The letter Angus now extracted from the small bundle of mail. The brown envelopes and the unsolicited advertisements which the Post Office saw fit to inflict on him, he tossed to one side; the advertisements would be recycled and would no doubt be made into fresh advertisements, endlessly perhaps, while the brown envelopes would be opened after breakfast. Angus was not one to put off the opening of mail, a habit which he had heard was extremely common. Sometimes it took the form of leaving the letter unopened for a day or so–something which was in the range of normality–but the condition could become more serious and could lead to mail remaining unopened for weeks, even months. A friend of his had suffered from this and had sought the help of a clinical psychologist, who had revealed to him that the letters represented an emotional claim–one emotional claim too many–and he was simply denying this to protect himself.
But this did not afflict Angus, who slit Domenica’s envelope open with relish and read it while seated at his kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of him, the morning sun streaming in through his window. It was a delicious feeling, this anticipation of word from Domenica, and he thought for a moment that he would paint such a scene, a small, carefully-worked canvas in the style of…well, let us not be too modest about our abilities, Vermeer. Yes, that would be entirely appropriate. A small tribute to Vermeer: the reading of a letter in an Edinburgh kitchen, with all that stillness and quiet which Vermeer could put into his paintings, and which Angus Lordie could, too.
The letter began with the usual salutation. Then: “You will see from the postmark–and the stamp–that I have reached my destination safely. When I embarked on that questionable ship I confess that I began to doubt my decision to make the journey by sea, but I must say that I do not regret it for a moment. Air travel is completely artificial. One enters a gleaming metal tube and subjects oneself to the experience of being carried through the sky while breathing the recycled air of several hundred other people. And then they have the effrontery to suggest that one should settle back and ‘enjoy the flight’! Of course, these airline people speak a different language altogether, a sort of debased mid-Atlantic English which is full of circumlocutions and cliché. The word ‘now’, such an honest, workmanlike word, has been replaced by ‘at this time’, as in ‘please fasten your seat belts at this time’, or ‘we are commencing (anglice starting) our descent at this time’. Why can’t they say ‘now’?
“Well, as you know, I refrained from all that and took a passage on a merchant ship, a large Norwegian container vessel of no discernible character. They had twenty passengers–a motley crew–and indeed they had a motley crew too. But we were able to read and play bridge with the Captain (a most eccentric bidder, I might add), and there was a simply immense deck to walk about for exercise.
“It got hotter and hotter, of course, and several of the other passengers became very morose and low. I was comfortable enough; my cabin windows opened and the ship’s movement made for a pleasant breeze. I lay about a lot, reading suitable books. I must confess, Angus, that I reread Somerset Maugham because it seemed to be just the thing in such circumstances. You know, Maugham really could write, unlike some novelists today, who go in for pretentiousness in a very big way. Maugham told marvellous stories, in the way in which nineteenth-century writers told stories. No artifice. No play with words. Just stories. I read Rain several times on board, because it’s all about a voyage, as you know. What a story! And The Painted Veil too, because it’s so refreshing to see a male writer having a go at a truly nasty woman; male writers don’t dare do that these days, Angus. You wouldn’t get a modern Flaubert punishing Madame Bovary as the real Flaubert did. Oh no. By the way, did you know that Flaubert wrote terribly slowly? He managed five words an hour, which meant that on a good day he wrote about thirty words. Now they were good words, of course, but even so…”
Angus put down the letter and rose to his feet. He looked out of the window. It was as if Domenica was in the room with him. He could hear her voice. Her laughter. She was there, and not there at the same time. He did not want the letter to end, and so he decided to go for a brief walk and return to savour the rest of the letter. This would give him something to look forward to.
He whistled for Cyril, who appeared from the other end of the flat, one ear cocked inquisitively.
“Do you miss Domenica too?” Angus asked as he attached the lead to Cyril’s collar.
Cyril was silent. As a dog, he missed everything–intensely. He missed Lochboisdale. He missed favourite, remembered bones. He missed the tooth he had lost when he had bitten that other dog’s tail. Everything–Cyril missed everything.
22. An M.A. (Cantab.)
Angus returned from his walk round Drummond Place. There were people about, and one or two greeted him, but he barely noticed them, so absorbed was he in thoughts of Domenica’s letter. He began to compose his response mentally–he would tell her about Antonia and how he had let her in and how he had decided that she…no, he would not do that. He should remember that Antonia was, after all, Domenica’s friend. I must make more of an effort in that direction, he told himself. I shall persist. I shall give her the chance to prove that she is as charming and good company as Domenica herself. At the very least, I shall be civil; I shall do the neighbourly thing and invite her in for a drink some evening, although perhaps it might be wise to dilute her. And not just to dilute her with alcohol, which has the power to transform difficult company into good, but dilute her with other guests, perhaps Matthew and that engaging girl, Pat–if they would come.
Now entering his kitchen, into which the slanting rays of sun still shone, Angus made himself another cup of coffee and sat down to read the rest of Domenica’s letter.
