Old Filth (3 page)

“Don't drop off,” said a woman's voice. “Don't drop off the perch! Not yet.”

“Hey, hello, what? Betty?”

But again, nobody there.

Hope I'm not feverish.

“And I'm not being a fool,” he shouted to the door of Betty's old bedroom and shut his own bedroom door behind him.

Perfectly in charge.

The bed was warm, and his own. Extraordinary really, the idea of sharing a bed. Bourgeois. Something Betty and I never talked about.

“This is not the time of frenzy,” he heard himself say out loud as the images of the day merged into dreams. He was clinging to someone on a boat-deck and the sea a silver skin. There was screaming but it was somewhere else and hardly woke him. “We dealt with all that,” he said, “in what they call my long, untroubled and uneventful life.”

“Sleep, Filth,” said a voice. “Nobody knew you like I did.”

Which of them said that? he wondered.

Y
es, yes, yes,” said Auntie May of the Baptist Mission, striding up the gangplank. “Now then, here we are. Excellent.”

The motor launch, now and then trying its engine to see whether it would be safe to let it die, stirred the black water around it, rocked and snorted. All across the wide river, small waves slapped and tipped. Heat seemed to drip from the trees like oil. It was summer, the monsoon coming, and when it did the river traffic would die. This was why they were getting the baby home at only one week old. Otherwise he would have been stranded in the Port where he had gone to be born. Here they were, safely home, but it had been a near thing. A two-day journey and Auntie May, after she had seen him safely to his father's house, would have to make it back again herself, alone and at once.

 

On the journey out to the Port not much more than a week ago the baby not yet born had travelled the river in a native boat with his mother and the Malay woman who was now climbing the grass ladder to the landing stage, sorrowful and frightened, behind Auntie May. She had carried her own baby for she was the wet nurse who had been taken to Mrs. Feathers's confinement in case of an emergency should Mrs. Feathers have been unable to feed the child herself.

Nobody had expected Mrs. Feathers to die. The Clinic at the Port was good, the Baptist Mission efficient and known to her already for she had been a nurse before marriage to Feathers, the District Officer of Kotakinakulu province. She was a tough, lean Scot, like her husband, solid as a rock. She had nursed him through his war wounds of 1914, quieted his shell-shock, coped with his damaged ankle, borne his mad rages, loved him. She had been born in the East herself, loved the climate, the river, the people, and had never ailed for a day of this her first and straightforward pregnancy. She had brought to the Clinic only the wet-nurse and her prayer book, knowing that she would be back within the month. As she left she had been helped a little into the open boat but had not looked back. The landing stage stood on its high crooked stilts with only one person watching the boat disappear round the bend of the river—a girl of twelve called Ada, the wet-nurse's eldest child. As stick-thin as the landing stage itself, the girl wound her arms about the rough branches and stayed long after the boat had disappeared.

Comfortable in the long low boat, Mrs. Feathers in her loose cotton dress—never a sarong—she was the District Officer's wife—had scarcely looked pregnant. The baby had dropped low in the womb and become very quiet, which its mother knew meant the birth was imminent. In the Long House where they had rested that night, she had not worried that the child might be born early. With the peaceful happiness that often predicts labour, she had smiled and knitted a tiny lace jacket, fondly taking a strand of wool at a time and loosening it, holding it high. She had knitted most of the night, listening to the baboon on the roof clacking like a typewriter in short, unaccountable snatches of baboon monologue.

The wet-nurse, her own baby beside her, lay on the floor, terrified at being a day's journey down river from home. She whimpered.

“Now, now,” said Mrs. Feathers, patting her. “Hush, don't be afraid. Tomorrow we'll be at the Port and the next day the new baby will be here. I know. Then soon we shall all go home.” And she held up the jacket and looked at the pattern by the light of the kerosene lamp on the floor. She knew that the baby would be a girl and was finishing off the little garment with pink lacy scallops.

 

She finished the last scallop the following night in the Clinic but gave birth to a long, rangy, red-headed, eight-pound boy. She was delighted with him (Edward) and passed the jacket to the wet-nurse's silky brown baby, who never wore it, and the next day puerperal fever began its cruel course and three days later Mrs. Feathers died.

 

Ten days after that, the Welsh missionary Auntie May was plodding firmly on board the river steamer which might be the last to run before the onset of the monsoon, one big hand on the rail of the gangplank, the other arm tight round the swaddled child. Behind came the weeping and now indispensable wet-nurse with her baby. She had wept for two days. Auntie May never wept.

