The Sea Inside

displays had come to obsess the writer. To him their convulsions seemed a kind of shock therapy; the masked figures in the darkness, lit by their flaming torches, driving out ‘demons of pain, psychosis and bad luck by inducing such terror in the subject that he will automatically expel them’.
    At night Bowles lay in bed, listening to the waves crashing on the island’s seaward cliffs, contrasting them with the softer sound they made on the sandy bay. It was the greatest luxury he could imagine. He was untroubled by the sharks that swam around the reef, or by the enormous turtle that haunted the rocks, rising to the surface occasionally like ‘a floating boulder’, its great domed back an indication of its age, so the gardener said. During the hours of darkness, flying foxes hung in the trees, to be chased away at daybreak by flocks of crows. ‘Once they had done that and remarked about it with each other for a while, they flew back to the mainland. But the bats never returned before dark.’
    Sitting at one of the Count’s desks, cigarette holder in his mouth, fingers poised over his typewriter, Bowles wrote his novel
The Spider’s House
. It was set in Morocco, but its title might have applied to his current refuge. His wife Jane was much less enamoured of the island. She took to drinking, hard, and particularly objected to the flying foxes – they seemed to be leathery demons to her – and couldn’t wait to leave. Perhaps she sensed a place haunted by its past. The dark island of Ceylon itself may have been where all the devils were. As a young boy growing up near Colombo, my brother-in-law Sam saw a burning light at the end of the garden one night. As he watched, the apparition zoomed closer and closer towards him, taking on the shape of a human head engulfed in flames.
    With the arrival of the high seas of the monsoons, and the high taxes levied on foreigners, Paul Bowles was also driven out. According to one writer, Richard Hill, he became unpopular with the locals, not least on account of his use of hashish; at night they came to whistle and throw stones at the island and its unwelcome tenant. After only two years on Taprobane, Bowles sold up and retreated to Tangier, from where I received polite replies to my enquiries, neatly typed on cigarette-paper-thin sheets, as well as an invitation to visit which I never took up.
    Nor did I see any devils on Taprobane, although for all I knew there might have been hundreds hiding in the lush vegetation. Guests drifted under the thirty-foot-high cupola of the Hall of the Lotus from which the villa’s rooms radiated like the hands of a clock, and where any manner of other lives might be being lived out. De Mauny’s elegant furniture still stood against the walls. In the darkness, I swam around the rocks, the light from the torches flaring on the lapping waves. Only when it was time to leave did we realise how far the tide had risen. Wading across the water, which was now above thigh-height, I had to support an older lady, elegantly clad in an immaculate gold-embroidered sari, as she picked her way through the swirling cocoa-coloured sea like a waterlogged bird-of-paradise. I wouldn’t have been surprised, looking back over my shoulder, if the entire island had disappeared behind us, sinking into the Indian Ocean.

    In an interview for the BBC conducted at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, the writer Arthur C. Clarke spoke, in his heavy Somerset accent, of things to come. ‘The only thing we can say of the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic,’ he declared. He went on to make a specific prediction for the year 2000, even though he thought ‘it may not exist at all’. Not through nuclear war or a ‘new stone age’, he said, but because of incredible revolutions in communication.
    Clarke foresaw a world ‘in which we could be in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be … for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti just as well as London, independent of distance’. By then the globe would have ‘shrunk to a point where men will no longer commute, but communicate’, and the modern notion of the city would have been abolished – although at the same time Clarke feared that the world would become one great suburb.
    The prophetic air of the black-and-white film – faintly undermined by its very British voiceover – is animated by a glimpse of a working model of that future world, one in which ‘from the heart of what was