The Rain Forest

by Olivia Manning

  ‘So much for the vulture,’ said Ambrose. Cheered by the incident, he turned to Lomax: ‘A brandy would go down very nicely.’

  When the safragi placed the brandy on the table, Ambrose filled his glass and lifted it: ‘What shall we drink to?’

  ‘Your magazine of the arts,’ said Lomax.

  His tone, cold and cynical, caused Ambrose to put his glass down and stare at Lomax like a disappointed child: ‘Are you trying to tell me you’ve decided against the treasure project? You won’t fly me back to find the chart?’

  Lomax smiled a smile that afflicted every part of his face. Even his ears seemed pained by it. It was perverse and yet sheepish, and had in it an element of cunning. He glanced at Hugh as though to say: ‘You will understand,’ but Hugh did not want to understand. He said to Kristy: ‘You look tired. Do you want to go?’

  ‘I must rescue the moth.’

  She found it among the gardenias and cupping her hands over it, she went to release it in the garden.

  Ambrose had subsided in his chair as though sinking into himself, his huge body going down like a dying dirigible. As he collapsed, his face oozed sweat which seemed to be squeezed from him. He muttered to himself: ‘What is left for me now? Where can I go? What can I do?’

  Distressed by his suffering air, Hugh tried to rally him: ‘This is absurd. You could do anything you wanted to do. Simon Hobhouse said that at Cambridge you were regarded as the most brilliant man of your year.’

  Ambrose, reflecting on this statement, began slowly to reflate. He said: ‘I don’t know that I’d’ve said exactly that. There were at least two other alpha-plus brains up with me. Really,’ he sat up and his voice took on its full beauty, ‘I think the most remarkable thing about me is, that I am a squire.’

  The modesty of this claim caused Hugh to laugh aloud. Ambrose gave him an indignant glance and lifting his chin and brows, he said with some hauteur: ‘The Gunner estates carry the squireship of a wide area. The Gunners are a very old Catholic family.’

  ‘But you’ve been married three times,’ Hugh protested, ‘how did you fix that?’

  ‘A godson of Montini can fix anything.’

  Lomax, who had been listening to this conversation with a strained expression, asked: ‘Who is Montini?’

  Ambrose eyed him with scorn: ‘Montini was Secretary of State under Pacelli. He is now Christ’s Vicar on Earth.’

  Dumbfounded by the audacity of a man who spoke of popes by their surnames, Hugh and Lomax stared in silence as Ambrose emptied his glass and refilled it with an appearance of considerable satisfaction.

  When Kristy returned, Lomax walked with his guests to the hall where he sent the Nubian porter to call his car. As they stood together by the door, Ambrose gazed, in an abstracted way, at a vase filled with Leopard orchids.

  Lomax said: ‘They’re brought from Kenya in the ship’s refrigerator.’

  Ambrose did not speak. The vase, an immense artifact of gold-veined Venetian glass, stood on an elaborate, gilded table: a welcome and earnest of the hotel’s grandeur. Ambrose, like one under a spell, began to move towards it.

  The Nubian, throwing open the doors, called: ‘Mis’ Lomax car’ but Ambrose did not change direction. Reaching the vase, he lifted his arm and gave it so violent a blow, the whole structure of glass and orchids rose into the air before dropping to the ground. The glass shattered and shot in every direction. One piece passed like a razor blade over Lomax’s left cheek. The Nubian bawled: ‘What you do, sayyid? What you do?’

  Hugh hurried to Ambrose and seizing him by the arm, rushed him out of the hotel to the waiting car. Kristy followed. They packed into the back seat and the chauffeur stamped on the accelerator. Before anyone thought to pursue them, they were speeding away from the scene of the crime.

  PART TWO

  The Bird Tree

  1

  Ambrose, at breakfast a week later, announced to all present that Mrs Gunner was much recovered and would like to be visited.

  ‘And when will she be back at the helm?’ Ogden asked.

  ‘Any day now.’

  ‘That won’t be a day too soon,’ Ogden said.

  Kristy set out for the hospital that very morning. Everyone knew where it was for it stood, stark and isolated on the road above the Residency. Its isolation had been deliberate as it had once housed patients with infectious diseases. In those days, Ambrose had told her, the hospital had been notorious for the fact that whatever disease a patient went in with, he or she had come out – if he or she did come out – with another: malaria.

