its frock-coated porter’s coin-eyed humility;
its corner-pub, The Rodney, with its copper bell,
sporting prints, and brown quiet where a pint of ale,
two bangers and mash made his fist a sea-diver
coming up with a fortune. “It’s the Admiral
Rob-Me, all right,” he told Maud. Much of the river
was quietly preserved like the area-railing
near Putney Boat-House, where garden-boxes in June
exploded with chrysanthemums; but the ailing
statues of lions wearied him. One afternoon,
he so badly missed shaking the paw of his tom
drowsing in the window-light like a regular
lion that he cried. The bombsites had become
cubes of blue glass and indifferent steel. Trafalgar
was all tourists and cameras and the red roar
of pillar-box buses. They would begin to argue
over menus in windows. But the worst horror
was in the voices. Caught on a traffic island,
waiting for the sea-green light, he began to hear
the surf of a dialect none would understand;
it coiled in his ear-shell with its tireless moan,
feet could not muffle it nor traffic round the Strand,
nor a Kensington crescent remote as the moon.
II
After the voices faded, he heard his own voice
growing brazen in its key from the hotel stair,
one step above that with which he spoke to the boys
on the estate. He searched the eyes of the waiter
pouring breakfast coffee with a frightening rage
at the spoon-clicking silence. Ringing the porter,
his pitch kept wavering on the proper language
and the correct key—not a plea, but an order.
This tightened his jawline and increased his hatred.
He thought of Tumbly and Scott. They’d fought the same war,
but he limped with pride at being the walking wounded
in the class-struggle, in the hotel’s high ranking,
its brass-buttons and tips, and he might have ended
that way, saluting taxis and crisply thanking
gentlemen. The Major waited till his rage
ebbed and, with his eyes shut, his hands behind his head,
was ready to go back home. Through their ersatz lace
came the surf of cars. The sailing curtains lifted.
Level-voiced London unnerved him. He found his excuse
in its self-rapt adoration. Steering around
lines patiently forming at drizzling bus-queues,
umbrellas politely revolving in its rain,
the cold, beaded faces in raincoats and parkas,
he shook off the old hallucination again,
from a spun umbrella, that they were back at war.
On wet summer afternoons that grew dark as
February, its gutters muttered in patois
in the indigo light that spelt a hurricane
or thunder over Marble Arch. What he missed was
the roar of his island’s market, palm-fronds talking
to each other. It was one of the mysteries
of advancing age to like those tempestuous
gusts that hyphenated leaves on a railed walk, in-
stead of keeping things in place and their proper use.
He felt like a strolling statue, passing the News
of the World, and the Thames looked smaller to his eyes.
III
Maud could never sleep the length of those afternoons;
stretched out on the verandah in the chaise-longue, and
fanning with a palmetto, deep in her cushions,
she stopped to examine the maps along one hand.
Dennis was sprawled out upstairs in his khaki shirt.
In the hot breeze everything stirred like an omen.
She knew it was coming, but when? In the inert
pasture with its quiet trees? In the wide-open
bay? Was its message that rooster kicking up dirt
like a grave near her kitchen just behind the pen?
In a donkey’s bray sawing the heat? It was not
visible, it was only cold sweat on her brow.
In the day’s slow yawn before it swallowed the night?
In the mango’s leaves, the square shade under a cow?
Whenever you want, dear God, once it is not now.
She found herself exhausted before it was night.
In the heat, the low biplane of a dragonfly
buzzed the reed-wilted pond, as its rings spread the white
languid dominion of the crowned water-lily;
from their straw nets the orange beaks of the ginger-
lilies gaped for rain. She knew that it was silly
but she heard them screeching with the ceaseless hunger
of fledglings. She watered them. She personified
everything these days, from the archaic elegance
of Queen Anne’s lace to the gold, imperious pride
of the sunflower’s revolving, lion’s countenance.
She preferred gardens to empires. Now she was tired.
Chapter LI
I
He still enjoyed taking Maud to five o’clock Mass,
backing out of the garage with the dewy stars
sharp through black trees, the metal wet, and Maud shawled as
if it were Ireland. Downhill, torches of roosters
caught a hill’s edge, and the Rover’s beam would surprise
clumps of grey workmen going to their factories,
all waiting for the first transport down the highway
with thermoses and construction hats in a breeze
as nippy as early spring, the greying road empty,
until, one morning, screeching round the cold asphalt,
twin lights had challenged him with incredible speed,
blinding him, until they veered and their driver called:
“Move your ass, honky!”
They were lucky to be spared.
Plunkett carefully parked the Rover near a ditch.
Maud was shaking. He kept the lights on and got out.
“Where’re you going?” she screamed.
“For that sonofabitch!”
