Limekiller!

Someone was coming toward them, walking very slowly. Said the Honourable Somerset, “And here is our host.” Jack felt something like instant recognition upon seeing Major Deak, and yet he knew he’d never seen him before… he seemed actually a giant tortoise walking upright, — the convex back, the waving fipperlike arms and hands, the head out-thrust from the loose collar at almost a right angle, the face here wrinkled and there divided into platelets, the absence of head or facial hair. The eyes lacked alike the clearness of youth and the milkiness of age; the eyes (Limekiller concluded) the eyes looked sick. He heard, in his inner ear, his own voice saying, You’re wrong. And, a second later, realized that he’d been replying to something not addressed to himself. something murmured back there a moment ago between Edwards and his wife.

De Major looking ageable.

Yes, mon, ahnd aging fahst.

But it was not age. The cayes were commonly considered to be of a healthier air than that of King Town; often Limekiller, comparing the fresh winds out on the islets to the soggy smells of the badly drained capital, had agreed. But clearly the air here was doing Major Deak no good. and, if today’s dead-sullen calm and. the phrase rose up in his mind and silently burst like a bubble of gas. and bad vibes. were typical… he did not finish the thought. He was being introduced, he had to speak.

“How are you, sir?”

And Major Deak, alas, proceded to tell him “. thought I was choking, strangling. doctor finds no evidence of asthma or emphysema. can’t go elsewhere to live,” he said, slowly moving his head from side to side, as though Limekiller had urged him to move on. “. all my savings here. planned to add a few rooms. receive a few people, retired people. paying guests. labor troubles. can’t seem to catch my breath for long. thought that in a place with underemployment there’d be no problem hiring workpeople, but. nothing seems to get done. eating up my capital. pension a trifle. say that from today on for a month nobody will do a job of work. would have retired in the Golconda Colony but the fanatics have gained control there.

There was one word which, Jack thought, described the man’s state. Misery.

Upstairs, surprisingly, the air was by far less dead. It was not only to discourage Critturs that this house, like so many in the country, was built on stilts: the chief purpose was to catch the wind. And it caught it. But the wind did not stay caught. And someone else was upstairs, as though waiting for them. Stickney Forster.

Stickney Forster was a Member of the Bar, and by now the only actively practicing White member. Those who liked him said, “Ah very clever mahn, he went to the Oxford College, you know.” Those who did not like him said that if he had ever been to Oxford it was only to use the toilet. “That Limey bahstard,” they called him. Although on this occasion he was not in his black robe and white tie and wig, Jack recognized him at once, had long been qui- edy amused by his having once said, “I have placed in my will that on my tombstone it should read, Father of the Illegitimate Children’s Sustentation Act, being the shortest Act in the Law Code. Do you know it? It reads in its entirely, The Illegitimate Children’s Sustentation Act shall follow in every detail the provisions of the Legitimate Children’s Sustentation Act. Caused a few grumbles, I can tell you, fat lot I care, but it makes sure that no ‘outside’ child is going to go raggedy-arsed while his half-sibs are fully-clothed just because their parents were ‘married in church.’ “Married in church and An outside child, Jack knew the words well, as they often appeared in casual conversation in British Hidalgo; B.H. being, he had often thought, the one country he knew of in which absolute adherence to the old-time religion went hand in hand with absolute heterosexual freedom. (There was as yet nothing like a “Gay Rights” Movement in British Hidalgo; very very rarely was the matter even mentioned, and then usually in a very tight-lipped line in the official Gazette: Sixteen months in gaol for having committed the crime against nature.)

However.

Outside child.

Married in church. .