Gay Phoenix (2 page)

But he was also paralysed like this because he was in the grip of two contradictory impulses before the problem of Charles’ body. He loathed it – so that he wanted to jump up, seize it cruelly by the heels, and pitch it without more ado to the sharks. At the same time, he couldn’t bear even to think of parting with it. Inert matter though it was, it yet seemed all that was left to him of the breathing world. With Charles gone, loneliness would be his sole companion.

Yet these were unmanly thoughts and emotions. They just wouldn’t do. Arthur Povey managed to take a deep breath.
His
lungs were still in working order. It was his duty to keep them that way. It was even his duty to find them, if possible, a larger air. In life, his brother Charles had been disposed to do precious little for him. Could Charles – the speculation began to stir dimly in his numbed brain – be made to do rather more for him in death?

The headache was going away, and the relief of this was immense. Only, he had an odd sensation as if what he was thus parting with had owned some physical dimension within his skull, in which there was now as a consequence a small vacant space waiting to be filled up with something else. He wondered whether he had suffered some mild concussion after all. Fleetingly he was aware of the vague visual image of a football field, and of a boy – who might be himself – scrambling out of a messy confusion of flailing limbs and wandering round in disconcerting circles until led off to the pavilion. He wondered whether, if set in the middle of a large open space now, he would begin to behave in this way. What had thus drifted into his mind so inconsequently had the feel of a memory rather than of a random creation of the mind, yet he could provide it with no context in his own experience. For some minutes after the picture faded, he continued to be unreasonably worried by this. He had to pull himself together in order to take hold of his present situation.

A spectator – but even the Dark Angel had departed – might have found something a shade macabre in the first action that Arthur Povey then bestirred himself to perform. His brother’s body was lightly clad in shorts and a singlet, and there were only plimsolls on his feet. Arthur stripped off the lot and threw everything into the sea. The small operation was surprisingly difficult. Charles’ limbs were like those of a sulky and uncooperative child, resentful of being undressed and put to bed. For a full minute Arthur stood panting slightly, his own legs, braced and sentient, responding to the sway of the yacht. The body thus spoiled was lean, strong, strangely young. It ought obviously to have gone on living for years and years – as he himself, by two years Charles’ junior, would certainly do.

A wave thudded, and the dead man helplessly lurched a little against the bulwark. Even so, it was without indignity. Arthur looked at his brother’s broad shoulders and narrow hips, at his flat belly, the fine hairs glinting golden on his chest, the dark curled abundant hair below. Charles had been a proper man. But Arthur himself, for that matter, was a proper man too. They were alike in physique and features, although they had not been very alike in temperament or in the course of their lives. Beset by a sudden irrational doubt, and still reluctant to raise that head and accept the verdict it gave, Arthur put a hand on Charles’ heart. It was still, and the body it had served was cold. He let his living right hand touch Charles’ dead left hand – and for a moment pause there, as if some message had been transmitted to him. He felt down Charles’ side: the taut rib cage, the hollow thigh, the moulded knee. Charles’ sex, exposed before him in a manner suggesting the drunkenness of Noah, made him momentarily frown. He hadn’t known much about that part of his brother’s life.

He began to think about what he did know – both in this regard and others. His mind moved into the past – but gropingly, as if even its salient landmarks lay in darkness or were farther away than they ought to be. Family history flickered inside his head jerkily and uncertainly, like images projected there by an amateur and incompetent cinematographer. Then, quite suddenly, memories came fluently and at an accelerating pace, rather after the fashion in which this is supposed to happen within the consciousness of a drowning man. Not that he was going to drown. It was Charles who – posthumously, as it were – was presently going to do that. He himself was going to tread dry land again; was infallibly going to do so, even although the wheel against which he was now leaning had, several days ago, abruptly ceased to have a rudder at its command. Everything of that kind would sort itself out. He had no problems he couldn’t confidently handle – not until that landfall came and he was among his own kind again. It was then would come the tug-of-war.

