The Cat's Table Read online

  One of the officers, we discovered later, had already gone down to Ramadhin’s cabin, because of his known connection to us. Ramadhin had pretended sleep and when woken pretended a lack of knowledge once he was told we were alive and had not been washed overboard. That must have been around midnight. Now it was two in the morning. We were given bathrobes and marched into the presence of the Captain. Cassius was looking around the room, regarding the furnishings, when the Captain’s hand slammed down on his desk.

  We had seen the Captain only look bored or smile falsely when making public announcements. Now he erupted with a performance, as if he had just been released from a cage. The reprimands began with a mathematical precision. He pointed out that eight sailors had been involved in our rescue – for more than thirty minutes. This resulted in at least, at least, four hours of wasted time, and as the average salary of a sailor was X pounds an hour, X times four was what it had cost the Orient Line, plus the Head Steward’s time at another Y pounds an hour. Plus double-time payments that were always made during emergencies. Plus the Captain’s time, considerably more expensive. ‘Our ship therefore will bill your parents for nine hundred pounds!’ he said, signing some formal-looking papers that for all I knew could have been his memo to English Customs to keep us out of England. He slammed the table again, threatened that he would put us off at the ship’s first landfall, and proceeded to blaggard our ancestors. Cassius attempted to interrupt him with what he thought was a remark of courteous humility.

  ‘Thank you so much for rescuing us, Uncle.’

  ‘Shut up you … you’ – he was searching – ‘viper’.

  ‘Wiper, sir?’

  The Captain paused and watched Cassius to determine if he was mocking him. He must have felt he was at a secure moral height.

  ‘No. You are a polecat. An Asian polecat, a loathsome little Asian polecat. You know what I do when I find a polecat in my house? I set fire to its testicles.’

  ‘I like polecats, sir.’

  ‘You repulsive, wet, snivelling …’

  In the silence that followed, as he continued searching for insults, the door to the Captain’s bathroom swung open and we saw his enamel commode. We were no longer interested in the Captain. Cassius groaned and said, ‘Uncle, I feel sick … Would it be possible to use your—’

  ‘Get out! You little cunt!’

  We were escorted by two sailors to our cabins.

  Flavia Prins peered closely at her bracelet as she spoke to me in the slightly damaged Caledonia Room. An abrupt note from her had insisted I meet her promptly. We had by now been processed through various interrogators, and it had been insisted in every case that we never mention what had occurred. Or we would be in more trouble. But we had mentioned it to two of our tablemates during the next morning’s breakfast. The dining room was almost empty, and only Miss Lasqueti and Mr Daniels were eating with us. When we told them, they did not seem to think it was that serious. ‘Not for you, but damn serious for them,’ Miss Lasqueti said. She was, we would discover, one for the rule books. Besides, she was more impressed by Ramadhin’s knots, which she said had ‘saved your bacon’. But now, as I approached Flavia Prins, I realised I might be in trouble with my unofficial guardian. She loosened and resnapped her bracelet, ignoring me, then struck like a bird suddenly pecking at the forehead of a dog.

  ‘What happened last night?’

  ‘There was a storm,’ I said.

  ‘You thought there was a storm?’

  I wondered if she was quite unaware of what we had travelled through.

  ‘There was a terrible storm, Auntie. We were all scared. We were shaking in our beds.’

  She said nothing, so I carried on.

  ‘I had to call a steward. I kept falling out of my bed. I walked in the hall till I found Mr Peters, and asked him to tie me to the bed, and also if he could tie Cassius up too. Cassius had nearly broken his arm when the ship rolled and something fell on him. He has a bandage.’

  She gazed at me, not quite with awe.

  ‘I saw the Captain last night, in the hospital, when I took Cassius there. He clapped Cassius on the back and called him a “brave fellow”. Then Mr Peters came down with us and tied us to our beds. He said there was a man and a woman playing in one of the lifeboats when the storm happened and they hurt themselves when it crashed down onto the deck. They are all right, but his “this thing” is hurt. He had to go to the surgery also.’

