The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  ‘Most certainly not, Walter,’ said Brooke-Popham, using his napkin to dry his moustache where a few drops of vinegar still glimmered. ‘You need only take the example of the year 1932. Is it a coincidence that the same year should see a mutiny of the British fleet and an aggression by the Japanese against the International Settlement in Shanghai? Most certainly not. One clearly suggested the other. Moreover, our socialist brethren were not without influence even at the War Office. Naval parities with Japan and the foolish doctrine of “No war for ten years” were the sad result of listening to their siren call.’ The Commander-in-Chief beamed around the table to show that his views should not be taken amiss, even by those whom they happened to contradict. Nor did his friendly gaze omit the joint of roast beef which had just been brought in and set down for carving in front of Walter.

  ‘All in all,’ went on Brooke-Popham, ‘it’s perhaps just as well that the Japanese don’t have a fighter to match our Brewster Buffalo, otherwise they might be tempted to try something on in this part of the world.’ He hesitated. ‘Not, of course, that we can afford to be over-confident,’ he added, and his brow clouded somewhat; reports had been coming in of increased shipping at Camranh Bay for the past few days and even of landing-craft being loaded at Saigon. Well, he had not been nick-named ‘Fighting Popham’ for nothing. He sighed, thinking how difficult modern warfare was. Not like the old days! He was tired: ready to return to his quarters at the Sea View. Perhaps he would take a stroll on the hotel’s lawn by the sandy beach (bristling, though, nowadays with barbed wire and machine-gun nests), just to settle his mind before retiring. He wanted no landing-craft forging into his dreams and bursting there like ripe pods.

  17

  Now for some reason an air of melancholy settled over the table like a gentle fall of snow on an avenue of statues in the park, collecting in white drifts on heads and shoulders and blurring individual features. Matthew was contemplating Geneva again as he served himself with two delightfully lacquered roast potatoes, musing not without bitterness on the years he had spent travelling as the envoy of the Committee for International Understanding. For the truth was that those who governed the destiny of nations had remained as remote when he appeared in person as they had when he had written letters. Years, he remembered, had been spent roaming the corridors of palatial hotels (all the doings of the Committee had been attended by the most drastic luxury, as if the merest suggestion of economy would have blighted its high ideals) waiting to be summoned by some minor official of this or that Chancellery. On the rare occasions when he had found himself face to face with the statesman himself, it had always turned out to be because the statesman was in exile or disgrace, or because the Committee had been thought to be more important than it really was, or on account of some other such misunderstanding. In Japan, where he had gone in 1937 to recommend caution with respect to the ‘China Incident’ he had had an interview with a senior officer of the Japanese Army. This man had listened politely to what he had to say but had, himself, refrained from comment. Matthew had asked him whether he thought a war between Japan and America was probable. The officer had replied that he shared the view of the Emperor on that question. And what, Matthew had wanted to know, was the Emperor’s view? Unfortunately, the officer had replied without blinking, the Emperor’s view was something about which he was completely in the dark.

  From about that time, perhaps, had dated Matthew’s growing feeling of hopelessness concerning the Committee’s task. After this visit to Japan he had taken to reading a good deal on his travels and though he still performed his duties conscientiously, of course, his spirit was no longer quite as deeply engaged as it had once been. It had become his habit to take books with him when visiting government offices: unimportant visitors were sometimes left to cool their heels in desolate ante-rooms for long periods. On more than one occasion he had become so engrossed in his reading that when finally informed that the dignitary in question would now receive him he had looked up in surprise, unable to think for a moment what the fellow might want of him.

