The Four Beauties Read online

  ‘It won’t take a minute. I’ll have the kettle on in a jiff.’

  ‘English tea?’ Otto suddenly said. ‘This I am liking very much. Mit toast, eh? This is something splendid.’

  ‘Good. Then we’ll all go in, shall we? Freddie’ll be awake now.’

  Perhaps the very thought of Freddie having been asleep all afternoon, deeply lapped in a zizz, roused some demon in Mr Wilbram. At any rate he suddenly thrust his head out of the window of his car and positively barked:

  ‘Otto! There is no time!’

  ‘You mean for tea?’ Aunt Leonora spoke with the utmost sweetness, itself as maddening as anything could be, smiling blandly with those long teeth of hers. ‘Of course there’s time. There’s oceans of time.’

  ‘Otto, we must go. There simply isn’t the time.’

  ‘Oh! don’t be such a fidget. Of course there’s time.’

  ‘I am not a fidget!’

  ‘Then don’t be so spokey. If Otto wants a cup of tea then he can have a cup of tea, can’t he? Don’t make such an issue of it.’

  ‘I am not making an issue of it. But Herr Untermeyer has a programme to keep.’

  ‘Then he must do a Francis Drake, mustn’t he? Have a cup of tea with plenty of time to beat the Spaniards afterwards—’

  ‘Otto! We haven’t the time. We must get going. Spaniards!—’

  Otto was already half-way up the garden path, with Aunt Leonora not far behind. As if this were not irritation enough in itself the front door of the house suddenly opened and Uncle Freddie appeared, fresh and vibrant from sleep, eager with smiling welcome.

  ‘Ah! there you all are. Tongues hanging out, I expect. I’ve got the kettle on.’

  I suppose it was ‘tongues hanging out’ that provided the last extreme force that unloosed the puritanical demon in Mr Wilbram. Suddenly he yapped like an infuriated dog:

  ‘Once and for all, Otto, we have to go.’ He was actually out of the car now. Paler than ever, he strode as far as the garden gate. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t you realise it’s nearly five o’clock? Why on earth must you have tea?’

  ‘Because I am thirsty.’

  ‘Then get Mrs Elphinstone to give you a glass of water and let’s get going. Quickly.’

  ‘Glass of water, my foot,’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘The man’s entitled to tea if he wants to have tea, isn’t he? Without being bossed around.’

  ‘The tea I am taking only in small portion. Most quickly. In one moment.’

  Mr Wilbram banged with his fists on top of the garden gate, shouting:

  ‘Otto, if you don’t come now, I wash my hands of the whole affair. I disclaim responsibility. We shall only be just in time as it is. It’s on your head, I warn you, it’s on your head.’

  Herr Untermeyer too strode to the garden gate.

  ‘You are spoking very loud at me?’

  ‘I am and I will!’

  ‘Ah! so? You wish conflict?’

  ‘I am not talking of conflict. I am talking of time. Getting to places on time. People are waiting. Don’t you understand?’

  ‘I do not understand when you are making loud words!’

  ‘Now, now,’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘You two. You mustn’t get at loggerheads.’

  ‘Loggerheads?’ Otto said. ‘Loggerheads? What is this word? Explain to me, please.’

  ‘Oh! damn the explaining! I don’t often use strong language, but really, really! Damn the word! Damn the man!—’

  ‘This word I am knowing. This damn. This is not polite.’

  ‘Oh! it’s an everyday word nowadays,’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘Nobody takes any notice. Like bloody. Anyway, you shouldn’t swear at your visitor, Mr Wilbram, should you?’

  ‘I am not swearing at him!’ Mr Wilbram actually shook his fist in the air. ‘I am simply saying that if he doesn’t come now, this minute, I’ll wash my hands of the whole affair.’

  ‘Oh! why don’t you all come in?’ Uncle Freddie called from the doorway. ‘The tea’s already made.’

  ‘I come!’ Otto said. ‘The tea I will take at once! Like blitzen – quick take!’

  ‘You will do no such thing. We’ve had to deal with this German obstinacy before,’ Mr Wilbram explained. ‘This wretched Teutonic – whatever it is—’

  ‘Bloody-mindedness,’ I said.

  ‘Well, whatever it is! The only way is to treat with obstinacy in return. I say we go now! I say no tea! You understand?’

