Fuel for the Flame

by Alec Waugh

  The envelope was collected that afternoon by a large, aggressive-looking African with a scar over his forehead. It was opened that evening in a bungalow in the fashionable residential district by a Chinese gentleman, plump, suave, wearing a European suit. He did not set out the problem on a chess-board; but he unlocked his desk and took a small notebook from it. He kept glancing at the notebook as he studied the problem, then he chuckled. ‘As their poet Shakespeare remarked,’ he murmured, ‘A fellow almost damned in a fair wife.’

  3

  The Macartney estate house was an hour’s drive from Kuala Prang. Whenever possible, Angus returned there at the end of the day’s work. His father was in his late fifties, but looked in his late seventies. He had never recovered from his experiences as a Japanese prisoner-of-war. Every month he seemed feebler, older, less capable of effort.

  The son of a Scots planter and the daughter of a Goanese merchant, Jock Macartney had spent his whole life in the Far East. His father had planned to send him back to Scotland for his education, but in the year when he would have gone, the First World War broke out, and it was difficult to get a passage home. He had been sent to Singapore instead. His five years there had inspired in him a dislike for the English, mingled with a profound respect for them. He suffered many humiliations. In Karak he had taken no account of his dark skin. It was not very dark, his mother was half-Portuguese, he was tall and athletic, and anyhow dark skins had not mattered in Kaula Prang; they did, however, in Singapore. Most of the other boys were Chinese or the natural sons of Englishmen and Malays. There were by then many more white women in Malaya than there had been when his father had come out, but up-country the tradition of the temporary local wife persisted and there were very few completely white boys at his school. Those few kept to themselves. When he tried to join them he was rebuffed.

  His experiences had made him resentful of the arrogance and snobbery of the English, yet at the same time he was impressed by them. They were so sure of themselves, they were so efficient, they carried their power without self-assertion. They were thoroughbred. He disliked them, but he would have given anything to be one. He vowed that when his time came to marry, he would choose a wife who was unmistakably white.

  He was chary though, of marrying an English girl. She would despise him for his dark skin. He would never feel at ease with her. At the age of thirty-three he visited in Holland the family of a Dutch planter. The bride he brought back was blonde, with a pink and white complexion, the complete Nordic type. But to his surprise and disappointment Angus was far more like his grandmother than either his mother or his father. Angus had his grandmother’s dark, luminous eyes, straight black hair, pale skin, and delicately chiselled lips. He had the same magnetic vital warmth. His father looked at him with mingled feelings of pride, devotion and resentment. Why couldn’t his son have looked like his Dutch mother? These things did not matter as much now in 1930 as they had in 1900, but they did matter. Angus would have stood a better chance if he had been an obvious northerner. Anyhow, he would go to school in England—not only a public school but a preparatory one as well. Angus sailed for his first term at Summerfields in August 1939. He nearly had my bad luck, his father thought.

  Jock Macartney’s own bad luck was as marked in the Second War as in the First. After Pearl Harbour, the King advised all British nationals to leave the country. ‘I cannot rely upon your safety if you do not,’ he said. ‘I propose to remain neutral. I refuse to subject my people to a war.’

  There were a number of dark-skinned British subjects at Karak then, but very few members of the white Colonial class. Those few went home, all except Macartney. He trusted the British Navy. The English might be arrogant; they might treat the dark man as an inferior; but they were strong. No yellow man would set his foot, in the title of a master, on the land to which Britain had offered its protection. When he heard of the fall of Singapore, the faith of a lifetime foundered.

  He spent three years in a prison compound. In the fifteenth month his wife died of fever, her body weakened by malnutrition. He himself developed tuberculosis. He came out of the camp a broken man, but more than his health was shattered. He had changed inside himself. He no longer believed in Britain. The Union Jack might be flying over Singapore; British soldiers might be drilling in the barrack square; British policemen might direct the traffic. But it was American and Russian arms that had restored them. Unaided Britain could not have driven out the Japanese.

  The English had no justification for their arrogance, for their contempt of the brown and black and yellow skins. They had tricked him with their insolence. He had fallen for the bluff.

  Jock Macartney was in himself a mixture; and his house symbolized that mixture. It was Scottish and it was Karaki too. It was a bungalow set on a low knoll, with rubber trees stretching above it and below. It was built in the Dyak style, with high thatched gables rising to a point; his main living-room was arranged on an Oriental plan, with divans stacked with cushions and low round footstools; but it had a bar room in imitation Tudor, such as you would find in a Butlin’s holiday camp. There were imitation oak beams; there were tankards and hunting prints and there were framed facetious statements like ‘Work is the ruin of the drinking classes’ and ‘If water rots the soles of your boots, think what it must do to your insides’. There was a small study, with a roll-top desk and photographs of college cricket and football groups. Over one group hung a tasselled cap. It was a house that would have puzzled the visitor who did not know its background.

  On the evening of his attendance at the Court, Angus returned home shortly before seven to find his father occupied as he had so often seen him in recent months, with a chess problem.

