As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  The driver’s mate shouted, “Antrez-y. Nous pattim.”

  The Swiss youth took the child from Louise, then pulled her in after it. The lorry drove off, trailed not only by dust but by shouts and jeers and a flurry of stones from the villagers. Her fellow Communards had said nothing to Alexandra—shown no more interest in her than a herd of hartebeestes next to a herd of elands. But the villagers she now feared, as a single doe might be afraid when left to the mercies of a jackal pack. She need not have worried. Once the lorry was a distant vanishing point, the villagers resumed their lives, except for one small child who stood and stared at her until the bus arrived. Nevertheless Alexandra stayed at Larache until the day before Roddy’s departure.

  When she returned to the Community she was stopped in the holm-oak wood not by the villagers, but by the police. And she and Oliver were put into a lorry and taken to Azilah police station. There she found the few remaining Communards—most of whom, since they had been too disembodied to follow the general trek to warmer climates, were too disembodied to be feeling the despair or desolation which clearly showed itself on the faces of Ned and Rodrigo. As for Elinor, she sat, not, Alexandra noticed through her own alarms, with the dull vacancy of the others but in a calm passivity that was a triumph of all the disciplines she had endured in the previous months. She wore an expression, not of the zany beatification which showed on the face of the stoned Danish boy at her side, but of a peaceful, happy absentness. Yet she also looked ill, old, tired, shivered continuously, and ran at the eyes and nose with a hideous cold.

  Their stay at the police station was so frightening to Alexandra in its suddenness, its uncertainty, and its menace that she scarcely felt the indifference, the contempt, and the roughness of the policemen. She fed Oliver at the breast and as far as she could tried to go with the sea into a deep trough of oblivion: but the sea swell brought her not rocking contentment, but lurching sickness in the stomach.

  She was not questioned for long, for she had no hesitation, once she knew what had happened, in telling how Louise and the Swiss had gone south. And the fact that she did not know the registration number of the lorry caused no surprise, for neither did the village family who had stood by and seen their goat livelihood disappear into the south on the backs of three white children.

  She had very often to interpret for others, since, except for Elinor, she alone knew French at all fluently: and Elinor would only reiterate, smiling vaguely, “Rien à dire.” And in fact Elinor was right, Alexandra reflected. There was nothing to say. The goats had gone. The peasants to whom they represented their sole livelihood might with satisfactory assistance from the police of Marrakesh regain three badly sewn goatskins. Three white children would then be without warm covering, and, as they were likely to be compulsorily repatriated with their parents to England and Switzerland, where the climate was inclement, they would be the worse for the loss. As to the Robin Hoods, who had supplied the needs of the children of the new Kingdom of Love at the expense of the children of the old Kingdom of Greed, they had disappeared into the etheric void from which they claimed that their life energies, on which presumably they had depended in the very exhausting task of transporting, killing, and skinning goats, derived. So a bewhiskered German youth, the only one of the dozen who had ever talked with them, informed the police.

  Alexandra, remembering the clients waiting in the Larache police station where she had gone to register, thought there is nothing really for us twelve people to do but sit on the stone benches or the floor until we are released. A Moroccan brought into a police station, with nothing to say, would no doubt wait patiently until the righteous anger of the police gave way to their normal indifference and this in turn to a strong desire to relieve their cramped quarters of the presence of an intruder. But then a Moroccan, no doubt, would know how long all these psychological influences would take to have effect. But not so the Europeans. Like those Wilcoxes, it would be telegrams and anger, or rather, telephones and consuls.

  Herself, after the first half hour, she was no longer frightened. Her sole thought was for Oliver. But even into this capsule of maternal concern, there was from time to time injected a shame for what had happened, a disgust for being associated with it which was in no way lessened by the theatrical anger with flashing teeth and glinting eyes of the dispossessed peasant nor by the theatrical grief with hair tearing and wailing of his wife. Indeed this pantomimic display seemed to make the Community Robin Hood heroics even more shabby, as being committed against people too simple, too suppressed, to command any personal emotions, only these formal, traditional expressions of their desperate loss. She wanted only to make one gesture—to produce the cash to recompense the losses of the poor. But she had only just enough money to ensure independence for herself and Oliver for a month to come. There was no room for the luxury of buying decency.

