J. G. FARRELL (1935–1979) was born with a caul, long considered a sign of good fortune. Academically and athletically gifted, Farrell grew up in England and Ireland. In 1956, during his first term at Oxford, he suffered what seemed a minor injury on the rugby pitch. Within days, however, he was diagnosed with polio, which nearly killed him and left him permanently weakened. Farrell’s early novels, which include The Lung and A Girl in the Head, have been overshadowed by his Empire Trilogy—Troubles, the Booker Prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip (all three are published by NYRB Classics). In early 1979, Farrell bought a farmhouse in Bantry Bay on the Irish coast. “I’ve been trying to write,” he admitted, “but there are so many competing interests—the prime one at the moment is fishing off the rocks..... Then a colony of bees has come to live above my back door and I’m thinking of turning them into my feudal retainers.” On August 11, Farrell was hit by a wave while fishing and was washed out to sea. His body was found a month later. A biography of J. G. Farrell, J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer by Lavinia Greacen, was published by Bloomsbury in 1999.
DEREK MAHON was born in Belfast in 1941, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Sorbonne, and has held journalistic and academic appointments in London and New York. He has received numerous awards, including the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Prize, the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the Scott Moncrieff and Aristeion translation prizes, and Lannan and Guggenheim fellowships. His Collected Poems were published in 1999 and Harbour Lights, a volume of new poetry, is forthcoming in 2005.
THE SINGAPORE GRIP
J. G. FARRELL
Introduction by
DEREK MAHON
New York Review Books
New York
Contents
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
Jim Farrell, the finest novelist of recent times, drowned in Bantry Bay on Saturday 11 August 1979, at the age of forty-four. Two days later eighteen more lives were lost when gale-force winds broke up the Fastnet Race; but Jim wasn’t sailing, he was fishing. He had bought a house near Kilcrohane, County Cork, only five months before and turned into the complete angler in a matter of weeks. Though born in England, he spent much of his youth in Ireland and returned constantly in his thoughts. Like Brendan Archer in Troubles he had left the love of his life here and never quite severed the umbilical cord.
He traveled a great deal, latterly in India and Southeast Asia to research The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip—though his research was singular in that he drafted the novels first and made his field trips afterward to confirm or revise the background he had read up or imagined at home in London. He traveled in time too, of course, and his evocation of the Raj at the time of the Indian Mutiny must be one of the best there is. One of the remarkable things about the work is his uncanny sense of period, his eye for the clinching detail—an elephant’s-foot wastepaper basket in Troubles, or the contents of Prince Hari’s room in The Siege:
Near a fireplace of marble inlaid with garnets, lapis lazuli and agate, the Maharajah’s son sat on a chair constructed entirely of antlers, eating a boiled egg and reading Blackwood’s Magazine. Beside the chair a large cushion on the floor still bore the impression of where he had been sitting a moment earlier. He preferred squatting on the floor to the discomfort of chairs but feared that his English visitors might regard this as backward.
Out of context this reads, I realize, rather like a racist joke; but Jim was no racist. On the contrary, he is one of the few English (or Anglo-Irish) writers about the British Empire who can see events through the eyes of the colonized, certainly in The Siege and the Grip, where the submerged life of the Chinese community is explored sympathetically. The exception, curiously, is Troubles, where everything is seen through the eyes, or binoculars, of the Big House characters; and although the “native Irish” are treated affectionately, they remain oddly baffling to the narrator, as to his protagonist:
The Major raised the binoculars and gazed once more at the young man on the rock jetty, wondering what he was saying to the crowd. Behind him as he spoke great towering breakers would build up; a solid wall of water as big as a house would mount over his gesticulating arms, hang there above him for an instant as if about to engulf him, then crash around him in a torrent of foam. “He looks like a wild young fellow,” the Major said as he handed the binoculars back. Before turning away he watched another wave tower over the young Irishman, hang for a moment, and at last topple to boil impotently around his feet. It was, after all, only the lack of perspective that made it seem he would be swept away.
Rereading that, I’m aware of an uncanny parallel between the “wild young fellow,” presumably a Sinn Féin organizer, who wouldn’t be swept away, and his creator, who would; and I’m reminded of some remarks, in a piece Jim wrote on his early reading, about the “hallucinating clarity of image” he admired in Conrad and Richard Hughes. He talks too about Loti’s Pêcheur d’Islande which he read at school:
I realised with surprise that I was becoming intensely interested in this story of Breton fishermen and their difficulties .... So powerful an impression did this book make on me that even today there are certain phenomena for which an expression of Loti’s will alone suffice. A certain wintry light over the sea, for example, still conjures up Loti’s lumière blafarde. I had no idea then, nor have I now, of the precise meaning of blafard. In my own mind it bears such perfect witness as it is, that to find its accepted meaning might prove an inconvenience.
Well, the Oxford French Dictionary gives “pale, pallid, wan, sallow, dull, leaden.” But of course Jim is perfectly right: none of them is sufficiently blafard, with its edge of wildness, insanity even.
There was nothing obviously wild, much less insane, about the man I knew. Eccentric, yes; outspoken too. Adopting John Berger’s precedent, he continued the practice, now alas in abeyance, whereby the recipient of a Booker Prize should bite the feeding hand in no uncertain terms. Presented with his winning check for The Siege of Krishnapur, he made a short speech of thanks in his mild, wandering voice and took the opportunity to criticize conditions on the Booker McConnell plantations in the West Indies.
“We devote too much time to satisfying the ego, time which could be better spent in fruitful speculation or in the service of the senses; in any case, owning things one doesn’t need for some primary purpose, and that includes almost everything, has gone clean out of fashion. I’m sorry to have to break this news of the death of materialism so bluntly; I’m afraid it will come as a shock to some of your readers.” Thus spake Jim when, an unlikely fashion journalist, I interviewed him for Vogue in 1974. Ascetic epicurean, gregarious solitary, aristocrat of the spirit, he was then entering upon the late, disinterested “Marxist” phase (though he was never really a Marxist) which would issue in his most ambitious work, The Singapore Grip, with its clear-eyed depiction of economic imperialism at work in Southeast Asia and the Far East.
But there’s an intimation of something else too in his hip Vogue prophecy. When, at his mother’s suggestion, my wife and I visited the Kilcrohane house in 1981, we found on his desk and bookshelves Japanese dictionaries and Buddhist texts which seemed to indicate the way his thoughts were tending during his last year, and even to reveal an important, if barely visible, aspect of his nature; for his early brush with death and subsequent singularity had developed in him a mystical strain, one which expressed itself in impatience with London and withdrawal to the silence of West Cork—there, in an old phrase, to make his soul. When the wise man grows weary of the world, said the Buddha, he becomes empty of desire;
when he is empty of desire, he becomes free; when he is free he knows that he is free, that rebirth is at an end, that virtue is accomplished, that duty is done and that there is no more returning to this world; thus he knows.
—DEREK MAHON
Dublin, 1999
THE SINGAPORE GRIP
For
Bob and Kathie Parrish
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Odd though it may seem to attach a bibliography to a work of fiction, this novel depends very heavily on primary research conducted by others, as well as on opinions and personal experiences recorded by those who travelled, worked or fought in the Far East before or during the last War. Nevertheless the Singapore of these pages does not pretend to be anything but fictional: although many of its bricks are real, its architecture is entirely fantastic.
J.G.F.
Part One
1
The city of Singapore was not built up gradually, the way most cities are, by a natural deposit of commerce on the banks of some river or at a traditional confluence of trade routes. It was simply invented one morning early in the nineteenth century by a man looking at a map. ‘Here,’ he said to himself, ‘is where we must have a city, half-way between India and China. This will be the great halting-place on the trade route to the Far East. Mind you, the Dutch will dislike it and Penang won’t be pleased, not to mention Malacca.’ This man’s name was Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles: before the war his bronze statue used to stand in Empress Place in a stone alcove like a scallop shell (he has been moved along now and, turned to stone, occupies a shady spot by the river). He was by no means the lantern-jawed individual you might have expected: indeed, a rather vague-looking man in a frock coat.
Although people had once lived there, the island of Singapore, when he arrived, was largely deserted except for a prodigious quantity of rats and centipedes. Rather ominously, Raffles also noticed a great many human skulls and bones, the droppings of local pirates. He wasted no time, however, in negotiating for the island with an alarmed native and then proceeded, his biographer tells us, to set up a flag-pole thirty-six feet high. ‘Our object,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘is not territory but trade: a great commercial emporium, and a fulcrum, whence we may extend our influence politically as circumstances may hereafter require.’ As he stood there on that lonely beach and gazed up at the flag with rats and centipedes seething and tumbling over his shoes did Raffles foresee the prosperity which lay ahead for Singapore? Undoubtedly he did.
When you think of the city as it was forty years ago you should not imagine an uncivilized frontier-town of the jungle. You had only to stroll around the centre of the city with its wide avenues and lawns and look at the monolithic government buildings, at the luxurious department stores and at the marmoreal dignity of the banks, to realize that Singapore was the work of a great and civilized nation. True, there were other parts of the city, the various native quarters where Tamils, Malays, and above all the Chinese lived, which were rather less imposing. There, in those ‘lower depths’ Chinese secret societies undoubtedly performed monstrous crimes, kidnapped their own prominent citizens, fought out appalling territorial battles, stunned themselves with drugs and so forth. If you were merely a visitor, a sailor, say, in those years before the war, Singapore would undoubtedly have seemed no less tawdry, no less exciting than another of the great Eastern sea ports. You would have gone to drink and dance at one of the amusement parks, perhaps even at The Great World itself, whose dance-hall, a vast, echoing barn of a place, had for many years entertained lonely sailors like yourself. There, for twenty-five cents, you could dance with the most beautiful taxi-girls in the East, listen to the loudest bands and admire the glorious dragons painted on the walls. In the good old days, before the troops started flooding in at the beginning of the War, that place could swallow an entire ship’s company and still seem empty except for you and the two or three Chinese girls with dolls’ painted faces sitting at your table, ready to support you with tiny but firm hands should you look like plunging to the floor full of Tiger beer.
There, too, when you staggered outside into the sweltering night, you would have been able to inhale that incomparable smell of incense, of warm skin, of meat cooking in coconut oil, of honey and frangipani, and hair-oil and lust and sandalwood and heaven knows what, a perfume like the breath of life itself. And from the roof of the Seamen’s Institute, or from some other less respectable roof, you might have seen the huge purple sign advertising Tiger Balm and, beside it, once darkness had completely fallen, its guardian, the great sabre-toothed tiger with glowing orange stripes beginning its nightly prowl over the sleeping roofs of Singapore. But there is no denying it, certain parts of the city were tawdry and others were wretched, and becoming more so as the age advanced: already, by 1940, the walls of cheap hotels and boarding-houses. hitherto impermeable except to an occasional muffled groan or sigh, were becoming porous and beginning to leak radio music, twangings of guitars and news bulletins. Every great city has its seamy side. And so let us look for preference at the gentler parts of the city at the elegant European suburb of Tanglin, for instance, where Walter Blackett, chairman of the illustrious merchant and agency house of Blackett and Webb Limited, lived with his family.
At first glance Tanglin resembled any quiet European suburb with its winding, tree-lined streets and pleasant bungalows. There was a golf course close at hand with quite respectable greens; numerous tennis courts could be seen on the other side of sweet-smelling hedges and even a swimming pool or two. It was a peaceful and leisurely life that people lived here, on the whole. Yet if you looked more closely you would see that it was a suburb ready to burst at the seams with a dreadful tropical energy. Foliage sprang up on every hand with a determination unknown to our own polite European vegetation. Dark, glistening green was smeared over everything as if with a palette knife, while in the gloom (the jungle tends to be gloomy) something sinister which had been making a noise a little while ago was now holding its breath.
If you left your bungalow unattended for a few months while you went home on leave, very likely you would come back to find that green lariats had been thrown over every projecting part and were wrestling it to the ground, that powerful ferns were drilling their way between its bricks, or that voracious house-eating insects, which were really nothing more than sharp jaws mounted on legs, had been making meals of the woodwork. Moreover, the mosquitoes in this particular suburb were only distant cousins of the mild insects which irritate us on an English summer evening: in Tanglin you had to face the dreaded anopheles variety, each a tiny flying hypodermic syringe containing a deadly dose of malaria. And if, by good fortune, you managed to avoid malaria there was still another mosquito waiting in the wings, this one clad in striped football socks, ready to inject you with dengue fever. If your child fell over while playing in the garden and cut its knee, you had better make sure that no fly was allowed to settle on the wound; otherwise, within a day or two, you would find yourself picking tiny white maggots out of it with tweezers. At that time, when parts of the suburb were still bordered by jungle, it was by no means uncommon for monkeys, snakes and suchlike to visit your garden with the idea of picking your fruit or swallowing your mice (or even your puppy if you had an appetizing one). But all I mean to suggest is that, besides the usual comforts of suburban life, there were certain disadvantages, too.
Not far from where the Blacketts lived Orchard Road sloped gently down (a gradient that was more psychological than real) almost straight for a mile or so until it lost itself on the fringes of Chinatown and the commercial city where Walter had his headquarters on Collyer Quay and did battle on weekdays. Down there in the city, taking the place of the rats and the centipedes which had once made it their home, seething, devouring, copulating, businesses rose and fell, sank their teeth into each other, swallowed, broke away, gulped down other firms, or mounted each other to procreate smaller companies, just as they do elsewhere in other great capitalist cities. But up here in Tanglin people moved in a quiet and orderly way about their daily affairs, apparently detached from these sordid encounters, detached especially from the densely packed native masses below. And yet they moved, one might suppose, as the hands of a clock move. Imagine a clock in a glass case; the hands move unruffled about their business, but at the same time we can see the working of springs and wheels and cogs. That ordered life in Tanglin depended on the same way on the city below, and on the mainland beyond the Causeway, whose trading, mining and plantation concerns might represent wheels and cogs while their mute, gigantic labour force are the springs, steadily causing pressures to be transmitted from one part of the organism to another … and not just as that time or just to Tanglin, of course, but much further in time and in space: to you thousands of miles away, reading in bed or in a deck-chair on the lawn, or to me as I sit writing at a table.
2
The Blacketts, on the whole, had reason to be satisfied with the calm and increasingly prosperous life they were leading in Singapore in 1937. Only once or twice in the two decades following the Great War had anything occurred to disturb their peace of mind and even then nothing that could be considered particularly serious. True, their elder daughter, Joan, had shown signs of becoming involved with unsuitable young men … but that is the sort of thing that any family with growing children has to expect.
Although his wife, Sylvia, became greatly agitated, Walter himself was inclined to take it calmly at first. Joan, who had recently returned from a finishing school in Switzerland, had found it hard to settle down in Singapore, separated from the friends she had made in Europe. She was rebellious, contemptuous of the provincial manners of the Straits, as one naturally would be, Walter supposed, after being at such a school (the school, incidentally, had been her mother’s idea). Given time it was something that she would get over.
Joan’s involvement with the first of these young men, a penniless flight-lieutenant whom she had met nobody knew where, was an act of rebellion probably. Even Joan had not tried very hard to pretend that he was anything but impossible. Besides, she knew well enough what her parents, who took a dim view of the Services, thought of even those generals and air vice-marshals whom duty had called to Singapore, let us not speak of flight-lieutenants. Walter had not set eyes on the person in question because Joan had had the good sense not to try to bring him home. He had waited calmly for her to see reason, explaining with a touch of exasperation to his wife that her tears and her fretting were a waste of energy which she could use to greater profit in some other direction, because Joan would presently come to her senses with or without the aid of her mother’s tears. In due course, it had taken a little longer than he had expected, Walter’s confidence had been justified. Joan had disposed of the flight-lieutenant as surreptitiously as she had found him. Tranquillity had returned to the Blackett household for a while.
Presently, however, it transpired that Mrs Blackett, testing the material of one of Joan’s cotton frocks beween her finger and thumb, felt an unexpected crinkle of paper. Ah, what was this? Something left by the laundry? Mrs Blackett had happened to grasp the light material of her daughter’s frock just where there was a pocket. Joan, who was in the frock at the time, blushed and said that it was nothing in particular, just a piece of paper of no importance. ‘In that case,’ replied Mrs Blackett, ‘we had better throw it away immediately, because it does not do to let our clothes bulge out in an ugly fashion by carrying unnecessary things in our pockets.’ Quick as a flash her fingers darted into the pocket and retrieved the offending piece of paper (as she had suspected! a love-letter!) before Joan had time to retreat. The ensuing scene, the shrieking and hysterics and stamping of feet, even reached Walter who was upstairs in his dressing-room at the time, brooding on business matters. He gave the storm a little time to blow over but it showed no sign of doing so and at last he was obliged to come downstairs, afraid that they might burst blood-vessels in their passion. His appearance quelled mother and daughter instantly: they gazed at him glassily, breasts still heaving, faces tear-stained. He promptly sent Joan to her room and, when she had gone, reminded his wife that she was under instructions to take these matters calmly.
‘The fact is, my dear, that these emotional scenes do no good at all. Quite the reverse. I should like to know how much you have found out about this young man as a result of all this shouting and screaming? My bet is … nothing.’
It was true. Mrs Blackett hung her head. Joan had declared that she would rather be dead than reveal the least thing about him, where she had met him, where he worked, even what his name was. ‘His name appears to be “Barry”,’ said Walter with a sigh, perusing the letter, ‘and I can even tell you where he works, since he has written on his firm’s notepaper. As to where she met him, that is of no importance whatsoever. So all you have succeeded in doing is putting Joan’s back up. In future kindly consult me before you say anything to Joan about her boyfriends. I shall now go and have a word with the young lady.’
Walter climbed the stairs thoughtfully. The marriage of his daughters was a matter to which he had not yet given a great deal of attention. And yet it was undoubtedly a matter of great importance, not only to Joan, as it would be, in due course, to little Kate, his younger daughter, but potentially to the business as well. After all, if you are a wealthy man you cannot have your daughter marrying the first adventurer who comes along. To allow such a match is to invite disaster. The fact was that Joan would do far better for herself and for Blackett and Webb Limited if she agreed to marry someone whose position in the Colony matched her own.
There were, as it happened, two or three young men in Singapore with whom a satisfactory alliance of this sort could have been made and who, given Joan’s attractions, would have asked for nothing better. But when, on her return from her finishing school, such a union had been suggested to her, Joan had been indignant. She found the idea distasteful and old-fashioned. She would marry whom she pleased. Naturally the elder Blacketts in turn had been indignant. Walter had demanded to know why he had paid good money to such a school if not to drill some sense of reality into her. But Joan had been stubborn and Walter had quickly reached the conclusion that patience was the best policy. They would wait and see, tactfully fending off unsuitable young men in the meantime. Despite the scene which had just taken place Walter remained confident that Joan was too sensible a girl to remain permanently attached to someone whom her parents considered unsuitable.
Walter, climbing the stairs, had considered rebuking his daughter and ordering her not to communicate with this young man again. Instead he decided to continue banking on her good sense and merely said: ‘Joan dear, I’ve no objection to you flirting with young men provided you are sensible about it and don’t do anything you might regret later. What I do object to is the fact that you have upset your mother. In future please be more discreet and hide your love-letters in some safe place.’ Joan, who had been expecting another row, gazed at him in astonishment as he handed her back the letter which had caused all the commotion.
Was Walter taking a great risk with his daughter’s future by responding so mildly? Mrs Blackett was inclined to think that he was. Walter, however, reassured her. He was on friendly terms with the chairman of the firm on whose notepaper the young man wrote his love-letters and saw him frequently at the Club. He was confident that if the worst came to the worst and Joan persisted in taking an interest in him, it would require only a nod and a wink to have the fellow moved away from Singapore to a convenient distance (back to England if necessary). As it turned out, this intervention was not necessary: at a certain age nothing can be more stifling to enthusiasm than the permission or approval of your parents. ‘Barry’, (whoever he was), lovelorn, was allowed to continue his residence in Singapore.
Mrs Blackett now decided that the best way to prevent Joan from carrying on with unsuitable young men was to surround her with suitable ones. True, there was a serious shortage of the latter in Singapore but she would draw up a list and see what could be done … Joan’s trouble was that she never met anyone of the right sort. Mrs Blackett would put an end to that by inviting one or two young men chosen by herself to tea once a week. Joan would be asked to act as hostess and Walter would be there, too, to keep an eye on things. What did Walter think of it? Was it not a good idea?
Walter was dubious. He doubted whether Joan would take an interest in any young chap of whom her mother approved. He was even more dubious when he saw the list that she had drawn up. But in the end he agreed, partly because he saw no reason why his wife should not have her own way for once, partly because he had a secret weakness. This weakness, which was so mild and agreeable it might almost be considered a virtue, was for holding forth, as a man with some experience of life, to younger men just starting out. So it would happen, once these weekly tea-parties were inaugurated, that while Joan sat tight-lipped and rebellious, her green eyes as hard as pebbles, Walter would grow animated and have a jolly good time. Mrs Blackett, meanwhile, would dart glances from her husband to her daughter to the young guest trying to estimate what impression each was making on the other. As a matter of fact, the young man usually sat there looking faintly alarmed as Walter harangued him: after all, this was Blackett of Blackett and Webb, an important man in the Straits, and his parents had told him to be careful not to put his foot in it and to behave himself properly for once.
For a number of years now it had been Walter’s agreeable habit to take his visitors by the arm and escort them along the row of paintings that hung in his drawing-room. So it happened that the young man intended for Joan, although on the whole he felt safer sitting down and less likely to knock something over, would reluctantly allow himself to be plucked out of his chair while Joan continued to sit mutinously silent beside the tea-pot, ignoring her mother’s whispered entreaties that she should say something to her guest, and even accompany the two men across the room.
Some of the paintings which Walter was showing the young man were primitive in style, painted perhaps by a native artist or by a gifted ship’s officer in his spare time: here was a three-masted vessel being loaded with spices or sugar, a line of native porters with bundles on their heads marching in uncertain perspective along a rickety quay surrounded by jungle. In the next painting, by a more sophisticated hand, the ship had arrived in Liverpool and was being unloaded again, and after that would come three or four paintings of the port of Rangoon and Walter would exclaim: ‘Look! They’re loading rice. Still all sailing ships, of course, and Rangoon’s just a sleepy little village. But you wait!’
In the early days, he would explain, while the youth at his side gazed at him uneasily, white rice would not survive the long passage round the Cape and so it was shipped as what was known as ‘cargo rice’, that is, one-fifth unhusked paddy and four-fifths roughly cleaned in hand-mills. Throughout the East, to India mainly, it was shipped simply as paddy (The blighters cleaned it themselves.’). Now Walter, unreeling history at a prodigious speed, would guide his guest (well, Joan’s guest) to a later picture of Rangoon. ‘You see how it’s grown in the meantime. And see how steam has taken the place of sail in the harbour (though some ships still have both, of course). And these great buildings with chimneys, d’you know what they are? Steam rice-mills!’
For now it was possible, with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870, to ship cleaned rice to Europe, thereby cutting out the fine-millers who used to clean the ‘cargo rice’ in London.
‘Ruined ’em,’ Walter would remark with a frown. ‘They weren’t quick enough. A businessman must keep his wits about him.’ And if the young man happened to be starting out on a business career himself, as he probably was, Walter might pause to lecture him on how you must always be ready to move with the times, never taking anything for granted.
‘Go and join them!’ hissed Mrs Blackett to her daughter in a penetrating whisper. ‘You’re being impolite to your guest.’
‘But Mother, I’ve told you a thousand times …’ And it was true … she had.
The last picture of Rangoon had been painted after the turn of the century and showed how the thriving rice trade had caused it to spread and grow into a great modern city, now only surpassed as an Eastern port by Calcutta and Bombay. Walter would draw his dismayed captive closer and after a moment’s examination of the teeming wharves on the Rangoon River he would put his finger on a fine warehouse and say. ‘Our first! The first to belong to Blackett and Webb … or rather, to Webb and Company as the firm was then called. We still have another exactly similar here in Singapore on the river. Well now, you see how a bit of trade can make a place grow?’ And with an air of satisfaction he would lead the suitable young man on to yet more paintings of Calcutta, Penang, Malacca, and of Singapore itself, in various stages of development.
‘You see how we made these little villages grow in just a few years. That’s what a bit of tin and rubber have done for Singapore!’
There was still another painting to be seen, and one that was more important than all the others, but by now Mrs Blackett was growing impatient and calling Walter and his audience back for another cup of tea. These tea-parties, she was beginning to think, were not having the desired effect. A disturbing thought occurred to her and she eyed her daughter suspiciously. Could it be that the reason for Joan’s lack of interest in her guest was that she was already carrying on in secret with yet another unsuitable young man?
3
Walter, after one such occasion, found himself left alone to brood in the drawing-room while Joan, with a sudden friendliness born of relief, conducted her guest to his motor-car and then went to join little Kate who was waiting on the lawn with a warped tennis racket for a game of French cricket. Joan was still just enough of a schoolgirl to enjoy such games. As the young man’s limousine crept towards the gates his pale face appeared at one of the windows and he waved, but no one was paying any attention to his departure. He caught a glimpse of Joan, though, dashing joyfully after a tennis ball while Kate clumsily passed the racket round and round her plump little body, and he thought with a pang: ‘What a smasher!’ And rather well off, too. For once he and his parents were entirely in agreement. Too bad old Blackett was so peculiar!
Meanwhile, Mrs Blackett had seized the opportunity of slipping upstairs to Joan’s room in order to set her mind at rest by having a quick read of her daughter’s diary. She picked up this little volume and began to flick over its pages. So far, so good. There did not appear to be anything incriminating. She heaved a sigh of relief as the weeks fled by under her thumbnail. But then, just as she had almost reached this very week, she received a nasty shock, for the diary suddenly turned from plain English into a jumble of meaningless letters. What on earth did this signify? It could only be that Joan had taken to writing her diary in code! And that in turn must mean that she had something to hide! Mrs Blackett, seriously alarmed, tried again and again to make sense of those jumbled letters but was quite unable to make anything of them. The only thing that she did discover was that the same name (she assumed it was a name because it began with a capital letter) kept recurring: ‘Solrac’!
‘Oh dear, he must be a Hungarian this time!’ thought Mrs Blackett, raising a hand to her brow.
Downstairs she found Walter still in the drawing-room, musing in front of the most important painting in his collection, the one which he had not had time to show Joan’s young guest. He merely greeted her revelations about the diary in code with a shrug, however, and told her to calm herself … any family with growing daughters must expect occasional difficulties of this sort. It was in the nature of things. Mrs Blackett retired, by no means reassured.
The painting which had pride of place in Walter’s vast drawing-room and in front of which he was now standing, was not yet another view of an embryonic city, but of a man. It was a portrait of old Mr Webb himself, a bearded, sharp-featured gentleman of great dignity. Walter, when given the opportunity, would lead his guests up to this portrait and speak with respectful warmth of his former partner, the man without whom he himself ‘would never have amounted to anything’. For it had been Mr Webb who had given young Walter Blackett a chance to compete with the giant firms of the Far East like Guthries, Jardines and Sime Darby, by agreeing to merge his own powerful business with Walter’s fledgling. And they had got on well together, too, so that in no time a real understanding had been established between them. Besides, growing older now, Mr Webb had needed the energy of a younger partner. In due course Blackett and Webb Limited had been the result.
A lesser man, as he grew weaker, would have held grimly on to everything, with the result that within a few years both the rubber and the agency business would have tumbled about his ears. But old Mr Webb, never afraid to face unpleasant realities, had realized that the years ahead would be too much for him. Perhaps, too, he had dimly perceived some of the approaching hazards of the next decade: in particular, the growing rivalry with Japan in the markets of the Far East. There are few things in life more difficult than for a man to retire from the business he has founded and built up himself. Yet this difficult feat had been managed, at least reasonably well, by Mr Webb when Walter had taken over completely in 1930. And there had still remained a firm bond of mutual respect between the two men.
After his retirement Mr Webb’s main interest had been in a small estate business known as the Mayfair Rubber Company which he had kept back, he would explain, as an old man’s plaything. He was chairman of this company but his duties were not onerous: the Mayfair was one of the assortment of independent companies whose day-to-day management was handled collectively by Blackett and Webb with an efficiency that neither of them, alone, could have matched. No, it was more likely, if the truth were known, that he had seen the Mayfair as a convenient Old Gentleman’s Home. From this point of view there was something to be said for the Mayfair, however slender the yield from its estate in Johore.
When he retires an elderly gentleman needs a pleasant place to live: the Mayfair had maintained its Singapore headquarters for many years back, not in the commercial district as you might expect, but in a rambling, palatial bungalow in Tanglin, adjacent to Walter’s own splendid mansion so that only a pleasant stroll through two compounds separated them. A retired gentleman needs the respect and assistance of those around him … who is more respected and assisted than a chairman in his own company? He needs something to keep him interested in life lest he slip out of it through the inattention that besieges the elderly … what better than his own rubber company? On the other hand, he needs to be left alone, not bothered by people, because they increasingly irritate him … whose peace of mind is more carefully preserved than the chairman’s? This last point had been particularly important to old Mr Webb.
He had lived alone all his life and did not mean to change his ways simply because he was getting on in years. Surprisingly, he was married. But his wife was in England and always had been. He had married her late in life and never encouraged her to come out to Malaya. Perhaps he had been afraid that people would laugh at him, for she was some thirty years younger than himself (she was dead now, though: he had outlasted her despite those thirty years). More likely, he had simply preferred living by himself and his wife had not seemed to mind, as far as anyone knew. Moreover, he had paid visits to her in England where he was sometimes obliged to go on business. On one of these visits he had even made her pregnant, which speaks for cordial relations. The result of their union had been a son called Matthew who, like his mother, had never appeared in Singapore.
At one time Mr Webb had had the notion that young Matthew should marry Joan. Yes, the old chap had taken a benevolent interest in her as a little girl, showering her with silver spoons, napkin rings and strings of pearls. No doubt Mr Webb, used to his own somewhat despotic family arrangements, had seen no reason why authority should not be exercised to merge families in the same way as businesses. Walter smiled. That might have saved all this bother with unsuitable young men! But by the mid-thirties this union was no longer mentioned, nor had been for some years.
Matthew and Joan … they might almost had been designed for each other. What a shame! As it happened, neither Walter nor the rest of his family, except for his younger daughter, Kate, had set eyes on Matthew although they, too, had made occasional visits to England. Matthew and Walter’s son, Monty, were roughly the same age, yet when Monty had been at school in England Matthew had not joined him … he had been sent to school in Switzerland, or in Sweden, or in some other country. For, Walter recalled, gazing sadly at the portrait of his former partner, in the smooth and otherwise flawless edifice which Mr Webb had constructed around himself in preparation for a dignified and comfortable old age, a single nasty crack had appeared.
Old Mr Webb, although his faculties had remained unimpaired in most respects, had been assailed by certain progressive ideas about diet and education and Matthew had been brought up in accordance with them. This was surely a tragedy worthy of that… what was his name? … that French blighter … yes, Balzac, that was it. The most progressive of all the schools Matthew had been sent to, so Walter had heard, had taken co-education to the limit of allowing no distinction whatsoever to be made between the sexes. Children were known simply by the title ‘Citizen’ and a surname. Boys and girls alike wore the same baggy, flowing pantaloons and bullfighter jackets. They swam naked together in the swimming pool, had their hair cropped to a similar length, played the same noncompetitive games, and were allowed to unroll their sleeping mats in whichever dormitory they pleased provided it was not in the same one two nights running.
This was undoubtedly the most extreme of several private schools which Matthew had attended. The others had probably specialized in nothing more extreme than vegetarianism and some form of non-coercive teaching. Yet the thought of these schools still haunted Walter to this day. He had done his best to remonstrate, mind you, but the old man was obstinate and had shown himself ready to take offence. The matter had had to be dropped. But what all these schools had done to young Matthew, Walter could only wonder. It seemed to him pathetic beyond words that this old gentleman, whose own life had been an example of rectitude, hard work and self-discipline, should have succumbed to such an array of peculiar and debilitating theories, the very opposite of everything that he himself had stood for.
Only too glad would Walter have been if events had proved him wrong, if the fatal vegetarian flaw had not brought about the tragedy he feared. But this was not to be. One of Mr Webb’s visits to England had coincided with the General Strike of 1926. Matthew had been a student at Oxford at the time. While his fellow undergraduates had poured cheerfully out of their colleges to lend a hand in breaking the strike Matthew had skulked in his room ‘sporting his oak’ (Walter understood this to be university jargon for ‘keeping his door shut’). Despite the shut door Mr Webb had argued with his son. Very likely the word ‘patriotism’ had been mentioned.
Walter had received no first-hand account of the meeting but somehow he pictured Mr Webb standing on the lawn of Brasenose College holding up fistfuls of white hair to the icy wind that howled through the quad, while dismal dons, looking up from their books, surveyed this representative of suffering humanity with distaste from leaded casements. He understood that after wandering about for a day or two the old chap had offered his own services as a tram-conductor. They had been refused, of course. No matter how enthusiastic he might be, for the serious business of collecting fares and clubbing trouble-makers off the rear platform he was much too frail. He had retired to Singapore then, having watched the strike collapse without his son’s assistance.
At one time it had been understood that Matthew would take his place in the firm one day. But after 1926 this was no longer discussed. Matthew’s mother had died suddenly in 1930 and Matthew himself had seldom been mentioned after that. He was known to be living in Geneva where he had some job connected with the League of Nations. And that, reflected Walter, given the poor boy’s peculiar education, is about what one might have expected! Old Mr Webb was still alive, by the way, and on certain social occasions he could still be seen in Walter’s garden or drawing-room, looking no less upright and dignified than the old gentleman in the portrait which Walter had just been contemplating. ‘Matthew and Joan … what a shame indeed. It would have suited the firm nicely.’ And with a sigh Walter went to look for his wife who had retired to her room with a pencil and a piece of paper, determined to break the code in which Joan had taken to writing her diary.
Never in her life had Mrs Blackett subjected herself to such mental effort as she did during the next few days in her attempt to make sense of those mysteriously jumbled letters. She tried everything she could think of, she pummelled her brain with one theory after another, she covered the floor of her bedroom with crumpled pieces of paper, she grew thin and haggard, but still without result. At last, however, as she sat defeated in front of her dressing-table gazing at her hollow-eyed reflection and still with a line of Joan’s fiendish code gripped in her fingers, chance came to her rescue: she dropped her eyes to the reflection of the paper and found that she could read it without difficulty! It was the simplest of all codes used by children: mirror-writing. She searched feverishly for the other coded sentences she had copied from Joan’s diary and held them to the mirror, her lips working … There was a knock on the door and Walter came in, looking sombre.
‘He’s not a Hungarian!’ cried Mrs Blackett. ‘He’s a …’
‘A Brazilian, I know. It’s even worse.’
‘Walter, how do you know?’
‘I just asked Joan. What’s more, I have a feeling that this time it may be more serious.’
Walter was beginning to think that although difficulties of this sort were in the natural order of things and were such as any family with growing daughters has to expect, a Brazilian was going a tiny bit too far. Weary of his wife’s efforts to break Joan’s code he had decided to approach his daughter directly. Joan had replied without hesitation that the object of her affections was a secretary at the Brazilian Legation in Peking who had come to visit Singapore for an extended holiday. They would probably be married in a year or two in Rio de Janeiro, once she had had time to become a Catholic. Although his family did not have much money (they were rather hard up, actually), they were direct descendents of King Alfonso or someone of Spain, or was it Portugal? She was glad that Walter had brought the matter up because she had been on the point of asking whether she could invite Carlos to tea. Oh yes, and if Walter did not mind, it might be best not to show him all the paintings of Rangoon, at least to begin with, until they all knew each other better.
This was serious, undoubtedly. But Walter did not lose his nerve. He knew Joan to have an obstinate streak in her and had quickly decided, in spite of the danger, that the best policy would be to continue as before, counting on her good sense. He believed that given time she would perceive that an impoverished Brazilian was out of the question. Still, this talk of marriage was disquieting. He replied guardedly that he saw no reason why Carlos should not come to tea. In return Joan gave him a kiss.
Carlos, it turned out, wore a monocle, affecting to be a British gentleman. Over tea (this time it was Mrs Blackett’s turn to remain tight-lipped and sullen) Carlos explained to Walter that in the Brazilian Legation in Peking there had been nothing whatsoever to do … nobody there did any work, not a bit, not an ounce, not a scrap! And he uttered a high, bleating laugh, also modelled on that of a British gentleman. One reason nobody did any work in Peking was because the Chinese Government was not there, nowhere near! The blessed thing was miles away in Nanking! In any case, the Chinese and Brazilian governments had nothing whatever to say to each other, not a blessed word! No Brazilian had been near China for centuries! So what could a chap do? he enquired, failing to notice the unfortunate impression he was producing on Walter. What could a chap do but spend his entire day in riding-breeches or tennis flannels and his evenings dancing on the roof of the Grand Hôtel de Pékin? ‘A poor show, actually,’ he added regretfully, somewhat to Walter’s surprise. After a long silence he dropped his monocle glumly into his handkerchief and began to polish. Walter had agreed with his last remark. He glanced quickly at Joan but her face was impassive and he could not tell what she was thinking.
Carlos cleared his throat. Sometimes, when they needed a change from Peking, they would go on leave to Shanghai. He brightened a little. Did Walter know that the Lambeth Walk was now all the rage in Shanghai’s nightclubs?
Once he had met Carlos, Walter was reassured. Joan, a sensible girl who knew how important her eventual marriage would be both to herself and to her father’s business, could not fail to see how thoroughly impossible he was. Walter was amazed, indeed, that she should have been able to put up with him for a day, let alone a week. But somehow she seemed able to manage it and, presently, the week became several weeks. As time went on, Walter’s confidence diminished. He had almost decided to use his parental authority to put a stop to the liaison when he happened to mention the matter to a French friend, a certain François Dupigny, who was passing through Singapore at the time. Dupigny, to whom he had applied for information about the young man’s background in the hope of uncovering something discreditable, exercised some important function in the Indo-Chinese Government on behalf of the French Colonial Ministry; he was unusually well-connected in the Far East and had an ear for gossip.
Although, as it turned out, Dupigny knew nothing at all about Carlos he threw up his hands in dismay at Walter’s idea that the two young people should be prevented from seeing each other. On the contrary, he declared, nothing could be worse for Walter’s cause! The lovers should be not only permitted but obliged to spend as much time in each other’s company as decorum and chastity allowed. In such circumstances nothing could be better guaranteed to pour icy water over the passion of one young person than intimate acquaintance with the other!
Walter was taken aback by this cynical view, though there might be a grain of truth in it, he had to admit. In all probability, however, he would not have adopted such an unconventional approach to his difficulty had not Joan, at that very moment, asked for permission to visit Shanghai for a holiday in the company of Carlos … and, of course, of her mother who would have to be persuaded to act as chaperon. Joan naturally expected a refusal and, seeing him hesitate, began to show signs of indignation and rebellion. But Walter’s hesitation was less concerned with Carlos than with the political situation in Shanghai and in China generally. He recalled the trouble there had been there in 1932, of which he had been given a vivid description by the manager of Blackett and Webb’s Shanghai branch. The curious scene which he had evoked had for some reason remained in Walter’s mind: a chilly night in January, the booming chimes of the Custom House clock dying away into silence over the rainswept city, and then the sudden rattle of rifle and machine gun fire.
As was usually the case with these China ‘incidents’ the rights and wrongs of the affair had been thickly cloaked in ambiguity. All that one could say for certain was that soon after eleven p.m. an armed contingent of the Japanese Naval Landing Party led by men carrying flaming torches had crossed the border from the International Settlement into Chapei. They had been greeted with a hail of bullets by the bitterly anti-Japanese, anti-foreign, pro-revolutionary Nineteenth Route Army: in no time the streets around the North Station had been littered with dead Japanese Marines. The Japanese had not thought to switch out the streetlights and, with the brilliantly lit International Settlement behind them, had made an easy target for the Chinese in the darkness of Chapei. And since the North Szechuan Road between the Post Office and North Honan Road had remained illuminated and the sound of gunfire could be heard all over the Foreign Concession area, presently taxis and private motor-cars began to arrive loaded with Europeans and Americans in evening-dress who had stopped by on their way from theatres, restaurants and dinner-parties to see the fun. In a few minutes a cheerful, chattering crowd had gathered, champagne was being sipped and neighbouring cafe proprietors had been roused to supply hot coffee and sandwiches. The general view of this good-humoured, after-theatre audience was that the good old Japs were saving Britain, France and America the trouble of teaching the Chinese a lesson. For undoubtedly the Chinese, with their growing ‘anti-foreign’ and nationalistic feeling, had been getting too big for their boots. Allow them to continue in this direction and it would not be too long before the various commercial and legal privileges enjoyed by the Great Powers in China would be at an end.
Walter, still hesitating, reflected that the ‘anti-foreign’ feeling in China had not diminished and could still be a source of trouble. On the other hand, it was now mainly concentrated on the Japanese, who thus acted as a lightning-conductor for Europeans and Americans. This spring (of 1937) had been relatively quiet, apart from reports of increased Japanese troop movements in Manchuria. Besides, the various garrisons of the Foreign Concessions had been greatly strengthened and the Chinese were so busy fighting among themselves that the threat to Shanghai appeared negligible.
‘I see no reason why you shouldn’t go,’ Walter said calmly, ‘provided you don’t do anything foolish.’ And then, though not without misgivings, he settled down to await developments. He was beginning to realize that the marriage of a daughter to the right sort of young man is a matter to which a great deal of attention must be given, whether you like it or not.
4
‘But don’t you see, Papa dear,’ said Joan, reclining on her bed in her underwear and luxuriating in the draught of the fan directly above her, ‘how it could come as a shock to a nicely brought-up girl like me who has always been either at home or at school. It was absolutely shocking, I mean, and Mama was quite as taken aback as I was, at least she turned as white as milk and I thought she was going to faint. Her eyes got a funny look in them and even Carlos, in his absurd British clothes, looked a bit shaken. Actually, it was a good job Carlos was there because although I don’t think he’d seen much of the rougher side of life either, at least his presence was reassuring. He was a man, at any rate, even though I know you think he’s a bit ridiculous, and his clothes, a tweed suit I think it was, did tremendously inspire confidence. Anyway, without him and his tweeds and his monocle I’m quite sure that Mama would have fainted and think what problems that might have caused in the middle of I think it was called Hongkew and Mama already complaining that she was worn out because we had spent most of the afternoon trailing around the Japanese part looking for this wretched silk shop and being sent on one wild-goose chase after another and it would soon be getting dark and she wanted to get back to Bubbling Well Road where she felt safer and, anyway, I should have felt distinctly uncomfortable, particularly as all the rickshaw coolies vanished the moment they saw there was going to be trouble with Japanese soldiers arriving and, trust him! Carlos had told his chauffeur to pick us up not there, but two or three streets away. By the way, have I shown you the remains of my blisters?
‘Well, no, Daddy, I agree that nothing did happen … We weren’t actually molested but we easily could have been. It was more the feeling of being, well, vulnerable. One moment we were strolling along peacefully and the next the street was full of cars and lorries and little Jap soldiers pouring out … Well, all right then, I admit there was only one car and no lorry and only three or four soldiers poured out of it, the car, I mean, but still it was quite frightening when they started herding us in to the side of the pavement with their rifle butts and there was an officer who looked like a chimpanzee with a sword several times too long for him which he kept tripping over in the most ludicrous fashion. Until then it seemed at least fairly amusing, though Mama was getting apprehensive and Carlos was looking helpless and saying something like: ‘What a to-do!’ which frankly wasn’t very helpful of him because Mummy and I could think of that much ourselves. Well, we tried to walk on and they wouldn’t let us, and then Carlos suddenly stopped saying ‘Bless my soul’ and began to rattle away in Portuguese and got quite red in the face because he had seen that they’d blocked off the end of the street and he was afraid that he might be involved in heaven knows what, a diplomatic incident perhaps?
‘Of course, there was no reason to be alarmed, I’m not saying there was! All I’m saying is that it did occur to one that the Jap soldiers could turn nasty and their bayonets looked very sharp, even though there were only three or four of them, and in the meantime the street had suddenly filled with people pressing around the doorway that the soldiers had gone into and some of them looked pretty worked up about something, so unlike the Chinese who are usually well-behaved and mind their own business (or at least they do here in Singapore, don’t they?) and I’d never realized before how much smaller they are than us, because our three heads were sticking out of the crowd and it felt a bit like Gulliver’s Travels or something.
‘Anyway, then two Jap soldiers came out of the doorway again carrying someone. All I could see at first was the front man who had a very shiny leather boot gripped in the palm of each hand … I never did see the rest of him properly, I’m glad to say, just a hand trailing along the pavement and then a glimpse of a shape with its tunic and trousers undone and a horrid mass of red stuff around its middle. He was S-shaped because of the way they were carrying him and he had a sword, too, which scraped tinnily on the ground and kept getting in the way of the man behind who had him by the armpits. But really what gave me such a shock was the Chinese girl they dragged out of the doorway and threw up against the wall … at least, I thought then that she was Chinese because of her clothes, she was wearing a quilted tunic and black silk trousers and I’d never seen a Eurasian wear anything but European clothes, even though there was something about the colour of her hair which was a very dark red, I naturally thought that she had simply dyed it, which would have been nothing compared to the weird creatures in some of the nightclubs which Carlos had persuaded us to go to the night before. The point is that she looked as if she were about my age or even younger, and then she saw me in the crowd and that is what I found so upsetting.
‘Well, it’s not my fault that I’ve led such a sheltered life, is it? I suddenly thought that if I hadn’t been English it could have been me up against that wall. The little officer was shouting at her and striking her. Her face had gone grey, I mean literally grey, the colour of porridge. It gives you a shock yourself to see someone so frightened. Afterwards I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I kept thinking that if she were English she’d have only just left school like me.
‘I don’t know where everybody came from but by that time the street was full of people clustered in a very tight semicircle around the Japanese officer and the girl and the other two soldiers who had carried the dead man out of the house were having trouble getting through the crowd again to reach them. And suddenly … he was so busy screaming at the girl and slapping her face that he hadn’t noticed the crowd behind him … suddenly, they pressed forward and swallowed him and the girl up completely. There was some shoving and kicking and I think he tried to draw his sword but he was so tightly packed in with everyone else that of course he couldn’t do anything. And at that moment Carlos said: “Now’s our chance to beetle off” because the Japanese soldiers who had gone to the end of the street to stop people leaving were coming running back to rescue their officer, and between us Carlos and I managed to drag Mama around the corner and then he went off to find the car, and in no time we were drinking a much-needed cup of tea at the Park Hotel, all back safe and sound on Bubbling Well Road.
‘Well, that was that, and even Mama gradually came to see that she had had a little adventure and felt quite pleased with herself, especially when Carlos got hold of a newspaper which said that the officer had been lured into that house by a girl and then murdered by Communists. It didn’t say anything about what happened to the girl. Anyway, as I say, that was that and the holiday continued as before with sight-seeing and shopping et cetera and we went to the Moscowa nightclub which was full of the most divinely beautiful Russian girls, all aristocrats, Carlos said, I felt so jealous of them and … thank you, Daddy dear, but I know very well that I don’t though I wish I did, it must be nice … and so on and then, then it was time to go on board again to come back to dear old Singapore and Mama had to make a fuss about the way her maid was doing the packing, just rolling things up and cramming them into our trunks and, as you know, Mama has only to set eyes on a boat to get sea-sick, and so it was really lucky that Carlo was there, even though he was beginning to get on our nerves a bit and we’d privately christened him “The Stage Butler” because he was always so polite and pompous, because otherwise I’d have had to mope about by myself, what with Mama groaning and swallowing tablets in her cabin and all.
‘Well, we had lots of lovely dances and games on deck and simply enormous meals and one evening with some other young people we’d met we all got a bit tipsy and decided we’d have an adventure and explore the ship and prowl around in the cabin class and the third-class parts of the boat where one wasn’t normally supposed to go. So we set off in a horde, the men in dinner-jackets smoking cigars and us girls in our most gorgeous evening dresses, giggling with champagne and silly jokes and some of the men were even wearing funny hats. Straight away we ran into a hitch. A locked door. Steward won’t let us through. “I say, Carlos,” said one of the men, “why don’t you bribe the fearful little fellow while we look the other way,” and we all whooped and shoved Carlos forward and being a Brazilian, of course, he was frightfully good at bribing people and in no time we were pouring through into the other classes.
‘Actually, it was then that we began to realize that it was probably rather a boring idea after all to go prowling about in the other classes … There was really nothing much to do! And one of the men who was in the Diplomatic … He told me his name was Sinclair Sinclair (he had a stammer and he always said it twice and I never found out whether it was really that or whether he was just repeating one of his names) and had been to Harrow and was a great sport and was something like the millionth secretary in Bangkok or somewhere … he said : “I say, I don’t know what you people think b-b-but it seems to me that the other cluh-cluh-cluh … parts of the ship are just a tiny bit disappointing, if you get m’meaning,” and he did rather say what was in everyone’s mind. And someone else said: “I mean to say, it’s ever so slightly dingy, which is not to say that it’s not frightfully jolly in its way, and all that.’
And soon we were all feeling pretty glum which was awful considering how cheerful we’d been just a few minutes before. And by that time we’d come to another locked door and almost decided to go back but Carlos, alias the Stage Butler, had already bribed somebody, sort of automatically, and he was opening the door so we went through that one, too. And that was a mistake because on the other side of that door things were really pretty grim and we found ourselves trooping through a sort of dreadful dormitory with bunks which had a ghastly stuffy smell and was full of half-naked people snoring, and Sinclair Sinclair said: “I think we must be in one of the holds,” and one of the girls began to feel faint, but the man had locked the door behind us again and we couldn’t find anybody else to open it and we were afraid the girl was going to faint or have hysterics or something. So someone said that there must be a way of getting up to the deck … that there was a law of the sea or something which said even third-class passengers had to have a way of getting on to the deck, and so we decided to wait up on deck in the fresh air while we sent Carlos to bribe somebody to get us back to the first class. Incidentally, when I told Sinclair about the man I’d seen in Shanghai with strawberry jam coming out of his stomach he wasn’t at all impressed and said he’d seen lots of things like that and that Asiatics were always killing each other. It seems they don’t mind. It’s been proved scientifically, that’s what Sinclair said anyway.
‘In the end we found some stairs and got up on to the deck and thank heaven because it was ghastly down there. Someone said that now he knew why it was called the bowels of the ship but nobody laughed because it was vulgar. And even on deck there were people sleeping huddled here and there, Chinese, I think, I suppose they didn’t care for it down below either. It was quite warm and there was a lovely moon and a soft breeze. After crawling about down below it was super to be in the fresh air again and one of the men produced a bottle of champagne he’d brought with him and we all took a swig and felt quite merry again. And while we were waiting for Carlos to come back Sinclair Sinclair told us about a game he and his chums used to play in Paris when he was learning French (which they all have to in the Diplomatic) … it was called saute-clochard: evidently all the beggars in Paris sleep in rows over the hot-air vents from the Métro in winter to keep warm and the game consisted in seeing how many you could jump over at a time: it sounds a bit heartless, I must say, but anyway, Sinclair announced that he had decided to beat the world record for saute-Chinois which meant the number of Chinamen he could jump over at a time and he said he’d never have a better opportunity than the present. All the other men egged him on and in a flash he’d taken off his dinner-jacket and was pounding over the deck towards a row of sleeping Chinese. Then he leaped into the air and … oh, incidentally, I’ve just remembered something I wanted to ask you. When we were on the way out and stopping at ports here and there before reaching Shanghai … I think it was the morning after we left Canton and we were steaming up a river into Wuchow in Kwangsi Province, anyway, someone pointed out a golf club on the left-hand bank and said it was definitely the most exclusive in the world and when I asked why? he said because it only had four members, the manager and assistant-manager of the Standard Oil Company and the same of the Asiatic Petroleum Company, but that’s ridiculous, isn’t it? A golf club with only four members. He was only joking, wasn’t he? Really! Good heavens! How d’you mean, “Chinese don’t play golf?” Now you’re making fun of me. But sorry, I’ll go on: Sinclair leaped into the air and must have jumped over at least a dozen Chinese who were asleep on the deck and luckily didn’t land on one … but not so luckily he did catch his foot against something, a piece of iron or a rope or I don’t know what, and took a nasty fall on the deck and grazed his knees and palms and tore his trousers and made a frightful din.
That’s when some of the Chinese woke up and looked at us. I was quite near one of the lights and happened to be looking in the direction of one of the bundles when it stirred and sat up. It was the girl I’d seen in Shanghai shoved against the wall by the Jap officer. I was only a few feet away. I’d have recognized her even if her face hadn’t been still all bruised and swollen. And she recognized me, too, I could see that. I smiled at her and said something like I was glad she had got away and was she all right? She didn’t say anything at first and I thought, of course she wouldn’t speak English and she was obviously shocked to see someone who recognized her. But then she suddenly asked me in perfect English, you know, like an educated person, if I would please not tell anyone about the business with the Jap officer because she was afraid that if people knew about it they might not give her a landing-permit in Singapore and that she was going there to get away from the Japanese. Her name was Miss Chiang, she said, Vera Chiang, and her mother had been a Russian who’d had to leave during the Revolution and then had died and she’d been educated in an American mission in Manchuria or somewhere and that she’d had nothing to do with the man who’d been killed and had never seen him before. Of course, I said I wouldn’t tell anyone and I gave her your card with the firm’s name on and my name and said to get in touch if she needed help getting work or something. And that, Papa dear, was all that happened except that the Stage Butler started making scenes because he was jealous of me talking to Sinclair Sinclair, but it wasn’t my fault if Sinclair was more amusing and I can’t bear it when men are jealous and want to have you all to themselves and keep trying to have “serious talks”. In the end Mummy and I stopped calling him the Stage Butler and christened him High Dudgeon because of the way he kept stalking about the ship and sulking. Because of him it was quite a relief to see Singapore and the good old Empire Dock and there were the usual little brown boys diving for pennies, but one thing I’d never noticed before was that there were one or two quite old men diving for pennies, or would have except we preferred to throw them for the boys. And that was that except that I forgot to tell you what happened to Sinclair Sinclair. One of the Chinamen he had jumped over turned out to be a very big man and was in a fearful rage about it, and he just picked up poor Sinclair and threw him overboard and there was a terrible splash and he just vanished in the wake … no, Daddy, you’re tickling … and was never seen again. No! Daddy, stop! You’re hurting … I’m sorry, I’ll never tell a lie again! I promise!’
5
Late in September 1940 at a garden-party given by the Blacketts for a large number of the most influential people in the Straits a further incident occurred to disturb their tranquil lives. Joan unexpectedly threw a glass of champagne in the face of one of the guests. The victim was a young officer from the American military attaché’s office, Captain James Ehrendorf. Fortunately, though, he was more or less a friend of the family and showed no sign of wanting to make a fuss.
The success, of this garden-party (for which, incidentally, old Mr Webb’s birthday had been chosen) was important to both Walter Blackett and his wife. For Walter its importance lay in the fact that it was the forerunner of a series of social occasions planned to celebrate his firm’s jubilee in the coming year. Webb and Company had been founded in Rangoon in 1891 and its first office in Singapore had been opened shortly afterwards. It was hoped that twelve months of rejoicing, symbolized by an occasional garden-party, firework display or exhibition of Blackett and Webb services and produce, would culminate at the New Year of 1942 in one of those monster carnival parades so beloved of the Chinese in Singapore. The outbreak of the war in Europe had for a time thrown these festivities into question, but the Government, it transpired, was anxious for propaganda purposes that they should continue in order to combat the ceaseless anti-British ravings from Tokyo. It was felt that nothing could better demostrate the benefits of British rule than to recall fifty years of one of Singapore’s great merchant houses and the vast increase of wealth which it had helped to generate in the community for the benefit of all. As for Sylvia Blackett, this garden-party was taking place in the absence of her only serious rivals in the Crown Colony’s society (the Governor and Lady Thomas had departed for eight months’ leave in Europe) and she believed that provided all went well nothing more was required to consolidate her already well-established social position.
The Blacketts lived in a magnificent old colonial house of a kind rare in Singapore, built of brick and dating back seventy years or more. The ranks of fat white pillars that supported its upper balconies combined with the floods of staircases that spilled out on either side of its portico like cream from the lip of a jug to give the building a classical, almost judicial appearance, and yet, at the same time, an air of ease, comfort, even sensuality. This impression was heightened by the lush and colourful gardens down into which the staircases flowed. Here fountains played on neatly mown aquamarine lawns flanked by brilliant ‘flame of the forest’ trees. Behind one accurately-trimmed hedge were the tennis courts, behind another the path that led to the Orchid House; in the middle of the largest expanse of lawn was the swimming pool whose blue-green water, casting jagged sparks of reflected sunlight at the white shuttered windows of the bedrooms above, seemed merely to be the lawn itself turned liquid. Beyond the pool a shady corridor of pili nut trees with white flowers or purple-black fruit depending on maturity led to an even more colourful wilderness of rare shrubs. Whoever had planted this part of the garden had tried to escape from the real, somewhat brooding vegetation of the tropics in order to create an atmosphere of colour and brilliance, the tropics of a child’s imagination. Here pink crêpe myrtle and African mallow crowded beside the white narcissus flowers of kopsia and the astonishing scarlet of the Indian coral tree and behind them a silent orchestra of colours: cassia, rambutan, horse-radish, ‘rose of the mountain’ and mauve and white-flowered potato trees until the mind grew dizzy. Scintillating butterflies, some as big as your hand, with apricot, green or cinnamon wings lurched through the heavily perfumed air from one blossom to another. Mrs Blackett, however, no longer ventured into this part of the garden despite the brightness and colour. She found herself sickened by the sweet, heavy smell of the blossoms. Besides, the grounds of the Mayfair Rubber Company were adjacent to this brilliant, leafy grove and she was afraid that she might catch a glimpse of old Mr Webb prowling about naked, pruning his roses with secateurs or, for that matter, doing heaven knows what.
Even before Joan threw the wine at Captain Ehrendorf Mrs Blackett had become aware that she would have to deploy all her social skills to avoid the sort of disaster that is talked about for years in a place like Singapore: this was because Walter, without consulting her, had invited General Bond, the General Officer Commanding, Singapore, while she herself, without consulting Walter, had invited Air-Marshal Babington, the Air Officer Commanding, Far East. Rumours about the rivalry of these two officers had been percolating for some time in the Colony. The open dislike which the General showed for the Air-Marshal was matched only by that which the latter showed towards the former, and on each side was duly reflected, as in a hall of mirrors, by the hordes of aides and subordinate officers who devoted themselves to aping their respective commanders. Air-Marshal Babington, asserted the gossips at the various ‘long bars’ that sprinkled the city, was filled with envy by the fact that his rival, as GOC Singapore an automatic member of the Legislative Assembly, should have the right to be called ‘His Excellency’ which he himself did not, although the frontiers of his own fiefdom of the ‘Far East’ lay infinitely more distant.
Now one of these gentlemen was chatting with his staff officers near the tennis courts while the other, surrounded by his subordinates, held court near the Orchid House, each still ignorant of the presence at the garden-party of the other. It was clear that it would take a miracle to prevent their meeting. Ah, Mrs Blackett recalled with remorse the rule that she had made many years ago and hitherto strictly observed, to the effect that she would not have military men in her house. In her house! On account of the outbreak of war in Europe she had weakened to the extent of putting a literal interpretation on this rule, allowing them into the garden. How she wished she had not! And now, in addition, it looked as if her daughter were about to make a scene.
Mrs Blackett had been conversing pleasantly with a member of the Legislative Assembly. This gentleman had been describing to her how the Japanese were moving into northern Indo-China and the French were not resisting. Why weren’t they resisting? she had enquired politely, though really more preoccupied with the question of whether Air-Marshal Babington would move into the Orchid Garden. Because, he explained, of pressure on the Vichy Government by the Germans. And then, all of a sudden, Joan had thrown champagne into the face of one of the guests.
‘The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? What’s that?’ cried Mrs Blackett in horror. Startled, the gentleman explained that it was in the natue of a propaganda exercise by the Japanese who wanted to establish economic dominion over various countries in the Far East.
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Blackett, recovering her composure.
Joan for some reason was smiling. She had even been smiling, though rather tensely, as she threw her wine into Captain Ehrendorf’s face. There was not, it must be admitted, a great deal left in her glass, but there was enough to rinse his handsome smiling features, collect in drips on his chin and spatter his fawn-coloured uniform with darker spots. He only stopped smiling for a moment and then went on smiling as before, though he looked surprised. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dried his face carefully, patting with particular attention the thin moustache on his upper lip. With his other hand he took Joan gently by the arm and drew her a little deeper into the blue shadow of the ‘flame of the forest’ tree beneath which they had been standing. As luck would have it, they had been on the fringe of the lawn and only Mrs Blackett herself appeared to have noticed. Joan shook herself free of Captain Ehrendorf’s guiding hand and they came to rest again.
‘If you’re interested in Indo-China,’ said Mrs Blackett brightly but firmly to the gentleman from the Legislative Assembly, ‘you must have a word with François Dupigny, who escaped from there only the other day with Général Catroux … and neither of them with a stitch of clothing. You’ll find him by the tennis court.’ With that, leaving the gentleman looking rather baffled, she moved away towards the ‘flame of the forest’.
As she approached, she found Joan and Ehrendorf chatting quite naturally about the band, Sammy and his Rhythmic Rascals, which could be heard playing not far away beside the swimming pool. This band, a daring innovation thought up by her son, Monty, had also caused her some anxiety for she was afraid that it might be thought vulgar. Captain Ehrendorf, the skin around his eyes crinkling into an attractive smile, assured her that it was a great success and that he believed he had even seen General Bond’s highly-polished shoe tapping to the rhythm. One thing was for sure: the General had moved nearer to the pool … but that might be because he had an eye for the bathing beauties who swooped and tumbled like dolphins in the blue-green water beneath the dais set up for the band; it had been Monty’s idea, too, that the physically attractive younger guests should be invited to bathe. Mrs Blackett, aghast, for this was the first intimation she had had that General Bond had left the comparative safety of the Orchid Garden, glanced towards the band whose metal instruments winked with painful brightness in the late afternoon sunlight, to see four Chinese saxophonists in scarlet blazers and white trousers rise as one man from the back row, play a few bars and sink back again. ‘I must find Walter quickly,’ she thought. At the same time she wondered whether she might not have imagined the scene between Joan and Ehrendorf. But a glance at Ehrendorf’s uniform was enough to tell her that she had not: there were still a number of dark spots on the light fabric though they were fading rapidly in the heat.
‘ “A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square,”’ crooned four of the Rhythmic Rascals, their arms on each other’s shoulders and their four heads very close to the microphone. ‘ “I know ’cos I was there …”’
Mrs Blackett noticed with relief that Walter was moving among the guests not far from the pool. ‘Are you sure people won’t find them vulgar?’ she asked distractedly, and again the young people were obliged to reassure her.
‘She did what to Jim Ehrendorf?’ demanded Walter a few minutes later. He had left the pool and taken up a vantage point at the balustrade where the twin flights of stone steps met beneath the portico. From here he had been watching sombrely for some time as General Bond and his staff officers like a small flock of sheep, swagger-sticks under their arms, browsed peacefully on cocktails nearer and nearer to where Air-Marshal Babington and his pack of wolves lay in wait by the tennis courts.
‘I can see I shall have to give that young lady a talking to!’ But Walter’s eye remained on the browsing officers below.
Walter, as it happened, knew a little more than most people in Singapore about the cause of friction between the two commanders. The question that separated them was this. How should Malaya be defended and above all, by whom? Air-Marshal Babington, imbued with the fanatical doctrines of the Air Ministry, considered that only the RAF could handle the task. General Bond believed, on the other hand, as any red-blooded Army man would, that rather than trust to aeroplanes, whose effectiveness was conjectural, the Army should deal with the matter. And now, as ill-luck would have it, both sides of this dispute were represented at his garden-party!
‘Did you ask her what the devil she thought she was doing, throwing wine at our guests?’ demanded Walter with a scowl which also served to discourage the Bishop of Singapore who was smiling his greeting from the lawn below and perhaps contemplating an approach.
‘You know how headstrong Joan is. She’s highly strung like me.’ Mrs Blackett shrugged her shoulders helplessly.
‘Singapore’s too small to have her carrying on like that,’ grumbled Walter. ‘Of course, it may not mean anything.’ All the same, it was worrying. Why had she done it?
He had gradually come to see that his early fears, lest Joan should insist on marrying someone unsuitable, had been unfounded. She did not readily attach herself to the men who courted her: he need not have worried about the absurd Carlos. Indeed this, he was now beginning to realize, was just the trouble. She had shown herself to be erratic and unpredictable in her dealings with the eligible young men of the Colony of whom there were, in any case, precious few. The truth was that Walter had not been surprised to learn that Joan had thrown champagne into young Ehrendorf’s face (not that he was very much more suitable than Carlos had been, agreeable fellow though he was). In the past three years, while she was shedding the last traces of the schoolgirl he loved and was imperceptibly changing into a young adult, there had been a number of incidents, trivial in themselves but collectively disturbing. One lovelorn young planter she had even invited to step fully-dressed into the swimming pool. He had done so but it had not advanced his cause. Undoubtedly, the marriage of a daughter is something to which a great deal of attention must be given, like it or not.
The band had stopped playing for the moment and his wife had left his side to ask the Rhythmic Rascals if they would mind not emptying the saliva from their musical instruments into the swimming pool. A cloud had passed over the sun and though it grew no cooler a momentary chill seemed to affect the garden-party, an ominous sensation which was, perhaps, only in Walter’s own mind.
6
Walter, elbows planted on the stone balustrade, chin in hand, gazed moodily down over his chattering guests, half musing on the marriage prospects of his daughter, half hypnotized by the chicken-wire reflections of sunlight on the surface of the pool, still gently heaving although the last of the bathing beauties, wrapped in a bathrobe and escorted by Monty, was already retreating in the direction of the changing pavilion. Walter himself seldom swam, never in public; he was inclined to be sensitive about the ridge of hairs, so thick that they almost amounted to bristles, which for some odd reason had decided to grow over his vertebrae in a thin line stretching from his neck to the base of his spine. These bristles had a tendency to rise when he was angry and sometimes, even, in moments of conjugal intimacy. His wife had once confided in him that every night of their honeymoon she had been visited by a dream in which she had been led by a boar into the depths of a forest; there on a carpet of leaves, marooned in loneliness, she had been mounted by the animal in the grunt-filled silence of the trees. Walter, at the time, had merely shrugged his shoulders, but his feelings had been hurt by his wife’s dream. True, he could have enjoyed a swim with his friends if he had consented to wear an old-fashioned swimming costume with neck and sleeves instead of scanty, all-too-revealing shoulder straps. But Walter was sensitive also about his clothing.
A camera clicked. Walter turned away sharply, aware that his photograph had just been taken. He beckoned to a tall, rather anxious-looking man in his fifties who happened to be passing. This man, whose name was Major Brendan Archer, had been introduced to the Blacketts three or four years earlier by the same François Dupigny who had given Walter such valuable advice on how to detach Joan from her unsuitable young man. Major Archer, who though a civilian had kept his rank as a souvenir, Walter supposed, of the Great War, had become friendly with the Blacketts and with old Mr Webb, too. The old gentleman has responded to the Major’s air of rather gloomy integrity, had even paid him the unusual compliment of offering him a partnership in the Mayfair Rubber Company, his plaything, though more likely because he wanted someone to talk to than because there was any serious work to be done. The Major, in any event, had presumably had nothing better in mind and presently had been installed in a little bungalow on the other side of the road. Walter approved of this arrangement. The Major was a discreet and sensible fellow, though sadly lacking in ambition. He was just the man to keep an eye on old Mr Webb who was showing signs of becoming increasingly odd as the years advanced. Nor was it simply vegetarianism and a habit of pruning his roses stark naked: Mr Webb now sometimes invited young Chinese of both sexes for nude physical training and gymnastics ‘to build up their bodies’. There was nothing sordid or secretive about this, however, although Walter had heard that the few young women whom Mr Webb had managed to conscript had only agreed to build up their bodies as a result of financial incentives. Mr Webb simply believed that if China were ever to rise again and redeem itself from the shattered and decadent nation it had become, it would be thanks to mental and physical alertness and a generous helping of vegetables. Still, it was sad to see him go like this, and unsettling, if only because Mr Webb still owned a considerable proportion of the company’s equity. Walter could not be altogether confident that Mr Webb would not make some drastic provisions in his will following the unfortunate estrangement with his son, Matthew. It was worrying. It would have to be watched. The Major would help in the watching.
Walter and the Major began to pace up and down in the shade of the portico discussing the progress of the war in Europe; at the same time Walter kept an eye on his guests in case of trouble. Presently the conversation turned to the Blackett and Webb jubilee celebrations: Walter wanted to involve the Major more deeply in the planning of the carnival parade in which the celebrations would reach their climax. The Major was just the sort of conscientious individual with time on his hands who can usually be relied upon to volunteer for such things, charity balls, picnics in aid of orphans, Buy-a-Bomber-for-Britain Funds and so forth. But today for some reason he seemed reluctant to step forward.
The jubilee of a great merchant house like Blackett and Webb is by no means as easy to celebrate as you might think. The choice of the form the celebrations should take is a delicate matter and certainly it was one which had greatly exercised the minds of Walter and his board of directors. They had tried to find precedents in the business life of Singapore but with little success: such is the penalty for leading the field, you have nobody to imitate. The festivities to mark the royal jubilee in 1935 had been recalled. On that occasion every bank in Singapore had wrapped its pillars in red, white and blue. Even the Yokohama Specie Bank on the corner of Battery Road next to Robinson’s, Walter remembered, had been swagged in Union Jacks. For the royal jubilee the RAF had lent a hand: as a demonstration they had bombed and set ablaze a construction on the padang. Perhaps the RAF could be persuaded to bomb something for Blackett and Webb?
But in the end these ambitious projects had had to be abandoned, because of the war in Europe. It would hardly have been suitable to hold elaborate celebrations when London shareholders were having to fight for their lives. And so they had been obliged to fall back on garden-parties, fireworks and the carnival parade. It was the latter, it seemed to Walter and his board, which offered most opportunity for doing something out of the ordinary, something which people would remember in Singapore, and which would be, as it were, the apotheosis of trade and the British tradition in the Colony combining for the betterment of all races.
In due course a theme for the parade had been found: ‘Continuity in Prosperity’. The Government, harassed by Japanese propaganda to the effect that the white man was exploiting his Asiatic subjects as if they were slaves, had responded enthusiastically and had even ventured to suggest that not only Chinese should take part, but other races too. If a few Europeans were to take part the parade would have less the appearance of a performance by slaves to amuse their masters; nor should the Europeans be confined to regal or magnificent rôles, sitting on thrones and so forth: they should not shrink, if required, from the dusty anonymity of the dragon’s feet. It was, however, accepted that if old Mr Webb could be persuaded to take part, he should be carried on the ultimate float sitting on the throne of Prosperity. For who better than Mr Webb, the founder of the company, could personify Continuity in his own bony, dignified frame?
In his mind’s eye Walter saw a splendid procession of dragons, effigies and floats representing the commercial successes of Blackett and Webb winding through Chinatown to the thump of brass bands and the crackle of fireworks, then up the hill after dark carrying flaring torches to file past Government House where Sir Shenton Thomas would take the salute from the verandah. A Roman triumph indeed! And yet it had to be admitted that so far the response of those Europeans he had approached to take part in a democratic ‘parade of all nations’ had not been encouraging. Not that Walter would have expected them to leap at the opportunity … but given the fact that there was a war on, in Europe if not out here, one might have expected a little more support. Walter paused for a moment, having explained this to the Major, in order to give him time to volunteer either for the organizing committee or for the parade itself. But the Major, though he looked oppressed, contented himself with clearing his throat and mutely fingering his moustache.
‘Of course, the presence of Europeans in the parade isn’t absolutely necessary. We could probably make do with Eurasians, perhaps with chalk on their faces in a pinch. After all, such a parade deals in symbols, not in the real thing. We do need Europeans to help in the organization, though.’ Again Walter paused and again the Major fingered his moustache and hung back.
‘Absolutely indispensable,’ declared Walter vigorously, sensing that the Major was weakening.
‘Well, I suppose …’ the Major began reluctantly. But at this moment he was saved by a Eurasian newspaper reporter in an ill-fitting white suit who presented himself to interview Walter about his firm. Notebook and pencil in hand the reporter, who was from the Straits Times, fell into step with the two men as they paced up and down. Walter, abandoning for the moment his pursuit of the Major, began discoursing fluently on the early days of the company.
When Walter had assumed full command of Blackett and Webb in 1930 he had been faced with grave difficulties, given the Depression. He himself believed that it was precisely the catastrophic decline in business activity which had given him the opportunity to display his ability.
‘When trade is booming,’ he explained, more to the Major than to the reporter, ‘anyone can make money for the simple reason that most things you do turn out to be right. It takes a depression to show you what’s wrong with your business.’
‘Chairman overcomes early snags,’ wrote the young man from the Straits Times in his notebook without breaking his stride.
Because of the haphazard way in which Blackett and Webb had grown up the complexity of the business which Walter had to prevent from foundering was such as to numb the mind of an ordinary mortal. But Walter made light of it, insisting that his partner’s early exploits should be regarded as the firm’s golden age. When old Mr Webb had started out in business in 1890 it had been simply as a merchant in tropical produce. Rice, tea, copra, spices, pineapples, even opium had passed through his hands in those early days. And human beings, too, of course, for like everyone else he had shipped coolies from South China to Malaya and Java, usually as deck cargo. But his principal concern had been with the rice trade in Burma. There, thanks to an agreement with the other Rangoon merchants to keep down the prices paid to the peasants, vast profits were to be made. This trade was not without risk, however, what with forward contracts to fill and a limited supply of shipping.
‘Varied trade gets firm off to flying start,’ scribbled the reporter.
‘Yes, he’s the man you should be talking to,’ declared Walter as his eye fell on old Mr Webb in the distance: he was sitting bolt upright in the shade over by the Orchid Garden, his back still as straight as a ramrod despite his years. Over there the younger executives of Blackett and Webb approached him in turn, evidently according to some rota system of their own, to exchange a few remarks with him. On occasion, when a young man’s name was shouted into his ear, he would reply grimly: ‘Knew your father well.’ And the faintest twinkle would appear in his steely eyes. At a little distance a cadaverous individual with shoulders so rounded that they amounted, at least in Walter’s view, to the beginnings of a hump, was observing these ritual respects with derision from behind a flowering shrub. This was the odious, crafty Solomon Langfield, chairman of the rival firm of Langfield and Bowser Limited. Though Walter could not abide old Langfield he was nevertheless pleased that he had accepted the invitation to attend: evidently Langfield’s curiosity had got the better of his desire to ignore the opening of Blackett and Webb’s jubilee celebrations, which happened to fall a year or two before his own. Having permitted himself to pause for a moment to sample the pleasure of Langfield’s company, Walter returned to the consideration of his former partner, for he was fond of recalling the skill with which old Mr Webb had managed his business in those pioneering days when disaster had seemed always to be just round the corner. In years, for example, when a famine occurred in Bengal, as they did periodically, the peasants in Burma could hold back their crops, secure in the knowledge that the merchants would have to pay what they asked or default on their shipping contracts. Gradually, though, the situation for the merchants had improved. Chettyar moneylenders from India had penetrated the rice-growing delta, entangling the peasants in debt and bringing them to the point where they could no longer hold back their crops for higher prices even when there was a shortage on the market.
At Walter’s side the Major had a gloomy expression. He did not like to hear of people being entangled in debt, even for the best of reasons. But Walter, warming to his task, went on: ‘You see, the Chettyar money-lenders in Burma and, to a lesser extent, here in Malaya, too, acted on the peasants like saddle-soap on leather. They softened them up for us. Of course, some of the Chetties became rivals in the milling of crops but that couldn’t be helped. Without them to get the peasants used to dealing in cash (which, of course, in practice meant tricking them into debts they would have to pay up) rather than in barter of produce the merchants would have all been in the poorhouse, including Mr Webb. One bad crop with forward contracts to fill!’ And Walter made his blue eyes bulge with mock horror.
‘Pliable peasants bring bulls into rice-market!’
‘But that’s dreadful,’ muttered the Major. ‘I mean to say, well, I had no idea …’
It had taken some time before the Burmese peasants were altogether subdued but by about 1893 the Rangoon merchants had their hands on the key that would lock up the market: namely, control of the rice-mills throughout the country.
‘Instantly,’ explained Walter, making a chopping gesture with the flat of his hand, ‘they cut the price of paddy in half. In 1892 they paid 127 rupees: in 1893 only 77 rupees. How’s that for a grip on the market?’
As a result of this forcing down of the price the peasants, ruined by their thousands, had been obliged to leave the land. This was hard luck on the peasants since they had as a rule worked strenuously to clear it from the jungle, but it did have one further advantage, at least for Mr Webb and his fellow merchants. Cheaper methods could now be introduced by the use of seasonal workers, the trusty ‘division of labour’ which, the Major must agree, had conferred such benefits in prosperity on mankind. To put it bluntly, you no longer had to support a man and his family all year round, you could now bring him in to do a specific job like planting or harvesting. The traditional village communities were broken up and the Burmese had to learn to travel about looking for seasonal or coolie work, from the producer’s point of view a much more efficient and much cheaper system. ‘The rice-growing delta had been turned into what someone called “a factory without chimneys”,’ summed up Walter with satisfaction, wondering what ailed the Major who was looking more chagrined than ever.
‘Modern methods increase output. Peasants take to travel.’
‘But that’s tragic,’ burst out the Major unable to contain his indignation. ‘It’s disgraceful.’
Walter, however, paid no attention to him for that had not been the end of the story, by any means. Even in later years problems still used to crop up for the merchants. The Burmese, certainly, had been largely reduced to the status of coolies by the turn of the century, but Indians and Chinese, who understood western business methods better, had taken to setting up their own mills in the interior of the country and milling rice for export, thereby weakening the monopoly of the big European mills in Rangoon. When in 1920 Blackett and Webb and the other European millers tried as usual to keep the price of paddy down they failed and had to pay up (‘Those damned forward sales again!’). So the following year Blackett and Webb had joined the other three main European houses in the notorious Bullinger Pool to harmonize their buying and selling policies.
‘Well, that was nothing new. But someone … don’t ask me who! … used his influence with the railway company to make the freight charges for moving milled rice more expensive than for moving paddy.’ Walter chuckled with pleasure at this recollection of twenty years ago. ‘Result? The mills in the interior could no longer compete with Rangoon in the export trade. We were back on Easy Street!’ The Major muttered inaudibly, clasping his brow.
‘What’s that you say, Major! Complaints? Of course there were complaints! There always are. Nationalists brought it up in the Legislature in 1929. But that was nearly ten years later and when they held an enquiry it didn’t get anywhere. Besides, by that time world prices had collapsed and people had more important things to worry about.’
‘Rice sleuths’ freight enquiry comes off rails,’ scribbled the reporter fluently, stifling a yawn. How had Blackett and Webb come to be involved in rubber? He had to repeat his question because Walter was eyeing his guests to make sure that all was still going smoothly.
The Rhythmic Rascals had started playing once more: this time it was ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’. Down below, not far from the pool, one of the browsing military men stiffened for a moment, nose in the air, as if scenting RAF officers on the breeze. But Babington and his men were still safely downwind in the direction of the tennis courts. A moment later he resumed his drinking and chatting, though a shade more warily than before; white-coated waiters passed among the little flock carrying trays of champagne or pahits. Joan and Ehrendorf were still standing together, a little way apart from the other guests. Joan had just held out her glass to a waiter carrying a champagne bottle wrapped in a white napkin. Was it Walter’s imagination or did Ehrendorf flinch away slightly as she made a move to raise it to her lips?
It was certainly true that rice, explained Walter, turning back to his companions, was only one of many kinds of tropical produce to be handled by Blackett and Webb when the partnership had first been formed. But rubber rapidly became the most important. The years of old Mr Webb’s active business life, from about 1880 to 1930, had witnessed a prodigious exporting of capital from Britain to the colonial Empire: this capital’s role was to take advantage of the high investment returns attending the plentiful supply of land and, above all, cheap labour in the colonies. Already before the Great War Mr Webb had begun to acquire plantations in order to be sure of a steady supply of the various commodities in which he traded. As it turned out, nobody was in a better position to take advantage of the rubber boom which came with the motor-car than a merchant with a good reputation, like Mr Webb whose integrity was beyond question and whose firm was already accustomed to administering plantations. Such a merchant house, instead of risking its own resources (this was a new industry: demand might fluctuate), could tap that huge reservoir of silver which had accumulated in Britain thanks to the Industrial Revolution and which had since grown stagnant. After that, the firm had grown rapidly. The next years had been spent starting plantations or acquiring those started by other people and floating them in London as rubber companies, using Blackett and Webb’s reputation and its participation in the issues to attract investors. In due course, as a result, they had found themselves managing-agents of a considerable number of small rubber companies.
‘Expanding rubber boom stretches firm’s own resources despite elastic demand!’ wrote the reporter, warming to his task.
By the early twenties Blackett and Webb had been in a position to channel business to European companies in return for being made their sole Singapore agents. Shipping lines interested in the freight trade accompanying the rubber boom appointed Blackett and Webb their agents in the Far East. Insurance companies, manufacturers of this and that hoping to find a market in Malaya or the Dutch East Indies, engineering and construction firms looking for contracts … In no time they were agents for all sorts of business radiating from Singapore over a vast area in every direction, a commercial grip on land and labour of enormous potential resources. And everything, except perhaps for pineapples and the entrepôt business, had flourished. Blackett and Webb could look back with satisfaction on their fifty years of service to the community.
‘What’s your name, son?’
‘Malcolm, sir.’
‘Well, you’re a bright lad, Malcolm,’ said Walter with magnanimity. ‘Work hard and you’ll get on in life.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
The music had come to a stop once more. The Rhythmic Rascals, exhausted by their efforts in the humid heat, were sitting back enjoying a rest. Walter had just noticed something rather odd: old Mr Webb, seated by himself in the shade and temporarily deserted by young executives, was no longer sitting bolt upright as was his custom, indeed he was slumped rather pathetically. Could it be that the old fellow had had too much to drink on this day of celebration? But Walter had never known him to touch alcohol. More likely he was simply too tired to make the effort when he was by himself. Still, he should not have been left alone, today especially.
Walter left the Major and was about to join his former partner when he realized that events elsewhere were beginning to take a disastrous course. One of the staff officers had just spoken to General Bond, evidently suggesting that they should go and have a look at the tennis, for the General and his flock began to stride out firmly in that direction. But they were still some yards away when Air-Marshal Babington and his men, clearly having just made a similar decision to visit the Orchid Garden, put in a sudden appearance from behind the hedge. The two rival groups stopped and glared at each other, bristling.
‘Oh Lord!’ muttered Walter, hurrying to intercept them. But again he was diverted, this time by an urgent shout from one of the servants. He was just in time to see old Mr Webb topple out of his chair and roll over on the lawn. At the same moment the first heavy drops of a providential shower of rain began to patter on the lawn and make rings in the pool, scattering the guests who still had not noticed old Mr Webb. The guests took cover, laughing, leaving Walter and the Major, assisted by some alarmed servants, to carry the old gentleman into the house.
‘Oh no! Not a death as well!’ groaned Mrs Blackett to herself. It was one of those days. Her party had not been a success.
7
Was Mr Webb actually dead or not? It was very hard to say at first. The scurrying cortège that was carrying him into the house made its way, in order not to alarm the other guests, behind the refreshment tent which had been set up on the lawn. From there it made a quick dash for a side door normally used by the servants. Mr Webb’s body was extraordinarily light despite its length: the old capitalist was really nothing but skin and bone. The Major had surrendered his share of it to one of the ‘boys’ and hurried ahead to telephone for an ambulance.
Returning presently to the drawing-room he found that Mr Webb, who was after all still breathing, had been laid horizontal on a sofa which by chance stood so close to the vertical portrait of himself that the heavy shoes he was wearing came within a few inches of the identical shoes in the painting. This coincidence gave the Major the curious feeling that he was looking at a toy soldier that had just fallen over. He rejected this impression immediately, however, and filled with concern, for he was genuinely fond of the old man, he hastened forward to where Walter was unlacing the three-dimensional shoes with respect and taking them off the ancient feet. The Major, determined to be helpful, loosened the old gentleman’s stiff collar and then hurried away once more to see if he could find a doctor among the guests.
