The Jam Fruit Tree

by Carl Muller

GEORGE GLADSTONE. who married LEAH BERNADETTE, daughter of CECILPRINS HANS VON BLOSS and MAUDIEGIRL ESTHER KIMBALL.

  DUNCAN DANNISTER who married SYLVIE, daughter of JINORIS RATNAYAKE and PATTIE FONSEKA.

  H. CLARENCE FENNIMORE DA BREA married FLORRIE MARIA TODD (both of Mutwal)

  They produced:

  CHARLES WHITECHAPEL who married HAZEL MARJORIE, daughter of BILLYBOY PETERSON and EUNICE GABRIELLA HERFT.

  MARION PRIMROSE who married HUBERT LINCOLN, son of LIONEL ‘BULL’ BERTUS and GWENDOLINE VERA BROHIER.

  LILIAN NORA who married ‘BUNNY’ PETER, son of PATRICK BRIAN TOUSSAINT and DEBORAH RAUX.

  MURIEL EMMALINE who married VICTOR LAWRENCE, son of EUSTACE VANDERWALL and EVANGELINE NICHOLAS.

  MARYANNE DAISY who died at birth.

  ELSPETH ‘JUPPIE’ IRENE who married RONALD GEORGE, son of DORIC LOOS and ABIGAIL BLOSSOM FOENANDER.

  ROSEMARY MAY, who died.

  HENRY LIVINGSTONE who married DULCIMER, daughter of ERIC WINDSOR DUCKWORTH and FRANCINE ODILE CAMILLUS.

  MILLICENT JUNE, spinster.

  KATHLEEN MARGARET who married CHARLES RODERICK, son of JEREMIAH DE LA ZILVA and SONIA CRYSTAL FORSYTHE.

  ERNIE ‘BIRDIEBOY’ who married IRIS CLODAGH, daughter of JOHN JAMIESON HEPPONSTALL and MARIA RABOT.

  ELVA COLUMBINE who married BERTIE PUGWASH, son of JOSEPH DREADNOUGHT CARRON and NELLIE ‘KONDAY’ RULACH.

  BERYL HYACINTH who married SONNABOY DUNCAN CLARENCE, son of CECILPRINS HANS VON BLOSS and MAUDIEGIRL ESTHER KIMBALL.

  The reader might find it an eminently time-consuming, albeit absorbing exercise to figure out the number of immediate relations who could lay claim, through ties of blood (and water), to two-day-old Noella Marietta de Mello, who slept all day and howled all night and made mother Elsie as mad as a hornet. In the grand uncle and grand aunt circle there were de Witts, Colontotas, Godamunaralas, McHeyzers, Vancuylenbergs, Ludwicks, Moraeses, Holdenbottles, Frughtneits, blighters in Goa and the Lord knows where else in India, Muspratts, da Breas, Todds, Phoebuses, Vanderwerts, some village types in Moneragala, others called Polgasowitas, Gonsaals, Bakelmans, Vanderstraatens, Pringles, Maartenszes, Ohlmuses, Spittels, Marses, Bartholomeuszes, Ferreiras, a few from a dhoby clan in Bambalapitiya, some members of a Sinhalese carpenter’s family, a shady lady from Borupana, a streetwalker from Kollupitiya, the Holsingers, Leembruggens, Davidsons, Thomaszes, Rauxes, Vanderwalls, Jacksons, Van Twests, Ratnayakes, Looses and Foenanders, Fonsekas, Petersons, Herfts, Bertuses, Brohiers, Toussaints, Nicholases, Duckworths and Camilluses, de la Zilvas, Forsythes, Hepponstalls, Rabots, Carrons and Rulachs. And the infant still had two grandfathers and a grandmother and was blissfully unaware of the hordes of cousins that would await her, besides brothers and sisters.

  The chronicler maintains that the foregoing has been recorded to illustrate how well the jam fruit tree spreads its branches. Naturally, of this tribe, some gave themselves airs and tried to ignore the others, but that is silly thing to do. You cannot cling to one branch without a thought about the others that also rise to the sky. The celebrated Jack, it is recalled, just had the one beanstalk, and as the story goes, he had to cut it down in the end! But who would take an axe to a jam fruit tree and imagine that once cut down it would stay down? It gives you the raspberry and shoots up again!

  Leah, too, found life in her, after George had covered her nightly for three months and constantly expressed his chagrin that his seminal fluid kept faring forth from the lips of his wife’s vagina. ‘What, men, putting right inside, no? Then why it all coming out again?’