  Opposite Matthew, Brooke-Popham sat with his shoulders up to his ears, frozen in an attitude of weariness; he was remembering the old days. What fun it had been when they had first gone over to France in 1914! Not like today when every initiative was frustrated by some administrative detail. In those days the Flying Corps had only had to take care of reconnaissance: they had moved about the country like a travelling circus looking for a suitable field which they could use as an aerodrome wherever it was needed. In the course of the retreat from Mons it had been even more like a circus: he would set off in the morning in the Daimler in search of a suitable field and then the aeroplanes would follow and land on it later in the day, while the ground staff trailed across country after them with the fuel and the field work shops loaded into the most extraordinary collection of vans, solid-tyred lorries and pantechnicons, borrowed in London from different businesses … the van they had borrowed from Maples, the furniture people, had kept breaking down for some reason … As for the Daimler and the other motor-cars, they had been lent by various officers and civilians. One day, he remembered, he and Maurice Baring had set off in the Daimler on a misty autumn morning and about lunchtime had found a field on some table-land above a village called Sailly: and they had set to work then and there to carry stooks of corn to the side of the field so that the machines could land; and then on the way to Senlis he had bought a brass bell with a beautiful chime for the Mess. It had grown dark before they reached Senlis and a great yellow harvest moon had risen over the misty fields and the poplars. Baring had said it reminded him of a Corot. What a fine autumn that had been in 1914! A clear golden light lay over the reaped fields and the farms and the gardens full of fruit. He had only to close his eyes to see a little group of pilots at Saponay, lying in the straw and chatting after a reconnaissance sortie, or to see the heat-distorted air rising above the stubble at midday.

  ‘A penny for your thoughts, sir,’ said the General, hearing him utter a sigh.

  ‘Oh, water under the bridge, Jack,’ replied Brooke-Popham, clearing his throat dejectedly.

  Matthew, accustomed to rationing, had found the roast beef extremely appetizing and was even wondering whether it was likely that he would be offered some more. At his side, however, Dupigny was eyeing his plate dubiously, prodding the meat here and there with his fork.

  ‘It’s roast beef,’ said Mrs Blackett firmly.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Dupigny said to Matthew in an undertone, ‘it is sometimes possible to eat well here. Today, no, we are out of luck. But sometimes, when Walter invites his fellow merchants of Singapore the cook makes un petit effort. Then, ah! you would think you are in Italy of the Renaissance seated at a table surrounded by merchant-princes. You see, here in Singapore there are many people of this kind. The names of their commercial empires have the ring of glorious city-states, don’t you think so? Sime Darby! Harrisons and Crosfield! Maclaine Watson and Company! Langfield and Bowser! Guthrie and Company! And the greatest of them all, brooding over the Far East like the house of Medici over Tuscany: Jardine Matheson! Nor should we forget Blackett and Webb for there, in his usual place at the end of the table, a merchant-prince in his own right, Walter Blackett presides over this reunion of wealth and power as if he were Pope Leo X in person! That is a sight worth seeing!’

  Dupigny’s flight of fancy was interrupted by a sudden crash outside the door. Walter half rose to his feet but before he could make a move the door opened and a man lurched into the room backwards, as if he had just eluded the grasp of someone he had been struggling with in the corridor outside. For a moment he seemed to be expecting a further onslaught from his invisible assailant, but none came so he straightened himself and smoothed down his hair; the door was closed quietly from outside by an unseen hand. ‘Sorry I’m late, Walter,’ he said in rather slurred tones. ‘Where am I sitting?’

  ‘Quelle horreur!’ whispered Dupigny, his eyes glinting with malicious pleasur
e. ‘C’est Charlie, le frère de Madame Blackett. Et ivre mort, en plus!’

  Charlie was wearing merely a cream flannel shirt, open at the neck, and grey flannel trousers. On his feet he wore tennis shoes with the laces undone. His dishevelled appearance and the fact that he was panting slightly suggested that he had just come from some energetic sporting event. Matthew could see no family resemblance to Mrs Blackett in Charlie and he was clearly some twenty years younger. Like her, though, his face framed by blond curls bore the traces of youthful good looks. He was badly in need of a hair-cut.

  Monty swiftly rounded the table and took him by the arm, steering him towards the empty place beside Joan. Charlie surveyed the table with watery blue eyes as he went, muttering half to himself: ‘I’m glad to see you haven’t polished off all the grub.’

