The Cat’s Table (9 page)

The millionaire’s wife, Delia, always considered him maddeningly private. Now, days after leaving Colombo on the
Oronsay
, with the administration of the ayurvedic’s drug, she had a chance to uncover the man she had married. Every little crumb from his youth came into view. He exposed the terror from his father’s whippings that compartmentalised him and eventually made him a brutal financier. He spoke of his secret visits to his brother, Chapman, who had run away from home, taking a neighbouring girl with whom he was in love, who was known to have an extra finger. They had it chopped off in Chilaw and were living a sane and quiet life in Kalutara.

Delia discovered too the way in which her husband had diverted his money into many underground tributaries. Much of this information was being revealed around the time of the cyclone during which Hector de Silva rolled from side to side on his large bed as the vessel bucked and dived. He actually seemed to be enjoying himself, while his wife and the rest of the retinue scurried from his bed to vomit in their adjacent cabins. The datura had snuffed out any concern in him, as well as any side effect of sickness, and any quality of guardedness. If it was an aphrodisiac, it turned him from a lean and distant partner into a benign companion. At first this character change went unnoticed. The whole ship was in the midst of the storm. A small fire had broken out in the engine room when he began telling the truth for the first time in his adult life. And the dangerous weather had brought out the pickpockets, who always thrived in unstable situations where physical help was needed. Added to this, a whole compartment of grain had got wet and burst loose in the hold, altering the very balance of the ship, so emergency crews were down there shovelling it back as carpenters rebuilt the borders. They worked in darkness in the depths of the hold, with only the spray of an oil lamp, doing ‘gravedigger’s work’, as Joseph Conrad called it, waist deep in the grain. Meanwhile Sir Hector was recalling to his little retinue a small, sweet memory of a gliding car he had driven as a boy at a fair in Colombo. He told the story again and again, unwrapping it as if it were new each time, to his wife and daughter and the three uninterested medical aides.

Whatever the fate might have been for our ship, which was now travelling like a coffin in the cyclone, Sir Hector enjoyed a few good days letting free the truth about his wealth, his hidden pleasures, his genuine affection for his wife, while the vessel plunged into the bowels of the sea and then emerged like an encrusted coelacanth, the ocean pouring off its features, so that machinists, thrown against the red-hot engines, burned their arms, and the supposed cream of the cream of the East stumbled against pickpockets in the long corridors, and band members fell off the dais in the midst of ‘Blame It on My Youth’, as Cassius and I lay spreadeagled on the Promenade Deck, under the rain.

Gradually the decks and the dining rooms repopulated. Miss Lasqueti came up to us with a smile to say the Head Steward had to enter ‘all unusual occurrences’ into a logbook, so perhaps we would appear in the ship’s records. There had also been a series of ‘misplacements’ on the ship. Croquet sets were missing, wallets had been lost during the storm. Our Captain appeared and told everyone that a gramophone belonging to a Miss Quinn-Cardiff had gone astray and could not be located, so any knowledge of its whereabouts would be appreciated. Cassius, who had recently been down in the hold to watch the engineers fix a section of bilge pipe, claimed the gramophone was being played there, loudly and constantly. The ship’s staff countered this trend of losses with an announcement that an earring had been found, somehow, in a lifeboat, and to please identify and claim it at the Purser’s Office. No mention was made of the Assistant Purser’s glass eye, though the intercom continued to obsessively list the few objects that had been recovered. ‘
Found: One brooch. One lady’s brown felt hat. One journal belonging to Mr Berridge with unusual pictures
.’

The ship’s recovery from the storm and the better weather did mean one good thing. The prisoner was once again allowed his evening walk. We waited for him and eventually saw him standing there on the deck, shackled. He drew a huge breath – taking in all the energy that was in the night air around him – and then he released it, his face full of a sublime smile.

Our ship steamed towards Aden.

