Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "You've been here well over two months, that's a hell of a lot of time for a mere distinguished visitor. When are you moving on, shall we say?"

  "Blunt, very. I'm writing a novel. About Sir Stamford Raffles. Malaya's the place to write it in. Philip Shawcross has kindly given me a quiet place to work. The rest house here is not quiet. I pay for my keep. If you like, I'll write to the Colonial Secretary, I know him slightly, get formal permission. The Sultan is delighted I'm here, or so he says. One of his daughters is at the London School of Economics. She saw a play of mine."

  "You know the Malay expression kaum nabi Lot?"

  "Yes. Strangely enough, I heard it used of you. Tribe of the prophet Lot. It should really mean those who are against sodomy, but the Koran probably got it wrong. I think you ought to confront Philip Shawcross with the term. He's nothing to lose. His tour's nearly over. He'll carve you up with a scalpel."

  "I've said my say." And he loudly called, "Boy, gin merah."

  "You've more than said it. It strikes me that you've made a very slanderous accusation. Cloaked in a piece of periphrastic Malay."

  "It strikes me," and his voice began to trill deeply as in a gargle of blood, "that you're no different yourself with your saying that you first heard that used about me."

  "The slander's not mine, if it is slander. It's what one of the girls in Taiping said. At the Gates of Heaven cabaret. A girl from Kelantan called Mek Hitam."

  "And I'm only saying what people say. The same as you. So I suggest we drop the whole business."

  "It was you who started it."

  "I was merely doing my duty." Boo Eng brought his gin merah. Received without love. The waltz ended and the dancers clapped the recorded dance band. "Informing you about the general feeling."

  "Which you'll now do your best to exacerbate. It makes me feel unclean. It makes me want to leave. With an unfinished book. A book that will not now be dedicated to the friendly community of Kuala Kangsar. Because of the unfriendly attitude of its District Officer."

  Greene sat down at the tropicalized upright among backslaps and good mans and began to play "If You Were the Only." I went over to Mrs. Renshaw, wife of the headmaster of Malay College, and asked her to dance. Her back was damp, our joined hands were damp. A dance was a very damp occasion. The French chalk on the floor had become a tenuous light grey mud. "When are you coming over to dinner?" she asked. She was a pretty little woman from the Black Country with a translucent wart on her brow that her damp coiffure no longer masked.

  "When you invite us."

  "Inseparable, aren't you? I've already asked Phil Shawcross but he said something about you working like a fury."

  "That's true. A novel about Raffles." The DO was now at the bar talking grimly to Grieves, physical training instructor at the college. Grieves looked at me. What was being arranged? A serenade on Bukit Chandan, the word homo set to the Westminster chimes? A rugger club roughing up of a rich visitor here on the cheap, a member of the kaum nabi Oskar?

  Her eyes showed her brain churning from raffles to gentleman crook to the founder of Singapore. "Oh, that Raffles. That's going back a bit, isn't it? There won't be any of us in it."

  "Why not? You'd look beautiful in a Regency ballgown. And I have a very villainous Malay who looks a bit like the District Officer."

  Oh Mr. Toomey, you authors. How many had she met? Our dancing tour of the room had brought us to the street door open for the heat. A lot of the townfolk were there, tolerantly observing our fun, chewing wads of sireh.

  Mahalingam was there, agitated. He grasped my sleeve. "If You Were the Only" ended with sung rugger club harmony. Claps and cheers. "Good evening, Mr. Mahalingam," Mrs. Renshaw said queenlily. The tone of condescension was not willed, it never was, it was the unconscious product of long cultural transmission, never to be eradicated. Mahalingam seemed to make a distracted forelocktugging gesture.

  He said, "It is Dr. Shawcross I want. Where is Dr. Shawcross?"

  He was at the far end of the room. A fat planter was demonstrating to him the agonies of some disease of the joints. Mrs. Renshaw was grabbed by Symes the English teacher for "Felix."

  "Some trouble, Mr. Mahalingam?" I asked.

  "My son. He will not wake up. We have tried everything."

  I threaded through the dancers and got Philip. As we threaded together, I heard someone whistle "Here Comes the Bride."

  "Your son?" Philip said. "The one we saw? The one you call a fool?" That was nasty but a mere natural emanation of situational authority. "I'll come."

  "Shall I come too?" I asked.