  Rodrigo’s disgust was as great, but his anger was greater, for the whole of his future life seemed to hang on his early release. And Alexandra understood. For some people, at some times, telegrams and anger were necessities. For Rodrigo it was the telephone and the British Consul at Tangier. This official, enormously impressed by Sir James’s summons, took little time, especially with the aid of cash, in securing Rodrigo’s release. Other consuls were to act as effectively, but much more slowly. Meanwhile there was one snag in Rodrigo’s course of action: Alexandra refused to go with him while Ned’s position was in question; indeed she could not go with him for the police insisted on her remaining as a witness to the departure of the children in their ill-gotten goatskins. She might stay where she liked, but not on the beach, for the rule of love was now officially forbidden. So Thelma was summoned and arrived in a hired luxury car, dressed in all her diamonds and a clean mink coat, her skeleton body almost plump with dollars and travellers’ cheques. Such ostentatious wealth and the flourish of her husband’s name—an American Senator!—threw some of the police into a frenzy of hostility that Alexandra feared for a moment might be counter-productive, but luckily it threw a lesser number of them but these the senior into a salaam of sycophancy. And it was not many minutes before Alexandra and Elinor were free to leave.

  Then came Alexandra’s hardest fight, to persuade the generous Thelma to recompense the peasants for the loss of their goats.

  “But it’s charity, Alexandra. You can’t give charity. Just think now, hon, what a chance this is to expose to these kulaks—for that’s what they are—the realities of the system they live under.” It was hard to say whether her American ethic of self-help or her Marxism was more outraged.

  And, for once, mother and daughter were united, since Elinor declared that any such acceptance of surrogate guilt would chain them once more to this area—an area which events so apparently casual, yet, because so casual in their appearance, undoubtedly cosmic, showed to have become emptied of vital fluid.

  “I just can’t breathe here any more,” she said. And instantly, to the alarm of the officials and of Thelma, showed real signs of convulsive asthma.

  But Elinor’s dismissal of the goat-owner’s right to recompense had in turn a violent effect upon Ned.

  “Look,” he said, “someone’s got to pay for this. I mean like we shall leave a whole community up-tight with injustice.”

  “But, Ned, it’s all so banal.”

  Elinor’s lofty manner plunged him straight into action. With the translating aid of the unwilling British Consul (for neither Elinor nor Alexandra would act), Ned made a Dostoevskyan confession of guilt on behalf of all the Community. The confession puzzled the police, but offered them a scapegoat, and Ned was immediately hustled off to a cell, where it was evident—or so the Consul told them—he would have to remain at least until the goatskins were recovered, probably until the thieves were caught.

  It was only then that Thelma agreed to pay the peasants, but she gave double the sum asked for through the police.

  “If I know these God-damned cops, that’ll shorten the guy’s time in this st
inking place.”

  With Ned in prison, there was reinforced reason for Alexandra to obey the police order. She could promise Rodrigo no more than that she would seriously consider returning to England as soon as Ned was released.

  And so she did, for the situation at the hotel became intolerable: Oliver cried so much when Ned never appeared; Elinor, refusing to eat more than a cupful of brown rice and to drink more than a cupful of water, was judged by the doctor, whom Thelma insisted on bringing in, to be in a dangerously weakened condition—the postures and breathings to which she gave large parts of the day he declared to have produced a state of physical hyperæsthesia, in which the mucous membranes were sensitized to a dangerous degree.

  To this Elinor replied, “I should hope so. That’s got to be the preliminary to any transcendence.”

  Thelma shouted at her, and, when the doctor cautioned that any such state of tension could be highly dangerous, she shouted at him. Paying him three times his fee, she told him to take his incompetence out of her daughter’s room. Then in her remorse, she went on a heavy bout of Bourbon (the local Scotch supply having run out), repetitive self-recrimination, swearing at Elinor, cursing of the absent Senator, and tears. Through it all, Elinor just sat or lay, apparently quite remote from all that was happening. The spectacle of Elinor’s distaste for her mother, the mother’s bewildered, fuddled concern for the daughter, and the hatred and contempt of both of them for the apparently corrupt and double-dealing Senator Tarbett was like a terrible parody of her own family situation to which she now seemed committed to return. Alexandra could keep her sanity, she thought, only by locking herself day after day through three weeks of almost continuous rain into the sad little cheaper bedroom in which she and Oliver were now installed. Living in and for him minute by minute she shut out all but the immediate feeding and potting and nappy-changing and rocking, to a background, an insane surrealist background, of the complicated plots, the high-flown sentiments and overcharged French of seven George Sand novels that she found in the hotel lounge and which she read at every moment when thought could possibly invade.

