The Rain Forest Page 7

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there’s nothing left to kill them. Not even a war. There’s too many of them. Some profound instinct prompts them to die and the weakest submit to it.’

  Watching Simon’s exact movements as he tidied the kitchen, Hugh was impressed again by his imperturbable assurance but said: ‘I think you feel more than you admit. What about the seaman with smallpox? And you wanted to help the child.’

  ‘Merely habit. I don’t practise medicine but if consulted, I automatically advise. Just habit. But you’re right. I should have said: “Let the child die. The world has no use for it.”’

  As Hugh opened his mouth to expostulate, Simon laughed at him and, taking him by the shoulder, pushed him towards the front door: ‘If you don’t go, you’ll be caught by the dark. I’ll walk you across the square.’

  Hugh was aware that Simon’s amusement disparaged him but, at the same time, he was excited by the fact that this man, who had no friends, was treating him with the affection of friendship.

  ‘Are you really going tomorrow?’

  ‘I can’t say. I have to take a look at the Land-Rover. It’s been in the car park for the last three months and may need an overhaul. You can go back this way.’ Turning right through the awakened and noisy market, Simon led the way to the western sûks and the gate on to the car park. A few old cars stood round the petrol pump, the Land-Rover among them. Simon waved Hugh away: ‘If you walk down there, you’ll come to the plantations.’

  The road was as decayed as the wall beside it but Hugh, who had been dreading a return through the lanes, set out with the light step of the reprieved.

  4

  Kristy had pushed the desk to a point opposite the balcony door. Finding her seated before a view of the harbour, pen in hand, paper stacked in front of her, Hugh was unreasonably irritated: ‘You can’t move things around. The room isn’t ours.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Kristy had spent most of the day unpacking and arranging the room so it had for her the sympathetic semblance of a workroom. The balcony, that had table and chairs of its own, delighted her, but she could not work out of doors. The ideal, she felt, was to remain in out of the heat and wind but so placed that she could, if she raised her head, enjoy the view of the harbour and the rock façade rising behind it.

  The morning scene had been silvered over with mist, making the foliage more blue than green. As the clouds lifted, the Indian Ocean could be seen crashing in, as fierce as the Atlantic. The look of the island suggested to her an autumnal smell of bonfires and a nip in the air, yet even then, at ten in the morning, the heat pressed on her. She noted the incongruity of the frigid light and the tropical temperature, and wrote a few words on the flap of a used envelope. She did not keep notebooks but liked to collect notes on slips of paper, preferably of an odd shape or colour, and when she went through them, she was stimulated by their variety and disorder.

  No one had spoken to her during the day. She knew nothing of the mistake about the room and she faced Hugh with such a look of dismay, he regretted his grudging ill-humour and said: ‘Well, it may be ours. It was reserved for a senior couple called Ogden but they may let us have it.’

  To make amends, Hugh decided to go at once and ask Mrs Gunner if the Ogdens had spoken yet. Mrs Gunner was unlocking the bar grille.

  ‘What now, dear?’ she asked as though Hugh’s importunings were too much to be borne. When, apologetically, he explained his mission, she said in a tone of long-suffering: ‘If I’d heard, dear, I’d’ve told you.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you. I wonder, could I have a word with Mr Gunner?’

  ‘No one’s stopping you, dear. He’s in the office, or should be. Over there, dear. It’s clearly marked.’

  Ambrose, calling Hugh to enter, sounded as discouraging as his mother. He was sitting on the edge of a bed, his weight bending the mattress down to the floor, his expression preoccupied. He smiled at the sight of Hugh and said: ‘Thank God, it’s only you. Sit down somewhere.’

  Hugh thought the office a gloomy place. The window was obscured by creepers that had glued their tendrils to the glass. A few rays from the setting sun struck through the leaves and reddened the floor that was cluttered with Ambrose’s possessions.

  A typist’s desk stood by the door and Hugh, unable to advance further, seated himself on top of it. The whole room smelled of Ambrose, whose large, seedy garments hung from every shelf. At his feet stood an old suitcase, a telephone, a wireless set, a portable typewriter and books enough to stock a bookshop.

  ‘This isn’t your bedroom, is it?’ Hugh asked in surprise.

