CHAPTER THREE

 

"Well, I'm glad it's all so amusing," a deep voice suddenly commented.

      Will Farnaby turned and saw, smiling down at him, a small spare man dressed in European clothes and carrying a black bag.  A man, he judged, in his late fifties.  Under the wide straw hat the hair was thick and white, and what a strange beaky nose!  And the eyes - how incongruously blue in the dark face!

      "Grandfather!" he heard Mary Sarojini exclaiming.

      The stranger turned from Will to the child.

      "What was so funny?" he asked.

      "Well," Mary Sarojini began, and paused for a moment to marshal her thoughts.  "Well, you see, he was in a boat and there was that storm yesterday and he got wrecked - somewhere down there.  So he had to climb up the cliff.  And there were some snakes, and he fell down.  But luckily there was a tree, so he only had a fright.  Which was why he was shivering so hard, so I gave him some bananas and I made him go through it a million times.  And then all of a sudden he saw that it wasn't anything to worry about.  I mean, it's all over and done with.  And that made him laugh.  And when he laughed, I laughed.  And then the mynah bird laughed."

      "Very good," said her grandfather approvingly.  "And now," he added, turning back to Will Farnaby, "after the psychological first aid, let's see what can be done for poor old Brother Ass.  I'm Dr Robert MacPhail, by the way.  Who are you?"

      "His name's Will," said Mary Sarojini before the young man could answer.  And his other name is Far-something."

      "Farnaby, to be precise.  William Asquith Farnaby.  My father, as you might guess, was an ardent Liberal.  Even when he was drunk.  Especially when he was drunk."  He gave vent to a harsh derisive laugh strangely unlike the full-throated merriment which had greeted his discovery that there was really nothing to make a fuss about.

      "Didn't you like your father?" Mary Sarojini asked with concern.

      "Not as much as I might have," Will answered.

      "What he means," Dr MacPhail explained to the child, "is that he hated his father.  A lot of them do," he added parenthetically.

      Squatting down on his haunches, he began to undo the straps of his black bag.

      "One of our ex-imperialists, I assume," he said over his shoulder to the young man.

      "Born in Bloomsbury," Will confirmed.

      "Upper class," the doctor diagnosed, "but not a member of the military or county sub-species."

      "Correct.  My father was a barrister and political journalist.  That is, when he wasn't too busy being an alcoholic.  My mother, incredible as it may seem, was the daughter of an archdeacon.  An archdeacon," he repeated, and laughed again as he had laughed over his father's taste for brandy.

      Dr MacPhail looked at him for a moment, then turned his attention once more to the straps.

      "When you laugh like that," he remarked in a tone of scientific detachment, "your face becomes curiously ugly."

      Taken aback, Will tried to cover his embarrassment with a piece of facetiousness.  "It's always ugly," he said.

      "On the contrary, in a Baudelairian sort of way it's rather beautiful.  Except when you choose to make noises like a hyena.  Why do you make those noises?"

      "I'm a journalist," Will explained.  "Our Special Correspondent, paid to travel about the world and report on the current horrors.  What other kind of noise do you expect me to make?  Coo-coo?  Blah-blah?  Marx-Marx?"  He laughed again, then brought out one of his well-tried witticisms.  "I'm the man who won't take yes for an answer."

      "Pretty," said Dr MacPhail.  "Very pretty.  But now let's get down to business."  Taking a pair of scissors out of his bag, he started to cut away the torn and bloodstained trouser leg that covered Will's injured knee.

      Will Farnaby looked up and him and wondered, as he looked, how much of this improbable Highlander was still Scottish and how much Palanese.  About the blue eyes and the jutting nose there could be no doubt.  But the brown skin, the delicate hands, the grace of movement - these surely came from somewhere considerably south of the Tweed.

      "Were you born here?" he asked.

      The doctor nodded affirmatively.  "At Shivapuram, on the day of Queen Victoria's funeral."

      There was a final click of the scissors, and the trouser leg fell away, exposing the knee.  "Messy," was Dr MacPhail's verdict after a first intent scrutiny.  "But I don't think there's anything too serious."  He turned to his granddaughter, "I'd like you to run back to the station and ask Vijaya to come here with one of the other men.  Tell them to pick up a stretcher at the infirmary."

