by Alec Waugh
As they came up the steps she turned to Rhya. ‘Do I take my shoes off?’ she asked.
She had said it as a pleasantry, to hide her own mounting nervousness. But he took her question seriously. ‘It isn’t necessary. Only when you go upstairs.’ What did they have upstairs? she wondered.
She was soon to see. There were Buddhas everywhere. It was like being in a temple. Her room was dark and high; black and gold were the contrasting colours. The windows were wired against mosquitoes. Her bed was low and wide. Facing it was a large gilt Buddha. After all, why not. A Catholic would have a crucifix and at least one picture of the Virgin Mary. A corner was curtained off to make a wardrobe. On one wall there was a black lacquer box, coffin type, decorated with gold dragons, standing on a stool. She had seen several such boxes in the downstairs rooms. Were they cupboards? No, Aunt Ladda informed her, they were book cases.
‘Book cases?’
‘Our books are scrolls,’ and Aunt Ladda tittered.
There were a number of pictures on the walls. They represented scenes of battle, hunting and ceremonial occasions. The men were richly armoured. There were elephants and prancing steeds. Their subjects seemed prehistoric. But it was not so long since Karakis had gone into battle, similarly caparisoned.
The bathroom was on a lower level. It was a large tiled room, containing an earthenware jar, with a dipper by its side. ‘It is one of the old-fashioned bathrooms,’ explained Aunt Ladda. There was also a wash-hand basin with a mirror over it. It was probably here that one fixed one’s face.
‘Come down when you are ready. There is no hurry,’ she was told.
She was not disposed to dawdle. A situation awaited her. She did not want to delay the joining of it. Some dozen females rose as she came down the stairs. They were slim and dark and elegant, like Aunt Ladda, and it was as hard to tell their ages as it had been hers. Half of them were wearing European dress, one or two were in Chinese-type jackets high-buttoned at the neck, the others were wearing a mixed style of dress. half-European, half-Chinese, cut out of richly brocaded silk. Thev raised their joined hands before their faces. One by one they were introduced to her. Each introduction was followed by an explanation. ‘My cousin Charan’s wife’ or ‘my cousin Bungpat’ or ‘Charan’s half-sister’. She would have to get Rhya to draw her up a family tree, she thought.
The moment the introductions had been finished, two servants appeared, one carrying glasses of iced lime squash, the other a plate of small green cones. Annetta took one. It was soft. Some kind of matter had been wrapped in banana leaf. She looked inquiringly at Aunt Ladda. ‘Fold back the top and press the point of the cone,’ she was instructed. It was white, cool, sweet, refreshing with a slight taste of coconut.
‘Our main flavourings here are coconut and ginger,’ she was told.
They began to ask her questions: about her journey out, about the British Royal Family, about Winston Churchill, about her impressions of Karak. ‘Is it how you expected it to be?’ ‘Do we look how you thought we would?’
They spoke English well, with an attractive, birdlike, high-pitched accent. They listened carefully to her answers, waiting till she had finished, making sure that she had finished, then making a comment. At the end of their comment they invariably laughed. Each in turn asked a question. She felt that she was a curiosity, but one towards which they felt affection. She had read about the mysterious and inscrutable East. But these, her future relatives, seemed singularly free of guile. Rhya sat silent throughout the symposium. Was she ever going to be alone with him?
The women rose in a pack. ‘We must take our leave. We are so happy to have met you. Rhya is very fortunate. We shall see you soon and often.’ They raised their joined hands before their faces. She was alone now with Rhya and his aunt.
‘I have not arranged a lunch party,’ Aunt Ladda said. ‘I expect you are very tired. You will need to rest. My brother, the King, wants to meet you as soon as possible. Tomorrow morning would be the best time.’
I could use a drink, Annetta thought. She supposed they served them here. They were not Moslems. Before coming out, she had taken a textbook on Buddhism from the local library. She had read about the eightfold path, right views, right aims, right speech and all the other rights. It had seemed very sane and simple. The avoidance of pain was its main concern. You could do more or less what you liked as long as you did not cause pain to others. But her little book had not told her whether Buddhists served Martinis. Til show you my garden now,’ Aunt Ladda said.