  ‘You may well wonder at it. I’m her only child. I’m all she has in the world, yet she won’t waste a room on me, and even this isn’t all mine. Every afternoon, when I could be taking a nap, a girl comes in to do the typing.’ Ambrose picked up a cigar box that was filled with small keys: ‘I’ve been trying to open this suitcase. I’m pretty sure it contains my collection of modern poets and I believe the chart’s inside Adrian Mitchell.’

  ‘Where did the keys come from?’

  ‘She collected them over the years. Guests leave things, you know.’

  Hugh watched as Ambrose tried key after key until one turned in the lock and the case was opened.

  ‘What have we here?’

  The case was full of objects roughly wrapped up in newspaper. Ambrose lifted one, unwrapped it and disclosed half a brick. He turned it about in a puzzled way then sighed and dropped it back into the case.

  ‘Not the poets after all.’ He tried to push the case with his foot but it was too heavy to move.

  Hugh, bewildered by what he had seen, awaited an explanation. Getting none, he asked: ‘Who would send you a suitcase full of bricks?’

  ‘Oh, some landlady, long forgotten. Mrs G. has more sympathy with landladies than she has with me. When one of them manages to track me down, she sends the scratch and they release the goods.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I still don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s the usual thing. A heavy suitcase creates confidence. You have to put something into it. You know what it’s like! They want something in lieu. You make them up a case, hand it over, say you’ll be back and settle up. You must have done it often.’

  Darkness came down. Ambrose switched on a lamp and looked at Hugh through sad, bleary eyes. Remembering Simon’s statement that on Al-Bustan an intelligent man was likely to be a fugitive, Hugh did not try to know more but said: ‘I was wondering if you could put in a word for us. We’ve been given a room intended for Mr and Mrs Ogden and as Kristy doesn’t want to leave it, I thought perhaps you . . .’

  ‘Me? In this place I count for as much as the kitchen cat. Rather less. I wouldn’t dare speak to Ogden or Mrs G. Better let them fight it out.’ Dismissing Hugh’s anxiety with a gesture, Ambrose changed to a subject of more interest to himself: ‘Did you get the impression Lomax will, eventually, come across?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. He’s not an easy man. Where did you pick him up?’

  ‘I dropped into Gurgur’s one night and saw him sitting there. I felt his solitude: it was like a sickness. I was moved by it.’ An expression of concern came on to Ambrose’s face and his eyelids slid down in modest consciousness of his own good-nature: ‘I offered to sit with him and we had a few drinks together. I began to wonder how I could rouse him out of himself. He needed, I felt, a spiritual undertaking, a larger window on life, an interest beyond his narrow preoccupation with money-making. I gave myself to helping him. You see how he repays me.’

  ‘And you learnt nothing about his background?’

  ‘I’ve learnt a little, but not from him. When Gurgur’s had a few drinks, you can get him talking.’ In his present state of annoyance with Lomax, Ambrose was more willing to disclose the source of his wealth: ‘He’s the eternal middle man and speculator. And he started young. He reached Cairo during the war – God knows where he came from. Scarcely more than a boy, he wa
s a refugee, penniless; but not for long. He offered himself as a contractor to the army and was put on several building jobs. He paid his men the minimum and chalked up the maximum, and, what’s more, half the names on the payroll were imaginary. At first he employed fifty men and charged for a hundred, but by the end of the war he was employing five hundred and charging for five thousand.’

  ‘How did he get away with it?’

  ‘I’m told you could get away with most things in those days. The ordnance officers didn’t care, they were too busy feathering their own nests. Lomax got the work done and saved them trouble. That’s what they wanted. Once he had money, his money made money. He settled in Beirut and became a professional middle man, doing nothing but just sitting there, passing things from his right hand to his left. He was a broker between enemies. Or friends. If one friendly country wanted to export the wrong thing to another friendly country, they used Lomax. Gurgur says you could find his name on the dockets of some pretty strange things.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Rhino horn, cantharides . . .’

  ‘Drugs?’

  The telephone rang. Ambrose, who had been sprawling, indolent with grievance, sat upright. He lifted the receiver and said in a coldly businesslike tone: ‘Yes?’ Listening to the caller, he sank down again, smiling a smile of great charm. ‘I think we would be delighted,’ he said very warmly.

