A Boat Load of Home Folk (6 page)

9.30 a.m., 10th December

A
LWAYS
, after his wife left him, if only for the first minute or so, Gerald was afflicted with instant regret and was tempted to run after her vowing—well, anything at all, but a comfort of sorts. He resisted this. He had resisted most temptation to rectitude over the last few years, except for unexplainable urgencies of conscience that jipped him into kindness beyond his analysing.

Gerald blinked for some seconds, then with resolution moved along the foreshore towards the shipping stores, the white low building he had seen from the café veranda. The windows were a mass of camera
equipment, small farming implements, bales of cheap cotton, stacks of discarded factory china, canned foods. The doorways were slung back on an interior of shipping clerks and typists under whirling fans. Buyers wandered between desks and stacks of goods.

Gazing in on this he stood, cocky in the bright light with his camera dripping from its strap, his panama pushed back now on the pinking dome with its fair fluff. His face bore an absent-minded smile as he wondered whether he could pick Kathleen up some sort of sop—a scarf, a dress-length, exotic junk: he was mentally labelling it without the wish to be unkind. Behind one of the tables was a heap of shiny Chinese silk one of the buyers had brought down from the north, displayed lushly for a month until sun-spots appeared on the rolls near the shutters, and finally was bundled, the whole unsold mass, at the back of a junior clerk's desk. The colours were remarkably clean and flowed like green and blue and scarlet water even in shadow. He was a man not aware of quality, only of colour or shape, and he went into the long room and picked his way past a counter loaded with patent medicines until he was standing next to the silk with its soft mouldings.

Someone was observing from the doorway of an inner room.

“It's not very good,” she said. “There's better stuff inside.”

Gerald had instant preparations of gratitude that
came with urbane movements of his mouth and crinklings about the eyes. He smiled and said, “It was nothing.” It really wasn't! “It was just a little present for my wife.”

Miss Latimer's eyes clasped his with easy sympathy and an interest that had trapped others before. She was adept at quick friendships and had an intimate manner that involved her hand before her heart, could bring it to rest like a bird on a sympathetic arm, could smile quickly or warmly or remain sufficiently cool. He was conscious at that moment of someone in the inner room passing the door for an instant, of recognition so brief as almost not to be there. In the smothering heat still present in the inner cave of the co-operative stores, Gerald was swooner-like involved with premonitions he did not normally feel. Now he put it down to indigestion or the fight with Kathleen or perhaps even the frightful languishing remains of breakfast that came at him in little short pitches. This other woman was sending for someone and he had agreed already on what to take.

He heard himself say fatuously, “But it would suit you marvellously,” and her ripe answering smile was sufficient for a man so cheaply paid off. In a few minutes he was aware of hiatus in the small talk; it was punching air. The inner room? He tried to peek round the door but saw only legs stretched out that looked familiar but were giving nothing away. In any case Mr Seabrook prided himself on never becoming too
involved with anything at all, so automatically rejected what appeared inessential. The by-products of his interest had over the years produced from his victims a few fruity lyrics, some dampened hankies, and a mistrust in men. But what he never knew about never worried him. And even what he did.

There was more in this transaction than cloth and money and the third person who involved them, for there was some mutation in the atoms that flickered in the air. The world was confettied or peppered with light. Subtract what you like from situations, Gerald Seabrook was with it, swingingly with nuance, and so self-assured and in control of the bowels of emotion he began to laugh remembering the last fight with Kathleen and his suave “But I never hit her till the guests have gone.” This was certainly true. For on the only occasion his arm had been raised, by some freak (he was inclined to believe in divinities) he wrenched a muscle so badly it tore and his arm dropped agonizedly back into a more familiar role.

Outside again with his parcel and his anticipatory senses snapping like mandibles, he took in visually whole strips of waterfront—saw some hundreds of yards away the two old ladies talking together outside a store, saw some link break between them as one came back and one went on. Dear God, Gerald breathed aloud as Miss Paradise wavered towards him along the front, where can I hide? There was nothing but to turn his back and feign interest in the sea or the hill
with its house-cluster; and although his prayers were direct and forcefully simple, nothing could save him ultimately from Miss Paradise who, palpitating in the heat simmer, found him trapped by the last flamboyant near the jetty. He was picking his nose. Not quite hidden by the tree bole, he had seated himself on a council bench that ate its way into his plump rump, and even though he held himself as thinly as possible like some sort of hard biscuit, she descended still. When her voice finally flung a net he submitted with a smile and tried to pretend he had been scratching the tip of his nose after all.

“Do sit,” he begged, moving along a little into the shadier part. The cracking of her knees as she planted herself down was quite amazing.

“I'm very angry,” she began.

“What's the matter?”

“Kitty's the matter. She's so annoying. I've let her go.”

“She won't go far in this heat.”

“I don't suppose so.” Miss Paradise closed her umbrella very deliberately. “Why do you fight so much?”

“Why does who fight?”

“You. You and your nice wife.”

“Don't you think that rather impertinent?” Gerald asked.

“Nothing's impertinent in places like this and at our age,” Miss Paradise said. “At our age.” She repeated the pronoun with intense satisfaction.

“You mean your age,” Gerald replied.

“I mean ours. You are not nearly as young as you would like others to believe.” Thirty years of spleen were emerging in one convulsion. “I am only fifty-six. You cannot be much less.”

Gerald was redder and angrier than heat required.

“The answer, of course, is mind your own business,” he said.

“Then you should not make your squabbles so public.”

“Oh for God's sake!”