“We eventually arrived in Malacca. I must confess that I had made no arrangements to speak of and had to find myself a hotel more or less on the spot. This proved to be remarkably easy and I was soon ensconced in a rather charming old building with a wide veranda and a garden full of frangipani trees. The hotel called itself the São Pedro and was run by a charming Malaccan Portuguese and his Indonesian-Dutch wife. They made me extremely comfortable, but were much alarmed when I disclosed that I proposed to find a pirate community in which to do anthropological observation. They felt, for some reason, that I had some kind of death-wish (the very thought!) and were completely unpersuaded by my attempts to reassure them. I told them that anthropologists were accustomed to putting themselves in dangerous situations. Look at the number of people who did their field work in New Guinea amongst people who still resorted to occasional head-hunting. Look at the people who did their research in the mountains of Corsica, which are pretty dangerous at the best of times. Very few anthropologists opt for the soft life when it comes to their field work. In fact, I know only two–one went to the Vatican to study the domestic economy of a male-dominated society, and the other went to Monaco to study sense of place and permanence amongst tax exiles. Both of these were rather condescended to by their peers later on–they were treated as if they had not really earned their spurs, so to speak, as anthropologists. There were sniffy remarks about doing one’s research in a meadow rather than a field–that sort of thing. Not really funny, but very barbed.
“But do you think that my hosts would be reassured by any of this? They would not. Eventually, they shrugged their shoulders and said that if called upon they would be happy to identify my remains and have them shipped back to Scotland. I thanked them for this; the offer was genuinely meant.
“Of course, I had to find somebody who would give me the necessary introductions. The Royal Institute of Anthropology had given me the name of somebody who was in the business of arranging academic exchanges for students, and they said that this person had been very helpful to another anthropologist who had studied minority-group relations in several of the Malaysian states. He was called Edward Hong, and I eventually found his office near a row of old godowns by the river. It was in a charming old Chinese house, with red roof and pillars w
hich had been painted light blue. On the front door there was a sign which announced that this was the office of the World Scholar Cultural Exchange, of which the proprietor and director was Edward Hong, M.A. (Cantab.).
“I do like to meet an M.A. (Cantab.) in a place like Malacca–it’s so reassuring! Of course, one does come across one or two of them who might not be the real thing, but they are usually utterly charming and tremendously Anglophile (and remember, Angus, before you say anything: Anglophilia includes Scots in its generous embrace). Do you remember, by the way, that charming habit of putting letters behind one’s name, even if one failed the degree in question? Did you ever meet a B.A. (Calcutta) (Failed)? Or were they apocryphal? I certainly remember speaking to somebody who had seen a plate outside a dental surgery in the Yemen which said: Bachelor of Dental Surgery (Failed). I suppose that if one’s toothache were severe enough, one might just take the risk.
“Edward Hong was very urbane. He was an impressive-looking man with a pencil moustache and elegant patent-leather shoes. He appeared terribly pleased to see me and summoned a maid to produce a tray of tea, which we drank out of Royal Doulton cups.
“‘I do so miss good old John’s,’ he said, referring, I assumed, to St John’s College, Cambridge. ‘I had such a well-placed room in Second Court, and from time to time I took tea with the Master and his wife in the Lodge. He had a strong interest in Chinese ceramics, and I used to help him read the reign marks on the base of vases. We also used to discuss Waley’s translations of Tang poetry. We discussed those for hours. Hours.’
“I listened to this talk about St John’s and Cambridge for almost half an hour. At one point, he asked me if the Church clock continued to stand at ten to three, and I replied that there was, as far as I knew, honey still for tea. He was delighted with that, and at the end of our conversation I think that he would have done anything for me. So that was when I asked him whether it would be possible to arrange an introduction to some contemporary pirates.
“He hesitated for only the briefest of moments before he smiled and said that this could certainly be arranged. It would take a day or two, he said, and in the meantime would I care to meet his daughter, Mary, who was studying piano and French? ‘She loves Chopin,’ he said, ‘and I love listening to her playing. I can listen to Chopin for hours–hours and hours.’”
23. The Charms of Neo-Melanesian Pidgin
“I had rather a lot of Chopin that morning, I must confess,” wrote Domenica. “The Mazurka in C sharp minor, the Nocturne in E major, and so on, all interpreted sympathetically by Mary Hong, daughter of Edward Hong, M.A. (Cantab.). By lunchtime I was obliged to look discreetly at my watch and claim that, owing to jet lag, I needed to get back to the hotel for an afternoon nap.
“We parted the greatest of friends. If I came back for a midmorning tea a couple of days later, Edward Hong said, he would make sure that there would be a pirate contact for me to meet. ‘He might be a little on the rough side,’ he said. ‘But we can have some Chopin afterwards to make up for it.’
“I returned to the hotel and spent an afternoon writing up my diary. I haven’t done such a thing for years, but I have the feeling that my experiences here in Malacca are going to be somewhat unusual and should be recorded. I did a little pen and ink sketch of Edward Hong in the margins and one of his daughter playing Chopin. I was quite pleased with these, although you would regard them as mere amateur scratchings, Angus. Yes, you would, although you would be far too polite to say as much.
