by Patrick Gale
‘There’s a man in my pool, Ayu. A fellow guest. I…I think he’s drowned,’ she said.
The sofa was immensely deep and comfortable and she found she had no power to leave it now she had sat. Perhaps she had not slept as well as she’d thought. Feeling her sixty-nine years, sweating despite the air conditioning, she waited and ate a grape or two abstractedly. Then she heard voices by the pool: a man’s and a woman’s, Ayu’s. Ayu sounded almost angry but then she appeared at Edith’s door, utterly composed, and tapped lightly on the glass.
‘Miss Chalmers? Are you all right?’
‘Yes. I’m fine,’ Edith said, forcing herself to rise. ‘It was a bit of a shock, that’s all.’
‘Er. There is no one in the pool, Miss Chalmers. Here. Come and see.’
One of the groundsmen, his skin far darker than Ayu’s, was raking the leaves and petals off the water and heaping them in a shallow, woven basket. Peter was no longer there. The groundsman saw her staring and said something in Bahasa. Ayu snapped back at him but he smiled at Edith and she felt stupid.
‘I’m so sorry to have alarmed you all,’ she said.
‘That’s all right. There were a lot of flowers on the water. Perhaps it was a trick of the light?’
‘Yes. Of course. Yes. I’m sure that’s all it was. I’m so very sorry.’
‘I’ve had them bring your breakfast to the terrace,’ Ayu added. ‘In case you were…’ She sought the correct word and, as always, her cautious use of an idiom highlit its strangeness. ‘In case you were not quite yourself.’
‘How kind.’
‘Your flight for Singapore leaves at twelve forty-five so I’ll bring the buggy for you at a quarter to ten.’
‘Thank you. And will you bring my bill then?’
‘Your bill? Oh. Please, Miss Chalmers, there is nothing for you to pay.’
‘Nothing? But I had several breakfasts. And snacks.’
‘Nothing. Enjoy your breakfast.’
Ayu performed a tidy namaste and withdrew via the poolside where she dropped her courteous tone to deliver another clattering rebuke to the groundsman.
There were several altars about the place, lapped in the black and white checked cloth Peter had explained symbolized the perfectly maintained balance of good and evil. Every morning someone left fresh offerings on them, Lilliputian arrangements of flowers and fruit on a leaf, usually with a smouldering incense stick in their midst. One saw these everywhere in Ubud, not just on altars but on the pavements and thresholds, protecting a house from unhappy spirits presumably. Edith had assumed that the hotel altars were purely decorative, like the faux-antique Buddhist or Hindu statues she had seen tourists showing off to one another at the festival. But perhaps not? Perhaps they were ancient sites of worship that long predated this artificial, impeccably staffed Eden.
As Edith obediently sipped her Juice of the Day – carrot, papaya and lime, a little card informed her – she saw an old woman, surely too roughly dressed to be a member of staff, placing a fresh offering at the altar that lay between her terrace and the point where the hotel grounds gave way to the dazzling green of the rice fields.
Edith forced herself to eat her pancakes, as they were probably the last wholesome food that would be set before her for twenty-four hours. She watched the old woman finish her interesting combination of prayers and housekeeping at the altar and make her way up towards the pool, via one of the bush-screened paths that criss-crossed the grounds’ jungly planting. Edith saw her exchange a few words with the groundsman – who seemed as respectful of her as Ayu had been haughty with him – before kneeling at the poolside just where Edith had knelt earlier, to leave a little offering there too. The old woman began to talk again but the groundsman waved her away and completed his clearing. He respected her offering however, even making a small, private gesture as he passed it. It reminded her of the rapid, barely conscious gesture she had seen Sicilians make against the evil eye.
The scent of incense began to reach Edith’s seat and when she had finished her breakfast and drained the last of her astringent green tea she went, fortified, to examine the offering. The groundsman smiled at her defensively as he lifted his basket of sodden foliage and petals.
‘Bhuta Kala,’ he told her. ‘For the spirit,’ he told her. ‘Hantu.’ Then he turned swiftly away as though he had said too much.