Presently, though, an ambulance arrived and events took their course. The old fellow had had a serious stroke and was not expected to survive for very long. Walter gloomily rejoined the garden-party. It was not worth sending people home, even if he had had a mind to: they were beginning to go already. By half-past seven the garden was quiet. The ‘boys’ had finished the task of clearing up after the guests, the caterers had struck their tents, the band had moved on to its evening assignment. Where the rest of his family had got to, Walter had no idea. He suspected his wife had gone to lie down in her bedroom. Having told one of the ‘boys’ to send Joan to him, he himself retired to brood in his dressing-room from where he had a view over the now peaceful garden.
This tiny, high-ceilinged room was the one place, his family and servants knew, where he must never be disturbed without permission, for it was here perched on the arm of an old leather armchair by the window that he did his thinking. This habit of sitting always in the same place had given the dull leather that covered the chair a deep polish on the arm nearest the window. Teak drawers with gleaming brass fittings, their size according to whether they contained shirts, or collars, or handkerchieves, rose in tiers around him. Beside the door in an alcove stood a vast Edwardian washbasin, also with brass fittings and so deep, so capacious that one could have bathed a spaniel, say, or a child in it, submerging them without difficulty.
Now that the garden-party had come to its sad end Walter had a good deal to brood over and not much time in which to do it. Soon more guests would be arriving, or at least he supposed that they would, unless they were forestalled by news of Mr Webb’s stroke. Below in the dining-room eighty places had been laid in silver cutlery on a glistening white table-cloth. A dinner-party had been organized as a preview of Blackett and Webb’s jubilee celebrations, to mark the opening of the campaign, as it were, which would reach its climax in the great parade scheduled for New Year’s Day 1942. To this party the innermost circle of Singapore’s business and governmental community had been invited to offer their congratulations to himself and, in particular, to old Mr Webb whose birthday it was. Walter had instructed his secretary to telephone as many of the dinner-guests as he could find, cancelling the engagement. But undoubtedly at this last minute it would be impossible to locate them all. Well, so much the worse. Those who came would be received and fed. If there were only a few he could leave Monty to take care of them. It would be good practice for him.
Walter gazed out at the insects swirling around the lights by the swimming pool, listening to the tropical night which like some great machine turning over had begun its humming, whirring and clicking, steadily growing in volume as the darkness deepened. And as he listened, he brooded, not on his partner’s imminent death (he would think about that presently) but on his daughter’s marriage. Walter was considered, and considered himself, fond of his children. But the truth was that he had been disappointed when, after a promising start with Monty, his wife had given him only two daughters, Joan and little Kate. If he had had more sons what could he not have done with Blackett and Webb! He loved his daughters, of course, but he had always assumed them to be a liability. And he had been unable to prevent himself making a bitter comparison between his own family and the Firestones’. It seemed to him perfectly unjust that Harvey Firestone should not only have set up such an effective business but should, in addition, have engendered five energetic sons in his own image with which to expand it. At one time Walter had entertained kindly thoughts of the Firestones and had even sent an occasional Christmas card to their family farm in Ohio. But relations between producers and manufacturers had been soured by the international rubber restriction agreement set up by the British and Dutch rubber producers to stabilize the price. Firestone and the American consumers had launched a political counter-attack … and now, though there was already too much of the stuff being grown, they had put great areas of Liberia under rubber! What could you do with such people!
‘Harvey’s trouble was that he was drunk with his own power and just because he used to go camping with the President, who was only a flea-bitten politician anyway!’
Sons are an asset, daughters a liability. This had always been, in Walter’s view, axiomatic. But there remained, nevertheless, one time-honoured way in which a daughter could prove an asset: namely, by her marriage. By a judicious match she could accomplish more, at one stroke, than any number of sons might accomplish in a lifetime. What might not have been achieved if Joan had appealed to one of the young Firestones? Walter shrugged the thought away dejectedly: he must not torment himself with such fantasies.
In the past three years a considerable change had come over Joan. She had grown more mature. Above all, she had come to take a serious interest in the business, much more interest than Monty, as it happened. On one or two occasions when Walter had been in need of assistance in some delicate and confidential matter which he did not care to reveal even to his closest colleagues, Joan had done useful work for him, showing a natural grasp of the important issues which he could not help but find gratifying. A sense of reality had come to replace the romantic nonsense she had brought back from her finishing school. Walter now dared to hope that she would no longer find a marriage soundly based on commercial logic quite so distasteful. What worried him, though, was this throwing of wine into young men’s faces and invitations to them to step fully-clothed into swimming pools. Nor, it must be admitted, had she as yet shown much interest in the right sort of young man … or old man, for that matter.
There had, Walter reflected as he left his seat by the window and began dressing for a dinner which he hoped would not take place, only been one merchant’s son who had appeared to take her fancy. That had been young Langfield of Langfield and Bowser Limited, heir to a merchant house neither bigger nor smaller than Blackett and Webb. You might wonder who could have been more suitable. Not so. The Langfields were the one family in business in the Straits with whom Walter would have no dealings (none, at least, that he could decently avoid, for he found himself obliged now and then to sit with a Langfield on this or that Government committee). What jubilation there would be among the Langfields when they learned of the disastrous outcome of the garden-party! It had been reported back to Walter that they had already been at work in Singapore insidiously suggesting that there was something vulgar about starting jubilee celebrations more than a year before the date of commemoration. Walter’s brows gathered at the thought of the unctuous, salt-rubbing letter of regret which he would receive from old Solomon Langfield in the morning. The old fox was probably hunched over it at this very moment, savouring its hypocritical phrases. He tugged angrily at the butterfly wings of his tie and the knot shrank to the size of a pebble. There was a knock on the door and Joan came in.
‘You wanted to see me?’ She stopped short at the sight of her father’s scowling face, and then came forward and took his arm: ‘Poor Daddy, you must be upset about Mr Webb. I forgot what a blow it must be after all these years.’
‘Eh? What? Oh yes, of course, it does come as a bit of a shock. He was certainly a fine man and the place won’t seem the same without him. Not that he’s dead yet, of course. Hm, but that’s not why I wanted to see you, Joan … What’s this your mother tells me about you throwing wine at Jim Ehrendorf?’
Joan smiled. ‘Has Mother been making a fuss? It was nothing. Really. He was just getting on my nerves. I’d already forgotten about it.’
‘But he’s a nice fellow,’ said Walter, looking at his daughter in surprise. ‘Everyone likes him, even though he is American. And he’s the least American American I know. And there’s no one more cultured and with better manners. I can’t see why you want to throw wine in his face.’
Joan looked out of the window for a moment with a sly, half malicious, half amused expression on her face which Walter had not seen before. She shrugged. ‘I don’t know why, myself. I suppose I wanted to see what he would do, whether he would get angry or something. He didn’t, of course. He’s always so reasonable.’ She added with a laugh: ‘Even if I kicked his shins he still wouldn’t do anything, except perhaps look rather pained and forgiving.’
‘Well, please don’t kick his shins at my garden-parties, or do anything else to him, if it comes to that. We have a position to keep up in Singapore. Promise?’
Joan nodded and smiled, peering curiously at her father at the same time, or rather at his neck. ‘What have you done to your tie, Daddy? It looks most peculiar. Here, let me tie it again for you. I’m expert at tying men’s bow-ties. I’ve had to practise so much on Monty.’
‘All right, but I shall sit down if you don’t mind.’ He held his chin up, gazing at the ceiling while Joan’s fingers played deftly about his neck. ‘There was something else I wanted to mention. Have you seen Miss Chiang recently? Does she still have a room at the Mayfair? I meant to ask the Major.’
Vera Chiang was the Eurasian girl whom Joan had seen arrested by the Japanese in Shanghai three years earlier and then met again on the boat to Singapore. Nothing had been heard of her for a couple of years during which Joan had wondered idly once or twice what had become of her … but after all she was just another tiny drop in the flood of Chinese immigrants, legal and illegal, who had been pouring into the Straits Settlements now for three decades. Then some nine months earlier Walter had been visited at his office on Collyer Quay by an official of the Chinese Protectorate. A young Eurasian woman, picked up in connection with the General Labour Union-inspired strike at the Singapore Harbour Board and faced with a deportation order, had given his name and Joan’s as credentials. As there was no direct evidence to implicate her personally with the Communist-infiltrated General Labour Union’s subversive campaign, and as the name of Blackett carried considerable weight in the Colony, it had been decided not to proceed with the deportation order if the Blacketts were prepared to vouch for her.
Walter had little appetite for vouching for people, even former employees: at best, it was a waste of time, at worst, a source of future trouble. Moreover, he himself did not know the girl and Joan had long since lost interest in her. Above all, he had a great deal of work to do and, as ill luck would have it, old Mr Webb had chosen that particular day to make one of his rare ceremonial visits to Collyer Quay and for the past hour had been sitting in Walter’s office, wasting his valuable time. If Walter had been by himself he would have dismissed the matter in a moment: as it was, for form’s sake and the benefit of Mr Webb who seemed to be taking an interest in it, Walter had felt obliged to ask if anything else was known about her. Not a great deal, it transpired. She had been the friend or concubine of a Communist sympathizer, deported the year before to an uncertain fate at Chungking; despite the rapprochement between the Communist and the Kuomintang he had most likely been done away with by the latter. Since then Miss Chiang had been scraping a living as a taxi-dancer or, more likely, as a casual prostitute and bar-girl, not a profitable profession to follow these days. The most suspicious thing about Miss Chiang, the man from the Protectorate had declared becoming voluble and oddly intense (‘Who on earth is this chump and why must he come and waste my time?’ Walter asked himself sourly), was that she was extremely well-educated and spoke excellent English! Walter, who had heard enough, had risen impatiently to escort the fellow to the door, saying that, in the circumstances, he did not think…
Walter had been conscious for some time that Mr Webb was shifting uneasily in his chair but at this point the old chap had suddenly burst out in anger: ‘And why shouldn’t she be educated? Eh? Tell me that! How will the Chinese ever pull themselves together unless they build up their minds and bodies? Tell me! And you can stop grinning like that, too. I was in this Colony before you were born!’
The old man had stood up, white with anger. The man from the Protectorate, taken aback by this sudden outburst, muttered : ‘When they’re educated it can mean that they’re Comintern agents, that’s all I meant,’ but at the same time his eyes had narrowed suspiciously, as if he were wondering whether Mr Webb, too, might not be a Comintern agent.
‘Well, I shall vouch for her if Blackett won’t! Here’s my card. Webb’s the name. Send her to me if she needs a job. I’ll give her one. And another thing, any more impertinence and I shall be in touch with your superior. The first thing you have to learn is to take your hands out of your pockets when you are talking to someone.’ With that, Mr Webb had stalked out of the office, leaving the man from the Protectorate, (whose name was Smith, it turned out) with his hands half out of his pockets, licking his lips in an odd sort of way, and grinning at Walter. And that had been that.
Vera Chiang, reprieved, had taken up residence with Mr Webb at the Mayfair. Her duties there were vague: most likely she helped her employer to hire destitute young women whose bodies needed building up. She certainly gave English lessons for on one occasion Major Archer, taking an unsuspecting stroll through the compound of the Mayfair, had come upon her giving instruction to a small, naked class in the use of the verbs ‘to do’ and ‘to make’, so he had informed Walter. He had beaten a hasty retreat, needless to say. Strangely enough, despite her past reputation and present employment the Major had taken a liking to her, and so had Mr Webb, though he had never mentioned her name in Walter’s presence. As for Joan, though she had visited Miss Chiang once or twice and brought her some of her own clothes which she no longer needed, it would have been difficult for her as a European to become the bosom friend of a Eurasian girl, however well-educated. Such friendships were considered unsuitable in the social climate of Singapore. By a curious coincidence her clothes fitted Miss Chiang to perfection without the least alteration, and Joan had been startled to see how pretty she looked in them. Even Walter, seeing a familiar blue and green dress and a young woman posting a letter at the corner of the road, had slowed his car to give his daughter a lift, only to accelerate muttering to himself a moment later. Walter, in any case, could not have permitted Joan to be friendly with Miss Chiang, given her dubious relationship with Mr Webb.
All this time Joan had been prevented from answering his question by the fact that the moist, pink tip of her tongue was firmly gripped between her strong white teeth, an outer sign of the mental concentration required to tie a bow-tie on the neck of another person, particularly when the tie was of modest length and the neck, like Walter’s, resembled the bole of an oak. At last she had finished, however.
‘I haven’t seen her for some time but I think she’s still living there.’
‘The point is,’ said Walter, going to the mirror to inspect her handiwork, ‘that we don’t want a young woman of that sort turning up at Mr Webb’s hospital bedside. You know how people gossip. If necessary we might have to consider giving her some money to stay out of the way. This, my dear, is a beautiful job!’
8
Walter slowly descended the stairs, brooding again on Harvey Firestone’s skill in engendering male babies. How on earth did he do it? Pausing with his hand on the banister, Walter experienced that unnerving feeling which no other businessman had ever produced in him of being outclassed. Not three or four, but five! That was luck of a very high order … or no, not just luck, it was … how could one put it? … from the business point of view, correct behaviour, a mixture, very hard to define, of luck, certainly, in large part but also of opportunism, skill and rightness. Walter had been almost overpowered on the occasion of his first visit to Akron, Ohio, by this sensation of the right thing being done at high intensity all around him, and not only in the production of male babies but in that of motor tyres and rims, too. Perhaps it was just as well that he and Firestone were on opposite ends of the rubber business.
Walter sank a few more steps and paused again, his mood of self-doubt having passed. Rubber these days was in demand in a way it had never been before. This was, to some extent, thanks to the war and to the fact that the British and American governments were trying to acquire reserve stocks against a breakdown in supplies. But above all it was due to the determination of a few men, Walter among them, who had argued that rubber producers could and must agree to limit the amount of rubber they released to the market. There was no other answer (except ruin). His brow, which had furrowed like a stormy sea at the thought of Harvey Firestone, returned to more placid undulations as he recalled how the doubters had argued that it had been tried before (they meant the Stevenson scheme from 1922–8) and had failed. Walter had not been daunted. The Netherlands East Indies, the only country to come close to Malaya in rubber production, had not agreed to take part in the Stevenson scheme so of course it had failed. This time the NEI must be made to see reason. They had vast areas of rubber smallholdings; nobody, not even the Dutch administration knew their extent. With all this rubber about to reach maturity and start flooding the market the entire rubber business could collapse. It was obvious that a reasonable price would have to be maintained artificially by a cartel of producers or rubber would become worthless. So Walter and his allies had argued against the doubters, who included, needless to say, old Solomon Langfield, and in the end they had won.
Under the new scheme (somehow Langfield had wormed his way on to the assessment committee despite his earlier opposition) an estimated annual production was established for each country: for Malaya, for the NEI, Indo-China and the other smaller producers. Then an international committee was set up to decide, quarter-yearly, what percentage of the total rubber production of all these countries might be released to the world market without risking a drop in price because there was too much of it about. As a result it had become possible to allot a specific tonnage of rubber to each country and declare that this quarter they might export so much and no more.
Think of this rubber not as the solid elastic sheets resembling bundles of empty flour sacks in which it was actually exported but as the milky latex in which, very slowly, it seeps out of the trees. Walter and his fellow-producers now had a tap in the shape of the restriction scheme with which they could control the flow of latex on to the market. Around this tap were gathered the thirsty manufacturers of the industrial nations, and none more parched than the men from the American motor-tyre industry, the Goodyears, the Goodriches and, of course, the Firestones. Open the tap and they would drink their fill, splashing about as if latex were as worthless as water. Close it, though, and you would soon see their lips begin to crack and their tongues to swell. Let them get thirsty enough and they would not mind what they paid.
Walter had watched the manipulation of the tap with interest. In the years following the Depression demand for rubber had been slack. But by 1936, thanks to an increase in motorcar production and a miserly hand controlling the flow, the price of rubber had begun to rise and there had been a boom in rubber shares. At the end of that year the manufacturers had croaked a request for the producers to release a higher percentage in the coming year. The Restriction Committee had maintained its strict hand on the tap, however, and when criticized by the Americans for the rubber shortage in 1937, had artfully replied that even if it had raised the percentage released there would still not have been any more rubber available. Why not? The manufacturers had been floored by this paradox. Well, because there was a shortage of labour for one thing. For another, from February to April is when the trees are ‘wintering’ and production always falls. For those who knew the rubber business this was not very convincing but never mind, it would serve.
Walter had now reached the bottom of the stairs and the last traces of scowl had disappeared, giving way to an expression of beatitude. For when the restriction scheme had been set up it had been understood that available rubber stocks should not be allowed to fall below the equivalent of five months’ absorption by the manufacturers: this was in order that their businesses, and a possible expansion of demand, should not be put in jeopardy by shortages or delays in supply. And, mind you, the official policy of the Restriction Committee was not to make a killing out of rubber but merely to ensure, in a silky phrase worthy of Solomon Langfield himself, ‘a reasonable return to an efficient producer’. It had come as no surprise to anyone in Singapore, least of all to Walter, when stocks fell below the promised five months’ absorption and the price began to rise. Presently, the Committee’s idea of what represented ‘a reasonable return’ began to rise, too. Seven pence a pound, eight pence, nine pence … The scheme was working. Walter had watched, enthralled. Standing at the foot of the stairs he suddenly flourished his fist in the air. That had been one on the nose for the Firestones!
Walter, returning to his senses, now realized that Abdul, his Malay major-domo, had approached silently and was eyeing him with concern.
‘What news, Master?’
‘Good news, Abdul,’ replied Walter conventionally. The fellow clearly wanted to tell him something. He bent an ear.
‘A what, Abdul? A yogi?’ Walter stared in amazement at the elderly Malay who had been in his service for some years and for whom he felt a considerable affection and respect.
The major-domo explained. The yogi had come to entertain the guests. It was the idea of the young Tuan Blackett.
‘Well, tell the bloody man to go away again. It’s supposed to be a dinner-party, not a circus.’
‘Yes, Tuan.’ The old man smiled faintly for there was a bond of sympathy between him and Walter when it came to the behaviour of the younger generation and it was clear that he, no less than Walter, had found the idea of a yogi at a dinner-party outrageous.
‘But no, wait, Abdul. On second thoughts we must let Monty make his own decision about the yogi. He’ll never learn if we always have to tell him what’s what. I shall let him take charge of the dinner-party this evening. There probably won’t be more than a dozen guests or so and they can be served in the breakfast-room. Tell him, will you, that I won’t appear until after they’ve eaten. I’ve work to do.’ And as the old servant was leaving Walter added: ‘The boy must learn by his own mistakes, Abdul. There’s no other way, I’m afraid, no other way.’
Alone in his study Walter was once more preoccupied with his family, this time with his son. Monty had energy and he worked hard. He had done a good job in reorganizing the administration of their estates when business was expanding again after the Depression. He was doing a good job now of pushing through the replanting, very often against opposition from estate managers who could not see the logic of it when rubber was booming. He even had some business sense which, with experience, might be developed. But the boy was erratic, there was no other word for it. Every now and then he would produce some wild idea that made you wonder whether he had understood anything at all. A yogi to entertain at supper on a day like this! True, he had not known that Mr Webb would collapse, but all the same! And they had barely recovered from the Chinese band he had insisted on having at the garden-party.
Moreover, Monty was no longer, strictly speaking, a boy. He was thirty. If he were ever going to learn by his mistakes it was high time that he started. Walter could not help comparing him, unfavourably, with a photograph he had once seen of the five young Firestones, each one as neatly brushed, as smartly turned out in his identical dark suit as his four brothers. And each one, no doubt, with a perfect command of that day’s Wall Street Journal. You would not catch the young Firestones inviting fakirs to dinner-parties.
Monty had certain good qualities but he was seriously lacking in judgement. Perhaps this would not have mattered if it had been merely a question of the occasional bizarre idea for amusing guests, but alas, it was not. In 1936 Monty had been sent to take charge of the London office for a few months to learn the European side of the business and, while he was there, he had got Blackett and Webb involved in something that anyone with common sense would have avoided. Towards the end of that year Monty had lent the authority of the firm to a great wave of speculation which was being generated by the rubber dealers and brokers in Mincing Lane. Mincing Lane’s market analysts, peering into the swirling mists of the future, had perceived not only an approaching shortage of rubber but, stretching beyond that shortage, higher prices as far as the eye could see (that is what they said they had perceived, anyway). The brokers’ market reports were in little doubt, they declared, but that the Restriction Committee had decided on maintaining higher prices indefinitely; after all, it could make little difference to the manufacturers who would simply pass the increases on to their customers. And even if the Committee had not decided on a higher price it was well known, in Mincing Lane if not in Malaya, that not enough rubber could be produced to meet higher percentage rates of release. Besides, there was a shortage of labour. Besides, it was well known that once the native smallholders, who produced almost half of Malaya’s rubber, made a little money, as they would with present high prices, they had the amiable habit of downing tools instead of pressing home their advantage, preferring to doze the day away in hammocks. So, one way or another, a shortage of rubber was inevitable. There was a quick fortune to be made.
Well, promotion of this sort, designed to make your mouth water, is what one must expect of a commodity broker. After all, such a fellow has to make a living somehow and Walter was the last person to hold that against him. But a steady market is not much good to a broker: he wants prices to rise or fall (he does not mind which provided they do one or the other). And if the market declines to fluctuate of its own accord it must be encouraged to do so. A cold night in Brazil and frost has wiped out the coffee plantations. A high wind in Jamaica and it’s goodbye to bananas. Fair enough. Walter did not expect the commodity broker to emerge clad in different stripes simply because he was dealing in rubber. But for Monty to give Blackett and Webb’s support to such devious special pleading struck Walter as so foolish as almost to amount to the work of an imbecile. Perhaps he had made some money for himself from a judicious trading of rubber shares, yes, perhaps even a large amount, though, if so, he had evidently lost it again gambling. But that was not what he was there for. Fluctuating markets do not help producers because an artificial boom brings with it inevitably its dark shadow, a collapse. And a collapse in prices brings for more difficulties for the producer that the boom earlier brought advantages. But what really angered Walter was something different, something even less tangible. It was the damage which had been done to Blackett and Webb’s good name.
Walter got to his feet and stretched wearily. A murmur of voices from another part of the house told him that Monty’s guests had arrived. He hoped that the boy would behave in a suitably subdued manner, given the circumstances. Presently, he himself would have to put in a brief appearance. ‘Poor old Webb!’ he thought as he settled down at his desk and began to read through the bundle of cables which had been steadily collecting on it all afternoon in his absence. But as he sat there, deep below the surface of his working mind, a disturbing thought shifted imperceptibly once or twice. To whom would Mr Webb leave his share of the business?
After an hour he felt hungry and remembered that he had had nothing to eat since mid-day. The clink of cutlery and cheerful conversation came to him faintly from the breakfast-room. It was clear that not everyone was allowing Mr Webb’s approaching end to weigh on his spirits. Reluctant to join this cheerful gathering he made his way towards the dining-room, thinking that perhaps there might still be some food set out there.
Entering the dining-room he received a shock, for the servants, evidently uncertain as to the evening’s arrangements, had left the room exactly as it was. The long table was still set with eighty places in silver cutlery. Bowls of flowers and silver candlesticks alternated from one end to the other while at each place there stood a little family of wine glasses in which toasts would have been drunk to Mr Webb on his birthday, to himself, to the firm’s future prosperity. But what had given Walter such a shock were the four life-size heads fashioned of cake and icing-sugar, crude but recognizable, which had been set up on side tables, one in each corner of the room. Two of the heads he recognized immediately: one was of himself, benign, dew-lapped, cheeks unnaturally rouged with cochineal, the scalp tonsured with white icing-sugar. The other, more lifelike, represented old Mr Webb’s gaunt and dignified features. It seemed to Walter that a cold, almost cynical smile hovered about his former partner’s lips, and for a moment he found himself believing that real thoughts might be passing through the fruit-cake brain behind those piercing pale-blue eyes of sugar, that he was thinking: ‘So! You thought you had got rid of me at last!’
Recovering from his surprise Walter advanced smiling to read a sugar inscription which announced that these cakes had been presented on the occasion of Mr Webb’s birthday and the inauguration of the firm’s jubilee celebrations by Blackett and Webb’s Chinese employees who had collected subscriptions for the purpose, perhaps, Walter surmised, with the tactful encouragement of the publicity department but nevertheless … This was unexpected and gratifying, given the troubled labour situation in the Colony. And to think that only a few weeks earlier all work in the rubber godowns had come to a halt and Singapore had trembled on the verge of a General Strike! ‘Now who are these other chaps?’
One was clearly intended to be Churchill, but a Churchill with slanting eyes and an Oriental look, manifestly the work of a Chinese pastry-cook. It took him a moment longer to recognize the fourth head, thin-featured, high-cheekboned, facing Churchill diagonally across the room but eventually he realized that it must be Chiang Kai-shek. How patriotic the overseas Chinese remained and, considering everything, how well organized!
In the past three years while the Sino-Japanese war had continued to boom and crash like a distant thunderstorm here and there over the mainland there had been a great multiplication of so-called ‘Anti-Enemy Backing-up Societies’, not all of them, alas, controlled by the Kuomintang. Sinister letters by courier from Shanghai to the Malayan Communist Party had been intercepted (according to the Combined Intelligence Summary), declaring that ‘a victorious war for China will be the overture for an emancipation movement in the colonies.’ A memorandum from the Special Branch of the Straits Settlements Police warned against the influence these patriotic societies might acquire with the Malayan Chinese, thanks to their anti-Japanese stand. In appearance, harmlessly engaged in collecting funds to support the Chinese army, many of these ‘National Salvation’ and ‘anti-enemy’ organizations were in fact under the control of the Communists.
Finding no other food in the dining-room and unwilling to interrupt his train of thought by summoning one of the ‘boys’, Walter broke off one of Mr Webb’s ears and munched it, pacing up and down. How many of his own employees who had perhaps subscribed to these effigies in cake of hated imperialists were at the same time secret members of, say, the Overseas Chinese Anti-Enemy National Salvation Society or of the even more outlandishly named Youth Blood and Iron Traitor-Exterminating Corps (the latter, to be sure, thought not to be Communist-led and, despite its bloodcurdling title, specializing in nothing more violent than the occasional tarring of a shop in the city for selling scrap-iron to the Japanese), not to mention more conventional gangs like the Heaven and Earth Society? Walter found it disturbing to know so little of where the real allegiance of his employees might lie. ‘Not with us, anyway! Or only when it suits them.’ The strikes which throughout this summer of 1940 had caused the foundations of the Colony to shake were, moreover, only a local manifestation of an ominous awakening of labour throughout the Far East. Shanghai at this very moment was in the embrace of a transport strike which, as it grew, scattered pollen far and wide. First, the British-owned Shanghai Tramways Company, then the China General Omnibus Company had stopped work. Pollen had been carried on the wind from the International Settlement into the French Concession to fertilize workers of the Compagnie Française de Tramways et d’Eclairage Electrique de Shanghai.
‘And the next thing you know they’re all at it!’ One of the cables which Walter had glanced at a few minutes earlier brought news of a meeting organized by the Shanghai General Labour Union on the 27th at which some ninety-odd unions had been represented. The rubber workers’ union, the restaurant workers’ union, the weaving and spinning workers’ union, the bean sauce workers’ union, the silk filature workers’ union, the ordure coolies’ union, the wharf coolies’ union … and so on and so on. Shanghai, despite its almost incredibly precarious political situation, was important to Blackett and Webb. But Walter was more worried by the general implications of the strikes, for where Shanghai led, the rest of the Far East had a habit of following. Admittedly, workers in Shanghai were in real desperation. All the same Walter did not doubt but that the pollen could be carried across the South China Sea to Malaya and Singapore.
Walter halted in his pacing: again he was aware of a cold, cynical, even bitter expression on the icing-sugar features of his former partner, as if that fruit-cake brain were now thinking: ‘This would never have happened in my day!’ Well, that was true enough. Malaya’s gigantic labour force had been docile in the old man’s day when there were always ships to be seen anchoring in the roads crammed every available inch with wretched, fermenting, indentured coolies. In those days there was always cheap labour to be had. It had been the Depression which in the end, here as elsewhere, had brought about a change. Faced with great numbers of unemployed among the Chinese the Government had spent some millions of dollars in repatriating them to China: this display of munificence had been generated by the shrewd calculation that the cost of relief would be even greater if they remained in Malaya. But it had not done the employers any good.
In 1933 the Aliens Ordinance had dealt another blow to the business community for it gave the Governor the power to limit the number of aliens landed in the Colony. Although the intention had been more to check the arrival of Communist subversives from the mainland than to limit the size of the labour reservoir, this had proved, nevertheless, to be its effect. The cost of recruiting in China plus an increase in shipping fares had made it less expensive to recruit free workers locally than to ship those cargoes of indentured coolies. The Indian Government in the meantime, in the belief that Malayan businessmen were exploiting its subjects, had taken steps to limit the flow of Indian workers into the country.
The result? Strikes had begun to break out in Malaya and the Straits Settlements with increasing frequency. The supply of cheap labour had become finite. Many of the estate workers and squatters on pineapple plantations, hitherto isolated from their fellow-workers, had managed to acquire cheap Japanese bicycles: now meetings of widely dispersed workers could be held and collective resistance to low wages had become possible.
‘And we didn’t even have the wit to sell them the bloody bicycles!’ reflected Walter with a wry smile at Mr Webb’s effigy.
There had been another development, too. Chinese women, deprived of employment by the collapse of the silk industry in China and not subject to the limitation of the Aliens Ordinance, had begun to arrive by the shipload, whereas before the Depression, apart from women imported by brothel-keepers to stock their establishments, there had been few or none. The result was a sudden sinking of roots. Women had begun to take the cooking and buying of food out of the hands of the Chinese labour-contractors. The workers, who had once been easily abused nomads drifting from one estate or tin-mine to another, had started to settle down and demand the rights of citizens. Old Mr Webb’s almond-paste lips might well curl in contempt at the way his younger partner had allowed the initiative to pass to his employees but could he himself have done anything to prevent it?
One of the first strikes, though isolated, had been the most serious of all. In the winter of 1935 Communist miners had taken possession of a coal mine at Batu Arang and set up a soviet to administer it. A soviet in the middle of British Malaya, if you please! Walter had been staggered to hear of it. Of course, it had not lasted long. Even if the Batu Arang mine had not been crucial for electricity and the railway it could not have been allowed to remain as an example to the rest of Malaya’s labour force. The police had wasted no time in storming and recapturing it. But the miners’ rash action (how naïve they must have been to think that they would get away with it!) had been like a sudden gust of wind which fills the air with thistledown and strips the dandelion of its whiskers. In due course, given time for germination, strikes had begun to spring up all around. Next year it had been the turn of the pineapple factories. The year after that they had spread for the first time to the rubber estates. And what could the old man have done to prevent it? Not a thing.
‘Times have changed. That’s what the old chap never wanted to see. He thought everything should continue the way it always had. But times have changed, for all that.’
Again that shadow stirred in the depths of his mind: to whom would Mr Webb leave his holdings in the business? ‘A businessman must move with the times,’ said Walter aloud. And breaking off Mr Webb’s other ear, in the interests of symmetry as much as of appetite, Walter departed in search of Monty and his guests, crunching it between his strong yellow teeth as he went.
9
Walter could hear no sound as he made his way along the passage to the breakfast-room and his hopes began to rise. The room, indeed, proved to be deserted, although aromatic cigar smoke still hung in the air. Could it be that the guests had taken their leave already, as a mark of respect to old Mr Webb? If that was the case, then so much the better; Walter was weary after the day’s difficulties. But one of the ‘boys’ clearing the table undeceived him. The party had moved outside to watch the yogi demonstrate his talents. Walter followed them, cracking his knuckles. ‘Let the young fool learn by his mistakes then!’
Stepping grimly out of the luxuriously refrigerated air of the house into the sweltering night Walter found that a little herd of guests, men in white dinner-jackets, women in long evening dresses, had collected on that same portico from which, earlier in the day, he had surveyed the progress of the garden-party. On each side flights of stone steps, glimmering white in the darkness, dropped in zigzags to the lawn on which, directly beneath the balustrade, a platform on wooden trestles had been set up for the yogi’s performance. Two powerful floodlights smoking with insects had been directed down on the yogi from above. From behind the lights the guests watched him uneasily. Walter passed among them, shaking hands and responding with a few grave words to their expressions of regret over the collapse of Mr Webb. It was true, of course, he muttered, that the old gentleman had had a good innings. Still, one could not help feeling that it was the end of an era. Walter’s words, replete with the quiet dignity which the situation demanded, were unfortunately accompanied by a strange descant from below, some monotonous rigmarole in a language no one could understand, spattered from time to time with incomprehensible English. Really, it was perfectly unsuitable and ludicrous.
Monty suddenly came springing up the steps from the lawn where he had evidently been making some final arrangements. He was rubbing his hands together violently and chuckling in anticipation. Walter’s heart sank at the sight of him: the boy had such a wild look.
‘There you are, Father. I was just going to get you. I was afraid you might miss this fellow. He’s really a scream. He does the most amazing things.’
Walter drew his son to one side and said quietly: ‘I want you to get this over as quickly as possible. I very much doubt whether it was ever a good idea, but to carry on with it this evening in view of what has happened to Mr Webb, really, you must have lost your senses.’
‘Oh, look here, Father …’ protested Monty.
But Walter went on, ignoring him: ‘I should have thought that the merest common sense would have told you … And what d’you think the Langfields will say when they hear about it? They’ll waste no time in putting it around that the Blacketts have been dancing on Mr Webb’s grave while the body is still warm!’
Walter, becoming excited, had spoken louder than he had intended and the bristles on his spine had puffed up beneath his shirt … One or two of the guests had begun to show signs of concern at this sudden whispered altercation between father and son. Walter realized that even Monty was looking at him oddly. ‘Anyway, get rid of the fellow as soon as you can,’ he said sharply.
Monty stiffened. The chanting had stopped. ‘OK, Father. Yeah, OK!’ he muttered and slid away swiftly towards the balustrade beneath which the yogi was now beginning to demonstrate his powers. Walter continued to pass among the guests, conversing gravely with them as if something unsuitable were not happening, or about to happen, just out of sight beneath the portico. And while he conversed he mused grimly again on the damage done to the firm by Monty’s erratic hand in its affairs, for was it not fair to say that the labour trouble on the estates in 1937 had stemmed, indirectly at least, from that great speculative rubber boom which Monty and the London office, in concert with certain unscrupulous brokers of Mincing Lane, had whipped up in the autumn of 1936 with their predictions of a rubber scarcity lasting as far as the eye could see?
Well, the truth of the matter was simple: the swift rise in the price of rubber, and of the employers’ profits, had not, unfortunately, gone unnoticed by the Chinese work-force. There had been complaints about low wages in Selangor and Negri Sembilan. On the Bangi estate in Ulu Langat the manager had tried to get rid of his Chinese workers and replace them with Javanese. In no time the workers on half a dozen estates had downed tools. Moreover, other districts soon began to join because the workers from the Connemara estate, who had drawn up a list of demands for the Protector of Chinese, were fanning out on bicycles, those same cheap Jap bicycles which Blackett and Webb had not, until too late, thought of importing instead of the more costly products of Birmingham and Coventry, spreading the news far and wide. Presently twenty thousand or more Chinese had stopped work.
And it had all been perfectly unnecessary. The peaceful atmosphere of Malaya had been riven for no purpose. Ugly scenes had developed. Chinese detectives sent to look for Communists among the strikers, that idée fixe of the Chinese Protectorate, had been roughed up. Heads had been broken. In due course over a hundred workers had found themselves behind bars and, to their original demand for a ten cents a day increase in wages, the strikers were now adding two more: the release of the arrested men and compensation for injuries, bound in the end to involve a loss of face for the Government.
And why had it been unneccessary? Beceause that ‘almost permanent’ rubber boom which Monty and the market analysts had seen trembling in their telescopes at the end of 1936 had proved to be a mirage, as anyone in Malaya or the Netherlands East Indies could have told you it would. The price of rubber, ridiculously inflated by brokers’ claims, had collapsed, aided by a recession in America. Sales of cars had declined and by the spring of 1938 the price of rubber had plummeted to about five pence a pound. Hardly had the strikers had their pay increased from sixty to seventy-five cents a day as a result of bitter struggles up and down the country, when workers were being laid off and wages reduced once more. But Monty, the young fool, impervious to the effects on Malaya’s estate workers (on Malaya’s social fabric even, for once this sort of thing started …!) of these wild fluctuations in price generated by the London market, had been unable to see further than the chance of a quick profit. Instead of squashing the brokers’ claims he had egged them on. And that, thought Walter more grimly than ever, was another example of the changing times. ‘Young men these days have no sense of responsibility to the country!’
The yogi, Walter discovered, gazing down at him with distaste, was a tall, cadaverous individual, evidently a Punjabi. He was clad only in a white dhoti and gold turban. In the middle of the turban a large white gem, perhaps a diamond but more likely a piece of cut glass, flared in the floodlights. Thin as he was his naked chest was nevertheless disturbingly equipped with a pair of well-formed female breasts. Some distance to the right of the improvised stage the Blacketts’ kebun could be seen tending a blazing bonfire.
Meanwhile, the yogi’s assistant, a sallow, gold-toothed Eurasian in tattered black evening dress was following in Walter’s wake among the guests, proffering for their inspection a box of tin-tacks and a cheap china tea-cup. The guests fingered them uncertainly. When they had satisfied themselves that no deception was being practised on them the Eurasian threw the box of tacks down to the yogi who caught it, opened it and began, rather gloomily, popping them into his mouth one by one and swallowing them. The guests continued to watch him uneasily. The only sound was the impatient cracking of Walter’s knuckles.
The box of tacks was a large one and the yogi seemed to be in no hurry, as if anxious to savour each one. Presently the guests began to exchange glances, as if to say that it was dreadfully hot out here and would this go on much longer? Certain of the men, particularly those who considered their time valuable, glanced at their watches with a preoccupied air; one of them, whom Walter recognized as an influential executive of one of the big tyre companies in Singapore, even turned away from the balustrade altogether.
‘Yes,’ agreed Walter, swiftly taking him by the arm and compelling him to saunter up and down along the same path which he himself had been pacing earlier in the day, ‘it’s bound to come as a shock to those who, like you and I, knew him as a younger man. But then, at his time of life …’ Walter shrugged sadly.
‘Some time may elapse, I’m afraid, before we see his like again,’ declared the man from the tyre company with an air of rather sepulchral piety, but again sneaking a look at his watch.
They began to discuss, in a desultory fashion while the yogi went on stolidly swallowing tacks, the mysterious latex-drinking snails which were said to have appeared on certain isolated estates. Neither of them was inclined to take these snails very seriously. ‘Still,’ said Walter, ‘we’d better not let Mincing Lane get to hear of them or they’ll be using the wretched creatures to fuel another round of speculation.’ He paused sombrely, having reminded himself of the results of the last speculative boom. These speculators were playing the game of those who, like the Communists, wanted to foment trouble in the Colony. What a lot of strikes Singapore had seen this year already! The Harbour Board dockers had been on strike for three months … at a time when shipment of rubber and tin was vital, not only for profits but for the War Effort as well. Hardly had that collapsed when, amid violent riots, another one had started at the Firestone factory and then trouble had spread all over the place with rubber immobilized everywhere, a disastrous pile-up of fruit at the height of the season caused by a go-slow of pineapple cutters at the canning factories, and to cap it all, pitched battles between police trying to arrest trouble-makers at the Tai Thong factory and the labour force armed with staves, stones and soda-water bottles.
Walter, despite those heads of cake, began to suffer misgivings about the loyalty of his workers. What if the Blackett and Webb jubilee should be chosen for propaganda purposes not only by the Government to demonstrate ‘Continuity in Prosperity’ under British rule, but also by the Communists to demonstrate the exploitation and disaffection of the workers! The thought of a jubilee procession up the hill to Government House in the teeth of a howling mob was alarming. How the Langfields would laugh!
‘Where are they taking Margaret?’ demanded Walter’s companion suddenly, for the yogi’s Eurasian assistant, gold teeth gleaming, had selected his wife from the little herd of guests and with much polishing of hands was leading her down the steps to where the yogi, his meal of tin-tacks finished, was waiting glumly on the platform. Half-way down the steps she baulked and would have returned had not Monty come hurrying down to reassure her. The bristles on Walter’s spine began to stir beneath his dress shirt.
All the lady was required for, explained the Eurasian in an ingratiating tone, was to inspect the mouth of the yogi. The yogi, recognizing the signal, opened his mouth wide. The Eurasian promptly grasped the lady’s shrinking fingers and stuffed them into the yogi’s open mouth. She snatched them out again quickly. No tin-tacks had been discovered. Monty, beside himself with delight, beamed up at the balustrade. In the strong lights he looked wilder than ever.
Meanwhile, the yogi, his appetite returning, had bitten the handle off the tea-cup which had been passed round for inspection earlier and was crunching it noisily between his teeth. When he had devoured the handle he smashed the rest of the cup by rapping it sharply against his own skull, then popped the broken pieces of china into his mouth, crunching them up too. Monty was invited this time to inspect his mouth and was soon able to confirm that the cup had been eaten up entirely. A slight delay followed while the yogi and his assistant peered at something in a cardboard box full of straw, evidently trying to decide how best to deal with it. Walter leaned over the balustrade and beckoned to Monty impatiently.
‘Just a moment, Father.’
The yogi dipped his hand quickly into the box and withdrew a thrashing, apple-green snake, holding it up by the tail as it twisted this way and that trying to bite him. He quickly slid his other hand down the body and gripped the reptile firmly behind its head. The assistant began to hammer with his palms on a grimy drum. The guests gazed down at him apprehensively from the balustrade, afraid that something disagreeable might be about to happen. The yogi had opened his mouth and was slowly bringing the snake’s head towards it while the rest of its body continued to thrash and flail against his wrists and forearms. ‘Oh no!’ cried one of the ladies in dismay. Hissing, the snake’s head came nearer and nearer the yogi’s mouth, its tongue flickering. Abruptly the yogi took the snake into his mouth and bit off its head. There was an audible cracking of bone, a working of the yogi’s jaws as he masticated and swallowed it. Then the tip of a pink tongue appeared and licked a few scarlet drops from his lips. Walter stared down at the headless body of the snake which continued to thrash by itself on the platform, smearing glistening red marks on the pale wood which, just for a moment, seemed to resemble Chinese ideographs, as if the snake were trying to make some last furious communication. One or two of the ladies had turned pale and even Walter himself was shaken. He announced loudly: ‘If you would like to move inside, coffee and brandy will be served in the drawing-room where it’s cooler.’
‘But Father, he hasn’t finished yet!’ exclaimed Monty, dashing up the steps again as Walter began shepherding the guests back into the house. ‘He drinks nitric acid. It’s amazing. I’ve seen him do it. He dissolves a copper penny in it first and then he just swigs it! And he’s going to walk barefoot through that bonfire before he drinks the acid … Look, I mean … since we’ve got the blighter here!’
Walter stared at his son for a moment, tight-lipped. Then he turned and strode back into the house. Presently, the yogi, left to his own devices, took off his sandals and began to trudge barefoot back and forth through the glowing embers of the bonfire while, at a little distance, his assistant discussed money matters with Monty in a high-pitched voice.
10
Another hour elapsed before Walter had said goodbye to the last of the guests, some of whom had a stricken look. One of the ladies, so Abdul informed him, had been overcome by nausea and had been obliged to lie down: it was that ghastly business with the snake that had done it. He must remember to write a note of apology in the morning. He must also give Monty a dressing-down but that too would have to wait until morning for Monty had prudently disappeared.
Walter climbed the stairs wearily. It was some time since he had given his wife a thought and now he remembered that she had retired with a headache and was doubtless upset by the outcome of the garden-party. Could it still be the same day? That garden-party now seemed to have taken place weeks ago. He found her awake, lying as if stunned against a mound of pillows. She said she was feeling a little better and asked him where everyone was, it seemed very quiet.
‘Search me. The only person who seems to be still here is young Ehrendorf. He’s in the sitting-room smoking cigarettes. As for the others …’ Walter shrugged. All the guests had gone. Monty had gone. Joan had gone. The yogi had gone, full of china.
‘You mean, full of china tea?’
‘No, not really, no, I don’t,’ replied Walter in an edgy sort of tone.
Mrs Blackett sighed but felt too weak to pursue the matter.
‘Well, I suppose I should go to the hospital to see how old Webb is getting on.’
Downstairs, Walter found that there was another guest who had not yet departed though now, daunted by the empty echoing rooms, he seemed to be in the process of doing so: this was Dr Brownley, their family doctor. Dr Brownley frequently visited the Blacketts, but more often for social than for professional reasons. Indeed, he was always invited to the Blacketts’ parties, always came, was always the first to arrive and usually the last to leave. The Doctor, however, was troubled by the knowledge that he was always going to the Blacketts’ but never invited them back! Someone less addicted than the Doctor to the grand social occasions in which the Blacketts specialized, where inevitably one found oneself cheek by jowl with the people who mattered in the Straits, might have preferred to soothe his inflamed conscience, or at least to limit the spread of further inflammation, by not accepting any more invitations. Such a remedy, alas, was out of reach of the good Doctor. Though his inflammation throbbed more painfully on each new occasion he simply could not but accept. Now, at the sight of Walter on the stairs he winced visibly, thinking: ‘This makes it twelve times in a row and they haven’t once been invited to my house!’ He had been hoping to slip out of the house while no one was about, thus avoiding the awkwardness of a leave-taking. Indeed, the reason Walter had not seen him earlier was that the Doctor had dodged behind a bookcase to avoid detection. But this time there was no escape and he called out heartily: ‘Ah, there you are, Walter. I was looking for you to thank you and, of course, Mrs Blackett for a delightful … mind you, one of many such … I’m just off now. Must be going. Look here, you must come to my place one of these days…Can I give you a lift? No, of course, this is where you live, isn’t it? Ha, ha, well, hm … You must come to …’ His voice trailed off into a mutter as he prepared to plunge into the friendly darkness outside. Issuing invitations, the Doctor had found, provided a little welcome relief in awkward situations like this … but you felt correspondingly worse later when faced with the prospect of redeeming them!
‘What’s that?’ demanded Walter, puzzled by the Doctor’s habit of muttering to himself before departure. The Doctor flinched. ‘I was just saying that you must come to my place one of these days,’ he was obliged to state in a clear and unequivocal tone.
‘Oh, all right. Why not?’ said Walter. ‘Good night, Doctor.’ And with that he returned to the drawing-room.
Walter, who had a horror of hospitals, had been contemplating a quiet stengah before paying a visit to old Mr Webb. He had forgotten that young Ehrendorf was still there and was not altogether pleased to find the room full of cigarette smoke. ‘These days you really have to winkle out your guests one by one,’ he thought as Ehrendorf stood up politely, trailing a newspaper from his fingers. However, on the whole he had a good opinion of Ehrendorf and even felt, as one male to another, some sympathy for him in his predicament with Joan. But there it was, women were peculiar and there was not very much one could do about it. If some woman had thrown wine in Walter’s face as a young man he would have fetched her a clout. Ah, but then he had never pretended to have the exquisite manners of an Ehrendorf and could very well see that, equipped with polished manners, one could not go about clouting women at garden-parties.
‘You haven’t seen Joan, have you?’ Ehrendorf enquired, resuming his seat but sitting, Walter was glad to perceive, on the edge of his chair as if ready to stand again.
‘Not for some time. I have an idea that she may have gone out for the evening.’
‘Well, in that case it seems,’ said Ehrendorf with a rather strained smile, ‘that I’ve been stood up. Well, never mind, it’s not for the first time. I’ll just finish my drink if you don’t mind and then I’ll be on my way.’
‘No hurry.’
Walter called for his stengah and sank back in his chair, glad enough after all to have Ehrendorf’s company and to delay his visit to the hospital for a little while. Walter did not greatly care for Americans these days: the acrimony aroused over the Rubber Restriction scheme and the subsequent counter-attack by the American consumers had left its mark. But when one day Captain Ehrendorf, posted to the US military attache’s office in Singapore and armed with an introduction to the Blacketts, had presented himself at their house, neither Walter nor the rest of his family had been able to find fault with him. This had been partly because his introduction had come from none other than Matthew Webb and the Blacketts were curious to learn more about Matthew and the way he lived (incidentally, he must soon do something about sending the poor boy a telegram about his father’s illness), but most of all because Ehrendorf himself was unusually charming and good-looking. He might, indeed, have been specially constructed to topple all Walter’s prejudices about Americans.
Americans, thought Walter, are vulgar: but no one had better taste than Ehrendorf. They are loud: no one more soft-spoken. They have no culture: Walter had yet to meet anyone more cultured, better educated, better mannered, more tactful and well-informed. The fellow, amazing though it might seem to Walter’s jaundiced eye, was quite simply a gentleman. Walter had found it hard to think of him as an American at all. Why, he even spoke English like a civilized person.
Ehrendorf had wasted no time in telling the Blacketts what he knew of Matthew, whom he had first met at Oxford. He himself had been a Rhodes scholar at the university (here he paused for a moment but the Blacketts had stared at him blankly) for a couple of years. Then, five or six years later, they had bumped into each other again, this time in Geneva in 1932 where he himself had been posted as a very junior military assistant to Mr Norman Davis in the long, tortuous and exhausting discussions on the Disarmament Conference. Matthew had not been working for the League Secretariat itself but for some other organization whose name escaped him, connected with it in some way. There were so many! Was it the International Peace Bureau, or the Red Cross Committee? Was it the Permanent Secretariat for War Veterans and War Victims? Or the Union for the Assistance of Calamity-Stricken Populations? Of one thing he was pretty sure, he laughed: it was not the International Humanitarian Bureau for Lovers of Animals, whose rather odd programme was ‘to extend to the animal kingdom the sentiments and duties of humane justice’. He had a suspicion that it might well have been the International League for the Protection of Native Peoples; that was certainly the field he was interested in, anyway. But no matter! How glad they had been to meet each other again!
Geneva in winter was the most depressing town on earth, the international community was cliquish and segregated grimly by nationalities, the Genevese burgher himself was the most narrow and xenophobic animal on two legs. He and Matthew, whom he considered ‘the most wonderful person in the world’ and ‘a wonderful human being’ (young Kate tittered when he said this and clasped a hand over her mouth), casting aside the depressing and Jesuitical, even Jansenist, shackles of Disarmament had resumed their own much more interesting discussions on art, sex, Freud, the existence or otherwise of God, chattering away, as young men will, he added with a smile, about the causes of the Thirty Years War and whether the Defenestration of Prague was instrumental in the downfall of the Palatinate and of the Bohemian church, and countless other matters of this kind which they had been unable to settle to their own satisfaction during the time they had spent together at Oxford. Matthew, ‘a very delightful person’, had been the ideal companion in this dull and provincial Swiss town. They had even managed to make a quick trip to London that winter to see Gielgud’s production of Rodney Ackland’s magnificent play, Strange Orchestra at the St Martin’s Theatre. Then, alas, all too soon, the call of their respective duties had caused their paths to diverge once more. In the years that followed they had only managed to meet again once or twice, for a hurried meal in the nearest restaurant to this or that railway station in some European city where the threads which each was unreeling behind him on his way through Life’s maze had happened briefly to intersect. But they had at least kept in touch by letter, just about.
Walter was sufficiently accustomed to American hyperbole to realize that Ehrendorf might not literally consider Matthew to be ‘the most wonderful person in the world’. Americans, he knew, were inclined to use such expressions about any acquaintance they found moderately inoffensive. Still, it was encouraging. The poor boy’s bizarre education might not have completely ruined him, after all. Mrs Blackett had reacted more cautiously: gossiping about the Defenestration of Prague, whatever that was, did not seem to her such a good sign. As for Ehrendorf, he really was delightful. The Blacketts were charmed by him. Not even young Kate, who was passing then through a stage when she detested all men, could quite resist him.
Ehrendorf had become a frequent visitor at the Blacketts’ house and he would call without performing any of the preliminary social manoeuvres which were still customary among the older Singapore families. Instead of making use of the box fitted to the gate with a tiny slit for visiting cards, and then retiring, as the ritual required, to wait for an invitation, he would have his staff car drive him boldly up to the front door and wander in unannounced. He never stayed for long, though. He was always on his way somewhere…to Government House, perhaps; the Blacketts would not have been surprised to learn, such was Ehrendorf’s disarming ease of manner, that he wandered in on the Governor and Lady Thomas as casually as he did on them, and he was certainly on friendly terms with the Governor’s ADC and staff (‘the servants’ hall’ as it was known at Government House) … or to a reception at some legation, or further afield, to a conference in Manila, or Saigon, or Batavia. Sometimes, if he were going to a party nearby and Joan was at a loose end, he would courteously invite her to join him and together they would be whisked away in the staff car to some elaborate reception or beach party. It was clear, of course, that Ehrendorf, despite his accomplishment, was a long way from being an ideal, or even a possible, suitor for Joan. But his manifest good-nature inhibited the elder Blacketts from objecting for a time to the attentions that he was paying to their daughter and, in any case, it very soon became clear to Walter that no objections were likely to be needed. Her delicate appearance notwithstanding, Joan’s tender womanhood was clad in a tough hide. The distressing day which this young man seated opposite him had evidently just experienced would have been further proof of it, if he had needed proof.
‘Perhaps you would tell Joan that I waited for her,’ Ehrendorf said calmly and without resentment as both men got to their feet. ‘I guess it slipped her mind that she had a date with me.’
‘I expect so,’ agreed Walter blandly. ‘Well, I must be on my way over to Outram Road. I could drop you off in Market Street if you like?’ But Ehrendorf had a car waiting and each went his separate way.
The night was very hot and still, but clear. Walter found it refreshing to sit there in the back of the open car beneath the stars, surging through the empty streets. And how peaceful the low, tiled roofs of the shophouses along Orchard Road looked in the starlight! Noticing that the California Sandwich Shoppe on the right-hand side was still open he remembered that he had eaten nothing, apart from Mr Webb’s ears, for some hours. For a moment he considered telling the syce to stop, but no … he no longer felt hungry. The heat and weariness had robbed him of his appetite. At the bottom of Orchard Road the Bentley turned to the right into Hill Street, past the white Moorish façade of the Oriental Telephone and Telegraph Company trembling in the starlight like a vision from the Arabian Nights, and then glided on its way south-west under the looming blue-black shadow of the police barracks, over the river (Walter, holding his breath against the stench, briefly glimpsed the silhouette of Blackett and Webb’s godown at the bend of the river and closer at hand on the water itself the huddled lighters and sampans where prodigious numbers of Chinese were fated to live out their lives), and then on along New Bridge Road towards the General Hospital, Walter brooding now about the Chinese once more.
‘We in Singapore may have our share of overcrowding and child-labour and slums, but at least it’s not like Shanghai!’
For Walter, Shanghai was a constant reminder, a sort of memento mori, of the harsh world which lay outside the limits of British rule. The population of Shanghai’s foreign areas had already been excessive before the war had broken over the city in August 1937. But within a few weeks the influx of refugees to this sanctuary had brought it to more than five million. Moreover, these were people who, even in peacetime, had been living on a level of bare subsistence that all too often dipped into total destitution: then a man’s only means of supporting his family was to sift through rubbish bins or dredge the flotsam from the ships along the wharves. ‘You would think the Chinese here would be more grateful considering what their relatives in Shanghai have to put up with!’ There existed, Walter was aware, a macabre thermometer to the state of health and well-being of the Shanghai population (of other cities in China, too): namely, the ‘exposed corpse’. Even in relatively good times, such was the precarious level of life in China, vast numbers of ‘exposed corpses’ would be collected on the streets … six-thousand-odd in the streets of Shanghai in 1935. In 1937 more than twenty thousand bodies had been found on the streets or on waste ground in the city. By 1938 with the help of the war the number of corpses collected had risen to more than a hundred thousand in the International Settlement alone! ‘The cremation of six hundred corpses,’ the Health Department report for that year declared encouragingly, ‘takes only four hours, though a greater number must have from six to eight hours for complete combustion.’
Well, no wonder that labour in Shanghai was so cheap and productive when the worker was accompanied everywhere by his grim doppelgänger the ‘exposed corpse’! ‘Our workers in Singapore may sometimes find it hard to make ends meet but at least they don’t have that sort of thing to cope with. And why not? Because men like old Webb saw fit to devote their lives, not to a lot of political bilge about nationalism, welfare and equality, but to the building up of businesses which would actually produce some wealth! Perhaps one day we shall see what sort of fist our rabble-rousing friends the Communists make of feeding people but I only hope I don’t have to depend on them for my next meal!’
Righteous indignation welled up inside him at the prospect until he remembered that, for the moment at least, the Communists were dropping their anti-British campaign, so people said, in order to concentrate all their efforts against the Japanese.
‘Well, Mohammed,’ asked Walter leaning forward in the rush of air to speak into the syce’s ear, ‘are you happy living in Singapore?’
‘Very happy, Tuan.’ Walter could not see the man’s features in the darkness beneath the black outline of the cap he wore, but he glimpsed the flash of white teeth as he smiled.
Presently, soothed by the vastness of the night sky, his thoughts turned to Mr Webb again and not, this time, with the lingering resentment of the old man’s rigid ideas which he had felt earlier in the evening (those contemptuous marzipan smiles) but with sympathy and gratitude. And for the first time he began to feel a real pang of sorrow, that painful sense of absence, of being deserted almost, when someone whose life has been closely intertwined with your own suddenly disappears. For in spite of his age, Mr Webb’s collapse had come as a surprise: it was only when you had a hand in picking him up that you realized that there was nothing much to him any more but skin and bone and the undimmed presence of a powerful personality, what weight there was consisted largely of his heavy English shoes. He had, after all, continued hale and hearty throughout the decade that followed his retirement. Only in the past year or two had he shown some signs of failing: at one time he had come to believe that his fellow directors of Blackett and Webb were trying to poison him, in the gruesome Malay fashion, with needle-like bamboo hairs coiled like watch-springs which then unwind to puncture the intestines or lodge undetected in the mucous membrane of the bladder. Fortunately, he had forgotten about it after a while.
Next, there had come a final flaring-up of the entrepreneurial fires which had been banked up peacefully since his retirement. He had demanded that Walter should expand Blackett and Webb into a great vertical combine like Lever Brothers or Dunlop. A vast amount of rubber was already under their control and there was still time to get a foothold in the palm-oil business. Why should they not go into the production and marketing of motor-tyres and margarine in Europe and America? Walter, though he considered the idea ridiculous, had murmured soothingly that it was worth thinking about. But old Mr Webb had become querulous, demanding a proper response to his plan. Gently Walter had explained that the opportunity for such an expansion was long since past: the competition was too powerful, capital and European executives too hard to come by, even if business had not been so sternly regulated by Britain’s war economy. Mr Webb had been bitter and disbelieving, had denounced Walter as ‘a mere tradesman’ … but presently the fires had died down again; in the last few months before today’s fateful garden-party at which he had tumbled out of his chair and into the strange twilit ante-room to death, neither his dreams of a huge combine nor his fears of bamboo poisoning had caused him any distress. The question of palm-oil, though, had lodged in Walter’s mind like a coiled bamboo hair: insignificant at first, it was coming imperceptibly to irritate him. Blackett and Webb should have become involved in palm-oil ten years ago. A businessman must move with the times. How often, recalling the fate of the fine-millers of rice in London ruined by the opening of the Suez Canal, had he not warned young men against thinking that a business could be maintained in a changing world without constant change!
The Bentley, having skirted the teeming, narrow streets of Chinatown, ill-lit and even at this hour apparently bubbling with sinister activity and subversion, had now almost reached Outram Road. The several buildings of the hospital were scattered on a small hill among trees; first-class, second-class and third-class buildings respectively housed patients occupying corresponding positions on the social ladder. Mr Webb, naturally, had been taken to a building from which he would be able to leave the world in a suitable manner. The Bentley, therefore, drew up beside the half-dozen cream pillars which formed the entrance to the main building: Walter remained in the motorcar while the syce went to make enquiries about Mr Webb. The man was gone some time and, presently, Walter got out to take a stroll beneath half a dozen tall palms on the lawn opposite the building. Above, on the roof, he could see the silhouette of a clock tower but it was too dark to make out the time. He supposed it must be well after midnight by now. Through the open windows on the ground floor he could see into what was evidently a general ward, dimly lit. He stared into it for a moment, half fascinated, half repelled : he was just able to make out shadowy figures stretched motionless beneath the silently whirring fans. So, this was how it ended for a man who had once had the Rangoon rice trade by the throat: in essentials not very different, he thought sombrely, from the way it ended for one of Shanghai’s ‘exposed corpses’.
A crunch of gravel. Walter turned away. The syce was approaching accompanied by Major Archer. The Major had come earlier on a similar mission to Walter’s. Old Mr Webb was still in the same condition, unconscious and paralysed. Walter could no doubt look in on him for a moment if he wanted.
‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ said Walter, moving back towards the Bentley, reprieved. ‘I really just came to find out how he was getting on.’ He lingered, however, for a moment with the Major, explaining that Mr Webb’s collapse meant that a number of difficult decisions would have to be taken. What were they going to do now about the theme of ‘Continuity’ in the jubilee procession? That was just one of many new problems that were zigzagging their way to the surface like bubbles as Mr Webb drew nearer to death. And should he make arrangements for young Matthew Webb to come out to Singapore? ‘After all, it seems a long way for him to come if he’s not going to inherit.’
The Major showed surprise. But surely. Why, Mr Webb had happened to mention only the other day that Matthew would be his heir! He had even asked the Major some months earlier to witness his signature on the appropriate document and at the same time had spoken warmly of those who devoted themselves to the rehabilitation of native peoples.
‘He said nothing to me about it,’ muttered Walter, thankful for the darkness which helped to mask the shock which this news had caused him. Until this moment he had allowed himself to entertain some hopes that, in default of an heir, he himself might be left at least a substantial part of Mr Webb’s holdings in the business.
‘Surely he would have told me if he had changed his mind?’ He stood for a moment with his hand on the door of the car looking up at the stars.
‘Well, perhaps I will go and look in on him after all,’ he said finally and with a nod to the Major made his way heavily towards where his former partner lay on his death-bed.
11
The medical opinion had been that Mr Webb would not survive more than a few hours. But the hours and the days and presently the weeks went by and still the old fellow lingered on. An era had ended, Walter was right about that, and no doubt a new era had begun. But Mr Webb somehow managed to survive this jolting passage over the switched points of history and live on into the spring of 1941. Most likely, if his feeble hold on life had been shaken loose and he had died then and there, which probably would have been best for everybody, Walter would not have thought it worth while to summon Matthew merely to attend a funeral. But Mr Webb continued to cling on stubbornly and, besides, if Matthew was to inherit his father’s share of the business Walter preferred to have him in Singapore where a clear idea of the serious responsibilities attached to his inheritance could be the more easily printed on his mind. After all, they knew so little of Matthew. He would have to make up his own mind, of course, whether or not to come out. Was he even in Europe still? A number of the more affluent people in Britain, according to J. B. Priestley’s wireless broadcasts, were prudently moving to Canada and the United States, leaving the lower classes to defend their estates against the Germans. Walter knew nothing of Matthew’s financial situation but assumed that he must be, at least, comfortably off.
As a child Matthew had once or twice written dutiful letters to ‘Dear Uncle Walter’, thanking him (his little fingers guided by his mother’s hand) for some Christmas present or other. In the years that followed the General Strike one or two more letters had arrived. Their purpose was not stated but Walter had not found it hard to guess. The young man, filled with remorse by the estrangement from his father, was seeking some word of him. Naturally, Walter had replied with reassuring descriptions of the old man’s comfortable days at the Mayfair Rubber Company. Matthew had continued to write an occasional letter to the Blacketts throughout the thirties, though his letters had grown shorter and the information they contained somewhat random, as if he merely wrote down whatever caught his eye as he looked around his hotel room or out of the window (he never seemed to have a home of his own). These letters had come not only from Geneva but occasionally from other cities, too. There had once even been a picture postcard from Tokyo, showing what appeared to be a sheep standing up to its knees in a lake. ‘What is supposed to be the purpose of this?’ Walter had wondered, amazed, staring at the sheep and trying to penetrate its significance. It seemed that the boy had paid a visit to the Far East, after all.
One of Matthew’s letters in 1939 had mentioned that he would soon be in London on some unspecified business. As it happened, Kate, then aged almost twelve, had been there at the time, staying with an aunt for a few days before returning from school to Singapore for the summer holidays, holidays destined to be prolonged by the outbreak of war. The Blacketts’ curiosity about Matthew was considerable. Why should Kate not go and have a chat with him?
Walter had wasted no time in cabling his London office, instructing them to telephone every hotel in London until they found a Matthew Webb. In the meantime poor Kate, who had not been consulted and who naturally dreaded the meeting in prospect, had waited praying that he would not be found. The principal cause of her despair was the thought of being seen ‘by a man’ in her school uniform, a fate which she and her school-friends agreed was the ultimate humiliation. But in due course, after on or two false alarms, Matthew had been unearthed in a shabby boarding-house in Bloomsbury. The London manager of Blackett and Webb had packed Kate into a taxi and rushed her across London.
The meeting had not been a great success at first. Matthew had been lying on his bed in his underwear reading a book while his trousers, which had just been soaked in a cloudburst, were drying over a chair in the window. Without his trousers he was reluctant to let a young girl into his room although, as Walter later observed, one might have thought that this was one of the few contingencies in life that his progressive education had prepared him for. Moreover, at first he appeared never to have heard of any Kate Blackett and could not think what she wanted of him. Kate had had to shout explanations through the door, arousing the interest of the other lodgers. Meanwhile, the landlady’s suspicions had been awakened by the telephone drag-net which had caught Matthew in her establishment and she had become convinced that he was a malefactor or prevert of some kind. So Kate’s mortified explanations through the door had been punctuated by instructions from the landlady for him to leave her premises immediately. Finally, however, Matthew had dragged on his sodden trousers and opened the door.
Kate was later asked to describe the person who had confronted her as the door opened. Well, he was quite nice, she thought. She could not think of anything else to say. Oh yes she could, he wore spectacles. Chiefly what she remembered was that his shoes squelched when he walked: they had evidently been soaked, too. He had walked straight out of the boarding-house, ignoring the landlady and the London manager, who was rubbing his hands in consternation at the way things had turned out. Kate, dreadfully embarrassed by the furore she had caused, had followed Matthew to a tea-shop round the corner. She had felt so self-conscious that almost the only thing she remembered about their conversation was that when, at the end of it, Matthew had risen from his seat there had been a wet patch where he had been sitting. And yet they had got on very well really, she assured her father. He was quite nice, she thought.
Why stay at such a wretched place? Why travel with only one pair of trousers and shoes? It could hardly be that he was short of money. He presumably had a salary of some kind and Walter was certain that despite their estrangement old Mr Webb had not ceased to provide a generous allowance for his son. ‘I’m afraid,’ Walter had said when discussing Kate’s revelations with his wife, ‘that all those half-baked schools have had their effect on the lad, whatever Jim Ehrendorf may say to the contrary.’
As it happened, the Blacketts had been unable to learn much more from Ehrendorf than they had from Kate. Ehrendorf was perfectly well able to tell them what Matthew thought about a number of matters, many of them abstract. He could tell them where Matthew stood on ‘socialism in a single country’, on J. W. Dunne’s ‘serial time’ and suchlike. What he could not do was to give the Blacketts any real idea of what he was like. Was he married? How did he dress? Well, if he wasn’t married where did he eat his meals? Smiling, Ehrendorf had to admit that they had been so busy talking that many of these questions had not crossed his mind. Now that he thought about it he had come across Matthew once or twice in restaurants in Geneva, eating by himself with a book propped against a jug of wine or beer. But there was not much else he could remember. He agreed with Kate that Matthew wore glasses, however. He was sure of this because once, while they were strolling under the plane trees on the Quai Wilson, he had broken them.
‘How?’
‘Sir?’
‘How did he break them?’
But Ehrendorf could not remember. Perhaps he had dropped them. They had been discussing Locarno at the time. Matthew had strong feelings about such treaties and soon Ehrendorf was sharing them with the Blacketts: it seemed that as a good League man Matthew did not believe in the Big Powers settling things behind closed doors.
‘And so,’ smiled Walter, ‘all you can tell us is that he wears glasses, which we knew already.’
‘And that he’s a wonderful human being,’ added Ehrendorf with warmth.
Kate had taken to giggling whenever Ehrendorf spoke warmly of Matthew. This time, when she giggled, Ehrendorf suddenly sprang across the room and seized her before she could escape. He picked her up bodily, although she was getting to be quite a lump, and brought her back under one arm. This time he was going to find out why she was laughing. In the end Kate had to confess: it was because he was always calling Matthew a ‘wonderful human being’ and she kept thinking he was calling him a ‘wonderful Human Bean’! Her parents exchanged exasperated glances at this: Kate had recently discovered that she had a sense of humour and they had suffered greatly in consequence. But Ehrendorf seemed to find it amusing. Thereafter Matthew became known to the younger Blacketts as ‘the Human Bean’.
Well, since old Mr Webb continued to cling on stubbornly Matthew had to be sent for, whatever he was like, and influence used on his behalf to overcome the difficulties of war-time travel. Fortunately, rubber was a priority cargo these days and the Ministry of Supply listened sympathetically to Walter’s request that Matthew should be sent out to take his father’s place in the Mayfair Rubber Company. It took time before Matthew could be located through his solicitors (it turned out that he had not made a prudent bolt for it with the stampeding herd of well-to-do), and more time before the details could be arranged. The result was that not just weeks but months had passed since the unlucky day the old gentleman had fallen out of his chair at the garden-party before word eventually reached Walter that Matthew had started out on his journey. But these days unless you were a brass hat or a Minister nobody knew when you would arrive, or even if you would arrive at all.
Mr Webb, though severely paralysed and still unable to communicate, had in due course been moved back to the Mayfair with a nurse in constant attendance. Walter, who himself had a secret dread of dying in hospital, had overborne medical advice to the contrary and had the old gentleman returned to his home. There he could more easily take a few minutes away from his business affairs to lift a corner of the mosquito net and give a comforting squeeze to the cold knuckles which lay on the sheet.
Once or twice Mr Webb had tried to say something. Something to do with the sun, apparently. It could hardly be that the light was bothering him because the blinds of split bamboo chicks had been unrolled and allowed only a muted glow to enter the room. Perhaps the old man had been thinking of agreeable evenings spent prowling with his secateurs and watching the sunlight gleam on the skins of his naked gymnasts as they swooped and swung and balanced, growing stronger every day. Walter found it disturbing, nevertheless, to see his friend lying there, breathing noisily in his tent of white muslin. Mr Webb’s eyelids were half open but his expression was vacant for the most part and he showed little sign of being aware of his surroundings. ‘This is how we all finish,’ mused Walter grimly.
‘It’s the end of an era,’ he said aloud to Major Archer who stood beside him in a respectful pose at his dying chairman’s bedside.
Because presently Mr Webb again tried to say something about the sun Walter decided that Miss Chiang should be recalled.
Perhaps he would find her presence soothing. After Mr Webb’s collapse the gymnasts and body-builders had been dispersed with a bonus added to their emoluments. Miss Chiang had declined indignantly when offered an additional reward for staying away from her former employer while he was in hospital. Now the Major was given the delicate task of running her to earth in some tenement in Chinatown and persuading her to return to visit the patient. She agreed without fuss and her presence did indeed seem to exert a soothing influence on the old man. She was still wearing one of Joan’s cast-off dresses and Walter, glimpsing her one day as she was leaving the Mayfair was taken aback, as much by her good looks as by the thought of her dubious relationship with old Mr Webb. ‘Who would have thought that Webb would end up like this with a half-caste holding his hand!’
Walter, these days, had little time to spare for visiting the sick. Business had never been more hectic and besides he was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the problem of finding a husband for Joan. Now that it had become clear that he was unlikely to inherit Mr Webb’s share of the business it had become more important than ever that she should make a sensible match.
‘What are your feelings for Jim Ehrendorf, if you don’t mind me asking?’ he enquired mildly one day, finding her alone.
‘Oh, he’d put his hand in the fire for me,’ she replied with a laugh.
Walter was silent for a moment, contemplating this reply which, though interesting, did not answer his question.
‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘Of course I believe you,’ said Walter, laughing in turn. ‘What I wanted to know was what you feel for him?’
Joan shrugged, gazing out of the window, her eyes like green pebbles. ‘He’s all right. He gets on my nerves though, I’m thinking of chucking him one of these days … in fact, the sooner the better.’ Walter was satisfied with this reply.
Some days later, however, he thought of it again in a rather different light. For it happened that one day, in the course of a casual conversation while waiting for Joan to come downstairs, Ehrendorf said something which Walter, as a rubber producer, found unusually interesting, and which placed him in something of a predicament if he were to pursue his policy of replacing Ehrendorf in Joan’s affections with someone who would make a more suitable husband.
Walter’s predicament stemmed indirectly from the successful operation of the Restriction scheme’s tap for controlling the flow of rubber on to the market, of which he had originally been one of the chief plumbers. As a result of the recession of 1938 and the fall in price to five pence a pound the Committee had given the tap a savage twist, shutting down the flow to forty-five per cent of capacity. Thereafter in the reservoir of rubber stocks the level began to sink and the price to creep up again. By the beginning of 1939 the level had fallen once more below the danger mark which had released the previous boom, but the Committee still showed no sign of opening the tap.
As it had turned out, it was neither the idleness of the native smallholders nor the lack of capacity of the producing countries which had now set the price of rubber on its long, steady climb, but the declaration of war in Europe. At the end of 1939 with the level in the reservoir very low (a mere two months’ absorption) the price had been standing at a gratifying shilling a pound. This, patriotism apart, had been a tense period for Walter and his colleagues. What effect would war have on the use of rubber? Their experience during the Great War had been of little help: in those days the industry had hardly got under way. But they had not had long to wait. Despite a grudging increase in the amount released to the market the level continued to sink. Rubber was being used more than ever.
At this point the Committee began to come under heavy pressure, not just from the manufacturers but from the United States Government and the British Ministry of Supply. More rubber must be released! And it was, but still not enough. The German attack on France and the Low Countries the preceding spring (May 1940) had alarmed the Americans about their future supplies: they wanted to build up a reserve in case it should be needed for their defence programme. And so they had established the Rubber Reserve Company to buy the 150,000 tons they thought they would need at a decent price of up to twenty US cents a pound; the Committee had agreed to increase the flow so that there would be enough rubber on the market for them to buy. Presently the Americans had decided to make it 330,000 tons.
Alas, against all expectations the amount of rubber used by private manufacturers continued to rise and, despite the increased rate of release, there was still not enough to go round. The United States Government’s twenty cents, which at one time would have been considered bountiful, was being resolutely outbid by private manufacturers who, often as not (Walter had to smile at the thought of it) were themselves the chaps who had been appointed as buying agents for the Government and who were now in the satisfactory position of bidding against (and naturally outbidding) their official selves! How poignant it was when the Reserve Company found that after six months of effort its cupboard was still almost as bare as it had been at the beginning! Even when the Committee had at last reluctantly agreed to raise the rate of release to one hundred per cent for the first quarter of 1941 there was still no sign of the market reaching saturation point. The spreading Japanese influence, moreover, was diverting rubber from Indo-China and Siam away from Britain and the United States. There could no longer be any serious doubt about it, in Walter’s view: the producers’ wildest dreams were being realized. This time they had a genuine shortage of rubber, not just the wishful thinking of a fast-talking London broker.
Now in February 1941 while he was chatting idly with Ehrendorf about Japan’s need for raw materials and the powerful grip that this gave the Western nations on her wind-pipe (where on earth had Joan got to, by the way, she surely hadn’t stood him up again!) the young man happened to remark that his countrymen were planning to acquire a further 100,000 tons of rubber for the Reserve Company.
‘What did you say?’ asked Walter casually, doing his best to conceal his surprise: this was the first he had heard of such a deal. He was certain that none of the other producers or dealers in Singapore was aware of it. Nor had he heard anything from his friends on the Committee. In fact, he could hardly believe that it was true; it seemed more likely that Ehrendorf had made a mistake. Ehrendorf repeated what he had said: he had heard it from someone at the consulate. ‘By the way,’ he added cheerfully, ‘it’s supposed to be a secret so please keep it to yourself. Careless talk can cost jobs as well as lives.’
‘Of course,’ agreed Walter blandly, and then to change the subject asked: ‘What did you do to your hand?’ Ehrendorf’s left hand was bandaged.
‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just a burn.’ Walter was on the point of asking him now he had done it but, on second thoughts, decided not to pursue the matter. An uncomfortable silence prevailed for a few moments until at last Joan’s footstep was heard on the stairs.
In March Ehrendorf’s prediction was proved correct when news came that the Committee had agreed to an offer for a further 100,000 tons. This gave Walter food for thought. A day or two earlier Joan had confided in him that she had now definitely decided to see no more of Ehrendorf. He was getting on her nerves! She was going to clear the decks! And yet, Walter realized, this might not be altogether convenient for himself because it so happened that there was something about the American attitude to the buying of rubber which he badly wanted to know. And it seemed possible that Ehrendorf might be able to tell him.
For some months Walter had been aware that sooner or later difficulties would arise over the fact that the Reserve Company, though given the job of piling up vast quantities of rubber, was being constantly outbid by the big American companies. Why, of 140,000 tons at present afloat for America, the Reserve Company’s share was a paltry 5,000 tons! This situation, with the American Government increasingly biting its nails over its reserve stocks, could not be expected to last. Already the first hints were reaching Singapore that the American authorities were on the point of taking some remedial action. Walter was anxious to know what that action would be before it was actually taken.
There was only one thing to be done. Though he did not like to interfere in Joan’s private affairs (except, of course, where a potential husband might be concerned) Walter decided to explain his predicament to his daughter. She listened carefully to what he had to say and once again he was pleased by her quick grasp of business matters. ‘I can’t promise, of course, but it might just happen that we learned something that would do the firm a power of good.’
‘A reprieve has been granted!’ declared Joan, smiling. ‘What a lucky man he is to have you pleading his cause!’
12
Walter did not consider himself a person easily given to self-doubt and discouragement: vigorous initiative was more his cup of tea. But sometimes these days he could not avoid the feeling that his familiar world was crumbling away at an alarming rate. No doubt the Japanese were at the root of a great deal of the present trouble in the Far East: since 1937 a veritable blizzard of edicts designed to cripple European and American interests in China had come from their puppet Government in Peking. Foreign trade had been progressively frozen out and replaced by Japanese monopolies. Look at the huge cigarette factory currently being built in Peking by the Manchuria Tobacco Company, a sinister edifice indeed when you remembered that non-Japanese cigarettes were already subject to a special discriminatory tax throughout Inner Mongolia! Or consider the way the Japanese had taken over the Peking—Mukden and Peking—Suiyan Railways without paying a cent of the interest these railways owed to the foreign bondholders who had financed them, not to mention the havoc they were wreaking throughout China with their military currency. Nor had Blackett and Webb been spared: their import-export trade with Shantung, which had once gone through Tsingtao, had been driven from there by penal anti-Western restrictions to Weihaiwei, only to have the same restrictions follow hot on their heels. Walter did not particularly blame the Japanese for taking what they could get, but he did blame the British Government for allowing them to do so with impunity.
But even without the Japanese Walter believed that his familiar world would still have been crumbling. The strikes of the past decade had changed the whole complexion of Malaya. Serious strikes had continued: Walter doubted now whether they would ever stop. The rise in the cost of living brought about by the outbreak of the war in Europe was the present cause: the workers were aware that profits had risen, too. Five months ago (December 1940) two and a half thousand tappers in the Bahau Rompin area had struck, claiming a daily rate of $1.10 for a task of 350 to 400 trees. The estate manager had promptly paid them off, which meant that they lost the barrack accommodation on the estate that went with the job. They had set up a makeshift camp in Bahau Town. When the police had come to arrest the ring-leaders a few days later crowds sympathetic to the workers had confronted them. Ugly scenes had developed in the course of which the police had opened fire, killing three workers.
Nor was that the end of it, nor likely to be for years to come, in Walter’s view. At this very moment, while he sat eating lunch in the Cricket Club with a colleague, Indian workers in the Klang District were on strike. If you had tried to tell old Webb that one day Indian estate workers would take to this strike game he would not have believed you. Indian workers, though paid less than Chinese, were habitually docile and respectful of authority. And yet now they were having to quell them with police and troops! Many of Walter’s friends at the Singapore Club were amazed at this change of spots by the Indian workers, but not Walter. He had been expecting it for some time. Because now, he knew, the changed atmosphere in the country would permit such things to happen. The old order of things was as dead as a doornail. Walter sighed and dipped a silver spoon into the pudding which crouched on his plate, a solid moulding of greyish tapioca with coconut milk and a thin, dark syrup. Gula Malacca! How that cool taste stirred memories of the old days in Singapore!
His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of a ‘boy’ with a telephone message which had been relayed from his office: Mr Webb’s condition had taken a turn for the worse. Would he come at once? Walter, perhaps in the grip of nostalgia, had drunk several beers and, unusually for him, did not feel altogether sober. He glanced around the room as he stood up: many of the other diners were in uniform and he thought : ‘I’d better not fall over and make an ass of myself in front of this crowd!’ But he managed without difficulty to negotiate the door and the hallway in a dignified manner. It was outside on the steps, beneath the red-brick Victorian portico, that he almost had a serious collision with a tall, thin and rather chinless Army officer who was entering the Club. The officer’s disapproving expression intensified into a grimace of annoyance as Walter, to prevent himself plunging head first down the steps, grasped a thin arm in its rolled-up khaki sleeve. A glance at those blue eyes and tentative moustache was enough. Although Walter, for preference, did not consort with military men he recognized this one immediately. For it was none other than General Percival who had recently taken over the military command from General Bond (Bond’s rival, Babington, had been replaced, too). But this General Percival, to Walter’s bleary eye, looked a scarcely more encouraging prospect than his predecessor.
‘Silly fool! Why don’t you watch where you’re going?’ muttered Walter under his breath as he let go of the General and hurried on down the steps in search of his car.
Before he could find it, however, he recognized a familiar figure also in uniform approaching from the direction of the Victoria Memorial Hall. It was Ehrendorf. Walter hailed him and they exchanged a few words; Walter was barely able to conceal his impatience. He declined Ehrendorf’s offer of a stengah, explaining that he must hurry to Mr Webb’s bedside as it seemed that the old man’s long resistance might now be coming to an end.
‘By the way,’ Walter permitted himself to enquire at last, ‘did you hear any more about the new buying arrangements for the Reserve Company?’
‘Why, yes, as a matter of fact.’ Ehrendorf looked somewhat uncomfortable at the question. ‘I guess I can rely on you to keep it to yourself!’ Walter reassured him, trying to seem casual.
‘Buying is to be centralized … no more private deals. All rubber exports to the United States are to be licensed. Licences will only be issued for shipping through the central buying agency and for fulfilling any outstanding forward contracts.’
‘I see,’ said Walter. ‘That’s interesting. Outstanding orders will go through? When will it begin?’
Ehrendorf did not know. ‘In a few days, I suppose.’
Walter said goodbye to Ehrendorf and climbed into the back seat of the Bentley. ‘Mohammed,’ he said presently to the syce, ‘I would like you to drop me at Collyer Quay and then to go to the Mayfair with a message for Major Archer. Tell him that I have been delayed by a very serious matter but will come as soon as I can.’ He sat back, satisfied with his decision. It was one, he knew, with which old Mr Webb would have been in perfect sympathy.
As it turned out, although it was evening before Walter had at last finished sending cables and reached the Mayfair, there had been no particular need to hurry: his old friend and partner still had not succumbed. Nor, for that matter, did there appear to have been any great change in his condition. Mr Webb still lay there, breathing noisily in his illuminated tent of white muslin. The Major explained, however, that the old man had gone through a crisis of some sort about mid-day, had appeared restless, and several times had repeated the word ‘sun’ and a number of other words too garbled to be understood, at least by the Major.
‘But the interesting thing was,’ he told Walter, ‘that Vera Chiang, who was here at the time, thought she understood that he was trying to say: “Sun Yat-sen”.’
‘Nonsense!’ cried Walter. ‘The old boy just wanted to go and prune his roses in the nude. He didn’t give tuppence for Sun Yat-sen.’ And clapping the Major cheerfully on the back Walter strode off, chuckling, through the compound in the direction of his own house; but as he went a grim thought came stealing after him through the hushed garden and pounced on him before he had reached the safety of his own walls: ‘This is how we all end up, mumbling rubbish to people who interpret it as they want!’
