Running in the Family (23 page)

Fortinbras. Edgar. Christopher, my sisters, Wendy, myself. I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us. And why of Shakespeare’s cast of characters do I remain most curious about Edgar? Who if I look deeper into the metaphor, torments his father over an imaginary cliff.

Words such as
love, passion, duty
, are so continually used they grow to have no meaning—except as coins or weapons. Hard language softens. I never knew what my father felt of these “things.” My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult. Was he locked
in the ceremony of being “a father”? He died before I even thought of such things.

I long for the moment in the play where Edgar reveals himself to Gloucester and it never happens. Look I am the son who has grown up. I am the son you have made hazardous, who still loves you. I am now part of an adult’s ceremony, but I want to say I am writing this book about you at a time when I am least sure about such words.… Give me your arm. Let go my hand. Give me your arm. Give the word. “Sweet Marjoram” … a tender herb.

There is a story about my father I cannot come to terms with. It is one of the versions of his train escapade. In this one he had escaped from the train and run off naked into the jungle. (“Your father had a runaway complex,” someone has already told me.) His friend Arthur was called to find him and persuade him back. When Arthur eventually tracked him down this is what he saw.

My father is walking towards him, huge and naked. In one hand he holds five ropes, and dangling on the end of each of them is a black dog. None of the five are touching the ground. He is holding his arm outstretched, holding them with one arm as if he has supernatural strength. Terrible noises are coming from him and from the dogs as if there is a conversation between them that is subterranean, volcanic. All their tongues hanging out.

They were probably stray dogs which my father had stumbled on in jungle villages, he had perhaps picked them up as he walked along. He was a man who loved dogs. But this scene had no humour or gentleness in it. The dogs were too powerful to be in danger of being strangled. The danger was to the naked man who held them at arm’s length, towards whom they swung like large dark magnets. He did not recognize Arthur, he would not let go of the ropes. He had captured all the evil in the regions he had passed through and was holding it.

Arthur cut the ropes and the animals splashed to the ground, writhing free and escaping. He guided my father back to the road and the car that his sister Stephy waited in. They put him in the back seat, his arm still held away from him, now out of the open car window. All the way to Colombo the lengths of rope dangled from his fist in the hot passing air.

After the morning’s drive to Colombo, after the meeting with Doris—tense, speaking in whispers in the hotel lobby—he would force himself to sit on the terrace overlooking the sea. Would sit in the sunlight drinking beers, which he ordered ice-cold, and finishing them before the sweat even evaporated from the surface of the bottle. Poured out the glasses of Nuwara Eliya beer. He sat there all afternoon, hoping she would notice him and come down to speak with him properly, truthfully. He wanted his wife to stop this
posing
at her work. Had to speak with her. He could hardly remember where the children were now. Two in school in England, one in Kegalle, one in Colombo.…

Till 5 o’clock, he sat out on the blue terrace with the blaze of sun on him—determined to be somewhere where they could be alone if she changed her mind and came down to him—not with the other guests and drinkers in the cool shadows of the lobby of
the Mount Lavinia Hotel. He recalled everyone. Their crowd. Noel, Trevor, Francis who was dead now, Dorothy who ran riot. All burghers and Sinhalese families, separate from the Europeans. The memory of his friends was with him in the sun. He poured them out of the bottles into his glass tankard and drank. He remembered Harold Tooby from his schooldays and his years at Cambridge where the code was “you can always get away with more than you think you can get away with.…” Till Lionel Wendt accidentally told his father of the deception. Lionel always guilty over this, who gave him and Doris a painting by George Keyt for their wedding. He still had that in any case, and the wooden statue of a woman he had picked up at an auction which everyone else hated. Objects had stayed and people disappeared.

At five he got into the white Ford. She had not come down to him. And he drove to F. X. Pereira in the Ridgeway Building and bought cases of beer and gin to take back to Kegalle. Then he parked near the Galle Face Hotel, old haunt, and crossed the street to the bar where journalists and others from Lake House sat and talked politics, talked rubbish, talked about sport, which he was not at all interested in now. Did not mention Doris. Drank and laughed and listened, till eleven at night at which time they all went home to their wives. He walked down Galle Road and ate a meal at a Muslim restaurant, sitting alone in one of the frail wooden booths, the food so hot it would sear back the drunkenness and sleepiness, and then got into his car. This was 1947.