Loving Monsters (9 page)

It was ‘Pusser’ Hammond who enabled Jayjay to slip away from the office on strictly unnecessary errands to the port or the terminal. ‘Figures in books one thing, bottoms on water quite another,’ he would observe. Jayjay would even volunteer to act as a messenger, by this menial expedient contriving to visit the yellow-painted Egyptian Health Office building in the little bay by the entrance to the Canal as well as assorted government and private offices in Rue Colmar, Suez’s main commercial street. Before long he had acquired a grasp of the town’s geography as well as a small degree of street wisdom. This amounted to a bare degree of familiarity with typical fares and prices, together with a smattering of pidgin Arabic; yet it was already more than his queasy roommate Simpkins had managed in almost a year.

Was Jayjay homesick? Not perhaps in the usual sense of a constant awareness of being in the wrong place, of that interior hollowing which renders an entire landscape no more than a blank sheet on which are projected the fond pinings of the inner eye. But a feeling of missing familiar things would sometimes break through without warning while he was doing something that
required no thought, such as cleaning his teeth in the Caramanli’s cavernous bathroom, a place of cracked tiles, ornate taps lacking handles and dark corners full of the sweetish breath of cockroaches. Suddenly this no longer felt like a rewarding adventure. He would long for the sound of trams on Well Hall Road, for the smell of Eltham in a winter’s dusk. How he yearned just for a moment to swap Suez’s hot reek of donkey urine and fuel oil for the cool incense of smoky fires being lit in suburban grates! To exchange the bedlam beyond the Caramanli’s windows for the musical tinkle of pine kindling being laid in a hearth; to trade the sky’s desert glare for the blossoming glow behind a sheet of newspaper held taut across a fireplace to make it draw! It was the vividness of the details that made them poignant: being able to summon the exact smell of hot newsprint as the fire behind it began to scorch the paper, knowing to an instant the right moment to take it away before it burst into flames between one’s hands, hearing the paper crackle with dryness as it was refolded. Thus could one sit on a seatless lavatory in Suez and meticulously perform an unrelated task two thousand miles away. It was painful and peculiar. Maybe this was not the massive ache Saki’s Unbearable Bassington had felt as he watched children romp at sunset on an African hillside, but for a moment Jayjay thought he knew how exile might feel. He wondered if it would have been the same if instead of being a day-boy at Eltham College he had been a boarder, accustomed to long separations from home. And he marvelled that this was what some of his overseas friends must have been feeling, cut off from their families for years at a time, even though, because they were Britons in England, one had never thought that they might be homesick. But he soon discovered that being truly homesick only lasts as long as there is nothing better to be. Being interested and diverted works wonders. There was too much too new about Suez for him to feel seriously bereft.

*

One morning Jayjay accompanies Hammond to the docks to meet the
Otranto,
which has just arrived from England on the
Australia run. ‘Pusser’s’ good-natured equanimity (or drunken indifference) has maybe responded to his newest apprentice’s evident boredom with the office. They take a gharry, sitting up beneath a decrepit hood like a patched bellows. The horse’s hide is shiny black leather stretched over protruding croup bones. Only when they have crossed the harbour and are in Port Taufiq does the traffic – always anarchic – become immovable, with barrows and hand-carts filling the spaces between higgledy-piggledy vehicles. The driver’s whip cracks over his nag’s bones more out of ritual than to effect progress. It is the same gesture that makes the drivers of motor vehicles lean on their klaxons: something one does when one is stationary. It is directed at nobody, a brainless declaration of one’s immovable presence. Quite unbidden there comes into Jayjay’s mind a habit of his father’s which he has always disliked without knowing why, a habit shared by several of his schoolfriends’ fathers. This is to stand with his back to a fireplace with his hands in his trouser pockets, loudly jingling his small change and slightly rocking back and forth on his heels as he does so.

