Where the Clocks Chime Twice Read online

  He was affable, good-humoured, well-informed; he was appreciative, I suspect, of the pleasures of the table. I am sure that, had I found myself seated next to him at dinner at the Athenaeum, I should have enjoyed his company: but I should have steered the conversation away from certain topics.

  Those of us who are members of the Church of England recognise that there are certain subjects—suicide, birth control, divorce —that we cannot discuss profitably with Roman Catholics. We would be foolish not to respect a faith that is held by so many persons whom we respect. But you cannot appreciate the beauty or lack of beauty of a stained-glass window by looking at it from the outside, and we should be wise to accept the fact that certain aspects of the Roman Catholic dogma are to us incomprehensible.

  I have recently been re-reading Grahame Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. The book had such a wide success that I am justified in assuming that any reader of these pages will be familiar with its plot. Anyone who has not read it, will be grateful to me for recommending that he should. On a second reading I thought even more highly of it than I had on my first. Grahame Greene divides his fiction into two categories—novels and entertainments. But a novel like Brighton Rock is no less exciting than an entertainment like The Ministry of Fear. The difference lies in this, that in his novels a serious theme is interwoven with the plot. There are no philosophical asides, the narrative is continuous, heightening in pace and tension. In The Heart of the Matter the central character’s relationship with God is as highly dramatised as his relationship with his wife and mistress.

  It is this relationship with God that to the non-Catholic is incomprehensible. Mr. Greene constructed a story in which a well-intentioned man, who has stage by stage acted in terms of what seemed right and prudent, finds himself in a position where suicide is the sole solution of the problems that he has created for himself and others. As any novelist knows, that is not an easy thing to do. A tragic ending can be as much ‘contrived’ as a happy one. Many novels attempt, with a suicide or murder, to give the story an air of inevitability which is not justified by the plot. There is no such contriving about The Heart of the Matter. It is logical right through. You feel not only that things did happen in this way, but that they could not have happened in any other way. You see no solution other than suicide for the central character’s predicament in view of the fact that as a Catholic he cannot remarry after a divorce. That is one of the great merits of the novel—its inevitability.

  The final twist of the screw is provided by the Roman Catholic belief that suicide is the supreme crime; so that the hero’s inner conflict is not only concerned with a straightforward human problem but with a Catholic’s sense of guilt. This inner conflict is described so dramatically, so movingly, and so convincingly in terms of its reality to the chief character that the non-Catholic reader may not at a first reading recognise how, I will not say unconvincing, but incomprehensible the nature of that conflict is to him. Somerset Maugham once expressed his surprise that theologians rarely credited God with common sense. On a third reading of the second chapter of the second part of the last book of The Heart of the Matter, I was reminded of that well-known anecdote of the first Duke of Wellington being accosted by an obscure commoner with the words ‘Mr. Smith, I believe’; to which the Great Duke replied, ‘Sir, if you believe that, you would believe anything.’

  I fancy that Roman Catholics themselves recognise how incomprehensible to the average Anglican is, on certain issues, the Roman Catholic point of view. The hero’s mistress is not a Catholic, and Graham Greene’s sense of verity and fairness puts into her mouth the retorts that come naturally to the uninitiate. “I don’t understand a thing you’re saying. It’s all hooey to me,” she says, and again: “I didn’t hear so much about God when we began, did I? You aren’t turning pious on me to give you an excuse. … It’s a wonderful excuse. It doesn’t stop you sleeping with me. It only stops you marrying me.” While the priest says to her, in his final summing-up: “I’m sorry for anyone happy and ignorant who gets mixed up in that way with one of us.”

  Happy and ignorant; that is what we all are, I suppose, we who look at the stained-glass window from the cemetery. And it is cheerless for us to reflect that the most effective barrier, at any rate in Europe, against the tide of Communism has been raised by the Roman Catholic Church. The European liberal is in a forlorn predicament. On the one hand is the authoritarianism of the Vatican, which he distrusts, and on the other the authoritarianism of the Kremlin, which he detests.