  "Nothing you can do. I'll see you back home. Had enough of this anyway." So I went over to the bar. I would have one more drink and then pick up a trishaw. The DO was no longer there, was perhaps micturating out his load of gin merah, but Grieves greeted me cheerfully though with shifty eyes.

  "Still pushing the pen? A deathless masterpiece born in the suburbs of KK? Have a drink."

  "Have one with me. Nothing deathless, just practising my trade. No pen, I use a typewriter. Dua stengah," I asked Ah Wong.

  "Speak the lingo, eh? Good for you. Nothing like knowing the lingo."

  "A few words, no more. Just enough to get around. Cheers."

  "Chahs." There was a certain difference in our accents, but it was surely unseemly of Grieves, a Liverpudlian I gathered, to mock the difference. He turned on his barstool to grin at the sight of Mrs. Hardcastle, whose husband was down with gyppy tummy or something, whispering something hotly to Grieves's colleague Warrington as they trod the floor in steps uncoordinated. "Looks as though Jack Warrington's getting in there," he said. "He's left it pretty late. Could have had it a year back."

  "Dissatisfied colonial wives," I said. "Yes, I've heard about the phenomenon."

  "Heard about it, have you? The onlooker seeing most of the game. Of course, a lot depends on what game you play." I ignored that; I even smiled pleasantly. Fothergill the planter came up. He had removed his jacket and also his black tie; he was wiping face, neck and a good deal of his chest with a glass cloth from behind the bar. He ordered a pint of lime juice with a quadruple gin in it, saying:

  "I don't know why we're such bloody idiots. Sweating cobs, as they say in your part of the world," to Grieves. To me, "Don't see much of you, never even got my revenge."

  "Revenge? Oh, poker. I've been working. Evenings I came in here you weren't there, simple as that."

  "A lot depends," Grieves said, "as I said." The DO appeared from the yard at the back where the jakes or jamban was, raised two fingers at everybody in grim and qualified blessing, then was off. "He's done well," Grieves said. "He's kept it quiet."

  "Kept what quiet?" Fothergill said. "Oh, that. He just has them in and then out. A buck a time, fifty cents for infants. A good clean thrust before dinner, gives him an appetite."

  "Like Norman Douglas," I said, perhaps unwisely.

  "Don't think I know him," Fothergill said. "If you mean old Potch Douglas, he was very clean-living, know that for a fact." He downed half of his pint gin and lime with gulps like labor contractions.

  "A bit of brown," Grieves said. "No harm in it if he keeps it quiet. But bugger a man that sets up house and home with his own kind. Lets the side down."

  "I take it," I said boldly, "you're referring to homosexual relationships. As opposed, shall I say, to impersonal bouts of sodomy."

  "Homo," Grieves said, "meaning a man. Man and man. Homo homo it would be in the glorious Malay lingo. Yes, something like that. Two more of these," he said to Ah Wong. "Dua stengah lagi."

  "A common error," I said. "The homo bit doesn't mean man. It's not Latin, it's Greek. Meaning the same. Sex between members of the same sex," very ineptly put.

  "Well, we haven't all had the benefit of a classical education." Grieves smiled pleasantly at me, signing sightlessly for two stengahs in his club book. "Not like Norman Douglas and the rest of the Greeks. Take this in your right hand, remembering the ancient Greek wisdom about a bi
rd never flying on one wing." The gramophone was playing "What'll I Do" again, but not many were now dancing. Exhaustion was quick to set in here: pallid wives suffering from anorexia and tropical discontent were dragging their husbands home, as they called it. I sipped my stengah, positively the last one, must go home too.

  "You know Norman Douglas?"

  "I've been to the isle of Capri, ignorant as I am. Last trip UKwards, picked up an Eyetie boat at Suez. Quite an education."

  "But," I said, "the point is that Douglas is a buck-a-time man, just like your DO."

  "Look," said Symes the English teacher from the Malay College, "let's have no talking about a man behind his back." Symes was fattish, pale, without eyebrows. I noticed that there were quite a number at the bar now and that I was hedged in. "Especially," he added, putting it straight, "from guests of the community. If," he added, softening it, "you don't strenuously object to my saying so." He had probably read some of my books and didn't like them much. After all, he taught English literature.

  "Mr. Toomey," Grieves said, "was giving us a classical education. Explaining the difference between home oh and hommo."

  "Right," I said. I drank up. "I know when I'm not wanted."

