The Cat’s Table (7 page)

Miss Lasqueti

MISS LASQUETI WAS regarded by most of those at the Cat’s Table as a likely spinster, and by us three as having a possible libido (that elbow against Cassius’s scrotum). She was lithe, and white as a pigeon. She was not fond of the sun. You would see her in a deckchair reading crime novels within the rectangles of deep shadow, her bright blonde hair a little sparkle in her chosen gloom. She was a smoker. She and Mr Mazappa would simultaneously rise and excuse themselves after the first course and take the nearest exit onto the deck. What they spoke of there, we had no idea. They seemed an unlikely pair. Although she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in mud. It surprised you because it emerged from that modest and slim frame; we heard it usually in response to one of Mr Mazappa’s ribald stories. She could be whimsical. ‘Why is it when I hear the phrase “
trompe l’oeil
” I think of oysters?’ I overheard her say once.

Still, most of the time we had barely a fishhook’s evidence about Miss Lasqueti’s background or career. We considered ourselves good at vacuuming up clues as we coursed over the ship each day, but our certainty about what we discovered grew slowly. We’d overhear something at lunch, or witness a thrown glance or the shake of a head. ‘Spanish is a loving tongue – is it not, Mr Mazappa?’ Miss Lasqueti had commented, and he had winked back at her from across the table. We were learning about adults simply by being in their midst. We felt patterns emerging, and for a while everything was based on that wink by Mr Mazappa.

A peculiarity of Miss Lasqueti was that she was a sleeper. Someone who at certain hours during the day could barely stay awake. You saw her fighting it. This struggle made her endearing, as if she were forever warding off an unjustified punishment. You’d walk past her in a deckchair, her head falling slowly towards the book she was attempting to read. She was in many ways our table’s ghost, for it was also revealed that she sleepwalked, a dangerous habit on a ship. A sliver of white, I see her always, against the dark rolling sea.

What was her future? What had been her past? She was the only one from the Cat’s Table who was able to force us out of ourselves in order to imagine another’s life. I admit it was mostly Ramadhin who coaxed this empathy from Cassius and me. Ramadhin was always the most generous of the three of us. But for the first time in our lives we began to sense there was an unfairness in someone else’s life. Miss Lasqueti had, I remember, ‘gunpowder tea’, which she mixed with a cup of hot water at our table, then poured into a thermos before she left us for the afternoon. You could actually see the flush enter her face as the drink knocked her awake.

Describing her as ‘white as a pigeon’ was probably influenced by a later discovery about her: it was revealed that Miss Lasqueti had twenty or thirty pigeons caged somewhere on the ship. She was ‘accompanying them’ to England, but she breasted her cards about her motive for travelling with them. Then I heard, via Flavia Prins, that an unknown passenger in First Class had informed her that Miss Lasqueti had often been seen in the corridors of Whitehall.

In any case, it seemed to us that nearly all at our table, from the silent tailor, Mr Gunesekera, who owned a shop in Kandy, to the entertaining Mr Mazappa, to Miss Lasqueti, might have an interesting reason for their journey, even if it was unspoken or, so far, undiscovered. In spite of this, our table’s status on the
Oronsay
continued to be minimal, while those at the Captain’s Table were constantly toasting one another’s significance. That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.

The Girl

IF ANYONE APPEARED to be the most powerless person on the ship it was the girl named Asuntha, and it was only gradually that we became aware of her. She seemed to own just a faded green dress. It was all she wore, even during the storms. She was deaf, and that made her seem even more frail and alone. Someone at our table wondered how she had managed to pay for her passage. We watched her once, exercising on a trampoline, and when she was in mid-air, with all that silent space around her, we felt we were witnessing a different person. But as soon as she stopped and walked away, you were not conscious of any agility or strength in her. She was pale, even for a Sinhalese girl. And slight.

She was scared of water. If she was walking past the pool we’d taunt her by threatening to shove handfuls at her, until Cassius had a change of heart and stopped our doing it. We glimpsed a little mercy in Cassius then, and noticed he began to watch over her shyly from that point on. Sunil, The Hyderabad Mind from the Jankla Troupe, seemed to be looking after her. He sat beside her at meals, at the table where Emily also sat, and he’d glance over to the Cat’s Table, horrified at the amount of noise being made by our group.

Asuntha had a specific way of listening. She could hear only with her right ear, and then only if someone spoke clearly and directly into it. In this way she would take the tremor of air and interpret it into sound, then words. You could not communicate except by coming intimately close. During lifeboat drills a steward took her aside to explain rules and procedures, while the rest of us were told the same information from a loudspeaker. It felt there were barriers all around her.

It was chance and nothing more that Emily was sitting at the same table as the girl. And if Emily was the glittering public beauty, this girl was the reclusive one. Gradually they seemed to become friends, and we began to see an intensity in their conversations – the whispers, the holding of hands. It was Emily as a very different soul, when she was with the deaf girl.