  Now it was a general hospital and would not accept cases of smallpox or bubonic plague, and patients no longer came out with malaria.

  There had been a shower that morning and the rain pools were evaporating. The old women were out, smoothing the sand with brushes made of twigs. Along by the Residency, the road had been cleared of every leaf and fallen branch and the surface was patterned over with delicate twig marks. When Kristy came to the rough ground above the Residency, a shudder passed through the island. She found these small earthquakes unnerving. They seemed a manifestation of the quivering mirages above the pools and she saw why, in this unreliable world, the English held to their conventions as their only certainties.

  The lane to the hospital ran eastwards, with a cliff face on one side and a cliff drop on the other. Eucalyptus trees had been planted on either side and these had sucked dry the marshy soil and left no breeding place for mosquitoes. The eucalyptus trees had shot up tall and slender. Their leaves, trembling and shaking off the glitter of the rain, reflected the azure of the sky. Massed against the upper cliff were bougainvillaea covered with papery mauve and reddish-purple flowers that were so long lasting, they collected dust.

  The hospital stood in a coign of the rock. It was a plaster-fronted building, its grey-white paint flaking off on to the grass at its base, looking more like a relic of empire than did the Government Offices below it. Kristy, when she reached it, saw that the coign was much deeper than it appeared when viewed from the lower roads. Behind the hospital building there was room for an extensive walled garden, a jungle garden – except, she realized, it was not a garden: it was a graveyard. She was shocked by the sight of it. It was too convenient.

  She went to look in through the gate that was padlocked to keep the dead in, or the living out. The gate was ornate but heavily rusted. Peering between the rusty iron curlicues, she saw the stones were almost hidden by weeds and creepers. In the middle of the path stood an ancient tree that bore both flowers and fruit. The flowers were purple – their colour may have been thought fitting for this place – and the fruits, like giant sausages, hung down to touch the ground. Though the area was enclosed by cliffs, a wall had been built round it, so old a wall that its bricks were held together only by mosses.

  The nearest memorial, a broken column that had become still more broken, commemorated John Cookson, aged nineteen, dead of dysentery in 1871.

  The graveyard, alerted by her step, had fallen silent except for the hum of bees, but she stood so quiet that a lemur swung from the sausage tree and dropped to the column to observe her. She whispered to it and put her hand through the ironwork but as she moved, it flashed away.

  ‘Ladies upstairs,’ said the hospital porter. If there were male patients downstairs, Kristy saw no sign of them. The hospital was as silent as the graveyard. On the upper floor a passage, as wide as a ward, ran from one end of the building to the other. Rooms led off on either side. In the centre of the passage stood a long table at which three Arab women sat playing cards. They were fat, their fat breasts rolling out of nylon wrappers, and they put the cards down with a lingering slowness of ennui. Fearing that the newcomer might be a man, they began to cover their faces but seeing Kristy, they sighed and continued their resigned and desultory movements. When Kristy asked them where she might find Mrs Gunner, they pointed to a balcony at the farthest end of the passage. There she found Mrs Gunner lying under an awning, on a bed,
her crêpey little face as yellow as saffron.

  ‘So it’s you, dear,’ she said: ‘Well, it’s nice to have a bit of company, whoever it is. That son of mine’s been up only once. He says the walk kills him and he’s the cheek to ask me to pay for a taxi.’ Mrs Gunner gave her hoarse, snuffling laugh: ‘I said: “No, dear, I don’t want to see you that much.”’

  Kristy sat on a chair beside the bed and looked down on the Residency garden: ‘At least, you’ve something to look at.’

  ‘Not bad, eh?’ Mrs Gunner propped herself on her elbow and surveyed the bower of trees and flowers that was still lustrous from the rain: ‘In the old days of dip and scarlet and yellow jack, this door was nailed up. They wouldn’t have anyone out here then, and now . . .’ she made a little grimace of social knowingness: ‘You only get out if you’re a cut above the others. I know her nibs, the matron, so I’m all right but ornerily they only let government wives out here. It was the war changed things. When they had naval officers and suchlike here, the Governor felt he had to let them out. There, look!’ Mrs Gunner’s face lit with sardonic glee as Sir Beresford appeared on the Residency terrace: ‘Smoking a cigar, eh? The old bugger. All right for some, eh? I bet your hubby’s stewing in his office. Her nibs don’t like me calling him “old bugger”. There’s a snobby bitch, if you like! And hand in glove with that pair at the Daisy.’

