‘A short story perhaps,’ I said.
‘Well, a short story then. And that’s what makes me so mad about Summerskill Morgan.’
‘Summerskill Morgan?’ I said. ‘What’s he got to do with it?’
‘Everything. Everything,’ she wailed. ‘You know he came East to get plots for his books? Well, I met him and told him all about me and Robert and Alfred—the whole tragedy.’
‘You met him?’ I said. ‘But, good Lord, Summerskill Morgan only visited Malaya once and that was many years ago.’
‘I knew him very well,’ she said. ‘The short time he was in Malaya.’
It was incredible. The creature beside me couldn’t have been more than thirty at the cruellest estimate. I glanced with wonder at that cold, pale, youthful face: the huge greenish eyes met mine without a blink. Her voice seemed to come over a great distance like the sound of breakers in a sea-shell.
‘You see, darling, Summerskill Morgan was a writer and I thought he might be able to explain me to myself. That’s what writers do, isn’t it? But after I’d told him about Robert and the brandy, well, he used to try and avoid me. He didn’t seem a bit grateful for the story I’d told him. He went back to Corfu and then all those stories about the Far East began to appear. My dear, it was too humiliating. All my friends starred in Morgan’s stories but never little me. And then one day Alfred brought in a magazine article by Morgan. “He’s mentioned you at last,” he said. And he had, in one sentence. “I don’t ever remember being so horribly bored as I was by a dentist’s wife my last weeks in Singapore.” Summerskill Morgan had written that. There was Alfred grinning away like a baboon. All the pride and self-respect I had ever had, crumbled to dust. Pull up at the side here, will you?’
I pulled up. The rain was clearing but the night was very black.
‘Do you think me a bore?’ Isobel asked.
‘No. Not a . . . er . . . bore,’ I said.
‘My friends recognised who it was, of course. It was all too shaming. I decided to kill myself.’
She had pushed open the car door and had stepped out onto the wet grass. ‘Have you a torch?’ she asked.
I gave her one.
‘Come with me to the door?’ she begged. ‘It’s not far.’
I climbed out after her. We crossed the road and walked a short way along a sodden track. I felt hypnotised. I couldn’t take my eyes from hers.
‘I finally decided to use dentist’s gas,’ she said. ‘At least I died with a smile on my lips. In fact they heard me laughing away like mad, but I’d bolted the door. And when they found me I was dead. That is why I want you to write my story. You’ve got to show Morgan up, and be sure you explain me to myself.’
We had stopped by the headstone of a grave.
‘Alfred bought this plot when land was cheap,’ she said. ‘I won’t ask you in tonight, darling. It’s rather late. But listen, if you don’t make a good story of what I’ve told you I’ll haunt you till you howl. . . . Goodnight.’
And she was swallowed slowly, feet first, into the grave.
I ran in panic to the road, stumbling among the gravestones. The car was parked where I had first met Isobel, under the raintrees. Although the storm had passed, heavy drops from the leaves pattered fleshily on the roof of the car and on the road.
This morning I visited the graveyard to make sure. And the stone was there with the name carved on it: ‘ISOBEL. LOVED WIFE OF ALFRED GARDENROSE. DIED 30TH JANUARY, 1927. AGED 28. GENESIS, III, 4–5.’
And there, I suppose, she will be lying, tuned into this wavelength listening to me. I hope she doesn’t feel I’ve let her down, too.
(A girl laughs—quite joylessly)
Hullo, what’s that? You can’t come in here. I’ll be finished in a minute. Here let me out . . . let me out! It’s Isobel! She’s here, I tell you, she’s here . . .
(A very nasty girlish laughter—into music)
Walking on Air
JUST NOW, AS I was taking the short cut by the servants’ quarters, I heard someone singing: it was a small, tinkling voice—clear as a bell of glass.
