by Patrick Gale
‘Don’t worry that we’re so far out from all the action,’ she told her. ‘There’ll be a free car to take you into Ubud whenever you need and the compensations are terrific. The nights are cooler and quieter out here. You won’t be troubled by barking dogs or woken by cockerels and the rooms and service are perfection.’
The car paused at a gatehouse for security men to check beneath it for bombs then they were waved through. They approached a brightly-lit pavilion, where staff were lined up in expectation.
‘Now don’t go racing off with your famous friends tomorrow. I’ll want to catch up with you,’ Ms Yeung said as a young man in a version of traditional dress came to open their door.
Female staff met them with namastes and draped them with scented white garlands of welcome. Then, before Edith could say goodnight, they were deftly separated and whisked in different directions into the lantern-lit grounds.
It was like no hotel she had ever visited. There was none of the usual sordid business of credit-card swipes or checking who was paying for what. Edith’s guide introduced herself as Ayu.
‘I’m your personal assistant for the duration of your stay. Anything you need, anything you don’t like, just dial one and I’ll answer,’ she said. ‘I’ll stop by each morning after breakfast to file your requests for the day. Your room is this way. Watch your step here, it’s a little uneven.’
She led the way past a bewildering succession of pavilions and pools, gardens and terraces. She pointed out various restaurants and spa centres in passing which Edith was sure she would never rediscover by daylight. Edith could hear rushing water somewhere far below and, through the trees, a music like nothing she had heard before, at once frenetic and calmly circular, as though moving at two speeds at once. It seemed to be made by gongs or tuned drums of some kind.
‘It’s a temple ceremony,’ Ayu told her, seeing she had paused to listen. ‘There’s a full moon this week…So. Here we are. This is your room and your own pool is just there across the terrace. Beyond that grille you’ll find a library with a computer and broadband access.’
She unlocked and slid open a huge glazed door into a suite of rooms easily the size of Edith’s little flat in Tufnell Park. She demonstrated shower, fridge, television, lighting, remote control, air conditioning, mosquito nets and only then, on the point of bidding goodnight and as though she sensed it was deeply distasteful, she asked for Edith’s passport and took a swipe of her credit card on a tiny electronic reader she produced from a pocket.
After a dreamy night haunted by the sound of distant gongs and the perfume of aromatic oil in the lanterns on her terrace, Edith woke to find herself in a kind of paradise. The hotel was a series of tastefully converted antique buildings spread across an old estate or plantation on the steeply folded sides of a river valley. Through the trees came virid glimpses of deserted rice fields but no other buildings.
Edith had been trained by Margaret never to have a hotel breakfast delivered for fear of extra charges and a reduction in choice. Besides, breakfast in a pretty pavilion built over a cascade was part of the treat. Deciding not to fret after English marmalade and her usual toast and strong coffee, she elected to embrace, with a good child’s passivity, whatever this adventure threw at her. She thus found herself sipping a lawn-green concoction made of melon and parsley and eating some kind of pancakes stuffed with nuts and berries.
It was impossible to sense how many guests there were since they were housed far apart and many, like Ms Yeung, might have elected to take breakfast on their terraces. The restaurant was almost deserted. There was a severe Japanese woman glaring into her tea in a corner and an Australian couple were leaving, softly arguing, as she arrived. At the table next to her a wan young man was poring over the festival programme. He smiled fleetingly and mouthed a hello at her as she sat so it didn’t seem too forward to speak back once she had finished the last of her surprisingly filling pancakes.
‘Are you here for the festival too?’
‘Looks like it,’ he said quietly.
‘Are you Irish?’
‘American,’ he said. ‘But my mother was from Limerick.’ He looked back at the programme. ‘My event seems to have been left off this.’
‘How terrible! Is it too late to complain?’
‘Oh I’m used to it. A voice in the wilderness, that’s me.’
‘I’m Edith Chalmers,’ she said brightly, in an effort to head him off from gloom.
He brightened at once. ‘No!’
‘The other one. The one no one’s heard of.’
