The Cat's Table

  What I most wished to witness was a card game between my aunt Flavia and my cabinmate, Mr Hastie. He was still despondent about his demotion. He missed his dogs, and he missed the spare time when he could read. I longed for the possibility of a tournament between these two separate worlds, and I wondered whether the Violets might be destroyed by him in a fair game – in the Delilah Lounge, or in our cabin at midnight, or perhaps best of all, on neutral ground, deep within the hold, on an unfolded card table, under a naked bulb.

  Two Hearts

  MR HASTIE’S LOSS of his job as Head Kennel Keeper meant the nightly card games did not take place as often as they used to. First of all, Mr Invernio’s rise in authority meant there was more squabbling between the two friends. And Mr Hastie, now assigned to chipping paint in bright sunlight, did not have the same energy he had when simply overseeing dogs and reading mystical works. In the past the two had shared a breakfast at the kennels – usually a whisky and then some form of porridge, which they ate from a washed-out dog bowl. Now they barely saw each other. But sometimes a late game of bridge would still take place, and I’d watch the four of them until I fell asleep, only to be woken by Mr Babstock who was a shouter whenever he lost a hand. He and Tolroy, on a night break from being wireless operators, would come to these games exhausted. Only Invernio, who now had the easiest job, was lively, clapping his hands at any small victory. With the odour of dalmatians and terriers rising off him he continued to irritate Mr Hastie.

  By the fantail of the ship there was a yellow stern light. And during the hottest nights my cabinmate dragged his cot there and lashed it to the railing in order to sleep under the stars. I realised he had probably been sleeping there on those first few nights out of Colombo. Cassius, Ramadhin and I came upon him on one of our night expeditions and he explained he’d been doing this since going through the Straits of Magellan as a young man, when the ship he was on had been surrounded by icebergs that came in every colour. Hastie was a ‘lifer’ in the Merchant Navy, travelling to the Americas, the Philippines, the Far East, being altered, he claimed, by the men and the women he met. ‘I remember the girls, the silk … I don’t remember the work at all. I chose tough adventures. Books were only words then.’ In the late-night air, Mr Hastie was a nonstop talker. And what he told us, when we visited him by his yellow light on some of those evenings, put an excited fear into our hearts. He had worked for the Dollar Line, which passaged through the canal in Panama – the Pedro Miguel Locks, the Miraflores Locks, the Galliard Cut. That, he said, was the realm of romance! He described the man-made excavations, and the portal cities at each end of the canal, and then Balboa, where he was seduced by a local beauty, got drunk, missed his ship, and married the woman, escaping five days later by signing up on the next Italian vessel.

  Mr Hastie spoke in his slow, dry voice, the cigarette hanging from his lips, the words whispered modestly through the smoke. We believed everything he told us. We asked to see a picture of his ‘wife’, who, he said, continued to follow him from port to port, never giving up, and he promised to ‘reveal her image’, although he never did. We imagined a great beauty, with blazing eyes, and a horse under her. For when Mr Hastie signed on to his Italian ship out of Balboa, Anabella Figueroa had read his self-blaming but still dismissive letter too late to catch the vessel herself. She gathered two horses and rode without pause and in a fury to the Pedro Miguel Locks and boarded the steamer there as a first-class passenger – in order that she could be served a meal by him in his steward’s monkey jacket, and not even acknowledge his surprised face or his servile presence with one word or glance, until that evening when she entered the small cabin he shared with two other crew members, and leapt into his arms. Our dreams were busy that night.