  ‘We’ve just been hearing, Charlie,’ declared Mrs Blackett, ‘that Matthew has recently come from Geneva where he has been working for the League of Nations.’

  ‘Has he, indeed?’ mumbled Charlie over the roast beef which had been hastily placed before him. ‘And I’m sure a fat lot of good …’ The rest of the sentence was muffled by his first bite of roast beef.

  ‘Well, not recently,’ said Matthew with a smile, and explained that the Committee for International Understanding, with Europe crumbling about it, had closed down in 1940, naturally dismayed by the amount of misunderstanding the outbreak of war entailed. ‘As a matter of fact, for the past year I’ve been working on a farm. Because of my poor eyesight they didn’t want me in the Army.’

  ‘Le “Digging for Victory”, alors?’ suggested Dupigny. ‘It is evident that the supply of food is no less important than the supply of munitions,’ he added reassuringly.

  Meanwhile Walter, swallowing the irritation caused him by the unorthodox arrival of his brother-in-law, had engaged Brooke-Popham in conversation, for the Commander-in-Chief had shaken off his melancholy and, though comatose, was still awake. For someone like himself, Walter was explaining, whose job it was to run a merchant business, a war with Japan was not a vague possibility for the future, it had already been in progress for some time. In this war, which was being fought invisibly and in silence by means of quotas, price-cutting and a stealthy invasion of traditional markets, Blackett and Webb had found itself not only in the front line but fighting for its life. Since the end of the Great War there had been a steady encirclement of British commerce in the Far East. By 1934 Japanese assaults on British textile markets had caused Westminister to introduce import quotas on cotton and rayon goods destined for Malaya. No wonder Walter and other Singapore merchants had protested to the Colonial Office that their mercantile interests were being sacrificed for no better reason than the inability of Lancashire to survive intensive competition from Japan. Walter paused and the faint grinding of his teeth became audible in the silence. He had reminded himself of the fact that Solomon Langfield, a big importer of Lancashire cotton, had been in favour of the quotas. That unprincipled blackguard! The bristles on his spine stirred beneath his Lancashire cotton shirt.

  Walter surveyed his family and guests sullenly, as if somehow they had been responsible for this lamentable state of affairs. They gazed back, as if hypnotized. Only Monty, who had doubtless heard all this before, twiddled his fork and smothered a yawn.

  ‘What I would like to know is this: can one really blame the Japanese?’ enquired Walter. His guests exchanged puzzled glances, as if to say: ‘Of course one can blame the Japanese. Why ever not?’

  ‘After all, they too are fighting for their lives. They depended so heavily for their survival on silk and cotton that, naturally, they would do whatever they had to in order to sell them. In 1933 the average Japanese price for textiles was ten cents a yard while Lancashire’s was eighteen or nineteen cents, almost twice the price! Mind you, the Japs got up to every trick in the book to evade the quotas. For example, since cotton piece-goods were not included in the quotas in no time pillow-cases big enough to put a house in began to arrive here in Singapore … pyjamas to fit elephants … shirts that twenty people could have got into … and all designed to be swiftly unstitched and used by our local manufacturers instead of the Lancashire cotton they were supposed to be using. Frankly, I admire their ingenuity. Can you blame them?’

  ‘Business is all very well, Mr Blackett,’ said the General rather brusquely. ‘But you surely do not mean to condone the way they grabbed Manchuria and invaded China. Your own firm’s business must have suffered as a result of the way the Japs have been closing the Open Door.’

  Walter nodded and smiled. ‘That’s true. We have suffered. But look at it from the Japanese point of view. Can you blame them for extending their influence into Manchuria and China? After all, the demands they have been making since 1915 … for the lease of Port Arthur and Dairen, for the South Manchuria and Antung-Mukden Railways and for the employment of Japanese capital in Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia, what do they remind you of?’ Walter, smiling now, gazed at his baffled guests. ‘I can tell you what they remind me of! They are an excellent imitation of the sort of economic imperialism through demands for special privileges which Britain herself has been making in Asia since … well, since this young man’s father started our business in the 1880s.’

