When the World Was Steady (12 page)

E
MMY WAS WAKENED
by the workmen shattering stones outside her room. When she peered through the slats of her door-shutters, she could see men silhouetted around and inside the hole that would be the swimming-pool. Behind them hovered the shadow of the gorge, then the sacred ridge, then the blood-orange disk of the sun, creeping up the sky. As she rubbed at the sleep in her eyes and at the film of sweat across her cheeks, she became aware of the stirrings above her in the house, and of the early-morning movements along the road outside.

After almost two weeks in this household, this was the moment in the day that she liked best: it was secret and serene. She almost felt like a conjuror, in her room against the hillside beneath the rest of the building, as if she could emerge into a world of her own imagining. By the time she was dressed, however, and faced with the prospect of opening her shutters on to the men and the pool, this supreme confidence had inevitably dissipated.

Staying here had just sort of happened. Max had pushed for it—they got on well—and somehow Emmy had been caught up in the strange Sparke dynamic. Not that Buddy was attentive: he hardly spoke to her except when she protested that she ought to leave. She felt a bit like an old servant on the sidelines, observing.
But Emmy didn’t mind. She was fascinated, horrified, entranced by this life, and said to herself almost every evening that she would stay just a few days longer, just long enough to understand.

After the meal on the edge of the Monkey Forest all that time ago, it had been too late for the trip back to Kintamani, and Emmy had not been sorry to follow Buddy, Max and the two women back to the house. Arriving exhausted as night fell, she had not appreciated the beauty of the place, and only after a long rest for her twisted muscles, on a generous and welcoming bed, had she first seen the sacred sunrise.

From then on, things seemed to be beyond her control, despite her fantasies to the contrary. When, over a haphazard breakfast in the vast main room of the house, Max asked if she would stay another day or two, she thought just long enough to slip a spoonful of papaya into her mouth, and accepted, only to discover that K’tut had already been dispatched to return Gdé and young Wayan to Kintamani and to retrieve her bag from the dreary
losmen
there.

Her new accommodation was quite splendid. She had this room to herself, with its sprawling framed bed, carved armoire and cool stone floor, and even a little bathroom with a shower and erratic plumbing, all separate from the body of the house, so that her privacy (and theirs) was not infringed. Above her was the main room, which she reached via a pathway and some concrete steps. It was a large room, with sofas and armchairs and another, immense bed in one corner, everything covered in intricate batiks. Off this room, open to it, stretched a long, thatch-covered porch looking across the ridge; and at the other side of the house, a narrow kitchen. To reach Buddy’s private quarters, one had to go outside again and climb a flight of steps. There, off an external corridor, were three more bedrooms with private facilities, one for Max, one for Buddy, and one for any of a variety of visitors—women, mostly.

The patterns of life in this place were at the same time orderly and random: orderly in terms of Buddy’s life, and indifferent, hence random, in terms of everyone else’s. It had its natural movements—the rustling of geckos in the thatch, the rotation of the days around the sun’s progress, so that bedtime came with nightfall and the day began for all at five. And then the rest: Buddy did not take breakfast, so none was regularly provided. But he took his other meals like clockwork, and already at sunrise a group of Ubud girls and women had arrived and begun work. They prepared lunch and washed the floors daily; they beat the cushions and refilled the oil lamps; they created what semblance of normality there was, talking and laughing among themselves and blushing at the sight of young Max. They did not leave until the last dish was washed, the last mosquito coil set and smouldering, and then they set off down the rutted path by torchlight, still talking and joking in the night.

For Emmy, her stay had been calm. She and Max frequently set off together to see the temples or markets within easy reach. They had wandered together like mother and son, wading through rice paddies to visit villages unattainable by road, stopping for meals at
warungs
. She had gone with him to a tailor in Ubud, and had counselled him on which fabrics would suit shirts or jackets for himself, dresses for his mother. She had stopped comparing him to Pod, had stopped considering Pod so much at all, but in this way she felt she was coming to understand her daughter better.

