Island of Demons (38 page)

Outside, oompahs had given way to the cascading tinkle of a
gamelan
. I looked up to see the Kuta group, McPhee's old orchestra, already settled and raising their hammers to rattle off into something inchoate and watery with Lothring on the female drum, hands a blur, guiding and driving them on.

“A new composition,” Walter explained far too loudly, ”inspired by the ocean that he saw in a very wet dream.” It had ended up sounding like an imitation of Debussy at his most pastelish. Nyoman Kaler was out there too, hovering at the edge of the group, hiding vainly behind a cigarette, ears pricked for what he might borrow and puckering sourly at his orange crush. Behind me, Walter was explaining his big, new idea of an art shop exalting sea and fish to the brothers who were automatically scanning each other's faces, trying to organise a common reaction that retained symmetry. The piece ended and Lothring looked around swiftly – no time for a smoke – caught everybody's eye and immediately brought them in again with a few smart drumtaps, the introduction to
baris
. A symbolic pair of curtains had been set up, and now a dancer – properly male for once – parted them and stepped out evenly into the space, back stiffened by a long
kris
running from shoulder to shoulder, bright sunlight gleaming off the thick white makeup and painted black moustache. It was Sampih, but a Sampih transformed. Every movement of his eyes, his shoulders, his feet picked out and synchronised with something in the music. He was not performing to it, he embodied it. Even the Westerners could tell that this was something special,
luar biasa
. The music accelerated into a sudden stormy section and Sampih was all audacious fireworks, sharp muscle contractions, then riding the slowing rhythm with his breath and feeling its crests gently with his hands to cries of “Beh!” from the Balinese who were there, their eyes fixed, all sympathetically inside his body, bouncing on the balls of their own feet along with him, feeling with him, as he waited for the next explosion of sound and movement. At the end, there came a throaty Balinese roar, thunderous applause from the Europeans. Sampih, allowing no wedge between self and role,
sembahed
unsmiling and glided back through the curtains. I turned to Walter.

“What? How? Who?”

This was not the work of the Bedulu woman. This was something else. I caught Nyoman Kaler throwing down his cigarette and stamping on it before stalking off, a very choleric Kaler, a “windhead” as the Malay has it.

Walter was immensely pleased with himself. “You know Mario?” Of course I knew him. Who did not? The most famous dancer in the whole of Bali, inventor of the flashy
kebyar duduk
, a dance that had created a sensation and set him head and shoulders above everyone else on the island. A very vain and difficult man by reputation, completely unapproachable. “He owed me a favour or two and felt uncomfortable not being able to pay me back so he agreed to take Sampih on for three months, sink or swim, and we needed a main act for the opening, so … Well, I think he swam at our
akvarioom
, don't you?”

I was lost for words, “gobsmacked”, to use one of Walter's recent acquisitions. He had taken two problems – three really – and, putting them together, created a short-circuit to make a solution. I ducked confusedly behind the curtain, looking for Sampih, wanting to congratulate him, warn him against excessive arrogance, ask him what further arrangements had been made … He had disappeared. I asked around. Balinese shrugs. Headshakes. From the front, I heard Walter's voice, shy, squirming and embarrassed, forcing itself into a stiff speech. Now I was stuck behind the curtains until he had finished.

“Ladies and gentlemen. The Balinese just do things but, for some reason, we have to both do them and say what it is that we are doing. Sooo … Let me thank you all for coming to this opening today. I should like …” There was a sharp bang, a puff of blue smoke, as if in mockery of a military salute, and all the lights went out in the tanks. As I peered round the curtain, suddenly, all the fish in the main display were boiling, convulsing, one even flying through the air to land, with a wet slap, in the lap of a large – and not surprisingly, screaming – woman in a cloche hat. Another short circuit, then, this time less welcome. The crowd turned like some great mindless beast and a stampede was about to happen when Walter – in what was surely his finest hour – stopped it dead.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he called. “I should just like to announce our special surprise event for this evening.” Unwillingly, they turned back and listened. The hubbub died down. Perhaps all this had been a deliberate stunt. All colonial life is about keeping up a front. Perhaps they were showing themselves up. They looked guiltily around for natives that they might be showing themselves up in front of. “We have just decided that, in about an hour, we invite you to a special, and very fresh, mixed fish barbecue on the beach.” They stared and then someone started to laugh and soon they were all laughing and clapping. The military band struck up again and Walter retrieved the flying fish with great ceremony and carried it away, by its tail, to be cooked. One of the waiters caught my eye, smiled and shrugged. There were, he seemed to say, plenty more fish in the sea.