  ‘But was that a reason for Japan to invade China?’ the General wanted to know.

  Walter shook his head. ‘As a businessman I understand very well why the Japanese had to invade China in 1937. China, from the point of view of trade and investment, was chaotic. No reasonably hard-boiled businessman looking at Nationalist China would have seen much to give him confidence. The Kuomintang wanted to put an end to foreigners’ privileges. They wanted to see the foreign concession areas at Shanghai, Tientsin and so on handed back to China. They wanted to stop foreigners having their own courts and raising their own taxes in China. No, business must go on, whatever the price. And a businessman needs security. So can one blame the Japanese?’

  ‘Security for business doesn’t give people the right to invade and kill their neighbours!’ protested Matthew.

  ‘My dear chap, I couldn’t agree with you more. But there comes a point where the justice of the matter becomes irrelevant. You must look at the situation from the Japanese point of view. For them it was a matter of life and death because while the Kuomintang was putting their investment in China at risk they were faced at home by the disastrous effects of the slump. In 1929, forty per cent of Japan’s total export trade was in raw silk. It only needed the collapse of American prosperity and a consequent plunge in the demand for silk to bring the Japanese economy to catastrophe. Raw silk exports were halved almost overnight. Sales of cotton and manufactured goods joined the slide! What were they expected to do? Sit at home and starve? Let’s not be naïve, my boy. Justice is always bound to come a poor second to necessity. Strong nations survive. Weak nations go to the wall, that has always been the way of the world and always will be! The point is, can one blame them for taking matters into their own hands? From the business point of view they were in a pickle. And now, mind you, with their assets frozen and their difficulties in getting raw materials their pickle is going from bad to worse. I believe the Americans should give them the raw materials they need. Otherwise what can they do but grab them by force?’ Noticing that the Commander-in-Chief was looking taken aback by this suggestion, Walter added tactfully: ‘Not that they’d get very far in this part of the world.’

  ‘The reason the Japs are so touchy and arrogant is that they eat too much fish,’ said Brooke-Popham. ‘It’s scientific. The iodine in their diet plays hell with their thyroids. They can’t help themselves. So, no, I suppose one can’t blame them.’

  18

  Now the last course had been placed on the table: a thoroughly satisfactory baked bread-pudding. Matthew, for his part, eyed it with concern, afraid that it might prove too unusual for the taste of Dupigny. He need not have worried, however, for Dupigny surprisingly proved to have a craving for it, ate two helpings li
berally coated with bright yellow custard and even went so far as to ask for the ingredients. Mrs Blackett, mollified by his enthusiasm, gave them: stale bread, raisins, sugar, an egg, a little milk and a pinch of nutmeg.

  ‘Incredible,’ murmured Dupigny, eyebrows raised politely.

  Brooke-Popham’s thoughts had wandered back to August 1914 again, recalled to France by Dupigny’s presence. He chuckled inwardly at the thought of how primitive all their arrangements had been that first summer. He had carried a small, brand-new portmanteau full of gold everywhere he went, paying for everything out of it, from new flying-machines to spares, to chickens and wine for the HQ Mess. The hours he had spent guarding that portmanteau! Once he and Baring had driven into Paris in the Daimler and gone to Blériot’s factory there to buy a new flying-machine. Then, later, they had bought new tyres and headlights for the Daimler. He had paid for them in gold to the astonishment of the chap in the shop. ‘The English are amazing!’ he had said in French to Baring, who spoke the lingo. Yes, those were the days! Brooke-Popham folded his napkin, stifling a yawn, beckoned home now by the nodding palms of Katong and the Sea View Hotel. ‘Life is good,’ he reflected.

  The great dish of pudding had been removed. The meal was over. A large white pill and a glass of water had been set in front of Charlie, who had been eating doggedly with his mouth very near his plate and making no effort to join in the conversation. Since he had finished eating, however, he had been practising backhands with an invisible tennis racket over the tablecloth. In the process his wrist caught and knocked over a glass of water. There was a moment of startled silence.