Fuel for the Flame

by Alec Waugh

  ‘Don’t think us rude for rushing back the moment you arrive, but as I’ve been explaining to the Colonel I only got back from England this afternoon. I had to get into the pool the moment I arrived. I’m not properly unpacked. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  He said it without embarrassment; as he had said other things before, at so many such chance meetings, at the cocktail party before the cricket match for instance. That had been one of the gayest things about the whole relationship: the chuckles they had had in private over the discretion they had displayed in public. They had enjoyed the dramatic ironies of the situation.

  ‘You probably didn’t know it,’ she said, ‘but I had to go back to England for a month. My son had appendicitis. No, nothing serious, but he thought it was. He’d have felt cheated if I hadn’t gone.’

  ‘He’s all right now?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better now.’

  His voice had assumed a tone of genuine condolence. His eyebrows had gone up. Just as they always did in public when he expressed surprise and concern over some event with which in private they were both familiar. She had seen that look a dozen times, the same lift of the eyebrows, the same half-twisted smile. Nothing was changed. Everything must be all right.

  Everything must be all right, she reassured herself as she followed the rehearsal. Why should Angus have warned her that he was coming down? They never had let each other know when they were to meet unexpectedly. Each had enjoyed the element of surprise. If anything had happened between himself and Shelagh, if it was to see Shelagh that he had driven down, he would have told her to disarm suspicion. There was nothing in it. He had been so natural when he had seen her. He could not have been so natural if he had come down here to see Shelagh. Everything was all right; she must concentrate on this rehearsal.

  She listened, thoughtfully. Iris was improving fast. Katheryn Howard was not a difficult part. It only needed youth and prettiness, an ability to speak the lines and create sympathy in the audience for herself and for her problems. But anyhow, Iris was entering into the spirit of her part. When she said, ‘We were young and wild, that was all,’ you felt she was speaking for all the young women of all time who had been born into an unreflecting period.

  Yet, though you thought of her as irresponsible, you could see how she had come to fall in love with Henry. She was not a young woman marrying for practical reasons, a man old enough to be her father. Through her acting, she made Harry seem glamorous and powerful, not a gross, middle-aged voluptuary. Harry was a good amateur actor, but she had not seen him so alive in a part before. He had been set alight by Iris. Watching them rehearse their scenes she could understand how a young girl could fall in love with him.

  She thought back a dozen years. How had she felt when she had seen him first? She had been flattered by his attention. She had been excited by the idea of marriage. He had seemed strong, powerful, effective. He would look after her. Her father had died when she was four. She had always needed a man she could rely upon. Had she been in love with Harry? She supposed she had. It was so long ago. There were so many kinds of love.

  They drove Iris back after the rehearsal. It was close on eight o’clock but Rex urged them to a final drink. Harry shook his head. ‘No, no, it’s late, but thank you very much.’

  Rex was insistent.

  ‘I’ll bet Iris has had a drink with you. Now you can take a drink with me.’

  He said it aggressively. He had been up to the golf club and had been drinking since the light had faded. Drink always made him truculent.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The sooner you’ve got your drink, the sooner I’ll let you go.’

  ‘But only one,’ said Blanche.

  Rex stood in the centre of the room. He was not exactly swaying but he looked as though he might begin to any second. He looked from one to the other.

  ‘How’s the play and how’s the brilliant young actress who’s going to explain to the hard-boiled oil men how a young girl can fall in love with an old man?’

  There was a sneer in his voice; there was an angry distrustful expression on his face. In another second there would be a row, thought Blanche. She had got to sidetrack this.

  ‘Did you see South Pacific? Everyone said that was the ideal play for the middle-aged man,’ she said. ‘When the play starts you think that the young nurse will have the good sense to prefer this young officer to the fifty-year-old planter, but instead the planter becomes a war hero and gets the nurse as well. Have you seen it, Iris? Which did you prefer, South Pacific or Oklahoma?’

