At slow but regular intervals, in the rhythm of a Roman water-clock that knew the Empire would last for ever, the gathered globule of sweat at the end of his nose fell into the telephone mouthpiece. Down the nose from the watershed of the forehead, the leisurely wait at the tip for a drop heavy enough to drip, drop and break, and, then, at the other end of the line, an infinitesimal plonk unheard in the huge indifferent office. And again. And again. Till, desperate, Lydgate yelled fit to shatter the diaphragm:
“The key! The key! Somebody must have the key!”
Carruthers Chung stood by him, cool. Glasses, a moustache whose every hair could be counted by Lydgate as he waited, could he but see through the sweat, could he but be calm enough to wish to count, a James Joyce beard. Carruthers, the orthodox might say, was not a saint's name. Some day, Carruthers Chung had said, it might be. Carruthers Chung said, “Evelybody is looking for the key. That is the histoly of Western Philosophy. Flom Alistotle to Bertland Lussell. But the key is not there.”
A New Zealand voice at the other end now said: “The Electrical Department has the front-door key. The other keys are inside the house. Including the spare front-door key. The Electrical Department are on their way back from the house now to the Electrical Department. They've turned on the juice. Rather, they've turned the master-switch on. There's a juice cut at the moment. If you go to the Electrical Department now you'll just about catch them before the midmorning break. They've got the key.” The voice hung up. Lydgate hung up, and now the residual drop fell slowly from the instrument on to the magnificent marble floor of the marble halls of the Post Office. Across the road the Public Works Department truck waited, as it had waited since dawn, as it might still wait till dewy eve, a summer's day, with the workmen waiting too in the shade of Lydgate's house, if you could call it a house. It was really a kind of shelter, all woven like a big basket. It was to something like a real house that Lydgate was now to move, a slow step up in the evolutionary scale of housing. From the amoeba to God, or the gods, the gods being in a Valhalla of mansions up the hill, Lydgate now having achieved a dwelling perhaps fit for a mammal, certainly fit for a vertebrate. But he had to get the key. He saw, cruising by the Government Building and the half-built Civic Centre, a yellow-topped taxi driven by a Chinese youth he knew.
“I must get the key,” he said to Carruthers Chung who was licking stamps, big proud stamps as big as the blade of the tongue that licked. Carruthers Chung finger-and-thumbed delicately out a limp scene of river and jungle (STATE OF DUNIA: ONE DECEM) and said: “Continue your search. The key to leality.” He smiled sadly. “Do not forget our blidge party tonight. I shall call for you. We shall play together.”
“Taksi!” called Lydgate. He ran with fifty-year-old stiffness down the slope of brown grass, scorched his hand on the door-handle of the taxi, winced as his thin buttocks met the oven-top of the front passenger-seat. The youth nodded and nodded, greeting Lydgate with one harshly projected word:
“You.”
Then, as they went down Caliph Road, turned into General Mark Clark Avenue, side-streeted towards the Electrical Department, the youth gave a monotoned commentary on the sights of the town. It was a dull recital of the self-evident. To pretend that his passengers were blind gave the youth some obscure Chinese satisfaction:
“Woman cross road now. Two black woman go in shop. Dog sit bite foot. In market fish smell. There two Patu's mans.” (Patu was the local nationalist leader. The two men were in Nazi jackboots, dirty shirts, on bicycles, crinkly hair long uncut, wild beards long unshaven. It was a vow; to remain hairy till Independence was achieved.) “One India man drunk. He drink brandy. There white woman very thin.” The youth with great force gathered his phlegm together and gobbed out of the taxi window. “There Hillman Minx. It number D437.” Sated of the animate, the youth now kept strictly to vehicles. “That Land Rover. Number DG98. That left-hand-drive car. Very big. Number D724.” Then he announced, without satisfaction: “Here Lectric. All mans go out drink beer.”
