Earthly Powers (5 page)

       "Sorry, dear. But you must admit it's a bit comic, going down, doing his duty. Nurse Walt. A whale of a time in the war."

       "It is not to be laughed at," cried Sciberras. "We did our duty. We did not go down. Except to the air-raid shelter."

       "Yes yes yes," said the Poet Laureate, somewhat unhappy, but not half as unhappy as I. "We're all very proud of you, yes yes. The George Cross and all that. Jolly brave people, you Maltese."

       "Who is he, then?" Geoffrey said. "This George Cross character, I mean."

       "It is not a person but a thing," Sciberras shouted. "For valour in the Second World War, the whole island. I wrote a sonetto—"

       "In Italian too?" said Wignall. "Jolly forgiving of you."

       "No relation to Double Cross," Geoffrey said, helping himself to his fifth or sixth whisky mac, "the bugger who always came twice? And while we're on notable personalities, did you ever meet Joe Plush, the man with the velvet—"

       "I said stop it, Geoffrey," I ground out. "Stop this nonsense at once."

       "Or Chunky, the man with the pineapple ballocks?"

       "Not heard that one before," Wignall lied. "Jolly good."

       "The names," Sciberras called, "are not familiar to me."

       "Oh Jesus bloody Belial Beelzebub, Lord of the Open Flies. Where's your bloody sense of bloody humour?"

       Ovington kept smiling, pipe gripped hard. His wife came in, wrinkling jollily, to say: "Grub's up, chaps."

       "Bring that in," Ovington said to Geoffrey, pipe gripped hard.

       "Not worth it, old boy old boy," and he drained it. "Now lead me to the costly vintages."

       "Maltese wines tonight," Ovington said. "You did say you wanted to try some, Dawson. Improved a lot lately."

CHAPTER 6

Geoffrey quietened down when the imported cod fillets were brought on, and this had much to do with the Maltese wine. He insulted everybody during the avocado course, and the insults were taken with good humour by all except me and Sciberras. First he ribbed young John Ovington about his presumed philosophy of life: "I mean, we can't all be bloody parasites, can we? Got to be a host, hasn't there, to be parasitic on, right? So it won't work for everybody, so that means there's got to be a parasitic elite, which doesn't change the bloody world much, does it? Too right, it doesn't, sport." To the Mother Hubbard girl, whose name seemed to be Janie: "It becomes you, it does really, that chunk of filthy butter muslin, but then you're the sort of girl who could get away with anything, even having one tit bigger than the other." He did a comic oenophile act with the bottle of Marsovin: "Oh, I'd definitely say those raisins came from Grima's backyard not Fenech's, the north side where that diabetic tomcat goes for a piss, wouldn't you?" He told Sciberras that the Maltese language sounded like somebody sicking it all up, and no bleeding wonder, mate. It was ill-advised of him to make the similitude. He was telling the Poet Laureate that he ought to give the Maltese and the expats, if any of the sods turned up, and he wouldn't blame the buggers if they didn't, a recital of Great Filthy Poems, instead of the muck about sniffing little girls' knickers that he was probably going to drone out, when his colour changed radically. Everybody noticed it but only Sciberras remarked on it.

       "You are now very bloody green, mate," he shouted. He was no fool, despite the sonetti and the not going down. Subdued Geoffrey got up, saying nothing, and left the table with speed but dignity.

       "You know where it is," called Ovington. To me, who had said nothing, he said, "Not at all, think nothing of it. He's a good chap, I know. Overworking, a little overexcited perhaps. It happens to the best of us."

       "He hates us," Scriberras declared, with a bit of cod on his tongue. "This I can see. He hates both Malta and the Maltese. He thinks we are a small island and an inferior people."

       "You are, you know," Wignall said. "A small island, I mean. No getting away from that."

       "It is no reason to despise or for hate. 'This precious jewel set in the sea.'"

       "Jolly good, very apt bit of quotation." Wignall finished his fish. To me he suddenly said, "When are you coming home?"

       Home. Another of those damned emotive words. I must give up seeing people, I told myself, sniffing the tears back. All the old bitch can do these days is lay on the weepy-weepies. Self-pity, you know. "I doubt if I'll see England again," I said. "I'll perhaps have my cremation there. Or in France. I don't know. I suppose I'd better start making up my mind."

