scanning the poetry shelves to look at the fat, signed piles of his rivalsâ work or reciting his poems while three Australian women loudly disagreed with one another about Sufism, oblivious to him. She believed he was slighted at every turn. When they caught the car back to the hotel, she had to stop the driver from leaving without giving him time to climb aboard. And, for all his talk of the wonderful massages he was getting, the hotel staff seemed to pay him as little heed as they did the geckos which chuckled so startlingly from the restaurant eaves.
She felt their interest in her slacken too, once Ayu realized she wasnât going to book a chakra realignment or a colonic irrigation. Ayu was still there to greet her each morning as she emerged for breakfast, but by the third day she did so with a singsong slackness that hinted at mockery.
Edithâs events were both, in their way, disasters. Her spotlight session had a tiny, restless audience because she was programmed, in the smallest auditorium, at the same time as the latest Indian prizewinner was packing out the big one. As for her paneldiscussion on romantic fiction, her attempt to take the subject seriously, although she was by no means a romantic novelist, went for naught because one of her fellow panellists had broken the agreement and written a lengthily tedious speech, not remotely on the topic, which she insisted she had to read as she had been up half the night writing it. After which there were only fifteen minutes left for their moderator â not alas the implacable Ms Yeung â to ask the rest of them one question each.
But Peter came to both sessions and so, astonishingly, did Lucinda Yeung, although she did not sit rapt as he did but took such repeated notes in her agenda that Edith suspected she was merely claiming the nearest convenient chair while she prepared for her next session with someone more newsworthy.
âI feel Iâve seen nothing of Bali,â Edith confided in Peter, once she had explained to the only audience member to ask that no, the bookshop had only managed to stock one of her earliest books, not the latest and that all the others were by a quite different Edith Chalmers. âAnd itâs my last night. It seemed criminal doing nothing but coming to festival events and walking in the hotel grounds.â
He convinced her to stay on in Ubud as night fell and the streets began to buzz with scooters. âBut Iâve left all my cash at the hotel so youâll have to be Sugar Mother,â he said with an unexpected wink.
That was fine by her. When she last counted herrupiahs on her bed she seemed to have over a million still.
He said he wasnât hungry since that morningâs particularly strenuous massage seemed to have wiped out his appetite, but he encouraged her to take a table in the Café Lotus to drink a delicious cocktail of lemongrass, lime juice and pressed ginger then he led her off down some lively side streets to a little restaurant, where they seemed to be the only big-boned Westerners, and chose for her a sequence of small dishes of fish and chicken that seemed the very essence of exotic travel after her lonely plunderings of her fruit bowl.
Finally he led her to a neighbourhood temple. A full moon ceremony was building up to some kind of climax or at least was in full flow. The steps were busy with worshippers coming and going, the air bright with the jangling melodies of the percussion orchestra he explained was called a gamelan. It would have felt quite wrong to go inside as they werenât Hindus but he found a comfortably low wall outside where they sat for a happy hour smelling incense and frangipani, listening to the music and hubbub and marvelling at the elegance with which local women could ride side-saddle on their husbandsâ scooters while balancing little towers of fruit or rice cakes on their heads to offer at the altars within.
âI think this is why I
She felt their interest in her slacken too, once Ayu realized she wasnât going to book a chakra realignment or a colonic irrigation. Ayu was still there to greet her each morning as she emerged for breakfast, but by the third day she did so with a singsong slackness that hinted at mockery.
Edithâs events were both, in their way, disasters. Her spotlight session had a tiny, restless audience because she was programmed, in the smallest auditorium, at the same time as the latest Indian prizewinner was packing out the big one. As for her paneldiscussion on romantic fiction, her attempt to take the subject seriously, although she was by no means a romantic novelist, went for naught because one of her fellow panellists had broken the agreement and written a lengthily tedious speech, not remotely on the topic, which she insisted she had to read as she had been up half the night writing it. After which there were only fifteen minutes left for their moderator â not alas the implacable Ms Yeung â to ask the rest of them one question each.
But Peter came to both sessions and so, astonishingly, did Lucinda Yeung, although she did not sit rapt as he did but took such repeated notes in her agenda that Edith suspected she was merely claiming the nearest convenient chair while she prepared for her next session with someone more newsworthy.
âI feel Iâve seen nothing of Bali,â Edith confided in Peter, once she had explained to the only audience member to ask that no, the bookshop had only managed to stock one of her earliest books, not the latest and that all the others were by a quite different Edith Chalmers. âAnd itâs my last night. It seemed criminal doing nothing but coming to festival events and walking in the hotel grounds.â
He convinced her to stay on in Ubud as night fell and the streets began to buzz with scooters. âBut Iâve left all my cash at the hotel so youâll have to be Sugar Mother,â he said with an unexpected wink.
That was fine by her. When she last counted herrupiahs on her bed she seemed to have over a million still.
He said he wasnât hungry since that morningâs particularly strenuous massage seemed to have wiped out his appetite, but he encouraged her to take a table in the Café Lotus to drink a delicious cocktail of lemongrass, lime juice and pressed ginger then he led her off down some lively side streets to a little restaurant, where they seemed to be the only big-boned Westerners, and chose for her a sequence of small dishes of fish and chicken that seemed the very essence of exotic travel after her lonely plunderings of her fruit bowl.
Finally he led her to a neighbourhood temple. A full moon ceremony was building up to some kind of climax or at least was in full flow. The steps were busy with worshippers coming and going, the air bright with the jangling melodies of the percussion orchestra he explained was called a gamelan. It would have felt quite wrong to go inside as they werenât Hindus but he found a comfortably low wall outside where they sat for a happy hour smelling incense and frangipani, listening to the music and hubbub and marvelling at the elegance with which local women could ride side-saddle on their husbandsâ scooters while balancing little towers of fruit or rice cakes on their heads to offer at the altars within.
âI think this is why I
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