After the Rain (16 page)

I began to feel foolish, and took my hand from Tony’s arm. He kept his face averted from me, but even in the moonlight I could tell that he was blushing.

“I’ve tried,” he said. “Over and over. They won’t believe it at first. They think I must be queer or something. You know how it is with some of them photographers, always wanting you to strip off and all, but somehow I couldn’t fancy that.”

He seemed close to tears. I said, “I’m sorry, Tony.”

“That’s all right.”

“I’ve been … I’m sorry.”

“Being a father, I expect,” Tony said, “it takes people funny ways. They talk about women getting fancies and all that, but I——”

“A father.” All the tension went out of my legs, and I began to fall.

Tony caught me, and lowered me to the deck. “You all right?” he said.

“I don’t think I can get up.”

“You sick or something? I’ll get Arthur.”

“No.” I sat there, looking at him. I felt rather liquid inside, but quite calm. I said, “Tony, will you help us get away?”

“Leave, you mean? You and Sonn?”

“Yes.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll die. No food or nothing. What d’you want to leave for?”

“We have to. Arthur says the god needs a sacrifice. He says that’s why it came out of the sea. He says it wants a life—something new and unblemished. He says that when Sonya’s baby is born, I have to help him sacrifice it to the god.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I would.”

There was a long silence. “You must be bloody mad,” Tony said, and went indoors.

He went straight into the temple. He didn’t even knock. When Arthur saw him, he put on the frowning mask quickly. “Hee ha—” he said, and then Tony pulled it off him. “Bloody kids’ stuff,” Tony said.

Arthur reached behind the pillow of the bunk, and brought out a kitchen knife, sharpened at the point and at both edges; it was his sacrificial knife. With this he stabbed at Tony, cutting his shoulder. Tony put his hand to the wound, which was bleeding. “Christ!” he said. He reached out for Arthur, but Arthur dodged, and went backwards quickly through the door and into
the main cabin. “Stop him,” he said. “He is attacking the high priest.”

Muriel began to move, but Tony said, “The first one that comes near me will get her face bashed in. This loony wants to kill little kids.”

Arthur said, “Mr. Clarke had no right to say anything about it. He promised to tell nobody.”

Tony said, “Well, he told me.”

Everyone in the cabin remained where he was, and watched Tony and Arthur. Arthur still had the knife, and Tony did not try to look for a weapon, but kept his gaze on Arthur, and came steadily towards him. Arthur backed through the cabin door, and went out on deck. Tony followed him. On the bare deck, the two began to circle around one another.

As for me, I was still sitting there. All the strength seemed to have left me, and had been replaced by peace of spirit. I was quite content to watch. If Arthur were to kill Tony, I supposed I should have to fight. But I hoped that Tony would kill Arthur.

It seemed as if they would circle for ever. Whenever Tony lunged at Arthur, then Arthur would cut at him with the knife, and Tony would have to dodge. Arthur, on the other hand, did not dare to pass first at Tony, for fear that Tony would catch his wrist. “You will all be helpless without me,” he said.

Nobody replied.

Tony was the heavier, but Arthur was the cleverer. He had manœuvred Tony into a position in which Tony had the closer edge of the raft at his back. Slowly they
approached that edge. I said clearly, “You’d better be careful, Tony, or you’ll be over.” For a moment, Tony relaxed his attention to glance behind him, and Arthur seized the opportunity to close.

He stabbed for the neck, but misjudged, and the blow went lower. In the bright moonlight, Tony’s blood was black, staining his chest. He had caught Arthur’s wrist, and the two struggled together, poised on the edge of the raft. Then they both fell into the water. There was a swirl and a snap, and a single shriek from Arthur, but the attendant sharks gave him no time for last words. Tony made no sound whatever.

I stood up, and went to Sonya. She said, “Tony! Poor Tony!” put her arms around my neck, and wept freely. I guided her gently indoors, and put her to bed in the temple, spending the night on the floor beside her bunk. The others slept on deck.

In the morning, Banner woke us. “You can see land ahead,” he said. “I think it’s an island. There are trees and everything.”

*

And so we came to land at last, and to a land that was green, luxuriant and fruitful—the Promised Land of the New Society, Arthur would have called it, but we made no such speculations, and simply set about the business of keeping alive. Arthur’s last words, “You will be helpless without me,” were not justified by experience. We had been helpless with him, but without him we had to help ourselves.

It was as if our time on the raft had been a long
process of recession. We had begun as ordinary,
grown-up
intelligent human beings, and slowly self-doubt, the habit of self-justification, jealousy, possessiveness, all the ordinary human faults had destroyed us. I myself with my tigers and my need to feel intellectually superior; Muriel with her special position, first as Arthur’s spy and then as the woman possessed by the god; Hunter who had run away from any commitment to society before the Flood, and who continued to run away even from our small society on board the raft; Harold and Gertrude, whose ideals were vitiated by doubt and lack of purpose; even Sonya, whose candidness and trust my jealousies destroyed.

But Tony had not been worried by doubts. His horizons were not large; his ambitions were limited. He performed the simple discipline of his exercises; he gave to other people a wide tolerance and respect; he made no moral judgements outside the simple estimate of right and wrong that he applied to himself. Tony was not a noble savage. On the contrary, he fitted very well into a society, asking no more than that it should give him work to do, respect his privacy, and not require him to do anything that he believed to be wrong. He had the simplicity that we think of as childish, but on the raft it was the rest of us who had become as demanding as children, as parasitic, as spiteful, as uncertain. We had moved back, unknowing, making the long journey into childishness as, also without our knowing, the raft had been borne steadily along by the current towards the island.

When he went overboard, Tony left us an example, and by taking Arthur with him, he lifted from us an incubus. We have profited from both.

John Bowen was born in India, sent ‘home’ to England at the age of four and a half, and was reared by aunts. He served in the Indian Army from 1943–47, then went to Oxford to read Modern History. After graduating he spent a year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar, much of it hitch-hiking. He worked for a while in glossy journalism, then in advertising, before turning freelance when the BBC commissioned a six-part adventure-serial for children’s television. Between 1956 and 1965 he published six novels to excellent reviews and modest sales, then forsook the novel for nineteen years to concentrate on writing television drama (
Heil Caesar, Robin Redbreast
) and plays for the stage (
After the Rain, Little Boxes, The Disorderly Women
). He returned to writing novels in 1984 with
The McGuffin
; there were four more thereafter. Reviewers have likened his prose to that of Proust and P. G. Wodehouse, of E. M. Forster and the young John Buchan: it may be fair to say that he resists compartmentalisation. He has worked as a television producer for both the BBC and ITV, directed plays at Hampstead and Pitlochry and taught at the London Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in a house on a hill among fields between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon.