I get out as often as I can. Walked miles today, great windswept sandy foothills, and a long line of stunted pines all leaning away from the sea.
Saturday, 7 September
Posted to the 2nd Manchesters. We leave tomorrow.
It’s evening now, and everybody’s scribbling away, telling people the news, or as much of the news as we’re allowed to tell them. I look up and down the dormitory and there’s hardly a sound except for pages being turned, and here and there a pen scratching. It’s like this every evening. And not just letters either. Diaries. Poems. At least two would-be poets in this hut alone.
Why? you have to ask yourself. I think it’s a way of claiming immunity. First-person narrators can’t die, so as long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we’re safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha.
Eight
Rivers turned to watch the sun swelling and reddening as it sank, a brutal, bloody disc, scored by steeples and factory chimneys, obscured by a haze of drifting brown and yellow smoke.
He’d come out to walk on Hampstead Heath because he was feeling ill, and needed to clear his head before settling down to an evening’s work, but it wasn’t helping. With every step he felt worse, muscles aching, throat sore, eyes stinging, skin clammy. By the time he got back to his lodgings, he’d decided to miss dinner and go straight to bed. He knocked on the door of Mrs Irving’s private apartments, told her he wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be in to dinner, and glimpsed through the open door the portrait of her dead son that hung above the mantelpiece, with flowers beneath it and candlesticks on either side.
Going slowly upstairs, pausing frequently to lean on the banister, Rivers thought about what he’d just seen: the portrait, the flowers. A shrine. Not fundamentally different from the skull houses of Pa Na Gundu where he’d gone with Njiru. The same human impulse at work. Difficult to know what to make of these flashes of cross-cultural recognition. From a strictly professional point of view, they were almost meaningless, but then one didn’t have such experiences as a disembodied anthropological intelligence, but as a man, and as a man one had to make some kind of sense of them.
Once in bed he started to shiver. The sheets felt cold against his hot legs. He slept and dreamt of the croquet lawn at Knowles Bank, his mother in a long white dress coming out to call the children in, the sun setting over the wood casting very long, fine shadows across the lawn. The shadows of the hoops were particularly long and fearful. He’d been awake for several minutes before he realized he was trying to remember the rules of mathematical croquet, as devised by Dodgson, and actually feeling distressed because he couldn’t remember them. Then he realized that although he was now fully awake he could still see the lawn, which meant his temperature was very high. Always, in a high fever, his visual memory returned, giving him a secret, obscurely shameful pleasure in being ill. He wouldn’t sleep again – he was far too hot – so he simply lay and let his newly opened mind’s eye roam.
On the Southern Cross, on the voyage to Eddystone, he’d stood on deck, watching the pale green wake furrow the dark sea, reluctant to exchange the slight breeze for the stuffy heat below deck.
At one of the stops a group of natives got on, the men wearing cast-off European suits, the women floral-print dresses. A few of the women had naked breasts, but most were obviously missionized. A pathetic little remnant they looked, squatting there, part of the small army of uprooted natives who drifted from one island to the next, one mission station to the next, and belonged nowhere. At first sight all mission stations seemed to be surrounded by converts, and the uninitiated always assumed these were converts from that island. Only later did one become aware of this uprooted population, travelling from one station to the next, most of them from islands where the impact of western culture had been particularly devastating.
He squatted down beside them, and, as he expected, found enough knowledge of pidgin to make conversation possible. He’d devised a questionnaire that he used on occasions when it was necessary to extract the maximum amount of information quickly. The first question was always: Suppose you were lucky enough to find a guinea, with whom would you share it? This produced a list of names, names which he would then ask them to translate into kinship terms. And from there one could move to virtually any aspect of their society.
When he sensed they were getting tired he paid them their tobacco sticks and stood up to go, but then one of the women caught his arm and pulled him down again. Poking him playfully in the chest, she retrieved two words of English from her small store: ‘Your turn.’
