A Boat Load of Home Folk (14 page)

He crawled out of the bed and struggled into his creased whites, fumbling round in the darkened room for his watch which now he discovered to have ceased recording at three twenty. Giddiness attacked him then and he dropped back into a chair with his head grasped in his hands and waited. After a while he managed his socks and shoes and the shirt someone had thoughtfully put on a hanger behind the door. He wiped a bean clean of the sauce and sucked at it and, finding it pleasant and soothing, did the same with another, managing this way to finish half a plate. The food helped enormously and with something like pleasure he watched the sun through the wooden shutters slip down suddenly over the Ebouli hills.

Beyond the veranda the sky was a horrible colour like dried blood and the heat a rubber coat that almost forbade movement. Under awnings a chain of creeper was flung suddenly by wind and all at once, struck obliquely, the trees in the front yard leant over towards
the squatting factory. It was like a stage direction. One moment unbearable stillness. The next frenetic movement all round the sky edges.

Undecided, Stevenson pulled a croton leaf from the vase and cracked it, rubbing the fragments between his fingers. Down the wide hall behind him came the din of voices and thudding feet from Talbot's children in the playroom, unexpectedly released from silence by the wild stranger in the yard. He pushed open the door onto their stage and was dazzled by the light.

“I'm sorry I overslept,” he said apologetically. Three towheads inspected his white face and smiled, and Talbot took his arm and drew him in. Woodsall was protected by a long drink.

“It's only six,” he said. “We're feeding the kids.”

“I have to go,” Stevenson said. His voice came from outside himself (the mouse in the wainscot, he told himself wryly). “I have to be back tonight.”

Craziness, they all cried, even the oldest of the children who was ten and fancied himself an authority on distance. Foolish man. But even as he insisted they explained that one of the doctors had been rung and was coming in the morning.

“I didn't want it,” he complained stubbornly. Thinking of Timmy. Thinking of Timmy all those hundreds of miles away writing with the mumps and telling him about the blancmange that had the fly in it. “I really have to go.”

Talbot was not a subtle man, but offered instead the
darkness, his illness and the ferocity of the wind that was now working savagely at the surface of the compound, dragging dust about like wool. He was persuaded to have another drink and, above the noise of the banging unfastened doors and the thumping of the children, they were all conscious of a high snarl in the air as it knotted and unravelled among the trees.

“That's funny,” Talbot kept saying. “It was only a breeze at five. While you slept. My God it's going to tear the place apart.”

His wife was tying ropes on blinds and bending catches to fit in place. His thanks fell on her through a tangle of loose ropes and slats and he went down the path alongside his host, leaning against the wind. They stood for a minute beside the truck. Talbot kept trying to persuade, not knowing Stevenson was moved by a vision of love he could neither discover nor grasp.

“Don't stop me,” he snapped impatiently. “I've three hours ahead of me as it is.”

Talbot became humble at that and only increased Stevenson's irritation. It is very hard to forgive those you hurt. He drove off abruptly and was instantly sorry, for in the driving mirror he saw the wind belt the other man so hard he staggered, and felt as if he had delivered the blow himself.

Timmy drove beside him.

He said, “Dad, I don't want to go back,” over and over, and his father steered stupidly between the shuddering
jungle and the munching surf into the wind coming up from Pango.

“I'm sorry, boy,” he kept saying through bouts of pain and nausea. “But wouldn't it be better, I mean isn't it better to avoid the nothingness between your mother and father? Why don't you like Marie? Would you hate it if we lived together? Would you?”

“I'd hate it!” Timmy's unbroken voice protested with passion. “I'd hate it hate it!” And his father looked down at the stubborn face slanted away from his shoulder, shadowy with a blue fuzz in the truck cabin, and he was so distressed he swung all over the road. This sobered him up for a bit and Timmy vanished; only his hurt marble-clear eyes remained staring greyly ahead under their long lashes, and his skinny wrists sticking out of the school jumper that was too short for him.

Once, Stevenson remembered harshly, he had hugged the child to him on his first holiday back from the mainland and beneath his hands the small heart pumped steadily although his own seemed ail over the place.

“I've got something for you,” he said and the boy had eyed him off coldly, this parent who shoved him out into the savagery of the school. So he said “What?” without thanks implicit in the short hardness of the word, making it like a stone he'd chuck at an enemy.

“Wait and see,” Stevenson had said, brimming with the sensation of giving that swamped all other apprehensions.
And later he had shown him the model plane gleaming with expense and newness and he had watched shocked as his son deliberately thrust back the pleasure cry that had begun to part his lips and turned to him, instead, an expressionless wiped-clean face.

“Thanks, dad.”

“Do you like it?”

“It's okay.”

“Don't you like it then?”

“I said it's okay.”

“Oh.” Stevenson had gone away and the plane had remained in its box all day untouched and ostentatiously Timmy had lumbered after his old football punting it around the paddock. Yet going past his boy's room that night late and seeing a crack of light exposing privacy to parental glare, Stevenson had managed to peer in, and there was the boy hunched over the plane, his profile unsmiling but intent, and he was stroking the wing-span like a lover.

Stevenson had almost cried.

And now with the wind and rain sobbing and clubbing all over the truck's body he again felt the drunken sentimental tears lurch up to blot out the last glimmer of landscape on the hill-hips above the lagoon and the minatory black cone of the crater diver-poised above the southern sea.

