A Boat Load of Home Folk (13 page)

He had been put into boarding-school too soon.

He was ten and thin and recovering from a respiratory
complaint whose recurrence weakened his natural cheerfulness. His aunt, who had brought him up since he was three, made private and busy consultations. “A drier area,” they had all said. He was packed away with all his underwear taped Vincent Joseph Lake, a new bat, a pencil set, and a lot of confused advice about blowing his nose and speaking up if he felt ill and resting as much as possible and playing good healthy sport.

The bigger boys, the small bullying knot who controlled the play-yard, were waiting for him on the first morning.

He had stood shivering on the asphalt quad wanting badly to wet himself as they swaggered up and closed in.

“What's your name? How old are you? What's your father do? Can you fight?” The questions blurred and coalesced into one enormous threat as his skinny legs trembled. He began to sneeze in his nervousness, his head bouncing. This pricked them. Jeers and cat-calls and forced loud laughter bombarded him and the less successful smaller boys, anxious to capitalize, moved in as well.

They gave him hell for a fortnight—dropped ink on his books and clothes; tripped him up in corridors; made farting sounds right behind him and then complained to the master. At night he'd find his bed tumbled or the pillow sodden. They filled his football boots with glue. Then after a while they began to forget
about him and one of the senior boys, who had observed with some pain but refrained from interfering, got him to do small jobs and patted him kindly on his skinny shoulders and made him grin. He hero-worshipped this boy until one steaming night on the pretence of helping him with his prep the bigger fellow attempted seduction, and young Lake, ignorant and afraid of hurting the other boy's feelings and completely unsure of what he should do, complied in his own clumsy way.

They were united furtively and occasionally for a year until matriculation removed the one and liberated the other.

Others had suspected, but he had slid into a position of moderate acceptance in the junior school, came in the middle of his class, was mediocre at games, and sang in the choir. He had never experimented again but formed rather weak friendships with other unsuccessful boys and trudged on through senior school and went prizeless out of the closing gates into a clerical job in a law office. He took out two girls but never plucked up the courage to kiss either of them, and one Christmas, after running into one of his old teachers and talking with him seriously over a lunch-time beer, he entered a seminary in despair as much as in hope, and for a time his problems were settled for him.

He never had to think.

“I think that was what pleased me most,” he admitted drunkenly to himself now, tracing interlocking wet
rings on the bar before him. “I never had to think, to worry, to examine. I accepted the lot.”

“Garbage,” he added out loud. “Utter garbage.”

His loneliness had only sharpened in his thirties and he had begun clubs for the young men in the parishes in which he worked. It was only a step from there. Only a step.

Yet fighting it back all the time, all the time, all the bloody time he said now, that he could remember, became such anguish he decided he would have to go away. No island outpost could really need such a failure, he knew, but he concealed his uselessness under the bright boy smile that disarmed authority. Everyone said what an amiable bloke and watched alarmed when he drank too much at the church socials and made remarks that smacked of the unorthodox if not the actually heretical. Otherwise . . . he was certainly fun.

“I was always fun,” Lake said, looking up and trying to catch Fricotte's eye. “I was fun fun fun and not one bloody person really liked me.”

Fricotte was battening down shutters. Some of them sprang loose at once.

He watched a hideous painted lady some tables away dab more colour on her mouth. It was an unspeakable wound. Her face held under its wrinkled surface the outlines of something he already knew but had forgotten. Gulping the last of his whisky he wondered for a minute or two where or how, and inexplicably he was in an inland town cluttered with pubs and pepper-trees
where locusts drilled the summer wide open. The metal of cars grilled. Bare flesh, it was sensed, would spit if placed directly upon roadways. He was cycling out of town along the southern road and his black choking clothes were devouring him from the outside. He was on a sick call and he carried his God in a black valise on the carrier. Not even this protected him, however, and at the swimming hole two miles from town he left his bicycle under the trees and pushed through the tree growth to the sandy beach above the water where truant boys ducked and dived. Their nakedness terrified him but gripped him there in his clerical disguise, a timid satyr beneath the freckled leaves. He was recognized and hailed and invited to join them but could only shake his head and grin and tremble until finally one of the smaller ones waded out and stood beautiful and dripping before him.

“Father . . .” the boy had begun and had stopped startled as the man turned from him almost roughly and stumbled at a half run through the sand and into the shelter of the trees.

W
HEN
they had passed the second of the big villages and were somewhere up above Vaitape, Stevenson had stopped the truck and got out, leant against a buritree and been sick. Streaming-eyed, he waited gasping until the spasm settled and looked back at Woodsall from his reddened eyes.

“Sorry,” was all he could manage. His belly felt as if it had been scooped round by a knife.

Woodsall did not know whether to help or ignore in British fashion, as one would a fellow diner who had emitted some unpardonable sound, so he made noncommittal noises and vague movements with the door handle while Stevenson weakly waved him back.

“Do you think it's your ulcer?” Woodsall asked sillily.

“No. It's more than that. It's been happening too much lately.”

“Lay off the late nights, old boy,” Woodsall said,
embarrassed. He winked disgustingly and Stevenson had to hide his anger which brought bile straight back to his mouth by clambering into the truck and grinding off in bottom gear, churning along for a hundred yards before making the change up.

Unbelievably green and still, the hills staggered back from the heat like giant walls of sea that broke finally on the far side of this island in a surf of trees while, unsure of itself, the road twisted between low spurs and tidal inlets. Stevenson felt dependent on the truck as if it knew its own way. He clung to the wheel. But near Mount Ebouli, with the harbour and the islands now below them like some dream of bestilled heaven, he was forced to stop once again. This time, while Woodsall held his thin shoulders, he convulsed against the red flushed bole of a palm, but nothing came, only the thinnest trickle of green slime as the pain ripped him open.