She knew that Buddy considered her purely as a companion for Max, a toy as his own women were toys, and she suspected that this extraordinary father would be unperturbed, relieved even, if she and Max were to go to bed together. He obviously saw little other purpose for women, no matter what their age; and it wounded her pride. She struggled not to take his indifference as a challenge or a slight, but it was nonetheless a struggle.
And when she had, on occasion, found Buddy in the sitting-room alone, and had attempted conversation, she had felt her usually dormant temper bubbling to the surface. Hence her dread, in the mornings, at the few short steps to the main house.

Sometimes she was included in family events, taken in K’tut’s bus to ceremonies or public gatherings, to Den Pasar for household trips. Buddy was planning a trip to Komodo, and spoke as if Emmy would go with them. And other times she enjoyed a sublime, serene solitude. She watched the bus pull off loaded with Sparkes and retinue, and she returned to read, or to walk along the pebbled riverside at the bottom of the gorge, or to swim in the spring-fed pool that belonged to the neighbouring hotel and that Buddy and his guests were welcome to use until their own pool was completed.

She enjoyed a certain status, staying with Buddy: there were chuckles and whispers, but all the locals asked if she was well, if she needed anything, if they could escort her anywhere. She was beginning to know some of them by name, particularly the men, because they wandered up to the house in the afternoon or early evening to recline on the bed in the sitting-room and watch Ubud’s only colour television, complete with video recorder. The younger men came in groups, with gallon jugs of rice liquor, and grew raucous over Clint Eastwood videos. The older ones generally came alone, seeking conferences with Buddy about their rice harvest, their daughters’ marriages, the feuding of local politics. When they watched television, it was stealthily, from the corners of their eyes, as they stood contemplating greater things.

Emmy was fascinated by these people who accepted Buddy’s life as ordinary and who made niches for themselves inside it. And she was fascinated, above all, by the women. Sylvia and Sasha had moved on almost at once, and Max—who could hear everything—assured Emmy that nothing had come of their fledgling intimacy with Buddy. Since their departure, two others, New
Zealanders, had stayed one night and scuttled northwards, but none of them learned what Emmy knew, from Max and from her quiet observation.

There was Suchi, Buddy’s official girlfriend and expectant mother of his child. She was young and physically frail, her belly as yet only gently swollen. K’tut would pick her up from her parents’ house in the bus and bring her to Buddy in the evenings. She spoke no English, he hardly any Balinese or Indonesian, except the phrase ‘shy as a cat’. They would be sitting over supper—Buddy, Max, Emmy, Suchi and any others—and he would tap lightly on Suchi’s nose and recite his foreign phrase: ‘shy as a cat’. Whereupon her face would crinkle, orchid-like, into an expression of delight, and she would cover her eyes with her hands. He would grin and pat her on the arm as if to praise her performance: a party-trick, used over and over again.

It wasn’t clear to Emmy whether Suchi knew about the others. She was friendly with the women who cared for the house, and perhaps they had told her, but one of Buddy’s favourites, Jenny, was among them, and Emmy could not tell where the women’s loyalties lay.

Jenny, unlike Suchi, was sturdy and small, with a broad face and clever eyes. She spoke a fair amount of English—she had been to Den Pasar, to the university, she told Emmy, although she hadn’t had the money to finish her studies. She was twenty-four. She functioned as the housekeeper, leader of the troupe of younger women. More than anything, she hoped that Buddy would arrange a visa for her so she could go to Australia, to study accounting and to work.

She never spoke of her liaison with her employer; she seemed to value discretion more than he did, and Emmy sometimes wondered whether strategy did not play a large part in Jenny’s surrender to his charms. If anything, she seemed to be interested in Max, engaging him in conversation, asking him to correct her
English letters, standing close enough to smell his skin for longer than was necessary. It was only because of Max’s firm reports that Emmy knew Jenny and Buddy were entangled at all, and it seemed a shame to her because she knew how Max felt about women his father had ‘had’, and because she could see that when Jenny stood at Max’s elbow, he didn’t really want to move away.

There were others, too. There was a brassy peroxided American living further up the road, who made brightly-coloured children’s clothes for export. She accosted Max in town as though he were her son, but defiantly cut Buddy dead when he passed. There was a plain woman who ran the restaurant in the hotel next door, and who also suffered from being discarded: she responded by swinging her head and laughing sharply whenever Buddy came near.

