The Love Beach (20 page)

Conway never went with the men. He was spending a lot of time over on St Paul's island, ascertaining the natives, as he explained. and helping Joseph of Arimathea and his elders to build a new grandstand and crush barriers for Ascension Day. But on the mornings when he was not visiting the other island he would sit in his window at the Hilton, directly over the street, beer in hand, held like a urine specimen, and call encouragement and jeers to the patrol as it set out. 'Boots, Boots, Boots ...' he would sing
or 'Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you'. Dahlia would be there with him some mornings for they found his room more restful than hers, and she would blow extravagant kisses to Davies and once threw a coloured streamer at him from the window.

Depending on which part of the jungle they were going to survey that day, the file would march north or east from the town. Men they went north they would pass Bird's shop and she and those customers who were not trapped under hairdriers would crowd to the doors to see the spectacle. The older women were either tolerantly amused or scathing, although none of their remarks ever reached the marching men, but Bird stood, fresh in her hairdresser's smock, watching solemnly. Davies always looked towards her and she always smiled.

Once they left the town the dust road began to crawl upwards and the sun came face on, when they were going east, and worked around to the backs of their necks when they were moving north. They began to puff and pant and out came the little jars of boded sweets. This was the most difficult part of the journey, much of it was through rocky, open areas, where there was no shade, and it was too early to occupy themselves in the business of looking for a skeleton. After they had made two such journeys, Mr English began whistling Scots airs through his teeth and the others, taking heart, tramped and whistled to their boots in the best musical tradition of the British soldier.

It took an hour to reach the skirts of the upland jungle. It was a place of deep tangles and thick growth that thickened with each rainy season. It was a solemnly quiet place too, like a temple, with the sun cutting down through the higher trees, but only in columns and shafts, because overhead the leaves and branches were often sufficient to roof the place and keep the rays away. The floor was either glutted with growth, generations of it, too thick, too powerful to ever penetrate, or spread with a secondary tangle that could be cut away, or sometimes, quite miraculously, clear with all the sweetness of a fairy glen.

They concentrated on the penetrable areas, where they could make progress and where the battles of long ago would have logically been fought. They discovered a machine gun one morning, and army mess tins with a mould of food within on another day. Another afternoon, just as they were about to call a halt to the search and return to Sexagesima, Mr Hassey found a Japanese steel helmet and there was a great fanned‑out operation looking for the head that might have worn it, but with no success.

Davies found a strange change happening to him as he tramped with the men. He began to get the feel of the place. Of the jungle, of the hills, of the island, the archipelago, and of the Pacific. He found the silence filling him with rest, the shadows full of comfort after the heat. He did not even resent the heat itself. He let it sink into his body, he let the sun assault his face and arms.

All the more he enjoyed the gulps of beer when they rested before going to search again, all the more he enjoyed the late returns when the sun was moving away. He enjoyed too the sudden rustles of small animals and the occasional flight of coloured birds that tore the jungle silence. And he enjoyed the sudden breakthrough, when they would emerge from the trees at mountain level and be confronted with the green body of the island spread below, the tracks and the little watercourses that were the veins, the small patches of cultivated land around the villages, the brown of the villages themselves, their quiet smoke in the air, the beaches, the necklace of the reef, and the great, shining, swinging sweep of the ocean that seemed to occupy the rest of the world.

But he enjoyed most the company of the men. Odd they were. and narrow and strange, but in them, in their talk and their lives, he discovered something that had not been apparent to him before. These were the brave, the explorers, the colonists, the conquestors, even. These funny, odd‑shaped little men, with their burnt faces, their prejudices, their suburban fears, their narrow lives, their hopeless dreams, their hate and their deep love for their homeland so far away from these islands ‑ these were the Empire Builders, the last of them too, not the rugged, romantic 149

imperious figures from the imagination of history books. For what Empires were worth, these were those who made them and preserved them, working under fans in oppressive offices, counting up little additions in notebooks in warehouses and stores, going home in the rain, worrying about their health and their wives, sending their children ten thousand miles to school so that they lost them for ever. These were the pioneers. They
couldn't even send for a gunboat, because there wasn't one.

