As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  My sympathy for your attitude to your father leads me further to encroach upon your kindness—despite the unfortunate misunderstanding which led to my presence at the Jonkheer’s tea-party. I cannot forget how, by my clumsiness, I may have further harmed the fortunes of the extraordinary youth, who, you tell me, was already in disfavour with his employer (now, I very much fear, ex-employer). I realize that, living out here, and accepting the desperate quality of much human life, as you are bound to do if you are to manage your estate efficiently, you will find my request sentimental. However, I can assure you that it is heart-felt. I cannot believe that some provision of work, shelter, clothing, perhaps even further education could not be of service to the youth. I venture to trespass upon your sense of justice, so close to the sense of respect you show for your father, by asking you to dispose of the enclosed cash on the youth’s behalf as with your knowledge of these parts you think best.

  Yours sincerely,

  Hamo Langmuir.

  P.S. There can be no need of telling him the source of the help, for I have been the cause of enough distress for him not to wish to be reminded of me.

  He wrote out a cheque for £100 to Lacey’s credit and addressed the whole to the Club where he had met him.

  But although his heart was lighter, the threatening sense of the avenging uncles and the mocking boys remained with him. Each time as his eye caught sight, through the thick safety of the window of the plane, of the vast rush of steam and air that hissed and shrieked through space away behind him, he felt as though the Jonkheer with his crown and sceptre, as in the German song they had learned at school, was threatening him with an intruder’s punishment. Their plane, hurtling indeed through night and wind, came, unwontedly in that perfect sky, into the edge of a typhoon’s cloudy turbulence. Strapped, but jolted and bumped, he felt himself riding desperately away from anger to which as it grew more violent he was less and less able to give a specific, even an avuncular name. But it must be the uncles’. After all, he had insulted them (those trolls) beyond anything, for he had declared their dream to be his nightmare. As most men would think his dream. So now, as when we try to leave a nightmare, its phantasms hold us to them, the uncles’ hot breath was fast upon him. So hot, that, however he assured himself that the pursuing figures were but figments built of cloud and vapour, he felt himself fighting for breath and had to ask Erroll to ask the Stewardess to adjust the air control, but he felt sick to death of it all. A nice thing it would have been for Erroll to arrive with the Chief dead in his arms! But “Ladies and Gentlemen, we are about to make our descent to Kuala Lumpur airport. Will you . . .” And he stepped out on to the tarmac alive, temporarily purged of irrational fears, glad to help Erroll count their many suitcases against the baggage receipts.

  After Indonesia, Malaysia brought the now rather mechanical round: The Institute for Tropical Crops, the University Department of Agriculture, the Ministry, the British Council, the Commercial Counsellor of the Embassy, some field-work among native grasses allied to oryza indica, visits to the paddy-fields. It was pleasant, but now a little mechanically tedious, to hear again the miracles that Magic had performed (after all, why else call it Magic?). It was less surprising now, but increasingly disturbing, to learn by chance how two years before, when Magic gave an especially miraculous surfeit, it had all been eaten by rats and weevils. However, storage difficulties are an endemic teething trouble of developing countries . . .

  But all this was familiar enough now to Hamo. Each day and week he heard more purely tourist talk with its varying yet inescapable flavour of the advertising people, and more purely business talk with its varying yet inescapable flavour of the entertainment world. As he did so, he became aware that he belonged to a third group, an inter-group, growing indeed every day in numbers, as people a decade or two ago used to warn that intersex was growing. This hybrid army, neither tourist nor business, but a bit of both, whose service being intended as perfect freedom, somehow, he felt, failed to be either quite free or very useful, had, he began to suspect, just enough engagement disguised as leisure or leisure disguised as concern, to hear, because they moved camouflaged, what tourists, business men, and officials all missed—a high, distant overtone of perpetual, desperate woe. Could it be the natural noise of the world, as he began to fancy? More likely, with insufficient occupation, unsatedly randy, the noise was simply present in his own too little disciplined head. Certainly he heard it; and with increasing frequency, as soon as he was alone, he ran gushing taps and cascading showers to cleanse his sweat and drown the sound, but to no avail.

