Earthly Powers (6 page)

       Geoffrey said, "Yes dear of course dear. Behaved badly, haven't I? It's this bloody place, you know. Shitty nasty little bloody island. Still, it is your birthday, after all." Oh my God. "Should have behaved better on Grand Old Man's bloody birthday."

       Sciberras cut into the general shock with: "You make a mistake. It is my birthday. But I do not think you are able to get anything right. You have a mind very badly arranged."

       "Deranged you mean," Geoffrey said. "You're not the only bugger in the world or even on this shitheap of an island to have a birthday today. If you knew anything about anything you'd know whose birthday it primarily bloody well is." He raised a recharged glass. "Many happy returns, cher maitre, and all that shit," he leered at me. Sciberras had to be made to take all this as a very tasteless joke.

       "A tasteless joke," Wignall soothed a fellow poet, "but still a joke. It's your birthday," patting Sciberras blindly. "That's right, isn't it, Toomey? His and his only, isn't it?"

       I had given up many things in my time but had never yet had to deny the most basic fact of my life. "Certainly not mine," I said. I heard, thank God, what could only be our car coming back for us.

CHAPTER 7

I was stupid not to go straight to bed, initiating the new regime of sleeping alone, instead of having it lengthily and dangerously out with Geoffrey. In the upper salon he sat at the untuned harpsichord, picking at ensoured harmonies while I tried to address him with calm, to treat him as some errant character of my own fiction. But my inner agitation was too strong to permit me to sit. I tottered up and down on the fur and marble, a weak nightcap whisky and water atremble in my claw.

       "It was deliberate, wasn't it? An attempt, highly successful, to make me look a fool. What I want to know is why. But I think I know why. This is my punishment for making you leave Tangier. A punishment for consulting your own interest and, indeed, safety. And, as far as that matter is concerned, you are very far from being out of the wood. But still I had to be punished."

       "Oh, bloody balls." And, as if this were opera buffa recitative, he struck a sort of chord. He had his mirror glasses back on, though the salon lights were dim enough. His stomach seemed to have settled, and his speech was unblurred.

       "Stop that. Stop that stupid noise."

       He twanged a foul fortissimo cadence and got up. Shambling over to the leather couch he said, before falling onto it, "Things just got a bit out of control, that's all." He lay glooming up at the dead chandelier. "Didn't care much for the atmosphere. Hostile. That stupid bloody poet too. Making you hand over your birthday like that. It was on your behalf really. Got irritated, got pissed."

       "Well, it obviously can't go on, can it? I obviously can't afford to let it go on."

       "You mean peace in your declining years, tranquil twilit fulfilment and the rest of the bloody crap. Honour and fucking dignity. You mean I've got to go."

       "You're not happy here." I was being very reasonable. "And I've no intention of making another move. This one was shattering enough."

       "You're bloody well telling me it was bloody shattering. So I have to go."

       "Oh, I don't really want you to go, you must know that. But it's a matter of it's a matter of self-preservation."

       "Very cold words, sir, after all those former hot avowals. Right right right. Go. Pack my pitiful possessions and go. London first, I think, sort myself out from there. And then Percy in the Bahamas or that epileptic snuffling sod in Lausanne. Good good good. I shall need some money."

       "Three months' salary. That seems to me just and reasonable."

       "Yes," he said quietly. He took off his mirrors to eye me coldly. "A just and reasonable bastard, that's what you are. And when you've snuffed it I'll be just and reasonable too. Ten thousand quid's what I want, dear."

       "You're joking."

       "No, not really. As a matter of fact, you foresaw all this. You set it all down in that stupid bloody sentimental shitbag of a novel called The Affairs 0f Men, fucking silly pretentious bloody title. You know, this just and reasonable writer bastard who's getting old but has the O. M. and the Nobel and his best friend goes in for the term as I remember is posthumous blackmail. And there's all this guff about when the writer's dead he's finished with and it doesn't matter a monkey's ballock what anybody writes about him so up your arse Jack and publish and be damned. Then he bethinks himself that he's a Great Writer and doesn't want to go down in history as a Right Bastard so he pays up in return for a Solemn Promise in Writing to produce nothing of a haha Biographical Nature after the great writer sod has snuffed it. And the great big subtle marvellous point is that he knows there's nothing to stop this shit of a best friend spewing all the muck up when he's kicked but at least he'll go to his tomb in Westminster Abbey knowing that if the shit is shovelled out at least it is Unjust."

