The Pritchett Century (65 page)

Under the blades of the wide fan turning slowly in its Yes-No tropical way, the vice-consul sloped in his office, a soft and fat man, pink as a ham, the only pink man in the town, and pimpled by sweat. He was waiting for the sun to go down into the clouds over the far bank of the estuary, ten miles wide here, and to put an end to a bad week. He had been plagued by the officers and crew of a Liverpool ship, the
Ivanhoe
, smoking below in the harbour. There was trouble about shipping a puma.

His Indian clerk put his head in at the door and said in the whisper of the tropics, “Mr McDowell’s here.”

Years at this post on the river had reduced the vice-consul’s voice also to the same sort of whisper, but he had a hoarseness that gave it rank. He believed in flying off the handle and showing authority by using allusions which his clerk could not understand.

“Not the bloody Twenty-third Psalm from that blasted tramp again,” he said and was glad McDowell heard it as he pushed in earnestly after the clerk. McDowell was a long-legged man with an unreasonable chin and emotional knees.

“I’ve brought Felden’s licence,” he said.

“I ought to have had it a week ago,” said the vice-consul. “Have you
got the animal aboard yet? It was on the dock moaning away all day. You could hear it up here.”

“We’ve got it on deck,” said McDowell.

“Typical hunter,” said the vice-consul, “thinking he could ship it without a licence. They’ve no feeling for animals and they’re liars too.”

“No hearts,” said McDowell.

At this low hour at the end of the day, the vice-consul did not care to have a ship’s officer trump his own feelings.

It was part of the vice-consul’s martyrdom during his eight years at the port that he was, so to say, the human terminus on whom hunters, traders, oilmen, television crews, sailors whose minds had been inflated by dealing with too much geography, dumped their boasts. Nature in the shape of thousands of miles of jungle, flat as kale, thousands of miles of river, tributaries, drifting islands of forest rubbish, not to mention millions of animals, snakes, bloodsucking fish, swarms of migrating birds, butterflies and biting insects, had scared them and brought them down to the river to unload their fantasies.

“Take your boa constrictor …” they began. “Take your alligator … Take your marching ant …”

Now he had to “take” a man called Felden who had tried to stuff him up with the tale that his fourteen-year-old son had caught the beast on his fishing line in a backwater above Manaos.

The vice-consul was a sedentary man and longed to hear a fact. “When do you sail?” he said when McDowell sat down on an upright chair which was too small for him.

“The day after tomorrow,” said McDowell.

“I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see you lot go,” said the vice-consul, making his usual speech to departing sailors. “I’d like to know where the hell your company gets its crews.”

“I’m from Belfast,” said McDowell, placing his hands on those knees.

“Oh, nothing personal,” said the vice-consul. He stamped the licence, pushed it across his desk and stood up, but McDowell did not move. He leaned forward and said, “Would you do me a favour?”

“What favour?” said the vice-consul, offended.

McDowell started to caress his knees as if to get their help. “Would you be able to recommend a dentist in the town?” he said.

The vice-consul sat down, made a space on his desk and said, “Well, that’s a change. I thought you were going to tell me you had got yourself clapped like the rest of your crew and wanted a doctor. Dentist? Afraid not. There isn’t a dentist in the place, not one I’d recommend, anyway. You’ve been here three weeks and can see for yourself. Half the population have no teeth at all. None of the women, anyway. Go down the street, and if you’re not careful, you can walk straight down their throats.”

McDowell nodded. The vice-consul wanted more than a nod.

“It stands to reason,” he said, expanding. “What do they get to eat? Dried meat and manioc covered in bird droppings, fish that tastes of newspaper from the bloody river. No fresh milk, no fresh meat, no fresh vegetables—everything has to be flown in and they can’t afford it. It would kill them if they could.”

McDowell shook his head and kept his knees still. “Catholic country,” he said.

“No topsoil,” said the vice-consul, putting on a swagger. “If you’ve got a pain in the jaw, I’m sorry. Take my advice and do what I do. Get on the next plane to Miami. Or Puerto Rico if you like. It’ll cost you a penny or two but it’s the only way. Sorry for you. Painful.”

“Oh,” said McDowell, sitting back like an idol. “My teeth are all right,” he said.

“Then what do you want a dentist for?”

