A Boat Load of Home Folk (20 page)

From the main room came the sounds of packing-cases being dragged or bumped. People came once or twice to the doorway and spoke to Stevenson but seemed anxious to go when they saw her. She felt so redundant she found her hands flapping uselessly at her side; she had not even the comfort of a bag to dangle.

“I'll go back,” she said rather pitifully. “There doesn't seem to be anything I can do.”

“Do you mind if I sit down?” Stevenson asked. The pills had not yet begun to work. He watched her for a minute baffled, trying to remember how she had got there. “Perhaps if you went up to the hospital—do you know where that is?—they could use you. Anyone hurt will be taken in there, I suppose. Other than that. . . .” His voice trailed away and he clutched the tablet box in his hand. He noticed at that point that it felt reassuringly full.

“All right,” she said. But lost. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” he said, getting to his feet. His smile was as full as he could make it and he ignored her hand to put a kiss on her forehead. It was unbearable to see her eyes begin to formulate tears so easily and he turned away so that when he was back in his chair she had gone.

Like a child he began to take the tablets from his pill bottle and lay them in double rank along the edge of
the desk. They were very tiny and there were a great many of them, so many they looked in their impartial way like some aloof cure-all. His absorbing task was to lay them from one end of the desk to the other and observe their tempting attractiveness as the pain took him from several points like a gale at sea. He had every intention of being brave and resisting them. He concentrated on thinking of his son and a variety of sharpened sentiments evolved by parenthood.

It was still early, only seven, and more voices came down the road and the splish of wading feet and even laughter. He thought he could hear oars and from the hill behind him the thrum of a car engine.

Slowly, out of consideration for his restless guest, he walked to the front of the store and began to wave duty and the day in together.

Observing this monstrous sore upon the sleeping face next to him, Lake, elbow-propped, gave himself up to clean meditation as the morning umber slid across the sky to Prison Hill. Here was the one who, some weeks before, he had seen giggling over a comic, his misery abating in laughter and polished to keener gloss by the contrast of his daily enduring state. One patch of perfect skin was left below the eyes; the hair was curly and shiny; there was a shoulder and arm and side still tenderly young and unblemished. Other parts could not bear to be looked upon. Sisters were silent but aggressively attentive all about as he slouched in a
swinish representation of morning ease. Yet during the night in some restless dream he had laid his hand upon the fevered skin of the man whose mattress he was sharing, a decadent who welcomed his touch as his own.

Now the shame and the regret. It was, of course, too late.

He rolled away from the institutional blanket that had made them one and crawled mentally and physically into wakefulness.

They were handing round makeshift breakfast, a lot of thin white sugared and milked slops and coffee. The mouths beaked like birds, Lake observed, huddled against a wall. He felt he should move out of obscurity to aid, but his unworthiness held him on threads until he saw across the long room from him a very old man calling soundlessly for help. Stepping between the palliasses Lake steered his charity to some purpose, for the old fellow, he saw as he bent over, was only the frame of a man across which the black skin acted merely to protect the sensitivity of the bone. His grey hair tufted like wild grass. Across his dry lips lay the scum of approaching death.

Lake raised the water glass to his mouth and moistened it. To do this he had to take the old man's head like a delicate shell under one cupped hand that was surprised by the heat of the lost body. The head nodded a thanks and kept nodding for a few minutes as if impaled and tried to make known another want. A
skinny hand was pointing towards the urinal bottle against the wall. Lake banged back his nausea that was like an ill-behaved child and fetched the greasy looking plastic vessel. Now the old man was struggling to lift the blanket back from his belly and Lake peeled this back, too, back from the bones seen as X-ray under the withered skin. The old man was quite helpless and could only gargle and point. Lake lifted the limp genital very gently and held it over the bottle. He could sense the man's struggle to relieve himself and heard him hiss with pain as the trickle began and hesitated and stopped altogether. In this emaciated body there was no waste at all now, the total being ready for resumption. Divine resumption, Lake thought bitterly, and as he pulled the blanket back over the dying man he was struck forcibly by the antithesis between the violence of sexual communication and this other intimacy required by love. Blank-minded at this, he gave the man another sip of water and was surprised by voices from the door.

Mrs Seabrook was offering herself up.

Her immolation took place in a high-walled room where windows perforated only in a rudimentary way at least four feet above the eyes that might have lusted after sky. She felt too enclosed, and spiritually as well, but struggled to explain, offer, and finally to aid. She was to change water-jugs and remove breakfast bowls. She could, if she wished superlative sacrifice, have emptied pans, but they thought it would be better if
she went to the kitchen along the corridor and helped wash up.

Lake printed a tiny cross with his thumb on the dark dying man. It did not burn white. Then he followed Mrs Seabrook to the kitchen and watched her for a moment as she was absorbed by two others. These left and Lake said, “I saw you last night, I think.”

She did not know whether priests cared for reminders of their dissipation and, hesitating for mollifying words, paused too long.

“Although I was blind myself. Blind drunk.”

“Were you?”

“Yes. Quite. But not so drunk I couldn't see you were in trouble. Is that impertinent?”

She felt a spasm of annoyance. “That's your job.”

“Yes. Under the guise of Christian charity we are really maliciously inquisitive. I have never been the sort of religious sticky-beak I should have, you know. Like last night. I was not sufficiently interested in that old woman Mr Stevenson brought in. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

Yes. Yes. He picked up a towel and began to help her. Sisters rattled in, unheaped another load of plates and went away.

“She died. Early this morning. About three, I think. I wouldn't help her when she came.”

“Why?”