      Mary Sarojini nodded and, without a word, rose to her feet, and hurried away across the glade.

      Will looked after the small figure as it receded - the red skirt swinging from side to side, the smooth skin of the torso glowing rosily golden in the twilight."

      "You have a very remarkable granddaughter," he said to Dr MacPhail.

      "Mary Sarojini's father," said the doctor after a little silence, "was my eldest son.  He died four months ago - a mountain-climbing accident."

      Will mumbled his sympathy, and there was another silence.

      Dr MacPhail uncorked a bottle of alcohol and swabbed his hands.

      "This is going to hurt a bit," he warned.  "I'd suggest that you listen to that bird."  He waved a hand in the direction of the dead tree, to which, after Mary Sarojini's departure, the mynah had returned.

      "Listen to him closely, listen discriminatingly.  It'll keep your mind off the discomfort."

      Will Farnaby listened.  The mynah had gone back to its first theme.

      "Attention," the articulate oboe was calling.  "Attention."

      "Attention to what?" he asked, in the hope of eliciting a more enlightening answer than the one he had received from Mary Sarojini.

      "To attention," said Dr MacPhail.

      "Attention to attention?"

      "Of course."

      "Attention," the mynah chanted in ironical confirmation.

      "Do you have many of these talking birds?"

      "There must be at least a thousand of them flying about the island.  It was an old Raja's idea.  He thought it would do people good.  Maybe it does, though it seems rather unfair to the poor mynahs.  Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks.  Not even St Francis's.  Just imagine," he went on, "preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs!  What presumption!  Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?  And now," he added in another tone, "you'd better start listening to our friend in the tree.  I'm going to clean this thing up."

      "Attention."

      "Here goes."

      The young man winced and bit his lip.

      "Attention.  Attention.  Attention."

      Yes, it was quite true.  If you listened intently enough, the pain wasn't so bad.

      "Attention.  Attention ..."

      "How you ever contrived to get up that cliff," said Dr MacPhail, as he reached for the bandage, "I cannot conceive."

      Will managed to laugh.  "Remember the beginning of Erewhon," he said.  "'As luck would have it, Providence was on my side.'"

      From the further side of the glade came the sound of voices.  Will turned his head and saw Mary Sarojini emerging from between the trees, her red skirt swinging as she skipped along.  Behind her, naked to the waist and carrying over his shoulder the bamboo poles and rolled-up canvas of a light stretcher, walked a huge bronze statue of a man, and behind the giant came a slender, dark-skinned adolescent in white shorts.

      "This is Vijaya Bhattacharya," said Dr MacPhail as the bronze statue approached.  "Vijaya is my assistant."

      "In the hospital."

      Dr MacPhail shook his head.  "Except in emergencies," he said, "I don't practise any more.  Vijaya and I work together at the Agricultural Experimental Station.  And Murugan Mailendra" (he waved his hand in the direction of the dark-skinned boy) "is with us temporarily, studying soil science and plant breeding."

      Vijaya stepped aside and, laying a large hand on his companion's shoulder, pushed him forward.  Looking up into that beautiful, sulky young face, Will suddenly recognized, with a start of surprise, the elegantly tailored youth he had met, five days before, at Rendang-Lobo, had driven with in Colonel Dipa's white Mercedes all over the island.  He smiled, he opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself.  Almost imperceptibly but quite unmistakably, the boy had shaken his head.  In his eyes Will saw an expression of anguished pleading.  His lips moved soundlessly. "Please," he seemed to be saying, "please ...” Will readjusted his face.

      "How do you do, Mr Mailendra," he said in a tone of casual formality.

      Murugan looked enormously relieved.  "How do you do," he said, and made a little bow.