       The nightcap was spilling. I sat on the edge of the armchair and tried to drink it but could not. I could see Geoffrey grinning with a film gangster's laziness at the tremolo of teeth and glass. I put the glass down on the fretted Indian table with care and difficulty. "Bastard," I choked. "Bastard bastard."

       "A bastard who's read your books," he said. "And a prissy old-fashioned load of fucking codswallop they are. Things have changed, my old darling. Now we're allowed to set it all down stark and bare, not in ah ah elegant periphrases, your term I think. About a dirty old man trying to get it up and in and crying because he can't come. And snuffling about darling boy oh this is such ecstasy. You just and reasonable bastard, you."

       "Go on," I said, rising. "Out. Get out now. Before I put you out."

       "You and whose fucking army?"

       "I'm ordering you to go, Geoffrey. You can spend the night at a hotel and have the bill sent here. You can pack your bags tomorrow. I shall not be around. A check will be waiting for you on the hall table. Three months' salary and enough for your air fare to London. Now get out." I had to sit down again.

       "Ten thousand nicker here and now and I'll be on my merry way. Didn't you write some fearful shitty nonsense called On Our Merry Way or was it that bloody twerp Beverley? Never mind." He grimaced and painfully belched. "Christ, that bloody muck. Alum and cat piss. Cheeseparing sods."

       "Out of my house, go on."

       "I've got a fair amount done already, dear. You always said that my letters showed I could have flair if I got down to it. That business at Rabat makes quite a nice paragraph—you know, when pocky little Mahmud literally shat on you."

       "Go on, go." Then I collapsed into snivelling. "To think of all I've done for you—the faith—the trust—"

       "Ah, here we go: faith and duty and the rest of the boxroom junk. Boo hoo hoo. Tears idle tears. You do really, you know, cry most bee-ootah-flah. England, home and duty. Jesus Christ on the fucking cross. Owwwwwwww."

       "Out of my house—" I was on my feet again, hands blindly seeking something to hold on to. He lay there comfortably, admiring the shaking ineffectual pathetic shrunken trembling mannikin. "There's a police station across the street. I can have you thrown out."

       "I'll scream bloody blue murder, dear. I'll tell them you were trying to bugger me. It's the death penalty here, I believe."

       There was no time for me to see clearly what Geoffrey's real intention could be. The rage was too fierce a tenant. I felt collapse impending but held it off. "You want me to die," I gasped. "That's it. Easier that way."

       "Very neat, to do that on your birthday. Like Shakespeare, if he really did. And then that Maltese sod can write a sonetto about it. A homo generoso. He gave me his birthday, cake and all."

       "Don't. Can't."

       "Do control yourself, dear. You've gone all blue around the lips." And then, in a deliberately bad parody of my dictating: "Geoffrey lay unperturbed on the ah settee while his aged friend exhibited all the symptoms of an approaching ah cardiac ah spasm. In impeccable cockney he remarked: 'Yer've gawn owe bleeoo abaht ye—'" And then, getting up in concern: "Oh God, no."

       "Get me the... can't... it's the..." An obscene shaft of indigestion followed by mild toothache followed by agony that shot from clavicle to wrist, all on the left side, the right serenely aloof. I went down to the rugs as neatly as in a stage fall but without syncope.

       "All right, dear, the white ones, I know—" He was into the bedroom to the bathroom, I heard the click of the medicine cupboard door. Then I passed out, as it were, volitionally. I came to, it seemed, no more than a second later, but I was in pyjamas and bed and Dr. Borg or Grima, it had to be one or the other, was taking my pulse. When I opened my eyes I saw Geoffrey standing there. He gave me a sweet and loving smile. Dr. Borg or Grima was also wearing pyjamas but an egg-stained dressing gown as well. He was severely unshaven and had a cigarette in his mouth. I had once seen an Andalusian priest conducting a burial service unshaven with a cigarette in his mouth. It took the seriousness out of things.

       He dropped my wrist and his own, which had a wristwatch on it. He said, "No excitement. Eighty-one is a good age, but my father is ninety-five. I tell him no excitement but the television programs sometimes excite him. The Italian ones, not the Maltese. It is the girls who make the announcements even that excite him. I give him," he said, "simple sedatives," taking out and dousing his cigarette, a presumable sign that the examination was over.

       "He did get excited," Geoffrey said. "It was what you might call literary excitement. But I'll make quite sure there's no more of that."

       "Yes, and next time please telephone me. You woke up the family with the knocking."

