The Tomorrow-Tamer Page 3

  Mr. Archipelago beamed. His shiny eyes were green as malachite. He stood on tiptoe, a plump pouter-pigeon of a man, puffing out his chest until the brocade waistcoat swelled. His hair, black as ripe olives, he only touched from time to time with pomade, but it gave the impression of having been crimped and perfumed.

  “Wreckage found floating,” he said proudly. “It said–‘wreckage found floating’.”

  “The very thing!” Doree cried, clapping her hands, but Mrs. Webley-Pryce looked aloof because she did not understand.

  The air in the shop was syrupy with heat and perfume, and the odd puff of breeze that came in through the one window seemed to be the exhalation of a celestial fire-eater. Mrs. Webley-Pryce, feeling the perspiration soaking through her linen dress, wriggled uncomfortably in her chair and tried to close her eyes to the unseemly and possibly septic litter all around her. The shop was not really dirty, although to the fastidious English minds of lady customers it appeared so. Doree swept it faithfully every evening at closing time, but as her sight was so poor and she would not wear glasses, she often missed fragments of hair which gradually mingled with dust and formed themselves into small tangled balls of grey and hazelnut brown and bottled blonde. The curl-papers, too, had an uncanny way of escaping and drifting around the room like leaves fallen from some rare tree. Doree chain-smoked, so the ashtrays were nearly always full. Mr. Archipelago found her cigarette-butts charming, each with its orange kiss mark from the wide mouth he had never touched. But the ladies did not share his perception; they pushed the ashtrays away impatiently, hintingly, until with a sigh he emptied them into a wastepaper-basket and watched the ashes flutter like grey flakes of dandruff.

  Sweat was gathering on Mr. Archipelago’s smooth forehead, and his fingers were becoming slippery around the comb and scissors.

  “The morning beer,” he announced. “It is now time. For you, as well, Mrs. Webley-Pryce?”

  “I think not, thanks,” she replied coldly. “Nothing before sundown is my rule. Can’t you hurry a little, Mr. Archipelago? At this rate it’ll be midnight before my perm is finished.”

  “Pardon, pardon,” said Mr. Archipelago, tilting the beer bottle. “One moment, and we fly to work. Like birds on the wing.”

  Out came the solutions, the flasks of pink and mauve liquid, the odour of ammonia competing with the coarse creamy perfumes. Out came clamps and pins and curl-papers, the jumbled contents of a dozen shelves and cupboards. In the midst of the debris, stirring it all like a magic potion, stood Mr. Archipelago, a fat and frantic wizard, refreshing himself occasionally with Dutch ale. He darted over to the mainstay of his alchemist’s laboratory, an elaborate arrangement of electrically-heated metal rods, on which he placed the heavy clamps. He waited, arms folded, until the whole dangerous mechanism achieved the dull mysterious fire which was to turn Mrs. Webley-Pryce’s base metal, as it were, to gold.

  “You should sell that lot,” Mrs. Webley-Pryce remarked. “Any museum in Europe would give you a good price.”

  At once he was on the defensive, his pride hurt.

  “Let me tell you, dear lady, there isn’t one beauty salon in the whole of Europe could give you a perm like this one does.”

  “I don’t doubt that for one instant,” she said with a short laugh.

  Doree stood up, an emaciated yellow and white bird, a tall gaunt crane, her hair clinging like wet feathers around her squeezed-narrow shoulders. With her long hesitant stride she walked across the room, and held out her green lacquered hands.

  “Sea pearl,” she said. “Kind of different, anyhow. Africa Star Chemists just got it in. Like it?”

  Shuddering slightly, Mrs. Webley-Pryce conceded that it was very handsome.

  “Pearl reminds me,” Mr. Archipelago said, returning to cheerfulness, “the Concise Oxford stated another thing for flotsam.”

  Mrs. Webley-Pryce looked at him with open curiosity and begged decorously to be told. Mr. Archipelago applied a dab of spit to a finger and casually tested the heat of the clamps.

  “Precisely, it said ‘oyster-spawn’. Think of that. Oyster-spawn. And that is me, too, eh?”

  Doree laughed until she began to cough, and he frowned at her, for they were both worried by this cough and she could not stop smoking for more than an hour at a time.