Lydgate gave a picture of the Caliph to the youth, legend: STATE OF DUNIA: ONE BUCK. The youth left, nodding gravely as in conspiracy again to share a frightful catalogue of the town's sights. Lydgate passed a vast silence of generators to enter the Electrical Department offices. There were small boys and refrigerators. Only one man had kept to his post this mid-morning, and that was the State Electrical Engineer himself. He, an urbane Indian with a cigarette-holder, smiled at Lydgate over a plate of curry. (Heavy sustenance at eleven o'clock was essential, breakfast having been eaten at six.) “All of my men have gone out, I'm afraid. If you search the coffee-shops you will probably find some of them. It is, I know, difficult to enter a house in the normal way without a key. And a key, of course, is such a small thing, easily mislaid, forgotten or overlooked.” The voice had the high pitch of a film Lama.
Wearily Lydgate went the rounds of the coffee-shops. Men of many racial groups sat round tables in party spirit, toasting, laughing, calling for unbelievable dishes – ox brains in sour sauce, goat's innards, plain unseasoned vermicelli, cucumber and chilli, the gravy of stewed buffalo. Directions and advice were cheerfully given to Lydgate.
“Mr. John has the key still in his pocket. I saw him take it out when he took out his packet of Lucky Strike.”
“Camel.”
“The brand is immaterial. He wondered, I know, what the key was for, being forgetful, but he certainly returned the key to his pocket. His right-hand trouser pocket.”
“But who is Mr. John?” asked Lydgate, his handkerchief saturated. “And where is he?”
“His race is not sure,” said a black man, heavily tattooed. “But he will be in the Dunia Hotel. He will eat there with men of his own rank of foreman.” Then a song started. Lydgate left, looked about him for an instant in the hot, hot sun. Scaffolding was everywhere, blue sky peeped in patches through the ribs. The richness of the state's uranium deposits was everywhere being proclaimed in half-built temples to Commerce, to Transatlantic Cinema, to the Broadcast Word, to Allah. How magnificent the new Mosque was to be: its cupolas gleamed like oranges in the distance. Why did mineral wealth and Islam go together? The Middle East, Borneo, here in Dunia. There must, somewhere in the Koran, be a fulfilled prophecy: “For. as Allah Most High has denied you in this world the solace of the fatness of pigs, so He has made the earth to yield a most spiritual fatness, wherewith your loins shall be larded and those of the fruit of your loins, and the richness thereof shall spout heavenwards to His glory.”
The youth with his yellow-headed taxi had been circling like a buzzard. Exhibiting no told-you-so triumph, he alighted on Lydgate and opened the door for him. As they made slowly for the Dunia Hotel he resumed his catalogue monologue, now rarefied to the purely arithmetical.
“There two man. There four woman. There five, six, seven dog. Chase one dog, woman dog. In shop there see two new ice-box come today. One ship come in today from Aden.” Indeed, masts stood high above the Customs House. But there was no heartening smell of the sea here; the river sang and stenched of inland, spoke of being lost in the river-web of the colossal continent, never to see home again. “Outside Dunia Hotel two, three cars. No room park. You get out here.” Obediently Lydgate got out by the bank of the river. Across it was a village sparkling in the sun. Village women were coming over in a ferry to the town, some of them naked above an ornate waist-throttling belt, the gleam of breasts answering the gleam of the distant cupolas. The youth counted impassively. “There five woman. That make ten.” Lydgate gave the youth another picture of the Caliph. The youth nodded sadly, conspiratorially yet again.