It was scarcely a garden judged by English standards. There was a pond fringed with gladioli. There was a tree in blossom; there were one or two bright-leaved shrubs. There was a palm tree and a banyan tree and a cluster of casuarinas. There were no flower beds. The house was draped with bougainvillea. Aunt Ladda’s chief pride was in a small artificial pond, with rocks and midget maples and a toy bridge on which only a child could have walked with safety. ‘It isn’t a Japanese garden but it was designed by a Japanese professor from the University.’
What looked a house for birds to nest in was set upon a pole. It was painted blue. It contained a couple of images and several candles. It was decorated with flowers. ‘It is to placate the spirits,’ she was told. ‘The candles are lit at night.’
Annetta was then shown round the house. The rooms opened one into the other. Lacquer screens divided them. The pictures on the wall like those in her own room depicted hunting and battle scenes. One of the book cases was opened and she was shown a book. It was a series of pieces of rice paper inserted into a bamboo holder, not unlike the holders for newspapers that are used in hotels and clubs.
‘This is the old style of house,’ Aunt Ladda said. ‘The modern generation does not like high rooms with fans and houses built of teak, ft wants small concrete boxes with air-conditioning. The house that is being prepared for you, my dear child, is I am glad to say a wooden house, but I am sure that within a few months you will be bullying Rhya into moving into one of those modern prisons.’
‘When can I see the house?’
‘Not until you are married. That is the bridegroom’s surprise for you. it would offend the spirits if you saw the house before.’
Annetta felt suddenly very tired. Was it really only four days ago that she had been in Highgate? What was she doing here? If only she could be alone with Rhya.
‘I think, Aunt Ladda, that after her long journey Annetta would like a glass of sherry,’ Rhya said.
It was not what she really wanted, but it was an assurance that she was not in a dry household. There should be wine at lunch.
2
‘I am giving you Karaki food. I hope that you will like it,’ Aunt Ladda said.
The plates and bowls in which the meal was served were, Annetta suspected, very good. They were cream coloured with pale red and golden dragons. Soup was brought first; a pale clear soup in which a few leaves floated. ‘We take our soup as a kind of water. We sip it when we feel thirsty.’ It was warm rather than hot. It had a fresh scented flavour. She was given a short curved china spoon to eat it with. A dish of rice was brought to her; the rice was faintly green. A steaming bowl of what looked like a thick soup was placed before her, along with two or three small dishes. There were sliced eggs, nuts and small split seeds, red and green. ‘Those are chillis. They are very hot,’ Aunt Ladda warned her.
The thick soup had a kind of scum upon its surface: red and yellow with a streak of ochre. ‘It is a Karaki curry. You pour it on the rice.’
It was unlike any curry that she had tasted. It was sweet with a delayed afterbite. She scattered the nuts and the eggs over it. She looked at the saucer of severed seeds. Were they really as hot as she had been warned? She took one cautiously: for a moment nothing happened. The sensation was not unpleasant, even when it grew intense. But she took a quick mouthful of the soup and then a second.
‘Have you explained to Annetta the problem about your wedding date?’ Aunt Ladda asked.
‘I w
as going to talk to her about that afterwards.’
It was for this reason, and for this reason only, Annetta suspected, that she was allowed after lunch to be alone with Rhya.
They sat on the porch facing the artificial pond. An elderly woman with a floppy hat was weeding the gladioli. This wasn’t the way it ought to be. Lovers meeting after six weeks’ separation should go straight to bed and find their way, that way, back to one another. But this was the way it was and she must make the best of it. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what’s the problem?’
‘I’ve got to go into a monastery.’
‘What!’
‘Every good Buddhist does. My father did. It’s like going to a university. Like your military service. I should have gone years ago. But somehow I didn’t. I put it off, the war, one reason and another, but the people wouldn’t accept me now unless I did. I hadn’t realized it, but well there it is. …’
He paused interrogatively. ‘For how long?’ she asked.
