The Cat's Table Page 2

  * * *

  The friendship between the quiet Ramadhin and the exuberant Cassius and me grew fast, although we kept a great deal from one another. At least, this was true of me. What I held in my right hand never got revealed to the left. I had already been trained into cautiousness. In the boarding schools we went to, a fear of punishment created a skill in lying, and I learned to withhold small pertinent truths. Punishment, it turns out, never did train or humble some of us into complete honesty. We were, it seems, continually beaten because of miserable report cards or a variety of vices (lounging in the sanatorium for three days pretending to have mumps, permanently staining one of the school bathtubs by dissolving ink pellets in water to manufacture ink for the senior school). Our worst executioner was the junior school master, Father Barnabus, who still stalks my memory with his weapon of choice, which was a long splintered bamboo cane. He never used words or reason. He just moved dangerously among us.

  On the Oronsay, however, there was the chance to escape all order. And I reinvented myself in this seemingly imaginary world, with its ship dismantlers and tailors and adult passengers who, during the evening celebrations, staggered around in giant animal heads, some of the women dancing with skirts barely there, as the ship’s orchestra, including Mr Mazappa, played on the bandstand all wearing outfits of exactly the same plum colour.

  LATE AT NIGHT, after the specially invited First Class passengers had left the Captain’s Table, and after the dancing had ended with couples, their masks removed, barely stirring in each other’s arms, and after the stewards had taken away the abandoned glasses and ashtrays and were leaning on the four-foot-wide brooms to sweep away the coloured swirls of paper, they brought out the prisoner.

  It was usually before midnight. The deck shone because of a cloudless moon. He appeared with the guards, one chained to him, one walking behind him with a baton. We did not know what his crime was. We assumed it could only have been a murder. The concept of anything more intricate, such as a crime of passion or a political betrayal, did not exist in us then. He looked powerful, self-contained, and he was barefoot.

  Cassius had discovered this late-night schedule for the prisoner’s walk, so the three of us were often there at that hour. He could, we thought among ourselves, leap over the railing, along with the guard who was chained to him, into the dark sea. We thought of him running and leaping this way to his death. We thought this, I suppose, because we were young, for the very idea of a chain, of being contained, was like suffocation. At our age we could not endure the idea of it. We could hardly stand to wear sandals when we went for meals, and every night as we ate at our table in the dining room we imagined the prisoner eating scraps from a metal tray, barefoot in his cell.

  I HAD BEEN asked to dress appropriately before entering the carpeted First Class Lounge in order to visit Flavia Prins. Though she had promised to keep an eye on me during the journey, to be truthful we would see each other only a few times. Now I had been invited to join her for afternoon tea, her note suggesting I wear a clean and ironed shirt, and also socks with my shoes. I went up to the Verandah Bar punctually at four p.m.

  She sighted me as if I were at the far end of a telescope, quite unaware I could read her facial responses. She was sitting at a small table. There followed an arduous attempt at conversation on her part, not helped by my nervous monosyllables. Was I enjoying the voyage? Had I made a friend?

  I had made two, I said. A boy name Cassius and another named Ramadhin.

  ‘Ramadhin … Is that the Muslim boy, from the cricketing family?’

  I said I didn’t know but would ask him. My Ramadhin seemed to have no physical prowess whatsoever. He had a passion for sweets and condensed milk. Thinking of this, I pocketed a few biscuits while Mrs Prins was attempting to catch the eye of the waiter.

  ‘I met your father when he was a very young man …’ she said, then trailed off. I nodded but she said nothing more about him.

  ‘Auntie …’ I began, feeling secure now in how I could address her. ‘Do you know about the prisoner?’

  It turned out that she was as eager as I to get away from small talk, and she settled in for a slightly longer interview than she had expected. ‘Have more tea,’ she murmured, and I did, although I was not enjoying the taste of it. She had heard about the prisoner, she confided, although it was supposed to be a secret. ‘He’s under very heavy guard. But you must not worry. There’s even a very senior British army officer on board.’

