The Love Beach (15 page)

Bird said quietly: 'You played for them? That was very kind.'

'I couldn't think of anything else to do. They were standing around like a lot of infants when Father Christmas hasn't turned up. I didn't play, really, I just sort of picked out the notes as best I could.'

'And you made them happy.'

'If I'd been Albert Schweitzer they couldn't have been more pleased. The box was actually making a tune. They went mad. They nodded along to it for a bit, following it. Then they realized what it was ‑ it was
There Is a Green Hill Far Away
‑ and they all began howling again. Christ, what a row! But it was marvellous in a way. And then ... well, you'd never believe this ... I forgot to tell you before...'

'What else? You forgot to tell me a lot,' she protested.

'I came to fix this light,' Davies pointed out, looking at the ceiling. 'Anyway I was a bit uncomfortable standing up playing this harmonium so I sort of looked around for something to sit on, a box or anything. But I couldn't see anything. Then Old Joseph realized what I wanted and said something to one of his warriors, and the next thing I know this chap is down on all fours and making himself into a stool so I could sit on his back. I didn't want to, naturally, but they insisted and they wanted some more tunes, so I sat down on him. as lightly as I could mind, and carried on playing. What about that! And all the time I was sitting on him he was singing too, I could feel him singing away underneath me!'

Bird stared at him. 'He was like a stool for you?' she asked unbelievingly.

'Like a stool,' he confirmed.

'Ad he was singing too?'

'Yes. I could feel his lungs going in and out under my backside and I could hear him too.'

She began to laugh again, almost hysterically. 'Oh, that is not possible,' she pleaded. 'Look you make me cry with laughing. Look at my eyes. They are all running.'

'Here's a handkerchief,' said Davies, politely fumbling. She waved it away and picked a tissue from a holder by the shampoo basin. She turned from him while she wiped her eyes. He looked at her. The gentle moulding of her back showed through the cotton dress and her hair was running all over her neck. Her legs were brown and bare with the creases behind her knees like slim white channels. She turned. 'What happened then?' she asked.

'Well, it stopped being funny for a start,' he said. 'They took us up the village, first. Just huts, like on this island, wood and corrugated iron and palm‑leaf thatch, roughly set around a square full of chickens and kids, children I mean, not goats, although they had some of them too.

'Joseph said they had a very important procession to hold, being as it was Good Friday. He took us to his garden which was supposed to be where Christ was buried, as it says in the Bible. He's got a cave there and a big stone in front of it and he said that is where it all happened.'

'They believe that,' she nodded seriously. 'This I have heard before, of course. They think that the whole of the Bible is about their island. Did you see Noah's Ark?'

'Well, they pointed out the mountain where they said it stuck when the flood went down and they said we could go up and see it some other time, but they wanted us to watch the procession just then. But they did take us up to see the motor bike, just above the village, all ready to bring this new Saviour, this Dodson‑Smith, down to them when he arrives. It's an American army relic, but it's in great condition. They keep it clean and tuned up and full of juice and everything. One of them gave it a kick and started it up for us. It's amazing how they believe that this bloke is going to arrive among them. It's frightening too.'

'They have faith,' she said. 'Are not we as Christians looking forward to the second coming of Jesus? We're supposed to if we have faith.'

'Of course,' he said caustically. 'But not on a two‑stroke motor bike. I swear they'd have cut our heads off if we'd laughed. Anyway, then we did a round tour of Bethlehem, Jericho, and all the other tourist places. And they told us that their village was the original Jerusalem. All we could keep doing was to nod our heads as though we were agreeing with them. It was like trying to humour the people in a loony bin.'

'They are very strange,' she agreed. 'That is why no one will venture there. I would be most afraid.'

