The Cat’s Table (14 page)

‘Was he always shy?’ she added after a moment.

‘He was … careful. He had a weak heart he had to protect. It was why his mother loved him so much. She did not expect a long life for him.’

‘I see.’ She looked down. ‘What happened in the bar … what I heard was, it was only noise, there was nothing violent. Rajiva’s not like that. I don’t see him any more, but he wasn’t like that.’

There was so little to hold on to in our conversation. I was clutching wisps of air. The Ramadhin I fully needed to understand in order to bury was not catchable. Besides, how could that fourteen-year-old have comprehended the desire and torment he had felt.

Then she said, ‘I know what he wanted. He’d go on about those triangles and maths riddles about a train going thirty miles an hour … or a bathtub holding so much water and a man weighing ten stone gets into it. That was the kind of stuff we were learning. But he wanted something else. He wanted to save me. To bring me into
his
life, as if I didn’t have my own.’

We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit, some wish fulfilment. Yet Heather Cave, even in her youth, had known what Ramadhin probably wished for her. And yet, in spite of having asked him to do something for her that night, she had never accused herself of his death. His participation was governed by his own needs.

‘He has a sister, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am married to her.’

‘So that’s why you came to see me?’

‘No. Because he was my closest friend, my
machang
. One of my two essential friends, at one time.’

‘I see. I am sorry.’ Then she added, ‘I remember that smile so well, whenever he left the flat, as I closed the door. It’s like when someone says goodbye on the phone and the voice becomes sad. You know that change that happens in a voice?’

When we got up to leave, she came around the table and gave me a hug, as if she knew that all of this was not for Ramadhin’s sake, but for mine.

ONE SUMMER NIGHT, in our garden flat on Colliers Water Lane, as I walked back into the living room during a party, I saw Massi, across the room, nudge herself off the wall to dance with someone we both knew well. They danced at arm’s length so they could see each other’s faces, and her right hand lifted the shoulder strap of her summer dress and shifted it slightly – she was glancing down at it, as he was. And she knew he was.

All our friends were there. Ray Charles was singing, ‘
But on the other hand, baby
.’ I was halfway across the room. And without needing to see anything more, or to hear a word being said, I knew there was some grace between them that we ourselves did not have any more.

Such a small gesture, Massi. But when we are searching for an example of what we no longer have, we see it everywhere. And it was a few years since we ourselves had ridden bareback out of the loss of your brother, something neither of us could deal with on our own.

* * *

When Massi and I broke up, it was in truth most devastating to her parents, whereas we both hoped to be calmer in our relationship without the marital role. But, it turned out, we would not see each other any more.

Did the years fall away when I saw her move the strap of a summer dress not more than a quarter-inch, so that I interpreted it as an invitation to that mutual friend? As if it were suddenly essential for him to see that small sunless part of her shoulder. I say this long after the bitterness and accusations and denials and arguments. What was it that made me recognise something in the gesture? I walked into our narrow garden and stood there listening to the night traffic racing past Colliers Water Lane that made me think of the constant noise of the sea, and then all at once of Emily in the darkness of the
Oronsay
, leaning back against the railing with her beau, when she had glanced for a moment at her bare shoulder and then up at the stars, and I remembered the sexual knot beginning to form in me as well. All of eleven years old.

I’ll tell you the last time I thought about Ramadhin. I was in Italy and, curious about heraldry, asked a docent in a castle for an explanation of all the crescent moons, their tips facing up. A series of crescent moons and a sword, I was told, meant members of a family had taken part in the Crusades. If only one generation participated, then the crest would have just one crescent moon. And then the guide added, unasked, that having a sun on your crest meant you had a saint in your family. And I thought,
Ramadhin
. Yes. He leapt, all of him, into my thoughts, as a sort of saint. Not a too-official one. A human one. He was the saint of our clandestine family.

Port Said

ON THE FIRST of September, 1954, the
Oronsay
had completed its journey through the Suez Canal, and we watched the city of Port Said approach and slide beside us, the sky dark with sand. We stayed up all night, listening to the street traffic, the chorus of horns and street radios.