  ‘I understood. You wish conflict again, ah? This is catastroff!’

  Herr Untermeyer actually raised his fist and shook it so aggressively that I thought he would, for one moment, poke Mr Wilbram in the eye. The two men faced each other, one red with passion, one pale with ashen indignation, both speechless, at a point of thunderflash, until suddenly my Aunt Leonora said with disarming sweetness:

  ‘Into the car, the pair of you. The tea-party can wait until some other time. We don’t want another Boston on top of us, do we?’

  Like two scowling dogs, anger unappeased, Mr Wilbram and Herr Untermeyer got into the car.

  ‘Good-bye, Otto,’ Aunt Leonora said, almost as if nothing had happened. ‘Auf Wiedersehen. You won’t be late. It’s been like old times. Come again.’

  ‘It is catastroff!’ I heard Herr Untermeyer say. ‘Catastroff!’

  The car drove away. The pair of hands that waved the briefest of farewells, one German, one English, were scarcely flags of cordiality.

  Slowly I walked back to the house with Aunt Leonora. Above us the hills were bathed in serenity. The golden summer air was utterly silent. Nothing could have been more peaceful. Only she herself seemed, for once, I thought, more than a little perturbed.

  ‘I wouldn’t have expected that from Otto,’ she said at last and her voice was hurt. ‘Why did he have to behave like that? It wasn’t like him at all. It wasn’t a bit like he used to be. I do wish people wouldn’t change so. It would make it so much easier if they always remained the same, don’t you think?’

  As I looked back at the tranquil hills, in the golden August sun, it was suddenly on the tip of my tongue to say that the chords of youth were very tender; but I kept quiet instead, content to know that I had no answer.

  The White Wind

  The lagoon had the hot brilliance of a stretch of celluloid constantly ignited by sunlight into white running flame. From far beyond it the Pacific galloped ceaselessly, charging, white-maned, against the coral reef. At each point of the gap, where the swell poured in, flew great conical flags of splendid spume.

  ‘Does the boat go fast?’

  ‘Like the wind.’

  ‘How fast?’

  ‘Like the wind, boy. I told you. Like the wind.’

  In the shadowy shed, half tin, half palm-frond, the boy fed into a strange rattling wheel-like contraption, not unlike a roundabout at a fair, another soda-water bottle. The machine filled it, sealed it with a sound like that of gnashing iron teeth and bore it away.

  ‘How long to go to Papeete in the boat?’

  ‘No time.’

  ‘And Bora-Bora?’

  ‘No time. Just like the wind, I tell you. No time.’

  On the far side of the machine sat a mass of yellow indolence on a box. It stretched out at mechanical intervals a soporific crab-like hand that grasped the filled soda-water bottles and dropped them in a crate. It had grown over the years so completely into the lethargy of this rhythm that occasionally, when it fell asleep in the heat of oppressive afternoons, the hand kept up its fat, slow clawing, independently.

  The boy knew this mass of odiously distended flesh as Fat Uncle. He knew of no other name than Fat Uncle.

  ‘Fat Uncle, is the boat faster than Pierre’s?’

  ‘Pierre, Pierre, who’s Pierre? Boat? – you call that a boat? That fish barrel?’

  The flesh of the face was so solidly inflated, like a hard tyre, that the simple eyes appeared in it merely as two long slits nicked there by a knife held in a hand that had grown suddenly unsteady as it tra
ced the left-hand eye.

  This eye seemed not only larger than the other. It slanted upwards and backwards, jaggedly. The appearance achieved by it was one of idiotic cunning. It was then repeated, astonishingly, in the centre of the naked, soapy paunch below. There the navel lay like a third snoozing eye, the creased lid of stomach folding across it, heaving deeply up and down.

  The boy’s own eyes were black and listening. He was slightly over four feet in height, rather squat, with thick yellow skin and a mat of black shining hair that was never combed. There was nothing in these rather inconspicuous features to distinguish him from a score of other boys who ran about the water-front except the eyes. They were far-seeing, arrested, solemn eyes and they were inclined to fix themselves for long periods on distances away at sea, without the trace of a smile.