  ‘I know your uncle very well …’ She paused for tremendous effect. I was wary of this sentence of hers and began to sense she knew more of last night’s events than I thought.

  ‘And I knew your mother, slightly. Your uncle is a judge! How dare you speak such falsehoods to me – who is so concerned about your safety.’

  I blurted out, ‘They told me not to say anything, to say nothing about Mr Peters. They said Mr Peters is a “rogue sailor”, Auntie. They said they will put him off at first landfall. When we asked him to tie us to our bunks for safety, instead, he took us up and tied us to the deck with these ropes, to punish us for … interrupting the card game he was having with some drunk men. He said, “This is what we do to disobedient boys who keep interrupting us!”’

  She peered at me. I thought I had her for a moment.

  ‘I never, ever, ever met …’

  Not much happened during the next day. An eastbound steamer passed us at dusk one evening, all of its lights on, and it was a fantasy among the three of us to row over to it and return with them to Colombo. The chief engineer ordered the engines to be slowed while the emergency electrical systems were tested, and for a while it seemed we had stalled in what was now the Arabian Sea. The stillness made us feel we were sleepwalking. Cassius and I went out on the becalmed deck. It was only then, in that peacefulness, that I imagined the full nature of the storm. Of being roofless and floorless. What we had witnessed was only what had been above the sea. Now something shook itself free and came into my mind. It was not only the things we could see that had no safety. There was the underneath.

  *

  Smuggled among the belongings of the ayurvedic from Moratuwa was a cache of datura leaves and seeds from Pakistan. He had purchased the plant for Sir Hector to dispel the recent disruptions on his body, and also to retard the onset of hydrophobia. Datura was to be the most successful potion the millionaire took during his sea journey. The drug had a reputation for being versatile yet unreliable. Supposedly, if you were laughing when its white flower was picked, it resulted in much laughter, or dancing if that was the activity during the gathering. (As a flower it was most fragrant in the evening.) It was good for fevers and tumours. However, as part of its wayward nature, while under its influence a person would also respond to questions with no hesitation and with utter truthfulness. And Hector de Silva was known as a cautiously untruthful man.

  The millionaire’s wife, Delia, always considered him maddeningly private. Now, days after leaving Colombo on the Oronsay, with the administration of the ayurvedic’s drug, she had a chance to uncover the man she had married. Every little crumb from his youth came into view. He exposed the terror from his father’s whippings that compartmentalised him and eventually made him a brutal financier. He spoke of his secret visits to his brother, Chapman, who had run away from home, taking a neighbouring girl with whom he was in love, who was known to have an extra finger. They had it chopped off in Chilaw and were living a sane and quiet life in Kalutara.

  Delia discovered too the way in which her husband had diverted his money into many underground tributaries. Much of this information was being revealed around the time of the cyclone during which Hector de Silva rolled from side to side on his large bed as the vessel bucked and dived. He actually seemed to be enjoying himself, while his wife and the rest of the retinue scurried from his bed to vomit in their adjacent cabins. The datura had snuffed out any concern in him, as well as any side effect of sickness, and any quality of guardedness. If it was an aphrodisiac, it turned him from a lean and dista
nt partner into a benign companion. At first this character change went unnoticed. The whole ship was in the midst of the storm. A small fire had broken out in the engine room when he began telling the truth for the first time in his adult life. And the dangerous weather had brought out the pickpockets, who always thrived in unstable situations where physical help was needed. Added to this, a whole compartment of grain had got wet and burst loose in the hold, altering the very balance of the ship, so emergency crews were down there shovelling it back as carpenters rebuilt the borders. They worked in darkness in the depths of the hold, with only the spray of an oil lamp, doing ‘gravedigger’s work’, as Joseph Conrad called it, waist deep in the grain. Meanwhile Sir Hector was recalling to his little retinue a small, sweet memory of a gliding car he had driven as a boy at a fair in Colombo. He told the story again and again, unwrapping it as if it were new each time, to his wife and daughter and the three uninterested medical aides.

