The Cat’s Table (2 page)

I HEARD A note being slipped under my door. It assigned me to Table 76 for all my meals. The other bunk had not been slept in. I dressed and went out. I was not used to stairs and climbed them warily.

In the dining room there were nine people at Table 76, and that included two other boys roughly my age.

‘We seem to be at the cat’s table,’ the woman called Miss Lasqueti said. ‘We’re in the
least
privileged place.’

It was clear we were located far from the Captain’s Table, which was at the opposite end of the dining room. One of the two boys at our table was named Ramadhin, and the other was called Cassius. The first was quiet, the other looked scornful, and we ignored one another, although I recognised Cassius. I had gone to the same school, where, even though he was a year older than I was, I knew much about him. He had been notorious and was even expelled for a term. I was sure it was going to take a long time before we spoke. But what was good about our table was that there seemed to be several interesting adults. We had a botanist, and a tailor who owned a shop up in Kandy. Most exciting of all, we had a pianist who cheerfully claimed to have ‘hit the skids’.

This was Mr Mazappa. In the evening he played with the ship’s orchestra, and during the afternoons he gave piano lessons. As a result, he had a discount on his passage. After that first meal he entertained Ramadhin and Cassius and me with tales of his life. It was by being in Mr Mazappa’s company, as he regaled us with confusing and often obscene lyrics from songs he knew, that we three came to accept one another. For we were shy and awkward. Not one of us had made even a gesture of greeting to the other two until Mazappa took us under his wing and advised us to keep our eyes and ears open, that this voyage would be a great education. So by the end of our first day, we discovered we could become curious together.

Another person of interest at the Cat’s Table was Mr Nevil, a retired ship dismantler, who was returning to England after a patch of time in the East. We sought out this large and gentle man often, for he had detailed knowledge about the structure of ships. He had dismantled many famous vessels. Unlike Mr Mazappa, Mr Nevil was modest and would speak of these episodes in his past only if you knew how to nudge an incident out of him. If he had not been so modest in the way he responded to our barrage of questions, we would not have believed him, or been so enthralled.

He also had a complete run of the ship, for he was doing safety research for the Orient Line. He introduced us to his cohorts in the engine and furnace rooms, and we watched the activities that took place down there. Compared to First Class, the engine room – at Hades level – churned with unbearable noise and heat. A two-hour walk around the
Oronsay
with Mr Nevil clarified all the dangerous and not-so-dangerous possibilities. He told us the lifeboats swaying in mid-air only
seemed
dangerous, and so, Cassius and Ramadhin and I often climbed into them to have a vantage point for spying on passengers. It had been Miss Lasqueti’s remark about our being ‘in the least privileged place’, with no social importance, that persuaded us into an accurate belief that we were invisible to officials such as the Purser and the Head Steward, and the Captain.

I found out unexpectedly that a distant cousin of mine, Emily de Saram, was on the boat. Sadly, she had not been assigned to the Cat’s Table. For years Emily had been the way I discovered what adults thought of me. I’d tell her of my adventures and listen to what she thought. She was honest about what she liked and did not like, and as she was older than I was, I modelled myself on her judgements.

Because I had no brothers or sisters, the closest relatives I had while growing up were adults. There was an assortment of unmarried uncles and slow-moving aunts who were joined at the hip by gossip and status. There was one wealthy relative who took great care to remain in the distance. No one was fond of him, but they all respected him and spoke of him continually. Family members would analyse the dutiful Christmas cards he mailed out each year, discussing the faces of his growing children in the photograph and the size of his house in the background that was like a silent boast. I grew up with such family judgements, and so, until I found myself out of their sight, they governed my cautiousness.

But there was always Emily, my ‘
machang
’, who lived almost next door for a period of years. Our childhoods were similar in that our parents were either scattered or unreliable. But her home life was, I suspect, worse than mine – her father’s business dealings never assured, and their family lived constantly under the threat of his temper. His wife bowed under his rules. From the scarce amount Emily told me, I knew he was a punisher. Even visiting adults never felt safe around him. It was only children, who were in the house briefly for a birthday party, who enjoyed the uncertainty of his behaviour. He’d swing by to tell us something funny and then push us into the swimming pool. Emily was nervous around him, even when he grabbed her around the shoulders in a loving hug and then made her dance with him, her bare feet balanced on his shoes.