  Within half an hour Blanche and Harry were on their way.

  During the rehearsal and while they were at the Sinclairs’ for the final drink that had become two drinks, Harry maintained the highest spirits, but the moment he got home his face fell into its drained post-party look.

  ‘You were very tactful tonight,’ he said. ‘I thought we were going to have a flare up. What was biting Rex?’

  Blanche shrugged. ‘How can you tell about a man with a chip on his shoulder who drinks to hide it? Perhaps he’s jealous.’

  ‘Jealous?’ He flashed a quick look of interrogation at her. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ He frowned. ‘Jealous, no, no, he couldn’t be.’ He walked over to the cocktail cabinet and poured himself a drink. ‘What’s for dinner? Something light, I hope.’

  ‘Don’t we always have something light?’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. You’re so considerate. You’d probably much prefer a seven-course banquet.’

  He put his arm round her shoulders, squeezing them. His habitual gesture. He’s fond of me, she thought. He’d miss me if I died; he’s used to me, but … She shrugged mentally. He didn’t need her. All he cared about was work and parties.

  7

  Forrester’s car stopped outside the Macartney bungalow.

  ‘Are you coming in?’ asked Angus.

  The Colonel hesitated. It was close on eight. Eight o’clock was not late by island standards. When Macartney had been young you sat drinking until nine, half past nine, ten. It would have seemed strange not to look in for a drink if one brought the son of the house home. Besides he could use a stengah. He was very tired. This was his last chukka whatever the boys at Whitehall argued. ‘I’d like to come in,’ he said.

  He curled up again in a long chair. The whisky was cold upon his palate, with a rich smoky flavour.

  ‘Can you remember when iced drinks became the general thing out here?’ he said. ‘I can’t. I’m pretty sure we had them in the towns but I’m not so sure about up-country. One forgets that kind of thing. When did we first have Frigidaires in England? I can’t remember. When I was a boy the fishmonger used to bring ice round in a sack that we laid on the floor of the cold larder where we hung the game. One ought to keep diaries, recording things like that. When one went in one’s first taxi, for example. I went in my first one in 1912: until then it was hansoms or fourwheelers, growlers we used to call them. You won’t believe this, Angus, but when we came up to London, we’d be met by a station coach; we travelled as a family with a lot of luggage and there’d be a man who would run all the way behind the coach from Paddington right out to Hampstead, for the tip he would get when he unloaded the trunks and carried them upstairs. He didn’t expect more than sixpence and was pathetically grateful for a shilling. My mother used to be so upset. She’d watch him through the back window of the coach. She was afraid he’d strain his heart. She’d beg my father to give him sixpence right away and tell him to go home. My father never would. It would set a precedent, he said; it would encourage a kind of blackmail. Let men earn their money. Think of that only fifty years ago: a man running from Paddington to Hampstead and back again for sixpence.’

  He spoke in a slow monotone, that had a mesmeric effect on Angus. It had been a long day and he felt drowsy. Yet he was worried too; worried about his father and for his father; worried about Blanche’s return. She had looked very pretty this eveni
ng and there had been an amusing conspiratorial twinkle in her eye when she had told him about her trip to London; he had always enjoyed that undercurrent of conspiracy. He could almost wish that there was no such person in the world as Lila, but there was, and that was all there was to it; while there was Lila, there could be no one else. The last thing he wanted was to hurt Blanche’s feelings. They had been such friends. With Lila there was no pretence of friendship: it was a kind of battle; a fierce tempestuous desire to dominate, possess, encompass her so that she should have no existence outside himself. He wanted to take everything, he wanted to give everything, with every nerve cell, every muscle, every heartbeat, to hold nothing back. He grudged every hour that he had to spend away from Kuala Prang: from the telephone over which she could report her movements. At any moment the whim might take her or the chance might be offered her to spend an hour with him. He could not ring her up. He had to wait for her to call him. At this very moment she might be hanging up the receiver with a shrug; with a tightening of the lips, as though she were setting down a mark against him: looking forward to the day when she could level the score by breaking off an appointment she had made with him. It was a continuous battle: they were enemies as much as they were lovers.

