The Cat's Table Page 9

  We came on deck an hour later. It was already dark, and the lights on the Oronsay were brighter than those on land. The ship had still not moved. In the dining room there were loud conversations about the day’s adventures. Only Ramadhin and Cassius and I kept silent. We were so excited by our smuggling of the dog onto the boat we knew that if we spoke just one syllable, we’d slide uncontrollably into the whole story. We had spent the past chaotic hour trying to bathe the animal in Ramadhin’s narrow shower stall, avoiding the swipe of its claws. It was clear the creature had never met carbolic soap in his life. We’d dried the dog in Ramadhin’s bedsheet and left him in the cabin while we went up to eat.

  We listened to the stories as we sat at the Cat’s Table, with people interrupting one another. The women were silent. And the three of us were silent. Emily passed by our table and bent down to ask me if I had had a good day. I asked her politely what she had done while we had gone ashore, and she said she had spent the day ‘carrying things’, then winked at me and went off laughing. One of the things we had missed while walking around Aden was the ‘Gully Gully man’, who had rowed up to the Oronsay and performed magic tricks. Apparently his canoe was partially boarded up so he could stand on a sort of stage while he made chickens appear from his clothing. By the end of his act there were over twenty chickens fluttering around him. There were many Gully Gully men, we were told, and with luck there would be another at Port Said.

  There was a shudder during dessert as the boat’s engines started. We all got up and went out to the railings to watch the departure, our castle slipping away slowly from the thin horizon of lights, back into the great darkness.

  WE GUARDED THE dog that night. He was fearful of our sudden movements, until Ramadhin managed to bring him into his bunk and fall asleep with his arms around him. When the three of us woke the next morning we had already entered the Red Sea, and it was during this passage, on the first day steaming north, that something astonishing happened.

  It had always been difficult to penetrate the barrier that separated us from First Class. Two polite and determined stewards either let you through or turned you away. But even they could not stop Ramadhin’s small dog. He had leapt out of Cassius’s arms and bolted from the cabin. We ran up and down the empty hallways looking for him. Within moments the little fellow must have emerged into the sunlight of B Deck and run beside the railings, raced perhaps into the lower ballroom, up its gilded staircase, and past the two stewards into First Class. They managed to grab him, but soon he was free again. He had eaten none of the food we had offered him, which we’d smuggled out of the dining room in our trouser pockets, so perhaps he was looking for something to eat.

  No one was able to corner him. Passengers saw him for just a blurred moment. He did not seem at all interested in humans. Well-dressed women crouched down, calling out high-pitched, artificial-sounding greetings, but he charged past them all without a pause and into the cherrywood cave of the library, and disappeared somewhere beyond that. Who could know what he was after? Or what he was feeling, in that no doubt pounding heart? He was just a hungry or scared dog on this claustrophobic ship whose alleyways suddenly became cul-de-sacs, as he ran farther and farther from any sign of daylight. Eventually the creature made his way trotting along a mahogany-panelled, carpeted hall and slipped through a half-open door into a master suite, as someone left it carrying a full tray. The dog jumped up onto an oversized bed, where Sir Hector de Silva lay, and bit down into his throat.

  ALL NIGHT THE Oronsay had been within the protected waters of the Red Sea. At daybreak we passed the small islands off Jizan, and we could see in the distance the hazy presence of the oasis town of Abha, the sunlight revealing a glint off a piece of glass or a white wall. Then the town dissolved under the sun and was gone from our sight.

  By breakfast the news of Sir Hector’s death had already raced over the ship, quickly followed by whispers that there would have to be a burial at sea. But apparently a funeral could not take place in coastal waters so the body would have to wait for the open spaces of the Mediterranean. Next came the more startling news of how he had died, followed by the story we had already heard from the ayurvedic about the spell put on him by the Buddhist priest. Ramadhin reasoned therefore it was fate that had killed him, and not us, because we had brought the dog on board. And as the little creature was never to be seen again, we came to believe the smuggled dog was a phantom.

