Acts of Mutiny

by Derek Beaven

  In my comics everyone except the English stayed where they had been put. My story-books threw no more light on race, or guilt. Mr X fought the wily orientals in Kowloon; Kim was nursed in the wisdom of Tibet. There was a secret poison from the dark jungles of Burma in The Sign of Four, Mowgli was loved by Indian wolves. I preferred Rikki-tikki-tavi who could kill snakes, or the djinns stroking their beards. No one was ever homeless or thought of migration.

  On the ship, Robert and Penny’s love reminded me of the tune Erica sang along to in the cramped little dark green kitchen among the pots. It was from a show. Its verse sketched an ascent not via fear but on wings of desire; a soaring desire which, unrequited, might still leave you angelically stranded aloft. Like a stranger in paradise – that was the title.

  She said it was Kismet. Her face had that rapt look of certain women and girls. But now I mistrusted Chaunteyman and with him even rapture itself. The lover, Robert: had he told the authorities as he promised? Had he told Penny there was danger? They had made no contact with me since taking up with that sari woman. I had not much time.

  45

  The morning we anchored at Colombo, I noticed one other realignment as a result of the Kettle-Kendrick entente. Cheryl Torboys appeared to declare herself Erica’s bosom friend. And then we discovered Mr Chaunteyman was suddenly, like them, going to get off at Singapore, the next port of call after this.

  I was touched on Erica’s behalf. Mr Chaunteyman had always felt free to put himself about, I could see that. No doubt he already was ‘buddy’ enough with Lucas and Co., as he was with so many people in the bars, but without feeling the need to include his ‘fiancee’ and her son. I was never precisely aware of his movements. I had put myself about too; but by this stage in the voyage, and after being left in the hold, I was on the fringes of things. Such had been Erica’s position all along. I see now it must have been obvious – from her dress style and slightly gauche manners, and most of all from her accent – that she was out of the wrong drawer. Cheryl’s patronage came then as a bolt from the blue, and Erica was flustered and rather thrilled. Overnight she was entering High Society, her favourite film.

  Ceylon embraced us, a waving harbour of brightness. While port formalities were being completed, Mr Tingay cornered me near the foredeck and asked whether I was troubled about anything, anything at all. He had been watching me, he said. I was on my own a good deal. I looked low. He had the care of souls. Did I feel the need of someone to confide in? In view of my mother’s, ah …? If so, I should think of him as of a father.

  I regarded him suspiciously for a moment, and then in a new light. That I might have misjudged, and made foolish mockery of him. A listening ear was being offered in my time of need. I told him that something down there might go off.

  ‘Ah!’ he said, starting back. ‘Yes, but so young. You’re surely not … Can it be possible? My dear little boy.’ He told me that sin was transmitted through the female and I should say my prayers. Did I say my prayers every night like a good boy? I nodded. He would pray for my mother, he said.

  Mr Chaunteyman had broken the news to Erica and me before breakfast; there may have been a telegram for him. He called at our cabin.

  ‘You won’t mind, sugar, if we make a slight change of plan?’ Yes, he held a piece of paper in his hand. ‘Something’s come up. I need to do the last leg by plane. Uncle Sam wants me to spend a week or so in Changi, courtesy of your RAF. What you people call hush hush. They’ll pay for everything pro tern. And the Pentagon will pick up the tab.’ He smiled his ail-American smile, bright as chromium, yet he looked nervous. ‘It’s only a little bit of business for me. You wouldn’t mind that, honey, would you?’

  Erica acquiesced without a murmur. ‘Whatever you want. Whatever you have to do. I know you’ll look after us, Dave.’

  ‘Sure, Erica. Sure I will. You’ll be given the best. I’ll see to it.’ And he tossed me half a crown to make myself scarce for twenty minutes.

