Читать книгу The Male Response - Brian Aldiss - Страница 10

‘With patient look, thou watchest …’

All men think alike; no two act alike.

In Umbalathorp there were, quite unknown to Soames, several people who considered themselves interested parties where he was concerned and who, from the moment of his arrival, vibrated with a passion of curiosity about him. In the thoughts of each, he appeared as a pawn merely, an object they could profitably, for one reason or another, incorporate into their own designs. But the ways in which they set about arranging a meeting with him were diverse; the meeting became, to one, an ambush, to another an attack, to another a lure, to another only a wary circling.

Timpleton also was under surveillance, but to a lesser degree. It was recognised from the start, in the uncanny fashion one does recognise such things, that Soames, of the two, was – in the expressive American phrase – loaded. Soames, though he would have shrunk from the idea, conformed to the slightly dated and therefore doubly appealing world-image of The Englishman Abroad to a remarkable degree. His indecisiveness, by which an inward panic frustrated all outward action, chimed curiously in all its external aspects with the British tradition for keeping one’s head while all around are losing theirs; and the delicacy with which, on first riding through Umbalathorp, he had averted his eyes from its grosser squalors had easily been misinterpreted as the chill aloofness of a white barra sahib.

Eyes, hostile, friendly and calculatingly neutral, had read these marks upon Soames on his arrival and during his ride through the market, and had laid their plans accordingly. The first of these plans to develop from the theoretical to the practical phase was that of Queen Louise.

The Queen descended upon him while he was still surveying his room. Timpleton had been shown by a servant to another, similar room down the corridor. Apart from the tropical generosity of window space, this might have been the cell of a top-brass priest on Mount Athos; it was of whitewashed stone, furnished only with bed, chair and chest of drawers. The bed was covered with a bright rug. The big brass bowl on top of the chest contained a handful of dead leaves.

The Queen knocked and swept into Soames’ room, accompanied by a small, tittering maid, almost before he had time to cry ‘Come in’. She was a large, ugly woman, with nostrils as mobile as gills and skin the colour of strong tea; when she announced herself, one heard the loud but inaudible fanfare of trumpets.

‘You may kiss my hand, Mr Soames,’ she said, in clear English, ‘but otherwise no formalities. Kindly address me as “Queen Louise”, as do my other subjects. Come, I shall be good enough to show you round the palace.’

Soames protested that his clothes looked too disreputable, that when the expedition to the plane returned he could make himself more presentable for such an honour.

‘If I show you round as you are, that only makes the honour more great,’ Queen Louise said. ‘Please step along – I am, alas, not with much patience.’

It was difficult to decide what to say to this lady, Soames thought, as he followed into the corridor, jostling to get past the little maid to the Queen’s side, for her manner was impersonal enough to make one wonder if she was being formal or friendly. In the end, he tried for common ground by saying, ‘It is a pleasure to meet the mother of Deal Jimpo, whom I have grown to like very much.’

‘Of course,’ the Queen said. ‘I shall not deny you any pleasure you ask. You shall see her copiously soon.’

This plunged Soames into eddies of confusion. He felt like a male Alice walking beside a composite of the Queen of Hearts and Humpty Dumpty. Either Queen Louise was referring to herself in the third person, in the manner of Caesar’s ‘Caesar is turned to hear’, and offering to strip for him, or they had somehow come a cropper over the language barrier.

‘You are Jimpo’s mother?’ he enquired hesitantly.

‘Not I,’ said the Queen. ‘I am the mother of lovely, intellectual Princess Cherry, whom you shall soon meet. Jimpo is the son of the President’s wife.’

‘But you are the President’s wife.’

‘I am the King’s wife.’

‘But President and King are one!’

‘They are held by one person, but they are two separate offices, each of which is entitled to one wife.’

‘Oh.’

‘I make bed with the King; that is fealty. I must not make bed with President; that would be adultery.’

‘You must find these rather fine distinctions difficult to draw at times,’ Soames murmured.

‘It needs mighty discipline,’ said the Queen with relish.

She swept him into an empty banqueting hall, clapped her hands and ordered him to sit down on a couch. She deposited herself beside him. When the gamelan-like harmonies of the springs had died, she began to interrogate him, first about England, then about himself. To excuse this interest, she claimed she had British blood in her veins, but did not amplify the point.

‘The climate of Umbalathorp is good,’ she said, changing the subject abruptly. ‘You find it so?’

‘I have no complaints so far,’ Soames said, permitting a slight sulkiness to enter his voice.