The interior of the hotel reminded Lydgate of the interior of a Centre of Rest and Culture he had once seen in a small Spanish town. There culture had meant many pictures of Franco, here it meant even more pictures of the Caliph. Here, as there, rest meant very hard chairs. Food and drink came from behind a screen, whence too came noises of rage and impatience. And on the very hard chairs, round square unlovely tables, the mid-morning break prolonged itself. So also did the power-cut, for the ceiling fans were still and silent. Near the door were men known to Lydgate, good-hearted young unstable men in whom the mingling of blood had gone as far as it conceivably could. One was tiny and delicate, like a bird, but with a huge face scrawled with the lines of the agony of a Christ. He was Filipino, Chinese, Scottish, unsure of his allegiances, ready to weep over Old Glory or Union Jack as the drink took him; then, as the drink took him further, all for red blood and the crunch of bones. His name was Sebastian Hup. With him sat an Anglo-Burmese dashed with the blood of an Arab trader, a suspicion of Malayalam, a single drop of Portuguese. He looked handsome and English in his uniform of an Inspector of Vehicles, two pips on each shoulder, but his name was Dominic De Cruz, and his arms were covered with tattooings – hieroglyphs of Syrian secret societies for which he had worked as strong man, a sentimental back-view of a fat-bottomed toddler, a winsome pouting head labelled “Pixy Face”. And standing, ready to go and supervise his Municipal Dog Catchers, was another tattooed man – Sudu, Potok, Danish, Chadi, English – called David Lloyd-Evans. On the table were chop sticks and the remains of an ample meal. Their quarrel, in this limp air, after food taken in great heat, was growing languid.
“I still say,” said Dominic De Cruz to Sebastian Hup, “I still say that you've no right to sell information you get from the confidential files. And to sell that information about me was not a friendly act.”
“But you were ready enough to drink on the money I got,” said Sebastian Hup, frowning as in the agony of a difficult stool. “Besides, the information wasn't really confidential. Everybody knows that you were thrown out of Nigeria for fighting. True, not many people know you were thrown out of Kenya for fighting. But one thing is the same as another. It's the fighting that's the main point. And it wasn't big information. It was worth what I got for it, no more and no less. Five bucks.”
“But you lost your own confidential file, didn't you?” said Dominic De Cruz. “That, of course, was very convenient.” He tapped the table with a chopstick. “I, if I were less well-disposed, could tell some stories about you that would have got you out on your ear. Sit down, Mr. Lydgate,” he said courteously. “There was the case of the two thousand bucks from the Madagascar Company, wasn't there?”
“You ought to forget about that,” said David Lloyd-Evans gravely. “It doesn't do any good to bring up the past. Besides, you got your cut, remember.”
“Oh, and you didn't, I suppose.”
“It was a small cut. I wasn't involved in anything as you were. You ought to bury the past.”
“What is the past? The past is five minutes ago. In five seconds, in one second even, this will be the past. This,” he added and made a fairy bell-stroke with his thumb-nail on a plate. On his thumb-nail he, or somebody else, had drawn eyes, nose and mouth with a Biro.
“Stop getting metaphysical,” said Lydgate. “Please, please, which is Mr. John?”
“There.” Everybody pointed in the same direction; everybody agreed as to the identity and locality of Mr. John. And Lydgate saw a man like President Nasser drinking beer and gesticulating fiercely. His table-companions were, like himself, not easily assignable to any known ethnic group. The fact of the brown pitted complexion established, one had to digest a vision of some tract of land like the Gobi Desert which produced a hieratic fruit – brown plump men born to be chief clerks, superintendents of meter-readers, store-supervisors, assistant district engineers. They were a class rather than a race; though, if a race had to be looked for, it could conceivably only derive from a trapezium whose corners were Ankara, Kirgiztan, Kabul and Yemen. Yet each guarded jealously – like a bank-book – a British passport.
“I understand, Mr. John, that you have the key to my new house. I believe that you were good enough to switch on the electricity.” Lydgate's voice dropped wearily to nothing.
“What Raschid says is neither here nor there,” Mr. John was saying. “The meeting had already ruled out of order any censure of the hon. treasurer. It was expressly ordered to be expunged from the minutes.”
“The key.”