  He looked across at Hugh and winked. Hugh whispered ‘Lomax?’ Ambrose raised his chin and dropped his eyelids meaningfully. Hugh laughed, knowing that he was, and always would be, on Ambrose’s side.

  Putting down the receiver, Ambrose said with satisfaction: ‘Well, that’s very nice! He’s off to Beirut for a few days and when he comes back, he means to invite us all to the Praslin for a meal. You, me and your missus. Really, he’s not a bad fellow. What were you asking me? Whether he dabbles in drugs? No, no. Most certainly not. Not his line at all.’

  The dinner-bell sounded and Ambrose, ready for food, said, ‘See you in the tent.’

  As Hugh passed the bar, Mrs Gunner called cheerfully to him: ‘I’ve heard from the Ogdens. They’ll let you keep the room.’

  The lemur, coming in at supper-time, fixed its expectant stare on Kristy who fed it pineapple, saying in a cooing voice that irritated Hugh: ‘Look at it! I love it. I love its hands. I love its ringed tail. It’s my lemur.’

  ‘It’s not your lemur. It’s a wild creature. It doesn’t want love. It wants pineapple.’

  The lemur was not the Fosters’ only visitor that evening. A man and a woman, on their way out of the tent, paused beside their table, looking as expectant as the lemur. The man, very tall, bony and red-skinned, smiled down on them but the wife, a plain little woman, self-consciously reflecting the power vested in her husband, kept a step behind him and saw no reason to smile.

  The man said: ‘We are Mr and Mrs Ogden.’

  ‘Oh!’ Hugh leapt to his feet, realizing that the Ogdens expected what was outside the lemur’s scheme of things: gratitude. He stuttered in his effort to express it: ‘We must thank you . . . we were so pleased . . .’

  Ogden silenced him by lifting a hand: ‘Mrs Ogden and I talked it over, and we decided we’d leave you where you are. When we looked in last night and saw the pair of you, curled up like puppies in a basket, I said to my lady wife: “Let the young people stay put.” I admit I had to talk her round, but now we’re agreed. The room is yours and we hope you enjoy it.’

  ‘It’s enormously kind of you.’ Hugh looked at Mrs Ogden who gave a minimal stretch of the lips. She, he realized, had taken some talking round, but Ogden was affable for both of them. He said ‘Say nothing of it’ and nodding from his great height, he put a hand to his wife’s shoulder and steered her away.

  ‘There!’ Hugh spoke with relief: ‘Someone has spoken to us.’

  ‘Mrs Ogden was careful not to speak to me,’ Kristy said. ‘She’s not going to be the one who lets me into the girls’ club.’

  ‘If you don’t upset them, they’ll accept you in time.’

  That evening the Ogdens gave a little party in the Lettuce Room. The only guests invited from the Daisy were the Axelrods, Princes and Mr Simpson. The rest were villa-owning officials who looked to Kristy and Hugh exactly like everyone else. The uninvited inmates of the Daisy tactfully kept their backs to the glass door of the room and pretended that nothing was happening behind them. The Fosters, in their obscure corner, could look without being seen to look. Remembering London parties where the guests sorted themselves into couples and made love on the floor, the Fosters thought this party not so much formal as static. When Ambrose joined them for coffee, Kristy asked: ‘Are all Al-Bustan parties as dull as this?’

  ‘Duller, I’d imagine. This lot’s the service upper crust. Most of them can afford to own villas and villas aren’t cheap.’ A couple passed through the salon to the Lettuce Room. Though indistinguishable in dress and appearance from the Daisy couples, they managed in a very decorous way to convey their superiority. Ambrose raised an ironical brow: ‘Still, they’re not as grand as the island Smart Set.’

  ‘Is there a Smart Set?’

  ‘A small one: an exclusive, moneyed little group that circulates round the Chief Secretary.’

  ‘Are we likely to meet them?’

  ‘Not likely, no. You see, you’ll probably never meet anyone who is in a position to introduce you.’

  Hugh had secretly consulted his contract and found that he was of the middle rank. Conscious of his demotion in the world, he realised that if Kristy could not make friends among the Daisy women, she would get little chance to make them elsewhere. He wondered how long she could remain here, an isolated figure in the midst of social tedium? And if she decided to return home, how would he feel? It was strange that he could not answer that question.