‘Two months, at least.’
‘At least. Should it be more?’
‘I’ve been assured it needn’t be.’
‘A month is a month, is a month, is a month. Well, what’s the problem?’
‘Whether I should go into this monastery before we marry.’
‘When else would you go in?’
‘Directly afterwards.’
‘No, heavens no.’
‘Why not?’
‘When I start a marriage, I mean it to be a marriage. .To be with one person and to stay with him. To go on a honeymoon and then have one’s husband go off to a monastery. Oh no, no, no.’
‘I see,’ he said. He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘You are still free. If you want to get out of this, you still can,’ he said.
She raised the heels of her hands against her eyes. Oh God, this was so awful. They ought to be in bed. Then they’d be one person, or else it would be so wrong, so ghastly, that they’d know there was only one thing to do, call the whole thing off. But as it was, sitting on this porch, in all this heat, with that woman with that floppy hat fiddling in that damn-fool rock pool …
‘Have you brought me all the way out here to tell me that:’ she said.
‘Please listen.’
He paused. It was the first real silence she had known for days. The roar of the plane, the whirring of the air-conditioning in Singapore, the clamour of the streets, the chattering cousins, now this sheltered porch. When at last he did speak, the tone of his voice changed, became lower, deeper, tender.
‘It was so long since I’d been here,’ he said, ‘I’d forgotten what it was like. When I had been here, it had been on a holiday. I didn’t think of my responsibilities. I enjoyed myself. I was among my friends. I always do enjoy myself. You know that. I thought I was offering you the same kind of good time that we had had in Europe, but when I got back I saw the difference. It isn’t going to be too easy. It’s not only the obligations and responsibilities. I guessed at those. I expect you did too. But it’s more than that. There are storm clouds; there are threats of storms. There’s no such thing as a safe throne.’
‘You mean your life’s in danger.’
‘No, not quite that. This is a Buddhist country. Buddhists didn’t lose their heads in the way Moslems do. They haven’t that sense of a holy war, the need to slash and slay. But there’ve been revolutions everywhere. During my father’s lifetime there’s no need to worry. He is loved and he is respected, but they don’t know me. They may distrust me. I have to move very carefully.’
‘Are you warning me?’
‘I wouldn’t use the word “warn” where you’re concerned.’
‘Then what are you doing?’
‘I’m trying to tell you that this may not be the kind of marriage that you expected, that it may be a different kind of life from the one that you expected. I don’t want you to accept it here upon false pretences.’
East is East and West is West, she thought. Would she ever know what he was really thinking? But then, for that matter, did any woman ever know what any man was thinking? If an Englishman had talked to her like this she would have thought that he was trying to talk himself out of something. But Rhya was different. She’d better be direct.
‘Will being married to an Englishwoman make it more difficult for you with your own people?’
‘Yes.’
It was not the answer she had expected. An Englishman would have been less direct. He would have compromised. He’s telling me the truth, she thought.
‘How difficult?’
‘It’s a difficulty that can be overcome.’
‘Your father would have preferred you to marry a Karaki?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he say so?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you write and tell me about this?’
‘It would have been hard to explain in a letter. Besides, I wanted you to see the country. I wanted you to decide for yourself. You couldn’t, until you had seen what it was like out here.’
So he had brought her out all this way, at such cost. But then cost did not count with him. That was one of his traits to which she had not yet grown accustomed. He never asked how much anything would cost, but how much fun it would be. The measure of a thing’s amusement was his standard.
‘If I were to go back to England, you’d marry a Karaki, I suppose?’
‘That would be one of my obligations. A throne has to be two thrones.’
‘If I were to go back, your father would be relieved?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you, yourself, now that you’ve come back here, that you’ve seen how different everything is, wouldn’t you feel it easier if you had a Karaki woman on that throne beside you, someone who would understand Karaki problems? You’ve enough handicaps without an extra one. Wouldn’t you, in the last analysis, be relieved if I said, “Yes, I will go back”.’
