Loving Monsters (8 page)

*

Not a firebrand, then, this urbane man’s adolescent self, but a disciple, a seducee. Something is not quite right, there are still gaps to be filled. My question about sex
had
been vulgar, of course: a blundering attempt to jolt him into confession. It was crass, and I now blushed for his brief reptilian glare. This was a beady old sophisticate who could well afford to appear stuffy if he chose. Still, all that being said, the fact is that nobody dreams of a private landscape, whether jungled or ideological, without something erotic hovering nearby, bouncing ominously in the thermals. Let it go for the moment. Sooner or later it will alight as it always does: that persistent scavenger of ideals that pecks out visionaries’ eyes and tears away their flesh to expose the bone.

Meanwhile the
Orontes
has picked up a pilot in Port Said, has passed through the Canal to Ismailiya, down through the Bitter Lakes and the lagoons of Old Suez to Port Taufiq where she docks. Across a stretch of cluttered water Suez town is a jumble of white and ochre buildings seen as through a lattice, so dense are the masts and rigging of intervening vessels. From over the water drift blares and cries and the mechanical howling of cranes, while
the air smells of rotten water, ammonia and dried leather mixed in with something dark and spicy. Port Taufiq is clearly more modern than Suez town across the harbour to which it is connected by a causeway with a railway, so it is presumably the industrial suburb created by the Canal. Several black pyramids of coal dominate it, coal Jayjay cannot yet identify as Yorks washed steam mix. Yet anyone approaching Suez port from the south might be more impressed by the dominance of oil, since clusters of immense petroleum tanks are what first take the eye. On that seaward side of the
Orontes
’
bows a bay opens out with a red lighthouse standing on an islet in the middle. To either side the roads are dotted with moored shipping. Of this a black tramp steamer, a mile or two off at most, must represent the outer limit of the port’s wiry activities. On the right are the red cliffs of Gebel Ataqa, beyond which the Gulf opens out between dwindling grey-blue hills to a landscape empty as far as the eye can reach. The ultramarine water vanishes into a yellow haze of airborne sand somewhere beyond the distant point of Ras el Adabiya. Nothing breaks its glittering monotony except the white sails of a couple of
feluccas.
There is a sense of being at the twentieth century’s outermost fringe: that immediately past the harbour’s sullen rainbows of floating oil lie the Gulf’s aquamarine waters and a Biblical world of Sinai and camels and nomads’ tents.

The eighteen-year-old from Eltham, the first-time traveller, worries that his trunk will disappear among the brown press of porters and stevedores elbowing and burrowing and shouting their way up through the disembarking passengers, or else that it might be left in the hold and carried on to Ceylon. But then he is seized with excitement, by the vibrant novelty of the heat and smells and vertical light, by the mysterious allure of that sand-coloured horizon. Pale-faced, he at last has a foothold in that world of spices he once evoked from tantalising scents in a warehouse. Cool, grey, faraway London. He feels a sudden affection for this ship as a link with home, his magic carpet, its very substance transfigured into salty paintwork too hot to touch, her
crew now wearing tropical gear. When he disembarks he will be alone and adrift. His eyes fill with tears of excitement and the thrill of endless possibility makes his stomach tingle. A more fearful part of him urges that it is still not too late to remain safely aboard, see Colombo, catch a home-bound sister ship and within a matter of weeks watch the gloomy gantries of Tilbury once again harden out of estuarine mist.

He is met by Richards, a close-barbered youngster with a small moustache, veteran airs and tanned extremities, as revealed when the linen sleeve rides up with his proffered hand to expose a forearm nearly as pale as Jayjay’s own. A perfunctory flash of white teeth somewhere beneath the shadow of his hat.

‘A & G sent me,’ he allows through the moustache, as though in a private rage that he of all people should have been detailed to meet a junior clerk off one of the company’s liners. He has a slight Birmingham accent. ‘Good trip, no doubt. She’s quite a comfortable old tub,’ and raises a seasoned traveller’s eyebrow at the black wall of the ship’s side.

‘Hardly old. Nineteen twenty-nine.’

This is not deferentially said, and it is obvious from this moment that these two strangers are not about to embark on one of those deathless friendships.