‘It is good,’ the Queen said. ‘Even the wretched Mr Picket thrives here, although he is an Englishman of another sort. I have read in a Geographical Magazine that the English race comes from the tropics, and Princess Cherry is also very educated, reading great many books. She will make somebody, some privileged personage, a good wife one day. No doubt you are eager to meet her?’

‘Perhaps when my own clothes …’

‘She is engaged with her studies in the library now,’ said the Queen, ‘but it is possible to interrupt. Come, I know you will like her.’

Soames and the little black maid scurried after her, down a dark passage and into a room full of rickety shelves, on some of which reposed books and magazines. On a long cane chair lay Princess Cherry, heiress to her mother’s estate and physiognomy. She wore a heavy, heavily flowered dress; a blue plastic bow slide was clipped into her tight curls. One pair of earrings adhered to her ears, another was clipped to the superb dihedral of her nostril flanges. In her hand, negligently, was a copy of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks; it was right way up.

‘This is the Englishman, Mr Soames, Princess dear,’ said the Queen. ‘Get up and put your shoes on at once.’

The Princess complied and said, guiltily, ‘How do you do? Possibly you like to sit down in my chair and read something?’

‘Perhaps I might borrow something to have in bed tonight,’ Soames said. A slow flush crept over his face, in case they should think he had been attempting an innuendo, but both faces were – features apart – blank.

‘So you are a literary man?’ enquired Queen Louise, looking at her daughter to prompt her to take over the conversation. ‘The English are a great literary nation as well as conquering parts of Africa.’

‘I read quite a bit,’ Soames agreed.

‘The English are a very great literary nation,’ the Princess admitted uneasily.

‘What do you read – besides Buddenbrooks?’ Soames enquired. He would have enjoyed the conversation better had the Queen not been drawn up like an RSM behind him; she was breathing deeply, like a man receiving a VC at Buckingham palace.

‘I read Buddenbrooks for a long time,’ said the Princess sadly. ‘The servants forget to bring me tea when I sit here in this room – library. Also I read John Keats’ “Ode to Autumn”, which I like. It is a poem. Have you heard of it?’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ Soames said. They had swotted up the Ode for School Cert, fifteen years ago. ‘For summer has overfilled their clammy cells.’

The Princess clapped her hands and smiled with delight. ‘He knows it!’ she said to her mother. Genuine pleasure filled her, she sat down naturally on the cane chair like an English schoolgirl, and Soames’ feelings changed to liking for her.

‘This is a sad poem,’ she said, ‘but for me mainly puzzling – for you see we do not have autumn in Goya.’

‘Otherwise the climate is excellent,’ said the Queen.

‘Autumn must be so strange,’ the Princess said. ‘I wish John Keats had written a novel also. Will you perhaps explain the poem to me, line by line, if you are not always busy at your machine, for my English is so foul?’

‘I should love to read the poem with you,’ Soames said, ‘but I assure you your English is very good indeed. Where did you learn it?’

The young girl’s manner altered. The smile faded from her face, she turned her head away; she seemed to recall unhappy, far-off things.

‘From Mr Picket,’ she said.

‘Come, we must leave the girl at her work,’ said the Queen briskly, uttering a sharp word of command in Goyese to the maid. Before Soames was bustled out, the Princess rose and curtsied; a memory rose in his mind of a performing bear he had seen as an infant. It, too, could curtsy and look sad.

Outside the door, the Queen, drawing herself up to her full height and girth, surveyed Soames thoroughly. Under the glare of her eyes and nostrils, he felt like a man confronted by a bandit aiming a double-barrelled gun.

‘She is sweet, the Princess, eh?’ the Queen challenged.

Soames nodded once, saying curtly, ‘I should like to talk to her alone sometime.’

For answer, he received a salacious wink. The password had evidently been given; the shotgun was lowered; Greek had met Greek. Queen Louise seized his wrist as they set off down the corridor again.

‘You are staying here not less than two weeks, Mr Soames.’

‘Probably.’

‘That time must be enough for you to grow to love this country. We shall show you up all over it. Perhaps you will not like to leave it then. If it would be so, a very good job can be secured in the President’s government; perhaps the post of Prime Minister could be found for you. I could arrange everything of consequence.’

‘I don’t doubt that, Queen Louise,’ said Soames. ‘But I must get back to England.’

‘You are not married?’

‘No.’

‘You are single?’

‘Yes.’

‘A bachelor?’

‘Yes.’

‘Goya has many attractions for a young man, a single literary bachelor.’