‘Figures in books one thing, bottoms on water quite another,’ Hammond is saying. He is clearly oblivious to the surrounding chaos as he is to the omnipresent flies that cluster on lips and around eyes. He digs in a pocket and hands Jayjay an Orient Line badge to wear on the lapel of his lightweight cotton jacket. ‘Your usual Port pass won’t let you aboard.’ A lorry so overloaded with some kind of fodder that it looks like a haystack has broken down. As they grind slowly past the knot of gesticulating men Jayjay sees that a rear wheel has collapsed. The vehicle is so antique the wheel’s spokes are wood. Eventually they bounce over the sour mat of compacted vegetation that lies at the Port’s entrance.

It is only a six-hour layover for the
Otranto
and few ongoing passengers without brief and urgent business in Suez have troubled to disembark. Jayjay assumes the stewards have already gone around as they had on the
Orontes,
telling all who would listen that
Suez was a ‘hell-hole’ and recounting with relish stories of previous voyages when unwary passengers or greenhorn crewmen went ashore only to be robbed blind or found unconscious with their pockets cut out. ‘The British are here in Egypt to run the Canal for the Egyptians (like clockwork of course) but the Egyptians are supposed to run everything else and as you’d expect it’s a corrupt shambles. If you get robbed don’t blame me, and don’t go near a policeman is my advice. They’re the worst of the lot. I could tell you a few tales, make your hair curl …’ (A deck-hand on the
Orontes
had been obligingly graphic.) Now, seeing a British liner from the perspective of a denizen of the port everyone aboard has been warned against, Jayjay is aware of its defensive condition. The single canvas-sided gangway deployed is surrounded at both ends by junior officers in white duck uniforms keeping a wary eye on all comings and goings. Those who were disembarking have long since done so. Now the ship lies, taking on various provisions as well as fifteen hundred tons of fuel oil, moored to the dockside as though with wary reluctance. Jayjay notices that the immense hawsers fore and aft all wear large metal cones like megaphones to prevent rats, mice and all manner of other vermin from invading the ship.

After greetings and handshakings at the top of the gangway ‘Pusser’ goes off to pay his respects to the Captain and no doubt enjoy convivial tots in the cabins of various officers and old friends. ‘Make yourself known to the Chief,’ he says in parting. ‘He’ll show you bunkering from his end.’ So Jayjay wanders aft, being directed down through ever less carpeted and hotter regions, from stairs to companion-ladders, from doors to watertight hatches dogged open with immense wing-nuts, from passageways to perforated metal catwalks. At last he gazes down into a sweltering cavern in which the liner’s twin turbines bulk three storeys high. In a soundproof booth at one end of the engine room he finds the Chief Engineer watching dials and introduces himself. Seeing that Jayjay is new to all this the Chief explains the finer points of bunkering, most of which seem to concern
distributing the fuel between various tanks. ‘The way she lies to this pier, bowsering’s to starboard so it’s all coming into 5 and 6.’ He points to the quivering needles of two dials. ‘But fifteen hundred ton would trim us by the stern, see, and we can’t have that. Our paying guests would be complaining the bleeding water in the swimming-pool isn’t level. Apart from matters of draught here in port. She draws enough as it is. So we pump some of it forrard to 4 here’ – an oil-black fingernail prods at a diagram – ‘and on up to 2 here …’

The explanations make Jayjay drowsy, or else it is the heat in the engine room combined with the heavy reek of oil and the noise. Although the main engines are shut down there are several lesser motors clattering away for the various generators supplying the ship’s electricity, keeping fans churning the stifling air in darkened cabins and maintaining subzero temperatures in the walk-in meat lockers and food refrigerators. The Chief’s control booth may be comparatively soundproof but for someone unused to it the level of noise is trying. It dawns on Jayjay that although he is standing in the bowels of a liner with Port Taufiq’s rancid waters less than fifteen feet below his shoe soles he might as well be in a Birmingham factory for all the nautical romance. As soon as he can he leaves the Chief to his dial-gazing and blunders back up in the direction of those carpeted zones where occasional portholes give glimpses of daylight.

Somewhere along the way he becomes aware of being followed and glimpses a red-haired figure darting ever closer. Mildly alarmed but curious he waits for the man to come up to him in an otherwise empty passageway.

