The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  ‘By the way, just look at that Indian bloke over there in his striped tie and cricket blazer, modelled on some fatuous English tradition that has no real meaning for him at all. He’s borrowed a culture that doesn’t fit him any better than his jacket.’

  Ehrendorf, while looking at the whole picture, had also had his eye on the Blacketts and Sinclair some way in front of them; perhaps he, too, was no longer as keen as he used to be on abstract discussions, or perhaps he was preoccupied with other matters. He had grown thinner since he and Matthew had last met in Europe and had developed one or two hesitations in his manner which had not been there before. Once or twice Matthew had been on the verge of that nightmare sensation when you suddenly find yourself thinking: ‘But I don’t know this person at all!’ and the person in question happens to be your closest friend. But now a glance at Ehrendorf reassured him: it was the same old Ehrendorf, except for the moustache; a little older, of course, and not quite so cheerful and self-confident as he had once been. But then, he himself had aged, too.

  Ehrendorf’s fine eyes rested on Joan’s botttom as she walked some distance ahead between her brother and Sinclair; the light blue, neatly ironed cotton of her dress picked up the glow of naphtha lanterns as she passed each stall so that, from a distance, it seemed that her figure flared and died, flared and died, almost hypnotically. Very often a girl’s bottom begins to sag in her twenties (which does not matter particularly since few people notice or care whether a bottom has dropped or not) but Joan’s had not done so; from behind you might have thought that she was simply a mature adolescent. Nor had she developed those over-bulging cones of tissue at the top of the thigh which sometimes bestow even on a slender woman a saddle-bag effect. ‘Her bottom is too perfect,’ Ehrendorf might have been thinking as he stared ahead in a trance. ‘It’s too beautiful to get a purchase on, like everything else about her, it simply slips out of your hand.’

  Matthew, however, could not be expected to notice this sort of thing. Besides, it was doubtful whether, even if he had been interested, he would have been able to see far enough without taking off his spectacles and polishing them: in the course of the evening a thick film of dust had collected on the lenses.

  ‘Sinclair must be a new arrival in Singapore, I should think,’ remarked Ehrendorf. ‘Although he seems to know his way round OK.’ This was undoubtedly a statement rather than a question but, nevertheless, a vague air of interrogation lingered about it. Matthew, however, paid no attention: he was evidently still too busy trying to express what was in his mind.

  ‘Let me give you an example, Jim, of what happens when cash and the idea of profit strike root in a country unaccustomed to them like Burma. It seems that’s there a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less, that “the cheapest will survive”. This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-economic values tend to be eliminated. In Burma they used to build beautiful, elaborately carved cargo-boats which looked like galleons: these have been entirely replaced over the past fifty years by flat barges which can transport paddy more cheaply. And it’s the same everywhere you look: native art and craft replaced by cheap imported substitutes, handlooms have disappeared, pottery has given way to petrol tins. Even the introduction of new crops by western capital has tended to impoverish rather than enrich the life people lead. In Burma the natives used to cook with sesamum oil, now they use ground-nut oil because, though it doesn’t taste so good, it’s cheaper. In Java people have taken to eating cassava instead of rice because it’s cheaper …’

  ‘If it’s cheaper,’ protested Ehrendorf, ‘then they have more wealth to spend on other things.’

  ‘Not so! If they can live more cheaply it stands to reason that they can be paid less, provided there’s no shortage of labour. Yes, exactly, it’s our old friend “the iron law” up to its tricks again! What additional wealth may be generated by the use of cheaper methods and cheaper foods doesn’t cling to the natives: the extra saving goes to swell the profits of the western businesses which control the land or the market … like Blackett and Webb! The native masses are worse off than before. For them the coming of Capitalism has really been like the spreading of a disease. Their culture is gone, their food is worse and their communities have been broken up by the need to migrate for work on estates and in paddy fields. Well, am I right?’

  ‘But Marx believed, did he not, that such a stage is necessary in the progress of society from feudalism to Communism and therefore even saw the British in India as a force for progress.’

