Mrs Caliban and other stories Read online

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘At her worst around 8.15, or whenever it was.’

  He laughed. It had taken her years to say things that made him laugh and she still didn’t know what sort of remark was going to appeal to him. Sometimes he’d laugh for what seemed to be no reason at all, simply because he was in the mood.

  They went up to their rooms for a rest. She closed her eyes and couldn’t sleep. He got up, shuffled through the magazines and newspapers he’d already read, and said he couldn’t sleep, either. They spent the afternoon making love, instead.

  ‘Dress for dinner tonight?’ she asked as she arranged her clothes in the wardrobe.

  ‘Let’s go someplace simple. I’ve had enough of the well-tempered cuisine. Why don’t we just slouch around and walk in somewhere?’

  ‘You wouldn’t rather get the ptomaine at the end of the trip rather than straight away?’

  ‘Well, we’ve got lists of doctors and hospitals a mile long. We could get a shot for it.’

  ‘Will Michael be coming with us?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘Then I guess it’s safe enough.’

  ‘In a pinch, I could probably protect you, too.’

  ‘But you might get your suit creased.’ She made a funny face at him.

  ‘I love vacations,’ he told her. ‘You’re definitely at your best.’

  ‘I told you: I’m fine now.’

  ‘They say most of the jet-lag hangover is caused by dehydration, but the big difference I’ve noticed this time is the change in light.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice to be away for a while. There’ll be at least three new quarrels going by the time we get back, and they’ll be missing us a lot.’

  ‘We might take more time off sometime. A long trip. A year or so.’

  ‘Oh, Jamie, all the sweat. I couldn’t do it so soon again, setting up a whole new household and uprooting the children from all their friends.’

  ‘I didn’t mean I’d be working. I meant just you and me away from everybody in a lovely spot, somewhere like Tahiti. New Caledonia, maybe.’

  She said again, ‘Would Michael come too?’

  ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.’

  She pulled a dress out of the hanger and decided that it wasn’t too wrinkled to wear without having the hotel maid iron it.

  ‘I guess he’d have to,’ James said.

  ‘He wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘Kelvin? He never minds anything. He’d love to.’

  She’d have to think. If it had been Michael asking her to go away with him to the South Seas, she’d have gone like a shot. But the more dissatisfied she’d become with her life, the more reluctant she was to make any changes.

  She said, ‘Well, it’s something to think over. When would you want to make a decision about it?’

  ‘Three weeks, about then.’

  ‘All right. We’ll have to talk about the children. That’s the main thing.’

  She was still worrying about the children as they started towards the steps that led to the elevators. There was an entire puzzle-set of interlocking staircases carpeted in pale green and accompanied by carved white banisters that made the whole arrangement look like flights of ornamental balconies. If you wanted to, you could continue on down by the stairs. James always preferred to ride in elevators rather than walk. Exercise, in his opinion, was what sport was for; it wasn’t meant to move you from one place to another. Locomotion should be carried out with the aid of machines and servants.

  ‘Let me just call home again quick,’ she suggested.

  ‘You’ll wake them all up. It’s the wrong time there.’

  ‘Are you sure? I’m so mixed up myself, I can’t tell.’

  ‘We’ll phone when we get back from supper,’ he said.

  They had been on other trips together long ago, when the telephoning had become a genuine obsession. Now they had a routine for it: she mentioned it, he told her when, she believed him and agreed to abide by the times he designated. The whole game was a leftover from the unhappy years when she’d had no self-confidence and felt that she kept doing everything wrong.

  Michael stepped into the elevator after them. He moved behind them as they walked through the lobby.

  ‘Look,’ Flora said.

  The central fountain, which earlier in the day had been confined to three low jets, now sprayed chandelier-like cascades of brilliance into the three pools beneath. Tables and chairs had been set out around the display and five couples from the hotel were being served tea. As Flora and James watched, a group of children rushed for a table, climbed into the chairs and began to investigate the spoons and napkins. A uniformed nurse followed them.