‘Milo?’ says the stranger softly, glancing again over his shoulder.

‘I’m afraid not,’ says Jayjay, and then without a thought adds, ‘But of course I know who you mean. Chap with the rum eye.’

‘He sent you instead?’

‘Exactly.’ (To this day Jayjay remembers using this word, recognising that it sealed his new career as an impostor. What made him say it he cannot tell. It was an impulse faster than thought,
accompanied by an exciting sensation of boats being burned, of years of principled raising being reneged on in a jiffy. The only token remnant of having been brought up to tell the truth was in finding it easier to say ‘exactly’ rather than the more outright version of the same lie, ‘yes’).

‘Come ’ere then, quick.’

The stranger, whom Jayjay was to discover was a Second Mate, leads the way to a cramped and smelly locker without a porthole. A 40-watt bulb reveals clothing lying in dark puddles on the floor. To Jayjay’s surprise the man swiftly treads off his own shoes, gropes inside them and comes out with a pair of cork insoles which he thrusts towards his startled visitor.

‘That’ll be twenty quid,’ he says. ‘You tell Milo he’ll get the usual after the Colombo leg.’

‘Twenty quid?’ exclaims Jayjay, astounded. ‘For … for
those,
you mean? You don’t imagine I’ve got twenty quid?’

Very alert, the man peers at him for a moment in the gloom. ‘You bastard,’ he says bitterly. ‘He never sent you, did he? Well, you bloody get out of here. And you can bet that by the time you’ve told your guv’nor and they’ve sent the uniforms down they’ll have had a wasted journey. These will have disappeared.’ He makes a gesture both insolent and menacing in Jayjay’s face with the insoles. ‘And you can tell them not to bother trying it on again with me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ says Jayjay truthfully and quickly leaves. Regaining the lower deck and mid-morning’s searing light he leans for a while over the port rail trying to make sense of what has happened. His heart is beating faster than the climb justifies. Gradually he becomes aware of some crude bumboats of bleached wood bobbing at the foot of the forty-foot cliff that is the
Otranto’
s
side. Barefoot traders in tattered robes balance expertly as they shout up to a group of male passengers whom Jayjay instantly recognises as steerage class. One of them, a man in a white panama with a jauntily lurid hatband, is lowering a tiny wicker basket on a string. When it reaches the boats several brown
arms stretch up simultaneously towards it before one grabs hold and reaches inside. Having made sure it contains what he expected, the Arab substitutes what looks like a white envelope which is duly hauled up. The knot of men crowd around the panama before some remarks and laughter can be heard. Again the basket descends.

For the umpteenth time since leaving England Jayjay has the sensation of having briefly intersected with an utterly different world, one he knows nothing about and which is obviously not entirely above board. At the same time he wants very much to know what it is and how it works, to learn whether it can offer him advantage or pleasure. Despite the shade of the promenade deck immediately overhead the sun is scalding, and he is young, and an expectant seagull glides past only feet away with its beady head cocked in his direction and an evilly knowing look in its eye. It was no doubt born here and is a lot more clued up about the world than Jayjay. He turns as though his mind were made up, although in fact it is still in turmoil over a pair of cork insoles. Twenty
pounds
?
Five weeks’ salary?

On the return drive to Anderson & Green’s flyblown office he is careful not to hand back the Orient Line lapel badge that Hammond lent him. The ‘Pusser’, now well lubricated by shipboard hospitality, has obviously clean forgotten about it.

For some time my uneasiness over this project of Jayjay’s biography had been growing. At out first meeting he had clearly said he would pay me to write the book – I seemed to recall something about ‘sweeteners’, which I took to imply regularity of payment if not great largesse. The uneasiness was partly self-recrimination for my own unprofessional behaviour. I was after all a fall-time writer with an agent, a publisher and an editor. I already had a commission to write the account of a deep-sea treasure hunt in mid-Atlantic from which I had not long returned. Meanwhile, a contract was being drawn up in London for a book about Southeast Asian politics which would probably jell around the issue of dictatorships. In theory the next two or three years were already spoken for.