  ‘You can’t have it both ways! What you and Marx say is fine … that is, if Communism is what you want. But what if we reach this stage where the poor are made poorer and organized into gangs of coolies and then … lo and behold, there is no revolution! Are the natives not worse off than they were in their traditional communities? Of course they are! You still have to show me what advantages the coming of western capital has brought, in Burma at any rate.’ After a moment Matthew added: ‘In any event, my bet is that in practice Communism would be scarcely any better than Capitalism, and perhaps even worse.’

  Ahead of them Monty, Joan and Sinclair had disappeared into the Wing Choon Yuen Restaurant whose palatial entrance was partly screened from the alley by a substantial brick and pillar wall: on top of this wall neat rows of palms had been set in brown earthenware pots decorated with dragons. Ehrendorf said: ‘This is still a partial view, Matthew. No doubt there is something in what you say. But in the West, too, craftsmen have been unable to survive mass-production, capitalism and the Law of Substitution. That’s life, I guess.’ He shrugged and added with a smile: ‘There’s another principle which I shall call Ehrendorf’s Law which is now in operation in all prosperous Western countries and which asserts “the survival of the easiest”. Twenty years from now coffee beans will have disappeared and we’ll drink nothing but Camp Coffee, not because liquid coffee tastes better … it tastes worse … but because it’s easier to prepare. Pretty soon nobody will read books or learn to play the piano because it’s easier to listen to the radio or phonograph. Mark my words! Ehrendorf’s Law will do just as much damage in the long run! All the same, Matthew, I can’t agree with you because you neatly avoid mentioning all the benefits of western civilization, the social welfare, education, medicine and so forth. But let’s discuss that another time. And by the way, it has just occurred to me, if this guy Sinclair had been an old family friend of the Blacketts I’m sure I’d have seen him or heard of him in the last couple of years …’

  ‘Let’s not bother with the Blacketts … I want to discuss my theories,’ said Matthew.

  It was then that Ehrendorf suddenly went silent and looked rather upset. It had occurred to him that Matthew, far from being too preoccupied with his own ideas to discuss Sinclair and his mysterious relationship with Joan, had all this time been deliberately keeping the conversation away from the Blacketts.

  Matthew had not noticed his friend’s reaction and, following him into the restaurant, muttered grimly: ‘Oh, education and medicine. Don’t worry. One could say something on that score, too!’

  23

  Monty, Joan and Sinclair were seated at a table set among foliage on the terrasse. As Matthew and Ehrendorf approached, Sinclair got to his feet saying: ‘Got to duh … duh … ash off, I’m afraid. Got to do my duh … duh … duh …’

  ‘Of course you haven’t,’ said Monty. ‘Sit down, Sinclair, you’re being a bore. It’s nowhere near midnight yet. You said you didn’t go on duty till midnight. Well then?’

  ‘Got to duh … duh … duhoo … well, a whole lot of things, a fearful amount, in fact. So, have a nice time and I’ll be suh … seeing you,’ he added in a fluent rush. He kissed Joan’s hand, rolling his eyes for some reason, waved to the others and departed.

  The young Blacketts had ordered ikan merah (fish, Matthew understood) and chips and a large bottle of Tiger beer between them. Matthew and Ehrendorf orde
red the same. While they waited a rather tense silence fell over the table: even Monty, not usually at a loss for words, seemed disinclined to speak. In the dark shadows behind Joan glowed a shower of delicate, speckled marmalade-coloured orchids, framing her perfect face and shoulders. Ehrendorf snatched a quick glance in her direction and then, though he had already given his order, buried himself in the menu. While his eyes moved silently over won ton soup, crab sweetcorn soup, sweet sour prawn, Taoist fish ball, cornedbeef sandwich, lychee almond beancurd … his face took on a strained and innocent expression, as if he were thinking: ‘The trouble about such perfection is that you can’t get a grip on it, it slips away. There’s no perspective.’

  ‘Will you kindly stop that!’ said Joan suddenly and with anger.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Looking at me in that stupid way.’

  ‘I wasn’t looking at you at all. I was reading the goddam menu, if you don’t mind.’ Ehrendorf’s voice had grown shrill and his accent, which normally might have been taken for English, suddenly became that of an American again. Matthew took off his dust-filmed spectacles, polished them on a rather grey handkerchief, put them on again and stared unhappily at Ehrendorf.