  “I don’t see–” Mrs. Webley-Pryce probed.

  “A little joke,” Mr. Archipelago explained. “Not a very good one, perhaps, but we must do the best with what we have. My father, as I may have told you, was an Armenian sailor.”

  “Oh yes,” Mrs. Webley-Pryce said, disappointed, holding her breath as he placed the first hot clamp on her tightly wound-up hair, “I believe you did mention it. Odd–Archipelago never seems like an Armenian name to me, somehow.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Oh?”

  Mr. Archipelago smiled. He enjoyed talking about himself. He allowed himself a degree of pride in the fact that no one could ever be sure where the truth ended and the tinted unreality began. With the Englishmen to whom he administered haircuts, Mr. Archipelago talked sparingly. They seemed glum and taciturn to him, or else overly robust, with a kind of dogged heartiness that made him at once wary. But with the lady customers it was a different matter. He had a genuine sympathy for them. He did not chide, even to himself, their hunger. If one went empty for long enough, one became hungry. His tales were the manna with which it was his pleasure to nourish his lady customers. Also, he was shrewd. He knew that his conversation was an attraction, no less than the fact that he was the only hairdresser within a hundred miles; it was his defence against that noxious invention, the home-permanent.

  “It would have been difficult for my mother to give me my father’s name,” he said, “as she never knew it. She was–I may have mentioned–an Italian girl. She worked in a wineshop in Genoa. It smelled of Barbera and stale fish and–things you would prefer I did not speak about. I grew up there. That Genoa! Never go there. A port town, a sailors’ town. The most saddening city in the world, I think. The ships are always mourning. You hear those wailing voices even in your sleep. The only place I ever liked in all Genoa was the Staglieno cemetery, up on the hills. I used to go there and sit beside the tombs of the rich, a small fat boy with the white marble angels–so compassionate they looked, and so costly–I believed then that each was the likeness of a lady buried beneath. Then I would look over at the fields of rented graves nearby. The poor rent graves for one, two, five years–I can’t remember exactly. The body must be taken out if the rent cannot be paid. In death, as in life, the rent must always be paid.”

  “How horrible,” Mrs. Webley-Pryce said. “Look here–are you sure this clamp isn’t too hot? I think it’s burning my neck. Oh thanks, that’s better. It’s your mother’s name, then?”

  Doree glared. Mrs. Webley-Pryce was the wife of the Government Agent, but she had married late and had lived in Africa only one year–she had not yet learned that however eager one might be, the questions must always be judicious, careful. But Mr. Archipelago was bland. He did not mind the curiosity of his lady customers.

  “No, dear lady, it is not her name. Why should a person not pick his own name? It sounds Italian. I liked it. It suits me. Do you know what it means?”

  “Well, of course,” Mrs. Webley-Pryce said uncertainly. “An archipelago is–well, it’s–”

  “A sea with many islands, according to the Concise Oxford. That has been my life. A sea with many islands.”

  “This is one of them, I suppose?”

  “The most enduring so far,” he replied. “Twelve years I have been here.”

  “Really? That’s a long time. You’ll go back, though, someday?”

  “I have no wish to go back,” Mr. Archipelago answered offhandedly. “I would like to die here and be buried in my own garden. Perhaps if I were buried under the wild orchids they would grow better. I have tried every other kind of fertilizer.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Mrs. Webley-Pryce protested.
“About not going back, I mean.”

  “Why not? I like it here.”

  “But it’s so far away from everything. So far from home.”

  “For you, perhaps,” Mr. Archipelago said. “But then, you are not a true expatriate. You may stay twenty years, but you are a visitor. Your husband, though–does he anticipate with pleasure the time when he will retire and go back to England?”

  She looked at him in surprise.

  “No–he dreads it, as a matter of fact. That’s understandable, though. His work is here, his whole life. He’s been here a long time, too, you know. But it’s rather different. He was sent out here. He had to come.”

  “Did he?”

  “Of course,” she said. “If a person goes in for colonial administration, he must go to a colony, mustn’t he?”

  “Indeed he must,” Mr. Archipelago said agreeably. “If he goes in for colonial administration, it is the logical step.”