  During lunch most of the questions were to do with how a dog had boarded the ship. And where was it now? Miss Lasqueti was certain the Captain was in serious trouble. A lawsuit could be brought against him for negligence. Then Emily came over to our table and demanded to know if we had brought the dog onto the ship, and we responded with an attempted look of horror, which made her laugh. The only person showing no interest in the opinions around him was Mr Mazappa, who sat mulling over his oxtail soup. His musical fingers were for once still on the tablecloth. He seemed suddenly alone and incapable of talk, and he became my preoccupation during the meal, during all of the talk and conjectures about Sir Hector. I noticed Miss Lasqueti was also regarding him, her head lowered, gazing at him through the fence of her eyelashes. At one point she even put her hand over those still fingers, but he pulled his away. No, being within the stricter confines of the Red Sea was not an easy time for some of those at our table. Perhaps emotionally we felt landlocked after all the freedom that came with the wilder oceans we had crossed. And Death existed after all, or a more complicated idea of Fate. Doors were closing, it seemed, on our adventurous travels.

  I WOKE THE next morning without the usual desire to meet with my friends. I heard Ramadhin’s familiar knock, but I did not answer. Instead I took my time dressing, then went up to the deck alone. The desert light had been there for hours, and we passed Jeddah at about eight-thirty. On the other side of the ship passengers with binoculars were attempting to catch a glimpse of the Nile somewhere deep inland. They were all adults on the deck, no one I knew, and I felt without any connection. I tried to remember the cabin number for Emily, who was never an early riser, and I went there.

  I was fondest of Emily when we were not surrounded by other people. In those moments, I always felt I learned from her. I knocked a couple of times before she opened the door, wrapped in a dressing gown. It was about nine by now, I had been awake for hours, but she had still been in bed.

  ‘Oh, Michael.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And she stalked back and slipped under the sheets, simultaneously discarding the robe, both done, it seemed, in the same movement.

  ‘We are still in the Red Sea.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We went past Jeddah. I saw it.’

  ‘If you are going to stay, make me some coffee, will you …?’

  ‘Do you want a cigarette?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘When you do, can I light it?’

  I stayed with her all morning. I do not know why I was confused about things. I was eleven. One doesn’t know much then. I told her about the dog, how we had brought it on board. I was lying beside her on the bed, holding one of her unlit cigarettes, pretending to smoke, and she reached over and turned my head towards her.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I mean, don’t tell anyone else about this – what you just told me.’

  ‘We think it might be a ghost,’ I replied. ‘The spell’s ghost.’

  ‘I don’t care. You must not mention it again. Promise me.’

  I said I wouldn’t.

  So began a tradition between us. That I would at certain moments in my life tell Emily things that I would not tell others. And later in our lives, much later, she would talk to me about what she had been going through. All through my life, Emily would be distinct from everyone I knew.

  She touched the top of my head in a gesture that essentially managed to say, ‘Oh, let’s forget about it. Don’t worry.’ But I didn’t turn away, and kept watching her.

&nb
sp; ‘What?’ She raised her eyebrow.

  ‘I don’t know, I feel strange. Being here. What will happen when I go to England? Will you be with me?’

  ‘You know I won’t.’

  ‘But I don’t know anyone there.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘But I don’t know her like I know you.’

  ‘Yes you do.’

  I put my head back on the pillow and looked up, no longer watching her.

  ‘Mr Mazappa says I am peculiar.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re not peculiar, Michael. Besides, that’s not so bad.’ She leaned over and kissed me. ‘Now, make me some coffee. There’s the cup. You can use hot water from the tap.’ I got up and looked around.

  ‘There’s no coffee here.’

  ‘Then order some.’

  I pressed the intercom button and, while I waited, studied the photograph of the Queen of England watching us from the wall.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Some coffee for cabin three-sixty. Miss Emily de Saram.’