When they sat under trees and ate their sandwiches he listened to their talk, talk of the islands, people they had known, how they came there in the first place, their ridiculous plans for putting St Peter's and the whole of the Apostles on the true map. Getting tourists and industry, getting their voice shouting down the tombs of Whitehall. 'Wait until the Queen arrives,' they said. 'We'll show them who and what we are. Wait until she arrives.'

But to Davies it was most touching when they spoke oftheir homeland. It was as though they spoke of some foreign place that had long ceased to be familiar. Therewere arguments as to whether Manchester was two hundred or four hundred miles from London, whether the first snow fell on the Western Highlands in November, who was

the present captain of England at cricket, the extent of the

area ruled by the Thames Conservancy Board. Some be‑

lieved that trams still ran along the Victoria Embankment.

Some thought that Croydon was London Airport. Davies

listened in wonder and pity. They were like blind men play‑

ing a guessing game. Not many took their leave in Britain,

it was a habit that died away after a few years. The news‑

papers were always two months old. George Turtle at the

radio station usually managed to hear Radio Fiji
news

bulletins and if something tremendous happened in the

world he would report to the rest of them at the Hilton or at

the British Legion Club. The Governor always received his

private intelligences but they knew nothing of them, nor did

they care. George Turtle's news had to be exceptional to be

taken to them as they talked their talk of the islands. He

usually judged whether something was of interest or not.

Quite often he would go for two weeks without breaking anything to them. His predecessor at the radio station, a man called Melville who had been found dead with the earphones still on, had not even bothered to tell the people of the Apostles about the Cuba crisis. The assassination of President Kennedy was talked about for some twenty minutes and then forgotten because the volcano on St Barnabas Island began to show signs of erupting for the first time in fifty‑three years. As Seamus at the Hilton had said, no world disaster ever struck the Apostles. By the time they heard it was always far too late.

On the afternoon of the third patrol that Davies had joined, a hairless man called Vicary, who had a small plantation and a chemist's shop on the outskirts of Sexagesima, ran back, plunging through the waist‑high growth, and shouted for Mr English. The men had fanned out in their search. Some had tunnelled into the undergrowth and vanished. When Mr Vicary called, heads bobbed up like bathers bobbing out of the sea.

Davies turned in the clinging growth pulling against it as it sought to retain him. Mr Vicary's red baldness moved through the green excitedly as he called. 'Mr English! Mr English!' The head vanished momentarily as he stumbled. It appeared again over the undergrowth. 'Mr English ‑ !I've found him! I've found him!'

He reached a plate‑shaped clearing at the same time as Mr English and some of the others. Davies pulled himself from the mass and reached the open space. Mr Vicary, wearing khaki trousers tucked into red socks, panted to the others. 'In there!' he said. 'I've found him in there.'

They knew what he meant, but his words were such that no one was entirely sure. Mr English said: 'Who?'

'Who?' repeated Mr Vicary. 'Who? The soldier, of course. The Unknown Soldier.'

Mr English started forward with determination, Mr Vicary pointing the way. 'This way. Here he is.' The party stopped, up to its necks in jungle tangle. 'There,' said Mr Vicary triumphantly. 'Down there, see.'

'Machette,' grunted Mr English with authority. Somebody passed a machette and he began to hack away at the stems and fronds on either side. He made a clear area and first looked down and then bent down. 'Pig,' he said.

'Pardon,' said Mr Vicary, surprised.

'Bones of a wild pig,' said Mr English. 'Soldiers don't have cloven feet like that. You're a chemist, you should know, Mr Vicary.'

They trudged back to their survey. Mr Vicary was sullen and hurt all day and did not volunteer for another search party.

'I can't see why we couldn't have packed up those bones

in a bag and brought them back and said they were the unknown Soldier,' he grumbled to Davies as they returned in the lessening evening. 'Nobody's going to notice the bloody difference.'