It was then, at the angle described by a coconut plantation tangent upon the bulging Tongoa slopes and a glimmer of road that aimed like an arrow at the airport
grounds, that he slowed his bucketing truck in time to pick out the knotted figure under the living fence. Even in these final and vigorous darknesses, the antithesis was discernible—the effect of something animate against the obscene vegetable growth that was devouring the whole island with a trumpeting fanfare of wind, metallic and hooting through the hollow pipes of tropic grass.

He stumbled in the dark and the wind took him from behind and flung him on the grass hump, where the other lump, that second one of sixty self-accusatory summers, moved uneasily on the earth's thigh and held her taut face away from the rain.

Miss Trumper was beyond questioning or self-support, he saw at once.

He attempted to lift her, the effort grinding his strange guest, and instantly the pain that had lain at the back of his mind like an animal sprang with the consummate effort that gathered her and lumped her and dumped her in the corner of the truck cabin. Water trickled out of her clothes onto the floor and with that mixed the stench of urine pitifuly uncontrolled. Her face flinched.

Some delicacy made him rearrange her sodden clothes after he had settled her with her head against the door. The frailty of her stick-like legs appalled him above the incongruity of snazzy beach sandals through which bulged the blue and veined feet, the lumpy toes. God help you God help, he said continually, and the
pain dragged more prayer out of him in a sticky worm of self-humbling; but as he drove he managed now and again to watch her old head wobble and fall forward and her mouth drop slackly. One hand, he observed, gripped tightly, tightly about some object, so he reached his free hand out to pat the cold skin and found contact with smooth metal. Even as he worked his fingers, gently prising at hers, he realized she was clutching her teeth.

Pity accelerated.

He smashed and flung the truck into town along the last whining, fast obliterating reaches of road over which a tangle of branches like hyphens connecting tree and earth were scattering themselves. And when he reached what should have been the safe glittering cluster of mission hospital, there was only a kind of writhing busyness.

Between the tossing of wind and the faceless people who seemed to be hurling themselves around portions of bucking wall, he was lost and utterly unable to establish links, although he plucked at and called several who snapped and said “for God's sake” as he stammered “But here, but this woman.” They wrenched themselves away from his hands in the rain to attend to the battered victims still trapped in their beds.

Behind him Miss Trumper moved in the dark. Scattered, unfused sounds tumbled from her, bringing him back to the truck where he took her cold hands between his own, patting and rubbing, and bent his
compassionate ear to her streaked mouth which was flecked with saliva and pleas.

She was babbling for a priest.

“I know,” he assured her. “I'll try.”

But she gave no sign of hearing his assurance, and once her eyes opened, almost lizard-like between her words, and the aged irises found him for a few seconds, held him in focus, and underlined her cries. She was beginning to tremble, too, not with the shivering of cold but with the involved slow-developing uncontrollable shake of shock, that, continuing, grinds the flesh from the bone and the last essense of humanity from the spirit. Her hair hung like old grass.

It was too painful for him to stay with her and, putting his jacket over her hollowed chest and arms, he went back into the darkness and found a flying figure at last whose garments he noted made her a religious, and he took her thin arm firmly and requested.

“The bishop went up to Erromango after lunch,” she told him. “Father Mulgrave took him up to the mission.”

“What about Father Lake?” Even as he automatically asked he remembered. And even in the half-light from her hurricane-lamp saw the glaze on her eyes that showed she was determined to protect Lake.

“He was flying out this afternoon.”

“Yes. But the plane did not come. There was no plane.”

She was silent. The viciousness of the wind caught
them and bent them together and just behind them came the crash of a telephone pole and the whine of the wire tangle it dragged behind. The rain burst on them like a tap, and they cowered and ran for the hospital veranda.

He said, “Where would he be?” His impatience demanded a brutal answer. “Would he be in the pub?”

“I don't know, Mr Stevenson.” She had recognized him finally and this small appeasement to his ego at such a point surprised but did not elate him, he realized in an access of charity; and he recognized, too, the dislike in her uninflected voice and knew that scandal concerning him coloured her response, so that the years of his petty despotic insistencies with the native boys working for the firm and the almost uncontrolled bigotry he had felt rose like Tongoa and filled him with regret now that he needed help. He began to explain again, while all the time the surf of rain beat in on them and the wind tore away at the iron roof. He explained slowly and carefully why he wanted a priest and the nun listened in the soaking tormented dark, for each had long ago ceased to care about bodily comfort.

Back at the truck they found the open door which Miss Trumper in an ultimate charge of energy had forced back. The old woman was crumpled in a pool of water beside the truck.

“I'd say leave her with us,” cried the nun, “but there's nowhere. The roof went on the main building
an hour back and we've been shifting patients and equipment over to the prison. Half the patients are still lying in the rain.”

Around them everything was collapsing, or sounded so, and flogging as it fell.

Stevenson bent down and levered the old woman up, cradled her somehow, and flopped her back onto the front seat.

“Good night,” he said.

The little nun's veil had been torn off. She stood there in her soaking clothes with the jagged ends of her cropped boy hair hanging wetly round her face.

“But where are you taking her?”

“The Lantana. For the last sacraments. Spiritual or carnal.”

His own pain devoured his right side. Miss Trumper twitched into stillness at last.

I
N
front of the mirror at the Lantana, doing a small Folies Bergère and feeling hard and unforgiving, Miss Paradise was drinking herself silly, cuddling gin and ice at seven hundred francs a time, bitching at the lemon slices, and watching the day's torpor melt into dark rain lines and wind scrawl. She felt every second of her sixty-two years, but was braving it out with
parfums de bain
and some raggedly applied lipstick whose end result was sad.