On the evenings that followed, while Mr Webb, now mute again, continued to lie there, and on through June, July and August of 1941, Walter’s nostalgia for the old Singapore became acute. Perhaps this was paradoxical for in the old days, about which he was less and less able to resist holding forth to Major Archer at his dying partner’s bedside, business had never boomed the way it was booming now. But in those days the atmosphere had been different, more relaxed … no, it was not simply youth, though being young undoubtedly had something to do with it. No, it was the place itself. Singapore had been different in those days. Business had been an adventure, not the grim striving for advantage it had become latterly. They had been as if on a different time scale: everything had seemed to happen more slowly, more comfortably.
Walter paused, staring up as if for enlightenment at the grey metallic blur of the ceiling fan and then down again at the billowing cocoon of the mosquito net within which lay old Mr Webb (soon to be hatched out into a better world). At one time in Singapore everyone had known everyone. Those were the days of great rambling colonial houses where the tradition of lavish hospitality lingered on from the nineteenth century. Ah well, all that had gone with the wind. In the course of time the bachelor messes, too, which the merchant houses kept going for their young chaps, had been replaced by blocks of flats. And once they had disappeared all the fun that young men used to have in the tropics had disappeared with them.
It was the development of Singapore as a great naval and military base which had started the rot. People who had no real connection with the country had flooded in. The Military had their uses, he went on, forgetting that the Major himself had been a military man in his day, but they were nomads, here today and gone tomorrow, never bothering to get to know the people or the country. What was the result of this influx? Simply that the old feeling of space and tranquillity which used to make Singapore such a pleasant place to live in had gone, and gone for ever.
‘Sylvia and I used to motor thirty or forty miles sometimes in our pyjamas to have supper with friends in Johore. That’s what I call a comfortable way to live!’
And the Major, though he would have preferred to discuss Japan’s increasingly threatening attitude in the sphere of international politics, was obliged to confess that going to a dinnerparty in pyjamas did sound to him the very model of a life of contentment: obviously in those days there was no risk of meeting maddened hordes of strikers waving parangs.
The Singapore Club in the old days was not, declared Walter on another visit a few weeks later (forestalling the Major’s attempt to ask him what he thought of Roosevelt’s proposal, just announced, that French Indo-China should be considered a neutral country from which Japan could get food and raw materials; the Major had got on well with old Mr Webb and sorely missed his chairman’s forceful views on perplexing world topics), no, it was not the mixing pot of all ages and conditions it had since become, no sir! Nowadays you might find yourself rubbing shoulders with any young twerp just out from England or some other fellow whose too careful public school accent might slip from time to time exposing heaven knew what dubious origins. But then it had been truly exclusive, the sort of place frequented by the older and more influential men in the Colony, reserved exclusively for males, of course, except for New Year’s Day when ladies were invited for lunch to eat the traditional dish: Pheasant Lucullus! Yes, the Singapore Club used to be the lair of the Tuan Besar, like this poor old chap here, and it was quite a daunting prospect for a young man to go and visit him in it.
A mere two days later, as the Major, perfectly disconsolate at being deprived of his chairman and unable to settle down to the paper work awaiting him in a very empty-seeming office, was roaming the bungalow like a dog without its master, he once more came upon Walter who had somehow stolen into the building without being seen and was lurking at the old man’s bedside.
‘Singapore had a pride in herself in those days,’ declared Walter, spotting the Major in the doorway, but then he hesitated, perhaps realizing that as an opening remark this might be considered odd. After a moment he cleared his throat and added: ‘Everything is all right here, is it, Major? If you need any help let me know and I’ll send someone down from the office.’
The Major agreed that everything was in order. Indeed, since Blackett and Webb managed the day-to-day running of the Mayfair there was little for him to do except play cards with Dupigny (for the Frenchman, now penniless and a refugee in overcrowded Singapore, had been given shelter in one of the Mayfair’s many rooms) and at fixed hours to open up the recreation hut which old Mr Webb had patriotically built in the grounds for the troops flooding into the Colony (fortunately, no troops ever put in an appearance to make use of it). But though life had pursued its usual uneventful course at the headquarters of the Mayfair Rubber Company, there had been some alarming developments on the international scene: in response to the reported occupation by Japanese troops of the whole of Indo-China, America, Britain and Holland had frozen Japanese assets. One did not have to be an economist to see that this put Japan in a serious plight. Would this action make the Japanese see reason or would it light the blue-paper to a Far Eastern war? The Major was anxious to have Walter’s opinion about this (he had already had Dupigny’s which was deeply pessimistic, but then so were all Dupigny’s opinions), but Walter, brushing aside this prospective clashing of continents, was impatient to give the Major some idea of the pride that Singapore had had in herself. Lifting one corner of the mosquito net to peer at the grey, rigid form of his old friend he exclaimed: ‘My word! Before the Great War we came second to none. After it, too, for a time.’
Taking the Major’s arm he explained with a chuckle how the great Russian dancer, Pavlova, had come to Singapore expecting to find herself dancing at the Town Hall theatre, only to find that it had already been booked by the Amateur Dramatic Society. Her manager had suggested that the Amateur Dramatic Society would not mind postponing its performance of Gilbert and Sullivan so that the great ballerina, before whom grovelled the most refined, most perfumed, most diamond-glittering, evening-dressed audiences in the world, might dance on the best stage available in the Straits. Ah, but as it turned out the Amateur Dramatic Society did mind! They had their pride. They had been founded over a hundred years ago. They saw no reason why they should surrender the Victoria Hall to a foreign artiste … and so she had to go off and make the best of a cramped little stage at the old German Club. And Walter laughed so long and loud that the ceiling rang with his laughter and even the melancholy Major looked amused … but had Walter’s laughter concealed a muffled cry from the direction of the mosquito net? The Major cast an uneasy glance in that direction. A strange rictus was twisting the old man’s lips. A mumbled cry broke from them which might have been: ‘Sun Yatsen!’ (or might not, it was hard to tell).
The Major freed himself from Walter’s grasp. It surely could not be … or could it? With an exclamation the Major sprang to his chairman’s side, whipping aside the film of mosquito netting. But too late! That smile or grimace, whichever it had been, that strangled cry, whatever it had meant, had been his last.
‘Young Matthew will be too late after all,’ observed Walter sadly. ‘And he’s due to arrive any day now.’
>‘If you have an hour to spare,’ Walter said to Joan on the following day, ‘I should like to show you something.’
Together father and daughter installed themselves in the back of the Bentley. Walter had evidently already given instructions to the syce for they set off without more ado in the direction of the river. Walter was more silent and subdued than usual and Joan found this whole expedition somewhat mysterious. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘To look at a warehouse,’ he replied briefly but said no more. Only when the motor-car was nudging its way along the crowded streets beside the river did Walter again break his silence, to ask Joan if she had seen Ehrendorf.
‘No. I’ve finished with him,’ said Joan with a smile.
‘Ah,’ said Walter. ‘Good enough.’ He leaned forward to tap the syce on the shoulder. With considerable difficulty on account of the lorries being loaded and unloaded at the wharves where lighters and tong-kangs clustered several deep they had reached a tall brick godown at a bend in the river. Apart from the fact that it was built of brick in a conservative style and bore an inscription in white letters: Blackett and Webb Limited, recently repainted for the jubilee celebrations, there was nothing very remarkable about it.
‘You may wonder why I brought you here,’ said Walter, smiling now. ‘As you see, it’s just a godown, nothing very special. But to me this building is rather important because it’s the first we put up here in Singapore and, incidentally, an exact replica of Webb’s first building in Rangoon. I used to come here a lot and day-dream as a young man. Not that old Webb used to give me much time for day-dreaming. There’s a little office up above … Let’s go up if you don’t mind getting your frock dusty.’
They stepped through a small door cut in the massive wooden gates facing the road. After the heat and sunshine of the road it seemed dark and cool inside. Dust sparkled in a shaft of sunlight which blazed at their feet and cast a dim light back over the rest of the cavernous building, illuminating the bales of rubber which rose around them.
‘I used to think I’d bring Monty here one day but I doubt if he’d understand what the place means to me.’
They climbed a swaying ladder, Joan going first, to a dim ledge that hung in the shadows above them. As he followed her Walter noticed his daughter’s strong thighs beneath her frock and thought: ‘Yes, she’s a real Blackett. She has pluck. Her mother would never climb a ladder like that.’ When he had reached the ledge Walter led the way through a maze of rubber bales to a little store-keeper’s office with a window over the river. ‘Here we are,’ he announced. ‘This is my little nest. You have the chair. I’ll sit on the table. Well, my dear, the reason I asked you to come here isn’t only sentimental, though that may be part of it. The fact is that the business is at a crossroads now that Mr Webb is dead and I am going to need your help. As you know, Matthew Webb who is due out here shortly will inherit his father’s share of the business. Well, we don’t know what he’s like exactly but as far as I can make out he’s a somewhat muddled person. We don’t want him rocking the boat, therefore … No, Joan, just let me finish … therefore it would suit me, putting it in a nut-shell, and I hope you won’t mind me suggesting this … it would suit me if he found you as attractive as, let’s say, his chum Ehrendorf does … Yes, in a moment, Joan, but please let me have my say first. Now I want you to understand that I’m not asking you for anything more, though I shall be pleased if you find a good husband one of these days … Just make him find you attractive, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how although … and this is something that I have never told anyone, not even your mother … the one sure way that a woman can make a man lose his head is by blowing hot and cold, you know the sort of thing, loving one moment, indifferent the next, that sort of feminine way of carrying on is something, let me tell you straight, that a man finds irresistible Well, there you are, but before you give me your answer just let me repeat two things. Firstly, the business could well be vulnerable to foolish behaviour by Matthew Webb and, secondly, you don’t have to marry him if you don’t want to. It will be enough if you get him under your thumb for a couple of years. There!’
‘But Father!’ exclaimed Joan, laughing and jumping up from her chair to give her father a hug. ‘How old-fashioned you are to deliver such a speech! I took it for granted long ago that you’d want me to marry Matthew for the sake of the firm. And the answer is “yes”, of course. I don’t care what he’s like! You took such a long time to pop the question. I was beginning to think you’d never ask!’
Part Two
13
On account of the hazards of war-time, the convoys that were diverted without explanation, the passenger vessels that were commandeered for the movement of troops, the seats on aeroplanes usurped at the last moment by august officials, not to mention the spies that lurked everywhere and studied every mortal thing that moved on the face of the earth through field-glasses or kept their treacherous ears open while quaffing pints in dockside pubs, Matthew Webb had been frustrated again and again in his efforts to reach Singapore. The result was that the month of November was already well advanced before he found himself on the last stages of his journey. By that time, though his impending arrival had not been forgotten by the Blacketts (Walter brooded on it constantly and so, presumably, did Joan), it had assumed less momentous proportions than in the first days after Mr Webb’s death. Walter could see the matter now more in perspective, for the old man had been buried for almost a month, sad news which had been conveyed to Matthew in Colombo where he had been stranded interminably until Walter could pull a string or two with the RAF. Moreover, in the frenzied commercial atmosphere of Singapore at the time, exacerbated by the bewildering arrival of more and yet more troops from Australia and India, who could manage to spare time for such domestic, or dynastic, matters, or even, if it comes to that, think of the same thing for two moments running? But at last Matthew was about to arrive.
The Avro Anson which for an hour or more had been following the wandering dark-green edge of the coast now swung out to sea before turning north-west in a wide curve that would bring it back over Singapore. For a few moments nothing could be seen but an expanse of water so dazzling that it hurt Matthew’s eyes as he looked down on it from the cabin window. Then, as the Anson floated in over the harbour in which lay three grey warships and a multitude of other vessels, over the railway station with its track curving away across the island to the Causeway, and over a number of miniature buildings scarcely big enough to house a colony of fleas, it began to wobble in a dreadful, sickening fashion, and to lose height. Presently, the Singapore River (which was really nothing but a tidal creek) crept from under the wing, ominously bulging near its mouth like a snake which had just swallowed a rabbit and then trailing back inland to the thinnest of tails on the far side of the city.
Next there came an open green space on which a fleas’ cricket match was taking place and then the toy spire of a cathedral, aptly set at the intersection of diagonal paths forming the cross of St Andrew, with one or two flea-worshippers scurrying over its green sward to offer up their evening prayers, for the sun, though still brightly fingering the cabin of the aircraft, was already casting deep shadows over the cathedral lawns … But again the plane dropped sickeningly and the wing on one side tilted up in the most alarming way, so that even though Matthew continued to look down he could still see nothing but sky. This dismaying sensation continued until the plane had completed a full circle and was coming in from the sea again with level wings. But even so, every few moments the floor would seem to drop away and when Matthew tried to interest himself, as a diversion, in MacFadyean’s History of the Rubber Industry which lay open on his lap, he was promptly obliged to jettison even this light work from his thoughts, simply to keep the plane airborne.
By now they were distressingly near the surface. He saw waves, then a junk floating past the cabin window with a thick-veined sail, then a flotsam of human heads and waving hands. Somehow or other the wheels cleared the roof of the swimming club at Tanjong Rhu (Matthew would have thought they were too low to have cleared anything at all). A few more perilous wobbles and the wheels consented to touch down with a bump and a brief howl, followed by another bump as the tail touched. The journey had been a strain: he had never been up in an aeroplane before. But now he felt relieved and pleased with himself; soon he would be describing the experience to his earthbound friends.
‘Don’t forget to watch out for the Singapore Grip!’ shouted one of the crew after him in a clamour of cheerful goodbyes and laughter as he jumped stiffly to the ground.
Now he found himself standing on the tarmac, a little unsteadily on account of the equatorial gale from the still turning propellors. Uncertain which way to walk he peered around in the haze of evening sunlight. The heat was suddenly stifling: he was clad in it from head to toe, as if wrapped in steaming towels.
A figure in a white flannel suit was hurrying towards him into the slip-stream, trouser legs flapping, jacket ballooning and one large hand clapped on to a khaki sun-helmet to keep it on his head. The other hand was held out even from some yards’ distance towards Matthew who, a moment later, found himself shaking it.
‘You’re Matthew Webb, aren’t you? I’m Monty Blackett. I expect you’ve heard of me … Hm, now let me see, I don’t think we have met before, have we? Never mind, anyway. It doesn’t make any difference. We’ll get to know each other in a jiffy, I expect. Can’t very well help it in a hole like this.’ Monty was a burly young man about the same age as Matthew but his face had a heavy-set appearance which made him look older: an impression reinforced when he removed his sunhelmet for a moment to scratch his head by the fact that his hair was receding. Matthew wondered whether the black tie he was wearing, which had been blown back over his shoulder, was a mark of respect for his father or merely conventional Singapore attire.
After the two young men had exchanged greetings, which they had to shout because of the noise from the engines, there was an awkward pause between them.
‘Look, it’s been raining,’ Matthew shouted, nodding at the shivering pools of rainwater that lay here and there on the tarmac; at the same time he smiled at himself, thinking that that was not what he had meant to say at all.
‘What?’ bellowed Monty, stepping forward and giving Matthew an odd look. ‘Yes, I’ll say it has, it rains almost every bloody day at the moment, I’ll have you know. Come on now,’ he added, ‘enough of the weather.’ He took Matthew’s arm to steer him away from that whining aeroplane which only then agreed to arrest its motors with a few last chugs and swishes. ‘Well, well, same old Matthew,’ he chuckled cautiously, though, strictly speaking, he could not have known very much about the ‘old Matthew’ at all, since they had never met before. Once more he darted an odd, sideways look at Matthew as if trying to weigh him up, while, still chuckling vaguely, he conducted him to the terminal building, a surprisingly up-to-date construction with control tower and observation decks, somewhat resembling a cinema. Matthew remarked on its modern appearance. Singapore must be quite …
‘Oh yeah,’ agreed Monty indifferently. Brightening a little, he added: ‘They have a restaurant there. You don’t feel like some oysters, do you? They fly them in from Hawkesbury River in Australia. Look, that’s not such a bad idea …’
‘Well, not just at the moment, thanks,’ said Matthew, surprised. Monty’s enthusiasm subsided with a grimace. Matthew, still groping for a topic of conversation, said: ‘I must say, I don’t know how you stand this heat.’
‘Heat? This is the coolest part of the day. Wait and see how hot it can get here. I say, is something the matter?’ For Matthew had suddenly stiffened.
‘I think that man is making off with my bags.’ Like many people whose natural inclination is to think the best of people Matthew found it necessary, when travelling, to remain dramatically on the alert to defend himself against malefactors.
‘He bloody well better had be,’ grinned Monty. ‘Otherwise he’ll get hell from me!’
‘You mean …?’
‘Of course. He’s our syce … you know, chauffeur. Now don’t worry, old boy. Just trust old Monty. Everything’s organized. Come on, Sis is waiting for us in the car …’ And with that he led the way out of the building uttering a strange, smothered groan as he went. Matthew hurried after him, filled with pleasure at the prospect of seeing little Kate, to whom he had taken a considerable liking in the course of their one short meeting.
‘Monty, I must thank you for getting me on that plane. Otherwise I might have been stuck in Ceylon for ever, what with the war and so forth.’
‘Think nothing of it. We just pulled a few of the right strings and it was a stroke of luck that there happened to be an empty plane coming our way. You see, the point is this …’
Now they had reached the motor-car and Monty broke off to give the driver some instructions. The latter murmured: ‘Yes, Tuan,’ and stowed Matthew’s suitcases in the back of the vehicle; this was a huge open Pontiac with white tyres, a wide running-board and deep leather seats. A young woman whom Matthew failed to recognize was half reclining on the back seat, holding a cigarette holder in a studied pose. She was wearing a simple white cotton frock and a green turban with two knots which stood up, Hollywood style, like a rabbit’s ears. The haft of a tennis racket was gripped between her bare calves and its glimmering strings between her pretty, pink knees. She ignored Matthew’s greeting and said to Monty: ‘Let’s scram before I die of heat.’ Matthew, disappointed to find this person instead of Kate, tried not to stare at her: this must be Joan Blackett, Kate’s elder sister. Kate had spoken of her as of a superior being, sophisticated beyond measure, terrorizing the young men of the Colony with her irresistible appeal, breaking hearts with as little compunction as if they had been chipped dinner-plates.
‘But the point is this …’ Monty was repeating, a trifle more sonorously than before, now that they were comfortably installed in the Pontiac one on each side of Joan. There was another pause, however, while the young men each lit a Craven A.
‘The point is this,’ he said yet again, puffing out an authoritative cloud of blue smoke. As he did so, Matthew found himself wondering whether Monty Blackett might not on occasion be ever so slightly ponderous and self-important, and though, of course, it had been kind of Monty to come and meet him, nevertheless, an ungrateful voice whispered in Matthew’s ear: ‘What is the point?’ and he glanced quickly at Joan to see whether she was sharing his impatience. But she was looking moodily in another direction… towards the wind-sock waltzing impatiently in the breeze at the end of the aerodrome, or towards a large American limousine with Stars and Stripes fluttering from its bonnet which had come into the airport drive at great speed with a squeal of tyres as it negotiated the bend but was now nosing uncertainly in the direction of the terminal building while the driver made up his mind which way to go. Presently, she turned her turbaned profile and her grey eyes fixed themselves intently on his face. He stirred uneasily.
‘The point is, Matthew, that at the moment the blighters are so anxious for our rubber that they go out of their way to help whenever they can. They’re not usually so helpful, I can assure you. And it doesn’t stop the bloody bureaucrats, those clever merchants in Whitehall, making a nuisance of themselves whenever they get the chance. We’re constantly battling with penpushers in some ministry or other a few thousands miles away.’ He added sententiously: ‘You’ll soon find that out when you have a look at the files in your father’s office. Now what’s all this? What does this cove want?’
While Monty had been speaking the American limousine which had been prowling about uncertainly for a while had at last made up its mind to approach the Pontiac. It came to a stop beside them and an American soldier slid out from behind the wheel and held the door open.
‘Oh lumme, it’s him,’ said Monty, glancing at Joan.
‘Great Scott!’ exclaimed Matthew. ‘I know that bloke. We were at Oxford together. His name’s Jim Ehrendorf … He’s a really wonderful fellow, you must meet him. I was meaning to try and look him up when I got here and now … but wait a sec … Of course, you already know him, don’t you?’ And Matthew clapped a hand to his brow.
‘Yes, we do,’ said Monty. ‘The thing is …’ But without waiting to hear what the thing was, Matthew had leaped out of the Pontiac and was warmly shaking hands with the smiling Ehrendorf. They exchanged a few words, both talking at once. Joan and Monty watched them blankly from the motor-car.
‘I thought I wouldn’t get here in time,’ Ehrendorf was saying as they turned back towards the Pontiac, ‘and I’m tied up for the rest of the day. In fact, I wouldn’t have heard you were arriving at all if it hadn’t been for the chance of meeting up with Walter downtown. Hiya Monty, Hiya Joan!’
‘Hiya,’ said Monty. Joan showed no more sign of acknowledging Ehrendorf’s presence than she had Matthew’s. She looked irritable and said again: ‘For God’s sake, let’s scram … It’s so hot.’
‘How pretty you look, Joan, in your vêtement de sport,’ said Ehrendorf in a way that managed to be both casual and rather tense. ‘ “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” ’
‘I’d far rather you didn’t, if you don’t mind,’ replied Joan sullenly. ‘Let’s go, for God’s sake.’
‘I know his type,’ said Matthew. ‘Next thing, he’ll be trying to tell you you’re “more lovely and more temperate”.’ Both he and Ehrendorf laughed but the two Blacketts did not share their amusement; indeed they both looked rather put out.
Ehrendorf continued to stand uncertainly beside the motorcar, gazing at Joan, who looked away petulantly. Matthew took out a handkerchief, removed his glasses and mopped his streaming face. The heat was dreadful, despite the breeze and the approach of night.
‘I’ve got it,’ said Ehrendorf. ‘Why don’t I ride in with you guys. I’ll tell my driver to follow and then I can go on from there.’ Without waiting for approval Ehrendorf spoke to his driver and then installed himself in the front seat of the Pontiac. Matthew climbed in beside Joan again.
Now the Pontiac was in motion at last; an air of interrogation, of words unspoken, formed over it as it swung out of the aerodrome gates. From near at hand there suddenly came a clamour of music, laughter and singing. A thousand coloured lights twinkled in the gathering dusk through a grove of trees that lay just to their right in the fork of the two roads. Keeling over like a yacht tacking against the wind the Pontiac turned away from the lights on to the Kallang Road.
‘That’s one of the sights,’ Monty said, pointing back with his cigarette shedding sparks. ‘A sort of funfair called The Happy World. They’re going to catch hell, though, unless they do something about blacking out those lights.’
‘There’s a better place called The Great World on Kim Seng Road on the other side of town,’ said Ehrendorf, turning to grin at Matthew. ‘You’ll be able to dance with lovely taxi-girls there. Twenty-five cents a throw.’
Matthew decided not to ask for the moment what a ‘taxi-girl’ was. Instead he said: ‘You didn’t have that natty moustache in Geneva, did you, Jim? And what have you done to your hand?’ For Ehrendorf, though he no longer wore a bandage, still had plaster around his fingers. But to Matthew’s surprise these questions only seemed to embarrass Ehrendorf (was he sensitive about his moustache?) who murmured vaguely that it was nothing, he’d stupidly burned himself a few weeks earlier, and then, without further comment, turned his evidently sensitive moustache to face forward again while he examined the road ahead through the windscreen.
Meanwhile the Pontiac had howled over a bridge and was careering through the twilight at an alarming speed. Every now and then as an obstruction loomed up the driver would brake and swerve violently. The horn blared without pause. The blurred forms of rickshaws, motor-cars and bullock-carts receded rapidly on either side. Once, to avoid a traffic jam which suddenly presented itself, they mounted a verge and without slackening speed thrashed through some sort of vegetation, evidently someone’s garden.
‘Good God!’ thought Matthew. ‘Do they always drive like this?’
‘People in Britain seem to find it amazing,’ Monty was saying, his thoughts still on their earlier conversation, ‘that we should know more about running the rubber business than they do in Whitehall. What they don’t seem to realize is that if we suffer here in Singapore, everything suffers, and that includes their wizard War Effort. It’s so hard to get anything done with these bloody civil servants. Sometimes I wonder if they haven’t all got infantile paralysis!’ And Monty bent his wrist, hunched his shoulders and twisted his face into a highly amusing imitation of a cripple. But Matthew found it hard to smile: he had somehow never found imitations of cripples very entertaining. Monty did not notice this lack of response, however, and shed a great bark of laughter into the humid, sweltering twilight.
Becoming serious again Monty said, pointing at a group of dim buildings on the left: ‘That’s the Firestone factory where last summer’s strikes were started by the Commies. Thanks to the bungling of our little men in the Government they very nearly turned it into a general strike.’ Matthew, who had been beginning to fear that he and Monty might have no common interest, became attentive and ventured to remark that he was interested, not only in political strikes and the relations of native workers to European employers, but also in … well, the ‘colonial experience’ as a whole. But Monty’s response was disappointing.
‘Oh, you’re interested in the “colonial experience”, are you?’ he mumbled indifferently. ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place. You’ll get a basinful of it here, all right.’
Ehrendorf glanced round quickly but without catching Matthew’s eye. His glance, indeed, got no further than Joan’s tennis racket still tightly gripped between her knees as she lolled back against the leather seat: he stared at the racket with great intensity, but only for a moment. Then his moustache was dividing the breeze again.
For some time the spinning back and forth of the Pontiac’s steering-wheel as they swerved to avoid other vehicles had caused the three young people on the back seat to sway from side to side. Joan, because she was in the middle and had less to hold on to, tended to slide more than the others and already once or twice Matthew had found himself pressed against her soft body while she struggled to recover. Now, however, as the Pontiac negotiated a wide curve with muttering tyres and Joan was once more thrown up against him, she appeared to abandon the unequal struggle: she simply lay against him with her head on his shoulder. Matthew wondered whether to push her off but decided it might not seem polite: better to wait for a curve in the opposite direction to do the job for him. In a few moments the car straightened its course again, which should have allowed her to slide back towards her brother, but to his surprise she remained where she was, sprawled against him. And even when, presently, off-side tyres howling like souls in torment, they entered a curve in the opposite direction, she still remained firmly glued to his side, as if all the laws of physics had been suspended in her favour. Then he really did begin to wonder, because that surely could not be right.
Matthew licked his lips, perplexed. He was not quite sure what to make of it all. The truth was that he felt too hot already without having someone pressed against him. He was very much tempted to shove her away to allow the air to circulate. Not that he found the sensation of her body against him altogether disagreeable, he had to admit. But still, it was a bit awkward. Ah, now he caught a tantalizing breath of French perfume on the rushing tropical evening.
‘Watch out for that tennis racket, Sis,’ said Monty with a leer.
Matthew glanced at the turbaned head beside him but Joan showed no sign of having heard her brother’s remark. Nor had Ehrendorf apparently. At any rate, only the neatly barbered back of his head continued to be visible.
Thinking that perhaps some conversation might revive Joan sufficiently to unglue her from his side Matthew asked: ‘Does anyone happen to know what the Singapore Grip is? The RAF blokes in the plane kept telling me to watch out for it but they wouldn’t tell me what it actually was!’ But as a conversational opening this proved a failure. Nobody replied or showed any sign of having heard. ‘How deuced odd they all are!’ thought Matthew crossly. ‘And what’s the matter with Jim Ehrendorf?’ He was tired from his journey, too tired to make an effort with people who were not prepared to make an effort back.
Monty, meanwhile, had pulled the brim of his sun-helmet over his eyes, turned up his collar, stuck his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and was saying in a hoarse, gangster voice: ‘Keep your heads down, you guys. The men from the Ministry of Supply are after us!’ Again the Pontiac shed a great bark of laughter as it raced on into the city, leaving it to float behind among the padding rickshaw coolies who formed a slow stream on either side of the road.
14
Weariness caused Matthew to give up the struggle for a while; he merely lay back against the sighing leather-clad springs. He could not think what was the matter with Ehrendorf who might have been hypnotized the way he continued to gaze stolidly at the road ahead: this was quite unlike the gay and talkative person Matthew had known in Oxford and Geneva.
‘I suppose everyone here is worried about these talks with the Japs in Washington,’ he said presently, hoping again to initiate a conversation. But Ehrendorf still made no reply and Monty, who did not appear to have heard of them, merely asked: ‘What talks?’
Surprised, Matthew explained that Admiral Nomura, the Japanese Ambassador in Washington, had been having talks with the American Government. The Americans wanted the Japs to move their troops out of Indo-China and to agree to peace in the Pacific; the Japs wanted the Americans to stop helping Chiang Kai-shek in their war against China and to unfreeze their assets. Things would look grim if they didn’t agree. That was why he had expected that people in Singapore might be worried.
‘I suppose some people may have the wind up,’ said Monty indifferently.
Matthew decided to give up once more and let events take their course. While he lay slumped in the corner of the seat with a young woman sprawled on his shoulder like a hot compress, one curious picture after another trembled before his eyes, reminding him of the ‘magic lantern’ he had played with as a child. One moment the Pontiac was grumbling and nudging its way through a narrow street hung with banners of Chinese ideographs, the next it was speeding down a wide avenue between silver slopes which flashed and winked at him and proved to be great banks of fish (Matthew was glad of the speed: the stench was so powerful it made you clutch your collar and roll your eyeballs back into your brain). He peered in wonder at the glistening naked bodies of the men working by oil lamps to gut and salt these silvery Himalayas of fish but the next moment again the Pontiac had transformed itself into a stately barge forging it way over a smoky, azure river … Here and there Chinese waded head and shoulders above the blue billows, which presently grew transparent and correspondingly thickened into a darker blue empyrean hanging a few feet overhead; through this blue canopy, like cherubim, disembodied Chinese heads peered down from balconies at the Pontiac making its slow progress beneath.
‘This is the street of the charcoal burners. The bloody Chinese live fifty to a room here in some places.’
Now the clouds of smoke had rolled away to reveal that they were in another, quite different street where from every window and balcony there swung pots of ferns and baskets of flowers. Strings of dim, multi-coloured lanterns hung everywhere. ‘It’s time this lot got weaving with their black-out, too,’ said Monty, and his eyes glittered like cutlery as they roved the balconies above. Suddenly Matthew saw that in the heart of each display of lanterns and flowers there was a beautiful woman set like a jewel.
‘Did we have to come this way, Monty?’ grumbled Joan, removing herself from Matthew’s shoulder. ‘Why didn’t we go along Beach Road?’ Ehrendorf stirred at last and looked around with an uncomfortable smile; meanwhile, the Pontiac continued to advance with Joan firmly sandwiched between the two perspiring Englishmen on the back seat. Certain of the women on the balconies above stuck languorous poses, or stretched out a slender leg as if to straighten a stocking. One idly lifted her skirt as if to check that her underwear was all in order (alas, she appeared to have forgotten it altogether); another forced a breast to bulge out of its hiding and palped it thoughtfully.
‘Look here, Monty,’ Joan protested, ‘this is a bit thick. You did this on purpose.’
‘Did what on purpose?’
‘You know perfectly well. And it’s not very clever.’
‘In Singapore you can see things they don’t mention at posh finishing schools,’ exulted Monty, ‘but that’s no reason to get in a bate.’ He added for Matthew’s benefit: ‘This is respectable compared with Lavender Street yonder where the troops go. You could have a “colonial experience” there all right!’
So wide was the Pontiac, so narrow the streets of this part of the city, that it was a miracle they could pass through them at all. Even so, they frequently had to slow to a walking pace while the syce made some fine decisions, an inch on this side, an inch on that. On one such occasion a figure sprang suddenly out of the twilight and landed with a thump on the running-board causing Matthew to flinch back, startled. But the figure proved to be only a small bundle of skin and bone wrapped in rags, a Chinese boy of six or seven years of age. This child clung to the side of the motor-car with one small grubby hand while he cupped the other under Matthew’s nose, at the same time dancing up and down on the running-board with a dreadful urgency. But more distressing still, the boy began a rapid, artificial panting like that of a wounded animal.
The Pontiac had cleared the last of the narrow streets and could now accelerate … but still the child clung on, panting more desperately than ever. Meanwhile, the syce was steering with one hand and using the other to reach behind Ehrendorf and hammer at the little fingers gripping the chassis.
‘Stop!’ cried Matthew to the driver. ‘Stop! … Make him stop!’ he shouted at Ehrendorf. But Ehrendorf sat as if in a trance while the Pontiac hurtled through the dusk swaying violently, the child panting, the syce cursing and hammering.
‘No father, no mother, no makan, no whisky soda!’ howled the child.
Monty had calmly selected a couple of coins from his pocket and was holding them out, almost in the child’s reach, and making him grab for them with his free hand. Having enjoyed this game for a little he negligently tossed the coins out of the speeding car. A moment later the boy dropped off the running-board and vanished into the rushing darkness in their wake.
‘That’s one of their favourite tricks. The word makan means “grub” by the way, and you could probably do with some yourself, I should think. We thought we’d take you first to the Mayfair to leave your things and then on to our house for some supper.’
They were now on a wider thoroughfare; in front of them rattled a green trolley-bus: from the tips of its twin poles a cascade of blue-white sparks dribbled against the darkening sky. Despite the advance of darkness the heat seemed only to increase. The sun had long since dropped out of sight somewhere behind Sumatra to the west but in the sky it had left a vast striated blanket of magenta which seemed to radiate a heat of its own like the bars of an electric grill.
Soon they were on a long straight road, still lined with Chinese shophouses but with here and there an occasional block of European shops or offices. This was Orchard Road, Monty explained, and that drive that curved away to the right led up to Government House. The large white building a little further along was the Cold Storage: in there homesick Britons could buy food that reminded them of home.
Presently they turned off Orchard Road and found themselves in a residential district of winding, tree-lined streets and detached bungalows with now and then a small block of flats set amidst tennis courts. They lurched up a sharply curving slope past a tiny banana plot.
‘It may not be much … but given the hordes of brass hats commandeering living quarters in Singapore these days one is lucky to find a roof at all. Here we are, anyway.’
The Pontiac keeled over sharply and pulled off the road with groaning tyres. The Mayfair Building was a vast and rambling bungalow built on a score of fat, square pillars. Because the ground here was on something of a slope these pillars grew taller as they approached the front of the building, exaggerating their perspective and giving them the appearance of a platoon on the march beneath an enormous burden. The bungalow itself was encased in louvred wooden shutters and open balconies, along the sides of which partly unrolled blinds of split-bamboo hung beneath the great jutting eaves. The apex of the bungalow’s roof of loose red tiles was left open in the manner of a dovecot to allow warm air to escape, and was crowned by a second, smaller roof of red tiles. Despite the metropolitan grandeur of its name the Mayfair Building had a slightly decrepit air.
While Joan performed a quick and efficient inspection of herself in a hand-mirror, Matthew got out of the car and prepared to follow Monty.
‘I won’t come in with you, Matthew,’ Ehrendorf said. ‘I’m busy right now but I’ll see you later. We’ll get together real soon, OK?’ Now that he, too, had got out of the car and stood there, an elegant figure in his uniform, it seemed to Matthew that he looked more his former cheerful and confident self. They shook hands, agreed to telephone each other and then Matthew followed Monty around the side of the building to the main entrance. Here he glimpsed a tennis court, disused, from whose baked mud surface giant thistles had grown up and now waited like silent skeleton players in the gloom. Beyond the tennis court the compound was walled in on each side by a powerful tropical undergrowth and the encroaching jungle.
Gesturing in the darkness Monty said: ‘There’s a recreation hut and a lot of gym stuff over there. I expect you know that your father was keen on that sort of thing? What? You didn’t? He was very partial to rippling muscles and gleaming torsos.’ Monty chuckled cautiously. ‘This way. Watch your step.’
They made their way up protesting wooden steps to a front door that stood open and was plainly two or three inches too big for its frame. As Monty dragged it open further the hinges shrieked. He went inside. Matthew, having paused to polish his glasses, was about to follow him when he heard a faint scuffling sound from the darkness on the other side of the house. He heard the sound of heavy, indignant breathing, then silence followed and, after a few moments, a long, melancholy sigh, barely audible against the hum of the tropical night. In another moment he heard footsteps and Joan emerged from the gloom.
The interior of the bungalow exuded the unloved air of houses that have had to endure temporary occupation by a succession of transient lodgers. Matthew surmised that his father had not taken a great interest in his material surroundings.
‘What a dump!’ said Joan, wrinkling her perfect nose as she peered in.
‘It’s seen better days, I admit,’ agreed Monty. In the obscurity Matthew sensed rather than saw that the furiture was chipped, the paintwork peeling and the woodwork so warped that drawers and cupboards would no longer quite open, nor windows altogether close. He was surprised to think that it was in these modest surroundings that his father, a man of wealth, had spent so much of the latter part of his life. ‘Perhaps the old chap was not such an ogre after all.’
As he advanced into a wide verandah room scattered with darker masses which might be furniture, two floorboards sang in counterpoint under his shoes. A middle-aged man who had evidently been brooding by himself on the verandah in the now almost complete darkness came on a serpentine course through the sagging rattan furniture to meet them, snapping on a light switch as he passed and bathing the room in an electric light which at first flickered like a cinema projector but presently settled down to a more steady glow.
‘Major Brendan Archer,’ said Monty casting his sun-helmet away into the shadows. ‘This is Matthew Webb.’ He added to Matthew: ‘The Major has been more or less running things since your father’s illness.’
Matthew and the Major shook hands. The Major came vaguely to attention and said indistinctly: ‘I’d like to say how sorry … hm … your father …’ With a muffled bark indicating emotion he stood at ease again The Major had a mild, vaguely worried appearance. His very thin hair had been carefully smoothed with water and brushed straight back, revealing only the finest of partings. It was supplemented by a rather doleful moustache.
‘I see you’re looking at my moustache,’ the Major said, causing Matthew to start guiltily. ‘That blighter Cheong got at it with the scissors. He said he’d be careful but of course he got carried away. Took too much off one side.’ It was true. The Major’s moustache, when you looked at it, was definitely lopsided. The young people peered at it respectfully.
‘How sensitive people are about their moustaches out here, thought Matthew. ‘It must be the climate.’
‘Why don’t you prune the other side a bit?’ suggested Monty. ‘Even it up?’
‘Mustn’t look like Hitler.’
‘No, of course not,’ agreed Monty. To Matthew he explained: ‘The Major’s been trying to re-enlist for active service. He can’t be bothered with the Japs. Defend the old homeland, eh, Major?’
‘Oh, I’m afraid the war will be over by the time I get back to England. One worries, you know, about people at home in the air-raids. I have a couple of young nieces in London … well, not really nieces … more god-daughters than nieces, in South Kensington, actually, though strictly speaking …’
Monty interrupted: ‘You don’t say so, Major? I’ve heard that the entire might of the Luftwaffe is being thrown against South Kensington.’ To Matthew he said: ‘Come on, I’ll show you around quickly and then we’ll beetle off.’ They left the Major looking baffled.
‘Old bore,’ said Monty.
As they made their way round the bungalow Matthew was conscious of Joan’s blank eyes and neatly plucked eyebrows turning towards him from time to time, but she still had not addressed a word directly to him. Swinging louvred shutters divided one room from the next, there seemed to be no doors here except for the bathroom and one elaborately marked ‘Board of Directors’. They peered into his room which contained nothing except a long, deeply scratched table and a dozen or so chairs. Above the table a huge electric fan laboured noisily. Monty switched on the light at the door. A wiry, middle-aged man clad only in shorts lay stretched on the table, asleep with his mouth open. Monty led the way over to inspect him, saying: ‘This is Dupigny. I gather he’s supposed to have some sort of job here, God knows what, though. Hey, wake up!’ Monty shook him. ‘François is what is known as a “sleeping partner”,’ he jeered. ‘Come on, wake up! The Japs have landed in the garden!’ But the man on the table merely uttered a groan and turned over. They retreated, Monty saying over his shoulder: ‘François used to be a big-wig in the Indo-Chinese Government until Pétain booted him out. He’s convinced Jap parachutists are going to land any moment.’
Now at last they were approaching the rooms which had been set aside for the Chairman: a swinging door upholstered in green felt had once divided this part of the bungalow from the rest but now, removed from its hinges, it was merely propped against the wall. Beyond it, nevertheless, one could discern an improvement in the quality and condition of the furnishings. First, they came to an outer room used as an office. Matthew had expected a room that was perfectly bleak and bare of ornament, to match his own view of his father’s character. To his surprise the walls were crowded with pictures and photographs of all kinds. He barely had time to glance at them; besides, the presence of the young Blacketts inhibited him. But what was he to make of this sepia photograph showing his father perhaps thirty years ago, holding a tennis racket and with his arm cheerfully around the neck of his smiling partner or opponent? Or of this one of his father good-humouredly presenting something to a group of neatly suited Chinese, each of them with his trousers at half mast? Surely the old tyrant had not smiled more than once in his entire life!
They peered into the bedroom which lay beyond, a great high-ceilinged room which contained two massive Edwardian wardrobes, a narrow iron bed with a mosquito net hanging knotted above it like a furled sail, and a bedside table on which medicine bottles still crowded around the stem of a table-light. Matthew, harrowed by the sight of these medicine bottles, withdrew to the office once more. Joan had remained in the background plucking with finger and thumb at the back of her turban. The driver had brought in Matthew’s suitcases and now carried them into the bedroom.
‘There should be a Chinese boy around somewhere. He’ll unpack for you. Let’s go and get something to eat.’
A balding young man was hovering diffidently at the door of the office as they passed through. He cleared his throat when he saw Monty and said: ‘Monty, I wonder could I have a quick word with you?’
‘No, you bloody can’t. I’m busy. And what are you doing here, anyway? You’re supposed to be out on the bloody estate. We don’t pay you to hang around Singapore.’
‘I just came in this evening, Monty. You see, it’s rather important and I had already mentioned it some time ago to Mr Webb before his illness …’
‘You just came in this evening, did you, Turner? Well, you can bugger off back this evening, too. If you aren’t satisfied with your pay you can send us a letter of resignation and join the bloody Army. Got it?’
‘But I’ve just spoken to Major Archer and he …’
‘I don’t care who you’ve spoken to. I’m telling you to hop it. Get going. Scram!’
‘I could eat a horse,’ said Joan suddenly, addressing Matthew for the first time and even smiling at him. ‘I only had a sandwich at the Cold Storage for lunch. Actually, I’m trying to lose weight. How much do you think I weigh? Go on, have a guess.’ Matthew could only blink at her, however, too astonished to reply.
The young man’s face had turned very pale and his forehead glistened with perspiration: there was clearly nothing for it but for him to depart, and he did so, but without making any abrupt movement. His image seemed gradually to grow indistinct until presently one could make out pieces of furniture where he had been standing and then he had faded away completely.
‘Eight stone exactly!’ exclaimed Joan in triumph, clapping her hands. ‘I knew you couldn’t. Nobody can. You see, it’s partly the way I dress.’
‘That miserable cove,’ Monty explained in a self-satisfied tone, ‘is Robin Turner, the manager of your estate in Johore, though you’d hardly think so the amount of time he spends in Singapore. That little so-and-so and I were at school together and I pulled a few strings to get him a job out here when jobs weren’t easy to come by. What d’you know? Within a couple of years he’d got himself married to a stengah and his career out here was as good as finished.’
‘A stengah?’
‘Half one thing and half the other … a Eurasian … a mixed drink! You can tell ’em by their chichi accent … sing-song like Welsh. He’s been trying to get her a job as a governess in a white household but nobody wants their kids to end up with that accent … no fear! In this part of the world, Matthew, people don’t mind who you have your fun with, provided you do it discreetly (they’re pretty broad-minded about that), but they get shirty if you try to mix things socially. Quite a few young fools like Turner have lost their jobs or missed promotion with European companies because they thought they could suit themselves. Young Turner had to resign from the clubs he’d joined, of course, double quick. I warned him it would happen but no, he knew better.’ Monty heaved a sigh: his good-nature had been tried to the limit. ‘Anyway, you’ve seen the set-up. Let’s go and get something to eat.’
Matthew glanced at Joan. Her moment of animation had passed; now she was looking down her nose and plucking delicately at her chest, evidently rearranging whatever she wore under her frock. ‘Isn’t François supposed to be coming?’ she wanted to know.
On their way back to the verandah they came across Dupigny, now clad in a billowing white suit, tying his tie by the light of a candle. He was a gaunt, dignified man in his fifties. He said in careful English: ‘I shall follow you, Monty. I look forward with delicious alarm to discover what your cook has prepared for us.’
15
‘My dear boy, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you at last to this house and, I should say, to these Straits Settlements which your father did so much to build up in his lifetime.’ Monty and Joan had slipped off to change, leaving Matthew to introduce himself as best he could to the elder Blacketts whom he had with some difficulty located in a palatial drawing-room. He had often tried to picture Walter Blackett: he had supposed him to be someone very large and commanding. As it turned out, the man with whom he had just shaken hands was certainly commanding, but only his head was large: it loomed over a compact body and short legs and was covered in thick bristles of white hair which had collected here and there like drifts of unmelted snow on a stark mountainside; further white bristles supplied moustache and eyebrows: from beneath the latter, eyes of an alarming pale blue examined Matthew with interest. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘and meet Sylvia.’
In her day Mrs Blackett had been considered beautiful, but all that now remained of her good looks were a pair of cornflower blue eyes, a shade or two darker than Walter’s, set in a puffy, handsome, disappointed face. She still retained, however, some of the mannerisms of a woman accustomed to being admired for her appearance: a habit of throwing back her head to shake away the ringlets which had once tumbled charmingly over her smooth cheeks, or of opening her eyes very wide while you were talking to her, as if what you were saying was of enthralling interest. It made little difference whether you spoke about the emergence of a Swahili literature, about training schemes for electrical engineers, or about the best way to stuff a field-mouse. She would still gaze at you as if fascinated, her lovely eyes open very wide. Sometimes this automatic fascination could have a numbing effect on her interlocutor.
Looking at Mrs Blackett’s disappointed, once-beautiful face, Matthew suddenly recognized that Joan was a beauty, though until this moment her appearance had not made much impression on him. It was as if, looking into her mother’s faded features, he was confronted by a simplified version of Joan’s and could say to himself: ‘So that’s the sort of face it’s supposed to be!’ It was a process not very different, he supposed, from thinking a girl was beautiful because she reminded you of a painting by Botticelli: if you had never seen the painting you would not have noticed her. But wait, what was it the Blacketts were saying?
For some moments the Blacketts, each ignoring the other’s voice as only a married couple can, had been raining statements, questions and declarations of one kind or another on the already sufficiently bewildered Matthew. In the course of the next few minutes of incoherent conversation they touched on the war, his journey, rationing in Britain, his father’s illness, his father’s will (Walter took him by the arm and steered him away down the other end of the room, thinking this as good a time as any to remind Matthew of the responsibilities which would accompany his inheritance, but his wife uttered shrill complaints at being abandoned on her sofa and they were obliged to return), the Blitz, the approach of the monsoon, the rubber market and his journey again. Then Walter was summoned to the telephone.
While Walter was absent Mrs Blackett took hold of Matthew’s wrist: she wanted to tell him something. ‘I think you met my children, Monty and Joan, earlier this evening, didn’t you? You know, I hardly think of them as my children at all. We are more like three friends. We discuss, oh, everything together as if we were equals.’
Matthew, who could think of no reply to this confidence, scratched his ear and gazed at Mrs Blackett sympathetically. But where was Kate? he wondered aloud. He had been looking forward to seeing her again. Was she away somewhere?
‘Oh, she was here a moment ago,’ said Mrs Blackett vaguely. There was silence for a few moments. Walter’s voice, speaking emphatically, could be heard from the adjoining room. ‘Yes, just three friends,’ added Mrs Blackett despondently.
Presently she groped for Matthew’s sleeve and with a tug, drew him to his feet. She wanted to introduce him to the people who had just come into the room. But these newcomers, on closer inspection, proved to be merely her children, or ‘friends’, Monty and Joan. She had evidently thought they might be someone more interesting for at the last moment she hung back, murmuring: ‘Oh, I thought it might be Charlie.’
Monty and Joan, ignoring their mother, subsided into armchairs and ordered drinks from a Chinese servant who moved silently from one person to another. They both looked hot, though the air here was pleasantly cool. Joan had exchanged her white cotton frock for a dress of green silk with padded shoulders and leg-of-mutton sleeves. Now that she had removed her turban her sable ringlets tumbled charmingly over her cheeks. Matthew, however, could not help staring at her legs; if he feasted his eyes on them so greedily it was not because they were unusually well shaped (though they were) but because she was wearing silk stockings which had become a luxury in England in the past year. Unfortunately, both Monty and Joan had noticed the direction of his gaze; he saw them exchange a sly glance.
‘Kate!’
Kate had been hovering for some time in the next room anxiously awaiting the right moment to make a casual entry. She had been allowed to wear her best dress for besides Matthew an important RAF personage had been invited to supper. Now here she was, looking self-conscious. There was a moment of awkwardness, then she and Matthew shook hands. Kate blushed furiously and, stepping back, almost fell over a chair she had not noticed.
‘You know what?’
‘What?’
‘If we were having steak for supper we could grill it on Kate’s cheeks.’
‘Mother, will you make him stop!’
‘Really, Monty,’ said Mrs Blackett wearily.
Snatching up a magazine Kate went to throw herself down on a sofa at the other end of the room. She did not open the magazine, however, but instead picked up a Siamese cat which had been curled up on the floor and began stroking and kissing it, ignoring the rest of the company.
‘It’s so nice to have a chance to talk,’ said Mrs Blackett, ‘before the others arrive.’
There was a murmur of assent but then silence fell again. Monty glanced at his watch; Joan yawned behind scarlet fingernails. Kate continued to stroke the cat at great speed, occasionally planting a kiss on the wincing animal.
Walter came back presently and took a seat beside Matthew, explaining that he had invited Brooke-Popham, the Commander-in-Chief, Far East, and a member of his staff to supper; earlier in the day he had attended a meeting with them about rice distribution. For the truth was, he went on, that in the event of hostilities in the Pacific, Malaya could find her food supplies in jeopardy, at least in the long run, because the greater part of the country’s rice had to be imported. Ten years of effort (he himself had served on the Rice Cultivation Committee set up in 1930) still had not induced the native smallholders to grow rice instead of rubber. They were too idle. What could you do with such people?
‘I suppose they think that rubber is more profitable,’ suggested Matthew.
‘I suppose they do,’ agreed Walter.
‘And they’re right, aren’t they?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, exactly.’ Walter’s tone was casual but he glanced sharply at Matthew as he spoke. ‘There have been great variations in demand, of course, for rubber. Point is they can’t eat it in bad times. Otherwise it would be the perfect crop for a country like this. Rice involves too much hard work. Anyway, there it is, we have to import it in vast quantities to feed the estate workers.’
‘Perhaps the estates should grow rice …’ murmured Matthew. ‘It seems unfair to expect the smallholders to grow a less profitable crop simply to allow the estates to go on growing the more profitable crop …’
‘Ah, but we haven’t agreed that rice is less profitable.’
‘In that case why do the estates …?’
‘Drat!’ exclaimed Mrs Blackett, hearing a distant bell. ‘They’re arriving already and just as we were beginning to have a nice talk.’
Walter had risen before Matthew had time to finish what he was saying. But even so, Mrs Blackett reached the door before he did. It opened to admit Dupigny in his billowing white suit. He and Mrs Blackett exchanged greetings. As she made to lead him deeper into the room she said: ‘You, François, who always keep so well in touch, must tell us what you think.’
‘Of what, Mrs Blackett?’
‘Of the situation,’ she replied vaguely.
‘My dear Mrs Blackett, if you want my opinion the Japs will overrun us in a twinkling. First they exhaust us in the jungle. Then they seize us by the throat.’
‘You terrify me, François, when you say such things. Except for Matthew you are the first to arrive so you must pay the penalty and come and sit down here with us for a few minutes … though I can see that what you have to tell us will scare us out of our wits.’
‘My apologies,’ murmured Dupigny with the exquisite tact of the diplomat and man of the world. He was evidently apologizing not for having cast Mrs Blackett into a state of alarm but for having arrived too early, for thus he had interpreted the words ‘first to arrive’.
Mrs Blackett, leading the way across the room, said over her shoulder: ‘How smart you look, François! I’m so glad to see you are managing in spite of your difficulties.’
In the meantime, Monty had slipped into the chair beside Matthew vacated by his father, and in a malicious whisper explained to him that Dupigny was penniless! a beggar! a total pauper! and that his mother, of course, knew very well that she was being pursued across the drawing-room not only by Dupigny but by his entire wardrobe as well, for the fellow was still clad in every single garment he had been wearing when he had slipped away from Saigon with General Catroux, give or take the odd pair of shorts or shoes he had been able to borrow off Major Archer who luckily for Dupigny happened to be an old chum of his from the Great War.
While Matthew listened to all this and watched Dupigny stoop to brush Joan’s knuckles with his smiling lips, he could not help wondering whether he would ever find anything in common with Monty. Dupigny looked up, still smiling, his attentions to Joan’s knuckles complete.
‘Well, François, what’s the joke?’
‘I smile because I remember that yesterday for the first time in my life I have been mistaken pour un macchabée … for a corpse.’
‘For a corpse?’ cried Joan, suddenly becoming vivacious again. She was evidently a willing victim of Dupigny’s charm and polished manners. ‘I don’t believe you, François. What a terrible liar he is!’ she grumbled to her mother.
‘But precisely, for a corpse!’ Dupigny struck an attitude. ‘I am just leaving the bungalow when a Chinese gentleman approaches and says to me: “Tuan, are you dead?” I assure him that to the best of my knowledge I am still alive …’ Dupigny paused to acknowledge the smiles of his audience.
‘ “But, Tuan,” says our Chinese friend, “are you not then seriously wounded?” On the contrary I tell him that I am never feeling better in my life … “But then, Tuan,” he says, almost in tears, “you must at least be ‘walking wounded’ otherwise you would not be here in this street!” ’
‘I know, it was an air-raid practice!’ exclaimed Joan. ‘I bet your Chinaman was wearing an ARP armband and a tin hat. But I thought that for corpses they always used Boy Scouts. Does this mean that they are now using grown men?’
‘Hélas! Every day they grow more ambitious!’
New arrivals had been shown into the room in the meantime and Mrs Blackett set off once more towards the door, stumbling against a low foot-stool on the way, for the truth was that her lovely blue eyes were far-sighted and she should have worn glasses. Two officers had just entered. One of these newcomers was Air Chief-Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, a solidly built gentleman in his early sixties whose appearance suggested slightly baffled good nature. He had a square head, bald on top and with very thin hair plastered down at the sides above large, protruding ears. Beneath his white walrus moustache his open mouth lent him the air of wary incomprehension one sometimes sees in people who are not quite sure they have heard you correctly. Each of his powerful forearms cradled a shaggy bundle of documents which he was now trying to shuffle into a single bundle so that he might grasp the hand of Mrs Blackett. But in doing so a few sheets detached themselves and subsided in a series of gentle arcs to the floor. As he stooped to retrieve them, a few more slipped from his grasp and his air of bewilderment increased. At his side a tall, saturnine staff officer in the uniform of a Major-General watched without expression as the Commander-in-Chief scrabbled on the floor to assemble his papers. ‘You’d better let me, sir,’ he said taking the bundle and stowing it firmly under his arm. Then he put his swagger-stick down on a side table; an instant later he neatly scooped it up again as Mrs Blackett, turning, failed to notice the table and stumbled into it. She smiled her thanks to Brooke-Popham who had kindly steadied her with a hand to her arm. After a moment’s hesitation the General put his stick down again.
Matthew’s attention was now diverted by Monty’s voice in his ear, whispering a further malicious commentary, this time on the Commander-in-Chief himself: it was common knowledge among those ‘in the know’ that despite his grandiose title Brooke-Popham had frightful difficulty finding anybody who was actually subject to his authority. Certainly not the Navy. And the Governor, too, if he wanted could go his own sweet way. And even General Percival and Air-Marshal Pulford who had replaced the dreaded Bond and Babington still took many of their orders from the War Office and Air Ministry respectively leaving poor old Brookers in his office at the Naval Base with nothing to do but stick flags in maps and, to make things worse …
But Matthew had to struggle to his feet to shake hands with the Commander-in-Chief. Brooke-Popham shook hands firmly with Matthew and gave him a somewhat rabbity smile. Then he moved on to greet Walter and his place was immediately taken by a dapper gentleman who was following in the Commander-in-Chief’s wake: this was Dr Brownley, the Blacketts’ family doctor. The Doctor was somewhat distraught this evening for, earlier in the day, after weeks, even months of inner struggle and deliberation, he had purchased an article he had seen in John Little’s window in Raffles Place, an article he had longed and lusted for with the passion of a lover. But now that it had at last become his, somehow the expected consummation had not taken place. Since buying the wretched thing, which he could ill afford, he had scarcely given it a thought. The joyous fever to which he had been subject for months had suddenly left him. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he wondered, surreptitiously taking his own pulse. And now another distressing thought occurred to him: ‘This makes eighteen times in a row that they’ve invited me here and I still haven’t invited them back!’ ‘You must come to us one of these days’, he muttered as he shook hands with Matthew, rolling his eyes in a rather odd and desperate way … (but fortunately the fellow didn’t seem to hear).
‘D’you really think the Japs will attack us?’ Joan was asking Dupigny.
‘Without a doubt,’ replied Dupigny emphatically, and an expression of surprise and dismay passed fleetingly over Brooke-Popham’s honest features as he overheard these words.
‘My dear, François is in a most macabre mood this evening,’ said Mrs Blackett to her daughter. ‘I advise you not to listen to him. He has already had me shaking like a jelly.’
‘Ah, but it is not amusing, I assure you,’ said Dupigny, seeing that his words had caused Joan to smile, for with Dupigny it was often hard to tell whether he was joking or not and he frequently said the most outrageous things with a perfectly straight face.
‘But I understand, François, that the Japanese specialize in chopping the heads off Frenchmen. They raise a sword above their heads and go … chop! And Monsieur’s head is rolling in the gutter. They say it is quite a sight. I think I shall take my knitting like Madame whatever her name was.’
‘You think I am joking, Joan. Not at all! You forget that I know something of them, the Japanese. But what is the good?’ he added, turning to Matthew as Joan went off laughing. ‘You British are so serious. And when you think of France it is always in the manner of that grand emmerdeur, Charles Dickens. As for your self-confidence, that is something miraculous! Did you know,’ he pursued, taking Matthew by the arm and leading him aside, ‘that your Governor, Sir Thomas, went on holiday for eight months despite the outbreaking of war? That is an example of your phlegmatic British behaviour which fills a poor Frenchman like myself with awe, with admiration and, it must be admitted, with alarm!’ He surveyed Matthew with an ironical smile.
‘But never mind about that. Let me explain to you instead about this Air-Marshal. Sir Popham, for he is a most unusual sight. I refer not to his appearance, which is, I agree, awe-inspiring … but to his very presence here in this room. It is something quite unusual.’ And Dupigny went on to explain to Matthew in an undertone (how fond everyone seemed to be of whispering assessments of each other’s behaviour behind their backs!) that years of living in Singapore had, it was well known, instilled in Mrs Blackett a deep contempt for the Armed Forces. It had been, in peacetime, a most surprising sight to see her heaping abuse on the old and respected profession of arms, members of which she had for years resolutely refused to invite to her table. Why, even Major Archer, the least martial of men, given an introduction to the Blacketts while making his first tour of the Far East in 1937, had had to be warned to demobilize himself before calling. The poor fellow would otherwise have left a card on which, printed in spidery script for all to see, was his guilty secret: Major Brendan de S. Archer. And Dupigny laughed heartily at the thought.
The fact was, he went on, that Mrs Blackett, though charming in every way, was something of a snob and this very drawing-room was the meeting-place of one of the most exclusive circles on the island, scarcely even rivalled by Government House. For, as Mrs Blackett willingly used to admit, she had one advantage over the Governor. She was not obliged, as he was, to invite the rabble of dignitaries, military and civilian, whom the war was bringing to Singapore. She could invite whom she pleased. ‘All those depressing generals!’ she used to exclaim sometimes in the presence of her own more carefully selected guests. ‘Poor Lady Thomas!’
And yet, not even the Blacketts, as it transpired, had been able to prevent the invasion of their circle by the War. Since the beginning of hostilities in Europe there had been progressive signs of weakening. He, Dupigny, had been there in person on one occasion when Mrs Blackett had asked Walter whether she should not relax this prohibition of military men from her dining-room ‘in the interests of the War Effort’. An admiral or two, perhaps?
Walter had stroked his chin as he pondered his wife’s difficult question, groping for the reply of a frank, straightforward sort of man. Well, no, he did not think so. After all, one’s principles don’t change simply because there’s a war on. The problem, after all, was not that the odd admiral was short of food, but that he was tedious company. This had not changed. Very likely it had become worse. With a war raging in Europe the admiral would doubtless feel encouraged to discourse interminably on military and naval matters at the expense of … well, of the more important things in life.
And so Mrs Blackett had continued for some time to exclude the Forces (except for the Major, of course, who was in any case masquerading as a plain civilian and who had had no connection with the Army in twenty years). But then, little by little, as Hitler had advanced through Europe, the Allies had made corresponding advances into the Blacketts’ exclusive circle … a colonel here, an air commodore there, in civilian clothes at first but, presently, in uniform. ‘Until today we have the pleasure of seeing an Air-Marshal and a General sipping their pahits among us as if it were the most natural thing in the world!’
Matthew had listened with interest and amusement to this discourse. Dupigny was an entertaining companion and he would have liked to hear more about the Blacketts. But at this moment a distant gong sounded and supper was announced. Joan had disappeared for a few moments but returned just in time to catch her father’s eye as they were going into the dining-room. Walter raised his eyebrows as if to enquire: ‘Well, what do you think?’ Joan did not have to be told what her father’s raised eyebrows referred to. She had just slipped into the dining-room ahead of the guests to rearrange the name-cards by the various places, allotting herself a seat where she knew the light would fall to particular advantage on her long neck and delicate features, casting a special sheen on her sable curls when viewed from a certain other place. She smiled at her father and discreetly raised her thumb. Walter, in turn, did not have to be told that his daughter expected to make short work of the task she had set herself.
16
On his way into the dining-room Matthew, attempting to demonstrate to the Doctor the width of a stream where he had once caught a number of trout, struck Mrs Blackett a blow in the stomach that robbed her of her breath for a moment or two. A fuss then took place. Matthew fell back, disgraced, while the other guests crowded around to help her to a chair, offering her drinks of water and telling each other to move back and give her air. She sat there, gasping. Matthew watched her from a distance, discomfited and surprised: it had not seemed to him that he had struck her very hard. The impression left on his knuckles by the blow was already fading but he was pretty certain that it had never amounted to a good, solid punch, the sort that one might have expected would drop one’s hostess to her knees. The unworthy thought occurred to him that Mrs Blackett might be putting it on a bit. But women were, after all, members of a gentler sex. It was distressing, whichever way one looked at it. He had been hoping to start off on a better footing with the Blacketts.
Meanwhile, Dr Brownley, at Mrs Blackett’s side, kept saying: ‘Highly interesting … Highly interesting’ as if to himself; this caused Walter to look at him askance but actually the Doctor had been saying ‘Highly interesting’ to Matthew before the blow had been struck and was now merely repeating it. Sometimes a word or a phrase would get stuck in the Doctor’s mind and rattle around in it for hours without any apparent reason. Occasionally, if by misfortune the phrase expressed some powerful image, it might stay in his mind for days or weeks. Once, for example, he had heard a dentist admonishing a patient who was inclined to neglect her teeth: ‘Your nose will meet your chin!’ For several weeks this phrase, alien, violent, rapacious, eating up all other thoughts, had whirled around his mind like a rat in a refrigerator. ‘Your nose will meet your chin!’ He had thought he would never get rid of it. In the end only the desire for an article he happened to see in Whiteaways had been sufficient to suffocate it. ‘Highly interesting,’ he murmured as Mrs Blackett, getting to her feet with a sigh, declared herself sufficiently recovered for the dinner to proceed.
This incident, fortunately trivial, did serve a useful purpose, however. It reminded Matthew that he must keep a stern watch over his comportment while at the dinner-table. It was not simply a question of table manners, though years of eating by himself with his eyes on a book beyond his plate rather than on the plate itself (how often had he been roused from his thoughts by something hot and slippery, a grilled fish, say, or a great bundle of spaghetti, dropping into his lap from an incorrectly angled fork!) certainly left room for improvement in that respect. No, it was more a tendency to grow over-excited in the course of what he knew should be an urbane discussion, to utter great shouts of derision at the opinions of his table companions, to gloat over them excessively when he found them guilty of faulty reasoning or some heretical assumption. Next day he would realize, of course, that he had behaved boorishly and would be filled with remorse, but next day it would be too late. Alas, more than once in Geneva he had found a door closed to him after he had allowed himself to get carried away. With the Blacketts he must watch his step!
Often had the Blacketts wondered precisely how Matthew had spent the years since he had left Oxford. Why had his infrequent letters been sent from hotels in remote corners of Europe? What was it, at a time of life when most young men decide to settle down in a home of their own, that had kept him flitting across frontiers like a lost soul? While these questions were being put to him Mrs Blackett, looking tired after her ordeal, glanced around the table to make sure that everything was in order; her gaze lingered for a moment on an unoccupied chair next to Joan and a shadow of concern passed over her features. Meanwhile, a bowl of soused fish was being proffered by the ‘boys’ to each guest in turn.
Oh, the answer to that was simple, Matthew explained, fishing in the dark tide of vinegar and peppercorns. He had been working for a charitable organization in Geneva called the Committee for International Understanding, vaguely connected with the League of Nations.
‘My dear boy,’ said Walter, ‘I’d be surprised to learn that a single one of those charitable organizations ever did a damn thing that was any practical use to anybody. Geneva, if you ask me, is a city of hot air and hypocrites and that’s all there is to say about it.’ Walter hesitated, glancing at Dupigny who appeared to be rolling his eyes in horror at this opinion of Geneva, uncongenial, perhaps, to a former functionary of the Ministère des Colonies: but it might simply have been that Dupigny was flinching away from the fumes of vinegar rising from the bowl of soused fish which had now been offered to him in turn. He somewhat grimly captured a piece of fish on the serving spoon, inspected it for a moment, sniffed at it, then dropped it back into the dish, indicating to the ‘boy’ that he did not want any.
‘These idealistic committees are a waste of time and as for the League itself …!’
Matthew chewed his fish calmly even though such a remark would normally have provoked him to vociferous argument: lucky that he had been reminded of his weaknesses a few moments earlier! Moreover, in a sense Walter was right. It was true that the Committee for International Understanding, which was merely one of hundreds of such idealistic barnacles clinging to the hull (already low in the water) of the great League itself, had not achieved any visible success in all the years he had worked for it. In the early days he had spent hour after hour writing letters to politicians urging them to good behaviour in the interests of the ‘world community’. Invariably these letters had been answered in vague but polite terms by private secretaries who hinted that there were grounds for optimism. But as for any concrete improvement, well, that was another matter! All that one could say for sure was that ‘out there’ (Matthew had spent hours during his first winter in Geneva gazing out through the rain-rinsed window of his office in the direction of the lake), in the real world there was a sort of counter-Committee composed of private secretaries whose letter-writing labours exactly mirrored his own and, it had gradually dawned on him, were equally without significance.
And what a dismal place Geneva had been! The steadily falling rain through which one might occasionally, if one were lucky, be permitted to see the brooding mass of the Grand Salève across the lake, the bitter wind from the Rhône valley churning the waves to a grey cream beneath the low blanket of cloud, the sensation of oppression which lay over the city during its never-ending months of winter, Geneva was no place for the experiment that was taking place there, the most daring, most idealistic, the grandest, most thrilling and sublime effort to introduce reason and equity into the affairs of nations. And gradually, so it had seemed to Matthew, the proceedings of the Assembly with its myriads of committees and sub-committees emitting a thick fog of quibbling resolutions and differing points of view, which thickly cloaked its good intentions just as mist clouded the Grand Salève, had come to resemble the Geneva weather. For month after month you could see nothing through the curtains of rain tumbling out of the sky but then abruptly, like a miracle the clouds would disappear, the sun would shine and Mont Blanc would appear white and glittering in the distance across the water. Yet how rare it was that the fog lifted from the Assembly’s proceedings! On those rare days, the opening of the great Disarmament Conference in 1932 had been one of them, Matthew had believed himself to be present at one of the great turning-points in the history of mankind. He had been wrong as it had turned out and now he was sadder and certainly older, if not much wiser.
‘Did someone mention Geneva?’ asked Brooke-Popham who, at first busy with a large helping of fish, had now got the better of it and was free to enter the conversation. ‘Met a young chap only the other day who’d been a couple of years there. Said it was a deuced awful hole. What was his name now? M’memory isn’t what it was. American. Capital fellow. Very obliging. Let’s see now. Colonel … no, Captain Erinmore. No. D’you know the chap I mean, Walter? Said he knew you and your charming daughter here. Herringport. No…Now let me see …’
‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, Sir Robert,’ said Walter somewhat stiffly, exchanging a quick glance with Joan. The whole table, including Matthew, gazed at Brooke-Popham as if hypnotized.
‘I know …’ said Brooke-Popham. A tremor ran through his audience and Joan turned a little pale as she waited for the Commander-in-Chief to speak. There was silence, however, until it became clear that Brooke-Popham, worn out by his long day, had momentarily dozed off. However, his staff officer, the General whose name Matthew had failed to catch, now smoothly took control of the conversation in the place of his slumbering superior and launched into a lengthy reminiscence, not of Geneva but of Lake Maggiore where he had been on holiday in 1925 with his wife, who was a god-daughter of Chamberlain’s wife. And this, by the most fortunate coincidence, for he had never been to Lake Maggiore before or since, had happened to be the historic October of Locarno! What an extraordinary scene he had witnessed! The peasants, their clothes white with dust, tramping in from the surrounding hills with vast hood-shaped baskets of grapes on their backs. And Chamberlain himself, a bizarre figure among these sons of toil. Ah, the General could see him still as if it were yesterday, his monocle glinting in the autumn sunshine as he lolled among the scarlet cushions of his red Rolls-Royce whose long silver horns like trumpets occasionally cleared their metal throats to scatter the rustics from its path: this machine, once the property of a maharajah, had been hired locally, it seemed.
‘But…’ began Matthew, becoming indignant despite his good intentions.
The General, however, had not yet reached the high point of his reminiscence, which amounted to nothing less than an invitation from the Chamberlains to join them for the excursion in celebration of Mrs Chamberlain’s birthday so charmingly thought up by Briand and his friend, Loucheur: they had hired an Italian lake steamer, the Fleur d’Oranger for the occasion. On that delightful, extraordinary trip on the lake the General and his wife had mingled with all the chief delegates to the Conference, with Skrzynski and Benes, with the bearded, bespectacled, floppy-hatted Belgian, Vandervelde, with the shaven-headed, thick-necked German, Stresemann, his duelling-scarred cheeks set on fire by the sun and champagne … what a day to remember! In his mind’s eye he could still see Loucheur with his round pop-eyed face and the curling black moustaches of a Victorian waiter, chuckling as the champagne flowed. And then, to cap it all, Mussolini, ostentatious as ever, had made a dramatic dash by racing car from Milan to Stresa and from there by speedboat to Locarno!
And then, the General’s voice became solemn at the recollection, on the following day a great crowd of peasants had gathered in front of the town hall as the autumn twilight thickened. The word spread quickly through the crowd. The Treaty had been signed! Like a holy relic the document was carried to the window and shown to the crowd. A great cry had gone up. The church bells had been rung and women had wept and prayed. The Treaty had been signed!
‘But just look at the result!’ cried Matthew, his kindly face transfigured with emotion.
‘Eh?’ said the General, taken aback.
‘Just look at the result! “By our signatures we affirm that we want peace,” Briand declared and yet within fifteen years France and Germany were at war again and the rest of Europe with them. And the reason was this: Locarno was the old way of doing things! Behind-the-scenes diplomacy between the Big Powers. Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay and the Wilhelmstrasse up to their old tricks again …’
‘I know, his name was Herringdorf,’ exclaimed Brooke-Popham waking up suddenly, but nobody paid any attention to him and presently he dozed off again.
‘And so it goes on. So it has always gone on. If the League failed to prevent this war it was because Britain, France, Italy and Germany, while paying lip-service to the idea of an international assembly to settle differences between nations, were never prepared to submit to its authority. Nor give it the power it needed. Who could take the League seriously when the real business was not being transacted in Geneva at all but aboard a pleasure steamer on Lake Maggiore! The Big Powers have brought this horrible destruction down on their own heads because their half-baked foreign ministries staffed by upperclass dimwits, who have more in common with each other than with the people of their respective countries, preferred to make cynical treaties rather than give real meaning to their membership of the League.’
‘Steady the Buffs!’ said Walter, not in the least concerned by Matthew’s unfortunate harangue.
Matthew’s face had grown flushed as he spoke. In his excitement he had wound a napkin round his clenched fist and delivered a terrible uppercut to the under surface of the table with the result that a miniature earthquake accompanied his final words, causing the glasses to dance on the table. Mrs Blackett, painfully surprised by this outburst for which she could see no sane explanation, glanced significantly at her husband to warn him against pursuing the argument. But Walter, calmly reaching out a hand to steady the tinkling cutlery beside his plate, said with a smile: ‘Strong nations, Matthew, will always take advantage of the weak if they can do so with impunity. This is a law of nature. After all, as you must agree, the disapproval of the League did nothing to inhibit Japan from taking over Manchuria …’
‘Well, exactly!’ shouted Matthew. ‘Because the League was given no support. Because Sir John Simon and the Foreign Office preferred to turn a blind eye to the crying injustice done to China and give tacit support to Japan!’
‘Even without Britain’s tacit support Japan would not have acted differently. Well, François, you’re the expert at this sort of thing, what d’you think?’
‘It is, I’m afraid, very simple. Powerful nations will have their way with the weak. They will see that their own interests are served. No doubt life would be better if both nations and people were guided by principle rather than by self-interest but … it is not the case. It is foolish to pretend otherwise.’
‘Self-interest? But surely a government has a duty to act in the moral as well as the material interests of its people!’ This last assertion, however, was received only with sympathetic smiles. The matter had already been settled to the general satisfaction.
Matthew was still in a state of dangerous excitement and these cynical views might well have caused him to deal the delicate rosewood dining-table another and perhaps even terminal blow but with an effort he managed to control himself. He was aware that in any case he had already made quite an exhibition of himself. Besides, he had heard this sort of thing so often before. He unwound the napkin from his fist and nudged his spectacles further up his nose, peering sadly round the table at his companions. Kate, who was bored, was over-heard asking her mother in a whisper what would be for pudding. Everyone chuckled and relaxed at this, even Matthew, though he was still distressed. He became aware that Joan was gazing at him from across the table and he could not help thinking how beautiful she was, the way the light caused her hair to glow and modelled with shadow the delicate contours of her cheekbones. He found it strange and disconcerting how this good-looking but impassive and perhaps even rather dull girl would suddenly brighten up and radiate a strong sexual attraction all around her, just as fireflies, mating at dusk in a warm climate, light up at intervals to signal their presence to a potential mate. No wonder, then, that according to Kate her elder sister was always breaking the hearts of the young men of the Colony: she evidently could not help it, any more than a firefly can stop itself lighting up at intervals.
‘Your nose will meet your chin!’ muttered the Doctor to Brooke-Popham at his side.
‘What!’ demanded Brooke-Popham waking up abruptly and staring at the Doctor in astonishment.
‘Your father and I often used to discuss these matters,’ said Walter who could not resist putting a few finishing touches to their argument, ‘and I think we both felt that misplaced idealism had sapped the nation’s strength badly in the last twenty years. The pacifism which has been vaunted since the end of the Great War by our friends of the socialist persuasion has resulted in the decline of British prestige and, even more serious, of her forces, too. Our enemies have been encouraged to try their luck.’ Noticing that the Commander-in-Chief was awake again Walter added: ‘What d’you think, Sir Robert? Am I talking through my hat?’
‘Most certainly not, Walter,’ said Brooke-Popham, using his napkin to dry his moustache where a few drops of vinegar still glimmered. ‘You need only take the example of the year 1932. Is it a coincidence that the same year should see a mutiny of the British fleet and an aggression by the Japanese against the International Settlement in Shanghai? Most certainly not. One clearly suggested the other. Moreover, our socialist brethren were not without influence even at the War Office. Naval parities with Japan and the foolish doctrine of “No war for ten years” were the sad result of listening to their siren call.’ The Commander-in-Chief beamed around the table to show that his views should not be taken amiss, even by those whom they happened to contradict. Nor did his friendly gaze omit the joint of roast beef which had just been brought in and set down for carving in front of Walter.
‘All in all,’ went on Brooke-Popham, ‘it’s perhaps just as well that the Japanese don’t have a fighter to match our Brewster Buffalo, otherwise they might be tempted to try something on in this part of the world.’ He hesitated. ‘Not, of course, that we can afford to be over-confident,’ he added, and his brow clouded somewhat; reports had been coming in of increased shipping at Camranh Bay for the past few days and even of landing-craft being loaded at Saigon. Well, he had not been nick-named ‘Fighting Popham’ for nothing. He sighed, thinking how difficult modern warfare was. Not like the old days! He was tired: ready to return to his quarters at the Sea View. Perhaps he would take a stroll on the hotel’s lawn by the sandy beach (bristling, though, nowadays with barbed wire and machine-gun nests), just to settle his mind before retiring. He wanted no landing-craft forging into his dreams and bursting there like ripe pods.
17
Now for some reason an air of melancholy settled over the table like a gentle fall of snow on an avenue of statues in the park, collecting in white drifts on heads and shoulders and blurring individual features. Matthew was contemplating Geneva again as he served himself with two delightfully lacquered roast potatoes, musing not without bitterness on the years he had spent travelling as the envoy of the Committee for International Understanding. For the truth was that those who governed the destiny of nations had remained as remote when he appeared in person as they had when he had written letters. Years, he remembered, had been spent roaming the corridors of palatial hotels (all the doings of the Committee had been attended by the most drastic luxury, as if the merest suggestion of economy would have blighted its high ideals) waiting to be summoned by some minor official of this or that Chancellery. On the rare occasions when he had found himself face to face with the statesman himself, it had always turned out to be because the statesman was in exile or disgrace, or because the Committee had been thought to be more important than it really was, or on account of some other such misunderstanding. In Japan, where he had gone in 1937 to recommend caution with respect to the ‘China Incident’ he had had an interview with a senior officer of the Japanese Army. This man had listened politely to what he had to say but had, himself, refrained from comment. Matthew had asked him whether he thought a war between Japan and America was probable. The officer had replied that he shared the view of the Emperor on that question. And what, Matthew had wanted to know, was the Emperor’s view? Unfortunately, the officer had replied without blinking, the Emperor’s view was something about which he was completely in the dark.
From about that time, perhaps, had dated Matthew’s growing feeling of hopelessness concerning the Committee’s task. After this visit to Japan he had taken to reading a good deal on his travels and though he still performed his duties conscientiously, of course, his spirit was no longer quite as deeply engaged as it had once been. It had become his habit to take books with him when visiting government offices: unimportant visitors were sometimes left to cool their heels in desolate ante-rooms for long periods. On more than one occasion he had become so engrossed in his reading that when finally informed that the dignitary in question would now receive him he had looked up in surprise, unable to think for a moment what the fellow might want of him.
Opposite Matthew, Brooke-Popham sat with his shoulders up to his ears, frozen in an attitude of weariness; he was remembering the old days. What fun it had been when they had first gone over to France in 1914! Not like today when every initiative was frustrated by some administrative detail. In those days the Flying Corps had only had to take care of reconnaissance: they had moved about the country like a travelling circus looking for a suitable field which they could use as an aerodrome wherever it was needed. In the course of the retreat from Mons it had been even more like a circus: he would set off in the morning in the Daimler in search of a suitable field and then the aeroplanes would follow and land on it later in the day, while the ground staff trailed across country after them with the fuel and the field work shops loaded into the most extraordinary collection of vans, solid-tyred lorries and pantechnicons, borrowed in London from different businesses … the van they had borrowed from Maples, the furniture people, had kept breaking down for some reason … As for the Daimler and the other motor-cars, they had been lent by various officers and civilians. One day, he remembered, he and Maurice Baring had set off in the Daimler on a misty autumn morning and about lunchtime had found a field on some table-land above a village called Sailly: and they had set to work then and there to carry stooks of corn to the side of the field so that the machines could land; and then on the way to Senlis he had bought a brass bell with a beautiful chime for the Mess. It had grown dark before they reached Senlis and a great yellow harvest moon had risen over the misty fields and the poplars. Baring had said it reminded him of a Corot. What a fine autumn that had been in 1914! A clear golden light lay over the reaped fields and the farms and the gardens full of fruit. He had only to close his eyes to see a little group of pilots at Saponay, lying in the straw and chatting after a reconnaissance sortie, or to see the heat-distorted air rising above the stubble at midday.
‘A penny for your thoughts, sir,’ said the General, hearing him utter a sigh.
‘Oh, water under the bridge, Jack,’ replied Brooke-Popham, clearing his throat dejectedly.
Matthew, accustomed to rationing, had found the roast beef extremely appetizing and was even wondering whether it was likely that he would be offered some more. At his side, however, Dupigny was eyeing his plate dubiously, prodding the meat here and there with his fork.
‘It’s roast beef,’ said Mrs Blackett firmly.
‘Nevertheless,’ Dupigny said to Matthew in an undertone, ‘it is sometimes possible to eat well here. Today, no, we are out of luck. But sometimes, when Walter invites his fellow merchants of Singapore the cook makes un petit effort. Then, ah! you would think you are in Italy of the Renaissance seated at a table surrounded by merchant-princes. You see, here in Singapore there are many people of this kind. The names of their commercial empires have the ring of glorious city-states, don’t you think so? Sime Darby! Harrisons and Crosfield! Maclaine Watson and Company! Langfield and Bowser! Guthrie and Company! And the greatest of them all, brooding over the Far East like the house of Medici over Tuscany: Jardine Matheson! Nor should we forget Blackett and Webb for there, in his usual place at the end of the table, a merchant-prince in his own right, Walter Blackett presides over this reunion of wealth and power as if he were Pope Leo X in person! That is a sight worth seeing!’
Dupigny’s flight of fancy was interrupted by a sudden crash outside the door. Walter half rose to his feet but before he could make a move the door opened and a man lurched into the room backwards, as if he had just eluded the grasp of someone he had been struggling with in the corridor outside. For a moment he seemed to be expecting a further onslaught from his invisible assailant, but none came so he straightened himself and smoothed down his hair; the door was closed quietly from outside by an unseen hand. ‘Sorry I’m late, Walter,’ he said in rather slurred tones. ‘Where am I sitting?’
‘Quelle horreur!’ whispered Dupigny, his eyes glinting with malicious pleasure. ‘C’est Charlie, le frère de Madame Blackett. Et ivre mort, en plus!’
Charlie was wearing merely a cream flannel shirt, open at the neck, and grey flannel trousers. On his feet he wore tennis shoes with the laces undone. His dishevelled appearance and the fact that he was panting slightly suggested that he had just come from some energetic sporting event. Matthew could see no family resemblance to Mrs Blackett in Charlie and he was clearly some twenty years younger. Like her, though, his face framed by blond curls bore the traces of youthful good looks. He was badly in need of a hair-cut.
Monty swiftly rounded the table and took him by the arm, steering him towards the empty place beside Joan. Charlie surveyed the table with watery blue eyes as he went, muttering half to himself: ‘I’m glad to see you haven’t polished off all the grub.’
‘We’ve just been hearing, Charlie,’ declared Mrs Blackett, ‘that Matthew has recently come from Geneva where he has been working for the League of Nations.’
‘Has he, indeed?’ mumbled Charlie over the roast beef which had been hastily placed before him. ‘And I’m sure a fat lot of good …’ The rest of the sentence was muffled by his first bite of roast beef.
‘Well, not recently,’ said Matthew with a smile, and explained that the Committee for International Understanding, with Europe crumbling about it, had closed down in 1940, naturally dismayed by the amount of misunderstanding the outbreak of war entailed. ‘As a matter of fact, for the past year I’ve been working on a farm. Because of my poor eyesight they didn’t want me in the Army.’
‘Le “Digging for Victory”, alors?’ suggested Dupigny. ‘It is evident that the supply of food is no less important than the supply of munitions,’ he added reassuringly.
