“This is Vijaya Bhattacharya,” said Dr MacPhail as the bronze statue approached. “Vijaya is my assistant.”
“In the hospital?”
Dr MacPhail shook his head. “Except in emergencies,” he said, “I don’t practise any more. Vijaya and I work together at the Agricultural Experimental Station. And Murugan Mailendra,” (he waved his hand in the direction of the dark-skinned boy), “is with us temporarily, studying soil science and plant breeding.”
Vijaya stepped aside and, laying a large hand on his companion’s shoulder, pushed him forward. Looking up into that beautiful, sulky young face, Will suddenly recognized, with a start of surprise, the elegantly tailored youth he had met, five days before, at Rendang-Lobo, had driven with in Colonel Dipa’s white Mercedes all over the island. He smiled, he opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself. Almost imperceptibly but quite unmistakably, the boy had shaken his head. In his eyes Will saw an expression of anguished pleading. His lips moved soundlessly. “Please,” he seemed to be saying, “please …” Will readjusted his face.
“How do you do, Mr Mailendra,” he said in a tone of casual formality.
Murugan looked enormously relieved. “How do you do,” he said, and made a little bow.
Will looked round to see if the others had noticed what had happened. Mary Sarojini and Vijaya, he saw, were busy with the stretcher and the doctor was repacking his black bag. The little comedy had been played without an audience. Young Murugan evidently had his reasons for not wanting it to be known that he had been in Rendang. Boys will be boys. Boys will even be girls. Colonel Dipa had been more than fatherly towards his young protégé, and towards the Colonel, Murugan had been a good deal more than filial — he had been positively adoring. Was it merely hero-worship, merely a schoolboy’s admiration for the strong man who had carried out a successful revolution, liquidated the opposition and installed himself as dictator? Or were other feelings involved? Was Murugan playing Antinous to this black moustached Hadrian? Well, if that was how he felt about middle-aged military gangsters, that was his privilege. And if the gangster liked pretty boys, that was his. And perhaps, Will went on to reflect, that was why Colonel Dipa had refrained from making a formal introduction. “This is Muru,” was all he had said, when the boy was ushered into the presidential office. “My young friend Muru,” and he had risen, had put his arm around the boy’s shoulders, had led him to the sofa and sat down beside him. “May I drive the Mercedes?” Murugan had asked. The dictator had smiled indulgently and nodded his sleek black head. And that was another reason for thinking that more than mere friendliness was involved in that curious relationship. At the wheel of the Colonel’s sports car Murugan was a maniac. Only an infatuated lover would have entrusted himself, not to mention his guest, to such a chauffeur. On the flat between Rendang-Lobo and the oil fields the speedometer had twice touched a hundred and ten; and worse, much worse, was to follow on the mountain road from the oil fields to the copper mines. Chasms yawned, tyres screeched round corners, water buffaloes emerged from bamboo thickets a few feet ahead of the car, ten-ton lorries came roaring down on the wrong side of the road. “Aren’t you a little nervous?” Will had ventured to ask. But the gangster was pious as well as infatuated. “If one knows that one is doing the will of Allah — and I do know it, Mr Farnaby — there is no excuse for nervousness. In those circumstances, nervousness would be blasphemy.” And as Murugan swerved to avoid yet another buffalo, he opened his gold cigarette case and offered Will a Balkan Sobranje.
“Ready,” Vijaya called.
Will turned his head and saw the stretcher lying on the ground beside him.
“Good!” said Dr MacPhail. “Let’s lift him on to it. Carefully. Carefully …”
A minute later the little procession was winding its way up the narrow path between the trees. Mary Sarojini was in the van, her grandfather brought up the rear and, between them, came Murugan and Vijaya at either end of the stretcher.
From his moving bed Will Farnaby looked up through the green darkness as though from the floor of a living sea. Far overhead, near the surface, there was a rustling among the leaves, a noise of monkeys. And now it was a dozen hornbills hopping, like the figments of a disordered imagination, through a cloud of orchids.
