Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online Page A

said, and I could see he thought I was referring to Shakespeare.
           "The East, the East," in a manner wailed Wignall, and I feared he was starting to recite a poem. But then, "You think you've wrung the West dry, you kids."
           "Wrung us dry," John said, pleased, smirking.
           "What do you know about the East?" I said, angry at the smirk, also at last feeling the sugary acid of the wine bite, sickened by Geoffrey's behaviour and by a birthday that was going to end miserably, remembering too late that the Ovington boy had been born in Kuala Lumpur and now undoubtedly to be told that the girl Janie, smirking "I was born in New Delhi."
           "Oh, it was the sahib's East for both of them," Ovington admitted. "I should have mentioned that Janie's father is the Assistant High Commissioner. This new orientalism has nothing to do with being children of the Foreign Service. I think they're partly right, I think they've been let down—"
           "Oh my God," Wignall said, "who hasn't been let down? But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold." I felt sure that he must have written a poem on some such theme. Nay, perhaps his entire oeuvre was erected on it. Anger I could not well explain started to bubble in me. I was about to say, angrily, that we'd all let down our past, our culture, our faith when Sciberras saved me from public tears by speaking quite quietly over his emptied plate.
           He said, "I will tell you this. It is as follows. It is that we must look for what we want where we are and not in some other place." I gaped at that good sense as if this comic Maltese had turned into an oracle. Then I saw him as a symbol that, had I still been writing, would have been of immense potency: the whole incarnated Mediterranean-Phoenician, Arabic-speaking, inheritor of Greek philosophy, Roman stoicism, a provincial faith promulgated in Aramaic that had built its own empire. "It is also that we do not sneer at duty and at the faith we are taught at home."
           Ah, that terrible emotive trinity. The force of the words was softened by the comic Mediterranean accent, otherwise the tears that started would have flooded onto the congealed sauce on my plate. And then we were all saved, except the children, who were past saving, by the appearance of the birthday cake, brought in by Ann Ovington herself, its shape that of an open book, three candles only on top out of, I presumed, deference to my shortness of breath. Sciberras, beaming now, had plenty of breath. The children la-lahed "Happy Birthday to You" with a knife-on-bottle punctuation from John Ovington while Sciberras, a smiling moon of delight, blew out and commenced cutting.
           He said, "Where is our friend? Perhaps now he will be less bloody green."
           "I think," I said, starting to rise, "I'd better go and—"
           "Leave it to me," Ovington said, quicker. Wignall nodded and nodded, putting crumbs of the cake to his mouth, smiling down some long vista of the years at perhaps some fateful childhood party in Hampstead or an as yet uncorrupted Golders Green. I settled myself again and brought out, thinking to give pleasure to their author, the lines I had read that afternoon: "But then I saw your tongue protrude To catch the wisp of angel's food. Ah God! I quailed beneath the shock: Your something something party frock—"
           "Shut it," he cried. Shock was right. "Shut it, shut it. It's nothing to you except a chunk of—" His eyes now were the ones to fill. "All over, it's all over. Sorry," he sniffed to his hostess, who wrinkled painfully though not in bewilderment: she had entertained plenty of authors in her time. And then to me: "Sorry. It's just that—Growing old