Landfall

ADEN WAS TO be the first port of call, and during the day before our arrival there was a flurry of letter writing. It was a tradition to have one’s mail stamped in Aden, where it could be sent back to Australia and Ceylon or onward to England. All of us were longing for the sight of land, and as morning broke we lined up along the bow to watch the ancient city approach, mirage-like out of the arc of dusty hills. Aden had been a great harbour as early as the seventh century B.C. and was mentioned in the Old Testament. It was where Cain and Abel were buried, Mr Fonseka said, preparing us for the city he himself had never seen. It had cisterns built out of volcanic rock, a falcon market, an oasis quarter, an aquarium, a section of town given over to sail makers, and stores that contained merchandise from every corner of the globe. It would be our last footstep in the East. After Aden there would be just half a day’s sailing before we entered the Red Sea.

The
Oronsay
cut its engines. We were not docked on the quay but in the outer harbour, at Steamer Point. If passengers wished to go ashore, they could be ferried into the city by barges, and these were already waiting beside our vessel. It was nine in the morning, and without the sea breezes that we were accustomed to, the air was heavy and hot.

That morning the Captain had announced the rules about entering the city. Passengers were allowed just six hours of shore leave. Children could go only if accompanied by ‘a responsible male adult’. And women were forbidden to go at all. There was the expected outrage at this, especially among Emily and a group of her friends by the pool who wished to disembark and take on the citizens with their beauty. And Miss Lasqueti was annoyed, for she wished to study the local falcons. She had hoped to bring a few of them blindfolded on the ship. Cassius, Ramadhin and I were concerned mostly with finding someone who was
not
a responsible male, who could be easily distracted, to take us along. Mr Fonseka, in spite of his curiosity, had no plans to leave the ship. Then we heard that Mr Daniels was eager to visit the old oasis to study its vegetation, where, he said, every blade of grass was swollen with water, and thick as your finger. He was also interested in something called ‘khat’ that he had been talking to the ayurvedic about. We offered to help him transport any plants back to the ship, and he agreed, and we went with him down the rope ladders into a barge as quickly as we could.

We were surrounded instantly by a new language. Mr Daniels was busy negotiating a fee with a hackney to transport us to where the great palms were. His authority seemed diminished by the crowd, so we left him there arguing and slipped away. A carpet salesman gestured to us, offered us tea, and we sat with him for a while, laughing whenever he laughed, nodding when he nodded. There was a small dog that he indicated he wished to give us, but we moved on.

We began to argue about what to see. Ramadhin wanted to visit the aquarium that had been built a few decades earlier. It was obviously something Mr Fonseka had told him about. He was sullen about having to see the markets first. In any case we entered the narrow shops that sold seeds and needles, made coffins, and printed maps and pamphlets. Out on the street you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of any further hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.

I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odour), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall. Here was a sterner world, with fewer luxuries. There was no overripe fruit in the gutters. There were in fact no gutters. It was a dusty landscape, as if water had not been invented. The only liquid was the cup of dark tea offered to us by the carpet salesman, along with a delicious, permanently remembered almond sweet. Even if this was a harbour city, the air held hardly a particle of dampness. You had to look closely, for what might be buried away in a pocket – a petite vial of oil for a woman’s hair, folded within paper, or a chisel wrapped in oilcloth to protect its blade from the dust in the air.

We entered a concrete building at the edge of the sea. Ramadhin led the way through a maze of mostly subterranean tanks. The aquarium appeared deserted except for a number of garden eels from the Red Sea and a few colourless fish swimming in a foot of saltwater. Cassius and I climbed to another level, where there were taxidermic examples of marine life, lying in dust alongside whatever technical equipment was being stored – a hose, a small generator, a hand pump, a dustpan and brush. We gave the whole place five minutes and revisited all the stores we had been into, this time to say goodbye. The barber, who still had no other customers, gave me a head massage, pouring unknown oils into my hair.

We reached the wharf before the deadline. Out of a too-late courtesy we decided to wait for Mr Daniels on the dock, Ramadhin wrapped up in a djellaba, and Cassius and I hugging ourselves in the brisk air coming from over the ocean. The barges rocked in the water, and we tried guessing which vessels were owned by pirates, for we had been told by a steward that piracy was common here. A cupped hand held up pearls. The afternoon’s catch of fish, strewn at our feet, more multicoloured than their indoor ancestors, sparkled whenever buckets of water were sloshed over them. The professions along this promontory belonged to the sea, and the merchants whose laughter and bartering surrounded us were the owners of the world. We realised we had seen just a small sliver of the city; we had only glanced through a keyhole into Arabia. We had missed the cisterns and wherever it was that Cain and Abel were buried, but it had been a day of intricate listening, of careful watching, all our conversations made up of gestures. The sky began to darken out at Steamer Point, or Tawahi, as the bargemen called it.