And then, of course, there were the ones who came and went, tourists, tour guides, just women passing through, although there had been none since Emmy’s arrival. She knew there were people who would think she was one such, despite her age. Whether this was somehow pleasing or purely a source for alarm she couldn’t quite decide.

But on this day, eleven days into Emmy’s stay with the Sparkes, two things were supposed to take place that might, Emmy felt, radically alter her fragile grasp on the household. When she had said as much to Max, he laughed and said, a little bitterly, ‘Damn right they will. You’ll have to stay another six months to figure it out.’

Figuring it out, Emmy was convinced, would mean being able to pass judgement, which in turn would mean knowing where she stood, what she believed. And only then would she be able to go home and know how to begin again. In spite of everything, she was half in love with this life, and she knew Max was too. They both needed to understand; their pleasure and their quiet horror needed explaining. She sometimes thought Max already knew
more than he pretended, but as with the women, it wasn’t ultimately clear where his loyalties lay.

Two things, two events. Emmy remembered them both before she even washed her face. She remembered them as she peered out into the growing daylight. Today, first of all, little Ruby was arriving from Thailand, all of three years old, to stay with her father and half-brother. What nobody seemed to know for certain, and what Max seemed most concerned about, was whether Aimée, Ruby’s mother, would be coming to stay as well. She had been to the house before, in the time of the American clothes exporter, and the visit had not been fortuitous. K’tut had told Max this. He thought the strain of that time had brought on his ulcer, a wound that still had him driving to a doctor in Den Pasar every week. K’tut didn’t want to go to meet the plane, because if Aimée was on it, he didn’t want to know. Just thinking about it made him sweat, he said.

And the second thing was a party, the celebration of a wedding. It would be a chance to see Buddy’s real friends, who were coming to celebrate the marriage of a foreigner from the north of the island, whom Buddy fondly referred to as ‘Kraut’, to a Balinese woman named Madé, whose family lived in a village near Ubud. Emmy could not help her curiosity: she wanted to see what these friends, foreign and native, were like, what it meant for a man like Buddy to have friends, and she wanted to know whether Buddy would continue to play the role of feudal lord amid his minions, or whether a new aspect would reveal itself.

When she stepped outside, she could tell that the whole house was already humming. The workmen did not pause, as on other mornings, to greet and to appraise her. A young girl she hadn’t seen before was arranging frangipani flowers around the carved gateway at the foot of the path that separated Buddy’s world from the hotel below and from the road. And the number of flip-flops piled outside the sitting-room door indicated that
there were many more women at work than usual.

The large room had been turned upside down: the women were brushing and mopping, and more were calling to each other in the narrow kitchen. Rolls of mosquito netting had been brought in to encase the porch after dark, and were half-spread, like huge spider webs across one end of the room, where two women knelt to inspect the laced pattern for holes. Spiced smells and heat hung already on the air.

Only K’tut remained unaffected by the commotion; he sat cross-legged on the bed in a white shirt and sarong, smoking, intent upon a seventies film playing without sound on the television.

‘Busy busy, isn’t it?’ ventured Emmy, perching beside him. ‘Good film?’

‘Max is still sleeping,’ he said. ‘Buddy’s out.’

‘In town? With Suchi?’

He shrugged.

‘Are you worried about today?’

He looked up from the television and narrowed his eyes at her. ‘I’m going to the doctor today. I’m always worrying about the doctor. I think he’s a bad man. Very bad man.’

‘I meant about Ruby coming. And Aimée.’

‘Aimée?’ He made a face. ‘I’m going to the doctor. Then maybe I’m taking a holiday. Buddy don’t know trouble when she’s coming.’

‘Well … no chance of breakfast today, I suppose?’ Emmy thought K’tut looked at her disapprovingly.

‘Ask Jenny,’ he said, his gaze flitting back to the television screen.

When Emmy had hovered for a few moments and had not found any sign of Jenny’s efficient movements, or any sounds of life from upstairs, she decided to walk to the western-style
warung
halfway into town, down by the bridge, to have a slice of chocolate
mousse cake for breakfast. If K’tut’s monosyllabic chill was any indication, this day, Emmy thought, might be less exciting and less revealing than she had hoped.