The Ground Beneath Her Feet (42 page)

Reasons go on pouring out of him. Maybe he’s in England because, to be absolutely frank, things with his lover, Sam Tropicana, are no longer what they were, the bloom is off. Or maybe he just plain got bored with the construction industry, all those hard hats and girders, all those empty rooms for other lives to fill. Or maybe it’s the fault of the CIA, because, yes, they approached him on several occasions, a Chinese-language expert is assumed to be top-grade spy material, so they try and sign you up before the Yellow Peril gets to you and turns you to the dark side, and the second time he refused them—a man called Michael Baxter or Baxter Michaels had made the approach right in the foyer of the Sherry Netherland—he was accused of having an attitude and threatened with the confiscation of his passport. I
crossed some line when that happened, it changed America for me, and it became possible to leave
. And then, of course, it’s surprising he’s taken so long to get round to mentioning it, there’s the war, America is at war. Ballot boxes have been stuffed full of votes for President Kennedy, war is
always good for sitting presidents, his numbers are up from the tight squeeze against Nixon in 1960, he’s got four more years of power and priapism at Pennsylvania Avenue, and now it’s the voters, the young generation of soldier electors out there in jungled, swamped, incomprehensible Indochina, who are being stuffed into boxes in shocking quantities and being sent home to various addresses less exalted than JFK’s. Their numbers, too, are up.

Mull Standish is against the war, but that’s not exactly what he wants to say. He wants to say—his eyes are gleaming now, and the energy pours from him with redoubled, frightening force—that the war has turned him on to its consequent music, because in this dark time it’s the rock music that represents the country’s most profound artistic engagement with the death of its children, not just the music of peace and psychotropic drugs but the music of rage and horror and despair. Also of youth, youth surviving in spite of everything, in spite of the children’s crusade that’s blowing it apart. (A mine, a sniper, a knife in the night: childhood’s bitter end.)

That’s when I really fell in love with rock, Standish is off and rolling, because I admired so much what it was doing, the humane democratic spirit-food fullness of its response. It was not just saying fuck you, Uncle Sam, or give peace a chance, or I feel like I’m fixin’ to die, or even making patriotic noises, zap zap zappin’ the Cong. Rather, it was making love in a combat zone, insisting on the remembrance of beauty and innocence in a time of death and guilt; it privileged life over death and asked life to take its chance, let’s dance, honey honey, in the street, on the phone, and we’ll have fun fun fun on the eve of destruction.

His manner has changed completely, from patrician Bostonian to eager-beaver muso peacenik, and Ormus, watching the transformation, begins to see who he really is. Never mind all his explanations, the truth is he’s just another one of us chameleons, just another looking-glass transformer. Not only an incarnation of Jason the Argonaut but also perhaps of Proteus, the metamorphic Old Man of the Sea. And once we’ve learned how to change our skins, we Proteans, sometimes we can’t stop, we career between selves, lane-hopping wildly, trying not to run off the road and crash. Mull Standish, too, is a slip-slider, Ormus understands: a shape-shifter, a man who knows
what it’s like to wake up as a giant bug. That’s why he picked me out, he can see we’re of the same tribe, the same sub-species of the human race. Like aliens on a strange planet we can recognize each other in any crowd. At present we have adopted human form, here on the third rock from the sun.

Standish, this new, exhilarated, high-as-a-kite Standish, says: I came to England to get away from a country at war. One month after I arrived, the new Labour government decided to join forces with the Americans and ship its own kids out to die. Things here stopped being theoretical. British boys and girls, too, started being mailed home in small packages. I couldn’t believe it, as an American I felt
responsible
, as if I’d flouted quarantine regulations and imported a deadly epidemic, I felt like a flea carrier. A plague dog. This development was not as per programme. In a spin, I flew out to India, which is what I do when I need to regain equilibrium. That’s when I looked in at your big moment at the Cosmic Dancer, by the way.