  3. The Beachcomber’s Arms

  The Evenings that I spent in town I stayed at the Continental.

  Victoria owns two hotels; the Empire is the other one. Accommodation is available at either, at the shortest notice. Their clientele and atmosphere are completely different. The Empire stands opposite the club. It is the first building that the visitor sees as he drives up from the pier. Prospective residents use it as a base while they are discovering ‘how the land lies’. It has a large hall that is hired for weddings and receptions; meals are served punctually, and breakfast tables are cleared at nine.

  The Continental is two blocks away. It advertises itself as facing ‘the quiet of the Cathedral Close’. The Cathedral stands at the junction of the road over the mountain and the road along the coast. This latter road is also the main shopping thoroughfare. On the other side of it lie the taxi-stand and car park. Behind these lies the football field. The Continental stands, therefore, in the noisiest corner of the town. It is the hotel that I preferred.

  It is a real place. I do not know how you are to define reality in terms of restaurants and hotels; it is not a question of cost or lavishness. Claridge’s is as real as Sweeting’s. An inexpensive boarding-house in Kensington can be as ‘phoney’ as a meretricious West End aping of the Ritz. It is a question of whether the guests and staff and management are living in tune with their own tastes and personalities, whether they feel they are being themselves when they are balancing a ledger, serving a dinner, or flirting over a pre-lunch cocktail. The Continental is that kind of place.

  Its owner, a prominent member of the Chinese community, owns not only one of the larger stores but a property in the country. When the Chinese Association gave a farewell vin d’honneur for the Governor, it was he who made the speech. He is philanthropic, and when the Mauritius was in gave at his own expense a ratings’ dance. He has so many irons in the fire that presumably the hotel fits into his planned economy: certainly it finds employment for a number of his dependants.

  It is a haphazard place. You are roused just as day is breaking by the clatter of a tea-tray at your side. Your room measures twelve feet by six. It is furnished with a single narrow bed, an adjustable armchair, a table, a washhand-stand, and a cupboard. The walls do not reach the ceiling, so that the lights and noises of the adjacent rooms are forced on your attention; facing you a pair of high wooden doors open on to a balcony which gives on to the Cathedral. The Prison is adjacent. It is pleasant sitting out there at first light, sipping your tea, while the sky brightens and the green on the mountain-side grows vivid, watching the flow along the street of men and women on their way back from market. The air is fresh and you will need a dressing-gown.

  A narrow passage off which rooms open leads from the balcony to the covered indoor verandah that is the dining-room; a wide stone stairway leads into the courtyard, to the lavatories, the kitchens, and a residential block of rooms designated Richard’s Mansions; it also leads to a large covered space, floored with cement, and consequently a kind of hall where the management pursues its various occupations.

  At all hours of the day somebody is doing something there: cooking a meal or eating it, preparing savouries; peeling potatoes, shelling peas, bargaining with a vendor. This is the chief characteristic of the Continental; a constant eventfulness. There is always a lot of people everywhere; in the courtyard, in the passage, washing dishes, emptying slops, carrying laundry. No one is in any particular hurry, but everyone is occup
ied; no one ever shouts at anyone; such faces as are not smiling are invariably grinning. There are only three permanent residents: the weeks are few when there are more than a couple of transients, and though opening on the street there is something that is called a grillroom—a medium-sized room set with three rows of tables and decorated with cigarette advertisements—it has only a couple of pensionnaires, and there are in Mahé no entertaining in restaurants nor casual visitors from the districts seeking nourishment. It is hard to see how so many can be so occupied with so much about so few; probably the manifold ramifications of Mr. Man Cham’s activities provide the answer. The courtyard of the Continental is the factory for innumerable Chinese banquets.

  The catering for the residents is in keeping with that supposition. Breakfast is definitely organised, to the extent that it arrives fresh and hot, in response to an individual order when you are in the mood for it. Lunch is more improvised. If you have given no definite instructions, at half-past twelve at the long communal table on the covered-in verandah you will be served with a meal consisting first of soup, and then five minutes later and all in a rush of whatever may be available. Fish, meat, and vegetables are served simultaneously, their quality and quantity depending on what happens to be around. You have whatever the family is having; sometimes it is excellent, sometimes less so. It is always a toss-up.