  ‘Mrs Axelrod and Mrs Prince?’

  ‘Who else?’

  The confiding note of criticism in Mrs Gunner’s voice induced Kristy to speak what she had in mind: ‘I’m very worried about something, Mrs Gunner. I was wondering if you could help me?’

  ‘You’re worried, dear?’ Mrs Gunner settled back with a glow of interest on her cheeks: ‘What about?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m pregnant.’

  Mrs Gunner’s interest began to fade: ‘That’s nothing to worry about. You’ve got a ring on your finger.’

  ‘That’s the trouble. If I were the only one concerned, I wouldn’t be worried. But my husband doesn’t want children.’

  ‘Doesn’t he, dear?’ Mrs Gunner’s renewed interest raised her voice to a delighted squeak: ‘He’s a funny one.’

  Seeing in Mrs Gunner’s gaze more curiosity than sympathy, Kristy feared she had said too much. But, having said what she had said, she had to say more: ‘He lost his mother when he was a child. She died and he has the feeling that, by dying, she abandoned him and he, if he had a child, might do the same thing.’

  ‘Ree-lee! I never heard the like.’

  ‘The thing is, Mrs Gunner, I wanted to ask you: is there an abortion clinic here?’

  ‘A what?’ Mrs Gunner laughed at the question: ‘You won’t find nothing like that here. You’d have to go . . . Well, I don’t know where you’d have to go; Durban or Cape Town, I s’pose. But how far gone are you, dear?’

  Too far gone, Kristy feared. She could already feel her dress stretched taut over her stomach. ‘I didn’t realize. I thought the food had upset me. . . . It didn’t enter my head. After all, we’ve been married eleven years. But now I remember, I was so tired the evening we reached Al-Bustan, I forgot to take that damn pill.’

  ‘If it was as long ago as that, it is too late, dear, unless you want a major op. I wouldn’t recommend that, dear. You be a sensible girl and go and see Dr Mueller. Don’t go to old Dixon, he’s past it. Mueller was trained in Johannesburg: he’s right up to the minute. And you tell your hubby if he don’t like it, he can lump it.’

  ‘That’s not so easy. I feel it’s unfair to him. I promised him it wouldn’t happen.’

  ‘Well!’ Mrs Gunner eyed Kristy all over and it was clear she thought the Fosters a freakish couple.

  Kristy had come to her as the only woman to whom she could speak, and now she realized her error. She was on the point of making a desperate appeal to her to say nothing to anyone, when footsteps echoed down the passage.

  Mrs Axelrod and Mrs Prince were coming to visit Mrs Gunner.

  ‘Why, look who’s here!’ Mrs Gunner propped herself up to welcome them. In spite of her previous remarks about ‘that pair’, she looked as joyful as a little girl who finds her playmates at the door.

  Kristy said with breathless urgency: ‘Please don’t tell them what I told you.’

  ‘Me, dear? As if I would! You know me.’

  Holding out a hand to each of the new arrivals, Mrs Gunner gave Kristy a vague ‘Bye, bye,’ while Mrs Axelrod and Mrs Prince seemed not to have seen her.

  When she reached the main road, Kristy turned right and went on up towards the plantations. She had decided to visit Gopal in the Medina. ‘A last jaunt,’ she said to herself, feeling she was a doomed woman.

  Up among the plantations, a whole field was on fire. The workers, surrounding it, were fanning the flames with palm leaves and the smoke, rising in yellow clouds, drifted upon the wind. It had settled into the plantation path as into a gully, lying so heavily in places that Kristy could not see the feather tops of the sugar plants. She could feel the heat of the fire and the smoke smell, that was sweet like a compound of honey and nuts, made her feel sick. She should have turned back but refused to give in to her condition. She had mislaid the dimension that fed her imagination but she would not be defeated by her physical self. She ran till she was out of the smoke then, reaching the mango tree, she dropped down beneath it. Propping her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, she waited for her sickness to pass. It went slowly but when she opened her eyes, she was too dizzy to rise. Her weakness was unlike anything she had experienced before. She felt resentful, believing that the foetus inside her was drawing the life from her, draining her as a cuttlefish drains its victim. Several minutes passed before she could attempt to rise.

