The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  ‘And that he’s a wonderful human being,’ added Ehrendorf with warmth.

  Kate had taken to giggling whenever Ehrendorf spoke warmly of Matthew. This time, when she giggled, Ehrendorf suddenly sprang across the room and seized her before she could escape. He picked her up bodily, although she was getting to be quite a lump, and brought her back under one arm. This time he was going to find out why she was laughing. In the end Kate had to confess: it was because he was always calling Matthew a ‘wonderful human being’ and she kept thinking he was calling him a ‘wonderful Human Bean’! Her parents exchanged exasperated glances at this: Kate had recently discovered that she had a sense of humour and they had suffered greatly in consequence. But Ehrendorf seemed to find it amusing. Thereafter Matthew became known to the younger Blacketts as ‘the Human Bean’.

  Well, since old Mr Webb continued to cling on stubbornly Matthew had to be sent for, whatever he was like, and influence used on his behalf to overcome the difficulties of war-time travel. Fortunately, rubber was a priority cargo these days and the Ministry of Supply listened sympathetically to Walter’s request that Matthew should be sent out to take his father’s place in the Mayfair Rubber Company. It took time before Matthew could be located through his solicitors (it turned out that he had not made a prudent bolt for it with the stampeding herd of well-to-do), and more time before the details could be arranged. The result was that not just weeks but months had passed since the unlucky day the old gentleman had fallen out of his chair at the garden-party before word eventually reached Walter that Matthew had started out on his journey. But these days unless you were a brass hat or a Minister nobody knew when you would arrive, or even if you would arrive at all.

  Mr Webb, though severely paralysed and still unable to communicate, had in due course been moved back to the Mayfair with a nurse in constant attendance. Walter, who himself had a secret dread of dying in hospital, had overborne medical advice to the contrary and had the old gentleman returned to his home. There he could more easily take a few minutes away from his business affairs to lift a corner of the mosquito net and give a comforting squeeze to the cold knuckles which lay on the sheet.

  Once or twice Mr Webb had tried to say something. Something to do with the sun, apparently. It could hardly be that the light was bothering him because the blinds of split bamboo chicks had been unrolled and allowed only a muted glow to enter the room. Perhaps the old man had been thinking of agreeable evenings spent prowling with his secateurs and watching the sunlight gleam on the skins of his naked gymnasts as they swooped and swung and balanced, growing stronger every day. Walter found it disturbing, nevertheless, to see his friend lying there, breathing noisily in his tent of white muslin. Mr Webb’s eyelids were half open but his expression was vacant for the most part and he showed little sign of being aware of his surroundings. ‘This is how we all finish,’ mused Walter grimly.

  ‘It’s the end of an era,’ he said aloud to Major Archer who stood beside him in a respectful pose at his dying chairman’s bedside.

  Because presently Mr Webb again tried to say something about the sun Walter decided that Miss Chiang should be recalled.

  Perhaps he would find her presence soothing. After Mr Webb’s collapse the gymnasts and body-builders had been dispersed with a bonus added to their emoluments. Miss Chiang had declined indignantly when offered an additional reward for staying away from her former employer while he was in hospital. Now the Major was given the delicate task of running her to earth in some tenement in Chinatown and persuading her to return to visit the patient. She agreed without fuss and her presence did indeed seem to exert a soothing influence on the old man. She was still wearing one of Joan’s cast-off dresses and Walter, glimpsing her one day as she was leaving the Mayfair was taken aback, as much by her good looks as by the thought of her dubious relationship with old Mr Webb. ‘Who would have thought that Webb would end up like this with a half-caste holding his hand!’

  Walter, these days, had little time to spare for visiting the sick. Business had never been more hectic and besides he was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the problem of finding a husband for Joan. Now that it had become clear that he was unlikely to inherit Mr Webb’s share of the business it had become more important than ever that she should make a sensible match.

  ‘What are your feelings for Jim Ehrendorf, if you don’t mind me asking?’ he enquired mildly one day, finding her alone.