Only at dawn did we leave the deck and climbed down several levels into the heat and the prison-like light of the engine room. This had become a habit of ours each morning. Here the men lost so much sweat we’d see them drink tepid water from the emergency fire pails while the turbines around them swivelled, flinging their pistons. Sixteen engineers on the
Oronsay
. Eight for the night shift, eight for the day, nursing the forty-thousand-horsepower steam machines that drove the twin propellers, so we could travel through a calm or a storm-filled sea. If we were there early enough, as the night shift ended, we followed the crew into the sunlight, where they stepped one by one into the open shower stall and then dried themselves in the sea wind, their voices loud in the new silence. It was where our Australian roller skater had stood just an hour earlier.

But now, as we docked in Port Said, all turbines and engines stilled, and there was a different purpose and manner among the crew. Their anonymous work became public. The passage through the Red Sea and the Canal had resulted in desert sands blasting millions of fragments of canary-yellow paint off the sides of the ship, so while we lingered for a day in that Mediterranean port, sailors hung in rope cradles, scraping and repainting the yellow hull, and the Engineers and Electricals worked among the passengers in the hundred-degree heat, securing the ship for the final leg of the voyage. The Wipers blew oil sludge out from the pipes, collecting the black phlegm-like substance into barrels. As soon as the ship was free of the harbour, they hauled those barrels up to the fantail and dumped them over the side.

Meanwhile, sections of the hold were being emptied. A brief afternoon rain continued down three levels into the base of the hold as workers, soaking wet, rolled seven-hundred-pound drums towards the mouth of the waiting crane, and hooked the chain and each drum to an I beam. They grabbed and steered tea chests and carpets of raw rubber towards the opening. Bags of asbestos broke apart in mid-air. It was angry, fraught work. If a person lost his grip on a container, it could fall fifty feet down into the darkness. If someone was killed, the body was rowed back to the harbour and it disappeared there.

Two Violets

BY NOW THE status of Mrs Flavia Prins on the
Oronsay
was considerable. She had been a guest at the Captain’s Table, and was invited twice onto the bridge for Officers’ Tea. But it was the combination of Aunt Flavia with her two friends and their skills at duplicate bridge that gave her power within the A Deck salons.

Violet Coomaraswamy and Violet Grenier, ‘the two Violets,’ as they were referred to by all, had represented Ceylon in numerous Asian bridge tournaments from Singapore to Bangkok. They were therefore superior to the usually listless card players during the voyage, and these women, not revealing their professional status, cut a swathe with their gambling, searching out a different wispy bachelor every afternoon and making him join them in a couple of rubbers.

The games were in reality a slow interrogation as to the availability of the man, with a possible courtship in mind, as Miss Coomaraswamy, the younger Violet, now happened to be trawling for a husband. And so, though she was in fact the most Machiavellian player of the three, Violet Coomaraswamy pretended modesty at the card tables in the Delilah Lounge, underbidding and faltering when she could have pounced. If she happened once or twice to play a Three No Trump like a genius, she blushed and credited her luck in cards, not, sadly, her luck in love.

I still imagine those three ladies surrounding and ensnaring solitary gentlemen who were out of their depth, not even aware they were in fatal waters. The bangles and brooches tinkled and shimmered as the two Violets and Flavia laid their cards down for the kill, or clutched them shyly to their bosoms. All through the Red Sea there was hope that one middle-aged tea planter would succumb to the charms of the youngest hunter among them. But he proved more gun-shy than they had thought, and during our landfall at Port Said, Violet Coomaraswamy stayed in her cabin and wept.

What I most wished to witness was a card game between my aunt Flavia and my cabinmate, Mr Hastie. He was still despondent about his demotion. He missed his dogs, and he missed the spare time when he could read. I longed for the possibility of a tournament between these two separate worlds, and I wondered whether the Violets might be destroyed by him in a fair game – in the Delilah Lounge, or in our cabin at midnight, or perhaps best of all, on neutral ground, deep within the hold, on an unfolded card table, under a naked bulb.