The only thing she couldn’t pack was the garland of sweetly scented flowers with which she had been welcomed. She had kept it on her dressing table and it had not yet begun to turn brown. Throwing it away would have felt wrong so, before she followed her suitcase up to Ayu and the waiting buggy, she walked back to the pool and coiled the flowers neatly about the old woman’s offering.
To lighten her luggage she inscribed her nearly-new copy of her latest novel, A Respectable Sufficiency, to Peter.
‘Would you give this to my friend who is staying here?’ she asked Ayu when they’d arrived at the entrance pavilion where her car was waiting.
‘Of course,’ Ayu said. ‘What is their name?’
‘Mr John. Peter John.’
‘Oh but,’ Ayu began, then she faltered. Glancing to one of her occupied colleagues, she bit her lip, a bit like a reluctant child, but took the novel from Edith. Then she smiled as defensively as the groundsman had. ‘I’ll give it to him, Miss Chalmers. Have a good flight now. And come back soon!’
She stood on the pavilion steps to wave the car off, as she had surely been trained to do so that each visitor could glance back at a parting tableau of delicate Balinese courtesy. However Edith saw her calling something over her shoulder whereupon two of her colleagues hurried over and stared at Edith as the car pulled away.
The driver was not her usual one and seemed to have almost no English and no desire to exercise the little he had, which was a kind of mercy. He said only, ‘Berhantu!’ gesturing back at the hotel. When he saw she couldn’t understand he merely shrugged and asked, ‘Airport?’ to which she nodded.
As they neared the top of the drive they had to slow down to allow the passage of a guest out jogging with her personal trainer. To her surprise, the guest was Lucinda Yeung, barely recognizable with her hair tied back and no make-up on but infinitely more approachable. Ms Yeung spotted her and gestured excitedly for her to lower her window.
‘I’m writing a piece about you for my column, Edith,’ she said. ‘I wish we could have spoken more. I think your novel is very interesting. Unique, in fact. I’ll see you’re sent an invitation to the Hong Kong festival and get you on my cable show. You’re original. So unlike all the others of your generation. I think I could really make something of you.’
‘Oh. Well thank you,’ Edith said.
‘You’ll come?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good.’ And Ms Yeung was off again, apparently outrunning her trainer.
Hong Kong, along with Adelaide, was one of the festivals to which Margaret had always longed in vain for an invitation. Edith knew she ought to go but now that she was embarked on her journey home, to her silent flat, her books and the notes for a still unwritten novel, an ageing weariness began to steal over her. With every dusty mile placed between her and the ambiguous paradise she was leaving, she framed fresh excuses and grew in certainty that exotic travel did not suit her.
OBEDIENCE
Perran was slightly late arriving because the puppy was still unused to car travel and first vomited then shat in the Land Rover on the way over. Classes took place in a barn on a remote farm a few miles inland from Zennor. Evidently used for pony classes at other times, the old building was deeply carpeted with sawdust and its inside walls were marked out with whitewashed numbers at intervals.
As always, Chris greeted the dog not the owner.
‘Evening, Toffee.’
Perran pulled Toffee to heel and joined the other pupils walking in a large clockwise circle around her. The dogs varied from a ball of fluff, too young yet to do much more than follow its owner in a childish
panic, to a magnificent Belgian Shepherd, forty times its size. There was a handful of clever mongrels, a Border Collie rejected for sheep training on account of an ‘hysterical tail’, an ancient, unexpectedly spiteful Labrador and two white lapdogs he could not place but suspected were French. The owners were as varied as the breeds. There were children dutifully attending with bewildered Christmas presents and two women, well into their sixties, who always wore gaudy fleeces and hats as though to suggest they were warmer than their wintry expressions suggested. These two had dogs who were exceptionally obedient, clearly veterans of many classes, so perhaps they only attended as a favour to Chris, to inspire and encourage.
‘Toffee, heel. Good boy,’ he said, remembering to keep his tone light and playful because apparently that was what puppies responded to best.