Meanwhile Walter, swallowing the irritation caused him by the unorthodox arrival of his brother-in-law, had engaged Brooke-Popham in conversation, for the Commander-in-Chief had shaken off his melancholy and, though comatose, was still awake. For someone like himself, Walter was explaining, whose job it was to run a merchant business, a war with Japan was not a vague possibility for the future, it had already been in progress for some time. In this war, which was being fought invisibly and in silence by means of quotas, price-cutting and a stealthy invasion of traditional markets, Blackett and Webb had found itself not only in the front line but fighting for its life. Since the end of the Great War there had been a steady encirclement of British commerce in the Far East. By 1934 Japanese assaults on British textile markets had caused Westminister to introduce import quotas on cotton and rayon goods destined for Malaya. No wonder Walter and other Singapore merchants had protested to the Colonial Office that their mercantile interests were being sacrificed for no better reason than the inability of Lancashire to survive intensive competition from Japan. Walter paused and the faint grinding of his teeth became audible in the silence. He had reminded himself of the fact that Solomon Langfield, a big importer of Lancashire cotton, had been in favour of the quotas. That unprincipled blackguard! The bristles on his spine stirred beneath his Lancashire cotton shirt.
Walter surveyed his family and guests sullenly, as if somehow they had been responsible for this lamentable state of affairs. They gazed back, as if hypnotized. Only Monty, who had doubtless heard all this before, twiddled his fork and smothered a yawn.
‘What I would like to know is this: can one really blame the Japanese?’ enquired Walter. His guests exchanged puzzled glances, as if to say: ‘Of course one can blame the Japanese. Why ever not?’
‘After all, they too are fighting for their lives. They depended so heavily for their survival on silk and cotton that, naturally, they would do whatever they had to in order to sell them. In 1933 the average Japanese price for textiles was ten cents a yard while Lancashire’s was eighteen or nineteen cents, almost twice the price! Mind you, the Japs got up to every trick in the book to evade the quotas. For example, since cotton piece-goods were not included in the quotas in no time pillow-cases big enough to put a house in began to arrive here in Singapore … pyjamas to fit elephants … shirts that twenty people could have got into … and all designed to be swiftly unstitched and used by our local manufacturers instead of the Lancashire cotton they were supposed to be using. Frankly, I admire their ingenuity. Can you blame them?’
‘Business is all very well, Mr Blackett,’ said the General rather brusquely. ‘But you surely do not mean to condone the way they grabbed Manchuria and invaded China. Your own firm’s business must have suffered as a result of the way the Japs have been closing the Open Door.’
Walter nodded and smiled. ‘That’s true. We have suffered. But look at it from the Japanese point of view. Can you blame them for extending their influence into Manchuria and China? After all, the demands they have been making since 1915 … for the lease of Port Arthur and Dairen, for the South Manchuria and Antung-Mukden Railways and for the employment of Japanese capital in Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia, what do they remind you of?’ Walter, smiling now, gazed at his baffled guests. ‘I can tell you what they remind me of! They are an excellent imitation of the sort of economic imperialism through demands for special privileges which Britain herself has been making in Asia since … well, since this young man’s father started our business in the 1880s.’
‘But was that a reason for Japan to invade China?’ the General wanted to know.
Walter shook his head. ‘As a businessman I understand very well why the Japanese had to invade China in 1937. China, from the point of view of trade and investment, was chaotic. No reasonably hard-boiled businessman looking at Nationalist China would have seen much to give him confidence. The Kuomintang wanted to put an end to foreigners’ privileges. They wanted to see the foreign concession areas at Shanghai, Tientsin and so on handed back to China. They wanted to stop foreigners having their own courts and raising their own taxes in China. No, business must go on, whatever the price. And a businessman needs security. So can one blame the Japanese?’
‘Security for business doesn’t give people the right to invade and kill their neighbours!’ protested Matthew.
‘My dear chap, I couldn’t agree with you more. But there comes a point where the justice of the matter becomes irrelevant. You must look at the situation from the Japanese point of view. For them it was a matter of life and death because while the Kuomintang was putting their investment in China at risk they were faced at home by the disastrous effects of the slump. In 1929, forty per cent of Japan’s total export trade was in raw silk. It only needed the collapse of American prosperity and a consequent plunge in the demand for silk to bring the Japanese economy to catastrophe. Raw silk exports were halved almost overnight. Sales of cotton and manufactured goods joined the slide! What were they expected to do? Sit at home and starve? Let’s not be naïve, my boy. Justice is always bound to come a poor second to necessity. Strong nations survive. Weak nations go to the wall, that has always been the way of the world and always will be! The point is, can one blame them for taking matters into their own hands? From the business point of view they were in a pickle. And now, mind you, with their assets frozen and their difficulties in getting raw materials their pickle is going from bad to worse. I believe the Americans should give them the raw materials they need. Otherwise what can they do but grab them by force?’ Noticing that the Commander-in-Chief was looking taken aback by this suggestion, Walter added tactfully: ‘Not that they’d get very far in this part of the world.’
‘The reason the Japs are so touchy and arrogant is that they eat too much fish,’ said Brooke-Popham. ‘It’s scientific. The iodine in their diet plays hell with their thyroids. They can’t help themselves. So, no, I suppose one can’t blame them.’
18
Now the last course had been placed on the table: a thoroughly satisfactory baked bread-pudding. Matthew, for his part, eyed it with concern, afraid that it might prove too unusual for the taste of Dupigny. He need not have worried, however, for Dupigny surprisingly proved to have a craving for it, ate two helpings liberally coated with bright yellow custard and even went so far as to ask for the ingredients. Mrs Blackett, mollified by his enthusiasm, gave them: stale bread, raisins, sugar, an egg, a little milk and a pinch of nutmeg.
‘Incredible,’ murmured Dupigny, eyebrows raised politely.
Brooke-Popham’s thoughts had wandered back to August 1914 again, recalled to France by Dupigny’s presence. He chuckled inwardly at the thought of how primitive all their arrangements had been that first summer. He had carried a small, brand-new portmanteau full of gold everywhere he went, paying for everything out of it, from new flying-machines to spares, to chickens and wine for the HQ Mess. The hours he had spent guarding that portmanteau! Once he and Baring had driven into Paris in the Daimler and gone to Blériot’s factory there to buy a new flying-machine. Then, later, they had bought new tyres and headlights for the Daimler. He had paid for them in gold to the astonishment of the chap in the shop. ‘The English are amazing!’ he had said in French to Baring, who spoke the lingo. Yes, those were the days! Brooke-Popham folded his napkin, stifling a yawn, beckoned home now by the nodding palms of Katong and the Sea View Hotel. ‘Life is good,’ he reflected.
The great dish of pudding had been removed. The meal was over. A large white pill and a glass of water had been set in front of Charlie, who had been eating doggedly with his mouth very near his plate and making no effort to join in the conversation. Since he had finished eating, however, he had been practising backhands with an invisible tennis racket over the tablecloth. In the process his wrist caught and knocked over a glass of water. There was a moment of startled silence.
‘I leave you to deal with him,’ Walter said to his wife with unexpected anger, rising from his chair.
‘Oh, really, Uncle Charlie, what have you done now?’ Kate said, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder. ‘And you haven’t taken your pill.’ The guests filed out in silence, leaving Charlie staring sulkily at the saturated table-cloth.
Matthew would have liked to retire to bed at this point: he had had a long and tiring day. But it seemed that the Blacketts had not yet finished with him for Monty suggested a quick stroll in the garden. Together they stepped out into the warm, perfumed night accompanied by a dull-eyed Joan, yawning again behind scarlet fingernails. Birds uttered low cries, insects clicked and whirred around them and once a great patch of black velvet swooped, slipped and folded against the starry sky. Some sort of fruit bat, said Joan.
Although flanked by the young Blacketts, Matthew found himself peering uneasily into the vibrating darkness: he was not yet accustomed to the tropical night. As they sauntered through the potentially hungry shadows in the direction of the Orchid Garden he tried to recall whether he had once read something about ‘flying snakes’ or whether it was simply his imagination. And did fruit bats only eat fruit or did they sometimes enjoy a meal of flesh and blood? He was so absorbed in this speculation that when, presently, he felt something slip into his hand he jumped, thinking it might be a ‘flying snake’. But it was only Joan’s soft fingers. To cover his embarrassment he asked her about fruit bats. Oh, they were perfectly harmless, she replied, despite their frightening, Dracula-like wings.
But, Monty was saying with a laugh, what did Matthew think about another weird creature, namely their Uncle Charlie? Did Matthew know that he had been a cricket Blue at Cambridge? For he had been, though one might not think so to look at him now.
‘Does he work for Blackett and Webb?’
Monty and Joan hooted with laughter at this idea. ‘Father wouldn’t let him within a mile of the place. No, he’s in the Indian Army, the Punjabis. That was OK while they were stuck on the Khyber Pass or wherever they normally spend their time. But then, disaster! Charlie’s regiment gets posted to Malaya. Father can’t abide him, as you may have gathered. He has to put up with him, though, because of Mother who insists on inviting him to stay whenever he has any leave. She’s afraid he will go off the rails if she doesn’t watch over him. She may be right at that. Once he spent a week in Penang and we kept getting telephone calls asking us if we were prepared to vouch for a Captain Charles Tyrrell who was running up bills right left and centre. Then he started tampering with someone else’s wife and there was the most frightful palaver over that. Father had to go up and straighten it all out. You can imagine how delighted he was. Because, of course, we’re well known in this country and gossip spreads like wildfire.’
‘Oh, and he’s a poet, too,’ said Joan, giving Matthew’s perspiring hand a little squeeze.
‘That’s right. He wrote a poem about a place in Spain …’
‘Guernica.’
‘Yes, that’s it, about the place Joan just said. Mother had to warn us all not to laugh because he took it so seriously. He’s quite a card.’
Matthew had only been able to give part of his attention to what he was being told about Charlie because of the sensations that were spreading up through his body from the hand which Joan was holding. Not content with the damp, inert clasp of two palms, Joan’s fingers had become active, alternately squeezing his own and trying to burrow into the hollow of his palm. He could not help thinking: ‘If Monty weren’t here …’ and his heart pounded at the thought of what he and Joan might get up to. But Monty was there; and he showed no sign of noticing the delicious hand-squeezings that were going on in the darkness. Presently he said: ‘We’d better be going inside. They’ll be leaving soon.’ With a final squeeze Joan’s hand abandoned Matthew’s as they passed back into the light.
They found the elder Blacketts and their guests drinking coffee and brandy in the drawing-room. Relations between Walter and the unfortunate Charlie had evidently been somewhat restored while they had been in the garden for, as they entered, they heard the tail-end of an argument that had been taking place.
‘You expect young men being paid next to nothing to die defending your property and your commercial interests!’ Charlie was asserting vociferously. He was still a little drunk but had tied his shoe-laces in the interim and his appearance was less dishevelled.
‘I don’t know about dying,’ replied Walter good-humouredly. ‘All you’ve done so far is drink.’ And that proved to be the end of the discussion and of the evening, for the Air-Marshal and the General announced that it was time that they were on their way. They politely insisted on shaking hands with everybody on their way out, even with little Kate who, overcome by the momentous occasion, got mixed up and said: ‘Thank you for having me.’ This caused smiles all round and poor Kate wished she were dead. How could she be so childish! She blushed furiously and tried to smile, too, though she really felt like bursting into tears.
‘You must come to our place one of these days,’ muttered Dr Brownley to a semi-circle of glassy-eyed Blacketts who seemed to have gathered for no other purpose than to stare after him in mute accusation as he escaped into the darkness.
Dupigny suggested to Matthew that they walk back to the Mayfair by way of the road rather than the garden, to see if the Major had retired to his little bungalow on the opposite side of the road. Matthew said goodnight to the elder Blacketts. On the way out he found Monty and Joan on the steps by the front door. Monty held out his hand, saying that he was off to bed and would wish Matthew good night.
‘Monty, I’d like to thank you for your help in getting me out here.’
‘Think nothing of it, old boy. After all, we couldn’t leave you to be raped by all those strapping Land Girls, could we?’ And with a wave Monty disappeared inside.
After a moment Joan came forward. He thought she was going to say good night, too, but no. ‘Hello you!’ she said, lighting up like a firefly in the darkness. He peered at her uncertainly. ‘You always look so serious,’ she added, putting her shoulder against his and shoving him a little off balance.
‘Do I?’ he asked cautiously.
‘Come on, I’ll walk down the road a bit with you and François.’
They set off together down the drive but almost immediately Joan was called back by her mother who was standing at the front door. She wanted to know where Joan was going.
‘Oh Mother!’ Joan said irritably.
‘Why can’t you leave the girl alone?’ Walter wanted to know, equally exasperated. A hurried conference took place.
While they were waiting for her Dupigny asked: ‘D’you like women?’
‘Well, yes, of course.’ To Matthew this seemed a rather peculiar question. After a moment he added: ‘I’m rather keen on D. H. Lawrence, as a matter of fact.’
There was a pause while Dupigny turned this over in his mind. Presently he said: ‘Out here, you know, there are many young men but few young women … I mean, European. There are, bien entendu, the Asiatical women, ah yes, but in Singapore, you see, although the young men make terribly love in a physical way to the oriental ladies and sometimes even to the mature European ladies (those who have, as we say, la cuisse hospitalière), still, alas, they are not satisfied. They sigh for companions of their own age and race. They are encouraged, moreover, by their elders who wish to preserve the purity of the race, a desire of which Hitler himself would not disapprove. With us in Indo-China it is different. We do not worry like the British when one of us decides to marry the daughter of a prosperous native. Such marriages have very often a great utility, both commercial and political.’
‘Well, I must say …’ began Matthew, but his tired brain declined to furnish him with any suitable observation.
‘You like Joan, perhaps? Yes, she is a nice English girl, healthy, full of virtues, plainly but solidly built in the English manner, made (comme le bread-pudding de Madame sa mère) entirely of good things, but, alas, without either the ravishing innocence of a child or the serious attractions of a mature woman. Personally I believe the only one of the Blackett ladies to my taste is la petite … Miss Kate, and even she is becoming a trifle trop mûre … She is already in my opinion a bit too … how d’you say … bien balancée … bien foutue … Yes a bit too well-endowed, thank you.’
‘But she’s only a child!’
‘I agree she has that in her favour. All the same, the rot begins. I speak physically, of course.’ Dupigny suppressed a yawn.
‘Of course,’ agreed Matthew hastily, feeling the tide of the conversation carrying him swiftly out of his depth. ‘But what I meant was …’
‘Ah, Joan is returning at last.’
The night air seemed very humid: the breeze had dropped, increasing the impression of heat. An hour ago there had been a brief, heavy downpour and water still gurgled busily in the deep storm-drain beside the road, but overhead the sky was clear. Matthew and Dupigny sauntered along hands in pockets; Joan walked between them, humming a song beneath her breath. As the road curved towards the Mayfair, however, she dragged the two men to a stop and disengaged herself. She had promised her mother she would not stay out long. Matthew shook hands with her stiffly: he thought it best not to attempt a more intimate embrace for the moment. As for Dupigny, he collected her slender fingers in his own and conveyed them to his lips but, despite the darkness, Matthew could see that he was using them to mask the remains of the yawn against which he had been struggling while speculating on the sensual qualities of the Blackett women.
‘How romantic you are, François! Why can’t Englishmen be like you? Well, good night!’
Matthew and Dupigny walked on towards the Major’s bungalow which seemed, as far as Matthew could tell in the darkness, to be no less ramshackle than the Mayfair Building on the other side of the road. They called at the verandah but there was no reply, except the soft cry of a night-bird from somewhere in the undergrowth. Matthew produced his packet of Craven A and they each lit a cigarette, lingering in the road while they smoked: indoors the heat would be suffocating.
‘D’you happen to know what the Singapore Grip is?’ Matthew asked. ‘Some people I met said I should watch out for it.’
‘I believe it is what they call here a certain tropical fever, very grave. Certainly, you must watch out for it.’
‘Oh?’ But why, wondered Matthew, would the RAF men have found it so amusing if it was a serious illness? This was a mystery.
Matthew would have pursued the matter but Dupigny was asking him how well he knew his old friend Major Archer. ‘What? You have been introduced only? You must make his acquaintance better …’ And he went on to explain how fond he was of the Major. The Major, indeed, was one of the few people on earth for whom he, Dupigny, had any affection at all. They had first met in France during the Great War. In those days he had been a liaison officer with a British regiment. He and the Major had hardly known each other then. After the war he himself had gone to Indo-China, the Major had gone to Ireland. But then, one day in 1925, on a visit to London to see his tailor during his European leave, they had bumped into each other at a restaurant in the Strand, chez Simpson, perhaps? With enormous difficulty they had succeeded in recognizing each other, they had exchanged cards, they had renewed their acquaintanceship. Then, in the course of his next visit to Europe in 1930, they had met yet again, this time on purpose, and in 1935 yet again.
Dupigny had watched his English friend with the utmost curiosity. It had taken the Major time to settle down after the war. For a while he had been in hospital. And then he had evidently witnessed some unpleasantness in Ireland which had affected his peace of mind. The terrible unemployment of the post-war years had further unsettled him. In those days, too, he had perhaps still been yearning to capture a suitable young lady as a bride. There had no doubt been some woman in Ireland … but that Dupigny suspected only. For the Major himself never spoke of such matters.
Over the years Dupigny had noticed the Major becoming more private in his habits and, in some ways, undoubtedly a bit eccentric. If you had gone to take coffee with the Major in, let us say, 1930, you would have witnessed a strange ritual. The housekeeper would first appear with a silver jug containing just-boiled water. The Major, still chatting to you politely, would whip a thermometer from his breast pocket, plunge it into the water, remove it, read it, dry it on a napkin and, with a nod to the housekeeper, replace it in his pocket. The coffee could now be made! Ah, that was the bachelor life for you! And there were other things, too. He had taken to grumbling if his wine glasses did not sparkle as clear as rain-water … yet at the same time thought nothing of piling his cigar ash on the polished surface of his mahogany dining-table, or of dropping it, without ceremony, on the carpet.
You might also, if the Major had ushered you into his drawing-room in Bayswater about the year 1930, have found it hard to discover a satisfactory seat, since all the more comfortable chairs and the sofa were occupied by slumbering dogs, refugees for the most part from Ireland’s fight for independence and by now growing old. If you did find a seat it would be covered in fine dog hairs: these animals were always moulting for some reason. The Major himself would merely perch on the arm of a chair while the dogs gazed at him with bleary devotion from their cushions. Sometimes, if a bark was heard in the street outside, they would give answering barks, though without moving an inch from their chairs. Dupigny had known few more strange experiences than that of sitting in the company of the silent, withdrawn Major towards the end of a winter afternoon and hearing those dogs erupting round him in the gloom.
‘Eh bien! So all is up with the Major!’ one might have thought in 1930, looking at him perched on the arm of a chair across his penumbrous, dog-strewn drawing-room. ‘Nothing surely can save him now from the increasingly private comforts and exacting rules of his bachelor life.’ One by one over the next five years while he, Dupigny, was again in Indo-China the dogs had dropped away and were not replaced. The Major, perhaps, was no longer very fond of dogs and had kept them mainly from a sense of duty, just as he had kept the drawing-room itself exactly as it used to be when his aunt was still alive. By this time, without a doubt, he had become a confirmed bachelor. The marriages of his contemporaries no longer filled him with such envy. He had begun to see that being married can have drawbacks, that being single can have advantages.
Not, of course, that the Major had not continued to fall in love at regular intervals. But now he tended to fall in love with happily married women, the wives of his friends and thus, for a man of honour like himself, unattainable creatures who personified all the virtues, above all, the virtue of not being in a position to return his feelings. The love he bore them was of the chivalrous, selfless kind so fashionable among the British in late-Victorian and Edwardian times, perhaps because (selon l’hypothèse Dupigny) it handily acknowledged the female principle in the universe without incommoding busy males with real women. Still, Dupigny had had to admit that his poor friend had a life which suited him very well, y compris les amours.
Agreed, the Major’s reward in these encounters was not the tumultuous one of illicit embraces between the sheets: it was the glance of gratitude on a pure maternal brow, the running of a moustache as soft as … blaireau, how d’you say? (badger? thank you) … the running of a badger-soft moustache over fair knuckles, the reading of unspoken thoughts in bright eyes. These small moments, remembered late at night as he sprawled in his lonely bed smoking his pipe in a bedroom that smelled like a railway carriage (Fumeurs), were the Major’s only but adequate reward.
If, however, perhaps hoping for a deeper relationship, the lady should pay him a visit one afternoon bringing her children (Dupigny had witnessed one such occasion) the Major would become cross. Young children would totter about the house knocking things over and trying to hug the elderly, malodorous dogs, themselves grown short-tempered with age. Older children would chase each other from room to room and would keep asking him if they could play with certain important possessions of his (a gramophone, a pair of Prussian binoculars, a steam-powered model boat or electric railway) without realizing that these objects could only be handled with elaborate ceremony and precautions. These children-accompanied sentimental visits, Dupigny surmised, had never failed to be disastrous, passion-damping.
On such occasions, no doubt, faced with a terrifying glimpse of what a real marriage might entail, the Major could not help congratulating himself on his escape. A white marble statue of Venus, it was true, still glimmered, seductively unclothed, at the foot of his stairs. But having turned forty the Major must have reflected that by now he was over the worst. He had come through the years of emotional typhoons battered, certainly, but all in one piece. It was wonderful how a human being could adapt to his circumstances. The Major knew in his heart that he could not have endured marriage, the untidiness and confusion of it.
And so, there the Major had been, about 1935, fixed in his habits, apparently suspended in his celibacy like a chicken in aspic. But one day, abruptly, he was no longer satisfied: he had decided to give it all up, this comfortable life, to travel and see the world before he was finally too old. A man has only one life! How surprised Dupigny had been when one day he learned that the Major was making a voyage to Australia, and then to Japan, even to visit him in Hanoi and later in Saigon! Why had he done this? Another love affair that had gone wrong? The Major never spoke of such things. Why had he then settled in Singapore, opportunely for himself as it now turned out? This was something which Dupigny had not understood. And neither, perhaps, had the Major!
Matthew and Dupigny, having finished their cigarettes, approached the entrance to the Mayfair Building: a little way into the compound a stiff, dignified old jaga in khaki shorts and a yellow turban watched them sleepily from his charpoy but all they could see of his face in the darkness was a copious white moustache and a white beard. Dupigny asked whether the Major was still in the bungalow. The jaga raised a skinny arm to point towards the building behind him.
‘It seems the Major has been here all the time. Let us go and wish him good night.’
After the starlit compound the darkness on the verandah seemed almost complete. It was agreeably perfumed, however, by the smoke of a Havana cigar whose glowing tip Matthew had no difficulty in locating as it danced for a moment in fingers raised in greeting.
‘Not yet in bed, Brendan? Old gentlemen must take care of themselves.’
‘I’ll be going to bed in a moment,’ the Major said, but Matthew had already been informed that the Major, harassed by insomnia, was just as likely to sit here on the verandah smoking cigars until first light. ‘Did you hear anything? Were there any military big-wigs there?’
‘Brooke-Popham and a General. They appear confident.’
Matthew and Dupigny groped their way across the verandah to the Major’s side. There Matthew collapsed with a shriek of bamboo on to a chaise-longue. How tired he was! What a lot had happened since he had last been in bed! ‘Very soon now I shall go to bed,’ he thought wearily. From where he sat he had a view of the Major’s silhouette. He could see the outline of his ‘badger-soft’ moustache, recently outraged by Cheong’s scissors. He could even see the corrugated wrinkles mounting the slope of the Major’s worried brow, growing smoother as they reached the imperceptible line of hair neatly plastered down with water.
‘What fools those men are!’ exclaimed the Major, and the tip of his cigar glowed fiercely in the darkness. But after a moment he added humbly: ‘Of course, they may know things that we don’t.’
19
At the end of the first week of December a little group of men wearing overalls or boiler-suits or simply shorts on account of the heat gathered one afternoon in the shade of the tamarind tree in the Mayfair’s compound. They belonged to the Mayfair Auxiliary Fire Service unit (AFS for short) and they had been summoned, although today was Sunday, to an urgent practice. The morning newspaper had carried news of a convoy of unidentified transport ships heading south from Japanese-occupied Indo-China and the Major, who was in charge of the Mayfair AFS unit, feared the worst. The Major, at the moment, was not under the tamarind tree but in the garage beside the house, struggling with a tarpaulin. Matthew, who had just been enrolled in the unit, was assisting him. There was no ventilation in the garage and the day’s sun, beating down on the corrugated iron roof, had made it like an oven inside. Matthew had already been suffering from the heat: now he felt the perspiration running down his legs and collecting in his socks.
The Major had dragged the tarpaulin off a large box-shaped object which proved to be some sort of engine, gleaming with steel and brass pipes and fittings. Matthew stared at it blankly. It had two large dials on a sort of dashboard and, instead of wheels, two carrying-poles like a palanquin.
‘It’s a Coventry Victor,’ declared the Major with pride. ‘Brand new!’
‘But what does it do?’
‘It’s a trailer-pump. The trailer is over there. I’ve had a bracket put on the back of my car so we can tow it about if need be. Give me a hand and we’ll carry it outside. We’re going to have a drill with it when our instructor gets here. He’s an ex-London Fire Brigade man and when he’s sober he knows his stuff … which isn’t always, unfortunately.’
Presently, the instructor arrived. He turned out to be a short, bald and red-faced man in his fifties called McMahon. After a lengthy altercation with the taxi-driver who had brought him he advanced swaying towards the Mayfair Building. The Major had explained to Matthew that Mr McMahon, like many firemen, had started life as a seaman. It became clear, however, as he collided with a bush, shouting, on his way round the house, that this was not the explanation of his rolling gait.
The Major had drawn up the members of the Mayfair AFS unit in a line beside the tennis court ready to be inspected by their instructor. They stood at ease, waiting uncertainly, while Mr McMahon weaved his way towards them, cursing. Apart from the Major himself, the unit consisted of Dupigny, a Mr Sen and a Mr Harris, both clerks who were occasionally lent to the Mayfair by Blackett and Webb (the former was Indian, the latter Eurasian), Mr Wu, a friendly Chinese businessman, the Chinese ‘boy’, Cheong, who had surprised the Major by volunteering and who, though his face remained perfectly impassive in every situation, had proved easily the most efficient of the recruits, Monty Blackett, who had volunteered (the lesser of two evils) to avoid conscription into the Local Defence Force but was still hoping to achieve, if not a complete dispensation, at least, a more agreeable position in Singapore’s active or passive defences, and finally, a handsome young man called Nigel Langfield, the son of Walter’s arch-rival and enemy, Solomon Langfield: Nigel was wearing a very new blue boiler-suit with AFS prettily embroidered in red on one of its breast pockets; from time to time he would lower his nose to sniff the satisfying newcloth smell of this garment.
These would-be firemen eyed their instructor with concern as he waded towards them, as if through a swamp. Before reaching them, however, he unexpectedly changed course to embrace the trunk of another tree not far away. Then, with his arms still round the tree and still cursing, he slithered to the ground, eventually struggling around to use it as a back-rest.
‘God help ye, y’ blithering lot o’ helpless bastards!’ he babbled, fighting for breath. ‘Let’s see another dry drill then, you perfumed bunch o’ pansies or, God help ye, the fists’ll be flyin’ or me name’s not McMahon! Get on with it … A dry drill, I’m tellin’ ye!’
‘I thought we were going to do a wet drill today,’ said the Major, looking dissatisfied. ‘That’s what you said last time.’
‘This time I’m sayin’ it’s a dry drill, y’bastard, so hop to it and see that ye run the bleedin’ hose out without a twist in it or ye’ll catch it hot, I’m tellin’ ye …’
‘Well, we might just do one,’ said the Major, ‘in order to get the feel of it before we do a wet drill. I’m afraid McMahon’s not going to be much help to us today by the look of it,’ he added in an undertone to the rest of the unit.
‘I heard that, y’ pissin’ old goat,’ yelled McMahon, quivering with a fresh paroxysm of rage and struggling ineffectually to get to his feet, evidently with the intention of exacting retribution.
‘Shut up or we’ll bash your silly brains in,’ said Monty languidly, sloping off in the direction of the bungalow.
‘Look here, Monty, where are you off to? We’re just going to begin,’ said the Major indignantly.
‘I’m just going to find an aspirin, old boy, if you don’t mind.’
‘Well, hurry up about it. I’ll try and explain the basic drill to Matthew in the meantime.’
There were, the Major explained, two types of hose: suction hose for picking up water from an open source such as a canal or a river, and delivery hose, for relaying water to the fire. Suction hose had a wide diameter and was reinforced to keep it cylindrical; it also had wire strainers to prevent stones or rubbish being sucked up into the pump. ‘Have you got that?’
‘I think so. This other one, then, is the delivery hosepipe, is it?’
From under his tree McMahon shrieked with laughter. ‘Hosepipe! He thinks he’s a bleedin’ gardener!’
‘Hm, I should have mentioned that, we say “hose” rather than “hosepipe”, and ropes are known as “lines” and the rungs of a ladder are called “rounds” … I don’t suppose it matters particularly, as we’re just a scratch team, but McMahon seems to prefer it.’
Delivery hose, the Major continued, was wound flat on a revolving drum and came in fifty or a hundred-foot lengths with a diameter of two or three inches; at the business end there was a tapering brass tube called the ‘branch’, not the nozzle! The drill was that the number one man ran off in the direction of the fire with the branch, unreeling a length of hose as he went; meanwhile the number three man laid out another length of hose and dealt with the couplings. These couplings were what were known as ‘male’ and ‘female’, that was to say …
‘That fat pansy wouldn’t know the difference if ye took up y’skirts and showed him!’
‘That will do, McMahon,’ said the Major sharply. He turned back to Matthew. ‘The idea is that the male coupling plugs into the female on the previous length of hose. The male plugs into the standpipe, if that’s where the water is coming from, or into the engine pump. Meanwhile the runner takes hold of the lugs on the “female” end around which the delivery hose is normally wrapped and he uses them as an axle round which the roll of hose unwinds. Here, Nigel will give us a demonstration.’
Nigel obediently took the roll of hose and holding it a little way from his body went loping gracefully away with it, laying it down neatly on the turf behind him as he went.
‘It’s not as easy as it looks. Nigel’s rather good at it.’
It was true. Everybody watched in admiration and even McMahon was temporarily silenced by this display of skill. There was still no sign of Monty so Cheong was sent to look for him. Meanwhile Mr Wu, who with Dupigny and Cheong had been tinkering with the engine, was called forward to show Matthew how to climb a ladder which had earlier been set up against the roof of the Mayfair.
‘When climbing radder glasp lounds not side of radder,’ explained Mr Wu to Matthew.
‘What?’
‘Glasp lungs!’
‘Good heavens! You mean, your own? Or someone else’s?’
‘That’s right,’ said the Major, approaching swiftly. ‘You should always hold the rungs, or the “rounds” as we call them, rather than the frame of the ladder. And incidentally never step on to a window-ledge: they tend to collapse. The drill is to put one leg right into the window. Ah, thank heaven for that, it looks as if McMahon has gone to sleep,’ he added. ‘Perhaps this would be a good time to get the pump working. After all, we may not have much more time to practise.’
A gloomy silence had fallen on the Mayfair AFS unit. Even McMahon, muttering in his sleep, looked discouraged. Staring into the distance where the white wedding-cake mass of the Blacketts’ house glimmered above the trees, the Major said: ‘Still, with luck we may never be needed.’
As soon as the afternoon’s drill was over Matthew with a sigh of relief made for the bathroom, which as he had already discovered, had one serious disadvantage: the absence of any running water. A vast green and yellow earthenware jar with a copper ladle stood in one corner. This was a Shanghai jar. The procedure was simple: you dipped the ladle into the jar and poured the water over yourself. Matthew stripped and began sluicing himself; he found the water in the jar tepid but refreshing, nevertheless.
‘An Irishwoman will be fired from a cannon, Monty? Whatever for?’
Monty, who had followed Matthew into the bathroom with an invitation, explained. It was some special show being put on at The Great World in order to raise money for the war against the Jabs in China. The Irishwoman was a human cannonball making a tour of the Far East. And there was also a group of singers called the Da Sousa Sisters. Anyway, Joan had said she was keen to go. That meant they only needed another woman and they could make an evening of it. ‘You don’t happen to know any women, do you?’
‘Monty, I’ve only just arrived.’
‘Never mind then. I expect I’ll be able to scrape one up somewhere. I’ll see you over at our place in a couple of hours, OK?’
‘Oh look, while you’re here, Monty, I’d like you to explain something about our Johore estate that I don’t understand. Why are we replanting at a time when it’s so urgent to produce rubber? I don’t get it.’ The previous day Matthew and the Major had driven over the Causeway and into Johore on the mainland so that Matthew could inspect the Mayfair estate. They had discovered that in a number of places mature trees were being replaced with saplings. When they had questioned Turner, the estate manager whom Matthew had glimpsed on his first evening in Singapore, he had not known the reason for it. He had simply been instructed to replant by Blackett and Webb who, as managing agents, were in control of planting policy.
‘Well,’ replied Monty, sighing heavily, ‘it’s nothing to worry about. It’s all under control.’
‘I’m sure it’s under control. I just want to get the hang of things, that’s all.’
‘Rubber trees don’t last for ever, you know. And as they get older they get brittle. They break in the wind …’
‘But they last for thirty years or so, don’t they? And the trees that are being replaced aren’t that old. Besides, it’s not just an odd tree here and there. It’s being done in sections.’ There was no sound in the bathroom except for a steady splash of water and Monty’s rather laboured breathing. Matthew began to ladle water over himself again.
‘Look here,’ said Monty finally in a rallying tone, ‘I have to admit that your question has stumped me. We have so many estates that it’s hard to know everything about each one. The Mayfair is small beer compared with some of the others. But I tell you what. I’ll get the facts straight before your next Board meeting and we’ll thrash it out there, OK? Now don’t worry about a thing. I’ll be on my way now …’ However, he continued to stand in the doorway watching the water coursing over Matthew’s plump body. Did Matthew know, he enquired with a leer, that in the East there were many stories of beautiful girls who, in order to be cool, climbed into Shanghai jars and then could not get out, so they had to call a manservant to break the jar? Matthew could probably imagine what happened next! With that Monty departed, licking his lips, to bathe in the greater comfort of his parents’ house.
Later, refreshed by his bath and wearing a light linen suit, Matthew was on the point of leaving for the Blacketts’ house when the telephone rang. It was Ehrendorf. In the few days which Matthew had now spent in Singapore the two friends had so far managed only one brief meeting. The reason, undoubtedly, was that Ehrendorf was extremely busy. With the rapid decay of the political situation in the Far East his services, Matthew surmised, must be in constant demand for the assessment of British military strength and strategy. However, Matthew was aware of a new feeling of constraint in his friendship with Ehrendorf. How different it was now from the way it had been before! He could not help contrasting that strained meeting at the aerodrome and the subsequent drive into Singapore with their previous meetings in Europe. Matthew, though by nature unobservant, was well aware that Joan was somehow at the root of this new awkwardness. He supposed that Ehrendorf and Joan had had some sort of affair; he remembered the melancholy sigh he had heard from the darkness at the Mayfair on the night of his arrival. But why should that affect his relationship with Ehrendorf?
On the telephone, Ehrendorf sounded more friendly and cheerful, more like his old self. He asked Matthew how he was going to spend the evening, suggesting that they should have a meal together. Matthew explained that Monty had just enlisted him to watch an Irishwoman being fired from a cannon. Perhaps Ehrendorf would like to come, too? As a ‘military observer’ it could almost be considered his duty.
‘OK, I’ll meet you at The Great World. There’s a place where they sell tickets at the main gate, something like the lodge of an Oxford college (inside you’ll find it’s more interesting, though!).’ And Ehrendorf rang off. It was only on his way to the Blacketts’ that Matthew remembered … Joan would be there, too. And that might cause some difficulty.
Presently Matthew found himself in the Blacketts’ drawingroom, waiting for Monty and Joan. While the elderly major-domo went off at a dignified pace to alert some member of the family to his presence Matthew took a quick look at the portrait of his father which hung at the end of the room, then he went to sit down on a sofa. A Chinese ‘boy’ came and placed a packet of cigarettes and some matches at his elbow and then silently withdrew, leaving him alone except for a long-haired Siamese cat curled up on the floor: this was Kate’s beloved pet, Ming Toy. He scooped it up and sat it on his lap. It opened its eyes for a moment, then closed them again.
‘Are you a tom-cat, I wonder?’ he asked the cat, lifting its magnificent tail to inspect its private parts. He began to rummage about in the animal’s fur, peering at it closely for signs of gender. The cat began to purr. Matthew was in the middle of this careful inspection of the cat’s hindquarters (its fur was so long and thick one could only guess at what it might conceal) when Walter came into the room. He gave Matthew a rather odd look. Matthew hurriedly let go of the splendid tail and put the cat back on the carpet.
‘You’re just the man I wanted to see,’ said Walter. ‘I want you to look at some of these paintings of Rangoon and Singapore in the early days.’
20
‘So there you are, my boy, is that not an achievement to be proud of? Over this great area of the globe, covered in steaming swamp and mountain and horrid, horrid jungle, a few determined pioneers, armed only with a little capital and a great creative vision, set the mark of civilization, bringing prosperity to themselves, certainly (though let’s not forget that the crocodiles of bankruptcy and disgrace quietly slipped into the water at their passage, ready to seize the rash or unlucky and drag them down into their watery caverns), but above all, a means of livelihood to the unhappy millions of Asiatics who had been faced by misery and destitution until their coming! Such a man was your father!’
Over the years Walter’s rhetoric as he conducted his guests on a tour of his collection had grown more solemn and impressive. Here and there fanciful touches had crept in (the crocodiles, for example, which nowadays forged after his intrepid capitalists): if they earned their keep he allowed them to stay; otherwise they were discarded. He had grown more convinced himself of the rightness of what he was saying and more indignant at the absence from history books of the great men of commerce. Surely it was unjust that history should only relate the exploits of bungling soldiers, monarchs and politicians, ignoring the merchant whose activities were the very bedrock of civilization and progress!
On the whole Matthew was inclined to agree with Walter: he, too, considered it odd that great commmercial exploits should have been so neglected in the list of man’s achievements. Both courage and a creative intelligence were certainly needed to set up a great commercial enterprise, even one on the scale, relatively small by international standards, of Blackett and Webb. Why, then, did History hesitate? Could it be that History was unhappy about the motives of the great entrepreneurs, or about the social ills that accompanied the undoubted social benefits flowing from these enterprises? Matthew, listening to Walter with one ear, began to ponder this interesting question.
Walter, who had been inclined to fear the worst on first acquaintance with Matthew, had been surprised and gratified to discover that Matthew was quite well-informed about economic conditions in the Far East and in other backward countries of the colonial Empire. Agreed, it was theoretical knowledge, culled from books so that facts and statistics and ideas lodged in his head in a Russian salad of which it was unlikely that any practical use could be made. But still, it was clear that Matthew was interested, as opposed to Monty who was not. Walter even dared to hope that given some experience of the real world of the market-place, and a little time for Joan to make him familiar with the unaccustomed snaffle and bit, something might be made of Matthew, after all. He explained in ringing tones the importance for the morale of Malaya’s native masses of Blackett and Webb’s jubilee celebrations. Soon these native peoples, like the inhabitants of the British Isles, might find themselves having to fight for their country. They needed an idea to fight for. By a happy chance that idea, by general consent, had been found to be embodied in Blackett and Webb’s jubilee slogan: ‘Continuity in Prosperity’! And it was here, went on Walter enthusiastically, that Matthew would have his first opportunity to make a contribution to the War Effort; for the jubilee procession planned for New Year’s day, after a sequence of floats symbolizing the benefits conferred on the Colony by Blackett and Webb, was to have culminated in the founder sitting on a chair borne by grateful employees. Thus the image of Continuity would be stamped indelibly on the native mind. But, alas, Mr Webb’s death had left the chair empty. Who better to fill it than his son, Matthew?
‘Oh well,’ murmured Matthew vaguely, ‘I’d like to help, of course, but that sort of thing isn’t really my cup of tea. Not at all. Hm, why don’t you try Monty? He’d be much better.’
‘Well, we’ll see about that,’ replied Walter somewhat testily, disappointed by Matthew’s lack of enthusiasm. He decided to have a word with Joan: he could see it was high time she started producing some results: ‘Are you and Joan going out this evening?’ he asked after a pause.
Matthew explained about their proposed trip to The Great World.
‘Really, Monty’s the limit,’ Walter muttered to his wife who had just entered.
At this moment Monty and Joan burst into the room, laughing over something. They both stared at Matthew as if surprised to see him there … But no, that had been the arrangement.
‘Well, let’s get going,’ said Monty. ‘We don’t want to miss the show. Besides, Sinclair is waiting in the car.’
‘But Duff and Diana are coming,’ said Mrs Blackett, ‘aren’t you even going to stay and say hello to them?’
But Monty regretted that they had not a moment to spare. Yes, he would see that Joan was not home too late and, yes, he did have the keys of the Pontiac. If you once got stuck with those ‘talkative buggers’ from Westminster, he explained to Matthew on the way out, there was no getting away from the ‘dreary sods’, the evening was as good as ruined.
Standing, for some reason, bolt upright on the back seat of the Pontiac and shading his eyes with his hand, or perhaps saluting although there was nobody in the vicinity except the Malay syce, was a tall, thin Army officer of about Monty’s age. This was none other than that Sinclair Sinclair with whom Joan had enjoyed such an agreeable voyage from Shanghai some years earlier; in the meantime he had exchanged his career in the Foreign Office for a commission in the Army where, thanks to family connections and the dearth of regular officers which attended the outbreak of war, his rise had been swift; now here he was, instead of fighting Jerry in North Africa, called to put his experience of the Far East at the disposal of Malaya Command and pretty fed up, too (as he had explained to Joan), at finding himself a member of the ‘Chairborne Division’!
‘Thank heaven!’ he cried while they were still at some distance. ‘I thought you’d never come. I was beginning to feel like a ca … ca … ca … person abandoned on a desert island!’ and he uttered a shrieking laugh, like the working of a dry pump, and with the same sort of hollow gulping coming from his midriff.
‘I’m Matthew Webb,’ said Matthew, since the young Blacketts, intent on dismissing the syce and installing themselves in the Pontiac, had not bothered to introduce them.
‘Suh … suh … suh … suh … suh … suh …’ Matthew was obliged to pause with his hand in the officer’s while this long string of redundant syllables was dragged out of his mouth like entrails, and his smile grew a little fixed as he waited. But finally, with a gulp and a snap of his teeth, the officer was able to bite off the string and exclaim: ‘… inclair Sinclair!’ Matthew, who had taken an immediate liking to him, nodded encouragingly, wondering whether Sinclair was his first name, last name or both at once. It seemed better not to risk an enquiry.
This time Monty was driving, but no less recklessly than the Malay syce had done on the previous occasion that Matthew had been in this car. As the Pontiac surged down the drive into humid evening and then turned with screaming tyres on to the road, Monty thumped the steering-wheel jubilantly chanting ‘Run, rabbit, run!’ Joan sat in front with her slender, sunburned arm gracefully resting on the back of the seat behind her brother. She was wearing a plain, short-sleeved dress of blue cotton, beautifully ironed. How fresh she looked! ‘She toils not, neither does she spin,’ thought Matthew, gazing in wonder at the beautiful creases in the starched cloth. She turned, her hair tossing in the wind as they hurtled down Grange Road, and gave him a quick, sly smile.
‘I’m going to have to duh … duh … dash off early this evening,’ shouted Sinclair. ‘I go on duty at midnight.’
‘I knew it,’ said Monty. ‘You’re going to be a bore, Sinclair. I feel it in my bones.’
‘No, I’m not,’ protested Sinclair. ‘Must watch out for the jolly old Jap, though.’
‘You are going to be a bore then.’ Monty fell into a moody silence until they were approaching The Great World. ‘It looks as if we’ll have to leave the car and walk. It’s been like this every night for the past few weeks with the bloody troops arriving.’
‘By the way,’ said Matthew, ‘Jim Ehrendorf wanted to come so I said we’d meet him at the gate.’
‘Oh no! That’s all we needed,’ grumbled Monty exchanging a glance with his sister. ‘What did you do that for?’
They parked the Pontiac in River Valley Road and proceeded on foot. Women shuffled along in the crowd carrying on their backs doll-like babies with shaven heads, some asleep, some peering out in wonder at this strange world with black button eyes. Already by the time they had reached the corner of Kim Seng Road the crowd had thickened considerably.
‘Is all this for the human cannonball?’
Monty shook his head. ‘Everything goes on here. You’ll see. People here are crazy about dancing. They bought the dance-floor out of the old Hôtel de l’Europe which used to be the swanky hotel on the padang and had it put here. They sometimes get the orchestras from the P & O boats in dock (or they used to, anyway). Makes a change from Chinks and Filipinos.’
Presently they came to the entrance beneath an archway on which was written in streamlined neon script: The Great World. Here a dense crowd of men and women struggled for admission; among them several men in uniform. Suddenly a man in a lighter uniform caught Matthew by the arm: it was Ehrendorf. ‘I just got here this moment,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Hi there, Monty! Hiya Joan!’
‘What a surprise,’ said Monty without surprise.
‘Jim, I’m not sure that you know, ah, Sinclair …’ said Matthew.
‘Let’s get inside before we get crushed to death,’ said Joan, ignoring Ehrendorf. ‘These soldiers smell like pigs.’
‘Look, I just want to hire someone to watch my car while I’m inside so could you wait a moment?’ said Ehrendorf, his cheerfulness evaporating. ‘I’m afraid the local gashouse gang will have it stripped down if …’
But the young Blacketts had pressed on through the entrance dragging the hesitating Matthew and Sinclair with them.
‘Look, shouldn’t we wait for Jim?’
‘Don’t worry, he’ll find us all right.’
Matthew had a last glimpse of Ehrendorf’s face as Monty propelled him through the entrance and was harrowed to see the expression of suffering on it.
‘See you in a minute then,’ Ehrendorf called after them and hurried away.
21
Matthew now found that he had been shoved into a great circular concourse in the middle of which stood a thicket of bamboo and palms. On one hand was an open-air café whose tables were thronged with rowdy troops drinking beer, on the other a billiards saloon through the tall open windows of which Matthew glimpsed green pyramids of smoke-filled light above the tables and oriental faces glimmering in the surrounding darkness. Farther along was a great hall from within which there came the regular thump of drums and sighing of saxophones.
Together they struck off through the crowd which in some places was so thick that they had to shoulder their way through, passing along a street of stalls with corrugated-iron roofs and flimsy, brightly lit fronts. Some of these stalls were open-air eating-houses festooned with lurid, naked, pink-eyed chickens hung by their necks on hooks, lidded eyes closed in death; beside them were piled varnished ducks and lumps of meat swimming in grease and studded with fat flies gorging themselves; next to the meat laboured a wizened specialist in fish dumplings, and next to him a family of plump Malays beside bubbling cauldrons of nasi padang, giant prawns, curried eggs, nuts and ikan bilis (dried fish no bigger than your fingernail), all being shovelled on to plates or twisted in cones of leaves. Here a groaning lady was being sawn in half, there another was being put through a mincer with blood horribly gushing out underneath; next came a shooting-gallery where an Australian sergeant in his wide-brimmed hat was using an air-rifle to smash blackened light-bulbs to the jeers of his comrades, and a striptease stall; a neighbouring stall displayed a sign warning of Waning Virility: ‘Please swallow our Sunlight Pill for Male Persons, Moonlight Pill for Female Persons. Guaranteed.’ Beneath the sign was a display of medicine bottles together with a crude and alarming diagram in coloured crayon which was evidently intended to represent sexual organs.
As Matthew paused to study it his arm was suddenly taken by a tall and slender Tamil girl with a pigtail (in which jasmine flowers were intricately braided) hanging to her waist. He nudged up his spectacles to see her better, gazing with surprise into her dark face where a silver stud gleamed in the whorl of each nostril. She was very pretty and he would have liked to talk to her, but the others were already disappearing; and so he disengaged himself apologetically and hurried after them, his heart thumping. How exciting it all was, how much more interesting than Geneva!
Now, hurrying through the crowds in search of his friends, he almost ran full tilt into a makeshift stage (merely boards and trestles) on which a Chinese opera was taking place. Actors and actresses in glorious costumes were declaiming in a penetrating falsetto, impervious to the scene-shifter in khaki shorts and singlet and with a cigarette dangling from his mouth who was rearranging the furniture around them. One of them, with a forked beard reaching to his knees, stalked off into the wings, rolling his eyes in histrionic rage, and a murmur went up from the crowd of Chinese who had gathered to watch. On his way round the side to rejoin the alley which he had left Matthew found himself gazing into the dressing-room, for the sides and back of this miniature theatre were covered only by cloth hangings blowing about in the breeze and allowing him a glimpse of the actresses making-up for the next scene: elaborately rouged and pink-powdered faces glared at mirrors while tweezers prepared a further assault on already well-plucked eyebrows. Several tiny Chinese girls clung to wooden spars also peering in at this arresting sight.
Afraid that he had lost his friends altogether, he pressed on; his progress was slow, nevertheless, for his attention was captured by various wonders which sprang up one after another: a man selling bunches of dried frogs tied together by their legs, a family of acrobats turning somersaults, a stall selling the juices of unfamiliar fruits by the glass, a wizened cashier in a bamboo cage, satay morsels skewered on hundreds of bamboo spills roasting over charcoal, sellers of soto soup, and won ton mee, and apple fritters fizzing in rancid-smelling oil, and nasi goreng, and heavenly ice-cream flavoured with mango and durian, and the durian itself, so desired and so dreaded for its peculiar odour, piled in pyramids like cannonballs … and other astonishing sights and events beyond description, taking place, too, in a street crowded with men and women of every shape, size and colour, from a family of performing pygmies, to the graceful, delicate Chinese, to floury, bucolic British and Dutch in voluminous khaki shorts; and accompanied by a cacophony of musical instruments and gramophones in an atmosphere heavy with perfume, incense, sandalwood, sweat and tobacco smoke in the soft, humid air of the tropics.
Matthew recalled the conversation he had had earlier in the evening with Walter and began to ponder the commercial enterprise which had brought about this extraordinary mixture of races and cultures. It was as if the sudden appearance of Western capital in Malaya had created a vacuum which had sucked in people from all the surrounding countries and from much farther away. Would this nation of transients who had come to seek a livelihood under the British Crown one day become a nation with a culture of its own, created somehow out of its own diversity? It had happened in America, certainly, but would it happen here where the divergences of culture were even greater than they had been among the American immigrants? Was a colony like Malaya, as the Communists claimed, a mere sweat-shop for cheap labour operated in the interests of capitalism by cynical Western governments? Or was Western capital (which included his own capital, too, now that his father had died; he must not forget that!) … or was Western capital, as Walter insisted, a fructifying influence bringing life and hope to millions by making hitherto unused land productive? Or was it perhaps both things at the same time? (Had not Marx himself suggested something of the sort?) To what extent were the affairs of the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States directed by Britain with the welfare of their inhabitants at heart and to what extent with British commercial interests? that was the root of the question! Matthew had halted again, perturbed. He could see Monty and Joan and Sinclair not too far ahead and he wanted to think this out before rejoining them. But at this moment something odd happened.
Among the strollers, diners and revellers Matthew had been aware, while sinking his teeth into these weighty problems, of a number of painted girls, Chinese or Eurasian, unusually graceful and attractive in their high-collared, straight-cut Shanghai gowns, slit at the side to above the knee. These girls wore their blue-black hair short and marcelled in the Western fashion, but as Matthew stood there, immobilized by thought, he could not help noticing that one of them, strolling arm in arm with another girl, was not only wearing a Western summer frock but also wore her hair long and loose. And even more surprising, for she seemed to be Chinese, when she passed in front of a brightly lit food-stall her hair, which had seemed to be as black as her companion’s, glowed dark red around the edges, like a bottle of red ink held up against the light.
She was saying something to the girl beside her and accompanying her words with a sweet smile which revealed a glimmer of white teeth. Matthew, captivated by her appearance, could not help staring at her. Looking up, she noticed his glance and gave a start of surprise, as if she recognized him. With a word to her companion she came boldly up to him, still smiling, and said in a low voice: ‘Matthew, I knew your father.’ Then, since Matthew merely goggled at her, she went on: ‘He was very kind to me. I was so sorry when he died! My name is Vera Chiang … I saw you when you came to the Mayfair with Mr and Miss Blackett, who has also been kind to me … and she is beautiful, too, don’t you think? just like Joan Crawford she reminds me of, so lovely … and now, Matthew, you are all alone in the world …’ Her eyes had filled with tears of sympathy.
‘Good gracious!’ murmured Matthew and continued to peer at her in astonishment. He cleared his throat, however, in order to say something more adequate and was about to nudge his glasses up on his nose, but she took hold of his hand and clasped it feelingly in both of hers, saying: ‘I was in trouble and your dear father, like a saint of heaven, from the depths of my misery gave me “a bunk up” (please excuse my slang expression of speaking!) and now he has died, it is so sad, it really does give me “the blues” when I think about it and sometimes at night I cry by myself, yes, but forgive me, for you it must be very much worse than for me!’ And with emotion she clasped his hand tightly to her chest with both of hers.
‘Actually, my father and I weren’t all that …’
‘Yes, I know how you were feeling when you heard this news and I thought “Poor Matthew” because your father had shown me a “snap” of you when small baby and I wondered: “In whatever country in the world will this news reach him?” and your father had told me that when one day he was no more, you, his only son, would be left alone in the world because your dear mother had “kicked the bucket” long ago and there was no one else to look after you.’ On an impulse she flicked open a button of her frock and gently slipped his hand through the opening, clasping it with both of hers more tightly than ever to comfort him, with the result that Matthew now found his rather damp palm moulding what appeared to be, well, a naked breast: whatever it was, it was certainly silky, soft, plastic, agreeably resistant and satisfying to the touch. He continued to stand there for some moments enjoying this unusually pleasant sensation, though distinctly bewildered. Meanwhile, they gazed into each other’s eyes, hypnotized, and currents of feeling flowed back and forth between them.
At this moment a torrent of inebriated Dutch sailors, their arms on each other’s shoulders, half running, half dancing the remains of a drunken hornpipe, scattering the crowd right and left, suddenly came bearing down on them. One moment Matthew was standing there, immobilized by the question of colonial welfare and progress, with the damp palm of his hand neatly moulding a young woman’s naked breast, the next he was being jostled by a crowd of chuckling Chinese as they fled before the hornpiping sailors. He was pushed this way and that. He and the young woman were sundered … the hand through which such agreeable sensations had been flowing was brushed away, his spectacles dislodged from his nose and swung perilously from one ear as he struggled to keep his balance. Now a gale of deep-throated laughter blew in his ear, his wrists were grabbed and slung around enormous damp necks, powerful hands closed round his chest, and the next instant he had been whisked away as part of a giant spider’s web of sailors from which one or two diminutive Chinese were struggling like flies to extricate themselves. Matthew found himself carried along in a blur of rushing lights and figures, swaying and horn-piping at a terrifying speed, his feet hardly touching the ground, until at last the spider’s web’s progress was arrested by crashing into a tent where what might have been some rather intimate massage seemed to be taking place. By the time that he, too, had managed to disengage himself and adjust his spectacles, which by a miracle he had not lost (he would have been helpless without them), he was some distance from where he had seen the girl. He went back a little way, looking for her, but the crowd had surged over the place where they had been standing and he could no longer even be quite sure where it had been.
He felt a hand on his arm. He turned and found that it was Monty.
‘We thought we’d lost you. What have you been up to? Come on, it’s this way.’
‘Monty, I must tell you, a really strange thing just happened …’
But Monty was anxious not to miss the beginning of the show and without waiting to hear any more had set off again towards a distant spot-lit enclosure. From that direction, too, there now came a high-pitched, piercing laugh, like the creaking of a dry pump, or perhaps the lonely cry of a peacock in the dusk.
22
A considerable crowd had assembled to witness the unusual sight of a European lady being fired from a cannon; canvas awnings had been erected to screen the event from those reluctant to pay the price of admission but here and there the fabric was torn and small boys fought for places at peepholes. Inside the enclosure an elaborate scene had been set: on the right stood the cannon, its long barrel, mottled with green and brown camouflage in the best military manner, protruding from a two-dimensional cardboard castle on which was written Fortress Singapore. Behind the cannon loomed the giant papiermâché heads of Chiang Kai-shek and King George VI, the former with a legend hung round his neck: ‘Kuo (Country), Min (People), Tang (Party). World friend with all Peace-loving Peoples!’ together with a similar legend in Chinese ideographs beside it. ‘God Save King’ said a more prefunctory legend around the King’s neck.
On the left, at a distance of some fifty yards, stretched a large net and, in front of the net, an impressively realistic armoured-car constructed of paper and thin wooden laths. From its turret there reared, like snakes from a basket, a fistful of hideously grinning bespectacled heads in military caps; towering above these heads, like a king cobra ready to strike, was yet another bespectacled snake’s head which was surely, thought Matthew, intended as a caricature of the young Emperor Hirohito. Any doubt but that this was intended to be the cannon’s target was dispelled by a sign on the armoured-car which declared: ‘Hated Invader of Beloved China Homeland.’
‘But where are the Da Sousa Sisters?’ demanded Monty. ‘I thought they were part of the show.’ The programme he had bought consisted of a single folded sheet, on the outside of which was a blurred photograph of a bulky, helmeted figure, presumably the human ammunition; inside, it read:
1 Advance of atrocious enemy.
2 Cannon fires.
3 Miss Olive Kennedy-Walsh, BA (Pass Arts), H Dip Ed, TCD will hurtle through air towards advancing disagreeable aggressor.
4 Treacherous aggressor smashed. (Mgt not responsible.)
5 Voluntary contributions to China Heroic War Effort gratefully received.
6 God sake King.
7 End.
8 Please to exit. Thank you for custom.
Paper model supplied courtesy Chou & Son, Undertaker and Funeral Preparation. All Religions catered for. Sago Lane, Singapore.
‘End as you wish you had begun.’
‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ said Monty to Matthew, who had remarked on the excellence of the imitation armoured-car. ‘You should see the Cadillacs and houses and ocean liners and whatnot they make for rich towkays to take away with them to the next world. It’s a skilled profession. The Chinese can be pretty simple-minded,’ he added with a sneer.
‘Where are those suh … suh … suh … sisters? This is a duh … hm … liberate swindle, don’t you think so, Monty?’
But a pink-faced young planter nearby, overhearing Sinclair’s complaint, assured him that the Da Sousa Sisters had already made their appearance. They had sung a number of songs, including ‘Chocolate Soldier’ and, of course, their signature tune: ‘Halloa! halloa! halloa!’ He doubted whether they would appear again that evening.
‘Just our luck,’ grumbled Monty.
‘I don’t think Jim will ever find us,’ Matthew was saying, but at that moment he saw Ehrendorf shouldering his way into the enclosure. Meanwhile, a portable gramophone was being vigorously wound by one of the stage-hands. Another Chinese in a white dinner-jacket took the microphone. ‘Just in time,’ said Ehrendorf cheerfully. ‘I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.’ Joan was sitting at the end of the row and he sat down next to her. But she stood up immediately, saying to Monty and Sinclair: ‘Move along. I want to sit next to Matthew.’ With some confusion, because the gap between the rows of seats was narrow, she struggled to the place which opened up between Sinclair and Matthew. Ehrendorf flushed and stared grimly down at the arena.
Now the star of the performance, Miss Kennedy-Walsh, was being announced: she was a strongly built woman in her thirties, dressed from head to foot in an aviator’s suit of white silk which perfectly modelled her impressive figure: the audience murmured in appreciation of her well-formed thighs, her generous breasts, her strong jaw and pink face.
‘Will she ever squeeze down the barrel?’ joked Ehrendorf tensely.
‘Big ah blests number one!’ remarked a smartly dressed young Chinese beside Matthew giving the thumbs-up sign. Matthew had already noticed by the pin-ups displayed at the ‘virility’ stall how the Chinese seemed to admire big-bosomed women.
Miss Kennedy-Walsh, indeed, was not finding it easy to insert herself in the barrel. Her splendid thighs she fitted in with comparative ease; somehow, aided by the slippery material of her suit, she also managed to cram her hips into the muzzle. But her breasts remained obstinately stuck on the rim and with her arms pinned to her sides she was helpless. Stuck! Her face flushed with irritation. A murmur of concern arose from the audience. ‘Glory be to God, will ye give us a shove, y’lazy gombeens!’
A hasty conference of the Chinese organizers was already taking place. They scratched their heads and stared at Miss Kennedy-Walsh’s too ample bosom and then they stared at the cannon and scratched their heads again. The master of ceremonies put his hands on her shoulders and shoved politely, but that did not help. If anything it made things worse. Miss Kennedy-Walsh slipped down a few inches but her bosom remained on the rim and her face grew redder.
‘Will we be stayin’ here all the night or what?’ she demanded furiously. Her mouth could be seen working but her further comments were drowned by the martial music which suddenly started up. Matthew, who had been watching with interest and concern, stiffened suddenly as he felt Joan’s hand creep into his own and his pulse quickened.
In the meantime someone had had an idea and a Chinese lady had been invited on to the stage. She was heavily made-up and, despite the heat, wore a brilliant feather boa round her neck. She had evidently been hastily summoned from other duties and appeared flustered. The master of ceremonies, explaining what he wanted her to do, made kneading motions and pointed at the recalcitrant breasts. A sheet was modestly thrown over the muzzle and Miss Kennedy-Walsh’s protruding head and torso. The lady with the boa vanished underneath it; the gramophone continued to play martial music. When, after a few moments, the sheet was whipped away again, there was no sign of Miss Kennedy-Walsh. A ripple of applause echoed around the enclosure.
Now the show was beginning in earnest. The master of ceremonies, first in Cantonese, then in Malay, then in English, asked the audience on a given signal to count down from ten. A spotlight was directed on a man by the breech of the cannon holding a lanyard: he smiled nervously; a wheel was spun and the barrel elevated. Another spotlight was directed on to the model armoured-car with its wavering, two-dimensional Japanese effigies. Long ropes had been attached to the front of the armoured-car which now began to move very slowly, dragged by two Chinese stage-hands, from behind the net and on towards ‘Fortress Singapore’. A high ramp had been set up in front of the net and the armoured-car obligingly diverted from its course and, instead of continuing to advance directly on the Fortress, started to climb it. The martial music had come to a stop, replaced by a long roll of drums. The counting began. Ten … nine … eight … The armoured-car had almost reached the top of the ramp … Three … two … one … Fire! The man holding the lanyard jerked it, but nothing happened A gasp of dismay went up from the spectators. In the silence that followed, muffled comments could be heard from inside the barrel of the cannon. Monty consulted his programme: ‘We seem to have got stuck on number 2: “cannon fires”.’
Another hasty conference took place, this time around the breech. While it was taking place the men with the ropes, somewhat apprehensively, darted up the ramp under the eye of the cannon, seized the armoured-car and carried it back to its original position; then they took up their stations once more with the ropes. Presently, after another roll of drums and a few adjustments by a man with a spanner, they were again given the signal to start pulling. The armoured-car began to climb! Ten … nine … eight … The nervous strain was clearly telling on the men with the ropes: the vehicle was advancing jerkily, now halting, now bounding forward. Three … two … one … Fire! A tremendous explosion echoed around The Great World and a white projectile went winging its way in a glittering arc beneath the black vault of the sky. Swooning with excitement, the men with the ropes gave a great pull: the armoured-car shot over the top of the ramp and down the other side just as Miss Kennedy-Walsh hurtled by where it had been standing an instant before; on she went to land helmet first in the net; there she jumped and arched and flapped like a netted salmon.
Missed! This was not a contingency for which the men holding the ropes had prepared themselves. They looked at each other helplessly. What were they to do? Even the most perfunctory realism required them to continue pulling. The armoured-car turned its nose hesitatingly towards ‘Fortress Singapore’ and continued, slowly but steadily, to convey its wavering cargo of grinning, bespectacled Japanese towards where the cannon loomed, bereft of ammunition. A roar of indignation went up from the crowd. The master of ceremonies hurriedly intervened and the armoured car was whisked away, Miss Kennedy-Walsh took a bow. A collection in favour of the Nanyang Anti-Enemy Backing-up Society was announced.
‘Let’s go and have a drink,’ said Monty, who seemed satisfied with the way the show had turned out despite the nonappearance of the Da Sousa Sisters. As they made their way towards the exit the crowd was beginning to sing: ‘God save glacious King!’
They set off down another alley; the crowds strolling up and down had grown even more dense than they had been earlier. Monty, Joan and Sinclair walked in front. Matthew followed at a little distance with Ehrendorf; he wanted to think of some way of comforting his friend who was still clearly upset by the way Joan had changed places in the enclosure. Moreover, he was worried that if he walked beside Joan, she might not be able to resist the temptation of holding his hand in full view of the others, thus causing Ehrendorf further unnecessary chagrin. Matthew could not help thinking it curious that she should find him attractive. Very few other women ever had. He had tried to accept this, as he tried to accept everything, philosophically.
But above all Matthew simply wanted to talk with his old friend and to recover their former intimacy, for Ehrendorf was one of those rare people who could be interesting whatever he talked about. Matthew enjoyed argument and speculation the way other people enjoy a game of tennis. Furthermore, although he did not mind the particular, it was the general which really stirred him. It was not enough for him to know, for example, that two Catholics were pitched out of a window in Prague in the interests of the Jesuits and Ferdinand of Styria early in the seventeenth century (as it would be for you and me), Matthew immediately wanted to investigate the general implications of the deed. And he would speculate lovingly on whether or not it had been necessary (not merely a coincidence) that a period of intolerance should follow the Emperor Rudolph’s liberal reign, or on some other quite different aspect of the matter … on religion as against economics as a cause of war, or (even more far-fetched) on the effect of windows, and of glass generally, on the Bohemian psyche, or on the marriage of physical and mental enlightenment (windows, lamps, electric light advancing hand in hand with rational thought) in the progress of humanity.
Of course, people change. Matthew and Ehrendorf had both undoubtedly changed in the years since they had argued into the night in Oxford and Geneva. Matthew had realized even in Geneva that he himself was beginning to change: he no longer enjoyed arguing with his friends, above all those who had embraced the academic life, quite as much as he had once done. It was not simply that these friends had tended to adopt the lugubrious and self-important air which distinguishes academics: surrounded by the paralysing comforts, conveniences and irritations of university life what else could they do? He sensed that what distressed him was a gap which had opened up between thought and feeling, the remoteness, the impartiality of his friends to the subjects they were teaching or studying. Objectivity, he had had to agree with them, was important obviously. But what was required, he had declared, striding up and down with their vintage port inside him while they eyed him dubiously wondering whether he would wake the children, was ‘a passionate objectivity’ (whatever that might be). He had usually found himself taking the last bus home feeling muddled and dissatisfied with himself as well as with his friends. Yet with Ehrendorf it had always been a little different, perhaps because, coming from a military family, he had chosen to become a soldier rather than an academic, though more likely it was simply a difference of personality. Whatever the reason, in Geneva he had always found it delightfully easy to discuss things with Ehrendorf.
Now, just as if they had been strolling along the Quai Wilson instead of through a pulsing, perfumed, malodorous, humid, tropical evening, Matthew brushed aside some trivial enquiry from Ehrendorf about Sinclair (who was he? how long had Joan known him? were they particularly close friends, perhaps even childhood friends?) and reverted to the important matter which had stopped him in his tracks earlier. Could the coming of western capital to the Far East be seen as progress from the natives’ point of view?
‘I’m sure you’ve heard Walter’s lecture on how he and my father and some other merchants transformed Burma from a country, where, unless a coconut fell off a tree, nobody had any supper, into a modern rice-exporting nation … I gather he delivers it to everyone he comes across …’
‘Well,’ sighed Ehrendorf, automatically falling into his old Oxford habits, ‘it all depends what you mean by …’
‘Progress? Or natives?’
‘Well, by both, I guess,’ Ehrendorf smiled faintly, ‘since there was massive immigration of Indians and their situation must have been different from that of the Burmese. Walter certainly exaggerates. Burma was a fertile and prosperous country before the British took over. But you mustn’t think that a barter economy is like Paradise before the Fall: a cash economy has more resources to survive floods, typhoons, and whatnot, even if it does introduce certain difficulties of its own which were not there before.’
‘Difficulties! Why, the rice merchants knocked Burma for six! The whole culture was destroyed. The old communal village life collapsed. Almost overnight it became every man for himself. People started fencing off grazing land which used to belong to the whole village and so forth. Profit took a grip on the country like some dreadful new virus against which nobody had any resistance. When the Burmese were reduced to becoming migrant seasonal workers in the paddy fields the old village life was finished off completely … and with it went everything that made life more than a pure money-grubbing exercise. At one time they used to hold elaborate cattle races, and water festivals, and village dances and theatricals and puppet shows. They all vanished. And what replaced them? A huge increase in the crime rate! To be happy people need to live in communities. If you don’t believe me you can read it in the government reports!’
‘Sure, I believe you,’ said Ehrendorf rather vaguely. ‘But still, this is a partial view. You must look at the whole picture.
‘By the way, just look at that Indian bloke over there in his striped tie and cricket blazer, modelled on some fatuous English tradition that has no real meaning for him at all. He’s borrowed a culture that doesn’t fit him any better than his jacket.’
Ehrendorf, while looking at the whole picture, had also had his eye on the Blacketts and Sinclair some way in front of them; perhaps he, too, was no longer as keen as he used to be on abstract discussions, or perhaps he was preoccupied with other matters. He had grown thinner since he and Matthew had last met in Europe and had developed one or two hesitations in his manner which had not been there before. Once or twice Matthew had been on the verge of that nightmare sensation when you suddenly find yourself thinking: ‘But I don’t know this person at all!’ and the person in question happens to be your closest friend. But now a glance at Ehrendorf reassured him: it was the same old Ehrendorf, except for the moustache; a little older, of course, and not quite so cheerful and self-confident as he had once been. But then, he himself had aged, too.
Ehrendorf’s fine eyes rested on Joan’s botttom as she walked some distance ahead between her brother and Sinclair; the light blue, neatly ironed cotton of her dress picked up the glow of naphtha lanterns as she passed each stall so that, from a distance, it seemed that her figure flared and died, flared and died, almost hypnotically. Very often a girl’s bottom begins to sag in her twenties (which does not matter particularly since few people notice or care whether a bottom has dropped or not) but Joan’s had not done so; from behind you might have thought that she was simply a mature adolescent. Nor had she developed those over-bulging cones of tissue at the top of the thigh which sometimes bestow even on a slender woman a saddle-bag effect. ‘Her bottom is too perfect,’ Ehrendorf might have been thinking as he stared ahead in a trance. ‘It’s too beautiful to get a purchase on, like everything else about her, it simply slips out of your hand.’
Matthew, however, could not be expected to notice this sort of thing. Besides, it was doubtful whether, even if he had been interested, he would have been able to see far enough without taking off his spectacles and polishing them: in the course of the evening a thick film of dust had collected on the lenses.
‘Sinclair must be a new arrival in Singapore, I should think,’ remarked Ehrendorf. ‘Although he seems to know his way round OK.’ This was undoubtedly a statement rather than a question but, nevertheless, a vague air of interrogation lingered about it. Matthew, however, paid no attention: he was evidently still too busy trying to express what was in his mind.
‘Let me give you an example, Jim, of what happens when cash and the idea of profit strike root in a country unaccustomed to them like Burma. It seems that’s there a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less, that “the cheapest will survive”. This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-economic values tend to be eliminated. In Burma they used to build beautiful, elaborately carved cargo-boats which looked like galleons: these have been entirely replaced over the past fifty years by flat barges which can transport paddy more cheaply. And it’s the same everywhere you look: native art and craft replaced by cheap imported substitutes, handlooms have disappeared, pottery has given way to petrol tins. Even the introduction of new crops by western capital has tended to impoverish rather than enrich the life people lead. In Burma the natives used to cook with sesamum oil, now they use ground-nut oil because, though it doesn’t taste so good, it’s cheaper. In Java people have taken to eating cassava instead of rice because it’s cheaper …’
‘If it’s cheaper,’ protested Ehrendorf, ‘then they have more wealth to spend on other things.’
‘Not so! If they can live more cheaply it stands to reason that they can be paid less, provided there’s no shortage of labour. Yes, exactly, it’s our old friend “the iron law” up to its tricks again! What additional wealth may be generated by the use of cheaper methods and cheaper foods doesn’t cling to the natives: the extra saving goes to swell the profits of the western businesses which control the land or the market … like Blackett and Webb! The native masses are worse off than before. For them the coming of Capitalism has really been like the spreading of a disease. Their culture is gone, their food is worse and their communities have been broken up by the need to migrate for work on estates and in paddy fields. Well, am I right?’
‘But Marx believed, did he not, that such a stage is necessary in the progress of society from feudalism to Communism and therefore even saw the British in India as a force for progress.’
‘You can’t have it both ways! What you and Marx say is fine … that is, if Communism is what you want. But what if we reach this stage where the poor are made poorer and organized into gangs of coolies and then … lo and behold, there is no revolution! Are the natives not worse off than they were in their traditional communities? Of course they are! You still have to show me what advantages the coming of western capital has brought, in Burma at any rate.’ After a moment Matthew added: ‘In any event, my bet is that in practice Communism would be scarcely any better than Capitalism, and perhaps even worse.’
Ahead of them Monty, Joan and Sinclair had disappeared into the Wing Choon Yuen Restaurant whose palatial entrance was partly screened from the alley by a substantial brick and pillar wall: on top of this wall neat rows of palms had been set in brown earthenware pots decorated with dragons. Ehrendorf said: ‘This is still a partial view, Matthew. No doubt there is something in what you say. But in the West, too, craftsmen have been unable to survive mass-production, capitalism and the Law of Substitution. That’s life, I guess.’ He shrugged and added with a smile: ‘There’s another principle which I shall call Ehrendorf’s Law which is now in operation in all prosperous Western countries and which asserts “the survival of the easiest”. Twenty years from now coffee beans will have disappeared and we’ll drink nothing but Camp Coffee, not because liquid coffee tastes better … it tastes worse … but because it’s easier to prepare. Pretty soon nobody will read books or learn to play the piano because it’s easier to listen to the radio or phonograph. Mark my words! Ehrendorf’s Law will do just as much damage in the long run! All the same, Matthew, I can’t agree with you because you neatly avoid mentioning all the benefits of western civilization, the social welfare, education, medicine and so forth. But let’s discuss that another time. And by the way, it has just occurred to me, if this guy Sinclair had been an old family friend of the Blacketts I’m sure I’d have seen him or heard of him in the last couple of years …’
‘Let’s not bother with the Blacketts … I want to discuss my theories,’ said Matthew.
It was then that Ehrendorf suddenly went silent and looked rather upset. It had occurred to him that Matthew, far from being too preoccupied with his own ideas to discuss Sinclair and his mysterious relationship with Joan, had all this time been deliberately keeping the conversation away from the Blacketts.
Matthew had not noticed his friend’s reaction and, following him into the restaurant, muttered grimly: ‘Oh, education and medicine. Don’t worry. One could say something on that score, too!’
23
Monty, Joan and Sinclair were seated at a table set among foliage on the terrasse. As Matthew and Ehrendorf approached, Sinclair got to his feet saying: ‘Got to duh … duh … ash off, I’m afraid. Got to do my duh … duh … duh …’
‘Of course you haven’t,’ said Monty. ‘Sit down, Sinclair, you’re being a bore. It’s nowhere near midnight yet. You said you didn’t go on duty till midnight. Well then?’
‘Got to duh … duh … duhoo … well, a whole lot of things, a fearful amount, in fact. So, have a nice time and I’ll be suh … seeing you,’ he added in a fluent rush. He kissed Joan’s hand, rolling his eyes for some reason, waved to the others and departed.
The young Blacketts had ordered ikan merah (fish, Matthew understood) and chips and a large bottle of Tiger beer between them. Matthew and Ehrendorf ordered the same. While they waited a rather tense silence fell over the table: even Monty, not usually at a loss for words, seemed disinclined to speak. In the dark shadows behind Joan glowed a shower of delicate, speckled marmalade-coloured orchids, framing her perfect face and shoulders. Ehrendorf snatched a quick glance in her direction and then, though he had already given his order, buried himself in the menu. While his eyes moved silently over won ton soup, crab sweetcorn soup, sweet sour prawn, Taoist fish ball, cornedbeef sandwich, lychee almond beancurd … his face took on a strained and innocent expression, as if he were thinking: ‘The trouble about such perfection is that you can’t get a grip on it, it slips away. There’s no perspective.’
‘Will you kindly stop that!’ said Joan suddenly and with anger.
‘Stop what?’
‘Looking at me in that stupid way.’
‘I wasn’t looking at you at all. I was reading the goddam menu, if you don’t mind.’ Ehrendorf’s voice had grown shrill and his accent, which normally might have been taken for English, suddenly became that of an American again. Matthew took off his dust-filmed spectacles, polished them on a rather grey handkerchief, put them on again and stared unhappily at Ehrendorf.
‘What I wanted to say, Jim, about education and medicine …’
Silence, however, fell over the table once more. Matthew examined the wall and the dragons which decorated the earthenware pots; from beyond the palms which grew out of them came the constant murmur of voices and laughter and the throbbing of music. Presently, a Chinese girl appeared with a bowl from which she took a steaming face-flannel with a pair of wooden tongs and placed it in Joan’s hands: she then offered one to Monty, Matthew and Ehrendorf in turn. Matthew mopped his perspiring face: the sensation of relief this afforded was extraordinary. More waiters presented themselves, bringing fish and chips and beer. As they began to eat the atmosphere grew more relaxed. Matthew, knife and fork raised and ready to pounce on his fish (he was hungry), cautiously raised the subject of education. Admittedly, he had yet to delve deeply into the matter as it affected Malaya but he did know what the British had managed to achieve in this line in India … namely, a prodigious number of unemployable graduates. ‘The Indians have always had a tremendous desire for education. The only trouble is that there are hardly any actual jobs for educated men to do, unless they want to be clerks or lawyers, and there are already several times too many of them.’
Monty had taken knife and fork and begun vigorously to chop up his fish, first laterally into quarters, then diagonally, as for the Union Jack, but most likely this was not the mute response of a patriot to the drift of Matthew’s argument so much as a convenient way of reducing the fish to pieces small enough to deal with; he speared one of the pieces together with a bundle of chips and stuffed the lot into his mouth.
‘All we needed in India were Indians educated enough to serve as clerks and petty officials: in no time at all there were enough of them, and several times too many. Curzon did his best to launch vocational and technical education and I gather it’s been tried here in Malaya, too. But with miserable results. You may well ask why.’
None of Matthew’s listeners seemed, as it happened, to be on the point of putting that or any other question to him. Monty, breathing heavily through his mouth, seemed completely occupied in masticating fish and chips. Joan and Ehrendorf simply stared at Matthew, looking tense and dazed; Joan had not touched her knife and fork but now picked up a single chip in her fingers and snipped off the end with her perfect teeth, without taking her eyes from Matthew’s face.
‘The fact is that in most tropical colonies the only work available is agriculture, and sometimes a bit of mining. What we really want is cheap unskilled labour. What skilled jobs there are in a country like Malaya don’t go, it appears, to Malays, but to Eurasians, Chinese or sometimes Europeans. No cheap unskilled labour is what western capital came here for and that’s what it gets …!’
‘But …’ began Monty. He was silenced immediately, however, by his own right hand which, spotting its opportunity, had raised another forkful of fish and chips and now crammed it into his mouth as soon as it opened to speak.
‘As I expect you all know there was talk of starting an engineering school a couple of years ago at Raffles College here in Singapore. What happened? A commision reported that it was pointless because there’d be no jobs for the graduates. So you see the idea that we British are educating our colonies in our own image simply won’t wash. That may be what we’d like to do, and certain attempts have been made no doubt, but that’s not what is actually happening.’
‘Oh, look here,’ said Ehrendorf mildly, but to Joan not to Matthew. ‘This is a bit ridiculous.’ Joan, her eyes still on Matthew snipped off another inch of the chip she held neatly between finger and thumb, but otherwise ignored him.
Matthew went on: ‘And yet there still persists this sad belief that a man can better himself by education. At this very moment here in Singapore, according to the official figures, there are more than ten thousand clerks, most of whom live in the most dreadful conditions earning ten dollars a month if they’re lucky, not even a living wage, simply because their numbers far exceed any possible demand for them. Ten thousand clerks for a city of this size! It seems it’s a regular practice for older clerks to be replaced by younger men at lower salaries and yet that doesn’t stop the schools turning out another seven hundred boys every year with qualifications for clerical jobs. And all because of this pathetic, unfounded belief that education leads to lucrative jobs!’
‘Really, you can’t expect me to put up with this,’ said Ehrendorf suddenly.
‘Well, clear off then! Nobody invited you, anyway.’
‘As it happens, Matthew did.’
‘Frankly,’ said Monty, pushing away his empty plate and selecting a toothpick, ‘I don’t think it matters a bugger whether they work as coolies or anything else so long as they have jobs. That’s precisely what they don’t have in South China and India. They come here because they think it’s better, and they’re damn right. It is.’
‘I thought you said you were going. If so, what’re you waiting for?’
‘That’s just what you’d like, isn’t it?’
‘Monty, surely we have a responsibility,’ went on Matthew doggedly, ‘to the people living here when we arrived; even more so to those we encouraged to come and work on the estates. One of the most astounding things about our Empire, when you come to think about it, is the way we’ve transported vast populations across the globe as cheap labour. Surely we must have their interests at heart, at least to some extent, as well as our own. Otherwise it’s not much better than the slave trade.’
‘We do have their interests at heart: we’re giving them employment which they didn’t have where they came from. Besides, almost half our rubber in Malaya is produced by Asiatic smallholders, people who probably came here originally as coolies and then set up in business for themselves. They produce pretty piss-awful rubber but that’s their business.’
‘Let’s go and dance,’ said Joan. ‘Monty, pay the bill and let’s go.’
Monty summoned the waiter and produced a roll of blue dollar bills, saying: ‘Without British capital there wouldn’t have been any rubber business.’
‘But don’t you think, given the huge returns on money invested in Malaya that something more should be done for the people who actually do the work on the plantations to produce it …? Otherwise, the British Empire is nothing more than a vast business concern …’ But Matthew’s last words, though intended for his companions, had been transformed into a soliloquy by their sudden departure, Joan in the lead, Ehrendorf striving to walk beside her and speak to her, and the burly figure of Monty not far behind. Matthew hurried after them, nudging his glasses up on his nose.
As they approached The Great World’s dance-hall the atmosphere seemed to thicken, as if the very dust which hung in the air was quivering with the percussion of drums and wailing of saxophones. Monty dropped back for a moment, indicating that he had something he wanted to say to Matthew. No, it wasn’t about the colonial question, he muttered confidentially, it was more of a proposition he wanted to make. He’d thought it over quite a bit and consulted his two chums who were also very, very interested (that went without saying, actually, because in its way this was a bargain such as one didn’t often come across and so of course they would be interested) and, well, the upshot of it was that he and his two chums had decided unanimously to invite Matthew to join them in … the point being that he was a chap from the same sort of background as they were, a factor one had to bear in mind in a place like Singapore where gossip got around in no time … anyway, in short, they’d decided that Matthew should be given the opportunity of making up the fourth … No, nothing like that, he hated all card-games himself, couldn’t abide them, in fact, well … in a nutshell, instead of risking heaven knows what dreadful diseases with the sort of women one was likely to pick up here at The World or anywhere else in Singapore he and his chums had decided to club together and they’d found a very nice Chinese girl called Sally who had her own flat in Bukit Timah. She was clean and not the kind who’d get drunk or make a fuss. She was …
‘Oh, but really, Monty…’
‘No, just listen a moment. You aren’t a bad sort of bloke, Matthew, in your way (in fact, I quite like you), but you’re the sort of chap who rejects things out of hand without even listening and weighing up the pros and cons. And this is just the kind of arrangement that would suit a bloke like you who isn’t very good at getting women, if you don’t mind me saying so, and besides, it’s not expensive …’
‘Monty, I can assure you …’
They had now joined Joan and Ehrendorf in the queue of people, many of whom were in uniform, waiting for admission to the dance-hall. Monty lowered his voice a little so that his sister should not hear what he was saying. She was clean, she had imagination (which was something one didn’t often find), she was good-tempered and sober, she was not narrow-minded in her approach (in fact, you could do almost anything you liked) and it would only come to $17.50 a month per person. It was such a bargain that Matthew probably thought he meant American dollars, but not a bit of it! He meant Straits dollars. It was an incredible opportunity! For $17.50 Matthew would have, at least to begin with, one evening a week guaranteed and the possibility of another, if one of his three partners did not exercise his option for two evenings in that particular week, as would most likely very often happen because of some social occasion they couldn’t get out of, OK? Because Matthew was the last to join it was only fair, after all, that the others should have first choice but he, Monty, for one would be most surprised if it did not work out that Matthew found he had two evenings on most weeks …’
‘Hey, Yank! Why don’t you join in the bloody war then?’ demanded a perspiring, drunken Tommy, waving a beer bottle at Ehrendorf.