  Leah, who left it all to George and admitted to but a general working knowledge of ‘these caddish things’ just lay back and hummed a hymn to Mary. In truth, George was new to the game despite his worldly airs with a lot of theory and no practice whatsoever. A book on sex by an Indian maniac had told him all he needed to know. All he had to do was translate this wisdom into deed. He began to reason with Leah, bringing in a bottle of Parker Quink blue ink and fountain-pen filler. ‘Now look, will you, when put the filler and squeeze the top it takes in the ink, no?’

  Leah would watch interestedly.

  ‘Now see, filler full with ink. Now put filler inside and squeeze on top and all the ink going. See the filler now. No ink. And where the ink? In the bottle. And won’t come out.’

  Leah would nod. She always admired George when he got scientific.

  ‘So if my cock is filler and I put it in and all the stuff comes then like going into your bottle, no? Then why it coming pouring out?’

  ‘Anney, I don’t know. Must be you’re putting too much inside and it overflowing.’

  George considered this and was pleased. ‘You mean too much in my filler? Must be that cow’s milk I drinking when at home. Then must be having enough inside, no?’

  ‘So that’s all right then?’ Leah would say, trying to rise, ‘must go and wash.’

  ‘Wait a little. Think have some more in the filler,’ and he would straddle her again and Leah would wish he’d get the business over with. Like any full-blooded Burgher girl, she had thought long and lustily about sex. She and George had not kept their hands to themselves and the pre-marital fondling had been tremendously exciting. Quite unnerving at times, in fact. But the sameness of the business, night after night was becoming, to Leah, a bore. And George, too, was a bore. He did not make love. He practiced technique. He was quite exhilarated about having a woman all to himself. Leah grew tired of his sexual posturings, yet, her own appetite needed to be met and so she made the best of these nightly encounters and felt that, on the whole, her marriage was secure and theirs was a mutually satisfying relationship. (If only the bugger would stop strutting around the bedroom and saying: ‘See my cock. Bigger than this where will you get?’ Pooh! Dunnyboy has twice that size!)

  Leah didn’t know it at the time, but she was nurturing in her womb a perfect genius of a child. Perhaps there is something to be said about extraneous impressions that are registered on the mother and are imparted in some mysterious manner on the foetus. Leah could never understand later how it could have happened. And George, at his best, made a rather negative impression—nothing to excite any foetus. Only one thing could be considered and attributed: Leah’s collectomania that grew to fanatic proportions after marriage. Two things contributed to this totally indisciplined process of what could be called, self-education. First, there was a visiting bookman. This patient little individual would come over once a week with a pyramid of books and magazines on his head. A sort of perambulating lending library. The type no longer exists in the Sri Lanka of today. Leah had her favourite whose name was Daniel.

  Daniel was quite a knowledgeable lender of books. Blessed with no literary tastes, he would pick up anything that consisted of covers and pages. Old Royal Society journals, poetry, penny dreadfuls, novels, Sexton Blake series, old Strand magazines, pulp romances, children’s readers, hymnals, Bible stories, fairy tales, engineering and agricultural pamphlets and medical gazettes. The pyramid was always tied up in a large white diaper, and when he came calling, Leah would help him lower the load and watch breathlessly as he untied the bundle and display enough books to fill a goodish veranda. Daniel was a patient man. He did not mind that Leah would wallow in his books for half a morning. She would leaf through the entire stock and select many she would try to read. She had no decided tastes but took what appealed to her and what would give her hours of pleasure in selecting and writing out excerpts and passages. Daniel would note what she chose and quote: ‘These three, good novels five cents each, and those women’s magazines—how many lady took? Five? That is ten cents for all, and those two books ten cents each, so altogether forty-five cents.’ Leah would clutch at her breast and imitate a dying swan. ‘So give forty cents,’ Daniel would concede and Leah would revive immediately and say, ‘You’re mad? old books like this? How to know how many pages gone, also? Then never mind. You take and go.’ Daniel would smack his forehead and wail: ‘Carrying on this h
ead all day, no, lady? And see the time to take out and put back again. Thirty-five cents.’

  ‘Other people take only one book. See how many I’m taking. And when you come next week even if I haven’t finished reading you will take and go. Here, twenty-five cents. Only one week, no?’

  And this was the first part of Leah’s cultural ‘induction’. Secondly, she had all the time in the world and a goodly collection of very large Port of Colombo ledgers which George had snaffled one day and stored on the top of his almirah. George had this kleptomaniac conviction that anything he snaffled would always come in useful some day. The handsome, leather-bound ledgers each with 200 stout pages were bound to be of use some day. It was no real effort to get them out of the port—all twelve of them—although it is not known what effect their loss could have had on such sections of the port as Administration, Audit, Stores or the Custom’s Long Room where such ledgers were normally used.

  Leah had never been great shakes as a student. She would add laboriously and calculate with a total disregard for every mathematical principal. She had no head for geography, abhorred history, and was the despair of Reverend Sister Theresa who took singing and was of the opinion that Leah’s octave C sounded like a Mississippi tug boat. But Leah was fascinated by words—pretty quotes and descriptive language. The Burgher patois which surrounded her in her everyday life may be as colourful and as vibrant as a toucan in a baobab tree, but she discovered, quite early in life that people like Shakespeare and Donne and even Disraeli and Voltaire used ‘proper’ English and found a priggish satisfaction in poring over all manner of little literary offerings which she would encounter in her school literature texts, the family Bible, the newspapers and even the cheap romantic magazines and other pulp she would avidly collect. That she rarely understood did not deter her. She felt that she was gathering together masterpieces of a rare order. Soon this became an impulse that could not be quelled. She had biscuit tins stuffed with clippings and the bright verses of Christmas cards.

  When she found the ledgers she was more than delighted. Now all her ‘gems’ could be neatly glued in . . . and they were. Each ledger held quite a hotch-potch, to be sure, but they did become comprehensive albums of a rare literary beauty.

  There was, for example, a sober directive on the engaging of servants:

  Every portion of work which the servant will have to do should be plainly stated by the mistress, and understood by the servant. If this plan is not carefully adhered to, an unseemly contention is almost certain to ensue, and this may not be easily settled; so that a change of servants, which is so much to be deprecated, is continually occurring.’

  Commonsense, certainly, for the ages!

  And these curious words of Ben Jonson on the effects of a formal dinner on men:

  Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding, and those who are conscious of their inferiority have the modesty not to talk. When they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous; but he is not improved, he is only not sensible of his defects.

  And a couplet from Campbell;

  The world was sad! The garden was a wild!

  And man the hermit sigh’d, till woman smiled.

  Little verses were collected from everywhere and many were not even attributed. Like this verse on the virtues of being a good housewife:

  The woman the name of the housewife doth win

  By keeping her house and of doings therein;

  And she that with husband will quietly dwell

  Must think on this lesson, and follow it well.

  and Jeremy Taylor’s stirring lines on what a good wife will always be:

  A good wife is Heaven’s last best gift to man; his angel and minister of graces innumerable; his gem of many virtues; his casket of jewels. Her voice is sweet music; her smiles his brightest day; her kiss the guardian of his innocence; her arms the pale of his safety, the balm of his health, the balsam of his life; her industry his surest wealth; her economy his safest steward; her lips his faithful counsellors; her bosom the softest pillow of his cares; and her prayers the ablest advocates of Heaven’s blessings on his head.’

  There were even some old lines from Tusser, written, believe it or not, in 1557:

  THE PRAISE OF HUSWIFRY

  I serve for a day, for a week, for a year,

  For lifetime, for ever, while men dwelleth here;

  For richer, for poorer, from north to the south;

  For honest, for hard-head, for dainty of mouth;

  For wed and unwedded, in sickness and health;

  For all that well liveth in good commonwealth;

  For city, for country, for court and for cart,

  To quiet the head and comfort the heart.’

  There were ‘Advice to Cooks’, various recipes, Shakespeare, Disraeli, Rules for Choosing Good Meat, Macbeth’s ‘Let good digestion wait on appetite, And health on both’, lines from Ralph Hodgson, Pope, Herrick and Shelley.

  What Leah could not clip out and paste in, she laboriously copied, and in her large flowing hand she would record Tennyson’s The Beggar Maid and James Hogg’s famous The Boy’s Song and even Robert Louis Stevenson’s Requiem. All manner of proverbs, sayings, bon mots, extracts from after-dinner speeches went into the pot, stirred briskly with typical autograph album offerings, the dying words of Anne Boleyn and the words of Toplady’s immortal Rock of Ages. It was certain that some lines had been copied out from cemetery headstones for there lay, between a passage from Goldsmith and some words of Cardinal Wolsey:

  Born into beauty

  And born into bloom

  Victor immortal

  O’er death and the tomb

  With her first child in her womb, Leah would spend long lazy hours of each day with her ledgers. She was on a sort of literary safari. She would even take little poems and sing them to the tune of popular songs and hymns, making the potted ferns in the veranda stand on end. And so her nine months passed pleasantly enough and she brought forth a girl who was named Marlene Christina and Cecilprins grumbled long and loud because all he was getting, he said, were granddaughters and, ‘With all these buggers married, nobody getting a son.’