  James said, ‘Like some tea?’

  ‘Unless Michael doesn’t –’

  ‘Sure,’ Michael said. ‘I’ll sit right over there.’ He headed towards the sofas and armchairs near the reception desk. Wherever they were, he always knew where to find the best spots for surveillance, and probably had a good idea where everybody else might choose to be, too. He’d been trained for all that. You couldn’t see from his walk or from the way his clothes fitted that he carried guns and a knife, but he did. Sometimes it seemed incredible to Flora that he had been through scenes of violence; he’d been in the marines for two years while James was finishing up college. His placid, law-abiding face gave no sign of the fact. But she thought how upsetting the experience must have been to him at first. Even killing didn’t come naturally – especially killing: somebody had to teach it to you. And boys weren’t really cruel or bloodthirsty unless they had a background of brutality.

  Michael’s background, she knew, was quite ordinary. He was a child of an undergardener and one of the parlourmaids at the house. Once she’d asked him how he’d managed to get through his military training and he’d told her that he’d been lucky: he’d been with a group of boys who’d become really good friends. And, as for violence, he’d added, ‘You got to be objective, say to yourself this is completely a professional thing. Like render unto Caesar. You know?’ She had nodded and said yes, but had had no idea what he’d been talking about.

  They sat close to the fountain to enjoy it but not so near as to be swept by the fine spray that clouded its outpourings. James had also taken care to station himself, and her, at a reasonable distance from the children, who looked like more than a match for their wardress.

  Their nearest companions were a man and woman who might have been on a business trip or celebrating an early retirement. They gave the impression of being a couple who had been married for a long time. The woman looked older than the man. She had taken two extra chairs to hold her shopping bags and as soon as the tea was poured out she began to rummage through her papers and packages. She looked up and caught Flora’s eye. Flora smiled. The woman said, ‘I couldn’t resist. It’s all so pretty and the prices are just peanuts. Aren’t they, Desmond?’

  The man’s eyes flicked to the side. ‘We’re going to need an extra plane to take it all back,’ he said. His head turned to the stairway and the main door, warily, as if looking for eavesdroppers.

  ‘Not here,’ his wife told him.

  ‘Only damn part of this hotel they let you smoke a pipe is in your own room. Place must be run by the anti-tobacco league.’

  ‘Do you good,’ his wife said. She began to talk about silks and jade and porcelain. Flora guessed before the woman started to quote numbers that they were going to be several price-brackets under anything she and James would have bought. On the other hand, like most rich people, she loved hunting down bargains.

  The couple, whose name was Dixon, went on to tell their opinions of the city and of the country in general. They regretted, they said, not having made provision for trips outside town to – for example – the big flower festival that had been held the week before, or just the ordinary market mornings. They were leaving the next day. Flora saw James relax as he heard them say it: there wasn’t going to be any danger of involv
ement. He began to take an interest in the list of places and shops they recommended. Flora was halfway through her second cup of tea and could tell that James would want to leave soon, when Mrs Dixon said, ‘What I regret most of all, of course, is that we never got to see the goddess.’

  ‘Oh,’ Flora said. ‘At the festival?’

  ‘At her temple.’

  ‘A statue?’

  ‘No, no. That girl. You know – the one they train from childhood, like the Lama in Tibet.’

  ‘Not like that,’ her husband said.

  ‘Well, I just couldn’t face standing in line for all that time in the heat. But now I really wish I’d given myself more of a push.’