  The monstrous joviality of the uncles, echoing across the flooded valley, came back to Hamo even in the civilized and controlledly picturesque tropical landscape of Penang’s huge-treed Victorian botanical gardens, or among the absurd Moorish domes and minarets that English Edwardian taste thought appropriate for the railway station of Malaysia’s capital, or in Singapore harbour, when watching the great steamships basking like friendly docile sea cows, as though George V, our second, better sailor king, were still with us and the Nips had never come. Yet in the end such constantly fresh scenes—some natural, some colonial—proved too strong for the nightmare’s mood. The grey thunder-clouds of the Jonkheer’s implacable anger rolled away from the brilliant blue sky. Nevertheless there remained, as with nightmares, visual fragments, aural fancies that came back, even on beyond Malaysia into Ceylon, to catch Hamo unawares.

  Such, encouraged perhaps by Erroll’s continued entertainment of him with the saga of the exploits of his two likely lads, were his sudden apprehensions of the Danish uncle and another—was it the German uncle or the American uncle who had been led by the jokey Dane into such partnership?—but certainly two of the uncles appearing in unlikely guise wherever schoolboys, grubby or clean, mealy or chubby, made their, by now to Hamo, nauseating appearance in groups of three or four.

  At first, these apprehensions turned apparitions so disconcerted Hamo as to bring him near to deserting his habitual dignity in company. But in the end these very vestiges, these last uncertain shadows of his Adventure with the uncles, led him on by means of the Fairest Youth he had Ever Seen into his next Adventure, that of Cinnamon 7, where the lovely suburban homes and gracious gardens of Colombo’s élite bid fair to outvile man.

  No apparitions, of course, perform their seductive task at our conjuring summons quite directly—that would be too crude for our credulity, or for theirs. The Danish uncle’s and his companion’s visitations, on the edge of Hamo’s vision, were no contradiction to this. At first, indeed, instead of barking him Cerberus-like towards a new circle of adventure, they seemed to be regular dogs in a manger. As witness their appearance on the evening of Hamo’s fourth full day in Colombo.

  “Phew!” said Erroll in relief as they watched Mr. Watteratne’s hysterically rattling, ten-year-old Peugeot disappear out of the hotel fore-court into the quickly darkening streets of the capital city; and then, “Oomph! Aah!” as, turning towards the surf-thrumming ocean, he breathed in the first cooling breeze that they had known in four days. The car’s retreating clatter sounded the end of a day of sweaty frustration, of indignation pent up in apoplectic heat, of the endless irritation of Mr. Watteratne’s soothingly intended stream of aimless flattery and promise, and, in climax, of a dismal dinner that had undone all the refreshment of the evening’s three lengths of the hotel swimming pool. Hamo’s sense of relaxation at its close was doubled by Erroll’s noises. He alone of all people that Hamo had ever known used such sounds, “Phew!” “Oomph!” “Aah!” “Ugh!” “Wheee!”—so much for those who saw his assistant only as a Cockney character, he was much more than that—a real original, basic, knowing yet unspoiled, as solid as these ridiculous yet absolutely apposite monosyllables that he and no one else emitted.

  “Well, no complaints about this. The Isle of Spice at last. Spicey! My old dad would have been looking for a bit of fun on the promenade as soon as he heard that word. Shocking what repression did to all
that lot, wasn’t it?” He waited for Hamo’s reply which didn’t come. “All the same, I can never quite relax on tropical evenings until that bloody great sun’s made its sudden bump into the sea. Doesn’t seem right, does it? I mean the sun . . . Well, you know, it ought to go down stately, like one of those old dowagers taking the waters, not like fat Phyllis falling off the deep end. ‘And so we say farewell.’ Funny to believe they could ever have said that without taking the mickey. I can remember it as a kid though. Travelogues! The breeze and the surf and the . . . no, not a bloody coconut palm in sight,” he surveyed with exaggerated disappointment the flat distance of the Galle Face Green that flanked the promenade, “Wimbledon Common on a windy evening, Southend without the pong.”