  ‘Oh, he’d put his hand in the fire for me,’ she replied with a laugh.

  Walter was silent for a moment, contemplating this reply which, though interesting, did not answer his question.

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘Of course I believe you,’ said Walter, laughing in turn. ‘What I wanted to know was what you feel for him?’

  Joan shrugged, gazing out of the window, her eyes like green pebbles. ‘He’s all right. He gets on my nerves though, I’m thinking of chucking him one of these days … in fact, the sooner the better.’ Walter was satisfied with this reply.

  Some days later, however, he thought of it again in a rather different light. For it happened that one day, in the course of a casual conversation while waiting for Joan to come downstairs, Ehrendorf said something which Walter, as a rubber producer, found unusually interesting, and which placed him in something of a predicament if he were to pursue his policy of replacing Ehrendorf in Joan’s affections with someone who would make a more suitable husband.

  Walter’s predicament stemmed indirectly from the successful operation of the Restriction scheme’s tap for controlling the flow of rubber on to the market, of which he had originally been one of the chief plumbers. As a result of the recession of 1938 and the fall in price to five pence a pound the Committee had given the tap a savage twist, shutting down the flow to forty-five per cent of capacity. Thereafter in the reservoir of rubber stocks the level began to sink and the price to creep up again. By the beginning of 1939 the level had fallen once more below the danger mark which had released the previous boom, but the Committee still showed no sign of opening the tap.

  As it had turned out, it was neither the idleness of the native smallholders nor the lack of capacity of the producing countries which had now set the price of rubber on its long, steady climb, but the declaration of war in Europe. At the end of 1939 with the level in the reservoir very low (a mere two months’ absorption) the price had been standing at a gratifying shilling a pound. This, patriotism apart, had been a tense period for Walter and his colleagues. What effect would war have on the use of rubber? Their experience during the Great War had been of little help: in those days the industry had hardly got under way. But they had not had long to wait. Despite a grudging increase in the amount released to the market the level continued to sink. Rubber was being used more than ever.

  At this point the Committee began to come under heavy pressure, not just from the manufacturers but from the United States Government and the British Ministry of Supply. More rubber must be released! And it was, but still not enough. The German attack on France and the Low Countries the preceding spring (May 1940) had alarmed the Americans about their future supplies: they wanted to build up a reserve in case it should be needed for their defence programme. And so they had established the Rubber Reserve Company to buy the 150,000 tons they thought they would need at a decent price of up to twenty US cents a pound; the Committee had agreed to increase the flow so that there would be enough rubber on the market for them to buy. Presently the Americans had decided to make it 330,000 tons.

  Alas, against all expectations the amount of rubber used by private manufacturers continued to rise and, despite the increased rate of release, there was still not enough to go round. The United States Government’s twenty cents, which at one time would have been considered bountiful, was being resolutely outbid by private manufacturers who, often as not (Walter had to smile at the thought of it) were themselves the chaps who had been appointed as buying agents for the Government and who wer
e now in the satisfactory position of bidding against (and naturally outbidding) their official selves! How poignant it was when the Reserve Company found that after six months of effort its cupboard was still almost as bare as it had been at the beginning! Even when the Committee had at last reluctantly agreed to raise the rate of release to one hundred per cent for the first quarter of 1941 there was still no sign of the market reaching saturation point. The spreading Japanese influence, moreover, was diverting rubber from Indo-China and Siam away from Britain and the United States. There could no longer be any serious doubt about it, in Walter’s view: the producers’ wildest dreams were being realized. This time they had a genuine shortage of rubber, not just the wishful thinking of a fast-talking London broker.