Miss Paradise was wrestling with a cigarette and holder but the end result was a pitiful fracture that she lit nevertheless.

“Wave for the dinghy,” she commanded. “We'll go back and get out of the heat. You are going back, aren't you?”

“Yes.” Gerald was beginning to sulk.

If it was merely the heat that had been rising from the rank grass they would have been bonded by the sticky sympathy created, but there was a fine scent of dislike. Gerald lit a cigarette, too. He began to wonder if Kathleen could be watching from the
Malekula
through the spyglass of a port.

“Actually,” he said, “we're very fond of each other.” He squeezed his parcel to convince himself and instantly thought of the other woman, while Miss Paradise cackled five chook notes of disbelief. She prodded with her parasol a vicious little hole between the
kikuyu roots and dug up a mound of sand and dirt. After a minute she looked back along the road for Kitty but there was no sign, and in an unlikely way she began to worry. She knew herself to be naturally cruel, and only she understood how hard it had been to fight her inner impulses for all those years, to practise a kindness based on the need to retain a companion. Oh, the self-denial of it!

Gerald Seabrook, she observed, had risen to wave at the
Malekula.
“Hi!” he shouted across the water and made fatuous rowing signs. A deck-boy waved back, but nothing else happened and Gerald was forced to walk along the wharf past the crates and the wire fish-creels. A middle-aged blackfellow lay half-asleep with his old felt hat jammed down, his splayed toes resting on a rope-coil, at home to all the flies.

“Excuse me,” Gerald said absurdly, “we want to go out there.”

The blackfellow opened his eyes and blinked.

Gerald pointed to the
Malekula
and remembered something and fished for a coin which the man inspected without passion, closing his eyes again.

Miss Paradise began to walk along the jetty towards him. Gerald, in rage and lust for escape, cupped his mouth and hailed the boat over and over. At last Brinkman appeared on deck and stared across the blue thick water at him. He shouted something neither could understand, but after a little a dinghy pulled away and came towards the jetty.

Gerald recalled his manners for once and stepped in ahead of Miss Paradise; but as he turned to hand her in over the side, he dropped his parcel into the harbour and when they fished it out it was a ruin.

F
ATHER
G
REELY
had been a spiritual investigator, the very private eye of ecclesiastical courts, for years. Padding across the tarmacs of airport terminals, through the spurious security of plastic and nylon carpeting in Gauguin colours that went with the terminal bars, he was a sinister figure in his black, much given to gaberdine overcoats and overstuffed briefcases. The nose, the formidable jaw, the baggy eyes and the hard mouth gave nothing away—he was a dangerous poker player—while his habit of reading a paper and watching over the top of it the farewelling unmarried couples gave his whole person an ambience of espionage. He carried his job like a disease.

Now, having left the others by the Burns Philp Stores, under the awnings with their cameras clicking like crickets, he came up the main street along the water-front, his bulging grip clinging to official letters, two changes of underwear, three pairs of socks, an
admonitory letter from the bishop and a secret communication from the provincial of the area. His strangeness attracted natives like flies. He was buzzed about by children and tried to smile, although the heat and the nuisance of it all were making him inwardly whimper.

“Off now! Off now!” he kept saying as unbrusquely as he could manage, patting the thick air about him with his free hand. Not once did he think consciously of what he would have to say, to do, although those very things were all round him like climate. Or love. He did not know much about love, imagining from the cruciform tower where his bleak eyes watched the world that folk disported themselves as challenge to challenge. The bliss flaked off within months and there they were, the contestants, one battered, one victor, and the ropes sagging all round the ring. But when the beaten and the conqueror looked out over the crowd, faces were turned away, their souls or the features of them in shadow, and they too were all in pairs, wounding, striking, accepting.

He wiped his face on his fourth handkerchief—Deladier had warned him things dried so fast in the heat there was no need to bring too much—and he swung right between the big store that sold plastic gimcrackery to the natives and the offices of Air-Torres, and paced steadily up the hill towards the mission buildings and Father Lake's doom.

Mulgrave was an ashen flurry in the parlour, somehow
desexed in his cassock that he insisted on wearing for visitors despite the heat. One hand was fingering a frantic pocketed set of beads. Since his moralistic pounce three weeks before he had crumpled with a kind of social regret that made him tongue-tied before Lake and unable to regulate those functions which must be shared. He had tried at first to excuse himself—what else could he do? The morals of the parish, the young? Lake said, “Sure thing, feller, I'd have done pre-cisely the same, pre-cisely that. In fact I'd have emptied the bucket on me.” His charity only made things worse. So now when Mulgrave had to take in his hand that of the sombre Greely, the flower of guilt pressed between their obscene damp palms yielded a horrible conspiratorial scent.

But,

“It's terrible weather. Terrible,” Greely commented, putting black hat beside bag and smoothing back his last strands of hair. “I found it dreadful pulling up the hill.” A fan was rebuffing his statements. He stood before it and let the air stream across his face. “Ah.” He let the breath of relief fall out of his mouth.

“It's always like this,” Mulgrave said. “I hardly notice any more, you know. I can't even make a sacrifice of endurance.” He giggled nervously at that. He was not given to cynicism and came from a small town in the south where he had a dentist father and a dental nurse mother and three carefully scrubbed sisters with shockingly white teeth who had behaved predictably
since they had first tottered across the unobtrusive family carpet. So had he.

Greely submitted to the articulation of the fan for some seconds without looking up and then his eyes, which were like grey secret animals under the shaggy brows, ferretted into the other man.