When the World Was Steady (2 page)

‘You do much sports, yes?’ He looked her up and down. Emmy put her hands over her bare knees and glanced around the bus. The others, although they doubtless understood little or no English, were watching the exchange intently. ‘I say this,’ said the German, ‘because it is quite a difficult climb. It is three hours.’

The
bemo
bounced to a halt. ‘This is the centre,’ the German said. ‘If you want a
losmen
, this is where you should get off. I live further along, past the playing-field on the way out of town. Goodnight.’

‘Yes, thank you. Goodnight.’

The village was unlike the seaside towns that Emmy had seen; unlike Ubud, even, or the smaller villages through which she had passed. It could not have been less like Penelokan, its neighbour down the road, where whitewashed cottages nestled on a shelf above the lake, and Western-style restaurants with resident
gamelan
orchestras welcomed busloads of visitors daily.

Kintamani depressed her. Stained concrete buildings with little windows lined the dusty street. Bali’s ubiquitous dogs sniffed at trodden peel and cabbage leaves, and stick-legged children with high spots of colour on their cheeks scuttled from doorway to doorway, rather than playing boisterously in the road as they did elsewhere. And in the moments that she stood looking, as the
bemo
jostled on up the hill, Emmy noticed that it was getting cold.

Finding the three
losmen
huddled in a row was not difficult, except that then Emmy had to choose one. Although she had, until now, sought out places on the island with few tourists, she had not been anywhere where there appeared to be none, save the sinister German—whose reasons for settling in Kintamani for a month she didn’t want to know.

The
losmen
looked not like guest houses at all but like typical Balinese households: there were no guests in sight. Emmy couldn’t help but think, despite guidebook assurances about the Balinese love of Western tourists, that in truth she was despised. So she was afraid. Afraid, too, to be a woman alone, here; the horrible question, ‘You married? You married?’—to which Emmy had to restrain herself from saying, ‘Not any more’—had been asked everywhere she had been on the island. Here, nobody came up to her and asked; nobody approached her at all, not even
to sell the oranges they carried in piles upon their heads. For the first time in her two weeks in Bali, she felt alone. More than that, she felt divorced. By and from everyone.

In the gloom of the third
losmen
, Emmy discerned a Western man, missed at first because his back was to the doorway. He was playing with a child. The game consisted of her running across the room to him—a stumbling little run; the girl was not more than two or three—and his lifting her off the ground. Each time he lifted her he said, soothingly, ‘There’s my pretty little one, there’s my beauty.’ And the little girl would squeal.

Emmy crossed from the dusk into the unlit salon, and the child’s mother emerged from the shadows. Yes, there was a room; would Emmy like to see it? She led Emmy back behind the sitting-room, where two more children sat eating their supper, to a courtyard that served also as a garage. Off it were half a dozen rooms, one obviously larger, with the door ajar. Emmy saw a grandmother sitting there, chewing betel, and assumed it was where the family lived. The woman unlocked the door next to it and handed her the key.

The naked bulb hanging from the ceiling revealed a concrete box, slightly longer than the bare and mouldy mattress on which Emmy now sat, and about twice as wide. Once painted pale green, the concrete was flaking in places, and the corners were festooned with cobwebs. There was no window, other than a slatted opening above the door.

As she examined the two scratchy blankets at the base of the bed—for lice? for fleas?—Emmy thought of home, of her comfortable bedroom and of the crispness of her newly washed linen. This room, this whole experience, was for someone Portia’s age, surely? How ironic to think that she, Emmy, was here, while her daughter basked in the comforts of Emmy’s house in Double Bay. Even now, while Emmy sat shivering beneath a bare lightbulb, watching a centipede ripple earnestly across the floor, Portia was doubtless
reclining in her—Emmy’s—bed, with Pietro at her side. They were probably, Emmy thought, crossly stamping on the centipede, soiling the sheets.

She put on long trousers and a cotton pullover and ventured out to the sitting-room. A lamp had been lit in one corner, shedding a dim light. The man whose presence was responsible for her own was still seated with his back to the door. He was reading an ancient copy of
National Geographic
, left by some other traveller, some other year. The woman was not in evidence, nor were her children; rather, an Indonesian couple with a baby sat at the table where the children had been eating. They were talking quietly, but nodded as she passed.

