He had me badly off balance, just the way he wanted me, Ormus tells me, A.V.: I was ripe for adventure, and he’d taken me by storm.
The pilot announces the flight’s clearance to land. The air hostess approaches, asks Ormus to resume his own seat. Ormus, rising to go, asks Mull Standish, Why me?
Call it a hunch, he replies, No, let’s say inspiration. I flatter myself that I am a judge of men. Something about the way you tore off the Santa beard that night. Something about you struck me, strikes me, as, ah, ah.
Piratical? Ormus suggests.
Emblematic, Mull Standish finds the word, with what looks suspiciously like the makings of a blush mounting above the semi-stiff collar of his Turnbull & Asser shirt. I asked around a little, you know. Seems you’re capable of generating a following. People look to you. Maybe you’ll get ’em listening to us.
But I’m trying to be a singer, not a DJ on a cold, wet boat, Ormus makes his last, wavering stand. His imagination has been captured, and Standish knows it.
You will be, Standish promises. As a matter of fact you already are, and a good one, might I add. Yes, sir. At this very moment—hark at you—I could swear you’re singing right now. Yes. I can hear your song.
As the plane touches down, Ormus Cama’s head starts pounding. There is something about this England in which he has just arrived. There are things he cannot trust. There’s a rip, once again, in the surface of the real. Uncertainty pours down on him, its dark radiance opens his eyes. As his foot alights upon Heathrow, he succumbs to the illusion that nothing is solid, nothing exists except the precise piece of concrete his foot now rests upon. The homecoming passengers notice none of this, they stride confidently forward through the familiar, the quotidian, but the new arrivals look fearfully at the deliquescent land. They seem to be splashing through what should be solid ground. As his own feet move gingerly forward, he feels small pieces of England solidify beneath them. His footprints are the only fixed points in his universe. He checks out Virus: who is untroubled, serene. As for Spenta Cama, her eyes are fixed on the crowd of waving greeters high above. Trying to pick out a familiar face, she has no time to look down. Never look down, Ormus thinks. That way you won’t see the danger, you won’t plunge through the deceptive softness of the apparent into the burning abyss below.
Everything must be made real, step by step, he tells himself. This is a mirage, a ghost world, which becomes real only beneath our magic touch, our loving footfall, our kiss. We have to imagine it into being, from the ground up.
But he will spend his early days on the sea, within sight of land, which will remain just out of reach but which will listen, as though hypnotized, to his seductive, imagining voice.
Beyond the barrier, William Methwold and Mull Standish are waiting, two large pinkish thumbs sticking out of a rackety Indian crowd, the land children running at top speed to greet their cousins from the air, outpacing the astonishingly stentorian shouts of the older women in their heavy-framed spectacles and wine-dark overcoats worn over brilliant saris, and the bellowed rebukes of the older men with jutting lower lips and jangling car keys. The younger women, not in fact demure, group together to perform demureness; they lower their eyelids, whisper, simper. The younger men, not in reality half as backslapping and juvenile as they seem, likewise gather in clutches, their arms around one another’s shoulders, to yell and joke, giggle and nudge. Ormus, emerging into England, finds himself momentarily, dizzyingly, back in India, hearing an echo of home. Nostalgia tugs at him for an instant. He jerks himself free of it. There’s new music in the air.
Out of the migrant throng, this new way of being British, the two white men rise like Alps. Methwold is a walking antique, with mottled skin blotched over his hairless unwigged dome, making his baldness look like a map of the moon, with its dry seas of shadow and tranquillity, its veiny lines, its pocks. Limp fleshfolds flap above the collar that has grown too large for his neck. He walks with a stick, and he looks, Spenta is happy to note, as pleased to see her as she is to see (indeed, to recognize) him. As for Mull Standish, he has evidently evaded arrest. Perhaps the IRS isn’t as hot on his trail as he fears; and as for his pirate ships, technically they are breaking no law, though the state’s lawyers are working overtime to come up with pretexts on which they can be closed down.
The Camas pause. They are at their crossroads. Their futures tug them apart.
Okay, then, Ormus says to his mother.
Okay, then, in a muffled voice she replies.
Okay, then, Ormus punches Virus on the shoulder.
Virus makes a tiny sideways motion of the head.
