Forbes of Marmion came of stock that had no love of police actions; he sought wild justice several times after, and once during, the working hours of Paolo Tasca. Attempting to bring anger and violence into the holy coolness of the Mosque, he was met by tough Sudus with marble-workers' tools. Hammering for revenge at the door of the Casa Tasca, determined to "have it out", he himself was had out, and speedily, by the father as well as the son. But, he promised, one night he would bring his road labourers along, tougher than men of marble. Let the two Eyetie bastards beware.
Nando Tasca's attitude to his son changed somewhat now. He was determined to finish the marbling of the Mosque on time, for (and this Paolo did not know, nor did the labourers) he had been promised a bonus of so many bucks per marble block should the time-limit of the contract not be exceeded. It was important that Paolo not be beaten up and rendered incapable of working the cutting-machine. Though he deplored his son's incontinence and, more, his foolishness in letting himself be caught in the act, he had to admit to a faint admiration (faint as angostura colouring gin and water) for Paolo's enterprise and achievement: the boy was a chip off the old marble. And Nando Tasca felt, too, a certain awe that the Caliph himself should seem to condone the act, along with an itch of approval for a religion whose morality was so elastic. But Nando Tasca had a new annoyance. He had to watch over Paolo now, take him around in the evenings or sit in with him in the hot little house, and this at a time when some small sexual adventure, its intensity tempered to his fifty-odd years, could be his for the asking: nightly Eileen Forbes went down to town to consider, and reject, the curtaining materials on sale there. Still, soon Nando Tasca would be in Tripoli or Zanzibar on a new job, and he felt he was not yet too old for patience.
Tonight father and son lay at home. Paolo stretched near-naked on the grey sheet of his bed, hands joined on his shaggy nape, showing to the light-bulb two dark beards of under-arm hair. His father drank from pint beer-bottles on his own bed, decently clad in striped shirt and shark's skin trousers. Paolo began to describe, at length and earthily, the charms of the new Australian woman who had recently arrived in the town. Nando Tasca cut short the flood of aromatic Tuscan and said:
"You try speak a English. It a good a practice for when you go work on a coconut estate."
"Non capito."
"Why you a always say a that? I speak always very slow, very clear a English. Now, who a this a woman?"
"Fat here," indicated Paolo. "Thin here," indicated Paolo. "Very good."
"I not say a what a she like. I say what er a name."
"I not know."
At this moment Forbes's nightly hammering on the door commenced. The house shook, two beer bottles by Nando Tasca's bed tintinnabulated. The two men lay calm. "Come out I” shouted Forbes of Marmion. "Come out and fight like a man!"
"I think I go fight him," said Paolo languidly.
"That not a bad. But better you a say 'I think a I a go to fight aim.' "
"I think I go to fight him."
"That a much better. But you not a go a to fight im. You stay a ere." Nando Tasca started on a new bottle. The noise of challenge continued. "E a drink," said Nando Tasca. "E a drink a beer'first and then e come a ere. Very afraid a man."
"Come out and fight, you bloody coward!" called Forbes of Marmion.
"Blad-ee cow-ard," repeated Paolo, patiently, as if merely at a lesson. "What that mean?"
"I buy a you good a book," said Nando Tasca. "Very old a book. Why you not look in a book? I not teach a you all a the time. I an old a man. Get very a tired." But, vigorously, when the thwarted Forbes had shrieked his last challenge and gone back to tend the babies he had awakened, Nando Tasca got up, stroked the creases from his clothes, and said, "Now we go a out."
"Dove?"
"Why you always ask a where a we go? We go a out. You a sit a with me and learn a English from a book. Perhaps a too you listen what a people say. That a way you learn a English good."
"Non capito."
"If you a listen more perhaps you a understand a better."
Paolo got up from his bed and stood like a boxer in filthy shorts and canvas shoes. "You not a come a out a like a that," said his father. "Where a your shirt?"
"Shirts in bucket water. Today have water. Today wash shirts."
"That not a bad. You work a ard and you learn a good a English. I lend a you one shirt. I very good a father."