  "Oh, but you are," Symes said. "Very much wanted. I mean, the Upper Fifth would be honored if you'd give them a little talk about The Mill on the Floss.

  Keeping it simple of course. George Eliot, Victorian master, or should it be mistress? Afraid of admitting what sex she was. Those were bad times for a woman."

  "All writers," I said, "are like Kipling's jollies. A sort of a blooming ermophrodite."

  "I like that," Grieves said sincerely. "I like that very much." Nobody was attending to the gramophone. It wound down. Wokkle aaah dawwwwwww.

  "Soldier and sailor too," I explained. "I really must be going."

  "Oh, come on," Fothergill said. "Push the boat out, talking of sailors. Satu empat jalan."

  "One four road," Symes translated. "Daftar dua bintang papan. List to star board. Talking of sailors. Stengah for me."

  "Talking of sailors," Greene said, "what did you do in the war, Toomey?"

  "Faced the terrors of Europe," I said lightly.

  "Meaning," Greene said, "you weren't stuck out in the glamorous East chewing bananas. Nasty, very nasty."

  "Heart," I said. "Heart trouble. As you saw."

  "No need to defend yourself," Symes said softly. "You're not on trial or anything."

  "As we saw," Greene agreed. "Doe Shawcross to the rescue. Well, let's toast a beautiful friendship."

  "Do doctors have to learn Greek?" Grieves asked with an extravagantly puzzled look. "Or is it just Latin?" He shrugged excessively, then drank. Others drank, I drank off. I signed. Off.

  "Thanks for a pleasant evening." They would not let me get through. "Please," I said.

  "All the ladies have completely disappeared," Grieves said in feigned surprise. "All men together, situation normal, more or less. You," he said to the planter Booth, "are by way of being our new secretary. Is there a club rule that forbids debagging?"

  "Cut it out," Fothergill said. "We're not at school now."

  "Not," Symes said with mock prissiness, "before the natives. The DO," less mock, "would not be pleased."

  "Ah, come on," Grieves Liverpudlianly whined, "you don't know the DO like I do. It only means that Mr. Toomey will parade in his shorts. Nothing indecent."

  I was glad to find myself feeling contempt. I was gladder when it moved to rage. "You and your bloody infantile games," I said to Grieves. I was surprised to see myself picking up Fothergill's empty pint glass by the butt. I opposed its mouth to that of Grieves. But wait, it had first to be cracked, jagged, to threaten to draw blood. The stern planter's hand of Booth grasped it, wrested it away before I could smash it on the bar-counter's edge. The number one boy Ah Wong, who must have been near seventy, crooned something, the fulfilment of some Taoist prophecy.

  Booth said, "The club rules certainly forbid violence or attempted violence between or to or from members, temporary or otherwise. I think we have a quorum. Will anybody put the motion?"

  "I can go, can I?" I said, shaking with indignation.

  "You not only can," Symes said.

  I could not find a trishaw. I walked to cool off, to heat up, up Bukit Chandan. Philip was not yet back. Yusof was in bed. I helped myself to a neat slug of Beehive brandy, shuddering with anger. I was dithering out another tumblerful when the Ford shook into the porch. "The bloody club," I told Philip as he came in. "The bloody bastards."

  "What's happened? Give me some of that. No, not that much. Christ, you're shivering."

  "They hinted, they leered, the bloody DO as good as spelt it out. They want to believe we're carrying on a homosexual relationship. Gives them a smug little thrill, the dirty-minded bastards."

  "Oh no." He sat in an armchair, I paced the Siamese carpet unsteadily. "Well, I suppose they were bound to, sooner or later. I just didn't think about it. The DO doesn't have much room to talk from what I hear. A homosexual relationship, eh? Well well well. Pure as the driven. We ought to have imported a couple of hints from the bazaar, that would have shut them. Looks as if I shan't want to come back here."

  "The trouble is. You remember that MP who came that time, Garside, the cocktail party at the istana? He did a bit of smearing, apparently. Bachelor writer living abroad, stories, actors, Oscar Wilde--"

  "Are you?" Philip looked at me pale. "Have you? I never even... It didn't cross my... Good God, my blessed innocence."

  "Ours. Ours. Whatever word I use will probably be wrong. We've just been here together. We didn't have to put it into words. I was never so happy in my life. And I'm not leaving you, I'm not going to lose you."