‘That I do not doubt. But I hardly think I shall stay, all the same.’

‘Dumayami, the witch doctor, who is a clever man at reading the future, tells otherwise.’

Lunch was served in the banqueting hall. The small handful of people present huddled round two tables at one end of the room, under the only electric fan which was working. M’Grassi Landor with his two wives, Queen Louise and Mrs President, a buxom Goyese called Tunna, sat at one table with such of their respective offspring as were of manageable age (a category including Princess Cherry and her younger brother Shappy), eating in almost complete silence. At the other table sat Soames with an assortment of black men who were court officials or government ministers. Since none of them possessed much English, silence fell there, too, when they had tried out the little they had. Timpleton was not present, thereby missing an excellent Indian curry.

After the meal, the Indian chef came out of the kitchen to present himself to Soames. He was a slender man whose goat’s eyes did not smile when the rest of his face did.

‘My name is Turdilal Ghosti, sir. I am the head cook to this palace since three years, sir. Was the dinner exactly to your liking, I am hoping?’

‘Excellent,’ Soames said. ‘I am very fond of Indian food. The chicken pilau was first rate.’

‘Is the best, sir. How long you are staying here?’

‘Oh, about a fortnight. I hope I’ll see you again,’ Soames said, shuffling his feet, preparing to leave.

‘I am living in this bloody town, sir, since seven years. Is too long time for me. Here I am all alone with my old mother and my wife and my six little children and my brother and his family and my uncle and some of his relations and their relations.’

‘I noticed there were a lot of Indians in Umbalathorp,’ Soames said. He was cornered in an alcove, and the little chef was adroitly keeping him there. Soames could see that the inside of his mouth was bright with betel.

‘Plenty Indians are living here, sir,’ Turdilal agreed, ‘and all are being so bloody unhappy, sir. This climate only good for black men. No other man is liking, sir. In the Japanese war I was cooking three years in Firpo’s restaurant on Chowringhee Street at Calcutta; there I am learning all my culinary skill, sir. Perhaps one night you will come to honour my house with your presence? Then I am cooking for you a splendid meal, sir, and displaying to you my children.’

‘It’s really awfully kind,’ Soames said, ‘but I fear I’m going to be very busy during my brief stay.’

‘I have very nice house, sir, half up Stranger’s Hill. You will be having good entertainment.’

‘Oh, I’m sure.’

‘When I am in Calcutta I am having a white friend, sir.’

Growing more embarrassed, Soames attempted a feeble joke and said, ‘I’d like to come. It’s just that I think Queen Louise has my spare time pretty well arranged.’

‘The Queen is a bloody old hag, sir, if you excuse the word,’ Turdilal said, with no trace of anger in his voice. ‘I think later you are regretting you don’t come my house like I am asking, sir.’

He turned on his heel and snaked down the corridor. Soames sighed, abandoned his alcove, stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered down a flight of stone steps into the sunshine. Here, he was at the back of the palace; it was private and a rough attempt had been made at a garden. The trees were beautiful; big green lizards scuttled up them like rats as he approached.

Soames was enjoying himself. People are taking an interest in me, he thought self-indulgently; they may be no less self-seeking than my fellow-countrymen, but they go about the business with more originality, more verve. They are more amusing. The real reason for his enjoyment, however, was a deeper, sillier, better, less analysable reason; he was living in a strange land.

It was a different thing altogether from holidaying in a strange land. Here, although only temporarily, he belonged, was in touch. It was something, for all his excursions abroad and the brief business trips to Brussels and Paris, he had never managed before.

At the bottom of the garden flowed the river Uiui, only five feet below the brow of a tiny cliff. Soames stared down into the flood, its surface green and turbulent as it hurried along. A small fishing boat, manned by four negroes bent sweating over the oars, laboured against the current. A hill rose sheer out of the opposite bank, its jungle studded with jagged outcrops of rock. ‘Africa,’ whispered Soames to himself, ‘darkest Africa’; and he exulted.

There seemed to be no reason why his stay here should not be entirely pleasant, despite the vaguely disturbing warnings of M’Grassi Landor about the witch doctor. Already, reports of the situation had been transmitted home from the wireless room in the palace. What had threatened to be a difficult monetary situation had also been cleared up by M’Grassi Landor and a gentleman grandly styled Minister of Finances who turned out to be manager of the Umbalathorp Bank. Both Soames and Timpleton had been loaded down with doimores, the local coin; twenty mores equalled one doimore, and one doimore was worth ten shillings at the current rate of exchange.