  ‘You’re younger than I am,’ Forrester was continuing, ‘and you didn’t go to Europe till after the First War. You can’t compare the England of today with the England I knew as a boy. I can remember the map that hung over the mantelpiece at my prep, school; a sixth of it was painted red: the Empire on which the sun never set. “Dominion over palm and pine”. I remember marching to camp with the band playing “Land of Hope and Glory”.mdash;”.od who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet”. How simple the world looked then, how secure for the kind of Englishman who went to a public school. If you did reasonably well at school, or rather if you didn’t get into disgrace, there was always a job waiting for you overseas. There was always somewhere to take up “the white man’s burden”. They talk today about inferiority complexes. We had, my generation, a superiority complex. We knew the worst couldn’t happen to us; and in point of fact it hasn’t. But what’s coming next? Think what’s happened in the last fifteen years, in Persia, Palestine, Iraq, the Gold Coast, Pakistan; one by one they go. And here—what’s going to happen here, do you think?’

  He paused. He looked questioningly at Macartney. Macartney made no answer.

  ‘Do you think it can go on the way it is?’ he asked.

  This time he waited for his host to answer. Macartney shifted in his chair.

  ‘Of course I don’t, of course it can’t.’

  ‘The monarchy will go, you mean.’

  ‘How many monarchies have survived?’

  ‘Do you think the Communists will take over?’

  ‘Not here, Karak’s too small and it’s too prosperous. The people are too well off.’

  ‘What about that attempt yesterday on the Crown Prince’s girl?’

  ‘Are you sure that the man was a Communist?’

  ‘I’m sure of nothing. It looks as though it were.’

  ‘As a prelude to what, do you think?’

  Forrester shrugged. ‘I’m in the dark. I don’t know why he did it. He may be an Anarchist. He may have a racial feeling against the Crown Prince’s marriage to an Englishwoman. He may be … there are half a dozen things it might be, besides being part of an organized Communist plot.’

  ‘But that’s how you’ll report it, isn’t it, as part of an organized Communist plot?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘And the Americans will decide that there’s a Red menace in Karak and pour in more money.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And that’s going to strengthen, isn’t it, the hand of any party that is prepared to act … well, that is prepared to act?’

  ‘Are you referring to any party in particular?’

  ‘There’s always an opposition isn’t there, always another party waiting to seize power? It won’t do that party any harm to say, “We are protecting the country against the commies.” That’s what Hitler did.’

  ‘You mean with the burning of the Reichstag?’

  ‘That and other things.’

  ‘You think that this attempt against Miss Marsh was staged by some party that is the Karaki equivalent of the Nazis, to frighten the people and the Americans, to make them think there’s need for a strong party?’

  ‘It’s possible, don’t you think?’

  ‘Everything is possible.’

  To Angus listening it seemed that his father had been led into an admission. He remembered how his father had talked in his delirium. His father had known about this attempt. How much more had his father known and along what channels did that knowledge run?

  Forrester rose to his feet. ‘I must be on my way. Thank you for the stengah and thank you, Angus, for your company. It made very agreeable what might have been extremely boring.’ He turned back to Macartney. ‘I’ll come out again and we must have that game of chess.’

  8

  The next morning Basil found on his desk an envelope with the typewriting with which he had become familiar. He held it up to the light. As he had expected the outside sheet was blank. He slit the flap. A blank sheet of paper was folded round a chess problem.