‘Because we don’t want to make it too easy for you guys,’ replied Ehrendorf cheerfully.
‘Give us some gum, chum!’ shouted someone else and there was a cackle of laughter.
‘Because you’re a lot o’ pissin’, cowards, that’s what!’ shouted the first man belligerently.
‘Who needs the bleedin’ Yanks anyway? Old Adolf would only give ’m a spankin’!’
Raucous cheers greeted this remark but Ehrendorf, still smiling good-humouredly, had reached the bamboo cage and handed over fifty cents for himself and each of his companions. Then he waved to the boisterous crowd in khaki behind him and vanished into the throbbing darkness followed by a medley of cheers, insults and ribaldry.
‘Yankee ponce!’
‘They ’ave ’em ’orizontal wi’ teeth in ’em ’ere, sir!’
‘Can I do yer now, sir?’
Blundering after his friend, Matthew presently found himself at the edge of a dance-floor, covered but open at the sides for ventilation, gleaming with French chalk in the semi-darkness like a subterranean lake. So this was the famous dance-floor taken from the old Hôtel de l’Europe which, Joan was now whispering huskily into his ear, at the turn of the century had been the finest in Singapore. No doubt his father, together with the wealthy and influential in the Colony, in his day had waltzed or fox-trotted on those very boards! But now the beau monde had been replaced by that bewildering array of races and types he had noticed earlier in the evening in the open air, even two members of the family of pygmies could be seen executing a perfect tango close at hand. Matthew gazed enchanted at the teeming dance-floor. Abruptly, he realized why this sight gave him such pleasure. He tried to explain to Monty who had taken Joan’s place at his side: this was the way Geneva should have been! Instead of that grim segregation by nationality they should have all spent their evenings like this, dancing the tango or the quick-step or the ronggeng or whatever it was with each other: Italians with Abyssinians, British with Japanese, Germans with Frenchmen and so on. If there had been a real feeling of brotherhood in Geneva such as there was here (the Palais des Nations turned into a palais de danse) the Disarmament Conference would not have got stuck in the mud the way it did! ‘It was the feeling, perhaps even the confidence that men of different nations and races could get on together that was so tragically missing. And yet here is the evidence! Men are brothers!’
‘Yes, er, I see what you mean,’ mumbled Monty cautiously, ‘but about that other matter we were discussing. I mean, well, you think it over. There’s no need to make a snap decision, Matthew. On the other hand we do know plenty of blokes who would jump at the chance if we offered it to them, so you can’t keep us waiting indefinitely.’
‘But I’m not keeping you waiting, Monty. I’ve told you, I’m not…’
‘No, well, you think it over,’ muttered Monty hastily. ‘No need to make a snap decision.’ And he started to explain to the rather bewildered Matthew how to set about dancing with a taxi-dancer. You first of all had to buy a book of four twenty-five-cent dance tickets from the bloke over there. Then when music started you made a dash for the one you liked the look of. But you had to make it snappy or someone else would grab her. At the end of the dance she took you back to her table and you handed over a ticket. You weren’t allowed to sit with them unless you paid a special fifteen-dollar fee for taking them away from the taxi tables.
‘Thanks Monty, but I think I just want to watch.’
‘You would!’ murmured Monty inaudibly.
Meanwhile, however, the tango had turned into an exhibition by a Filipino couple who were chased somewhat haphazardly round the floor by a white spotlight; the man was a foxy-looking individual in a white suit, the woman, a sinuous person in sequins with flashing eyes and raven tresses. The music changed tempo and they began jitterbugging violently, shoes flashing. The grinning members of the band were also from the Philippines; clad in dazzling white blazers and orange trousers they formed a shallow bank against the far wall, harmonizing satisfactorily with the lurid, unlikely birds which had been painted on it. Overhead, painted on the ceiling, Matthew could just make out the shape of a gigantic golden dragon whose bulging eyes, faceted with mirrors, showered reflected sparks like confetti on the swaying dancers below. Now the spotlight, outguessed by the movement of the dancers, strayed for a moment to the edge of the floor and hesitated there by coincidence on Joan and Ehrendorf. He was talking intensely into her ear while she stared unseeing at the polished floor, tapping her foot moodily to the beat of the music. He looked up for a moment, dazzled and bewildered; Joan shook her head, tossing her hair. The spotlight moved jerkily away in pursuit of its quarry.
Saddened by the look of desperation on his friend’s face, Matthew shifted his attention to the taxi-girls sitting at tables beside the floor, wondering whether the girl whose breast he had found himself clasping earlier in the evening might not be among them: these girls, too, appeared to be Chinese or Eurasian for the most part, with a few Malays, Siamese and Indo-Chinese; undoubtedly, thought Matthew, these women from further up the peninsula towards China were the loveliest and most graceful of all with their glistening black eyes and delicate features: beside them even the delicate Joan looked clumsy, heavy and rough-skinned. Ehrendorf, however, did not seem to think so for he had taken Joan by the wrist and was trying to persuade her to join him on the floor which, temporarily deserted, now began to fill up. The band set to work on another tune. Men of all descriptions, from dimunitive Chinese clerks to enormous tipsy Australians, swarmed across the floor to secure the services of the taxi-girls. Ehrendorf tried to lead Joan on to the dance-floor but she resisted, snatching her hand away from him. Ehrendorf then seemed to give up hope all of a sudden: his chest deflated, his shoulders drooped, he passed a hand over his forehead as if dazed.
‘Well, have you thought it over about that nifty Chinese girl I was telling you about?’
‘Monty, I told you before: it’s not my line.’
Monty looked taken aback: ‘There’s no need to decide right away, old boy. I don’t want to rush you. And look here, if you have only one evening a week we could probably fix it so you don’t have to pay quite so much. After all, that’s only fair, isn’t it? How about fifteen dollars a month? It’s really worth it, you know. God, boy, she goes at it hammer and tongs, I can tell you!’
‘It’s not the price, for heaven’s sake. It’s the idea of it.’
Monty stared at Matthew, baffled. It had not occurred to him that Matthew would drive such a hard bargain. Or could there perhaps be some other explanation? And then an idea struck him.
‘If you think you’ll get it from her,’ he said warningly, indicating his sister who was standing a few paces away, ‘I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree. I know lots of blokes who’ve been out with her and she doesn’t.’
‘Doesn’t what?’ asked Matthew. And then added hurriedly: ‘Oh, sorry, I see what you mean …’
But Monty, nevertheless, uttered the heavy sigh of someone whose patience has been tried beyond endurance. ‘She doesn’t,’ he repeated. And then, just to rub it in: ‘Not even occasionally!’
24
Matthew’s head was reeling as he and Monty and Joan passed out of The Great World and into Kim Seng Road; for a moment he felt quite giddy and had to steady himself with a hand on the wall. Ehrendorf, shattered, had left half an hour earlier by himself; before leaving he had said to Joan: ‘We must have a serious talk. I’ll look in this evening if you’re not back too late.’ Joan had replied that he could do what he liked. She was accustomed to young men wanting to have serious talks with her. After a moment Matthew felt well enough to remove his hand from the wall and proceed: it was doubtless the effect of the unaccustomed heat and the crowds which had caused that moment of dizziness. Outside the gate there were fewer people to be seen; the stars shone brilliantly and the night seemed less oppressive.
They had only taken a few steps in the direction of River Valley Road when Joan said grimly: ‘I’m going home. I’ve had enough for one evening.’
‘But it’s not even ten o’clock yet!’ protested Monty indignantly. ‘We can’t turn in at this hour, particularly now we’ve got rid of Romeo. Besides, we’re supposed to be showing Matthew the town.’
Matthew announced that he, too, felt he had seen enough for one evening. His spell of giddiness a few moments earlier had left him with a feeling that everything he had witnessed was utterly unreal. But Monty would not hear of another defection. He said to Joan: ‘Why don’t you take the Pontiac if you aren’t going to come with us? We’ll take a taxi.’
Presently, Matthew found himself in a taxi with Monty and heading, not for Raffles Hotel which Monty said would be full of stuffed shirts and only open till midnight anyway, but for some more interesting destination which Monty knew of. The taxi was a little yellow Ford 8 with springs that chimed and wheezed at every bump in the road. At the end of Grange Road they came into Orchard Road again, then into Bras Basah Road. Now they were drawing near the sea and a great white building loomed up on the left: Raffles Hotel, Monty said. As they passed the brilliantly lit entrance on the landward side Matthew glimpsed an elderly couple leaving, the man in a black dinner-jacket, the woman in a long glittering evening-dress and stole. Monty chuckled at the crowd of natives who had gathered on Beach Road to watch the Europeans dining on the lawn beneath the tall pencil palms. ‘That’s the nightly show for the Asiatics. They think white women are whores the way they wear backless evening gowns. They come here every evening and lick their lips.’
At Monty’s direction the taxi turned away from Raffles Hotel along the sea-front. On the right now was the starlit expanse of the padang and beyond it, just visible against the sky, the dignified silhouette of the former Grand Hôtel de l’Europe, the benefits of whose dance-floor Matthew had longed in retrospect to transfer to Geneva. The driver evidently knew what was expected of him without having to be told, for their progress had slowed to a crawl and he had half turned in his seat awaiting further instructions. Monty was peering intently at the shadowy figures of women sitting in rickshaws or standing idly in groups of two or three beneath the trees which lined the road. ‘Stop!’ he said, and the taxi drew in to the kerb.
Hardly had they come to a halt when there was a great stirring in the darkness; from what had seemed to be empty rickshaws shadowy figures emerged. Further shapes could be seen shifting in the obscurity beneath the trees; beyond, anchored at sea in the inner roads, were a great number of ships of which only the lights were visible. In a moment, to Matthew’s surprise, the open windows of the taxi were entirely filled with women’s faces, piled one on top of another like coconuts; shortly the windscreen, too, was blocked by the faces of yet more women leaning over the bonnet. A soft murmur filled the air from which an occasional word in English detached itself: ‘OK John!’ … ‘Nice!’ … ‘Back all same flont!’ ‘Whisky soda!’
Meanwhile, the driver, an elderly Malay with a brown face and the white hair of a grandfather, had groped for an electric torch and shone its beam on one window after the other.
‘Can these be real women?’ wondered Matthew as the beam wandered unsteadily over the serried painted masks. Yet on many of these masks the wrinkles stood out despite the paint and powder; the angled light etched them all the more harshly, replacing sunken eyes with a blob of darkness. At the same time, here and there skeletal arms had stretched through the open windows to trail about in the interior of the cab, floating and flickering like sea-weed, plucking weakly at his shirt and trousers, palping his arm or thigh.
‘Hags!’ declared Monty. ‘Drive on!’
The driver raced the engine and the windscreen cleared. One or two other faces showed themselves fleetingly in the places of those that had gone: younger, weaker, more innocent, but no less desperate, trawling unhopefully with this brief glimpse of their younger faces for the twin male lusts which they knew were swimming back and forth like sharks somewhere in the depths of the cab. The hands groped more desperately, pleading, tugging, pinching. Then the taxi moved off in a hail of curses and vociferation. One or two of the women even tried to follow in rickshaws, hoping to catch up at the next traffic lights. But in no time they were left behind.
Monty explained, with the weary condescension of an expert, that certain of these women had their own permanent rickshaw coolies, usually ancient, hollowed-out skeletons of men, excavated by the pursuit of their shattering trade in the Singapore heat, who could no longer compete with younger rivals but might still, now and again, whip their broken limbs into a trot to reach some likely looking prospect with their fair cargoes of flesh … by which he meant, he added with a chuckle, those leathery harridans whose services you could always purchase for a few cents. And they weren’t all Chinese, Malay or Tamil either, by any manner of means. Sometimes you came across Europeans, yes, women who had ‘gone wrong’ in some Eastern city, who had found disgrace through opium or alcohol in Calcutta, Hong Kong or Shanghai … He, Monty, as a student of human nature, took a pretty keen interest in the stories that some of these women could tell you … there were even aristocratic women driven out of Russia in penury by the Revolution. And more recently, as a matter of fact, things had been getting better in Singapore as far as women went. Young Chinese girls had been arriving in droves, refugees from the Sino-Jap war escaping from Shanghai or Canton …
‘Not better, Monty!’ cried Matthew indignantly. ‘How can you be so heartless!’
‘Oh, I just meant younger, you know,’ muttered Monty sullenly. ‘No need to get worked up, old boy. After all, it’s not my fault …’
‘But it’s all our faults! It’s disgraceful! This is supposed to be a prosperous country. We send huge profits back to our fat shareholders in England and yet we can’t even provide for a few refugees without them having to go on the streets.’
‘It’s no good taking this high moral line out here in the East, you know. People don’t go in for that sort of thing out here. It’s not our cup of tea. You just have to accept things the way they are. In the Straits it’s every man for himself, if you know what I mean, and it’s as well not to over-do the pious remarks. Personally, and I think I can speak for a lot of chaps who have been out here a while, I don’t care for moralizing, in fact it binds me rigid.’ Monty sounded irritated. The evening’s entertainment, which had started promisingly with the woman fired from the cannon, had proved the dampest of damp squibs. And now, would you believe it? he could hardly say a word without getting a sermon in return.
‘I’m sorry, Monty. I don’t mean to sound prudish. It’s just that I think we have a rotten way of doing things when it comes to anything but making money,’ replied Matthew absently for, of course, Monty could not be blamed for the plight of Chinese refugees on the sea-front in Singapore. But where then did the fault lie? While Matthew mused on this problem the little yellow taxi turned about and headed north again. It rather looked, said Monty gloomily, as if they would have to settle for a massage somewhere.
25
Among the painted masks which had peered in through the cab’s open windows Matthew had noticed one or two younger faces: he remembered one in particular, of a Chinese girl aged perhaps no more than fifteen or sixteen, rather ugly than pretty, but with a pleasant, homely, elfin ugliness like that of a bulldog, if you can imagine a delicately featured bulldog. Supposing that this girl, as seemed likely, was one of the new recruits that Monty had been talking about, he wondered at what precise moment during the past ten years it had become inevitable that she should be uprooted from her village somewhere in South China, or from a slum in Shanghai, and flung down on the streets of Singapore, obliged to sell herself if she could find a buyer? Surely, suggested Matthew to the passive figure of Monty beside him, one must connect this child’s desperate face with the long series of failures he himself had witnessed at the League of Nations in Geneva, with the ever-recurring inability of the Great Powers to commit themselves to a world organized on international lines, with the ever-present cynicism of the Foreign Office, and the Quai d’Orsay, and the Wilhelmstrasse where no opportunity was ever missed for showing the diplomats’ professional distaste for open diplomacy or for sneering at the idea of a world parliament. What chilled the blood was the thought that this girl’s plight and a million other tiny tragedies had been brought about by suave, neatly barbered, Savile Row-suited, genial, polite, cultured and probably even humane men in normal circumstances who would shrink with horror from themselves if they could be made to see their responsibility for what was happening!
Monty’s only reply to this suggestion was a grunt or, possibly, a groan. What the point was, in this sort of speculation, he could not for the life of him see. He yawned and smacked his lips. What an evening! First one thing, then another. Well, the only consolation was that this business about which Matthew was getting so steamed up did sometimes produce mouth-watering opportunities. Perhaps he would manage to lay hands on some newly arrived little Chinese piece before the evening was out. It was sometimes on the cards these days, though one had to be lucky.
Encouraged by Monty’s grunt of interest in what he had been saying, Matthew went on to explain that his own arrival in Geneva had coincided almost to the day with that fateful explosion beside the South Manchurian Railway in 1931. He had seen it all at first hand, from the first angry denunciations by China’s representative, Dr Sze, of massacres by Japanese troops and the reply of Yoshizawa (the same chap who had just recently been in Java demanding oil and minerals from the Dutch) that the troops were merely defending Japan’s enormous interests … to what had happened much later: to the devious, hypocritical, perfectly disgraceful support given to the untenable Japanese position by Sir John Simon and the Foreign Office, not to mention the British Press. Only the Manchester Guardian had condemned the Japanese and their British supporters.
Monty, peering out at the shadowy streets of Singapore as they fled by on either side of the cab, mumbled that he had been ‘in the dark’ about all that side of things. He belched dejectedly (perhaps he should not have bolted his fish and chips and beer so greedily at The Great World).
‘You see, Monty, so much depended on how the League reacted. It was the first time the Council had had to deal with a quarrel involving a major power and it set the style for everything that has happened since … for everything that will happen, even if one day they manage to revive the League, for years to come. Because at that time people all over the world still believed in the League. When the Manchurian crisis broke out it was almost like some medieval tournament. People flocked to Geneva to see the respective delegates do battle. Each side spent vast sums of money, which their countries could ill afford, on propaganda and entertainment to try and win people over to their side. The Chinese took over a luxurious suite on the Quai Wilson, got hold of a French chef and some vintage wines and started giving magnificent dinner-parties.
‘Meanwhile, as a sort of counter-attack the Japs staged a colossal reception in the Kursaal at which tons of food and gallons of wine were funnelled into the open mouths of the plump burghers of Geneva as if into Strasbourg geese … In return they made everyone watch a dreary propaganda film which they showed in the empty, echoing opera-house next door (both places had been shut down for the winter) all about the benefits of the South Manchuria Railway Company. Dismal isn’t the word. It did no good, anyway, because of the Lytton Report. You know all about that, I expect?’
Hoping to forestall further revelations Monty murmured that, as a matter of fact, he was rather well-informed on that … er … particular subject … er … But Matthew willingly set to work to refresh his memory, just in case. ‘This fellow is a serious menace,’ thought Monty, glancing at the stout, bespectacled figure of his companion.
What had happened was that the League, this was actually a temporizing device, sent a commission of enquiry composed of a German doctor, a French general, an Italian count and an American Major-General under the chairmanship of Lord Lytton to Manchuria to establish the disputed facts of the matter. It had taken them a year but when they finally published their report, they made no bones about it: Japan was roundly condemned … no doubt to the horror of Sir John Simon and his ilk. They concluded that Manchuria was an integral part of China, that the Japanese action could not be justified as self-defence, that Jap troops should be withdrawn and a genuinely Chinese régime restored. ‘That really set the cat among the pigeons, as you can imagine!’
Whether Monty could imagine or not, all he said was: ‘This place is usually full of troops at this time of night. It’s funny, there must have been a police raid or something.’
The taxi had come to a halt in a sleazy rubbish-strewn street lined with the usual two-storey shophouses but wider than the streets they had come through. Matthew, still in Geneva, stared out in a daze. Washing, hanging over the street from a forest of poles, tossed and billowed in the light breeze like the banners of an army on the march. Here and there dim electric lights glimmered, emphasizing the darkness rather than shedding light. Monty was speaking.
‘Sorry, what’s that?’
‘I said I thought we might have a beer before going home.’
One moment the street was deserted except for a few shadowy figures playing mah-jong under a street-lamp, the next it suddenly began to fill up; men were scurrying out of doorways, pedalling up on bicycles, galloping towards them in the shafts of rickshaws, even slithering down drainpipes. Nearby a manhole cover where the pavement spanned the storm-drain popped up and men began to pour out of that, too. All these men were converging on one place, the taxi in which Matthew sat in a trance with his thoughts struggling back like refugees from Geneva. He roused himself at last. ‘What’s all this?’
‘They’re just looking for customers for their girls,’ said Monty who had been paying the taxi-driver. ‘Come on, and hold on to your wallet.’
Before they could set foot on the pavement they were surrounded by dim, jostling figures. Words were whispered confidentially into Matthew’s ear as he waded after Monty … ‘Nice girl’ … ‘Guarantee virgin’ … ‘You wantchee try Singapore Glip? More better allsame Shanghai Glip!’ (‘Do I want to try what?’ wondered Matthew unable to make head nor tail of this rigmarole.) … ‘Oil massage number one!’ … Hands flourished grubby visiting-cards. ‘You want very nice pleasure!’ bayed a giant, bearded Sikh, placing himself menacingly in their path. ‘You coming please this way.’ But Monty brushed him aside and dived into a lighted doorway beneath a sign reading: ‘Dorchester Bed and Breakfast. Very select. All welcome. Servicemen welcome.’ Matthew, one hand anxiously gripping his wallet, plunged after Monty. His head was reeling again. ‘I must be ill,’ he thought giddily as he clambered up a smelly flight of stairs. ‘What am I doing here? I should be at home in bed.’
At the top of the stairs an Indian with oiled black hair and a dark, pock-marked face was waiting to greet them. His smile revealed very white teeth among which nestled here and there a glittering gold one; the glitter of his teeth was echoed by the glitter of a row of gold-topped fountain pens and propelling pencils in the breast pocket of his shirt, by the fat gold rings on his fingers, and by the steel watch on his wrist: all this combined to give him a disagreeably metallic appearance. Around his waist he had wound what at first appeared to be a white sarong; on closer inspection it proved to be merely a bath towel with the words Hotel Adelphi Singapore in blue. Was this his normal attire or had they just surprised him in his bath? For a moment it was hard to be sure.
‘Very kind lovely gentlemen,’ he said, putting his palms and long, delicate, glittering fingers of both hands together in graceful gesture, ‘please coming this way please.’
They were shown into a small, dimly lit room. An elderly and very fat Indian lady, who had evidently been asleep there on the floor, was making a hasty exit and dragging her bedding with her. Monty ordered beers and they sat down, Monty on a bamboo chair, Matthew on a broken-backed couch. The Indian had disappeared down a passage. Matthew stared round the room uneasily. What strange places Monty frequented!
On the wall there were two calendars: one, for 1940, advertised the Nippon Kisen Kaisha and showed an enormous ocean liner with Mount Fuji rising improbably out of the mists behind it; the other was for 1939, advertizing Fraser and Neave’s soda water: a healthy-looking European girl, whose rather blank, flawless face bore an odd resemblance to Joan’s, was holding a tennis racket in one hand and a glass in the other: two men in tennis flannels in the background, very much diminished by perspective, whispered together beneath her outstretched arm and eyed her with interest. Nearby was another picture, this time a photograph torn from a magazine and framed. Matthew gave an exclamation of surprise when he saw who it was: for how often had he not seen that familiar face coming or going in the lobby at the Hôtel Beau Rivage in Geneva! For what hopes and, ultimately, for what despair had its owner not been responsible when he had faced Mussolini over the Abyssinian crisis! With excitement he summoned Monty to join him in gazing at the foxy, handsome features of Anthony Eden.
Monty, however, declined to move. Either he was an habitué of the establishment and had already seen the picture, or else he had no particular interest in Anthony Eden; it might be, too, that he feared another discourse on world affairs for he winced visibly as Matthew, reminded of Geneva by the picture of Anthony Eden, suddenly resumed his harangue on the Lytton Report.
‘As I was saying, it set the cat among the pigeons, of course it did! The Lytton Report condemned Japan. Result? China could now demand action under Article 16 according to which the other members of the League could be asked to sever trade and financial relations with Japan. This was something that the Big Powers did not want to do: both Von Neurath, for Germany, and the bald baron, whatever his name was, for Italy, made it quite plain in the Assembly debate on the Lytton Report that they wouldn’t put up with any positive action. For three days the matter was thrashed out by the whole assembly in one of the larger rooms of the Disarmament Conference Building, where, as I expect you know, another long-running tragedy was playing at the same time, but among the Big Powers it was our man, I’m afraid, Sir John Simon, who really took the biscuit …’
While Matthew, who had sprung up from the couch again and was striding up and down the room making the floorboards creak, had been discoursing the Indian had reappeared with two bottles of beer with straws in them. He looked unsurprised to find one of his customers striding up and down shouting; odd behaviour was by no means unusual under his roof, but he was inclined to take it philosophically, reflecting that every profession must have its disadvantages. He handed one bottle to Monty and the other to Matthew who took it without noticing.
‘Simon, believe it or not, managed to give such a selective interpretation of the Lytton Report that anyone who hadn’t read it might have wondered whether it wasn’t the Chinese who had invaded Japan instead of vice versa. Not surprisingly, the smaller nations were indignant. Before their very eyes all the fine words and noble undertakings were proving to be gross hypocrisy. “If the League does not succeed in securing peace and justice,” the Norwegian delegate declared angrily, “then the whole system by which right was meant to replace might will collapse.” And he knew what he was talking about, as it has turned out. One of the Finns then wanted to know if the League was merely a debating club. I don’t know if you can imagine, Monty, the shock and anger and disappointment we all felt at the way Simon and our Foreign Office destroyed, with the help of their cronies, what was without doubt the best chance the world had ever had to institute a system of international justice!’ Matthew, making a violent gesture with his beer bottle, had caused the liquid inside it to foam out of the neck and spill over his hand. He paused for a moment to brood and lick his knuckles.
In the meantime the door had opened and half a dozen women had been shown in; they went to sit in a glum row on a bench against the wall.
‘You picking please woman at your disposition,’ said the Indian politely.
Four of the newcomers were middle-aged Chinese women with scarlet cheekbones; two of them started a whispered conversation in Cantonese, a third puffed smoke-rings from green lips, a fourth took out her knitting. The other two women were much younger, mere girls; one was a flat-nosed, round-faced Malay, the other a plain, pallid Chinese with neat pigtails; this latter girl took out a school exercise book and a text book and began to do her Latin homework. Monty looked them over without excitement and belched: the beer seemed unusually gaseous this evening. He was uncomfortable and out of sorts, no doubt about it. He felt, in particular, that there was still another bubble of air lodged distressingly inside him. Would it soon rise to the surface? He waited, surveying himself internally and thinking what a wretched evening he was having.
Suddenly, from some other part of the building through the thin walls there came a drunken Scandinavian voice. ‘You say you are a wirgin. I say you are not a wirgin!’ This was followed by an alarming crash.
‘But,’ said Matthew, who had taken a gulp of beer and was striding up and down once more (he was sweating copiously and felt by no means sober though he had had little to drink all evening), ‘the Report was there and there was nothing they could do about it. That Report had stuck in the gullets of the Great Powers. They could neither swallow it nor spit it out. In fact, the only thing they could think of to do was, of course, what they always did in Geneva when they found themselves at a loss: they formed a committee … this one was to report on the Report! Ludicrous! It was called the Committee of Nineteen. It wasted no time in settling down to the stern task of fostering sub-committees of its own in the best Geneva tradition, in particular a sub-committee for conciliation. What a farce! At one time the cynics were saying that they would soon have to have a report on the report on the Report. And yet the Report itself was plain enough. In due course the Committee of Nineteen produced its report on the Report, however. They even went so far as to broadcast it from the League’s new wireless station in Geneva. And yet again the Big Powers found themselves with egg on their faces! Japan was plainly condemned. Chinese sovereignty should be restored. Members of the League should not recognize Manchukuo. But ironically enough, at the very moment that Japan was being condemned at Geneva she was preparing to invade Eastern Inner Mongolia as well.’
‘I say you are not a wirgin!’
‘But even so, most likely the Western powers would not even have made the effort they did make to condemn Japan’s aggression, had the Japs not attacked Shanghai …’
The young Chinese girl with pigtails, on instructions from the management, had unfastened her bodice, allowing a small lemon-nippled breast to shudder free of its constraining buttons. Meanwhile, its owner pouted over a perplexing sentence she was invited to translate: ‘Romulus and Remus, you are surely about to jump over the walls of Rome, are you not?’ (Question expecting the answer ‘Yes’). What did this mean? Was it gibberish deliberately planned as a snare to the unwary, perhaps designed to make one lose face in some subtle occidental way? Surely it could be nothing else? (But wait! That, too, was a question expecting the answer ‘Yes’. She had the feeling that an invisible net had been thrown over her and that an unseen hand was beginning to pull the cords tight.) Well, she could not spend all night trying to penetrate the mysterious workings of the occidental mind so, with a sigh, she passed on to the next question.
‘To be frank, Monty, outside Geneva who cared a damn about Manchuria, or a music-hall place called Eastern Inner Mongolia? But Shanghai was different. When the Japs sent in troops from the International Settlement and bombed unarmed civilians in Chapei, people began to realize that Western business interests were threatened. There were limits, after all. But in the end what action did the Big Powers take?’
Again a dreadful crash! This time it was against the very wall of the room in which they were assembled: the whole building seemed to shake and the framed photograph of Anthony Eden cantered clippety-clop against the wall for a few seconds. ‘I give you “wirgin”!’ came a hoarse voice accompanied by a woman’s cry.
The row of women stared at Matthew with dull eyes. The Indian, disappointed with the effect they were having on his two customers, had encouraged them to unbutton their blouses and undo their skirts or sarongs in order to present themselves more advantageously. The young Chinese girl, having finished her Latin as best she could, had turned to arithmetic. Now she was sitting, stark naked, sucking her pencil over a problem which involved the rate at which a tap filled a bath. What, she wondered, was a tap? And what, come to that, was a bath? She would have to consult her aunt who was one of the older women with scarlet cheekbones.
The Indian was hurrying along beside the stout gesticulating figure of Matthew, trying to draw his attention to the enhanced appearance of his girls. The far door opened a crack and the fat Indian lady, his mother, peered in. She was still holding her bedding and anxious to resume her slumbers. He motioned her away crossly.
‘Uh … uh … uh …’ Monty could feel that bubble of air rising.
‘Very young! Soft as rising moon! Or perhaps nice gentleman preferring experience lady with wide knowledge all French and Oriental techniques? Are they, sir, not what doctor ordering?’
‘What?’
‘Experience lady … wide knowledge …’
Matthew, sweat pouring off his brow in torrents, gripped him by the arm and said, blinking fiercely: ‘You may well ask! As a gesture the British, several months too late, declared an arms embargo … but on both sides, as if both had been equally guilty. In a couple of weeks it lapsed anyway because the arms manufacturers were big employers and there was a lot of unemployment at the time. So, the Japs had plainly broken the Covenant and got away with it. They left the League, of course, or at least Geneva, the following day. I watched them go myself in a great procession of motor-cars from the Metropole where they’d been staying … There was something horrible about it because it meant the end of everything. I was standing near the Pont de Mont Blanc as they went by on their way to the Gare Cornavin. They went by in silence. Each car that passed was like another support being pulled out from under the League. That was the last we saw of them in Geneva but they left the League in ruins … they and the Big Powers between them. Why? Because this sad defeat of principle at the hands of expediency, this old way of having things settled behind the scenes by degenerate foreign ministries had set a precedent from which we never recovered. Ah, you say that History will find them guilty? Nonsense! History is too muddled and nobody gives a damn about it anyway. Disarmament! Abyssinia! Spain! The same thing was to happen again and again!’ Matthew released the Indian and staggering to the couch, sat down with his head in his hands.
Another crash shook the wall and Anthony Eden went clip-pety-clops once more.
‘Uh … uh … uh … aaaaaaah!’ Monty belched deafeningly. His expression, which had been careworn, brightened a little and he looked with more interest at the row of women. The Indian, however, was already signalling them to be on their way. Evidently they were not what doctor ordering.
Now he approached Matthew with a large leather-bound album of photographs and beckoned Monty to come and have a look, too. These pictures were of his better, high-class girls, he explained. Matthew gazed at them in wonder. The photographer had surprised many of them in intimate moments and some of them had prices pencilled against them, as on a menu. In a few cases there was the instruction: ‘Client must ordering in advance’ or ‘Miss Wu (20 mins.). She weighing one hundred pounds of tropical charm.’ Or even ‘Miss Shirley Mao (2 pers.)’.
The Indian, seeing Matthew reading with interest, pointed with a grubby finger and said: ‘She personally recommending, sir.’
‘Are some of these girls refugees from the war in China?’ asked Matthew.
The Indian’s eyes narrowed as he tried to penetrate the signification of this remark. ‘You wanting refugee-girl?’ he asked carefully. And he, too, studied the album, wondering which of the girls would best accommodate this special interest. ‘I finding Japan-bombing-Chinese-refugee-cripplegirl. Very interesting. You drink beer waiting ten five minutes. I find.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Monty. ‘Give the man a dollar for the beer and a couple of dollars for the girls. Otherwise we’ll be here all night.’
‘You staying, please, nice gentlemen,’ cried the Indian. ‘No, you going out,’ he shouted at his mother who was trying to sneak back in again with her bedding. ‘No, you must signing police book,’ he howled as Monty made for the door. He produced a grimy ledger. Monty made a quick scribble in it and handed the pencil to Matthew who signed carefully, looking at the list of other signatures.
‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed, hastening down the stairs after Monty. ‘Did you see whose names were in the Visitors’ Book? The Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Robert Brooke-Popham have both been here tonight!’ He paused dizzily to steady himself against the wall. Monty rolled his eyes to heaven and plunged out into the night, saying over his shoulder: ‘People don’t sign their own names in places like this, you idiot!’
‘I say you are not a wirgin!’ echoed after them into the empty street. A distant crash, a faint cry, and all was quiet. Singapore slept peacefully under the bright, equatorial sky. The shadow of a cat slipped through the street. A child cried. A weary coolie dragged his rickshaw home. An old man sighed in his sleep somewhere. Presently, in two or three hours from now would come the first faint drone of Japanese bombers approaching from the north-east. But for the moment all was quiet.
26
The taxi-driver (it was still the grandfatherly Malay with white hair who had been driving them earlier in the evening), seeing Matthew stagger as he got out of the cab at the gate of the Mayfair, assumed him to be drunk and asked him if he would like a massage because he knew of a certain place … But Matthew shook his head. He felt weak and dizzy: all he wanted to do was to plunge into bed. He said good night to Monty and set off up the short drive towards the Mayfair Building; with a growl of its engine the taxi was gone, leaving only a deep sigh of relief floating in the empty air where it had been standing. Monty, bound on pleasure, this time did not intend to be thwarted.
‘I must have caught some fever,’ Matthew thought as he climbed the steps and dragged open the protesting outer door to the verandah. This thought was followed by another, still more distressing: perhaps he had caught the Singapore Grip! Certainly an illness of some kind had taken hold of him. He had half expected to find the Major smoking a cigar on the verandah, but though an electric light was burning, there was no sign of him. Nor was Dupigny anywhere to be seen. So tempting, however, was the prospect of resting his weary body without delay that Matthew allowed himself to be diverted into the nearest rattan armchair, where he lay panting and perspiring while he recovered a little of his strength. Almost immediately his eyelids dropped and he fell into a doze.
But in only a matter of moments he was woken again by the screeching hinges of the outer door. Someone was coming in. He struggled to sit up and look alert but his eyes seemed to have slipped out of focus and for some moments only presented him with a grey blur. Then he found himself face to face with Joan who was saying: ‘We saw the light from the road as Jim was on his way home and we thought we’d just call in to say good night.’
‘That was nice of you,’ said Matthew warmly. Ehrendorf had come in with Joan but was sitting on the arm of a bamboo chair half in the shadows of the door.
‘And Jim wanted to have a word with you,’ Joan went on.
‘If it’s about what we were discussing earlier,’ said Matthew, aware that his eyes were trying to slip out of focus again, ‘about, you know, the colonial question and so forth, well, the point I was trying to make is that we must allow the whole country to develop. At the moment what it amounts to is that we only allow the native people to work in agriculture because we insist on selling them our own manufactures. Let me give you an example…’
‘No, no, it wasn’t about that,’ cried Joan hastily. ‘Jim will tell you. Go on, you said you would,’ she added accusingly while Ehrendorf stirred uneasily on the edge of the circle of light and perhaps contemplated whatever it was that he had had in mind to say to Matthew.
In the meantime another layer of gauze had been removed from Matthew’s memory of what had gone on earlier in the evening, so that now at last he began to think: ‘What a miracle that they should have made it up after the row they were having an hour or two ago!’
‘Go on, you did say you would.’
Ehrendorf’s pale, handsome face continued to stare mutely at Matthew from out of the semi-darkness and he sighed. A motorcar passed up the road with a deep, chugging sound; the reflected light from its headlights glowed in thin slices through the unrolled blinds of split bamboo. Finally Ehrendorf said: ‘I just wanted to say, Matthew, that I expect I shall be leaving Singapore in a day or two … Another posting, I guess you’d call it. Not yet sure where to. I realized this evening that Joan and I … Ah, no future in our relationship … Best of friends … Hm, wish each other well, naturally …’ He fell silent.
‘There,’ said Joan.
‘What? You’re leaving? And I’ve only just arrived! That really is a shame!’ exclaimed Matthew, distressed. Ehrendorf had sunk his head briefly in his hands to give his face a weary polish. ‘It’s time I was getting home,’ he said. But whether he meant to America or to his flat in Singapore it was impossible to say.
For some moments Matthew had been aware that there was something odd about Ehrendorf’s appearance. It was this: his uniform clung to him as if it were sopping wet. Indeed, staring more closely at it Matthew saw that it was several shades darker than it should have been and clung to his skin. His hair, too, was plastered down as if a bucket of water had been emptied over him. Moreover, a pool of water had collected round his shoes and was advancing slowly into the circle of light.
‘We shall both certainly miss you,’ said Joan brightly.
‘I guess it’s about time I packed my grip and moved on some place else,’ said Ehrendorf with a wry, bitter smile.
Matthew, on the point of bringing up the question of Ehrendorf’s sodden clothing, was diverted by this last remark into asking if, by the way, either of them happened to know what a Singapore Grip might be, was it a fever of some sort? Ehrendorf seemed taken aback by this question: after a moment’s consideration he said he thought it was a suitcase made of rattan, like a Shanghai Basket, as they were called, only smaller. If that was what they were he had one himself. Joan, however, said no. In an authoritative tone she declared it to be a patent double-bladed hairpin which some women used to curl their hair after they had washed it. This brief excursion into lexicography served to add a further element of confusion to a scene which Matthew had already found sufficiently puzzling. There were questions which must be asked, he felt, to straighten everything out. And he must think of them immediately for Ehrendorf, plucking dejectedly at his wet trousers, was already getting to his feet. He must ask about the pool of water where Ehrendorf had been sitting, and about his departure and Joan and the Singapore Grip. But his eyes chose this critical moment to become a blur through which nothing could be seen, though his mind remained as keen as ever and he heard a voice which reminded him of his own saying a cheery good night to some people who were leaving. Some moments went by while he sat quietly waiting for clear vision to be restored. When it had been, he found himself sitting opposite an empty chair beneath which was a little pool of water. Something else glistened on a rattan table not far away: it was a small handbag of white leather which Joan must have forgotten.
‘I must be quite seriously ill and undoubtedly I should call a doctor before it’s too late.’ But again he closed his eyes and, again, within a few moments, was obliged to open them, this time because he had heard a crunch of gravel and a creak of the wooden steps which led up to the house. The Major, perhaps, or Dupigny returning home, he surmised. They would certainly help him to make contact with a doctor. It was Joan, however, in excellent spirits.
‘It’s me,’ she cried gaily. ‘I forgot my handbag. Come for a walk outside. It’s lovely. The moon’s just rising or perhaps it’s the starlight. You can see as clear as day and it’s getting cool at last. Come on, stop day-dreaming. You’ll be telling me next that you want a “serious talk”. But I’ve had enough “serious talks” for one evening. Well, come on, let’s enjoy ourselves.’ With that she grasped his hand and pulled him up out of his chair, ignoring his protests and pleas for help. Soon, with his head spinning, he was blundering down the steps beside her. Once in the fresh air, however, he felt a little better and decided that perhaps he was not so ill after all. Joan was right. It was cooler and the heavens were so bright that two shadows accompanied them across the lawn, past the gymnastic equipment, unused since the death of old Mr Webb, the vertical bars, and the high bar like a gibbet with a background of stars, into the denser shadows of the little grove of flowering trees and shrubs which lay between the Mayfair’s grounds and the Blacketts’ and then on through the dark corridor of pili-nut trees.
‘I want to show you something,’ Joan said as Matthew shied away from entering this funnel of darkness. Despite his dizziness he was aware that voracious animals might be lurking there and he did not intend to dispense entirely with prudent behaviour. Joan tugged him through the darkness, however, and presently they reached the open space of the lawn with the swimming pool and the house behind it rising white and clear in the moonlight. But instead of heading towards the house, Joan now drew him aside into the blue-black shadow of a ‘flame of the forest’ tree. There, to his surprise, she slipped into his arms and he felt her lips on his. His arms tightened round her convulsively and the blackness around them became drenched in magenta with the pounding of his blood. He felt her teeth begin to nibble at his lips; her hand found its way inside his shirt and began to travel over his damp skin, leaving a trail of awakened desire wherever it went. He released her to unbutton the top of her cotton dress. But as he did so she slipped away from him laughing, deeper into the shadows.
‘Matthew, are you in love with me?’ she asked.
‘Well, yes,’ he muttered, blundering in the direction from which the voice had come. But he found the shadows were empty and again he heard her laughter from where he had just been a moment before; and her voice asked mockingly: ‘Are you in love with me, Matthew?’
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’
‘First you must answer. Are you in love with me?’
‘Yes, oh, that is …’
‘How much?’
‘Well …’ Matthew found a handkerchief and mopped his steaming brow. He felt somewhat unwell again.
‘Here I am, over by the swimming pool. Come and look at the moon’s reflection. That water is so still tonight!’
Matthew left the shadow of the trees and went to where she was sitting on her heels at the edge of the pool gazing down at the bright, motionless disc of the moon stamped like a yellow wax seal on the surface of the water. He attempted to put his arm round her but immediately she drew away, saying that there was something he must do first. She told him but he did not understand what it was.
‘What?’
‘Yes, you must jump into the water with your clothes on.’
‘I must do what?’ cried Matthew in astonishment. ‘Are you joking?’
‘No, you must jump in with your clothes on’
‘But really …’
‘No, that’s what I want you to do.’
Matthew said crossly: ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m going to bed now so … goodnight!’
‘Wait Matthew, wait!’ pleaded Joan. ‘Wait!’
Matthew paused. The edge of the pool was rounded and raised a little, like the rim of a saucer. Joan was now walking along it, arms outstretched like a tight-rope walker. As he watched she allowed herself to lose her balance and fall backwards into the moon’s reflection. There was a great splash and a slapping of water against the sides of the pool. Joan, smiling, lay back against a pillow of water and did one, two, three strokes of a neat overarm backstroke which caused her to surge out into the pool with a bow-wave swirling back on each side of her head. Matthew shook his head in bewilderment, scattering drops of perspiration, as if he himself had just stepped out of the pool. But really, this was the limit! He was invaded by a feeling of unreality. Moreover, the moon and the stars had begun plunging and zooming in the heavens. Any moment now he would collapse if he did not reach his bed and lie down. He plodded back over the moonlit lawn which tilted now this way, now that, like the deck of a ship in a storm, and on through the dark corridor of trees, pausing only to vomit into the shrubbery.
‘Wait, I’m coming too,’ came Joan’s distant voice. ‘I still haven’t got my handbag.’
But when he had wearily clambered up the steps of the May-fair Building and once more dragged open the creaking door of the verandah he found another surprise waiting for him. So slippery had reality become to his grasp that, for a moment, it seemed to him quite likely that the young woman who came forward, smiling, to greet him, was Joan who had somehow managed to rearrange time and space to her convenience and arrive back there before he did. It was not Joan, however, but the Eurasian girl with dark-red hair whom he had met earlier in the evening at The Great World, Miss Vera Chiang. At the very sight of her the palm of one of his hands began to tingle deliciously.
‘You are most surprised, I expect, to see me here, are you not? (You remember, yes, Vera Chiang.) Well let me put things straight for you, Matthew, and then you won’t be any longer looking in such a condition. You see, I still have in this house the bedroom which your dear, dear father gave to me when I was “on my uppers”. Your father, Matthew, was such a good, kind and generous man. You can be pretty sure I’ll always say one for him for the help he gave me … And so here I still have some of my precious bits and pieces, such things like my books (because I always have my “nose in a book”) and “snaps” of your dear father with no clothes on and of my family (all now having “kicked the bucket” I’m sorry to say) who were very important in Russia and obliging to leave in Revolution and so this evening, when we were split up by those rowdy sailors, I remembered I must look at them again, which I haven’t for some time and I heard you come in and I thought Matthew will also enjoy looking at my “snaps” … There! And, are you all right, dear? You look rather “hot about the collar”, I must say.’
Matthew, who was very hot indeed and distinctly unwell despite the pleasant surprise of finding Miss Chiang again so soon, had been obliged to steady himself against a table as the bungalow gave a lurch. After a moment, however, he felt sufficiently recovered to say: ‘As a matter of fact, I’m not feeling very well. I seem to having an attack of the Singapore Grip, or whatever it’s called.’
It was Miss Chiang’s turn to look surprised at this information and she even went a little pink about the cheeks, which made her, thought Matthew, look prettier than ever. For a moment she appeared nonplussed, though. What a pretty girl she is, to be sure, he mused, and what a pity that everything seems so unreal.
‘Matthew!’ called a voice from outside and in no time there came the by now familiar sound of the door being opened. Joan stopped short when she saw that Matthew was talking to Miss Chiang. She raised her eyebrows and looked far from pleased.
‘D’you know Miss Chiang?’ Matthew managed to say. ‘I think she said she was going to show me some photographs …’ he hesitated and eyed Miss Chiang’s face carefully: it had occurred to him that she might already have shown him the photographs, in which case what he had said would sound rather odd. Miss Chiang agreed, however, that that was what she had been about to do and Matthew gave an inner sigh of relief.
‘Gracious, Miss Blackett, you’re all wet! Let me get you a towel.’
‘No, thank you, Vera, I shall have dried out in no time. Besides, I find it pleasantly cool.’ And Joan slipped into a cane-chair not very far from where Ehrendorf had sat and dripped only a few minutes earlier. As she did so, despite his fever (or perhaps even because of it), Matthew could not help noticing how the thin cotton of her dress stuck to her body, outlining its delicious shape and revealing a number of things about it which he had had no opportunity to notice before. In the meantime, Joan, who still had not quite swallowed her irritation at finding Vera and Matthew together, was asking superciliously whether Vera was pleased with the dress which she was wearing. Was it not lucky for Vera, she asked turning to Matthew, seeing that the poor girl was penniless when she came to work for Mr Webb, that her cast-off clothing had proved to be a perfect fit?
‘Oh, it was terribly lucky for me!’ exclaimed Vera, clapping her hands. ‘I had never worn such lovely clothes before, Matthew. Except, of course, when I was a baby in Russia, I suppose, because my mother’s family was of noble blood, princesses at least … and my father was a wealthy tea-merchant, definitely “well thought of” in the highest circles, so I understand …’
‘In our family,’ said Joan, ‘it has always been our custom to give our cast-off clothes away … My mother always gives hers to the amah of to the “boys” for their wives or to someone like that. It seems such a shame to allow good material to go to waste, especially when it turns out to be a perfect fit like the clothing I gave to Vera …’
‘Perhaps not quite a perfect fit, Miss Blackett,’ said Vera sweetly. ‘I sometimes think that when I wear this dress it is a little tight across the chest. What is your opinion, Matthew? If I were a little more flat-chested would it not be an even more perfect fit? But then, even as a young girl, my breasts were rather well-developed. I find I sometimes breathe easier when I open these two top buttons. So!’
And Matthew, though the bungalow had for some time been rocking so badly that it was astonishing the vase of flowers could remain standing on the table, nevertheless snatched a moment to cast a hungry eye on Miss Chiang’s exquisite chest, a good deal of which had now come to light as she fanned it, murmuring: ‘Ouf! That’s better.’
‘A funny thing,’ said Joan in honeyed tones, ‘but my mother says the servants to whom she donates her old clothes are very often not in the least grateful! Would you believe it, Matthew? D’you think it is because they aren’t of pure European stock or is it simply a lack of education and good breeding?’
‘Well, good gracious!’ exclaimed Matthew, gripping the arms of his chair for dear life as he was hurled this way and that. ‘I should hardly …’
While Joan had been talking she had been struggling with one hand behind her back, frowning with concentration. Now her expression relaxed and she, too, unbuttoned the front of her dress, though with difficulty because it was wet; having done so she began tugging away a shapeless piece of white cloth, saying: ‘I must say, there’s nothing more disagreeable than a damp bra.’
‘Look, I really must go to bed now,’ said Matthew, jumping to his feet. ‘I feel dreadfully ill …’ The floor had now begun to tilt in different directions at the same time and it was a miracle that he could retain his balance at all.
‘But Matthew,’ exclaimed Vera, jumping to her feet. ‘You must come and look at the “snaps” I have in my room.’ And taking his arm she began to lead him from the verandah. But Joan, too, had got to her feet and taking him by the other arm started to drag him in the other direction, saying: ‘First Matthew is coming to see something I want to show him outside in the compound … and as it may take a little time, Vera, I think it would be best if you don’t bother to wait up.’
‘In that case it is better that I take him first to my room,’ cried Vera tugging Matthew rather hard in that direction.
How long this embarrassing scene would have continued it was hard to say, but at this moment a torrent of blackness swept over Matthew’s storm-battered brain and he sank diplomatically to the floor between the two young women.
‘It’s no joke being attractive to women, I must say,’ he thought as he lost consciousness.
27
When Matthew came to he found himself lying on the floor exactly where he had fallen. The Major and Dupigny were kneeling beside him. The two young women had disappeared (Joan to fetch Dr Brownley, Vera to crack ice for a cold compress). The Major and Dupigny, seeing that he was conscious again, helped him to his feet and then supported him to his bedroom, one on each side.
‘Ça a l’air assez grave,’ remarked Dupigny to his friend over Matthew’s swaying head. ‘C’est la grippe de Singapour si je ne me trompe pas.’
Matthew, however, felt a little better after a few moments and declared himself able to peel off his own clothes which were as sodden as if he had indeed plunged into the swimming pool. He dried his quaking body with a towel and then crawled under his mosquito net. A pair of wet footprints glistened on the floor where he had been standing. The Major handed him an aspirin and a glass of water; when he had swallowed them he lay back in the darkness, watching giddily as the room began to revolve slowly like a roundabout. Gradually, the bed, too, began to spin, dipping and rising, faster and faster. He had to cling on tightly, as to the neck of a wooden horse, or be hurled out against the walls by centrifugal force. Although the night was still, great gales of hot air poured in through the open shutters and tugged at the mosquito net. Time passed. The light was switched on. Now faces were swirling round the bed: he recognized the Major’s anxious features and Dupigny’s wrinkled face, pickled in cynicism like a walnut in vinegar, and Dr Brownley chuckling like a fiend, but then Matthew closed his eyes, knowing he must be delirious, and fell into a troubled sleep. In his dreams he was back in Geneva … the pale, sorrowful ghost of Matsuoka appeared and whispered: ‘Matthew, why do you persecute me like this? You know I am only trying to do what is best.’ And then he smiled and his face turned into that of a cobra. Outside in the darkness some small creature uttered a cry as it was killed by a snake.
Now, a few miles away at Katong, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham also lay dreaming of the Japanese. Brooke-Popham slept on his back, legs apart, arms away from his body, wrists and palms turned upwards, an attitude of total surrender to sleep, perhaps, or that of a man felled suddenly in the boxing-ring by an unexpected blow. His honest, friendly face looked older now that sleep had allowed the muscles of his jaw to sag, older than his age indeed for he was not much over sixty; but this long Sunday had been spent in interminable conferences and he was exhausted. Moreover, these conferences still had not resolved the problem which faced him. Should he order troops across the border into Siam in order to forestall a possible Japanese landing there?
Malaya, very roughly, was carrot-shaped with Singapore at its tip and Siam, more roughly still, providing its plume of green leaves. The obvious place to defend Malaya’s northern border with Siam was where the green plume grew out of the carrot, at the thinnest part, for there you would need least troops to do the job. Alas, there was a snag to this, because the border, although it obligingly started at the thinnest part on the western side of the carrot, instead of heading straight to the east to snip off the leaves neatly where they should be snipped off, wandered south for some distance into the pink flesh of the carrot itself at its fattest. Nor was the problem simply that Malaya’s real border, by wandering hither and yon through the bulging part of the peninsula, was a good deal longer than it need have been: the fact was that there were only two roads south into Malaya through the jungle and mountains and both of them began some fifty miles across the border into Siam, one at a place called Singora, the other at Patani.
So what was he going to do? (Or, to put it another way, what should he have already done?) Should he order the 11th Division to invade Siam and occupy Singora before the Japanese could land? There was hardly still time to do so, anyway. Ah, but he did not know (although he might suspect) that the Japanese were even thinking of landing there. This was a terrible dilemma for a man who was not as young as he used to be. After all, one rash act might plunge Britain into war with Siam and her patron, Japan, when by abstaining it might be avoided. This was the fix which Brooke-Popham had found himself in. During the past week the Chiefs of Staff in London had authorized him to go ahead and launch his forestalling operation (which had been named Matador) into Siam if he thought a Japanese landing there was imminent. Well!
Nor was it only a question of occupying Singora. There was the other road, too, the one which began at Patani and ran south-west towards the Malayan border. To hold this road would also mean pushing into Siam, though it should not be necessary to occupy Patani itself. This time the idea was to seize the only defensible position on the road, at a place called ‘the Ledge’, where it entered the mountains near the border. The Ledge was vital, Brooke-Popham was in no doubt about that. If you did not stop an attacking force at the Ledge there was no knowing where you would stop it. Most likely you would have to take to your heels and try to halt it again some miles down the road at Kroh. But once the enemy (still hypothetical, thank goodness!) had reached Kroh they would have crossed Malaya’s mountainous spine and reached the civilized and vulnerable western coast with its open rice fields and rubber plantations. And once there you would no longer have the jungle to inhibit their flanking operations. Somehow you would have to bottle them up, for if they once got loose in all that open country, well, it would be better not to think of what might happen … ! He and General Percival, whose responsibilities began on the Malayan side of the border, had agreed therefore, that they should have a battalion waiting at Kroh, ready to sprint up the road into Siam and grab the Ledge: they might have some Siamese border guards to deal with on the way but that should not worry them. So everything was ready as far as the Ledge was concerned, more or less, though the troops could have done with more training, raw recruits as many of them were. Brooke-Popham knew, even in his sleep, what had to be done. What he did not know, and could not decide, was when, if ever, to do it. After all, by acting too soon he could start an international incident! And if he did that he would really look a fool. Because, frankly, that is the sort of thing that people remember about a chap, not all the hard work he has got through in his career.
Brooke-Popham lay pole-axed on his bed. Occasionally he gibbered a little or champed his moustache briefly with his lower lip. Although he was asleep his mind still bore the traces of the day’s dilemma, printed on it like crisp footprints in the snow: the problems that faced him went on rehearsing themselves even when his conscious mind had been ordered to stand easy. If only he had known earlier what the Japanese were doing! (Mind you, he still did not know for sure, for absolute sure.) For the past week the sky over the South China Sea had been thickly carpeted with cloud, making air reconnaissance impossible. But then, late on Saturday morning, one of the RAF Hudsons, on the point of turning for home, had come across a break in the cloud over the sea some distance to the south of the tip of Indo-China. And there below had been first one Japanese convoy with three troopships, then another with twenty, both with an escort of warships. What he and his staff had found difficult to determine was where they were going. The first convoy was heading north-west into the Gulf of Siam, the second due west: therefore, the most likely explanation was that they were innocently rounding the tip of Indo-China from Saigon on their way to Bangkok. So more Hudsons and a Catalina flying-boat had been sent out to look for them where they should have been, in the Gulf of Siam. The Catalina had failed to return: nothing more had been heard of it. As for the Hudsons, that providential break in the cloud had sealed itself up again and they had seen no more, merely that endless fluffy carpet, white on top, grey below, stretching from one horizon to the other. Somewhere beneath that carpet were two sinister little herds of Japanese troopships, but where? They had cudgelled their brains all Saturday night to find the answer.
What was to be done? Last night he would have given a great deal to be able to ask General Percival and Admiral Phillips what they thought. But Percival was in Kuala Lumpur visiting 111 Corps and Tom Phillips was in Manila. Moreover, with one’s own staff one must be careful to display confidence and an air of decision; the important thing is to give the impression that you know what you are doing, even when in doubt: any commander will tell you that. But what a burden it had been that he had had to carry by himself! He remembered a cartoon he had seen in some magazine, making fun of the excesses of German discipline. A platoon of storm-troopers were marching over a cliff while their officer was trying to decide what order to give next. An NCO was pleading with him: ‘Say something, even if it’s only goodbye!’ Brooke-Popham had chuckled heartily when he had seen that cartoon. But in the last few terrible hours it had returned to haunt him and he had been unable to get it out of his head. Say something, even if it’s only goodbye!
The hours of Sunday had ticked away slowly until, at long last, at about the time when the first pahits of the evening were being sipped all around him in peaceful, unsuspecting Singapore, the Hudsons, skimming the wave tops, had found the troopships again. All his worst fears had been immediately realized: the troopships were on course for Singora and a mere hundred miles away. Others were steaming down the coast in the same direction. A Hudson had been fired on by a destroyer.
Brooke-Popham champed his moustache again and uttered a long, low sigh, aware that in a few minutes he would have to drag himself back to full consciousness to find out what was happening. The sighting of those troopships approaching Singora had meant another round of exhausting conferences. Percival had come back on the train from KL, displaying surprise that he had not begun ‘Matador’ and ordered the 11th Division into Siam yesterday when the troopships had first been sighted. But it was all very well for Percival, he did not have the wider responsibilities! Any fool could see that the political implications of ‘Matador’ could not be shrugged off lightly. Had he not just had a telegram from Crosby in Bangkok warning him against alienating the Siamese by violating their neutrality? As Commander-in-Chief Far East he was obliged to consider all sides of the matter.
While Matthew and the others had been at The Great World more exhausting conferences were taking place, and yet more after supper. By now Tom Phillips had returned from Manila. Percival asserted that ‘Matador’ should be abandoned as General Heath and 11th Division would no longer have time to reach Singora before the Japanese landed. Well, in a way this had come as something of a relief: it meant that, whatever else might happen, he would not involve his country in a diplomatic incident. Still, ‘Matador’ had been a good idea strategically and he was reluctant to abandon it altogether. It might still come in useful, though in what way, precisely, he could not quite say. So, before retiring to rest in the early hours, he had ordered that word should be sent to Heath to keep the ‘Matador’ troops standing by. He had noticed one or two raised eyebrows at this (what was the point, his staff might have been wondering, in keeping troops standing by for an operation which it was too late to execute?) and a ghostly voice had whispered in his ear: ‘Say something, even if it’s only goodbye!’
And yet … and yet, perhaps he should have ignored Percival and ordered ‘Matador’ to go ahead and hang the consequences. Which was the greater risk, to start a military engagement at a disadvantage or to risk making an enemy of a potential ally? And what had happened to the poor devils in that Catalina which had gone out yesterday? A typewriter was clattering faintly two, three rooms away. Soon it would be dawn and he would have more decisions to wrestle with; he must sleep, if only for a while. Perhaps they were even now floating somewhere in the warm, sluggish waters of the Gulf of Siam, hoping against hope for rescue. He felt old and tired: he, too, was floating in warm, sluggish waters, hopelessly, hopelessly. Life had been better when he was still Governor of Kenya: he had not felt so worn out there; the drier climate had suited him better than this humid heat. Well, he had retired once and now here he was back again in harness. Ah, but life had been best of all in France in 1914, the good fellowship and the sunlight and the smell of the country. What fun he had had with their liaison officer, Prince Murat, when the mayor of Saponay was making a fuss about Royal Flying Corps men stealing fruit from orchards: Murat had told the poor mayor that he would have him court-martialled and shot! That had quietened him down. And then there was another time at some little country restaurant near Fère-en-Tardenbois with Murat and Baring, yes, eating outside in the sunlight surrounded by roses and pear trees … how golden the Montrachet had sparkled in their glasses! And the time Hillaire Belloc had visited them from England and the boxer, Carpentier, a colleague in the French naval air force; he remembered how Trenchard (he was a General in those days) had thrown his cigar into a carppond at some place, perhaps a monastery, where they were having lunch, and a carp had eaten it and for a while seemed to have poisoned itself but afterwards to everyone’s delight staged a recovery. But above all there came to him now, as he lay troubled and sweating on his bed at Katong, the smell of cider echoing back over quarter of a century from that long, sunlit autumn of 1914, and the memory of Avros and Blériots and Farmans as they came grumbling through the translucent evening, one by one, towards the stubble of the aerodrome. Now the first ground-mist was beginning to form while the shadows reached out across the field and the Mess bell sang its clear note into the still air, calling them all to supper. Brooke-Popham sighed again in the darkness. Outside the window the breeze gently tossed the palms of Katong, making them creak and rustle. Beside him the menacing shadow of the telephone crouched like a toad in the gloom.
General Percival, too, had stretched out to snatch a little rest. And he also slept with his mouth open, snoring slightly from time to time. Were those his teeth in a glass by his bedside? No, his teeth, though they protruded, were perfectly sound: it was just a glass of water in case he should wake during the night and feel thirsty. Beside it glimmered the luminous dial of his watch. What time is it? Half past two, perhaps. It is difficult to make sense of those glowing, trembling dots and bars in the darkness. He was dreaming, partly of the defence of Malaya, partly of the Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas. Someone was whispering to the Governor that he, Percival, was not senior enough to take command in Malaya. Who is this sinister whisperer dripping poison into the Governor’s ear? Percival can see the man’s hands, knotted and heavily veined, emerging from the sleeves of a uniform, but the face remains in shadow. It must be someone who had known him when he was out here before in Singapore, in 1937, on General Dobbie’s staff … General Dobbie, there was a man for you! Over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and with the quiet confidence of a man who has the gift of Faith. You had only to look into those steady blue eyes and to witness that calm, informal manner to know that Dobbie would support you through thick and thin. And yet the whispering continued: that face in the shadows was telling the Governor that Percival would be a nuisance, that he did not know how to handle civilians. But this was not true! He did know how to deal with civilians. It is just that one must be careful with them. With civilians it is all a question of morale, of what goes on in their minds. He had seen that in Ireland as a youngster. And civilians get things wrong! They take fright, like one of those herds of antelope dashing this way and that on the African plain. And no army on earth can save them once they start this blind dashing about. A snore back-fired and almost woke him, causing his sleep to stall like a cold engine, but somehow he managed to keep it going, and presently the rhythm picked up again and he slept on, breathing deeply.
At his bungalow opposite the Mayfair the Major, reclining in a cane chair in his pyjamas, had managed to doze off too, and was dreaming of Ireland twenty years ago and of a woman who might have been his. He woke up and cleared his throat despondently. How sad it all was! But no doubt everything had been for the best. He dozed again. Perhaps in sleep the past could be rearranged and things turn out better.
On one of the upper floors of Government House Sir Shenton Thomas slept uneasily, his handsome face unstirring, however, on the pillow. His difficulties were not near the surface of his sleeping mind but he was dimly aware of them, nevertheless, fluttering and darting shadows like sparrows in a leafy thicket. He got on well with the Asiatics, so it was not that … They liked and respected him. No, of all his preoccupations the most disturbing was that in these troubled times unless he remained alert he might not be able to prevent the dignity of his office from being eroded. Duff Cooper and the Military watched the powers he held as Governor the way greedy schoolboys might watch a pie cooling on the window-sill. He did not mind for himself, he was not a selfish man, but for the Colonial Service and for his successors. And for the natives, too, lest they should be abused. Beside him the telephone dozed peacefully in its cradle. In a few minutes it would awaken and begin to shriek.
Not everyone was asleep, however. In the Operations Room at Sime Road a considerable amount of excitement was developing. When Sinclair had come on duty (at one a.m., not midnight as he had told Monty) he had found a discussion taking place between the GSO2 and the Brigadier General Staff as to whether the code-word ‘Black-Out’ should be sent out. The BGS, however, had declared that this was the Governor’s responsibility. Not long afterwards the ‘green line’ telephone had suddenly started to ring. Sinclair, beside himself with excitement, had watched the RAF officer on duty pick it up. It was the aerodrome at Kota Bahru on the north-east coast near the Siamese border. Suspicious shipping had been detected standing off the coast. Pulford, the Air Officer Commanding, had been summoned. GHQ Far East had been contacted and asked to identify these ships because it looked as if they could only be … Sinclair shuddered with the effort of maintaining an impassive appearance as he worked rapidly to assist the GSO2 in the preparation of the Situation Report. He was going to be present at the beginning of war in the Far East, he was certain of it!
Nor was General Gordon Bennett, the commander of the Australian Imperial Force in Malaya, asleep. As a matter of fact, he was not even in Singapore but hundreds of miles away in Rangoon. He had been obliged to stop there on his way to Malaya from Egypt where he had been visiting the Australian troops in the Middle East. Now, while waiting for an aircraft to convey him to Singapore, he was spending the night at the splendid old Strand Hotel beside the Rangoon River. Instead of sleeping, however, he was sitting in the dark beside the open window of his room, gazing out surreptitiously into the sweltering night towards the window of another room and holding his breath with excitement.
On account of the heat the window of this room, too, stood open and a light was burning there despite the lateness of the hour. Thanks to the angle of the building Gordon Bennett could see into it across the intervening courtyard. And what could he see in that room but four men who he was pretty certain were Japanese busy poring over maps which he was convinced were maps of Malaya. Japanese spies! What else could they be? He had already telephoned Military Headquarters in Rangoon and told them, guardedly at first, that he had uncovered a nest of spies. Then, since they did not appear very interested, he had had to make it explicit. Jap spies hard at it, spinning their toils practically under his nose! But although the blockheads in charge had told him, soothingly, that they would see about it, he had been watching for hours and they had still done nothing. Meanwhile, he had been staring so long and so fixedly at that nest of spies that he was finding it difficult to keep his eyes focused on them. He ground his teeth in frustration. Why didn’t the police come? This heat was quite unbearable. Every now and then he was obliged to close his aching eyes. So the night wore on, the spies scheming, Gordon Bennett grinding his teeth.
Back in Singapore the Major had opened his eyes to find himself still in his cane chair with a burned-out cigar between his fingers. He must have dozed off for a moment. What time could it be? Presently he would go across the road to see whether Matthew’s fever was any worse. He yawned. His limbs were stiff. He wondered whether all the claret he had left in Berry Brothers’ cellars was surviving the Blitz. How wasteful and senseless was the destruction of war! He had hoped to have finished with all that in 1918. And the twins! Where were they under the bombing? Safely evacuated now, thank heaven. He had had a letter from Northumberland a couple of days ago. Wearing sensible shoes and lisle stockings, each with her brood of unruly, unnerving children (his god-children). It was just as well, too, since (husbands away at the war) they had taken to dancing with Free Frenchmen. He must write tomorrow, no later, and tell them not to flirt with the farmhands, not that he had much confidence that they would do as they were told. ‘There’ll be a lot to sort out, one way or another, when this one is over.’ More to the point, was his Château Margaux and Château Laffitte surviving? It should be almost ready to drink by the time he got home. He had not meant to stay out in the East so long. And Sarah, where was she under the bombs? Married somewhere, no doubt. Oh well, perhaps it was all for the best in the long run. And Sarah? He dozed again. How sad it all was! Sarah … The Major dozed despondently.
Not far away, in bedrooms looking out over the placid gleaming skin of the swimming pool Monty and Joan lay on their beds and slept. Joan was visited in her dreams by Matthew, but a slim, handsome, graceful, authoritative Matthew with a thin moustache and without spectacles; together, wealthy, powerful and admired for their good looks, they reigned in contentment over the Straits. As for Monty,’ in his dreams you might expect to find naked women jostling each other for the best position under the eye of his subconsciousness; surprisingly this was not the case. Instead, a young boy with a pure, loving face came to see him. He had known this boy at school, though he had never spoken to him. He had left school suddenly when his father had died and had never returned. Now, though, he at last came back, filling Monty’s sleeping mind with a piercing tenderness; no doubt everyone carries such an image of purity and love without limit, hidden perhaps by the dross of tainted circumstances and the limits of living from one day to the next, but still capable of ringing through one’s dreams like the chime of a bell on a frosty morning. It was this chime which the conscious Monty, fated to toil in sexual salt-mines throughout his waking hours, now faintly heard from an unexpected direction.
Who else? Walter and his wife sleep side by side, rather touchingly holding hands: it is too hot to get any closer than that. Walter’s bristles lie smooth and sleek against his spine: he is at peace. He sleeps a calm and confident sleep, very black, and when he wakes he will not remember having had any dreams. Only deep down in the foundations of his sleep are there one or two disturbing shapes which slip or slither (the problem of palm-oil for instance crouches blackly in the blackness and watches him with blazing eyes) but nothing that would seriously disturb that towering, restful edifice. But it’s all very well for Walter to sleep peacefully. He is used to the Straits, has spent most of his life here. It is not so easy for the soldiers scattered about the island in clammy tents or snoring barracks. The Indian troops sleep best, the heat is nothing to them, but what about the British and even the Australians? The whirrings and pipings that issue from the jungle close at hand are enough to make a bloke’s hair stand on end, particularly if he has only been in the tropics for a week, and in the army itself for not much longer.
Somewhere in the dark waters far to the north, a certain Private Kikuchi (a nephew of Bugler Kikuchi who, as every Japanese schoolboy knows, died heroically for the Emperor not long ago in the war in China) waits tensely in the troopship bringing him closer to Kota Bahru and the north-eastern shores of Malaya. He has just finished reading a pamphlet called ‘Read This Alone — And the War Can Be Won’. This work, issued to himself and his comrades on board, explains in simple terms how in the Far East a hundred million Asians have been tyrannized by a mere three hundred thousand whites sucking their blood to maintain themselves in luxury, the natives in misery. Private Kikuchi has read with drumming pulse how it is the Emperor’s will that the races of the East shall combine under Japan’s leadership for peace and independence from white oppression. In addition he has read about numerous other matters: about how to avoid sea-sickness in various ways, by keeping a high morale, by practising the Respiration Method, by use of bicarbonate and Jintan pills, and by willpower. He has learned how to cherish his weapons, what to eat, to treat natives with consideration but caution, remembering that they all suffer from venereal diseases, how to mount machine-guns in the bow of the landing-craft and to plunge without hesitation into the water when ordered. If he discovers a dangerous snake he knows he must kill it and then swallow its liver raw as there is no better tonic for strengthening the body. He knows that when it is very hot he must bind a cloth round his forehead beneath his steel helmet to prevent sweat from running into his eyes. He knows, too, that in the jungle he should avoid highly coloured, strongly scented or very sweet fruit. He must avoid fruit that are unusually beautiful in shape or with beautifully coloured leaves. Nor must he eat mangoes at the same time as drinking goat’s milk or spirits. These and a thousand other useful things he has learned, but now, just for a moment, the motion of the ship gives him a queer sensation. And yet… No! Fixing his mind on Uncle Kikuchi’s glorious example he wills himself to feel normal for the Emperor.
Now a young Malay fisherman, dozing on the poles and planks of his fishing trap out in the sound off Pulau Ubin, suddenly wakes and hears a faint but steadily increasing drone from the north-east. He has heard aeroplanes before but this time they are coming in a great number. What an ominous noise they make when they fly all together like a flock of birds! But aeroplanes are the business of the white men: their comings and goings are nothing to him. His job is merely to catch fish: he wonders whether the fish in the swirling black water can hear this dreadful pulsing as it swells overhead.
When the bombs fall, as they will in a few moments, it will not be on the soldiers in their tents or barracks, who might in some measure be prepared to consider them as part of their duties, nor even on black-dreaming Walter whose tremendous commercial struggles over the past decade have at least played some tiny part in building up the pressures whose sudden bursting-out is to be symbolized by a few tons of high explosive released over a sleeping city, but on Chinatown where a few luckless families or individuals, floated this way by fate across the South China Sea, sucked in by the vortex of British capital invested in Malaya, are now to be eclipsed.
The starlight glints on the silver wings of the Japanese bombers, slipping through the clear skies like fish through a sluice-gate. They make their way in over Changi Point towards the neatly arranged beads and necklaces of streetlights, which agitated and recently awakened authorities are at last and in vain trying to have extinguished. In a dark space between two necklaces of light lies a tenement divided into tiny cubicles, each of which contains a number of huddled figures sleeping on the floor. Many of the cubicles possess neither window nor water supply (it will take high explosive, in the end, to loosen the grip of tuberculosis and malaria on them). In one cubicle, not much bigger than a large wardrobe, an elderly Chinese wharf-coolie lies awake beside a window covered with wirenetting. Beside him, close to his head, is the shrine for the worship of his ancestors with bunches of red and white candles strung together by their wicks. It was here beside him that his wife died and sometimes, in the early hours, she returns to be with him for a little while. But tonight she has not come and so, presently, he slips out of his cubicle and down the stairs, stepping over sleeping forms, to visit the privy outside. As he returns, stepping into the looming shadow of the tenement, there is a white flash and the darkness drains like a liquid out of everything he can see. The building seems to hang over him for a moment and then slowly dissolves, engulfing him. Later, when official estimates are made of this first raid on Singapore (sixty-one killed, one hundred and thirty-three injured), there will be no mention of this old man for the simple reason that he, in common with so many others, has left no trace of ever having existed either in this part of the world or in any other.
Part Three
28
The suburb of Tanglin where Matthew continued to thrash and sweat in the grip of his fever lay some distance from Chinatown and Raffles Place. The noise of bombs exploding over there on the far side of the river was not quite loud enough, therefore, to wake heavy sleepers like Walter and Monty. It was not until morning that they learned the astonishing news: Singapore had been bombed, Malaya had been invaded! Nor was that all, for the Japanese had simultaneously attacked the Americans, too, demolishing their fleet at Pearl Harbor. America was in the war at last. A strange elation took hold of the European community.
The United States suddenly became popular. The Stars and Stripes sprouted beside the Union Jack in the shop windows along Orchard Road. American citizens who had been ignored or even jeered for their country’s neutrality found themselves welcome everywhere and were bought drinks whenever they showed themselves in the street or Club. Joan even considered revising her opinion of Ehrendorf, despite the tiring scenes which had led up to what she jokingly described to Monty as ‘Ehrendorf’s Farewell’. (‘The lovesick glances he kept ladling over me like tepid soup!’) Perhaps, carried along on the tide of goodwill, if Joan or Monty had happened to bump into Ehrendorf they would at least have bought the blighter a drink. But he did not put in an appearance anywhere. No doubt he was busy with his superiors, putting finishing touches to plans for obliterating the yellow aggressors.
Later in the morning Walter strolled the few yards from his office on Collyer Quay to have a look at the damage to Robinson’s in Raffles Place. Around the corner barriers had been set up to keep back sightseers, but Walter showed his official pass and was allowed through. Broken glass and silk underwear from Gian Singh’s window in Battery Road still lay on the pavement; part of Guthrie’s had been reduced to a pile of rubble across the road. Walter surveyed with equanimity this devastation of one of his principal rival’s buildings. Nevertheless he offered his sympathy to a Guthrie’s man he saw standing nearby, and feebly tried to prevent himself thinking: ‘It’s an ill wind …’ His blue eyes glittered cheerfully in the sunlight as he watched the cautious efforts being made to search for unexploded bombs and to clear the rubble. Later, however, when he had returned to his office once more, a more sober mood took hold of him and he thought: ‘This is a fine thing to happen in our jubilee year!’ Moreover, this unexpected attack by the Japanese could prove troublesome to Blackett and Webb’s commercial interests.
Forewarned of centralized buying by the Americans, Walter in a short space of time had committed himself to a great deal of forward business in order to escape the limitations of the new arrangements. He had been obliged to acquire rubber in substantial quantities from other producers as well as from the estates managed by Blackett and Webb in order to fill these contracts. Not that, under the Restriction Scheme, it had been enough to get his hands on the rubber: it had also been necessary to buy the right to sell it. Under Restriction each rubber producer, whether estate or smallholding, had been allotted a share of Malaya’s total exports. Each producer’s share, naturally, was less than his capacity to produce: that was the point of the Scheme. Even with light tapping, heavy replanting and recent high rates of release to the world market, there was still no shortage of rubber (inside Malaya, that is). Rubber was plentiful, the right to sell it was scarce.
Fortunately, however, export rights could be bought from Asiatic smallholders who, for one reason or another, were not using them to sell their own rubber. Smallholders were issued with coupons which were equivalent to their share of Malaya’s export rights: these coupons had to accompany any rubber they intended to sell. However, many of the smallholders were illiterate, or simply baffled by the bureaucratic intricacies of the system. Others were swindled out of their coupons by unscrupulous clerks at the Land Offices which issued them or, believing them to be of no value, gave them away to Chinese or Chettyar pimps who lay in wait outside. Some even believed that these perplexing pieces of paper represented a new government tax and therefore willingly surrendered them to entrepreneurs who magnanimously undertook to pay on their behalf in return for some favour. A number of smallholders gave up tapping their trees and simply sold their coupons instead of rubber. Walter, in any event, had found it possible to enlarge the export quota of Blackett and Webb’s estates to cover the considerable stocks of extra rubber he had accumulated. Blackett and Webb’s godowns in Singapore on this first day of the war in the Far East were crammed with rubber destined for America and fit to burst.
Walter, at first, had been delighted by his success in arranging contracts which would evade the Americans’ new centralized buying. He had secured this business at prices which none of his competitors would be able to match. This was surely a coup to rival those of Mr Webb’s early days in Rangoon! It made him feel young again; it reminded him that business was an adventure. How angry old Solomon Langfield must have been when he heard of these deals which Walter had closed in the nick of time. It would have been obvious to old Langfield that Walter had been tipped the wink in advance. How bitterly he must have remonstrated with Langfield and Bowser’s board of dimwits for not having got wind of it! Walter thought with satisfaction of their fat, complacent Secretary, W. J. Bowser-Barrington, trembling before the old man’s anger. Every stengah they drank for a month must have tasted of bile. Ha! He had vowed to give Langfields and the rest something to remember Blackett and Webb’s jubilee by … and he had done so.
All the same, even at the height of his satisfaction with this state of affairs he had not been able entirely to conceal from himself certain misgivings about the sheer quantity of rubber he had awaiting shipment to various American ports. These misgivings had increased steadily week by week as shipping became more difficult to find. This morning, with the American Pacific fleet knocked out of action, or at best disabled, the prospects were that merchant shipping would become even more scarce. Hence, the chances of realizing Blackett and Webb’s considerable investment in the rubber-crammed godowns on the wharfs in the near future had also diminished. Walter was not seriously worried yet. But he was beginning to wonder whether he might not have been a little too clever. Besides, there was another aspect of the matter on which he now began to brood and to which had not given sufficient attention earlier.
Walter, you might argue, must have always known he was taking a risk, given the ominous way in which the Far Eastern political climate had been developing for some time past. He must have known that there was a possibility that he might be left holding a great deal of rubber which he was unable to deliver to the buyers. But a businessman must sometimes take a risk, particularly if he hopes to make profits on a grand scale. So what is all the fuss about? Walter will get rid of his rubber sooner or later, particularly now that America is in the war. If instead of making his grand profit the risk causes his plans to go astray, it will not be the end of the world for Blackett and Webb, merely a nuisance and a dead weight that must be carried for a while. Well, the aspect of the matter on which Walter had begun to brood (not that it was easy to brood on anything in the hectic atmosphere of that Monday morning, and with the sudden vulnerability of Blackett and Webb’s Shanghai and Hong Kong interests demanding instant attention) was this: although certainly a considerable risk was embodied in those rubber-crammed godowns, there was no chance of making a grand profit, nor had there ever been. Blackett and Webb, being British-registered, were subject to the one hundred per cent excess profits tax introduced in the summer of 1940. The most that could be made on Walter’s risky initiative was ‘a standard profit’. He had known this all along but had ignored it, dazzled by the prospect of an old-fashioned coup to celebrate his jubilee year. This was the first time in years that he had committed an error of judgement of this magnitude. It was clear that the prospective reward should have been on the same scale as the risk.
‘Well, it may still turn out all right,’ Walter told himself with an effort and, shrugging off this depressing line of thought, turned to the more urgent matters awaiting his attention.
‘We have good reason to be proud of the RAF. In aircraft and efficiency it is second to none in the world!’
These words, echoing beneath the high ceiling of an upstairs room in the Singapore Cricket Club were sucked into the blur of the fan revolving above and scattered on the breeze to every corner. Half a dozen members of the Citizens’ Committee for Civil Defence, of which the Major was founder, chairman, secretary, treasurer and most active participant, stirred and murmured: ‘Hear! hear!’ These members, and others not present, had been summoned to attend an emergency meeting of the Committee. Of the other members, three were absent without explanation (either they had not been successfully contacted, or were ill, or were dead … death being a not uncommon reason for non-attendance, given the great age of most of the Committee members), three more were temporarily away in Malacca and Kuala Lumpur, another had not come on principle because he was having a feud with the Major: he was indignant at having been urged on a previous occasion to abbreviate his harangues to the Committee. There remained two other members whom the Major officially considered to be present although, in fact, they had been lost in the bar downstairs where they were performing the useful function of toasting the American entry into the war.
The Major, slumped in his chair at the head of the long table, did not join in the approval of the RAF; indeed, his eyebrows gathered into a gloomy frown. Although as loyal to the Forces as the next man, he had come to dread these patriotic remarks. He had found that even on a good day they badly clogged the proceedings of the Committee. On a bad day the wheels would not move at all. Besides, the Major reflected that he was surely not the only person in Singapore to wonder why the RAF had not managed to shoot down or drive off the Japanese bombers last night.
‘The attempts to set fire to London from the air persistently carried out in the raids from 1915 to 1917 resulted in failure,’ declared the speaker, an octogenarian planter called Mr Bridges, in a quavering voice. ‘Why?’ He lifted his bespectacled eyes from the paper he held and glared round the table at his colleagues: this, however, was a mistake because he then had to find his place again, which took some time. The Major stirred restlessly and looked at his watch.
‘Why? Because of the low efficiency of the incendiary bombs then used, the poor marksmanship of the enemy and the brilliantly effective fire-fighting services.’ Again Mr Bridges was unable to resist looking up from the paper in his trembling hand and glaring at his audience over his spectacles. This glare did not mean that Mr Bridges was aroused: it was purely rhetorical, part of the old chap’s habitual oratory learned in youth from some forceful speaker and displayed year after year before the boards of the various tin mines and rubber companies on which he had served. ‘Let me say, gentlemen, that for courage and ability I doubt if there is a finer body of men than the London Fire Brigade.’
Once more his audience stirred and muttered: ‘Hear! hear!’ with the exception of the Major who ground his teeth and scratched his bare knee which had just been bitten by some insect.
‘Out of 354 incendiary bombs on London only eight caused fatal casualties. The maximum number that fell during one raid was 258 and these were distributed over a wide area averaging seven bombs per square mile …’
‘Seven bombs per square mile! Where on earth has the old blighter got all this from?’ wondered the Major knocking out his pipe into an ashtray which had been filled with water to prevent the ash being blown about by the fan overhead. He stifled a yawn. Lunch, combined with Mr Bridges’ statistics, had made him drowsy. It was hot here, too, despite the generous dimensions of the room. How he loved the tropical Victorian architecture of the Cricket Club with its vast rooms, high ceilings and ornamented balconies! Behind his chair a segment of the green padang could be seen through the window which was angled to face, not the Eurasian Club at the far end of the ground, but the Esplanade and the sea. In the small area of the field that was visible from where he sat a little group of Tamil groundsmen were peacefully at work moving the practice nets a few feet seawards to a fresh patch of turf. No doubt cricket would continue despite the bombing; important matches could not be expected to wait until the Japanese had been dealt with. While the Major was trying to recall whether the annual Civil Service and Law versus the Rest (Gentlemen v. Players some cynic had called it) had yet taken place, there came unbidden to his mind the recollection of a girl being shot at a cricket match in College Park, oh, years ago. He had read about it in the Irish Times: a young woman of twenty or so who had been watching the Gentlemen of Ireland playing the Army. Some Sinn Feiner had fired a revolver through the park railings and taken to his heels; the bullet, aimed at one of the Army officers, had struck her on the temple. She had been engaged to be married, too, if he recalled correctly; an innocent young girl killed by a scampering fanatic in a cloth cap. This recollection, echoing back over two decades, still had the power to numb the Major with indignation and despair. The uselessness of it!
