Old Filth - Jane Gardam [11]
“You’ve had no leave in ten years, Alistair. It isn’t safe. Nobody knows better than you what happens out here to District Officers who work too hard. They drink and go native.”
Alistair fastidiously poured another whiskey and said, “At least I still change for dinner.”
He was in dinner jacket and black tie that would have been acceptable at the Ritz. Not a bead of sweat. Auntie May in sarong and sandals, her chin a little more whiskery, her arms resting almost to her elbows on the table a little more muscular, had put on weight and felt hot. She looked at Alistair and had to admire. She wanted to take his hand. Her hardest task now as she grew older in the Ministry was to deal with her longing to be touched—hugged, stroked by anyone, any human being—a friend, a lover, a child or even (and here she scented danger) a servant. Of either sex. She prayed about it, asking that God’s encircling arms would bring comfort. They did not.
“Alistair, you have no choice. You have a son who has no mother. At Home there will be your sisters, both unmarried. They will love a little nephew. They don’t answer any of my letters but you say you’ve been making arrangements, telling them? You have to take leave and accompany the boy home. It’s what his mother would have done.”
Alistair rose and limped about, his crooked shadow every- where. Outside in the steaming night there was an upsurge of voices across the compound and the crowing of a cock. A drum began to beat.
“It’s the festival. They’re sacrificing a cockerel.”
“You don’t need to tell me, Auntie May.”
“Your son is watching. Do you think this is the right way of life for a Christian child?”
“He isn’t a Christian child.”
“Yes, he is. I saw to that. He was baptised at birth. His mother held him. It’s not the Baptist way but she asked for it. In case he didn’t survive the river boat. He is baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who have nothing to do with the slitting of a cock’s gullet at the full moon.”
“They are calling on their god,” said Alistair. “There is no God but God. I’m nearer to their gods than yours ever was to me in 1914. Can the child not go on as he is?”
“No,” she said and left it at that.
The next day she went looking for Edward and found him in the river shallows where Ada on the bank was rubbing at coloured cloths, the pair of them calling and laughing. Other children stood in the water sending showers of it over each other and Edward and Ada, with their round dark hands. Edward began to do the same and kicked more of it about with his long white feet. Ada, pretending to be furious, dropped her cloths and ran in amongst them, splashing back. All the heads bobbed away into the rocks like black floats. Edward splashed forward and took Ada round the waist and buried his face against her thighs. “You are my leopard,” cried Edward Feathers in the Malay of the compound. “My beautiful leopard and I want to eat you alive.”
This, thought Auntie May, will not do.
That night at dinner she said so.
“He goes Home, Alistair. If you won’t take him, I will. I’m due some leave, too. There will be other English children on board. There always are. I’m told there may be two of his cousins joining a ship Home from Ceylon. We may pick them up. We shall be able to go the short way through Suez next year. Your sisters must organise warm clothes for Liverpool.”
“They wouldn’t know how,” said Alistair. “They’re independent spinsters. Play a lot of golf.”
“Very well. I’ll contact the Baptists. In Lancashire and in Wales. And I shall also—” she looked hard at him “—inform the Foreign Office. How well do you know your son, I wonder?”
“I see him.”
“I’ve sent for him to come here now. Tonight.” She clapped her hands and shouted for the servant