  He went back early after lunch and set out the pieces. The message ran ‘Information Marsh’. He stared at the board, then gathered up the pieces. He stared at the deciphered message; then lit a match and set it to its corner. He watched the flame creep down the paper; as it grew black and shrivelled, he crunched the ashes and flung them in the basket. He wrote out a single word then took out the key; worked out the formula, then marked out the chess-board. ‘White to move and mate in seven moves.’ He re-checked the placings. It was all right. The message read ‘Impossible’. What happens next? he asked himself.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Muriel Studholme hesitated before ringing up Annetta. Should she say ‘Lady’ or ‘Muriel Studholme speaking’? Her husband’s promotion had presented her with a problem that she had not anticipated. It was flattering to be called ‘Milady’, but she could not get used to calling herself Lady Studholme. At the same time she did not want, by saying ‘Muriel Studholme’, to become familiar with people with whom she did not want to be on Christian name terms. In Annetta’s case, which should she use? There was a great disparity of age, yet this was a personal occasion. Perhaps ‘Muriel Studholme’ was the better, as a first step to Muriel and Annetta.

  ‘My dear, I can’t tell you what a shock this news has been to me. For this to happen to you …’ she said. ‘I do pray that you don’t feel too badly, that you do realize how indignant we all are, for your sake. Everyone is so happy about your being here, about it’s being “you”.mdash;if you can follow me. I won’t say there weren’t qualms when we learnt that the Crown Prince was going to marry an English girl. People here did not know much about him, and he had, I know you won’t mind my saying it, an unconventional reputation. But the moment we saw you, we knew that it was not only the best thing that could happen for him but for his country too. Ninety-nine per cent of Karakis are on your side, you do realize that, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s very nice of you to say so.’

  ‘I’m saying it because it’s true; you won’t, will you, because of this, imagine that you’re not wanted here?’

  ‘I’m not the kind of person who imagines things.’

  ‘I know you’re not. That’s why you’re so right for here.’ For a couple of minutes she talked on in the same strain; then she changed the subject.

  ‘Francis Reynolds is coming here next week. My husband tells me that you travelled out in the same plane. We’re having a small dinner party on the 23rd, quite informal. It would be very nice if you could come.’

  Annetta hesitated, but only for a second. She was anxious to see the man again, provided she could meet him under the right conditions. These were as near to the ideal as she could hope to find. />
  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘I’d love to—and I’m touched, very touched, by the things you said.’

  She was touched, yes; but in a remote, impersonal region of her mind. She was conscious of a general numbness, a complete atrophy of all sensation, physical and mental. She had driven back to Kuala Prang on the morning after the incident with only one objective, to see Rhya as soon as she could. It was possible that in a day or two she would find herself the victim of a delayed shock, that she would suddenly break down, trembling and hysterical, but she did not think she would. This numbness would pass, but not into that. When she had seen Rhya, this mood would pass, one way or another, into one state or another. She would know where she was headed.

  2

  She drove out to the monastery that afternoon.

  ‘Do you think he knows about it?’ she asked Ladda.

  ‘Probably.’

  She wondered how he could have learnt. Walking through the streets in the morning with his begging bowl, he would not have entered into conversations, but she supposed that the coconut wireless of which she had so often heard, operated even in a monastery.

  It was a close, humid day; it had rained at lunch time and the rutted roads were puddled. The side streets looked tawdry under the grey sky. The Karakis crowding the pavements seemed in a nervous hurry as though they were anxious to get their errands finished before it began to rain again.

  She sat beside Aunt Ladda on the parapet by the canal. Prince Rhya came across the lawn toward them. He sat beside his aunt. He knows, she thought. For a full minute no one spoke. Yet the silence was not oppressive. For the first time Annetta did not resent Aunt Ladda’s presence. She felt her numbness passing. She was conscious of a dawning peace.

  ‘What has happened has happened,’ Rhya said. ‘It is a moment in the long cycle of effect and cause. Man must accept his dhartna. The acts of one life pass into the next, as one candle is lighted from another. On our long journey towards enlightenment we cannot question the episodes that befall us on the way. They are pre-ordained: it is for us to meditate upon the mysteries that lie behind them, on the sequence of lives that lie ahead of them.’