  Thelma she had to listen to, Elinor she tried not to see. She tried also to keep Thelma’s desperate loneliness from invading, in the self-deceptive guise of parental duty, her daughter’s search for nothingness. After all Elinor was someone of her own age; and, however she disliked her, she must help her in her right to do her own thing. And, it seemed, she really was doing it. Until one evening she burst into Alexandra’s room and hysterically attacked her for preventing Ned from expressing himself; and then equally hysterically begged her to take Ned away when he came out of prison.

  “Help me, Alexandra! It’s not a small thing I’m trying to do. I don’t aim to some cranky life living in an ashram, or hanging round a guru. I’m almost through it. I’m almost free. And when that’s done I can go back into the world. Oh, say in a year’s time. Why I could even teach literature in college and do it well without it meaning a thing. I’d be so secure on the plane I’d reached. What have I done this Ph.D. for if it’s not to work in the world?” And she laughed in a natural way that Alexandra had never heard before. “But I’ve got to free myself of him, of all thought of those muscles working in that strong white neck, of the crazy way he talks when his ideas come too fast, of the way all his clumsiness turns into grace when he starts showing us the movements of the mime. Help me to run away from him!”

  So Alexandra did just that. She closed her mind to the bitterness Ned would feel when he came out and found Elinor gone. She never ceased to back Elinor in her resolution. One part of her felt a terrible treachery to Ned, another part felt that she was doing him a great service. It appeared that in Goa in India there was a certain Swami Sant Sarada Maharysh, usually called the Austrian Swami because he came originally from Salzburg, who was the master of pranayama.

  “He’s a genuine magister of the occult, an adept too,” Elinor said, “but that doesn’t interest me. Oh! and I guess he’s quite a charlatan too, which is how it should be.”

  So it was arranged that Elinor should fly to Bombay and then join the Swami’s classes in Goa. So she would escape both Thelma and Ned.

  Two days before she went, Ned came out of prison, miserably thin, muted, diarrhœic, and a bit the worse for blows and kicks. Alexandra had hardly begun to organize ministration for him, Oliver had only just greeted him twice with delighted cries, when suddenly he was gone, at Elinor’s expense, with her to Goa. For there he would be close to the real Community, the one that had begged to perform “Batteries”, which was assembled or would soon be assembled farther down the Indian West Coast in Malabar, probably at Cochin. And the group led by the girl from Warwick was rumoured to be in that area, at Trivandrum.

  Alexandra was so angry that she nearly left at once for England. But then Thelma got gastroenteritis, verging on dysentery, and, with it, a morbid misery that frightened Alexandra when she was near her. Yet near her she had to be, for there was no one else to care for the old tramp. Near, and, at the same time, constantly vigilant to see that no infection of Thelma’s, physical or emotional, should reach the baby. And anyway, baby cried because Ned had been taken away from him.

  Rodrigo—darling Roddy—sent her a first-class fare to England, and announced with triumph that Sir James had engaged him. But a few days later when Thelma was enough recovered, she announced that she was travelling to Goa.

  “Hon, I conceived Elinor without any love. I just was the lowest crawling creature on God’s earth after I’d sold the piss on the McCarthy thing. And being that low what could I do but marry the lowest bum I could find, Congressman Tarbett. God rot his two-timing soul! But that didn’t say I had to get a child by him. But I did. I gave poor Elinor that rotten, stinking father. So I’ve got to stand by her, hon. She’s all out on a limb, walking to the end of the jetty. And the drop at the end could be pretty big.”

