Beat Not the Bones

by Charlotte Jay

  ‘I don’t know you,’ he said. ‘Though your face is familiar.’

  ‘You might have seen a photograph.’ She had reached one of the crises of her pilgrimage and felt that for him, too, the moment should be similarly illuminated.

  He looked away as if she disturbed him and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You haven’t met me,’ she said. ‘I’m Stella Warwick.’ She waited. It was one of those moments which she thought would offer happiness. There was still a bitter joy in belonging to David Warwick. She had been, after all, his choice, and some trace of his eminence was surely reflected in her.

  But he gave her a very curt acknowledgement. ‘You can’t be his wife!’ he said.

  ‘I am.’ She resented his incredulity.

  He was staring at her, but at the very moment that expression started to flood his face, it became like a mask. He jerked around and turned his back on her. She stared at him, so surprised she did not know how to go on.

  After a moment he turned around again. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I have come to see you.’

  He brushed her remark aside, waving the hand with the screwdriver. ‘Here, in this country?’

  She saw that something was wrong. ‘Where else would I go?’ she said. ‘This is my home.’

  ‘You’ve never been here before.’

  ‘I have no other,’ she said. ‘My father is dead and the house is being sold. Anyway, where else would I go? His friends were here. This was where he lived and worked.’

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered, ‘that’s so.’ But he did not look at her, just threw a wild glance about the room. ‘You’re Australian, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘You must have people in Australia?’

  She resented his response, and answered tartly, ‘I have no people.’

  He looked away again. A faint sound came from his lips. She thought he had said, ‘Oh, my God!’

  She spoke stiffly now, unwilling to expose to him the more precious motives that had brought her here. ‘There was no one, there was nowhere else to go, there was nothing else to do. You sound as if I shouldn’t be here. Where else should I be? There’s no other place for me.’

  ‘And this,’ he said harshly, ‘isn’t possible for you.’

  She began to see his behaviour in a new light. Eagerly she moved a little nearer, then restrained herself. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a queer place,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘Is it wicked?’ she asked. It was only four years since she had left the convent where she had been educated – she was not Catholic but her father had believed a convent training suited a child he hoped would turn out gracious, submissive and ‘womanly’. The four years following this had been given over almost exclusively to nursing her father and completing secretarial training. She had had no time or ­opportunity to formulate any complicated notions of wickedness. Wicked­ness, she believed, was a quality you recognised in in the faces of disreputable strangers. She had not yet learned to suspect the gentleness of parents or the generosity of friends.

  ‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘But any wickedness that there is, is likely to come your way.’

  She moved forward again, her eyes sparkling. ‘Do you think so? It was dangerous, wasn’t it, to come here?’

  He looked down at her young, eager face. ‘Yes, it was stupid, and dangerous.’

  ‘Thank God! But you will help me, won’t you? I’ve come here for your help.’

  ‘Where are you living?’

  ‘In my husband’s house.’

  ‘You’re mad! What in God’s name are you up to?’

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I’m looking for a man called Jobe. Do you know where he is?’

  He flung up the hand holding the screwdriver. ‘I won’t help you. I won’t help you in any way. I want nothing to do with you.’

  She drew away from him. The fact that he was her husband’s friend had held her loyal to the hope that he would help her, but now she felt a rush of anger. She hated him, for having refused to help her, and for some other more terrible reason. She felt that some new obstruction had presented itself. She never wanted to see him again. She wanted to forget his face and everything that he had said and before she left she wanted to wound him. ‘I thought you were his friend. I was told that you’d help me. But I can see you’re afraid and don’t want to implicate yourself.’

  He was frowning. ‘I’ve never professed to be your husband’s friend,’ he said, ‘and I’m quite sure he’s never claimed me as one. I’m beginning to suspect that you’re making a mistake.’

  ‘You’re not Trevor Nyall.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ He was moving to the door.

  She stood watching him, glad that he was not Trevor Nyall. It felt good not to have to change your mind about someone you had theoretically trusted. But best of all it was good to know that David had not been wrong. It would have injured her memory of him to have found that Trevor Nyall had been a false friend.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked, following him out on to the verandah. But he ran down the steps ahead of her. She saw to her surprise that it was almost dark. Stars had broken out in the sky and the fires had left the shrubs and trees. The bougainvillea twining over the verandah was papery and colourless.

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ he called back over his shoulder and disappeared round the corner of the house.

  She followed him round the drive to the back where a jeep was parked under a large tree. ‘I’m not going home,’ she said. ‘I’m going to see Mr Nyall.’

  He opened the door and stood waiting for her to get in. A light switched on in the back of the house, and he turned his head and looked at it anxiously. He slammed the door behind her and hurried round the front of the jeep to the driver’s seat. His movements were urgent, almost desperate, as if he wanted to be rid of her as soon as possible. He started up the engine and drove along a short drive at the back of the house and out through a gate. Twice he looked back over his shoulder.

  ‘I am not going home!’ she said again. ‘I am going to see Mr Nyall!’

  He did not answer. She knew that he would not take her there, but it did not occur to her to ask herself why she had consented to drive with him at all. She was conscious now of a strange new exhilaration. Hostility fluttered like passion between them.