Okay, see you, then, Ormus repeats. Nobody is touching him, but he feels himself held. He pulls against the force field, turns a shoulder and tugs hard.
Okay, see you, then. Spenta seems incapable of offering more than echoes, is herself becoming no more than a member of that crowd of echoes bouncing around them, fading, fading.
Ormus goes towards Standish, parts from his mother without looking back. Though his last image of her is a trembling lip and a lace kerchief at the corner of an eye, still in the rear-view mirror of his mind he can see her looking grateful. He can see her future shining like a diamond on her brow, the great mansion, the silver thread of river, the green and pleasant land. Though he abhors the countryside, he is happy for her. She has given him what she has been able to give, though she could never love him. It has been less than enough by ordinary standards, but he is prepared to call it sufficient. In a way it is this lack of emotional enthusiasm, this absence of unconditional love, that has prepared him for his great future, has gotten him on to the runway, so to speak, like a jet aircraft, ready to fly. And she herself is husband hunting now. She’s a fishing fleet of one. Best for her to arrive as unencumbered as possible. Virus grins mutely at her side at the approaching English milord, but Ormus makes himself scarce. Spenta, preparing her smile for Methwold, has no time for a sentimental farewell. Mother and son go their ways: she into the arms of an old England, he into the new country that’s in the process of being born. Destiny summons them both, breaking their family ties.
Music in the air, from a crackly transistor. Soft brushes coax a whispered beat from a drum, a big bass line is laid down, a high riff screams from an invisible clarinet. All that’s needed is for a singer to grab some of that stuff and go for broke. Here she comes, her bluesy coloratura spiralling over and around the jazzy rhythm of the tune. Vina! It sounds like her voice, drowned in crackles and arrivals-lounge ruckus as it is, but high, strong, who else could it be. As she will one day hear him on a Bombay radio, so today, at the beginning of his journey back into her heart, he thinks he hears her, and even when, after their reunion, she promises him it couldn’t have been, she didn’t have a recording contract back in ’65, he refuses to accept his mistake. The long-haul terminal was a chamber of echoes that day, and that’s how he heard her voice, an echo returning from the future to summon up his love.
He is clear about his purpose: by his labours to make himself worthy of her again. And when he’s ready he’ll find her, he’ll make her real by touching her kissing her caressing her, and she’ll do the same for him. Vina I’ll be the ground beneath your feet and you, in this happy ending, will be all the earth I need.
He walks towards her, away from his mother, into the music.
The rapid disenchantment of Ormus Cama with his fantasy of the West, which will be the making of him as an artist and almost the unmaking of him as a man, begins the instant he lays eyes on Radio Freddie, that seven-hundred-ton rust bucket, pitching uncertainly, like a super-annuated rodeo rider, upon the saddle of the sea. His heart sinks. His imagined journey from periphery to centre has never included the low, dank northern flats of Lincolnshire, nor this biting, sou’westered journey out from shore. He feels “out of land,” the land-lubber’s version of fish-out-of-water. Briefly he wants out, but there’s nowhere to go, no other course but the one on which he’s set. Indentured Indian labourers ar
riving in Mauritius and erasing from their Bhojpuri vocabularies such words as “return” or “hope” would have felt, in Ormus’s shoes, no less enslaved.
By contrast, Standish, erect at the prow of the motor launch that is transporting him to his kingdom, aquiline of profile, silver hair streaming, looks exalted, haloed. A man with a mission is a dangerous man, Ormus thinks, feeling for the first time in their admittedly brief acquaintance a jolt of something resembling fear. Then Standish turns his head, gleaming with anticipation, points. There they are, he shouts. Look at them, Hook and Smee. The two Tweedles. They hate me, naturally; as you will soon discover. (This in an odd voice pitched halfway between tragedy and pride.) Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne Crossley and Mr. Waldo Emerson Crossley, he finishes, raising an arm in salute, Your new colleagues. My sons.
The men standing at the Frederica’s rail do not return his greeting.