  “I’ve never been to Southend, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, that’s two of us.” He chuckled, teasing himself, a habitual, pleasing Erroll sound. “Shockin’ admission for a Cockney. After that dinner, old Water Rat’ll have some stories to tell to make the baby rats’ mouths water when he gets back to his homely hole. Mulligatawny soup! I ask you. When we’ve had bloody great rivers of soupy sweat running down our backs all day. Peculiar odour the sweat has here, hasn’t it? I thought Janey’s parting present of perfume had got rid of it. But back it came with that soup. Hot ham. Hot hams is about it. Cumberland sauce. Well, they can put that back in the lakes they drained it out of. And Queen’s pudding No wonder the place is a Republic, if that’s the little leavings from the Royal Table.” As so often, Erroll’s cheerful Cockney send-up of the scene, his total extroversion, gradually relaxed Hamo. This time to the extent that he could give his attention to the groups of strollers who made up the evening promenade.

  For the most part, respectable middle-class family parties, their children, especially the little girls, all fluffs and frills and ribbons so revoltingly feminine that it made him, with a start, think for the first time that he would not perhaps have been happier living in the more ordered early years of this century. In the centre of the vast Green, stolid, blazered little boys flew hired kites, strange black dragons and bats with scarlet figurings, that seemed absurdly to be threatening to darken the turquoise sky before nightfall. But little boys, too, now, however neat . . .

  There were lovers, also, almost all in Western dress—indeed, as Erroll said, it could have been Southend, or to choose what he knew better, Eastbourne—the middle-class promenade that must have been Leslie’s social apogee as a boy; but, thank Heaven, lovers here were more modest, more circumspect than the unpleasing permissiveness of England now decreed. And, yes, knots of young men . . . somewhat drearily trousered, or seductively saronged; seldom a sartorially mixed group. But there was one, as it passed him, which contained in the centre, flanked by shapeless trousers, a smooth white sarong that suggested, in its darkening creases shaped to the gracefully moving limbs, all manner of thoughts of sheets and of bed. Surely the perfect length of thigh, tightly swathed waist and hips; and the whole, though short, barely 5’8”, certainly quite twenty years of age, certainly no horrid schoolboy.

  “ ‘So Monday, Dr. Longmoor’—poor old Water Rat! ‘Your car will be at your hotel at 8.30 a.m. on Monday. A very early hour for a V.I.P., but then you are also a working bee. Hee, hee, hee.’ Honest, that’s the noise he made. I thought it only came in comics: like ‘Ugh!’ and ‘Wham!!’, you know. But that’s the genuine water-rat squeak all right. Then old Watton has to correct the obvious, ‘Look, you said Thursday, Mr. Watteratne.’ ”

  Erroll, as so often in retelling, presented himself in a highly authoritative light, not at all the breezy Cockney, but the sergeant taking charge. And so of course he did; or he would not have been in Ceylon at his side. Yet the tropical air had brought out some old-fashioned, almost atavistic streak—could his grandfather have been an N.C.O. in the army in India? It threatened at times to embarrass—he surely would drop a little insularity, a little prejudice, as their voyage continued. Up to now it had seemed to grow. And yet, when he was on his own, he appeared to fraternize with the local people as happily as . . .