A further uncertainty could be summed up as an insistent
Why
me?
Why had Jayjay singled me out to write his story? The reasons he had given were plausible enough, yet my doubts persisted. He claimed that he had read my books, had decided that I was ‘on the same wavelength’ as him and could give a sympathetic
account. When I asked him which particular book he was thinking of he singled out the stuff I had already written about Southeast Asia. This surprised me but he threw little light on it other than to say that he liked the books’ exotic aspects and my refusal to condemn. According to him I had a quite un-British approach in that I did not see things exclusively from the perspective of my own culture and avoided making moral judgements about behaviour that would normally have been roundly denounced. From what he said it was obvious he knew the books well and this was not just some blarney he had thought up on the spur of the moment. I never went further into this since I am residually British enough to be embarrassed at having to talk about my own work. I also distrust praise.

Sometimes when I thought about Jayjay’s having chosen me I told myself it was surely no mystery. Sheer convenience explained everything. I lived nearby and was a professional writer of the correct nationality, age and background. Why look any further for reasons? He was getting older, probably a little lonely and, no matter how well acclimatised to life in Italy, felt the need for some belated contact with his own cradle culture. I didn’t think this project of his was a mere pretext for company, exactly, but I did suspect this factor played a part. Well, all right, provided his story was worth it. Yet at other times I found even this commonsensical theory unsatisfactory. What really had he seen in those books of mine he claimed to have liked? No piffle about fine style and adroit characterisation; what he chose to mention was a refusal to condemn. For the first time I began to wonder if there were not some disreputable secret in Jayjay’s life for which he was slowly softening me up, all the while cautiously testing me for signs of impending disapproval.

In any case none of this changed the immediate necessity to put our relationship on a more professional footing, especially as regards money. I had plenty of other work to do at present and more than enough calls on my remaining time not to be able insouciantly to write off entire mornings down at Il Ghibli. My
‘private life’ (as theatrical folk artlessly call a
vita
sexualis
they make sure is public gossip from Hampstead to Hollywood) was its usual undemonstrative self, running at a gentle tick-over. From time to time I would drive a visitor back down to Castiglion Fiorentino station and change the sheets with that mixture of relief and regret which is the hallmark of the failed hermit. ‘Very
young,’
I would tell myself reprovingly for a day or two afterwards as though I knew I ought to have outgrown the juvenile and instead be deriving deep satisfaction from the marriage of true minds. Mainly, though, their going enabled me to get back to those pressing hillside tasks that never end: keeping the feedpipe from the spring in the forest free of silt, laying in logs for the winter, adjusting the Toyota’s clutch (thanks be to Haynes’ manuals!), extending the irrigation system to include the baby apricot trees. Or else the seasonal pleasures like collecting new chestnuts, making sloe gin and picking wild rosehips for the jelly that tastes to me of childhood, an example of food for free much promoted during the war as being rich in vitamin C at a time when oranges and lemons were virtually unobtainable. And at all seasons there were the bees to consider.

It is a half-truth that, except at certain critical moments, bees can pretty much be left to their own devices for most of the year. The other half of the truth is that they need a constant eye kept on their welfare and for signs of disease. An affectionate ear, too, should regularly be pressed against a hive. Much can be deduced from the sound made by an industrious community of forty thousand individuals who together constitute five solid kilos of insect life. One is alert for the raised, agitated note that means they are uneasy about something potentially disastrous such as the failure or even complete absence of their queen. Like any social animal, bees need order and hierarchy before they can function properly. In fact anything approaching democracy makes them radically unhappy and their society falls apart. Somehow the older I get the less this surprises me but let’s not pursue
that.
Jejune philosophising aside, there are always frames to be re-wired, wax to be
recovered and similar maintenance tasks one put off doing last year.