       "I can't telephone," Geoffrey said with his dangerous sweetness, "because we have no telephone. They tell us there is a long waiting list for the telephone. They say we have to wait at least eighteen months for a telephone. Or even longer, for a telephone. During the day, if I wish to telephone, I go to the shop at the corner, which has a telephone and allows me to use the telephone. But when that shop is shut I cannot telephone. That is why I did not telephone."

       "There is always the police station."

       "Yes," Geoffrey said, "and a right lot of snotty bastards they are." I found that I could not speak. "Well," the doctor said, "this is Malta."

       "You're bloody well telling me that it's bloody well bloody Malta." I found that I could speak. "Please, Geoffrey, no."

       "No excitement," the doctor ordered. "I'll watch him," Geoffrey said.

CHAPTER 8

This intention went unfulfilled that night, although, despite my avowed purpose of the afternoon, I did not sleep alone. I did not, for that matter, sleep very much. After an hour or so I woke ridiculously refreshed and, as it were, cathartized, and none of the properties of the Maltese night conduced to sleep's resumption. The electric mosquito repellers whirred and clicked and puffed, and public clocks all over the island announced in imperfect unison the full hour or the part hour and, as an exordium to the part hour, the full hour which had already been completed. I watched Geoffrey, instead of he me. He was snoring irregularly, his fat back turned to me, and occasionally forgetting how to breathe, remembering only in a bed-shaking spasm. At one point he started to breathe easily and then he said something in Latin. It sounded like "Solitam Minotauro—pro cans corpus..." I listened with care and surprise, having believed that he had attended a minor public school that despised the classical tongues and taught in their stead a kind of elementary anthropological linguistics.

       I took a cigarette from the silver box, a gift from the Sultan of Kelantan, that stood on the night table, seeing it clearly in the very rich moonlight, and, to my vague astonishment, was able to light it with Ali's flaring gift that lay beside it. I had, I thought, left that below in my study. The big flame seemed to impinge on Geoffrey's sleeping mind, for he flailed as if fighting it and then turned toward me. After a pause he snored out a ghastly odour that was neither vinous nor vomitory, more ferrous in its basic tone, with indefinable harmonics of gross decay. It puzzled more than appalled me: it was remotely familiar.

       Moonlight showed a heavy sweat on Geoffrey's nakedness, which was now too close for my comfort. I had not, on my first waking, been sure whether to encourage a certain vague hunger for tea and a sandwich to attain a solidity that demanded satisfaction; now I was quite sure. I got out of bed on firm legs and found my slippers and dressing gown. The bed was all Geoffrey's now. I felt for him none of the bitter resentful loathing I might properly, in spite of his eventual yielding to duty or fear, be expected to feel and, indeed, expected to feel. I felt only the generalised pity one always feels for the defenceless prisoner of sleep, seeing in him the defenceless prisoner of life. Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness. If that is contradiction, it is because human language disposes to contradiction. I told myself, untruthfully perhaps, that I knew the world and had learned tolerance. That it was too late for me to take human passions seriously, including my own. But I remembered saying something of that kind publicly at the age of forty-five. Give us peace in our time, whatever the time. Which logically meant throwing Geoffrey out. And then feeling no peace because of a lack of charity, of awareness that I was, all said and done, a dithering nuisance, a hypocrite, a prissy product of a bad period, ludicrous in my senile sensuality, everything that, in blunter language, Geoffrey had termed me. Let him sleep, let it all sleep.

       I went down and entered the great white kitchen, its surgicality qualified by the ghosts of spices, softly, very softly. Ali's room was just beyond it and he was, the desert life only three generations behind him, a featherweight sleeper. Very softly I boiled water, made a sandwich from the remains of the luncheon roast chicken, scalded the Twining creature. Then I softly carried my bever to the study on a tray, helped by moonlight to toe-on the footswitch of the standard lamp. It was not urgency but curiosity, as well as a disquiet that would clarify itself later, that made me want to look again at the story of the priestly miracle. I munched while I searched for the three volumes of my collected shorter fiction, beautifully leatherbound and tooled, my American publisher's ten-year-old Christmas gift. That it was in the second volume I knew, since the first was given over to tales with a European setting, the third to the harvest of my Eastern travels, and the second to the Americas. The event on which the story had been based had taken place in Chicago in the twenties, this I knew, but the title I had totally forgotten. It turned out to be Laying on 0f Hands and the style more slipshod even than I remembered. A thousand-dollar effort done hastily for a long-dead illustrated monthly. I read with shame, sipping and chewing, trying to reach the tones of a reality under the shabby professionalism.