After Bombay, Standish had gone to sit at the feet of a teenage mahaguru in Bangalore, and then up to Dharmsala to spend time at the Buddhist Shugden temple.
Again
—I find myself thinking when Ormus tells me the story—
again the curious possessive fascination of the hedonistic West with the ascetic East. The arch-disciples of linearity, of the myth of progress want, from the Orient, only its fabled unchangingness, its myth of eternity
. It was the god-boy who came through. He’s an old soul in a young body, Mull says reverentially, a Tantric Master in his final incarnation. I confessed everything to that wise child, my alienation, my guilt, my despair, and he smiled his pure smile and said, The music is the glass is the glass ball. Let it shine.

I understood then that the limit on needle time was the enemy, the censor. The limit was General Waste-More-Land’s broadcasting ally, General Haig’s whore. Enough with big bands and men in white tuxes with bow ties pretending nothing was going on. I mean come
on
. A nation at war deserves to hear the music that’s going
mano a mano
with the war machine, that’s sticking flowers down its gun barrels and baring its breasts to the missiles. The soldiers are singing these songs as they die. But this is not the way soldiers used to sing, marching into battle bellowing hymns, kidding themselves they had god on their side; these aren’t patriotic-bullshit, get-yourself-up-for-it songs. These kids are
using singing, instead, as an affirmation of what’s natural and true, singing against the unnatural lie of the war. Using song as a banner of their doomed youth. Not
morituri te salutant
, but
morituri
say up yours, Jack, those about to die give you the fucking finger. That’s why I got the ships.

He slumps back in his seat, almost talked out. He has sold up a chunk of his American real estate holdings to purchase, equip and staff up these barely seaworthy little boats. A complete encirclement of England and Scotland is envisaged, seagoing conditions permitting. Now we’re blasting the material at them round the clock, he says, Hendrix and Joplin and Zappa, making war on war. Certainly, the loveable moptops too. Also the Lovin’ Spoonful, Love, Mr. James Brown feelin like a sex machine, Carly Simon and Guinevere Garfunkel feelin groovy et cetera. My one regret is that we can’t moor a boat on the Thames, right outside the Houses of Parliament, mount giant speakers on the deck and blow those complacent bastards right out of their murderous seats. But never say die; this project, too, is in development. So what do you say? Are you with us or withered? There or square?

He had me badly off balance, just the way he wanted me, Ormus tells me,
A.V.
: I was ripe for adventure, and he’d taken me by storm.

The pilot announces the flight’s clearance to land. The air hostess approaches, asks Ormus to resume his own seat. Ormus, rising to go, asks Mull Standish, Why me?

Call it a hunch, he replies, No, let’s say inspiration. I flatter myself that I am a judge of men. Something about the way you tore off the Santa beard that night. Something about you struck me, strikes me, as, ah, ah.

Piratical? Ormus suggests.

Emblematic, Mull Standish finds the word, with what looks suspiciously like the makings of a blush mounting above the semi-stiff collar of his Turnbull & Asser shirt. I asked around a little, you know. Seems you’re capable of generating a following. People look to you. Maybe you’ll get ’em listening to us.

But I’m trying to be a singer, not a DJ on a cold, wet boat, Ormus makes his last, wavering stand. His imagination has been captured, and Standish knows it.

You will be, Standish promises. As a matter of fact you already are,
and a good one, might I add. Yes, sir. At this very moment—hark at you—I could swear you’re singing right now. Yes. I can hear your song.

As the plane touches down, Ormus Cama’s head starts pounding. There is something about this England in which he has just arrived. There are things he cannot trust. There’s a rip, once again, in the surface of the real. Uncertainty pours down on him, its dark radiance opens his eyes. As his foot alights upon Heathrow, he succumbs to the illusion that nothing is solid, nothing exists except the precise piece of concrete his foot now rests upon. The homecoming passengers notice none of this, they stride confidently forward through the familiar, the quotidian, but the new arrivals look fearfully at the deliquescent land. They seem to be splashing through what should be solid ground. As his own feet move gingerly forward, he feels small pieces of England solidify beneath them. His footprints are the only fixed points in his universe. He checks out Virus: who is untroubled, serene. As for Spenta Cama, her eyes are fixed on the crowd of waving greeters high above. Trying to pick out a familiar face, she has no time to look down. Never look down, Ormus thinks. That way you won’t see the danger, you won’t plunge through the deceptive softness of the apparent into the burning abyss below.