‘Ah. Well no one’s heard of me either so we’re quits. I’m Peter John.’ He leant across to shake her proffered hand. His grasp was so cool and weak she wondered if he were unwell. ‘You see? You’ve forgotten it already. I always told my mother it was a mistake to marry a man with no proper surname; two first names give the mind no anchor.’
‘I’ll think of you as Prester John,’ she said. ‘Then it’ll stick. Sorry. What do you write?’
‘I’m a poet,’ he said. ‘So my case is hopeless really. Still, we’re in the very best hotel and I intend to make the most of it. Although even the staff seem to have forgotten I’m here.’
As if on cue, the waitress ignored his pleading look as she came to clear Edith’s place. Edith offered him a roll and nut butter as he looked famished but he waved her little basket aside.
‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ve a massage at ten and it’s best on an empty stomach. They’re going to pound me with sea salt then dribble me all over with stimulating oils. But show me your event so I can circle it.’
She flicked through his programme and shyly pointed out her two events, feeling she ought really to give him one of them. He circled them both with a tiny pen worthy of Ms Yeung. It was ivory with a little skull carved on its cap.
‘If I hear no one else,’ he said, ‘I shall come into town to hear you, the other, the real Edith Chalmers!’
Although her events were not until the third day, she felt honour bound to attend as much of the festival as possible because someone else had paid for her to be there and she had been nicely brought up. Besides, the hotel’s luxury – a part of which plainly lay in its keeping the vulgar question of prices aired as rarely as possible – made her nervous. It might have been different had someone from the festival welcomed her and made it quite clear what she was and wasn’t going to be paying for at the adventure’s end…
So for two days she fought jet-lag and lived like a nun among sybarites, eating minimal breakfasts, catching her free ride into Ubud in the morning and dining in the evening off the treats in her lavishly restocked fruit bowl, which Ayu had expressly pointed out were free of charge. By day she heard novelists and translators and historians and poets. She sat through discussions of adultery in young adult fiction, the gender politics of far eastern folklore and Does Post Colonialism Exist. She winced at one woman’s account of her daughter’s circumcision and laughed at another’s sonnet to her neurotic Abyssinian. It was all very lively and interesting but she felt lonely in a way she never felt at home, where she saw far fewer people. She longed to escape and explore the island, which clearly had a unique and fascinating culture, but she was intimidated by her lack of language and the vast denominations of the local currency. She felt she shouldn’t go touring during festival hours yet when the last event finished it was nearly dark and she was nervous of missing her free ride home.
She spotted Lucinda Yeung repeatedly, either on stage or in the middle of an animated crowd, but Ms Yeung’s glance seemed to slide over her in a myopic way that discouraged friendly approaches. The other writers all seemed to know each other and wandered off to socialize in merry groups but nobody thought to ask Edith along, perhaps because she had removed her author’s badge when she tired of explaining why she couldn’t sign the other Edith Chalmers’ books.
Massage, she was startled to gather, seemed to be playing a greater part in the festival for most writers than literature. When
ever she listened in on an offstage conversation, writers seemed to be comparing notes on which kind of pummelling, stretching or kneading had worked best for them so far, which day spa offered the best value and which the most handsome or beautiful practitioners.
Her lifeline, on the second day, was Peter John. He seemed to have been as overlooked as she was. Not only was he not in the programme but no badge had been made up for him and the shop had stocked none of his books. He seemed quite unabashed. He fashioned his own author badge which read Peter John: Neglected Poet!
Whenever he saw her he came to sit by her to gossip for a while or simply make her feel less unattached in the crowds. Madame Yeung, he assured her, was far too grand to chat to either of them now that her column was so widely syndicated around the Pacific rim and her cable show had taken off. ‘Consider yourself honoured she gave you five minutes in the taxi from the airport,’ he said. ‘She stood up Seamus Heaney and they say she once made Peggy Atwood cry, which must take some doing.’