Two Hearts

MR HASTIE’S LOSS of his job as Head Kennel Keeper meant the nightly card games did not take place as often as they used to. First of all, Mr Invernio’s rise in authority meant there was more squabbling between the two friends. And Mr Hastie, now assigned to chipping paint in bright sunlight, did not have the same energy he had when simply overseeing dogs and reading mystical works. In the past the two had shared a breakfast at the kennels – usually a whisky and then some form of porridge, which they ate from a washed-out dog bowl. Now they barely saw each other. But sometimes a late game of bridge would still take place, and I’d watch the four of them until I fell asleep, only to be woken by Mr Babstock who was a shouter whenever he lost a hand. He and Tolroy, on a night break from being wireless operators, would come to these games exhausted. Only Invernio, who now had the easiest job, was lively, clapping his hands at any small victory. With the odour of dalmatians and terriers rising off him he continued to irritate Mr Hastie.

By the fantail of the ship there was a yellow stern light. And during the hottest nights my cabinmate dragged his cot there and lashed it to the railing in order to sleep under the stars. I realised he had probably been sleeping there on those first few nights out of Colombo. Cassius, Ramadhin and I came upon him on one of our night expeditions and he explained he’d been doing this since going through the Straits of Magellan as a young man, when the ship he was on had been surrounded by icebergs that came in every colour. Hastie was a ‘lifer’ in the Merchant Navy, travelling to the Americas, the Philippines, the Far East, being altered, he claimed, by the men and the women he met. ‘I remember the girls, the silk … I don’t remember the work at all. I chose tough adventures. Books were only words then.’ In the late-night air, Mr Hastie was a nonstop talker. And what he told us, when we visited him by his yellow light on some of those evenings, put an excited fear into our hearts. He had worked for the Dollar Line, which passaged through the canal in Panama – the Pedro Miguel Locks, the Miraflores Locks, the Galliard Cut. That, he said, was the realm of romance! He described the man-made excavations, and the portal cities at each end of the canal, and then Balboa, where he was seduced by a local beauty, got drunk, missed his ship, and married the woman, escaping five days later by signing up on the next Italian vessel.

Mr Hastie spoke in his slow, dry voice, the cigarette hanging from his lips, the words whispered modestly through the smoke. We believed everything he told us. We asked to see a picture of his ‘wife’, who, he said, continued to follow him from port to port, never giving up, and he promised to ‘reveal her image’, although he never did. We imagined a great beauty, with blazing eyes, and a horse under her. For when Mr Hastie signed on to his Italian ship out of Balboa, Anabella Figueroa had read his self-blaming but still dismissive letter too late to catch the vessel herself. She gathered two horses and rode without pause and in a fury to the Pedro Miguel Locks and boarded the steamer there as a first-class passenger – in order that she could be served a meal by him in his steward’s monkey jacket, and not even acknowledge his surprised face or his servile presence with one word or glance, until that evening when she entered the small cabin he shared with two other crew members, and leapt into his arms. Our dreams were busy that night.

And further tales would follow by the yellow stern light. Because sometime later, on another ship, after he had again admitted his hesitancy about their relationship, my cabinmate was watching a four-day-old moon, when she came silently up to him and knifed him twice through the ribs, missing his heart ‘by the width of a communion wafer’. It was only the cold air that kept him conscious. If she had been a larger woman, as opposed to South American petite, he was sure, she would have lifted him over the railings and dropped him overboard. He lay there and bellowed – perhaps his yells were louder because of the stillness of the night. Fortunately, a watchman heard him. Anabella Figueroa was arrested, and jailed for only a week. ‘Female despair,’ Mr Hastie explained. ‘They have a single word for it in the South American criminal code. It is the equivalent of “driving under the influence of hypnotism”. Which is what love is, or at least what love
was
, in those days …

‘There is a madness in women,’ he tried to explain to the three of us. ‘You have to approach them carefully. They might be quaint and hesitant as wild stags, if you wish to lie with them, go drinking with them. But you
leave
them and it’s like plunging down a mine shaft you didn’t realise was there in their nature … A stabbing is nothing.
Nothing
. I could have survived that. But in Valparaiso she was there again, released from jail. She hunted me down at the Hotel Homann. Luckily I had caught the typhoid, perhaps in the very hospital I was taken to with my knife wounds, and luckily she had an unreasonable fear of the disease – a fortune-teller had told her she might die of it – and she left me for good. So the knifing near to my left heart saved me from a permanent fate with her. I was never to see her again. I said
left
heart, for men have two. Two hearts. Two kidneys. Two ways of life. We are symmetrical creatures. We are balanced in our emotions …’

For years I believed all this.