Finally we saw Mr Daniels striding along the wharf. He was carrying a cumbersome plant in his arms, and was accompanied by two weak-looking men in white suits, each holding a miniature palm. He greeted us cheerfully – obviously he had not been too concerned, if at all, by our disappearance. The slight, moustached figures helping him were silent, and as one of them passed me the small palm, he wiped the sweat from his face, and winked, and smiled, and I saw it was Emily in men’s clothes. Beside her was a similarly disguised Miss Lasqueti. Cassius took the palm from her and we carried them onto the barge. Ramadhin got in with us and sat hunched over, bundled up in his cloak, during the ten-minute ride to the ship.

Once back on board, the three of us made our way down to Ramadhin’s cabin, where he unfolded his djellaba to reveal the carpet salesman’s dog again.

We came on deck an hour later. It was already dark, and the lights on the
Oronsay
were brighter than those on land. The ship had still not moved. In the dining room there were loud conversations about the day’s adventures. Only Ramadhin and Cassius and I kept silent. We were so excited by our smuggling of the dog onto the boat we knew that if we spoke just one syllable, we’d slide uncontrollably into the whole story. We had spent the past chaotic hour trying to bathe the animal in Ramadhin’s narrow shower stall, avoiding the swipe of its claws. It was clear the creature had never met carbolic soap in his life. We’d dried the dog in Ramadhin’s bedsheet and left him in the cabin while we went up to eat.

We listened to the stories as we sat at the Cat’s Table, with people interrupting one another. The women were silent. And the three of us were silent. Emily passed by our table and bent down to ask me if I had had a good day. I asked her politely what she had done while we had gone ashore, and she said she had spent the day ‘carrying things’, then winked at me and went off laughing. One of the things we had missed while walking around Aden was the ‘Gully Gully man’, who had rowed up to the
Oronsay
and performed magic tricks. Apparently his canoe was partially boarded up so he could stand on a sort of stage while he made chickens appear from his clothing. By the end of his act there were over twenty chickens fluttering around him. There were many Gully Gully men, we were told, and with luck there would be another at Port Said.

There was a shudder during dessert as the boat’s engines started. We all got up and went out to the railings to watch the departure, our castle slipping away slowly from the thin horizon of lights, back into the great darkness.

WE GUARDED THE dog that night. He was fearful of our sudden movements, until Ramadhin managed to bring him into his bunk and fall asleep with his arms around him. When the three of us woke the next morning we had already entered the Red Sea, and it was during this passage, on the first day steaming north, that something astonishing happened.

It had always been difficult to penetrate the barrier that separated us from First Class. Two polite and determined stewards either let you through or turned you away. But even they could not stop Ramadhin’s small dog. He had leapt out of Cassius’s arms and bolted from the cabin. We ran up and down the empty hallways looking for him. Within moments the little fellow must have emerged into the sunlight of B Deck and run beside the railings, raced perhaps into the lower ballroom, up its gilded staircase, and past the two stewards into First Class. They managed to grab him, but soon he was free again. He had eaten none of the food we had offered him, which we’d smuggled out of the dining room in our trouser pockets, so perhaps he was looking for something to eat.

No one was able to corner him. Passengers saw him for just a blurred moment. He did not seem at all interested in humans. Well-dressed women crouched down, calling out high-pitched, artificial-sounding greetings, but he charged past them all without a pause and into the cherrywood cave of the library, and disappeared somewhere beyond that. Who could know what he was after? Or what he was feeling, in that no doubt pounding heart? He was just a hungry or scared dog on this claustrophobic ship whose alleyways suddenly became cul-de-sacs, as he ran farther and farther from any sign of daylight. Eventually the creature made his way trotting along a mahogany-panelled, carpeted hall and slipped through a half-open door into a master suite, as someone left it carrying a full tray. The dog jumped up onto an oversized bed, where Sir Hector de Silva lay, and bit down into his throat.