  Changi spelt horrors to me. I had read my father’s paperback about Japanese tortures, or rather glanced at it, put it down in a sweat, and then, agonised, continued. And he would be leaving the Armorica to go precisely to Changi? To hell more readily, surely. How could anyone bear it? I may have been ostracised, but at least on the ship I was safe. For that reason I loved it – and almost began to whisper my thoughts in prayer, to God, or the Leviathan. I did not want Erica hurt; I did not want torture mentioned. I smelt a rat. Did Mr Tingay know what I knew? Perhaps, underneath everything, he had been trying to tell me he understood.

  So Cheryl Torboys took up with us and I found myself chatting now and then with her sons, though their names still escape me. Cheryl dominated Erica. She needed someone on whom to vent her spleen about Robert and Penny. I remember how we all got into the launch to go ashore at Colombo. The water in the harbour was milky-green and spangled in the sun. It was more than spangled, far more. The light was intense, coming from all directions. Each wavelet, or the smallest reflective angles of ships, or buildings, or cars, or windows in the near distance, might have had flares, glass, diamonds, perpetual flash bulbs. The launch had a canopy supported on iron struts. Of the true East it was my very first.

  Cheryl made sure our little party occupied the space in the stern because she had seen Robert, Penny and the Piyadasas in the bow. She spoke loudly of how sad it was that we seemed to be in such a rush once again. All because of that dreadful storm she still kept hearing so much about. What a pity folk who’d got excursions worked out to here and there in the middle of the island – that native place called Kandy, for example – should have to give them up. I tried to catch Penny’s eye and wave. Erica discouraged me.

  ‘Will you tell him, Dave?’

  ‘Look, son. Your mother and I think there are certain people you’d better steer clear of from now on. Some ladies and gentlemen are not so nice to know. Right now you’re too young to understand; but just take it from me you’re better off with your own kind. Say, did I ever teach you “The Ballad of Davy Crockett”?’

  ‘That old hat?’ I said, rudely. The adults stared. I looked back to the hull of the Armorica. My time was running out. They were cutting me off from Penny, but she only had eyes for Robert. Clutching my blue suitcase I turned sulkily forward again to stare right through the lovers at the other end of the canopied launch to Colombo. I could make no ballad of my own, and Finlay would have nothing to do with me.

  46

  When Robert whispered, ‘We’ve made it, Penny. We’ve done it,’ she was thrilled that she knew him well enough to understand. Though it was said lightly, almost as a joke, his response to the Piyadasas’ house was significant, and gave her hope. For the extraordinary place was so different from anything she had known or conceived of as a home, that she too saw how it proved the legends and the pictures of another world.

  There were still new worlds then. Through a doorway not far from the harbour Robert and Penny were shown into one.

  There was something Venetian about it – Colombo sits on water – and the house was austere from the outside as a small fort among small waterside forts, with passages and all the business of bright streets. But if a vague notion of Venice was the only visual reference through which Penny could describe the exterior to herself, once inside she was left to flounder with churches and the past and some general evocation of India that spilled over from schoolroom Kipling.

  The house was made of marble that swam in a pale light like a glimpse into an opened coconut. The light came through arched windows and, sinking down, like a cool whiteness, it spilled from level to level, and swirled between the pillars that led away, presumably, into some other quarters beyond; only to be refreshed once more from above. Heavens, she could not tell if it was a small room or a cathedral, whether it was the living area for an established royal family or only an entrance hall.

  There were carpets laid upon the stone, and people were sitting on them. Steps led down to make a garden floor by the open doors. Tabl
es were set around the sides, with upright chairs, like those a hotel might provide near the foyer. The Piyadasas floated through the space in a mystery of greeting, from whose language she was withdrawn, so that she had the idea they moved in an aquarium like brilliant fish. Why, she had never had the faintest inkling, from their quiet demeanour on board ship, their polite engagement when spoken to, that in their own place they were merchant princes, who lived in such simple magnificence. The house was full: family, servants; trestles supporting plates of food and drink; patterns and plants. She had the feeling of having entered a painting.

  Robert and she should sit on chairs.

  ‘Now these are my sons.’ Mrs Piyadasa introduced them, and her shy daughter.