Much of the time her father was away at his job, or he simply disappeared. There was no secure map that Emily could rely on, so I suppose she invented herself. She had a free spirit, a wildness I loved, though she risked herself in various adventures. In the end, luckily, Emily’s grandmother paid for her to go off to a boarding school in southern India, so she was away from the presence of her father. I missed her. And when she returned for summer holidays, I did not see that much of her, for she’d caught a temporary summer job with Ceylon Telephone. A company car picked her up each morning, and her boss, Mr Wijebahu, would drop her off at the end of the day. Mr Wijebahu, she confided to me, was reputed to have three testicles.

What did bring the two of us together more than anything was Emily’s record collection, with all those lifetimes and desires rhymed and distilled into two or three minutes of a song. Mining heroes, consumptive girls who lived above pawnshops, gold diggers, famous cricketers, and even the fact that they had no more bananas. She thought I was a bit of a dreamer, and taught me to dance, to hold her waist while her upraised arms swayed, and to leap onto and over the sofa so it tilted and fell backwards with our weight. Then she would be suddenly away, at school, far away in India again, unheard from, save for a few letters to her mother, where she begged for more cakes to be sent via the Belgian Consulate, letters her father insisted on reading aloud, proudly, to all his neighbours.

By the time Emily came on board the
Oronsay
, I had in fact not seen her for two years. It was a shock to recognise her now as more distinct, with a leaner face, and to be conscious of a grace that I had not been aware of before. She was now seventeen years old, and school had, I thought, knocked some of the wildness out of her, though there was a slight drawl when she spoke that I liked. The fact that she’d grab my shoulder as I was running past her on the Promenade Deck and make me talk with her gave me some cachet among my two new friends on the boat. But most of the time she made it clear she did not wish to be followed around. She had her own plans for the voyage … a final few weeks of freedom before she arrived in England to complete her last two years of schooling.

* * *

The friendship between the quiet Ramadhin and the exuberant Cassius and me grew fast, although we kept a great deal from one another. At least, this was true of me. What I held in my right hand never got revealed to the left. I had already been trained into cautiousness. In the boarding schools we went to, a fear of punishment created a skill in lying, and I learned to withhold small pertinent truths. Punishment, it turns out, never did train or humble some of us into complete honesty. We were, it seems, continually beaten because of miserable report cards or a variety of vices (lounging in the sanatorium for three days pretending to have mumps, permanently staining one of the school bathtubs by dissolving ink pellets in water to manufacture ink for the senior school). Our worst executioner was the junior school master, Father Barnabus, who still stalks my memory with his weapon of choice, which was a long splintered bamboo cane. He never used words or reason. He just moved dangerously among us.

On the
Oronsay
, however, there was the chance to escape all order. And I reinvented myself in this seemingly imaginary world, with its ship dismantlers and tailors and adult passengers who, during the evening celebrations, staggered around in giant animal heads, some of the women dancing with skirts barely there, as the ship’s orchestra, including Mr Mazappa, played on the bandstand all wearing outfits of exactly the same plum colour.

LATE AT NIGHT, after the specially invited First Class passengers had left the Captain’s Table, and after the dancing had ended with couples, their masks removed, barely stirring in each other’s arms, and after the stewards had taken away the abandoned glasses and ashtrays and were leaning on the four-foot-wide brooms to sweep away the coloured swirls of paper, they brought out the prisoner.

It was usually before midnight. The deck shone because of a cloudless moon. He appeared with the guards, one chained to him, one walking behind him with a baton. We did not know what his crime was. We assumed it could only have been a murder. The concept of anything more intricate, such as a crime of passion or a political betrayal, did not exist in us then. He looked powerful, self-contained, and he was barefoot.

Cassius had discovered this late-night schedule for the prisoner’s walk, so the three of us were often there at that hour. He could, we thought among ourselves, leap over the railing, along with the guard who was chained to him, into the dark sea. We thought of him running and leaping this way to his death. We thought this, I suppose, because we were young, for the very idea of a
chain
, of being
contained
, was like suffocation. At our age we could not endure the idea of it. We could hardly stand to wear sandals when we went for meals, and every night as we ate at our table in the dining room we imagined the prisoner eating scraps from a metal tray, barefoot in his cell.

I HAD BEEN asked to dress appropriately before entering the carpeted First Class Lounge in order to visit Flavia Prins. Though she had promised to keep an eye on me during the journey, to be truthful we would see each other only a few times. Now I had been invited to join her for afternoon tea, her note suggesting I wear a clean and ironed shirt, and also socks with my shoes. I went up to the Verandah Bar punctually at four p.m.

She sighted me as if I were at the far end of a telescope, quite unaware I could read her facial responses. She was sitting at a small table. There followed an arduous attempt at conversation on her part, not helped by my nervous monosyllables. Was I enjoying the voyage? Had I made a friend?