  On one occasion some five of us, only two of whom were residents, found ourselves still at the club at half-past one. It was high time, we all admitted, that we ate somewhere. We decided to try the Continental. It was half-past two before we sat down to lunch, and when we did it was to find ourselves consuming a six-course meal. The courses taken separately were meagre, and when the first arrived, a small dab of fried fish apiece, general concern was felt. More was to follow, we were assured. More did: a rabbit pie, a slice of cold pork, finally a fiery curry. From devious caches of luncheons here and there the five of us enjoyed one of our best meals in Seychelles. That is the kind of thing that endears the Continental to its clientele.

  It is in keeping with that kind of thing that dinner should be unorganised. The clientele is masculine exclusively: masculine and unattached: at least while it is in town; and unattached males tend to find themselves at seven-thirty in the club, uncertain as to how they will be feeling in an hour’s time. The management of the Continental recognises this. It has been up itself since early after five, and it is resolved to have its shutters closed and to retire to its private life at eight-fifteen. If a resident is not back by quarter to, food of a kind, ample and nourishing but ‘unmemorable’, is set out on a tray and placed upon a table in the room. That covered tray is a tribute to the gentleman’s live-and-let-live agreement that exists between guest and host.

  It is, I said, a bachelor establishment: by that I mean that rooms are rented there by men. It is not a monastery. There is no lounge to receive guests nor is there any bar. The establishment does, however, possess both a licence to sell alcohol and an icebox; and the management sees no reason why a tenant should not in his own room and over a Tom Collins discuss literature with a female visitor. Such visitations are, indeed, quite frequent. But it is a slightly different kind of visitor from those who enliven the Empire Hotel who is invited to relax opposite the quiet of the Cathedral Close. It is not a question of charm, of wit, or indeed in the last analysis of breeding but of the social register. Ladies who are members of the Seychelles Club do not park their cars outside the Continental. It is not surprising that it should have been christened The Beachcomber’s Arms’.

  The Beachcombers comprise a Fifth Estate. And I hope I shall not seem ungenerous or ungrateful towards my friends in the other four estates if I admit that it was among them that I felt most myself. Beachcombers is their own name for themselves— and I hasten to explain that they are far from satisfying the dictionary’s definition of the word, as penniless derelicts who rely for their support on the generosity and credulity of the local populace; they are anything but that. They were all of them, at one time, in their separate ways, what were known as ‘Empire Builders’. They are all over fifty; they have their pensions and their savings; the ecclesiastical authorities may view their conduct with disquiet, but the treasury cannot deny that they are a definite financial asset to the colony; they spend there and pay taxes on money that has been earned elsewhere. Socially they are responsible for making the Seychelles Club one of the liveliest institutions in the tropics.

  The Empire Builder in retirement in England is for the young man deliberating the choice of a career a source very often of melancholy reflection. Under sixty, he is physically and mentally alert. For thirty years he has led an active, useful life. As a white man abroad he has held a position of respect; for his last years of service he has been a person of some consequence. He has lived in a certain degree of state. Then he returns to England, to become an impoverished nonentity, without a position and without occupation. He is out of touch with his boyhood’s friends: his children have grown up; either he potters about in Bath or Cheltenham or he takes a small house in the country and busies himself with parochial activities; while his wife, who in the East has never done anything more strenuous than sit on a charitable committee at the request of His Excellency’s wife, finds herself making beds, polishing stair-rods, fiddling over a kitchen sink, a series of activities that do not increase her general geniality. And this, thinks the young man meditating a career abroad, is the reward for thirty years of service. To think that this—retirement with a pension— was the oasis that sustained the young proconsul as he gazed with homesick eyes across the desert! Actually, though at the time he did not know it, his recompense lay there and then, in the chance to live more fully than his untravelled cousins, during the years when his powers of appreciation were at their keenest.