So as I say, at the moment when Jayjay had insinuated himself so charmingly into my life I lacked neither work nor play. And from the start, despite his blithe hint of remuneration and my own supposed professionalism, our precise relationship remained unclear. I was definitely intrigued by him, there was no question of that. I did not seriously begrudge a single minute spent in his company. But as time went by I increasingly found myself driving back up the track saying, ‘Yes, but what am I actually
doing
?
Is this old gentleman a new acquaintance, a future friend or a job of work? These regular visits to his house, all this attentive note-taking: are they a disguised act of charity or part of a business deal?’ I resolved to have it out with him. By now I was assuming from impressions I had already formed that he was more likely to be a canny rogue about money than one of those people who are genuinely pained at the mention of anything financial. Besides, I was beginning to feel guilty about keeping the whole thing from my agent. He also stood to benefit from this deal, assuming it
was
a deal. Well before it ever reached the stage of a typescript in search of a publisher both he and my editor would have to know.

It was typical of Jayjay to have out-thought me. I realised at once that I should have known he would. The very morning I rang Il Ghibli’s bell and Marcella (who happened to be dusting by the front door) let me in, he greeted me by handing me an envelope with its flap discreetly tucked in.

‘Long overdue, James,’ he said apologetically. ‘I see from my records that this will be your ninth visit and some of our sessions have dragged on for as much as six hours. Dragged on for you, I mean. For someone in his anecdotage I can assure you the time has passed in a flash. But it’s eating into your life. You will find in there a thousand pounds. Well, it’s rather to the north of three million
lire
and you must tell me if you prefer to be paid in Guatemalan quetzals or something to suit your no doubt arcane and shrewd offshore banking habits.’

So nonplussed was I by misplaced surprise and chastened that the man I’d thought of as an old rogue had in fact been keeping scrupulous accounts, I came over all British and heard myself blurting things like ‘Heavens, Jayjay, I’d completely forgotten … Surely far too much …?’ and then (even more British), ‘Well, if you’re
quite
sure?’

‘We both fell into the trap our countrymen often fall into. But nice chaps and well brought up as we both are, we are also too old to get tangled up over money. I said I would make it worth your while to hear about my life, and I know you heard me say it. Quite simple. We now have to discuss whether a thousand pounds is enough for what you’ve already undergone.’

So we did indeed thrash the whole thing out. To relate the details would be wearisome as well as compromising from the taxation point of view. The important thing for me was that my trust and liking for the old boy went up several significant notches. Matters involving cash are very revealing of character, of course, which is exactly why we surround them with such comedies of manners. People like Jayjay who, unprompted, acknowledge debts and pay on the spot lead one instinctively to believe they will conduct their other affairs in a similarly principled fashion. We expand towards them, we feel easy and confident. What a contrast with others we have known and liked, often for years, who one day do something that can no longer be overlooked and we find ourselves totting up (and how readily the list comes to mind!) the previous occasions when they have reached for their wallets just too late in a restaurant, or said once too often that oh dear, they can’t pay you back right now because they seem to have nothing smaller on them than this five-hundred-thousand note.
Tight
(one hears oneself saying bitterly, feeling diminished by so trivial a resentment). Just plain goddamn
tight
.

Jayjay and I flourished under our new dispensation so that I felt less like a salaried amanuensis and more like a paid companion. To my surprise I found his story did not interfere with my
other writing commitments. It seemed to inhabit a too well defined world of its own. Our sessions were often at irregular intervals. For several weeks at a stretch I stayed on my hillside, concentrating on my notes of recent experiences in the Atlantic. These had been scribbled on the deck of a ship towing sonar scanning equipment and in the cramped capsule of a Russian submersible as it groped its way five kilometres down in a lightless universe of dunes and pillow lava. Concurrently, I was reading tendentious and often barely literate journalists’ prose about Asian dictators. When I could no longer bear it I went down to see Jayjay for the sheer relief of urbane conversation and a world apart. The candid warmth of his welcome assuaged any worries that I might not have been fulfilling my part in our unwritten bargain. Within half an hour I was back once more in the fossil sunlight of pre-war Suez.