“Are you comfortable?” Vijaya asked, bending solicitously to look into his face.
Will smiled back at him.
“Luxuriously comfortable,” he said.
“It isn’t far,” the other went on reassuringly. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Where’s ‘there’?”
“The Experimental Station. It’s like Rothamsted. Did you ever go to Rothamsted when you were in England?”
Will had heard of it, of course, but never seen the place.
“It’s been going for more than a hundred years,” Vijaya went on.
“A hundred and eighteen, to be precise,” said Dr MacPhail. “Lawes and Gilbert started their work on fertilizers in 1843. One of their pupils came out here in the early fifties to help my grandfather get our Station going. Rothamsted in the tropics — that was the idea. In the tropics and for the tropics.”
There was a lightening of the green gloom and a moment later the litter emerged from the forest into the full glare of tropical sunshine. Will raised his head and looked about him. They were not far from the floor of an immense ampitheatre. Five hundred feet below stretched a wide plain, checkered with fields, dotted with clumps of trees and clustered houses. In the other direction the slopes climbed up and up, thousands of feet towards a semicircle of mountains. Terrace above green or golden terrace, from the plain to the crenellated wall of peaks, the rice paddies followed the contour lines, emphasizing every swell and recession of the slope with what seemed a deliberate and artful intention. Nature here was no longer merely natural; the landscape had been composed, had been reduced to its geometrical essences, and rendered, by what in a painter would have been a miracle of virtuosity, in terms of these sinuous lines, these streaks of pure bright colour.
“What were you doing in Rendang?” Dr Robert asked, breaking a long silence.
“Collecting materials for a piece on the new régime.”
“I wouldn’t have thought the Colonel was newsworthy.”
“You’re mistaken. He’s a military dictator. That means there’s death in the offing. And death is always news. Even the remote smell of death is news,” he laughed. “That’s why I was told to drop in on my way back from China.”
And there had been other reasons which he preferred not to mention. Newspapers were only one of Lord Aldehyde’s interests. In another manifestation he was the South-East Asia Petroleum Company, he was Imperial and Foreign Copper Limited. Officially, Will had come to Rendang to sniff the death in its militarized air; but he had also been commissioned to find out what the dictator felt about foreign capital, what tax rebates he was prepared to offer, what guarantees against nationalization. And how much of the profits would be exportable? How many native technicians and administrators would have to be employed? A whole battery of questions. But Colonel Dipa had been most affable and co-operative. Hence that hair-raising drive, with Murugan at the wheel, to the copper mines. “Primitive, my dear Farnaby, primitive. Urgently in need, as you can see for yourself, of modern equipment.” Another meeting had been arranged — arranged, Will now remembered, for this very morning. He visualized the Colonel at his desk. A report from the chief of police. ‘Mr Farnaby was last seen sailing a small boat single-handed into the Pala Strait. Two hours later a storm of great violence … Presumed dead …’ Instead of which, here he was, alive and kicking, on the forbidden island.
“They’ll never give you a visa,” Joe Aldehyde had said at their last interview. “But perhaps you could sneak ashore in disguise. Wear a burnous or something, like Lawrence of Arabia.”
With a straight face, “I’ll try,” Will had promised.
“Anyhow if you ever do manage to land in Pala, make a bee-line for the
palace. The Rani — that’s their Queen Mother — is an old friend of mine. Met her for the first time six years ago at Lugano. She was staying there with old Voegeli, the investment banker. His girl friend is interested in spiritualism and they staged a seance for me. A trumpet medium, genuine Direct Voice — only unfortunately it was all in German. Well, after the lights were turned on, I had a long talk with her.”
“With the trumpet?”
“No, no. With the Rani. She’s a remarkable woman. You know, The Crusade of the Spirit.”
“Was that her invention?”