  And further tales would follow by the yellow stern light. Because sometime later, on another ship, after he had again admitted his hesitancy about their relationship, my cabinmate was watching a four-day-old moon, when she came silently up to him and knifed him twice through the ribs, missing his heart ‘by the width of a communion wafer’. It was only the cold air that kept him conscious. If she had been a larger woman, as opposed to South American petite, he was sure, she would have lifted him over the railings and dropped him overboard. He lay there and bellowed – perhaps his yells were louder because of the stillness of the night. Fortunately, a watchman heard him. Anabella Figueroa was arrested, and jailed for only a week. ‘Female despair,’ Mr Hastie explained. ‘They have a single word for it in the South American criminal code. It is the equivalent of “driving under the influence of hypnotism”. Which is what love is, or at least what love was, in those days …

  ‘There is a madness in women,’ he tried to explain to the three of us. ‘You have to approach them carefully. They might be quaint and hesitant as wild stags, if you wish to lie with them, go drinking with them. But you leave them and it’s like plunging down a mine shaft you didn’t realise was there in their nature … A stabbing is nothing. Nothing. I could have survived that. But in Valparaiso she was there again, released from jail. She hunted me down at the Hotel Homann. Luckily I had caught the typhoid, perhaps in the very hospital I was taken to with my knife wounds, and luckily she had an unreasonable fear of the disease – a fortune-teller had told her she might die of it – and she left me for good. So the knifing near to my left heart saved me from a permanent fate with her. I was never to see her again. I said left heart, for men have two. Two hearts. Two kidneys. Two ways of life. We are symmetrical creatures. We are balanced in our emotions …’

  For years I believed all this.

  ‘Anyway, in the hospital, while I fought off the typhoid, a couple of docs taught me to play bridge. And I also began to read. When I was young, books never invaded my spirit. You know what I mean? If I had read this book, The Upanishads, when I was twenty, I would not have received it. I had a too-busy mind then. But it is a meditation. It helps me now. I suppose I would appreciate her now as well, more easily.’

  I was standing with Flavia Prins one afternoon, talking listlessly. Looking down the side of the ship, I saw Mr Hastie straddling a raised anchor, and painting the hull. There were other sailors cradled in rope ladders around him, but I could recognise his bald spot, which I saw whenever I looked down during his card games. He had his shirt off, and his torso was sunburned. I pointed him out to my aunt.

  ‘They say that man is the greatest bridge player on the ship,’ I told her. ‘He has won championships in places as distant as Panama …’

  She raised her eyes from him, up to the horizon. ‘What is he doing there then, I wonder.’

  ‘He is keeping his ears open,’ I said. ‘But he plays professionally every night with Mr Babstock, and Mr Tolroy, and Mr Invernio, who is now in charge of the dogs on the ship. All of them are international champions!’

  ‘I wonder …’ she said, and looked at her nails.

  I separated myself from her and went down to a lower deck, where Ramadhin and Cassius were. We watched Mr Hastie work until he happened to glance up, and then we waved to him. He pushed his goggles onto his forehead, recognised us, and waved back. I hoped my guardian had stayed where I had left her, to witness the moment. The three of us continued on, a slight strut to our walk. Mr Hastie would never know how much that gesture of recognition meant to us.

  *

  IT COULD HAVE been her growing social success, or perhaps my false testimony after the storm, but Flavia Prins appeared to be less interested in being my guardian. She now wished our meetings to take place briefly, on an open deck, where she ticked off two or three questions like a parole officer.

  ‘Is your cabin pleasant?’

  I dragged out a minute of silence. ‘Yes, Auntie.’

  She gestured me closer, curious about something.

  ‘What do you do all day?’

  I did not mention my visits to the engine room, or the excitement of witnessing the wet clothes on the Australian when she showered.

  ‘Luckily,’ she responded
to my silence, ‘I was able to sleep through most of the Canal. So very hot …’

  She was fingering her jewellery again, and I had a sudden thought that I should inform the Baron about my guardian’s cabin number.

  But the Baron had already left the ship. He had disembarked at Port Said accompanied by the daughter of Hector de Silva. I had heard someone remark that he had been consoling her, so I assumed he had coaxed her to join him in further gentlemanly crimes and fed her cakes as well as good tea in the privacy of his room. He had been carrying a flat valise that may have contained valuable papers and even perhaps the portrait of Miss de Silva herself, which I knew he had in his possession. He gave me a farewell nod from the top of the gangplank and Cassius nudged me – I had told him of my participation in the robberies, enlarging the significance of my role. The de Silva heiress moved beside him in an envelope of silence. That may have been grief. Or was she already hypnotised by the charms of the Baron?