So both walked slowly down the road to the town, the father smart though unshaven, the son in a vast shirt that, worn outside his trousers so that it hid their unsightliness, billowed and flapped in the dry wind that had arisen. The father was all sweat and thirst by the time they reached the Kool Kaffi. Paolo entered behind him, a long glum goat's face, shaggy hair, knock-knees near hidden by the great gay garment of his father. The regular drinkers – Fredericks, Crawshay-Davies and his huge meal of a Mongol wife, Frankie with his lipstick, Patrick Ong and his stage Irish – were tonight pushed out to the periphery. Deep whisky-laughs, collar-and-tied officials, the glitter and clink of a fresh round: the eye and ear were drawn towards the centre, where Lydia Lydgate was enisled in wet male homage. "She," pointed Paolo.
"You not a say a 'she'," said Nando Tasca. "You say a 'er'. So," he admired, his piggy blue eyes ashine, sixpences in Christmas pudding dough, "that a er. Malta bella," She was much to his taste: he had had his fill of the tiny, the black, the thin-loined: here was a woman with a waist two hands could span, but Venus-hipped, deliriously firm-and-heavy-breasted, with a flame of hair and a smile as sweet as figs, a voice that could ride above the male shouts, a laugh not afraid to show tongue (clean as a dog's) and teeth (sharp as steak-knives).
"What I want to know is," she was saying, "where does he get to? I mean, he must live somewhere. Or perhaps he's given up living." The accent was pure but the tone beefy, apt for loud shouts over vast Australian wastes. "I saw him in his office, through a kind of glass wall. But I couldn't get through to him. Do I have to make an appointment or something?"
Nando Tasca had cut through to her side, with a straight firm cut like the cut of a marble-cutting machine.
"We not a meet before," he said. "Nando Tasca. A please to a meet a you."
"Oh, how sweet. You must be Tony Spaghetti." Paolo was in his father's wake. "Oh, how sweet. What a long shirt he seems to have on. Does he wear anything underneath?"
"This a my son. He not a very good boy. You go," he ordered, "to a that a table. You sit a down learn a English. Where a your book?"
"I forget bring book." Paolo gave goatish admiration to Lydia Lydgate, throwing at her the light of his sheep's eyes.
"Oh, isn't he sweet? And can he sing?" The collar-and-tied men round Lydia Lydgate looked sullen or laughed too hollowly. This proximity of unshaven jowls and Southern charm – it killed the cosy chatty Britishness of their evening. Nando Tasca said, "Who a buy a me a one a beer? Very thirsty. Very ot."
"I can sing," said Paolo. "I am a good boy."
"Come on then," said Lydia Lydgate. "Give us 'Sorrento'.'
"You go a to a table," ordered Nando Tasca. "You not a sing a good." He took from the counter somebody else's beer, drank eagerly, and said with foamed lips, "You a ear a me a sing." He sang in a hoarse wheedling voice, straight into Lydia Lydgate's green gold-flecked eyes:
"Che gelida manina, se la lasei risealdar – "
Paolo picked him up on the high notes, an operatic hand on the breast of his vast lent shirt:
"Cercar ehe giova? Al buio non si trova – "
In horrid competition, an old and a young Rodolfo glaring at each other, they filled the Kool Kaffi with ill-produced tone:
"Ma per fortuna é una notte di luna – " At the same time they both reached, belatedly, for the hand of Mimi Lydgate, who said, "How sweet," contending fortissimo as they sang.
“E qui la luna l'abbiamo vicina."
But, sotto voce, in a brief pause for breath, Nando Tasca was able to say to his son, "You wait a till I get a you ome."
Meanwhile, far from the heart of culture, Lydgate sat in an open-air ramshackle eating-shop, under a light-bulb suspended from a tree. He had brought his car to the muddy end of a suburb and then stumbled over duckboards to this extra-territorial region called Groundnut Village. Here lived the Syrian gamblers. They emerged from their holes at nine each night to gamble till dawn. At midnight, at three, at first light they came to be served with boiled duck or baked fish by a waiter asleep on his feet. Thousands of bucks changed hands; deaths were unrecorded in the annals of the town and corpses never dredged from the near-by stinking river. It was a safe place to visit for a white man anxious to avoid meeting a white woman. Lydgate sat long over warm beer and a kind of pasta that looked like tape-worms, thinking.