       "You look jolly fit to me," Ann Ovington said. "Ah, talking of ah incinceration—" She meant the pork chops that were now being brought in by a moustached Maltese matron, each chop topped with a pineapple slice. She saw that that was probably tactless.

       Wignall said, nodding, grinning at me, "Chunky, eh? I hadn't heard that one."

       "A sort of anthropophagous aura hovering." I smiled, consciously thinly. Wignall was delighted.

       He said, "Yes yes yes. Significant perhaps that the Real Presence is on its way to becoming the Real Absence. Except for a few like me. It must be because secular cannibalism is on its way in." Sciberras looked bewildered, chomping away at his chop. "I refer," Wignall told him, "to the population explosion and so on. Cans of Mensch in the supermarkets." Sciberras was still bewildered. "Kosher for those who want it. Nothing in Leviticus or Deuteronomy against it, is there? Or Munch, perhaps. Or Manch, even. But that sounds like canned Manchurian." He was disclosing a talent submerged in a nobler vocation. "Or a whole line of dressed meats presided over by Ann Thropp. Like Sara Lee, you know," he said to Sciberras, who did not know. I noticed that the two young people of the party took only vegetables. This would not, of course, be Wignall putting them off; this would be an aspect of their lifestyle, as it was called. The girl Janie, who was on my left, said: "You're the Great Writer, aren't you? What do you write?"

       "I'm retired now. Very old, as you can see."

       "What sort of things did you write when you did write?" She had quite clean fingernails and a slight venerean strabismus, rather like—No. Wait.

       "Novels, plays, short stories. Some of the stories were filmed. Did you ever see Fitful Fever or Down Came a Blackbird? Or Duet or Terzetto?" No to all those, and I couldn't really blame her. "Do you like reading?"

       "I like Hermann Hesse."

       "Good God," I said, surprised. "There's hope for us all. I knew Hesse."

       "You knew him?" Her jaw dropped, showing half-chewed greens. She goggled and then cried across the table, "Johnny. He knew Hermann Hesse."

       "Who did?" He had his own family-size bottle of Coca-Cola to help the greens down.

       "Him here. Mr er—"

       I was not quite all things to all men, but I had plenty to offer: for the Catholics a potential saint as good as in the family; for the young a much overrated German novelist of my acquaintance. And there was always my own work for those who cared for that sort of thing.

       "Hesse is great," John Ovington pronounced.

       "You've read him in German?" asked cunning Wignall.

       "He's above language," John Ovington pronounced.

       "There I must respectfully beg to differ," said Wignall. "No writer is above language. Writers are language. Each is his own language." I was impressed to hear a slight tremor of what I took to be vocational conviction.

       "It's the ideas," the boy told us. "They count, not the words."

       "And how about Shakespeare's ideas? Damn it, Shakespeare had no ideas worth talking about." Trembling more, rightly.

       "Perhaps that's why we don't read him." The boy swigged straight from his family-size bottle.

       "Dig is what you used to say, dear," wrinkled his mother.

       "Following," said his father, smilingly chewing, "the behest of the bard himself. 'Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear to dig the dust enclosed here.'" He looked round for approval and got a sort of grin from me. Sciberras looked blankly from face to talking face, eating heartily though.

       "A dead scene," the boy said. He made the gesture of being willing to pass his bottle across to Janie, but she shook her locks at him.

       "A dead shakescene," smiled his father. Wignall's jowls shook as he prepared unguestly reproof, outrage, disgust, something, so I got in quickly with, addressing Sciberras out of politeness: "He was a nice rather unhappy old man when I saw him last. It must be all of fifteen years ago. In Lausanne or Geneva or somewhere. He was as old then as I am now. He didn't seem to care much for his work any more. He wondered if he'd done the right thing in getting out of Germany and concentrating on fake orientalism and higher games."

       "What higher games?" Janie asked and, simultaneously, John pronounced, "I'm quite sure he didn't say fake."

       "Das Glasperlenspiel," I said, "for which he got the Nobel. And no, he didn't say fake, he said ersatz."

       "This cannot be so," Sciberras said, and I could see he thought I was referring to Shakespeare.

       "The East, the East," in a manner wailed Wignall, and I feared he was starting to recite a poem. But then, "You think you've wrung the West dry, you kids."

       "Wrung us dry," John said, pleased, smirking.

       "What do you know about the East?" I said, angry at the smirk, also at last feeling the sugary acid of the wine bite, sickened by Geoffrey's behaviour and by a birthday that was going to end miserably, remembering too late that the Ovington boy had been born in Kuala Lumpur and now undoubtedly to be told that the girl Janie, smirking "I was born in New Delhi."

       "Oh, it was the sahib's East for both of them," Ovington admitted. "I should have mentioned that Janie's father is the Assistant High Commissioner. This new orientalism has nothing to do with being children of the Foreign Service. I think they're partly right, I think they've been let down—"

       "Oh my God," Wignall said, "who hasn't been let down? But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold." I felt sure that he must have written a poem on some such theme. Nay, perhaps his entire oeuvre was erected on it. Anger I could not well explain started to bubble in me. I was about to say, angrily, that we'd all let down our past, our culture, our faith when Sciberras saved me from public tears by speaking quite quietly over his emptied plate.

       He said, "I will tell you this. It is as follows. It is that we must look for what we want where we are and not in some other place." I gaped at that good sense as if this comic Maltese had turned into an oracle. Then I saw him as a symbol that, had I still been writing, would have been of immense potency: the whole incarnated Mediterranean-Phoenician, Arabic-speaking, inheritor of Greek philosophy, Roman stoicism, a provincial faith promulgated in Aramaic that had built its own empire. "It is also that we do not sneer at duty and at the faith we are taught at home."

       Ah, that terrible emotive trinity. The force of the words was softened by the comic Mediterranean accent, otherwise the tears that started would have flooded onto the congealed sauce on my plate. And then we were all saved, except the children, who were past saving, by the appearance of the birthday cake, brought in by Ann Ovington herself, its shape that of an open book, three candles only on top out of, I presumed, deference to my shortness of breath. Sciberras, beaming now, had plenty of breath. The children la-lahed "Happy Birthday to You" with a knife-on-bottle punctuation from John Ovington while Sciberras, a smiling moon of delight, blew out and commenced cutting.

       He said, "Where is our friend? Perhaps now he will be less bloody green."

       "I think," I said, starting to rise, "I'd better go and—"

       "Leave it to me," Ovington said, quicker. Wignall nodded and nodded, putting crumbs of the cake to his mouth, smiling down some long vista of the years at perhaps some fateful childhood party in Hampstead or an as yet uncorrupted Golders Green. I settled myself again and brought out, thinking to give pleasure to their author, the lines I had read that afternoon: "But then I saw your tongue protrude To catch the wisp of angel's food. Ah God! I quailed beneath the shock: Your something something party frock—"

       "Shut it," he cried. Shock was right. "Shut it, shut it. It's nothing to you except a chunk of—" His eyes now were the ones to fill. "All over, it's all over. Sorry," he sniffed to his hostess, who wrinkled painfully though not in bewilderment: she had entertained plenty of authors in her time. And then to me: "Sorry. It's just that—Growing old isn't easy," he said loudly to the children, who had been crumbling cake in what I took to be embarrassment. He was all of sixteen years my junior. "Everything's spat upon now. Everything." Then Geoffrey came in, ahead of Ovington, pale and with a big damp patch on his jacket where, I assumed, vomit had been hastily wiped off with a face flannel. Ovington was trying to steer him into the salon, saying something about coffee, but Geoffrey said: "Just in time for that thing, I see. Won't have any, though. Just a beaker of that shitty local raisin juice." And he went back to the place he had vacated at the time of the fish course.

       "Is that wise?" his hostess asked.

       "It will either settle the guts or effect a definitive ah purgation," said Geoffrey in what I took to be a parody of my voice. He helped himself. "How's my booful lil boy?" he leered at John Ovington. Then he swigged.

       "Stop that, Geoffrey," I said, very weary. But then something hit out at the weariness, something a man of my age ought not to have had, namely a twinge of toothache. It was the cake, of which I had tasted the smallest possible fragment. It seemed unfair somehow, injury to insult.