  Now in February 1941 while he was chatting idly with Ehrendorf about Japan’s need for raw materials and the powerful grip that this gave the Western nations on her wind-pipe (where on earth had Joan got to, by the way, she surely hadn’t stood him up again!) the young man happened to remark that his countrymen were planning to acquire a further 100,000 tons of rubber for the Reserve Company.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Walter casually, doing his best to conceal his surprise: this was the first he had heard of such a deal. He was certain that none of the other producers or dealers in Singapore was aware of it. Nor had he heard anything from his friends on the Committee. In fact, he could hardly believe that it was true; it seemed more likely that Ehrendorf had made a mistake. Ehrendorf repeated what he had said: he had heard it from someone at the consulate. ‘By the way,’ he added cheerfully, ‘it’s supposed to be a secret so please keep it to yourself. Careless talk can cost jobs as well as lives.’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Walter blandly, and then to change the subject asked: ‘What did you do to your hand?’ Ehrendorf’s left hand was bandaged.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just a burn.’ Walter was on the point of asking him now he had done it but, on second thoughts, decided not to pursue the matter. An uncomfortable silence prevailed for a few moments until at last Joan’s footstep was heard on the stairs.

  In March Ehrendorf’s prediction was proved correct when news came that the Committee had agreed to an offer for a further 100,000 tons. This gave Walter food for thought. A day or two earlier Joan had confided in him that she had now definitely decided to see no more of Ehrendorf. He was getting on her nerves! She was going to clear the decks! And yet, Walter realized, this might not be altogether convenient for himself because it so happened that there was something about the American attitude to the buying of rubber which he badly wanted to know. And it seemed possible that Ehrendorf might be able to tell him.

  For some months Walter had been aware that sooner or later difficulties would arise over the fact that the Reserve Company, though given the job of piling up vast quantities of rubber, was being constantly outbid by the big American companies. Why, of 140,000 tons at present afloat for America, the Reserve Company’s share was a paltry 5,000 tons! This situation, with the American Government increasingly biting its nails over its reserve stocks, could not be expected to last. Already the first hints were reaching Singapore that the American authorities were on the point of taking some remedial action. Walter was anxious to know what that action would be before it was actually taken.

  There was only one thing to be done. Though he did not like to interfere in Joan’s private affairs (except, of course, where a potential husband might be concerned) Walter decided to explain his predicament to his daughter. She listened carefully to what he had to say and once again he was pleased by her quick grasp of business matters. ‘I can’t promise, of course, but it might just happen that we learned something that would do the firm a power of good.’

  ‘A reprieve has been granted!’ declared Joan, smiling. ‘What a lucky man he is to have you pleading his cause!’

  12

  Walter did not consider himself a person easily given to self-doubt and discouragement: vigorous initiative was more his cup of tea. But sometimes these days he could not avoid the feeling that his familiar world was crumbling away at an alarming rate. No doubt the Japanese were at the root of a great deal of the present trouble in the Far East: since 1937 a veritable blizzard of edicts designed to cripple European and American interests in China had come from their puppet Government in Peking. Foreign trade had been progressively frozen out and replaced by Japanese monopolies. Look at the huge cigarette factory currently being built in Peking by the Manchuria Tobacco Company, a sinister edifice indeed when you remembered that non-Japanese cigarettes were already subject to a special discriminatory tax throughout Inner Mongolia! Or consider the way the Japanese had taken over the Peking—Mukden and Peking—Suiyan Railways without paying a cent of the interest these railways owed to the foreign bondholders who had financed them, not to mention the havoc they were wreaking throughout China with their military currency. Nor had Blackett and Webb been spared: their import-export trade with Shantung, which had once gone through Tsingtao, had been driven from there by penal anti-Western restrictions to Weihaiwei, only to have the same restrictions follow hot on their heels. Walter did not particularly blame the Japanese for taking what they could get, but he did blame the British Government for allowing them to do so with impunity.

  But even without the Japanese Walter believed that his familiar world would still have been crumbling. The strikes of the past decade had changed the whole complexion of Malaya. Serious strikes had continued: Walter doubted now whether they would ever stop. The rise in the cost of living brought about by the outbreak of the war in Europe was the present cause: the workers were aware that profits had risen, too. Five months ago (December 1940) two and a half thousand tappers in the Bahau Rompin area had struck, claiming a daily rate of $1.10 for a task of 350 to 400 trees. The estate manager had promptly paid them off, which meant that they lost the barrack accommodation on the estate that went with the job. They had set up a makeshift camp in Bahau Town. When the police had come to arrest the ring-leaders a few days later crowds sympathetic to the workers had confronted them. Ugly scenes had developed in the course of which the police had opened fire, killing three workers.