  I couldn’t wait to lean forward. ‘I have seen him,’ I gloated. ‘Walking late at night. Under heavy guard.’

  ‘Really …’ she drawled, put out by the ace I had played so quickly and easily.

  ‘They say he did a terrible thing,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. It is said he killed a judge.’

  This was much more than an ace. I sat there with my mouth open.

  ‘An English judge. I should probably not say any more than that,’ she added.

  My uncle, my mother’s brother, who was my guardian in Colombo, was a judge, though he was Ceylonese and not English. The English judge would not have been allowed to preside over a court on the island, so he must have been a visitor, or he could have been brought over as a consultant or advisor… Some of this Flavia Prins told me, and some of this I later pieced together with the help of Ramadhin, who had a calm and logical mind.

  The prisoner had killed the judge to stop him from helping the prosecution, perhaps. I would have liked to speak to my uncle in Colombo at that very minute. I was in fact feeling worried that his own life might be in danger. It is said he killed a judge! The sentence clamoured in my brain. My uncle was a large, genial man. I had been living with him and his wife in Boralesgamuwa since my mother had left for England some years earlier, and while we never had a long or even brief intimate talk, and while he was always busy in his role as a public figure, he was a loving man, and I felt safe with him. When he came home and poured himself a gin he would let me shake the bitters into his glass. I had got into trouble with him only once. He had been presiding over a sensational murder trial involving a cricket player, and I announced to my friends that the suspected man in the dock was innocent, and when asked how I knew, I said that my uncle had said so. I had not said it as a lie so much as something to shore up my belief in this cricketing hero. My uncle, on hearing this, had just laughed casually, but firmly suggested that I not do it again.

  Ten minutes after I returned to my friends on D Deck, I was regaling Cassius and Ramadhin with the story of the prisoner’s crime. I spoke of it at the Lido pool and I spoke of it around the ping-pong table. But later that afternoon, Miss Lasqueti, who had heard the ripples of my tale, cornered me and made me less certain of Flavia Prins’s version of the prisoner’s crime. ‘He may or may not have done any such thing,’ she said. ‘Never believe what might be just a rumour.’ Thus she made me think that Flavia Prins had dramatised his crime, had raised the bar because I actually had seen the prisoner, and so had chosen a crime that I could identify with – the killing of a judge. It would have been an apothecary if my mother’s brother had been an apothecary.

  That evening I made the first entry in my school examination booklet. A bit of chaos had broken out in the Delilah Lounge when a passenger attacked his wife during a game of cards. Mockery had gone too far during Hearts. There had been an attempt at strangulation and then her ear had been perforated by a fork. I managed to follow the Purser while he guided the wife along a narrow corridor towards the hospital, a dinner serviette staunching the wound, while the husband had stormed off to his cabin.

  In spite of the resulting curfew, Ramadhin, Cassius and I slipped from our cabins that night, went along the precarious half-lit stairways, and waited for the prisoner to emerge. It was almost midnight, and the three of us were smoking twigs broken off from a cane chair that we lit and sucked at. Because of his asthma Ramadhin was not enthusiastic about this, but Cassius was eager that we should try to smoke the whole chair before the end
of our journey. After an hour it became obvious that the prisoner’s night walk had been cancelled. There was darkness all around us, but we knew how to walk through it. We slid quietly into the swimming pool, relit our twigs and floated on our backs. Silent as corpses we looked at the stars. We felt we were swimming in the sea, rather than a walled-in pool in the middle of the ocean.

  THE STEWARD HAD told me that I had a roommate, but so far no one had arrived to take the other bunk. Then, on the third night, while we were still in the Indian Ocean, the lights in the cabin suddenly blazed on, and a man who introduced himself as Mr Hastie entered with a folded-up card table under his arm. He woke me and lifted me onto the top bunk. ‘A few friends are coming over for a game,’ he said. ‘Just go to sleep.’ I waited to see who was coming. Within half an hour there were four men playing bridge quietly and earnestly. There was barely enough room for them to sit around the table. They were keeping the volume down because of me, and I soon fell asleep to the whispers of their bidding.