  She shuffled across the ground and turned so she sat facing the tree. Looking at all the nubs and nodes and blebs of its red trunk, at its great crown of glossy dark foliage, at the constant coming and going of the coloured birds, she thought of her previous visit when there had been women gathered beneath its shade, making curry on a primus stove. She had tried to talk to them but they were shy and even the children had been disinclined to smile. Having no success with them, she had wandered on, deciding that she would return to England. In the market square, she had observed everything with the detached attention of a temporary visitor. Gopal had said she looked sad. Perhaps she had felt the sadness of impending departure that would, she supposed, have ended her life with Hugh. But sad or not, she had been a free woman who took her freedom for granted.

  Now, all was changed. She felt herself hobbled like a nursing cow whose function is to give suck.

  ‘Good God,’ she thought. ‘No wonder the female sex was left standing at the post. We didn’t stand a chance.’

  Drowsy in the heat, she felt mesmerized by the movements of the birds. One of them, an inconspicuous grey, black-spotted bird, kept darting out from the tree trunk, fluttering in the air then darting back again. Once settled, it clung close to the bark and crept upwards, making quick, efficient head movements as it picked up insects. When its beak was full, it took off into the dense foliage above it. Looking to see where it had gone, Kristy saw a nest like half a coconut propped on one of the lower branches. As the bird settled on the rim, the nest showed a fringe of movement, the uprising of infant beaks, all open to be fed.

  She waited while the bird disgorged the insects and returned to creep again up the trunk and search and gather what it found. ‘A mouse bird,’ she thought then, as it took off, darting and fluttering: ‘A mouse that becomes a butterfly.’

  She sat for several minutes, enchanted by the bird’s selfless search for food, its assiduous devotion to the greedy beaks above. Kristy was deeply moved by it yet asked: ‘What is it for?’ Next year the bird would be feeding another set of beaks and this year’s young would be forgotten. And why did the bird do it? It did not know itself.

  ‘We are tricked,’ Kristy thought: ‘However you dress it up, we are tricked.’

  She manage
d to get to her feet and turning her back on the tree creeper, she went on into the Medina.

  Dr Gopal’s shop, on the eastern side of the square, pressed back against the city wall and seemed to become part of it. He had told her that it was the first ‘western style’ shop to be set up in the Medina. He had converted it himself from an old grain store, putting in the plate-glass window which was now being copied by other forward-looking shopkeepers. It had, however, no window display; only an inner ledge holding Damascus blades and antique pistols. Looking in, Kristy saw a half-lit cavern of a shop filled with carpets and embroidered hangings. Gopal, too, was inside but he was surrounded by young men. Feeling it would be indiscreet to enter just then, Kristy was moving away when Gopal came running out to detain her.

  ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no, Mrs Foster, you must not depart from us. Come in, come in. You have arrived at the very moment to meet some young friends with modern ideas. You think too badly of us, Mrs Foster. Now you can tell for yourself how advanced we are in the Medina.’

  ‘But I do not think badly of you.’

  ‘You do. I know you do,’ Gopal was playfully flirtatious and eager to show her off to his friends: ‘Enter please. My house is yours. Here is Musa, the son of Yusef Pasha. He had an English tutor and is infused with up-to-date opinions. Now I introduce you to the others: Khalil, Nimr, Farih, Zarbay and Sayyid. They have all been students at Cairo and Beirut so are greatly advanced, as you will see for yourself.’

  The young men, who had been lying around on Gopal’s divans, rose uncertainly as their names were spoken and stood, hanging their heads before the English visitor. Gopal saw to it that she shook hands with each of them. Musa was the only one who looked directly at her. Unlike the others, who wore the light-weight suits fashionable among westernized Arabs, he was in Arab dress and wore, as his father had, the gold algol of princes.

  When the introductions were over, Kristy was placed in the position of honour on the central divan. The others sat around her.