      Will looked round to see if the others had noticed what had happened. Mary Sarojini and Vijaya, he saw, were busy with the stretcher, and the doctor was repacking his black bag.  The little comedy had been played without an audience.  Young Murugan evidently had his reasons for not wanting it to be known that he had been in Rendang.  Boys will be boys.  Boys will even be girls.  Colonel Dipa had been more than fatherly towards his young protégé, and towards the Colonel, Murugan had been a good deal more than filial - he had been positively adoring.  Was it merely hero-worship, merely a schoolboy's admiration for the strong man who had carried out a successful revolution, liquidated the opposition and installed himself as dictator?  Or were other feelings involved?  Was Murugan playing Antinous to his black-moustached Hadrian?  Well, if that was how he felt about middle-aged military gangsters, that was his privilege.  And if the gangster liked pretty boys, that was his.  And perhaps, Will went on to reflect, that was why Colonel Dipa had refrained from making a formal introduction.  "This is Muru," was all he had said, when the boy was ushered into the presidential office.  "My young friend, Muru," and he had risen, had put his arm around the boy's shoulders, had led him to the sofa and sat down beside him.  "May I drive the Mercedes?" Murugan had asked.  The dictator had smiled indulgently and nodded his sleek black head.  And that was another reason for thinking that more than mere friendliness was involved in that curious relationship.  At the wheel of the Colonel's sports car Murugan was a maniac.  Only an infatuated lover would have entrusted himself, not to mention his guest, to such a chauffeur.  On the flat between Rendang-Lobo and the oil fields the speedometer had twice touched a hundred and ten; and worse, much worse, was to follow on the mountain road from the oil fields to the copper mines.  Chasms yawned, tyres screeched round corners, water buffaloes emerged from bamboo thickets a few feet ahead of the car, ten-ton lorries came roaring down on the wrong side of the road.  "Aren't you a little nervous?" Will had ventured to ask.  But the gangster was pious as well as infatuated.  "If one knows that one is doing the will of Allah - and I do know it, Mr Farnaby - there is no excuse for nervousness.  In those circumstances, nervousness would be a blasphemy."  And as Murugan swerved to avoid yet another buffalo, he opened his gold cigarette case and offered Will a Balkan Sobranje.

      "Ready," Vijaya called.

      Will turned his head and saw the stretcher lying on the ground beside him.

      "Good!" said Dr MacPhail.  "Let's lift him on to it.  Carefully.  Carefully ..."

      A minute later the little procession was winding its way up the narrow path between the trees.  Mary Sarojini was in the van, her grandfather brought up the rear, and between them came Murugan and Vijaya at either end of the stretcher.

      From his moving bed Will Farnaby looked up through the green darkness as though from the floor of a living sea.  Far overhead, near the surface, there was a rustling among the leaves, a noise of monkeys.  A now it was a dozen hornbills hopping, like the figments of a disordered imagination, through a cloud of orchids.

      "Are you comfortable?" Vijaya asked, bending solicitously to look into his face.

      Will smiled back at him.

      "Luxuriously comfortable," he said.

      "It isn't far," the other went on reassuringly.  "We'll be there in a few minutes."

      "Where 'there'?"

      "The Experimental Station.  It's like Rothamsted.  Did you ever go to Rothamsted when you were in England?"

      Will had heard of it, of course, but never seen the place.

      "It's been going for more than a hundred years," Vijaya went on.

      "A hundred and eighteen, to be precise," said Dr MacPhail. "Lawes and Gilbert started their work on fertilizers in 1843.  One of their pupils came out here in the early fifties to help our grandfather get our Station going.  Rothampsted-in-the-Tropics - that was the idea.  In the tropics and for the tropics."

      There was a lightening of the green gloom and a moment later the litter emerged from the forest into the full glare of tropical sunshine.  Will raised his head and looked about him.  They were not far from the floor of an immense amphitheatre.  Five hundred feet below stretched a wide plain, chequered with fields, dotted with clumps of trees and clustered houses.  In the other direction the slopes climbed up and up, thousands of feet towards a semicircle of mountains.  Terrace above green or golden terrace, from the plain to the crenellated wall of peaks, the rice paddies followed the contour lines, emphasizing every swell and recession of the slope with what seemed a deliberate and artful intention.  Nature here was no longer merely natural; the landscape had been composed, had been reduced to its geometrical essences, and rendered, by what in a painter would have been a miracle of virtuosity, in terms of these sinuous lines, these streaks of pure bright colour.

      "What were you doing in Rendang?" Dr Robert asked, breaking a long silence.

      "Collecting materials for a piece on the new régime."

      "I wouldn't have thought the Colonel was newsworthy."