  ‘I haven’t heard about the goddess,’ Flora admitted. James said that he’d read about it somewhere, he thought, but only remembered vaguely. And he hadn’t realized that the custom had to do with this part of the world.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Mr Dixon told him, and launched into the history of the goddess, who was selected every few years from among thousands of candidates. The child was usually four or five years old when chosen, had to be beautiful, to possess several distinct aesthetic features such as the shape of the eyes and ears and the overall proportion of the limbs, and could have no blemish. ‘Which is quite an unusual thing to be able to find,’ he said. ‘Then –’

  ‘Then,’ Mrs Dixon interrupted, ‘they train her in all the religious stuff and they also teach her how to move – sort of like those temple dancers, you know: there’s a special way of sitting down and getting up, and holding out your fingers, and so on. And it all means something. Something religious. There are very strict rules she’s got to obey about everything – what she can eat and drink, all that. Oh, and she should never bleed. If she cuts herself – I forget whether she has to quit or not.’

  ‘She just has to lie low for a few days, I think,’ Mr Dixon said.

  ‘And she can never cry – did I say that?’

  ‘And never show fear.’

  ‘Then at puberty –’

  ‘She’s out on her can and that’s the whole ball game. They go and choose another one.’

  ‘So people just drive out to her temple to look at her,’ Flora asked, ‘as if she’s another tourist attraction?’

  ‘Oh no, dear,’ Mrs Dixon said. ‘They consult her. They take their troubles to her and she gives them the solution. It’s like an oracle. And I think you donate some small amount for the upkeep of the temple. They don’t mind tourists, but it isn’t a show – it’s a real religious event.’

  Mr Dixon said, ‘She’s very cultivated, so it seems. Speaks different languages and everything.’

  James asked, ‘What happens to her afterwards?’

  ‘Oh, that’s the joke. She used to spend the rest of her life in seclusion as the ex-goddess. But this last time, the girl took up with a young fellow, and now she’s married to him and –’

  ‘– and there’s the most terrific scandal,’ Mrs Dixon said happily. ‘It’s really turned things upside-down. I guess it’s like a priest getting married to a movie star. They can’t get over it.’

  ‘Matter of fact, I wouldn’t want to be in that girl’s shoes.’

  ‘Why?’ Flora asked.

  Mr Dixon shrugged. ‘A lot of people are mad as hell. They’ve been led to expect one thing and now this other thing is sprung on them. They’re used to thinking of their goddess as completely pure, and also truly sacred. I guess it can’t look right for her to revert to being human all of a sudden, just like the rest of us. See what I mean?’

  Flora nodded.

  ‘She’s broken the conventions,’ James said, which didn’t seem to Flora nearly such a good explanation as Mr Dixon’s, but she smiled and nodded again.

  *

  They took a long time deciding where they wanted to eat their evening meal. In the beginning it was too much fun looking around to want to go inside; they had discovered the night life of the streets, full of people going about ordinary business that might have taken place indoors during the daytime: there were open-air barber shops, dress stalls where customers could choose their materials and be measured for clothes; shops that stocked real flowers and also stands that sold bouquets made out of feathers and silk.

  ‘No wonder Mrs Dixon had all those piles of packages,’ Flora said. ‘Everything looks so nice.’

  ‘Under this light,’ James warned. ‘I bet it’s pretty tacky in daylight.’

  Michael grunted his assent.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s fun?’ she asked.

  ‘Very colourful,’ he said. She wasn’t disappointed in his answer. It gave her pleasure just to be walking beside him.

  She would have liked to eat in one of the restaurants that were no more than just a few tables and chairs stuck out on the sidewalk. James vetoed the suggestion. They moved back to the beginning of richer neighbourhoods and he suddenly said, ‘That one.’

  In front of them was a building that looked like a joke: dragons and pagodas sprouting everywhere from its roof-tops. The lower floor was plate glass, which reassured the three of them – that looked modern and therefore unromantic and probably, they expected, hygienic. ‘We can rough it for once,’ James said. Through the downstairs windows they could see rows of crowded booths, people sitting and eating. Most of the patrons appeared to be tourists – another good sign.

  They entered and were seated all on the same side of a table. Flora had hoped to be put between the two men, but the waiter had positioned Michael at James’s far side. Opposite her an old man was eating noodles from a bowl. He stared determinedly downward.