  ‘What I wanted to say, Jim, about education and medicine …’

  Silence, however, fell over the table once more. Matthew examined the wall and the dragons which decorated the earthenware pots; from beyond the palms which grew out of them came the constant murmur of voices and laughter and the throbbing of music. Presently, a Chinese girl appeared with a bowl from which she took a steaming face-flannel with a pair of wooden tongs and placed it in Joan’s hands: she then offered one to Monty, Matthew and Ehrendorf in turn. Matthew mopped his perspiring face: the sensation of relief this afforded was extraordinary. More waiters presented themselves, bringing fish and chips and beer. As they began to eat the atmosphere grew more relaxed. Matthew, knife and fork raised and ready to pounce on his fish (he was hungry), cautiously raised the subject of education. Admittedly, he had yet to delve deeply into the matter as it affected Malaya but he did know what the British had managed to achieve in this line in India … namely, a prodigious number of unemployable graduates. ‘The Indians have always had a tremendous desire for education. The only trouble is that there are hardly any actual jobs for educated men to do, unless they want to be clerks or lawyers, and there are already several times too many of them.’

  Monty had taken knife and fork and begun vigorously to chop up his fish, first laterally into quarters, then diagonally, as for the Union Jack, but most likely this was not the mute response of a patriot to the drift of Matthew’s argument so much as a convenient way of reducing the fish to pieces small enough to deal with; he speared one of the pieces together with a bundle of chips and stuffed the lot into his mouth.

  ‘All we needed in India were Indians educated enough to serve as clerks and petty officials: in no time at all there were enough of them, and several times too many. Curzon did his best to launch vocational and technical education and I gather it’s been tried here in Malaya, too. But with miserable results. You may well ask why.’

  None of Matthew’s listeners seemed, as it happened, to be on the point of putting that or any other question to him. Monty, breathing heavily through his mouth, seemed completely occupied in masticating fish and chips. Joan and Ehrendorf simply stared at Matthew, looking tense and dazed; Joan had not touched her knife and fork but now picked up a single chip in her fingers and snipped off the end with her perfect teeth, without taking her eyes from Matthew’s face.

  ‘The fact is that in most tropical colonies the only work available is agriculture, and sometimes a bit of mining. What we really want is cheap unskilled labour. What skilled jobs there are in a country like Malaya don’t go, it appears, to Malays, but to Eurasians, Chinese or sometimes Europeans. No cheap unskilled labour is what western capital came here for and that’s what it gets …!’

  ‘But …’ began Monty. He was silenced immediately, however, by his own right hand which, spotting its opportunity, had raised another forkful of fish and chips and now crammed it into his mouth as soon as it opened to speak.

  ‘As I expect you all know there was talk of starting an engineering school a couple of years ago at Raffles College here in Singapore. What happened? A commision reported that it was pointless because there’d be no jobs for the graduates. So you see the idea that we British are educating our colonies in our own image simply won’t wash. That may be what we’d like to do, and certain attempts have been made no doubt, but that’s not what is actually happening.’

  ‘Oh, look here,’ said Ehrendorf mildly, but to Joan not to Matthew. ‘This is a bit ridiculous.’ Joan, her eyes still on Matthew snipped off another inch of the chip she held neatly between finger and thumb, but otherwise ignored him.

  Matthew went on: ‘And yet there still persists this sad belief that a man can better himself by education. At this very moment here in Singapore, according to the official figures, there are more than ten thousand clerks, most of whom live in the most dreadful conditions earning ten dollars a month if they’re lucky, not even a living wage, simply because their numbers far exceed any possible demand for them. Ten thousand clerks for a city of this size! It seems it’s a regular practice for older clerks to be replaced by younger men at lower salaries and yet that doesn’t stop the schools turning out another seven hundred boys every year with qualifications for clerical jobs. And all because of this pathetic, unfounded belief that education leads to lucrative jobs!’

  ‘Really, you can’t expect me to put up with this,’ said Ehrendorf suddenly.

  ‘Well, clear off then! Nobody invited you, anyway.’

  ‘As it happens, Matthew did.’

  ‘Frankly,’ said Monty, pushing away his empty plate and selecting a toothpick, ‘I don’t think it matters a bugger whether they work as coolies or anything else so long as they have jobs. That’s precisely what they don’t have in South China and India. They come here because they think it’s better, and they’re damn right. It is.’

