telephone and allows me to use the telephone. But when that shop is shut I cannot telephone. That is why I did not telephone."
"There is always the police station."
"Yes," Geoffrey said, "and a right lot of snotty bastards they are." I found that I could not speak. "Well," the doctor said, "this is Malta."
"You're bloody well telling me that it's bloody well bloody Malta." I found that I could speak. "Please, Geoffrey, no."
"No excitement," the doctor ordered. "I'll watch him," Geoffrey said.
CHAPTER 8
This intention went unfulfilled that night, although, despite my avowed purpose of the afternoon, I did not sleep alone. I did not, for that matter, sleep very much. After an hour or so I woke ridiculously refreshed and, as it were, cathartized, and none of the properties of the Maltese night conduced to sleep's resumption. The electric mosquito repellers whirred and clicked and puffed, and public clocks all over the island announced in imperfect unison the full hour or the part hour and, as an exordium to the part hour, the full hour which had already been completed. I watched Geoffrey, instead of he me. He was snoring irregularly, his fat back turned to me, and occasionally forgetting how to breathe, remembering only in a bed-shaking spasm. At one point he started to breathe easily and then he said something in Latin. It sounded like "Solitam Minotauro—pro cans corpus..." I listened with care and surprise, having believed that he had attended a minor public school that despised the classical tongues and taught in their stead a kind of elementary anthropological linguistics.
I took a cigarette from the silver box, a gift from the Sultan of Kelantan, that stood on the night table, seeing it clearly in the very rich moonlight, and, to my vague astonishment, was able to light it with Ali's flaring gift that lay beside it. I had, I thought, left that below in my study. The big flame seemed to impinge on Geoffrey's sleeping mind, for he flailed as if fighting it and then turned toward me. After a pause he snored out a ghastly odour that was neither vinous nor vomitory, more ferrous in its basic tone, with indefinable harmonics of gross decay. It puzzled more than appalled me: it was remotely familiar.
Moonlight showed a heavy sweat on Geoffrey's nakedness, which was now too close for my comfort. I had not, on my first waking, been sure whether to encourage a certain vague hunger for tea and a sandwich to attain a solidity that demanded satisfaction; now I was quite sure. I got out of bed on firm legs and found my slippers and dressing gown. The bed was all Geoffrey's now. I felt for him none of the bitter resentful loathing I might properly, in spite of his eventual yielding to duty or fear, be expected to feel and, indeed, expected to feel. I felt only the generalised pity one always feels for the defenceless prisoner of sleep, seeing in him the defenceless prisoner of life. Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness. If that is contradiction, it is because human language disposes to contradiction. I told myself, untruthfully perhaps, that I knew the world and had learned tolerance. That it was too late for me to take human passions seriously, including my own. But I remembered saying something of that kind publicly at the age of forty-five. Give us peace in our time, whatever the time. Which logically meant throwing Geoffrey out. And then feeling no peace because of a lack of charity, of awareness that I was, all said and done, a dithering nuisance, a hypocrite, a prissy product of a bad period, ludicrous in my senile sensuality, everything that, in blunter language, Geoffrey had termed me. Let him sleep, let it all sleep.
I went down and entered the great white kitchen, its surgicality qualified by the ghosts of spices, softly, very softly. Ali's room was just
"There is always the police station."
"Yes," Geoffrey said, "and a right lot of snotty bastards they are." I found that I could not speak. "Well," the doctor said, "this is Malta."
"You're bloody well telling me that it's bloody well bloody Malta." I found that I could speak. "Please, Geoffrey, no."
"No excitement," the doctor ordered. "I'll watch him," Geoffrey said.
CHAPTER 8
This intention went unfulfilled that night, although, despite my avowed purpose of the afternoon, I did not sleep alone. I did not, for that matter, sleep very much. After an hour or so I woke ridiculously refreshed and, as it were, cathartized, and none of the properties of the Maltese night conduced to sleep's resumption. The electric mosquito repellers whirred and clicked and puffed, and public clocks all over the island announced in imperfect unison the full hour or the part hour and, as an exordium to the part hour, the full hour which had already been completed. I watched Geoffrey, instead of he me. He was snoring irregularly, his fat back turned to me, and occasionally forgetting how to breathe, remembering only in a bed-shaking spasm. At one point he started to breathe easily and then he said something in Latin. It sounded like "Solitam Minotauro—pro cans corpus..." I listened with care and surprise, having believed that he had attended a minor public school that despised the classical tongues and taught in their stead a kind of elementary anthropological linguistics.
I took a cigarette from the silver box, a gift from the Sultan of Kelantan, that stood on the night table, seeing it clearly in the very rich moonlight, and, to my vague astonishment, was able to light it with Ali's flaring gift that lay beside it. I had, I thought, left that below in my study. The big flame seemed to impinge on Geoffrey's sleeping mind, for he flailed as if fighting it and then turned toward me. After a pause he snored out a ghastly odour that was neither vinous nor vomitory, more ferrous in its basic tone, with indefinable harmonics of gross decay. It puzzled more than appalled me: it was remotely familiar.
Moonlight showed a heavy sweat on Geoffrey's nakedness, which was now too close for my comfort. I had not, on my first waking, been sure whether to encourage a certain vague hunger for tea and a sandwich to attain a solidity that demanded satisfaction; now I was quite sure. I got out of bed on firm legs and found my slippers and dressing gown. The bed was all Geoffrey's now. I felt for him none of the bitter resentful loathing I might properly, in spite of his eventual yielding to duty or fear, be expected to feel and, indeed, expected to feel. I felt only the generalised pity one always feels for the defenceless prisoner of sleep, seeing in him the defenceless prisoner of life. Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness. If that is contradiction, it is because human language disposes to contradiction. I told myself, untruthfully perhaps, that I knew the world and had learned tolerance. That it was too late for me to take human passions seriously, including my own. But I remembered saying something of that kind publicly at the age of forty-five. Give us peace in our time, whatever the time. Which logically meant throwing Geoffrey out. And then feeling no peace because of a lack of charity, of awareness that I was, all said and done, a dithering nuisance, a hypocrite, a prissy product of a bad period, ludicrous in my senile sensuality, everything that, in blunter language, Geoffrey had termed me. Let him sleep, let it all sleep.
I went down and entered the great white kitchen, its surgicality qualified by the ghosts of spices, softly, very softly. Ali's room was just
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