Old Filth - Jane Gardam [9]
Here the girl was now, against Captain Feathers’s orders, and she had watched for two days, her legs pressed against the banana-leaf barrier, desperately watching. At the Port these choppy waves had been nowhere to be seen and the river had run oily and thick, seemed hardly to move. Here though, up river, there were no glow-worm lights on the great invisible nets, no sounds of fishermen calling from boat to boat. No ghostly cartwheels of weed, flying like skaters on the surface of the running river, almost outstripping it. No crocodile snout at the Port. No plop or scream of waterbird dropping on prey. Here on the landing stage, up river, fat metallic lizards moved about, long jaws angled for grubs in the leaves. They moved silently around her feet. She kicked them away. They were harmless things.
And here was the river boat. Would Mrs. Feathers be there? If she was indeed dead her strong, young body, her bright happy face would be already decaying in the wet earth of the Port’s Christian cemetery.
The boat’s engine reawakened with a roar and the boat approached the landing stage. Ada, the brown girl, twisted her arms tighter among the banana leaves. Here came lights. Men—not the District Officer—appeared to catch ropes.
The boat anchored, the engine stopped, the boat rocked and shuddered and Ada’s mother and her baby sister and big Auntie May from the Mission began to disembark. Auntie May carried a light bundle.
When she had both feet on the rickety platform, Auntie May looked at the girl and asked if she were the wet-nurse’s big daughter. Ada said yes, and looked at the bundle, and Auntie May put it in her arms. Ada’s mother went by, head-down over her own baby, afraid of seeing the District Officer somewhere in the shadows.
But there was no District Officer. Alistair Feathers was at his desk working, tonight not even drinking.
When Auntie May was admitted, he shook hands with her and sent for a servant to see her to her room, show her the bathhouse, make sure that food was taken to her.
“I can stay for several days,” she said. “I’ll risk the monsoon. To see that all is as well as can be for him.”
“F-f-for him?”
“For your son. He is Edward. He’s a fine boy.”
“Good. Good.”
He did not ask to see the baby who, by the time Auntie May left a week later, was the amazement of the village. A child with bright-blue eyes and white, white skin and curly chestnut hair. After Auntie May had left with a donation of ten pounds to the Mission, he gave orders for Ada to take charge of the child. Auntie May had already given orders (and the ten pounds) that Ada should sit each evening with the baby on the steps of his father’s verandah. This she did for many months, but Alistair Feathers never came near.
During the monsoon Ada and the baby moved up the steps and on to the verandah and sat there listening to the deluge, the crashing steaming torrent of the rain, and at last the girl was told by the District Officer’s servant to go away and take the child to live with her and his wet-nurse in their family hut. And so the baby’s first years were in the Long House among brown skins, brown eyes, scraps of coloured clothes, the Malay language; often sleeping, sometimes making musical singing, dreamily passing the time against the roar of the river and the rain. At night the lamps swung from the rafters and the baby watched the flames with their haloes of moths, heard the baboons with pleasure, saw the silver lizards without fear