The Kool Kaffi (Bar and Restaurant) lay – on a north-south line – between Podmore and Company, General Importers, Incorporated in U.K., and the Chin Chin Cinema. West arose the smells of the market; east, of the river. There was a barren garden enclosed by a high prison-camp fence, and in the garden were many empty bottles which the Municipal Garbage Disposal Department refused to collect. The Kool Kaffi (Bar and Restaurant) had the swing-doors of a frontier-town saloon. Lydgate swung them in with angry vigour. On his entrance, as at a signal, the ceiling-fans whirred back to life and the refrigerator resumed its humming. A Chinese bar-boy, in whose mind stirred some ember of neolithic philosophy, rushed to a tap. But a derisive choking airy gurgle stated that fire and water were not germane.
All along the bar, meaty buttocks overflowing the stools, sturdy legs dangling, sat Australian road-builders – engineers and foremen. The Cockney voices of the hellship pioneers rang out in a richness that drowned Lydgate's order. Lydgate's voice had always had a muffled, vaguely adenoidal, quality. Yet again, he asked for brandy and water. But there was no water.
“Tike your choice,” said a road engineer called Clout, “water or champigne. They haven't got either.” He was thin and wore glasses, looked like a parody of an intellectual.
“What does Jeff do with the water?” asked another man of the roads. (Jeff was the State Water Engineer.) “Flogs it to the Syrians.” This was a squat blond man from Bunbury. “Have to shive in ginger ile again tonight.”
Lydgate drank his brandy-soda in one gulp, then ordered another. He was going to see Mudd, chairman of the housing board. He could not go unfortified; his heart would beat too much, a red curtain would come down, he would stutter. “And again,” he said to the bar-boy breathlessly.
“Here.” Collie, a man from Bridgetown, stood before Lydgate. His belly was clad in a sweat-shirt, his chunky thighs in black shorts. His head, decollated, could rest on a desk like a paper-weight and never topple, so vast and leaden was the chin. “Here,” he said, “what's this I've been hearing about what you're supposed to have said?”
“Yes?” said Lydgate.
“You said that no Aussie dare ever go and have a swim.”
“Did I say that? The currents are treacherous, you know, especially – ”
“It was nothing to do with the currents.” (“Or the rizens,” said Clout.) “What you said was that we were frightened of tiking our socks off.”
“I don't think I ever said that,” said Lydgate.
“Yes. Frightened of tiking our socks off because we were ashimed of showing the marks of the convict's chines.”
“The convict's – ?”
“Chines. Did you say that?”
Lydgate looked round uneasily. The Antipods, as he sometimes called them to himself, were always ready to burst. The immobile grin, the clutched glass, the slight sway. Do him in, the Pommy bastard. The trouble was that they knew too much; knew that he loathed his second wife and that his second wife was Australian. One of these road-men (was he here now?) had said that he had met Lydia in Romano's in Sydney when he was on leave between contracts and that she was bonza and dinky-die. He had not known, he had said, at the time that she was Mrs. Lydgate, but she had, in the course of several evenings, told him all about her Pommy husband and how they had split up and whose fault it was. What she had said had made the road-man go crook and he had passed these things on to his compatriots in Dunia and they had gone a bit crook too. A fine Austrylian girl like that and this Pommy with his phony high society accent dishing her for the sike of a bit of black sharp and blunt.
“Did you sy that or did you not sy that?” asked Collie of Bridgetown.
“I did not,” lied Lydgate, “say that.”
“Say,” announced Clout in a very clear and beautifully forward-placed British film accent. “Say, oh I say, Horace.”
“Brandy,” said Lydgate breathlessly to the boy. “No soda.”
“Now then, you, old man,” said Collie. He spoke to an Australian sitting nervously at a table nursing a child. The Australian was unbelievably ragged-patched shorts and a dirty shirt-and his beaky nose and sharp chin were shaded from the ceiling-fan by an Aussie hat. With him was his wife-a Chadi of whom, when she had a bun in the oven, he had made an honest woman. The child he nursed was the love-child of his wife and Maximilian Hup, brother to Sebastian Hup. The child was a most curious colour, almost mulberry. Another child, gold as an angel, sat on the floor pulling a cream cake to pieces. “Are you a liar,” said Collie, “or are you not a bloody liar?”
