It was downstairs, in the grim restaurant where the counterfeit presentment of the Caliph watched, from all angles, every mouthful, that Lydgate saw Eileen. Lydgate had handed his laundry in and eaten in the small Islamic restaurant run, cynically, by Chinese Taoists. The curry had been like fiery liquid mud. He had drunk a liqueur or two in the Kool Kaffi, spoken with simpering Crawshay-Davies and his tower of a Mongol wife, rejected the advances of the Sudu Frankie, and walked back to the Dunia Hotel, weary, aimless, yet unwilling to go home and sleep. The restaurant was near-empty. Only a party of Chinese clerks and small traders poking their chopsticks into a central cauldron, only Eileen alone at a table, orange crush growing warmer before her. It was purely in a neighbourly spirit that Lydgate joined the wife of his cobber.
"Have," he said, in her language, “a proper drink. Orange crush is bad for the stomach." She gave a conventional brave-smile-through-her-tears and shook her head. She was not, thought Lydgate, a bad-looking woman – big lips, splay nose: the ungenerous noses of Europeans, shrinking at cold air, had long seemed unlovely to Lydgate; thin tight lips held no more for him any osculatory allure. But the body below would, flayed by the dark, announce no race but that of woman. Lydgate looked at her with only vicarious desire: to Wajak, who had been unfaithful to him, he had been faithful. Yet Wajak did not know what fidelity was and certainly would not prize it in him. Was it because of this that he had been faithful? Were there some seeds of virtue? Had he, in some way, achieved a slight sense of responsibility simply because responsibility had not been asked of him? The loss of a tooth reveals to the living tongue the presence of an area of the body formerly only known from anatomy books. Like a small patch of sore gum Lydgate's soul made itself felt. That ludicrous prayer-meeting had yanked a tooth out.
"Did you," asked Lydgate, "buy cloth for curtains?"
She frowned, puzzled. "Cloth? Curtains?" And then, timing the tears perfectly with Paolo's on the floor above, she wept quietly for the departure of Maximilian Hup (who, however, had not yet departed, being engaged in other damp farewells in other places).
"You shouldn't cry," he comforted. "You've got a nice new house near the town, and two lovely children and a husband. Have something to drink."
"Husband," she said, in her hot-potato voice. "I do not care now. There is no need to have a husband now. It was only to see Max that I had a husband. I kept myself for Max. 'A husband didn't count,' he said. But he would have killed me if I had gone with other men. And he couldn't marry me. And he couldn't give me much money. So he said I had to marry this one."
Lydgate found this hard to follow, but he thought he saw a way out for Forbes of Marmion. "You mean," he said, "that you'd go back to your old trade?" One of the pleasures of talking to a Dunia light woman was the complete candour possible – no simpering coyness, no European whore's mock-respectability. You could discuss clinically every detail of the act, strip away the cheap moral curtains that immorally pretended to hide the nakedness but, being raggedly translucent, turned nakedness into nudity.
"I shall do that," she said. "There's nothing left but that. Not now." Love, so little known on this continent, had given this woman a soul, a capacity for choice.
"But you can't, you know," said Lydgate. "Not in Dunia. You'd have to go away."
"I can't go away," she said. "I have to look after Max's child." She bowed her head in tears again at the name. Lydgate looked round for a waiter. He could hear them quarrelling in the kitchen. He called a loud word, was answered by derisive Chinese noises. But, hoisting his underpants, a chewing waiter appeared, taking his time. The Chinese eaters had reached the succulent coda of their meal: their dish was 'steamboat' – water kept bubbling over charcoal; slivers of meat and fish-gut and vegetable pincered in, pincered out when cooked; the residue of suspended matter and water making a rich and sustaining soup. The waiter belched at Lydgate; Lydgate ordered whisky and water for two. Lydgate said, "You could go to Shurga or Naraka. You could take the child with you."
"And who would look after him in the evenings? And what would he think, having no father? But here I am still a married woman. And that makes me safe, too. It makes it easier for me to go back to what I used to do." She had clearly worked it all out.
"But," asked Lydgate, "do you want to go back to Australia with – " (he did not know Forbes's first name) – "with your husband?"
"Oh, no," she said. "I have heard all about Austrylia." (This carrying-over of the natives' pronunciation of the name of their continent to her own tongue sounded strangely pedantic to Lydgate – like an Englishman's calling Paris by its French name.) "It sounds not very good," she said. "It is very big and the people are very noisy."
"Oh, well," he said. "That's all right, then." Forbes's problem was solved. Lydgate raised his glass as in a toast. "Drink that," he said. "It will cheer you up." Should he tell Forbes that his problem was solved? She probably wouldn't.