Plunkett said in the old Army voice. The transport
had braked to a screeching stop where the workmen were
waiting, and some of them were already inside
when he walked up the greying road like a major
out to bring them some discipline. One of them said:
“Mi ’n’homme blanc-a ka venir, oui.” Meaning: “Here comes
the white man.”
The dawn was coming up like thunder
through the coconut palms. Bagpipes and kettledrums
were the only thing missing. Plunkett smiled under
his martial, pensioned moustaches.
“HOLD ON!” he roared.
They froze like recruits. One with his boot in the door.
“TILL I TALK TO THE DRIVER NO ONE GETS ABOARD!”
The driver rammed his side open. It was Hector.
“Are you the bloody driver?” he asked him quietly,
close to his face. “Are you drunk? We were nearly killed!”
The engine was on.
“Very well, give me the key.
Come, come on, the key,” as if to a sulking child,
snapping his fingers. “And furthermore, I resent
the expletive you used. I am not a honky.
A donkey perhaps, a jackass, but I haven’t spent
damned near twenty years on this godforsaken rock
to be cursed like a tourist. Do you understand?”
All the workmen were now in the van. “What de fock!”
one yelled. “Fock da honky!” Hector held out one hand.
It was hard as a cedar’s roots.
“Pardon, Major,
I didn’t know it was you.” It was only then
that Plunkett recognized the ivory smile. Hector,
of course, of course; he had been one of the fishermen
and had given up his canoe for this taxi. More
business. He steered the conversation to Helen
cunningly and asked if she was happy. Morning
wickered the palms’ shadows on the warming asphalt.
He shook Hector’s hand again, but with a warning
about his new responsibility.
“My fault,”
he said to Maud, turning the key in the engine.
II
He dropped her off at the door of the cathedral
among other black-shawled women. The empty square
with rusty railings guarding the Memorial
still shone with the dew and its grass-green benches were
glazed with it. The fountain had uttered its last sigh.
The sidewalks were empty. He could park anywhere.
He parked the Rover in front of the library
with its Georgian trim and walked to the harbour.
Alone, down Bridge Street, he caught the smell of the sea
as the sunlight suddenly heightened the mutter
of Mass from the cathedral, and the balcony
uprights under which he passed rippling like water
or the dead fountain once. One sunrise in Lisbon,
walking along its empty wharves, he had wondered
where in this world he and his new wife could settle
to find some peace. At the Customs gate the old guard
let him in, unlocking it. He saw the metal
dazzle of the sea between rusty containers,
then the blue port itself, and on the opposite
headland the arches of Married Women’s Quarters
and the old Officers’ Mess as its hill was hit
by a salvo of light. He could hear the chuckle
of water under the hulls of island schooners,
and one still had a bulb on its binnacle
in spite of the sunshine. He strolled. His hunger was
pierced by the smell of coffee. He was repeating
with every step of his forked shadow the same pace
as the midshipman, centuries ago, reading
the italics of Dutch ships by moonlight. Now peace
swayed the creaking hulls of the schooners. His favourite
was an old freighter welded to the wharf by rust
and sunsets. He felt a deep tenderness for it,
that it went nowhere at all, grimed with coal-dust
from the back of the market, hung with old tires
as if it had had enough of the world. It once
had great plans for leaving, but after a few tries
it had grown attached to the helmeted capstans
to which it was moored and the light-surprising walls
of its retirement. Now, in their rising leaven,
clouds plump as dough grew fragrant as the long ovals
of crusting bread drawn out of a Creole oven
by spatulas longer than oars. The sunlight stuck
to his cheek, then ran down like salt butter
in the mouths of the loaves. Hunger gnawed his stomach
as he marched back to the gate. It was shut, but the
guard opened it again for him. He had to make
the bakery before they went, the wicker-woven
baskets emptied quickly; sometimes they’d be gone
before he and Maud got there. His Bread of Heaven
laced with salt butter, his private communion.
She was at the church door. He honked, hurrying her in.
III
Maud held the warm bag against her stomach and she
slapped his hand when it fumbled towards the package
of pointed loaves. “Pig.” She smiled and stung his raw knee
with a slap, turning away in pretended rage
when he squeezed her thigh. “Dennis! I’ve just come from
church! Here. Why don’t you squeeze one of these tits instead?”
By the time they crossed the wickered road to the farm
he had devoured two loaves of the fragrant bread
sunlit by the butter which he always carried.
Despite that morning’s near-accident, the old Rover
sailed under the surf of threshing palms and his heart
hummed like its old engine, his wanderings over,
like the freighter rusting on its capstans. The heat
was wide now and the shadows blacker in the rows
of Maud’s garden beds. Their fragrance did not draw her.
She smelt mortality in the oleanders
as well as the orchids; in the funeral-parlour
reek of stale water in vases. She went upstairs.
