“On your own?”
“No. With a woman called Ma Didds. Professional foster mother. Me and two vague cousins I’d never heard of. It wasn’t safe for Raj brats to stay in Malaya. We died off after five. And before five in hundreds. I felt pretty well in the East but I hadn’t a say in the matter. ‘Terrible for the parents,’ everyone says but I hadn’t a mother and my father lived in a world of his own. Anyway, all Raj Orphans forgot their parents. Some of them attached themselves to the foster parents for life.”
“Not you?”
“No.”
“Where did you go?”
“Wales. It was Wales or Norfolk. Wales was cheaper.”
Suddenly he knew that it must have been his aunts who had chosen it. “What about you, Loss?”
“Something of a mystery, my parents. They didn’t send me to England until I was ten. And they didn’t call it ‘Home.’ They weren’t Raj.”
“What did you do in the holidays?”
“Oh, I always went to Singapore.”
“You couldn’t have done. There wasn’t time.”
Loss continued to play Patience with a cloth over his head.
“Well,” he said vaguely. “I got humped about. I am a natural traveller. We are of Hakkar stock.”
“So you keep telling me. Were there many Hakkars going to Eton?”
“I beseech you, Feathers. You may have found your tongue at last and it is all very interesting, but do not drink any more of the beer. And leave off the bananas.”
“Why?”
“I shall have to look after you. I can see the fruit moving. It will be a humiliation.”
“For me or for you?” shouted Eddie, tight as a tick, flat on his back, feet in the air, peeling a thirty-seventh banana.
“Both of us,” said Loss. “Here. Cover yourself. Here is your shirt. You are calling attention to us.”
“Not true,” yelled Eddie. “They’re all drunk here. Look at the beer cans everywhere. Or they’re drugged — look at them all just standing staring. All des-o-late. All the best ones dead. We’re going to lose this War so we may as well drink and die.”
Another flying boat split the air with sound. “Bundle of spare parts,” shouted Eddie. “Won’t make it back. Torpedo boats bang bang — down. England won’t last six months against Germany. Churchill’s a buffoon. Ham actor. Country’s finished. Europe’s finished. Thank God I’m going away.”
Someone from the Red Cross hut came down the beach and took him off, Loss walking thoughtfully behind.
Eddie, put to bed, raved for three days. Loss moved into the Missions to Seamen and watched a scorpion hanging from a rafter, ate mangoes and played cards with anyone who would give him a game.
The Missions to Seamen medical man was troubled by Eddie. “How old is he?” he asked Loss. “Your friend. The other evacuee — a schoolfriend?”
“I am not an evacuee,” said Loss. “I am travelling home to pursue my life. Feathers is a young friend of mine, no; for I only met him on the Breath o’Dunoon. He is an unwilling evacuee. His father sent for him to return to Malaya. He wanted to stay and Do His Bit.”
“Did he? Well, now he’s yelling and ranting about dead pilots and the Battle of Britain.”
“That’s over,” said Loss. “I expect he’s lost best friends. There are those with best friends. I avoid such. He’ll be OK. He needed to blow up.”
The doctor looked dubious.
But by the time the Portuguese freighter arrived a fortnight later to carry them on, a gaunt, monosyllabic (but not stammering) Feathers was allowed to continue his journey.
“He’s strong,” said the Purser. “There’s those get malaria soon as they get to Freetown. He’s not had that. There’s blackwater fever if you so much as look at the swamp. He’s not had that. Just the guts. The guts and the brains. He’ll recover.”
“He drank palm-beer from a bad bottle,” said Loss, tightlipped as a Methodist.
“Maybe, lad, it saved his life.” The Purser was the only Englishman on the new ship, and spoke Portuguese. He had avoided the call-up, he said, because of flat feet. “I dare say the bugger’ll live,” he said. “He’s walking.”
But as they sailed — their neutral flag flying or rather hanging limp on the mast — down the bulge of Africa and at last out upon the hot-plate of the Indian Ocean, day after day, day after day, Eddie lay prone in the sick bay, hardly eating, drinking only lime juice, not talking but muttering and yelling in his sleep. Loss, three flights down in the noisome, sweaty bilges, sat on his bunk and wrote up his log book. He also sat with Eddie several hours a day thinking his Hakkar thoughts. In the night he went on deck and sat about learning Portuguese from the crew. He watched each morning the raising of the neutral flag to ensure that the sea and the sky and the sea-birds (there were few now) and the enemy submarines (there were none) knew that this was a craft on peaceful business.
In time, Eddie got up and began to wander on deck, sit against the davits, lean over the rails. He felt so alien and remote from anything that had happened to him before that tears of weakness filled his eyes and reflected the tremendous starlight. He was hollow, a shell on a beach — but safe at last. I could be OK now, he thought, if I could stay here for my life on the circle of the sea.
Loss watched him and considered the ranting he’d heard in the sick bay and risked saying, once, when they were sitting on the creaking deck under the moon, “Tell me about Ma Didds. Go on. You’ll have to tell somebody, some day.”
But Eddie froze to stone.
Breezily on another occasion, the crew eating fish stew, Eddie crumbling bread, Loss said, “I suppose you know that there are those who believe that endurance of cruelty as a child can feed genius?”
“I have no genius,” said Eddie, “and never would have had.”
“Bad luck,” said Loss. “It is perhaps a pity that I wasn’t sent to Ma Didds.”
“She would have broken even you.”
But this conversation was a turning point, and Eddie seemed to relax. As the heat grew ever stronger, the sea a shimmering disc wherever you looked, and the two boys shrunk into any patch of shadow under the life-boats; and as the engines chuntered on, and the wake behind them curdled the water, and the sea beneath held its mysteries, and as time ceased, Eddie began to sleep again at night and exist, and often sleep peacefully again in the day. Once or twice his old self broke through. He wondered about his father and whatever the two of them would do in Kotakinakulu — or Singapore or Penang, or wherever his father was now — but soon he dismissed all thoughts of the future and the past, and lazily watched Loss dealing out the cards.
“Do you smell something?” asked Loss. “Do you smell land?” Eddie sniffed.
“We’re still too far out.”
“Lanka,” said Loss, “was said by the poet to be the Scented Isle, the Aromatic Eden, the last outpost of civilisation. We’ve half a day’s sailing ahead. We should be sensing it now.”
“What — flowers? Wafted over the sea?”
“Yes. You can always smell them. It gives a lift to the heart.”
After a time Eddie said, “I do smell something. Not flowers. Something rather vile. I was wondering if there was engine trouble.”
“I have noted it, too,” said Loss, and went to the rail and stared hard into the Eastern dazzle on the sea.
“It’s smeary,” said Eddie, joining him. “The sky’s smeary.”
In half an hour the smears had turned to clouds black as oil and soot, lying all along and high above the curved horizon. The ship’s engines were slowing down.
Then they stopped and fell silent, the wake hushed, and the crew called to each other, gathered along the rail to stare.