*

– How naïve I was! – Jayjay reflected, safely on the far side of sixty years. – I could have done you a chunk of
A
Shropshire
Lad
into passable Latin verse, or a
Times
leader into French, or even at a pinch have got the valencies right for a simple chemical reaction. I could have told you about the Repeal of the Corn Laws and the chief exports of Glasgow. I even had a hazy idea where one might find silly mid-off on a cricket field. But I couldn’t recognise good Greek hashish when it was waved under my nose. You see at once the drawbacks of a public-school education? No ‘street smarts’, as the Americans call it.

– Luckily I had Milo to introduce me to Suez. He really was quite disreputable. He’d been thrown out of Haileybury for screwing his housemaster’s wife, got turned down by the Army on account of his eye, and sort of drifted. By the time I met him he’d got a finger in half the rackets in Suez. We’d met in the hall of the Caramanli on that first afternoon because he had a studio upstairs. The hotel was never able to fill the top floor so Milo had persuaded the manager to rent him a couple of rooms up there, one of which he’d turned into a dark room. He was doing a lot of
printing for the dirty picture trade. As predicted, we kept on bumping into one another. By the time I knew my job was a washout Milo came as a life-saver. He was breezy, scurrilous and kind. He proved to be as much an antidote to my virtuous upbringing as Michael had been at school, while nobody ever mistook Milo for a socialist. He was soon introducing me to various cafés and dives in the non-European quarters of town. Endless mint tea and sweet sludgy coffee. Everyone watching everyone else over the mouthpiece of a hubble-bubble. He knew fat men in fezzes and characters who looked like brigands you’d expect to see roaring down a Turkish mountainside, their chests crossed with bandoliers and waving long muzzle-loaders. For all that he was so British in obvious ways he somehow managed to blend in with these people. He looked completely unlike them, of course, but not out of place all the same. It took me a while to twig that some of them were his bosses, in the sense that it was they who were actually running the rackets. He was just scratching a living from the edges of pornography, drugs, prostitution and the black market. The brigand types turned out to be Greeks rather than Turks. It was the Greeks who ran Suez in those days although we British imagined we did. The Brits ran the Canal but it was the Greeks who worked out how to carve the fat off it.

– One night Milo introduced me to a tough old Arab with only half a foot who had sailed for years with Henry de Monfreid. De Monfreid? He was an astonishing French adventurer with an American father who couldn’t bear bourgeois life in Paris at the turn of the century and threw it all up to become a pirate in the Red Sea. That would have been in about 1910. He went to Djibouti and actually worked for the same merchant who had employed Rimbaud back in the eighteen-eighties. He soon discovered that the world’s biggest market for hashish was Egypt because it had recently been made illegal. In those days it came mainly from Greece, where it was a major export. De Monfreid devised a brilliant new smuggling route. He would buy the hash from villagers up in the Greek mountains, take it down to the port
at Piraeus, load it as an innocent cargo on a steamer heading down through the Canal to the Indian Ocean, and offload it in Djibouti. Then he would smuggle it back up to Suez in a sailing craft of his own, a crude wooden
boutre
indistinguishable from a thousand other native vessels. Hugely risky. Bear in mind that this was during the First World War. Egypt and the Red Sea were even more than usually a hotbed of spies and informers living off the conflicting political designs of the great powers who intersected in the region. The British had the Canal; Lawrence of Arabia was in military intelligence and just about to get into gear to help the Arabs get rid of the Turks; the Ottoman Empire was fighting a rearguard action; the Germans were there; the French were there; the Italians were there. Plus the usual mixture of rogues, riff-raff and freebooters like de Monfreid himself, each looking for something to steal or someone to shop. It was an incredibly dangerous area and he had to run the gauntlet in his sailing boat all the way up the Red Sea and through the Gulf of Suez. The first time around he didn’t even have a reliable contact in Suez whom he could trust. He eventually got rid of the stuff to Greeks with family links to the growers he’d bought it from, and for nothing like its true value. By the time I arrived in Suez de Monfreid had retired or gone back to France or maybe he was pearl-diving down in Djibouti. But there were still plenty of people in Suez who had known him and there were even a few left like this old Arab Milo introduced me to who had actually sailed with him. I think they had run guns together.