‘You’re in the Caramanli,’ says Richards shortly. ‘If you don’t like it you can no doubt transfer to the Bachet or the Bel-Air. At your expense, of course. Hardly worth it since they’re all much of a muchness but some people like to give themselves airs. You’ll get your own accommodation in the Anglo-Egyptian Bank building after three months if you stay the course. Juniors come and go. They get homesick’ – a contemptuous flash – ‘or just plain sick, so we’ve found it’s pointless putting them into Company digs right away.’

Richards has already commandeered a taxi to take them over to Suez. As its dented radiator noses through the dockside throngs a not very crestfallen Jayjay tries to make amends.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Three years this April.’

‘Heavens, I should think you must be about ready to move on,’ says Jayjay ingenuously, looking happily around him. ‘It surely can’t do much for a chap’s career to be stuck in a place like this for any length of time.’

‘Port Taufiq,’ says Richards in a heavy I’ll-have-you-know tone and leaning back cautiously in the appalling Chevrolet, ‘is an extremely important posting, as you will shortly discover. In fact, it’s pretty damned odd that you don’t already know, or mightn’t have guessed if you’d bothered to give it a bit of thought. Only practically every ship that passes through the Canal coals up here, that’s all.’ An immense pair of camel buttocks fills the glassless frame of the car’s windscreen. A stick thwacks heavily into them, producing no discernible effect other than a puff of dust.

‘But what about Aden? And anyway, I thought coal was a thing of the past. Surely it’s all oil-burners nowadays, like the
Orontes
?’ Another thwack.

‘Look, Jebb, I’ll tell you frankly and it’s for your own good. It would be a big mistake to make a poor start here. We’re a small community and I don’t mind telling you we set quite a store by first impressions.’ The camel at last moves aside, the taxi churns down a street pocked with khaki puddles of donkey stale and stops. ‘Quite a store’ (as he pays the driver with a careful disbursement of piastres and milliemes and signals imperiously to a listless
boab
to come and unstrap Jayjay’s trunk from the grid at the back). ‘You’ll find we’re pretty easy-going here but we’re not much for cockiness, if you get my drift.’

The Caramanli is at rest on the border between lodging-house and hotel, neither rising nor sinking. Gentility is served by a man in a fez asleep behind a concierge’s desk, an ormolu clock without hands, two fake Directoire chairs and a copper vase containing a single dusty ostrich feather. Richards goes into full old-hand mode.

‘Misa’l
ch
ir, ya rais. Fih hagze ‘alasanu,’ indicating Jayjay.

‘Good afternoon to you too, good sir,’ replies the elderly Turk in English, stretching politely and blinking. ‘The gentleman’s name, if you please? Was the reservation made in person or by the telephone?’

‘I daresay you can manage to find your room without my help,’ says Richards to Jayjay when this farce has run its course and the
boab
again shoulders the trunk with a loud sigh and begins the Sisyphean trudge up a flight of marble stairs that promise to revert to plain cement as soon as they are out of sight past the first turn. ‘We start work at seven in the morning, which does
not
mean ten past. Everyone knows where the shipping offices are. Watch out for pickpockets. Try not to catch the clap before tomorrow.’

He strides out and is instantly swallowed in the blare of light beyond the Caramanli’s chipped portals.

‘Ignore him, I should,’ an amused voice says at Jayjay’s elbow. ‘Richards is a complete twerp, I’m afraid. Nothing to be done about it, although I gather there was once a plan to black his bollocks and sell him to the Arabians as a slave. One deduces from the steamer trunk and the home counties tan that you’ve just arrived? Oh, sorry, my name’s Milo.’

‘Jerningham Jebb, but most people call me Jayjay.’ This Milo was a small, raffish-looking fellow in his late twenties with a frozen eye. ‘Are you with the Company, too?’

‘Which company would that be?’

‘Oh, well, Anderson & Green. The Orient Line, you know.’

‘Certainly not. What a dreadful thought. Don’t tell me you work for them?’

‘That’s what I came to Suez for. Why, what’s wrong with them?’

‘Nothing, I shouldn’t think. Not
qua
company. But the work’ll get you down. Within a month you’ll start to like Richards. Within a year you’ll have
become
Richards.’

‘No fear!’

‘On the contrary, it’s a dead cert. Still, there are plenty of other fates on offer here, though none as bad. Do you drink?’

‘Not that often,’ said Jayjay guardedly, thinking of a naughty glass of sweet sherry at Christmas and a couple of beers Michael had once bought him which he had much disliked.