He shook his head.
‘Do you remember what I said to you at Murren when I asked you to marry me?’
‘A girl doesn’t forget that kind of thing.’
‘You remember the twenty reasons that I gave you?’
‘Yes, I remember them.’
‘You remember the final one, the twenty-second?’
‘That one decided me.’
‘Well, I feel that way still; only much more so; oh, so much more so. I didn’t know till I came back, how much I’d grown away from Karak, how alien to me much of it had become. My relatives, my old friends were strangers. Their ways of living, their ways of thinking had grown strange to me. I had fallen into European ways. I was an adopted European; divided between two worlds. My European friends may have thought of me as an Asian, but I lived there as a European. No Karaki will ever understand that about me. Being a ruler must inevitably be a very lonely thing. It is going to be far lonelier for me because there’ll be so many things that are important to me that I shall never be able to share with my fellow countrymen. I guessed at Mürren, but I had no idea till I came back here, how desperately I was going to need one person with whom I could be myself.’
She drew a long slow breath into her lungs.
‘If that’s the case, the sooner you go into that monastery of yours the sooner you’ll be out of it.’
Chapter Eight
Charles Keable had come to the airport by himself. Barbara had insisted upon that. ‘Let’s break it to her in relays.’ In his nervousness he had arrived there half an hour early. He had spent most of the time talking to Colonel Forrester, or rather being talked to by the Colonel.
‘I don’t come to the airport very often,’ the Colonel said. ‘There isn’t any need. There’s so few air passengers that it’s easy to keep track of them. The air line companies do that for us, but I meet every ship. I like to stand at the foot of a gangway and watch the new arrivals file off one by one. I like to study their faces when they put their foot for the first time on the soil which is going to be their support. I can’t say exactly
what I learn. It may be I don’t learn anything at all. But I absorb something. By seeing what kind of people want to visit us, I get a glimpse of what we are like ourselves.’
‘Does this mean you are taking seriously what the Chief was saying to us?’
‘I always take seriously what he says to me.’
‘Do you see any cause for alarm?’
Forrester shrugged. ‘A policeman’s job is to prevent there being a cause for alarm; like a doctor who prevents your being ill. I don’t want the climate to exist in which alarm can flower.’
‘You talked the other morning about a fly having got through your net?’
‘I’ve an idea that I already know something about that fly.’
‘You also said something about watching for something unusual to happen.’
Forrester chuckled. ‘A policeman is in a curious position. His job is to see that life follows an even tenor, that property and persons are protected. At the same time he’s not quite happy unless property is threatened. His vanity is affected when there is no work for him to do. He enjoys the drama of “a case”. though the existence of a case is a reflection on his efficiency. I should be ashamed of myself if I confessed that I find myself hoping that something unusual will take place.’
His eye twinkled as he said it.
‘And you meet these ships because of the possibility of that something happening?’
Forrester smiled. He replied obliquely, ‘I like to be able to recognize these people afterwards, when I see them in the streets or at a race meeting. A policeman, when he reaches my position, is the spider at the centre of the web. Reports come to him from every corner of the island. He knows people through the written word; he does not know what they look like, how they walk, how they talk. They are case histories for him, not human beings. I can’t help spending a great deal of time in my office, but I can be on my guard against the danger. The knowing that there is that danger is something. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In five minutes I may see a man coming down the gangway; a Chinese man, shall we say; there’ll be something about him that strikes me as interesting. I’ll look at the passenger list afterwards, and find out who he is, or who out of three or four he is. Then two months later in a café I may see him talking to someone whom I have been watching for several months. “Now that is a little curious and rather interesting,” I tell myself. “How did those two get in touch with one another? I must look into this.” Once, let us say, in fifty times, I get on to something by coming down when a ship docks, or perhaps that’s how I fool myself,’ he added with a chuckle. ‘Perhaps it’s one of the excuses I give for my conviviality. It’s very pleasant after all to call on a French line purser and drink a good bottle of champagne.’