  Whatever the fate might have been for our ship, which was now travelling like a coffin in the cyclone, Sir Hector enjoyed a few good days letting free the truth about his wealth, his hidden pleasures, his genuine affection for his wife, while the vessel plunged into the bowels of the sea and then emerged like an encrusted coelacanth, the ocean pouring off its features, so that machinists, thrown against the red-hot engines, burned their arms, and the supposed cream of the cream of the East stumbled against pickpockets in the long corridors, and band members fell off the dais in the midst of ‘Blame It on My Youth’, as Cassius and I lay spreadeagled on the Promenade Deck, under the rain.

  Gradually the decks and the dining rooms repopulated. Miss Lasqueti came up to us with a smile to say the Head Steward had to enter ‘all unusual occurrences’ into a logbook, so perhaps we would appear in the ship’s records. There had also been a series of ‘misplacements’ on the ship. Croquet sets were missing, wallets had been lost during the storm. Our Captain appeared and told everyone that a gramophone belonging to a Miss Quinn-Cardiff had gone astray and could not be located, so any knowledge of its whereabouts would be appreciated. Cassius, who had recently been down in the hold to watch the engineers fix a section of bilge pipe, claimed the gramophone was being played there, loudly and constantly. The ship’s staff countered this trend of losses with an announcement that an earring had been found, somehow, in a lifeboat, and to please identify and claim it at the Purser’s Office. No mention was made of the Assistant Purser’s glass eye, though the intercom continued to obsessively list the few objects that had been recovered. ‘Found: One brooch. One lady’s brown felt hat. One journal belonging to Mr Berridge with unusual pictures.’

  The ship’s recovery from the storm and the better weather did mean one good thing. The prisoner was once again allowed his evening walk. We waited for him and eventually saw him standing there on the deck, shackled. He drew a huge breath – taking in all the energy that was in the night air around him – and then he released it, his face full of a sublime smile.

  Our ship steamed towards Aden.

  Landfall

  ADEN WAS TO be the first port of call, and during the day before our arrival there was a flurry of letter writing. It was a tradition to have one’s mail stamped in Aden, where it could be sent back to Australia and Ceylon or onward to England. All of us were longing for the sight of land, and as morning broke we lined up along the bow to watch the ancient city approach, mirage-like out of the arc of dusty hills. Aden had been a great harbour as early as the seventh century B.C. and was mentioned in the Old Testament. It was where Cain and Abel were buried, Mr Fonseka said, preparing us for the city he himself had never seen. It had cisterns built out of volcanic rock, a falcon market, an oasis quarter, an aquarium, a section of town given over to sail makers, and stores that contained merchandise from every corner of the globe. It would be our last footstep in the East. After Aden there would be just half a day’s sailing before we entered the Red Sea.

  The Oronsay cut its engines. We were not docked on the quay but in the outer harbour, at Steamer Point. If passengers wished to go ashore, they could be ferried into the city by barges, and these were already waiting beside our vessel. It was nine in the morning, and without the sea breezes that we were accustomed to, the air was heavy and hot.

  That morning the Captain had announced the rules about entering the city. Passengers were allowed just six hours of shore leave. Children could go only if accompanied by ‘a responsible male adult’. And women were forbidden to go at all. There was the expected outrage at this, especially among Emily and a group of her friends by the pool who wished to disembark and take on the citizens with their beauty. And Miss Lasqueti was annoyed, for she wished to study the local falcons. She had hoped to bring a few of them blindfolded on the ship. Cassius, Ramadhin and I were concerned mostly with finding someone who was not a responsible male, who could be easily distracted, to take us along. Mr Fonseka, in spite of his curiosity, had no plans to leave the ship. Then we heard that Mr Daniels was eager to visit the old oasis to study its vegetation, where, he said, every blade of grass was swollen with water, and thick as your finger. He was also interested in something called ‘khat’ that he had been talking to the ayurvedic about. We offered to help him transport any plants back to the ship, and he agreed, and we went with him down the rope ladders into a barge as quickly as we could.