Toffee did not look like a puppy any more. Although only five months old, he was already well over twenty-five kilos and tall enough to rest his head on the kitchen table. He was a source of some guilt. Perran had always wanted a deerhound, had been fascinated by them ever since he was old enough to pore over guides to different breeds, doubly fascinated because there seemed to be none in the county, only lurchers of all shapes and coats and the occasional greyhound, retired from racing and rescued by a charity. He had watched them on the television – at Cruft’s or in period dramas – and had once been allowed to pet one as it waited obediently outside the beer tent at the Royal Cornwall Show. But owning one of his own had never been possible. First his father vetoed it, buying the family a golden retriever instead, precisely, bewilderingly, because that was what other people had. Then there was Val, his wife. Val liked dogs well enough, she maintained, but they should get children out of the way first because a farmhouse was cluttered enough without both. But then children had never come along, first because money was too short and then because of his technical difficulty.
When he saw deerhound puppies advertised in Farmer’s Weekly, he became like a man possessed. He twice found pretexts to drive out to Dartmoor to view the litter, each time feeling as guilty as he imagined a man must feel meeting a mistress. The third time he was unable to resist buying one. It cost a crazy amount, enough to pay a broccoli cutter’s wages for over twenty days, but he had some cash put by in a building society from when he got lucky on a horse, money Val knew nothing about. He introduced the puppy as a charming mongrel bought for a tenner from a man at the slaughterhouse, somewhere Val never went.
‘Ten quid, for that?’ she complained.
‘He says it’s nearly a deerhound,’ he told her. ‘At least half. Maybe more. You only have to look at him. We can call him Toffee, ‘cause he’s so soft.’
She fought it for a while but softened when Toffee licked her hand and fell heavily asleep against her feet, exhausted by the terrors of a first car journey. She was adamant, however, that the dog eat nothing more expensive than scraps, that it come no further into the house than the kitchen, that clearing up after it until it was housetrained was entirely his responsibility and that should it fail to be housetrained in six weeks, it was to live in the old milking parlour.
He agreed readily to all conditions in his excitement; the greatest triumph was still his, after all. He hid the pedigree documentation when it arrived from the Kennel Club (Toffee’s real name, his secret name, was Glencoe McTavish, of which Toffee had seemed a reasonable and plausible diminutive) and took care to lose his various pocket dog encyclopaedias in a bale of things for the parish jumble sale, to lower the chances of Val’s making comparisons between the breed ideal illustrated and the dramatically emerging lines of their so-called mongrel. Toffee was like a disguised prince in a fairytale; sooner or later his breeding would out.
The deadline for housetraining was two weeks gone. Perran always woke first anyway, trained to farming hours since boyhood, so it was easy enough to slip down to the kitchen, mop up any accidents, plead with Toffee to try to be good next time then slip back upstairs with a large enough mug of tea to keep Val sweet and in bed while the tell-tale taint of disinfectant floor cleaner had time to disperse. Obedience classes met with no objection; he knew she was glad to have one night a week to herself.
‘And halt.’ All the owners halted. Half the dogs sat obediently. The other half had to be pushed down. A puppy yelped. You could always spot the puppies who would be a handful if they grew up unchecked, the monsters-in-making. It was the same with children. Everyone watched Chris expectantly. Half the fun of these classes was that you never knew what she would have you do next; jump little pony jumps, weave your dog in and out of poles, have it sit and stay while you walked to the fullest extent of the lead or even let go of the lead altogether and crossed the room, if you were showing off and your dog could do it.
He knew she was a lesbian, that she lived with a driving instructor who had cornered the market in teaching car-shy wives and widows, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t admire her. She was a good-looking woman, very neat, not like Val who dressed for warmth and had a horror of revealing herself. Chris showed off her trim figure by wearing jodhpurs and a tailored suede jacket. She carried a little riding crop for pointing with and tapped it against her thigh when they were performing tasks with a pattern to them.
‘And weave,’ tap, ‘and through the tunnel,’ tap, ‘and halt,’ tap. He liked that. She did this for love, since the tiny fee charged could barely cover costs of barn-hire and training treats, but there was a nice mystery to her because although she plainly loved dogs, she was here without one and you had no way of knowing what breed she favoured.