Hawthorne Crossley—greatcoated, long-silk-scarved, corduroy-jeaned, the sole of one shoe coming loose—has inherited his father’s looks and volubility. He uses his mother’s surname, but he’s Standish translated into English, filled up with alcohol and spite, and aged twenty-four or-five. Hail Standish, he mocks, as Ormus follows Mull aboard Radio Freddie, Hail the pioneer hero, maker of charts, conqueror of nations. So must the empire builders have looked in their prime, eh, Waldorf? My baby brother, he explains to Ormus. Not named as Mr. Standish would have you believe in honour of a great philosopher but after a fucking salad, as eaten by his presently divorced parents on the night he was conceived.
Rheumy-eyed Waldo, smaller, fuzzy-headed, leather-jacketed, Lennon-bespectacled, his mother’s boy, beams, nods, sneezes. In his personal universe Hawthorne is a blazing star.
Hail Standish, Waldo eagerly agrees.
Think of stout Cortez in the Keats poem, only it was really Balboa, gazing at the Pacific, Hawthorne exhorts. Consider Clive of India on the battlefield at Plassey Captain Cook sailing into Sydney harbour. The Islamic conquerors bursting out of Arabia to face the might of Persia, only to find the once mighty superpower rotten and decayed. They blew it away like sand. It’s what Standish hopes to do to the BBC Light Programme.
Why isn’t one of you in the studio? Mull Standish fondly interjects.
Because we decided to play the whole fucking Floyd album, Hawthorne answers, every last bubble and shriek. So we’ve got hours. We reckoned we could trust Eno to flip the disc while we greeted the aged parent. He takes an uncorked bottle of bourbon from his greatcoat pocket. Mull Standish takes it from him, wipes off the neck, prepares to drink.
Robert Johnson was poisoned by a theatre owner who suspected Johnson of fucking his chick, muses Hawthorne, thoughtfully, Sonny Boy Williamson tried to save him, knocked away the bottle he was going to drink from. Don’t ever drink from an open bottle, he said. You never know what’s in it. Johnson didn’t like the advice. Don’t ever knock a whisky bottle away from me, he said, and drank from another open bottle, and bango! End of story.
Mull Standish drinks, hands back the bottle, introduces Ormus.
Aha, the Indian nightingale!, says Hawthorne. (It is raining now, a fine icy drizzle that inserts itself between the men and their clothes, between Ormus and his happiness, between the father and his sons.) The bulbul of Bombay! He found you, then. About fucking time. And now you’re his Koh-i-noor diamond, the fucking jewel in his arse. A little on the old side for the work, I’d have thought. All I can say is I hope you wash your mouth before applying it to my fucking microphone.
Hawthorne, Jesus Christ. Standish’s voice is low and dangerous, and the younger man’s tongue stumbles, dries. But it’s too late, the cat’s out of the bag. Why me? Ormus had asked, and Standish had replied, Call it inspiration. But of course it had nothing to do with inspiration. It’s love.
Bareheaded in the rain, Mull Standish, exposed, shamed, confesses and apologizes to Ormus Cama: I have been less than frank. I asked around about you, I told you that. I should have admitted that my personal feelings were in fact engaged. The eagerness. The eagerness of my enquiries. I suppressed that information, which was culpably wrong. However, you have my one thousand per cent guarantee that it won’t become a problem between us.… Hawthorne snorts with mirthless laughter. Runny-nosed Waldo, not to be outdone, snorts too. Mucus explodes from his nose, like a glutinous flag. He wipes it off his face with the back of his chilblained hand.
Ormus is hearing echoes again. In Hawthorne Crossley he sees Vina reborn, Vina in her childhood incarnation of Nissy Poe, in whose family history there are poignant parallels to the tale of this smart-mouthed, bitter child of a broken home. He sees, too, that Mull Standish’s long autobiographical reminiscence about his lover, “Sam Tropicana,” who pursued him for months, then found him and changed his life, was a parable, a tale told in code, its real meaning being: This is what I can do for you. It’s true: I hunted you, you have been the quarry of my own obsessive love. But now I can change your life, it is my turn to give as once I was given, to be the bringer of good things as once they were brought to me. I want nothing from you except that you permit me to be your Santa Claus.
I want nothing from you, Mull Standish is saying, miserably. For you, however, I want very much indeed.
Let me out of here, Ormus Cama demands, and Mull Standish, who has abruptly run out of all his words, can do nothing but drip in the rain and extend, in a profound, involuntary gesture, both of his trembling, supplicant arms. Their palms are upturned, and empty.