‘The total number of casualties in England from aerial attack during the Great War was 1,414 killed and 3,416 wounded … Material damage costing three million pounds was produced by 643 aircraft dropping 8,776 bombs which weighed a total of 270 tons!’
This paroxysm of statistics was delivered with such vigour that it caused someone inopportunely to murmur: ‘Hear! hear!’ but the Major, profiting from the fact that Mr Bridges had once again glared round the table and lost his place, seized his chance.
‘We’re all grateful, I’m sure, to Mr Bridges who has spared no effort of research into the last war. The point he is trying to make, I believe, is that a great gulf exists between the bombing methods of then and now … What we must decide is how best to combat by our civil defence procedure the modern methods of which we had a sample in the early hours of this morning. And in any case …’
But here he was obliged to stop for Mr Bridges had now succeeded in hunting down his lost place and capturing it on the page with a long ivory fingernail: this permitted him to display indignation at the Major’s interruption. He still had a great deal to say! He still had to delve into the question of the Zeppelin raids on London in 1915 and 1916! The question he wanted to consider was whether the amount of damage caused varied according to the amount of cloud cover. ‘For example, on 31 May 1915, a fine moonlit night, Zeppelin LZ 38 dropped eighty-seven incendiary bombs and twenty-five explosive bombs, killing seven people, injuring thirty-two, and starting forty-one fires which caused £18,396 worth of damage whereas …’
This information was greeted by a groan. It came, however, not from one of the Committee members, whose minds had wandered in a herd to other pastures, but from behind the Major’s chair, to the leg of which a black and white spotted dog was tethered. This animal, a Dalmatian, did not belong to the Major but had been borrowed for a demonstration which was to take place later in the afternoon. The poor dog undoubtedly was bored, hot and restless. The Major, who was suffering similarly, without turning reached a sympathetic hand behind his chair to caress the animal’s damp muzzle. An unseen tongue licked his open palm.
But the Major did not want to hurt the old man’s feelings: he had clearly put in a lot of work on his Zeppelins. Alarmed by Dupigny’s sombre predictions of a Japanese advance to the south the Major had formed the Committee some weeks earlier with the idea of putting pressure on the arrogant, inert administration of the Colony to do something about civil defence. A gathering of influential citizens was what he had had in mind, but in the event he had only been able to conscript a handful of retired planters and businessmen, one or two Chinese merchants who agreed with everything but kept their own counsel and an argumentative young man from the Indian Protection Agency who disagreed with everything and, fortunately, seldom put in an appearance: at the moment he was several stengahs the worse for wear in the bar downstairs.
The truth was, and even now listening to Mr Bridges (the Zeppelins had moved off, giving place to some curious information about the angle at which bombs dropped from various heights arrived on the earth) the Major was reluctant to face it, they were making no headway. At best the Committee provided a weekly airing for a number of elderly gentlemen who otherwise would not get out of their bungalows very often. The Major himself had been responsible for such positive initiatives as had been taken. At his own expense he had put advertisements in the Straits Times and Tribune calling for assistance from the general public. The response had been disappointing.
A Chinese company had tried to sell him a stirrup-pump, ‘approved by ARP Singapore and now on show at ARP headquarters, Old Supreme Court Building, Singapore’. There had also been a long, mysteriously defensive letter from the sales manager of a firm manufacturing a patent rake-and-shovel for scooping up blazing incendiary bombs. It was not true, declared this letter, as had been stated ‘in certain quarters’ that, when tested, the incendiary bomb had burned a hole in the shovel. In most conditions this would not occur. It was the opinion of the sales manager that the people testing the shovel had used the wrong kind of incendiary bomb.
The other two replies had also had a commercial flavour, embroidering prettily on the initials ARP. One of them, addressed to Mrs Brenda Archer, urged him to Appear Rosy and Pretty under all conditions. ‘War is horrible but preserve your composure and don’t look terrible. Keep your colour by using Evelyn Astrova Face Powder.’ Finally, a printed circular in a similar vein suggested that ‘A Reassuring Packet of what is now a very popular brand, Gold Bird (Ceylon) Tea, will soothe and refresh you in your worried moments.’ To sell people things, reflected the Major, is all very well, nothing in the least wrong with it (does nothing but good when you come to think of it and one might even say, as Walter did, that but for commerce Singapore would hardly have existed at all), but this commercial spirit needed to be leavened by patriotism and an interest in the community as a whole. For if Malaya were nothing more than a vast congeries of competing self-interests what chance would it have against a homogeneous nation like Japan?
Of course, there were patriots here, too, and in plenty. At this very moment Mr Bridges had paused again to pay tribute to ‘the brave lads in khaki who had come from the four corners of the Earth to defend Malaya’. (‘Hear! hear!’) The trouble was that for the British this patriotism was operating at long distance: their real concern was not for Malaya but for a country several thousand miles away. As for the Indians and Chinese, the great majority of them felt more loyalty to their communities in India and China than to Malaya: they had, after all, simply come here to find work, not to die for the place. Moreover, Malaya’s population, already divided by race and religion, was even further divided by differing political beliefs. Walter Blackett, the Major knew, was concerned by the existence of clandestine Communist groups in his enormous labour force. Where the Government was concerned, anxiety about the allegiance of the Chinese and of their various ‘national salvation’ organizations was chronic.
A few weeks earlier the Major had been summoned by some official to the Chinese Protectorate on Havelock Road and shown a list of patriotic Chinese associations believed to be under Communist control. But, he had wanted to know, what had these alarming associations to do with his own gentlemanly Civil Defence Committee, which was never likely to cross the path, at least he hoped not, of, for example, the ‘Youth Blood and Iron Traitor-Exterminating Corps’? Blinking rapidly the official had replied that, in his ‘humble opinion’, the Malayan Communist Party would choose just such an innocent organization as the Major’s for its subversive manoeuvres. The Major should know that Communists behaved in a society, particularly in a Chinese society, the way hookworm larvae behave in the human body, boring their way from one organ to another.
Startled by this image, the Major had looked at the official more closely: he was a bald young man with glasses, sweating profusely; in the draught of the fan thin wisps of hair flickered about his ears like sparks of electricity. He had said his name was Smith. The Major wondered whether this could be the same Smith who, Walter had told him, had incurred the wrath of old Mr Webb one day in Walter’s office. The Major could not quite remember what it had been about…something to do with Miss Chiang, though. Perhaps he had made some disparaging remark about her, or about the Chinese generally, and Mr Webb had taken umbrage.
Yes, the young man had continued, they ignored what one considered to be the natural boundaries of the separate organs, passing through the skin into the blood-stream, migrating from the pulmonary capillaries into the air sacs, into the alveoli and bronchioles and thence, as adolescent worms, into the intestines where, developing a temporary mouth capsule, they attached themselves to the wall to suck blood, pumping it through their own horrible guts. And from time to time they would abandon the old site, which they had sucked dry … (‘dry, Major, d’you understand, dry …’) … and attach themselves to a new and more nourishing location.
‘Steady on!’ the Major had exclaimed, taken aback. ‘These blessed worms don’t have anything to do with civil defence. Nor with Communists, for that matter.’
‘No, they don’t,’ agreed Smith calmly, but with the tufts of hair still flickering around his ears in a disturbing sort of way. ‘Speaking of worms I’m trying to make you aware of how these men…and women, too, Major, I believe you are friendly with a certain Miss Vera Chiang, are you not? Yes? I thought so … of how they pass from one organ to another in our society. Did you know that Stalin has recommended infiltration of Nationalist movements in his Problems of Leninism? Ah, I see you did not! Did you know that the Comintern had opened a Far Eastern Bureau in Shanghai, Major, not to mention the Sun Yat-sen University and the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow? Perhaps some of your so innocent Chinese friends are graduates, Major, had you thought of that? Did you know that in 1925 the head of the Comintern, Zinoviev, declared that the road to world revolution lies through the East rather than the West … at a time, mind you, when the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang were still working hand in glove? What more natural, when Chiang Kai-shek turned on his Communist friends in 1927 and destroyed their power, than that they should seek other and more innocent organizations such as yours to worm their way into? That is why I speak of worms, Major! You lack experience in such matters. You’d do much better to leave civil defence to the proper authority.’
‘If we had thought the Government was competent we wouldn’t have considered it necessary to form the Committee in the first place!’ the Major had retorted sharply, nettled by the young man’s tone.
As it had turned out, he now reflected sadly, dropping a hand to soothe the Dalmatian again, for all the progress that had been made he might as well have taken Smith’s advice. He had been faced at every turn by total indifference. But what, after all, could one expect of a society whose only culture and reason for existence was commercial self-interest? A society without traditions, without common beliefs or language, a melting-pot, certainly, but one in which the ingredients had failed to melt: what could one expect of such a place?
The Major now saw an opportunity for interrupting Mr Bridges again, and this time more successfully, by suggesting that the time had come for questions. From behind his chair there came a long, warbling howl of despair. The Major added swiftly that since there were no questions they would adjourn until the following week and, in the meantime, he would continue to press the administration for air-raid shelters in the populous quarters of the city and a proper distribution of gasmasks among the Asiatic communities. With that, he got to his feet, released the dog, and with a hasty goodbye made for the door. The emergency meeting had not been a success.
29
A clock somewhere was striking five o’clock as the Major’s Lagonda turned to the right off Orchard Road on its way to the Tanglin Club. A few moments later the Major, followed by the dog, was making his way up the steps to the entrance. Here he unexpectedly came upon Dupigny, clad in billowing tennis flannels which the Major had no difficulty in recognizing as his own; moreover, it was the Major’s old school tie which had been knotted around Dupigny’s waist to serve as a belt. The Major’s old school, Sandhall’s, was not a famous establishment but the Major was attached to it, none the less, and it caused him a moment’s distress to see his school colours wrapped like a boa-constrictor around a Frenchman’s waist. But still, one must not make a fuss about trifles. This was war.
The Major continued to look preoccupied, though about something else, as he climbed the steps with the black and white dog trotting behind him, its tail waving back and forth like a metronome. At the top he paused and said: ‘Well, François, do we have to fear the Communists in Singapore?’
‘Until you have a government popular and democratical in Malaya, yes, you must fear them,’ replied Dupigny after a moment’s reflection. ‘Your Government here fears, naturally, an anti-colonial revolution if the Communists are allowed to operate freely. It is true, there is a risk. Thus, your dilemma can be stated so: with them in danger … without them, too weak to resist the Japanese!’
‘Oh, François!’ The Major shook his head and sighed but did not pursue the matter. Instead he asked Dupigny if he had heard any further news of the Japanese attack. According to the communiqué issued that morning by GHQ the Japanese had tried to land at Kota Bahru in the extreme north-east of the country but had been driven off. But in the meantime Dupigny had spoken to someone who had attended another briefing: the few Japanese left on the beach were being heavily machine-gunned, he told the Major.
‘First we repel them. Then, though we have repelled them, they are on the beach and we are machine-gunning them!’
The Major shrugged and turned away, but continued to stand there for a moment, fingering his moustache gloomily. Dupigny surmised that he was exploring the worrying possibility of the Colony being attacked not only from the sea and the sky but also, as it were, being eaten away from within by a Communist Fifth Column. Beside him, sitting up straight, the dog looked worried, too, though no doubt only because his friend the Major was looking worried.
The predicament of the British in Malaya, mused Dupigny not without satisfaction, for like any good Frenchman he had suffered from the superior airs the British had given themselves since the fall of France, was strikingly similar in many ways to that which he himself and Catroux, his Governor-General, had had to face in Indo-China. How were they to make twenty-five million natives loyal to France and impermeable to enemy propaganda? Catroux, remembering that Lyautey, faced with the same problem in Morocco during the Great War, had solved it by practising what he had called ‘la politique du sourire’, had resolved to do the same. Like Lyautey he had made it a rule that no one in authority should show the least sign of distress no matter how adversely the war might seem to be going. And so, Dupigny recalled smiling ruefully, their policy in Indo-China for the first few months of the war had been a display of nonchalance. Now, here in Singapore, the British had evidently decided on similar tactics to judge by their first cheerful communiqués.
Having invited Dupigny to attend the lecture he would presently deliver on ‘ARP and Pets’, the Major passed on his way leaving Dupigny to wait for his partner in the Club tennis competition: this was Mrs Blackett’s brother, Captain Charlie Tyrrell. Dupigny had decided for his own self-respect and for the prestige of France to win this competition, come what might. He had already discovered, however, that his partner was a serious impediment to this ambition. Charlie had been retained temporarily in Singapore to replace a staff officer who had gone sick. Alas, Dupigny had been deceived by Charlie’s athletic appearance into choosing him to share the spoils of victory. Not only had Charlie proved to be a highly erratic tennis-player, the man could scarcely even be depended upon to put in an appearance when a match had been arranged. Only grim efforts on Dupigny’s part had allowed them to reach the third round. Now their opponents, two polite young Englishmen, were already waiting for them on one of the courts.
But presently Charlie arrived, looking flustered and clutching an impressive armful of tennis rackets. ‘I say, I’m not late, am I?’ he asked apprehensively. He was alarmed and dismayed by Dupigny’s determination to win the competition, which seemed to him, at best, peculiar, at worst, deranged. And the further they advanced the more gravely unbalanced, it seemed to him, grew Dupigny’s behaviour. Needless to say, he now regretted ever having agreed to become the fellow’s partner. But with any luck they would be soundly beaten by the two sporting young men whom he could see waiting for them on a distant court beyond the swimming pool. On closer inspection their opponents both proved to have very blue eyes and hair glistening neatly with hair-oil. One of them stirred as they approached and called ‘Rough or smooth?’, spinning his racket on the red clay.
Dupigny was equal to this. ‘Ah, you mean, as we say in French, “Pile ou face”’? he said swiftly. ‘Alors, pile! Ah, pile it is,’ he added, picking up the fallen racket and inspecting it. He showed it to the young Englishman. They glanced at each other but said nothing.
But today even Dupigny, reminded of Indo-China by the Major, found it hard to concentrate on the game, determined though he was to win it. He recalled how, when Catroux had been appointed Governor-General in 1939, he had taken the train from Hanoi to meet him in Saigon. The day after their return to Hanoi war had been declared with Germany.
‘Mine! No, yours!’ Dupigny shouted as a tennis ball hurtled down on them out of the steamy sky. ‘Ah, well placed, sir!’ he added as Charlie executed a perfect smash between their two opponents. Charlie’s form today verged on the miraculous.
They were winning comfortably but Dupigny was overpowered by a sudden feeling of discouragement. He and Catroux had got on well together. Together, with one or two trivial adjustments to the course which events had taken, they might have brought off a splendid coup! They might have succeeded in detaching Indo-China from Vichy and have struck off on their own. Now, instead of standing here in a British colony in borrowed tennis flannels (ludicrously too long so that one of the Major’s ties, which he had selected for its disagreeably clashing colours with the idea of unsettling their opponents, encircled his body not round his waist but just below the armpits) he and Catroux might have been navigating an autonomous country like some great vessel into a new era.
Indo-China, self-supporting in food, was not a difficult country to administer, as Catroux had been pleased to discover. All their difficulties, indeed, had stemmed in one way or another from their confused and fitful contacts with metropolitan France. From time to time baffling instructions would reach them from one ministry or another. Supplies in vast quantities, they were instructed, were to be sent to France under the general mobilization scheme. As a result he and Catroux had presently found themselves presiding over great quantities of rice, maize, rubber, coffee and other commodities, rotting on the quays at Haiphong and Saigon for want of shipping.
And so it had continued throughout the drôle de guerre. Their contact with ministries in Paris had grown increasingly spasmodic. Urgent cables for instructions would be met by dead silence. But then suddenly, out of this silence, would crackle some insane command. The Ministère des Colonies, for example, in order to meet some whim of the European coffee markets, had abruptly ordered them to increase the area of the country under coffee. Catroux had had to point out that coffee would only start producing at the end of the fourth year of growth … and so, once again, the Ministry had lapsed into silence until, presently, there had come some other eccentric command … and another, and another. But by then it had become clear to both Catroux and Dupigny that, because of the lack of shipping to Europe and the need to trade instead with China, Japan and Malaya, the country in their charge was growing autonomous with every passing day.
Meanwhile, as to what might be going on in Europe nobody had bothered to inform them. Dupigny had two memories of that stifling early summer in Hanoi: one was of sitting with Catroux in the Governor-General’s palace. There, beneath the Sèvres bust of ‘Marianne’ on the mantelpiece, they had discussed the long official telegram containing news of the German offensive and of Gamelin’s counter-manoeuvre in Belgium: they had realized that unless there was a quick French victory in Europe their own position in Indo-China would be made precarious by the threat from Japan. Dupigny’s other memory was of the arrival of a second telegram, after four weeks of total silence, announcing that a request for an armistice had been made to the Germans.
‘Mine! No, yours! No, mine!’ howled Dupigny as their opponents once more lobbed high into the hot evening sky. But Charlie, ignoring these instructions, continued to crouch like a toad with his head in the air and a fixed expression on his face, precisely where the ball was about to return to earth. Dupigny knew better than to trust Charlie with that fixed look in his eyes posing gracefully beneath the ball. So, thrusting him aside he managed to usurp his place and scramble the ball back over the net with the wooden part of his racket. The two young Englishmen, who had already retreated to the back of the court in expectation of Charlie’s smash, hammered their legs with their rackets and looked tense.
Yes, all was going well … at least on the tennis court. Back in Hanoi, however, their position had become hopeless once France had fallen. Nevertheless, for two desperate weeks he and Catroux had not for a moment stopped looking for support. They had cabled Washington seeking American help, in vain. They had made a last appeal to Bordeaux (whither the Government had retreated) begging that war materials should be sent to Indo-China rather than handed over to the enemy. This had produced no result either. In the end everything had depended on Decoux, Admiral of the Far Eastern Fleet at Saigon. Decoux, who was not subject to the Governor-General’s authority, had been wavering as to whether he should order his fleet to fight on with the British or submit to orders from defeated France. At first he had seemed inclined to reject the armistice, sending a signal to Admiral Darlan in France to the effect that the universal feeling in Indo-China was for continuing the struggle with the help of the British. Darlan’s cunning response was an offer to make Decoux Governor-General in place of Catroux.
And so to Saigon where a last-resort conference had been arranged with the British represented by Admiral Sir Percy Noble, an old acquaintance of Decoux’s. The whole of Saigon, Dupigny recalled, had been simmering with excitement and patriotism. On the Rue Catinat every shop and café displayed French and British flags interlaced. Fervent crowds of anciens combattants held meetings to protest their loyalty or gathered in front of the British Consulate on the Quai de la Belgique. On the way to the quays for the conference on board his flag-ship, the Lamotte-Picquet, Decoux had shown signs of weakening in his determination to resist, hinting darkly that secret meetings were being held in Saigon at which ‘extreme solutions’ were envisaged. He had been approached by certain hot-headed young officers who wanted to join Noble in Singapore. Very soon it had been evident that, despite his protestations of friendship for the British, Decoux would not resist Darlan’s tempting offer. Catroux, even with the promised support of the Army and of the French community would clearly be unable to retain control of Indo-China against both Decoux and the Japanese.
During the conference with Noble they had discussed the possibility of defending Indo-China in case of attack by the Japanese, but that was out of the question. How could they possibly resist the two hundred modern Japanese planes on Hainan Island with the handful of obsolete aircraft at their disposal? The British were too weak themselves to send reinforcements. At the dinner to mark the end of the conference there had been an air of disillusion and hostility beneath the formal politeness: when Decoux proposed a toast to Le Président de la République there was a moment of hesitation, then Admiral Noble declared that because of the armistice he could not drink to the President but would simply drink to La France. Decoux had turned pale but said nothing.
Two days later, at a formal leave-taking on the quay, another moment of bitterness had occurred. In the full hearing of the officers standing around, Admiral Noble had remarked grimly: ‘As a friend, Decoux, I advise you not to stay on board the Lamotte-Picquet in future. If she were on her way back to Europe we might have to sink her and I should prefer to know that you were not on board.’ With that, he had turned away to board the British cruiser Kanimbla leaving Decoux, angry and shaken, standing on the quay in the sunshine. Thus had the French Far Eastern Fleet been lost to the Allies.
A year and a half later Dupigny found himself standing on a tennis court in the sweltering Singapore evening, watching a dense cloud of tiny birds swirling against the dying blaze of the sky. Their two opponents, overcome without difficulty, had trailed away to the changing-rooms with a baffled air and one or two backward glances at Dupigny, who struck them as decidedly odd. Charlie had followed them to stand them a drink at the bar. Dupigny, still brooding, drifted after them. Now the Major’s voice, floating down from the open deck-like structure above, reminded him of the ARP lecture. Feeling his years, he climbed the flight of outside stairs to where the Major, with his spotted dog slumbering at his side, was addressing a handful of people, mainly women. Out here, Dupigny had been told, dances and cinema-shows were sometimes held when the weather was considered too hot to use the ballroom inside the building. Dupigny himself never attended dances, seeing no interest whatsoever in grasping an adult woman and trotting with her fully clothed in the tropical evening.
‘It is most important that your animals should remain calm … A box of five-grain potassium bromide tablets from any chemist … one tablet for a cat or small dog, such as a Pekinese, two for a terrier, three for a spaniel …’
Stranded in an alien culture, surrounded by British dog-lovers, Dupigny suffered an acute pang of nostalgia for the pre-war days in Hanoi, or better still, Saigon … How pleasant to be sitting now as the light was beginning to fade on the terrasse of the Hotel Continental, drinking beer and watching the evening crowds swirling round the corner of the Rue Catinat towards the Boulevard Bonnard, the women so graceful in their slit tunics and flowing black silk trousers! Or to wander through the great flower market set up in the Boulevard Charner on the eve of Tet. Later, having eaten at one of the excellent restaurants in the city he might move on to take coffee at the Café Parisien in the Rue de l’Avalanche or, even better, at the Café du Théâtre from where he could look out across the square and listen to the night breeze in the tamarinds.
‘Gas masks are not suitable for animals …’ (Was this a joke? No, the Major was serious. He looked discomfited by the chuckles of his audience) … ‘but instead you can put them in a box with a hole covered in wire netting and a blanket soaked in a solution of bicarbonate of soda, four pounds to the gallon of water, or permanganate of potash …’ The spotted dog at the Major’s feet stirred and looked up enquiringly for it had heard the Major’s talk many times before and had come to recognize the moment when its services would be required.
Ah, Dupigny’s nostalgia became deliciously acute as he remembered Saigon mornings, walking in a vast airy room, treading the waxed tiles of the Continental’s long corridors which had a special, indefinable smell of France about them, on the way to a quiet inner courtyard to a breakfast of coffee and croissants and small, succulent strawberries from Dalat, sitting there in the open air surrounded by flowering shrubs. Later in the morning, perhaps in the company of Turner-Smith, a friend from the British Consulate and a pederast of refinement, he would make his way up the Rue Catinat past the looming red-brick Basilica de Notre-Dame. At the corner of the Rue Chasseloup-Laubat he and Turner-Smith would part company, the latter to take up his station outside the boys’ Collège, while he himself would find a vantage point near the gates of the girls’ school, the Lycée Marie-Curie: he had done this so often while on leave from Hanoi that the sly little creatures had come to recognize him and had even (one of them had confessed in a gale of childish laughter) given him a nickname … Monsieur Marie-Curie!
Yes, at any moment now it would be noon and the gates would open to release a flood of beautiful young girls, their bodies so lithe and graceful in their school uniforms, their skins so smooth, their black eyes sparkling with mischief. Why, he mused, his nostalgia bordering on ecstasy, if homosexuality was le vice anglais the Frenchman’s great temptation was le ballet rose! Of all the pleasures which he missed here in dull British Singapore he missed none so much as the ballets roses which an indulgent madame of Saigon would organize for his distraction from the cares of office. The British, hélas, would never understand. How, for instance, could he begin to explain such a joy to the Major?
The Major was concluding his address with the advice that his audience should get their animals used to seeing them in their gas-masks. ‘The point is,’ he explained, fumbling with his own gas-mask case, ‘that your dog may get frightened when he sees you wearing one and your voice, which means so much to him, will sound completely different. Let me show you what I mean.’ The Major, with the skill of long practice, drew on his gas-mask, transforming his mild face into that of a monster with round glass windows for eyes and a snout like that of a pig. He turned to the spotted dog beside him and the dog, recognizing its cue, barked loudly three times and then, pleased with its performance, wagged its tail. The Major’s talk was over; now they could both go home and have supper.
Dupigny, exiled among the British, uttered a sigh and longed to go home, too.
30
HOUSEHOLDERS: No lights showing seaward or upward. Remove bulbs so that your servants cannot put on a light you have considered unnecessary.
MOTORISTS: Headlights and sidelights have got to be darkened. It is the beam that is the danger. A sheet of brown paper entirely covering the whole headlight glass with a double thickness on the top half kills the beam and upward glare but gives a reasonable light on an unlit road. Wind down window before leaving car to prevent glass fragments in a blast.
Now darkness had fallen on Singapore, this first evening of the war in the Far East. While it was still daylight the coming of war had remained difficult to grasp, at least for those who had not been living or working near where the bombs had fallen. Even those who, like Walter, had looked at the roped-off bomb damage in Raffles Place and Battery Road had found it hard to see the rubble as being in any way different from some civilian catastrophe, the exploding of a gas main, say, or one of Chinatown’s periodic tenement conflagrations. But this evening when it grew dark, it grew very dark indeed. The dimming of street lights, the motor-cars creeping along with masked headlights, the blacked-out shops and bungalows and tenements and street stalls (not perfectly blacked-out, admittedly, because in that sweltering climate windows must be kept open, but still a shocking extinction of light and life) … all this came as an unpleasant surprise to the city’s population, reminding them that History had once more switched its points; this time most abruptly, to send them careering along a track which curved away into a frightening darkness, beyond which lay their destination.
But if the first evening of the war was bad, the second was even worse. The first had been a novelty, at least. People were excited by the prospect of another air-raid. They thought of the Blitz and felt that they were participating at last, that unusual demands were being made on them. But when it grew dark again on the second evening it gradually became clear that this new way of life was not a passing fancy: it had come to stay for as long as it liked and when it would end nobody could say. Walter, who had arrived at Government House in daylight and normality for a conference with the Governor’s staff and the Colonial Secretary on the subject of new freight priorities to take effect on the other side of the Causeway, experienced the darkness as a physical shock when his Bentley crept away down the drive once more and out into the shrouded city. Moreover, he was disturbed by what he had just heard for, just as he was on the point of leaving, the Governor, who had not himself taken part in the conference, had asked to see him for a moment.
Walter was no longer as frequent a visitor to Government House as he once had been. In his younger days he had been on more friendly terms with the Governor of the time than he now was with Sir Shenton and Lady Thomas. It was not that he found Sir Shenton Thomas more formal than his predecessors: if anything, it was the reverse. Walter had felt more at ease when the man was masked by the dignity and ceremony of the office. Walter and his wife had often been invited to formal dinners at Government House in days gone by. It had not seemed to him in the least unsuitable that the guests on such occasions should be assembled in a respectful herd while waiting for the Governor and his wife to make an entrance; nor that, when the entrance was made and an aide announced ‘His Excellency the Officer Administering the Government …’, a regimental band should strike up the National Anthem on the verandah a few yards away. This was exactly what Walter required in a Governor. It did not even seem to him ridiculous, though he would have had to admit that it was ridiculous if you had taxed him with it, that the Governor and his wife, who were followed by a private secretary in a tail-coat with gilt buttons and blue facings, should be presented by the latter to the assembled guests as if they had never met before, although in fact they knew each other quite well. Walter had simply felt that it was right to proceed, as they had proceeded, in strict precedence, the Governor having given his arm to one of the ladies, across the marble hall (which he was now treading accompanied only by a secretary) to The Roast Beef of Old England. It was the way things should be done, because that way it did not matter who the Governor was. He wore his office like a uniform. And he could not give himself airs any more than a uniform could. So Walter thought, glancing for reassurance at the statue of Queen Victoria presented by her Chinese subjects which stood at the end of the hall. That, at any rate, was still unchanged.
He had expected to find the Governor in his office; instead, the secretary led him up the main staircase to the first-floor reception rooms. There he found Sir Shenton standing beside his wife, the pair of them oddly silent, motionless and disaffected in this vast room scattered with crimson sofas and gilt chairs. The room, indeed, was so large that it seemed to dwarf the two small figures. Walter found himself thinking of two weary travellers stranded without explanation in a deserted railway station. They stirred at the sight of Walter’s squat, energetic figure and appeared to revive a little.
There was something about the Governor’s good looks, or about his voice, or perhaps just about his manner which made Walter feel ill at ease. He was faintly conscious of an effort to make him feel inferior, the slightly patronizing air of the diplomat to the businessman. Or was he just imagining it? Did he have a chip on his shoulder? No doubt it was just imagination. Nevertheless, the bristles along his spine began to puff up involuntarily as he advanced, and he thought: ‘Who does the real work, the work that pays the wages of stuffed shirts like this chump!’ Sir Shenton asked him whether he would like a drink and, when he asked for a beer, set off wearily towards a table against one of the distant walls to pour it himself. ‘Where on earth are the “boys”?’ Walter asked himself, amazed by this lack of circumstance. Meanwhile, he exchanged a few words with Lady Thomas who was enquiring politely after Sylvia and Joan (Walter stared at her suspiciously with his bulging blue eyes, examining her for traces of condescension and trying to make out what she really might be thinking) and saying that the Blacketts really must come over one of these days … ‘once everything is back to normal,’ she added, smiling bravely. When her husband, looking more exhausted than ever, had trudged back again from a distant part of the room, she said goodbye graciously to Walter and withdrew, leaving the two men alone together. Walter peered with suppressed irritation at the Governor’s handsome features; the blighter looked tired, certainly, but his manner was as urbane as ever. He explained that he had been up most of the night, that he would not keep Walter long, that…
At this point he appeared to get stuck, for he paused, his eyes vaguely on Walter’s chin, for a considerable time, until even Walter, who was by no means ready to let himself be outstared by this powdered, pomaded, well-tailored but otherwise nugatory symbol of His Majesty’s authority in a foreign land, began to grow uneasy. But just as he was about to clear his throat to remind the Governor of his presence he started up again of his own accord, at the same time putting an end to his long contemplation of Walter’s chin … That, he continued, looking Walter now straight in the eye, he wanted Walter’s opinion on how the native communities would respond to ‘the current situation’ if the Japanese effectively established themselves on the peninsula … ‘as they look like doing’, he added sombrely. He knew, he went on, that Walter kept a close eye on his work force and for that reason had felt that his opinion … the opinion not of an office-bound administrator but of a man in daily contact with the people of Malaya … would be of particular value.
Walter, by no means sure that this reference to his qualifications as an adviser was not subtly but slightingly intended, followed with a suspicious eye the distinguished figure of the Governor as he retreated a few steps to perch with a weary, languid air on the arm of a chair. Extending a neatly creased trouser leg which terminated in a brilliantly polished shoe, Sir Shenton began to move it back and forth in a very deliberate imitation of a casual manner. However, Walter was obliged to give his attention to the Governor’s question which was precisely that which he himself had not ceased to ponder ever since he had learned of Sunday night’s air-raid.
‘Not to mince matters, sir,’ he replied, ‘I would expect apathy towards both us and the Japanese until it becomes clear that either one side or the other is likely to get the upper hand. A possible exception, and one in our favour in most cases if not all, would be the politically-minded Chinese. Fortunately, the Japanese are even less popular with them than we are, thanks to their war in China. But as you know, discontent among the Chinese and even the Indians has been increasing steadily over the past four or five years, to judge by strikes …’
‘Then you take a pessimistic view? Did you read this?’
Walter took the paper which the Governor handed to him. It was the Order of the Day, published that morning. ‘… We are confident. Our defences are strong and our weapons efficient. Whatever our race, and whether we are now in our native land or have come thousands of miles, we have one aim and one only. It is to defend these shores …’ Not knowing quite what was expected of him Walter nodded gravely as he handed the paper back; but this pronouncement, when he had read it earlier, had seemed to him to be futile and inept. It simply served to draw attention to the fact that the different races in Malaya did not have one aim only, however ardently the Administration might wish that they did.
The Governor was evidently satisfied with his nod and did not pursue the matter further. He looked at his watch: the interview was at an end. Walter now found himself obliged to gulp off a large glass of beer while the Governor waited for him, tapping his foot. ‘No hurry,’ he said, noticing that Walter was becoming breathless, but at the same time stared about the room as if contemplating already the important matter which he would attend to as soon as he had got rid of his guest. Again Walter felt that he was being patronized and wished, having at last drained his glass, that he had simply put it aside with dignity, untouched.
To Walter’s surpise, however, the Governor courteously set out with him on the long trek back across the deserted room: this gave him an opportunity to ask if there was any news of the fighting in the north. The Governor replied grimly that he had heard nothing definite, that the Military, as Walter could imagine, were inclined to keep these things to themselves, but that he suspected that they were not very much wiser than he was, as to what was happening. And a grimace of pain passed fleetingly across the Governor’s handsome features, for Walter’s question had touched on a raw nerve: Sir Shenton had known of the plan to launch an attack over the border into Siam to forestall Japanese landings at Singora and Patani. He had assumed, therefore, that if the Japanese had been obliged to land on Malayan soil at Kota Bahru it was because British troops had denied them Singora and Patani.
But this had proved not to be the case. They had landed successfully at all three places and were threatening not only the difficult and inhospitable east coast but also the fertile and vulnerable west coast. It was the west coast that mattered, after all! But, in theory at least, the Japanese should only be able to get at the vulnerable west coast by using the road from Singora. And on that road defences had been prepared to deal with them, protecting the rich, rice-growing area of Perlis and Kedah, the important aerodrome at Alor Star, a staging post for aircraft reinforcements from Ceylon, and, some way farther south, Penang itself. So a great deal would depend on these defences which had been set up a little to the north of Alor Star, at Jitra.
There did remain, however, just one other way in which the west coast might be threatened: that is to say, along the road from Patani that led through the mountains. Luckily Brooke-Popham and Malaya Command had thought of this and had sent two battalions up the road into Siam to occupy the only defensible position on it (The Ledge) before the Japanese could get there. The Governor was grateful for their foresight because even he, though no military expert, could see that if the Japanese started coming down the road from Patani they would be coming in behind the defences at Jitra and would be able to cut their communications. And if Jitra had to be abandoned, the important aerodrome at Alor Star would be lost, and perhaps even Penang into the bargain.
The two men had reached the door now and had paused on the point of saying goodbye. Or rather, it was the Governor who had paused: in the middle of some valedictory remark he had got stuck again in the contemplation of Walter’s chin … For it seemed to Sir Shenton that, simply stated, the situation was this: if the Ledge went then the Jitra defences would be untenable; if the Jitra defences went then Alor Star would go, too; if Alor Star was lost then Penang and another important aerodrome at Butterworth would be in danger; and if … but, of course, it had not come to that and the Army was there to see that it never did. Why then had Blackett touched a raw nerve when he had asked for news of the fighting in the north? Precisely because the absence of news was beginning to be a cause for concern. The Japanese had landed at Patani in the early hours of Monday morning. Very well. But it was now Tuesday evening and he had still had no confirmation that the Ledge had been successfully occupied although more than thirty-six hours had elapsed. Sir Shenton did not know off-hand how far it was from the Malayan border to the Ledge but it could hardly be more than fifty miles. And the distance the Japanese would have to travel along that same road from Patani to reach the Ledge would not be much greater. In other words, by now both sides had had ample time to get there. Sir Shenton did not like to admit even to himself the possibility that the Japanese might have got to the Ledge first. Most likely there had been some breakdown in the communications which linked the Army with the Government.
‘… For giving up your time. I know how busy you must be at the moment,’ he said, concluding an earlier remark and at the same time releasing Walter’s chin from his gaze. ‘I hope you’re doing something about that cough, Blackett,’ he added, realizing that for the last few moments Walter had been trying to clear his bronchial tubes. ‘They can be the devil even in this climate.’ His eyes once more shifted towards Walter’s chin as he said vaguely: ‘Yes, yes … A jubilee? What jubilee?’
‘Ours, sir … Blackett and Webb’s,’ said Walter patiently, but at the same time wondering whether it would be regarded as treason or merely as common assault to knock down His Excellency the Officer Administering the Government; he was also annoyed with himself for having twice in the course of the interview addressed the Governor as ‘sir’. ‘You and the Colonial Secretary both agreed that it would be of benefit to the morale of the Asiatic communities if we made a bit of a splash with our jubilee. You may remember our slogan: “Continuity in Prosperity” … Well, I just wanted to reassure you that we would keep steadfastly to our plans regardless of the Jap invasion.’
‘That’s the ticket, Blackett,’ said the Governor with rather hollow enthusiasm. ‘That’s the spirit. Wish everyone had your … Well, I must be getting on …’ His eyes settled on Walter’s chin again like two butterflies, but just for an instant, then they were away once more, chasing each other this way and that.
‘You know, Walter,’ he said suddenly and with unexpected warmth, ‘we don’t see enough of you and Sylvia. We’re all too busy, I suppose. What lives we lead! Well, we must make amends one of these days! Goodbye.’
‘Thank you, sir. Goodbye.’
‘The Governor’s not such a bad chap when you get to know him,’ Walter was thinking as he descended the staircase, humming The Roast Beef of Old England, towards the marble hall. ‘Rather out of touch, perhaps.’
31
Walter’s more cheerful frame of mind was not fated to last much farther than the drive of Government House: sitting in the back of the Bentley as it crept out into the darkened city he recalled the Governor’s distraught air and his mind filled with foreboding. If the Japanese became established on the peninsula, he had said, ‘as they look like doing’ …
Slowly they made their way up Orchard Roard in the gloom; the other cars they passed loomed up simply as dark shapes, headlights masked with metal grilles or paper. A steady rain had begun to fall. If it were like this in the north it would not be much fun fighting the Japs in the jungle. The Malay syce peered ahead into the darkness through the swirling, flowing windscreen wipers. Walter sighed and sat back, folding his arms impatiently. It irritated him to be driven at this speed: he had a great deal to do. Before he got down to work, however, he must look in at the Mayfair to see whether Matthew was showing any signs of recovery. And that was another important matter which must be seen to: Joan must be married off without any further delay. The many uncertainties which faced international commerce over the next few months and years required that a business should have the strongest foundations. He was fairly confident, however, that Joan could be left to deal with that side of things. It was true that so far, by her own account, she had not made as much progress as either of them would have hoped. At first, as she now admitted herself, she had underestimated the difficulties of attracting a young man like Matthew. For one thing he spent so much time talking about ‘unreal things’ … yes, she meant abstract … that it had been hard to get him to fix his attention on her rather than whatever it was that was passing through his mind. Hard, not impossible. Right from the beginning she had noticed him staring at her legs, which was encouraging. ‘For another thing,’ she had explained to Walter, ‘half the time I believe that he can’t actually see me … physically, I mean. Which makes things difficult. I often feel like snatching off his spectacles, giving them a good polish, and then putting them back on his nose again. He does peer at you terribly! And if he can’t see me properly, I have to get him to touch me. Fortunately, he seems quite keen on the idea of that … but it’s not all that easy to find opportunities. And now he’s got this dratted fever just as I was beginning to make some solid progress. Oh, and incidentally, we must send Vera Chiang packing before he’s up and about again. She’s a distraction. We must keep his mind on me. No, Daddy, of course she isn’t … at least, not a serious one.’
Well, so much for Matthew. He would be dealt with. There remained the Japs. It was intolerable that they should have been allowed to land at Kota Bahru. What did the Army think they were up to? Or was it the RAF’s fault? His mind went back to the tedious disputes of the previous year between Bond and Babington as to who should be responsible for the defence of Malaya. It had been decided, had it not, that it was to be the RAF’s job and that the Army would protect the northern airfields, of which there was one at Kota Bahru, the very place where the Japanese had succeeded in landing! Could it be that the years of endeavour that had gone into the building of Blackett and Webb into a successful enterprise were now to be put at risk by a handful of pig-headed officers and snobbish emissaries of the Colonial Office? ‘Thank heaven that at least with the Prince of Wales and the Repulse in the Straits we have some protection for shipping!’
‘Watch, Mohammed!’
The Bentley had braked suddenly, narrowly missing some dim object that had lumbered across its path, perhaps a rickshaw, it was impossible to tell in the swirling darkness. Walter sighed with irritation and his hand closed over the door handle. For a moment he was tempted to step out and finish his journey on foot despite the rain. He mastered his impatience, however, and sat back again.
Well, what of the enemy? Walter knew better than to accept the general view in Singapore that the Japanese were either ridiculous or incompetent. Indeed, the skill with which the Army had gradually tightened its grip on Japan’s economy over the past decade was impressive. The policy of girding the economy for war, begun in Manchukuo under the sinister auspices of the South Manchuria Railway Company, had in due course spread back to Japan itself, leaving the zaibatsu (the old capitalist groups like Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Yasuda and Sumitomo which now found their enormous shipping, textile and trading industries beginning to flag) to compensate themselves as best they could with increased profits from their munitions and armaments factories. This diversion of resources from the zaibatsu, which had become even more pronounced since the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war, had provided Blackett and Webb with some relief in their Far Eastern trade as they struggled to recover from the Depression. Nevertheless, Walter had watched apprehensively the rise of the ‘new zaibatsu’, the firms like Mori and Nissan whose fortunes had been derived from the manufacture of armaments and whose future prosperity would depend, perhaps, on the successful use of the weapons they manufactured.
At last the car was edging its way off the road by the dim glow of its masked headlights. They had evidently arrived at the Mayfair. Walter continued to sit huddled in the back of the car, however, while the syce groped for his oiled-paper umbrella. Sometimes, in his rare moments of depression, Walter would imagine the whole of Malaya spread out before him with its population of Malays, Indians and Chinese all steadily working away. He would see the rubber and oil-palm plantations, the tin mines and rice fields, combining to produce a strong-flowing river of wealth. Above the mines and plantations, each of which sent its tributary to the main current, he would see a little group of Europeans … he saw himself and his family, he saw his colleagues from the Singapore Club, the men from Guthrie’s and Sime Darby and Harrison’s and Crossfield and the Langfields and Bowsers, all of them, the whole pack, he saw the police and the Government and the Military, the Shenton Thomases and Duff Coopers, the Brooke-Pophams and the Bonds and the Babingtons … he saw them all, herded together in a tiny élite group directing the affairs of the country. And then he would ask himself what would happen if, perhaps, some higher force removed this tiny élite group and replaced it by another … say, the South Manchuria Railway Company’s executives … Would the Colony then, as one might expect, wither away promptly, like a plant whose head has been cut off, or would it, on the contrary, continue exactly as it had before, producing that steady, strong river of wealth exactly as if nothing had happened? Experience had taught him that the answer which condensed in his mind in response to this question varied according to his frame of mind. Thus it provided him with a useful barometer to his health and spirits.
‘You blighters don’t know how lucky you are, Mohammed,’ growled Walter to the syce as the door beside him opened to the streaming blackness. The syce, who was used to having cryptic fragments of Walter’s inner debates addressed to him, nodded and smiled politely, holding out the umbrella for Walter to step under and ignoring the rain that hammered on his own unprotected shoulders.
‘Why don’t they oil that damn thing?’ Walter wondered a few moments later, standing in almost total darkness just inside the verandah door. There were distant sounds of movement and a scampering near the floor in the obscurity. He became aware than an animal of some sort was leaning forward to sniff him cautiously. A few seconds passed during which neither Walter nor this creature cared to make a move. Then an electric light was switched on, revealing a large Dalmatian. It wagged its tail briefly and then whisked away into the jungle of rattan furniture. Presently it returned followed by the Major.
‘Ah, Major, I see you have a dog.’
The Major, who appeared to have just awoken, stared somewhat dubiously at the Dalmatian and said: ‘Actually, it’s not mine. It goes home tomorrow with luck.’ After a moment he added: ‘Watch out, there’s another one behind you,’ causing Walter to give a violent start; it was true: another shadowy animal had crept out of the furniture and with its head tilted on one side was running its nose over his ankle. It uttered a yelp as Walter aimed a kick at it; then promptly waddled away to take shelter behind the Major. As far as Walter could make out in the dim light it was an elderly and decrepit King Charles spaniel: its coat, which had plainly come under attack from some worm, was in some patches bald, in others matted and filthy; its tail hung out at a drunken angle and was liberally coated in some dark and viscous substance resembling axlegrease.
‘I found it here when I got in this evening. Someone had left it tethered to the gatepost, with five dollars and a note. Probably someone who had heard of my lectures. Here, have a look.’
The note, typed with a great number of mistakes and unsigned, declared that the writer had been recalled to Europe at such short notice that he had had no time to settle his affairs. He urged the Major ‘as a lover of dogs’ to be so kind as to have this one destroyed. The money was enclosed to cover mortuary expenses. A harrowing postscript asserted: ‘He was a faithful friend.’ As if this were not enough the dog, perhaps divining that its fate was under discussion, set up a doleful whine and turned its bulging, bleary eyes up at the Major.
‘It’s a bit thick, frankly. I have enough on my plate already without having to deal with this poor little brute,’ said the Major gloomily, stooping to tickle the animal behind one cankerous ear.
‘Does it have a name?’ asked Walter, retreating as the repulsive creature, reassured, made to approach him.
‘The note doesn’t say. Francois has taken to calling it ‘The Human Condition” for some reason. I think he means it as a joke.’
‘Well, you’d better have it done away with before it gives us all rabies,’ said Walter. He became brisk again: ‘I just came to enquire after young Webb. How is he?’
The two men set off down the corridor towards Matthew’s room, the Major explaining that since the fever still had not abated they were continuing to give him large quantities of liquid. Dr Brownley was optimistic that the patient would soon be over the worst. The Dalmatian loped cheerfully after them, followed, groaning and gasping, at some distance by The Human Condition.
After a brief look at Matthew, who appeared to be still too busy thrashing and sweating beneath his mosquito net to recognize him, Walter took the Major by the arm for, as it happened, visiting the sick had only been part of his purpose in coming to the Mayfair. He also wanted to discuss Blackett and Webb’s jubilee parade with the Major and, if possible, to conscript him to play a more active part in it. ‘You’ll be lending us a hand, won’t you, Major?’ he asked with a winning smile, and he went on to emphasize the great importance which the Governor himself was placing on this event, as he happened to know for a fact, just having come this moment from Government House. To cut a long story short Sir Shenton was absolutely relying on this parade to keep up the morale of the Straits Settlements at this dire turning-point in their history … ‘And he expects every one of us, Major, to put his shoulder to the wheel,’ he was obliged to add, seeing that the Major was still showing signs of reluctance. Although work on the floats was well in hand there was still a great deal to be done in the way of organization. As soon as Matthew Webb had come to his senses again, every pressure must be exerted on him in order to persuade him to take the place that his father would have occupied had he lived: that is to say, he would have to sit on the throne as the symbol of Continuity and, no less essential, deliver a keynote speech on Prosperity as it affected workers of all races in the Colony.
Since the Major still hesitated and hung back, murmuring that he had a great deal to do in organizing his AFS unit and carrying the burden of his Committee for Civil Defence, Walter launched into an enthusiastic description of the way in which their plans for a parade had evolved into something more impressive: Blackett and Webb’s jubilee parade would not only be a patriotic cavalcade of a magnificence rarely seen, it would also be a living diagram, as it were, of the Colony’s economy in miniature, since the company was involved at least to some extent in every one of Malaya’s principle trading and productive activities (though only indirectly in tin-mining and no longer to a great extent in the entrepôt business) … ‘With the exception of palm-oil,’ he muttered as an afterthought, looking uneasy. The Major was surprised to notice the look of uncertainty which passed fleetingly over Walter’s commanding features. Walter coughed in a harassed sort of way and scratched the back of his head … but the next moment he was off again, brimming with confidence as he explained his ‘grand design’ to the Major.
The old idea, as the Major might remember, had been to have a series of floats depicting Blackett and Webb’s commercial ventures, plus a few of the dragons that are de rigueur in any Chinese festival, a brass band or two and the usual fireworks. But, one of his brighter young executives had suggested, since the idea of the parade was partly to instruct, should they not broaden their scope in order to include some of the hazards which these commercial ventures had had to overcome, and still were having to overcome? A brilliant notion! In this way the idea of a counter-parade to accompany the parade had been born. And so what was now projected was to have Chinese acrobats, schoolboys, and volunteers of all races dress up in appropriate costumes as devils and imps accompanying the main procession, tumbling and turning cartwheels and playing pranks on the crowd, squirting water over them and so forth. Did the Major not think that was an idea of genius? These imps and devils would carry pitchforks to prod maliciously at the characters of Continuity and Prosperity, throwing banana skins in front of them and so on. And, of course, they would wear placards identifying them as the particular enemies of Continuity and Prosperity. Thus there would be imps and devils representing: ‘Labour Unrest’, ‘Rice Hoarding’, ‘Japanese Aggression’, ‘Wage Demands’ (what a fearful lot of banana skins this devil would scatter in front of Blackett and Webb’s proud floats!), ‘Foolish Talk’, ‘International Communism’, ‘Fraudulent Accountancy’ (a great trick of the Chinese businessman who habitually keeps two sets of books), ‘Racial Enmity’, ‘Corruption and Squeeze’, ‘Slander Against Government and British Empire’, ‘Slander Against Private Enterprise’, ‘Irresponsible Strikes’ and many, many more: indeed, there were so many possibilities that they must be careful not to bury the floats completely … Well, what did the Major think? Would he enter into the spirit of the thing and perhaps wear one of the devils’ costumes not yet allocated? Would he mind personifying ‘Inflation’, for example, which would mean dressing up in a fiery red costume with horns and a tail and lashing about with a tennis ball tied to a stick?
‘Well, Walter, I’m not sure that I …’
‘The Governor and Lady Thomas will be personally grateful to you, I happen to know,’ said Walter, pressing his advantage as he saw the Major begin to weaken. ‘He sets particular store by having a mixture of races. What we must have above all is Europeans! That is crucial to the whole exercise. We’ve even considered having an additional slogan: “All in it together!”’
‘Well, I suppose, in that case …’
‘Good man! I knew I could depend on you … Well, Major, I think it should be a success but sometimes I do have the feeling that there’s something missing, that we still need a single float representing Singapore herself. We’ve thought of all the usual things, the Lion City and so on, but it’s weak, it’s been done before … We need to show Singapore in her relationship with the other trading centres of the Far East, holding them in a friendly grip. It’s deuced hard to think of anything suitable, I can tell you! All we’ve managed to think of so far is to have Singapore at the centre of a float as a sort of beneficial octopus with its tentacles in a friendly way encircling the necks of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bombay, Colombo, Rangoon, Saigon and Batavia. Of course, the snag is that the octopus does not have a very good reputation whereas …’ Walter fell silent.
They were standing in the corridor. From a few feet away they could hear the springs of Matthew’s bed as he thrashed and muttered and groaned in his fever. From the dim depths of the floor The Human Condition peered up at Walter in perplexity with its bulging eyes. The Major cleared his throat. ‘Forgive me mentioning this, Walter, but I noticed a moment ago that you had a spot of something yellow on your chin … a spot of, well, egg, I suppose.’
‘What?’ cried Walter, clapping a hand to his chin in horror.
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said the Major hurriedly, taken aback by the effect of his words. ‘Just a spot of something … You can hardly see it.’ Walter spat on a handkerchief and began to rub his chin violently. Watching him at work the Major could not help thinking: ‘Walter is getting rather odd in some ways.’
32
Poor Matthew! What a terrible fever he had to endure! Every two or three hours he would be roused from his churning dreams and would find himself surrounded by a circle of Oriental faces, for Cheong had summoned assistance from his relatives. Then he would become aware of many hands hoisting him into the air while other hands dragged away the sodden sheets and replaced them with dry: these dry sheets would be wringing wet too, though, within a few moments. At intervals he would find a glass of cold liquid held to his lips: then he would gulp for his life, while faces flared up before his eyes. ‘Hello you!’ said Joan brightly, puffing away at a long cigarette holder, to be replaced in a moment by Charlie informing him that there was a huge demand for cheap coolie labour during the rice-milling season from January to May, or by an unknown doctor, an Englishman wearing a linen jacket and a striped tie. This man, he found, was talking to him cheerfully and evidently had been doing so for some time, encouraging him to swallow some white pills which lay in his yellowish, horny palm. As Matthew took them the doctor opened his mouth and gulped sympathetically, as if he too had some pills to swallow; then, satisfied, he beckoned Cheong forward with a pitcher of iced lemonade. Matthew gulped down glass after glass, before sinking back into his dreams … only to find a moment later that the Major’s worried countenance was looming over him. He could tell by the Major’s expression that something had gone dreadfully wrong. What was it he was trying to say to Dupigny on the other side of the bed? The Prince of Wales had called but had been repulsed! Matthew could just reach consciousness with his fingertips. If he could only drag himself up a little further! ‘I had no idea he was even in Singapore,’ he just managed to say before losing his grip and tumbling back head over heels into his churning dreams again.
Hours passed. Some time later, in a moment of lucidity which occurred while he was trying to thrash his way out of a net that German spies were throwing over him to prevent him rejoining the League ‘somewhere in the Atlantic’, Matthew found himself hanging upside down out of bed, neatly trussed up in a cocoon of mosquito netting which he had somehow dragged off its frame. From this odd position he had an excellent view of a number of neatly swept floorboards in diminishing perspective. Standing on these floorboards under the bed was what he at first took to be a chamber-pot … a moment later he realized that it was simply a basin which had been put there to collect his own sweat which was soaking through the mattress and steadily dripping into it. The basin was already brimming.
A faint clicking sound approached him across the floorboards and suddenly he found that his own eyeballs were a mere inch or two from another pair of eyeballs; these ones, bulging and bleary, were set in the hairy face of a Chinese demon, of a kind he had hitherto only seen sculpted in stone outside temples. Matthew was on the point of howling for Cheong to come and drive off this horrid little creature (it was not exactly sweet-smelling, either) but at this very instant the German spies, one of whom bore a stern resemblance to the portrait of his father in Walter’s drawing-room, abruptly caught up with him and he was off again like a hare, twisting now this way, now that. His sweat continued its steady drip, drip, drip through the mattress.
When he finally returned to his senses the fourth day since he had been ill was just beginning. He lay half awake, listening for the drip of sweat beneath the bed. But now the silence, except for a distant creaking from outside the window, was complete. He crumpled the sheets in his fist: they were dry. Thank heaven for that! He wondered how many basins of his sweat had been poured away since his fever had begun; he felt so exhausted that it was as if he himself had been poured away.
The distant creaking, he noticed, was punctuated by an occasional thump. Creak, creak, thump! He dozed for a moment and woke again. Creak, creak, thump! Curiosity at last gave him the strength to make a move. Beside him lay a ‘Dutch wife’, a long narrow bolster whose purpose was to allow the air to circulate: he fought with it weakly and at last overcame it. Then with great difficulty he negotiated the fish’s gill exit from the mosquito net. The window shutters were open and he could see that it was already growing light in the compound outside. Somewhere on the other side of the house the sun must be just rising. It was pleasantly cool by the window.
The creaking was coming from the clearing beside the recreation hut where the abandoned vaulting-horse stood with its companion, a big horizontal bar tethered by rusting guyropes. A slender girl who appeared to be Chinese was swinging by her hands from this bar, attempting by a sudden kick and a stiffening of her arms at the elbow to bring her waist up to it. (Did she have red hair or was that just a glint of sunrise?) But what caused Matthew to blink and wonder whether this was still part of his feverish fantasy, now taking a more agreeable turn, was the fact that she appeared to be stark naked.
He scratched his head and set off in search of spectacles, but it was some time before he managed to find them: Cheong, afraid that he might damage them in his delirium, had removed them to a place of safety. He crammed them on and hurried back to the window just in time to see the girl (Vera! Good gracious! Naked!) at last succeed in bringing her shoulders above the bar. She steadied herself there for a moment, recovering from the effort she had made. In the early light her skin shone greenish-white against the dark foliage around her.
Matthew now realized that he was not the only spectator of this scene, for an elderly orang-utan with elaborate mutton-chop whiskers lay sprawled in a rubber tree on the edge of the glade watching the girl’s gymnastics. And while it watched her it distractedly ate an apple, holding it up from time to time for inspection and meanwhile drumming absent-mindedly with the fingers of its other hand on its pale, bulging paunch. Still supporting her weight on her straightened arms, her body curved in a slim crescent, Vera managed to hook one leg over the bar and then, with more difficulty, the other, so that at last she sat precariously on top of it, hands between her thighs gripping the bar tightly to steady herself. When she was satisfied with her balance she let go of the bar with her hands, raised them above her head like a diver and threw herself backwards.
The orang-utan, on the point of taking a bite of apple, paused with its mouth open to watch the outcome of this reckless manoeuvre. The girl’s flexed knees were still bent over the bar as she swung down through three-quarters of a circle trailing a stream of red-black hair behind her. Reaching the top of the arc she released the bar by straightening her legs, dropped to all fours on the grass, staggered a little, recovered her balance, stood up on tip-toe and marched smartly forward for three or four paces before returning to lean wearily against one of the perpendicular supports. Knitting its ginger brows the orang-utan returned its attention to the apple and, having smoothed its mutton-chop whiskers, took a bite.
Vera had her back to the orang-utan and perhaps had not seen it. She was leaning all her weight on the upright as if punting a boat and her chin rested charmingly on her raised arm. The orang-utan paused again in its eating and watched her. Then, holding the apple core delicately by its stalk in the fingers of its left hand it slipped from the branch on which it had been sitting, hung from it revolving by one finger for a few moments, then dropped silently to the ground. Now it hesitated for a moment, clearly in two minds as how best to proceed. It scratched its head, fingered the ginger hair that sprouted between its eyes, and at last began to move circumspectly towards the girl. Matthew watched as if in a dream (perhaps he was indeed in a dream).
She remained in exactly the same position, resting, lost in thought. The orang-utan moved towards her using the knuckles of its right hand to assist its progress, still holding the apple core in the other. Matthew would have called out but his vocal chords had ceased to work; besides, the animal did not appear aggressive in the least. As it drew near Vera another access of doubt overcame it. It halted, it looked around and rubbed its stomach dubiously, it plucked a blade of grass and threw it away. At length, however, it could wait no longer and, taking another step or two forward, it reached out to place one timid, hairy hand on the girl’s naked bottom. Without turning she slapped the hand smartly. The orang-utan sprang back, shocked, and returned in haste to its rubber tree. There it set about nibbling with renewed energy at the apple core until presently there was nothing left of it but an inch of stalk which it threw away.
Vera, meanwhile, had turned and seen the pale and haggard Matthew watching her from the window. She waved. For a moment she seemed about to shout something to him but thought better of it, smiled, shook her head, picked up a white bath-robe which she threw over her shoulder and walked away from the house, shaking her finger at the orang-utan as she passed. The orang-utan watched her glumly from the tree.
Before she was quite out of Matthew’s line of vision she threw the robe away again, poised for a moment, and then plunged forward headlong over the brilliant viridian lawn … which here astonishingly turned out to be water, for she landed with a great green splash and the lawn rippled about her in every direction and even lapped the edge of the tennis court. A moment later she had vanished from sight altogether and though Matthew waited by the window in case she should reappear there was no further sign of her.
Matthew left the window in a state of considerable excitement, not because he believed what he had just seen with his own eyes, but, on the contrary, because he was inclined to doubt it. Like everyone else he had, in his time, enjoyed a fair number of sexual dreams. Could it simply be another of these? The orang-utan, a clear symbol of male sexuality, had very likely been furnished by his own sub-conscious. The only trouble with this theory was that when he looked out of the window the symbol was still there, sprawled in the rubber tree and once more drumming idly with its fingers on its bulging abdomen … but never mind, there was no reason why it should not linger after the main vision had evaporated. He began to stride up and down, although rather weakly because of his state of exhaustion, discussing aloud with himself the implications of the strange hallucination from which he had just emerged. He must remember to mention it to Ehrendorf. No doubt the fever had heightened his sensibility, made porous the outer brickwork of his conscious mind!
Presently, though, he found himself climbing weakly back through the slit in his mosquito net, assisted by Cheong who was cooing reprovingly in Hokkien (or in Cantonese, for all Matthew knew), convinced that he had struggled out of bed in his delirium. And Matthew himself was obliged to conclude as he fell asleep again that his fever, far from subsiding, had perhaps taken a graver though not altogether unpleasant turn. But now he dreamed vividly that an old gentleman with a white beard was throwing a net over him: and he made such a good job of trussing Matthew up that for the next few hours he lay there unconscious, hardly moving a muscle. This unnatural stillness puzzled Cheong who looked in on Matthew from time to time throughout the day. But then, with ‘foreign devils’ one never knew what to expect: they were doubtless constructed on different principles from normal, beardless, small-nosed, odourless human beings like himself.
Cheong’s father and two uncles had been shipped to Singapore as indentured coolies before the turn of the century in conditions so dreadful that one of the uncles had died on the way; his father had survived the voyage but the memory of it had haunted him for the rest of his life. He had transmitted his anger to Cheong, describing to him how agents had roamed the poverty-stricken villages of South China recruiting simple peasants with promises of wealth in Malaya together with a small advance payment (sufficient to entangle them in a debt they would be unable to repay if they changed their minds), then delivered them to departure-camps known as ‘baracoons’; once there they were entirely in the power of the entrepreneur for use as cargo in his coolie-ships (each person allotted, as a rule, a space of two feet by four feet for a voyage that might take several weeks). No wonder Cheong was angry when he thought of how these simple people had been swindled and abused, of the thousands who had died like his uncle from illness or by suicide before reaching Malaya and beginning their years of servitude! But what affected him more deeply still was the knowledge that so few people in the Chinese communities of Malaya and Singapore now seemed to remember or care about the exploitation and suffering of their ancestors on these criminal voyages. These things must not be forgotten! Justice demanded that they should be known. With this in mind he had taken in the past few months the first laborious steps in educating himself at a night-school in the city, helped oddly enough by old Webb who had once, as it happened, shipped coolies himself, though only as deck-cargo with the other commodities in which he traded.
‘How strange these people are!’ he thought, looking at Matthew’s immobile form.
‘My dear chap, the way the war is going could hardly be better for us! There is no doubt about it. This time the Japanese have bitten off more than they can chew!’
It was the Major, standing beside Matthew’s bedside with a cheerful expression on his normally anxious face, who had just made this confident assertion. Matthew had just woken feeling much better after his long sleep. Dr Brownley had had a look at him and pronounced himself satisfied: another day or two’s rest and he should be back on his feet again. However, Dr Brownley had taken the Major aside on his way out to whisper one or two additional comments. He explained that a patient can suffer a serious depression after such a high fever: the system has to recover from the shock imposed upon it. Well, he happened to know that Matthew was a young man of great sensibility, excitable, given to sudden impulses. He did not, of course, consider it likely that Matthew, on hearing the news of the last few days, would snatch up a razor and cut his throat. There was, fortunately, no prospect of his doing anything so foolish (though it would probably be as well not to leave any sharp instruments lying about). It was simply that having just emerged from a debilitating illness a young man who, unlike himself and the Major, had been spared some of the buffets of life, was more likely to take things to heart which a more seasoned campaigner would shrug off without a second thought. For this reason the Major’s tone was cheerful as he recounted the reverses of the past few days.
Matthew listened in some surprise, first to the Major’s reassuring description of the first Japanese air-raid on Singapore, which had barely disturbed the slumbers of those living near where the bombs had fallen, then to his account of Japanese landings at Kota Bahru and elsewhere: where the latter were concerned the Major could inspire himself directly from the sedative communiqués issued by General Headquarters and did not have to fumble for words. So things were going along splendidly on that front but there was even better news to come! The Major, becoming more pleased than ever with the way things were going, explained that after the Prince of Wales and the Repulse had been sunk off the east coast a remarkably large …
‘Sunk!’ cried Matthew, lifting his large fist and waving it as if ready to fell the Major, not out of hostility but out of a need for a physical expression of his excitement, and at the same time rolling his eyeballs in a way which gave the Major to believe that perhaps his precautions in the breaking of bad news had not been exaggerated.
‘Sunk! But that’s dreadful! Our most modern battleship and cruiser …’
The actual sinking of these two capital ships, the Major agreed hastily, was not altogether good news, but what he had been going to say was that a remarkably large proportion of the officers and ratings of the two ships had been saved, some two thousand men.
‘But surely, the Japanese Navy isn’t …’
‘It wasn’t their Navy. It seems they were sunk by torpedobombers. But the thing is that …’ The Major paused, unable to think what the thing was. There was no disguising the fact that this was a terrible blow. Without those two powerful ships, and taking into account the loss of the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese would have control of the South China Sea, and perhaps even of the Indian Ocean as well. The Australian and Dutch Navies surely had nothing to challenge them.
‘But what was the RAF doing?’ demanded Matthew, sinking back weakly against his pillow, extenuated by this sudden surge of emotion. The Major made no reply however, and silence fell. It was very hot in the room. The shutters were partly closed for the sake of the black-out (or ‘brown-out’); the only illumination came from a bedside lamp whose shade had been swathed by Cheong in heavy cloth so that it shed an oblique light against the wall. At the edge of this pool of light a tiny brown lizard of the kind known as a ‘chichak’ had stationed itself on the wall, motionless, its fat little legs flexed like those of a Japanese wrestler. Presently it emitted an oddly metallic clicking sound and the Major explained that the Malays believed that chichaks brought good luck to the houses where they appeared and that, moreover … He sighed and silence fell again.
‘What’s that noise?’
A roaring sound had begun outside and was steadily increasing in volume.
‘It’s just the rain,’ said the Major, wondering how the rest of the British warships might be faring in the wet darkness. It was on just such a night as this, in April 1905, that Admiral Rozhdestvensky and his forty-five elderly, barnacle-clad Russian warships and supply ships had steamed in a tepid downpour through the Straits of Malacca on their long journey from the Baltic, too late to lift the siege of Port Arthur, aware that they were hopelessly outclassed by the Japanese fleet. What brave men, all the same! Sent to the other end of the world by the incompetents in the Ministry in St Petersburg; with crews untrained in war manoeuvres; without enough ammunition to practise gunnery; obliged to coal at sea as often as not for lack of a neutral anchorage that would accept them; continually obliged to stop as the engines of one ship after another broke down; and at the end of their long voyage only the prospect of being sent to the bottom by the superior Japanese fleet. The capture of Port Arthur and the Russian naval defeat at Tsushima, the Major reflected, should have been a warning not to underestimate the Japanese.
‘François has gone up to Penang for a few days. He may have some news of how things are going in the north when he gets back.’
‘Just listen to the rain!’
Now another grim possibility had occurred to the Major: if the Japanese Navy did get control of the Straits there would be nothing to prevent them landing troops behind the British lines at any point they wished. No doubt there were fixed defences already established at the most vulnerable places, but with such a long coastline to defend it was bound to be difficult. Still, they had the RAF to reckon with.
Now from another part of the house there came the plaintive cry of the door’s rusty hinges and, a moment later, voices on the verandah.
‘I wonder who that can be? I’d better go and see.’ The Major stood up.
‘Enter two drowned rats,’ laughed Joan, putting her head round the door before the Major could reach it. ‘We were halfway through the compound when it started to come down in torrents. It’s no good trying to shelter, either. You get just as wet standing under a tree.’
Matthew and the Major stared at her in wonder. Her hair had turned a shade or two darker and stuck to her forehead and cheeks in wet ringlets: water was still gleaming on her neck while her sodden dress clung to her so intimately that one could make out on her heaving chest the two little studs of her nipples and the flutter of her diaphragm where the ribs parted: evidently she had been running.
‘Come and sit down,’ said the Major genially. ‘But I can only see one drowned rat. Where’s the other?’
Matthew smiled wanly at Joan as she came to sit beside him, clearly not in the least abashed to be seen in wet and semi-transparent clothing. Indeed, she was positively sparkling with health and high spirits after sprinting through the downpour. ‘How attractive she is!’
‘The other is Papa. He’s just gone to get a towel from the “boy”. But here he comes now.’
Walter, too, seemed to be in exceptionally good spirits, as if the sudden downpour had revived him. Of late he had a careworn air, as if his manifold responsibilities were at last beginning to get the better of him: he had begun to hesitate in a way he had never done before, to speculate too exhaustively about the possible consequences of his decisions. The absence of old Mr Webb’s strong character in the background, the uncertainty which clouded the political future of the Colony, the blunder he had made over those huge stocks of rubber he had waiting on the quays, all these matters had combined to sap his strength of purpose. But Walter was not the sort of man who could be kept down for very long. What were all these difficulties but the biggest challenge he had had to face since the Depression? Having decided to define his problems as a challenge he found that a weight had been lifted from his mind. Now he stood there laughing, his stocky figure radiating energy, quite oblivious of the puddle of water which had formed around his shoes. Snatching up a rattan chair he set it down by Matthew’s bedside saying:
‘Soaked to the skin! That’s what comes of trusting your daughter, Major. Well, Matthew, you look a hundred per cent better … You’ve lost a bit of weight, perhaps, but there’s no harm in that for a man of your size …’ And on he went, his voice reverberating confidently above the roar of rain drumming on the roof.
Matthew and the Major stared at him, hypnotized. The Major, who had become accustomed to seeing Walter despondent or full of bitter nostalgia for the old days, was delighted to see the change that had come over him. Matthew lay back against his pillows looking somewhat bewildered but pleased that everyone should be in such a good mood despite the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse.
‘Now, my boy,’ said Walter affably, ‘these are momentous days we’re living through and it’s time we had a serious discussion about what’s to become of you. No, now wait a jiffy, you’ll have your chance to say your piece in a moment. What I want to say is this … Now that your poor father is no longer with us I feel I have a special responsibility not just to my own family but to you as well … Well, m’lad, I’ve had my eye on you and if you don’t mind me saying so it’s become pretty clear to me that you’ve taken a bit of a shine to my daughter Joan here and, frankly, young man, I can’t say I blame you because she’s a good young woman even if she does get her old Papa soaked to the skin from time to time, ha! ha! … and, between you and me, half the young fellows in Singapore are after her …’
‘But, Walter! Well, I mean, good heavens … !’ cried Matthew and began to struggle agitatedly with his sheet and the ‘Dutch wife’ and a fold of the mosquito net which had come adrift, as if he meant to spring out of bed and start pacing up and down. The Major, indeed, jumped up to restrain him, very concerned by the stare of excitement in which the patient had been thrown by Walter’s curious preamble about his daughter. But the Major’s intervention was not needed for Matthew had somehow got himself so entangled in his sheet that in his weakened state he could scarcely move and presently subsided again.
Walter, meanwhile, ignoring this commotion, held up his hand and, nodding towards his daughter, went on steadily: ‘And she, if I’m not talking out of turn, has a bit of a soft spot for you. Isn’t that right, m’dear? Well, in these circumstances I think that there’s only one course for sensible people to take … And I think we all know what that is! There now, I’ve said my party piece.’ Walter sat back, thoroughly satisfied with the way the interview was going.
‘But Mr Blackett … That’s to say, Walter …’ exclaimed Matthew, still bound to the bed by the folds of his sheet but rolling his eyeballs excitedly. ‘What can I say? I mean, I’m certainly very fond of Joan, that’s true, but never for a minute … I mean, such an idea has never even … but perhaps I’ve got the wrong end of the stick … Well, I simply don’t know what to say.’ He gazed at his companions, quite overwhelmed by this unexpected development. Once again it seemed to him that reality had taken a dream-like turn, for while Walter had been making his extraordinary speech Cheong had stolen up behind him with a towel and had set to work, his face perfectly impassive, briskly rubbing down Walter’s head and patting his pink, commanding cheeks, so that an occasional word here and there in Walter’s discourse had been muffled by a thickness of towel, causing Matthew to be not altogether sure that Walter was saying what he appeared to be saying. When Cheong had finished with Walter he started to rub no less briskly at Joan’s damp ringlets, but after a moment she motioned him away.
Although Joan had not assented very vigorously when her father had declared that she had a ‘soft spot’ for Matthew (instead she had gazed calmly at the floor where another puddle was beginning to form between her feet) neither had she uttered any word that might be interpreted as a disclaimer. Now, when she spoke, it was merely to ask, looking round: ‘Has the “boy” gone? If so, I’m going to take off this wet dress if you don’t mind. You don’t mind, do you, Papa?’
‘I don’t mind in the least, m’dear, but you’d better ask these gentlemen … though I’m sure they’re men o’ the world enough not to mind seeing a fat little piglet like you in your underwear … You don’t mind, do you, Major?’
‘Oh, me? Not at all, not at all,’ mumbled the Major, laughing and clearing his throat; and he puffed with embarrassment at his pipe, stopping and unstopping its bowl with two fingers to make it draw. He might have been thinking, as he cast a hasty, sidelong glance at Joan’s agreeable figure, that even with advancing years a man might still be troubled by thoughts of … well, never mind … who knows what he was thinking as he puffed at his pipe, for presently he had disappeared into a blue haze of tobacco smoke?
As for the patient, despite his weakened condition and his confused state of mind, his eyes wandered appreciatively over Joan’s gleaming skin as she stepped out of her sodden dress and he seemed to be thinking: ‘Well, a body’s a body, for all that,’ or something of the sort.
‘You don’t mind, Papa,’ asked Joan, smiling mischievously, ‘if I climb into bed beside Matthew until the rain stops? I’ll be much more comfortable. We can have the “Dutch wife” between us.’
‘Oh, the little rascal,’ chuckled Walter. ‘Oh, the little hussy! What d’you think of that, Major? And before her own father’s very eyes! And what, I should like to know, young lady, would your mother say if she could see you now?’ And while Joan hung her dress on a coat-hanger to dry before climbing into bed Walter beamed at Matthew more expansively than ever. ‘Well, there you are, my boy,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘There are the goods. You won’t find better. You can see for yourself. It’s a good offer. Take it or leave it.’
Presently, when the rain had stopped, Walter and Joan made their way back through the compound beside pools of rainwater which were now reflecting the stars. Father and daughter did not speak as they made their way through the drenched garden but they did not have to: they understood each other perfectly. Abdul, the old major-domo, was waiting for them, concerned that they should have got such a soaking.
‘What news, Master?’
‘Good news, Abdul!’ replied Walter in the conventional manner, but as he went upstairs to change his clothes he thought: ‘Yes, good news!’
33
‘Well, I suppose it might be true,’ the Major was saying doubtfully. ‘One never knows. I was in Harbin in 1937 and there was still a lot of White Russians there at the time. A lot of the poor devils were starving, too.’
The Major and Matthew were sitting in the office which had once been old Mr Webb’s. Matthew, drained of all energy, had at last managed to leave his bed and drag himself as far as his father’s desk where he sat drowsing over an untidy pile of reports, accounts and miscellaneous papers concerning the rubber industry. The Major, filled with concern by the young man’s sombre and listless frame of mind, attempted from time to time to engage him in cheerful conversation. But these days what was there to be cheerful about? Only the subject of Vera Chiang had aroused a tiny spark of interest in the patient: Matthew had remembered a dream conversation between Vera and Joan in which Vera had claimed that her mother was a Russian princess and her father a Chinese tea-merchant … or something of the sort. What did the Major think of it? The Major, it turned out, had heard the same story from Vera with one or two added details and had politely suspended disbelief. After all, far-fetched though it sounded, one never knew. Stranger things had happened in that part of the world in the last few years.
‘By the way, where is she? I thought she was supposed to have a room here still.’
‘One of Blackett and Webb’s vans came to pick up her belongings the other day. Not that they needed a van, mind you. There was only a small bag and a parcel or two. I gather Walter wanted her moved out for some reason, he didn’t say why. But she’s a friendly sort of girl and I expect she’ll look in to say hello one of these days.’ The Major stood up. ‘I must go and do some work. Monty said he’d be dropping in to see you presently.’
Matthew had begun to drowse over his papers once more when Monty suddenly appeared.
‘Congratulations,’ he said. Monty was looking preoccupied for some reason.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, I hear you and Joan are thinking of teaming up.’
‘Oh, it hasn’t quite come to that, has it? I mean, I know your father did say something the other night about it being a good idea, or something on those lines. But I don’t think anything, well, definite was decided, you know … At least that was my impression. After all …’
But Monty merely shrugged; he did not seem particularly interested in the matter. He said vaguely: ‘I expect I got hold of the wrong end of the stick … But from what they’ve been saying I thought they were planning a wedding … You know, bridesmaids and all that rubbish.’ Monty collapsed into a chair and put his feet up on Matthew’s desk, upsetting a tumbler full of pencils as he did so but making no effort to gather them up again. ‘I suppose this means you aren’t going to want to come in with me and the other two chaps in sharing this Chinese filly,’ he said morosely, ‘that, is, if you and Joan are teaming up. It’s going to make it damned expensive for the rest of us,’ he added accusingly.
‘But Monty …’
‘The other two are regular fellows. Great sports. And it’s not as if there were enough white women to go round (if there were I’d tell you). I don’t suppose you know that there’s only one to every fifty white blokes.’
‘I told you ages ago, Monty, that I wasn’t interested. It’s not my cup of tea.’
‘Oh, all right, all right. Don’t go on about it. It doesn’t matter to me whether you come in or not, though you’ll be missing a splendid opportunity. That’s your look-out, though.’ Monty sighed heavily. ‘I really came over to explain about the replanting of rubber trees on your Johore estate. The Old Man said I ought to keep you in the picture though you’re probably not interested. The answer is simply that it’s more profitable to replant now than to go on tapping.’
‘But how can it be? I thought there was someone clamouring for every scrap of rubber we produce.’
‘It’s to do with the excess profits tax … You don’t want me to go into it, do you?’
But Matthew evidently did want him to, and so, with a much put-upon air, Monty removed his feet from the table and began to explain. When the war had broken out in 1939 a sixty per cent excess profits tax had been slapped on all sterling companies either at home or abroad. Blackett’s hadn’t minded too much at first. Propitious years, as far as they were concerned, had been chosen for the calculation of ‘standard profits’. ‘We found we could still keep our hands on a satisfactory chunk of the profits. All well and good. But then I’ll be damned if they don’t increase the excess profits tax to one hundred per cent! Can you beat it?’ Monty, his eyes blue and bulging like his father’s, stared at Matthew in disgust.
At the same time the price of rubber had risen and more of it could be released under the Restriction Scheme. ‘The next thing we find is that we can make the bloody “standard profits” (all we’re allowed, the British Government confiscating the rest) by producing a smaller amount of rubber than we’re actually allowed to release to the market! Can you beat it? What’s the point in producing more when we don’t make any profit by doing so?’
Monty’s gaze had momentarily become troubled for, although on the whole he believed he did understand his father’s commercial strategy (and admired it, too, his father was hot stuff when it came to spotting opportunities), there was one of Walter’s initiatives for which a sound commercial reason had so far eluded him: the signing of contracts with the Americans, for huge quantities of rubber for which no shipping could be found. The accumulation for this rubber on the quays directly contradicted, as far as Monty could see, the other policy of not producing rubber from which no profit could be made. The excess profits tax would apply just as much to the American contracts. It was a mystery which Monty could not explain … though there must be an explanation. Monty had even, for want of anything better, come close once or twice to suspecting his father of patriotism. But no, it surely could not be that. He had, of course, asked Walter for an explanation, but he had shown signs of extreme exasperation and had declined to reply. However, the truth was at last beginning to dawn on Monty in the past few days following the Japanese attack. It was a terrible truth, if Monty had guessed correctly, but was there any other explanation? Walter, in his omniscience, had foreseen the Japanese attack. More than that, he had foreseen the capture of Malaya or destruction of Singapore. He was actually wagering on the capture or destruction of all that rubber and planning to demand compensation from the Government in some more healthy part of the world! True, this did seem, even to Monty, an extravagant wager, but what other reason could there be? His father never did anything in business without a sound reason.
‘Anyway,’ he said, returning his attention to Matthew, ‘we decided that the only sensible thing to do was to replant … Why? Because replanting expenses are allowable against tax.’
‘Even if it means replanting perfectly healthy and productive trees!’ exclaimed Matthew.
‘Certainly! Because we’re replanting them with these newly developed clones I was telling you about. When they’re mature in a few years time they’ll produce almost twice as much per tree.’
‘But what about the War Effort? Everyone’s crying out for rubber now not in a few years’ time. And we’re cutting down the trees that produce the stuff and-planting seedlings in their place. And we aren’t even slaughter-tapping, as far as I can make out! It’s madness.’ Casting off his apathy Matthew had sprung to his feet and now gripped Monty’s arm with one hand and the lapels of his jacket with the other. Monty uttered a hoarse cry of alarm and flinched away under this onslaught, convinced that he was about to be assaulted by Matthew whose reason clearly swung on very fragile hinges. Monty was not surprised: he had suspected as much for some time. Next time he would see to it that his father dealt with this madman.
‘Well, it wasn’t my idea,’ he murmured soothingly. ‘Don’t blame me. You’ll have to take it up with Father, though I must say …’ he added more confidently as Matthew released him and began to pace up and down the room, waving one fist certainly, but otherwise not looking so dangerous, ‘…that I really don’t think you should take this pious attitude the whole time. People don’t go in for that sort of thing out here. As a matter of fact, they think it’s deuced odd, if you want to know. But of course, you must suit yourself,’ he went on hurriedly, as Matthew turned towards him once more.
‘But it’s not that, Monty … it’s a matter of principle.’
‘Yes, yes, of course it is,’ agreed Monty. ‘Anyway, I must be on my way now. I’ve a lot to do. You don’t want to change your mind about that Chinese girl… No, no, I can see you don’t. It’s quite all right. Well, goodbye!’ And Monty beat a hasty retreat, thankful to have escaped without any broken bones.
Matthew sank back into his chair, exhausted once more. He poured himself a drink of iced water from the vacuum flask on his desk and gulped it quickly; he must soon have a talk with Walter and try to persuade him to stop all this ridiculous replanting. How much had already been carried out? He searched in vain among the papers on his desk but he could not find the figures he wanted before lethargy once more stole over him. With an effort he roused himself and went outside to the tinroofed garage where the Major was performing a laborious inspection of the trailer-pump. He intended to discuss the replanting issue with the Major and installed himself in the Major’s open Lagonda nearby: but the heat and his lassitude were too much for him and soon he was drowsing again with his feet poking out of the open door while the Major inspected and cleaned the pump’s sparking-plugs. The Major suspected that it would not be very long before this machine found itself in service. Meanwhile, The Human Condition, diminutive, elderly and frail, dozed perilously under one wire-spoked wheel of the motor-car which was on a slight gradient and might decide to roll forward at any moment, putting an end to its miseries.
The Major was thinking of Vera Chiang as he worked, and of Harbin in 1937. ‘How hard life can be for refugees!’ he mused, squinting at a sparking-plug (his eyesight was no longer what it had been). ‘We don’t realize in our own comfortable, well-ordered lives what it must be like to lose everything in one of these political upheavals that bang and clatter senselessly round the world like thunderstorms uprooting people right and left.’ He sighed and the sparking-plug which lay in his palm grew blurred and changed into a picture of Harbin … what was it? … four, no, five years ago almost. Harbin had surely been one of the most depressing places on earth.
That had been on the Major’s first trip out East … when he had suddenly, on an impulse, decided to give up the settled, comfortable life he was leading in London and see the world, visit François in Indo-China, visit Japan, too, and see what all the fuss was about … see what life itself was all about before it was too late and old age descended on him. You might have thought that Harbin was a Russian city from the great Orthodox cathedral towering over Kitaiskaya and Novogorodnaya Street, and from the Russian shop-signs you saw, the vodka, the samovars, the Russian cafés and the agreeable sound of the Russian language being spoken everywhere. But it was a Russian city which had turned into a nightmare of poverty for the White Russians who had been washed eastwards on the tidal wave of the Revolution. How helpless they were! How few human beings, the Major thought with a sigh, can exert by hard work, thrift, intelligence or any other virtue the slightest influence on their own destiny! That was the grim truth about life on this planet.
Until Manchukuo had bought the Chinese Eastern Railway from the Soviet Government the year before the Major’s visit, there had at least been a large contingent of Soviet railway employees in Harbin to patronize the Russian shops and cafés, but by the time he had arrived even this flimsy economic support had been pulled from under the refugees. The railwaymen had returned to Russia, leaving the refugees to destitution. At one time there had been 80,000 of them; by the time the Major had arrived this number had dwindled by half. Those young and strong enough had gone south to look for some means of support in a China which was itself ravaged by famine and bandit armies. Those who stayed in Harbin very often starved. The Major himself had seen ragged white men pulling rickshaws in Harbin.