  It is a lugubrious curtain for the ‘Colonel Sahib’; and there is a refreshing quality of independence about those who have refused to accept ‘the common lot’; who shudder at the thought of Cheltenham, ‘the dull hearth matched with an ageing wife’, who regard retirement not as a curtain but as a release from responsibility, as the being able to do at last all that they never could when they were representatives of the British Raj, as judges, district officers, and colonial secretaries: who pension off their wives, decline to interfere with their grandchildren’s education, and live their days out in terms of their own taste and temperament. At the back of each man who has made this choice there is a distinct and personal story. He is out of the rut, someone in his own right. It all may be somewhat reprehensible; but he is a genuine person and usually he is an excellent companion.

  Myself, I was introduced into this company under the happiest of auspices, with notes of recommendation from Compton Mackenzie to two of the most congenial of the group, to Leslie Harris and to Stanley Jones, and I can best describe the Seychellois version of the word ‘beachcomber’ by presenting sketches of them both.

  Stanley Jones, the son of a Welsh clergyman, was born in 1893. He is tall, very thin, completely bald, with a mottled weather-beaten face and prominent ears. His baldness is accentuated by his method of self-arrayal. He wears ankle-high socks and his white shorts which are highly starched fit tightly to the back of his legs and project in front in a way that suggests he is walking with bent knees. After front-line service as an infantryman in World War I, he became a district officer on the upper Zambesi and later in Tanganyika. His record of service was distinguished, and his name is honoured there. He did not marry when he was young, partly because he did not consider the climate of the Zambesi valley suitable for a white woman, but in the main because he preferred the routine of three-yearly six months’ leaves. He liked good food and wine, he liked good clothes, he liked dancing at the Savoy, he loved motoring through France, he more than liked feminine society. And a man of thirty-five who comes back to England on a short visit with an ample bank balance does not have much difficulty in finding an attractive companion, herself at a loose end, who is prepared to decor
ate an interval with a romance that will have no complications and no aftermath. Sitting in his magistrate’s court, dealing with the delinquencies of savages, looking out on to the palm trees and the tamarinds, his mind would wander to ‘the shaded lights of little corner tables’; only eight months away and a four-figure balance at the bank.

  Shortly before World War II he retired from Government service. As things turned out, he chose an unlucky moment. Had he held on a few months longer he would have been able to retire after the war with a higher rank, more years of service, and a considerably higher pension. He could scarcely have been expected to foresee that in 1939. He was forty-three years old. He had a reasonable pension. Why not travel while his capacity for enjoyment was unimpaired. Within a few months, war had been declared and he was back in uniform. His extra six years of service did not materially benefit his pension. Even so, when he was at last able to retire to Seychelles and fulfil a long-cherished ambition to write their history, his income was adequate to meet his bachelor requirements. He was not, however, to retain that precise status long. Within a few weeks he had become ensnared by a young and pretty petite blonde. ‘She must have put gris-gris on me,’ he maintains. Before he knew what was happening he had set up a menage: and almost before he had realised what was happening he found himself the father of two sons. Shortly before I reached the colony, a growing fondness both for them and for their mother decided him to regularise their position before the altar.

  The ‘extreme right’ of the Beachcomber estate deplored his action; ‘letting down the side’, they said, but most of his friends are highly optimistic. His sons are very good-looking, particularly his elder one. “And I would have you know,” he will say, “that it is my looks not his mother’s that he inherits.” In support of this— on the face of it an astonishing contention—he will produce a photograph taken during World War I. And, no, there can be no doubt, it was a strikingly handsome man who wore white tie and tails in the days of ‘Limehouse Blues’. In ten years’ time he will be very proud of his children, but at the moment their existence has strained the inelasticity of his pension and he has gone back into semi-harness, in part-time employ in a Seychellois trading company. He has a bungalow in the country, beyond Beauvallon, and comes into Victoria for a couple of nights a week. The club is always the gayer on those occasions.