  ‘It relaxes my mind,’ he said.

  Occasionally Angus would play with his father. He had not played himself since he had left his preparatory school, and he was surprised that his father was not better at the game. He told his father what the King had said. His father nodded. ‘Prince Rhya coming back. Well, well,’ He looked at his son thoughtfully. ‘You have met Prince Rhya, haven’t you? How did you like him?’

  ‘I was too young to meet him on equal terms.’

  ‘But you liked him, yes?’

  ‘He had glamour for me; he did all the things I hoped to do when I was older.’

  ‘Yes, I see that. Yes, I understand … and how do you feel about him now?’

  ‘I don’t know, Father. I … well, when the King told me that the Prince would need friends, I was flattered, naturally. I had not thought of myself as someone whom the King’s son could need. I have a feeling of great loyalty to the King.’

  ‘Do you think many others of your contemporaries have the same feeling for him?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘So you have a feeling of loyalty to Prince Rhya, because of your loyalty to the King?’

  ‘I suppose that’s how it is.’

  ‘And you don’t question, any of you young people, whether this business of loyalty to the throne is out of date?’

  ‘No, Father. No.’

  ‘Have you ever counted up the number of kings who attended King Edward VII’s funeral, and compared it with the number of kings who attended his son’s, a quarter of a century later? A quarter of a century, that is all. Have you considered what has happened to the British Empire since the Second War? Do you remember Winston Churchill saying that he had not become First Minister of the Crown to preside over the dismemberment of his monarch’s empire? They were proud words when he spoke them, sixteen years ago. What an ironic ring they have today. Do you ask yourselves, you of the younger generation, how this affects us in Karak?’

  He paused, rhetorically. It was not a question that required an answer. His father was addicted to this kind of conversation, this talking to himself out loud. He must be very lonely, Angus thought, with so few of his own generation left.

  ‘You’re only interested in making money and having a good time, you younger people, and there is a l
ot of money here now, thanks to oil. But have you asked yourselves how that discovery of oil has altered the position of this country? When I came here there were only rubber, rice and copra. We grew sugar for our own consumption. It was such a poor island that Britain didn’t bother to make it into a colony. She was content to sign a treaty with the King, so as to prevent the French and Dutch from taking it. The chargé d’affaires had the equivalent rank of a vice-consul, but now with the oil, and all the royalties on that oil going into the King’s pocket, a good many people have their eyes on Karak; and what are you doing, what’s the younger generation doing about it? Nothing—nothing at alL It’s we, the older ones, who have to do the planning for you. Prince Rhya coming back. Don’t you recognize the significance of that? No, of course you don’t.’

  He paused, his distrust of the British, his resentment against the British smouldering in his heart. Angus did not understand. Angus had been at school in England. In England, no one bothered about racial differences. One man was as good as another. The colour of the skin was immaterial. Angus had absorbed the British point of view. When Angus had read of the fall of Singapore, he had thought, ‘England loses every battle but the last.’ He had not seen Japanese soldiers marching down Nelson Avenue. He had not been subjected to indignities at the point of a Japanese bayonet. What had happened before might happen again, unless steps were taken. It was time the British went, returned to their own island and their white dominions, leaving Africans and Asians to run their own affairs. But Angus could not see that. He was British by training, if not by blood. He had the superiority complex of the British. Angus stood outside this. It was for the men of his generation to take the appropriate action.

  Jock Macartney spent a long time that evening, rearranging the pieces on the chess-board, copying the final positions on to a sheet of paper.

  Chapter Five

  By the time the King’s letter eventually reached his son, the front of the envelope was indecipherably covered with addresses and it was on the back that the last forwarder had written Hôtel des Alpes, Mürren, Switzerland. Prince Rhya found it in his pigeonhole when he returned at four o’clock from a long run. He turned it over thoughtfully, then replaced it. It had taken so long reaching him that it could well afford to wait for another hour or two. His father’s infrequent letters were invariably disturbing. He wanted to savour first the repose of this tranquil hour that was the reward and recompense for the day’s long battle against snow and wind.

  He sat in a far corner of the lounge. A waiter came towards him, but he shook his head. He wanted to relax, with eyes half-closed, physically exhausted, mentally at peace, with the sense of health, of supreme well-being slowly flooding his nerves and veins and muscles, restoring them, so that when evening came he should be in a mood for dancing. The orchestra was playing a selection from Oklahoma, deadening but not drowning the murmur of innumerable conversations. He felt drowsy, drowsier, his eyes closed.

  He woke to find a tall young woman with ash-blonde hair smiling down at him.

  ‘Isn’t it nearly time for our six o’clock champagne?’ she said.

  The romance that had begun so light-heartedly at a London cocktail party had to his surprise but increasingly to his delight continued.