Emmy installed herself in the armchair opposite the man and picked up a magazine from the table between them.

‘Good evening,’ she said, in what came out as her primmest Sydney society tone.

‘Yes, quite right.’ His voice was distinctly cockney, she could hear it now. He poked his head around the side of the magazine, which he had been holding unusually close to his face, and eyed her half-suspiciously. ‘Quite,’ he said again, and put the
Geographic
down.

He was at least sixty-five, possibly more, and had a dissipated air: pouchy skin sagged in folds beneath his jaw; a spread of broken blood-vessels reached from the bridge of his nose across his cheeks; his yellow-white hair, wispy, appeared to dance around rather than grow out of his head. He struck Emmy immediately as a pervert of some kind, hiding his pederasty or his opium addiction in the tropics. This impression was only enhanced by his crumpled, spotted linen suit, complete with panama hat neatly tucked beneath his chair. He seemed to appraise her with equal intensity.

She wondered what he saw: she had not caught sight of her reflection in days and did not know how much she might have
changed in the course of her rugged meanderings, her sun-filled hours out of doors. Usually, she knew herself to be well-groomed, a plump but pleasantly solid figure with a youthful face. She had large dark eyes, enhanced, she felt, by their creeping crows’-feet; she had a small forehead and a strong, slightly curved nose; her cheeks were still sprinkled with girlish freckles, her jaw was still strong, her dark, straight hair was thick, and her downy cheeks, she knew, were browned rather than burnt. In Sydney, among her friends, she was considered to be ageing well. Until recently, she had always taken pride in her appearance; she had thought of herself as attractive.

After a moment he said, ‘You don’t quite look the type. A bit old, aren’t you?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ The Sydney society tone again.

‘Well, for this whole thing.’ He gestured limply at the air. ‘Batur?’

‘No, Abang. I could say the same of you.’

‘He’s a guide, you know,’ he said, jerking his head towards the back of the building, presumably in the direction of the woman’s husband. ‘But he won’t take you up Abang. It’s not worth their while for one person.’

The woman came in with a tray of steaming food: dinner for the Indonesian family. Both Emmy and the man—whose name, it transpired, was Frank—waited until she had left to speak again—a futile silence, seeing as she spoke little English.

‘Have you been here long?’ Emmy asked.

‘In Kintamani? On the island?’

‘Either. Both.’

‘Here, I arrived today and will leave tomorrow. I go around the islands every year—Bali, sometimes Java, sometimes Lombok, Sumatra. Other bits of the region too—Thailand, you know. Always Bali. The Last Paradise.’ He winked. Lewdly, Emmy thought. ‘Such friendly people. The only Hindus, you know, in
Indonesia. Makes them more hospitable.’

‘Does it?’

‘And I love the little children. Such beautiful little girls.’

Emmy wasn’t sure what he meant, but she didn’t like the sound of it. When she remembered his eager game with the owner’s daughter, which had drawn her in the door of the
losmen
, Emmy felt certain that this winking, grinning, flaccid apparition was a seasoned child molester. Worse than that, he was the only Western gauge the
losmen
owners had besides herself. Which meant the smiling woman, the earnest Indonesian family, they would all think she was cast from the same mould. He was still smiling.

‘Are you from England?’ she asked. She herself rarely felt English any more; she could perhaps wedge a gap between them here.

‘Used to be,’ Frank said. ‘My daughter’s gone back. But I’ve been out in Australia for years, couldn’t live in Britain again, not now.’

This was worse: this was
her
life. It was only a matter of time till Portia set off for London. She decided not to ask more.

She got up and went to the street door to observe the night. A few distant lamps winked in the darkness, and somewhere dogs howled at the moonless sky. The air was cold; there was a breeze, not soft and salted as by the sea, but bitter and somehow dangerous. There was no patter of feet along the road; no hushed singsong of voices in the dark; no wafting strains of
gamelan
music.

Supper consisted of a plate of fried rice filled with lethal chili peppers, and beer. She and Frank ate in semi-silence, he slurping greedily and reddening, eventually sweating, from the chilis. Emmy picked fastidiously at her plate, careful to avoid the vermilion flecks; but there were so many that the process was lengthy, and the rice soon cooled to a glutinous and unappetizing mass. She offered it to Frank, who downed it with
swigs of beer that splashed a little and dribbled down his chin.

