There was complete silence.
“Bertie.”
Bertie looked down at the floor. He did not dare look at Tofu, because he knew what expression would greet him if he did that.
He looked up at Miss Harmony. “I’m not sure…” he began.
“He’s not sure,” Tofu interjected. “Don’t force him, Miss Harmony. Please don’t force him.”
“Bertie’s a useless actor, Miss Harmony,” said Larch.
Tofu, aware now of the threat that Larch might claim the role, spun round and glared at the other boy.
“And you’re useless too, Larch,” he said. “You know that you can’t act for toffee.”
“Toffee yourself!” said Larch, and everybody laughed, except Tofu, who fumed. He wanted to hit Larch, but he understood that principle which everybody, but particularly politicians and statesmen understand very well: you only ever hit weaker people.
55. Domenica Settles In
The arrival of a stranger in a remote village is usually something of an event. When Domenica Macdonald, though, arrived in the small pirate village on the coast of the Straits of Malacca, such interest as was shown by the villagers was discreet. As the party made its way down the path leading to Domenica’s bungalow, a group of women standing under a tree looked in its direction, but only for a few moments. A couple of children, bare to the waist and dragging a small puppy on a string, drifted over to the side of the path to get a better view of the new arrivals. But that was all; nobody came to greet them, nobody appeared to challenge the arrival of the anthropologist with Ling, her guide and mentor, and the teenage boy recruited to carry her suitcase.
Ling led the way to Domenica’s house. The young man whom they had spotted from afar now stood at the top of the steps. He was wearing a pair of loose-fitting linen trousers and a white open-necked shirt. His feet were bare, and Domenica’s eyes were drawn to his toes. They were perfect, she thought. Perfect toes; she had seen so many perfect toes in her times in the tropics–toes unrestrained by shoes, allowed to grow as nature intended them.
The young man lowered his head, his hands held together in traditional greeting. “I am very happy,” he said.
Domenica returned his greeting.
Ling turned to Domenica. “He says he is happy,” he announced.
“So I heard,” said Domenica. “And I am happy too.”
These niceties over, Domenica went up the steps that led to the veranda. Behind her, Ling took the suitcase from the boy who had carried it from the village at the end of the track. The boy was sweating profusely; it had been a long walk and the suitcase was heavy. Ling rested the suitcase on a step and fished into his pocket for a few coins. These he tossed at the boy, who caught them in the palm of his hand, looked at them, and then stared imploringly at Ling.
Domenica watched this, uncertain as to whether she should interfere. It was obvious to her that Ling had underpaid the boy. Of course, this is the East, she thought, and people work for very little, but it distressed her that she should be part of the process of exploitation. She looked at the boy; she had not paid much attention to his clothes, but now she saw them, as if for the first time. His shirt had been repaired several times, and his trousers were frayed about the pockets. He was obviously poor, and she, whose suitcase he carried, was by his standards, impossibly rich.
It would have been a simple matter for her to intervene. She had a pocketful of ringgits, and many more stashed away in her suitcase. It would have been easy for her to press a few notes into the boy’s hand to make up for Ling’s meanness, and she was on the point of doing this when she checked herself. One of the rules of anthropological fieldwork was: do not interfere. A well-meaning interference in the community which one was studying could change relationships and distort results. The anthropologist should be invisible, as far as possible; an observer. Of course, there were limits to this unobtrusiveness. One could not stand by in the face of an egregious crime if one could do something to help; this, though, was hardly that. The real bar to her intervention lay in the fact that if she now gave money to the boy, Ling would lose face. Her act would imply that he had acted meanly (which he had) and reveal her as the one who was really in charge (which she was), and that could amount to an unforgivable loss of face.
Domenica looked at the boy. He was still staring at Ling and it seemed to her that he was on the brink of tears.
She turned to Ling. “Such a helpful boy,” she said. “And he has such a charming smile.”
Ling glanced at the boy. “He is just riff-raff,” he said. “The son of an assistant pirate.”
“But such appealing riff-raff,” persisted Domenica. “In fact, I really must photograph him–for my records.”
She had been carrying a small camera in her rucksack, and she now rummaged in the bag to retrieve it.
“I do not think you should photograph him,” said Ling, shooing the boy away with a gesture of his hand. “He must go away now.”
“But I must!” exclaimed Domenica. “I must have a complete record.”
Ignoring Ling, she moved towards the boy and led him gently away from the side of the veranda. At first he was perplexed, but when he realised what was happening his face broke into a grin and he stood co-operatively in front of a tree while Domenica took the photograph.
The picture taken, Domenica reached into her pocket and thrust a few banknotes into the boy’s hand.
“Why are you giving him money?” Ling called out. “I have paid him. Take the money back.”
