Jane Gardam - Old Filth

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 a day’s sailing ahead. We should be sensing it now.”

“What — flowers? Wafted over the sea?”

“Yes. You can always smell them. It gives a lift to the heart.”

After a time Eddie said, “I do smell something. Not flowers. Something rather vile. I was wondering if there was engine trouble.”

“I have noted it, too,” said Loss, and went to the rail and stared hard into the Eastern dazzle on the sea.

“It’s smeary,” said Eddie, joining him. “The sky’s smeary.”

In half an hour the smears had turned to clouds black as oil and soot, lying all along and high above the curved horizon. The ship’s engines were slowing down.

Then they stopped and fell silent, the wake hushed, and the crew called to each other, gathered along the rail to stare.

Then a torrent of excited Portuguese splattered out from the tannoy on the bridge.

“I’ll find the Purser,” said Loss. “But I know what it is.” He listened. “There’s been a signal. There has been a signal from Colombo. Singapore has fallen to the Japanese!”

“The Japanese ? What have they to do with us?”

“We have seen no newspapers. We have heard no news since Christmas. We have been nearly four months aboard.”

“Singapore is impregnable.”

“It seems not.”

After dark, very slowly, the ship began to move on towards Colombo, though whether, said the Purser, they would get their refuelling slot was uncertain. Black smoke covered all the hills. The rubber plantations were all on fire. The dawn seemed never to come as they sailed nearer and nearer the murk.

And they were all at once one of a great fleet of battered craft, most of them limping towards harbour, a macabre regatta, their decks packed with the bandaged and the lame.

“They’re wearing red flowers in their hats,” said Eddie. “Most of them.”

“It’s blood,” said Loss.

Some of the bandaged waved weakly and uncertainly put up their thumbs and, as the boats reached harbour, there came feeble cheering and scraps of patriotic songs. “They’re singing,” said Eddie. But There’ll always be an England trailed away when the refugees on board were near enough to see the whole port of Colombo crammed with other English trying to get away.

“They look numb,” said Loss.

“They look withered,” said Eddie. “Like they’ve been days in water. Shrivelled. Hey — you don’t think Singapore can really have gone?”

Loss said nothing.

Then, “Look ashore,” he said, and pointed at the thousand fluttering Japanese flags that were flaming on every harbourside roof and window.

“I don’t think that they will be any safer here,” said Eddie.

“Nor will any of us,” said Loss.

All at once, high above the Fragrant Isle and to the South, there was a startling scatter of light. Several groups of tiny daylight stars, triangles of silver and scarlet that the sun caught for a moment before they were lost in the smoke. Aeroplanes.

“Like pen nibs,” said Eddie. “Dipped in red ink.”

“Japs,” said Loss.

The British Army was everywhere on the quays, top brass striding, the Governor with his little cane, the refugees being welcomed but too dazed to understand. A procession of stretchers. Eddie saw one old woman on a crutch asking courteously if anyone had seen her sister, Vera; then collapsing. Crowds hung over the rails of the Customs and Excise who were unhurriedly examining credentials even of the stretcher cases.

“What will happen to us?” said Eddie. “We’ll vanish in all that. The bombing here will start any time.”

“We’re to refuel and turn round,” said Loss — he had found the Chief Engineer. “It’ll be quite a time before we’re refuelled though, and we’ll be taking on refugees.”

“Turn back ?” said Eddie. “To Sierra Leone again?”

“No. Back to England. All the way. Probably via Cadiz.”

“I must get a message to my father.”

“If you send a message, it will have to be in Japanese.”

The ship somehow sidled into the madhouse harbour, the engines shuddered loudly, then stopped, and they were tied up and the first gangplank let down. Loss and Eddie stood above it, side by side, like lamp-post and bollard. Loss, now that Eddie looked down, had with him his suitcase and haversack.

“Feathers, I’m staying.”

“You’re what ?”

“I’m staying here. D’you want to come with me?”

“You can’t stay. You’ve no money. You’ll be on your own.”

“I’ve a bit of money and I won’t be alone. I’ve a couple of uncles. Attorneys. Everyone’s an attorney in Colombo. I shall be an attorney one day. So will you, I can tell. I’ll be safe from the Japanese. I’m not British. Not white. Come with me. My relatives are resourceful.”

“What about the customs?”

“Oh, I am adept at slithering through.”

“Loss, you’ll disappear. The Japs’ll be here in a week. After they’ve bombed Colombo into the sea. If you don’t get killed by a bomb, they’ll dispose of you and no one will know.”

“I tell you, Feathers, I am lucky. I am The Albat Ross. I’ll give you my pack of cards. An Albat Ross feather. A feather to Feathers. Here you are. Oh, could you give me your watch? For emergencies?”

“It’s my father’s.”

“I may need it.”

The masked face. The humourless, cunning, dwarf’s eyes. .

“Yes, of course.” Eddie took it off and put it in Loss’s outstretched hand.

“See,” said Loss. “You’ll be safe. Just look—,” and he pointed up behind Eddie at the mast-head “—an albatross. You don’t often get them this far South.”