  ‘Isn’t Mr Nyall’s house further up the road?’ she said as he turned down the hill. She had known he would turn, but there was a perverse excitement to be had from forcing out of him a declaration of uninterest. She had taken the right path. She had made her first enemy. And since there could be no love, hatred was what she most yearned for.

  ‘I’m not taking you there,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you to your house.’

  ‘I’m not going home!’ she cried. ‘I’m going to see Mr Nyall.’

  ‘I don’t care. You can do what you like, but I’m not taking you there.’

  ‘Why won’t you take me?’ she cried. ‘Why don’t you want me to see Mr Nyall? Are you afraid he’ll help me? Is that it? Are you afraid I might find Mr Jobe?’

  He made no answer, and his face told her nothing.

  They did not speak again till they reached Castle Warwick. She sat beside him with her hands clenched in her lap, fires of anger and excitement slowly dying down within her. He leaned across her and opened the door but did not get out.

  She stood on the roadway, closed the door and faced him. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done.’

  He looked at her with a quizzical expression, but said nothing.

  ‘I’ve always known that something was wrong. And you’ve given me my first proof. Now I shall find the truth,’ she said.

  ‘The truth!’ He echoed the words, but they broke from his lips like a moan. In the next moment he had gone, the jeep spurting away, raging up the hill.

  She was late for dinner. She found the dining-room, a large, airy room opening on to a verandah, on the other side of the house. There were three tables, and two young girls
sat at one talking and giggling. The other diners had left and the staff were carrying away the dirty dishes.

  She sat by the verandah and looked out over the darkening town. Those who have always known, and suddenly lost, security and comfort, find these evening hours the hardest to endure. Darkness brings with it tenderness. Voices, impatient during the day, are subdued. Stella forgot the man on the hill.

  When she had finished dinner it was dark. The town below twinkled with lights and only a pale streak along the horizon remained of the sunset. There was no light in the hall outside her room, and she felt her way with one hand along the wall. She paused outside Sylvia’s door and hesitated. The picture she held in her mind of the little room, warm, untidy and musty as a burrow, enticed her. She raised her hand to knock, but the door swung away from her, and a man, evidently in a hurry, lurched out into the passage.

  She did not see his face because he collided straight into her. She felt his body quiver. A sound that was almost a scream broke from him, and he stepped, or rather fell, back, and slammed the door in her face.

  CHAPTER 4

  Philip Washington leaned against the door, pressing his body against it.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ said Sylvia in her slow voice. She sat on the bed with her legs tucked up beneath a green chiffon skirt, fashionable some years ago, renovated, but still revealing its departed heyday. A cockroach had eaten a hole in the hem, and she scratched it absentmindedly with her fingernail.

  ‘There’s a native outside!’ He spoke quickly, and his clear, rather high-pitched voice trembled. ‘Prowling around outside the door.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Sylvia. ‘It’s the girl in the opposite room. I heard her close the door.’

  ‘I tell you it was a native! Do you think I don’t know one when I see one!’ But he had relaxed a little and spoke sharply, not because he was convinced, but because he did not like being contradicted, particularly by Sylvia. ‘I can smell one a mile off. You want to be careful about boys prowling round up here. If you aren’t careful you’ll be raped, lounging around with nothing on all day and flashing your legs about.

  ‘The place is “boy-proofed”,’ Sylvia said mildly. She knew that when Philip was nervous or upset he would invariably take it out on whoever happened to be near, and took no notice of him. That he was upset was evident. The blood had come back to his face, but it still looked pinched and strained. He did not go out again, but reached for the gin bottle with a hand that trembled. He was, in his calmer moments, a handsome man with a thin, well-featured face and light-grey eyes. He was tall, spare and graceful, and was looked upon by his rather more husky associates as effeminate. This was only partly to do with his appearance. He was interested in native life, particularly native arts, and this was supposed by the average white Marapai male to be queer and slightly indecent.

  He sat down in a chair from which Sylvia had removed some but not all of her clothes, slopped a little water into his glass and lifted it unsteadily to his lips.

  ‘You’re a pack of nerves, darling,’ said Sylvia gently. ‘You really ought to take leave.’

  ‘For God’s sake, stop telling me I ought to take leave!’ he burst out petulantly. ‘Of course I ought to be taking leave! Any fool can see that. I tell you I can’t get away.’ He put down the glass and upset the still unemptied ashtray. ‘Really, Sylvia,’ he continued coldly, brushing ash from his faultlessly laundered trousers, ‘you are a slut. You live like a pig. I don’t know how you can bear this squalid mess.’

  ‘I tidied it,’ said Sylvia. ‘And you don’t have to come here. I can’t think why you did. You always swore you’d never set foot in this house.’

  Washington, realising that if he became more objectionable he would probably have to leave, did not answer, but leaned back and lit a cigarette.

