The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest (9 page)

“I would be if I broke off my relationship with Paul and took a wife. So would Paul, of course, which was what Aaron really wanted, though I don't imagine he talked to anyone except me about it.”

“At least it sounds as if nobody can have been motivated by a certainty that he would succeed to the chieftainship.”

“No. Is that all?”

“For the moment, thank you very much. Do you know where either of the uniformed constables is?”

“I think Mr. Fernham's in the men's kitchen—it's on the right in the basement.”

“Did you have to put kitchens in when you came?”

“Three. There's a little one for Paul and me. The Gas Board thought I was pulling its leg.”

“I can imagine it.”

In the basement, the smells were outlandish and hungry-making, though the doors were shut. All the men were in their kitchen, the three young ones working carefully through Kempton Park runners, four of the elders playing knucklebones on a deal table, and a fifth stirring a very big new saucepan on a gas cooker. Fernham was slouched against the wall, helmet off, pretending to watch the game but really staring at the cook. This was a Ku whose Christian name Pibble had not yet identified, but whom he had mentally called The Poacher because of the jacket he wore, an elaborately pocketed and flapped affair in a green dogtooth tweed. It might have been made for some large and jovial squire, but on its present owner it hung below the knees. As Pibble watched, The Poacher groped in a pocket and withdrew a pawful of small brown paper bags which he smelled in turn before putting a couple of pinches from one of them into the brew. He put the bags back and began to search another pocket; this took some time, but at last he pulled out some small black objects (spiders?) and popped them in, too. Pibble crossed to Fernham.

“Smells good,” he said. “D'you know what it's called?”

One of the knucklebone players, Elijah, glanced up.

“We call it stew,” he said.

He picked up the bones in his right hand, flipped them into the air, caught four on the back of the hand, slid them off into a small pile, picked up the fallen two, tossed them a couple of feet into the air, picked up the pile, and caught the two as they fell. He seemed almost to have time to wait for them to come down. Then he did the same with his left hand. The black limbs moved so fast over the bleached deal that they lost their outline, becoming a patterned flicker like leaf shadow.

“Strong left this for you, sir,” said Constable Fernham.

Pibble read the list. There were eight pubs on it, with the name of the brewer followed by three columns of figures, which turned out to be points awarded for food, clientele, and comfort. The Station Hotel had far and away the best score; its brewer was down as “Bass, but careful landlord” and there was a further note: “It's all right once you're inside.”

“Thanks,” said Pibble. “If anyone wants me, I'll be at the Station Hotel till about two.”

When he got there, Pibble found he knew it well, a crazy adventure in turreted brick, a fistful of Mouse Towers, an abandoned design by Ludwig of Bavaria, the whole loutish hodgepodge shouldering out toward the roaring roundabout where the Ring Road crossed the A-something. (Not Pibble's idea of a pub, which was a back-street nook kept by a silent old man who lived for the quality of his draught beer. It would be empty when Pibble used it, except for two genial dotards playing dominoes, but its finances and its bitter would be kept healthy by squads of thirsty men working in a trade so peculiar that they had to do all their drinking at hours when Pibble was dredging for torsos.) Pibble willed his stomach to pessimism and went in.

The Bass was beautiful; the cheese was strong Canadian cheddar and the sausages Harris, cooked to a mahogany fatness; the butter was butter. Pibble, as he settled down to read, wondered why Strong wasn't farther up the ladder. If he had served his job as he had served his superior officer …

The cards turned out disappointing, collections of bony fact which Pibble couldn't put flesh on. The old men were a bit younger than they looked: Aaron had been fifty-eight, Melchizedek was fifty-four. Everyone seemed to be related: Leah was Ishmael's sister, Elijah was … Ach! Hell. He'd take them home and he and Mrs. Pibble could spend the evening constructing a genealogical table; that might amuse her for a bit.