  When the steward arrived, I met him at the door, and when he left I brought the tray over for her. She half sat up, then remembered the robe and reached for it. But what I saw hit me at the base of my heart. There was a tremor within me, something that would be natural for me later but at that moment was a mixture of thrill and vertigo. Suddenly there was a wide gulf between Emily’s existence and mine, and I would never be able to cross it.

  If there was a desire of sorts in me, then where did it come from? Did it belong to another? Or was it a part of me? It was as if a hand from the desert that surrounded us had reached in and touched me. For the rest of my life it would recur, but in Emily’s cabin it was my first brush with the long variety of it. Yet where had it come from? And was it a pleasure or a sadness, this life inside me? It was as if with its existence I was lacking something essential, like water. I put the tray down and climbed back onto Emily’s high bed. I felt in that moment that I had been alone for years. I had existed too cautiously with my family, as though there had been shards of glass always around us.

  And now I was going to England, where my mother had been living for three or four years. I don’t remember how long she had been there. Even now, all these years later, I have not remembered that quite significant detail, the period of separation, as if, as for an animal, there was a limited knowledge of the span of missing time. Three days or three weeks is the same for a dog, they say. But when I return from any period of absence there is from my dog a courteous instant recognition as we embrace and wrestle on the carpeted floor of the front hall; and yet, when I did meet my mother eventually, on the docks at Tilbury, she had already become ‘another’, a stranger, whose fold I would cautiously enter. There was no doglike embrace or tussle or familiar smell. And I think this may have been because of what occurred with Emily – our distantly related selves – that morning in that ochre-coloured cabin, shuttered away from the dazzle of the Red Sea and the desert that stretched away for miles.

  I knelt on that bed on my hands and knees and shook. Emily leaned forward and embraced me, in so soft a gesture I felt barely touched, an envelope of loose air between us. My hot tears that had come from my darkness rubbed on her cool upper arm.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Whatever small props of necessary defence I’d surrounded myself with, which contained and protected me, and which had marked the outline of me, were no longer there.

  Perhaps we talked then. I don’t remember. I was conscious of the easy quietness around me, my breathing eventually at the same calm pace of her breathing.

  I must have fallen asleep for a moment, and woke when Emily, not moving away from me, reached her other hand over her shoulder in a backstroke gesture for the cup of coffee. And soon I heard the quick swallows, my ear against her neck. Her other hand was still gripping mine as no one had ever done, convincing me of a security that probably did not exist.

  Adults are always prepared for the gradual or sudden swerve in an oncoming story. Like the Baron, Mr Mazappa would get off the boat when our ship reached Port Said and disappear from our lives – he had been overpowered by something in the few days before reaching Aden. And Mr Daniels would become aware that Emily had no interest in him or his world of plants. And the millionaire’s death from his second dog bite was more tragic than exciting. Even our unfortunate Captain would continue his journey and find more chaos among his human cargo. They all must have been imprisoned or fated in some way. But for me, in that cabin, it was the first time I looked at myself with a distant eye, just as the neutral eyes of the distant young Queen had watched me all morning.

  When I left Emily’s room (and there was to be no repeat of this intimacy), I knew I would always be linked to her, by some underground river or a seam of coal or silver – well, let us say silver, because she has always been important to me. In the Red Sea, I must have fallen in love with her. Though when I pulled away, the magnet of it, whatever it was, had gone.

  How long was I in what felt like that sky-high bed with Emily? When we’ve met it is never mentioned. She may not even recall how much of my grief she took away or held on to, or for how long. I had never known the grip of another, or the smell of an arm that had just emerged from sleep. I had never wept beside someone who also excited me in a way I could not fathom. But there must have been an understanding in her as she looked down at me, and in her small courteous gestures.