A THIN WASH of morning rain on the decks was perfect. Between Exit B and Exit C was a twenty-yard stretch unhindered by deckchairs. We raced towards it in our bare feet and let ourselves go, sliding along the slippery wood till we crashed into the railing or a door being suddenly opened by a passenger coming out to check on the weather. Cassius felled the ancient Professor Raasagoola Chaudharibhoy during one record-setting projection of his body. The distance could be improved during deck scrubbing. Once the layer of soap was down and not yet mopped, we could slide twice the distance, overturning pails, colliding into sailors. Even Ramadhin participated. He was discovering that more than anything he loved the sea wind in his face. He would stand for hours at the prow, his gaze locked into the distance, hypnotised by something out there or held in some thought.

If anyone wished to capture the daily movements on our ship, the most accurate method might be to create a series of time-lapse criss-crossings, depicted in different colours, to reflect the daily loitering. There was the path Mr Mazappa took after waking at noon, and the stroll the Moratuwa ayurvedic made when free of his duties with Sir Hector. There were the two dog walkers, Hastie and Invernio; the slow perambulation to and from the Delilah Lounge by Flavia Prins and her bridge-playing friends; the Australian circling on skates at dawn; the Jankla Troupe’s official and unofficial activities; as well as the three of us bursting all over the place like freed mercury: stopping at the pool, then the ping-pong table, watching a piano class with Mr Mazappa in the ballroom, a small nap, a chat with the one-eyed Assistant Purser – looking carefully into his glass eye as we passed – and visits to Mr Fonseka’s cabin for an hour or more. All these haphazard patterns of movement became as predictable as the steps of a quadrille.

For us, this was an era without the benefit of photography so the journey escaped any permanent memory. Not even one blurred snapshot of my time on the
Oronsay
exists in my possession to tell me what Ramadhin really looked like during that journey. A blurred dive into the swimming pool, a white-sheeted body dropping through the air into the sea, a boy searching for himself in a mirror, Miss Lasqueti asleep in a deckchair – these are images only from memory. On the upper deck, in Emperor Class, some passengers had box cameras, and they were often captured in their ‘soup and fish’ outfits. At the Cat’s Table, Miss Lasqueti now and then did sketches in a yellow notebook. She may have drawn some of us, but we were never curious enough to ask, an artistic interest not being something we assumed in those around us. She could just as easily have been knitting a portrait of each of us using different-coloured wools. We were more curious when she brought out her pigeon jacket to show us how she could walk around on deck carrying several live birds in its padded pockets.

Whatever we did had no possibility of permanence. We were simply discovering how long our lungs could hold air as we raced back and forth along the bottom of the pool. Because our greatest pleasure was when one hundred spoons were flung by a steward into the pool and Cassius and I dived in with competitors to collect as many as we could in our small hands, relying on those lungs for more and more time underwater. We were watched and cheered and laughed at if our trunks slipped down as we clambered out like amphibious fish with cutlery in our hands, gripping them against our chests. ‘I love all men who dive,’ Melville, that great sea-crosser, wrote. And if I had been asked to choose a career then, or at any time during those twenty-one days, I would have said I desired to be a diver in some similar competition for the rest of my life. It never occurred to me then that there was no such trade or profession. Still our slim bodies, almost part of the element, dumped our treasure and flipped back in for another helping, hunting underwater for the last spoons. Only Ramadhin, protecting his tentative heart, could not participate. But he would, slightly bored, cheer us on.

Thievery

ONE MORNING I was persuaded by a man known to us as Baron C. to help with a project. He needed a small, athletic boy, and he had been watching me dive for spoons in the pool.

First of all I was invited by him to have some ice cream in the First Class lounge. Then, in his cabin, in order to demonstrate my skill, I was asked to remove my sandals, get on the furniture, and move as fast as I could around the room, without ever touching the floor. I thought this was peculiar, but I leapt from the armchair onto the desk, then to the bed, and swung myself hanging on the door over to the bathroom. Compared with mine it was a very large cabin, and after a few minutes I stood there, barefoot on the thick carpet, panting like a dog. At which point he brought out a pot of tea.

‘It’s Colombo tea, not ship tea,’ he said, adding condensed milk into the cup. The man knew what good tea was. So far, we had been served what tasted like dishwater on the ship, and I had stopped drinking it. In fact, I would not drink tea for years. But the Baron made me my last good cup of tea. He had brought out very small cups, so I had to have several that day.

The Baron told me I was
athletic
. He walked me to his door and pointed to the window above it. It was rectangular and had a small latch that could secure it shut. Now the glass lay horizontal, flat like a tray, allowing the air to come into and go out of the room.

‘Think you can climb through that?’ Not waiting for an answer, he cupped his hands and made me climb onto them and up onto his shoulders. I was six feet from the ground. I began crawling into the opening, precarious on the glass and its wooden frame, scared I would fall through. Protecting this open space further were two horizontal bars. He asked me to try working my body between them, but I could not get through.

