A Boat Load of Home Folk (18 page)

Lake stood still in the drenching dawnlight. “No.”

“This is what you should have done yesterday, you know. It shouldn't take a
manifestum dei
to bring you to consciousness.”

“It doesn't concern yesterday.”

“Oh?”

“No. You see. . .” he stopped.

“Can't we get under some shelter somewhere, for God's sake?” pleaded Greely. They were tottering together in a fantastic
pas de deux.
The hospital buildings were still shouldering the wind in part, though there was no one near to call to. Under the remnants of the natives' surgery they huddled against the wind and the rain. Through the gash that had been a door and along a ward were the shapes of beds. Lake walked part of the way along. They were empty. The rain drummed in, on and on.

“Where do you suppose the sisters took them?” Greely asked.

“Into the prison. It's the only stone building in the town. It's double storeyed too, and there's a tiled roof on top of that.”

“Let's go there, then, and see if we can help. Or be helped,” he added selfishly, feeling his legs. He dreaded some youthful expunging drivel from this red-hot-headed fellow. But Lake had taken his arm and,
clutching it between a beggar's fingers, was offering the sore fruit that was his soul. It is your most prized possession, he had been warned. It was to be kept glowingly white under pain of for ever and ever and he had, had, had.

Father Greely regarded him steadily through the wilting greys of leaves that had intruded into the wreck of the room.

“What really is worrying you? Is it. . . .” “Your old trouble” was the old-maidish phrase he felt inclined to use. Lake declined aid.

“Is it what?”

“Is it about the boy?”

“That!” Lake laughed terribly. “That means nothing, you know. Nothing at all in the large sense of things undone or neglected. No. It was this thing last night. But seeing you regard the other as grave you might regard this as trivial. And this is the real wrong I have done.”

“I don't know whether I want to hear.”

“My God! You rotten Judas! Don't you even know your bloody duty? Don't you?” Lake raised his fist to push into the aseptic face in the shadow. “I won't have you act like me, do you hear? Once is enough for any place and even if I deserve inattention I shall bang attention out of you.”

Greely had begun to stumble away down the steps and into the rain once more, but Lake kept after him, tugging at his arm.

“I'm going across there,” Greely said doggedly, pointing to the prison bulk down the slope.

The wind seemed to bend him in two, but he managed to push at the younger man who capered crab-wise beside him, threatening and pleading. Like lovers quarrelling, they went through the now opened gates together and the untended front door into the oily uncertainty of lamps and patients groaning on blankets and the hopeless tending of half a dozen sisters.

“Where are the prisoners?” Greely asked.

“There.” Lake pointed to three natives dragging a bed across the corridor.

“Oh. What was their trouble?”

“Wife-stealing and theft. Whichever is the lesser. Would you care, anyway? Would your sanctimonious, dogma-clouded mind care a scrap? Rest easy. They aren't dangerous. Now will you listen to me?”

“No,” Greely said. His jaw thrust penitents back.

Lake wandered away to one of the nuns. “I can't help,” he apologized. “I'm too sick. Do you mind if I doss down here for a bit?” She only nodded at him, absorbed in rolling a patient across onto dry bedding.

In the dimmer end of the jail, some ante-room with bars, three scabby patients slept on a pile of mattresses. Lake crawled in beside one of them, moving carefully not to disturb.

It was only when the sun and his head split apart next day that he saw the face beside him was gnawed open by the rage of disease.

T
AKE
this scene now. Another postcard from latitude sixteen degrees south and longitude one hundred and fifty eight degrees east. The five of them in the dark. A hurricane lamp spatters lemon light around while outside flat 2 Erromango Street the night is belting the blackness into strips through which, for the first two hours of violence, lightning is reaching, and thunder.

In the slippery shadow Kathleen keeps watching Stevenson's bony face that seems to be moved by pain. She cannot be sure. But for hers and Gerald's, eyes are all closed and Gerald has already stripped the other younger woman to her essentials and even conversationally discovered something to his liking. Outside the wind is thrashing and whacking like a maniac.