"Will it?" she said. "I have never drunk whisky before." She drank it all off and twisted her face in nausea, hand at her sternum. "Oh," she said, "it's very hot. I don't like it."
"The second one always tastes better," encouraged Lydgate. "One more, and then I'll take you home."
"In a taxi?"
"In a taxi."
"I don't want to go home," she said. "I want to stay out."
"But the children will be expecting you. And your husband will, too."
"I don't feel so bad as I did," she said. "That tasted bad, but it's very good medicine."
"One more, and then we'll go."
Her eyes looked brighter already. She even took out her lipstick and mirror. She examined professionally the Chinese eaters, now spooning in the last of the soup. "They would not have very much money," she said. "Five bucks a time. That is not very much."
"It's money you want, is it?" asked Lydgate. "Doesn't your husband give you enough?"
"Oh, no, it's not really the money. I like to meet different people. Sometimes they give you presents. And if they give you a lot of money that means they like you. It's nice when a lot of people like you. You said I was to have more whisky." She seemed to be looking at Lydgate with reborn professional interest, the odd ultra-feminine tricks peeping out, like house-lizards at nightfall. Lydgate gave her, and himself, more whisky. She took it as quickly as before, this time with no grimace. "Like fire," she said, as other neophytes had said before her.
"And now we ought to go," said Lydgate.
"Oh, not just yet. Somebody nice might come in. Perhaps," she said, beginning to droop once more, “Max might come in again. To say good-bye again. She sniffed, rubbing her rubbery nose with the side of her hand. "I feel sad again," she said. "I'll have one more of those."
"I think," said Lydgate, "you've had enough." One never knew whether one was doing the right thing: how frightful was responsibility.
"One more. To stop me feeling sad. I'll drink it very quickly."
"I don't think you ought really. Two's enough if you're not used to it."
"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Eileen, "if you don't want to." She looked round, head proudly high. "Perhaps one of those men will buy me one. Don't worry about me. You go on home if you want to."
One must try to do one's best for others. Let it not be said that he, Lydgate, ever threw a wife and mother, with a nail-hammering singing husband innocent at home, into the opportunity of sin. Sin? What the hell was that, anyway? "All right," said Lydgate. "One for the road."
After the third it became evident that they would have to go. Material for a temperance tract, thought grim Lydgate. The monster in the dram. "Come on," he said. She threw off drops of her womanhood all round, shaking herself as from an aromatic bath, so that perfumed spray hit the tooth-pickers at the next table and made them turn to look at her. She advertised dentifrice, eye-drops, the cut of her brassiere. She giggled, spoke loud, crossed her legs. Warily the Chinese replete sucked their tooth-picks, watching, assessing. "Home," said Lydgate firmly. It was almost like an amateur stage performance of drunkenness – too swift in its onset to be true, like falling in love in a film. Lydgate had to put his arm round her to get her from the chair. She laughed delightedly as she nearly fell. Outside, the yellow-headed taxi waited. The youth said, "She drunk. Drink too much get drunk. I know."
"I don't want," said Lydgate, "any more of your bloody profundities. Home, quick."
Eileen tried to make a sort of bed of Lydgate in the back of the car, giggling, snaking her arms about his neck, flipping through the English vocabulary of her trade: "Darling. I love you. You like? You want?" But Lydgate knew that this was a mere limbering-up, a running-through of lines before a revival. Forbes, he thought, was a fool and ought to have known better at his age, but he did not feel like dropping a drunken wife on her husband's doorstep, saying, "This is what you married. Sort it out for yourself." To Eileen he said, very slowly, "We must walk round for a little while before you go home. You'll feel better then."
"But I feel well," she said. "I don't feel sad any more."
To prove it, she giggled.
"What would Max say?" said Lydgate. "You giggling like a girl and calling another man darling the night before he goes. He wouldn't like it, would he?"
The mere name was as good as a swig of vinegar. Eileen jammed herself in the corner and cried without tears. "That's better," said Lydgate. "You think of Max and we'll have no trouble with your husband. Here," he said to the driver. "Stop here. We'll walk the rest of the way."
The youth turned round to flash from gold teeth in the lamplight the grin of one to whom life, like language, is simple. "I wait," he said. "Good place there. Workmen hut."
"You," said Lydgate tolerantly, "are a dirty-minded little boy. Here is one buck. Now go."
Eileen's legs, unmoved by the mention of Maximilian Hup, went their own way, asking for a great deal of the road. Lydgate's arm scooped Eileen's body sternly in to his side. "I won't go home," she said. "I'm going back. To see Max. Max," she told the moon, boss of a round misty shield that spoke of more rain to come. The taxi reversed and made for town, the youth giving Lydgate a good-hunting wave.
