie” and had reason to be. Try saying “Corrie March” to the Big Eight here, and watch the effect.’

‘You must get two passports, must you not, one with and one without a “Corrie” on it. I will fix it, yes? At Bombay?’

‘So as I can cheat like you? No, thank you. My name is Lionel March and that’s my name.’ He poured out some more champagne.

‘Are you like him?’

‘I should hope not. I hope I’m not cruel and remorseless and selfish and self-indulgent and a liar as he was.’

‘I don’t mean unimportant things like that. I mean are you like him to look at?’

‘You have the strangest ideas of what is important.’

‘Was his body like yours?’

‘How should I know?’ 
–
 and he was suddenly shy. ‘I was only a kid and the Mater’s torn up every photograph of him she could lay her hands on. He was a hundred per cent Aryan all right and there was plenty of him as there certainly is of me – indeed there’ll be too much of me if I continue swilling at this rate. Suppose we talk about your passports for a change.’

‘Was he one in whom those who sought rest found fire, and fire rest?’

‘I’ve not the least idea what you’re talking about. Do you mean I’m such a one myself?’

‘I do.’

‘I’ve not the least idea——’ Then he hesitated. ‘Unless . . . no, you’re daft as usual, and in any case we’ve spent more than enough time in dissecting my unfortunate parent. I brought him up to show you how much the Mater has to put up with, one has to make endless allowances for her and you mustn’t take it amiss if she’s unreasonable about you. She’d probably like you if she got the chance. There was something else that upset her at the time . . . I seem to be bringing out all the family skeletons in a bunch, still they won’t go any further, and I feel like chattering to someone about everything, once in a way. I’ve never had anyone to talk to like you. Never, and don’t suppose I ever shall. Do you happen to remember the youngest of us all, the one we called Baby?’

‘Ah, that pretty Baby!’

‘Well, a fortnight after we landed and while we were up at my grandfather’s looking for a house, that poor kid died.’

‘Die what of?’ he exclaimed, suddenly agitated. He raised his knees and rested his chin on them. With his nudity and his polished duskiness and his strange-shaped head, he suggested an image crouched outside a tomb.

‘Influenza, quite straightforward. It was going through the parish and he caught it. But the worst of it was the Mater wouldn’t be reasonable. She would insist that it was sunstroke, and that he got it running about with no topi on when she wasn’t looking after him properly in this very same Red Sea.’

‘Her poor pretty Baby. So I killed him for her.’

‘Cocoa! How ever did you guess that? It’s exactly what she twisted it round to. We had quite a time with her. Olive argued, grandfather prayed . . . and I could only hang around and do the wrong thing, as I generally do.’

‘But she – she saw me only, running in the sun with my devil’s head, and m’m m’m m’m all you follow me till the last one the tiny one dies, and she, she talking to an officer, a handsome one, oh to sleep in his arms as I shall in yours, so she forgets the sun and it strikes the tiny one. I see.’

‘Yes, you see in a wrong sort of way’; every now and then came these outbursts which ought to be rubbish yet weren’t. Wrong of course about his mother, who was the very soul of purity, and over Captain Armstrong, who had become their valued family adviser. But right over Baby’s death: she actually had declared that the idle unmanly imp had killed him, and designedly. Of recent years she had not referred to the disaster, and might have forgotten it. He was more than ever vexed with himself for mentioning Cocoanut in the letter he had recently posted to her.

‘Did I kill him for you also?’

‘For me? Of course not. I know the difference between influenza and sunstroke, and you don’t develop the last-named after a three weeks’ interval.’

‘Did I kill him for anyone – or for anything?’

Lionel gazed into eyes that gazed through him and through cabin walls into the sea. A few days ago he would have ridiculed the question, but tonight he was respectful. This was because his affection, having struck earthward, was just trying to flower. ‘Something’s worrying you? Why not tell me about it?’ he said.

‘Did you love pretty Baby?’

‘No, I was accustomed to see him around but he was too small to get interested in and I haven’t given him a thought for years. So all’s well.’

‘There is nothing between us then?’

‘Why should there be?’

‘Lionel – dare I ask you one more question?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘It is about blood. It is the last of all the questions. Have you ever shed blood?’

‘No – oh, sorry, I should have said yes. I forgot that little war of mine. It goes clean out of my head between times. A battle’s such a mess-up, you wouldn’t believe, and this one had a miniature sandstorm raging to make confusion more confounded. Yes, I shed blood all right, or so the official report says. I didn’t know at the time.’ He was suddenly silent. Vividly and unexpectedly the desert surged up, and he saw it as a cameo, from outside. The central figure – a grotesque one – was himself going berserk, and close to him was a dying savage who had managed to wound him and was trying to speak.