They had been half-sleeping, mumbling exchanges now and then in the dark, ever since Stevenson had returned to the Lantana and persuaded them to go back to Erromango Street. Miss Paradise was troubled
at first. She had not wanted to leave her friend, but the priest had dropped asleep beside the bar and Fricotte assured them he would look after them both. Now, having gasped out her last agitation, Miss Paradise had collapsed suddenly in a chair, her head back, her paintless mouth gaping open, and snores bubbling softly out. They all nod towards and away from each other.

At two minutes past twelve a tree crashes across the end veranda and opens up a wound in the roof.

This was the beginning of their personal frenzies, for the hollowed-out house was taking in great gusts of wind, leaves and rain, and forced them to shelter huddled in the room just off the kitchen. Gerald began to complain, ever so lightly, about being hungry, and Marie, selfishly, wanted only to doze through the final damage. But he touched her arm and, in the enduring and persuasive dimness, the pausing of his fingers upon her flesh was so brief it might have been accidental. Baldie. Baldie. When this man, whom she could assess in the brutality of five minutes, became insistent, with the petulant authority of one whose wife had risen to every occasion, that there was nothing to be gained by merely sitting, she found herself becoming coldly furious and nudged the mad old lady at her side into wakefulness. Miss Paradise was very angry. The wind's crazy coughing punched her. She turned a face reshaped by sleep towards the other.

“What is it?”

“They want,” Marie hissed, “they want food. Come and help.”

“I'll come,” Mrs Seabrook whispered across the dark, afraid to wake the head that had plunged its face onto her shoulder. Miss Latimer observed this new coupling. “No,” she said at last. “You'll wake Steve. Just sit there a bit longer. He isn't too good today.”

Kathleen eased her cardigan up into a pad and pushed it gently under the mumbling head. It ground its way into the warmth. Involuntarily her arm went about him and for a minute, under shelter of movement, held his bony body against her and felt the terrible fever of his flesh right through her cotton frock. His illness shocked her. She could only cling to him and hold the rib cage that contained a stirring enemy, and wonder.

Miss Paradise was being pushed ahead into the gutted kitchenette where the food cupboard, still in a piece, was soaked with rain and crawling with leaves. She was filled with enormous hate. She stared while Miss Latimer got a spirit lamp going and watched the stupid little flame jerk even behind the shelter they made from cornflake packets.

“I can't find much,” Miss Latimer was complaining. “I'm not a great cook.”

“Leave me,” Miss Paradise said coldly. “You disturbed me. I might as well suffer fully.” She recalled in a visionary's spasm her dear friend pal buddy Miss
Kitty Trumper late Condamine. Late? She swerved like a crazy cyclist from that! Said “No” aloud to Miss Latimer's baffled face and bent above a bottle of milk and a saucepan she found hurtled under the table. Miss Latimer went away then and said “Well, rather you” and returned through the wind-woven house to where perhaps an arm might await and caress. She did not really care. She was bored.

Miss Paradise, meanwhile, did a small witch brew which turned out to be a harmless white sauce, the only thing possible in the denuded kitchen. There was nothing in the refrigerator except five bottles of beer. She found an empty weeties packet in the cupboard and contemplated it for a moment as the spirit lamp tussled with beating wind. Baldie and his furtive hand flashed before her and the poor anguish of the sleeper and the foolishly trusting face of the deceived Mrs Seabrook who had endured at sea. She discovered no pity for any of them, not even for herself. Slowly she began to tear the cardboard packet into appetizing bite-sized pieces and dropped them gently into the hot sauce where they swelled as gently as her meditation. As she was dropping the last bits of cardboard in, Gerald Seabrook, wolfish and bonhomous, leant into the doorway and in the half-dark he watched beside her as the pieces swelled and moved in the sauce, and he became flippant, giving even her arm a big brother squeeze.

“Looks good,” he said. “Can I stir?”