Vera Chiang had spent her childhood and adolescence in Harbin: that much was certainly true for when the Major had questioned her about it she had known every corner of the city. Her mother had died there, ‘of a broken heart’, she said sometimes; ‘of TB’ she said at others. She had only been a child then. Her father had gone south to try to establish another business to replace the one he had lost in the Revolution in Russia, leaving her in a school run by American missionaries. Thus she had learned to speak English. How sad and lonely she had been! she had told the Major with a tear sparkling in her eye, while the Major murmured comfortingly; he had never been able to resist a woman in distress. But how much worse her life had become when a message, long-delayed, had reached her from her father. He was lying ill, broken by poverty, in Canton. ‘Selling the last of my mother’s rings I set out …’ Easily affected by feminine distress though he was, the Major had been assailed by misgivings at this point … But still, one never knew. One thing was certain: you had to account for Vera Chiang somehow! Her Russian recollections were not very convincing, though. Furs, and icicles on window-panes, and snow on the rooftops, steam hanging in the ‘biting air’ from the horse’s nostrils, and jewels winking at the throat of the noblewomen who had leaned over her cot, for she had been a baby at the time of the Revolution, of course, the sleigh’s runners hissing in the snow as they glided east to escape the Bolsheviks, her own little black almond-shaped eyes completely surrounded by fur, gazing out over the interminable, frozen wastes of Russia. That sort of thing. It was not impossible, of course. Above all, it was the mother’s rings that made the Major uneasy. The reason was this. In a Shanghai nightclub the Major had found himself talking to one of the hostesses, a beautiful Russian girl, also a princess, who after one or two decorous waltzes had confessed her predicament to him: the following morning, as soon as the pawnbroker’s shop opened for business, she would have to pawn her mother’s wedding ring in order to prevent her younger sister from selling herself as a prostitute. Good gracious! What a business! What could the Major do but try to help avert this calamity? Well, you see, the Major’s dilemma was that sometimes these stories were true. Not very often, perhaps, but sometimes.
The Major had frozen into an attitude of despair, staring unseeing at the sparking-plug in his hand. Perhaps sensing that his thoughts had taken a bleak turn, The Human Condition left its perilous couch under the wheel of the Lagonda and crept over to lean its chin on his shoe, revolving its bulging eyeballs upwards to scan the Major’s gloomy features. Could it be that the Major was brooding over the best way to have a dog done away with? But no, the Major was still thinking of refugees, this time of those who had managed to escape from Harbin, moving south to where there were other cities with foreign concessions, to Tientsin and farther, to Shanghai. But even in Shanghai there were many Russians who found themselves starving side by side with the most wretched of Chinese coolies, obliged to sleep on the streets or in the parks through the bitter Chinese winter, candidates to join the grim regiment of ‘exposed corpses’. These gaunt scarecrows for a few years had haunted the foreign concessions. But time is cruel: people get shaken down into a society or shaken out. History moves on and the problem gets solved, one way or another, without regard to our finer feelings.
And Vera? Her father, she said, had had a stroke and was half paralysed. She had gone to Canton to support him as best she could (the Major had tactfully refrained from asking how). They were in destitution. Presently he had died and she had moved on to Shanghai. She had lived there for a couple of years until there had been some trouble with a Japanese officer. Then, with the help of some friends, she had come here to Singapore.
Well, was she indeed the daughter of a Russian princess and a Chinese tea-merchant? Was it likely that a Russian princess would marry a Chinese tea-merchant? No, but many strange alliances had been bonded in the bubbling retort of the Revolution in its early years. Vera, now in her early twenties, would be just about the right age, certainly, to be the product of such a desperate union. In Harbin, he recalled, it had been a common sight to see young women of noble blood sweeping out the Russian shops on Novogorodnaya Street or waiting at café tables beneath the inevitable, gradually yellowing portrait of the last Tsar. In such desperate circumstances people will do whatever is necessary to survive. Moreover, as the circumstances grew more desperate it had turned out, like it or not, that an attractive Russian girl, princess or dairy-maid, had at least something to sell … if only herself. In Harbin, he had heard, British and American visitors were sometimes approached by destitute Russians inviting them to abscond with the wives they could no longer support. The Major himself had been approached in that nightmare city by a young Russian girl in rags, anxious to exchange the use of her body for a meal. He sighed. Sometimes in Harbin he had wished he had never left London; if this was what finding out about ‘life’ entailed he would rather have remained in ignorance.
In Shanghai things had not been quite so bad. Attractive Russian girls could do better there, it transpired, because white taxi-girls were very popular with wealthy Chinese and could earn a reasonable living in the city’s dance-halls and cabarets. They earned, he had been told, two Chinese dollars commission on every bottle of champagne they sold. Moreover, in the brothels of Shanghai, while a Chinese girl was available from one Chinese dollar upwards, the minimum price for a white girl had been ten dollars. And for the princely sum of fifty dollars, so the Major had been informed on good authority, you could have a nude dance performed in the privacy of your own home or hotel room, by six Russian girls. The Major, despite the urgings of his informant, had not been tempted: it was not that he had been daunted by the expense; it was simply that he could not visualize himself cloistered in his hotel room with six naked White Russian ladies … perhaps even unclothed members of Russia’s fallen aristocracy. Besides (he found himself calculating providently), even for the libidinous it did not seem such very good value since, for another ten dollars, you could have enjoyed the six girls severally at the going rates.
Now in turn the nightclubs of Shanghai grew blurred and were replaced by a sparking-plug lying in a wrinkled palm and by a pair of bleary, anxious eyes. The Major turned the palm over to look at the watch on his wrist. The light was beginning to fade and it was a little cooler. Matthew, still looking weary, was struggling out of the Lagonda. With a sigh the Major replaced the plug in the pump and went to wash his hands. He had accepted an invitation to eat with Mr Wu, the Chinese businessman who had joined the Mayfair AFS unit. As he climbed the steps to the verandah he paused for a moment to look up while a single Blenheim bomber droned acros the opal sky in the direction of Kallang aerodrome. Later, he picked up the Straits Times, while waiting for Mr Wu, to read about how black things were looking for the Japanese.
34
From the beginning the Major and Mr Wu had conceived a great liking for each other. Each, indeed, recognized in the other a person so much after his own heart that it swiftly became clear to Mr Wu that the Major was simply an English Mr Wu, and to the Major that Mr Wu was nothing less than a Chinese Major. Mr Wu had even, some ten years earlier, served in what the Major supposed must have been the Kuomintang Air Force in China, for on one occasion he had given the Major a card on which, beneath a sprinkling of Chinese characters, one could read in English: ‘Captain Wu. Number 5 Pursuiting Squadron.’ The Major, in any case, since his arrival in the East had realized that there was no other race or culture on earth that he admired so much as the Chinese, for their tact, for their politeness, their good nature, their industry and their sense of humour. And Mr Wu combined all these virtues with a great warmth of character. He and the Major got on like a house on fire, a friendship conducted as much with smiles as with words because while Mr Wu’s grasp of English was loose the Major, for his part, could get no purchase on Cantonese at all.
Now they were sitting together smiling in a companionable silence in the back of Mr Wu’s elderly Buick on the way to some restaurant. Meanwhile, the Major was once more pondering the question of whether the Chinese community would remain loyal. If all the Chinese were like Mr Wu they would certainly help defend Malaya against the Japanese as staunchly as if it were their own country. For the Straits-born Chinese, of course, it really was their own country, but did they regard it as such? For the Major, no less than Walter, was worried about the prospects for Malaya’s plural society when faced with the homogeneity of Japan. What chance would muddled, divided Malaya have against the efficiency and discipline he had seen everywhere on his visit to Manchukuo and to Japan itself?
After several months in the Far East the Major had been amazed to find trains running more regularly than they did in Europe: on his way to Harbin from Dairen he had taken the Asia, the 60-m.p.h. luxury express that was the pride of the South Manchuria Railway Company. Why, it had even had a library of books in English for the delectation of its Anglo-Saxon passengers! But you should not, for all that, think that you were in an imitation Western country: if, as the train began to pull out of the station, you happened to look out at the people on the platform who had come to see their friends off, you would see no emotional waving or shouting: you would see instead that they folded themselves to the ground and bowed low to the departing train, all together like a cornfield in a sudden gale. The Major had received a little shock when he had seen that; he had allowed himself to forget just how different the Japanese were from Europeans.
Yes, the Japanese, thought the Major beaming at his friend, Mr Wu (where were they going, by the way?), were an astonishingly determined and disciplined people. They believed in doing things properly, even in Manchukuo. In the barbers’ shops there they even went so far as to wash clients’ ears in eau de Cologne! You only had to see what they had accomplished … the rebuilding of Changchun, for instance, formerly a mere collection of hovels, into a modern city with electric light, drains, parks, hospitals, libraries and even a zoo. There was, besides, that which no civilized modern city could possibly do without: a golf course!
Some young Japanese officers, seeing that the Major, from force of habit, was travelling with his ancient wooden golf clubs in his luggage, had invited him to play a few holes with them at the golf links on the outskirts of the city. He had declined the opportunity to play but had gone along to watch. For half the year, the officers explained, one was obliged to drive off into the teeth of the Siberian winter, for the other half into a Mongolian dust-storm. The Major had watched from the club-house, intrigued, as his new friends, wearing respirators, vanished gamely into the clouds of dust, driven here for hundreds of miles over the plains by the never-ceasing wind. Here and there the Major could see a patch of snow but not a single blade of grass (grass had been imported, he was told, but had not survived). Certainly, the Japanese were determined to do things properly!
In due course the young officers had returned, having surrendered a prodigious number of golf balls to the Mongolian plain, true, but with the obligations to civilized modern living thoroughly satisfied. Next they had whisked the Major, whom they had now identified not only as golfer and gentleman but as a brother officer into the bargain, off to a nearby inn for a meal of raw fish and eggs washed down by gallons of warm saké. With the utmost sincerity and good fellowship they explained to the Major as best they could in a mixture of English, French and German, how distressed they had been by certain apparently anti-Japanese démarches taken by the British in their China policy. They themselves, they explained, did not feel the ill-will towards the British that many of their young comrades felt. No, they felt more sorrow than anger that Britain should support the Nanking Government in its anti-Japanese behaviour and believed it was because the respected British people were so far away that they did not fully understand what the bandit war-lords of the Kuomintang were up to.
The Major, at the best of times, had trouble making up his mind about these perplexing international issues; but squatting on the floor of the inn with his new friends, some of whom wore military uniform, others kimonos, he soon found that the saké had stolen clean away with even those few elements of the situation which he believed he had grasped. To make matters worse, just as he felt he was beginning at last to get his teeth into the problem, a geisha girl dressed and painted like a charming little doll suddenly appeared and sang a song like that of a lonely wading-bird in a remote Siberian river, so charming, so melancholy, on and on it went, reedy, lyrical, moving, and sad … the Major was transfixed by its sadness and beauty and could have gone on listening for hours, but wait, what was it he had been about to say about the Nanking Government?
‘It is sincere wish, Major Archer,’ declared one of his more articulate companions, throwing off yet another thimbleful of saké, ‘that when we have cleared away bad China policy Japan and England co-operate in friendship for economic develop of China.’
‘Well, I must say …’ the Major agreed affably, while someone else was saying that they were not interesting in helping Osaka merchants attack Lancashire merchants (‘Well, that’s splendid!’ declared the Major heartily). They were against Big Business and their only desire was to spread Japanese National Spirit, although for the moment they might be obliged to make use of Big Business for their own ends such as develop of Manchuko. Yes, it was the Japanese National Spirit which was the important thing!
‘I must say I thoroughly approve of your Japanese National Spirit,’ said the Major holding his thimble of saké aloft and smiling.
‘Ah so?’ His companions looked surprised and gratified by this remark. The Major, who had merely been attempting a pleasantry, was a little disconcerted but thought it best not to explain. It was not the first time that one of his jokes had failed to find its mark.
Encouraged by the Major’s approval, his friends now began to enlarge on National Spirit though this was not easy to define. There were many aspects of it: Loyalty to Emperor: the Major had perhaps visited Tokyo and seen ordinary citizens stand beside the huge moat surrounding the Imperial Palace and bow towards the gate which the Emperor sometimes used? Then there were Morals, too: not long ago a group of patriotic young students had burst into a dance being held at a fashionable Tokyo hotel and obliged all Japanese couples to leave the floor as ‘a disgrace to the country’ … (‘I say, that’s a bit steep, isn’t it?’ murmured the Major) … but, of course, foreigners were not molested. It was, the Major should understand, to protect national ideals and national customs against the taint of foreign influence that such action was necessary. In schools, too, it was most important that national purity and loyalty to Emperor should be maintained. An officer on the Major’s right, who took a particular interest in education, now withdrew a book from the folds of his kimono and began to talk with great emphasis, his dark eyes burning.
The Major had noticed this particular fellow earlier because he had made a bit of a scene out at the golf club. While his comrades had been teeing up their balls and peering at them through the windows of their respirators before driving off into the swirling dust-clouds on a compass bearing for the first green, this man had begun shouting at them from a distance and waving his arms, making quite a din despite the howling of the wind. Since they paid no great attention to him he came, presently, to stand directly in front of where they were shifting their feet and waggling their wrists over their golf balls, in the very direction in which they were about to drive off. Not content with that, he even unbuttoned the tunic of his uniform to expose his naked chest to the bitter wind. And he had gone on standing there, still shouting, until two or three of the golfers had thrown down their clubs and led him gently aside. He had watched them morosely then from a distance while they began their ritual once more, shouting at them from time to time.
‘Ah Scotland tradition bad Japan tradition,’ muttered the officer who had stayed behind in the club-house to keep the Major company, and he had looked quite upset about something or other.
This man who had tried to stand in the way of the golf balls was the fellow who had now launched into a passionate discourse. Although, his companions explained, he had mastered several Western languages ‘as a mental discipline’ and spoke them fluently, he declined to use them, even speaking with a foreigner … so one of his brother-officers was obliged to interpret for the Major as best he could. This book in his hand was, he explained, a text book used in schools: he began to translate what the Major supposed must be chapter headings: Tea Raising, Our Town, The Emperor, Healthy Body, Persimmons, Great Japan, Cherry Blossom, Getting Up Early, The Sun and the Wind, Loyal Behaviour … and so on. (‘Charming,’ said the Major, ‘but I don’t think I quite …’) These subjects in book were designed to make good loyal Japanese citizen working hard for good of Japanese nation!
The officer at the Major’s elbow, his eyes (no doubt refuelled by the saké) smouldering more fiercely than ever, was now reading excitedly from the chapter on Military Loyalty, only pausing occasionally to aim a look of hatred and loathing at the Major. ‘The object of lesson is to arouse Loyalty-feeling and foster purpose of self-sacrificing for Emperor. He tells story of how in war with China our soldiers fall into ambush at dead of night and enemy fire on them at close range. Instead of cowardly retreating they are full of Self-Sacrifice-feeling and rush on and Bugler Kikuchi, who badly wounded, keep bugle to lips and sound bugle with dying breath …’ (‘Well, upon my word …’ said the Major.)
‘If at any time Emperor give command, he who is Japanese must bravely advance to battle-place. When he has reach battle-place he must carefully obey command of superior officer. Bugler Kikuchi, who offer life, perform duty nobly and manifest magnificent Loyalty-feeling to Emperor!’
The Major, not used to squatting for long periods, was becoming decidedly stiff in the joints and felt it was time to return to his hotel and sleep off the saké he had consumed. But the officer at his elbow kept on and on reading from the school text book. Presently, he had finished reading the chapter on Persimmons and was declaiming exultantly from that on Great Japan. At length, however, he was quelled by his brother officers who wanted to say something to the Major, they had a most sincere request to make of him. Would he kindly give them permission to sing old school song?
‘Why, certainly!’ said the Major, unable to think what a Japanese old school song might sound like (perhaps a chorus suggesting a whole flock of wading-birds standing in a lonely Siberian river).
But no, the Major had not understood. They wanted to sing his old school song. ‘You go perhaps to famous academy like Eton and …’ The officers groped for a name and consulted each other … ‘Eton and Harromachi.’
‘Something like those but smaller,’ agreed the Major cautiously. ‘Mine was called Sandhall’s.’ The young officers looked very pleased at this information and, smiling at the Major, rolled the word on their palates to savour it. And so it was that, in due course, after a great number of rehearsals and false starts, the Major’s old school song, sung by one light, not very certain tenor and a chorus of wading-birds which included even the officer with the burning eyes, had begun to echo out over the lonely expanses of Manchuria.
‘Alma mater te bibamus,
Tui calices poscamus,
Hanc sententiam dicamus
Floreat Sand … ha! … ha! … lia!’
Now, although he was at war with them, the Major, sitting beside his friend Mr Wu, could not help but think of the young officers with pleasure. The Major admired their idealism: what splendid young chaps they were! But at the same time one had to admit that their National Spirit had its disquieting side: he had felt it even at the time: he felt it all the more strongly now. One expects a patriotic spirit from military officers, of course. The British officer, though less voluble on the subject, was probably no less determined to do his duty. But what had struck the Major was that even in peacetime the entire Japanese nation seemed to be imbued with this fervour. Later in that same year he had visisted the vast Mitsui industrial and mining centre at Miike in Kyushu and had seen other signs of the nationalistic spirit which pervaded Japan. He had seen, for example, the entire staff of a factory, several hundred men, bow down three times in the direction of the palace in Tokyo. He had been shown a laboratory where special phosphate pills were prepared to make the miners work harder, each man being given a pill to swallow before he went down the mine-shaft. And if it had been like that in Japan in 1937 what must it be like now that the country was at war with the British Empire and America? The Major uttered a gloomy sigh as he climbed out of the Buick. For in the meantime they had arrived.
While the Major had been engrossed in his melancholy thoughts they had entered the maze of Chinese streets which lie between Bencoolen Street and Beach Road. They had only reached their destination, it transpired, to the extent that the Buick would no longer fit into the streets along which their route lay. The Major found himself following Mr Wu down a series of very narrow and strong-smelling alleys until, beaming and murmuring: ‘This way, please,’ his host led him into an amazingly dingy restaurant. It was deserted except for a rickshaw coolie who sat, barefoot, on a bench, his knees to his ears, quickly shovelling fried mee from a bowl propped against his lower lip into his mouth. An elderly woman mopping the floor paused to gaze impassively at the Major. Chuckling, Mr Wu led the way upstairs. But even as he climbed the stairs the Major had to deal with a final disquieting recollection from his visit to Japan. One of the young officers had told him that the readiness of the Japanese to die for their country may be compared to the ants in the ‘Japanese Alps’ which, when threatened by fire, mass themselves round it and extinguish it with their burning bodies so that it will not destroy their nests. Had not the Japanese infantry defied the Russian machine-guns at Port Arthur in exactly such a way? ‘But surely no one is threatening your nest,’ the Major had replied. The officer, after a moment’s pause, had explained ominously that an attempt to deprive Japan of raw materials and markets was just such a threat.
The room into which Mr Wu was now ushering the Major was densely crowded and very, very hot. The table to which they were shown was already occupied, at least in the sense that a young Chinese was sprawled over it in a stupor, whether the result of weariness or narcotics it was hard to tell. He was swiftly dragged away, however, and the table was given a swift polish with a damp cloth. It was evident that Mr Wu was a respected client. Meanwhile, the Major had been unable to resist putting to Mr Wu that same question which had been gnawing at his mind earlier (and apparently, elsewhere in Singapore, had been disturbing the peace of mind of the Governor, and of other prominent citizens): what would be the response of the Chinese, Indian and Malayan communities to the invasion?
Mr Wu, who had been smiling cheerfully, became grave instantly. The Major, unable to hear what he was saying because of the noise from the other tables, craned forward, but he still could not make out what it was, though Mr Wu’s round face grew steadily longer as he spoke. Ah, now he was looking cheerful again, thank heaven for that!
It soon became clear, however, that Mr Wu’s change of mood derived from the preparations being made for their meal rather than the state of the Colony … a rickety gas-burner connected to a rubber pipe had been set on the table and lit. On top of it was set a concave metal ring forming a bowl which was swimming with a clear broth. Then the gas jet was turned up so that blue flame roared out of the open funnel at the top of the metal bowl and the soup inside it began to bubble.
‘We call ah steam-boat,’ explained Mr Wu.
‘No wonder it’s so hot up here,’ thought the Major who was suffering from the heat. Similar blue flames roared at other tables and the noise from the men sitting around them was deafening. He sipped the hot tea which had been set before him and longed for a cold beer. A young waitress who had joined them at the table busied herself with chopsticks, picking morsels of raw meat, chicken and fish off a plate and dropping them into the seething soup. When they were cooked she fished them out and dropped them now into the Major’s bowl, now into Mr Wu’s. The Major, anxious to be polite, struggled to maintain a conversation on fire-fighting of which it was all he could do to make out his own words, let alone those of Mr Wu.
The noise from the other tables continued to grow in volume. The Major was astonished; he was accustomed to think of the Chinese as quiet and well-behaved but these Chinese were shouting their heads off. Mr Wu himself appeared not to notice his fellow-diners until the Major drew his attention to them. He had to shout to make himself heard … Who were these young men at the other tables?
‘National anti-enemy society of ah Kuomintang!’ shouted Mr Wu. ‘They drink ah whisky for defeating ah enemy!’ And he roared with laughter while the Major had a look. Mr Wu was quite right: each young Chinese had a half-bottle of whisky planted on the table in front of him and from time to time he took a swig from it to moisten his gullet before resuming his shouting.
The evening pursued its course. The heat and the noise grew steadily more acute. This, the Major decided, his brain reeling, could only be a local chapter meeting of the Youth Blood and Iron Traitor-Exterminating Corps. He could not help but make a dubious comparison between these wild and vociferous young men and the disciplined Japanese officers he had met. What chance would they have? Why, none at all. Their eyes bulged, their faces grew red, though not as red as the Major’s, and the veins stood out on their temples. Many of them wore string singlets over their stomachs and as they got drunker they lifted them to cool their navels. Presently, tired of shouting their lungs out at each other they gathered round the Major and Mr Wu instead and shouted their lungs out at them.
Meanwhile, unconcerned, Mr Wu, continued to pick delicately with his chopsticks in the bubbling soup, searching for choice fragments of squid and sea-slug to drop in the Major’s bowl. Only when he had finished this search did he notice the Major’s harassed expression. Then he tried to explain something but the Major, deafened, could not hear. Mr Wu turned to the shouting young men and with a barely perceptible frown murmured something under his breath. Instantly, the young men stopped shouting and fell back, watching the remainder of the meal in eerie silence from their own tables.
‘They make you member society,’ explained Mr Wu genially. ‘Society call ah Prum Brossom Fists Society.’
‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed the Major, touched. ‘Please thank them on my behalf. He wondered why the name of the society should stir some distant recollection in his mind. It was only later that it came back to him. Was it not something to do with the Boxer Rising in 1900? Surely one of the factions pledged to drive foreigners out of China had been called the Plum Blossom Fists Society? He was almost certain. He must remember to ask Mr Wu.
35
‘My dear Herringport, nothing could give me greater pleasure now that your country has entered the War than to accede to your request.’ Thus it was that Brooke-Popham, ambushed by Ehrendorf as he was leaving a conference, gave him the opportunity to satisfy his most pressing need: to leave the city in which Joan lived without delay. Brooke-Popham had spoken in what was, for that kindly gentleman, a somewhat surly tone: he was tired of being ambushed by people; he was tired of conferences, too; he was tired of the War, even, although it had only just begun. In a few days from now, however, someone else would be stepping into his shoes as Commander-in-Chief and he would be able to return to Britain. Not a moment too soon, as far as he was concerned.
Noticing that Ehrendorf was looking somewhat taken aback by the brusqueness of his tone, Brooke-Popham relented and placing a friendly hand on the young man’s shoulder he walked with him a few paces down the corridor for, after all, this was the charming young Herringport, not one of the aggressive blighters on the War Council.
‘What would you suggest, Jack?’ he said over his shoulder. ‘This young man wants a closer view of the action.’
‘I should think a spell on Heath’s staff in KL would be the place for a ringside seat,’ came the amiable reply.
‘Good idea! Clear it with Percival and Heath, will you? I take it,’ he went on, this time to Ehrendorf, ‘that your own chaps have no objection. After all, now that we’ve got allies we don’t want to get off on the wrong footing with them, do we?’ And the Commander-in-Chief strolled on, still with a paternal hand on Ehrendorf’s shoulder but with a wary eye open lest one of the Resident Minister’s minions should choose this moment to pounce on him. ‘By the way, Jack,’ he said over his shoulder again. ‘Have you come across a fellow called Simson? No? Obsessed with tank-traps. Says Japanese tanks could be through Malaya like Carter’s Little Liver Pills and we’d have no way of stopping ’m. Still, one never knows, he could be right. One must be fair, after all. What d’you think? All I can say is, thank heaven that’s Percival’s pidgin! Nothing to do with me. Quite a presentable looking fellow, actually. Says he’s an Engineer. No reason to doubt it, of course …’
Seeing that the Commander-in-Chief’s attention had moved on to another problem, Ehrendorf seized the opportunity to escape, though not before having made swift arrangements with another member of Brooke-Popham’s train for the necessary documents. Then he hastened out to where his car was waiting … but on the way, something rather curious happened. He had been aware for some days of a growing strain running in a line down the centre of his body. This strain, since his last meeting with Joan, had become steadily stronger. Suddenly now on his way to the staff-car (it was most unexpected) he split into two Ehrendorfs. While one Ehrendorf gave brisk instructions to the driver, who seemed not to have noticed anything unusual, the other took his seat in the back, shaking his head sadly, as if to say: ‘It doesn’t matter in the least where you tell him to drive you, because one place is exactly like another.’ And while the first Ehrendorf, ignoring this, tried to decide whether to send a last ‘final letter’ to Joan (there had already been one or two), perhaps mentioning that he was ‘off to the Front’ (a slight exaggeration since the HQ of 111 Indian Corps, where he was going, though the centre of operational command for northern Malaya, was actually situated in reasonable comfort and security in Kuala Lumpur, but never mind) and wishing her well for the future with Matthew or the guy with the stammer, the second Ehrendorf continued to watch him with detachment and contempt, as if to suggest that the writing of such a letter was quite as useless as any other course of action he could take and a sign of weakness into the bargain, the aping of noble sentiments which he did not feel in the least.
Passing across Anderson Bridge the car’s progress was slowed by a convoy of armoured troop-carriers; glancing down at the river, Ehrendorf saw the cluster of sampans and tongkangs riding the slime: here entire families of Chinese were fated to spend their lives. For a moment the misery of this waterborne population caused the two Ehrendorfs to merge into one again. But they separated once more on the other side of the bridge. One can hardly be expected constantly, day in and day out, to measure one’s own slender but personal misery against the collective misery of the world! That is asking too much. And about that letter, would it really be self-pitying to send Joan a note wishing her future happiness with Kate’s Human Bean, who was also his own best friend, after all? Yet the truth was (was it not?) that under the guise of these silken good wishes he would really have liked to send Joan a rasping sarcasm. Admit it! Thus brooded the two Ehrendorfs sitting in the back of the car.
When he had returned to his apartment in Market Street, he packed his kit and left it by the door; then he wandered aimlessly from sitting-room to bedroom and back again, now and again picking up a small object (a bottle of ink, a comb, a cotton reel of khaki thread), inspecting it and putting it down again. He stared for a long time at a section of the wall by the window where the whitewash, thickly applied, had begun to flake away: he examined it with great attention as if for some hidden significance, but at length, with a shrug of his shoulders he moved away, unable to make anything of it. He paused to look down into Market Street for a moment. Normally this was one of his favourite occupations: he loved the smell of cummin, cinnamon and allspice which drifted up to his window when sacks and kegs of spices were being unloaded at the spice merchant’s below. On the other side of the street were the money-lenders’ shops: there Chettyars in white cheesecloth dhotis dozed over their accounts in dim interiors, lounging or squatting on polished wooden platforms while they waited for business, or poring over ledgers at ankle-high desks whose wood was as dark and gleaming as their own skins. They reminded Ehrendorf of somnolent alligators waiting until chance should bring them a meal on the current of passers-by flowing down the street. He smiled at the thought but the street, too, had grown oppressive and he moved on, this time picking up a snapshot of himself and his brothers and sisters. On an impulse he put it in an envelope and scribbled Matthew’s name and address on it: he explored his mind for some friendly comment he might write on the back of it but could find nothing, his mind was perfectly empty. In the end, unable to think of anything suitable, he simply sealed it, stuck a stamp on it and put it in his pocket. ‘What time is it?’ he asked himself aloud. An overwhelming desire to sleep came over him, although he had slept soundly all night and most of the preceding afternoon. ‘This won’t do at all. If I leave now I could catch an early train and be in KL by …’ Instead he picked up a newspaper and began to read an article on the developing friendship between Chinese and Indian ARP wardens. ‘Perhaps I should eat something?’
‘… This little incident is typical of the comradeship now to be found every day of the week in the streets of our city among Asiatic and European volunteers in the “Passive Defence” services …’ What little incident? Ehrendorf, though he began doggedly to read the article again, was unable to find ‘the little incident’. He even counted the pages of the newspaper; he must have lost a page somewhere. But no, it was all there. He threw it aside. What did it matter? Should he go to sleep again or should he go to the railway station? He went into the kitchen and opened his refrigerator: it contained eggs, milk, a lettuce, some corned beef on a saucer (frozen on to it), a boiled potato that for some reason had turned a dark grey colour, some beetroot and the manuscript of a novel he was writing about a gifted young American from Kansas City who goes to Oxford on a scholarship and there, having fallen in love with an English girl who surrounds herself with cynical, sophisticated people, goes to the dogs, forgetting the sincere, warm-hearted American girl whose virginity he had made away with while crossing the Atlantic on a Cunard liner … et cetera … ‘How could I write such rubbish?’ Still, he could not quite bring himself to tear it up … (‘All I need now is the sincere, warm-hearted American girl.’) He left the novel where it was but transferred the food to the table, having fried the eggs and the grey boiled potato.
Then he began to eat. He still did not feel in the least hungry but his Calvinist conscience would not allow him to leave the food to spoil while he was away from Singapore. It would have been a better idea, he realized, to give it to some hungry Singaporean but he was unable, in his present frame of mind, to face the problem of finding and communicating with a suitable recipient. He ate his way remorselessly through the food on the table, trying to make himself belch from time to time to lessen the strain. When he had finished he obliged himself, as an extra penance, to eat his way through a wedge of cake he discovered in a biscuit tin. As he ate, taking frequent swigs of milk to reduce the cake to a gruel he could swallow, he mused on the natural tendency, observable in human affairs, for things to go wrong, a law which in his blind optimism he had not perceived until this moment. Since nobody else appeared to have given it much thought, either, he felt justified in christening this discovery: Ehrendorf’s Second Law. It asserted: ‘In human affairs things tend inevitably to go wrong.’ Or to put it another way: ‘The human situation, in general or in particular, is slightly worse (ignoring an occasional hiccup in the graph) at any given moment than at any preceding moment.’ This notion caused him to smile for a moment: he must pass it on to Matthew. The reflection which caused him to wince immediately after having smiled (namely, that as Matthew was a rival he had most likely lost not only Joan but his best friend into the bargain), he saw merely as a demonstration of the universal application to Ehrendorf’s Second Law.
Ehrendorf, having overcome with great difficulty a desire to retire to bed and sleep for several more hours, finally persuaded himself to take the evening train to Kuala Lumpur: it was Thursday, II December. By the time he set out he was already very tired; he also felt bloated and ill from the unwanted food he had consumed. The cavernous Railway Station in Keppel Road was already thronged with bored, weary or resigned-looking troops: British, Australian, Indian and Ghurka; their kit and rifles lay piled haphazardly; men shouted orders but without apparently diminishing the chaos, causing Ehrendorf, who for some weeks had been contemplating the conversion of his novel into an epic of Tolstoyan dimensions, to wonder whether war was of interest to anyone but the commanders who were conducting it. Was it not, for the troops themselves, a matter of standing around for hours on end speechless with boredom, perhaps with now and then a moment of terror?
The train, when he succeeded in finding it, was already crammed with troops. He forced his way into a first-class compartment with a number of British officers who eyed him with hostility; one of them reluctantly removed his kit from a seat by the window, the only place unoccupied. It was extremely hot in the compartment and the atmosphere of ill-will among its occupants showed no sign of dissipating, nor the train any sign of moving out of the station. The insignia of the Federated Malay States Railway, palm-trees and a lion, had been engraved on the window beside Ehrendorf: he gazed at it, thinking of the vanished comfort and security of earlier days in Malaya, and found it beautiful. At last the train began to move; they crept out of the station, passing the General Hospital and the old Lunatic Asylum on their right and then curved away across the island towards the Causeway. Almost immediately the redtiled roofs of Singapore gave way to jungle, so astonishingly dense that one might not have known that a great city lay just on the other side of it a few hundred yards away; after the jungle, mangrove swamps, a wretched Malay village scattered with rusting tin cans, a banana grove, a rubber smallholding or two, a few frail-looking papaya trees, then more jungle and mangrove until they reached the Causeway and the flashing water on either side.
Once out of the dilapidated streets of Johore Bahru the jungle returned, a solid green wall in which it was hard to distinguish individual leaves and fronds; Ehrendorf had the impression of travelling through an interminable dark green corridor. Presently, it grew dark and began to rain heavily, making it necessary to shut the windows. The heat quickly grew intolerable. The only illumination was a single light-bulb painted blue in deference to the black-out: in the faint glow that it cast it was barely possible to make out the faces of the other men in the compartment. Time passed. The rain stopped and it was possible to open the windows again. When, for no apparent reason, they halted, Ehrendorf could smell the steam from the locomotive which hung in the saturated air and refused to dissipate.
They crept forward again, then stopped. A man ran back along the train blowing a whistle and shouting ‘Air-raid!’ his feet crunching noisily on the cinders as he passed. One of the officers switched off the blue light and the others groped for their helmets. Nothing happened; they sat in silence, waiting. The night sounds of the jungle rose in volume around them, eerie and frightening. Something, perhaps a moth, brushed against Ehrendorf’s face in the darkness and he flailed at it in sudden horror. Still nothing happened. Feeling drowsy he leaned his head against the side of the coach, his helmet tilted to form a comfortable support. After a wait that seemed interminable the train began cautiously to advance once more.
Ehrendorf slept now, shaken this way and that by the motion of the train. A smell of tobacco, remembered from his childhood, flirted with his scarcely conscious mind, a smell not of burning tobacco but of the empty cigarette tins his father used to give him. In his dream he thought: ‘How close we are to things when we smell them!’ Then his restless mind meandered away in a long, meaningless series of half-thoughts about Joan. He saw her walking ahead of him in a blue cotton dress, flaring and fading rhythmically in time with the motion of the train. ‘It would never have worked in any case. We had nothing in common.’
The train had stopped, evidently in some small station, perhaps Segamat or Gemas. There were no lights on the platform so it was impossible to make out. There was a storm grumbling nearby: lightning flickered over the surrounding tree tops. He wondered what time it was. A flash of lightning illuminated the compartment for an instant and he saw his travelling companions; they were still silent but no longer sitting erect: now they slumped as if mysteriously gassed. Another train travelling in the opposite direction had stopped beside their own. One of them began to move: at first he thought it was the one he was in but it proved to be the other: a brief, sickening impression of immobility took hold of him as he realized. One darkened compartment after another slipped past. And then, surprisingly, a compartment which by comparison with the rest seemed brightly lit. Ehrendorf, still drugged with sleep, glimpsed a little cluster of illuminated brigadiers poring over a map which they had spread on a table between them. He sat up quickly, but the other train had already vanished into the darkness.
‘Wasn’t that General Heath in the middle?’ he asked the man opposite him, but there was no reply. Heath was in command of 111 Corps. After all, he mused, things might not be going too badly if Heath was paying a visit to Singapore.
36
Dupigny had spent the past two days very pleasantly in George Town, the only town of consequence on the island of Penang. He had come here partly because he felt he needed a change from Singapore, partly in the hope of borrowing some money from a French acquaintance. Although, as it had transpired, he had not succeeded in borrowing the money, in all other respects his visit to Penang had turned out well. He had managed, despite his threadbare clothing, to persuade the management of the Eastern and Oriental Hotel that Monsieur Ballereau, the French Consul in Singapore whom Dupigny considered, for no particular reason, his sworn enemy, would redeem all his bills and chits … a decidedly satisfactory state of affairs, given the excellence of the hotel’s cuisine. Now the problem which was exercising him as he strolled along the esplanade giving himself an appetite for a substantial lunch in prospect, was this: would his residence at the E and O be a sufficient sign of affluence for him to buy new clothes at a superior outfitter’s on credit? In normal times a European would have expected to be given credit in any case without difficulty, merely signing a chit to be redeemed in due course. But of late things had been growing more difficult. Dupigny had already been rebuffed more than once in his efforts to fit himself out in a suitable manner.
This was a thorny problem but he did not intend to let it spoil his stroll. This promenade, he considered, had something of the atmosphere of a seaside resort in Normandy … Deauville, say, or Cabourg. Here, on one rounded elbow of the island, the town hall and municipal offices presided in peaceful dignity over a stretch of open ground giving on to the ruined earthworks of Fort Cornwallis. In Deauville, of course, there would have been a bracing smell of the sea and the Tricolour would have been galloping on a flag-staff; here there was a flag-staff, certainly, but the Union Jack hung limp from it in the humid heat. No, it was not bracing here, far from it, but by half closing your eyes and very vigorously exercising your imagination you might, for a moment or two, think yourself in a tropical Balbec on your way to meet some darkskinned little Albertine.
George Town, he was thinking, as he followed the elbow of the coast road where it turned sharply to head back south-west along Weld Quay towards the ferry, though not the most exciting place in the world, was certainly one of the most peaceful, even with the war so close. Yes, it even seemed peaceful this morning when Weld Quay was thronged with Chinese and Indians, come to watch the Japanese bombers attacking Butterworth across the water as they had on the previous day. Undoubtedly there had not been such excitement in Penang, apart from some race riots between Chinese and Indians, in the hundred years since the government of the Straits Settlements had passed to Singapore … But Dupigny hardly had time to finish this thought: the next moment he looked out to sea, looked again, hesitated, then began to run.
It is unusual to see someone running in the tropics; now and then Europeans, in defiance of the heat, may be seen playing football, cricket or some other sport, but not running the way Dupigny was (as if his life depended upon it, as perhaps it did). People turned to stare at him as he raced back the way he had come towards the ruined walls and grassy banks of Fort Cornwallis. At first he shouted at them, but they paid no attention to him; he decided immediately it was useless, a waste of breath, so he ran on in silence, passing a Chinese ARP warden who realized immediately why he was running and started shouting wildly at a little group of Indians nearby, trying to marshal them in one direction or another. Although he tried to point in the direction of what was approaching from the mainland as he ran, it made no difference: one or two of the strollers even grinned at each other at the sight of a middleaged European running for all he was worth in the steaming midday heat. Now Dupigny paid no attention to them, hardly even saw them. He ran and ran and, wiry though he was, the sweat poured off his face and neck.
Here and there the crowds were so dense that there was hardly room to move, but Dupigny shoved people rudely aside in his determination to get where he was going, too breathless to apologize, though again he tried to point across the water. One or two of those he shoved aside shouted angrily after him; nobody cares to be barged into the gutter while taking a stroll. An elderly English gentleman shook a walking-stick after him: this was the sort of ill-mannered fellow one found coming out East in recent years: not enough breeding to wrap in a postage stamp! But still Dupigny ran and ran for his life. There was an expression of fierce concentration on his face as he ran, looking neither right nor left, head down, elbows working. The sole of one of his shoes, which he had been obliged by poverty to wear ever since leaving Saigon and which he had been nursing anxiously for some weeks, now detached itself and began to flap ridiculously. But he did not even stop to attend to this, merely kicked the shoe off as he was running because already, above the thudding of his own pulse in his ears, he could hear the drone of the approaching bombers.
As he drew near the corner of Light Street where the seafront turned towards the fort and the esplanade, the crowds became thinner and several people were looking up at the sky, their attention drawn by the steadily increasing sound of motors. One or two of them, concerned as much to see Dupigny running as by the thought that these approaching aeroplanes might be a source of danger quickened their pace, but with the air of people who do not want to be thought ridiculous. Dupigny ran on with open mouth and staring eyes, for now it seemed to him that he was running in a dream and in semi-darkness through which there penetrated, wriggling into his consciousness like little silver worms, the sound of ARP whistles, followed by the undulating wail of the siren from the roof of the police station.
He was no more than sixty yards from the protection of the green banks of earth by the fort but moving in slow motion. He ran and ran but the fort seemed to come no closer; the muscles of his thighs no longer obeyed him. Half-way across the intervening open space he stumbled and fell on the gravel. He could no longer hear the engines but looking up at last he saw that one of the bombers flying very low was almost on top of him and appeared to be hovering over him like a bird of prey, blotting out the sun. Getting to his feet he staggered forward again in desperation and finding himself on the edge of a grassy bank of earth he hurled himself over it and tumbled head over heels down and down into the shady depths of a gully full of sand and stones. And as he did so he was followed by a great tidal wave of sound that swept over his head and tore savagely at the flag hanging limply from the flag-staff a few yards away.
He lay there quaking for some moments with his head in his hands, flinching as one aeroplane after another roared overhead, each one followed by a series of resonant explosions which shook the ground and created a miniature landslide of pebbles a few inches in front of his nose. Simultaneously with the explosions there came what might have been the pattering of fingernails on a metal table, very thin and trivial compared with the violent beating of big drums and the grinding of masonry. Machine-guns!
Again and again he heard the crump of falling bombs. Some of them fell very close, and with each bomb there was the same dreadful shudder of the earth and a trickle of gravel by his face. A spider, horribly agile, galloped away in a panic. When he looked up he could see that the godowns along Swettenham and Victoria Piers were blazing briskly and beyond, on the peaceful and shining waters towards the mainland, smoke was rising from several of the anchored vessels, swelling from slender trunks into canopies that hung over them, giving them the appearance of monstrous elms.
For some minutes, while he recovered a little from the effort he had made, he lay where he was, thinking of nothing; then he climbed unsteadily out of his refuge. Without considering where he was going, though perhaps with some dazed notion that he might escape from this catastrophe by taking the electric tram which ran from the railway jetty along the Dato Kramat Road to Ayer Itam Village, he began to wander back the way he had come. But, of course, such an escape was out of the question: even if there had been anyone left to drive a tram the tracks were cratered and the overhead wires lay tangled on the ground amid the rubble of masonry.
Despite the crackle of burning buildings and the shouts and screams of those who had been injured, to Dupigny it suddenly seemed very quiet as he retraced his steps towards the Railway Jetty. It seemed that it was only a moment earlier that he had been running in the opposite direction; yet of the crowds through which he had had to force his way there was no sign: they had melted away mysteriously leaving only, dotted on the pavement here and there, bundles of clothes: from many of these bundles, however, blood was flowing.
One of the bundles was of pure white muslin and from it there issued such a lake of blood that Dupigny found himself marvelling that the human body could contain that quantity. He was obliged to make a considerable detour to avoid splashing through it, which, considering that he had lost one shoe, he believed he might find disagreeable. But even the sight of the blood nauseated him and he was obliged to shift his gaze to something more comforting: in the event this was the smoke pouring prettily out of the window of a burning building across the street.
He took a closer look. This time he noticed that the smoke did not have a long slender trunk and a canopy like an elm, as with the ships burning in the anchorage, but a short, fat stalk like a cauliflower. And also like a cauliflower this smoke seemed quite green below, billowing out into white flowerets above. Someone was shouting at him from the window.
No. There was someone at the window but she was dead, hanging out of it with gracefully trailing arms in the manner of someone in a rowing-boat idly trailing fingers in the water. At the same time there was someone shouting at him from the road: a short, fat man with no neck: his red, flustered face appeared to be set directly on his shoulders, his arms emerging from just below his ears.
‘Come on, now, I want you to take care of me,’ he was shouting. ‘You’ll have to shift things so that I can drive my car. Come on. Yes, you. You’re the only person here so you’ll have to do.’ He was standing beside a little Ford without a windscreen. As Dupigny made no move he added pleadingly: ‘There’s a good fellow. You aren’t going to leave me in the lurch, are you? Those bloody bombers may come back any minute.’
‘Very well,’ said Dupigny and having brushed the glass from the front seat he got in beside the fat man, who said: ‘No, no. You must crank!’ and produced a starting-handle which he handed to Dupigny. Dupigny got out again and with much difficulty found the hole in which to insert the end of the starting-handle. ‘Ready?’ But he could barely see the man in the driving-seat for the smoke which was drifting around them from the burning building nearby.
The motor fired immediately and Dupigny got back into the car. As he did so he noticed that a picture advertising a round tin of Capstan cigarettes had been painted on the side of the vehicle. ‘Do you have a cigarette, please?’ he asked, but there was no reply. They set off jerkily down the road following the tram-lines, weaving in and out between craters, bodies and rubble … in places, because of the drifting smoke, it was impossible to see what lay ahead. The fat man drove, muttering to himself and tears cascaded down his plump cheeks, but whether they were caused by grief, alarm or simply the smoke it was impossible to say. Now their way was blocked by a mess of twisted girders and high-tension wires. The fat man peered ahead uncertainly.
‘Drive up on the pavement.’
‘But that is against the law,’ said the fat man unhappily. ‘We must go back.’
‘Drive on the pavement,’ repeated Dupigny harshly, ‘or we’ll never get out of this place. Go forward. I see where you can cross the storm-drain.’
They drove on, managing with inches to spare to find a way through. Looking to his right Dupigny searched for some sign of life from the fire station in Chulia Street but all he could see was the unbroken curtain of smoke: perhaps the station itself had been hit. Turning inland to follow Maxwell Road they saw that a hysterical crowd had gathered around the dead and wounded in the market, which itself was a shambles in which carcasses of animals and humans had become indistinguishable.
‘We’ll never get through there,’ whimpered the fat man. ‘They’ll kill us like dogs.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Drive up Magazine Road instead. It looks more clear.’
At a junction with another road they crossed over the tramlines again. Here there was not so much damage and the overhead cables had not been brought down. Macalister Road was crowded with excited people but otherwise the way was clear. Presently they turned north, then west on to Burmah Road. Now they found themselves in almost deserted countryside. ‘Where are we going?’ Dupigny wondered.
Suddenly the fat man stamped on the brake pedal and the car drifted sideways, locked tyres screaming, until it came to a halt by some sugar cane. Dupigny could see no reason for stopping. The road ahead was empty. But the fat man had bounded out of the car and with his little arms working vigorously on his rotund body he scurried across the road and plunged into the sugar cane. The foliage swallowed him immediately and he gave no further sign of life.
‘Ah!’ Dupigny now saw why he had taken to his heels. A two-engined Mitsubishi bomber had crept into view following the coastline in a westerly direction but already beginning to turn inland towards the stalled motor-car where Dupigny was sitting. It was flying very slowly and very low. He could see every detail of it. Its wing dipped and it began to turn on a wide curve that would bring it back over George Town and the shipping once more. Dupigny sat there too tired to move and watched the nose of the aeroplane coming towards him, looking, he thought, like the cruel head of a pike. For a moment he could see the four bomb-doors under the belly of the plane and one wheel, half tucked into its undercarriage like an acorn in its cup. Now its camouflaged surface was hard to follow against the dark green flank of Penang Hill but then, as it banked more steeply, the underneath of the plane was eclipsed and the sunlight flared first on one facet of the glass cockpit, then on another, to be picked up in turn by the machine-gun turret just above and behind the wing; as the glare died Dupigny saw the dark silhouette of the gunner’s head and of the gun itself with its barrel swivelling and he realized that the pilot was banking to give the gunner a view of the ground. Now he, too, felt like running for the sugar cane but he knew it was too late: he sat perfectly still, hoping that the gunner would think the car was abandoned. The bomber came curving nearer, only a few feet above the church and market at Pulau Tikus and the rooftops along Cantonment Road. Dust and gravel spurted from the road and seemed to hang there printed on his retina like a formation of stalagmites. A great roar of engines and a draught of wind rocked the car and then the plane had passed over, leaving him with a singing in his ears. Silence fell again. Nothing stirred. Dupigny continued to sit there where he was. In the glove compartment there was a tin of Capstan cigarettes and a box of matches. Dupigny lit one and waited. There was no sign of the fat man.
After he had finished the cigarette, he put the gear lever in neutral and got out the starting-handle again. When the motor was running he sounded the horn, waited for a while, then drove away, thinking that he might find some sheltered and isolated place to stay until the ‘all clear’ sounded. He was obliged to drive slowly because in the absence of a windscreen he could not see properly. Soon, however, he was on the coast road to Tanjong Bungah. Several civilian cars, an Army lorry and a bren-gun carrier passed him, driving quickly in the direction of George Town. He saw a sign then for the Swimming Club and turned off the road into some trees on the right, parking the car in the shade of one of them.
The Swimming Club’s doors and shutters were open but it seemed deserted except for a frightened looking Chinese at the bar. Dupigny ordered a beer and told the boy to serve it on the verandah. While he was waiting he paused to examine a couple of framed photographs on the wall. One of them, dating from about 1910 to judge by the clothes, showed the ladies and gentlemen of the Penang Swimming Club attending what was evidently an annual prize-giving. The ladies, wearing long dresses and broad-brimmed Edwardian hats swagged with silk and taffeta, sat demurely in the foreground beside a small table laden with silver cups and trophies. The gentlemen, meanwhile, were disposed in studied little groups here and there at the windows and on the verandah of the club-house, suggesting the crowd-scene of a musical comedy when the members of the chorus in the background talk to each other with animation, roar with laughter or slap their thighs with delight … but all in silence, while some other matter is being dealt with by the leading players in the foreground. ‘Ah, what a great deal can change even in a place like Penang in thirty years!’
The other photograph, from about the same period, also showed a group of ladies and gentlemen, assembled this time for a picnic, perhaps. The padre was there looking young and vigorous, a watch-chain visible against his black waistcoat and with a white sun-helmet on his head. The ladies were still sitting in the rickshaws that had brought them; but only one coolie had remained to appear in the picture and there he was, still gripping the shafts as if he had only just trundled his fair cargo up. The European standing beside the rickshaw had reached out a hand as the photograph was being taken and forced the coolie’s head down so that only his straw hat and not his face should be visible in the picture.
With a sigh Dupigny stretched out on a comfortable rattan chair on the verandah, musing on the confident assumption of superiority embodied in that hand forcing the coolie to hide his face. He himself had often seen Europeans in the East treating the Asiatics in that way in his earlier days but now it looked … well, slightly incongruous when seen with the modern eye of 1941. Imperceptibly ideas had been changing, the relative power of the races had been changing, and not only in the British colonies but in the French and Dutch as well. Even without Vichy it would have been attempting the impossible to continue governing Indo-China from Hanoi for very much longer. Both he and Catroux had been aware of it at the time without acknowledging it. Whatever happened with the Japanese the old colonial life in the East, the European’s hand on the coolie’s straw hat, was finished. The boy had brought his beer. He took the chit and, not without pleasure, signed it ‘Ballereau’. The Chinese boy had lingered on the verandah looking east to the vast canopy of smoke that hung over George Town.
37
‘In human affairs things tend inevitably to go wrong. Things are slightly worse at any given moment than at any preceding moment.’ This proposition, known as the Second Law, its discoverer now had the opportunity of seeing demonstrated on a remarkably generous scale. His vantage point for watching its operation was 111 Corps Headquarters in Kuala Lumpur where a strong smell of incipient disaster hung in the air, like the smoke that hangs in a theatre after the firing of a blank cartridge. Not only, he discovered, had a great deal gone wrong before his arrival but almost every message which now arrived in the Operations room signified that something else had just gone wrong, with the probability of more to follow.
Ehrendorf had arrived at 111 Corps Headquarters shortly after nine o’clock in the morning, very weary after his night in the train. His arrival coincided almost to the minute with a crucial development in the struggle for northern Malaya, for General Murray-Lyon, commander of the 11th Division which had been given the principal rôle in its defence, had just telephoned. Murray-Lyon had been trying to contact General Heath, to request permission to withdraw from the preordained defensive position he had occupied at Jitra. He was afraid that unless he did so the 11th Division might be destroyed. General Heath, however, could not be found: Ehrendorf had not been deceived when in the middle of the night he had seen that illuminated compartment with its little cluster of brightly lit officers around General Heath vanishing into the jungle darkness. Heath had gone to Singapore to confer with General Percival. Ehrendorf also learned on arrival that Japanese bombers had given Penang and Butterworth a pounding on the previous day. Since there were no ack-ack guns on the island it had been defenceless.
‘But what about the RAF at Butterworth?’
‘Partly damaged, partly withdrawn to Singapore,’ he was told.
Somewhat surprisingly in the circumstances Ehrendorf found that he was given a warm welcome by General Heath’s staff. During the lengthy period he had spent in Singapore he had become accustomed to being treated with reserve by the British staff officers he had come across in the course of his duties, even sometimes in recent months with veiled contempt. But now he was warmly shaken by the hand, found a billet and given some breakfast. It was a little time before he realized that this was probably because he was the first American officer to be seen in KL since America had entered the war. The welcome was symbolic. Perhaps, too, since the unfortunate start to the campaign in Malaya a feeling was beginning to take root that the power of the United States might well become necessary if the Japanese were to be contained and subdued in the Pacific. It had been the habit of British officers to scoff at the Japanese Army. Had they not been battling fruitlessly with a rabble of Chinese since 1937, unable to get the upper hand? The military engagements of the last three or four days, however, had revealed that the Japanese invaders were far from being the ineffectual enemy they had expected. Finally there was another, more human reason for the warmth of Ehrendorf’s welcome: he had arrived at a moment when General Heath’s staff was secretly heaving a collective sigh of relief.
For a moment, half an hour earlier, it had seemed possible that in the General’s absence they might themselves have to come to a decision on Murray-Lyon’s request to withdraw the 11th Division from Jitra to a new position behind the Kedah River. Only 111 Corps HQ had detailed knowledge, after all, of the grave way the situation had developed. But think of it! After a night without sleep (for in KL the lights had been burning, too, while men pored over maps) to be presented with such a dilemma! To be asked at a moment’s notice when a telephone rang to sanction the abandonment of a defensive position established months, even years, in advance … and that in favour of a position not yet prepared!
No wonder, mused Ehrendorf, enjoying toast and marmalade and a welcome cup of hot coffee, that this particular potato which Murray-Lyon had just raked out of the embers and presented to HQ 111 Corps, after some moments of frenzied juggling from one hand to another should be got rid of with relief into the less sensitive palms of Malaya Command. When Murray-Lyon’s request had been considered, however, and judgement passed on it by Percival and Heath in Singapore, their verdict being that the 11th Division should stand its ground and fight the battle at Jitra as planned, gloom descended on the staff once more, in time for lunch … for it had turned out that there was, after all, a drawback to passing this crucial decision on to Malaya Command, which was simply that Malaya Command had made the wrong choice. That much was clear, even to Ehrendorf who had studied the positions and managed by tea-time to get the hang of what was going on. And what he saw on the battlefield in his mind’s eye as he sat eating cherry cake and drinking tea, and even enjoying them in the rather bleak sort of way of someone who considers that he might as well be dead, was everywhere the Second Law triumphant.
But even in terms of the Second Law the tribulations of the 11th Division were to be wondered at, for they had spent two whole days (while Brooke-Popham inspected his thoughts) waiting at the Siamese border under a tropical downpour for the order to spring forward and give the Japs a sock on the jaw as they were trying to land at Singora. And when Brooke-Popham had at last decided not to push forward into Siam, after all, helped out of his dilemma by the fact that it was now too late, anyway, the Japanese in the meantime having completed their landing satisfactorily, the two brigades of 11th Division (there was another brigade waiting in the wings somewhere, Ehrendorf had not yet discovered where) had trudged back to find their prepared defences at Jitra flooded out and far from ‘prepared’ … for the key part they were supposed to play in defending Malaya from the main Japanese thrust across the border.
What this amounted to, he was thinking as he said, yes, he would like another cup of tea, thanks, to the saturnine and upper-class young captain at his elbow, was that the British had been caught half-way between one plan and another and were in imminent danger of not succeeding with either. But in the meantime the plot had been thickening ominously elsewhere, for the column of two battalions under Lieutenant-Colonel Moorehead which was supposed to dash forward into Siam and deny the Japanese the road through the mountains from Patani by capturing the only defensible position on it: the Ledge … had not managed to do so. The Japanese had got there first. What could one say about this except that it was a pity? It was worse than a pity, it was a catastrophe, for it meant that even if the 11th Division succeeded in baling out their flooded defences, repairing the barbed wire and putting down their signals equipment in time to meet the Japanese attack, they would still have to face the prospect of having their lines of communication with the rest of the British forces severed by a Japanese column coming along that road through the mountains.
The best that one could say of the situation, as Ehrendorf saw it, was that one catastrophe (unprepared defences at Jitra) more or less cancelled out the other catastrophe (failure to secure the road through the mountains) because, after all, you could only lose Jitra to the enemy once and it was immaterial whether you did so by unprepared defences, or loss of a road behind you, or most generously of all, by both at the same time. Although, mused Ehrendorf, if it were possible to lose Jitra twice, these guys would certainly stand a good chance of doing so. All the same, they were treating him very hospitably and someone in their outfit clearly knew how to make a good cup of tea.
To make matters just a little worse, the ‘prepared’ position at Jitra was even at the best of times a long way from being the ideal place to make a stand, scattered as it was over a front of a dozen miles or so on each side of the main road from the Siamese border. Probing attacks by Japanese infantry and tanks had already put to flight or partly destroyed two reserve battalions sent forward to delay them, thereby rendering the defences even more shallow than they had been to begin with. Ehrendorf, whose favourite bedside reading since boyhood had been military strategy and who considered himself an unrecognized military genius obliged to fritter away his talents on diplomatic and administrative matters, shook his head over the lack of reserves; there should have another battalion of the reserve brigade (the 28th) but it had been left behind to guard the airfields at Alor Star and Sungei Patani against a possible parachute attack. There was, therefore, nothing serious in the way of reserve which could be used for a counter-attack. During the night, while he had been dozing in the train, the Japanese advance guard had attacked twice, the first time straight down the road against the position held by the Leicesters, who had succeeded in driving them back, the second time to the east of the road where they had managed to find a slight opening between the Leicesters’ right flank and the Jats’ left, thus threatening them both. Attempts to dislodge them and restore the integrity of the line had so far failed.
The day was unbearably hot and sultry with intermittent downpours and thunderstorms. Ehrendorf, whose digestion had barely recovered from the strain of eating up the odds and ends of food from his refrigerator in Singapore but who was still obliged to rely heavily upon eating, both as a comfort to keep up his own leaden spirits and as a means of social contact with the staff officers of 111 Corps, by tea-time had begun to feel dangerously bloated once more. So presently, while news was circulating that the Japs had attacked again and driven yet further into the already dented line between the Leicesters and the Jats, he asked to be directed to the ‘bathroom’ so that he could ‘wash up’, a locution which caused some of his new comrades to titter vaguely while they considered this new instalment of bad news from the front. Once in the ‘bathroom’ he forced himself to throw up: this was a disagreeable sensation but he soon felt somewhat better and found that on his return he could manage another slice of cake and cup of tea.
Over supper, which began with rather dry ikan merah fried in butter with lemon, there was talk of a counter-attack, but also of straightening out the line by withdrawing the Leicesters to a position farther back along the Bata River. While drinking beer and eating a creamy chicken curry whose fire was somewhat moderated by the fresh grapefruit and papaya with which it was served, Ehrendorf discovered, by a heroic effort of concentration on what his fellow-diners were saying, that some of them believed it had been decided that the Leicesters and East Surreys were to counter-attack, while others believed that the identical units were to retreat. He tried to draw attention to these discrepant opinions but found it hard to get anyone’s attention and was rewarded only with one or two baffled, toothy grins and, when he persisted, signs of offence being taken. It was true that he himself had had one or two beers … ‘But what a gang of clowns, all the same!’ he thought in wonder.
In due course, as the evening advanced, the first signs began to appear that the confusion at 111 Corps HQ was mirrored among the troops at Jitra. It also became clear that if the 11th Division was having such difficulty containing the advance guard of the Japanese force they would have little prospect of resisting the main assault which was bound to come in a matter of hours. Between the pudding, which was prunes and custard, and the cheese, things continued to go wrong at a comfortable rate. News came that Penang, still defenceless to air attack, had been heavily bombed for the second day running and that the docks and much of George Town were on fire. There was also word that the force commanded by Moorehead, which had failed to reach the Ledge in time and which had instead retired to take up a defensive position at Kroh, had suffered considerable losses. Would it have any chance now of resisting a Japanese thrust through the mountains led by tanks?
On the heels of this bad news of Moorehead’s force came the word that Murray-Lyon had telephoned again for Heath’s permission to withdraw; once again he had been referred to Singapore. ‘This time,’ thought Ehrendorf, ‘either they agree or the entire 11th Division will be cashing in its chips.’ For some minutes the Brigadier at the end of the table, none too sober, had been eyeing Ehrendorf with a sardonic and petulant expression. This man, who was short of breath and getting on in years, had a distressing habit of moistening his toothbrush moustache with a long and pendulous lower lip, an idiosyncrasy which he repeated at regular intervals. Now, as if guessing Ehrendorf’s thoughts, he said in a loud and condescending tone: ‘Perhaps our Yankee visitor would give us the benefit of his appraisal of the situation based, I’ve no doubt, on long experience of warfare in this part of the world.’
‘I’m afraid, sir,’ replied Ehrendorf in a neutral tone, ‘that in such a complex matter …’ And he shrugged diffidently.
But the Brigadier was enjoying himself. ‘Come, come … No need to be bashful, Captain.’
And he stared at Ehrendorf sardonically while the other officers grew quiet waiting to see how he would deal with the situation. This was by no means the first time they had seen the Brigadier making sport of a newcomer. But Ehrendorf replied unruffled: ‘If you really want to know what I think, sir, it’s this … I think the 11th Division is in serious trouble if it stays where it is, that it should have been withdrawn from Jitra this morning by a competent commander in full possession of the facts, and that it must, at any rate, be withdrawn now before the main Jap attack and preferably behind a river wide enough to stop their tanks. Surely, sir, nobody is in any doubt about that?’ And he gazed with equanimity at the Brigadier.
Gradually, despite the temperature, the glistening brows and necks, and the sweat-darkened shirts of the officers sitting round the table, the atmosphere grew chilly in the room. It was felt that Ehrendorf, who had been not only tolerated but treated rather well during this long day of battle, which had been felt no less keenly at 111 Corps HQ than at Jitra two hundred and fifty miles away, had displayed ingratitude by this low assessment of their efforts. They waited for the reply which would put this brash, too-clever-by-half American in his place. They waited and watched and, in due course, the Brigadier’s lower lip climbed towards his nose and moistened his neatly-clipped moustache. Whether, given time, he would have made any other reply it was impossible to say, because at this moment news came that Malaya Command had authorized Murray-Lyon to disengage and withdraw behind the Kedah River. And most likely he would do so tonight under cover of darkness.
‘Thank God for that!’ said Ehrendorf, smiling bleakly at his companions. The battle of Jitra was over but at least the 11th Division had been saved. This might be a good time, if it were not raining, to take a stroll in the fresh air before the Second Law, eating away steadily like worm in the rafters, brought another section of the roof crashing down.
38
‘Cheong, what thing trouble?’
Even the Major, by no means the most observant of men, could not have failed to take note of the Chinese servant’s deep sighs and of the glances of despair he dispensed to right and left as he went about his duties. Moreover, Cheong was the last person to make a fuss unnecessarily. ‘Cheong, blong what thing trouble?’ the Major insisted.
‘My too much fear,’ said Cheong grimly. ‘Japanese just now catch Penang.’
‘Nonsense, Cheong,’ exclaimed the Major, relieved to hear that Cheong’s worries were of such a chimerical nature. ‘Japanese this fashion no can. This blong fool pidgin.’
But the servant did not seemed reassured. ‘S’pose Japanese catch Penang, tomollow maybe catch Singapore! Japanese pay Blitish too much lose face!’ And shaking his head sadly he marched off to the kitchen refusing all comfort.
‘Cheong has some story about Penang falling to the Japanese,’ the Major informed Matthew later in the morning. ‘I don’t know where he’s got it from. But once these absurd rumours start buzzing around one finds that even a sensible chap like him is believing them. Nothing could be worse for the morale of the Asiatics than this sort of thing. Besides, where would he have got the news even if it were true?’ the Major added a trifle uneasily. ‘There’s been nothing in the papers about the Japs being anywhere near Penang.’ Undoubtedly the whole thing was nonsense and the Major now regretted even mentioning it to Matthew who looked depressed enough already. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. For the past three or four days Matthew had been sitting listlessly at his desk, haggard, unwashed, unshaven, the very picture of despair. He no longer ate anything. He was growing thin. Even his appetite for the rubber business had disappeared. At first, when he had still been expecting a visit from Vera Chiang, life had seemed capable of striking one or two sparks of interest from the dull succession of hours. But as the days went by and there was no sign of her he had relapsed into apathy.
What did it matter? he wondered, scratching his itchy scalp. She was beautiful, certainly, but so what? Even the idea of being married to a beautiful woman like Miss Chiang which had once seemed to him a delightful and tempting fantasy had lost its appeal. Was there any point in possessing a beautiful woman all to oneself? The answer was: no, not really. For, after all, he reasoned, having the proprietorial rights over a woman that a husband has over his wife or that a lover has over his mistress does not actually get you any further forward! For, unless you are the sort of Mohammedan who keeps his wife heavily veiled, her beauty is scarcely less available to casual passers-by in the street than it is to you, whose job it is to foot the bill for her food, lodging and general maintenance. True, the husband or lover has the added gratification of a range of intimacies usually denied to the passer-by. But look here! The effect produced by a beautiful woman is visual … touching her does not bring you any closer to her beauty than touching the paint of a Botticelli brings you closer to the beauty of his painting. It might even be argued that the closer you get to this painting or this woman the less you are able to appreciate its or her beauty, or even what makes each different from others of its kind. In the most intimate position of all, with your eyeball, so to speak, resting against the paint itself you would be hard put to it to tell any difference at all between this one and another. What had happened in the case of beautiful women, Matthew reflected, was that lust and aesthetic pleasure had got hopelessly mixed up. As a result, men felt obliged to marry beautiful women when in many cases they would have been better advised to marry a plain woman with a pleasant disposition and acquire, perhaps, some compensatingly beautiful object such as a piece of T’ang porcelain.
Matthew tried to engage the Major in conversation on the nature of feminine beauty. Very likely the Major had had more practical experience in these matters than he had. But the Major was distraught and plainly found it hard to give his full attention to disentangling the lustful from the aesthetic. The Major did try to cheer Matthew up, though, explaining to him that depression was bound to follow such a fever, never failed to do so. Matthew, unshaven, had taken to sitting all day with his feet on his father’s desk, spinning the chamber of a revolver he had found in one of its drawers.
‘A young man like you should think of getting married, you know,’ said the Major who found the appearance of the revolver disquieting.
‘Well, you never got married yourself, did you, Major?’ asked Matthew accusingly.
‘Ouf, well, no, I suppose not,’ agreed the Major, taken aback by this frontal assault. ‘Just between you and me, though, there have been moments when I’ve rather regretted it, just now and then, you know. After all, when all’s said and done …’ The Major lapsed into silence and at the same time felt himself invaded by loneliness and despair, so that the muscles of his face which was still wearing a cheerful expression began to ache with the effort of holding the expression in place and, severely pruned though it was, the moustache on his upper lip felt as heavy as antlers. ‘Anyway,’ he said at last, ‘if you don’t want to get married I think it might be a good idea to mention it to the Blacketts in the not-too-distant future.’
Matthew could see that there was something in what the Major said. Monty had dropped in the previous afternoon, explaining that he had had to escape from his family whose conversation these days was limited to talk of wedding arrangements. Nor was it simply ‘bridesmaids and all that rubbish’; now, a prey to this new and, in Monty’s opinion, sickening obsession, his family really had ‘the bit between their teeth’ … There was endless talk of recipes for wedding-cakes, of patterns of wedding-dresses and of printers who would have to be consulted about suitable invitation cards. ‘They really have it in for you, old boy,’ Monty had warned him. ‘Mark my words!’
‘But I don’t think I even said I wanted to marry her,’ protested Matthew apathetically. ‘I mean, good gracious …’
It was true, he really must do something about it but just at the moment he felt he could not quite face having it out with the Blacketts. And, after all, why not get married? Matthew wondered, grimly scratching his itchy scalp with the barrel of the revolver. After all, it is what everybody does. He was thirty-three, no longer a young man, really. All his Oxford friends and contemporaries except Ehrendorf were long since married and many of them had swarms of children into the bargain. His life certainly had not amounted to much so far: he might as well settle for reproducing himself like everyone else … at least that would be something. For a while, during his early optimistic years in Geneva pacing the deck of the League of Nations, he had believed he was playing a part, minuscule certainly but worthwhile none the less, in steering that great ship towards a hopeful shore. But then, torpedoed by the Axis Powers one after another, the League had sunk leaving merely a patch of oil and a few spars. The fact was that since the League had gone down, Matthew had been in a muddle; he had found it hard to bring himself to abandon ship, sunk though it was.
But sooner or later one must face reality. One must lay a solid foundation for one’s life. The League had been like a pleasant collective fantasy of mankind, dreaming of a better life for itself the way a tramp asleep in a hedge might dream of living in a mansion. Yes, why should he not get married to Joan and begin to live a more practical sort of life? One must make up one’s mind in the long run. And Matthew sighed, dejectedly scratching his ear with the revolver and pulling the trigger as he did so. The click caused the Major to start violently. ‘I’ll go over and see the Blacketts later on,’ said Matthew in a more resolute tone, taking his feet off the desk, putting down the revolver and sitting up straight.
On his way to the Blacketts’ compound Matthew paused on its threshold in the green antechamber lit with rare tropical flowers. Here, on his way to propose marriage to Joan (a spurious proposal, if Monty was to be believed, since she appeared to think it had already been made), standing beside the African mallow and crêpe myrtle, cassia and rambutan, Matthew suddenly found himself captured like a bird in a net by the heavy perfumes that wavered invisibly over the dripping leaves and glistening flowers. And while he was still lingering there to sniff and marvel at the new sensations which were flooding into his mind, one, two, three butterflies, astonishingly beautiful and of a kind he had never seen before with pink and yellow on their wings and long, trailing tails like kites came fluttering around him, as if they had taken a liking to his freshly ironed linen suit and were considering settling on it. He watched them, filled with wonder, noticing how the beat of their wings, slower than that of European butterflies, made them rise and fall as if in slow motion, and swoop and glide almost like birds. And presently these three butterflies, which had finally decided to forsake the elegant suit in which Matthew was going to make his proposal for the scarlet flowers of the Indian coral tree, were joined by a fourth, even more beautiful and languorous in flight, and larger, too, with black and white embroidered wings which suggested the scribbles of the batik shirts he had seen the Malays wearing. This butterfly Matthew was tentatively able to identify, thanks to a manual the Major had lent him while he was convalescent, as a Common Tree Nymph.
To have a profound spiritual or sensual experience, he was thinking as he strode on into the corridor of white-flowered pili nut trees, one must rupture one’s old habits of feeling. That was it, exactly … and that was what he would be doing by marrying Joan. You have to burst through the skin of your old life which surrounds you the way a bladder of skin surrounds the meat and oatmeal of a haggis! He paused on the white colonnaded steps which led up to the Blacketts’ house, pleased to find himself in such a positive frame of mind at this important moment of his life. Then, straightening his shoulders, he plunged into the shade of the verandah in search of Joan.
Inside, however, he found himself unexpectedly baulked. Miss Blackett was not at home, though she was expected back shortly. Would Mr Webb wait for her in the drawing-room? Matthew surveyed the old Malay servant, Abdul, feeling some of his resolution draining away: the old man’s eyes, dim and watery with age, were expressionless. Matthew said he would wait and was shown into the drawing-room. It was cool in here and a great stillness prevailed. A patch of whiteness stirred on the white sofa and Matthew recognized a friend; Ming Toy, Kate’s Siamese cat was taking its afternoon nap in the coolest and quietest room it could find. Matthew went to sit down beside it, feeling in his pocket for a letter the Major had handed to him as he was on his way out. He opened it: it contained only a photograph. Matthew gazed at it, moved, for it was a photograph he remembered having seen once before, years ago, when he and Ehrendorf had been at Oxford together.
They had been taking an evening stroll by the Cherwell, he remembered, towards the end of their last summer term. It was one of those hushed, damp, rather chilly June evenings that seem to go on for ever before darkness falls. The knowledge that they would soon be coming to the end of this phase of their life, saying goodbye to friends and launching out into careers that were still barely imaginable, had cast an air of melancholy over them. There had been a smell of damp grass, perhaps the flutter of a water-hen in the thicket overhanging the river bank. Ehrendorf had been saying how he felt he had changed during the time he had spent in Europe, how difficult he believed he would find it returning to his home town in America. ‘Why don’t you stay here then?’ Matthew had asked. Ehrendorf had handed him the photograph then, saying with a smile: ‘My brothers and sisters. They’d never understand if I didn’t go back.’
Matthew was now studying the photograph again. It showed Ehrendorf looking younger, as he had looked at Oxford, but otherwise not much changed. He was tall, handsome, smiling as ever. The absence of a moustache made him look younger, too. He was standing in the middle of the picture looking directly into the lens of the camera: grouped around him was what looked like a brood of dwarfs and hunchbacks, all gazing up reverently at their brother with gargoyle faces.
Well! Matthew still remembered how surprised he had been by the contrast between Ehrendorf and his brothers and sisters: it was as if every virtue and physical grace had been concentrated in him to the detriment of his adoring siblings. And Ehrendorf adored them, too, that was the point … or why else would he have gone back to Kansas City (or wherever it was) when all his interests and the people who understood him were no longer there but in Europe? But in the end Kansas City had not quite managed to claim him … nor Europe either, come to that. Poor Ehrendorf! Thanks to the Rhodes scholarship that had taken him to Oxford the poor fellow had split in two like an amoeba! Half of him had now fetched up in Singapore and had made itself unhappy by falling in love with the English girl whom he, Matthew, was about to marry. Matthew sighed, wondering whether it might not be a better idea to put it off until another time. The last thing he wanted to do was to hurt Ehrendorf’s feelings.
While he was considering this he seized Ming Toy and dragged that furry creature nearer; he had been interrupted by Walter on a previous occasion while trying to find out what sex the cat belonged to: this would be a good opportunity to pursue his researches. Ming Toy lay there, still half asleep and unprotesting, while Matthew once again lifted his magnificent tail and inspected his copiously furred hindquarters for some sign of gender. Finding none he picked up a pencil and began to rummage about with it. Ming Toy began to purr.
‘Oh hello …’ Walter was standing in the door, giving Matthew a very odd look indeed
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Matthew, startled. He hurriedly dropped Ming Toy’s tail and shoved him aside, deciding it was probably best not to try to explain. ‘I was just waiting for Joan,’ he said, recovering quickly, ‘but perhaps I could have a word with you about this replanting business …’
‘I can only give you five minutes, I’m afraid. Come into my study.’
Matthew had not been in Walter’s study before and was somewhat surprised to find that the room had an unused air. Walter himself had the air of a stranger as he looked around: indeed, he seldom used this room, preferring the tranquillity of his dressing-room on the first floor. He was looking impatiently at his watch, so Matthew explained that he thought it was wrong for the rubber companies managed by Blackett and Webb to be replanting healthy trees. Mature trees produced rubber badly needed for the War Effort; replanting them with immature rubber which yielded nothing simply did not make sense.
‘Monty told you, did he, about the excess profits tax? You realize that we make the same “standard” profit whatever we do?’
Matthew nodded.
‘And that replanting expenses are allowable against tax? Yes. Well, I agree that if we were the only people in the rubber industry there would be something in what you say. But alas, we’re not. We have rivals and competitors, my dear boy! If we don’t replant now with this new high-yielding material, particularly now when there’s a clear financial advantage in doing so, while our competitors do replant, where shall we be when it reaches maturity? Not on Easy Street, I can tell you! Because we’ll find ourselves producing half as much rubber per acre as, say, Langfield and Bowser at the same cost, or perhaps even a higher cost. It simply won’t wash, I’m afraid. Now does that answer your objection?’
‘Well, not really, no, Walter,’ said Matthew becoming physically restless as he always did when excited but controlling himself as best he could. ‘Because I don’t deny the commercial advantage. How could I? I don’t know anything about these things. But this is a matter of principle. Your argument is the one that businessmen always use when asked to make some sacrifice in the public interest: “We would like to help but it’s out of the question if we are to remain competitive.” The business community in Rangoon said exactly the same thing years ago when asked to make some contribution to the welfare of the coolies who were in the most dreadful state of poverty and dying like flies. But no! Spending money to help those poor devils would have made us vulnerable, Blackett and Webb included … You see, I’ve been reading about our dealings in the rice trade in my father’s papers and frankly … Ah!’ he grunted as the cat, which had taken a liking to him and followed them into the study, suddenly sprang into his lap.
‘The fact that an argument is often used, by businessmen or anyone else,’ replied Walter calmly, ‘does not unfortunately mean that it is any the less true. Would that it were! As for using all our resources now, as you recommend, for the War Effort and finding ourselves as a nation without any means of support when the war is over, well, I doubt if that is a very good idea. A nation, Matthew, is roughly speaking as strong as it is wealthy. And it’s as wealthy as, again roughly speaking, its individual businesses are healthy. And they are healthy only as long as they are able to compete with the industries and firms of other nations in their line of business. If we follow your advice the big Dutch estates in Java and Sumatra (which, incidentally, got on to new clones before we did) will have put us out of business by 1946 or 1947 when their new stock matures.’ Walter beamed at Matthew who, for his part, found himself at a loss for words, partly because this was an arguement he had not yet considered, partly because Ming Toy was kneading his trousers in order to test out his (or possibly her) claws, evidently not realizing that Matthew’s sensitive skin lay just underneath. Walter got to his feet.
‘But wait, Walter …’ Matthew sprang up and the cat, which he had forgotten about, in turn had to spring for its life. Matthew hurried after Walter. ‘It’s madness! With the Japs in the north of the country we should be producing every scrap of rubber we can. Who knows but that in a few months they won’t have taken over a lot of the estates?’ Matthew clapped a hand to his brow as he tried to catch up with Walter. Wait, what was he doing arguing with Walter? He had planned to ask Joan to marry him and here he was instead, arguing with her father.
‘There’s no shipping, anyway,’ said Walter, scowling for the first time in their discussion. ‘The wharves are packed with rubber already that we have no way of shifting. Well, now I really must be going, old chap. Duty calls. You and Joan are getting along all right, are you?’ he called back over his shoulder as he hurried down the steps to where his car was waiting. ‘Come and have supper. Bring the Major, too. We don’t dress, as you know.’
‘Well, that was another thing I wanted to … about getting married and so on …’ cried Matthew. But Walter, with a final wave, had disappeared into the back of his Bentley and it had moved off.
39
Matthew sat down on the steps, rather disconsolately. Joan still had not returned. Perhaps this was just as well, for he was by no means sure that he was all that keen on marrying her, after all. It had certainly seemed a good idea earlier in the afternoon, though. Besides, he had gone to the trouble of shaving and putting on a new suit. ‘Perhaps she will refuse,’ he thought hopefully; that would settle the matter without his having to make a decision. (But no, there was no chance of her refusing.) He sighed, and for some reason felt as lonely and as unwanted as if she had refused him.
Meanwhile, four bright eyes were surveying him from behind a dazzling cascade of bougainvillaea. One pair belonged to Kate Blackett, the other to a friend of Kate’s called Melanie Langfield. This Melanie Langfield, who was of an age with Kate, belonged to the detested Langfield family and was, in fact, a grand-daughter of old Solomon Langfield, the mere thought of whom was enough to make the bristles on Walter’s spine puff up with loathing. The raid which the two girls had just performed on the larder had been partly foiled by the vigilance of Abdul, the major-domo. Before being discovered, however, they had each managed to get a spoonful of Kate’s ‘Radio Malt’ and Melanie had had the presence of mind to slip a jar of lemonade crystals into the pocket of her frock. Now she and Kate, hidden by the bougainvillaea, were alternately dipping moistened fingers into the jar and licking off the crystals that stuck to them, enjoying the tingling acid taste on their tongues.
What was a member of the hated Langfield family doing at the Blacketts’ house? Kate and Melanie, as it happened, had been sent to the same school in England and neither of them had any other friends of her own age in Singapore. Since neither of their respective sets of parents could be convinced that the other children who abounded in the colony were quite the social equals of their own daughter both families had found themselves in a dilemma. The result was that though the Langfields and the Blacketts did not for a moment cease to speak ill of each other or to detest each other any the less heartily, they did sometimes grudgingly agree to the smaller children playing together ‘unofficially’. This was fortunate because otherwise Kate and Melanie might have had to spend their childhood totally immured, as so many unhappy children do, behind their parents’ snobbery. Kate and Melanie would be allowed to be friends for as long as they could be thought of as ‘children’; in just such a way Monty and Joan had been allowed when small to play with little Langfields they would now scarcely acknowledge in the street even if the rickshaws they were travelling in happened to pull up alongside each other at a traffic light. Thanks to this fiction that a child did not exist or, at worst, like an immature wasp had not yet grown its sting, Walter could even, and often did, reach out a paternal hand to fondle Melanie’s charming blonde curls and without suffering any ill effects whatsoever. But if you had insisted on telling him that this was not a child but a Langfield he would certainly have sprung back in horror. He would have been as likely then to stroke the slimy head of a toad as little Melanie’s curls.
Melanie, as it happened, was a pale little creature who looked younger than Kate though they were the same age. But her pallor concealed a powerful personality and a restless inventor of schemes. As for obeying rules, at school she had more than once spat in the eye of authority (she had practised spitting in the garden in Singapore). Rules were made to be broken, in Melanie’s view. Yes, Langfield blood ran in her veins all right; if Walter could have read her school report he would have been in no doubt about that. But perhaps she had mellowed a little, had she not, in the course of the past few months as her body began the upsetting change from that of a child to that of a woman? Well, no, not really, no, she had not mellowed at all. All that had happened was that her preoccupations had begun to change, and Kate’s with them: both girls had become more curious about men. A few months earlier those four eyes observing Matthew would have passed over him without really noticing him, as over a potted plant or a chest of drawers. But now they remained on him attentively as he sat on the steps with his head in his hands.
‘Darling, whatever is the matter with the Human Bean?’
‘Darling, I haven’t the faintest.’
‘Haven’t you, darling? Let’s go and ask him.’
Matthew was quite glad to see the girls, though surprised that Kate, who usually called him ‘Matthew’ should call him ‘My dear darling Human Bean’. When she had introduced him to her dearest friend in the whole world, Melanie, he asked her to explain and she told him how Ehrendorf had called him a ‘wonderful human bean’. ‘Ah, poor Ehrendorf,’ he thought. ‘Where is he now, I wonder?’
While this was being settled Melanie’s eyes had been examining Matthew’s face in a way which was every bit as calculating as one might have expected even of a senior Langfield. And now she had a suggestion which to Kate seemed staggering in its audacity: the Human Bean should take them to the cinema! This was daring: neither girl was allowed to go to the cinema until she had forced her way through a veritable thicket of preconditions: an eternity of good behaviour was demanded, not to mention school reports which were favourable almost to the point of fawning … and, most thorny of all, a preliminary inspection of the film by an adult member of the family.
But if Melanie’s first suggestion was daring, her second was breathtaking in its temerity. For, fixing her bright, unblinking eyes on Matthew’s face like a lizard watching a moth, she added: ‘We want to go and see Robert Taylor in Waterloo Bridge.’ Kate grew very tense; she held her breath and her heart began to pound. She had difficulty in preventing herself from gasping at this. Waterloo Bridge was a picture for grown-ups. It would never have qualified as suitable in a million years! It spoke (so they had been told by Mrs Langfield’s Irish maid) of intimate and romantic relations between men and women. It was about all that sort of thing (for Kate ‘all that sort of thing’ was a churning vat of dark and still mysterious experience from beneath whose tap-tapping lid there issued an occasional whiff of intoxicating steam). She suddenly began to feel rather sick with excitement and dread. One moment it had been an ordinary, rather boring afternoon, the next she was walking along the edge of a dizzy precipice with the gravel crumbling from under her feet.
