Old Filth - Jane Gardam [77]
“I am not an evacuee,” said Loss. “I am travelling home to pursue my life. Feathers is a young friend of mine, no; for I only met him on the Breath o’Dunoon. He is an unwilling evacuee. His father sent for him to return to Malaya. He wanted to stay and Do His Bit.”
“Did he? Well, now he’s yelling and ranting about dead pilots and the Battle of Britain.”
“That’s over,” said Loss. “I expect he’s lost best friends. There are those with best friends. I avoid such. He’ll be OK. He needed to blow up.”
The doctor looked dubious.
But by the time the Portuguese freighter arrived a fortnight later to carry them on, a gaunt, monosyllabic (but not stammering) Feathers was allowed to continue his journey.
“He’s strong,” said the Purser. “There’s those get malaria soon as they get to Freetown. He’s not had that. There’s blackwater fever if you so much as look at the swamp. He’s not had that. Just the guts. The guts and the brains. He’ll recover.”
“He drank palm-beer from a bad bottle,” said Loss, tightlipped as a Methodist.
“Maybe, lad, it saved his life.” The Purser was the only Englishman on the new ship, and spoke Portuguese. He had avoided the call-up, he said, because of flat feet. “I dare say the bugger’ll live,” he said. “He’s walking.”
But as they sailed—their neutral flag flying or rather hanging limp on the mast—down the bulge of Africa and at last out upon the hot-plate of the Indian Ocean, day after day, day after day, Eddie lay prone in the sick bay, hardly eating, drinking only lime juice, not talking but muttering and yelling in his sleep. Loss, three flights down in the noisome, sweaty bilges, sat on his bunk and wrote up his log book. He also sat with Eddie several hours a day thinking his Hakkar thoughts. In the night he went on deck and sat about learning Portuguese from the crew. He watched each morning the raising of the neutral flag to ensure that the sea and the sky and the sea-birds (there were few now) and the enemy submarines (there were none) knew that this was a craft on peaceful business.
In time, Eddie got up and began to wander on deck, sit against the davits, lean over the rails. He felt so alien and remote from anything that had happened to him before that tears of weakness filled his eyes and reflected the tremendous starlight. He was hollow, a shell on a beach—but safe at last. I could be OK now, he thought, if I could stay here for my life on the circle of the sea.
Loss watched him and considered the ranting he’d heard in the sick bay and risked saying, once, when they were sitting on the creaking deck under the moon, “Tell me about Ma Didds. Go on. You’ll have to tell somebody, some day.”
But Eddie froze to stone.
Breezily on another occasion, the crew eating fish stew, Eddie crumbling bread, Loss said, “I suppose you know that there are those who believe that endurance of cruelty as a child can feed genius?”
“I have no genius,” said Eddie, “and never would have had.”
“Bad luck,” said Loss. “It is perhaps a pity that I wasn’t sent to Ma Didds.”
“She would have broken even you.”
But this conversation was a turning point, and Eddie seemed to relax. As the heat grew ever stronger, the sea a shimmering disc wherever you looked, and the two boys shrunk into any patch of shadow under the life-boats; and as the engines chuntered on, and the wake behind them curdled the water, and the sea beneath held its mysteries, and as time ceased, Eddie began to sleep again at night and exist, and often sleep peacefully again in the day. Once or twice his old self broke through. He wondered about his father and whatever the two of them would do in Kotakinakulu—or Singapore or Penang, or wherever his father was now—but soon he dismissed all thoughts of the future and the past, and lazily watched Loss dealing out the cards.
“Do you smell something?” asked Loss. “Do you smell land?” Eddie sniffed.
“We’re still too far out.”
“Lanka,” said Loss, “was said by the poet to be the Scented Isle, the Aromatic Eden, the last outpost of civilisation. We’ve half