‘So ask her,’ Val said, typically, Val who could ask anyone anything. It took a woman without mystery to assume another had nothing to keep to herself.
Chris waited until she had everyone’s attention and a rescue greyhound called Misty had stopped yodelling.
‘Now,’ she said. ‘Now that we’re all here…’ That was meant for him and Perran looked suitably crestfallen, only no one was laughing. ‘I think you’ll all agree,’ Chris went on, ‘it’s only right we should have a minute’s silence to think about Janice.’ He looked around. Everyone was hanging their heads. One of the children was even dutifully mouthing what could have been a prayer. He hung his head too, so that Toffee looked up at him and produced one of his curious cries of uncertainty and impatience that was half yawn, half whimper.
He wanted to crouch down and give him a hug only Chris was always telling off the men in the class for leaning over their dogs too much. He supposed it was love he felt for him. Because of the lack of speech, love for animals was an odd affair, doomed to frustration. You couldn’t hug them as hard as you wanted or they’d be frightened. What you really wanted, he supposed, was to become them. You wanted to see out of their eyes and have them see out of yours. There was a bit of particularly soft fur, just behind Toffee’s huge black ears, that gave out a marvellous scent, a warm, brown biscuity smell, a bit like horse sweat, which brought on this feeling in a rush. He had heard Val talk with friends about babies often enough, heard, with an alien’s fascination, how often women were filled with a hot desire to eat them, had once even seen a woman thrust one of her baby’s feet entirely into her mouth and suck it. Perhaps this love of dogs and love of babies were not so dissimilar?
‘So long, Janice,’ Chris said at last. ‘We’ll miss you, girl.’ Someone blew their nose. ‘Now,’ Chris went on, having cleared her throat. ‘The police have asked if they can have a brief word with each of us afterwards. Don’t worry if you’ll be in a hurry. The sergeant can just take your details and pay a house call tomorrow or whatever. Otherwise they’ll want statements tonight.’
‘But I thought she was on holiday,’ one of the elderly fleece ladies said.
‘Were we the last to see her alive, then?’ asked her friend.
‘Looks like it.’
The greyhound yodelled again, breaking the gloomy spell.
‘Right,’ said Chris. ‘Dogs are getting bored. Let’s practise our downs. In a big cir
cle now. That’s it. You first, Bessie. Off you go. Not too slow. That’s it. I’ll tell you when. Now.’
‘Down!’ said Bessie’s owner and Bessie dropped from her trot to flatten herself most impressively in the sawdust. It looked impressive but somehow insincere and you sensed she’d never do it so well without an audience.
So Janice was dead. Unthinkable. Janice Thomas. Haulage princess. The Broccoli Tsarina they had called her in The Cornishman once. Her father had begun the business in a small way, running three lorries that collected produce from the farms and took it to a wholesaler in the east. But Janice, hard-faced Janice, who nobody liked much in school, had been away to business college and made some changes when she came home. She wasn’t proud. She drove one of the lorries herself for a while until she got to know all the growers, however small. Then she used her knowledge of them to persuade them to sell through her instead of merely using her as haulier, so Proveg was born, sprawling across an industrial estate outside Camborne. She was no fool. She chose the site because there was high unemployment thanks to all the closed mines and retrenching china-clay works and labour was cheap. Soon everyone had a son or daughter or wife who had done time on the packing lines or in the quality control shed. The pay wasn’t brilliant but she was still regarded as something of a saviour. ‘She doesn’t have to do it,’ people said. ‘She could have worked anywhere. She could have worked in London for big money.’
Then she began to show her sharper side, bailing out farmers and truck owners in trouble so that she seemed their rescuer until their fortunes took enough of an upturn for them to realize that she now owned their truck or most of their farm. Or rather, that Proveg did. Janice always played a clever game of making out she was just one of the workers and speaking of Proveg as though it owned her too and she was merely another employee, paid just enough to stay loyal but never quite enough to break away.