  We were surrounded instantly by a new language. Mr Daniels was busy negotiating a fee with a hackney to transport us to where the great palms were. His authority seemed diminished by the crowd, so we left him there arguing and slipped away. A carpet salesman gestured to us, offered us tea, and we sat with him for a while, laughing whenever he laughed, nodding when he nodded. There was a small dog that he indicated he wished to give us, but we moved on.

  We began to argue about what to see. Ramadhin wanted to visit the aquarium that had been built a few decades earlier. It was obviously something Mr Fonseka had told him about. He was sullen about having to see the markets first. In any case we entered the narrow shops that sold seeds and needles, made coffins, and printed maps and pamphlets. Out on the street you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of any further hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.

  I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odour), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall. Here was a sterner world, with fewer luxuries. There was no overripe fruit in the gutters. There were in fact no gutters. It was a dusty landscape, as if water had not been invented. The only liquid was the cup of dark tea offered to us by the carpet salesman, along with a delicious, permanently remembered almond sweet. Even if this was a harbour city, the air held hardly a particle of dampness. You had to look closely, for what might be buried away in a pocket – a petite vial of oil for a woman’s hair, folded within paper, or a chisel wrapped in oilcloth to protect its blade from the dust in the air.

  We entered a concrete building at the edge of the sea. Ramadhin led the way through a maze of mostly subterranean tanks. The aquarium appeared deserted except for a number of garden eels from the Red Sea and a few colourless fish swimming in a foot of saltwater. Cassius and I climbed to another level, where there were taxidermic examples of marine life, lying in dust alongside whatever technical equipment was being stored – a hose, a small generator, a hand pump, a dustpan and brush. We gave the whole place five minutes and revisited all the stores we had been into, this time to say goodbye. The barber, who still had no other customers, gave me a head massage, pouring unknown oils into my hair.

  We reached the wharf before the deadline. Out of a too-late courtesy we decided to wait for Mr Daniels on the dock, Ramadhin wrapped up in a djellaba, and Cassius and I hugging ourselves in the brisk air coming from over the ocean. The barges rocked in the water, and we tried guessing which vessels were owned by pirates, f
or we had been told by a steward that piracy was common here. A cupped hand held up pearls. The afternoon’s catch of fish, strewn at our feet, more multicoloured than their indoor ancestors, sparkled whenever buckets of water were sloshed over them. The professions along this promontory belonged to the sea, and the merchants whose laughter and bartering surrounded us were the owners of the world. We realised we had seen just a small sliver of the city; we had only glanced through a keyhole into Arabia. We had missed the cisterns and wherever it was that Cain and Abel were buried, but it had been a day of intricate listening, of careful watching, all our conversations made up of gestures. The sky began to darken out at Steamer Point, or Tawahi, as the bargemen called it.

  Finally we saw Mr Daniels striding along the wharf. He was carrying a cumbersome plant in his arms, and was accompanied by two weak-looking men in white suits, each holding a miniature palm. He greeted us cheerfully – obviously he had not been too concerned, if at all, by our disappearance. The slight, moustached figures helping him were silent, and as one of them passed me the small palm, he wiped the sweat from his face, and winked, and smiled, and I saw it was Emily in men’s clothes. Beside her was a similarly disguised Miss Lasqueti. Cassius took the palm from her and we carried them onto the barge. Ramadhin got in with us and sat hunched over, bundled up in his cloak, during the ten-minute ride to the ship.

  Once back on board, the three of us made our way down to Ramadhin’s cabin, where he unfolded his djellaba to reveal the carpet salesman’s dog again.