‘You should speak to him.’

Emmy looked puzzled.

‘Oka. The guide. The owner.’

‘You said he wouldn’t take me.’

‘He probably won’t.’

‘Besides, I have a name. I’ll ask the woman where I can find him.’

Frank shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t do that. Rivalry. Ask outside, in the morning. In the market. But if Oka
would
take you,’ he said, leaning forward confidentially, ‘you could go tomorrow at dawn, and be out of here by noon. You could come with me to Singaraja. It’s not too friendly, as villages go, this one.’

‘Why not?’

Frank shrugged. ‘There are rumours. People—Western people—get robbed here, or cheated. There was even a murder once, although it was never proved. A death under mysterious circumstances, shall we say.’ He sat back in his chair and belched, waiting for Emmy to take the bait. She decided not to. After a moment he said, ‘What would you say to a bit of fun?’

Again, she did not know what this meant. It flashed through her mind that he might be propositioning her. ‘No thank you,’ she said.

‘A game of cards?’ He pulled a worn pack from his jacket pocket. ‘A quick one?’

‘No thank you. I’ve had a long day.’

‘As you like.’ He looked disappointed. As she left he was dealing himself a hand of patience.

As a child, Emmy had known exactly what she wanted and how to get it. Born with the echo of bombs in her ears, she had felt special from the start. Her sister Virginia had been old enough to
spend the war doubled over in fear, but as the two of them crouched with their mother in the shelters, tiny Emmy would continue to hum or mumble to herself, oblivious, not missing a note when all around her gasped and shuddered.

She herself had no memory of this. And she had no memory at all of her father, a sacrifice to the enemy early in the war, a pilot shot down before Emmy’s singsong took on any tune. What was for Virginia a tragic first loss was not even a hiccup to her younger sister. It wasn’t until much later, when she felt for some reason that she should, that Emmy began to miss her father.

Her first and eternal belief was in the creation of one’s own luck. More than that, there was for Emmy a distinct morality to luck, an interrelation between good and bad luck and virtue and vice. Throughout her life, Emmy always took it very hard if things went badly for her.

When, at twenty, she announced to her mother and sister that she was leaving their modest home in south London in order to marry a dashing Australian named William and head for the Antipodes, they were not surprised. Emmy was in the brief flush of her beauty, between the sloppy plump child she had been and the handsome but formidable matron that she fast became. As Mrs Simpson pointed out, what better place for her to make her own luck than in the newest of the new worlds? And who could stop her?

Virginia was perhaps even a little glad. From the day of her birth, Emmy had never ceased to terrorize her older sister, or at least that was how Virginia saw it, and she attributed her pinched, shy nature to that unplanned birth amid the whistling bombs: all her dread born at once. That Virginia would probably have been the same without Emmy was not something she recognized on that damp spring morning in 1960 when Emmy said she was leaving.

Emmy felt her sister saw the world upside down. Virginia
believed that things just
happened
to one, and Emmy saw this not merely as a mistake but as evil. Her final advice to Virginia was to pray. As they weren’t then religious believers of any sort, Virginia, surprised, asked to whom Emmy would have her do so.

‘To yourself, silly,’ Emmy said. ‘That you’ll have the gumption to
live.
’

Emmy and William had sailed to Australia, to William’s home in Sydney, and there Emmy had discovered her luck to be greater, even, than she had imagined. She had married into a family of aspiring publishers, whose empire was small but flourishing, based on a solid ground of working sheep-stations.

Emmy would always tell Portia of her joy when, early in her marriage, she and William had made a tour of those outback stations. She had been greeted at homestead after homestead by women with their sleeves rolled up and dust in the creases of their skin, women with their arms outstretched, all of them weeping, weeping at the sight of Emmy, because they lived alone among men and she was water in the desert, balm on an aching wound. She heard about their cramps and labours and miscarriages, she heard their recipes for biscuits and the lists of supplies they couldn’t get hold of. She heard about their worries for their children—those who had them—and their problems with their men. She took down titles of books that they longed for, hesitant requests for feminine luxuries. Some hadn’t spoken this way for years, one for almost a decade. And as she left each woman to climb into the buzzing shell of the plane, Emmy would throw her arms around her and weep with that woman, these tough Australian labouring mothers and bright-eyed, primly English Emmy.