“I spent the next two days wandering around Malacca. It’s a delightful place, a bit like Leith, in fact, but with totally different people and buildings, and climate, too, I suppose. I spent very pleasant hours reading in a chair in the garden of the hotel, under a very shady tree that looked remarkably like those Sea Grape trees you see in places such as Jamaica, but no doubt something quite different. I read about the history of this place–very colourful–and about all the different groups of people who have made their home here. This had implications for my study of the pirates. Because of the dearth of information on the subject, I had no idea whether they would be Malay, Chinese or Indian in their origin, and this had implications not only for how I would approach the study, but also for how we could communicate.
“I had envisaged that I might need an interpreter, but then it occurred to me that because of the…how shall I put it?…delicate nature of the research it could be difficult to find a local person who would be prepared to live amongst the pirates themselves. For this reason, I might need to speak to them directly.
“I telephoned Edward Hong about this. He said that the pirate bands were of mixed ethnicity and that I should expect to encounter all the main groups to be found in Malacca.
“‘It’s rather like the French Foreign Legion,’ he explained. ‘People join up if they want to get away. But what makes them different from the Legion is that they bring their wives and children with them. And as for languages, well, I would suggest that since you don’t have any of the local Chinese dialects–and no Tamil, or Malay? No? Well, I’d use a pidgin of some sort.’
“As it happens, I know all about pidgin–I learned Tok Pisin in New Guinea and I became quite interested in the subject. It’s amazing how far one can get with pidgin, Angus. And pidgin languages are so colourful! Wonderful creations! I suspect they’ll be speaking pidgin down in Essex before too long–they’re certainly heading in that direction.
“As you know, pidgins are a real mixture of this, that and the next thing. You get a bit of English, a bit of German, a bit of Dutch–everything. And the grammar is simple in the extreme. Do you know that when Prince Charles went to address the Papua New Guinea legislative assembly–where the official language is a pidgin–they introduced him formally as ‘Nambawan pikinini bilong Mrs Kwin’? Isn’t that marvellous? And it was quite accurate, of course. The word “bilong” does an awful lot of work in pidgin. And here’s another little gem. In Neo-Melanesian pidgin, if I wanted to say: Why did you wreck that machine? I would say: Olsem onem yu buggerupim onefelo masin? You’ll notice that the verb has an obvious etymology.
“My mind was set at rest by the thought that I would be able to speak directly to the people in the pirate band–not that I imagined I would be speaking too much to the pirates themselves. I imagined that I would be talking to their wives–or, I suppose pirates have partners these days rather than wives–and discussing social arrangements and the like. It’s always very interesting to find out how decisions are made in these alternative communities. Often, you know, the power structure is fairly clearly delineated. Remember Lord of the Flies, Angus? Remember how the right to speak was determined by possession of the conch? Well, I rather suspected that I should find similar symbols of authority amongst my pirates.
“I was really rather excited by the whole prospect. And so, when I went in due course to Edward Hong’s to meet my contact, I was filled with anticipation. Edward’s manservant greeted me at the door and ushered me upstairs and into the room in which we had listened to the Chopin on my previous visit. My face fell, I’m afraid. Edward was by himself.
“‘I’ve made inquiries,’ he said. ‘I’ve found somebody who’s prepared to take you to them. But he wouldn’t answer some of my questions, and frankly I’m not sure if I trust him. But don’t worry; he’s obtained the pirate chief’s agreement to let you live with them for a few months in exchange for money. He asked for one thousand US dollars, and I beat him down to sixty. He’ll take you there tomorrow.’
“I was very grateful, and thanked him profusely.
“‘No need to thank me,’ he said. ‘The pleasure is all mine. But now, how about a bit of Chopin? Yes? Mary will be only too happy to oblige.’ He leant forward and winked at me. ‘Onefelo Chopin make nambawan good musik bilong piano!’ he said, and laughed, most collusively. Such a charming man. (Note: Edward Hong should not have said ‘piano’ but ‘bigfela bokis tut bilong em sam i blak, sam i waet–taem yu kilim emi singaot’, which mea
ns: big box with some black, some white teeth–when you hit it, it cries out.)”
24. Pat Gets to Know Tessie a Bit Better
When Pat found Tessie standing outside her door, she was unsure whether she had heard her agonised muttering about how Wolf meant nothing to her. The other girl, however, gave nothing away: Tessie was impassive.
“Oh, hello,” said Pat. “It’s you.”
Tessie nodded. “Yes. I thought I might drop in and offer to make you a cup of coffee. We haven’t had the chance to chat very much since you moved in. In fact, we haven’t really seen one another at all.”
Pat looked over Tessie’s shoulder, into the hall. “But your boyfriend,” she began. “I thought that your boyfriend was here.”
“He was,” said Tessie. “But he had to go. He just popped in to ask me something.”
Pat relaxed. It appeared that Tessie had not heard her muttering and had no idea of how she felt about Wolf. If she felt that way about Wolf; she was by no means sure about that yet, although all the signs had been there–the quickening of the pulse, that warm, butterfly-like feeling in the stomach, the slight dizziness. And then there had been that strange desire to touch his teeth; that was very peculiar and surely meant that something was happening between them.