The direction Arthur Povey’s thoughts now took was such as to make him pause at one point and ask himself whether he was in at all a normal state of mind. If he were not protected by the solitude of ocean might he possibly be saying and doing things which would constrain people to come and lock him up? Might he not, at least, be taking some first and irretrievable step in a rash and insufficiently considered direction? His present situation – although he firmly repeated to himself that it fell a long way short of the desperate – was not of a kind a man would willingly confront himself with. Still, it did seem likely to afford ample opportunity for reflection.

And now he noticed that his dead brother was still not quite reduced to anonymity. Round Charles’ neck there hung a fine silver chain carrying what, in time of war, had been called an identity disk. In certain services it had been worn on the wrist, and been so constructed that, like a handcuff, it wouldn’t come off. That had been so that they couldn’t too swiftly
make
you anonymous. Nowadays, people who went adventuring (and poor old Charles had been convinced he did precisely that) frequently provided themselves with such a possession – envisaging situations in which it might be beyond their power to name themselves, to remember their blood group, to announce their having this or that physiological idiosyncrasy which meant that one or another rashly injected drug would kill them. Charles had even obliged Arthur too to wear one of these things – much as some men thus secretly wear a cross, an image of St Christopher, even a piece of sheer cabbalistic nonsense.

Indulgently, almost absently, Arthur Povey removed the chain and its graven legends from Charles Povey’s neck. Charles was going to need nothing of that sort now – so let him go out of the world precisely as he had entered it. And not even ineffectively and impermanently swathed in canvas. The vast powers of working nature, embodied in that unslumbering oceanic swell, would contemptuously rip away anything of the sort swiftly enough. Let Charles descend stark into the deep, and the currents set about the trivial task of picking his bones to whispers.

The moment, in fact, had come. Arthur gripped Charles by the ankles. He did this – and then he looked about him, scanning the surface of the void waters guiltily, as if to make certain of being unobserved. The heave, the shove, required unexpected and surprising effort. It was only a matter of the inert weight a dead man presents. But the effect was as if Charles – unreasonable and recalcitrant now as always – was reluctant to go. But go he must. And he went finally with a very small splash. It might have been no more than a pebble that made those rather beautiful spreading concentric rings on the water.

Arthur Povey made his way below. He got out the first-aid kit. There were bandages, swabs, even sutures and needles. He boiled water. Taking the greatest care, he sterilized a knife.

Sir John Appleby glanced in the direction of the South Pole. It was really, he supposed, like that. Far below this terrace on which he sat, the city of Adelaide sparkled like a profusion of gems poured out at random from the black velvet jewelcase of the night.
Une parure de diamants
, as a dealer in such things might say. The spectacle was not quite so dramatic as Rio de Janiero viewed from a similar elevation, but it was roughly in the same class. There were the same constellations overhead – the Southern Cross, and Orion upside-down – and the same atmospheric clarity produced the same effect of the stars above and the street lights below as positively shouting at each other.

But let your gaze pass between the two – and what was there then beyond the invisible horizon? A little to the left lay the Coorong, a two-hundred-mile strip of something or other making no great impression on a map. A little to the right was Kangaroo Island – no more than six or seven times the size of the Isle of Wight, and so even less conspicuous in terms of the scale upon which nature built in this hemisphere. Between the two stretched Encounter Bay. (The explorers of Australia, Appleby reflected, had possessed a flair for naming both places and creatures which Adam in his Garden might have envied: cheek by jowl here were Cape Catastrophe, Mount Remarkable and Dismal Swamp.) In Encounter Bay you would be unlikely to encounter much. And beyond it – an empty four thousand miles off – hovered the chilly goal attained by Roald Amundsen on December 14, 1911.

Rather vaguely – for the dinner just concluded had been an excellent one – Appleby endeavoured to visualize the South Pole. As a small boy he had naturally thought of it as something actually sticking up out of the snow – rather in the manner of the candle from the icing of his baby sister’s first birthday cake. He knew it couldn’t have been placed by men, since it had already been in position when the first men arrived. Was it perhaps something that God had failed to tidy up after finishing the Creation? Or had it – at least at the start of things – had a functional significance? That was probably it. God, having fashioned the earth, had taken its North Pole between his finger and thumb and set his vast new top spinning upon a South Pole mysteriously poised in space. It had been a humming top. That was why there was something called the music of the spheres.