***

Another of those dreaded brown envelopes and Walter, headholding and gibbering over coffee.

“I won't do it. They can't make me, can they?” I opened my eyes in interrogation. He picked up the letter. “Listen: ‘Following the success of the recent
akvarioom
opening and in the light of your intimate connection with the museum, the Resident has determined that you are the fitting person both to organise the reception for H.E. Governor General throughout the period of his stay in Bali, the cultural events he will witness and to show him round the installation before the official opening'. And then there is an invitation to the banquet in Singhraja. ‘White tie and tails'. Tails! I hate such things! You know how I hate them. They can't make me do it.” All this fuss. The boys would be thinking he was about to start another painting.

“At least the aquarium opening was a success. Now it's official. I don't really see how you can refuse, Walter. As a semi-illegal alien you need friends not enemies and you disdain to take Dutch nationality. You know Smit would love to have a reason to send you packing. The Governor General might be a good friend to have.”

He groaned. “It doesn't work that way. You make friends with a dog to make friends with its owner not the other way around.” He slumped over the table, showed teeth, growled and howled in pain.

“Walter, this is his first visit to Bali and he will be judgemental. Please stop that noise. Every official promoted will thank you for it whilst every one found wanting will always lay that at your door. But think of it another way. You will have a huge budget. You can order around the army and the air force, arrange them in nice, neat patterns, make Smit stand in the hot sun for hours. All the Cokordas have to do anything you say. You can turn Bali into your own personal fairyland.” He raised his head. There was a flicker of interest at the back of the eyes. “You can get them to paint anything any colour you say – even Gunung Agung. You can pick the music and the food and the flowers and the dancers. You are dictator for a day.”

“Must I bite into the sour apple? Will there be not just
Wirrwarr
but also
Trara
?”

“All the
Trara
you want, Walter.
Trara-boom-de-ay
.”

He let his tongue loll out and panted doggishly. “God damn me, I'll do it.”

***

“As I mentioned this morning to Charlie,

There is far too much music in Bali,

And although as a place it's entrancing,

There is also a thought too much dancing.

It appears that each Balinese native

From the womb to the tomb is creative.

From sunrise till long after sundown,

Without getting nervy or rundown,

They sculpt and they paint and they practise their songs,

They run through their dances and bang on their gongs,

Each writhe and each wriggle,

Each glamorous giggle,

Each sinuous action,

Is timed to a fraction.

And although all the ‘Lovelies' and ‘Pretties'

Unblushingly brandish their titties,

The whole thing's a little too clever

And there's too much artistic endeavour.”

Thus Noel Coward on Bali, protesting against the onerous schedule imposed by Walter on his visitors. It has been wrongly assumed, because of the opening, that he and Charlie Chaplin came together. As a witness, I can vouch for the fact that this is emphatically not the case. The coda, with its typical cowardly sting in the tail, is habitually omitted. It runs thus, “Forgive the above-mentioned Charlie, I had to rhyme
something
with Bali”.

His extreme intellectual energy masked by professional langour, The Master spent his time on Bali “trying to find the rhyme” – his habitual term for lying around doing nothing more demanding than watching the slow dissipation of his own cigarette smoke. He lay by and in, the pool. He lay on the sofa. He lay in bed. Night and day, he sported extravagant silk pyjamas from the Burlington Arcade. The boys waited on him, hand and foot, in awe, recognising his immobility and dependence as marks of status. Oleg was his particular favourite. “Your young men here are very pretty, dear boy,” he would concede to Walter, “but they do not
move
me. I have been to the West Indies where the local lads make good old Anglo-Saxon terms like ‘heft' and ‘girth' spring to one's lips. One does not dine with tweasers. But Oleg here has ‘character', what, in the movies, we term ‘a good face'. Were I shooting a film about a mass murderer I should engage him at once.”