  Despite her best endeavours Penny found disconcerting the way the well-spoken boys loomed over her, tall, very dark, and somehow incomprehensible. She had thought she bore no prejudice. Now she perceived through her discomfiture that prejudice was written into everything she had grown up with. All that fell away as softly and simply as the light drifting down from above. She knew in just one more subtle mode that she was right to pledge her future to her feelings for Robert. That if she felt uncomfortable here when her inherited notions of race and home were so delicately yet decisively challenged, it only made sense of the doubts that still haunted her hours away from him. Prejudice was in her bones. It was deep down. She was ashamed and wanted it there no longer. Simply by falling in love Robert and she had scratched the surface of everything.

  And when the pieces of spiced food had gone round on a metal platter, and they had drunk the chilled coconut milk which the oldest of the servants brought, and when they had made polite conversation with the whole family, stretched their legs and taken tea in the garden so leaf-sworded and fragrant with many kinds of strange blooms, together with the brilliant, nectar-sucking bird, and the strutting peacock, then they must make haste to one of the cars, for their time was short and there was so much to see.

  Mrs Piyadasa was to be their guide, and one of her sons, since her husband had immediate business to attend to. Penny sat with Robert in the leather back of the upright, black, old-fashioned limousine, while mother and son sat opposite, as in a railway carriage, in order to call instructions to their driver through the glass. She felt established. It was curious and delicious, but she felt all the time now with Robert as though she had always known him, and that this was their true life; while her other existence back in Essex, and the Australia waiting for her, with Hugh, were phantasms.

  But it would be very foolish, she thought to herself, to imagine that these people were the answer to everything. It was tempting for the one day. She had to keep reminding herself that they would have their difficulties and desperations, top, and that this sheer torrent of outdoor light, this wonderful heat, this endlessly mobile scene of brightly-clothed people in their sarongs or reddas, the rickshaws, the bullock carts, the cars, the bicycles, pedestrians, fruit-sellers, cloth-carriers, snake-charmers and businessmen was probably not part of some permanent stream of happiness. No, it probably was not, though she had difficulty believing it. For everything here made sense, and sprang home to her like an old friend. She knew absolutely where she was. This, she told herself, is an illusion. How I love him, sitting beside me with his fine limbs and gentleness, his decency. That is not an illusion at all.

  47

  Robert, sitting next to her with the old leather hood of the car framing softly over them – no matter how the car jolted at pot-holes or shuddered over rails – felt an arousal not threatening, not squalid, not prurient, but embracing like a flame. It was nothing he had known. Deprived of intimate speech – by the decorum required in front of their hostess – they might communicate feeling only through glances and the stealthiest touch. But it was not that; it was not that the delight fed on restriction – for they had broken the last barrier of speech the previous night, and he would have told her every nuance of impulse had they been alone.

  All the while the city reeled and unreeled around them. Mrs Piyadasa explained what mangosteens were; and which merchant lived in that great house; or which coppersmith, from whom she bought all her kitchen requirements, in that diminutive booth. She spoke lightly of how the Indians had come first of all, and then the Portuguese, the Dutch, burning and torturing, unfortunately – the ones for God, the others for cinnamon. And here were the buildings of such-and-such descent and here were those of another, though this was not the ancient capital.

  And there was the house of her best friend from school; and there was her husband’s warehouse. And from just here they could see both lighthouses at the harbour entrance. And then last of all the British came. Did they see the clock tower while driving past the street’s end? And over there stood one of the few Muslim temples; until one drove through the Pettah where the Tamil people lived, who might be either Hindu or Muslim, of course. Sorry for the rails again.

  Over here a sweet stall, would they like sweets? How difficult it was these days to keep reliable workers; but the world market in tea was holding up well, she thought, smiling at her son, and would do as long as there were English people to drink it, smiling at them. Such, there, was the national dress, but very few of the men still wore it, only the women, really. What would they say to the zoo, the beach as well, perhaps, to kill two birds with one stone? Ah, here was her son’s school; he must return to his studies now that his mum and dad had returned safe from the sea.

  At Dehiwala they left the car, and strolled among the creatures, the palm trees, the unstoppable vegetation, which twisted up over everything, then cascaded down a precipice to the lake in great lavender drifts. A gang of long-legged storks was working the shallows, strutting in the green reflection; close at hand a tiny hen ran over lily-pads. And as they moved in the perfume of frangipani by the lawns and between the quiescent beasts in their cages – languid tigers or apes preoccupied amid the straggle of bougainvillea that quite covered them over with a froth of purple flowers – Robert longed to catch her, delay her in a stolen embrace.

  Still, again, he found himself flaming patiently, deliciously, without question. They climbed back up. The paths were narrow; creepers and bladed bushes thrust at them from either side. Mrs Piyadasa led the way, and Penny followed, a step in front of him. A pair of Buddhist priests in their pleated saffron, holding their umbrellas up against the dappled sun, passed by them on the slow earthen steps while butterflies large as birds, black and velvety-winged, flapped across their route.

  When they returned to the car, they drove past the great former Residency at Mount Lavinia and on to the beach where there was the same jungle stretching right to the edge, almost. They could believe the butterflies had followed them – great butterflies fluttering to the sound of surf. There were swimmers where a notch in the coastline made the hint of a bay, and one enormous palm drooped low over the sand towards the jut of a ridge: rock or coral he could not tell. Mrs Piyadasa found a table among the lilies at the edge of a shaded clearing where you could watch the waves, and ordered the white-suited waiter to bring them some tea.

  ‘As if we haven’t seen enough ocean to be going on with,’ she said, and laughed.

  ‘Poor Pom would have worried something might eat him,’ Penny responded, eyeing the white holiday-makers breasting the surf. ‘Sharks and crocodiles are his particular betes noires at the moment. And if you leave the water alone, there are still snakes, he says, that might drop on you from the trees. Now Finlay and the others appear to have dropped him.’

  ‘Can’t say I’m all that surprised,’ Robert said. He found himself having suddenly to picture the boy. It threw him off his absorption in her.

  ‘You won’t see him any more, anyway, Mrs Piyadasa,’ Penny said.

  ‘The boy Ralph? No. The one my husband lent his field-glasses to. How he loved to look at the waves during the storm.’

  Mrs Piyadasa told them about Kandy. ‘Ah, you would have seen the Buddha’s tooth.’

  ‘The Buddha�
��s tooth?’

  ‘You can see his tooth?’ said Robert.

  ‘Ah, well. You can see the casket in which its casket is hidden inside another casket. Or so we’re told.’ She laughed again.

  ‘Did the Buddha come to Ceylon?’ Penny asked.

  ‘Well, yes. We like to think he did. And when the moon becomes full – you will have gone, I’m afraid – there is a great celebration of his visit. In eight days’ time. But the tooth was taken from the actual flames of his cremation, and smuggled here from India.’

  ‘How astonishing.’ They saw another monk leave the thick margin of vegetation and begin to walk across the beach. ‘But must a true Buddhist really give up everything and renounce the world?’

  While Penny engaged their hostess about religion, Robert felt jealous again and left out, as if a snake’s hood collapsed on the instant and the gaze that had held them fascinated with what was dangerous, yes, but wonderful and worth everything, turned merely to slink off back to the jungle.

  ‘I thought the Buddha was a kind of god,’ she was saying. ‘I thought you … forgive me. I thought people worshipped him.’

  ‘Oh no. He was a man. A prince. He was married, and then renounced the world. He fasted until all his bones showed through and then he returned to teach. He enjoyed eating again. Then he died. That’s how the tooth became available.’

  At least there wasn’t God in it, Robert thought, angrily. He hated the thought of the tooth: how would anyone know it was there? He wished she would just laugh at it and turn back to him. Mrs Piyadasa was being polite. He looked intently at Penny, seeking to recover his feeling, wondering what had happened and what on earth they were going to do when they got to Australia. How on earth would they survive the landing? Hugh, and so on? Where would they live, supposing they did just declare independence, as it were? He felt himself smile sardonically at the joke. But surely it would be an impossibility after all?