Island - Aldous Huxley [18]
“I could see you didn’t want me to say anything about it,” said Will. “So of course I didn’t.”
“I wanted to thank you,” Murugan muttered between his teeth and in a tone that would have been appropriate to “You dirty swine!”
“Don’t mention it,” said Will with mock politeness.
What a delicious creature! he was thinking as he looked, with amused curiosity, at that smooth golden torso, that averted face, regular as a statue’s but no longer Olympian, no longer classical—a Hellenistic face, mobile and all too human. A vessel of incomparable beauty—but what did it contain? It was a pity, he reflected, that he hadn’t asked that question a little more seriously before getting involved with his unspeakable Babs. But then Babs was a female. By the sort of heterosexual he was, the sort of rational question he was now posing was unaskable. As no doubt it would be, by anyone susceptible to boys, in regard to this bad-blooded little demigod sitting at the end of his bed. “Didn’t Dr. Robert know you’d gone to Rendang?” he asked.
“Of course he knew. Everybody knew it. I’d gone there to fetch my mother. She was staying there with some of her relations. I went over to bring her back to Pala. It was absolutely official.”
“Then why didn’t you want me to say that I’d met you over there?”
Murugan hesitated for a moment, then looked up at Will defiantly. “Because I didn’t want them to know I’d been seeing Colonel Dipa.”
Oh, so that was it! “Colonel Dipa’s a remarkable man,” he said aloud, fishing with sugared bait for confidences.
Surprisingly unsuspicious, the fish rose at once. Murugan’s sulky face lit up with enthusiasm and there, suddenly, was Antinoüs in all the fascinating beauty of his ambiguous adolescence. “I think he’s wonderful,” he said, and for the first time since he had entered the room he seemed to recognize Will’s existence and give him the friendliest of smiles. The Colonel’s wonderfulness had made him forget his resentment, had made it possible for him, momentarily, to love everybody—even this man to whom he owed a rankling debt of gratitude. “Look at what he’s doing for Rendang!”
“He’s certainly doing a great deal for Rendang,” said Will noncommittally.
A cloud passed across Murugan’s radiant face. “They don’t think so here,” he said, frowning. “They think he’s awful.”
“Who thinks so?”
“Practically everybody!”
“So they didn’t want you to see him?”
With the expression of an urchin who has cocked a snook while the teacher’s back is turned, Murugan grinned triumphantly. “They thought I was with my mother all the time.”
Will picked up the cue at once. “Did your mother know you were seeing the Colonel?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“And had no objection?”
“She was all for it.”
And yet, Will felt quite sure, he hadn’t been mistaken when he thought of Hadrian and Antinoüs. Was the woman blind? Or didn’t she wish to see what was happening?
“But if she doesn’t mind,” he said aloud, “why should Dr. Robert and the rest of them object?” Murugan looked at him suspiciously. Realizing that he had ventured too far into forbidden territory, Will hastily drew a red herring across the trail. “Do they think,” he asked with a laugh, “that he might convert you to a belief in military dictatorship?”
The red herring was duly followed, and the boy’s face relaxed into a smile. “Not that, exactly,” he answered, “but something like it. It’s all so stupid,” he added with a shrug of the shoulders. “Just idiotic protocol.”
“Protocol?” Will was genuinely puzzled.
“Weren’t you told anything about me?”
“Only what Dr. Robert said yesterday.”
“You mean, about my being a student?” Murugan threw back his head and laughed.
“What’s so funny about being a student?”
“Nothing—nothing at all.” The boy looked away again. There