Zaitun was pegging out a flowered sarong on the clothes line. She stood on tiptoe as she sang, her heels lifted out of the bright red slippers. There was frangipanni blossom seeming to float in the inkpools of her hair. Her back was to me, and I stopped to listen:
Jelatak, burong jeladan
Tekukor terbang tinggi
Sama chantek, sama-lah padan
Kalau di-ukur, sama tinggi.
The clothes pegs were balanced like a row of small birds one end of the line, and with a swift graceful movement she snatched a couple from their perch and clipped them where she wanted them along the horizon of damp cloth. I thought how differently it was done in England—pegs like boars’ tusks in the mouth, the latest plugged radio tune hideously shrill despite or because of the wooden gag, a nose woefully red as if from a too recent encounter with the last of the four and twenty blackbirds.
The job completed, she turned and saw me.
‘Tabek, tuan.’
‘Tabek. It was a pretty song, Zaitun.’
‘Tuan understood it?’
‘A little. I know that one bird had to leave her perch when the other flew into her net.’
‘Tuan composes a pantun? Tuan is quick to learn Malay.’
‘No—it was told me by a bird, the other one: the bird that carried a nail in his beak.’
‘He has told you then? The male bird chatters the loudest, always.’
‘It’s a funny tale.’
‘But it was not funny then, Tuan. He would have killed.’ She put a hand to the starred blossom in her hair. ‘Still one forgets the thorn—for the flower.’
Hamid had come up, grinning, his songkok tilted forward over his eyes. ‘Tuan wants the car?’ he asked.
‘No. I’m going to post letters. I’ll walk.’
‘The tyre is mended.’ He turned to Zaitun and held up the nail that had done the mischief. ‘It was a long thorn, look, like the other.’
Zaitun laughed. ‘See, you have wearied Tuan with your silliness.’
‘Tuan is going to write the story.’
‘Night may cover folly,’ said Zaitun, ‘but ink is not black enough.’
I left them to it. They are a gay couple and quarrel very gracefully indeed.
Hamid and Zaitun have been with us for over a year, but it was only last night I heard their story. It came out literally by accident.
I was driving to Pasir Panjang and we got a puncture. Hamid pulled up on the grass verge, and got out to inspect the damage. I followed.
‘Paku, Tuan!’ said Hamid. And there was—a six inch nail, wedged like Excalibur in the tyre.
As he went round to the boot to get out the tools I heard an exclamation. Hamid had stopped in his tracks and was staring at a large house that stood well back among trees to our left.
‘What is it, Hamid?’
He nodded in the direction of the house. ‘I worked there once, Tuan,’ he said, ‘my first job.’
I read the name on the gate piers. ‘With a Mr A. Seyton?’
‘No, he’s new. It was a Tuan Gardenrose. An old gentleman. He has gone back to England.’
‘Were you married then?’
‘No, Tuan.’ And he added with a mystifying look: ‘If it were the same nail. . . . It’s very like. Zaitun will know it, perhaps.’
‘What are you talking about, Hamid?’
So while the spare wheel was unscrewed, while the car was jacked up and the wheels changed, I heard the story.
It was a pleasant job with Mr Gardenrose—a man of regular habits. Most evenings he stayed at home—but two nights a week he would be driven into his club; and Hamid would squat happily among the other syces and swap stories about many subjects until it was time to help Tuan Gardenrose into the car again. Hamid was very young and after midnight mostly he listened to the stories. Some of them were gruesome. During the Japanese Time there had been, he understoo
d, a great and visible increase in the ghost population of Singapore.
During the evenings that Mr Gardenrose stayed at home Hamid was often lonely. He had few friends in Pasir Panjang—for his people lived the other side of the island. Sometimes he would go for a solitary moonlight swim from the strip of beach which bordered the garden.
There is a wooded paddock between the house and the sea: a path wriggles among the tree trunks, and for the last twenty yards runs straight beside a peeling stucco wall that overlooks the neighbours’ compound. And it was one night as he was walking along this path that he heard a girl singing. The voice seemed part of the moonlight—a silvery jet of sound, splashing among the dark branches. The words of the song were not reassuring. Last night had been one of Tuan Gardenrose’s club nights and the conversation between the syces had been almost entirely of hantu.