      "You're mistaken.  He's a military dictator.  That means there's death in the offing.  And death is always news.  Even the remote smell of death is news," he laughed.  "That's why I was told to drop in on my way back from China."

      And there had been other reasons which he preferred not to mention.  Newspapers were only one of Lord Aldehyde's interests.  In another manifestation he was the South-East Asia Petroleum Company, he was Imperial and Foreign Copper Limited.  Officially, Will had come to Rendang to sniff the death in its militarized air; but he had also been commissioned to find out what the dictator felt about foreign capital, what tax rebates he was prepared to offer, what guarantees against nationalization.  And how much of the profits would be exportable?  How many native technicians and administrators would have to be employed?  A whole battery of questions.  But Colonel Dipa had been most affable and co-operative.  Hence that hair-raising drive, with Murugan at the wheel, to the copper mines.  "Primitive, my dear Farnaby, primitive.  Urgently in need, as you can see for yourself, of modern equipment."  Another meeting had been arranged - arranged, Will now remembered, for this very morning.  He visualized the Colonel at his desk.  A report from the chief of police.  "Mr Farnaby was last seen sailing a small boat single-handed into the Pala Strait.  Two hours later a storm of great violence ...  Presumed dead ...” Instead of which, here he was, alive and kicking, on the forbidden island.

      "They'll never give you a visa," Joe Aldehyde had said at their last interview.  "But perhaps you could sneak ashore in disguise.  Wear a burnous or something, like Lawrence of Arabia."

      With a straight face, "I'll try," Will had promised.

      "Anyhow, if you ever do manage to land in Pala, make a beeline for the palace.  The Rani - that's their Queen Mother - is an old friend of mine.  Met her for the first time six years ago at Lugano.  She was staying there with old Voegeli, the investment banker.  His girlfriend is interested in spiritualism and they staged a séance for me.  A trumpet medium, genuine Direct Voice - only, unfortunately, it was all in German.  Well, after the lights were turned on, I had a long talk with her."

      "With the trumpet?"

      "No, no.  With the Rani.  She's a remarkable woman.  You know, the Crusade of the Spirit."

      "Was that her invention?"

      "Absolutely.  And personally I prefer it to Moral Rearmament.  It goes down better in Asia.  We had a long talk about it that evening.  And after that we talked about oil.  Pala's full of oil.  South-East Asia Petroleum has been trying to get in on it for years.  So have all the other companies.  Nothing doing.  No oil concessions to anyone.  It's their fixed policy.  But the Rani doesn't agree with it.  She wants to see the oil doing some good in the world.  Financing the Crusade of the Spirit, for example.  So, as I say, if ever you get to Pala, make a bee-line for the palace.  Talk to her.  Get the inside story about the men who make the decisions.  Find out if there's a pro-oil minority and ask how we could help them to carry on the good work."  And he had ended by promising Will a handsome bonus if his efforts should be crowned with success.  Enough to give him a full year of freedom.  "No more reporting.  Nothing but High Art, Art, A-ART."  And he had uttered a scatological laugh as though the word had an 's' at the end of it, not a 't'.  Unspeakable creature!  but all the same he wrote for the unspeakable creature's vile papers and was ready, for a bribe, to do the vile creature's dirty work.  And now, incredibly, here he was on Palanese soil.  As luck would have it, Providence had been on his side - for the express purpose, evidently, of perpetrating one of those sinister practical jokes which are Providence's speciality.

      He was called back to present reality by the sound of Mary Sarojini's shrill voice.  "Here we are!"

      Will raised his head again.  The little procession had turned off the highway and was passing through an opening in a white stuccoed wall.  To the left, on a rising succession of terraces, stood lines of low buildings, shaded by peepul trees.  Straight ahead an avenue of tall palms sloped down to a lotus pool, on the further side of which sat a huge stone Buddha.  Turning to the left, they climbed between flowering trees and through blending perfumes to the first terrace.  Behind a fence, motionless except for his ruminating jaws, stood a snow-white humped bull, god-like in his serene and mindless beauty.  Europa's love receded into the past, and here were a brace of Juno's birds trailing their feathers over the grass.  Mary Sarojini unlatched the gate of a small garden.

      "My bungalow," said Dr MacPhail, and turning to Murugan, "Let me help you to negotiate the steps."