  Writing this, I do not want it to end until I can understand it better, in a way that would calm me even now, all these years later. For instance, how far did our intimacy go? I don’t know. It was, I believe, nothing of much importance to Emily. It was probably a casual if genuine kindness she gave me – and saying that takes nothing away from her gesture. ‘You should go now,’ she said, and rose from the bed and walked to the bathroom and closed the door behind her.

  Broken heart, you

  timeless wonder.

  What a small

  place to be.

  ‘MY DREAMS,’ EMILY says, leaning forward across the table that separates us. ‘You would not want to know them, they are— I am surrounded by their darkness, the incessant danger. Clouds crash against each other, loudly. Does this happen to you?’

  We were in London, some years later.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I rarely dream. I don’t seem to. Perhaps they emerge as daydreams.’

  ‘Every night I go into them, and I wake up afraid.’

  What was strange about this fear, almost guilt, was Emily’s ease with others during the day. It felt to me there was never darkness in her, there was instead the desire to comfort. Who or what caused this darkness in her? Now and then there would be a sense of separateness, when she seemed to give up on the world around her. And at those times she had an unreachable face. So for a while there was her ‘distance’. But when she returned to you, it was a gift.

  Early on she had confessed a pleasure in danger. She was right about that. It was there like a joker, something that did not quite fit in her nature. There were always to be discoveries about her, some of them as small as that wink on the pier in Aden when she wanted me to guess at something. But a good part of her world, as I would come to know later, long after our time on the Oronsay, she kept to herself, and I have come to realise the gentleness of manner I spoke of must have grown naturally out of a disguised life.

  Kennels

  I WOKE THE next morning to find Mr Hastie still in bed, reading a novel. ‘Good morning, young man,’ he said, hearing me jump down from my top bunk. ‘Off with your pals?’

  There had been no card game the night before, and I was curious as to why. Although since the millionaire’s death, many schedules and habits seemed to have been altered. Now Mr Hastie proceeded to inform me he had been relieved of his duties. He was no longer in charge of the kennels. The Captain had been looking for someone to blame and now believed it was one of the hounds from Mr Hastie’s kennels that had escaped its cage, slipped into the Emperor Class cab
in, and bitten Hector de Silva to death. Since the man’s death, a curious thing was occurring. The de Silva knighthood seemed to have fallen away, and was no longer mentioned. People began referring to him as ‘the dead man’. The knighthood was turning out to be as mortal as the body.

  I stood in front of Mr Hastie, listening with sympathy to this false accusation, but did not say a word. The little mongrel from Aden had not been found. The demotion of Mr Hastie meant he would now be on paint-and-varnish duty in the noonday sun, while his kennel assistant and fellow bridge player, Mr Invernio, took charge of the dogs. ‘I wonder how he is getting on with the O’Neal Weimaraner?’ Mr Hastie murmured.

  Later that day, after a random search for Ramadhin’s dog, the three of us strolled over to the kennels. Out on B Deck, along their twenty-yard runway, were several dogs moving slowly, as if with sunstroke, blank looks on their faces. We climbed over the barrier and walked into the kennels, where every dog was barking to be let out. Invernio was trying to read one of Hastie’s books in the midst of the racket. He recognised me when we came up to him, having seen my head peer down at him from the top bunk, and I introduced him to Cassius and Ramadhin. He put down The Bhagavad Gita and walked around the kennels with us, flinging pieces of meat at those who were his favourites. Then he brought out the Weimaraner. He removed the collar, stroked the grey egg-smooth head, and ordered the dog to walk away from him, to the far end of the mote-filled room. The dog was not eager to leave Invernio’s company but followed the commands of ‘Get! Get! Get! Get!’ walking away silently, its long legs tossing themselves to the left and to the right. At the far end of the kennel the dog turned and waited. ‘Hola!’ Invernio yelled, and the dog charged towards him in a slim gallop and when two yards from him leapt for his head. All four paws simultaneously landed on Invernio’s shoulders and chest, hard enough that the kennel keeper fell back, the dog overpowering him with scrabbling claws and loud barking.