‘Anyway, in the hospital, while I fought off the typhoid, a couple of docs taught me to play bridge. And I also began to read. When I was young, books never invaded my spirit. You know what I mean? If I had read this book,
The Upanishads
, when I was twenty, I would not have
received
it. I had a too-busy mind then. But it is a meditation. It helps me now. I suppose I would appreciate her now as well, more easily.’

I was standing with Flavia Prins one afternoon, talking listlessly. Looking down the side of the ship, I saw Mr Hastie straddling a raised anchor, and painting the hull. There were other sailors cradled in rope ladders around him, but I could recognise his bald spot, which I saw whenever I looked down during his card games. He had his shirt off, and his torso was sunburned. I pointed him out to my aunt.

‘They say that man is the greatest bridge player on the ship,’ I told her. ‘He has won championships in places as distant as Panama …’

She raised her eyes from him, up to the horizon. ‘What is he doing there then, I wonder.’

‘He is keeping his ears open,’ I said. ‘But he plays professionally every night with Mr Babstock, and Mr Tolroy, and Mr Invernio, who is now in charge of the dogs on the ship. All of them are international champions!’

‘I wonder …’ she said, and looked at her nails.

I separated myself from her and went down to a lower deck, where Ramadhin and Cassius were. We watched Mr Hastie work until he happened to glance up, and then we waved to him. He pushed his goggles onto his forehead, recognised us, and waved back. I hoped my guardian had stayed where I had left her, to witness the moment. The three of us continued on, a slight strut to our walk. Mr Hastie would never know how much that gesture of recognition meant to us.

*

IT COULD HAVE been her growing social success, or perhaps my false testimony after the storm, but Flavia Prins appeared to be less interested in being my guardian. She now wished our meetings to take place briefly, on an open deck, where she ticked off two or three questions like a parole officer.

‘Is your cabin pleasant?’

I dragged out a minute of silence. ‘Yes, Auntie.’

She gestured me closer, curious about something.

‘What do you
do
all day?’

I did not mention my visits to the engine room, or the excitement of witnessing the wet clothes on the Australian when she showered.

‘Luckily,’ she responded to my silence, ‘I was able to sleep through most of the Canal. So very hot …’

She was fingering her jewellery again, and I had a sudden thought that I should inform the Baron about my guardian’s cabin number.

But the Baron had already left the ship. He had disembarked at Port Said accompanied by the daughter of Hector de Silva. I had heard someone remark that he had been consoling her, so I assumed he had coaxed her to join him in further gentlemanly crimes and fed her cakes as well as good tea in the privacy of his room. He had been carrying a flat valise that may have contained valuable papers and even perhaps the portrait of Miss de Silva herself, which I knew he had in his possession. He gave me a farewell nod from the top of the gangplank and Cassius nudged me – I had told him of my participation in the robberies, enlarging the significance of my role. The de Silva heiress moved beside him in an envelope of silence. That may have been grief. Or was she already hypnotised by the charms of the Baron?

We ourselves did not go ashore at Port Said. We stayed to witness the Gully Gully man, and watched from the
Oronsay
railing as he arrived by canoe and began pulling chickens from his sleeves, his trousers, and out from under his hat. He sneezed, pulled a canary from his nose, and released it into the harbour air. The canoe rocked in the wash below us while he leapt up and down in pain, as a rooster revealed its combed head out the front of his trousers. Then we were treated to snakes falling out of his sleeves. They curled into two perfect circles at his feet, undisturbed as coins rained down into the canoe.