The questions were posed again and in the same order. When he told them that, since he was unmarried and had no children, he would not necessarily feel obliged to share his guinea with anybody, they at first refused to believe him. Had he no parents living? Yes, a father. Brothers and sisters? One brother, two sisters. Same mother, same father? Yes. But he would not automatically share the guinea with them, though he might choose to do so.
The woman who’d pulled his arm looked amused at first, then, when she was sure she’d understood, horrified. And so it went on. Because the questions were very carefully chosen, they gradually formed an impression – and not a vague impression either, in some respects quite precise – of the life of a bachelor don in a Cambridge college. Hilarity was the main response. And if the questions had led on to more intimate territory? If he’d been able, or willing, to lay before them the whole constricting business of trying to fit into society, of living under and around and outside the law, what would have been their reaction then? Laughter. They’d have gone on laughing. They would not have known how to pity him. He looked up, at the blue, empty sky, and realized that their view of his society was neither more nor less valid than his of theirs. No bearded elderly white man looked down on them, endorsing one set of values and condemning the other. And with that realization, the whole frame of social and moral rules that keeps individuals imprisoned – and sane – collapsed, and for a moment he was in the same position as these drifting, dispossessed people. A condition of absolute free-fall.
Then, next day, after a restless night, he and Hocart transferred to a tramp steamer for the last stage of the journey, and there he met the logical end product of the process of free-fall – the splat on the pavement, as it were – Brennan.
Smells of engine oil and copra, of sweaty human beings sleeping too close together in the little covered cabin on deck. Above their heads, offering no clear reference point to northern eyes, foreign constellations wheeled and turned.
Brennan slept opposite, his profile, under a fringe of greying curls, like that of a Roman emperor’s favourite run to seed. He snored, gargled, stopped breathing, gargled again, muttered a protest as if he thought somebody else had woken him, returned to sleep. On the other side of the cabin was Father Michael, trailing behind him the atmosphere of the theological college he’d not long left behind – cups of cocoa and late-night discussions on chastity in other people’s bedrooms. Then Hocart, looking much younger than twenty-five, his upper lip pouting on every breath.
Rivers supposed he must have slept eventually, though it seemed no time at all before they were stretching and stumbling out on deck.
The deckhands, emerging from their airless hellhole next to the engine, swabbed passengers down along with the deck. They finished off with a bucket of cold water thrown full into the face so that one was left gasping and blinded. Brennan stood, eyes closed, one hand resting between his plump breasts, a hirsute Aphrodite, water dripping from his nose, his foreskin, the hairs on his wrinkled and baggy scrotum. It was impossible to dislike somebody who brought such enormous zest to the minute-by-minute business of living.
As the sun rose, beating down on to the steaming deck, they began the day-long search for patches of shade. Father Michael and Hocart came close to quarrelling about the record of missionaries in the islands. Hocart was the product of a Victorian vicarage, and something of a rebel. Michael obviously thought he’d fallen among atheists
, or worse. Brennan listened to the argument, scratched his neck, then gathered phlegm in his throat, a rich, bubbling sound – his zest for life became a bit much at times – and spat it on the deck, where he inspected it carefully, and Rivers, cursing his medical training, found himself inspecting it too. ‘I knew a missionary once,’ Brennan said, with a look of placid, lazy malice. ‘Didn’t speak a word of the language – just sets up shop – Jesus saves. And then he starts to get worried ’cause they all come flocking round but he can’t get the buggers to kneel down. So down on his knees he goes. “What’s the word for this?” Well you know and I know,’ Brennan said, turning to Rivers, ‘there’s only one thing they do kneeling down. Come next Sunday, bloody great congregation, up he stands – raises his arms.’ He looked at Michael and, in an amazingly pure counter-tenor, sang, ‘Let us fuck.’
A bray of laughter from the open door of the engine-room where the skipper stood, wiping his fingers on an oily rag.
‘I wish you’d leave Michael alone,’ Rivers said to Hocart after the others had gone below deck.