The sheet of paper labeled “Finance” read:

I inherited a considerable amount of property from my mother, whose mother's father had been a successful speculative builder in the middle of the last century. This has enabled me to bring the Kus here and to maintain them—not as expensive as it sounds, as we prefer to live frugally, except for heating. Simon, Jacob, Daniel, and Magdalene work for London Transport and bring home roughly
£
50 a week between them. Paul's earnings from his paintings vary considerably, but recently he has been doing very well, earning just under
£
2,000 in the last financial year.

All this, together with most of the income from my property, goes into the Trust which I have established for the benefit of the Kus. Dr. Kerway, of King's College, London, and myself are the surviving Trustees; Aaron was one.

I pay a pension to my old nanny, whose name I do not imagine to be germane, and I have left her a sum of money in my will. I have no relatives, according to a firm of detectives I employed to ascertain whether any existed. I have left Paul enough money to maintain him should his talent fail. The rest will go to the Trust.

I have not told any of the Kus, except Paul and Aaron, about these arrangements. The men would regard it as an impertinence on my part and the women as not being their affair.

Aaron himself had no property beyond a few personal possessions. These would be valueless, except for the Crucifixion Paul painted for him, whose value (as it is not quite in the style of the paintings which have been selling so well) is difficult to estimate.

Clear, thought Pibble, but beside the point. I wish she'd put down how much rent Caine pays and whether he pays it. And whether the Kus are conscious of the extent to which she is supporting them. Can they guess how much her glass-sided ants' nest is costing her? Are they even aware of the value of money? They must be, after all that telly. And what. . . Ah, forget it. He turned to the chunk of filial piety in the blue loose-leaf folder.

It was not a coherent document. As far as Pibble could see, there were three distinct beginnings, about seven different swatches of middle (some overlapping), and no ends. Several title pages were scattered through all this, none apparently connected with any of the parts. One said, “
The Reverend John Hennekey Mackenzie, A Memoir
”; another, “
The Guinea Stamp
, by Eve Mackenzie”; and another, “
After the Manner of Men, An Experiment in Anthropology
, by Dr. Eve Ku.”

There was a genealogical table on a different size of paper and with different typewriting—the work of that detective agency, presumably. They'd done their stuff, going back three generations all along the line and more elsewhere. Eve's mother's mother's father, the note on finance had said; the table made him Ephraim Flagg, builder,
d.
1893, leaving two
d.,
one unmarried. A thoroughly unsatisfying solution to
that
mystery. Perhaps it meant that Eve owned the whole damned Terrace—say five flats in each of eleven houses, let at an average of four guineas a week (you couldn't visualize her as the extortionate landlord beloved of journalists), and not all that much upkeep on buildings put up by the proud and virtuous Grandfather Flagg. (Pibble stopped to wonder whether Eve knew anything about him; surely he must have left legends behind, to people the turrets of his fantasy.) Say ten thousand quid a year before tax, probably more. How many of the Kus would the tax hawks let her list as dependents? Rebecca, perhaps; Robin and the other kids? Bob Caine? Tchah!

He smothered his last morsel of bread with mustard, balanced a carefully preserved triangle of cheese on top, and began to read, chewing. She seemed to have tried every known style of biography:

… In many ways a typical child of the Manse. From that source he drew his romantic but practical venturesomeness, his deep natural piety, his belief in the virtue of labour, his obstinate certainty of the rightness of his own motives. But from what fey Celtic strain did this typical Lowlander inherit the visionary side of his faith? His almost Oriental ability to accept both of two conflicting truths? His uncondescending sympathy with alien modes of thought and action, so far from typical of the Lowland Scot? His spiritual humility? His …

There were several pages of that, with every abstract noun balanced by a contradictory one and hardly a fact anywhere.

School in the village was not like school elsewhere. Attendance was not compulsory. Adults and children both came, the women and girls and small boys squatting on the floor on one side of the big hut, the men and youths on the other. Down the gangway between the sexes Mackenzie walked. No writing was attempted. Mackenzie argued that it was more useful and less disturbing to the pupils if he worked on the resources of their elaborate oral culture, the (to a European) incredible memories, and the ingrained desire to arrange the structure of facts and events into ritual patterns. When his daughter came out at the age of thirteen, she joined the class, but was lost without these special abilities and had to have coaching in the evening.