I had made two, I said. A boy name Cassius and another named Ramadhin.

‘Ramadhin … Is that the Muslim boy, from the cricketing family?’

I said I didn’t know but would ask him. My Ramadhin seemed to have no physical prowess whatsoever. He had a passion for sweets and condensed milk. Thinking of this, I pocketed a few biscuits while Mrs Prins was attempting to catch the eye of the waiter.

‘I met your father when he was a very young man …’ she said, then trailed off. I nodded but she said nothing more about him.

‘Auntie …’ I began, feeling secure now in how I could address her. ‘Do you know about the prisoner?’

It turned out that she was as eager as I to get away from small talk, and she settled in for a slightly longer interview than she had expected. ‘Have more tea,’ she murmured, and I did, although I was not enjoying the taste of it. She had heard about the prisoner, she confided, although it was supposed to be a secret. ‘He’s under very heavy guard. But you must not worry. There’s even a very senior British army officer on board.’

I couldn’t wait to lean forward. ‘I have seen him,’ I gloated. ‘Walking late at night. Under heavy guard.’

‘Really …’ she drawled, put out by the ace I had played so quickly and easily.

‘They say he did a terrible thing,’ I said.

‘Yes. It is said he killed a judge.’

This was much more than an ace. I sat there with my mouth open.

‘An English judge. I should probably not say any more than that,’ she added.

My uncle, my mother’s brother, who was my guardian in Colombo, was a judge, though he was Ceylonese and not English. The English judge would not have been allowed to preside over a court on the island, so he must have been a visitor, or he could have been brought over as a consultant or advisor… Some of this Flavia Prins told me, and some of this I later pieced together with the help of Ramadhin, who had a calm and logical mind.

The prisoner had killed the judge to stop him from helping the prosecution, perhaps. I would have liked to speak to my uncle in Colombo at that very minute. I was in fact feeling worried that his own life might be in danger.
It is said he killed a judge!
The sentence clamoured in my brain. My uncle was a large, genial man. I had been living with him and his wife in Boralesgamuwa since my mother had left for England some years earlier, and while we never had a long or even brief intimate talk, and while he was always busy in his role as a public figure, he was a loving man, and I felt safe with him. When he came home and poured himself a gin he would let me shake the bitters into his glass. I had got into trouble with him only once. He had been presiding over a sensational murder trial involving a cricket player, and I announced to my friends that the suspected man in the dock was innocent, and when asked how I knew, I said that my uncle had said so. I had not said it as a lie so much as something to shore up my belief in this cricketing hero. My uncle, on hearing this, had just laughed casually, but firmly suggested that I not do it again.

Ten minutes after I returned to my friends on D Deck, I was regaling Cassius and Ramadhin with the story of the prisoner’s crime. I spoke of it at the Lido pool and I spoke of it around the ping-pong table. But later that afternoon, Miss Lasqueti, who had heard the ripples of my tale, cornered me and made me less certain of Flavia Prins’s version of the prisoner’s crime. ‘He may or may not have done any such thing,’ she said. ‘Never believe what might be just a rumour.’ Thus she made me think that Flavia Prins had dramatised his crime, had raised the bar because I actually had
seen
the prisoner, and so had chosen a crime that I could identify with – the killing of a judge. It would have been an apothecary if my mother’s brother had been an apothecary.

That evening I made the first entry in my school examination booklet. A bit of chaos had broken out in the Delilah Lounge when a passenger attacked his wife during a game of cards. Mockery had gone too far during Hearts. There had been an attempt at strangulation and then her ear had been perforated by a fork. I managed to follow the Purser while he guided the wife along a narrow corridor towards the hospital, a dinner serviette staunching the wound, while the husband had stormed off to his cabin.

In spite of the resulting curfew, Ramadhin, Cassius and I slipped from our cabins that night, went along the precarious half-lit stairways, and waited for the prisoner to emerge. It was almost midnight, and the three of us were smoking twigs broken off from a cane chair that we lit and sucked at. Because of his asthma Ramadhin was not enthusiastic about this, but Cassius was eager that we should try to smoke the whole chair before the end of our journey. After an hour it became obvious that the prisoner’s night walk had been cancelled. There was darkness all around us, but we knew how to walk through it. We slid quietly into the swimming pool, relit our twigs and floated on our backs. Silent as corpses we looked at the stars. We felt we were swimming in the sea, rather than a walled-in pool in the middle of the ocean.