Undaunted at being left off the programme, he made regular use of the open mike sessions during the lunch hour, reciting his poetry by heart to the near-empty auditorium in his whispery voice until jostled off the stage by someone else who acted as though he wasn’t there. Edith was not a poetry-reader by habit but she liked his. His verses were dry and witty and desperately sad and she couldn’t think why he wasn’t famous, especially as he was so pale and interesting.
‘I don’t care,’ he assured her, as though reading her mind. ‘Really I don’t. I’m here. That’s what matters. And my poems are all out there. Somewhere.’ He glared towards the bookshop. ‘Frankly I’m really more interested in the pursuit of deep relaxation. I’m running up a vast bill on massages at the hotel. Heaven knows how I’ll pay for it. I suppose I’ll just have to watch my card go into meltdown. The deep tissue man is a genius. And there’s a Javanese woman, unexpectedly stout, who does incredible things with jets of warm water. You should try it, Edith. Give yourself a lift before your big day.’
But she doubted him. She watched him when he didn’t know she was watching, scanning the poetry shelves to look at the fat, signed piles of his rivals’ work or reciting his poems while three Australian women loudly disagreed with one another about Sufism, oblivious to him. She believed he was slighted at every turn. When they caught the car back to the hotel, she had to stop the driver from leaving without giving him time to climb aboard. And, for all his talk of the wonderful massages he was getting, the hotel staff seemed to pay him as little heed as they did the geckos which chuckled so startlingly from the restaurant eaves.
She felt their interest in her slacken too, once Ayu realized she wasn’t going to book a chakra realignment or a colonic irrigation. Ayu was still there to greet her each morning as she emerged for breakfast, but by the third day she did so with a singsong slackness that hinted at mockery.
Edith’s events were both, in their way, disasters. Her spotlight session had a tiny, restless audience because she was programmed, in the smallest auditorium, at the same time as the latest Indian prizewinner was packing out the big one. As for her panel discussion on romantic fiction, her attempt to take the subject seriously, although she was by no means a romantic novelist, went for naught because one of her fellow panellists had broken the agreement and written a lengthily tedious speech, not remotely on the topic, which she insisted she had to read as she had been up half the night writing it. After which there were only fifteen minutes left for their moderator – not alas the implacable Ms Yeung – to ask the rest of them one question each.
But Peter came to both sessions and so, astonishingly, did Lucinda Yeung, although she did not sit rapt as he did but took such repeated notes in her agenda that Edith suspected she was merely claiming the nearest convenient chair while she prepared for her next session with someone more newsworthy.
‘I feel I’ve seen nothing of Bali,’ Edith confided in Peter, once she had explained to the only audience member to ask that no, the bookshop had only managed to stock one of her earliest books, not the latest and that all the others were by a quite different Edith Chalmers. ‘And it’s my last night. It seemed criminal doing nothing but coming to festival events and walking in the hotel grounds.’
He convinced her to stay on in Ubud as night fell and the streets began to buzz with scooters. ‘But I’ve left all my cash at the hotel so you’ll have to be Sugar Mother,’ he said with an unexpected wink.
That was fine by her. When she last counted her rupiahs on her bed she seemed to have over a million still.
He said he wasn’t hungry since that morning’s particularly strenuous massage seemed to have wiped out his appetite, but he encouraged her to take a table in the Café Lotus to drink a delicious cocktail of lemongrass, lime juice and pressed ginger then he led her off down some lively side streets to a little restaurant, where they seemed to be the only big-boned Westerners, and chose for her a sequence of small dishes of fish and chicken that seemed the very essence of exotic travel after her lonely plunderings of her fruit bowl.
Finally he led her to a neighbourhood temple. A full moon ceremony was building up to some kind of climax or at least was in full flow. The steps were busy with worshippers coming and going, the air bright with the jangling melodies of the percussion orchestra he explained was called a gamelan. It would have felt quite wrong to go inside as they weren’t Hindus but he found a comfortably low wall outside where they sat for a happy hour smelling incense and frangipani, listening to the music and hubbub and marvelling at the elegance with which local women could ride side-saddle on their husbands’ scooters while balancing little towers of fruit or rice cakes on their heads to offer at the altars within.