“I’m not paying him for carrying the case,” Domenica said lightly, indicating to the now delighted boy that he should leave. “That was for his photograph.” She glanced at Ling and smiled. She felt pleased with herself. She had repaired the injustice without causing a loss of face to her guide. The natural order of things had not been disturbed, and the amount of happiness in the world had been discreetly augmented. It was a solution of which Mr Jeremy Bentham himself could only have approved. The young man who was to be Domenica’s house-servant now picked up her suitcase and walked into the house. He moved, Domenica noticed, with that fluidity of motion that Malaysians seemed to manage so effortlessly. We walk so clumsily, she thought; they glide.
She followed him into the living room of the house. It was cool inside, and dark. Such light as there was filtered through a window which was largely screened by a broad-leafed plant of some sort. She suddenly thought of the Belgian anthropologist. Had he lived here? She looked about her. On one wall, secured by a couple of drawing pins, was a faded picture of le petit Julien, le Manneken Pis, symbol of everything that Brussels stood for, culturally and politically, or so the Belgians themselves claimed. I detect, she thought, a Belgian hand.
56. By the Light of the Tilley Lamp
There was no electricity in the village, of course, and when night descended–suddenly, as it does in the tropics–Domenica found herself fumbling with a small Tilley lamp which the house servant had set out on the kitchen table. It was a long time since she had used such a lamp, but the knack of adjusting it came back to her quickly–an old skill, deeply-ingrained, like riding a bicycle or doing an eightsome reel, the skills of childhood which never left one. As she pumped up the pressure and applied a match to the mantle, Domenica found herself wondering what scraps of the old knowledge would be known to the modern child. Would that curious little boy downstairs, Bertie, know how to operate an old-fashioned dial telephone? Or how to make a fire? Probably not. And there were people, and not just children, who did not know how to add or do long division, because they relied on calculators; all those people in shops who needed the till to tell them how much change to give because nobody had ever taught them how to do calculations like that in school. There were so many things that were just not being taught any more. Poetry, for example. Children were no longer made to learn poetry by heart. And so the deep rhythms of the language, its inner music, was lost to them, because they had never had it embedded in their minds. And geograph
y had been abandoned too–the basic knowledge of how the world looked, simply never instilled; all in the name of educational theory and of the goal of teaching children how to think. But what, she wondered, was the point of teaching them how to think if they had nothing to think about? We were held together by our common culture, by our shared experience of literature and the arts, by scraps of song that we all knew, by bits of history half-remembered and half-understood but still making up what it was that we thought we were. If that was taken away, we were diminished, cut off from one another because we had nothing to share.
The light thrown out by the Tilley lamp was soft and forgiving, a light that did not fight with the darkness but nudged it aside gently, just for a few feet, and then allowed it back. Looking out through her open door, she saw that here and there in the village other lights had been lit. In one of the houses a kitchen was illuminated and she could make out the figures within: a woman standing, holding a child on her hip; a man in the act of drinking something from a cup or beaker; the moving shadow of fan-blades. She had yet to adjust to where she was, and it seemed to her to be strange that the people she was looking at through the window were outlaws–contemporary pirates. How peculiar it was that ordinary life should take place in spite of this sense of being beyond the law. She would get used to that, of course; anthropologists in New Guinea came to accept even head-hunting after a while.
The house servant, who had gone off to his hut shortly before dusk fell, had left a meal for her in the kitchen: a bowl of noodles, a plate of stewed vegetables and a pot containing pieces of grilled chicken. Domenica was not particularly hungry; she always lost her appetite in the heat, but now she tackled the meal almost for want of anything else to do. It was, she found, tastier than she had expected, and she ate virtually everything prepared for her. Then, sitting in an old planter’s chair, she read for two hours by the light of her Tilley lamp.
It was nine o’clock when she went to bed. Taking the lamp with her, she made her way through to her bedroom, the only other room in the small house. Above her bed, suspended from an exposed rafter, hung a voluminous mosquito net. It was a comfort for her, a luxury, the only means of ensuring a night untroubled by stinging insects.
Sitting on the edge of her bed, she blew out the lamp’s flame and slipped behind the net. The bed was narrow, but not uncomfortable, and it seemed to her that the sheets had been freshly laundered, for they were crisp and sweet-smelling. She wondered who had gone to all this trouble. It was unlikely that the pirates themselves–crude types, she suspected–would have bothered to ensure her comfort in this way, and if they had not done this, then it could only be Edward Hong who was behind it. In fact, the more she thought of it the clearer it became to her. In Edward Hong M.A. (Cantab.), she had a protector, a man who cared for her welfare. It was a reassuring feeling, a feeling that can normally be expected to induce in many single women a warm feeling of contentment. And Domenica, for all that she was a distinguished anthropologist, was a woman; and what woman would not be pleased to know that there was a lithe young man immediately at hand, at her beck and call, while, in the background, there was a more mature and urbane M.A. (Cantab.) who had her interests at heart?
With these pleasant thoughts in her mind, Domenica began to feel drowsy. It had been an unusual and demanding day. The walk down the track to the village had been physically tiring, and the change of surroundings had also had an effect.