  They looked at the menu. As James ordered for them, a young couple came up and were shown to the remaining places; he had a short beard and wore a necklace consisting of a single wooden bead strung on a leather thong; she had a long pigtail down her back. They were both dressed in T-shirts and bluejeans and carried gigantic orange back-packs. They made a big production of taking off the packs and resting them against the outside of the booth. When the old man on the inside had finished eating and wanted to get out, they had to go through the whole routine again. Once they were settled, they stared across the table contemptuously at the fine clothes the others were wearing. They seemed to be especially incredulous over James’s outfit, one which he himself would have considered a fairly ordinary linen casual suit for the tropics.

  James switched from English to French and began to tell Flora about New Caledonia. It meant that Michael was excluded from the conversation, but he knew that this was one of James’s favourite methods of detaching himself from company he didn’t want to be associated with. It only worked in French because Flora’s limited mastery of other languages wouldn’t permit anything else. James had always been good at learning new languages. As a child he had even made up a language that he and Michael could use to baffle grown-up listeners. Occasionally they spoke it even now. Flora had figured out that it must be some variation of arpy-darpy talk, but it always went so fast that she could never catch anything.

  The back-packers spoke English. He was American, she Australian. Their names were Joe and Irma. They spent their whole time at the table discussing the relative merits of two similar articles they had seen in different shops. Some part of the objects had been made out of snakeskin and, according to Irma, one of them was ‘pretty ratty-looking’; on the other one, so Joe claimed, the so-called snake had been an obvious fake, definitely plastic.

  ‘It’s like those beads you got,’ he said. ‘Supposed to be ivory, and you can see the join where they poured it into the mould in two halves and then stuck them together. Why can’t you tell? How can you miss seeing it? If you keep on spending money like this –’

  Irma muttered, ‘Well, it’s my money.’

  ‘We should be keeping some by for emergencies,’ he said. She sulked for the rest of the meal. She chewed her food slowly and methodically. Flora wished the girl had picked everything up, thrown it all over her companion and told him to go to hell. He was
staring around with disapproving interest at the other diners. He wasn’t going to feel guilty about hurting his girlfriend; he hadn’t even noticed her play for sympathy.

  Flora said in French, ‘Could you really go for a year without work?’

  ‘Sure. I’d work on something else,’ James said. ‘We’d get a nice boat, sail around.’ He added, ‘The food isn’t too bad here.’

  ‘Wait till tomorrow to say it,’ she told him.

  *

  The weather next morning looked like being the start of another wonderful day. All the days were wonderful in that climate at the right time of year. They both felt fine. Michael too said he was OK. Flora called home.

  She got Margaret on the line, who said, ‘We’ve missed you. Anna-Louise is on the warpath again.’

  ‘What about?’

  Anna-Louise’s voice came in on an extension, saying, ‘That isn’t Margaret getting her story in first, is it? Flora?’

  ‘Hi,’ Flora said. ‘How are you all?’

  ‘The natives are restless, as usual.’

  Margaret tried to chip in but was told by Anna-Louise to get off the line. There was a click.

  ‘Children all right?’ Flora asked.

  ‘Couldn’t be better.’

  ‘Are they there?’ She waved James over. They spent nearly fifteen minutes talking to the children, who said again how much they loved the paper doll books and how all their friends thought they were great and wanted some too. James began to look bored and to make motions that the conversation should stop. He leaned over Flora. ‘We’ve got to hang up now,’ he said into the mouthpiece.

  They were the second couple into the breakfast room. ‘Are we that early?’ she asked.

  He checked his watch. ‘Only a little. It’s surprising how many people use their holidays for sleeping.’

  ‘I guess a lot of them have jet-lag, too. That’s the trouble with beautiful places – they’re all so far away.’

  He spread out the maps as Michael was seated alone at a table for two several yards beyond them. Flora had them both in view, Michael and James. She felt her face beginning to smile. At that moment she couldn’t imagine herself returning from the trip. The children and relatives could stay at the other end of the telephone.