The Dutch Wife (28 page)

Will shook his head. He said he wouldn’t even consider it.

“I just want you to think about it, that’s all,” said Rowland. “Just think about it and give me your final answer tomorrow.”

The time was now around eight o’clock.

“The night’s still young,” said Rowland. “This’ll be our last night. Let’s celebrate.”

THEY WENT OUTSIDE
and stood under the awning of the bar to keep the rain off. Just across the street, they saw a sign in red bulbs:
CLUB INFERNO
. A taxi drew up outside it and four people got out and went through the door.

“Let’s give it a try,” said Rowland. They bent their heads into the rain and sprinted across the cobblestones.

Gloom and the smell of beer greeted them inside the door. Most surprisingly, considering that Rowland had just seen four people enter, there seemed to be no patrons. The few tables scattered around were quite empty except for ashtrays. They could see a bartender busy behind the bar. Rowland and Will stood uncertain at the doorway till the bartender saw them. “Come on in, boys!” he called.

They went over to the bar.

“You boys looking for some fun?” the bartender said. He nodded towards a green felt-covered door through which they could faintly hear music and the hubbub of voices. “That’s where the club is,” he said. “You pay me a dollar and I let you in.”

“Why not?” said Rowland. “If nothing else, we can have a few drinks.”

INFERNO WAS THE RIGHT NAME
for the club, Rowland thought—if by inferno was meant dim red ceiling lights, loud music, a tobacco haze, the mingled smells of perfume, beer, fried fish and the sweat of too many people in a confined space.

A waitress led them to the remaining two seats at a candlelit table with two other couples already seated. They were the four Rowland had seen get out of the taxi. The men were in sailors’ uniforms. The faces of the two women were so white and their eyes so dark they looked to him like death’s heads in some old painting.

They all drank beer and watched the floor show on the tiny stage. A man in a bow tie stepped out from the wings and announced each act. There were ballad singers of various sorts and a comedian who wasn’t all that funny. Then the jazz band began playing loudly and Rowland signalled to Will that perhaps they ought to go elswhere. But just then the band stopped playing and the ceiling lights of the club dimmed even more, leaving only the spotlight shining on the stage.

The man in the bow tie came out. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, what you’ve all been waiting for, the highlight of the evening. I give you: Shaddock the Wondrous!”

He left to some light applause and Rowland saw a very thin man with a bald head, wearing only black shorts, shuffle onto the stage. His body was so pale, it might have been whitewashed. He was carrying in his right hand an ordinary-looking blue tin basin, the kind used to wash dishes, and in his left a glass jug filled with water. He looked pathetic, and some of the audience, including the death’s head next to Rowland, giggled.

Shaddock the Wondrous looked around the audience, quite at ease, knowing he was going to do something that would surprise them. Carefully, he placed the basin right under the spotlight and the jug of water beside it. Then, very gingerly, as though it were full of hot water, he stepped into the basin. He carefully straightened himself till he was perfectly upright, then he stretched his hands out like a man on a cross.

For a while, it looked to Rowland as though nothing was going to happen, and there was some impatient murmuring among the audience. Then they noticed the man’s legs begin to turn black at the shins; they saw that the blackness, all the more startling because he was so white, was rising slowly up, as though his body were a sponge, as though his flesh were absorbing some kind of black dye from the basin. This dye mounted higher and higher till all his body was black, then the dye spread out over his arms to the tips of his fingers. As it rose slowly up his neck, he closed his eyes. The dye climbed over his chin and, within seconds, his face, his entire head was black. His bald head was a black ball.

Shaddock the Wondrous stood there for a moment, quite still.

Then he opened his mouth—a round, pink orifice in all that darkness. And now the blackness began to pour into his mouth, like a river rushing into a sinkhole. At the extremities of his body, at his spindly legs, at the tips of his fingers, whiteness began to reassert itself. It seemed to be taking over faster than it had receded.

With revulsion, the audience understood.

