Old Filth - Jane Gardam [10]
Soon he stretched to pat her face, suck her chin, her ear. One day, at two months, gazing at her he gave a crow of laughter like a boy of two. Because of the memory of the child’s kind mother, the Long House respected him and accepted him, an ivory child in their warm dun dust, and he was passed about, rocked to sleep, talked to and sung to and understood only Malay. By the time he was one he rolled and tottered and waddled in the village compound with the other children. There were a number of pale-skinned half-caste children from the Raj’s peccadilloes. Sometimes this child’s father crossed the compound but seemed not to see him, not to notice his wife’s chestnut curls.
The village observed the District Officer. Captain Feathers was a strong just governor, but nobody liked him. His child was given extra attention and, from Ada, intense, unswerving, obsessive adoration.
When the child was four and a half, Auntie May came back. Big and strong, off the boat and over the landing stage to the compound, she looked about her, at once spotting Edward with his orange hair, naked and sucking a mango, his feet and hands as pale with the mud of the compound as the other children’s. She made no move towards him—the women were watching from the dark openings of the huts—but nodded and smiled in his direction, to his surprise, for his mouth fell open—and went on to climb the steps of the verandah.
She was expected: there had been correspondence for some time. But Captain Feathers had not been at the landing stage.
She had not seen him for four and a half years but rumour had it that he was unchanged in his attitude to his son, that his shattered ankle was worse and that he was drinking heavily. It was said he had become eccentrically pedantically absorbed in his work and the management of his District. He was celibate.
No girls were brought to him by their mothers as “extra servants,” though he was handsome still, his eyes bright with malaria. He turned away from the women’s beauty to the beauty of the whiskey in the glass. It did not seem to harm him. He had the Scottish immunity. He drank alone, for he had no friends. “Oh, Miss Neal. Auntie May. G-g-good evening.”
He looks tired, she thought.
She had come to take the child down to the Port, to be taught English for six months before the journey Home, where he would live with a Welsh family until he was eight. After that, he would go to his father’s old Prep school and then his father’s old Public school. Auntie May knew of the Welsh family with whom he was to be fostered. They were used to Raj Orphans. There would be home-cooked food, and it would be cheap (Alistair Feathers was a Scot). And there were two aunts about, his sisters, in Lancashire which was not really far away from North Wales.
“And of course,” said Auntie May at dinner, watching the lowering of the whiskey in the glass at the other end of the lamp-lit table, “you will have to take him to Wales. In six months’ time. And you will by then have paid for him in advance.”
Alistair Feathers’s eyes stared. Outside, the madhouse noises of the jungle. Inside, the servant padding about, taking plates, setting down others, offering fruit.
“He seems well and happy,” he said. “I have never seen the need for him to go Home. It’s not the law.”
“You know perfectly well that it is the custom. Because of the risk of childhood illnesses out here. You went Home yourself.”
“I did,” said Alistair. “So help me God.”
Auntie May on the whole agreed with him. She’d seen great damage. Some children forgot their parents, clung to their adoptive families who later often forgot them. There were bad tales. Others grew to say they’d had a much better time in England away from their