  Nor was that the end of it, nor likely to be for years to come, in Walter’s view. At this very moment, while he sat eating lunch in the Cricket Club with a colleague, Indian workers in the Klang District were on strike. If you had tried to tell old Webb that one day Indian estate workers would take to this strike game he would not have believed you. Indian workers, though paid less than Chinese, were habitually docile and respectful of authority. And yet now they were having to quell them with police and troops! Many of Walter’s friends at the Singapore Club were amazed at this change of spots by the Indian workers, but not Walter. He had been expecting it for some time. Because now, he knew, the changed atmosphere in the country would permit such things to happen. The old order of things was as dead as a doornail. Walter sighed and dipped a silver spoon into the pudding which crouched on his plate, a solid moulding of greyish tapioca with coconut milk and a thin, dark syrup. Gula Malacca! How that cool taste stirred memories of the old days in Singapore!

  His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of a ‘boy’ with a telephone message which had been relayed from his office: Mr Webb’s condition had taken a turn for the worse. Would he come at once? Walter, perhaps in the grip of nostalgia, had drunk several beers and, unusually for him, did not feel altogether sober. He glanced around the room as he stood up: many of the other diners were in uniform and he thought : ‘I’d better not fall over and make an ass of myself in front of this crowd!’ But he managed without difficulty to negotiate the door and the hallway in a dignified manner. It was outside on the steps, beneath the red-brick Victorian portico, that he almost had a serious collision with a tall, thin and rather chinless Army officer who was entering the Club. The officer’s disapproving expression intensified into a grimace of annoyance as Walter, to prevent himself plunging head first down the steps, grasped a thin
arm in its rolled-up khaki sleeve. A glance at those blue eyes and tentative moustache was enough. Although Walter, for preference, did not consort with military men he recognized this one immediately. For it was none other than General Percival who had recently taken over the military command from General Bond (Bond’s rival, Babington, had been replaced, too). But this General Percival, to Walter’s bleary eye, looked a scarcely more encouraging prospect than his predecessor.

  ‘Silly fool! Why don’t you watch where you’re going?’ muttered Walter under his breath as he let go of the General and hurried on down the steps in search of his car.

  Before he could find it, however, he recognized a familiar figure also in uniform approaching from the direction of the Victoria Memorial Hall. It was Ehrendorf. Walter hailed him and they exchanged a few words; Walter was barely able to conceal his impatience. He declined Ehrendorf’s offer of a stengah, explaining that he must hurry to Mr Webb’s bedside as it seemed that the old man’s long resistance might now be coming to an end.

  ‘By the way,’ Walter permitted himself to enquire at last, ‘did you hear any more about the new buying arrangements for the Reserve Company?’

  ‘Why, yes, as a matter of fact.’ Ehrendorf looked somewhat uncomfortable at the question. ‘I guess I can rely on you to keep it to yourself!’ Walter reassured him, trying to seem casual.

  ‘Buying is to be centralized … no more private deals. All rubber exports to the United States are to be licensed. Licences will only be issued for shipping through the central buying agency and for fulfilling any outstanding forward contracts.’

  ‘I see,’ said Walter. ‘That’s interesting. Outstanding orders will go through? When will it begin?’

  Ehrendorf did not know. ‘In a few days, I suppose.’

  Walter said goodbye to Ehrendorf and climbed into the back seat of the Bentley. ‘Mohammed,’ he said presently to the syce, ‘I would like you to drop me at Collyer Quay and then to go to the Mayfair with a message for Major Archer. Tell him that I have been delayed by a very serious matter but will come as soon as I can.’ He sat back, satisfied with his decision. It was one, he knew, with which old Mr Webb would have been in perfect sympathy.