  For example, Hamo remembered this very afternoon, coming out of the University talking to that bright young postgraduate about his work on the hormone stimulation caused by the decomposing of crotollaria juneca and wild indigo, he had seen Erroll with a whole group of Singhalese, chatting away happily. He would like to look into the question of green manuring: it was clear that the sunflower tithonia diversifolia, for example, while plentiful of leaf, was unhappy in many soils . . . But this was sheer agronomy. Nothing to do with him. All the same there had been something quite beautiful about the young man’s workings; graphs that delighted the eye in their symmetry. A year ago he would have come away from such work unable to think of anything else. But now there appeared to be no power to concentrate, to escape every manner of nightmare, of ludicrous irrelevancy. At least he must go back and talk to the young man, see more of his workings, encourage, criticize, give his mind . . .

  The groups had turned round and were moving towards him, giggling surely intentionally loudly, and, as they came nearer, large dark eyes, shy but inviting, fluttered across his own intent gaze. And then—he was younger, slimmer, smaller than his companions—they passed, chattering in staccato, preening awareness, through Erroll’s imitative flow, like a flock of lorikeets flitting above a miming mynah bird. Yes, there had been Erroll deep in matey laughter with two Singhalese business men, or so they seemed . . .

  “ ‘No, no, Mr. Wootton, I assure you there can be no question of Thursday. Thursday is Poya. Do you know what is Poya? Ah, Mr. da Souza, you must tell them what is Poya. Mr. da Souza does not believe in Poya. He is a Roman Catholic. He follows the Western Sunday. But now we are a Buddhist country. So all holidays follow the moon. Many from the U.K. find the computation hard. But you are no doubt a mathematician, Mr. Wootton, for you it will be easy. Poya is the holiday for all in Ceylon—Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian. So Thursday I am afraid is not possible. But I will send you on Monday with a very good driver. A Mr. da Silva, Anthony da Silva. He has been with many important people from the U.K. And given them great pleasure. You will tell me, please, what pleasure he gives you. So Monday . . .’ And then of course the interfering bastard Wootton has to wave his little diary. Sorry I just couldn’t help it. ‘You’re wrong, mate. I’ve got this Singhalese diary here. And your next Poya’s on Monday.’ ”

  The note jarred. There were moods of confusion, hesitation, expectancy in this tropical world . . . Erroll’s inflexibility, of course, was one of his great virtues. But . . .

  The red ball had all but tumbled into the sea. The braziers of the roasted-nut vendors with their no, not nauseous, rather their bizarre scent, were the brightest points of glowing red light beside the now black, still mysteriously surf-booming ocean. High above a few kites showed only their sinister outlines of black bats’ or dragons’ wings—but only a few, for the children, the families, surely all the respectable, had moved away at the approach of night. The hideous government offices, hotels and business houses—with which the British had shamefully made uglier this ugly crowded corner of a miraculously beautiful island—were fading in the dimming light to ruinous indefinite shapes. They would not now have seemed too disgraceful beside the fine ruins with which earlier conquerors—Dutch, Tamil, above all the Singhalese in their ancient cities—had, as he had seen in their preliminary weeks of tourist discovery of Ceylon, fittingly decorated the magnificent natural scene. Everything was mysterious. Not the least, the chatter and laughter, the glances in the dying light from the beautiful youth and his group once more coming by.

  “ ‘So then, Thursday. Please make a note of that, Mr. da Souza. Do not forget your photographic equipment, Mr. Wootton—you will pass a bird sanctuary . . .’ ”

  “I suppose you’ve got a date tonight.”

  Erroll stopped in his tracks.

  “Well . . . Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. Room 49. Sharon Gray. Nice little blonde. Bourbon she’s got and a ch
icken sandwich. I’ll see to the rest, I told her. But it’s not till ten o’clock. She’s gone on a conducted moonlight coach tour to Mount Lavinia. ‘No bathing lark, mind,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any shark’s leavings.’ ”

  But the youth had separated now and surely his head was nodding slightly towards the far end of the Green where some conduit or waterway ran out towards the sea.

  “Look,” Hamo said, “I think I’m going to leave you now.” And he tried to cover his answering nod to the youth in a gesticulatory accompaniment to what he said that he feared must seem very uncharacteristic to his assistant.