She didn’t garden that morning. Sick of flowers.
Their common example of bodily decay,
from the brown old age of bridal magnolias
to the sunflower’s empire that lasted a day.
By Bendemeer’s stream. Nature had not betrayed her,
she smiled, lying in her bed. On the sun-streaked floor
the sunflower’s dish, tracking the sun like radar,
altered the jalousies’ shadows till they meant more
than the rays they let in. The gold wheel frightened her.
Chapter LII
I
The morning Maud died he sat in the bay window,
watching the angel-hair blow gently from her face.
That wax rose pillowed there was his crown and wonder,
a breeze lifting the curtains like her bridal lace.
Seashells. Seychelles. The empire of cancer spread
across the wrinkled sheets. Loosened from their ribbon,
his fleet of letters sailed their mahogany bed
close to a Macaulay and a calf-bound Gibbon,
an empire’s bookends. His locket and his queen,
her golden knot his sovereign, and the covered keys
of the shawled piano she’d never play again.
She was his orb and sceptre, the shire of his peace,
the hedges aisling England, lanes ending in spires,
rooks that lift and scatter from oaks threshing like seas,
the black notes of sparrows on telegraph wires,
all these were in his letters, in the small brass-barred
chest next to her fingers, his voice was in each word.
She had been reading them in their carved double-bed.
That broke his grief. The Major stood, then staggered
to clutch the linen, burying his face inside her.
He rubbed their names against her stomach. “Maud, Maud,
it’s Dennis, love, Maud.” Then he stretched beside her,
as if they were statues on a stone tomb, so still
he heard the groan of a sun-expanded board
on the hot verandah, and from the roofs downhill
a bucket rattling for water, then the dry cardboard
rattle of breadfruit leaves on the bay-window sill.
II
Provinces, Protectorates, Colonies, Dominions,
Governors-General, black Knights, ostrich-plumed Viceroys,
deserts, jungles, hill-stations, all an empire’s zones,
lay spilled from a small tea-chest; felt-footed houseboys
on fern-soft verandahs, hearty Toby-jugged Chiefs
of Police, Girl-Guide Commissioners, Secretaries,
poppies on cenotaphs, green-spined Remembrance wreaths,
cornets, kettledrums, gum-chewing dromedaries
under Lawrence, parasols, palm-striped pavilions,
dhows and feluccas, native-draped paddle-ferries
on tea-brown rivers, statue-rehearsing lions,
&nbs
p; sandstorms seaming their eyes, horizontal monsoons,
rank odour of a sea-chest, mimosa memories
touched by a finger, lead soldiers, clopping Dragoons.
Breadfruit hands on a wall. The statues close their eyes.
Mosquito nets, palm-fronds, scrolled Royal Carriages,
dacoits, gun-bearers, snarling apes on Gibraltar,
sermons to sweat-soaked kerchiefs, the Rock of Ages
pumped by a Zouave band, lilies light the altar,
soldiers and doxies by a splashing esplanade,
waves turning their sheet music, the yellowing teeth
of the parlour piano, Airs from Erin played
to the whistling kettle, and on the teapot’s head
the cozy’s bearskin shako, biscuits break with grief,
gold-braid laburnums, lilac whiff of lavender,
columned poplars marching to Mafeking’s relief.
Naughty seaside cards, the sepia surrender
of Gordon on the mantel, the steps of Khartoum,
The World’s Classics condensed, Clive as brown as India,
bathers in Benares, an empire in costume.
His will be done, O Maud, His kingdom come,
as the sunflower turns, and the white eyes widen
in the ebony faces, the sloe-eyes, the bent smoke
where a pig totters across a village midden
over the sunset’s shambles, Rangoon to Malta,
the regimental button of the evening star.
Solace of laudanum, menstrual cramps, the runnings,
tinkles in the jordan, at dusk the zebra shade
of louvres on the quilt, the maps spread their warnings
and the tribal odour of the second chambermaid.
And every fortnight, ten sharp on Sunday mornings,
shouts and wheeling patterns from our Cadet Brigade.
All spilt from a tea-chest, a studded souvenir,
props for an opera, Victoria Regina,
for a bolster-plump Queen the pillbox sentries stamp,
piss, straw and saddle-soap, heaume and crimson feather,
post-red double-deckers, spit-and-polished leather,
and iron dolphins leaping round an Embankment lamp.
III
There was Plunkett in my father, much as there was
my mother in Maud. Not just the morning-glories
or our own verandah’s lilac bougainvilleas,
or the splayed hands of grape-leaves, of classic stories
on the barber’s wooden shelf, the closest, of course,
was Helen’s, but there in that khaki Ulysses
there was a changing shadow of Telemachus
in me, in his absent war, and an empire’s guilt