Matthew, meanwhile, was looking rather bemused, like someone who has just been roused from a heavy afternoon nap. He looked vaguely at his watch, shook his wrist and looked at it again. But it was working, after all.
‘Go on, be a sport,’ said Melanie. ‘We could go to the four o’clock show and be back for supper,’ she added persuasively.
‘No one would know,’ put in Kate, and received a vicious, warning pinch from Melanie: she would arouse the Bean’s suspicions by making stupid remarks like that.
Matthew was not all that keen, anyway. It was too hot to sit in a picture-house. ‘I really came over to see Joan, you know. There was something I wanted to ask her.’
‘She won’t be back for ages!’
‘Probably not before supper!’
‘Oh, won’t she?’ Matthew looked rather baffled and again consulted his watch. ‘Couldn’t we go another time? Say, the day after tomorrow, for example?’
‘But that’s Sunday!’ screamed Melanie. ‘Nobody goes to the pictures on Sunday. It’s simply not done!’
‘Oh, well then …’ Matthew hesitated. He really wanted to return to the Mayfair to ponder his conversation with Walter and perhaps discuss it with the Major. ‘You’re sure Joan won’t be back till supper?’
‘Of course we’re sure, you dumb-bell!’ shouted Melanie, beside herself with excitement and frustration. By now she had sized Matthew up and she could see that he needed a firm hand.
‘Wouldn’t you like instead just to go and eat ices at John Little’s?’
‘No we bloody well wouldn’t!’ declared Melanie emphatically: she had noticed Kate brightening at the idea, just like a little girl, and knew it must be scotched immediately.
Matthew scratched his head uncertainly and looked around. Then he again looked at his watch but that still offered no assistance. The girls stood there like coiled springs.
‘Well, in that case …’ he murmured and came to a stop again. Melanie rolled her eyes to heaven at these hesitations. ‘All right then,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll ask the Major if I can borrow his car.’
The girls gave a great whoop of delight.
‘But you must bring your gas-mask cases.’
‘Have we got to?’ They had been issued, by some stroke of bureaucratic insensitivity, with (of all things!) Mickey Mouse gas-masks! As if they were little kids! It was too, too shaming! They tried to explain this to Matthew. They would rather be gassed! But Matthew was adamant … No gas-masks, no pictures. The girls were so overwhelmed, however, by the startling success of Melanie’s boldness that in the end they were prepared to concede gas-masks. Curiously, as they dashed back into the house to get them they were holding hands tightly like two little children, having forgotten to be sophisticated in their excitement.
Accompanying Matthew back through the compound to the Mayfair, Kate and Melanie were inclined to be furtive at first. They were afraid of being spotted at the last moment by some interfering adult. But once they had plunged into the corridor of pili nut trees they considered themselves fairly safe, barring some coincidence. Mrs Blackett never ventured this far.
Unfortunately, while borrowing the keys of the Lagonda from the Major, Matthew could not resist mentioning the conversation he had just had with Walter about replanting. And the Major, who was also concerned about this matter, mentioned the interesting fact that two or three of the other small rubber companies manged by Blackett and Webb had attempted, in the interests of the War Effort, to stop this replanting in order to maintain the highest possible rate of tapping. But faced with Blackett and Webb’s orders to the contrary they had been unable to do anything about it. Matthew was astonished. ‘But that’s absurd, Major! How can they stop a company doing what it wants? They only manage it, don’t they? They don’t own it.’
So, while the minutes ticked away and the girls grew fretful, the Major explained. Blackett and Webb were responsible not only for the daily management (buying of equipment and supplies, selling of produce, tapping policy, hiring of labour and so on) but for the investment of profits as well. For some years now they had made it their policy to invest the profits of one company in the shares of the other companies for which they acted as agents. The result of this incestuous investment as far as the Mayfair, to give an example, was concerned, was that the Mayfair’s shares were concentrated in other companies controlled by Blackett and Webb, while the shares of each other company were held by the Mayfair and other Blackett companies. Thus, a revolt against Blackett and Webb’s tapping policy by the directors of any single company could be easily quelled by marshalling proxy votes from the others. The only way in which Blackett and Webb’s grip on the destinies of individual companies could be loosened would be by a simultaneous uprising, so to speak, of a majority of them acting in concert. But since the investment had taken place not only in rubber but in all sorts of other companies, shipping, trading, insurance and whatnot … such a simultaneous uprising was naturally out of the question. The beauty of this system from Blackett and Webb’s point of view was that they had not invested a penny in many of these companies and yet they lay as firmly in their grip as if they owned them lock, stock and barrel.
‘Oh, do let’s go!’ pleaded Kate. ‘We’ll miss the beginning.’
‘But good gracious! Can that be legal?’
‘Perfectly, it appears.’
‘Do get a move on. There’s no time for all this talk!’ Melanie seized the dazed Matthew by one arm and began to drag him physically towards the verandah door. But she was very slight and Matthew was very heavy: she only managed to drag him one or two reluctant paces.
‘Well I must say …’ Matthew might have gone on standing there until they had missed the newsreel had not the Major noticed the girls’ anxiety and said: ‘But I can see these young ladies don’t want me to waste any more of your time. What are you going to see, by the way?’
‘Oh, wait,’ said Matthew. ‘Something or other called …’
‘A picture with Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh,’ gabbled Melanie, interrupting him with the presence of mind for which Langfields were notorious in Singapore. ‘Now we must go!’
And go they did, at long last. Hardly had they turned out into the road than they passed Joan’s open Riley tourer just returning from the Cold Storage. Joan caught sight of them as they passed and the girls saw her head turn. But by that time they were away. Matthew, who managed to be both a cautious and a reckless driver at the same time, was peering with grim concentration through his dusty spectacles at the road ahead. He did not see her.
40
One hour, two hours passed. The sun dipped towards Sumatra in the west. Now Matthew was once more peering at the road ahead with a grim expression but this time the Lagonda was going along Orchard Road in the opposite direction, to drop Melanie at the Langfields’ elegant house on Nassim Road. It was cooler. The city was bathed in a gentle golden light which, for a little while before sunset, came as a reprieve from the dazzling hours of daylight. But still, Matthew had the dazed and vulnerable feeling, the slight taste of ashes, which he always experienced when he came out of a cinema into daylight. The girls sat crammed together beside him, for the Lagonda was only a two-seater, each busy with her own thoughts. As far as Kate was concerned these had a somewhat apprehensive cast. She was afraid there might be a row when she got home. She was also afraid that she might have got Matthew into trouble by taking advantage of his innocence.
For the most part, however, Kate’s thoughts were concerned with the film they had just seen. As they were coming out of the picture-house Melanie had whispered: ‘Isn’t he divine?’ Kate had nodded vehemently, but with closed lips. She was not certain whether Melanie meant Matthew or Robert Taylor and was afraid of agreeing to the wrong one. But after a moment Melanie added condescendingly: ‘She’s not bad … but I don’t think that sort of woman is really attractive, do you?’ This time Kate shook her head vehemently, still with set lips. Melanie could only mean Vivien Leigh, that much was settled at least. But whether or not that sort of woman was ‘really attractive’ was something that Kate had not even considered. Nor was she even sure how to begin to have an opinion. Melanie was simply amazing! While she herself had been struggling to understand what was happening in the story (which had suddenly grown puzzling with Vivien Leigh dressed in a beret, a sweater and high-heeled shoes hanging around Waterloo Station and saying hello to soldiers for no obvious reason), Melanie had clearly been coming to the conclusion that if Robert Taylor had had to choose between her and Vivien Leigh he would have chosen Melanie!
Kate was also afraid that Melanie had been rather rude to Matthew. For Matthew had grown restless once the old news-reel was over (he had been gratified to see a hundred thousand Italian prisoners being marched along in North Africa by one British Tommy). He had sat placidly enough through the beginning when Robert Taylor in uniform said to his driver: ‘To France … to Waterloo Station,’ and even through the air-raid on Waterloo Bridge when he bumped into Vivien Leigh with the sirens going and the wardens blowing whistles and said: ‘You little fool, are you tired of life?’ and she had said, as they were walking to the air-raid shelter: ‘Would it be too unmilitary if we were to run?’ and gave him a good luck charm to stop him being killed, which seemed to be made of Bakelite.
During all that part Matthew had not been too bad: he had only begun to fidget during the scenes when the strict sort of headmistress who ran the ballet was being beastly to Vivien Leigh who wanted to flirt with Robert Taylor who had not had to go to France after all, but then he had had to go before they had time to get married. Matthew had fidgeted worse and worse during the scene in the Candlelight Club with all the violins when they danced to the ‘Farewell Waltz’ which sounded very like ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and worse still during the scene where Vivien Leigh, who had been sacked from the ballet and had run out of money, read in the paper that he had been killed, while she was waiting in the Ritz to have tea with his mother, Lady Margaret, who turned up late and found her drunk.
‘Are you sure you want to stay for the rest?’ Matthew had asked suddenly in a loud voice at about the time when Vivien Leigh had started hanging around Waterloo Station saying things like ‘hello’ and ‘welcome home’ to soldiers. It was at that moment that Melanie had asked him to be quiet, she was trying to concentrate, and a man in the row in front had said shush. Kate had turned once or twice to look at Matthew after that. He had sunk very low in his seat with his shoulders to his ears: she could tell by the light from the screen that he was unhappy.
Meanwhile, Vivien Leigh was getting more and more unhappy, too, and spending more and more time with her beret and handbag and high heels saying hello to soldiers even though it did not seem to agree with her. There was something wrong, that was obvious, but what was it? Kate had no idea but could not bring herself to ask Melanie. And when Robert Taylor had suddenly appeared again at the station with some other soldiers she was about to say hello to, instead of looking pleased to see him she had looked quite upset and had said: ‘Oh Roy, you’re alive,’ and gone on acting in the same peculiar way. Even Robert Taylor did not seem to know what ailed her. He had taken her up to his castle in Scotland, and she had got on quite well this time with Lady Margaret and they were going to be married, but she still had moments of being peculiar and finally she had told Lady Margaret, who had become very understanding, that she had something to confess though without saying what it was. But Lady Margaret had seemed to guess (which was more than Kate could!) and said something like ‘Oh my poor child’ and then had seemed to agree that she should run away to London again which she did and then threw herself under a lorry on Waterloo Bridge and that was the end apart from some moping by Robert Taylor on Waterloo Bridge. Still, Kate, though she had not understood it, had found it a shattering experience. She only wished that Melanie had not been quite such a bully with Matthew. At the same time, in some strange way, a part of Kate did know what the film was about … the explanation, she knew, lay just below the surface of her mind, and when she uncovered it, it would seem perfectly familiar.
But now they had reached Melanie’s house on Nassim Road. Matthew would have driven up the drive and into this Langfield stronghold like some innocent wayfarer straying into a robber’s den, had not Kate had her wits about her and stopped him at the gate. Melanie gabbled a quick formula of thanks at Matthew, turned her bright, beady eyes on Kate for a moment and then bolted up the drive. Kate somehow knew that if their visit to the cinema were discovered Melanie would be ready with a story to divert all blame from herself to Matthew or to the Blackett family. But then, what could one expect of a Langfield? Even Kate was not too young to have learned that it made as much sense to reproach a Langfield for treacherous behaviour as it would to condemn a fox for killing a chicken.
Unexpectedly, Kate and Matthew became cheerful once they had dropped Melanie, and although it was almost supper-time they decided to buy mango ice-creams at the California Sandwich Shoppe to eat on the way home. As she sat in the Lagonda beside Matthew trying not to let the ice-cream drip on to her frock, a profound feeling of happiness stole over Kate. At first she thought it was because of the ice-cream, but even when she had finished the ice-cream it persisted. Besides, it was not just happiness, it was a feeling of relief to find herself alone with Matthew: she felt that she had no need to explain anything to him, that he understood her immediately and that somehow he even understood her without her having to say anything at all. This feeling of being understood, though it only lasted for the ten minutes or so it took them to return to the Mayfair, came as a shock and a revelation to Kate. It abruptly opened up all sorts of new possibilities, not just with the Human Bean, of course, though now she understood why Joan wanted to marry him, but of a much more general kind. It was as if she had suddenly realized what human beans are for! To understand each other without speaking, that was what they were for! … She felt she wanted to touch Matthew, but did not quite dare. As they reached the Mayfair she began to worry again about the row which might await her. How peaceful it was here beneath the green arching trees of Tanglin! She clutched her gas-mask case and hoped for the best.
The car had hardly come to a stop when they saw the Major signalling to them from the verandah. They could tell from his expression that something was wrong. Kate’s heart sank: her parents must have found out already what she had been up to. But it turned out to be something else which was troubling the Major. He waited until they had got out of the car and come quite close. Then he said grimly: ‘Penang has fallen. François has just got back from there. It seems incredible but I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it.’
As Kate walked home through the compound she thought: ‘With all the fuss nobody will worry about me going to the cinema, at any rate.’
When Matthew and the Major followed her to the Blacketts’ house a few minutes later they found an atmosphere of despondency and alarm. Mrs Blackett was worried about her brother, Charlie, who had returned to his regiment only three days earlier after a spell of comparative safety in Singapore. Had there been a big defeat and, if so, had the Punjabis been involved in it? Nobody knew, of course. For all anyone knew the Punjabis were still safely lodged in some barracks in Kuala Lumpur. Walter, though showing concern for his wife’s anxiety, was less worried about Charlie than about the general situation: Penang was such a familiar part of his life in Malaya that it seemed inconceivable that it should fall to the Japanese. Moreover, he was indignant that he should have had no prior warning from the authorities that such a disaster might occur. As for Monty, he was worried about his own prospects: he was afraid that unless he was careful he might end up having to fight Japanese himself. Everything was going wrong these days. All this ghastly wedding furore and now Penang. He could hardly even find anyone to talk to! Even Sinclair Sinclair seemed determined to give up his staff job and rejoin his regiment, the Argylls, if he could wangle it. Why he should want to go and get himself killed was more than Monty could fathom. Monty had been hoping that Sinclair might be able to use some influence on his behalf if the worst came to the worst, but he only seemed interested in getting shot at.
Of all the guests who assembled for supper at the Blacketts’ only Dr Brownley and Dupigny did not seem dismayed by the fall of Penang. The former went around shaking hands with everyone politely and murmuring to them in a soothing voice, as if in the presence of a mortal illness. ‘Sad news, I’m afraid,’ he whispered to Matthew, who was startled to see him winking and nodding. But this was only a nervous idiosyncrasy, it appeared. The Doctor had entered accompanied by Dupigny whose wounds he had been dressing. Despite these wounds Dupigny seemed in good spirits. A dressing had been applied to one side of his face with sticking plaster and there was another dressing on the back of his skull where the hair had been partly shaved away to accommodate it. Nevertheless, his eyes glinted with malicious pleasure as he surveyed the despondent scene in the Blacketts’ drawing-room. This was for two reasons: firstly, the Blacketts had behaved so condescendingly towards him since the fall of France that he found it agreeable to see them in a humbler frame of mind; secondly, it vindicated all the sombre predictions he had been making for the past few months concerning the Japanese to the general amusement of Singapore. Moreover, in a general way it reinforced all his deterministic beliefs about the way nations behave.
For Dupigny a nation resembled a very primitive human being: this human being consisted of, simply, an appetite and some sort of mechanism for satisfying the appetite. In the case of a nation the appetite was usually, if not quite invariably, economic … (now and again the national vanity which at intervals gripped nations like France and Britain would compel them to some act which made no sense economically: but in this respect, too, they resembled human beings). As for the mechanism for fulfilling the appetite, what was that but a nation’s armed forces? The more powerful the armed forces the better the prospects for satiating the appetite; the more powerful the armed forces the more likely (indeed, inevitable, in Dupigny’s view) that an attempt would be made to satiate it; just as heavyweight boxers are more frequently involved in tavern brawls than, say, dentists, so the very existence of power demands that it should be used. His own failure in Indo-China had merely confirmed him in his cynical views. The League of Nations? Nothing but a pious waste of time!
‘Never mind, he’s had a good innings,’ the Doctor observed soothingly to no one in particular, while Matthew, who was sitting on a sofa nearby, gazed at him baffled by this remark for which he could see no sane explanation. Joan came to sit beside him and he realized with a mild shock: ‘People must now think we’re a couple!’ He could not think of anything to say to her, however. She said in an undertone: ‘Poor Monty, they keep trying to call him up for the F.M.S. Volunteers. But, of course, he’s doing essential war work and can’t possibly go. Besides, they can hardly be “volunteers” if they’re forcing him to join, can they?’ Matthew had to agree that, strictly speaking … She ignored him, however, and went on: ‘I do believe that François is wearing new clothes.’
It was true. After months of appearing in the threadbare suit he had managed to salvage in his flight from Saigon Dupigny was now smartly dressed in a new shirt, new trousers, and a new linen jacket, not to mention a splendid pair of gleaming shoes. This elegant attire he had succeeded, not without difficulty, in looting from a burning shop in George Town. The bandages which swathed the fingers and palms of both hands were the result of this gallant effort, though he did not say so when anyone remarked on them, implying diffidently instead that he had been obliged to rescue someone (himself, as it happened: he had spent too long searching for clothes that were the right size) from a blazing building where he had been trapped by a beam which had fallen across his foot. ‘With the roof about to fall,’ he was explaining modestly to Mrs Blackett as he gingerly accepted a pahit from the Chinese boy’s tray, ‘it was necessary to pick it up with the bare hands, otherwise he would not have had a chance, the poor fellow.’
Walter, overhearing this, frowned at Dupigny, not because he disbelieved this story, but to indicate that he should speak guardedly in front of the ‘boy’; because if news of the disaster which had befallen Penang, a town which had been British for centuries, should circulate among the natives, what would be the state of their morale? The Major noticed Walter’s frown and knew what he was thinking. But he also knew that Walter’s precaution was futile, for had not Cheong told him of the fall of Penang that morning before anyone else had heard of it? The Major was doubly distressed to think that the Europeans had been evacuated from Penang while the rest of the population had been left to make the best of it.
Joan’s place beside Matthew on the sofa had been taken by Monty, who said gloomily: ‘You’ve heard they’re trying to shove me into the bloody Volunteers?’
‘Joan just told me.’
‘They’re being frightfully sticky about it. And now all this about Penang. If you ask me they’re making a complete mess of things.’ Monty sighed, wondering if he could get himself sent on a trade mission to Australia or America. To think that a few days ago life had seemed perfectly OK!
Dupigny, surrounded by a sombre group, was describing the nightmare journey he had made from Penang to KL. The last fifty miles he had travelled in a lorry belonging to a Chinese rubber dealer who had been out collecting rubber from small-holdings. One of the drawbacks to this vehicle was that there had been nothing to screen the engine from themselves. It had been right there with them in the cab, so that every time the driver accelerated there had been great flashes of flame from the fuel chamber, not to mention spurts of water from the radiator. The only seat for both himself and the Chinese had been a plank on a wooden box. To make matters worse there was no way of fastening the door: at every turn he risked plunging out into the rainy jungle. From time to time, when the engine faltered on an incline, the Chinese had leaned forward to grope encouragingly in the entrails, putting his hand on the carburettor to supply a choke or pinning a raw wire against the metal of the cab to sound the horn. The wiring festooned everywhere had sparkled like a Christmas tree and every few miles he, Dupigny, had been obliged to cool his heels while the Chinese crawled into the lorry’s intestines with a spanner to perform some major operation. By the time they had reached KL, thanks to the flames, the boiling water and the steam from the engine, he had been grilled, boiled and finally poached, like a Dieppe sole! How glad he had been to come upon young Ehrendorf having a drink by himself at the Majestic Hotel opposite the railway station.
‘Did he say how the fighting was going?’
‘He was not cheerful. But he did not say anything specific.’
‘Well, we had better eat,’ said Walter, ushering his guests towards the dining-room. ‘Perhaps things are not quite as bad as they seem.’
Penang, after all, was almost five hundred miles away. There was still plenty of territory between themselves and the Japanese. Still, although of little importance commercially, Penang had always been a part of the Blacketts’ world. Now they felt the ground beginning to shift under their feet.
The meal would have been lugubrious indeed if Dr Brownley had not been there. At first he had been uneasy, inclined to think: ‘Good gracious, this makes it twenty-two times in a row that they’ve invited me here and I still haven’t invited them back!’ But he was a doctor, after all, and could see that this evening the Blacketts needed the comfort of some more familiar topic to occupy their minds. And what better than the Langfields? A long time ago he had discovered that there was nothing that could make a Blackett feel himself again so swiftly as a Langfield (or vice versa, of course, for both these eminent Singapore families were the Doctor’s patients). Should a Blackett find himself suffering from depression, insomnia or loss of appetite, it would usually take no more than a faintly disparaging remark about the Langfields’ style of life, their furniture or curtains, say, to effect a cure. On other occasions, when a thorough quickening of the blood was indicated, as in cases of migraine, back-ache, severe constipation or the loss of concentration which Mrs Blackett increasingly suffered as she grew older, stronger meat was sometimes required. Then the Doctor would disclose some more serious matter, the Langfields’ reluctance to pay their bills, or their attempts to claim they had paid when they had not, or requests for medical attention on social occasions. As he had dined regularly with both families over the years and with each had concluded that the only topic of conversation guaranteed to please was the other, he had, perhaps, not been as sparing with this drug as he should. It had come about, indeed, that nowadays, just to maintain the family in normal health, he felt it necessary as a matter of course to prepare one or two choice bits of gossip and bring them to the table, the way a zoo-keeper brings herrings in a bucket when he visits the sea-lions.
‘Walter, you’d hardly believe the latest about a certain family (I won’t say who, mind, but it’s no secret they live on Nassim Road)! Well, it seems that they’ve really outdone themselves this time!’ And the Doctor chuckled conspiratorially, looking round the table. The Blacketts, shocked though they were by the loss of Penang, disturbed by thoughts of the future, felt nevertheless a slight alleviation of their burden. The Doctor cut away busily at his veal cutlet, taking his time but still chuckling, while the Blacketts put aside thoughts of Penang in flames and focused their attention on him. ‘Yes,’ thought the Doctor as he began to enlarge on an example of the Langfields’ shortcomings, ‘that’s what they need. Something to take their minds off it.’
In no time at all one herring after another was describing a glistening arc over the dining-table to be deftly plucked out of the air by one whiskered Blackett head after another. Presently, only the Major, Dupigny and Matthew were sitting there without the head and tail of a fish protruding from their mouths. What was all this about? they wondered. And what did it have to do with Penang?
Matthew, in his excitement and concern over this serious news from Penang had not been paying proper attention to the amount of alcohol he had been drinking. He had been absent-mindedly swallowing one glass of wine after another and now he was far from sober. He was bored with the Doctor and his chat about the Langfields: it seemed to him ridiculous and unworthy that they should be chatting in such a suburban vein at this historic moment when great events were brewing all around them, when a new and terrible link was being forged in the chain of events which reached back to the first betrayal of justice at the League. Instead they should be talking about, well … no matter what, provided it expressed one’s real feelings. This was a moment to discuss matters which one does not normally mention on social occasions for fear of making oneself ridiculous or embarrassing one’s friends; love and death, for example. Presently, inspired by Walter’s claret, he decided that this might be a good moment in which to make the proposal of marriage to Joan which he had intended to make earlier in the afternoon. He looked at her: never had the modelling of her cheekbones seemed so exquisite! Never had her sable curls glowed more richly! He felt moved by her beauty, or perhaps it was simply by the wine and the spice of risk which had been added to life by the news from Penang. Suddenly, he pushed back his chair and stood up.
Silence fell around the table. The Blacketts gazed at him in surprise. He stood there for a moment without saying anything, leaning forward slightly with his knuckles on the polished surface of the table. ‘A sad occasion,’ muttered the Doctor at his side, looking rather put out, for Matthew had interrupted a choice anecdote by so boorishly rising to his feet. Matthew, while his audience waited, combed his mind for the various things he wanted to say … he knew what they were (they had been there only a moment ago), and he knew he must say them from the heart.
‘Monty has told me,’ he began at last, ‘that for the past few days certain plans for Joan’s wedding have been discussed and that these plans have included me. Well, this evening, it seems to me, we should for once in our lives speak out about our innermost feelings … And that’s why I suddenly got up just now, I suppose it may have looked a bit odd, now I come to think of it … I think we should say, well … I think you see what I mean …’
The Blacketts stirred uneasily, by no means sure that they did see what he meant. Besides, Matthew had plainly had a few drinks too many. But still, he did sound as if he might be on the right lines as far as the wedding was concerned. Until now he had seemed thoroughly apathetic about the whole business, indeed, had not mentioned it at all, and that had been a strain, particularly for Walter and Joan, who could not quite decide whether to go ahead with final arrangements on the strength of what had been agreed already, or whether to wait for a more positive sign from Matthew.
‘To you sitting around this table who knew my father rather better than I did, I’m afraid … I hope you don’t mind if I call you “my dearest friends” … Well, I just wanted to say … and assure you that I do mean it …’ Matthew, who had got a bit muddled, had to pause for a moment to straighten out exactly what was in his mind, to run a hot iron over his thoughts and smooth out any final contradictions in them. This was not difficult. He had to say what he really felt about the prospect of marrying Joan. And so it was that a moment later, to his own surprise he heard a rather far-off voice saying: ‘I suppose I should have spoken up before in order to prevent a misunderstanding but, although I like Joan very much. I don’t really want to marry her, if you see what I mean. Well, that’s all I wanted to say.’ And with that he sat down, feeling distinctly uncomfortable.
Part Four
41
I returned to Singapore on the morning of 20 December and shortly afterwards issued a paper containing information of the Japanese tactics and instructions as to how they should be countered. In this I stressed that the first essential was rigid discipline and absolute steadiness and secondly, that the enemy’s out-flanking and infiltration tactics must not lead to withdrawals which should only take place on the order of higher authority. I suggested that the best method of defence might be for a holding group to be dug in astride the main artery of communication with striking forces on the flanks ready to attack as soon as the enemy made contact with the holding group. With a view to trying to curb the many wild rumours which were flying about, aggravated by the difficulty of finding out what really was happening, I ordered that the spreading of rumours and exaggerated reports of the enemy’s efficiency must be rigidly suppressed.
Lieutenant-General A. E. Percival,
The War in Malaya
JAPANESE BURNING KORAN IN NORTH
Refugees who have made their way out of Trengganu since the Japanese occupation bring a shocking story of sacrilege. They state that the Japanese broke into the Mohammedan religious school at Kuala Trengganu, capital of the state, ransacked it, threw the kitab-kitab (holy books) out of the window and desecrated the holy Koran. Further, they have set up their own idols in the Police Suran (place of worship) in Kuala Trengganu. This news, following on the bombing of the mosques in Penang and Kuala Lumpur, is causing Malays to recall bitterly that it is only a few weeks since the Tokio radio was broadcasting nightly assurances of special solicitude for Muslims and Muslim places of worship in Malay and elsewhere.
LULL IN MALAYA: NEW RAF SUCCESS
According to last night’s official communiqué, the Japanese have not been able to maintain their pressure on the Perak front, where our patrols have been active.
RAIDS ON KUALA LUMPUR
Since their first raid on Kuala Lumpur town on Friday the Japanese have returned regularly every day. On Tuesday there were five alerts. The raiders are always met by heavy ack-ack fire. As a result they have not dared appear directly over the town and have not dropped any bombs since last Friday.
Straits Times Thursday, 1 January 1942
Now the New Year of 1942 began and life in Singapore underwent yet another frightening metamorphosis. Little by little people had grown accustomed to the darkness of the blacked-out streets and the military road-blocks, though they had not ceased to be an inconvenience. But now air-raids, sporadic at first and usually aimed at the docks and airfields, came to remind Singapore’s inhabitants of the dangers they ran. And yet, when you thought about it, only a few days had passed since Singapore had been still enjoying the comfort and security of peace-time. How far away those pleasant days already seemed! These days, unless your character was unusually imperturbable, you found it hard to enjoy dining on the lawn of Raffles Hotel in the tropical night surrounded by the fan-shaped silhouettes of travellers’ palms. By now people preferred to dine inside: for one thing there was no light to read the menu by if you stayed outside; for another, although it was still just as enchanting to listen to the sighing of the warm breeze as it tossed the ruffled heads of the nibong palms against the stars high above you, you could no longer be quite sure that the dark shape of a Japanese bomber was not lurking like a panther in those tossing palms and watching you with yellow eyes as you put your spoon into a soufflé au fromage. Besídes, sitting out there by yourself, could you be altogether certain that you would not find yourself sharing your soufflé with a Japanese parachutist?
For Europeans, these days, work swallowed up everything. For no sooner had you finished at the office than you were obliged to report for an evening’s training with the passive defence and volunteer forces. If you were over the age of forty-one you now found yourself, unless exempted for some other essential work, serving with the volunteer police or firemen or with the Local Defence Corps. Nevertheless, it had taken Singapore’s second air-raid on 29 December, and those that followed in ever more rapid succession, to make a real dent in Singapore’s way of life. Sporting activities on the padang came to an end (to Matthew’s inexperienced eye not the least astonishing thing about Singapore had been the sight of thirty grown men engaged in a violently energetic game of rugby a mere few miles from the equator): the municipal engineering department had erected obstacles to deny such open spaces to aircraft or paratroops. Supplies of tinned food were brought up and people began to improvise air-raid shelters in their gardens or in the less fragile parts of their homes.
Outwardly, perhaps, not so much had changed. You could still pause almost anywhere in the city, just as you had always done, and buy a refreshing slice of pineapple, or a bunch of tiny, delicious bananas no bigger than the fingers of your hand, or even, if you were adventurous, scoop out the fragrant, heavenly, alarming flesh of the durian. Some people, no less adventurous, occasionally managed a round of golf under the air-raids, at least until golf links and club-house were taken over to be fortified by the Military despite a gallant rear-guard action by the Club Committee to save it for its members. Others sported and splashed in the wavelets at Tanjong Rhu while Japanese bombers raided Keppel Harbour across the water. Was this bravado or simply an illustration of the time it takes to change from the reality of peace to the new reality of war? Well, you were probably no less safe and a great deal more comfortable having a swim during an air-raid than sweltering in an improvised shelter.
The Major took tiffin one day in the first week of January with Dr Brownley at the Adelphi Hotel and was surprised to find that the hotel’s orchestra was still playing its usual lunchtime concert of old favourites. The only interruption to his conversation with the Doctor, whom he was trying to persuade to provide a mobile medical service for the Mayfair A.F.S. unit, came when a drunken Australian journalist blundered into their table, asked: ‘How’s the tucker?’ and blundered away again. The Major later glimpsed him vomiting into some palms in the lobby while the Swiss manager wrung his hands nearby. Still, considering it was wartime, it was not too much to put up with.
One thing, however, did come as a shock to the Major. He had expected that resentment towards the Forces, endemic for the past few years among European civilians, would be dissipated immediately by the opening of hostilities on the mainland. But on the contrary, it grew even more acute. The Military, it was felt, who were supposed to be defending Singapore’s commercial activities, vital as a source of produce for the Empire and for the earning of dollars from America, were doing everything to make business impossible by their high-handed requisitioning of land and property. If the Army had had its way it would have made off with a sizeable part of the labour force into the bargain, to build the camps and fortifications which they should be building for themselves! What indignation would presently be caused in Singapore when (in the third week of January) the Sunday Pictorial in Britain published what the Straits Times called ‘absurd allegations regarding whisky-swilling planters, indolent officials and greedy businessmen who refused to pay taxes.’
But as January pursues its course the civilians and the Military are at least united in one pastime in the increasingly devastated and dangerous city … they go to the cinema. They go to see Private Affairs with Nancy Kelly and Robert Cummings at the Cathay, or Bad Men of Missouri at the Alhambra, or Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator at the Roxy. Battered troops from up-country or new arrivals from Britain, Australia and India watch John Wayne in Dark Command at the Empire beside anxious and forlorn refugees from Penang and Kuala Lumpur. Together in the hot darkness they watch Joe E. Brown in So You Won’t Talk?, Mata Hari with Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro, and Henry Fonda in The Return of Frank James which, despite the boom and thud of bombs and anti-aircraft guns filtering into the cinema, has had all traces of gun-play removed by the Singapore censor in order not to give ideas to the city’s Chinese gangsters. Perhaps as they sit there they are a little reassured by ‘the first drama of Uncle Sam’s new jump fighters’: Parachute Battalion with Robert Preston and Edmund O’Brien … but no doubt they find parachutes too close to reality and prefer Loretta Young in The Lady from Cheyenne: ‘It was a man’s world until a low-cut gown took over the town.’ They watch in silence with the light from the screen flickering on their strained faces. The week it is shown (by that time people will be wearing steel helmets in the stalls during air-raids) will see, on Tuesday, a massive raid by eighty-one Japanese Navy bombers on the Tanglin and Orchard. Road district and, on Wednesday, an even more devastating raid on Beach Road.
‘Pakai angku punia sarong muka! Put on your gas-masks! Jangan tembak sampai depat hukum! Don’t fire until you receive orders!’ exclaimed the Major, stifling a yawn that threatened to have its way with him. ‘Jaga itu periok api … bedil itu sudah letup. Beware of bombs: the shell has exploded!’ Such was the heat and humidity that a prodigious effort was required merely to keep one’s eyes open. His head began to droop once more on to his chest. He forced himself to straighten up and say: ‘Gali parit untok lima kaki tinggi. Kapal terbang tedak boleh naik sabab musim ribot. Dig a trench about five feet high. The aeroplanes can’t go up owing to stormy weather …’ Again his head began to droop. There was a sudden crash and he sat up with a start. Dupigny had just hurled a book across the room at a fat, ginger cockroach which was making its way, glistening with health and horribly alert, across the wall of the outer office where they were sitting. The book had missed, however, and the cockroach darted away at an unnatural speed.
Revived by the noise, the Major put down the list of useful Malay phrases he had been trying to master and walked across to the window. The rain was pelting down on the broad, green banana leaves and sweeping down the drive in a river towards the storm-drain.
‘Listen to this, Brendan,’ chuckled Dupigny, who was sprawled in a rattan chair reading the Straits Times. ‘ “Newly arrived. Sandbags! Only a limited quantity available. Apply Hagemeyer Trading Company Ltd.’ They have a vigorous commercial instinct, the people of Singapore!’
‘Undoubtedly, François, the Japanese have gained some initial advantage,’ said the Major who had been following his own train of thought. ‘But I doubt if they will get much further.’
‘Sans blague!’
‘They had the advantage of surprise and that counts for a great deal. But the further they drive our chaps back, the more concentrated our forces become … like a spring which is being compressed. In due course we’ll spring back all the more powerfully.’
‘Sans blague!’
‘Would you mind not saying “sans blague” all the time? It gets on my nerves.’
‘Sorry.’
It had grown very dark outside and the rain fell so heavily that it filled the room with a noise like a roll of drums. Through a crack in the floorboards the Major could see a sheet of rainwater sliding under the bungalow between the pillars on which it stood. From time to time a flash of lightning lit up Dupigny’s face across the room, a cynical mass of wrinkles. He had put down the newspaper which he could no longer see to read.
‘What a storm!’ said Matthew, wandering in from his office next door and joining the Major at the window.
‘They don’t usually last very long,’ said the Major. He added presently: ‘By the way, Mr Wu was here earlier and said he had heard there had been more trouble up-country.’ The Major, though he did not say so, was afraid that Malaya might be beginning to fall to pieces. Nor was it simply a question of the military situation. He explained to Matthew what he had heard.
Last week there had been talk of Australian troops wrecking a hotel somewhere. Now rumours had reached Mr Wu, who had business contacts in Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh and Kuantan, that civil disorder, looting and inter-racial strife was spreading like a shock-wave in front of the advancing Japanese bayonets. In some places the retreating British troops, instructed to destroy stores that might be of value to the enemy, had set the example by looting jewellers and liquor shops, eagerly assisted by the local population and even by the police who had discarded their uniforms and joined in with a will. Open season had been declared on anything of value left behind. A cloud of locusts descended on every abandoned European bungalow: in no time it was stripped of everything down to light-bulbs, door-handles and bathroom fittings. When European bungalows had all been stripped the looters turned to those abandoned by rich Chinese, Indians and Malays … and, presently, to those that had not been abandoned, stripping them regardless and, if the owner did not promptly produce his valuables, torturing him until he did. Sometimes, according to Mr Wu’s all too circumstantial and convincing account, Chinese looters would wear masks, or pretend to be Japanese soldiers; sometimes two rival bands of looters would arrive to sack the same premises, which now included Government rice godowns, Land offices and Customs premises, and do battle with each other for the right to pillage. And all this accompanied by wholesale violence and rape, not to mention old scores being paid off. The country was foundering in anarchy!
‘What do you expect to happen?’ asked Dupigny, dismissing the matter with a shrug. ‘I do not see why you should be surprised.’
‘But wait, François. The laws of a country are merely the wish of people to live in a certain way. Remove the laws for a few days and you don’t expect anarchy to result overnight, any more than by abolishing road regulations you would expect motorists to pick at random which side of the road they would drive on. Laws aren’t a means of coercing a population of wild animals but an agreement between people … D’you see what I mean? But in that case why has this moral vacuum appeared in the space between the two armies where the rule of law is suspended? It must mean that all these people looting and raping don’t consider themselves to belong to our community at all!’
‘But exactly!’ cried Dupigny and a flash of lightning lit up his sardonic smile. ‘In a country like Malaya such an ideal community is impossible because people belong to different races and only have self-interest in common. A brotherhood of man? Rubbish! But let us not complain, self-interest is the surest source of wealth as your Mr Smith has so brilliantly demonstrated.’
‘Do you really believe, François, that until now our British laws have merely been preventing people here from doing what they would most like to do, namely: attack, rob and rape their neighbours? Come now!’
‘Certainly. Today you have the proof!’
Instead of replying, the Major stooped and held out his fingers to The Human Condition who was hesitating prudently a few feet away, as if afraid that the Major might be about to scoop him up and drop him into an incinerator. After some moments of interior debate the animal crept a little closer and faintly wagged its wretched tail. The Major sighed. Outside the window the first thin shaft of sunlight broke through the cloud and hung quivering in the murky gloom of the drive, at the same time striking emerald sparks from a dripping banana leaf.
Matthew, who had spent a little time with his hands in his pockets at the window, staring out in a gloomy reverie at the drenched foliage, had become interested in this discussion. He remembered with what pleasure he had watched the mingling of races on the dance-floor at The Great World. It was surely true that to build a nation out of Malaya’s plural society some greater ideal than the profit of plantation owners, merchants and assorted entrepreneurs combined with the accumulation of wealth by the labour force, was required. What was needed was a new spirit … the spirit that had animated people at Geneva in the early days before everything had turned sour. Matthew began, haltingly, to explain this to the Major and Dupigny. It was simply a question of breaking out of old habits of thought! It was so easy, given the right atmosphere, for people to change the way they approached each other! Even apparently self-interested people were capable of it. It was like … like … He groped the air with his fingers, searching for an example. Yes, it was like someone in the empty compartment of a train who pulls down the blinds and puts his suitcases on the seat to prevent another passenger sharing it with him. Yet if, once installed, the newcomer should become ill the original occupant will spare no effort to help him, will take off his jacket, perhaps, to spread it over him, will stop the train and bully officials into coming to his companion’s assistance, and go to all manner of trouble! It was a fact! And truly there was no earthly reason why all human affairs should not be conducted in this manner! It was just as available to people as conduct based on suspicion and self-interest. Even with the Japanese it would have been possible if they had not been infected with our own cynical approach to power.
‘I refuse to believe that self-interest is the best source of prosperity. It only seems that way because we’ve never been able to break out of this bad habit with which we’ve been shackled by our history. Men are capable of becoming brothers, whatever you say, François. And I’m sure you’ll find, once this dreadful war is over, that thousands of people of different races have been willing to risk their lives for each other!’
While Matthew, stuttering with excitement, had been stating his belief, his companions had been listening, the Major dubiously, Dupigny with derision. Now Dupigny got to his feet: it was time for his late afternoon siesta on the table in the Board Room, the only room in the building which possessed an efficient fan. On his way out he paused to pat Matthew on the shoulder, saying with a laugh: ‘You might just as well expect stockbrokers to be ready to die for the Stock Exchange!’
42
It was in these days that members of the Mayfair AFS unit first began to be seen at fires here and there in the city with their glistening new trailer-pump. Nothing spectacular at first while they were learning the business; a shop-house or a godown, perhaps, set on fire by an air-raid on the docks. A tiny convoy would set off led by the Major’s Lagonda driven by the Major himself, keeping an eye on the trailer-pump dodging and swaying in the rear-view mirror, and followed by Mr Wu’s ancient Buick, crammed with helmeted figures and equipment. Sometimes, as the fires grew bigger, they would find a number of other units there, too, and as they arrived they would have to bump over several hose-ramps while trying to locate the officer in charge of the fire. Quite often this would turn out to be a man called Adamson who, they learned from some of the regular firemen, had an unusual reputation for skill in beating back or outflanking fires that threatened to get out of control … the reputation of a general, one might have thought. His appearance, though, was disappointingly ordinary … a rather anonymous-looking individual in his forties with bristly grey hair and a manner that suggested more a curious by-stander than a general on a battlefield. Matthew, in particular, surveyed him with interest, wondering how it was that so many legends hat attached themselves to him.
At one godown fire, while Matthew was talking to a man called Evans from the Central Fire Station in Hill Street, there came a shout of ‘Stand from under!’
‘That means the façade is about to topple,’ Evans explained and together they joined the other men drifting back to a safer distance. Evans, however, was watching Adamson who still lingered beneath the building, staring up at it, hands in pockets. There was a story, he told Matthew, that Adamson had once been caught at just such a moment under a tall façade as it toppled outwards over him. Because it had been too late to run he had calmly estimated where an open window would fall, had changed his position slightly and then stood still. The façade had fallen neatly around him, leaving him untouched.
‘Great Scott!’ Matthew gazed at Adamson, deeply impressed by such sang-froid, but at the same time half suspecting that this might be just a story which old hands told to new recruits like himself.
Despite the satisfaction Matthew experienced these days in the knowledge that he was doing his bit for the Colony, and even putting himself at risk for it, he was still not altogether pleased with himself. His relations with the Blackett family had been seriously clouded by the unfortunate manner in which he had announced that he did not want to marry Joan. How could he have done such a thing? The Blacketts were his father’s life-long friends! Now he flushed with embarrassment at the mere recollection of his dreadful behaviour. Naturally, he had written notes of apology to Walter, to Mrs Blackett, and to Joan herself (how could he have been so insensitive as to reject the poor girl in public!) … but he had heard nothing and did not expect to be forgiven for his appalling lapse.
He would have written a note to Monty, too, but Monty had turned up in person before he could do so and, as a matter of fact, did not appear to be particularly put out. Monty, indeed, was inclined to look on the bright side and said, chuckling: ‘Boy, you’ve really put your foot in it this time. They aren’t very pleased with you at home, to put it mildly! But at least you’ve got rid of all the bloody bridesmaids! Frankly, old chap, I hand it to you … I didn’t think you had it in you.’ But Matthew was not to be consoled. It was true that he did not now have to marry Joan … but such was his remorse that he would almost have preferred to have done so.
Presently, a hastily written message from Walter did arrive and Matthew opened it expecting recriminations. But to his surprise the message did not even mention his lapse and one might even have supposed, reading it, that Walter had already forgotten about it. The note begged Matthew, in the name of his country and of everything he held dear, to reconsider his refusal to impersonate Continuity in Blackett and Webb’s jubilee parade. ‘Since the loss of Penang,’ wrote Walter, ‘it has become more necessary than ever to shore up the morale of the Asiatic communities in the Colony by a display of firmness and a reminder of our past association which has been so fruitful to them.’ Because of ‘recent events’ it had been necessary to postpone the jubilee parade and celebrations, but ‘any day now’ final arrangements would be made. In the meantime, Matthew was asked to come with the Major and Dupigny to a dress rehearsal for the parade to make sure that everybody knew what was expected of him.
This note had been dictated in a rather discursive style and typed on Walter’s office note-paper. Walter had added a cryptic postscript in ink, however, which stated: ‘I hear young Lang-field has not been doing too badly as a fireman. What d’you think? Perhaps he is not as bad as the rest of that gang?’ Matthew was relieved to get Walter’s note, though a little puzzled by the reference to Nigel Langfield: Walter musing aloud, it seemed. He hastily sent a note in return, agreeing to do anything Walter wanted. After his lapse there was nothing else for him to do, after all.
His conscience lightened somewhat by this exchange, Matthew decided to take the afternoon off. His efforts to grasp the complexities of the rubber business took second place these days, in any case, to his duties as a fireman. Besides, he still hardly knew Singapore.
The Major, who had to pick up an order of books from Kelly and Walsh’s, dropped him near Raffles Place and he set off, hands in pockets, with no particular destination. First he walked down Market Street. It was here, he remembered, that Ehrendorf had his flat but as to which number it was in the street he had no idea. As he strolled along he was suddenly enveloped in a delightful smell of cloves and cinnamon which hung outside a spice merchant’s. On the opposite side of the street his eye was caught by the money-lenders shops and he paused for a moment to stare in wonder and dismay at the white-garmented figures lurking in those dim interiors. What did this glimpse of money-lenders remind him of? Yes. He moved on once more, pondering the assertion that self-interest is the most efficient producer of wealth, that what an undeveloped tropical country most needed were entrepreneurs like his father and like Walter. Many people believed, he was aware, that no matter what an individual entrepreneur might accomplish in the way of exploitation or abuse of native labour, his presence was still beneficial to the country as the most effective means by which the local population could begin to accumuate capital of its own. This paradox, which was no doubt true within limits, was accompanied by a cynical companion in the form of another assertion: namely, that human beings would only produce their best efforts when they were working, not for the community in which they lived, but for themselves. This Matthew refused to believe!
He had paused, muttering under his breath, in the doorway of a metalwork shop where he found himself gazing at his own perspiring, bespectacled face upside down in a gleaming concave bowl. Inside the shop he could see a man on his hands and knees cutting out a long strip of metal to make a bucket; another man, cross-legged, sat on the floor hammering rivets into another strip which had been bent into a cylinder. Beside them glistened a pile of newly minted buckets. To produce such handsome buckets without even a work-bench, using only primitive tools, seemed to him miraculous.
He walked on at random, now northwards, now westwards. He passed a sign which read Nanyang Dentist and the dentist himself, perhaps, sitting in his white coat on the pavement smoking a cigarette. A ginger cat with a docked tail crossed his path and slipped hopefully under the bead-hung entrance to the North Pole Creamery. A Chinese song blared tinnily from a wireless somewhere above his head in the forest of poles and washing; two voices gabbled in different languages riddled with atmospheric from two other wirelesses nearby. He passed on to the street corner where a Chinese funeral, which he at first took for a parade, was getting down to business outside a shop-house. A framed photograph of the dead man had been set up on a table on the pavement, a prosperous-looking fellow wearing the most formal of Western blue suits and white shirts; two tall lamps swathed in sackcloth for the occasion flanked the photograph: piles of oranges and apples and bundles of smoking joss-sticks stood in front of it. At the side of this table was another; Matthew found himself confronted with a great lobster-coloured pig’s mask complete with ears and flaring nostrils, crabs, whole naked chickens, some squashed as flat as plates, very greasy-looking, others with their yellow waxen heads horribly bent back over their bodies.
Matthew looked at his watch: he would soon have to be getting back to the Mayfair for something to eat before the night’s watch. He lingered for a moment, however, to inspect the paper models of a motor-car, a wireless, a refrigerator and other useful articles that the dead man would be taking on his journey, thinking: ‘After all, if these are the things people want and entrepreneurs like my father help them to get them …’ He wondered what the head man had thought of it all, whether he had been satisfied. Here he was, presumably, in this impressive coffin which might, to judge by its size, have been hollowed out of a substantial tree trunk, each end swept up like the prow of a ship and standing on trestles which advertised, in English and Chinese, the name and telephone number of the undertaker. A line of professional mourners dressed in crudely stitched sackcloth sat on the kerb, smoking cigarettes and looking disaffected. A small boy hammered on a tin drum and was now joined by a rather down-at-heel brass band of elderly men in white uniforms who struck up raggedly for a few moments. An aeroplane roared by very low overhead and the mourners looked up apprehensively … but it was British, a Catalina flying-boat. Matthew walked on thoughtfully. As he walked, hands in pockets, he felt someone take his arm. Looking round he saw Miss Chiang’s smiling face.
‘Vera! Where have you been? Why haven’t you been back to the Mayfair?’
Vera’s smile disappeared; she looked a trifle upset. She said with a shrug: ‘They told me not to come back.’
‘Who told you?’
‘A man from Mr Blackett’s office.’ She shrugged again. ‘It does not matter. It is not in the least “pressing”. Tell me about yourself … I’m so glad to see you are now well again. What a terrible fever! You gave me such a fright. I was afraid you might “kick the bucket”.’
‘But why did they tell you not to come back?’
‘They say my job has been finished. They bring me suitcase and money and a letter of thanks signed by Miss Blackett. I think it is because she is jealous of my beauty.’
‘D’you really think so? Lumme!’ Matthew mopped his perspiring face with a handkerchief.
‘Yes,’ went on Vera, looking pretty and malicious, yet at the same time more innocent than ever, ‘it is because also she does not have my command of foreign languages and because my breasts are bigger than hers. She does not have my poise, either, which I have probably inherited from my mother … I think I told you my mother was Russian princess, forced to show “clean heels” during Revolution. Well, there … it is not worth bothering about.’
Meanwhile, they had strolled on together and, after a moment’s hesitation, Vera had taken his arm again and her light hand resting in the hollow of his elbow caused a delicate warmth to flow into him. Some women, he could not help thinking, were extraordinarily good at touching you, while others did so as if they had had a recently dislocated arm (no doubt women found the same about men). Vera’s touch was as distinctive as her voice. At the end of the street, however, they discovered that they were obliged to go in different directions, which seemed a pity. They lingered there for a moment.
‘You must halt …’ said Vera with a sigh. ‘I must go on because my silk-worms are hungry.’
‘What? You have silk-worms?’ cried Matthew, thinking: ‘How delightfully Chinese!’
‘Oh no, here in Singapore it is too hot for silk-worms.’ She smiled flirtatiously. ‘It is a line from an old Chinese song about a woman who is separated from her lover.’
‘Well, let me see …’ Matthew again looked at his watch. ‘Can I invite you to a cup of tea?’
‘Thank you, but first I must visit a friend who is dying. Will you come with me?’
Presently, Matthew found himself standing in a vast dimly lit shed, blinking and polishing his spectacles; but even when he had put them on again, such was the contrast with the brightness outside, he still could not see very well. Vera had set off down a sort of aisle on each side of which rose tier after tier of shadowy racks, as in a store-house or wine-cellar. Matthew followed her, stepping uncertainly. There was a smell of humanity here and a faint, twittering murmur of voices.
As his vision improved he saw that the racks on either side were occupied by recumbent forms, some of which stirred slightly as he passed but for the most part lying still … Eyes followed him incuriously, the sunken eyes of very elderly, emaciated people; here and there he made out a somewhat younger face. Vera explained to him that this was a Chinese ‘dying-house’ where lonely people came to die. He had not wanted to come; he had tried to explain to Vera that he had only just finished watching a funeral. It seemed to him that his life had taken a decidely lugubrious turn all of a sudden. No, he would definitely prefer to wait for her outside.
But as they were walking Vera had told him a little about the old man she was going to visit. He had befriended her on the boat that had taken her from Shanghai to Singapore (that same boat on which Miss Blackett and her mother had been travelling), had given her a little money and had helped her to find her feet; his own children had died or disappeared in one of the civil wars that had swept back and forth over China since the fall of the Manchu dynasty. While talking about this man, to whom she was bringing a little parcel of food, Vera happened to mention that until he had grown too old to work he had lived by tapping his few rubber trees on a smallholding near Layang Layang in Johore. Matthew had pricked up his ears at this and exclaimed: ‘That’s near my own estate!’ And so, despite his misgivings, he had decided to enter the dying-house with her. Now, blundering between these racks of moribund people in the gloom, he felt like Orpheus descending into the underworld.
It was not only the lonely who came to die here, explained Vera in a low voice, grasping him by the sleeve, but a great many others, too. People were brought here to die by their families in order to spare the home from the bad luck that comes when somebody dies there …
‘I must say, that sounds a bit heartless!’
Yes, and yet it was accepted by the person who was dying as the best thing to do and the custom had been carried on, perhaps, for generations. And no doubt those who came here from the land of the living to bring food and water to their dying relations would in due course come to spend their own last days or hours here, rather than take up room in one of the crowded tenement cubicles or boats on the river … It was very sad, certainly, but it was moving, too, to see the way these shelves of dying people accepted their fate. Vera’s dark eyes searched Matthew’s face to see whether he understood. He nodded cautiously though, as a matter of fact, he was not very keen on hearing of people ‘accepting their fate’. Vera seemed to him extraordinarily full of life by contrast with the trays of shadowy expiring figures on either side. ‘What a dismal way to end up though!’
‘How attractive he is!’ Vera was thinking. ‘How stooping and shortsighted! What deliciously round shoulders and unhealthy complexion!’ She gazed at him in wonder, reflecting that there was no way in which he could be improved. Indeed, she could hardly keep her eyes off him. For the fact was that Vera had been brought up, as Chinese girls had been for centuries, to find stooping, bespectacled, scholarly-looking young men attractive, and the more literary the better; no doubt there was an economic motive originally buried somewhere beneath this tradition of finding attractive qualities in poor physical specimens like Matthew (although, actually, he was quite strong): for until recently with the fall of the Ch’ing dynasty all China’s most powerful administrators and officials, a source of prosperity and glory for their families as well as themselves, had been chosen traditionally by competitive examinations in literary subjects open to rich and poor alike. Already though, a willingness to have their heart-strings plucked in such a way was beginning to seem old-fashioned to the young women of the New China. Yes, already by January 1942, young men with rippling muscles, fists of steel and a good posture were beginning to barge these spindle-legged weaklings aside and leave them grovelling in the dust for their spectacles while they, instead, installed themselves in maidenly dreams from Shanghai to Sinkiang. How lucky then for Matthew, who was just in time to catch Vera’s eye. He would not have cut much ice with one of these others. As a matter of fact, she had already begun to notice one or two young men with fists of steel who perhaps did not look too unprepossessing.
43
Vera had paused for a moment to talk to a middle-aged man sitting on his heels beside someone on the lowest rack; he was wearing a cheap, crumpled European suit whose pockets were bulging with packages of various kinds; a stethoscope hung over his open-necked white shirt. As he was talking he looked up briefly at Matthew and smiled: his face, which was deeply lined and cross-hatched, conveyed a strong impression of sensitivity and strength of character. As they walked on again, it occurred to Matthew that if you could tell someone’s character by his face, even without sharing a culture or language with him, perhaps people of different nations and races were not so deeply divided from each other as they appeared to be, that whatever Dupigny might think, there was such a thing as shared humanity, and that with one or two minor adjustments different nations and communities could live in harmony with each other, concerning themselves with each other’s welfare.
The doctor she had just spoken to, Vera explained, devoted all his spare time and money to treating the inmates of the dying-house who could not otherwise afford medical attention.
‘Of course he does!’ exclaimed Matthew excitedly. ‘You only have to look at his face to know that!’ He would hardly have believed her if she had suggested anything else. Oppressed as he was by Dupigny’s cynical views on human nature, he felt quite delighted to have stumbled on this lonely philanthropist. Vera, meanwhile, was indicating in a whisper that those inhabitants of the dying-house who were actually expiring were brought down to the floor level because it was believed that anyone below a dying person would be visited by bad luck.
After a moment of uncertainty while she peered in the gloom at one elderly Chinese face after another (each shrivelled and puckered like an old apple and, to Matthew, almost indistinguishable) Vera had made her selection and was kneeling by a frail figure where it was darkest at the end of the row. Matthew approached, too, and gazed with interest and sympathy at the wizened head which lay, not on a pillow, but on a small bundle, perhaps of clothing. At the touch of Vera’s hand on his arm, the old man’s eyes opened slowly. He surveyed her calmly, remotely, showing no sign of surprise or animation. But presently he murmured something. A faint conversation ensued. Once, very slowly, his eyes moved towards Matthew. Vera’s parcel contained a small bowl of rice, mushrooms and sea-slugs. A boy appeared with a pot of tea and Vera gave him a coin. Meanwhile the old man’s withered hand had been groping feebly at his bedside and presently closed over a pair of chopsticks. Vera took them from him and helped him to eat a few mouthfuls from the bowl.
When he had finished eating the old man again looked at Matthew and said something to Vera. Vera, too, looked at Matthew and replied with a smile, saying then in English: ‘I tell him you are in rubber business.’
The old man spoke again, this time to Matthew, in a faint, grumbling voice.
‘What does he say?’
‘He ask you where your estates are … I tell him you son of Blackett and Webb.’
Matthew nodded and smiled winningly at the old Chinese, delighted to think that he was at last, thanks to Vera, coming into contact with the real roots of life in Malaya, not just its top dressing of Europeans.
But despite Matthew’s winning smiles the old fellow on his death-bed did not altogether give the impression of being won over. Indeed, he had begun to fidget restlessly on his tray, muttering indignantly. Matthew was not sure but he thought he could make out the words ‘Brackett and Webb’ recurring in the old chap’s mutterings. Vera was listening attentively: her face showed concern.
‘Well, oh dear … He say you swindle smallholders. He says European estates swindle him and other smallholders …’
‘Oh really, Vera!’ scoffed Matthew. ‘The poor old blighter’s just wool-gathering. But I can see my presence is upsetting him so perhaps I’d better …’ He was afraid that the elderly Chinese, who was now searching crossly with trembling, skeletal hands for something in the pile of rags he was using as a pillow, might suffer some terminal seizure brought on by excitement and indignation. To judge by his wasted body and blue lips it would not take very much to capsize the frail craft in which the old chap was now trying to navigate the final stages of his life’s voyage. Still, something caused Matthew to linger. Until now he had not given much thought to native smallholders. Their smallholdings seldom amounted to more than a few acres, at most. And yet, now he thought about it, these native smallholdings together produced nearly half of Malaya’s rubber and covered almost a million and a quarter acres! ‘What’s he saying now?’ he asked uneasily.
‘He says British steal money from his rubber trees.’
‘How did they do that?’ asked Matthew dubiously. Vera turned back to the old man who had fallen back now, exhausted by his efforts to find whatever it was he had been looking for. He was no longer looking at Matthew but into the distance; his chest hardly seemed to move but still that faint, grumbling voice went on and on, rising and falling, almost like the wind when it sighs under a doorway.
‘He says the inspector did not give him proper share of rubber to sell when he came to look at his trees for Restriction Scheme …’
‘I suppose he means when his production was being assessed before the scheme started … to see what his share of the total export rights would be. All right, go on.’
‘It was the same with other smallholders in this village, too. Inspector says he tells a lie how much rubber his trees are making, that they are too thickly planted to make so much rubber. He says inspectors are Europeans who work for the estates and do not want smallholders to get their proper share …’
‘Well, good gracious! Tell him … tell him …’ But Matthew could not think what Vera should tell him. ‘What a disagreeable old codger!’ he thought, taken aback by this list of complaints. ‘You’d think that at death’s door he’d have better things to think about. There might be some truth in it, mind you … but all the same!’ Matthew had discovered that he did not mind being critical of the British himself, but when a foreigner was critical, that was different. And, after all, he had ventured into this decidedly creepy place merely to pay his respects to the old blighter!
But in spite of natural feelings of indignation that the old chap should pick a quarrel with him on what was really a social occasion (paying of respects to someone on the point of cashing in his chips), there was an aspect of the matter which Matthew, in spite of himself, did find rather interesting. For he had already been struck by the fact there there was one significant difference between the production of rubber and the production of most other things … namely, there was little advantage in cost to those who operated on a big scale with several hundred or more acres. Those who produce corn, say, or motor-cars on a large scale can usually do so more cheaply than their smaller competitors. Not so with rubber where a method of mass-production using machinery had yet to be discovered. If anything, the native smallholder, who as well as tapping his few rubber trees could very often keep himself by growing fruit and vegetables and raising a few chickens, should be able to produce rubber more cheaply than the European estates which were obliged to pay and feed a large work-force of tappers, weeders, foremen and other estate workers, not to mention the even more expensive European managers, agents, secretaries and, ultimately, company directors and shareholders.
Matthew now remembered the discussion he had had with Ehrendorf (it seemed ages ago but was, in fact, only a few days) at The Great World, when they had been trying to decide to what extent the coming of Western capital to Britain’s tropical colonies had had the benefits that were claimed for it. Well, the relationship between the European estates and the native smallholders seemed to throw an interesting light on that discussion. It was obvious that in most cases, although natives could be employed by Western enterprise, they lacked the knowledge, skill and capital to compete directly with it. But in the case of rubber, by a happy coincidence this was not so. There was nothing in the growing and tapping of trees, in the coagulation of latex by adding acid, or in the mangling and smoking of the resulting rubber sheets, that could not be done as easily by an illiterate Malay or Chinese as by a graduate of a British agricultural college. If the Colonial Office and the Government here really had the interests of their native subjects at heart, and not merely their exploitation as cheap labour, they could hardly have been presented with a better opportunity of demonstrating it by promoting and defending their interests! But wait! What was this he was hearing (for the old man’s quavering sing-song, while Matthew had been brooding on these matters, had not ceased its gentle sighing like the wind coming under the door)?
‘He says that European estates were given an extra share for trees that were too young to make rubber … Smallholders were given nothing.’ Vera looked at him helplessly, embarrassed by this litany of complaints. ‘He says European inspectors never looked properly at trees. He says there were only twenty inspectors for whole of Malaya. He says nobody inspected the estates. The estates told the Controller of Rubber how much share they wanted and Controller did as they say. He says Controller of Rubber was friendly to estates, not friendly to smallholders!’
‘Quite true, sir,’ piped up another quavering voice at Matthew’s elbow, causing him to start violently and peer into the gloom where another of the shadowy cadavers, hitherto lying supine on the lowest rack and displaying no-signs of life, had now collected up two sets of bones and thrown them over the side of his tray; after dangling uncertainly for a while they anchored themselves to the floor and proved to be legs; then, with a further scraping of bones, their owner levered himself politely to his feet and stood swaying beside Matthew. ‘Quite true, sir. Controller of Rubber listen only to European estates. He have five men on his committee from estates … only one smallholder! On his Rubber Regulation Committee he have twenty-seven men from estates, still only one from smallholders. And yet smallholders produce half country’s rubber! That is not fair, sir. It is disgusting. Quite true, sir.’ And he sank back with a moan into the shadows and a moment later there came a faint rattling sound. ‘Oh dear,’ thought Matthew, ‘but still, he’s probably had a good innings.’
Meanwhile, the speaker’s place had been taken by other shadowy figures and Vera, tugging at his arm, was anxious to gain his attention because the sighing, sing-song voice of her friend had not ceased all this time and by now had built up a considerable backlog of complaints. ‘He says Rubber Research Institute run by Government does not help smallholders, it helps only estates. He says smallholders pay for Institute from taxes just like European estates, but Institute only gives new, very good rubber plants to estates! What they call ‘budwood” …’
‘He means these new high-yielding clones?’
‘Yes, budwood … he means new clones … He telling truth!’ sang a chorus of skeletons and moribunds who had crowded around Matthew and were tugging at his garments to attract his attention …
‘He says smallholders producing more rubber per acre than estates but given much smaller share!’
‘Look here, Vera, I’m afraid I shall have to be going now. I’m on duty this evening and I’m late already …’
‘He says bloody big swindle … he says …’
For the past few moments, extenuated though he was by his long list of complaints, Vera’s friend had resumed his petulant search in the bundle of rags he was using as a pillow; now, with a final effort which seemed as if it might capsize him completely, his trembling fingers had fastened on what they were looking for. This proved to be a yellowing page of newsprint which he held up, quivering, to Matthew. Matthew took it, straining his eyes in the half-light to see what it was. He could just make out that it was the editorial opinion of The Planter and that the date on the top of the page was June 1930. ‘I’m afraid I can’t quite see what it says,’ he murmured apologetically. But one of the skeletons at his shoulder, with a prodigious effort which seemed to drain him of his last resources of energy, had succeeded in dragging the head of a match against the sandpaper of a matchbox held in the shaking hands of two of his companions. The match flared. Matthew read aloud as rapidly as he could …
‘ “In the hands of the producers of budwood …” ’
‘He means Government Research Institute …’
‘I say, please don’t interrupt me because otherwise I won’t be able to finish this before the match goes out,’ protested Matthew. ‘Well where was I … “In the hands of the producers of budwood lies the decision whether rubber planting will, in the far and remote future, become a native industry, or remain an asset of immense value to those European races to whose administrative skill and financial acumen … (Oh dear, I don’t like the sound of this) … the development of Malaya and of the Dutch East Indies has been due …” ’
‘More, sir, more!’ croaked his audience.
‘ “… It is the honest unbiased opinion of many leading men outside the rubber industry that the less the smallholder has to do with rubber the better it will be in the long run for himself and for all others engaged in rubber production …” ’ The match died. Matthew was left with the piece of paper in his fingers. He sighed.
All around him in the semi-darkness, as if summoned by the last trump for a final dispensation of justice over the doings of this imperfect world, supine figures were sitting up and casting off their shrouds and bandages, while others were clambering down from the tiers of shelves on which they had been stretched. He sighed again and looked down at his watch as they crowded round him.
44
Towards the end of the year Sir Robert Brooke-Popham had been replaced as Commander-in-Chief Far East by General Pownall. Although he had been on friendly terms with Brooke-Popham and his successor was unknown to him, Walter was nevertheless relieved to see the departure of his friend for it had grown increasingly clear that Brooke-Popham was not comfortable in the rôle to which he had been assigned. But if this change of commanders had been expected to exert a beneficial effect on the course of the campaign there was no immediate sign of it, at least to the eyes of a civilian onlooker. By now, in any case, the most crucial military decisions had to be taken within the borders of Malaya itself, and thus the responsibility for making them fell to General Percival and his staff at Malaya Command.
The departure of Brooke-Popham did have a disadvantage for Walter, though, in that it removed the one person from whom he could have found out, in general if not in particular, how the campaign was going. If there was going to be trouble in Singapore, and despite the confident tone of the daily communiqués it was growing increasingly clear that there was going to be, Walter wanted to make sure that his womenfolk were removed to a place of safety in plenty of time. But he was not only worried about his wife, Joan and Kate: he was also worried about the rubber which still crammed his godowns at the docks, for the greater part of which he had still been unable to arrange shipping. To make matters worse, this rubber was increasingly in danger from air-raids. He would have liked to have taken Brooke-Popham for a stroll round the Orchid Garden and asked him, man to man, when RAF reinforcements were going to arrive and do something about these raids. Because something would have to be done about them, that much was clear. Otherwise the whole of Singapore would go up in flames and nobody could do a thing about it. He would have liked to approach, if not Brooke-Popham, then someone on Percival’s staff. But Malaya Command did not have much time for Walter these days. They were too busy doing whatever it was they were doing up-country. ‘Not like it was a few months ago,’ he grumbled to his wife, ‘when they were willing enough to drink my pahits.’
Mrs Blackett herself was frantic with worry for her younger brother, Charlie, who had gone to rejoin his regiment across the Causeway and had not been seen since. This was not such a bad thing, in Walter’s view, but he did what he could to allay her fears, pointing out that it was perfectly normal for soldiers not to be heard from when they were fighting the enemy, particularly in the jungle. Could he not approach General Percival and ask him to have Charlie sent back to Singapore? she wanted to know. ‘My dear, I don’t even know the fellow,’ Walter replied, showing signs of exasperation, ‘and even if I did I could hardly ask him that. It might just be possible, if I knew Percival, to ask him to move Charlie towards the enemy, but I couldn’t possibly ask him to move him in the opposite direction. He’s a soldier, my dear. That’s his job. That’s what he’s there for. I can’t see why you should want him not to do his blessed job!’
‘But surely, Walter,’ cried Mrs Blackett, close to tears. ‘There must have been some terrible fighting … I hear that wounded men are arriving every day at the railway station by the hundreds and if the Japanese have captured Penang …’
‘Percival has too much on his mind, Sylvia, and there’s an end of it,’ said Walter crossly.
‘But you don’t know if you haven’t tried!’
Walter, however, was quite right. General Percival did have a great deal on his mind. After the débâcle at Jitra the British forces had withdrawn behind the Perak River. But there was a snag about the Perak River, for it flowed in the wrong direction from north to south in the direction of the Japanese advance rather than from east to west, across it. Unfortunately for Percival, however, a position any farther north would have been made untenable by that same Japanese unit which had landed at Patani and, by snatching the Ledge, had earlier threatened the communications of the doomed position of Jitra. This force, by continuing to advance parallel to the main Japanese thrust, which was coming down the trunk road, had maintained its threat of turning the right flank of any new defensive line. As the Japanese Army advanced, therefore, so did this menacing shadow beside it.
But why had this second force been allowed to shadow the main force along the trunk road? The reason was that the British commanders had considered that the terrain did not permit such a manoeuvre, omitting from their calculations a certain unmetalled road which they thought unsuitable for mechanized transport (and so it was, though by no means impassable for infantry advancing on foot or on bicycles). This road headed straight in the direction the Japanese wanted to go, towards Kuala Kangsar. The fact was that from the very beginning of the Campaign this force from Patani had supplied the loose thread which was causing the British defences to unravel right down the peninsula.
At last, however, at Kuala Kangsar this particular loose thread came to an end and the British right flank was secured by the solid stitching of Malaya’s mountainous spine. But even now, with the mountains at his elbow, Percival felt another retreat was necessary because, alas, the Japanese could use the Perak River to penetrate any defences established north of Telok Anson. And so, in due course and after a further withdrawal, new defensive positions had been prepared in the region of the border between Perak and Selangor on the Slim River, and also to the north and south of it.
It sometimes happens in a dream that you find, as if by coincidence, that all the fears you have when awake are improbably realized one after another. This dismaying sensation of events having tumbled together not really by accident but in a way specially designed to deprive you of all hope, which normally only takes advantage of a dreamer’s gullibility, for the British commanders had moved out of a nightmare into reality: having at long last escaped from what had been threatening them hitherto, they now found with relentless dream-logic that this apparently secure position on the Slim River was threatened from a completely different direction.
That very circumstance which the Major had feared in the first week of the campaign on hearing that the Prince of Wales and the Repulse had been sunk had materialized. Thanks to their virtually complete control of both sea and air the Japanese were now in a position to land as they pleased on the thinly defended west coast (on the east coast, too, come to that). To make matters worse this fragile military situation had to be contained in some way by the men of the exhausted 11th Division although, as it happened, Percival had at his disposal the fresh troops of the 9th Division on the other side of the mountains on the east coast: their job was the defence of the airfield at Kuantan and the denial of Mersing against possible landings, both tasks rendered pointless in the event by the collapse in the west. It was this same unfortunate 11th Division which had been obliged to wait in the rain at the very start of the campaign three weeks earlier while Brooke-Popham pondered his pre-emptive advance into Siam. Those fresh and confident troops waiting for the signal to advance and give the Japanese a thrashing would have been hard to recognize in the somnambulant men wearily digging themselves in and putting up anti-tank obstacles at the Slim River; even Mrs Blackett’s brother, Charlie, though his stay in Singapore had spared him the first part of the retreat, was looking decidedly the worse for wear as he worked with a company of Punjabis at wiring the road.
Yet if these fighting men were weary, so was General Percival, and he was worried, too. Does it strike you as odd that whatever iniative was planned by Malaya Command invariably turned out to contain a flaw which would cause it to fail? It was beginning to strike Percival as very odd indeed. At times he could see the flaw well in advance but even so … it always happened that he could do nothing about it. He could not find fault with General Heath, though it was true that Heath was ‘Indian Army’ and hence, in Percival’s view, not a great deal could be expected of him. As a matter of fact, it could even be argued that Heath was being miraculously successful in preserving his retreating 111 Indian Corps from being destroyed And so, who was to blame? He could not, in all fairness, blame himself or his staff for the flaw that kept appearing. Very often it was simply the lie of land that caused his plans to go adrift … or perhaps it was the result of that earlier bungling by poor old Brookers. Whatever the reason, the flaw kept on appearing. It was most peculiar. Or worse than peculiar.
On the night of 4 January, worn out by the constant strain and worried by the prospect of an important conference with General Heath and General Gordon Bennett at Segamat on the following day, Percival fell into a deep sleep. Almost immediately, it seemed, he plunged into a confusing dream about some interminable dinner-party at Government House. But it was not now that it was taking place, in the New Year of 1942, for there, opposite, was the decent, blunt, straightforward countenance of old General Dobbie, the GOC. So it must then be 1937 when he had been out here as GSO1 on Dobbie’s staff. At the end of the table he could see the Governor’s handsome, slightly supercilious face: behind the Governor again there was someone standing in the shadows speaking into his ear. Percival knew there was someone there because whoever it was had rested his hand on the back of the Governor’s chair in a familiar sort of way while he was whispering. He could just make out that the hand emerged from the sleeve of a uniform, but belonging to which of the Services he could not say.
Suddenly, and with spirit, he challenged this man in the shadows. After a moment the hand on the Governor’s chair was withdrawn. A period of confusion and darkness followed, of which he could make no sense. Presently he sat up, sweating and suffocating inside the mosquito net. The image of the Governor, gazing at him with a condescending smile, slowly faded. It was still dark.
Percival looked at his watch, took a swallow of water from the glass beside his bed and lay back again. It was very hot. The fan slogging away above him could make little impression on the air inside his mosquito net. He would have liked to tear away the net and sleep in fresh air again, but he could not possibly risk an insect bite that might lead to malaria or dengue fever, not at this stage. ‘I’ll never sleep like this, though,’ he told himself. Yet, despite the heat, he fell asleep again almost immediately and this time he dreamed that he was back at Staff College and he was doing some exam or other on which his whole career in the Army would depend. Wait, he had remembered now what it was. He had to prevent the Japanese from seizing the Naval Base on Singapore Island and they had already got almost as far as Kuala Lumpur. He was no longer at Staff College. He was in Malaya and it was the real thing. He began to sweat and worry again in his sleep.
But towards dawn Percival received a welcome visit. The shades of Clausewitz and Metternich came to his bedside to offer their advice. Presently they were joined by the spirits of Liddell Hart and of Sir Edward Hamley, author of Hamley’s The Operations of War, Explained and Illustrated. These gentlemen considered a number of solutions to the difficulties which faced him. Metternich recommended that everything should be wagered on a rapid strike north to disrupt the Japanese lines of communication, Hamley spoke vaguely of flanking movements (and also, less pertinently, of cavalry), Clausewitz wanted Percival to withdraw his troops intact to Singapore Island to conserve them until reinforcements could arrive from Europe and America. Ah, that was interesting! Percival listened eagerly to these ghostly advisers and found each more persuasive than the last. But presently their voices grew fainter and they fell to arguing among themselves. All too soon came the tread of the orderly’s heavy boots in the corridor outside.
Conscious again, Percival decided, at his meeting in Segamat with General Heath and General Gordon Bennett, that although in most respects the narrowness of the Slim River position lent itself well to defence, the threat of amphibious landings further down the coast would make it untenable in the long run unless reinforcements could be brought up to cover the coastal area. The Slim River defile, however, provided the last chance of stopping the enemy short of Kuala Lumpur … or indeed, south of it for a considerable distance. For as you went south the knobbly spine of mountains sank back beneath the peninsula’s fair skin, which itself became pleasantly wrinkled with roads. There would be little chance in such favourable terrain of stopping the Japanese in Malacca. And so, if not in Malacca, it would have to be in Johore … if not on Singapore Island itself. In the meantime, the Japanese must be denied the airfield at Kuantan on the east coast, at least until the reinforcements of troops and planes expected in mid-January had arrived. Moreover, if the defence of Johore was to be properly organized, the Japanese must be halted for a time and the capture of Kuala Lumpur postponed. Everything pointed therefore to the critical defensive stand being made at the Slim River. The Japanese must be stopped there or the defence of Johore would be hopeless. That was why the Punjabis and the Argylls had to keep on digging themselves in even after dark on the following nights. Everything would depend on them.
45
As the late afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen over the Mayfair’s increasingly neglected and overgrown compound, two figures could be seen making their way along the well-trodden path towards the Blacketts’ house: one of these was easily recognizable as Matthew, normally dressed, looking somewhat pensive, but who was the other, this individual wearing what looked like a scarlet boiler-suit, a scarlet balaclava helmet from which horns protruded, and carrying a large toasting-fork? This, as it happened, was only the Major who with great reluctance had put on the suit which he had been sent by Blackett and Webb Limited for the dress rehearsal of their jubilee parade. He was now regretting the decision because he felt much too hot: you cannot expect to wear a balaclava helmet and horns in the tropics without discomfort. Besides, he was afraid that he might be the only person who had decided to dress up, and he now regretted having yielded to Walter’s insistence that he should personify Inflation. The Major swiped irritably with his toasting-fork at one of the giant thistles growing beside the tennis court and the air filled with drifting white down.
The Major, however, had a reason for wanting to keep in with Walter. Several of Blackett and Webb’s vans had been set aside for conversion into floats for the jubilee parade and the Major, to whom it had been perfectly clear for some time that the parade would never take place, was anxious that his AFS unit should be able to call on them in an emergency to supplement what scanty transport was available: this amounted to the Lagonda, Mr Wu’s Buick, a motor-cycle belonging to the estate manager and a couple of bicycles.
A site for the building of the floats had been chosen adjacent to the Blacketts’ compound in a yard surrounded by a cluster of dilapidated godowns which at some time in the last century had been used as storage sheds for a nutmeg plantation but for the past many years had been disused, at least, until recently when Walter’s excessive buying of rubber to circumvent the new American regulations had filled all Blackett and Webb’s other godowns to overflowing and obliged these tumbledown buildings, hastily restored, to accommodate some of the surplus. Walter had originally bought the former nutmeg plantation, which still boasted pleasant groves of lofty, evergreen nutmeg trees, in order to cushion his own property from its acquisition by disagreeable neighbours. But now it seemed to him that he could hardly have made a better investment. Where better could he have found to prepare in secret the floats for Blackett and Webb’s triumphant parade?
The Major had been waiting patiently over the past three weeks for the reality of Singapore’s increasingly precarious situation to put paid to Walter’s jubilee parade. At least, he had assumed, work on building the floats would have been abandoned. With a continuing shortage of labour at the docks and with the Forces trying desperately to recruit men to build defences and accommodation that should have been built years ago it was inconceivable that labour should be diverted to something as trivial as Walter’s floats. Yet although the building of them had been considerably delayed he was astonished to find now that work was still continuing; moreover, twice as many men were working on them as before. The explanation was simple: the men in question, Asiatics normally employed as carpenters, painters or welders at the docks, very naturally preferred the comparative safety of this nutmeg grove to working on coastal defences, at the docks, or the Naval Base under the threat of air-raids.
In other respects, however, there were definite signs that reality was making substantial inroads into Walter’s dream. The only Europeans who had decided to attend this dress rehearsal were Monty, even more bizarrely dressed than the Major, and a few of the younger executives of Blackett and Webb who had presumably found it impossible to refuse; none of the latter had seen fit to dress up for the occasion. Less than half of the Chinese who had been summoned to animate the dragons had turned up. Not more than three-quarters of a Chinese brass band was perched on some rusting machinery at one end of the yard, occasionally banging or blowing at their instruments but for the most part watching dubiously as Walter, looking impatient and out of sorts, shouted at his helpers and tried to marshal enough volunteers to get one of the dragons moving. As he saw Matthew and the Major arrive he broke off, however, and came over to them.
‘It’s good of you to come,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it. Most people haven’t, though, and I doubt whether we’re going to be able to do very much with what we have …’ He paused gesturing vigorously. ‘Not there, you ass! Over there with the others! How many times do I have to tell you?’ He sighed with exasperation, stuck his hands in his pockets and surveyed the chaotic scene spread before him. He was perspiring freely, and looked squat, formidable and slightly demented. ‘It’s no use,’ he muttered, more to himself than to the Major and Matthew, ‘what can you do with such people?’
The Major cautiously lifted a finger to scratch one of his horns which was itching. He was a little surprised to find that he felt sorry for Walter. He said nothing, however. Together they set off to inspect the floats, Walter explaining that he had hoped to get the whole parade together and into motion and to take a couple of turns around the swimming pool and back here again to iron out any last minute difficulties. That was now out of the question unless the absentees presented themselves double quick. They passed two floats parked in the shade of a nutmeg tree: on one of them Joan sat, wearing a plumed Roman helmet and a flowing white garment of Grecian appearance which displayed her lovely arms and shoulders to advantage; in her left hand she held a trident, her right hand secured the Britannic shield. She was gazing impassively ahead and when Matthew murmured ‘Hello’ made no reply (perhaps she had not heard him). Kate sat on the other float with her arm around a gigantic cornucopia: she brightened up when she saw Matthew and waved her free hand.
Kate’s cornucopia had a few minutes earlier been the cause of a furious row between Walter and Monty. From out of its gaping mouth there spilled an abundance of everything made of rubber: motor-tyres of all shapes and sizes, bicycle tyres, inner tubes, shoes and wellingtons, rubber gloves, sou’westers, batting gloves, rubber sheets and tiles, shock absorbers, rubber-tipped pencils, cushions, kneeling pads, balloons, elastic bands, belts, braces and a hundred and one other things, not all of them recognizable. To this magnificent array Monty, as a joke, had attempted to add a packet of contraceptives. As ill luck would have it, Walter had noticed his son chuckling gleefully as he arranged something conspicuously on the very lip of the cornucopia. His display of anger, even to Monty who was accustomed to it, had been frightening. Walter was incensed, not simply that Monty should have done something that might have made the cornucopia look ridiculous, but that he should have paid so little heed to the modesty of his younger sister. Monty had retired, disgraced, and was at present slouching glumly in the shade of another tree.
‘Why don’t you get off your behind and do something to help,’ Walter shouted at him roughly as he passed. Monty stirred uncomfortably but evidently could think of no way in which he could improve on what was being done already, for presently he sank back again. Monty, the Major noticed, like himself had been allotted a rôle in the counter-parade which was to accompany the paradé proper, harassing it symbolically to represent the pitfalls that a thriving business might have to face in its passage over the years; as a matter of fact, the Major was quite looking forward to tormenting plump and cheerful little Kate with his toasting-fork, though he could see no real reason why inflation should carry a toasting-fork at all. Monty’s costume came no closer than the Major’s to suggesting the part that he was to portray: it consisted of an old striped swimming-costume with shoulder straps, striped football socks rolled right up his hairy thighs and a fanged mask which bore a disturbing coincidental resemblance to General Percival: at the moment this mask and an inflated bladder tied to a stick lay on the ground beside him; the final and most frightening touch in Monty’s costume were the awe-inspiring, curved talons which had been grafted on to a pair of batting-gloves for the occasion. Walter had alloted Monty the rôle of Crippling Overheads in the parade and had refused all his requests for a more heroic part.
The Major was now gazing with misgiving at one or two of the other floats which Walter, his spirits reviving a little, was showing him (Matthew had sloped off for a chat with Kate and perhaps was even hoping to make it up with Joan). Despite all the difficulties and postponements, Walter was saying, certain advances had been made in Blackett and Webb’s preparations: it would be a great shame, and the most bitter of disappointments to him personally, if the jubilee should ‘for one reason or another’ now fail to take place. These advances, the Major had to agree, were considerable: four of the vans which had been set aside for the jubilee had already been crowned with the harnesses of wooden spars and metal brackets on which would be placed, when the time came, the floats which the committee had decided upon; other harnesses and floats were still under construction here and there, and in due course other vans would be temporarily commandeered to support t
Review
“No writer has swallowed all of Singapore, from its stately colonial bungalows to its once opium-infested slums, with the verve and wit of the late J.G. Farrell, whose 1978 saga The Singapore Grip remains the great Singapore novel…Farrell’s pungent aroma still fleetingly hovers over today’s city…With his gentle wit Farrell captures the soul of Singapore: a polyglot Asian port, still partly under the sleepy sway of its British colonial past, and still lurching toward an uncertain future with a furious, irresistible energy.” —Time Magazine
Product Description
Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn’t what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore’s oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett’s partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming—what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett’s price-fixing and market manipulation—but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end.
A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogy” that began with Troubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur.