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.