  Somehow, at last, Alexandra decided that, given Ned and given Thelma, she too must go to Goa. And so here she was lying on the sands, feeling the baby and herself to be the swell and roll of the warmer ocean, where the dugong replaced the manatee, where the seaweed was more vermilion and more emerald, where sometimes, they said, great shoals of red and blue Portuguese men-of-war, with deadly stings, were washed ashore instead of seaweed. The sea they were, she and Oliver, and it was warmer here, hot so that all the Community lay naked day after day, and the trees had scarlet blossoms, and flashing blue-green birds flew zigzag before one’s eyes, and it had been Portuguese, and a Saint was buried there, an abbé to do with Dumas had hypnotized there—his statue was in the town—and once it had been the sea-god’s but he had given it to Vishnu, and Ned had begun “Batteries” again, and Elinor her breathing exercises, and Thelma’s room had a little wrought-iron balcony, and Oliver made noises that must surely be early speech, and it was warm, and she and baby were the ocean, slop, slop, slop, slop . . . and suddenly she was entangled in the seaweed, Oliver’s little head struggled to break through its brilliant, transparent coils, and they were sinking, down into warm sucking water, the swallowing ocean. Then she woke and Oliver was crying. The sun beat too strongly on him in his cot on this new beach.

  *

  The fear that Hamo had experienced as he clattered through the scrub-wood in escape from the uncles’ dream-feast, the sense of their malevolence bombarding him from the trees, of their pursuit through the labyrinthine descent from the fortress bungalow, did not entirely leave him when his aeroplane took off for Kuala Lumpur. Erroll talked of Janey Dare’s curry and afters, and compared them with Gillian Fail’s version of sukiyaki ceremony and even with May Latimer’s T-bone and starters. He then sketched a comedy short based on the bazaars. In which two drolls (likely English lads) fell tip over arse again and again.

  Then, seeking to dispel Hamo’s continuing dark brooding, he went on to speak of “Magic” so praised everywhere, jealously a little in Japan perhaps, grudgingly a little in the great Los Baños, but with awe and gratitude
in Hong Kong and Taiwan and Thailand and Indonesia. Then he ventured to criticize the workings of the labs even in the mighty U.S.A., in giant Japan or the great Philippines. “Oh yes, the gear’s all right but let them come back when they’ve learned how to us it as the tart said to the well-hung apprentices.” Finally, he chose another muse. Well, he said, with some effort in breaking through the Great Barrier Reef, and what were they like, the lads of Indonesia, different he supposed from the Bangkok lot, the sister-boys on bikes in miniskirts and frilly blouses! Oh yes, he’d heard about them from a G.I. in a bar—bastards those G.I.s too, shouting their big mouths off—telling how, when he felt her up and found it was a boy, he’d beaten him up, and he, Erroll, had told him he was a dirty fucker and, if he’d seen him at it himself, he, Erroll would have bashed him so much he’d have wished his old mother had died a Virgin in old Virginney. The Filipino boys looked a hot lot, he thought, though you heard ugly stories of night-life in Manila. But not, he supposed, for those like the Chief who knew how to look after themselves. And treat others right.

  At first Hamo felt every heat flush from anger to embarrassment, from shame to affection, at this first open speech on the tacitly understood, unmentioned subject from his faithful follower. He ached to respond as it had clearly cost Erroll much to bring it out. But he simply could not open his mouth to speak. But, at last, Erroll’s shock-tactic words blew him out of his depressed inertia. He knew what he had to do. He took out his silver pen and his leather writing-case and very neatly penned a letter:

  Dear Lacey,

  I have continued to feel most distressed by the unfortunate interpretation you put upon my laughter when we stopped at the temple on our return journey last week. The laughter was aroused by a very misplaced sense of absurdity which visited me at that moment. I had thought that I had left such sudden visitations behind me with other irrational, emotional spontaneities of youth. I can only plead the heat and fatigues of the day. Had you been saying “barmy” under the misapprehension that it was on the lips of every frequenter of Carnaby Street or of the King’s Road, Chelsea, it would have suggested to me an ignorance of fashion-dominated England which I entirely share. That, as you tell me, you like to use the word because it was a favourite of your father’s altogether delights me, if that does not sound patronizing. I assure you that it is not intended to be so. Since we are not likely to meet again, I feel emboldened to confide in you what I should hardly tell an habitual acquaintance or a business colleague. My own father’s memory is very precious to me. I honour it in many ways that the modern world might find comic. For example I continue to use his hairbrushes and clothes-brushes and I postpone arranging for their rebristling, though the need for it has long been apparent to my housekeeper. Such a thing could easily, and would, no doubt, be mocked by most people today. I should not care. So you may see how far I was from laughing out of the frivolous motive you supposed.