  Of course it hadn’t been a native, only a girl with a pale face. He could see it now quite clearly. The other figure – of a naked brown man with a face painted white for dancing – had been, as Sylvia had implied, purely imaginary, the figment of wrought-up nerves, a fortuitous banking of lights and shadows. And yet, imagination – he poured the barely diluted gin down his throat – where did it, in this cursed country, begin and end? The longer you stayed the less sure you were where flesh ended and phantom began. That a little brown man with a painted face could project his image over miles of jungle – there was nothing strange about this to a man of imagination. Washington pulled his fingers back through his hair.

  This was the house, he remembered, where David Warwick had shot himself. His hands started to tremble again. Oh, my God! I shouldn’t have come here. Poor Warwick! Perhaps I’ll be the next.

  ‘And speaking of the girl,’ said Sylvia, ‘she’s an odd little thing, looks like a chicken who’s come out of the egg a few days too soon. And oddest of all is her name. Have a guess what it is.’

  He made an impatient gesture.

  ‘Warwick,’ said Sylvia. ‘Stella Warwick. Could our ghost have a daughter?’

  ‘He was only married a few months,’ said Washington shortly. ‘Common enough name.’

  ‘She had an introduction to a very dear friend of yours.’

  ‘Of mine?’ He evinced a little more interest.

  ‘Trevor Nyall,’ Sylvia said with a faint smile.

  Washington did not reply. Six months ago a position as assistant to Nyall had fallen vacant in the department. Washington had applied for it, but his application had been rejected and the position had gone to an older man from the south. Since then Washington had seized on the idea that Nyall was a man who picked the brains of his subordinates but kept them lowly because he could not stand competition. Washington had lost interest in his work. It was, he decided, pointless to work when power from above was always on the look-out to baulk you.

  In the tropics decay is as swift and violent as growth. Overnight, mould will bristle up on a hat or shoe; in a few hours a body will rot, in a few weeks a personality will crumble. It was generally said that over the past few months Washington had gone to pieces. He was aware himself of some sort of internal disintegration. He held together just enough to be able to do his work without provoking complaint, for although he hated Nyall, he also feared him.

  ‘That,’ said Sylvia, ‘made it even odder.’

  This attempt on her part to involve the girl across the passage with David Warwick annoyed him. Such a circumstance would be one more intolerable quirk to an already intolerable situation. He answered sullenly, ‘Nyall has a million acquaintances. Doing things for people, little things that don’t matter, putting people under a sense of obligation … that’s life to a man like him. And Warwick … it’s a common name.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so.’

  ‘Women,’ Washington said acidly, ‘must always be making situations. They can’t see two people having lunch together without packing them off to bed. They must always be clamped on to someone else like limpets.’

  Sylvia leaned forward and replenished his glass. She had worked, after she left school in Sydney, as an artist’s model and was used to exhibitions of temperament. The artistic nature was, she believed, strange, unaccountable, and unpredictable. And it was to be admired and respected - all who laid claim to it had told her so. She, knowing herself to be ordinary, had never tried to be otherwise. She had lived most of her life with those who loved, or professed to love, painting, music, poetry, but had failed to cultivate in herself any interest in these various obsessions. She knew all the jargon but had never contracted the fever. You were born with it, she believed, you came into the world with the print of Apollo’s lips on your forehead. To these artists, these men of imagination, all reverence was due, all aberrations of behaviour permissible, all forgiven. For the past seven years she had dedicated her life to looking after them. She had lived with three artists who had all seen in her the image of their loved, lost or treacherously remarried mothers. Finally, when the last one left her, she fled in despair to a land whe
re men, she had been told, were made of more solid stuff, only to find her heart drifting back to the artistic temperament, back to Philip Washington.

  He was, it was true, hardly an artist in the correct sense of the word. His achievements in the creative line were confined to esoteric little poems, the distressing callowness of which, Sylvia – awed by an impressive profusion of Papuan place names – failed to recognise. There were, however, fresh ideas and fresh enthusiasms. Not ballet, but native dancing, not Picasso, but Sepik masks, not continental cooking, but strange, exotic, indigestible concoctions of taro and yam. The old familiar traits were there, rising like the ghosts of her former lovers through the bizarre vestments that twelve years of tropical living had imposed – the warm, but so transient affections, the sharp, lively, cruel tongue, the hysterical heights and depths of pleasure and despair.

  ‘Here,’ she said gently, ‘have another drink.’ For he was calmer, and therefore, she supposed, must be happier, when half drunk. He patted her hand, relenting. ‘Dear little slut.’

  ‘I think this place upsets you,’ she said kindly. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come here. It’s only lusty wenches like me that don’t mind lying down with dead men.’

  This pleased him. He was proud of his sensitivity, though of late it had troubled him. ‘Where else can I go?’ he said sulkily. ‘You are, in spite of being stupid, about the only sane human being in this incredible town.’

  Sylvia smiled and blinked. Constant wounding had never toughened her, and almost every word he spoke conjured some painful response. But no flicker of pain showed in her face. ‘You used to be happy enough to ask people home,’ she said.

  ‘The place is falling to pieces,’ he said bitterly. ‘It’s infested with cockroaches. I can hardly sleep at night. They stamp about in the thatch like elephants. And Rei’s such a fool he can’t even make a cup of tea.’