‘I should keep it that way. It doesn’t agree with this climate, believe me. You’ll shortly be running into a cove named Hammond at your office. Take note of same. Are you a ladies’ man?’

‘Well, er …’

‘Put it this way: would you
like
to be a ladies’ man? Sorry, none of my business and all that. Over the mark. I was only going to suggest you stick to Europeans, not that that’s much guarantee these days. There isn’t a taste Suez doesn’t cater for, and what with boredom and no longer being under Aunt Edna’s eye one can go awfully wild for a week and then spend the next thirty years watching bits drop off the old bod. Blighted prospects and so forth. Forgive the sermon, just thought I’d mention it. And now the good wishes, the extended hand of friendship and the adieu. I’ve no doubt we shall bump into one another from time to time. One does in this place.’ And with that Milo also vanished into the glare of late afternoon.

*

As Milo had predicted the work turned out to be grim indeed. It soon dawned on Jayjay that an exotic location was inadequate disguise for a job he would not for a moment have contemplated doing in London, not even at the very edge of penury. It was only on reflection that he realised it was essentially the same sort of work his father had been doing uncomplainingly for almost the last twenty years. He shared a large office with six Egyptian clerks and a fat boy named Simpkins from Tottenham whose stomach was in a state of constant rebellion even as his mind dwelt wistfully on plates of his mother’s toad-in-the-hole which, he asserted, would have had him right in a jiffy. Since to his dismay Jayjay found himself also sharing rooms with Simpkins in the Caramanli there seemed no refuge from his compatriot’s intestinal tract. In the clerks’ pool three fly-specked fans turned listlessly on stalks up in the high ceiling. Below
them, none the cooler, Anderson & Green’s junior employees sat at desks tallying ledgers. In the maritime world ‘coaling’, as Jayjay had perfectly well known on first meeting Richards, was an old-fashioned term that had long since been extended to include fuel oil. These days it was interchangeable with ‘bunkering’. He now found he was assigned duties that related exclusively to oil. He was supposed to enter the incoming supplies from the Anglo-Iranian oilfields at Abadan and tally those figures with the reserve tonnages held in Port Taufiq’s storage tanks as recorded by the tankmaster down at the terminal. Or something of the kind. After a year of this, and in the absence of any cock-ups on his part, he might with luck be allowed to graduate upstairs to an office with a single fan to do some invoicing. He found it was of no comfort to reflect that Rimbaud had once worked as a bookkeeper for a coffee and leather-goods merchant in Djibouti, some hundreds of miles away down at the other end of the Red Sea.

Within a week Jayjay had uncovered the great conspiracy of office work and found that it was usually possible to clear a day’s worth in well under an hour, given average intelligence and an urgent wish to get it out of the way. An employee’s skill therefore lay in dissembling in the most convincing manner so as always to appear hard at work when some shirtsleeved senior looked in. In this case the senior was the man Hammond whom Milo had mentioned. Having never encountered a hard-core alcoholic before, Jayjay took a while to match this amiable man’s appearance and behaviour with the gossip that surrounded him. According to office wisdom ‘Pusser’ Hammond was steadily and unregretfully drinking himself to death with bottles of whisky slipped him by the grateful pursers of passing liners in return for waiving certain paperwork and formalities. An ex-ship’s purser himself, Hammond was at ease with his life in the manner of men who have found a level that feels both acceptable and predestined, leaving them without the least ambition to better it in any way. He had been in Suez since the end of the Great War and in due course fully expected to wind up in a corner of the Christian
cemetery. The prospect bothered him not one jot. Indeed, it amused him to think of the baking soil slowly leaching the last molecules of Johnny Walker from his marrow-bones. In the meantime he was content to live with a Greek lady and four hairy children in a flat above the greengrocer’s shop her family owned. At the grandparents’ insistence the children were brought up to be Orthodox. The girls were demure and stayed at home practically in purdah; the boys were dark and serious and could be seen trotting daily to the English school, satchelled and well combed. None of them in the least resembled Hammond physically. In due course Jayjay learned that Hammond never quarrelled, never raised his voice and seldom neglected his scant duties whether in the home or at work. He was relaxed and vaguely effectual in a land scarcely noted for brisk efficiency, and in this town his comparative honesty in financial matters made him positively outstanding.