“It’s my dentures,” McDowell said, gleaming as he made the distinction.

“All right—dentures,” said the vice-consul.

“They’ve gone. Stolen.”

The vice-consul looked at McDowell for a long time. The jaws did not move, so he turned sideways and now studied McDowell, screwing up one annoyed eye. The man swallowed.

“Mr McDowell,” he said, taking the syllables one by one. “Are you feeling the heat? Just give your mouth a tap. If I’m not mistaken, you’re wearing them.”

McDowell let his arms fall to his sides and parted his lips: a set of teeth gleamed as white and righteous as a conjuring trick. “I never sail without me spares,” he said.

The vice-consul wasn’t going to stand funny business from British subjects. He had an air for this.

“Very wise,” he said. “You fellows are always getting your teeth knocked out by your pals. Makes you careful, I suppose. What do you want
me
to do? You’ve got a captain, haven’t you?” He became suspicious. “I suppose you’re not thinking of Filing an Official Complaint,” he said, pulling a form out of his drawer, waving it at McDowell and putting it back, “because I can tell you, officially, that who pinches what from whom on the bloody
Ivanhoe
is no concern of mine, unless it’s connected with mutiny, wounding, murder or running guns.”

The vice-consul knew this kind of speech by heart.

The sun had floundered down into the clouds; he shouted to his clerk to put on the light but switched it on himself. He decided to match McDowell on the meaning of words.

“You said ‘stole,’ McDowell. You must have some prize thieves in your crew. But will you tell me how you get a set of dentures out of a man’s head against his will, even when he’s asleep, unless he’s drugged or tied up. Were you drunk?”

“I’ve never touched a drop in my life,” said McDowell.

“I suppose not,” said the vice-consul coldly.

“I took them out myself. I always put my dentures in a glass.”

“So I should hope,” said the vice-consul. “Filthy leaving them in. Dangerous too. What else did they take? Watch? Wallet? Glasses?”

McDowell spoke carefully, picking over the peculiarity of an austere and personal case. “Only my dentures,” he said. “It wasn’t the crew. I don’t mix with them. They read magazines. They never think. I wasn’t aboard,” he said softly, adding to his mystery. “It wasn’t at night. I was ashore. In the afternoon. Off duty.”

The Indian clerk put his head in at the door and looked anxiously from McDowell to the vice-consul.

“What do you want now? Can’t you see I’m busy?” said the vice-consul.

The man’s head disappeared and he shut the door.

McDowell stretched his long arms and placed his hands on his knees and his fingers began to drag at his trousers. “I saw it with my own eyes,” he said. “I saw this girl with them. When the rain started.”

“What girl?” the vice-consul said, lighting a cigar and putting a haze of smoke between himself and his torment. “The rainy season started six weeks ago,” he swaggered. “You get your thunderstorm every afternoon. They come in from the west and build up over the river at two o’clock to the minute and last till ten past three. You can set your watch by them.”

The vice-consul owned the climate.

“Tropical rain,” he said grandly, “not the drizzle you get in Belfast. The rain comes down hot, straight out of the kettle, floods the streets and dries up in ten minutes, not a sign of it except the damn trees grow a foot higher. The trouble is that it doesn’t clear the air: the heat is worse afterwards. You feel you’re breathing—I don’t know—boiled stair carpet my wife says, but that’s by the way.” He waved at the smoke. “You’ll tear the knees of those trousers of yours if you don’t leave them alone.”

A dressy man, he pointed his cigar at them. McDowell’s knees stuck out so far that the vice-consul, who was a suspicious man, felt that they were making a displeasing personal claim on him. They indeed gave a jump when McDowell shouted in a voice that had the excitement of sudden fever, “I can stand thunder. But I can’t stand lightning, sheet or forked. It brings my dinner up. It gets under your armpits. A gasometer went up in Liverpool when I was a boy and was blown blazing across the Mersey—”

“I thought you said you came from Belfast,” said the vice-consul. “Lightning never bothers me.”

“There was this thunderbolt,” said McDowell, ignoring him, and his voice went to a whisper. “I’m in the entrance of this hotel, looking at the alligator handbags to take one home for my wife and I’ve just picked one up and down comes this bolt, screaming behind my back, with a horrible violet flame, and sends me flying headfirst up the passage. There’s a girl there, polishing the floor, and all the lights go out. The next thing, I’m in an open doorway, I’m pitching headfirst on to a bed in the room and I get my head under the clothes. It’s like the end of the world and I’m praying into the pillow. I think I am dead, don’t I?”