‘Why? He’s an arrogant little –’
‘He’s a baby.’
But Hocart, a baby himself, saw no need for mercy.
After dark, packed round the rickety table on which they ate their dinner, there was no escaping each other’s company. Elbows jarred, knees joggled, the leather seats tormented patches of prickly heat. Much covert and not so covert scratching of backsides went on. The skipper joined them for the meal, but contributed little to the conversation, preferring to be amused in silence. His trade had made him a connoisseur of social discomfort.
Brennan, sensing that Rivers liked him, embarked on what threatened to become his life story, interspersed with swigs of whisky and great breathy revelations of dental decay. He showed Rivers a photograph of his three naked brown babies tumbling over each other in the dust. Behind them, face, neck and breasts covered in tattoos, stood a young girl. ‘She must be from Lepers Island,’ Rivers said.
Brennan took the photograph back and stared at it. ‘Yeh, that’s right. Bitch.’
He seemed about to say more. Rivers said quickly, ‘I didn’t realize you’d been in the New Hebrides.’
‘Started there.’
He’d started as a ‘blackbirder’, as so many of the older traders had, kidnapping natives to work on the Queensland plantations, and he was frank about his methods too. Make friends with them, invite them on board ship, get them drunk and Bob’s your Uncle. By the time they come round they’re out at sea and there’s bugger all they can do about it. Used to give the girls a bit of a run round the deck, mind. We-ll why not, they’re all gunna get their arses fucked off when they get to the plantations anyway. ‘Do you know,’ he went on, leaning across the table in search of somebody to shock, and fixing on Michael, though Hocart’s expression might have made him the more obvious choice, ‘you can buy a woman – white, mind – for forty quid in Sydney?’
‘I’d’ve thought forty quid was a bit steep,’ Hocart said.
‘Buy, man, I’m not talking about fucking rent.’
‘So why didn’t you?’
‘Nah,’ Brennan said morosely, swishing whisky round his glass. ‘Years on their backs.’ He turned to Rivers. ‘Half way through the honeymoon you’d be pissing hedgehogs backwards. He knows what I mean,’ he said, jerking his thumb at Rivers.
‘We all know what you mean,’ Hocart said.
The skipper leant forward, smiling a positively old-maidish smile. ‘How about a nice game of cards?’
And then there was no further talk, only the creaking of the spirit-lamp above their heads, and the plump slap of cards on the table. Rivers, amused, watched Hocart slowly realize that when confronted by a dwindling stock of coins, Father Michael cheated and Brennan didn’t.
Next morning – a small triumph for Melanesia – Father Michael, who’d hitherto crouched over a bucket to wash, stripped off with the rest of them, his white arum lily of a body with its improbable stamen looking almost shocking beside Brennan’s.
The conversation that morning meandered on amicably enough, as they leaned together, sweating, in their patches of shade, until a smudge of blue-green on the horizon restored them to separateness.
By late afternoon they’d moored by a rotting landing stage on Eddystone, and clambered ashore to supervise the unloading of their stores. Rivers was used to missionized islands where canoes paddled out to meet the incoming steamer, brown faces, white eyes, flashing smiles, while others gathered at the landing stage, ready to carry bags up to the mission station for a few sticks of tobacco or even sheer Christian goodwill. A cheerful picture, as long as you didn’t notice the rows and rows of crosses in the mission graveyard, men and women in the prime of life dead of the diseases of the English nursery: whooping cough, measles, diphtheria, chicken pox, scarlet fever – all were fatal here. And the mission boat carried them from island to island, station to station, remorselessly, year after year.
Instead of that – nothing. Nobody appeared. Rivers and Hocart waved till the steamer dwindled to a point on the glittering water, then lugged the tent and enough food for the night up to a small clearing a hundred yards or so above the beach. Spread out below them was the Bay of Narovo. The village, whose huts they could just see between the trees, was also called Narovo.