As she lay there in this state of agreeable tiredness, Domenica allowed her mind to wander over what lay ahead. Tomorrow, she would introduce herself, with Ling’s assistance, to the people of the village. She would introduce herself to the women first, as they would be the focus of her scientific inquiry, and then in due course she would meet the pirates themselves. For a moment she thought of pirates, and a few snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan came to her mind, faintly, as if from a distant, half-heard chorus: For he is a pirate king! Hurrah for the pirate king! And it is, it is a glorious thing, to be a pirate king…How absurd, thought Domenica sleepily; how completely inappropriate. It was not at all glorious; not at all.
57. A Nocturnal Visitation
Domenica was a sound sleeper, even if she had a tendency to awake somewhat early. In Scotland Street, in the summer, she would often find herself wide awake at five in the morning; it was, she felt, the finest part of the day, and she would often go out and walk round Drummond Place at that hour, enjoying the quiet of the morning. In Malaysia, where the day was divided into two roughly equal parts, it would still be dark at five and she imagined that if she woke up that early she would stay in bed for a while before getting up and starting the day. Once the sun rose, of course, it would be too hot to stay in bed anyway, and one might as well get up and begin by pouring a large jug full of tepid water over one’s face and shoulders. She looked forward to that; bathing oneself in a place without running water was an almost sacramental act, underlining the preciousness of that water that one takes so much for granted when it flows from a tap.
However, she did not wake up at five that morning, but closer to two. She did not confirm that it was two o’clock; it just felt like that, when she suddenly became conscious of her surroundings and of the shafts of moonlight which came through the small window above her bed. The moonlight, soft and diffuse, fell half upon the folds of the mosquito net and half upon the floorboards.
Beyond it, the room was filled with dark shadows; the shape of the roughly-finished chest of drawers in which she had stacked her clothes before retiring; the form of the table and the small pile of books that she had piled there on retrieving them from her suitcase; the low hillock of the chair near the door. But then, between the bed and the chest of drawers, just touched in part by the moonlight, was the shape of a man, standing quite still.
The first thing that came to Domenica’s mind was a literary reference. She had read somewhere, some time ago, that one of the most disturbing experiences in this life was to wake up and discover that one is not alone in a house in which one had gone to bed believing oneself to be alone. Who had said that? Who? It was John Fowles; yes, that was who it was; not in The Magus, but somewhere else. Or at least she thought it was him; and now the words, whatever their provenance, came back to her, and caught at her wildly palpitating heart.
She did not move. She lay there, her limbs heavy beneath the sheets, her eyelids the only part of her moving, and very slightly at that, as she watched the still figure at the end of her bed.
For a moment she wondered if she was imagining it, if this was just another shadow, a trick of the light; but it was not, and she knew that it was not. She thought: I can scream. I can wake people up. It’s a small village and they will all hear me. People would come; Ling, the young man, the family in the house next door, which was not far away. And if I scream and this man comes for me, I can throw myself off the bed; there is a mosquito net between him and me, and he will have to fumble with that, which will give me the time to escape. She wondered if the man could see that her eyes were open. Probably not, she thought, for her head was in the shadows and he would not be able to see her face. That made her feel better. And the fact, too, that he was just standing there made her fear subside slightly. He was looking at her, just looking, and there was no sign that he was planning to attack her. And again, unbidden, there came to her mind another literary reference; this time its source quite clear. Carson McCullers, she thought. Reflections in a Golden Eye. The private soldier, the slow one, watches the Major’s wife from outside her window; that is all he does, he watches her. And then he comes into the house and watches her there too. He is gentle, unthreatening, a watcher. Boo Radley, she thought; another gentle watcher; the man who watches Jem and Scout Finch; watches over them, really, and saves their lives eventually. I am being watched. That is all this man is doing. He is watching me.
She felt calmer now, and for a moment almost as if she would laugh, with the release of tension. The figure in the shadows had ceased to be threatening; it w
as as if he had become a companion. That is what she now thought, and it was at that moment that he stepped forward; not a great step, but just a small movement in her direction. And as he did so, the moonlight fell on his face, and she saw who it was. It was not a man at all. It was the boy, the teenage boy who had carried her suitcase and whose photograph she had taken.
She caught her breath in surprise, a gasp that he heard, for he turned round quickly and ran out of the room.
“What do you want?” Domenica called out. “Why are you here?”
Her voice was not loud at all, and the boy probably did not hear it. Or her words might have been lost in the sound of the outer door slamming behind him.
She reached for the box of matches on the table beside her bed and struck one to light the lamp. In the glow of the lamp, the shadows resolved and became solid, unthreatening objects. Domenica no longer felt alarmed, just curious. She had frightened the boy away, and in a strange way she was sorry about that. If he had not fled, she would have let him remain there, perhaps, and he would have been company for her. She had no idea why he had been there; it was curiosity, perhaps, on his part; she did not think it was anything more sinister than that. Perhaps she was something of a miracle in his mind; a woman from somewhere distant, who had given him money. It had been a small thing for her to do, but it was probably not small for him.