He was thinking that it was already time to be thinking of moving on again. He had before him on the table his month's end statement from the bank. His credit balance was a little over one thousand bucks. He needed more. He would continue to send a hundred a month to Wajak, but he would cut down stringently in other ways. He would ration his drinking; he would eat even less; he would buy no more clothes. Perhaps in six months he would be ready to break contract and move on. But was there anywhere left to move on to? The world revolved heavily behind his eyes. There was Borneo. There was Japan. His mind was coloured swiftly with cherry blossom and kimonos: the Japanese girls he had known had been charming, submissive, ready to let a man have his own way. But no, no more women. What then?
He could not think what then. More women meant more pursuits. Wajak would be after him soon. Lydia was already here. The girl in Nairobi was, he was sure, already re-married. Others? He clicked off the switch. But was there really anything except women? He saw his tragedy quite clearly, or thought he did. He expected too much from women, and too little. Heaven, which they could give, was surely a passive thing, static, marble, light, air. But the heaven was enclosed in an irrelevant apparatus with a hellish high-powered will of its own. The trouble with women was that they wanted to be human beings. Lydgate, brooding over his beer and his messed-up plate, became aware that somebody was standing beside him. He looked up at a tortured grin, lines of agony on the young forehead, thin brittle bird-bones under a shirt bearing a design of boats, fans, flags, jars, treble clefs. Sebastian Hup, carrying no files.
"So here you are, Mr. Lydgate," said Sebastian Hup,
"Yes," said Lydgate and, with the image of bird-bones in his mind, "Sit down. I've got a bone to pick with you."
"Yes, Mr. Lydgate." Sebastian Hup sat down.
"What do you mean by showing my confidential file to other people? I could have you booted out of the service for that."
"At the bridge party, you mean? Oh, nobody actually sees it, Mr. Lydgate. It is just useful for reminding people about their sins."
"Sins? What do you care about other people's sins?"
"Other people's sins can be very profitable. We can learn from other people's sins."
"Earn?"
"And earn. But not very much. The U.N. Adviser has just committed a very big sin. But that will not do anybody any good. He allowed a man who had come to Dunia, a very innocent man, to go up-river and lose his head. The man had come to lecture on some subject or other. He gave one lecture up-river and then lost his head. His body, of course, has been eaten. His head is not yet ready for exhibition. Now the U.N. Adviser must pay, but not in money. He has gone to be told off by the authorities. But I suppose we are all sinners," said Sebastian Hup comfortably.
"Oh. So the U.N.A. will not be here when Bastians arrives?"
"No. There again he committed a very grave error, Mr. Lydgate." Sebastian Hup beat his breast three times and looked at Lydgate from sharp suffering black eyes, meagre-fleshed hands joined loosely on the table before him. "And how are your sins these days, Mr. Lydgate?"
"What are you getting at?"
"There are good forces working for you, Mr. Lydgate. There are many people doing their best to save you."
"What exactly are you driving at?"
"We wait, Mr. Lydgate. We wait for you to tell us what you do not want to tell us. It is best to tell your friends, Mr. Lydgate. Do not wait for your enemies to find out."
"Look here, I'd be very grateful if you'd explain."
"Oh, it's nothing, nothing. Just a thought. Look, Mr. Lydgate, I'm on my way to play poker. I find myself just a little short. Could you possibly lend me, say, a hundred bucks? Just till the end of the month?"
"But this is the end of the month."
"Is it? So it is. Money goes very quickly, doesn't it? This is an expensive place to live in." He looked down incuriously at Lydgate's bank balance. He probably knew it already.
"I'm afraid I have to give up lending," said Lydgate.
"I'm trying to save, you see. One so rarely gets one's loan back."
"Very, very true. Have you managed to save a great deal, Mr. Lydgate?"
"What's that to you?"
"Nothing, Mr. Lydgate. I was just interested. Perhaps we can have a little talk some other time. You must come to another bridge party at Carruthers Chung's. Perhaps the next one. We would be so pleased if you would really, honestly, sincerely, tell us everything. We're all so anxious to help."
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