Feeling both at peace with the world and excited by it, Soames turned left and made his way upstream by a path along the bank of the river. It wound enticingly, hedged with flowers and sheltered from the piercing sun. Soon he had left the palace grounds behind; the growth on either side became thicker, the path more devious. He passed an almost naked hunter, who stood gravely aside for him without a word or gesture. The dappled shadows ahead, the silence, led Soames on as if under an enchantment; he walked dreamily, mind a blank.

When he reached a square-framed reed hut, Soames halted, telling himself there was no point in going further. Suddenly he was tired. The hut was empty, its interior cool and inviting. Inside was nothing but a bundle of rags in one corner and an old orange box in another; gratefully, Soames went in and sat on the box.

He mopped his brow, letting his chin droop on to his chest as he rested. Warm drowsiness overcame him.

A sudden sense of being watched jerked his head up. A man stood in the doorway, staring at him with unfriendly eyes; he must have come up with almost supernatural quietness.

‘You frightened me for a moment,’ Soames said, aware that his start had been observed.

‘I am Dumayami, chief witch doctor of Umbalathorp. I want speak with you,’ the stranger said soberly.

It invariably happens that in those parts of the world which, disregarding the opinions of their inhabitants, we call remote, the products of the white man are more welcome than his presence. They precede him, they succeed him. In the heart of Sumatra (as dangerous now to a pale-haired one as it was two hundred years ago), you may come upon old men drinking from little round tins which once contained fifty of Messrs John Player’s cigarettes; the petrol can of the Occident is the foundation stone of the Orient; Coke bottles clog the very source of the untamed Amazon. Knowing this, Soames felt little surprise to find Dumayami clad in an undoubted Church of England surplice with, pinned to it, a badge saying ‘I like Ike’, just possibly a souvenir of the recent Gunther safari.

Apart from this, the witch doctor was an impressive figure, a giant feather nodding over his scaphocephalic skull, his face notched with tribal marks and wormed with wrinkles. An air of confidence and a whiff of rotten eggs surrounded him. Soames’ alarmed thoughts took on a defensive tinge; alas, he was armed with nothing fiercer than a nail file.

‘I am resting,’ he said. ‘What is it you wish to say?’

‘I think you already know that,’ Dumayami told him. ‘The many spirits of Umbalathorp all speak out against your coming. They declare only ill will come from your visit.’

‘What am I supposed to have done? Do the spirits tell you that?’

‘Spirits tell Dumayami all things,’ the witch doctor said, squatting for comfort on the threshold of the hut. The pupils of his eyes held a malevolent, tigerish glint. ‘Spirits say you come with machine to make much trouble here.’

‘Of course,’ said Soames. ‘The Apostle will trespass on your pitch in some respects, eh?’

‘In Umbalathorp is room for only one law. Now you bring Christian devil box, cast wrong spells, make much trouble.’

‘My dear man, the Apostle Mk II does no more than juggle with given data,’ Soames said; this old man was clearly a bit of a loon. ‘You’d better come up and look at it when it’s installed and set your mind at rest.’

Dumayami performed his own equivalent of crossing himself at the very suggestion.

‘First Apostle Mark come,’ he said gloomily, ‘then other apostles, Luke, John, maybe Paul. You must not have success here.’

‘Oh, how are you going to stop us? Burn cockerel feathers or something? Progress, Dumayami, has reached Goya at last.’

‘Already spirits pull down your flying machine,’ Dumayami said darkly. ‘Next blow up Christian devil box machine.’

It was, Soames mentally conceded, a crafty point; some people might even have been impressed by it.

‘And me? What’s going to happen to me, Dumayami?’ he enquired.

The witch doctor rose lazily, shaking his head as if to say that it was better for Soames not to know that. Groping under his surplice, he produced what looked like a sharp bone. With two backward paces he was out of the hut. He bent down and used the bone to inscribe a sign in the dusty earth of the threshold.

‘If you do not step over this sign, you do not leave Africa,’ he said. Raising one hand, he stepped from view and was gone as noiselessly as he came.

‘Damned silly,’ Soames muttered aloud. ‘Of course I can step over it.’

He went over the doorway to examine the mark Dumayami had made. Before he got there, two little yellow and red birds had fallen squabbling and copulating on to the path outside. Their bright wings, fluttering in lust and anger, erased the witch doctor’s sign. Soames stood there blankly, not heeding them as they plunged away.

At last, taking a long step over the threshold, he emerged from the hut and hurried back to the palace. Of Dumayami there was neither sight nor sound.