'So was 1,' said Davies. 'And I felt worse when they began this procession. They enacted the whole thing; Pilate washing his hands, Jesus carrying the cross, and the people spitting on him and striking him. We sat there drinking some native beer stuff that they'd brought to us, and watched it all going on. Joseph sat with us ‑ we were on the little veranda at the front of his house ‑ and he was lying back in a sort of horse‑hair armchair, just like the ones you used to see in the houses in Wales. All the stuffing was coming out of it. God knows where he got it, but he thought it was great, and he sort of lounged back and watched the business going on, just like a man watching television. He said he wouldn't be taking part until later. Oh yes, I forgot, the Ahole thing was done in silence. Absolute silence. All mimed and not a sound from anywhere or anyone, and the whole island population was there. That's what made it more frightening. Dead silence. Every time Conway took a swallow of beer it sounded to me like somebody flushing a toilet.'

'Jesus, I mean
their
Jesus, the man carrying the cross, what was he like?'

Davies raised his eyebrows at her. 'Yes,' he said. 'You're thinking like we began to think,' he said. 'It didn't occur to us, right then when we were sitting there with the chief drinking the beer. It was hot as hell, the sun really burning down, and no rain all day, for once. The chap who was carrying the cross was in a sort of blanket and his hair and his beard were long. He was the only one with whiskers, so he had obviously been prepared for the part. Anyway, it went on for hours, it seemed. The whole ritual, and in dumb show. And as I said it was terrible and hot and they kept bringing us these bowls of their beer and before long I was well on the way to being plastered. I thought it was the heat at the start, because the square, with the sun really white on it, started to get hazy and all the black bodies began to wriggle in front of my eyes. They looked just like a swarm of tadpoles.'

He could see she was about to ask him what tadpoles were, but she changed her mind and did not interrupt.

'I thought it was just me, but it wasn't because old Conway was well gone. He started putting his arm around Joseph of Arimathea and saying to him, "How would you and some of your lads like to go to Vietnam?"'

'What!' Bird exclaimed. 'Vietnam! Why did he say that?'

'God only knows, but he kept on. It was awkward for me, I can tell you. He was well gone, worse than I was. Yes, just leaning over as though he was in a pub at Woolamalloo and asking if they'd like to go to Vietnam. Plastered out of his mind. Fortunately Abe hadn't drunk
any of the native grog and he could see things were getting out of hand. So he got us up from our seats, shook hands with Joseph, and made us do the same. The old boy smiled quite agreeably and didn't seem to mind us going. Jesus, or the man playing the part of Jesus, was carrying this whacking great cross through all the people by then, sweating under it and dragging his feet in the dust. Joseph just nodded to us and when we slipped away he was sitting back there dead pleased, in his armchair.

'We didn't have to go through the crowd. We skirted the house and Abe took us through some palms and we found ourselves on the beach again. I never thought I'd be so glad to be away from anywhere. Abe seemed to be as scared as we were, or perhaps he was just annoyed with us, because he didn't say a word. He just hurried and got the boat out of the lagoon and headed back here. It wasn't until we were well out of the way, and I was feeling sick as the devil, what with the beer and the sea getting a swell on, that anyone said anything. Conway was looking green, really terrible, and I had the thought that had been there in my mind all the time. I said to Abe: "Abe, what are they going to do with that man? They're not really going to crucify him are they?"

'Conway looked up and he looked awful. He said to us, "When they did the Christmas pantomime they actually had a baby born. I was told that! "So I asked Abe again. "Are they going to crucify that man?" and Abe turned around, really grumpy, and said: "How the hell should I know. It's your bloody religion, not mine."'

Eight

The long ranges of cloud that for weeks had grown successfully on the eastern sea, bringing the thick rain to the island, became small foothills, then little mounds, and eventually failed to rise at all. The wet season was over. Within a few days, dust was piling in the streets of Sexagesima and both governors had broadcast a warning of an impending water shortage. 'Every year the situation is the same,' said Pollet to Davies. 'In March the place is a swamp, by the third day of April there's a drought.'

'It must be really bad for the governors to have to broadcast,' said Davies.

Pollet blew out his cheeks and hunched his shoulders in a continental gesture. 'It's no different, my friend. In fact every year on this day it's the same speech. The Governor records it and George Turtle puts the record on on April the third at eleven in the morning. The French do the same when they have their hour of broadcasting. You could call it a fixed feast. Next week Mrs Flagg will have a garden party and there will be Scottish dancing led by Mr English, the leader of the council, you remember. That is also a fixed feast. It is the beginning of the summer here in the Apostles.'