A typical class sounded like a long, rambling, bilingual conversation. Mackenzie insisted, with some justice, that each party was really teaching the other, since he was learning (slowly but to an extraordinary depth) the habits and thought patterns of the Kus. It is one of the tragedies of modern anthropology that his early death prevented his knowledge from being set down on paper. What a substructure it would have provided for the observations and theories of his more superficial colleagues!

He spoke to his class in both English and Ku, but never in any sort of mixture. He despised pidgin English, declaring that it was a tool of colonialism and the badge of a subject race. Instead he taught, with considerable success, standard English. He repeated longish passages in English and Ku, relying on the memory of his pupils to retain the one while hearing and comparing it with the other. After slow beginnings, this proved wholly successful.

Pibble skipped an intricate analysis of the areas of the two cultures with which the language of the other did not overlap, and picked up again where a capital “C” caught his eye.

But what of his avowed purpose in being in New Guinea at all, that of being a Christian missionary? Here again both his beliefs and his methods were personal and eclectic; and perhaps he was fortunate that the Church of Scotland maintained no organized missionary structure in New Guinea; his superiors would have been unlikely to approve of all he did. He felt that the more closely Christianity could be integrated with the existing customs of the Kus, the better. Dr. Schroeder, Baptist colleague who worked in a group of villages a dozen miles down the valley, used to twit him by saying that Mackenzie would have condoned head-hunting—had that been a custom of the Kus—as perfectly consistent with Christianity. Mackenzie would laugh and say his was the only way he could work. The basis of his every action was solid and abiding respect for each individual man, with a conviction that man's existing structure of beliefs was a part of his being, and therefore a part of human civilization. Uproot these beliefs, with however creditable a motive, replace them with however noble a creed, and your converts will be half destroyed in the process of conversion, at best dependent and at worst demoralized. And, in the end, the old roots will send out suckers, draining the strength from your new graft, corrupting and killing it. The last state of your flock shall be worse than the first!

Pibble skimmed again, this time an unconvincing and, he thought, unconvinced discussion of the nature of conversion. It had the feel of a conversation heard long ago and imperfectly remembered. He next found himself in the middle of a section, apparently earlier in date, written horribly in the historic present.

John walks slowly across the great patch of beaten earth between the huts. The whole tribe is assembled to see him, men and boys in one group, women and children in the other. Between them stands the chief and behind him squats the priest with the ceremonial slit-drums. The Kus believe that this priest, jealous of a rival, brought sickness and death to John's predecessor by incantations, drumming, and a magical arrangement of sacred bones. The previous missionary died, in fact, of malaria, but the priest is a creature of power. John speaks formally to the chief, asking permission to live among them. He exchanges a careful greeting with the priest and …

A hand fell on Pibble's shoulder, blighting his repose, an accent of lead. He knew who it was without looking up, and before the voice spoke.

“What'll you have, copper? Another pint of ordinary? They know how to look after it here.”

Caine picked up Pibble's tankard and strode off to the bar, his steps artificially long and masterful. There was a fair-sized group of lounging shouters there, but he was through it and being served at once. Angrily Pibble fished two and tuppence out of his pocket; he didn't want another pint, however good. But at least he did have something he wanted to talk to Caine about. The man came back, slopping beer without apology over another drinker's suède shoes.

“I'm afraid,” Pibble said, “you'll have to let me pay for my own. We must keep this talk on a formal basis.”

He slid the coins across. Caine said nothing for a full ten seconds; then he put the beer down.

“Bad as that, is it?”

“You told me you spent last night at Turner's Hotel, Crerdon Road, Southampton. The hotel informs us that they have in the past provided you with an alibi for social reasons, but that you were not there last night. They are not prepared, you see, to give false information to the police in a matter of importance.”