“I have myself never been anything of a real stickler for procedure. The meeting was there to get a job done and it got the job done. Expeditiously. Those were elected who obviously had to be elected and no opportunity was given for other nominations. That had been agreed upon before the meeting took place. But to censure the hon. treasurer was out of order. There has to be a wide margin for legitimate expenses.” Mr. John turned on Lydgate a great false smile. “We broke the seal, Mr. Lydgate. The electricity is now on. Potentially, that is. I gave the key to a man from the water-works.”
“But surely the main cock is outside the house.”
“So it is.” Mr. John slapped his thigh in high merriment. “What a fool the man was. He should have known that. But so few people here know their jobs.”
“And where is this man from the water-works?”
“He spends his morning break at home. He goes to bed for an hour. Sleep, he says, is more important than either food or drink.”
“And where does he live?” The words were almost inaudible.
“On the Paku road. The third milestone.” Mr. John smiled brilliantly in dismissal and returned to his off-duty interests. “So if Raschid has anything to say perhaps he had better say it to me. Not that I think he will. I know Raschid of old and Raschid knows me, and Raschid, though a fool, is not such a fool as to try anything on that he can't get away with.” He thought for a moment and amended this statement. “With which he can't get away.”
Outside the hotel the heat was mounting. Lydgate began to whimper very softly. A taxi appeared, and the youth said, “You.”
There was little to describe on the Paku road, on the way to the third milestone. The youth, who now wore sunglasses, became inarticulate in the face of so many natural objects-palms, sandy mounds, dried bushes, an arid watercourse. But once or twice he essayed a mystical language, apt for the description of things beyond even number, formless essences. “Ger,” he said once, and, much later, “Roft.”
The man from the water-works lay naked on a bed. Children crawled over him like flies. He received Lydgate with dignity. His woman offered tea. “I returned the key,” said the man, “to the Public Works Department. It was put on a hook behind the desk of the Architect. There it will be now. But,” he said, lying back, showing shaven arm-pits, “there is no water. It is the lack of rain. There may perhaps be water this evening at seven. There has never before been such a drought.” He stretched himself as it were in pain, like a dusky Fisher King.
The taxi-youth had gone, perhaps scared by so much naked nature. There was no vehicle in sight. Lydgate groaned, wishing to God he had his car. It was still in his old station, Shurga, having major repairs. For weeks now it had been promised in just two more days' time. He began to walk, shuffling up dust, back towards the town. In great dust a lorry passed, on it many workmen cheering and jeering. They had formed a square about what Lydgate knew, from loud squawks and crowings, was a cock-fight. Cock-fights were forbidden to be held in any place, but a moving lorry was not a place. Cheers, jeers, coco-ricos passed townwards in dust.
At length an Indian pedlar appeared in a Morris. He stopped by Lydgate, and Lydgate, in relief, was ready to climb aboard, but the Indian pedlar would have none of that. Not yet awhile. In the scorching sun, on the scorched sandy grass by the roadside, he displayed some of the more unsaleable of his wares. Lydgate bought a soapstone Buddha, Japanese chopsticks in a box, a set of plastic napkin-rings. Then, with great courtesy, he was offered a lift to Dunia Town. On the outskirts of Dunia Town a youth in a yellow-topped taxi honked at him like a goose. “I follow,” called the youth. “You not pay.”
And so Lydgate arrived at the point where he had started, the Post Office. Opposite, the woven strands of his temporary dwelling scorched in the sun. The Public Works Department van was still there, and the men slept in the shade. All except one. Lydgate, peering with attention, saw that this was not a man after all, but one of the large local simians called a chopi. It wore a loose denim suit. He wondered how long it had been on the pay-roll and who normally spent its wages. He rang up the general office of the Public Works Department and was answered by a soft shy epicene voice.
“This is Lydgate. Is Mr. Henryson there?”
“Oh, no.”
“It's about the key to my new house. Have you got it? Has it been returned to you?”
“Oh, yes, I have message. The key not fit. No need for key. The door open all the time.”