Kalau Tuan mudek ka-hulu
Charikan sahaya bunga kemoja
Kalau tuan mati dahulu
Nantikan sahaya di-pintu shurga.
The notes went drip-drop with the moonlight:
If you should voyage up the river
Frangipanni’s all I crave.
If you should die first, Oh never
Cease to await me in the grave.
Hamid felt uneasy: it was as if a trickle of quicksilver were coursing between his shoulder blades, finding its way to the vertebrae and causing paralysis. But all the same he approached the wall and looked over.
The song had ceased, but the singer was there. Very slim she looked and beautiful in the dappled moonlight: she was dressed in white and there were white flowers in her hair. Behind her some plantains, their broad leaves silvered by the moon, trunks hidden in shadow, looked like sea monsters—vast anemones, octopuses stretching out tentacles to seize her. Her arms were peculiarly bent —like a drowned person’s. It was the way she held her arms that had given Hamid the impression that he was at the bottom of the sea. She was moving too, very slowly—towards the clump of plantains.
And then Hamid noticed that she was floating in the air. She was floating about three feet from the ground. For an instant he was engulfed in quicksilver—drowning and breathless. From that icy immersion he surfaced, and all his body was hot with longing to run—but his legs remained paralysed. A beautiful woman with no feet can mean to a Malay only one thing. The singer was a vampire—a pontianak. The proximity of the banana trees confirmed it, for the pontianak likes to turn herself into a banana flower by way of diversion. Already this footless thing had deprived Hamid of the use of his own feet.
He was lost. For strangely his fear was giving place to another emotion. Oh, he knew well enough she had enchanted him—but it didn’t seem to matter. He could only feel pity for her: fear was gone. It seemed an injustice that so lovely a being should have to live the life of a pontianak. It was no life at all—from the stories he remembered—for a young girl with so entrancing a voice and figure. He was indignant, almost protective about her. It was unfair.
She had turned back from the banana trees and was floating very slowly towards him. The moonlight lit up her face, and it seemed more beautiful than ever. She was singing again —infinitely softly—the verse she had sung before.
Hamid knew what he must do. He had often thought that he should take a wife—but there had been financial obstacles to consider. If one poked a nail into the hole in a pontianak’s head she became human: one could marry her; and a pontianak, he reflected was unlikely to have relations who would demand ready money.
Swiftly he ran back through the trees to the garage, and as swiftly returned with a six inch nail and a heavy spanner. The girl had turned again and was swaying into the shadow of the plantains. There was little time. He vaulted the wall, and rushed towards her.
The next second he had tripped over the wire and the girl, screaming, had come down on top of him. When he fell the nail and spanner had flown out of his hand. He groped for them in the grass and clutched—a small warm foot. The girl went on screaming. Lights began to appear in the houses.
Zaitun was a Javanese circus artist. It was her habit to practice her slack-wire walking act at night in the compound of her Aunt’s house.
‘So I married her,’ said Hamid, climbing into the driver’s seat, ‘and so far there has been no need to put a nail in her head.’
Khorassim
THE RUINS OF Khorassim lay below us in the moonlight like the bones of a monstrous animal that had crawled across the desert and into this valley to die. The broken walls and tumbled marble columns were bleached as bone, and the drifts of sand that had built about them, windribbed and uneven, resembled a decaying pelt shrunken in tatters from its skeleton. The high cliff on the further side of the valley was scored with excavations (rock tombs I supposed), as if the dead monster below had tried to claw its way out of its grave.
I have never come across any place I so hated on first sight as this Khorassim; but perhaps my recollection is overshadowed by what I discovered there, the incredible cause of a city’s abandonment. I imagine in that first moment I must have felt some pride, some excitement even, after all the hardships of our journey to be looking down upon Khorassim: fabulous Khorassim, to which no archaeologist had ventured since Edward Monsell’s second expedition of 1881 had disappeared into the desert and never returned.