  When he was not working with Fat Uncle at the soda-water machine he spent most of his time working and running errands about the port for an American named Edison. Edison owned, among other things, the soda-water plant. He also owned the tin-hut, Fat Uncle, the schooner that Fat Uncle said was as fast as the wind and a hotel on the water-front.

  ‘Faster than the wind,’ Fat Uncle sometimes said. ‘Faster. Like a hurricane.’

  The hotel was a broken-down weather-boarded building with a balustraded upper verandah and a number of open cubicles for drinkers facing the street below. The outside had not been painted for many years but the cubicles inside were raw with violent scarlet, freshly painted, impressed here and there with what seemed like crude transfers of Polynesian girls, with purple leis about their necks and green and yellow bark-shirts, dancing.

  Edison was fond of purple. Most days he wore a purple shirt, sometimes with large designs of dragons across it, sometimes with rosettes of vast, purple flowers. This colour threw into sickly relief the thin, balding head, the long neck and the scooped dark cheeks with their two-day beard.

  On Saturday nights, when the boy spent most of his time helping a Chinaman to wash glasses in the kitchen at the back of the hotel, Edison thumped away at an out-of-tune piano, Fat Uncle played a ukelele and the floor between the cubicles thundered with sweating, stampeding dancers. In the wild heat of these Saturdays the boy heard men mouthing across the floor untranslatable violent slogans, sometimes in English, sometimes in French, which he did not understand, and occasionally in his own language, which he merely thought he did. Somehow he knew that these were dirty men.

  At night he dropped to sleep in the shed. He did not mind the shed. He was in fact very glad of the shed. The shed had become an almost solitary means of comfort to him. It reminded him always of Fat Uncle and the boat, the schooner that went faster than the wind. Sometimes too there was a bottle of soda water that had not been properly sealed and at night he lay down in the warm darkness and drank it, chewing a little raw fish at the same time, or a little coconut.

  Occasionally Edison got hold of a sucking pig, invited people to the hotel and gave a big meal, with dishes of hot rice, fish salad, tuna, bread-fruit, shrimps and yams. After it was over the boy could sometimes find among the dishes a few unchewed ribs of pork that he could take away to the shed and gnaw there like a dog.

  Over and over again, during the day time, he found some chance to speak with Fat Uncle about the schooner.

  ‘How long was the schooner yours?’

  ‘Years. Years.’

  ‘Why did you sell her to Edison?’

  ‘Bad luck, boy. Bad luck. We all have bad luck sometimes.’

  The accumulated effect of these conversations on the boy was one of wonder. Even when a sudden elephantine hand struck out at him because the soda-water machine had jammed he was aware of no resentment, no bitterness, against Fat Uncle.

  For some reason these blows seemed always to strike him on the right-hand side of the face, so that his head appeared to have developed a slight and permanent list to one side. It was this list that gave to his eyes the remarkable impression that he was always listening to half-formed, distant sounds. It deepened his air of being fascinated. It made him seem to regard Fat Uncle as a sort of demi-god, part sinister but full of gripping, fathomless sources of wonder.

  ‘Did you once take her to the Marquesas?’

  ‘Once? Once? About a million times!’

  ‘Samoa? You said you once took her to Samoa.’

  ‘Samoa – I took her everywhere. Over the whole Pacific. The whole world, I tell you. The whole world. Everywhere.’

  ‘Tell me about Samoa.’

  In Samoa, Fat Uncle said, the men were big and vain. The villages were neat and pretty, with big round huts of palm. There was much cocoa, a lot of copra. Lazy and easy, the voyages to Samoa, to pick up cocoa. Good profits. Plenty of dough.

  ‘Where is Noumea? You said you once took her to Noumea.’

  The yellow crab-like fingers would wave with exhausted disdain in a direction vaguely westerly.

  ‘A million miles that way.’

  As he spoke of these distances, totally incomprehensible to the boy, who had never even sailed beyond the reef, he would actually open his eyes to their full simple width, as if the very fact of their being open was proof of candour, and then wave his hand again.

  ‘Look at her. You’d think a man would take her out sometimes, wouldn’t you? A man who was a man.’

  A great hand would grab with bloated impatience at a soda-water bottle. A great mouth, with scornful looseness, would spit at the floor.

  ‘Look at her. By God, only look at her.’