We left Port Said early the next morning. A pilot rode out in a launch, came on board, and guided us out of the harbour. In his unconcerned manner he was similar to the man who had led us into the Canal with whistles and yells. I imagined them as twins, or at least brothers. Completing his task, the pilot strolled away from the bridge, his two-rupee sandals snapping at his heels, and climbed down into the launch that had followed us out. The harbour pilots from now on would be more ceremonial. In Marseilles one came on board in a long-sleeved shirt, white trousers, and blancoed shoes. He hardly moved his lips as he whispered instructions to bring the ship into harbour. The pilots I was used to wore shorts and seldom removed their hands from their trouser pockets. Their first request was usually for a cordial and a fresh sandwich. I would miss their air of loafing, the way they appeared like necessary jesters who felt they could stroll safely and behave as they wished for an hour or two in the court of a foreign king. But now we had entered European waters.

*

IT WAS IN Port Said that Mr Mazappa also left us. I waited for his return up the gangplank, even after it was concertinaed and rolled away. Miss Lasqueti was there beside us as well, but she slipped off silently when the departure bell began ringing endlessly, like an insistent child. Then the gangway dislocated itself from the dock.

I have realised only recently that Mr Mazappa and Miss Lasqueti were young. They must have been in their thirties that year, when he disappeared from our ship. Max Mazappa had been the most exuberant member of the Cat’s Table until about the time we left Aden. He had herded all of us around with a lighthearted rudeness, insisting we be a vocal dinner table. He was public, even when whispering something questionable. He had shown us that joy existed in adults too, though I knew the future would never be as dramatic and joyous and deceitful as the way he had sketched it and sung it for Cassius, Ramadhin and me. He was Homeric with his list of feminine charms, as well as vices, and the best piano rags and torch songs, illegal acts, betrayals, gunshots by musicians who defended the honour of their faultless playing, and the possibility of a whole dance floor yelling the word ‘
Onions!
’ during the brief pause of a jazz number by Sidney Bechet. And there always would be men Ever Grasping Your Precious Tits. What life there was in the diorama he constructed for us.

So we did not, and could not, understand what had invaded him so privately. Something dark seemed to have entered this protégé of Le Grand Bechet. What did I not understand about Mr Mazappa? Had I not sensed accurately the growing friendship between him and Miss Lasqueti? In our turbine-room discussions we’d concocted a great romance – the way they politely excused themselves between courses at dinner and disappeared on deck for a smoke. It would still be light outside, so we could see them leaning over the wooden rail, exchanging whatever wisdoms they knew about the world. Once he covered her bare shoulders with his jacket. ‘I thought she was a bluestocking, at first,’ he had said of her.

For a day or so after Mazappa left the
Oronsay
there were re-evaluations of him. Why had he needed
two
names, for instance? And the issue was raised again of his having children. (Someone at our table brought up ‘The Breastfeeding Conversation’.) So, I began to wonder if these children had already heard the same jokes and advice that he had been giving us. It was also suggested that he was possibly the kind of man who was joyous only when he was free, between
this
and
that
point of land. ‘Or maybe he has been married several times,’ Miss Lasqueti inserted quietly, ‘and when he dies there will be several simultaneous widows.’ We hung on to the silence that followed her remark, wondering if he had also proposed to her.

I had expected her to be shattered at Mr Mazappa’s departure, and to wear an ashen look at our table. But Miss Lasqueti, as the journey continued, was to become the most enigmatic and surprising one among our companions. We were seeing a sly humour in her remarks, and she came over and comforted us for the loss of Mr Mazappa, saying she also missed him. It was the word ‘also’ that felt like gold to us. She realised we needed the ongoing mythology of our absent friend, and one afternoon she told us, imitating Mr Mazappa’s voice, that his first marriage had indeed ended in a betrayal. He had come home unexpectedly to find his wife with a musician and had confessed to Miss Lasqueti, ‘If I’d had a gun, I would have shot him in the pump, but all there was in the room was his ukulele.’ She laughed at the anecdote, but we did not.