Walter bemused., vainly groping amongst dark Germanic roots. “What is ‘heft'? What is ‘girth'?”

“Ah! Quite so. What indeed?” He sucked his ebony cigarette holder that possessed neither. Noel was perhaps, then, at the height of his powers. In his mid-thirties, slim, sleek, he had conquered the musical stage, the theatre, the recording studio. He always seemed to be rehearsing, internally, incubating and wherever he went he left sheets of paper, ditties, drafts of something or other, as other men might leave dandruff. His early
Vortex
, with its overtones of drug-fiendery and homosexuality, had been a major
succès de scandale
, since when he had effortlessly reeled off hit show after hit show with no illusions about the shallowness of his craft. He could, he always made you feel, do so much more, delve so much more deeply but simply could not be bothered, as to break into a sweat was unbecoming. Walter recognised, in him, a brother.

“But why does he speak as though his mouth is full of tennis balls?”

Mixing economy with ingenuity, Walter devised a stream of allegedly local cocktails, based on
brem
and
arak
and Noel sank them without demur, though he always wished to know their name. “Ear, Nose and Throat”, “Southpour Punch”, “
Puputan
”, “Boy Meets Girth” and “Baliballs” were the least of it. Evenings would be spent, Noel at the piano, stemmed glass delicately balanced at the keyboard edge ready for tippling a “Jolly Todger” or whatever, in a sort of protracted cocktail lounge improvisation that recalled the competitive swapping of
pantuns
at Malay weddings.

“The Belgians and the Greeks do it,

Nice young men who sell antiques do it.

Let's do it. Let's fall in love!”

Then play would begin …

“Piles up your arse do it,

Members of the British upper class do it.

Let's do it! Let's fall in love.”

Or

“Greta Garbo all alone does it,

Marlene Dietrich with a mmmmoan does it.

Let's do it. Let's fall in love!”

Then Walter would bumshuffle onto the stool and join in:

“Queen Wilhelmina on her throne does it,

Barbara Hutton slowly with the phone does it.

Let's do it. Let's fall in love.”

And Noel would soar, with his high tenor voice, into the bridging section:

“Walter Spies, in a sarong does it, though he isn't the first,

Rudi, though it's wrong, does it. If he didn't he'd BURST!”

“Look,” I said, “I don't greatly care for …”

Interrupted by Walter, returning to the main melody:

“The very least Balinese does it,

Separately each of the McPhees – you don't know them – does it.

Let's do it! Let's fall in love.”

Back to bridging:

“Young Rosa and Miguel do it at the drop of a hat.

Oleg on his knees does it. Well, he is rather fat.”

Back to Noel:

“Charlie Chaplin as a tramp does it,

Rudi in the outside heat and damp does it …”

“What are you implying? If you mean the
lapangan kota
…”

“… Let's fall in love!”

By some extraordinary coincidence, Walter had a painting freshly finished, trailing around on the forest giant table, downstairs, ostensibly to dry. It was small painting, the sort that might obligingly fit into a traveller's luggage.

Noel looked down at it. “Ripping,” he commented, “simply divine. My first lover was a painter, Philip, and I remained with him till he died – ‘faithful unto death' – except perhaps for the two shillings and sixpence I earned from Sir Hugh Walpole during an otherwise tedious train journey from Philip's house, at appropriately named Looe, back to the metropolis. Perhaps that is what we are all seeking – someone to be unfaithful to. But, as artists, you will understand that what one does for money does not count, since it does not engage the heart and I might well not have fallen if the buffet car had been open.” He licked his lips naughtily and dropped briefly into lower class. “I have always been a bit of a bugger for a sticky bun. Philip opened my eyes to the world of art and the other thing but then, I suppose, one's taste in neither is of the best at the age of fourteen.”