  He would go to ‘High Street bottom’ to regard Anna with a jaundiced eye. Anna, who had taken to wearing voluminous house coats and moved around like a three-masted schooner in full sail, showed no sign of an abdominal dilation. ‘Tchach!’ Cecilprins would say, ‘What you buggers doing, men? Elsie, Leah, both get daughters and still you sitting here making mallung and cooking fish and no baby coming yet?’

  Anna would roll her eyes and say piously: ‘Must wait, no, Papa, until God give.’

  Cecilprins would snort. ‘God give? Then what is husband doing?’

  Anna would sigh gustily. Her papa did have a point but Colontota was convinced that, whereas he had performed with textbook thoroughness, it was Anna who was to blame. His parents, too, were disappointed and when several clinical examinations confirmed that Anna was incapable of ovulation, they were naturally huffed. ‘Parents must have known and not a word said,’ old Colontota remarked while his wife nodded. But the woman was too fond of her Burgher daughter-in-law and would not allow her husband to say too much.

  ‘So never mind,’ she would say firmly, ‘Still she is good girl even if getting fat too much. And not like other Burgher girls going dancing and parties and all; and putting red stuff on the mouth and cutting off the eyebrows and putting black lines with pencil. Sometimes I think, like village girl, only going to the church and once in a way to sisters’ house and that’s all.’

  But old Colontota felt that it had all been a ghastly mistake. Should have married a strong girl from the village. He could have arranged a match with some good coconut land as dowry.

  Meanwhile, in Bandarawela where Viva had secured a small house close to the railway station, Opel went about her slatternly way, quite enchanted at the thought that in this crisp mountain climate she would
never need to take a bath. In fact, Opel found life in the hills quite welcome. For one thing she was free of that abrasive father of hers who, she thought, was getting quite strange in his ways of late. Papa Ludwick would sit with his Bible in his lap and roll his eyes and mutter bits of Scripture. Then his eyes would fix unintelligently on her knees and he would lose himself in some blissful reverie, then suddenly leap up, shout ‘Alleluia!’ and rush to the lavatory. Most disconcerting.

  Viva, his disciple, was no better, actually, but she could put up with his peccadillos. They had found the little two-roomed bungalow which his company had provided, quite suitable. There was a pear tree in the small garden and quite a lot of peach trees too. Chrysanthemums straggled about ill-kempt beds and the previous tenants had done big things with barbetan daisies. There was an outhouse lavatory (presumably for an emergency or for servants) and a large piping system that brought in water from somewhere up the mountain behind the house, crystal clear spring water that flowed all day and night into a large trough, large enough to conduct a naval exercise in. In the backyard, cabbages and leeks grew in well-ordered beds and Viva felt that a coolie could be pressed into service to tend the yard and grow more vegetables. ‘Can have some carrots and radish,’ he said.

  What was most acceptable was the company van. It was parked under the tiny porch at nights and Viva would set off in it each day. A chauffeur would pop in each morning at seven, wearing a big blue Burberry coat (Royal Navy surplus, to be sure) and with a thick cloth swathing his head and ears. He would check the van and then sit on the front step until Opel brought him a cup of tea and he would grin and regard the buttons of her housecoat wishfully.

  The day began, Viva insisted, with a prayer. He would stand beside the van and begin with a strident ‘O Holy Father!’ and proceed to remind God that it was He who delivered the Israelites from bondage and sent an angel to Daniel’s fiery furnace and gave Moses the Ten Commandments and put a hex on a fellow named Uzzo who had tried to get too familiar with the Tabernacle. Having recounted all this (in case God had forgotten) he proceeded to ask for a great many things which he felt he was entitled to as a chosen one and for being such a good and faithful servant. ‘Bless the driver,’ he hooted, ‘and the road also, and grant, O Lord, that the van stays on it otherwise we go down the precipice for sure . . . Bless the van, O Lord God, and the steering-wheel and don’t forget the tyres, Lord, because you know these roads, God, all curves and hairpin bends and going round and sometimes feel as if the tail-light is touching the head-light also. Praise the Lord and proclaim His mercy . . . Alleluia! Alleluia!’