  “But for a hairdresser,” she said, “it’s not the sort of place most people would exactly choose–”

  “Aha–now we come to it. You are one of those who believe I did not choose to come here, then? That I was, perhaps, forced to leave my own country?”

  “I didn’t mean that–” Mrs. Webley-Pryce floundered. “And I suppose it’s a blessing for the European women that there’s someone in a tiny station like this who can do hair–”

  “Even if it is only Archipelago with his equipment that belongs in a museum. Well, well. Tell me, madam–what is the current theory about me? It changes, you know. This interests me greatly. No, please–I am not offended. You must not think so. Only curious, just as you are curious about me. Once, I remember, I was said to have been a counterfeiter. Another time, I had deserted my wife and family. Through the years, it has been this and that. Perhaps one of them is true. Or perhaps not. To maintain dignity, one must have at least one secret–don’t you agree?”

  Mrs. Webley-Pryce gave him a sideways glance.

  “I have heard,” she admitted, “about there having been some trouble. I’m sure it couldn’t have been true, though–”

  But Mr. Archipelago neither confirmed nor denied. He tested a curl, and finding it satisfactory, he began to remove the mass of iron from the hair. Mrs. Webley-Pryce, embarrassed by his silence, turned to Doree, who was applying bleach to her own long yellow hair.

  “Speaking of names, I’ve always meant to ask you about yours, Doree. It’s rather unusual, isn’t it?”

  “Yeh,” Doree said, through her mane. “I used to be Doreen.”

  “Oh?” Once more the lilt in the voice of the huntress.

  Doree spoke of herself rarely. She did not possess Mr. Archipelago’s skill or his need, and when she talked about her own life she usually blurted unwillingly the straight facts because she could not think of anything else to say. Her few fabrications were obvious; she wrenched them out aggressively, knowing no one would believe her. Now she was caught off guard.

  “I had my own shop once,” she said in her gentle rasping voice. “It had a sign up–DOREEN/BEAUTY INCORPORATED. Classy. Done in those gilt letters. You buy them separately and stick them up. The state of my dough wasn’t so classy, though. So when the goddam ‘N’ fell off, I figured it was cheaper to change my name to fit the sign.”

  Gratified, Mrs. Webley-Pryce tittered.

  “And just where was your shop?”

  Now it was Mr. Archipelago’s turn to glare. It was permissible to question him minutely, but not Doree. Customers were supposed to understand this rule. He saw Doree’s eyes turn vague, and he longed to touch her hand, to comfort and reassure her. But it was better not to do such a thing. He did not want her to misunderstand his devotion, or to be in any way alarmed by a realization of its existence. Instead, he slithered a still-hot clamp down on Mrs. Webley-Pryce’s neck, causing a faint smell of singed skin and a gasp of pain.

  “It was in Montreal, if you must know,” Doree said harshly.

  Last time someone asked, the answer was Chicago, and once, daringly, Mexico City. Mr. Archipelago himself did not know. She had simply walked into his shop one day, and where she came from, or why, did not matter to him. When they were alone, he and Doree never questioned each other, Their evening conversation was of the day’s small happenings.

  “Montreal–” Mrs. Webley-Pryce said thoughtfully. “Perhaps David and I will go to some place like that. There’s nothing much left for administrative men in England.”

  “You’re leaving?” Mr. Archipelago asked, startled. “You’re leaving Africa?”

  “Yes, of course–that’s what I meant when I said David dreaded–didn’t you know?”

  “But–why?” he asked in dismay, for recently she had been patronizing the shop regularly. “Why?”

  “Dear me,” she said, with an effort at brightness, “you are behind the times, aren’t you? Didn’t you know this colony will be self-governing soon? They don’t want us here any more.”

  “I knew it was coming,” Mr. Archipelago said, “but I had not realized it was so soon. Strange. I read the newspapers. I talk with Mr. Tachie, my landlord, who is a very political man. But–ah well, I tend my garden, and try to get wild orchids to grow here beside the sea, where the soil is really much too sandy for them, and I do the ladies’ hair and drink beer and talk to Doree. I think nothing will ever change in this place–so insignificant, surely God will forget about it and let it be. But not so. How many will be going?”

