Old Filth Read online

  She had, however, felt a great plunge of spirits as the river boat rounded the bend of the river before the District Officer’s landing, for there was nobody there except for the same young girl sitting at the ladder’s top with her arms tight round her knees. The boat lay in the water, silent, waiting for people to appear. Nobody. Auntie May knew that though there was neither telephone nor mail direct to the District Officer’s quarters, and their attempt to send a cable had failed, the news of his wife’s death would certainly have seeped through to Alistair Feathers. She had half expected him to turn up at the Port to bring his son home himself. News flies fast through the jungle. Attendance at his wife’s funeral would of course have been impossible, for the body had to be buried immediately, then, in Kotakinakulu province.

  “Not here,” Auntie May allowed herself to say.

  The wet-nurse was not surprised, however. Mr. Feathers had not come down to the landing stage to see his wife leave. Their goodbye—for them, a very affectionate goodbye—a kiss on the cheek (however had this child been conceived?)—had taken place inside the verandah of the house. A quick embrace, then out and down the verandah steps, Captain Feathers calling to the others to be ready. The wet-nurse was being well-paid and had been groomed for her possible job of nursing the baby with quantities of good food, and watched over against the betel nut and alcohol. Her elder daughter had come down to the landing stage, helped Mrs. Feathers to the gangplank—Mrs. Feathers had suddenly turned and given the girl a kiss—and watched the boat sidle towards the current and then pass from sight.

  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—their questing, swinging heads—and the geckos hooked into the mesh of the walls puffing out their lurid throats. He listened to the racket of the rats in the thatch, once watched with rapture as a fat snake came sliding up from a post-hole. Observed it being killed. He was satisfied by the nourishment of the wetnurse but passionate in his love for the girl.

  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 ta
ble, “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 parents, whom they did not care for. There were children who worked hard at growing stolid and boring, and made marriages only in order to have roots of their own at last. They never told anything. And Auntie May had never been sure about the ferocity of Eastern childhood diseases. But in this case there was no mother.

  “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 in the Raj voice of thunder.

  The servant looked at his master, but the master continued to open and shut a little silver box that had been his wife’s pinbox and now held his tooth-picks. Then he took up his glass and looked into its golden depths.

  “Yes. Very well.”

  Edward was brought in from just outside the door where he had been watching and holding Ada’s hand. He blinked in the glare of light, stared at the tall man’s queer clothes—the starched shirt, the gold watch chain—and the gleam of the table-silver and glass he had never seen before.

  “Now then, Edward,” said Auntie May. “Greet your father, please.”

  The child looked mystified.

  “Your father. Go on.”

  She gave him a push. “Bow, child. Hold out your hand.”

  The child bowed but scarcely took his eyes from Alistair’s pinched yellow face and sandy square moustache.

  Alistair suddenly threw himself back in his chair, dropped the silver box on the table and looked straight at Edward for the first time. His wife’s genial blue eyes looked back at him.

  “Hullo,” he said, “Hullo—Edward. And so you are going away?” Like Auntie May, he spoke in Edward’s own Malay.

  Edward wriggled and turned his attention to the silver box. “Did you know that you will be going away?”

  “They say so,” said Edward.

  “You are going first with Auntie May to the Port. For half a year. To learn to speak English, like all British boys have to do.”

  Edward fiddled with the box.

  “You hear English spoken sometimes, don’t you? You understand what it is?”

  “Sometimes. Why do I have to? I can talk here.”

  “Because you will one day have to go to England. It is called Home. They don’t speak Malay there.”

  “Why can’t I stay here?”

  “Because white children often die here.”

  “I shall like to die here.”

  “We want you not to die but to grow up big and strong.”

  “Will Ada come?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Can I go back to Ada now?”

  “Here,” the father called as the child made off to the verandah where Ada stood in the shadows. “Here. Come back. Take this. It was your mother’s,” and he held out the silver box.

  “Does Ada say I can?”

  “I say you can. I am your father.”

  “You can’t be,” said Edward.

  Silence fell and Auntie May’s hands began to shake.

  The servants were listening.

  “And why not?”

  “Because you’ve been here all the time without me.”

  Auntie May left with Edward next morning. She felt sick and low.

  I’m lugubrious, unattractive, bossy and a failure, she told God. I shan’t come here ever again. That man can rot.

  Alistair, however, had been on the landing stage, leaning only a little on his stick, spick and span in his khaki shorts and sola topi. He had shaken hands with Auntie May, acknowledged Ada. Had shaken hands with the little boy,
and asked if he had the box safe. Then he had given the order for the boat to be cast off, and had limped away.

  “Wave,” said Auntie May, but Edward did not.

  Nor did Alistair turn to look at his son’s second—and last— journey down the black river.

  As the trees on either winding bank blotted out the landing stage, Edward, who had been struck dumb by the sight of Ada left alone on the tottering platform, began to scream “Ada, Ada, Ada!” and to point back up river. Auntie May held him tight, but he screamed louder, and writhed in her arms. She spoke sharply in Malay and he bit her shoulder, wriggled free and seemed about to jump overboard. A sailor caught him by the belt of the shorts that Auntie May had brought and that had astonished him. The sailor lifted him high. Water poured down the sailor’s silky arms. “Hai, hai, hai,” he laughed and Edward lashed out at him, sobbing. He was a tall, strong boy for four and a half but the boatman lifted him into the air like a swathe of flowers. Something of the boatman’s smell and his happy eyes reminded the child of Ada, and the sobbing lessened and he went limp.

  “Why does she stay? Why is she not here?”

  “If she came with you, you would never learn English. You and she would talk Malay, as we are doing now.”

  “I will talk Malay with you always.”

  “Not after we get to the Port. You will learn something new. Ada will follow.”

  “Follow?”

  “She will follow to the Port when you have to go Home.”

  Edward gave a shuddering, hopeless sob. He had just left Home. What would Ada do without him at Home? He was placed in Auntie May’s lap and looked at her with eyes nearly mad and shouted “Ada! Ada!” He tried to hit Auntie May, and swim for it, but she grabbed him in her muscular arms and tried to rock him. He became limp again. The sobs that shook his body began to become farther apart. He hiccupped and tried to speak, but it came out jerky and odd: “Ek, ek, ek—” like the baboon on the roof. A cupfull of drink appeared from a bottle in Auntie May’s bag. (Auntie May had negotiated these hateful kidnappings before.) The drink was dark and sweet and he gulped it in the middle of a last shuddering sob. She passed the empty cup to the boatman and rocked the child, allowing herself the pleasure of a child in her arms, knowing that this stringy, red-headed boy would never tempt her into lullabies or spoiling comforts. But he was warm against her broad chest, and now he slept. She seethed against the father, the system, the Empire which she had begun to think was not God’s ordinance after all, and how had she ever thought it could be? Duty to these people was what mattered now. Well, to all people. Love and duty.