  ‘I thought you said you were going. If so, what’re you waiting for?’

  ‘That’s just what you’d like, isn’t it?’

  ‘Monty, surely we have a responsibility,’ went on Matthew doggedly, ‘to the people living here when we arrived; even more so to those we encouraged to come and work on the estates. One of the most astounding things about our Empire, when you come to think about it, is the way we’ve transported vast populations across the globe as cheap labour. Surely we must have their interests at heart, at least to some extent, as well as our own. Otherwise it’s not much better than the slave trade.’

  ‘We do have their interests at heart: we’re giving them employment which they didn’t have where they came from. Besides, almost half our rubber in Malaya is produced by Asiatic smallholders, people who probably came here originally as coolies and then set up in business for themselves. They produce pretty piss-awful rubber but that’s their business.’

  ‘Let’s go and dance,’ said Joan. ‘Monty, pay the bill and let’s go.’

  Monty summoned the waiter and produced a roll of blue dollar bills, saying: ‘Without British capital there wouldn’t have been any rubber business.’

  ‘But don’t you think, given the huge returns on money invested in Malaya that something more should be done for the people who actually do the work on the plantations to produce it …? Otherwise, the British Empire is nothing more than a vast business concern …’ But Matthew’s last words, though intended for his companions, had been transformed into a soliloquy by their sudden departure, Joan in the lead, Ehrendorf striving to walk beside her and speak to her, and the burly figure of Monty not far behind. Matthew hurried after them, nudging his glasses up on his nose.

  As they approached The Great World’s dance-hall the atmosphere seemed to thicken, as if the very dust which hung in the air was quivering with the percussion of drums and wailing of saxophones. Monty dro
pped back for a moment, indicating that he had something he wanted to say to Matthew. No, it wasn’t about the colonial question, he muttered confidentially, it was more of a proposition he wanted to make. He’d thought it over quite a bit and consulted his two chums who were also very, very interested (that went without saying, actually, because in its way this was a bargain such as one didn’t often come across and so of course they would be interested) and, well, the upshot of it was that he and his two chums had decided unanimously to invite Matthew to join them in … the point being that he was a chap from the same sort of background as they were, a factor one had to bear in mind in a place like Singapore where gossip got around in no time … anyway, in short, they’d decided that Matthew should be given the opportunity of making up the fourth … No, nothing like that, he hated all card-games himself, couldn’t abide them, in fact, well … in a nutshell, instead of risking heaven knows what dreadful diseases with the sort of women one was likely to pick up here at The World or anywhere else in Singapore he and his chums had decided to club together and they’d found a very nice Chinese girl called Sally who had her own flat in Bukit Timah. She was clean and not the kind who’d get drunk or make a fuss. She was …

  ‘Oh, but really, Monty…’

  ‘No, just listen a moment. You aren’t a bad sort of bloke, Matthew, in your way (in fact, I quite like you), but you’re the sort of chap who rejects things out of hand without even listening and weighing up the pros and cons. And this is just the kind of arrangement that would suit a bloke like you who isn’t very good at getting women, if you don’t mind me saying so, and besides, it’s not expensive …’

  ‘Monty, I can assure you …’

  They had now joined Joan and Ehrendorf in the queue of people, many of whom were in uniform, waiting for admission to the dance-hall. Monty lowered his voice a little so that his sister should not hear what he was saying. She was clean, she had imagination (which was something one didn’t often find), she was good-tempered and sober, she was not narrow-minded in her approach (in fact, you could do almost anything you liked) and it would only come to $17.50 a month per person. It was such a bargain that Matthew probably thought he meant American dollars, but not a bit of it! He meant Straits dollars. It was an incredible opportunity! For $17.50 Matthew would have, at least to begin with, one evening a week guaranteed and the possibility of another, if one of his three partners did not exercise his option for two evenings in that particular week, as would most likely very often happen because of some social occasion they couldn’t get out of, OK? Because Matthew was the last to join it was only fair, after all, that the others should have first choice but he, Monty, for one would be most surprised if it did not work out that Matthew found he had two evenings on most weeks …’