  The next morning I found myself alone again. The card table was folded and leaning against the wall. Had Hastie slept? Was he a full-time passenger or a member of the crew? He turned out to be in charge of the kennels on the Oronsay, and it must not have been an arduous job, for he spent most of his time reading or half-heartedly exercising the dogs on a small section of deck. As a result, he had energy to burn at the end of the day. So shortly after midnight, his friends joined him. One of them, Mr Invernio, was his assistant at the kennels. The other two worked on the ship as wireless operators. They played for a couple of hours each night and then left quietly.

  I was seldom alone with Mr Hastie. When he turned up at midnight he must have felt I ought to be getting my rest, so he rarely attempted conversation, and there would be only a few minutes before the others arrived. At some stage during his travels in the East, he had picked up the habit of wearing a sarong, and most of the time he wore just that around his waist, even when his friends came by. He’d bring out four shot glasses and some arrack. The bottle and glasses would be placed on the floor, the table cleared of everything except cards. I’d look down from my modest height on the top bunk and see the spread of a dummy hand. I watched the deals, listened to the shuffles and the bidding. Pass … One Spade … Pass … Two Clubs … Pass … Two No Trumps … Pass … Three Diamonds … Pass … Three Spades … Pass … Four Diamonds … Pass … Five Diamonds … Double … Redouble … Pass … Pass … Pass … They rarely had conversations. I remember they used to call each other by their surnames – ‘Mr Tolroy’, ‘Mr Invernio’, ‘Mr Hastie’, ‘Mr Babstock’ – as if they were midshipmen in a nineteenth-century naval academy.

  Later during the journey, when with my friends I would run into Mr Hastie, he behaved very differently. Outside our cabin, he was opinionated, and a constant talker. He told us about his ups and downs in the Merchant Navy, his adventures with an ex-wife who was a great rider of horses, and his strongly held affection for hounds over any other breed of dog. But in the half-glow of our cabin at midnight, Mr Hastie was a whisperer; he had courteously, after the third evening of cards, replaced the bright yellow cabin light with a muted blue one. So as I entered the realm of half-sleep, drinks were poured, rubbers were won, money changed hands, the blue light making the men seem as if they existed in an aquarium. When they finished their game, the four of them went on deck for a smoke, Mr Hastie slipping back into the room silently half an hour later to read for a while before turning out his bunk light.

  SLEEP IS A prison for a boy who has friends to meet. We were impatient with the night, up before sunrise surrounded the ship. We could not wait to continue exploring this universe. Lying in my bunk I would hear Ramadhin’s gentle knock on the door, in code. A pointless code, really – who else could it have been at that hour? Two taps, a long pause, another tap. If I did not climb down and open the door I would hear his theatrical cough. And if I still did not respond, I would hear him whisper ‘Mynah,’ which had become my nickname.

  We would meet Cassius by the stairs and soon would be strolling barefoot on the First Class deck. First Class was an unguarded palace at six in the morning, and we arrived there even before a fuse of light appeared on the horizon, even before the essential night-lights on the deck blinked and went out automatically at daybreak. We removed our shirts and dived like needles into the gold-painted First Class pool with barely a splash. Silence was essential as we swam in the newly formed half-light.

  If we could last undetected for an hour, we had a chance to plunder the laid-out breakfast on the Sun Deck, heap food onto plates, and abscond with the silver bowl of condensed milk, its spoon standing up in the centre of its thickness. Then we’d climb into the tent-like atmosphere of one of the raised lifeboats and consume our ill-gotten meal. One morning Cassius brought out a Gold Leaf cigarette he had found in a lounge, and taught us how to smoke properly.