Accepting brandy from his host (not Australian brandy, although the wine had been wholly admirable Australian wine), Appleby progressed to less childish, yet still relaxed, musings on his present situation. The astronomical infinitudes the silence of which scared Pascal may be appreciated by anybody who steps into his Kentish or Berkshire garden on a starry night. But the answering vastness, by any human measure, of man’s own speck of dust within them has to be traversed to be realized. Even then, modern modes of locomotion can delude you. When Appleby had last flown from London to Naples he had almost missed the Alps through secluding himself for a couple of minutes in the plane’s loo – whereas Hannibal must have been constrained to acknowledge such natural calls scores or hundreds of times as he scrambled across them with his elephants. Years ago, Appleby had made the trip from Cape Town to Fremantle on a freighter; and that had been quite something. On the present occasion (having succumbed to the persuasion that sea voyages are restful) he had crossed the Pacific on quite a fast liner; and that had been the real revelation. There were people who said it could be done, and had been done, in rafts or in dugout canoes. There were people who – apparently quite unconcernedly – made such passages as a one-man show. Appleby reflected soberly on the existence of such supermen. He had never, so far as he could remember, encountered one of them. They set sail from Vancouver, from Lima, from Valparaiso, and eventually turned up in Sydney Harbour (which was quite worth turning up in). They were then accorded civic receptions, and received telegrams of congratulation from the Queen. And quite right, too.

‘My dear Sir John, I hope it isn’t too chilly for you out here?’ The eminent physician whose invitation Appleby had accepted set down the brandy and reached for a box of cigars. His name was Budgery, and it appeared that he was the university’s professor of clinical medicine. He wasn’t what one might crudely think of as a colonial type; he had all the polish you pay extra for in Harley Street or Wimpole Street. ‘How fortunate,’ he was now murmuring, ‘that the excellent Mr Castro still consents to export these trifling luxuries. They are no less lethal than the Jamaican sort – but preferable, if one happens to have the habit of them, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Thank you very much.’ Appleby took a cigar. ‘And I don’t feel at all chilly. Although no longer, on the other hand, decidedly the reverse.’

‘It has certainly been one of our warmer days. But the cool change has turned up. You will sleep soundly, I’m glad to say, even down in that hotel.’

‘They have air conditioning, as a matter of fact.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Budgery clearly thought poorly of air-conditioned hotels. ‘But the old-fashioned among us still have faith in living up here, you know. And in digging our houses well into the side of a hill. This one – my great-grandfather built it – has a whole storey pretty well underground. We can dwell as troglodytes all summer long, if we have a mind to.’

‘A most judicious disposition of things.’ Appleby looked down at the city. It was an early March night, and all through the day the plain had swum in staggering heat. Even up here in the Mount Lofty range it couldn’t have been exactly temperate. ‘The hall porter told me there was coming up a change.’

‘His precise expression, that.’ Budgery laughed comfortably. ‘You have an ear for idiom, Sir John.’

‘Just where does the change come up from?’

‘From Antarctica, one must say.’ Budgery’s gaze went in the direction to which Appleby’s own had lately travelled. ‘You are looking down on what – on the dry-bulb thermometer – is about the hottest capital city in the world. But Mount Lofty looks to Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, and in that direction our nearest neighbours are the penguins.’ Budgery appeared to take pride in these geographical and zoological circumstances. ‘The region gives a puff from time to time, and Adelaide’s temperature drops dramatically.’ Budgery’s hand went to a pocket. ‘Matches, Appleby?’ he asked politely, and passed on to other guests.

Two or three ‘Sir Johns’ and then ‘Appleby’. English, not American, conventions. It seemed a rather homeward-looking part of what had been the Empire long ago. Appleby sat back and lit his cigar. Even the dinner jacket he’d been given a hint to don. But then there had been a hint, too, of something mildly formal about this all-male dinner at Budgery’s house. Presumably Budgery was a bachelor. ‘A few of us who dine together from time to time,’ the professor of medicine had said. It was some sort of dining club, in fact – and when playing host one could ask a guest of one’s own from outside. Appleby, doubtless naively, was impressed by meeting ordinances so familiar so far away.