  We ourselves did not go ashore at Port Said. We stayed to witness the Gully Gully man, and watched from the Oronsay railing as he arrived by canoe and began pulling chickens from his sleeves, his trousers, and out from under his hat. He sneezed, pulled a canary from his nose, and released it into the harbour air. The canoe rocked in the wash below us while he leapt up and down in pain, as a rooster revealed its combed head out the front of his trousers. Then we were treated to snakes falling out of his sleeves. They curled into two perfect circles at his feet, undisturbed as coins rained down into the canoe.

  We left Port Said early the next morning. A pilot rode out in a launch, came on board, and guided us out of the harbour. In his unconcerned manner he was similar to the man who had led us into the Canal with whistles and yells. I imagined them as twins, or at least brothers. Completing his task, the pilot strolled away from the bridge, his two-rupee sandals snapping at his heels, and climbed down into the launch that had followed us out. The harbour pilots from now on would be more ceremonial. In Marseilles one came on board in a long-sleeved shirt, white trousers, and blancoed shoes. He hardly moved his lips as he whispered instructions to bring the ship into harbour. The pilots I was used to wore shorts and seldom removed their hands from their trouser pockets. Their first request was usually for a cordial and a fresh sandwich. I would miss their air of loafing, the way they appeared like necessary jesters who felt they could stroll safely and behave as they wished for an hour or two in the court of a foreign king. But now we had entered European waters.

  *

  IT WAS IN Port Said that Mr Mazappa also left us. I waited for his return up the gangplank, even after it was concertinaed and rolled away. Miss Lasqueti was there beside us as well, but she slipped off silently when the departure bell began ringing endlessly, like an insistent child. Then the gangway dislocated itself from the dock.

  I have realised only recently that Mr Mazappa and Miss Lasqueti were young. They must have been in their thirties that year, when he disappeared from our ship. Max Mazappa had been the most exuberant member of the Cat’s Table until about the time we left Aden. He had herded all of us around with a lighthearted rudeness, insisting we be a vocal dinner table. He was public, even when whispering something questionable. He had shown us that joy existed in adults too, though I knew the future would never be as dramatic and joyous and deceitful as the way he had sketched it and sung it for Cassius, Ramadhin and me. He was Homeric with his list of feminine charms, as well as vices, and the best piano rags and torch songs, illegal acts, betrayals, gunshots by musicians who defended the honour of their faultless playing, and the possibility of a whole dance floor yelling the word ‘Onions!’ during the brief pause of a jazz number by Sidney Bechet. And there always would be men Ever Grasping Your Precious Tits. What life there was in the diorama he constructed for us.

  So we did not, and could not, understand what had invaded him so privately. Something dark seemed to have entered this protégé of Le Grand Bechet. What did I not understand about Mr Mazappa? Had I not sensed accurately the growing friendship between him and Miss Lasqueti? In our turbine-room discussions we’d concocted a great romance – the way they politely excused themselves between courses at dinner and disappeared on deck for a smoke. It would still be light outside, so we could see them leaning over the wooden rail, exchanging whatever wisdoms they knew about the world. Once he covered her bare shoulders with his jacket. ‘I thought she was a bluestocking, at first,’ he had said of her.

  For a day or so after Mazappa left the Oronsay there were re-evaluations of him. Why had he needed two names, for instance? And the issue was raised again of his having children. (Someone at our table brought up ‘The Breastfeeding Conversation’.) So, I began to wonder if these children had already heard the same jokes and advice that he had been giving us. It was also suggested that he was possibly the kind of man who was joyous only when he was free, between this and that point of land. ‘Or maybe he has been married several times,’ Miss Lasqueti inserted quietly, ‘and when he dies there will be several simultaneous widows.’ We hung on to the silence that followed her remark, wondering if he had also proposed to her.