Monsell’s theories have been discredited by modern archaeologists, and even his good faith has been challenged. It has been argued by more than one competent authority that the account of his first discovery of Khorassim is sheerest fabrication. Learned opinion will not allow that it could be a Greek city of the period he suggested—a Greek city so far from Greece. Monsell has written in his eloquent Victorian way of the Argonauts and those who had voyaged with Odysseus as if they were nineteenth century British colonialists of the type of Rajah Brooke of Sarawak, engaged in maritime adventure, setting up improbable kingdoms in remote parts of the earth; but then by his own account Khorassim lay far from the sea.
He had been alone when first he stumbled on the ruins in their desert valley; and some even among his contemporaries have alleged that both valley and city were a mirage, the illusion of an old tired scholar-adventurer, very near the end of his tether. When Monsell and his companions failed to return from the expedition he organised the idea gained ground that Khorassim was a myth. The relief parties that searched the desert for survivors from Monsell’s expedition discovered no traces of a ruined city, nor any trace of the expedition for that matter. It was believed that the Englishman and those with him had been made away with by desert tribes whom the early prophecies of the Mahdi, from remote Khordofan, were frenzying even in that year into xenophobia.
Archaeologists as I say had become sceptical of the existence of Khorassim. But Jules and I had never doubted the details Edward Monsell had given of it in his last work, published posthumously after all hopes of his survival had been given up: Khorassim, Spectral City of the Hellenes the book was called, and I suspect the subtitle was not Monsell’s but his publisher’s. There was only one detail we queried, and that was the location he gave for his city. It is obvious that in the case of so important a find as his he would not have made public its real locality—for that would have been to invite rival expeditions to share in the loot and perhaps to steal a march on him when the findings were made public. Moreover at that time of short-tempered imperialisms and disputed borders it might have been indiscreet to reveal just where the valley of Khorassim lay. Jules had other theories as to Monsell’s reasons for this deception, but those I give seem to be the obvious ones.
We found the opportunity to fly several times over one remote and unpeopled section of the south-eastern Sahara which we felt might have been the real objective of Monsell’s expedition, and we had brought back photographs of a strangely patterned valley: they confirmed what all along we had believed.
And here at last Khorassim lay at our feet, sprawled out under the moon in its gaunt and secretive valley. Yes, I think I must have been
proud in that first moment.
And yet it was a most desolate, odious place. Even Monsell’s easy Victorian optimism of outlook, his sane and virile Romanticism, seems darkened by those hours he spent alone in Khorassim. He finds unusual words for instance to describe its atmosphere: ‘sulky’, ‘morose’, ‘vacant yet peopled still’, ‘a stony silence’. The English phrases swarmed dizzily in my head as I gazed down upon the ruins: I would check them when we encamped, for of course Monsell’s last book travelled always with us.
We pitched our tents at the head of a narrow defile down which a road must once have led into the city. Even Jules, excited as he was by our discovery, thought that it would serve no useful purpose to investigate the ruins under the waning moon: we should wait for sunrise, he said, and try to put in some rest, for there would be much to see and do in the morning.
I sat up late making notes from Monsell’s book by the light of our pressure lamp, yet when I retired at last I did not sleep well. There was a thin breeze muttering in the defile, but its whispering served only to intensify the silence of the dead city beyond; and it was to the stillness there that my hearing, my every nerve, was strained—to the stoniness of that silence. Poor Jules lay stretched in sleep on his camp-bed, unmoving as a marble crusader. There was no sound from our Arabs’ lines. Whenever I sat up to light myself another cigarette I could make out through the gauzed vent in our canvas wall the camels at rest in the sand like misshapen sphinxes, and the Arabs’ tents above the mouth of the gully dark and solid-seeming as a group of pyramids. I longed to break up this quiet, to shatter it with gramophone music, to shout madly into the valley and wake at least an echo from the ruins. I did nothing of course except lie on my camp-bed in the dim tent and smoke cigarette after cigarette.
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