The blackness was alive. It consisted of millions of little black insects that had crawled up out of the blue basin till they covered every inch of the body of Shaddock the Wondrous. Now that great tide of insects was pouring into his mouth—he was swallowing them.

From all around Rowland came cries of disgust.

Shaddock the Wondrous kept swallowing till only his face was covered—then it too was all white again. He opened his eyes, closed his mouth and stepped out of the basin. He seemed in a hurry. He lifted up the jug of water, threw his head back and poured it down his throat. He kept his head back for a moment, then went back to the blue basin and leaned over it. He opened his mouth and his frail body began to heave as he vomited the blackness out of himself, millions of insects shining wet, plummeting into the basin once more.

After the last dribble, Shaddock the Wondrous shook himself and straightened up. The audience applauded. He smiled, bowed several times, then picked up his basin and his jug and went back into the wings.

“I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THAT
before,” Rowland said to Will, who was shaking his head in disbelief.

“I’ve seen it done,” said one of the sailors at their table. He was with the death’s head next to Will and he was a little drunk. “They do it with ants on one of the islands down near Vatua. They eat honey and that attracts the ants into their mouths. Then they drink salt-water to chase them back out.”

“Vatua?”
said Will, suddenly interested. “I knew somebody called Vatua. Where is it?”

“It’s an island down in the southern seas,” said the sailor. “It’s a dump, believe me.”

Will persisted. “Do the women have tattoos on their ankles?” he said. “A snake swallowing its tail?”

“A lot of them do,” said the sailor. “Why?”

Will didn’t answer. He shook his head at Rowland, marvelling at what he’d heard. “That’s where she must have come from—you know, that girl I told you about who tried to save me,” he said. “We thought it was her own name. I wonder how she came to be so far away from home.”

The sailor went on talking. “They’ve a lot of funny ideas down there,” he said. “The last time we stopped in for a load of corpra, the Bosun got stung by a rockfish.” He turned to the death’s head, showing off his knowledge. “There’s no cure for that, you know.” Then back to Rowland: “You just swell up and burst if you get stung by a rockfish. The Vatuans said we should kill him and get it over with, that you shouldn’t let a friend die like that. Well, anyway, we didn’t do anything. He was no friend of ours.” He laughed in an unpleasant way.

Rowland was still thinking of the performance by Shaddock. “And why do they swallow the ants?” he said, even though he could see the death’s head was getting annoyed at her sailor for talking to others.

“It’s supposed to cure sickness,” the sailor said. “They believe the sickness goes into the ants and that’s how to get rid of it.”

“Does it work?” Rowland said.

The death’s head had taken the sailor’s arm and was trying to get him to pay attention to her.

“I don’t know,” said the sailor.

Rowland found the information about Vatua fascinating. He’d never heard of it before. Now, he had a premonition it might become important in his life. “Where exactly is Vatua?” he asked the sailor.

But it was the death’s head who answered. “Find your own sailor!” she said venomously.

Just then, the man with the bow tie came back on stage to announce upcoming acts. The sailors and their escorts whispered together for a moment, then all four of them staggered from the club without another word.

– 4 –

THE NEXT MORNING
, over their last breakfast together, Will and Rowland talked for a while about the odd way in which Will had at last found the truth about the girl at the Fair.

“The world’s a strange place,” said Rowland.

“And sometimes an awful place,” said Will.

They thought about that for a while. Then Rowland asked him if he’d come to any decision about the proposition they’d discussed the day before. “I need to have an answer now,” he said.

Will was silent for a moment. “I suppose I’ve nothing to lose,” he said. “I’ll give it a try.”

Rowland raised his orange juice and they clinked glasses across the table.

In this way the bargain was sealed.

AT NOON, THEY WALKED TO THE STATION
in a thin rain and a chill breeze—perfect weather, Rowland was thinking, for farewells.

From the station’s Post Office, he telegraphed Rachel while Will bought his ticket. When the final call for boarding was made, they parted with a handshake at the platform.

Will had no sooner climbed into his carriage than the doors were slammed shut by the Porters and the Great Western puffed and squealed into motion and set out on its long journey. Rowland watched it disappear, then went back to the Maclaren Hotel.