‘It is no use. Get down.’ I put my knees on his shoulders again and held on to his brilliantined hair and climbed down, feeling I had betrayed him in some way, especially after the ice cream and the good tea.

‘I’ll have to try someone else,’ he murmured to himself, as if I were no longer in his presence. And then, conscious of my disappointment, he said, ‘I am sorry.’

The next day I saw the Baron at the pool speaking with another boy, who a short while later accompanied him to the upper deck. He was smaller than I was, though perhaps not as
athletic
, because the boy returned within an hour and talked only about the tea and biscuits he had been given. Then, perhaps a day after that, I was invited by the Baron to come to his cabin and attempt to climb through that window again. He had, he said, another idea. As we passed the steward who guarded the entrance to First Class, the Baron said, ‘My nephew – having him over for tea.’ And soon I was strolling legally through the carpeted lounge, keeping my eyes open for Flavia Prins, for this was also her territory.

He had asked me to wear my swimsuit, and when I removed the rest of my clothes he brought out a small pail of motor oil that he’d managed to get from the engine room, and made me spread the thick black liquid all over my body from the neck down. Then once again I was hoisted up to the open window, beyond which were the two horizontal bars. And this time, covered in oil, I slid through like an eel and dropped to the floor of the corridor on the other side of the door. I knocked and he let me back in. He was grinning.

Immediately he gave me a bathrobe to wear and we went along the empty corridor. He knocked at a door, and when there was no response he hoisted me up with his palms, and this time I slipped through the open window the other way,
into
a stateroom. I unlocked the door from inside, and as the Baron entered, he patted me on the head. He sat in an armchair briefly, winked at me, then got up and began looking around the room, opening up a few cupboard drawers. We were out in minutes.

Looking back, I think he may have convinced me that the breaking and entering that followed was a private game between him and some friends. For what he was doing seemed relaxed and good-natured. He strolled through a suite, his hands casually in his trouser pockets as he peered at objects on a shelf or a desk, or glanced into further rooms. I recall he once found a large sheaf of papers that he dropped into a sports bag. I also saw him pocket a silver-bladed knife.

While he did this, I was mostly looking out from one of the portholes at the sea. If they were open I’d hear yells from quoits players on a lower deck. That was the excitement for me, and being in such a large cabin. The one I shared with Mr Hastie was about the size of a stateroom’s large bed. I walked into one fully mirrored bathroom and suddenly saw receding images of myself, semi-naked, covered in black oil, just a brown face and spiky hair. There was a wild boy in there, somebody from one of the
Jungle Book
stories whose eyes watched me, white as lamps. This was, I think, the first reflection or portrait that I remember of myself. It was the image of my youth that I would hold on to for years – someone startled, half formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet. I became aware of the Baron on the edge of the mirror frame, watching me. He had a considering look. It was as if he understood what I was seeing in the mirror, as if he too had done that once. He threw me a towel and asked me to clean myself up and put on the rest of my clothes, which he’d brought in his sports bag.

I could not wait to tell the others at the next turbine room meeting what had happened to me. I felt my authority grow. But in retrospect I see that what the Baron gave me was another self, something as small as a pencil sharpener. It was a little escape into being somebody else, a door I would postpone opening for some years, at least until I was beyond my teens. Those half-blurred afternoons remain with me. I remember one day, after he had knocked on a door and got no reply and I had slid through the bars of the window frame and let him in, we were shocked to find someone asleep in the large bed, the table beside him arrayed with medicine bottles. The Baron held up his palm for silence, went closer, and stared at the comatose body, which I would realise later was Sir Hector de Silva. The Baron touched my shoulder and gestured to a metal bust of the millionaire on the dresser. While the Baron continued looking around the room for valuables – gems, I supposed; that was, after all, what thieves seemed to take – I looked back and forth, comparing the metal head with the real one. The bust made the sleeping man look leonine and noble, in contrast to the reality that rested on the pillow. I tried lifting the bust into my arms, but it was too heavy.

The Baron now leafed through documents but did not take any. Instead he plucked a small green statue of a frog off the mantelpiece. ‘Jade,’ he bent down and whispered to me. And then, almost too personally, he took a photograph of a young woman that was in a silver frame beside the man’s bed. He told me, as we walked down the corridor a few minutes later, that he found her very attractive. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘I will meet her at some point during this journey.’

The Baron would disembark, prematurely, at Port Said, for by then, suspicions of a thief on board were making the rounds, although they were not of course directed at anyone in First Class. I know that at Aden he mailed off some packages. In any case, all of a sudden he stopped asking me to meet him. He took me for a final tea in the Bedford Lounge, and I hardly saw him from then on. I never knew whether he had been stealing simply to cover his First Class passage or to give money to an ailing brother or some old partner in crime. He seemed to me a generous man. I still remember how he looked, how he dressed, although I am not sure if he was English or one of those mongrels who have assumed the panache of aristocracy. I do know that whenever I am in a country where they put up the faces of criminals in post offices, I look for him.