  Ramadhin politely refused, having his asthmatic condition that was already evident to us and the other diners at the Cat’s Table. (As it would continue to be evident when I saw him years later, in London. We were thirteen or fourteen by then, meeting up after losing sight of each other while busy adapting to a foreign land. Even then, when I’d see him with his parents and his sister, Massoumeh, he was constantly catching every neighbourhood cough or flu. We would begin a second friendship in England, but we were different by then, no longer free of the realities of the earth. And in some ways, at that time I was closer to his sister, for Massi always accompanied us on our journeys across South London – to the Herne Hill cycle track, to the Brixton Ritzy, and then the Bon Marché, where we would race down the aisles of food and clothing, for some reason delirious. Some afternoons Massi and I sat on the small sofa in their parents’ house in Mill Hill, our hands creeping towards and over each other under the blanket while we pretended to watch the interminable golf coverage on television. Early one morning she came into the upstairs room where Ramadhin and I were sleeping, and sat beside me, her finger to her lips to silence me. Ramadhin asleep in his bed a few feet away. I began to sit up, but she pushed me back with an open palm, then unbuttoned her pyjama shirt so I could see her new breasts, which appeared almost pale green from the reflection of trees outside the window. In the time that followed I was conscious of Ramadhin’s cough, the grate as he cleared his throat in his sleep, while Massi, half naked, fearful, fearless, faced me with whatever emotion goes into such a gesture when one is thirteen.)

  We left the crockery and the knives and spoons that came with our stolen meals in the lifeboat, and slipped back down to Tourist Class. A steward would eventually discover traces of our numerous breakfasts during a later security drill when the lifeboats were manned and swung over the water, so that for a while the Captain searched for a stowaway on board.

  It was not even eight o’clock when we crossed the border from First Class back to Tourist Class. We pretended to stagger with the roll of the ship. I had by now come to love the slow waltz of our vessel from side to side. And the fact that I was on my own, save for the distant Flavia Prins and Emily, was itself an adventure. I had no family responsibilities. I could go anywhere, do anything. And Ramadhin, Cassius and I had already established one rule. Each day we had to do at least one thing that was forbidden. The day had barely begun, and we still had hours ahead of us to perform this task.

  WHEN MY PARENTS abandoned their marriage, it was never really admitted, or explained, but it was also not hidden. If anything it was presented as a mis-step, not a car crash. So how much the curse of my parents’ divorce fell upon me I am not sure. I do not recall the weight of it. A boy goes out the door in the morning and will continue to be busy in the evolving map of his world. But it was a precarious youth.

  As a young boarder at St Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia, I loved swimming. I loved anything to do with water. On the school grounds there was a concrete channel down which the flood-waters raced during the monsoons. And this became a site for a game some of the boarded boys parti
cipated in. We leapt in so we could be hurled forward by the current, somersaulting, flung from side to side. Fifty yards farther along there was a grey rope that we grabbed to pull ourselves out. And twenty yards beyond that, the channel of racing water became a culvert that disappeared underground and journeyed on in darkness. Where it went we never knew.

  There might be as many as four of us racing down again and again in the channel waters, one at a time, our heads barely at the surface. It was a nervous game, grabbing the rope, climbing out, then running back under the heavy rain to do it one more time. During one attempt my head submerged as I approached the rope, and I did not come up in time to catch it. My hand was in the air, and that was all as I sped towards the eventual buried culvert. It was my given death, that afternoon in Mount Lavinia, sometime during the March monsoon, foretold by an astrologer. I was nine years old and there would now be a sightless journey into an underground darkness. A hand grabbed my still-raised arm and I was pulled out by an older student. He casually told the four of us off and then hurried away in the rain, not bothering to see if we obeyed him. Who was he? Thank you, I should have said. But I was lying there gasping and drenched on the grass.

  What was I in those days? I recall no outside imprint, and therefore no perception of myself. If I had to invent one photograph of myself from childhood, it would be of a barefoot boy in shorts and a cotton shirt, with a couple of friends from the village, running along the mildewed wall that separated the house and garden in Boralesgamuwa from the traffic on the High Level Road. Or it would be of me alone, waiting for them, looking away from the house to the dusty street.