  "No," Philip said very blankly. "We didn't have to put it into words. And we never talked about the future. What are we going to do?"

  "When does your leave start?"

  "Beginning of January. I get three months on full pay. Then back here, things as they were, Yusof on full pay too, caretaking. Pity. We'd just got things running nicely. Definitive thesis on yaws I thought, next tour, setting up of federal yaws clinic. Oh well, Ipoh, Penang, Kota Bharu, on the Beach of Passionate Love as they call it." He laughed without moisture. "Passionate love, well well."

  "We have to be together," I said. "But first I have to get out. I need to, anyway. I have to see Malacca. I thought of going up to Bangkok. Then I come home."

  "Where's home?"

  "You know damned well where home is. Where it will always be. Where did you propose spending your love, I mean leave?"

  "In a town I've never before visited, Adelaide, South Australia. My mother and stepfather are there. I haven't yet met my stepfather. A man who's gone partners with another man in a big sports store, the Aussies being keen on sport. Of the name of Black, which is a good plain no-nonsense unequivocal undescriptive kind of name, my mother's now, she being a very fair woman, very fair to herself, why not, why languish lifelong in widow's weeds?"

  "You don't approve?"

  "Oh, it's not up to me to have any opinion. Anyway, there's nowhere else to go."

  "I proposed the same general direction for myself, though further. I similarly have a stepparent unknown in the Empire, Canada as a matter of fact. No one in the world can plan all the way. We must think for the moment of a particular ship moving where?"

  "The SS Lord Howe, Singapore to Fremantle. Early January. Yes, we go together. We go everywhere together now. That's just something we know, isn't it? Is it wrong, I wonder? Are we depriving potential sexual partners of their right to a less, what's the term, Platonic bliss?"

  "It's not wrong, not from any point of view. This I know. I can leave now, I think, feeling, you know, for the first time--"

  "Secure, yes, secure, yes, secure. And that ought to make us both frightened. It's dangerous to feel secure, what with the big dirty Lord of Insecurity hovering. Don't go too far. Not without me. You need Malacca for this Raffles book?"


  "The look and feel of Malacca. I suppose I could get it all out of reading and imagination. But I feel I have to see Malacca."

  "Malacca, then. Stay at the rest house. I need to know exactly where you are."

  "Tomorrow, I thought."

  "Not tomorrow. Mahalingam's coming to dinner tomorrow."

  "Why for God's sake why?"

  "He was miserable, and no wonder. It's not the zombie son who's sick, it's the youngest, aged eight, the Benjamin, Jaganathan, the same as Juggernaut, a juggernaut's driving over him, poor little sod." Philip sounded drunk, it was the drunkenness of a sober elation for the first time articulated. "Tuberculous meningitis. Bad hygiene, bad feeding, a background of measles and whooping cough. They've left it late, trying to cure the vomiting with some bloody Indian confection and the constipation with castor oil. Now there's not much I can do. Mahalingam says he'll pay anything, anything, sell his daughters into concubinage, anything. I told him I couldn't do more than my best. 'My friend,' he said, 'my dear dear friend.' So he comes to dinner. And now we, tired out, much put upon, traduced, maligned, buggered about generally, go to bed."

  "Anyway, we know."

  "Yes yes, we know now, thank God we know."

  Mahalingam, in white tie and off-white suit, looking like a photographic negative of a European, came an hour early. The zombie son brought him in the phantom car: we heard objurgatory Tamil and metallic slaps before it sped off, too fast to be possible. "I have ordered the fool," Mahalingam told us, "to return for me in four hours' time." Oh Christ. "A very nice class of quarters," he admired grudgingly, "with ceiling fans and ornaments I take to be personal. This is your dead father, I see, and one of these two European ladies is your dead sister, the youngest of the two I must take it to be, the other is your living mother. Living, yes? Ah yes, it is your mother that is dead, Mr. Tombey."

  A very necrological beginning to the evening. "Toomey."

  "That is the name I said. And this is you, Dr. Shawcross, standing at the wicket with bat awaiting delivery of ball. That is good, that makes you look young and well and content with life."

  "I've changed a bit since then."

  "To die," Mahalingam said, "to sleep, no more." Sitting down, accepting a watered whisky, he kicked off his shoes and allowed his large purple toes to touchtype the matting. "My dear son appeared better today, he seemed in much less pain, you thought so too, Dr. Shawcross, I know. We may hope now."