  On the dingy water-front, from which every turn of wind licked up from the many pot-holes a darting tongue of dust, the schooner lay squat and desolate, listing to one side. She had all the beauty of a floating hen-house dragged from the sea.

  ‘Goes like the wind, I tell you. Like a bird.’

  As he stared at the schooner and listened to these things the boy ceased to exist as a mere half-naked figure in the shed. He walked out into a great world of water and islands beyond the reef, beyond the farthest rim of horizon, and found that Fat Uncle was king of it.

  The discovery, for all its wonder, was incomplete in itself. He knew it could never be complete until he himself was part of it. And always, at night, in the shed, he would lie for some time awake, however tired he was, openly dreaming, trying to think of devious situations in which Edison, by some miracle, would one day take the schooner out of the harbour and beyond the towering reef, to distant places.

  ‘Couldn’t you buy the boat back from Edison?’

  ‘Me? What with? It’s his. He owns it. He should take it out.’

  ‘It’s a pity you sold it.’

  ‘A pity – too true it was. Everything was going well. And then there it was. Suddenly. Like I told you. Bad luck. I wanted the money. Every man has bad luck sometimes.’

  ‘Perhaps one day Edison will have bad luck.’

  ‘You tell me why. Edison’s always had the luck. You tell me why.’

  There were times, in more fabulous moments of memory, when Fat Uncle also spoke of fish.

  ‘Until you get out there—’ the disdaining obese fingers waved to the far corners of the world – ‘you’ve never seen a fish. They’re like ships, the fish there. Like ships. The sharks have mouths like doors.’

  ‘And the wind? You said once about the wind.’

  ‘The wind will drive you for days. Weeks sometimes. Down to Australia before you can catch a rope or get your breath or turn a hair.’

  ‘Do you wish you were out there again? With the big fish? With the big wind?’

  ‘Wish it? By God, wish it!—’

  It ended one morning with Fat Uncle kicking over the crate of soda-water bottles, grabbing up a bottle as he passed and then heaving himself in outrage, blowing hoarsely, towards the door, to emerge there like an obese blanched maggot hunching itself from the dark core of a rotting fruit, half-blinded by sunshine.

  ‘I gave her away. That’s the truth of it. I should have got three times as much for her. Four times a
s much. I gave her away. Six times. He got her out of me.’

  He sucked coarsely at the soda-water bottle like a vast baby tugging at a glassy teat.

  ‘I could prove he got her out of me. Six times as much – that’s what I should have got for her.’

  ‘You said once the wind blew you for ten days. Were you frightened?’

  ‘Of a thing like that?’ He laughed his cackling, simple-minded laugh. ‘The sea’s your friend. I was never frightened. It never does to be frightened.’

  In the complication of feeling that the schooner was beautiful, that Fat Uncle was never frightened and that Edison was a person of sinister design who had achieved the unforgivable outrage of robbing Fat Uncle of the schooner and laying her up to rot, the boy stood staring at the lagoon’ with solemn musing eyes.

  A girl in a white and crimson pereu, hatless, with a single yellow hibiscus darting a pistil tongue from her waist-length blue-black hair, walked a moment later across the water-front, away from the hotel.

  ‘Ginette, Ginette.’ The fat lips of Fat Uncle sucked the name in and out, grossly, as they had sucked at the soda-water bottle. ‘Look at her. Ginette. They all love to call themselves by French names. Where do you suppose she’s hurrying off to?’

  ‘To get fish.’

  ‘Fish. Fish.’ The squelching lips made noises of scorn. ‘Perhaps he’s a man with her, eh? Perhaps even half a man—’

  The boy, without warning, suddenly lifted his face. The eyes, darting sideways, caught out of the glittering sky, from the south, a half-formed distant sound.

  A moment later he was running. His voice leapt out in a sudden little yell of surprise that made the girl in the pereu, walking across the dusty pot-holes of the water-front, suddenly halt and turn, as if he had yelled for her to wait for him.

  ‘It’s the day for the little plane,’ he was shouting. ‘The day for the little plane.’

  The girl had disappeared by the time he reached the end of the water-front, where a belt of palms, very tall, sprang out of a shore of graphite-coloured sand. Beyond these palms the airstrip opened out, a dusty stretch of uneven grass across which the plane was taxi-ing, wings dipping up and down, like a bird faking a wound and limping for cover.