“I don't know what you mean, Georgie,” smirked the patched Australian.
“Did you sy that he said it or didn't you sy that he said it ?”
“Brandy,” said Lydgate again. “No soda.”
“I suppose he did sort of sy it in a wy. But he might have been sying what somebody else had been sying.” Maximilian Hup's love-child got down from his knee. He poked his half-brother in the eye.
“And another thing, old man,” said Collie. “When he said that did you do anything about it, eh?”
The patched Australian, whose name was Forbes and who came from Marmion, New South Wales, licked his lips, smirked with nerves, and began very rapidly swinging the right leg that sat on his left knee. He was terribly torn. Drawn towards a man who, like himself, had dark meat in the larder and curiously coloured children, he was at the same time deeply ashamed of his ostracism. Any little door that his compatriots would open for him, however low the lintel, he was ready to crawl through. 'Let me not,' his heart said, 'be altogether rejected. Throw me not completely out of the bed where the great Australian dream is snored. I will cling to the edge, shivering without blankets, if only you will show me, by a word or smile, that I have a place there. My wife can sleep on the floor if you will let her. The children can sleep on the landing.' Forbes smiled. “Well, Georgie,” he said, “I told him that that sort of thing was the sort of thing that'd mike any good Aussie go a bit crook, I said. And I said that not everybody kime to Austrylia in the prison-ships. And then he sort of said how he was only kidding.”
“Well, old man,” said Collie. “My people kyme over in the early dyes.”
“Brandy,” said Lydgate.
“And I'm not ashimed of them. They started the country off, chines round their ankles or not. We still have a picture of the old man at home. He used to sy that the old country wanted to get rid of its real men. He used to sy that the old country was throwing buckets of good red blood awy, and that one dy the old country would sort of collapse. It would sort of die, he said, like a body with no blood in it. And that's coming true. Isn't it?” he said fiercely to Lydgate. “Isn't that true? You talk about the British Commonwealth, but what does it mean, eh? Is America in the British Commonwealth, eh?”
“No,” said Lydgate. “Not any more.”
“Too true it isn't. And that's where all your arguments fall down,” said Collie in triumph. “So we'll all have one more.” He ordered. “The old country got rid of its best men,” he repeated.
“Thank you,” said Lydgate gravely. He drank his last brandy and felt able to tackle Mudd. At the same time he felt an alcoholic twinge of exile's self-pity. The old country got rid of its best men. Too true it did. He signed his bill and began to leave, throwing to the other drinkers a sour smile and a shy wave. At the door of the Kool Kaffi the manager stood, a smart negro with hexagonal glasses and collar and tie. He was reasonably sober and spoke Spanish to Lydgate.
“Buenos tardes, senor. Muchlsirnas gracias.”
Tardes. Lydgate looked at his watch and saw that it was indeed afternoon. Twelve-forty. Mudd would have left his office and gone up to his house on the hill for lunch. He would be eating a cold-storage steak and tinned potatoes, gazing at a fair prospect from his dining-room window. The thought of the polished floor and the vista of trees and distant bay made Lydgate grind his teeth. There was over an hour to go before the necktied administrators returned to the Government Building. Grinding his teeth, Lydgate felt an exiguous flow of saliva. He too had better eat.
