A Boat Load of Home Folk (19 page)

He was sick, she realized. Once in his uncomfortable mumbling sleep he had taken her hand. She could not know of course that he was writing a poem lashed across by bouts of quite unbelievable bitterness that made him think he might be dying. What he was writing took the vaguest form.

Between two times,
he managed to arrange on some invisible papyrus,

The once looked-over

Guest of all dear occasions holds

Hand to hat, to heart, to other things

Unsymbolic and reflects

The hour is late.

It was those last three words that Mrs Seabrook caught him chewing between cardboard and bile.

At the Lantana there was only the bar-rail left.

The jigsaw ruins of the residency's cocktail party,
of the Tête Héroique with its spilled cosmetics, of flat 2, 17 Erromango Street, of the hospital at Prison Hill, of the bishop's residence, and the
Malekula
spitted on rock-fall across the bay, were like the spoils of a wake. Too much joy lay shattered everywhere, and in the native villages under the crushing admonitions of blown-down palms, natives awoke with a gritty feeling behind their eyes, if they had slept at all.

Stevenson was the first awake in Erromango Street, fired into daylight by his own pain and the sound of breathing near his heart. His eyes discovered an unfamiliar fairness and turning his neck he saw, too, the quiet sucking of a thumb; beyond his stirring legs sodden bedding, a fractured window-pane and an arrangement of leaves. It was a re-birth. All their waking eyes discovered each other at the same time. The thumb was slowly withdrawn. Miss Latimer prodded the secretions of sleep from the corners of her eyes. Mr Seabrook hauled himself up from an unfortunate curve his body appeared to have made across Miss Latimer's. And Miss Paradise, her orbs twitching from hangover, jerked into a vertical position. Then memory hit her.

It was with them all, striking in its various fashions. Kathleen Seabrook, lifting her face which sleep had pressed into another shape, smiled up at Stevenson with the candour of a child.

His heart would have, but for the pain, turned over.

“It's six.” Miss Paradise dealt in metallic words. Miss
Latimer's unabashed clock was spilling its sound all over the room.

“It seems to be over,” Gerald said with his wild gift for the fatuous. Only his wife could not agree.

The windows held stir and movement, but the sound had faded into the steady sea-throb. The rain had moved north.

Their squalor now fixed them for ever at this point with each other, the glaucous eye aware. Some cries, like bird wings rattling, broke across the early morning.

“I'm going out,” Stevenson said. “I want to see what needs doing.”

“Passivity in crises.” Marie leant back. “Passivity. What on earth can be done?”

“There are people. People besides us,” said Stevenson with the bite of dislike in his voice. He'd been a pretty good dog. “It could be—” He intended irony, but sharpness took his breath away for the moment and he stopped idiotically and stood looking at her strangely. Mrs Seabrook who had rested her head all night against his slackening heart sprang up and took his arm when he lifted it away. He removed her hand, but gently, for he wished to be alone on this last day, solitary, underlining the last gasp: this was, he felt, his last day. Miss Latimer dropped her eyes before the blue glare of his own and shifted a little distance from the man who had fondled her furtively all night. “That someone might be hurt, I was going to say.” He finished his statement
with some difficulty, giving a hiss to the sibilants.

In the gash of door he made a paused statement that was missed by everyone before he went down the battered gardenway to the street. At this precise moment, Gerald, fondling his bald spot, was contemplating an inner need for admiration and found himself unwillingly offering to help; but his wife's eyes inspected this gesture with such dispassionateness he sensed his foolishness swell along his throat. He needed to be critic and challenger.

Across the room Miss Paradise's painted face had broken up suddenly into smudged areas of tears like a grief-stricken map whose boundaries had been changed by war. She sat weeping, her Milly Molly Mandy legs jutting forward under the gable, her hands by her side and her unconcealed face gazing out but not seeing through the raped walls across the bitter blue of the lagoon alive in the sunlight.

The limp sunlight. This postcard was a bit of a failure. Half the littoral seemed to have been torn away and, above, the crater sent up the thinnest smoke trickle. Well-known landmarks were missing. From the veranda remnants, torn ribbons of palm draped across the blue vine flower that had become unlinked and was festering in the sun between bed-posts and scattered saucepans.

No one cared to help Miss Paradise.

But, “Don't go without me,” Kathleen cried loudly down after him. The jungle trappings had fallen back
behind the man who was walking slowly to the corner of the bay road. He carried part of the vine with him on his shoulders and was unsteady on his feet.

“You've forgotten your shoes!” she heard herself call fatuously as, swinging them from her fingers, she ran after him in her own bare feet, anxious for something. Gerald was staring amazed. Her anxiety found purpose.

“She is a Nightingale manqué,” he announced to the room. “She thrives on misfortunes.”

Miss Latimer inspected him then with a good deal of lip twisting.

“What a training you would have given!”

“Unselfish people are the most goddam crashing bores.”

Miss Latimer laughed harshly at this. “Do you mind shifting a teeny bit?” she pleaded. “You're leaning on me again and I do have to start somewhere on the mess. It is my home home home.”

Gerald stared insolently round the walls. The sterility of the house still showed through, but the breakages now added humanity. Some sunlight was even seeping in. “I wonder why. But of course, homes have to be restored.” He was thinking of his wife now, pattering in the slush of the hurricane-rotten landscape bearing the saint's shoes like an acolyte. Envy for the moment leant forward and, as if it were a string, pulled Stevenson and Kathleen back along the road, up the path, through leaves and into the room where she foraged
foolishly for her own footwear. Though each of them could have walked barefoot across deserts.