– 5 –

IN THE LIBRARY
of Rachel Vanderlinden’s house in Camberloo, everyone was silent. Rachel’s eyes behind her glasses were beady with concentration.

“That,” Rowland said after a while, “is more or less all I can tell you. I never saw Will Drummond again. I left for India myself a few days later. But most strange for me is how that name—Vatua—became so important in my own life. That was the first time I’d ever heard it.”

Thomas himself had found the entire narrative revealing. So his father had been a coal miner, a boxer, a not-very-ordinary ordinary working man, who’d arrived at his mother’s door one day and taken the place of her husband and had gone and got himself killed because of love. He had only the vaguest of memories of the man with the fair hair and the deep voice who’d long ago carried him in his arms.

He glanced over at Webber, who was smiling benevolently at Rachel, his lips redder than usual from the brandy. Had he always known she’d brought a stranger into her house, the father of her child? Thomas wondered. The knowledge that she’d done such a daring thing might even have made her more attractive to him.

Rachel spoke at last. “So he’d been married before!” she said—as though, of everything she’d heard, that was what had impressed her most. “I always wondered.”

“You didn’t even know that?” Rowland said. “You knew none of these things?”

She shook her head. “He told me nothing,” she said. “I wouldn’t let him tell me anything.”

Thomas felt like a spectator at some enigmatic play.

“Why not, Mother?” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

This was an unusual outburst from him, but Rachel ignored it. She was interested only in that private conversation with Rowland.

“When he first appeared at my door,” she said, “I didn’t understand what was going on. Then, even when I realized what was happening, I didn’t think it would work. But it did, it did. Yes, it really worked. I intended to ask him everything later. Then, when he was killed in the War, I thought it was better just to preserve things as they were. But in the last few years, I’ve regretted more and more that I’d never let him tell me who he really was. I couldn’t bear the thought of dying without knowing. That was when I sent Thomas to look for you.”

“Don’t you think your son ought to know the truth now?” Rowland said.

She looked at Thomas and smiled. “I suppose so. I meant to get around to it eventually. Why don’t you tell him, Rowland?”

“Very well,” said Rowland. “You see, Thomas, it came out of one of my trips to Africa, long before I met your mother. I spent some time there studying a tribe with a peculiar custom. They were called the Bizwas. The husbands were always recruited from distant villages by the elders and were never allowed to tell their wives anything about themselves or where they’d come from. The marriages seemed to work very well.”

Thomas was trying to fathom the absurdity of what he had heard. “So, that’s where the idea came from?” he said. “This primitive tribe was where you got the notion of sending Will Drummond to my mother’s door, a total stranger, to take your place?” He was exasperated, especially because he could see his mother still had a little smile on her face. “I must say,” he said to her, “I’m astonished you let him persuade you.”

“Persuade
me?
” Rachel said. “You’ve got it quite wrong. It wasn’t
his
idea. It was
my
idea.”

Thomas was speechless.

“I told Rowland, before he left for England, that I envied the Bizwas,” she said. “At least there would always be some element of surprise left in their marriages. When Will Drummond appeared at my door a few months later, it didn’t take me long to figure out what was going on. And indeed, letting him in that morning was the best thing I ever did. Thank you for that, Rowland.”

Thomas was silent, still trying to absorb what he’d heard.

“Oh, Thomas!” Rachel said. “You’re always so stuffy. For you, excitement’s something confined to a book.”

To that, Thomas could think of no reply.

“And what do you think now?” Rowland asked her. “Now that you at least know something about Will. Does it match the man you knew?”

“Yes, in a way, it does,” she said. “The funny thing is, I don’t really think it would have mattered
what
you told me. He loved me and I loved him. And in the long run, that’s really all that counts.”

As she made this final remark, she sat back in her chair, satisfied and exhausted.

Webber got up and went to her. “You’ve had quite enough for today,” he said. “Time for bed now.”

She made no objection. “Will you come again tomorrow, Rowland?” she said.