  “Oh, I don’t know–most of the Europeans in government service–perhaps all. I expect some of those in trade will remain.”

  Her tone implied that Mr. Archipelago would be left with a collection of lepers, probably hairless.

  “There are not enough of them,” he murmured, “to keep me in business.”

  He groped on a shelf for another beer and opened it with perspiring hands. He thought of the sign outside his establishment. Not a gilt-lettered sign, to be sure, but nicely done in black and aquamarine, with elegant spidery letters:

  ARCHIPELAGO

  English-Style Barber

  European Ladies’ Hairdresser

  “A sea with many islands,” he said, addressing only himself. “Sometimes it happens that a person discovers he has built his house upon an island that is sinking.”

  A large green house by the shore sheltered Mr. Archipelago. Once he had lived there alone, but for the past five years he had not been alone. Doree’s presence in his house had been, he knew, a popular topic of discussion at the morning coffee parties in the European cantonment. He did not blame the ladies for talking, but it did give him a certain satisfaction to know that their actual information on the subject was extremely slight. Neither he nor Doree had ever spoken of their domestic arrangements to customers. And their cook-steward, Attah, under the impression that he was protecting his employers’ reputations, had never told a living soul that the two shared only living and dining-rooms and that neither had ever entered the private apartments of the other.

  Mr. Archipelago’s dwelling was not close either to the white cantonment or to the African houses. It was off by itself, on a jut of land overlooking a small bay. The sprawling overgrown garden was surrounded by a high green wall which enabled Mr. Archipelago in the late afternoons to work outside clad only in his underwear and a round white linen hat. He had no wish to tame the garden, which was a profusion of elephant grass, drooping casuarina trees, frowsy banana palms, slender paw-paw, and all manner of flowering shrubs–hibiscus, purple bougainvillaea, and the white Rose of Sharon, whose blossoms turned to deep blush as they died. Into this cherished disorder, Mr. Archipelago carefully introduced wild orchids, which never survived for long, and clumps of hardy canna lilies that bloomed pink and ragged. He grew pineapples, too, and daily prodded angrily with his stick at the speared clusters which consistently refused to bear fruit the size of that sold for a mere shilling in the African market. The favourite of his domain, however, was the sensitive plant, an earth vine which, if its le
aves were touched even lightly, would softly and stubbornly close. Mr. Archipelago liked to watch the sensitive plant’s closing. Nothing in this world could stop its self-containment; it was not to be bribed or cajoled; it had integrity. But he seldom touched it, for the silent and seemingly conscious inturning of each leaf made him feel clumsy and lacking in manners.

  Just as the garden was Mr. Archipelago’s special province, so the long verandah was Doree’s. Here flew, uncaged, four grey African parrots, their wings tipped with scarlet. Sometimes they departed for a while, and sulked in the branches of the frangipani tree. Doree never attempted to catch them, nor would she even lure them with seeds or snails. Mr. Archipelago believed she almost wished one of them would find itself able to leave the sanctuary and return to the forest. But they had lived inside the verandah for too long. They could not have fended for themselves, and they must have known it. They always came back to be fed.

  Mr. Archipelago could well have done without some of the visitors to Doree’s menagerie. He did not mind the little geckos that clung transparent to the walls, like lizards of glass, nor the paunchy toads whose tongues hunted the iridescent green flies. But the trays containing all the morsels which Doree imagined to be choice fare for spiders–these sometimes drew scorpions and once a puff-adder. Doree would not kill even the lethal guests. She shooed them carefully out at broom-point, assuring the sweating Mr. Archipelago that they had no wish to harm anyone–they wanted only to be shown how to escape. Perhaps her faith protected her, or her lack of fear, for within her sanctuary no live thing seemed to her to be threatening. In any event, she had never been touched by the venom of wild creatures.

  She had a chameleon, too, of which she was extremely fond, an eerie bright green reptile with huge eyes and a long tail curled up like a tape-measure. Mr. Archipelago once ventured to suggest that she might find a prettier pet. Doree’s large pale eyes squinted at him reproachfully.

  “What do you want me to do, anyway? Conk him on the head because he’s not a goddamn butterfly?”