  Annetta Marsh lived with her parents in a small Georgian house in Highgate. Her father was a classics master at the school. He had a private income. She was an only child. ‘I suppose I ought to work,’ she said, ‘but I see no need. My father can well afford me an allowance.’ That early remark of hers, ‘I have no allergies. I’m rather hungry,’ seemed to Prince Rhya now symbolic. She had a zest for living, not a ravenous but a healthy one. She liked nearly everything. She had no complexes. Her height must have been a problem to her once, but since she had come to grips with that, everything else had fallen into place. Having no problems herself she raised none for others. She took life easily. She had friends and interests; though she did no work her time was occupied. She went to picture galleries, she attended concerts. She had a number of athletic friends who took her out to watch their football in the winter and cricket in the summer. With other women he had been often conscious of the difficulty of keeping them occupied when he was involved in social occasions to which he could not invite them. He had many obligations and responsibilities and he had not enjoyed the picture of a young woman sitting in a flat waiting for the telephone to ring. That never happened with Annetta.

  Early in their friendship he had called her for a date on the following day. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she had said. ‘It isn’t anything important. I could get out of it, but I’d rather not. I don’t think one should, do you? Someone may have planned something, one can’t tell what. …’ She paused. ‘The best thing,’ she had gone on, ‘would be for us to compare diaries every Monday, see what times each has free. Then if I know you’ve got to do something on a Friday, and somebody rings me up, I can say, “Let’s make it Friday.”

  He had liked her frankness, he had liked her lack of coyness, and also in a way that had surprised him he enjoyed her assumption that they would want to see each other, without imposing a bondage on each other. They were a team, yet they were free.

  It was unlike anything he had known. He was not in love with her in the way that people fell in love in books, but he liked making love to her. He was happy with her. She amused him and in her company he felt more alive. He had not meant to bring her out to Mürren. She had never skied. When he had told her that he was going, she had not looked glum, she had not asked to be invited, she had just asked him questions, as to whom he would meet, as to what he’d do, how long he’d stay, very much as a sister would have done. Without realizing what he was doing, he had found himself saying, ‘I plan to be there three weeks. You could stay that long, couldn’t you?’ She had answered without any appearance of surprise, ‘Yes, I could manage that.’

  Five minutes later he was wondering why he had invited her. Mürren was not a playground in the sense that St. Moritz was. It was a serious skiing centre, with its tests and Kandahar Club, its gold and silver K’s. She’ll be bored blue, and I’ll feel responsible.

  But she had not been bored. She had taken lessons on nursery slopes. At the end of ten days she was going on junior runs. She had learnt as a child to roller-skate and she made quick progress on the ice. In the evening, when he was sitting with the experts discussing the technique of skiing, she did not interrupt, she did not look restive. It was he himself, on the contrary, whom their professionalism had begun to tire. He was anxious to get away from it. And during the day when he went on a long Kandahar run, he would be waiting to round off the day. He had never enjoyed himself so much at Mürren. It was good now, to sit beside her, sipping a glass of wine while peace ran soothingly, inspiringly along his veins.

  ‘I wish you were entering for the Monte Carlo Grand Prix this year,’ she said. ‘I’d love to watch it.’

  ‘You’d find it very dull after the first ten minutes. It’s a screeching noise for three hours; you don’t see what’s happening; the exciting things always happen somewhere else.’

  ‘I know, at least, I can guess; but it’s something I’d like to be able to remember. All those people shouting and Grace Kelly driving round before it starts, seeing you racing through those streets … even though I wouldn’t be able to see you at all behind those goggles; thinking, We’ll be having dinner together afterwards, with you telling me what you felt at the various stages, with everybody staring at us and whispering. I’d feel so proud; and every year afterwards when I heard people talk about it, I’d think, I was part of this race once. It would be fun.’

  Her eyes shone, her voice took on an eager tone, and sitting there beside her he suddenly felt that, yes, it would be fun. He had raced in the Rally four times now. Once he had finished third. It had been exciting the first time, but after the novelty had worn off he had found it boring. It was not real racing. It was like playing cricket on a bad village pitch. There was too much luck; s
kill and training were not given their fair chance. But Annetta’s enthusiasm re-awoke his interest. Because it would be an adventure to her, it would become an adventure again for him.

  ‘It’s not too late,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, please then, do.’

  It was the first thing she had ever asked him to do for her; he was touched by its being this. It was for his sake that she had asked it, so that she, he had thought, could have a particular memory of him. ‘We’ll cable my application right away,’ he said.

  He waved to a waiter. ‘A Western Union form.’

  She clapped her hands. ‘Darling, there are times when I almost think I love you.’

  The waiter brought the form; Rhya wrote out the message to his agent. ‘That’s that,’ he said.

  She leant forward across the table and her eyes were eager.

  ‘Tell me all about it, but everything, from the very start,’ she said. ‘When will we get there, where shall we stay?’

  Question followed question. Her excitement set alight in him a sense of anticipation that he was beginning to outgrow. He had had so much so early. There was not much new to come, but because it was new to her, it was renewed for him. ‘It’s a ridiculous confession for me to have to make,’ she said, ‘but I’ve never been to Monte Carlo. You know how it’s been in England since the war; those limited travelling allowances.’