"Just a little walk round," said Lydgate. "Then home. See, there it is, over there. Your new house. We mustn't have you spoiling your first night in your nice new house." It seemed then that Eileen began to recite violently and intermittently the surname of her departing lover. Lydgate banged her on the back, but the noise went on. It was the only noise of the night, except for the sound of hammering in the distance, Forbes still at work.
"Water," said Eileen swiftly between hups.
"Round the other side," said Lydgate. "We mustn't pass your place. I'll give you some water." They walked, she still unsteady, a regular co-ordinated rhythm reserved for the passionate glottal strokes, on the side of the road opposite the tiny houses, near to Patu's small mansion. They crossed, went round the back of the end house, loud with its two drunken Sudus, and found themselves among the dust-bins. They trod mean sandy grass, seeing on their left a slag-tip made romantic by compassionate moonlight. Lydgate counted the dust-bins. Eileen's noise was swallowed by Sudu song, a recrudescence of the Italian quarrel, her hammering husband's anvil chorus, one of her children crying. This was a night of light; the humdrum bulbs in the houses seemed almost festive. Lydgate's back door was open. He switched on the kitchen light, thought it best to leave the living-room in penumbra. "Sit on this chair," he ordered Eileen. It was a rickety structure by the kitchen sink, one of many knocked out by an Indian contractor at fifty bucks apiece (twenty to the contractor, representing a profit of nineteen hundred per cent; thirty split on a sliding scale among various interested parties). The chair could hold Eileen but hardly her hiccupps. She nearly hupped on to the floor, clawing at the sink just in time. Lydgate felt inside his refrigerator, crowned by Forbes's butter, and gripped the neck of a bottle. It was a pint Gordon's, emptied of gin, filled with water. He took it to the kitchen, where Eileen sat on the floor, head against the food-cupboard, hiccupping against hammering song and a Tuscan duet (stringendo molto, but already fff), and slopped the water swiftly into a tea-cup. "Hold your breath," he said softly. "Drink it in ten big sips." He knelt on the floor beside her. She sobbed in breath like an asthmatic while he held the cup to her paint-smeared lips with one hand, steadying her small head with the other. At the first swallow she protested loudly, spitting it out. "Come on, more," said Lydgate. "It's the only way." She took half the tea-cup bravely, moaning, twisting her face. "That's better," said Lydgate. She panted desperately, but the hiccups had gone. "That's much better," said Lydgate.
"Like fire," she said. "Like that whisky."
"Nonsense," said Lydgate. He finished the cup himself and, with his dry mouth, could taste no no-taste of water. Came the last trickle. Even though he was a gin-drinker, even though he had had his share of American martinis, he spluttered and coughed. Some bloody fool had put a fighting-cock in among the capons. Forbes perhaps, doing a good turn, had swigged a couple of bottles of water in his worker's thirst, found no water in the tap, seen the Gordon's bottle, thought, with his limited knowledge of civilised drinks, that such bottles were made, label and all, only for chilling water, and put it in to cool for his cobber. Lydgate looked fearfully at Eileen. She drooled, lolled her head, but seemed happy. Lydgate tried to lift her, but tropical heat and a low diet had taken away his youthful strength. 'But,' he thought, 'I can't be blamed for this. It's Forbes's own bloody fault. He can help to carry her in.' Eileen tried to get up, failed, laughed loudly. "Wait," warned Lydgate. "Just a minute."
Next door Forbes had laid down shining oil-cloth on floor and table. His pictures were on the walls. An old horse-hair sofa snarled at the bright, cheap P.W.D. furniture. In one corner there was already a sand-pit for the children. Blue crockery in the book-case clattered at the final hammer-strokes. Forbes stood back to admire the coat-rack he had fixed on the wall-ornamental, Lydgate had time to suppose, for Forbes possessed no coat. "Hallo, Lyddy, old man," said Forbes. "Looking ship-shipe at last, eh?"
"Your wife," said Lydgate, "is in my house. I gave her a lift home. She wasn't feeling well. She wanted a glass of cold water. You haven't got a fridge, so – "
"Poor little kiddy,' said Forbes. "She's been pretty ill some mornings. Sick and all. I shouldn't have let her go out."
"But this is the trouble," said Lydgate. "She drank out of the wrong bottle, you see, and – "
"Not poison?" said Forbes, hushed. "Don't sy she's liken poison."
"No, no, gin. She's all right, but she can't get up from the floor. I need your help. Or perhaps you can do it yourself." 'Women,' he thought, 'women.'