‘I think this is why I became a writer,’ she found herself saying suddenly. ‘For the excuse it gives simply to sit quietly and watch.’ And, sitting and watching, she spotted several writers from the festival walking by and she felt gratifyingly less of a tourist than they were, simply by virtue of sitting still. ‘Thank you,’ she said at last. ‘Thank you for that.’ Lent courage by having a pale and interesting young poet at her side, she had no trouble in hailing them a taxi back to the hotel.
They rode in silence but there was no awkwardness because the driver’s radio was serenading them with flute music. When she caught Peter’s eye occasionally, as they bumped around a corner or swerved to avoid a precariously laden scooter, he smiled at her before looking back at the passing night scenes.
‘Can you really not pay your bill?’ she asked at last as they were walking back through the grounds.
‘Oh. Probably not. But it couldn’t matter less. I’ll plead ignorance, say I thought it was all covered by the festival. It couldn’t matter less, honestly, Edith. I have been here before.’
She realized they had observed none of the usual literary festival etiquette of exchanging addresses or cards or assurances to review one another favourably but he had cast a kind of spell on the evening’s end so they merely shook hands and he melted peaceably into the scented night. The scent, she had discovered by now, was nothing more exotic than citronella oil burning in the little lanterns on every surface to discourage mosquitoes, but she was still enchanted by it and by the elegance with which the lanterns had been used instead of banal electric light to outline flights of steps around the grounds.
She packed everything but the clothes she would be travelling in and the unwieldy Norwegian novel she had yet to finish. Then she sat out on her terrace, feasting shamelessly on fruit she couldn’t name and listening to the gentle plashing of water in her infinity pool and the distant flutes and drums coming from a temple that had been silent every night until now.
What, she wondered, would her friend Margaret have done differently had she been there? Struck up useful friendships, certainly. Left with invitations to festivals in Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai all but confirmed. Eaten more. Drunk more. But Edith doubted she would have befriended Peter John. At heart, like most crime writers, Margaret wa
s a social conservative and his pale and interesting qualities, his lack of vim, would have repelled her.
Edith ate the last rambutan in the bowl, dabbed her chin with a napkin and decided that when she got home she would institute some changes. She might even do what her agent had been suggesting for years and write something wildly different under a pseudonym. Something with sex and risk. Something with a plot.
She woke very early, as she always did the night before a long journey. Once she’d dressed and thrown back the curtains, she saw Ayu had not yet taken up her usual patient position on one of the terrace chairs. But perhaps that was because it was her last day and there could be no question of her suddenly requiring excursions or treatments.
Despite the terrific heat, she had not once swum in her pool because it had not occurred to her to bring a swimming costume to a book festival. She appreciated the pool as a thing of beauty, though, lined with slate tiles and reflecting the canopy of great trees overhead. The wind must have risen a little overnight for each morning the pool’s surface had been thinly carpeted with leaves which a groundsman would patiently extract with a rake while she was at breakfast.
This morning there were petals as well as leaves, as though some crimson shrub had shed all its blossom in the night. And, inches beneath them, Peter John was floating, open eyes to the morning sky, dressed in his habitual linen trousers and baggy white shirt. He looked paler than ever, as though the moonlit water had chilled him from merely pale to a silvery kind of blue.
She knelt at once and, dropping her book and spectacle case, tried to grasp his trailing shirt tails. He was floating just beyond her reach however and she was fearful of falling in herself. Growing breathless, she stood, glancing about her, and called out, ‘Hello?’ Her voice sounded especially feeble and bloodlessly English against the exotic birdsong and rustling of leaves. Usually the grounds were discreetly busy with staff by this hour. There always seemed to be a gardener raking up fallen leaves or one of the smarter-dressed personal assistants ferrying a guest in a buggy, but for once there was nobody in view. Edith hurried back inside, fumbling to fit her key into the lock with shaking fingers, and dialled 1.