“Absolutely. And personally I prefer it to Moral Rearmament. It goes down better in Asia. We had a long talk about it that evening. And after that we talked about oil. Pala’s full of oil. South-East Asia Petroleum has been trying to get in on it for years. So have all the other companies. Nothing doing. No oil concessions to anyone. It’s their fixed policy. But the Rani doesn’t agree with it. She wants to see the oil doing some good in the world. Financing the Crusade of the Spirit, for example. So, as I say, if ever you get to Pala, make a bee-line for the palace. Talk to her. Get the inside story about the men who make the decisions. Find out if there’s a pro-oil minority and ask how we could help them to carry on the good work.” And he had ended by promising Will a handsome bonus if his efforts should be crowned with success. Enough to give him a full year of freedom. “No more reporting. Nothing but High Art, Art, A-ART.” And he had uttered a scatological laugh as though the word had an ‘s’ at the end of it, and not a ‘t’. Unspeakable creature! But all the same he wrote for the unspeakable creature’s vile papers and was ready, for a bribe, to do the vile creature’s dirty work. And now, incredibly, here he was on Palanese soil. As luck would have it, Providence had been on his side — for the express purpose, evidently, of perpetrating one of those sinister practical jokes which are Providence’s speciality.
He was called back to present reality by the sound of Mary Sarojini’s shrill voice. “Here we are!”
Will raised his head again. The little procession had turned off the highway and was passing through an opening in a white stuccoed wall. To the left, on a rising succession of terraces, stood lines of low buildings shaded by peepul trees. Straight ahead an avenue of tall palms sloped down to a lotus pool, on the further side of which sat a huge stone Buddha. Turning to the left, they climbed between flowering trees and through blending perfumes to the first terrace. Behind a fence, motionless except for his ruminating jaws, stood a snow-white humped bull, god-like in his serene and mindless beauty. Europa’s lover receded into the past, and here were a brace of Juno’s birds trailing their feathers over the grass. Mary Sarojini unlatched the gate of a small garden.
“My bungalow,” said Dr MacPhail, and turning to Murugan, “Let me help you to negotiate the steps.”
CHAPTER FOUR
TOM KRISHNA AND Mary Sarojini had gone to take their siesta with the gardener’s children next door. In her darkened living-room, Susila MacPhail sat alone with her memories of past happiness and the present pain of her bereavement. The clock in the kitchen struck the half hour. It was time for her to go. With a sigh she rose, put on her sandals and walked out into the tremendous glare of the tropical afternoon. She looked up at the sky. Over the volcanoes enormous clouds were climbing towards the zenith. In an hour it would be raining. Moving from one pool of shadow to the next, she made her way along the tree-lined path. With a sudden rattle of quills a flock of pigeons broke out of one of the towering peepul trees. Green-winged and coral-billed, their breasts changing colour in the light like mother of pearl, they flew off towards the forest. How beautiful they were, how unutterably lovely! Susila was on the point of turning to catch the expression of delight on Dugald’s upturned face; then, checking herself, she looked down at the ground. There was no Dugald any more; there was only this pain, like the pain of the phantom limb that goes on haunting the imagination, haunting even the perceptions, of those who have undergone an amputation. “Amputation,” she whispered to herself, “amputation …” Feeling her eyes fill with tears, she broke off. Amputation was no excuse for self-pity and, for all that Dugald was dead, the birds were as beautiful as ever and her children, all the other children, had as much need to be loved and helped and taught. If his absence was so constantly present, that was to remind her that henceforward she must love for two, live for two, take thought for two, must perceive and understand not merely with her own eyes and mind but with the mind and eyes that had been his and, before the catastrophe, hers too in a communion of delight and intelligence.
But here was the doctor’s bungalow. She mounted the steps, crossed the verandah and walked into the living-room. Her father-in-law was seated near the window, sipping cold tea from an earthenware mug and reading the Journal de Mycologie. He looked up as she approached, and gave her a welcoming smile.