“It's too long to explain. I just wouldn't. I wasn't fit by my own standards and now she's gone.”

“She really
has
gone,” Mrs Seabrook said.

“What do you mean?”

“The whole hotel has gone. I walked by there this morning and there's only the bar-rail left.”

“What about Fricotte?”

“Who's he?”

“The manager, barman. He owned it.”

“I don't know. I'm only telling you what I saw. Or didn't see.”

“There's nothing we can do, is there?” Lake asked.

“No. Were there any others at the hotel?”

“No guests. A couple of staff. But they lived in the town and went home each night. We're not very touristy, you know. The Lantana was only here for the convenience of the port. You're the first visitors, in the tourist sense I mean, we've had for months.”

Probably the last, too, as everything else seems to be collapsing or to have collapsed. I should have been gone by now, Lake protested in his heart, and this last ritual of tending others would have been unnecessary. He began to cough as if he might vomit, bending well over the table and making violent hawking sounds that forced the woman away from him. The old lady had been washed away to sea and the last tangibility of guilt was taken by tide. Yet this did make him sick, did make him wish to throw up his soul. After some moments he got his control and breath.

“What is your trouble?” he asked.

At this point she could not have refused a man so overcome, with his eyes watering and his lungs refilling and emptying in gasps.

“My husband, of course. But nothing, I imagine, that isn't wrong with most marriages.”

“Do you love him?”

“I did.”

“But now?”

“Oh, I don't really know. There's all the force of years together and habit and debts we've collected as a pair. You know how it is.”

“No,” Lake replied gravely. “I have never had that privilege.
Non solus cum sola.”

“What's that?”

“Oh, the celibacy jazz. I wouldn't really know the simplest thing about the human relationships on which I have to be so doctrinaire.”

“That's funny really,” Mrs Seabrook said. “It almost seems crazy.”

“It is. Between you and me,” Lake said, “I'm getting out. Back and out. Last night was a farewell.”

“What will you do? Then, I mean.”

“Any old thing. To stop me thinking or regretting or having a conscience. We have the most professional consciences in this business. They never let you go.”

“I don't suppose I'll leave my husband,” Mrs Seabrook said wistfully, “even though I must. It's very hard.”

She finished the last pile of dishes and stirred waves into the sink with a small dish-mop. Two nuns brought more soiled crockery and then more. Let us know, they said, when you want a rest. But she was aware they were tireless and she must be too.

They worked like this through the morning, Lake sometimes taking his turn with dishes or cloth, and at eleven the thought of her husband jabbed. She could watch the check border of the rag in her hand and the dampness spread all through, see cups in piles, and plates, and hear the voices in the corridor or the makeshift ward, and groans from some; and yesterday's fun-trip had assumed the meaning she had come all this way to prove. All this way and all those years from the first confetti through the confetti (more scattered) of bills and cheque butts and purchase instalments on cars and washing machines, television, garbage disposal, to come to the parting that had begun all those years away with their linked signatures in a school chapel. Gerald's old school tie had begun to strangle both of them with his bogus and bourgeois subscriptions and demands.

“Where will you look for him?” Lake asked. He was not curious, only polite.

Mrs Seabrook explained.

“There will be makeshift accommodation for everyone who needs it, I suppose,” Lake said. “If there's any hall large enough standing. You'll find they'll all rally! My, they love drama. I imagine even Tucker-Brown
will succour half the town!” He smiled awkwardly.

“Who is Tucker-Brown?”

“Him big feller white boss. Him resident.” Lake threw down his own dish-rag suddenly and burst into tears, his face splitting into quite frightful patches of pain.

“Please go,” he said.

B
ISHOP
Deladier was determined there should be some sort of thanksgiving Mass the second morning and this was easy enough to organize, for half the refugees from the island villages and many of the townsfolk had been bedded down in the mission chapel. He was sleeping himself in the sacristy with Mulgrave, who had returned the day before from the hill mission, snoring liturgically beside. The bishop had tried to drag a font between but its callous concrete resisted. Now he stared out of grit-eyes, heavy-lidded because sleep had not touched them, and heaved his thin shanks out of the blanket in which he had rolled. The episcopal legs were definitely fallible this morning yet took him nevertheless through vesting and meanwhile prayer, his eyes heaven-absorbed, though they still found time to observe Mulgrave moaning up from sloth.

Deladier peered into the church.

Parishioners, mostly black, were sprawled beneath the stations of the cross and he could even see a pair of white legs sticking out from the confessional. Some prostrate penitent, he imagined with unexpected quirk of conventional sacerdotalism, ravished by divine forgiveness. Mulgrave would never have tolerated such a thought and came after him at that moment rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Shall I ring the bell?”

“If you would, father.”

Mulgrave went out to the warning bell in the yard and looked down the hill towards the port as he swung the rope. They will have to change the postcards now, he thought. The whole front had been bitten neatly along the sea-wall by the mouths of water and wind, and the harbour road swam with rubbish. The hotel had gone completely, half the bake-house, too, and three Chinese stores that sold kitchenware and seed necklaces and cheap fabric.

The cultural centre had lost its roof.

Bong, went the bell. Bong. Bong. Bong.

In shock he observed Father Lake striding across the grass from Prison Hell steering a woman between the slain trees. Some vestige of turbulence in the air still fought the flapping legs of his old-fashioned greys into which he had changed since the trouble. Father Greely, black and ominous, moved sombrely behind and two other people who looked like tourists. He wasn't sure until they reached the fence-line that it was Miss Latimer
from the trading company with a balding gentleman of great gallantry. He seemed to help over obstacles that were not there.