Everything must be made real, step by step, he tells himself. This is a mirage, a ghost world, which becomes real only beneath our magic touch, our loving footfall, our kiss. We have to imagine it into being, from the ground up.

But he will spend his early days on the sea, within sight of land, which will remain just out of reach but which will listen, as though hypnotized, to his seductive, imagining voice.

Beyond the barrier, William Methwold and Mull Standish are waiting, two large pinkish thumbs sticking out of a rackety Indian crowd, the land children running at top speed to greet their cousins from the air, outpacing the astonishingly stentorian shouts of the older women in their heavy-framed spectacles and wine-dark overcoats worn over brilliant saris, and the bellowed rebukes of the older men with jutting lower lips and jangling car keys. The younger women, not in fact demure, group together to perform demureness; they lower their eyelids,
whisper, simper. The younger men, not in reality half as backslapping and juvenile as they seem, likewise gather in clutches, their arms around one another’s shoulders, to yell and joke, giggle and nudge. Ormus, emerging into England, finds himself momentarily, dizzyingly, back in India, hearing an echo of home. Nostalgia tugs at him for an instant. He jerks himself free of it. There’s new music in the air.

Out of the migrant throng, this new way of being British, the two white men rise like Alps. Methwold is a walking antique, with mottled skin blotched over his hairless unwigged dome, making his baldness look like a map of the moon, with its dry seas of shadow and tranquillity, its veiny lines, its pocks. Limp fleshfolds flap above the collar that has grown too large for his neck. He walks with a stick, and he looks, Spenta is happy to note, as pleased to see her as she is to see (indeed, to recognize) him. As for Mull Standish, he has evidently evaded arrest. Perhaps the IRS isn’t as hot on his trail as he fears; and as for his pirate ships, technically they are breaking no law, though the state’s lawyers are working overtime to come up with pretexts on which they can be closed down.

The Camas pause. They are at their crossroads. Their futures tug them apart.

Okay, then, Ormus says to his mother.

Okay, then, in a muffled voice she replies.

Okay, then, Ormus punches Virus on the shoulder.

Virus makes a tiny sideways motion of the head.

Okay, see you, then, Ormus repeats. Nobody is touching him, but he feels himself held. He pulls against the force field, turns a shoulder and tugs hard.

Okay, see you, then. Spenta seems incapable of offering more than echoes, is herself becoming no more than a member of that crowd of echoes bouncing around them, fading, fading.

Ormus goes towards Standish, parts from his mother without looking back. Though his last image of her is a trembling lip and a lace kerchief at the corner of an eye, still in the rear-view mirror of his mind he can see her looking grateful. He can see her future shining like a diamond on her brow, the great mansion, the silver thread of river, the green and pleasant land. Though he abhors the countryside, he is happy for her. She has given him what she has been able to give, though she
could never love him. It has been less than enough by ordinary standards, but he is prepared to call it sufficient. In a way it is this lack of emotional enthusiasm, this absence of unconditional love, that has prepared him for his great future, has gotten him on to the runway, so to speak, like a jet aircraft, ready to fly. And she herself is husband hunting now. She’s a fishing fleet of one. Best for her to arrive as unencumbered as possible. Virus grins mutely at her side at the approaching English milord, but Ormus makes himself scarce. Spenta, preparing her smile for Methwold, has no time for a sentimental farewell. Mother and son go their ways: she into the arms of an old England, he into the new country that’s in the process of being born. Destiny summons them both, breaking their family ties.

Music in the air, from a crackly transistor. Soft brushes coax a whispered beat from a drum, a big bass line is laid down, a high riff screams from an invisible clarinet. All that’s needed is for a singer to grab some of that stuff and go for broke. Here she comes, her bluesy coloratura spiralling over and around the jazzy rhythm of the tune. Vina! It sounds like her voice, drowned in crackles and arrivals-lounge ruckus as it is, but high, strong, who else could it be. As she will one day hear him on a Bombay radio, so today, at the beginning of his journey back into her heart, he thinks he hears her, and even when, after their reunion, she promises him it couldn’t have been, she didn’t have a recording contract back in ’65, he refuses to accept his mistake. The long-haul terminal was a chamber of echoes that day, and that’s how he heard her voice, an echo returning from the future to summon up his love.