“You won't be able to drive back like this,” Woodsall said. “Let's turn round. Or for God's sake let me drive.”

“No!” gasped Stevenson. “They're expecting you. And I've got to get back.” His ruptured eye took in a distant and recurring picture of thigh and breast and her body's curve over him and more than his own body reaching to hers, some rapt sense that contained a promise or a revelation.

“No,” he kept repeating. “No.” But Woodsall had taken him by now to the truck and helped him up into
the back where he stretched out on a kind of palliasse. They moved on again and over the sick man's head the sky bucketed behind greenery and then as glass stretched like a woman's body in a yawn that provoked and stirred the next aspect of love.

Fidgeting about, he dug out his little bottle of whisky, uncapped it and trickled some into his mouth where it washed and scarified. His needs extended with each day: the pain, the reaction, the need, the spasm, and the need again. He could not dissociate the quality of his need from the nature of pain and now was uncertain which had come first—the boredom and the drink or the drink and the pain. Somewhere inter-sticed was the need for love that he still knew not to be satisfied. Sleepily now he puzzled on chickens and eggs and chickens crossing roads and, associating, recalled his wife and his son with his gumboil cheeks and the peaked school cap he wore dead straight above his fringe.

“Have a good term, feller?” It was a cheap and crummy school. The badge was too big and the headmaster afraid of something—perhaps it was the parents.

“I don't really want to go back.”

“Why's that?”

“I'm lonely.”

Dear God, thought Stevenson. You're lonely? You? With a hundred knuckly-kneed small boys all shoving
and chewing and yapping and running and sleeping and peeing and showering. Lonely?

“You don't know what it is yet to be lonely,” he said.

“Yes, I do,” the boy insisted.

“Well, what is it then?”

“It's being in a big crowd and not knowing anyone. It's being on the wrong side at meals and on sports days. It's not being picked.”

That's it, Stevenson thought. That's it in a nutshell. It's not being picked, you poor little blighter shot into boarding-school. And he remembered the wind-swept oval in the mountains with mournful pines about its margins and the little scraggly team of small boys pelting round in their sandshoes. Timmy had run with his little skull craning forward and his mouth ajar, tumbling in fifth and only two behind that, while the first and second waggled batons of red and white. He had gone over to him and, putting his hand on the narrow chest, felt the heart throbbing like a bird behind the fragile frame. “Good man,” he had whispered. But Timmy's lashes had drooped quietly over his failure and he walked away to the stall where the mothers sold hot dogs and pies until he was joined by a porker of a kid with his face hidden by bun.

He said now, “It's my job, you know. I can't help it. You have to go away to school because there's nothing here. I don't really want you to.”

“I know,” the boy had said. “But can't I stay here?” His persistence was pathetic.

“How can you? What could you learn at the mission school?”

“I can read.”

“Oh, please,” Stevenson had said. “Don't make it harder for us. You know we love you more than anything.”

He squeezed his hands tightly together as they stood on the airstrip in the midday heat.

The boy tightened his small face.

“It's all right,” he said. “Don't worry. I'll be all right.”

And he had gone off up the steps to the plane door, his red cap still squat on his head and his airways bag swinging from his hand.

He didn't wave, Stevenson thought miserably as he lay on the truck floor. He fumbled in his pocket for the last letter with the fat handwriting that said, “Dear Dad, Thank you for the pocket money and the book. I have spent it already. I have a friend called David. No one else likes him much but he has a battery set radio and we are let listen at week-ends. I came tenth in history. Sir said the rest wasn't as good. Please send me ten shillings. Love, Timothy Maurice Stevenson.”

The creasings represented love, he was aware as he folded and replaced the staggeringly simple revelation of suffering and need. “Dear Timmy,” he would write, “Would you like to ask your friend up here for a week
or two at the end of term? He can come back with you and your mother. He might find this place amusing.”

And I will be diverted, he swore to himself, from needs of all kinds and will make marital sacrifice and hide the face of lust. He rocked onto his side and closed his eyes and yielded to the bounce of the truck.

He woke at Dravuni with the balloons of three interested faces wobbling above him, Woodsall's, the mine manager's and Ted Napara, a native foreman whom he had once seen put away for six months for wife-stealing. He felt a silly sympathy. They were watching him now, their features crumpled with concern and curiosity and a reluctance to administer their diffident aids. Someone eased him up and two of them helped him down, packing their arms under his to walk him across to the mine manager's bungalow. From a canvas chair he watched the swoon of their melted faces emerge into shape in the half-light of the bougainvillea screen, the eyes shrinking to normal while their tongues created paragraphs of advice from which only a fact or two stood clear: he was to rest up for a day until they could get one of the medical officers from the port.

Later he recalled a bed and coolness and a fan pulsing behind and some hours of loss. When he woke his hands were curled as gently as tendrils, all the tense clenching vanished. Talbot's wife brought him a plate of beans in butter sauce that he could not bring himself to eat for the moment, but there was a glass of
very light dry red wine that he sipped slowly as he sat up. All round, conservatism, even in this temperature and latitude—old family prints of mainland relations—matriarch, patriarch, siblings in rows of sailor suits, all with a patina of sepia and fly speck. Some indoor lilies drooped. The quilt was china white raised piecrust and the floor an autumnal linoleum in a country that knew nothing of this season, only the frightful fecundity of polished leaf growth, gaudy bract and unscented flower.