“I think not,” Miss Paradise replied coldly. She
poked as many below surface as she could and they drowned for the moment and later came up shaped differently.

“Domestic as well,” Gerald said who was not to be rebuffed.

As well as what, she wanted to ask acidly but could afford to wait as her meal would expose him: she wanted to make him munch folly. And as she stirred she wondered if this were brutal or comic or even a final exposure of herself. This potential poisoner added salt and pepper and longed to grate a little cheese.

“Yumm-ee!” exclaimed Gerald, deciding on boyish enthusiasm. “What is it?”

“It's a panacea,” she said, repressing a spasm of guilt. I am not joking, she assured herself inwardly. I am expressing my disgust. “It should cure—a lot of things.”

“Can I help now?” The diffidence took her by surprise, and together they managed to scorch some toast from the hacked end of a loaf Gerald found on top of the refrigerator. The lamp blackened it in a variety of poignant places over which Miss Paradise heaped the balm of her sauce with its swollen brown bodies. The rain lunged in still through the lacerated walls and spat all over the table and the floor.

“This is the difference,” Gerald pronounced fatuously, “between animals and us. That we make attempts to survive. Plates and so on.”

The wall collapsed behind them and Miss Paradise's
shock emptied the last of the saucepan onto the floor. Its white splodge glimmered in the darkness.

It should have been comic, but they became at once so involved with the behaviour of the wind upon inanimate objects that they could not have laughed. Miss Paradise tottered sideways in the blast, holding plates of food in a wild balance intercepted by Miss Latimer rushing out at the thunder of the wall and Kathleen Seabrook silk-pale peering past her into the opened up night.

“Eat!” ordered Miss Paradise tightly. “Eat! We must keep our nerve!” She juggled the plates and the automatic responders took them and went away from the ruin into the now shuddering living-room where Stevenson, disturbed by the noise within his body as much as the outer pandemonium, had staggered up against the wall and was fumbling stupidly for the light switch. As his fingers scrambled over the fibrous plaster, his mind sorted things into proper shape and automatically, too, he took his communion from priestess Paradise who watched, spooning herself, her punishment shared about. She was castigating folly, she told herself, and her own complex and composite reasons for hating mankind.

Stevenson, after one forkful, hesitated and put his plate down. But the woman beside him, the bright-faced one he had observed in some passionate exchange of rage with her husband, kept eating steadily. She knew what was on her plate and, in trying to account
for this, would not be won or beaten back. She ate evenly, pushing the swollen cardboard to one side and watching with pleasure as Gerald unknowingly gobbled the lot, talking vigorously to dispel the first doubts of his tongue, busy at being a charmer.

Across the room in the twilight variations of humble light, Miss Latimer caught her eye and their secret knowledge was exchanged. Although Marie was horrified at the Medici that could produce this farce, she was amused, and the gutsy eating of Gerald satisfied her own quiet rage. I could almost think, she imagined, duplicating the thoughts of the wife, that this old witch had done it for me. And in the shadows Gerald was heard belching and proclaiming his cliché litany of thanks that that was that and now that the inner man and so on and so forth. Kathleen found herself miraculously unbound from the rock of twenty years of marriage and was once more the bed-time child observing the party through the chink in the door and, uninvolved, watching the incomprehensible and savage social antics of her elders with the grog and parts of each other's persons, and the more tender parts of each other's souls.

When the roof went they threw themselves beneath the table which in the burst of wind wedged itself abruptly against the wall forming an A shape that protected their heads from the populated air. Their legs in a row stretched out upon the rain-soaked matting and involved themselves so inevitably and intimately
it was useless to apologize, so that after a while, despite the cold and the frightening effects of turbulence, Stevenson fell asleep again with his head against the warm shoulder of this woman with the horrible husband from whose ever-readily protective arm Latimer leant back. This had folded about her shoulders involuntarily during the last splintering crash. He had offered, somewhat tardily, to protect Kathleen too, but in her new release she had declined, moving away from him until her soft untidy hair was brushing the thin face of the sleeping man.