She had, however, felt a great plunge of spirits as the river boat rounded the bend of the river before the District Officer's landing, for there was nobody there except for the same young girl sitting at the ladder's top with her arms tight round her knees. The boat lay in the water, silent, waiting for people to appear. Nobody. Auntie May knew that though there was neither telephone nor mail direct to the District Officer's quarters, and their attempt to send a cable had failed, the news of his wife's death would certainly have seeped through to Alistair Feathers. She had half expected him to turn up at the Port to bring his son home himself. News flies fast through the jungle. Attendance at his wife's funeral would of course have been impossible, for the body had to be buried immediately, then, in Kotakinakulu province.

“Not here,” Auntie May allowed herself to say.

The wet-nurse was not surprised, however. Mr. Feathers had not come down to the landing stage to see his wife leave. Their goodbye—for them, a very affectionate goodbye—a kiss on the cheek (however had this child been conceived?)—had taken place inside the verandah of the house. A quick embrace, then out and down the verandah steps, Captain Feathers calling to the others to be ready. The wet-nurse was being well-paid and had been groomed for her possible job of nursing the baby with quantities of good food, and watched over against the betel nut and alcohol. Her elder daughter had come down to the landing stage, helped Mrs. Feathers to the gangplank—Mrs. Feathers had suddenly turned and given the girl a kiss—and watched the boat sidle towards the current and then pass from sight.

Here the girl was now, against Captain Feathers's orders, and she had watched for two days, her legs pressed against the banana-leaf barrier, desperately watching. At the Port these choppy waves had been nowhere to be seen and the river had run oily and thick, seemed hardly to move. Here though, up river, there were no glow-worm lights on the great invisible nets, no sounds of fishermen calling from boat to boat. No ghostly cartwheels of weed, flying like skaters on the surface of the running river, almost outstripping it. No crocodile snout at the Port. No plop or scream of waterbird dropping on prey. Here on the landing stage, up river, fat metallic lizards moved about, long jaws angled for grubs in the leaves. They moved silently around her feet. She kicked them away. They were harmless things.

And here was the river boat. Would Mrs. Feathers be there? If she was indeed dead her strong, young body, her bright happy face would be already decaying in the wet earth of the Port's Christian cemetery.

The boat's engine reawakened with a roar and the boat approached the landing stage. Ada, the brown girl, twisted her arms tighter among the banana leaves. Here came lights. Men—not the District Officer—appeared to catch ropes.

The boat anchored, the engine stopped, the boat rocked and shuddered and Ada's mother and her baby sister and big Auntie May from the Mission began to disembark. Auntie May carried a light bundle.

When she had both feet on the rickety platform, Auntie May looked at the girl and asked if she were the wet-nurse's big daughter. Ada said yes, and looked at the bundle, and Auntie May put it in her arms. Ada's mother went by, head-down over her own baby, afraid of seeing the District Officer somewhere in the shadows.

But there was no District Officer. Alistair Feathers was at his desk working, tonight not even drinking.

When Auntie May was admitted, he shook hands with her and sent for a servant to see her to her room, show her the bathhouse, make sure that food was taken to her.

“I can stay for several days,” she said. “I'll risk the monsoon. To see that all is as well as can be for him.”

“F-f-for him?”

“For your son. He is Edward. He's a fine boy.”

“Good. Good.”

He did not ask to see the baby who, by the time Auntie May left a week later, was the amazement of the village. A child with bright-blue eyes and white, white skin and curly chestnut hair. After Auntie May had left with a donation of ten pounds to the Mission, he gave orders for Ada to take charge of the child. Auntie May had already given orders (and the ten pounds) that Ada should sit each evening with the baby on the steps of his father's verandah. This she did for many months, but Alistair Feathers never came near.

During the monsoon Ada and the baby moved up the steps and on to the verandah and sat there listening to the deluge, the crashing steaming torrent of the rain, and at last the girl was told by the District Officer's servant to go away and take the child to live with her and his wet-nurse in their family hut. And so the baby's first years were in the Long House among brown skins, brown eyes, scraps of coloured clothes, the Malay language; often sleeping, sometimes making musical singing, dreamily passing the time against the roar of the river and the rain. At night the lamps swung from the rafters and the baby watched the flames with their haloes of moths, heard the baboons with pleasure, saw the silver lizards without fear—their questing, swinging heads—and the geckos hooked into the mesh of the walls puffing out their lurid throats. He listened to the racket of the rats in the thatch, once watched with rapture as a fat snake came sliding up from a post-hole. Observed it being killed. He was satisfied by the nourishment of the wetnurse but passionate in his love for the girl.