  I had expected her to be shattered at Mr Mazappa’s departure, and to wear an ashen look at our table. But Miss Lasqueti, as the journey continued, was to become the most enigmatic and surprising one among our companions. We were seeing a sly humour in her remarks, and she came over and comforted us for the loss of Mr Mazappa, saying she also missed him. It was the word ‘also’ that felt like gold to us. She realised we needed the ongoing mythology of our absent friend, and one afternoon she told us, imitating Mr Mazappa’s voice, that his first marriage had indeed ended in a betrayal. He had come home unexpectedly to find his wife with a musician and had confessed to Miss Lasqueti, ‘If I’d had a gun, I would have shot him in the pump, but all there was in the room was his ukulele.’ She laughed at the anecdote, but we did not.

  ‘I was so fond of his Sicilian manners,’ she went on, ‘even the way he lit my cigarette, the long reach of his arm, as if igniting a fuse. Some thought he was a predator, but he was a delicate man. The panache was in his choice of words, and in the rhythm of them. I know masks and personas. I am a specialist in them. He was gentler than he seemed.’ Hearing such speeches by her we assumed again a passion between the two. Surely they were soulmates, the way she spoke of him, in spite of, or even because of, the line about his ‘simultaneous widows’. Perhaps they would continue to communicate via the ship’s telegraph service, and I made a note to ask Mr Tolroy about that. Besides, from Port Said to London was really not that far.

  Then there was no more talk of Mr Mazappa. Even from her. She kept to herself. Most afternoons I caught a glimpse of her in the shadows of B Deck, in a deckchair. She always had in her possession a copy of The Magic Mountain, but no one ever saw her reading it. Miss Lasqueti consumed mostly crime thrillers, which constantly seemed to disappoint her. I suspect that for her the world was more accidental than any book’s plot. Twice I saw her so irritated by a mystery that she half rose from the shadow of her chair and flung the paperback over the railing into the sea.

  SUNIL, THE HYDERABAD MIND, who was part of the Jankla Troupe, was by now often to be seen with Emily. I suppose it was his more adult self that fascinated and then tempted my cousin. I could always recognise Sunil from a distance – his thinness, his acrobatic walk. Watching them I’d see his hand move up her arm and disappear into her sleeve, holding her in a controlling way, all the time speaking about the intricacies of a world she must have desired.

  But about the time our ship slid alongside Port Said, they did not seem at ease in each other’s company. He’d be talking to her as they walked, that lean, strong arm of his gesturing to convince her of something, and then, falsely, he’d try to make her laugh when he saw her lack of interest. A boy of eleven, like any experienced dog, can read the gestures of those around him, can see the power in a relationship drift back and forth. The only power Emily had was her beauty, her youth, I suppose, and perhap
s something she was not even aware of having in her possession. And he was trying to capture these with arguments or, if that failed, a quick juggling of nearby objects or a one-armed handstand.

  Even if Emily had not been with him I would have been curious about him.

  I POSITIONED MYSELF at an equal distance from three tables in the dining room. There was the very tall couple with a small child at one; at the other were women whispering, and somewhere else were two stern men. My head was down, I was pretending to read. I listened. I imagined my ears pointing towards the couple with the child. The woman was telling the man about the pains in her chest. Then she asked him how he had slept. And he answered, ‘I have no idea.’ At the second table one of the whispering women said, ‘So I asked him, “How can it be an aphrodisiac and a laxative?” And he said, “Well, it’s all in the timing.”’ At the third table, nothing was going on. I listened again to the tall couple with the baby, a doctor and his wife. He was listing some powders she could take.

  Wherever I was I did this, since Miss Lasqueti had said, ‘You must keep your ears and eyes open. It’s an education out there.’ And I continued filling my old St Thomas’ College examination booklet with the things I heard.

  EXAMINATION BOOKLET: OVERHEARD CONVERSATIONS, DAY 12 TO DAY 18

  ‘Trust me – you can swallow strychnine as long as you don’t chew it.’

  ‘Jasper Maskelyne, the conjurer, set up all the “bullshit” work in the desert during the war. He actually became a magician when the war was over.’

  ‘It is absolutely prohibited to throw anything over the ship’s side, Madame.’

  ‘He’s one of the sexual predators on the ship. We call him “The Turnstile”.’