The air was full of hate, a warmth emanating from the spreadeagled Miss Paradise, Miss Latimer now on her feet, and the husband watching his wife in an action that excluded him. Stevenson leant heavily as he waited against the superbly surviving dresser, an oak piece of enduring quality that had got into the flat by mistake. Kathleen Seabrook straightened up finally and turned on Gerald an eye so cool it might have been part of the sea, but bleaker. If he had cared to look east he would have seen, too, that the
Malekula
had vanished.

“Something will turn up,” Miss Latimer said in interpretation. “Planes will come in. Everything will resume as usual.”

Not everything, Stevenson thought, conscious that this was his last day. And glad of it, until he remembered Timmy and, some time after that, his grown-up not-needing daughter. Timmy had become a vague blondness with spaghetti tube arms on a cricket bat that he whacked inexpertly this and that way, or practising googlies with empty hand and wide arm arc that stretched and stretched across his mind until everything vanished in a burst of pain that tore across his chest with banners flying and a triumphant bray of trumpets.

Kathleen Seabrook was ahead of him now, walking down the path. He knew she only wanted to escape
and his sympathy, had he the strength, would have moved him to take her hand. Instead he turned back from the veranda and on impulse went up to Marie and put his dry lips to her cheek.

“Good-bye,” he said, the finality somehow charging everyone.

She did not look up at once but delivered her last blow with covered eyes.

“I'm pregnant,” she said.

T
HE
office was a shambles too.

Some native boys were dragging the front wall off the mercery, which was ruined anyway, in the still-washing sea a foot high over the road and half that in the store. No one said I see you Mister Stevenson, sah. No one smiled. Every one of the boys had lost his hut the night before. Anyone hurt? Stevenson wanted to ask. Anyone? He had not the courage, and the components of grief were the impassive faces of the sweepers and haulers who moved stupidly among the sodden rubbish that was now dead loss.

“I don't think there's anything you can do,” he said to Mrs Seabrook. “There's nothing I can do for the moment. That's my room there.”

The sea moved gently across it.

“You see,” she said a bit pitifully, “we didn't need the shoes.”

“We had,” he countered, recalling the last punch that
had been delivered, “to go back for yours. It was my fate.”

Kathleen felt her lips pucker over this sentimentality, but could only be banal.

“Is that your desk?”

“Yes.”

He picked up the memo pad he had left there. The last entry said “Dravuni” and on the next page was a poem he had scribbled during the week before the cruise.

The mind walk, out to the sward

Where green on green, emphatic in this air,

Involves the harbourside.

It must not seem we tipple

From office windows at the goffered view.

They'd swab us for our drunken thoughts

Reaching past this to that, if once they knew.

He'd had trouble with the next bit. It was a mass of erasings and scribbled-over lines. But it was at least what he intended to say, if inept.

The soul bounds back on its lead,

A pretty good dog, at that, it would appear.

Squats beside desk to guard

What's left of clerkly self.

Here public service eyes watch through sly glass

The free dogs and the lovers move

Unreal upon the palpitating grass.

Now, looking at his too-orderly hand-writing, he knew he was always and had only ever been clerkly self bound to Holly for ever by something that certainly wasn't even affection, nor as definable, yet tugged him into line. There was a packet of pain-killer tablets in his drawer. He had been hoarding them for months against a day like this one. Now he took it out and emptied three of the little white pills into his sweating fingers. Mrs Seabrook watched him but said nothing.

“I'm not well,” he explained as he palmed them into his mouth. How bitter they were. He remembered the courting park where, across the plane surface of yellow and green, rhomboids of shadow stretched emerald like blocks of music. Trees squatted solid. People moved under them aware of the body's pleasure in the day, the wild health in the blood. How often, even younger, with jaws working at caramel, the fingers smoothed out the grease-proof wrapper for the eyes to devour as well, news about the latest stars. And then the fingers would discard paper pieces that said Pete Rivers, born March 1948, took up dancing at nine, was a gridiron player for Western United and starred in Dancin' Demons. Has fair hair, grey eyes, and is five feet three out of his built-up shoes. The wind chews the papers.

He imagined his own. James Thomas Stevenson born December nineteen thirteen or fourteen or something he was now vague about (although he felt it to be more), was a public servant of no particular ability,
and with a niggling aptitude for regulations (but no real administrative powers) that kept him stuck up in latitude sixteen degrees south, longitude one hundred and fifty-eight degrees west with not much possibility of anything else now except retirement in another ten years or so, but he wasn't going to last even a shade of that time. He had not much hair and blue eyes and stood five foot seven on his dignity and had once played a Roman soldier in a school production of
Julius Caesar.
He swallowed the last pill with trouble.

“I know,” this woman with the disconcerting straight eyes said.

He tore the top sheet off his memo pad and ripped the verse up, dropping the pieces one by one on the washing floor. They sailed round him.

“You know, you can't help really. I'll have to get the boys into working order and start getting this place cleaned up. All you people can do is sit around for a day or two and wait till the plane services start, as they will.”

He listened to his phone which was silent as old marriage.

But the sea grumbled wildly and formlessly as it tried to follow the rags of wind across the island. Mrs Seabrook felt foolish all of a sudden, standing stupidly in this strange room with a man she did not know yet had nursed half the night out of some challenge to pity and a rejection of her husband. There was an emptiness everywhere, in each of them and the room as
well, which, try as they might with worn ploys of talk, could not be filled.