On Sir William Sidebotham Road there was a small Chinese shop where, for one buck, one could eat one's fill of a speciality of the house with no precise name: a kind of greasy spaghetti coiled and writhed in soya sauce; there gleamed through the coils small prawns in full armour, shreds of meat, bits of chilli, diced sweet potato and the odd wheel of cucumber. It did not take long to eat one's fill. Lydgate entered the shop, passing through a wall of radio music, and found it full of workmen who, just over an hour before, had been stuffing themselves with elevenses. But one mess of workmen he had not seen before on his morning's quest. These were a mixed league of marble workers engaged on filling the Mosque with marble – a rushed job involving many strikes and much overtime, for the Mosque was – with many sacred visitors in attendance – to open in less than two months. With them sat a young Italian called Paolo Tasca. He was a hungry-looking Tuscan with a beardless goat's face and a boxer's body. He and his father had been sent by a Franco-Italian firm of marble specialists in Tripoli. They fitted into the community well, and three times the U.N. Adviser had talked of sending them packing and requesting two marble experts of more tractable race. They were a puzzle to the U.N. Adviser, for they did not fit into any known category of his colonial experience of races. To him a European was an Englishman or a Scot, possibly a Welshman, probably not an Irishman. Australians could be reduced to terms of the homeland – with a little twisting – and Eurasians, Chadis, Syrians, Sudus, Potoks, Chinese and the rest he felt he could handle. But Italians just would not fit. He could not talk to them of their duty to the community (that is, their duty to honour the flag, wear a tie in the evenings, do their drinking in the Club, treat white women with respect) for the father, who spoke some English, would say, “My duty to a the Mosque. What a I do outside a the Mosque not a nobody's business.” Or, “I not see a my flag. Here is a no Italian a Consulate.” Or, “It a custom in a my country to pinch a bottom of woman who is a bella. It not a disrespect.” The father's name was Nando Tasca, but most people called him Tony. His English, self-taught in the British-administered territories of Africa, was of an extinct type. It had disappeared from England with the organ-grinders when Mussolini, for the sake of his empire's dignity, had recalled them. Here it was prized and relished, a rare antique. Paolo Tasca was learning English at his father's behest. It was a filial duty. “When e come a ome from a the Mosque e can a sit down write a the letters. I bring im a out a ere from a Italy. I give im good a job. I an old a man. I ave a oliday ere a in Dunia. E work for is old a father. When e knew a English good a like me I get a im job on a coconut estate in a Shurga. There I ave a friends.” Nando Tasca saw dispassionately the time when he could be rid of his son for good and all. He would be killed by the local terrorists quite quickly. He was fairly sure of that. for Paolo was an unlucky boy. Always had been. He made no secret of his enmity towards his son. There had been a quarrel over their pursuit of the same girl in Tripoli. There had been many quarrels about Nando Tasca's dilatoriness in sending money home to his wife in Tuscany. Paolo was devoted to his mother. But Nando Tasca, according to his son (many times, and in public), was devoted to two things only. “Lei ama,” he would state, “due case. Due case solamente:” He would hold up two thick worker's fingers. “La birra.” He would make a beer-swiller's guzzling noise, flexing his strong arm in a pot-drainer's motion. “E questa putana Tripalitana.” He would then say “Aaaaah” without satisfaction, and give an obscene mime of his father at work with the Tripoli whore. This was usually followed by rapid operatic recitative with orchestral punctuations of fist on table or a smack on Paolo's ear or a most unfilial feint with a prize- fighter's ham-hand. All this, reported by spies, worried the U.N. Adviser. But these two, sturdy peasants as they were, grew browner and browner, and could be passed off to distinguished visitors as Asians who knew no better.
What Lydgate did not know was that, with today's move, he had become their neighbour.
Now, as he sucked in his Chinese spaghetti and cracked his prawns, Lydgate listened to threats of another strike. Paolo Tasca supported the motion with vigour. He spoke a rough kind of Sudu, using, at fortissimo points, words of Italian and even English: “Mio padre” came frequently and, as if Chaucer were translating Dante, “My fader”. That was the great evil image, filling the marble-dusty Mosque like a real presence, the more so because of his real, and daily, absence. The workmen pitied Paolo. One man, his uncut hair tortured into a rat-tail, comforted him with a hand on his shoulder. It was known, he said, that Paolo received no wages. They would strike over that. Then, when Paolo received some wage as inadequate as their own, they would be able to strike again.
“And all day,” affirmed Paolo, “he drink beer or sleep like a pig. Aaaaah. Come,” he emphasised, “un porco” You could see he had mistaken the meaning of 'strike'. His dictionary was an old one, all his father would give him, published in Turin, 1839. He spoke of arranging for a marble block to fall on his father. It was objected by an Indian with glasses that his father never came near enough to the Mosque for that to happen. But, Paolo thought, that too could be arranged. His father could be enticed with talk of a young Sudu girl haunting the Mosque and the workmen. Especially, suggested Paolo with no false modesty, himself. That would bring his father. Beer or a woman would always bring his father. “Farabutto,” he said. It was Renaissance melodrama, with all the Senecan trimmings. Lydgate felt heartened with all this talk of striking and smashing. He would now go and see Mudd.
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