‘Then how do you cut your toenails?’
‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘My boy does it for me.’
I wondered why she was ‘Miss’ if she’d been married and had a boy of her own. Perhaps he was illegitimate.
‘How old is your son?’ I asked, treading carefully.
‘No, no, no!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you know anything? A “boy” is one’s native servant. Didn’t you learn that when you read Isak Dinesen?’
‘Ah yes, of course,’ I said, remembering.
Absentmindedly I took an orange myself and was about to start peeling it.
‘Don’t,’ Miss Trefusis said, shuddering. ‘You’ll catch something if you do that. Use your knife and fork. Go on. Try it.’
I tried it. It was rather fun. There was something satisfying about cutting the skin to just the right depth and then peeling away the segments.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Well done.’
‘Do you employ a lot of “boys” on your coffee farm?’ I asked her.
‘About fifty,’ she said.
‘Do they go barefoot?’
‘Mine don’t,’ she said. ‘No one works for me without shoes on. It costs me a fortune, but it’s worth it.’
I liked Miss Trefusis. She was impatient, intelligent, generous and interesting. I felt she would come to my rescue at any time, whereas Major Griffiths was vapid, vulgar, arrogant and unkind, the sort of man who’d leave you to the crocodiles. He might even push you in. Both of them, of course, were completely dotty. Everyone on the ship was dotty, but none, as it turned out, was quite as dotty as my cabin companion, U. N. Savory.
The first sign of his dottiness was revealed to me one evening as our ship was running between Malta and Port Said. It had been a stifling hot afternoon and I was having a brief rest on my upper berth before dressing for dinner.
Dressing? Oh yes, indeed. We all dressed for dinner every single evening on board that ship. The male species of the Empire-builder, whether he is camping in the jungle or is at sea in a rowing-boat, always dresses for dinner, and by that I mean white shirt, black tie, dinner-jacket, black trousers and black patent-leather shoes, the full regalia, and to hell with the climate.
I lay still on my bunk with my eyes half open. Below me, U. N. Savory was getting dressed. There wasn’t room in the cabin for two of us to change our clothes simultaneously, so we took it in turns to go first. It was his turn to dress first tonight. He had tied his bow-tie and now he was putting on his black dinner-jacket. I was watching him rather dreamily through half-closed eyes, and I saw him reaching into his sponge-bag and take out a small carton. He stationed himself in front of the washbasin mirror, took the lid off the carton and dipped his fingers into it. The fingers came out with a pinch of white powder or crystals, and this stuff he proceeded to sprinkle very carefully over the shoulders of his dinner-jacket. Then he replaced the lid on the carton and put it back in the sponge-bag.
Suddenly I was fully alert. What on earth was the man up to? I didn’t want him to know I’d seen, so I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. This is a rum business, I thought. Why in the world would U. N. Savory want to sprinkle white stuff on to the shoulders of his dinner-jacket? And what was it, anyway? Could it be some subtle perfume or a magic aphrodisiac? I waited until he had left the cabin, then, feeling only slightly guilty, I hopped down from my bunk and opened his sponge-bag. EPSOM SALTS, it said on the little carton! And Epsom salts it was! Now what good could Epsom salts possibly do him sprinkled on his shoulders? I had always thought of him as a queer fish, a man with secrets, though I hadn’t discovered what they were. Under his bunk he kept a tin trunk and a black leather case. There was nothing odd about the tin trunk, but the case puzzled me. It was roughly the size of a violin case but the lid didn’t bulge as the lid of a violin case does, and it wasn’t tapered. It was simply a three-foot-long rectangular leather box with two very strong brass locks on it.
‘Do you play the violin?’ I had once said to him.
‘Don’t be daft,’ he had answered. ‘I don’t even play the gramophone.’
Perhaps it contained a sawn-off shotgun then, I told myself. It was about the right size.
I put the carton of Epsom salts back in his sponge-bag, then I took a shower, dressed and went upstairs to have a drink before dinner. There was one stool vacant at the bar so I sat down and ordered a glass of beer. There were eight sinewy sunburnt gophers including U. N. Savory sitting on high stools at the bar. The stools were screwed to the floor. The bar was semi-circular so that everyone could talk across to everyone else. U. N. Savory was sitting about five places away from me. He was drinking a gimlet, which was the Empire-builder’s name for a gin with lime juice in it. I sat there listening to the small talk about pig-sticking and polo and how curry will cure constipation. I felt a total outsider. There was nothing I could contribute to the conversation so I stopped listening and concentrated on trying to solve the riddle of the Epsom salts. I glanced at U. N. Savory. From where I sat, I could actually see the tiny white crystals on his shoulders.
Then a funny thing happened.
U. N. Savory suddenly began brushing the Epsom salts off one of his shoulders with his hand. He did it ostentatiously, slapping the shoulder quite hard and saying at the same time in a rather loud voice, ‘Ruddy dandruff! I’m fed up with it! Do any of you fellers know a good cure?’
‘Try coconut oil,’ one said.
‘Bay rum and cantharides,’ another said.
A tea-planter from Assam called Unsworth said, ‘Take my word for it, old man, you’ve got to stimulate the circulation in the scalp. And the way to do that is to dunk your hair in ice-cold water every morning and keep it there for five minutes. Then dry vigorously. You’ve got a fine head of hair at the moment, but you’ll be as bald as a coot in no time if you don’t cure that dandruff. You do as I say, old man.’
U. N. Savory did indeed have a fine head of black hair, so why in the world should he have wanted to pretend he had dandruff when he hadn’t?
‘Thanks a lot, old man,’ U. N. Savory said. ‘I’ll give it a go. See if it works.’