  5

  Hugh shared his office with an Indian girl who was his secretary and a half-Arab girl who was Pedley’s secretary. The noise of their typewriters rattled through the television news but he could not bring himself to ask for a respite. And there was another distraction: Pedley, in the room next door, had a habit of shouting when on the telephone and his pinched military voice penetrated the wall behind Hugh’s desk.

  Pedley was Assistant to the Minister of Information. In his youth, he had been an officer in the Guards and he still wore an army moustache, but now he was fat with the general dilapidation of the addict. Wherever he went, he trailed after him a fruity aroma of stale alcohol. Pedley, expressing surprise that the Fosters had not come by helicopter, said briskly, ‘Thought Ogden’d look after you. If I’d known y’were on the boat, I’d’ve met you.’ It was evident he, like Akbar, had been remiss and, later, Hugh wondered if Pedley had been too drunk to meet the boat. Still, he was sober enough to say on their first encounter that he saw neither use nor purpose in Hugh’s appointment.

  ‘This news-sheet’s a nonsense. If you want it to be read, stick to rape and murder, keep off politics.’

  ‘But that’s not the idea at all. I’m supposed to get the ministers interested in the problems of government.’

  Pedley sniggered: ‘Rather you than me,’ and left him to it. Hugh thought Pedley was a friendly fellow, tolerant of Hugh’s work even while disapproving it, but later in the morning, he heard Pedley shouting on the telephone: ‘Guess what they’ve sent me this time! A longhaired type who thinks he can teach me m’job.’

  Hugh feared there was more to Pedley than first appeared, and the more was not friendly. Later, recovering from the remark about the ‘long-haired type’, he decided that Pedley had been drinking and did not mean what he said. He was, most likely, a sick man, for the whites of his eyes were dotted over with tiny yellow growths, like yolk crumbs from a hard-boiled egg. Repelled and fascinated by these growths, Hugh attributed them to a liver disorder that would account for Pedley’s unreliability.

  The thing that irritated Hugh most was Pedley’s interference in his work. One of his tasks was to pick news
items from the Reuters sheets and collate them with island politics. Hugh would have found this simple enough had he been left to do it on his own. Pedley, however, was always wandering in with a brooding expression and picking up the sheets that came each day by helicopter, would mark the items he thought significant and say: ‘Put those in.’ Hugh, who was paid to make these decisions himself, looked at the growths on Pedley’s eye-balls, and excused when he should have remonstrated.

  During his early days, he was flattered as the supplicants in the hall crowded round him, assuring him, ‘You, only you, Mr Foster, can understand my case.’ Feeling that at last his life here was taking on depth and purpose, he hurried to ask Pedley whom he should approach in order to help this one or that.

  Pedley discouraged him wearily: ‘Go away. They’re only pestering you because you’re a new face.’ And this, alas, proved to be true. Before the week was out, the supplicants ceased to see Hugh as he passed through the hall.

  On the same day that he lost the sense of personal consequence they had given him, he heard Pedley shout: ‘A pass? Who the devil issued a pass? What’s the signature? God almighty, that’s the new man.’

  Hugh grew cold. He pressed close to the wall, his whole body become an ear, but he heard no more. Pedley threw down his receiver, crashed his way out of the office and could be heard ringing for the lift. When the lift did not come, he kicked the gate and bawled down the shaft: ‘Bring that bloody lift or else.’ The lift came and Pedley was carried to the floor above.

  Hugh shifted his Reuters’ sheets, unable to see the print. The telephone rang and the Indian girl in her soft, plaintive voice told him he was to go and see Sir George Easterbrook. For some moments Hugh could not move. He was held in a paralysis of apprehension such as he had not known since, long ago, he was summoned to the headmaster for punishment. When he managed to rise, he saw the Indian girl was looking at him. He thought she pitied him and he would, if he could, have expressed his gratitude. He went up by the stairs, slowly, seeing his life here in ruins. Still, he reminded himself, if his contract were terminated, they had to give him a year’s salary and repatriate him and his wife. That would mean a free year in which to do his own work. He could write a novel. He ought to be elated by the thought but all he could feel was a sense of failure. He had started a structure of life here, a new beginning and new friendships that would, if he went, never be developed or brought to maturity.