‘Aren’t we a bit close?’ Hocart asked.
‘We don’t want to be too far away. If we’re isolated we’ll be frightening. The wicked witch lives in the wood, remember.’
‘What do you suppose they’ll do?’
Rivers shrugged. ‘They’ll be along.’
By the time they’d erected the tent the swift tropical darkness was falling. After sunset the island breathed for a moment in silence; from the bush arose the buzz of different insects, the cries of different birds. Rivers was intensely aware of the fragility of the small lighted area round the tent. He kept peering into the trees and thought he saw dark shapes flitting between the trunks, but still nobody appeared.
After a meal of tinned meat and turnipy pineapple, Hocart said he would lie down. He looked utterly exhausted, and Rivers suspected he might be running a slight fever. Shrouded in his mosquito net, Hocart talked for a while, then switched off his torch and turned over to sleep.
Rivers sat at a table immediately outside the tent, trying to mend the oil-lamp which was smoking badly. A small figure alone in the clearing, in a storm of pale wings, for every moth in the bush appeared and fluttered round the light. Now and then one succeeded in finding a way in, and there was a quick sizzle, a flare, more smoke. Rivers shook out the charred corpse and started again. An oddly nerve-racking business, this. Working so close to the light, he was almost blinded and could see virtually nothing even when he raised his head. He was aware of the thick darkness of the bush around him, but more as a pressure on his mind than through his senses. Once he stopped, thinking he heard a flute being played in the village. He sniffed the oil on his fingers, wiped his chin on the back of his hand, and sat back for a rest, his retinas aching as they do after an optician has shone his torch on to them. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt. When he put them on again he saw a figure had come out from among the trees, and was standing on the edge of the clearing. A man in early middle age, white lime streaks in his hair, around the eye sockets, and along the cheek and jaw-bones, so that it seemed – until he caught the glint of eye white – that he was looking at a skull. He sat absolutely still, as the man came towards him. Alone, or apparently alone. He indicated the other chair, thinking it might be refused, but his visitor sat down, inclined his head slightly, and smiled.
Rivers pointed to himself and said his name.
A thin brown hand raised to his shell necklace. ‘Njiru.’
They stared at each other. Rivers thought he ought to offer food, but the only food easily available was the remains of the pineapple, and he was chary of breaking off the encounter by going into the tent to look for it.
&
nbsp; Njiru was deformed. Without the curvature of the spine he would have been a tall man – by Melanesian standards very tall – and he carried himself with obvious authority. In addition to the shell necklace he wore ear-rings, arm rings and bracelets all made of shells, and somehow it was immediately apparent that these ornaments had great value. His earlobes, elongated by the constant wearing of heavy shells, almost brushed his shoulders when he moved. The eyes were remarkable: hooded, piercing, intelligent, shrewd. Wary.
They went on staring at each other, reluctant to start exploring their shared resource of pidgin, aware, perhaps, even in these first moments, of how defective an instrument it would be for what they needed to say to each other.
Suddenly Njiru pointed to the lamp. ‘Baggerup.’
Rivers was so surprised he laughed out loud. ‘No, No baggerup. I mend.’
Njiru was the eldest son of Rembo, the chief who controlled the most important cults on the island. Because of his deformity, he’d never been able to compete with other young men, in canoeing, fishing, building or war. By way of compensation, he’d devoted himself to thought and learning, and, in particular, to the art of healing. His abilities would have made him remarkable in any society. On Eddystone, his power rested primarily on the number of spirits he controlled. The people made no distinction between knowledge and power, either in their own language or in pidgin. ‘Njiru knows Mateana’ meant Njiru had the power to cure the diseases caused by Mateana. Similarly, Rivers was told within a few days of arriving on the island that Njiru ‘knew’ Ave. Without in the least understanding the significance of what he’d been told, he repeated it to Njiru. ‘Kundaite he say you know Ave.’
A snort of derision. ‘Kundaite he speak gammon.’