Almost every day Davies went down to The Love Beach to swim, sometimes alone, sometimes with Bird, when the salon was not busy, and occasionally with Conway and Dahlia. He liked to go in the late afternoon best because then the children from the village would come from the school and run down on to the sand, roll and jump into the sea in the sun, and then sit about under the shade of the landing barges and sing sweet songs.

A strange feeling of carelessness had come over him when the sun had arrived in the islands. He felt it soak into him, slowing his thoughts and movements, his ambitions

too. His campaign to sell butter and fats had not been in the least successful. Some of the shopkeepers, the Chinese and Vietnamese particularly, had been polite and even encouraging, but his order book remained full of nothing but half‑promises. Since he considered himself a trained failure the sight of his plan draining away was no surprise, but this time the savage disappointment was not there. Somehow it did not seem to matter enough to hurt him. The sun had burned his body hard brown within a couple of weeks. He took his paints and his canvases into places in the interior, spending hours working alone, high up above a village with the sea at its door, trying to convey its domesticity among the green wildness, the smoke from the houses, the people moving about and throwing nets from the beach. Once he took his bicycle to the back of the island and sat under some rocks working at his canvas all day while two men fished with circular nets into a heavy surf. Another day he painted a village market, and then some natives working at the coconut gathering. At some of the villages they began to recognize him, to welcome him, and to congregate with polite curiosity as he went about his art. Children, at the front, men and women behind, they would form an orderly gallery, very quiet, but occasionally pointing out details on the canvas to their companions.

In the painting of these things he felt a set contentment he had not experienced before in his life. He was, he realized, and he told everyone, merely waiting for the arrival of
The Baffin
Bay to return him to Sydney where he would report the utter and dismal failure of his business mission to Trellis and Jones of The Circular Quay, and would doubtless then get the sack. But that was all to come. There was plenty of time, another month, to consider all his difficulties. In the meantime he would sit like Gauguin, and paint.

Davies, however, remained the worst artist in the world. Conway told Dahlia that he thought the Welshman was colour‑blind and didn't know it. Bird was always politely encouraging, but screwed up her face when she looked over his shoulder. He had no feel for his subjects, even if he thought he had, no romance, no flair, not even the compensation of bold technical efficiency. His only attribute was absolute blindness to his own incompetence. There was nothing else.

Once while he was asleep after lunch on a heart‑shaped coral beach in the north of the island, a Melanesian from the fishing village purloined his easel and proceeded to paint the scene with gusto, and with a vivid colour sense such as Davies would never have. When Davies woke up he was very angry with the man and told him he must not interfere again when an artist was at work near his village. But he let the man have his daub to take and hang in his house. 'After all, he didn't know what he was doing,' he said to Bird.

Each time he went out on one of his painting expeditions he would get Seamus at the Hilton to make him up a bundle of sandwiches and wrap up some fruit, and he would take with him a bottle of native beer. When he had worked through the morning he would sleep for an hour after lunch and then continue until he considered the light had changed. Sometimes he took two bottles of beer and his afternoon sleep lasted longer.

One afternoon, lying in the shade of the barges on The Love Beach, snoring into the black sand, he dreamed, as he had often done, of little Mag and David and Kate. But, for the first time, he had difficulty in focusing them. In his dream he could not see their faces, and when he came to look at their clothes he could not recognize them either. He strained to hear their voices, forcing himself deeper into the sand in his sleep, but they were only whispers with Welsh accents. He couldn't catch what they were saying. Where were they going, moving away from him like this? What had happened to the clear lines of their noses and the light in their eyes? Kate was the same, even worse, just a shadow in an oatmeal costume and a spot of rouge on her cheeks. In his dream a commentator kept explaining to him that the reason they had altered and he couldn't see them properly was because he had been away so long and they
had
changed; they were different and he was different, and
they could not be expected to remain faithful to him ‑ any of them ‑ because he had been away so long and they were not sure they knew him properly any longer, any more than he knew them.