Soon he stretched to pat her face, suck her chin, her ear. One day, at two months, gazing at her he gave a crow of laughter like a boy of two. Because of the memory of the child's kind mother, the Long House respected him and accepted him, an ivory child in their warm dun dust, and he was passed about, rocked to sleep, talked to and sung to and understood only Malay. By the time he was one he rolled and tottered and waddled in the village compound with the other children. There were a number of pale-skinned half-caste children from the Raj's peccadilloes. Sometimes this child's father crossed the compound but seemed not to see him, not to notice his wife's chestnut curls.

The village observed the District Officer. Captain Feathers was a strong just governor, but nobody liked him. His child was given extra attention and, from Ada, intense, unswerving, obsessive adoration.

 

When the child was four and a half, Auntie May came back. Big and strong, off the boat and over the landing stage to the compound, she looked about her, at once spotting Edward with his orange hair, naked and sucking a mango, his feet and hands as pale with the mud of the compound as the other children's. She made no move towards him—the women were watching from the dark openings of the huts—but nodded and smiled in his direction, to his surprise, for his mouth fell open—and went on to climb the steps of the verandah.

She was expected: there had been correspondence for some time. But Captain Feathers had not been at the landing stage.

She had not seen him for four and a half years but rumour had it that he was unchanged in his attitude to his son, that his shattered ankle was worse and that he was drinking heavily. It was said he had become eccentrically pedantically absorbed in his work and the management of his District. He was celibate.

No girls were brought to him by their mothers as “extra servants,” though he was handsome still, his eyes bright with malaria. He turned away from the women's beauty to the beauty of the whiskey in the glass. It did not seem to harm him. He had the Scottish immunity. He drank alone, for he had no friends. “Oh, Miss Neal. Auntie May. G-g-good evening.”

He looks tired, she thought.

She had come to take the child down to the Port, to be taught English for six months before the journey Home, where he would live with a Welsh family until he was eight. After that, he would go to his father's old Prep school and then his father's old Public school. Auntie May knew of the Welsh family with whom he was to be fostered. They were used to Raj Orphans. There would be home-cooked food, and it would be cheap (Alistair Feathers was a Scot). And there were two aunts about, his sisters, in Lancashire which was not really far away from North Wales.

“And of course,” said Auntie May at dinner, watching the lowering of the whiskey in the glass at the other end of the lamp-lit table, “you will have to take him to Wales. In six months' time. And you will by then have paid for him in advance.”

Alistair Feathers's eyes stared. Outside, the madhouse noises of the jungle. Inside, the servant padding about, taking plates, setting down others, offering fruit.

“He seems well and happy,” he said. “I have never seen the need for him to go Home. It's not the law.”

“You know perfectly well that it is the custom. Because of the risk of childhood illnesses out here. You went Home yourself.”

“I did,” said Alistair. “So help me God.”

Auntie May on the whole agreed with him. She'd seen great damage. Some children forgot their parents, clung to their adoptive families who later often forgot them. There were bad tales. Others grew to say they'd had a much better time in England away from their parents, whom they did not care for. There were children who worked hard at growing stolid and boring, and made marriages only in order to have roots of their own at last. They never told anything. And Auntie May had never been sure about the ferocity of Eastern childhood diseases. But in this case there was no mother.

“You've had no leave in ten years, Alistair. It isn't safe. Nobody knows better than you what happens out here to District Officers who work too hard. They drink and go native.”

Alistair fastidiously poured another whiskey and said, “At least I still change for dinner.”

He was in dinner jacket and black tie that would have been acceptable at the Ritz. Not a bead of sweat. Auntie May in sarong and sandals, her chin a little more whiskery, her arms resting almost to her elbows on the table a little more muscular, had put on weight and felt hot. She looked at Alistair and had to admire. She wanted to take his hand. Her hardest task now as she grew older in the Ministry was to deal with her longing to be touched—hugged, stroked by anyone, any human being—a friend, a lover, a child or even (and here she scented danger) a servant. Of either sex. She prayed about it, asking that God's encircling arms would bring comfort. They did not.