Hawthorne Crossley relents. Oh, stay. Will you stay, for fucksake. Stay for the same reason we do: viz., that here there’s booze and music, no dope, alas, because the law keeps boarding us to see if there’s the tiniest chance of fucking us up, but really the only thing to be afraid of is that one of these fine days the sea god might decide to open up his great gob and swallow us down. Whereas out there—he gestures vaguely with the emptying bottle of Beam towards the land—out there it’s just too fucking terrifying for words.
Out there there’s kinky bishops, Waldo elucidates. And dodgy Scotch eggs and takeaway chop suey and bent coppers and voodoo dolls and napalm. There’s anabolic steroids and cows and anti-personnel strikes north of the DMZ. And Bideford Parva and Piddletrenthide and Ashby-de-la-Zouch and country people in wellies and the Mekong delta where wellies aren’t much use and Tet which isn’t a place but a date, like Christmas, that’s out there too. There’s Arsenal F.C. and Ringo marries his hairdresser and Harold Wilson and Russians walking in space. And axe murderers and mother-rapers and father-rapers.
The draft as well, Hawthorne concedes, belching, We’re all blowing in that wind. What we’re hoping is, if we do this long enough, and throw in a spot of littering and creating a nuisance on the side, we may be thought not moral enough to be in the army. If we’re lucky we might be not moral enough to blow up women and children and such. We might even be not moral enough to die.
Like Arlo Guthrie, explains Waldo, swaying. (They’ve finished the bottle of Beam.) Meanwhile, out there, the wrong people are escaping bullets. King Jigme Wangchuk of Bhutan escapes assassination attempt. A machine-gun attempt on the Shah of Iran’s life fails. President Sukarno survives a communist coup.
Race riots in Watts, Hawthorne picks up the thread, Edward Heath elected Tory leader. Two charged with Moors murders. Churchill dead. Albert Schweitzer dead. T. S. Eliot dead. Stan Laurel dead. The British believe in God but prefer tv, polls prove. China has the A-bomb. India and Pakistan on brink of war. And England swings like a fucking pendulum do. It scares me to fucking death and back again.
Stay, repeats Waldo, showing his teeth and offering a bottle of sherry, Harveys Bristol Cream. Best we can do at the moment. Welcome to wonderful 199.
Ormus takes the bottle. And who’s Eno? he asks. The third Stooge?
You don’t have to worry about Eno, Hawthorne shrugs. Eno’s a prince. A man among men. A needle in a haystack. Eno’s the business. He’s OK.
It’s raining harder. Mull Standish makes as if to go.
His sons ignore him.
His real name’s Enoch, Hawthorne says, turning his soaked back on his father. He dropped the ch because he understandably didn’t want a racist handle, what with him being a person of tint. It’s as if you were a person of Jewishness who got named Hitler by accident and decided to be a Hit instead. Or if your name was unfortunately Stalin and you shortened it to Star.
Mao’s a tough one, says Waldo. But you could always answer to Dong.
Hawthorne confides, Actually, he’s called Eno because he knows how all this fucking equipment works and we don’t have a clue.
Or, Waldo offers, because e no say very much.
Or, Hawthorne continues, because he takes a lot of fruit salts, poor love. It’s his third-world digestion. Anyway, when you get to know him you call him Ali. Eno Barber, Ali Barber. I expect that’s a joke you’ll find funny. I expect that’s a joke with a cultural reference that isn’t too fucking tough for you to pick up.
He doesn’t get it, Waldo pouts. He hasn’t had halfway enough to drink, he says.
Hawthorne leans in on Ormus, blasting him with a fog of whisky breath. Listen, Mowgli, he says, not without aggression, you’re our fucking guest here, see. How’d you expect to understand the fucking host culture if you insist on remaining teetotal, if you obstinately refuse to fucking integrate in this obstinate fucking Paki obstinate bastard way?
Maybe he’s too good for us, Waldo ponders. Too good for Harveys Bristol Cream. Too good for the finest British sherry our father’s money can buy.
Mull Standish, with the help of the motor-launch captain, leaves the Frederica. Now that you boys have started getting on so well, he says, I’m sure the station will just go from strength to strength.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet Page 33