Davies was in the bar of the Hilton after one of the days in the jungle. He went willingly with the search parties. There was little else for him to do. He was sitting with Conway and Dahlia, George Turtle, and Hassey the planter. The place was all but empty because it was the night for the film at the British Legion. A middle‑aged Frenchman played the piano like an invalid at one end of the bar and Pollet, who was propped against the wall reading a French motor magazine which he had stolen that afternoon from the public library, mimed the song's words from long ago without looking up.

There was an expansive wall mirror across the room from Davies, a great earthquake crack in it. It had been brought from Sydney thirty years before, gilded with a whorly design at its edges and proclaiming the goodness of Lyons Fruit Pies. Davies, in turning to pass his beer mug up to Seamus at the bar, caught sight of himself in the old glass and stopped. He realized that he hardly knew himself. His face was rough brown, burned red raw at the cheekbones and at one patch above the right eye. His hair was long, matted too; his chin black‑bristled because he had got up early that day to go on the search and he had not shaved. His shirt curled in horns at the collar ends, its white long sunk to grey. Bird sometimes washed his clothes for him because the Chinese laundry made holes in them, but he often forgot to take the things to her.

He'd been walking in the heat of the afternoon, mostly in the clear because they had searched some of the open highlands too that day, and three quick pints of beer had given him a gassy uplift. Yet, how strange that this should be him. He looked around at the others, talking, heads bent over the table, and he realized that he had come to look like one of them.

'Wouldn't know you in Newport now,' would they boy?' he said confidentially to himself as he waited for the beer from Seamus. The long Irishman passed it over. Davies took another quick look at himself. Hell, fancy walking along Dock Street looking like that. No, much better to walk down our road like that. They saw plenty of tans in Dock Street, didn't they, straight off the boats? Of course they did. But say he walked down his own road like that ‑ tomorrow ‑ hard like he was now with a good suit on and a white shirt, and shaved of course. Kate would think that was a great thing. She was always going on about how tanned some of the men were at the swimming baths. She liked tanned men. And the kids would jump at him and ask him to tell them stories of his adventures in the horrible jungles. People would stop him in the street and inquire how he liked being back after all that time abroad. Yes, that would be marvellous, now wouldn't it? It was a pity there was no way of getting out of this place.

George Turtle was saying ponderously: 'All the values have gone now at home. Everything we fought for, Dunkirk, right through. All down the drain. Place full of blacks and layabouts. That's why I came here. Britain's no country for a civilized, go‑ahead, chap. Or his family either. My brother in Isleworth tells me I'm well off out of it, and the wife. But it wasn't easy, you know, I admit that. I was proud of the old country. I remember in 1940 our evening institute had classes in thatching ‑ you know thatching roofs of houses. In 1940!'

'S'pose they thought you'd be short of a few roofs,' suggested Conway soberly.

'Bombs andwhatever you had.'

Turtle glared at him. 'I tell you what it showed
me,
Mr Conway. It showed me we had faith in the future. Anyone who wants to learn thatching has to have the confidence to look a long way ahead. That goes without saying. Yes, I was proud of England then. But then it all slid away. All in no time, it seemed. When Dad and my dear mum died a few years ago I thought, "Well, George, now is the time to get out," and so I did ‑ bringing my wife with me of course. But the funny thing was, the
real
thing that
finally
decided me was something the undertaker said when they put the old lady away.'

George paused and seemed to find some mystery in his empty glass. Davies ordered him another beer. 'What was it, Mr Turtle?' he asked.

'What was what?' asked George. 'A beer, I said.'

'No, what was it the undertaker said that made you emigrate?'

'Oh yes, he was standing there talking on the telephone making sure of the times and that sort of thing for the funeral. I was sitting down and he's carrying on just as though he is selling two hundredweight of fertilizer or something. That was bad enough, but then he ended up the conversation by saying, "Right then, Fred" or Harry or Bill, or whoever it was, "Right then, eleven o'clock Wednesday ‑ West London Crem." WEST LONDON CREM!
That's what he said, in front of me, the bereaved. WEST LONDON CREM!'