Lydgate, feeling his age, crossed the road, seeing before him his absurd elongated shadow in shorts, the ridiculously swinging thin shadow-arms. As he came to his old dwelling – which smelt of burning grass – the denimed ape began to gibber and dance up and down. “Down, sir, down,” said Lydgate. The ape danced down and stopped and then began, with urgent chatterings, to wake its colleagues. Its colleagues woke. Soon, the ape chewing a cigarette donated by one of its keepers, work commenced. The ape thought the furniture had to be moved as well as the sewing-machine, the box of books and the old group photographs. “You have done this work before,” a man patiently explained in Sudu. “The furniture belongs to the Public Works Department. It stays here. He is not all that clever,” he added, to Lydgate. “He is, after all, only an ape.”
There was not a great deal to be moved. Wajak, Lydgate's mistress, had taken many things to the up-river village where she now abode, awaiting a baby. She had even taken the battery-radio as – so the village letter-writer had recently told Lydgate in a curt progress report – “Her mother want hear news big world over sea.” Lydgate's possessions, now broiling in sun and dust on the lorry, looked pathetically few, not much to show for fifty years of life. The denimed ape, gibbering to the world, held up a photograph of Lydgate in New Guinea, Lydgate with poor dead Jack Dunbar and little Corcoran who was now a British Resident somewhere, strange morose Arthur Pitt who had made his packet and gone mad, a couple of reformed cannibals with Semitic noses. The ape elevated and lowered the picture often, genuflecting to the sun.
They moved off, Lydgate sitting next to the driver, down Caliph Road, past the hospital, past the Australian nurses' quarters, past the Potok Girls' School, past busy building sites, over a small bridge, past a large waste patch of scrub, past the fine house of the local nationalist leader, past a shop called 'Chong, Glass Grocers and Frame Maker', and ended their journey at a row of mean houses set in grass-stitched sand. The door of Lydgate's new house swung in a sudden dry breeze, swung in a curiously deformed way, as if no longer firmly anchored to the jamb. Lydgate entered and began to weep dry tears (twenty-four years since he had seen England) at the cheap insult of the housing board's allocation. No fan, no power-points, termite-hollowed chairs, a table as rough as a butcher's bench, a floor with loose boards, damp on the walls and ceiling. He sat down, his trembling hand on the arm-rest. The arm-rest crumpled like paper. Men and ape entered with his chattels. Lydgate stood up and lost control. “God curse them!” he told the ceiling. On the ceiling rain had made a brown silhouette of the Prince Regent. “I'll get them, I'll get them!” he said to a gold and pearl and black spider. Then, feeling his heart hammer with a kind of after-click he could taste in his throat, he sat down again. The other arm-rest crumpled like paper. On the floor the men dumped Wajak's sewing-machine, the small bachelor refrigerator, the few books, the two suitcases of clothes, the framed photographs. The ape would not let go of the New Guinea group; he clasped it to his chest, showing formidable teeth. “It's mine,” said Lydgate; “give it to me. Let go of it, you damned idiot.” He stood up, towering above the ape, and the two of them began to tussle for the picture. The workmen stood round, ready to lay bets. Then Lydgate saw himself, a mature man, a much-married man of fifty, a man who had, several times in Europe, Africa and the East, had his own office, once with a secretary and two telephones, a man of dignified appearance though in shorts, grey-haired and grey-moustached, sufficiently genteel in manner and speech, with a self-taught gentility, tearfully struggling with an ape for an old yellowing picture. Ashamed, he desisted. He gave a ten-buck note to the chief workman and walked out into the sun. A youth in a yellow-topped taxi hovered. “You,” said the youth and opened the taxi-door. “You too,” snarled Lydgate as he got inside. “Take me to the Kool Kaffi.”
“In Kool Kaffi,” said the youth, “once I drink four beer. Once I drink two beer. On Chinese New Year I drink five brandy. Christmas I drink three whisky.” Well-pleased with these reminiscences, he drove towards the town, emitting several times a drawn-out satisfied “Aaaah.”
Back to opening page | Next chapter