"Gin?" said Forbes. "Gin? That little kiddy never touches a drop. Oh, my word, she will be in a stite. I'd better go and get her." His hand on the door-knob, he turned to Lydgate. "I don't quite get all this, Lyddy, old man," he said. "You've not been trying to get her tight, have you? Because if you have I'll get a bit crook, you know."
"Oh, don't be silly," said Lydgate with irritation. "Why on earth should I – ?"
"But I don't like it," said Forbes. "The first night she wears her new frock and goes down into the town. How do I know what's been going on? You're not an Aussie, either, see. You're a Pommy, aren't you? You're not like us."
"Oh, let's get on with it," said Lydgate. "If you want to know, it was all your fault. You've been into my house, haven't you, drinking water?"
"I had a couple of beers, and perhaps I'm a bit sorry I had them now," said Forbes. "And I'll bring round my pound of butter home along with the missis."
"You put a bottle of gin in with the water bottles."
"Are you saying now that I've been tiking your gin along with your beer? That mikes me get a little bit crook, that does. Gin's a woman's drink, anyway."
"That takes us back to where we started," said Lydgate. "Bring your wife home."
"After you've been gallivanting round with her." said Forbes. "That's it, eh? Throwing her to one side when you've done with her, eh? Getting that poor little kiddy drunk, eh?"
"You know what she's like," said Lydgate, nettled. "Or, if you don't, you ought to. She can look after herself. But I've not been touching her. I wouldn't if she paid me instead of me paying her."
"I don't quite like the sound of that," said Forbes. "Sy that again."
"What do you want? You're always saying you don't want to take her back. She'll never change. Women of that sort never do. Now please come along and carry her home."
"That little kiddy's a good little kiddy. And you know it," said Forbes. "Pure and innocent she was till that bastard got hold of her. And now you're trying his gyme, just because your bit's gone and left you. I know. The other Aussies know all about it."
"Don't be a bloody fool," said Lydgate.· "I've got witnesses, if you're going to make an issue of it. Now try and be sensible and come and get her home."
Forbes had the door half-open. Even if it had been closed they would have heard the great cry of Paolo going out into the night. "What's he sying?" asked Forbes. "What's he doing? If he's been in on this too I'll get him. Have you been miking everybody tight?" he said fiercely to Lydgate. Paolo stood in the middle of the road, shouting loud, conducting a brio passage. "la dormiro," he yelled, "nel minaretto!"
"He's going to sleep in the minaret," said Lydgate.
"How do you know his language?" asked Forbes suspiciously. "I don't like this one little bit. What's everybody plying at?"
"Come and get your wife," said Lydgate wearily. "Never mind about him."
They went through Lydgate's living-room to the back, where the light still burned. Even from there they could hear Paolo going off shouting down the road. The kitchen was empty.
"Where is she?" said Forbes. "You've got her upstairs in bed, haven't you? With no frock on. And it was a new frock, too. Bloody shimeless," he said. "I'll kill you, old man, that I will."
"She's not upstairs," said Lydgate. "Look if you don't believe me. She doesn't seem to be anywhere," he added, coming back from the lavatory next to the kitchen.
"What have you done with her, eh? Just tell me that," said Forbes. "Tell me what you've bloody well done with her."
"Nothing, nothing, nothing," cried Lydgate. "Have some blasted sense, man. Let's start looking. Perhaps she's being sick on the slag-heap."
"Poor little kiddy," said Forbes. They went out and looked round in the rainy moonlight. Eileen was not by the dust-bins, not by the slag-heap, not by the abandoned tractor on the waste land, not in the thicket of scrub among the tin-cans. "Where are you?" called Forbes. "Where've you got to, my little kiddy?" There was no answer, except from a distant pie-dog. "Gone," said Forbes. "Gone out of my life. I didn't want it to be this wy."
"Take it easy," said Lydgate. "She's probably on her way to town. You'll soon catch her up."
"You're coming too," said Forbes. "You started all this."
"I've finished," said Lydgate with passion. "I've finished with women. She's your wife, not mine. I," he said, "have wives of my own. I've finished with wives."
"Except other people's, eh?" said Forbes. "Come on, you're coming with me. Anything might have happened to the poor little kiddy. Anybody might have got hold of her. That foreign bastard," he added, immediately loping off in long Aussie strides. "That one who was shouting just now. I don't trust him," he said to Lydgate by his side. "I don't trust any of you. And if I catch him at it I'll kill both of you, because it'll be your fault as well as his. Getting that poor innocent little kiddy drunk on gin," he added. "The more I see of you Europeans the more glad I am I'm an Austrylian." They marched down the road, one out of step with the other, Lydgate impelled, as he had to admit to himself, by guilt, but by a guilt older than anything Forbes could possibly suspect.
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