“I don’t know,” said the vice-consul coldly. “But what do you do at sea? And where was this place?”

“It’s natural at sea,” said McDowell, calming down. “The Columbus. Yes, it would be the Columbus.”

“Never heard of it,” said the vice-consul.

“I don’t know how long I am there, but when it gets quieter I look up, the lightning is going on and off in the window and that’s when I see this girl standing by the mirror—”

“The one who was polishing the floor, I suppose,” said the vice-consul with contentment.

“No,” said McDowell, “this one was in the bed when I fell on it, on top of her, I told you.”

“You didn’t. You pulled her in,” said the vice-consul.

McDowell stopped, astonished, but went on, “Standing by the mirror, without a stitch of clothing on her. Terrible. She takes my dentures out of the glass, and the next thing, she opens her mouth wide and she’s trying to fit them, this way and that, to her poor empty gums.”

“You couldn’t see all that in a flash of lightning. You must have switched the light on,” said the vice-consul.

McDowell slapped his knee and sat back in a trance of relief. “You’re right,” he said gratefully. “Thank God you reminded me. I wouldn’t want to tell a lie. The sight of her with her poor empty mouth destroyed me. I’ll never forget it. It’d break a man’s heart.”

“Not mine,” said the vice-consul. “It’s disgusting. Shows ignorance too. No two human jawbones are alike.”

“The pitiful ignorance, you’re right!” said McDowell. “I called out to her, ‘Careful what you’re doing! You might swallow them. Put them back in the glass and come back to bed.’ ”

The tropical hoarseness left the vice-consul’s voice. “Ah,” he shouted and put his cigar down. “I thought we’d come to it. In plain English, you had come ashore to commit fornication.”

“I did not,” said McDowell, shocked. “Her sister works for the airline.”

“Oh, it’s no business of mine. I don’t care what you do, but you were in bed with that girl. You said so yourself. But why in God’s name did you take your dentures out? In the middle of the afternoon?”

McDowell was even more shocked. He sat back sternly in his chair. “It would have looked hardly decent,” he said, “I mean on an occasion like that, for any man to keep his teeth in when a poor girl had none of her own. It was politeness. You’d want to show respect. I’ve got my principles.”

He became confident and said, “My dentures have gold clips. Metal attracts lightning—I mean, if you had your mouth open, you might be struck dead. That’s another reason why I took them out. You never know who the Lord will strike.”

“Both of you, I expect,” said the vice-consul.

“Yes,” said McDowell, “but you’ve got to think of others.”

The vice-consul got out his handkerchief and wiped his face and his head.

“You’d never get away with this twaddle in a court of law,” said the vice-consul. “None of this proves she stole your dentures.”

“She had gone when I woke up, and they had gone. The rain was pouring down outside or I would have gone after her,” said McDowell.

“And you wouldn’t have caught her if you had,” said the vice-consul with deep pleasure. “She sold them before she got to the end of the street. You can say goodbye to that lot. You’re wasting my time. I’ve got two other British ships docking in an hour. I’ve told you what to do. Keep clear of the police. They’ll probably arrest you. And if you want a new set of dentures, go to Miami as I said.”

“But they’re not for
me
,” exclaimed McDowell. “I want them for this girl. I’ve got the money. It’s wrong to steal. Her sister knows it and so does she. If you see a soul in danger, you’ve got to try and save them.”

“God help me,” said the vice-consul. “I’ve got enough trouble in this port as it is, but as a matter of interest, who told you to go to this place—the Columbus—to buy handbags? You can get them at every shop in the town. The river’s crawling with alligators.”

McDowell nodded to the outer office where the Indian clerk sat. “That gentleman.”

“He did, did he?” said the vice-consul, laughing for the first time and achieving a louder shout to his clerk.

The Indian clerk came in. He loved to be called in when the vice-consul
was talking business. He gleamed with the prestige of an only assistant. The vice-consul spoke to him in Portuguese with the intimacy of one who sketches his way through a language not his own. The clerk nodded and nodded and talked eagerly.