“Susila, my dear! I’m so glad you were able to come.”
She bent down and kissed his stubbly cheek.
“What’s all this I hear from Mary Sarojini?” she asked. “Is it true she found a castaway?”
“From England — but via China, Rendang and a shipwreck. A journalist.”
“What’s he like?”
“The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won’t allow it.”
“So I suppose he’s very unhappy.”
“So unhappy that he has to laugh like a hyena.”
“Does he know he laughs like a hyena?”
“Knows and is rather proud of it. Even makes epigrams about it. ‘I’m the man who won’t take yes for an answer.’”
“Is he badly hurt?” she asked.
“Not badly. But he’s running a temperature. I’ve started him on antibiotics. Now it’s up to you to raise his resistance and give the vis medicatrix naturae a chance.”
“I’ll do my best.” Then, after a silence, “I went to see Lakshmi,” she said, “on my way back from school.”
“How did you find her?”
“About the same. No, perhaps a little weaker than yesterday.”
“That’s what I felt when I saw her this morning.”
“Luckily the pain doesn’t seem to get any worse. We can still handle it psychologically. And today we worked on the nausea. She was able to drink something. I don’t think there’ll be any more need for intravenous fluids.”
“Thank goodness!” he said. “Those IV’s were a torture. Such enormous courage in the face of every real danger; but whenever it was a question of a hypodermic or a needle in a vein, the most abject and irrational terror.”
He thought of the time, in the early days of their marriage, when he had lost his temper and called her a coward for making such a fuss. Lakshmi had cried and, having submitted to her martyrdom, had heaped coals of fire upon his head by begging to be forgiven. “Lakshmi, Lakshmi …” And now in a few days she would be dead. After thirty-seven years. “What did you talk about?” he asked aloud.
“Nothing in particular,” Susila answered. But the truth was that they had talked about Dugald and that she couldn’t bring herself to repeat what had passed between them. “My first baby,” the dying woman had whispered. “I didn’t know that babies could be so beautiful.” In their skull-deep, skull-dark sockets the eyes had brightened, the bloodless lips had smiled. “Such tiny, tiny hands,” the faint hoarse voice went on, “such a greedy little mouth!” And an almost fleshless hand tremblingly touched the place where, before last year’s operation, her breast had been. “I never knew,” she repeated. And, before the event, how could she have known? It had been a revelation, an apocalypse of touch and love. “Do you know what I mean?” And Susila had nodded. Of course she knew — had known it in relation to her own two children, known it, in those other apocalypses of touch and love, with the man that little Dugald of
the tiny hands and greedy mouth had grown into. “I used to be afraid for him,” the dying woman had whispered. “He was so strong, such a tyrant, he could have hurt and bullied and destroyed. If he’d married another woman … I’m so thankful it was you!” From the place where the breast had been the fleshless hand moved out and came to rest on Susila’s arm. She had bent her head and kissed it. They were both crying.
Dr MacPhail sighed, looked up and, like a man who has climbed out of the water, gave himself a little shake. “The castaway’s name is Farnaby,” he said. “Will Farnaby.”
“Will Farnaby,” Susila repeated. “Well, I’d better go and see what I can do for him.” She turned and walked away.
Dr MacPhail looked after her, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He thought of his son, he thought of his wife — of Lakshmi slowly wasting to extinction, of Dugald like a bright fiery flame suddenly snuffed out. Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny. “Poor girl,” he said to himself, remembering the look on Susila’s face when he had told her of what had happened to Dugald, “poor girl!” Meanwhile there was this article on Hallucinogenic mushrooms in the Journal de Mycologie. That was another of the irrelevancies that somehow took its place in the pattern. The words of one of the old Raja’s queer little poems came to his mind.
All things, to all things
perfectly indifferent,
perfectly work together
in discord for a Good beyond
good, for a Being more
timeless in transience, more
eternal in its dwindling than
Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 289
