Fenella. The long teaching morning limped towards its end, hot and airless. White shirts were sodden; sweat dripped on to the wet ink of exercise-books and blurred the words; even Tuan Haji Mohamed Noor, the Koran teacher, had to take off his turban the better to wipe his hair-roots. The fans whirred their fastest but they beat the air as impotently as the fists of a fretful child. The bell went early to-day.
Fenella Crabbe got out of bed as soon as she heard the first returning cyclists. The boys were coming back for lunch. Victor would be at least another fifteen minutes, unless someone gave him a lift. He insisted on walking usually. Penance. Fenella had not been sleeping all the time. She had on the bedside table a jug of tepid water which had, an hour ago, been ice. There was also a bottle of gin and a saucer containing sliced limes. She had a slight bout of fever, and gin helped a little. At the foot of the bed was a copy of Persuasion, a volume of John Betjeman’s poems and a work of literary criticism by Professor Cleanth Brooks. In her slightly trembling hands she had just been holding the day’s issue of the Timah Gazette, a badly-printed rag with scare headlines—“Tapper’s Eyes Gouged Out by C.T.’s”; “70-year-old Chinese Convicted Of Rape”; “Singapore Riot Threat”. She had been interested to read that a Film Society had just been inaugurated in Timah, and that there would be a meeting once a fortnight. The first films scheduled were: The Battleship Potemkin; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Sang d’un Poète; Metropolis; Les Visiteurs du Soir. It was too ridiculous that they hadn’t a car and that Victor seemed unwilling to be friendly with any European in the place, for all Europeans—except the Crabbes—had cars. She felt that in Timah there must be people of her own kind, people who would discuss books and ballet and music. If only they could join this Film Society. But what was the use if they hadn’t a car? It was about time Victor got over this stupid nonsense of refusing to drive again. She herself could not drive, but why should she have to do what was her husband’s job? She should be driven. Perhaps they could afford a driver—say, eighty dollars a month. But Victor was stubborn about buying a car. He was like a man who feared water and would not even sit on the beach. And in a sense that was true also. There was a Swimming Club in Timah. He refused to swim, and that meant that she could not go there. But, in any case, how could she without a car? Without a car life in Malaya was impossible. Life in Malaya was impossible anyway.
She wiped the sweat from her face with a towel. Perhaps if he could be persuaded to buy a car she might learn to drive. But who was there to teach her? And again she was much too nervous a type, much too highly strung. The roads were treacherous with erratic cyclists and trishaw-men. As she made up her face, cursing the sweat that clogged the powder, she was sick for London, coolly making up for a dance in the evening, or for the ballet, or for a concert. Civilisation is only possible in a temperate zone. She had written a poem about that:
Where sweat starts, nothing starts. True, life runs
Round in its way, in rings of dust like Saturn’s,
But creating is creating arid patterns
Whose signatures prove, always, the arid sun’s.”
She heard the boys shrilly entering the dining-hall downstairs, not heeding the prefects’ unsure barks. The noise made her head throb. Oh God, to have this added to the sheer, damned, uncultured emptiness. Noise from now on, till the games period started. Hearty noise after till dinnertime. Noise before and after prep. Noise in the dormitories. Why didn’t Victor control them better?
Victor’s feet could be heard, entering the lounge, the feet of a tired man. Fenella, in a dressing-gown, went out to greet him. He kissed her on the cheek, and she felt the sweat of his upper lip. His face dripped with sweat. She said:
“Do change your shirt before lunch, darling. That one’s soaked.”
“It’s bloody warm walking home. It’s not too bad in the mornings. Can I have a drink?” He flopped into an armchair.
Ibrahim had heard him come in and a sound of approaching rattling glasses and bottles came from the direction of the distant kitchen. Ibrahim entered, bearing a tray, simpering at his master, dressed in wide-sleeved, wide-trousered silk. He had dyed the front bang of his hair a vivid red.
“For God’s sake don’t try and look like Boothby,” said Crabbe.
“Tuan?”
“But there’s no danger of that. Nobody could call Boothby a pretty boy.”
“Saya ta’ erti, tuan.”
“I said that looks pretty. Itu chantek, Ibrahim.”
“Terima kaseh, tuan.” Ibrahim went out, smirking pleasure, waggling his bottom.
“You shouldn’t encourage him,” said Fenella. “I don’t mind our being a little eccentric, but I don’t like it reaching a point where people will laugh at us.”
“Are people laughing at us? Because we keep Ibrahim?” Crabbe drank off a tumbler of lemon squash with a double gin in it. “Are we supposed to get some sour-faced ancient Chinese who swigs the brandy while we’re out? I don’t know the correct procedure. I’d better consult the D.O. about it.”
“Oh, don’t be silly.” Fenella was still shaky. The long drugged sleep always left her exhausted and irritable. The fever would not go.
“I’m sorry, dear.” Hastily he remembered his responsibility to her, the pity she deserved. “It’s been a hell of a morning. Boothby got on my nerves rather.”
She did not ask what Boothby had done to get on his nerves. She walked to the veranda which swept, in a huge curve, round the entire flat. “There doesn’t seem to be any air,” she said. Crabbe looked at her as she leaned over the stone balustrade, trying to drink in air from the green lawns below. She was tall, elegant in the flowered thin dressing-gown, her yellowish hair hanging almost to her shoulders. The hair was lank and stringy with the wet heat. He put down his refilled glass and walked over to her. He put an arm round her, feeling damp through the thin stuff of the dressing-gown.
“Aren’t you feeling any better, dear?”
“I’ll feel better in two and a half years’ time. When we can get away. For good.”
“If you really want to go home, I can arrange your passage any time you like. You can wait for me there.
“…I shall not fail
To meet you back in Maida Vale.”
“Oh, don’t be so damned heartless all the time.” She turned on him, shaking. “I really think you don’t care a bit about what I feel.”
Another little tropical storm brewing. Another classical colonial row between tuan and mem. Crabbe said nothing.
“I want us to be together,” she said. “I wouldn’t dream of leaving you here on your own. I thought you felt that way about me.”
“All right, darling. But, in the meantime, we’ve got to live here. We’ve got to try and make some sort of life in this country. It’s no good fighting against it all the time. You’ve got to accept that this isn’t London, that the climate’s tropical, that there aren’t concerts and theatres and ballets. But there are other things. The people themselves, the little drinking-shops, the incredible mixture of religions and cultures and languages. That’s what we’re here for—to absorb the country.” ‘Or be absorbed by it,’ he said to himself.
“But we’re stuck here all the time. The noise is driving me mad. Boys yelling all over the place. And when the boys are on holiday the workmen come in, spitting and belching, scraping the walls, sawing wood. If only we could get into some decent company for a change, go to Timah a couple of times a week, meet people of our own type.”
“Timah’s full of hearty planters and Malay Regiment officers.”
“All right.” She was calmer now, wiping her face with a small handkerchief, turning away from the vista of lawn and mountain and jungle and river. “There must be some reasonable people there because they’re starting a Film Society. It’s in to-day’s paper. They’re showing good films, French films.”
“Very well, let’s join it.”
“How do we get in?”
Here it was again, not at all conventio
nal material for a row, most unusual, eccentric—that was her word—in a land where all the white men had cars, where a car was an essential limb, sense, faculty.
“We could use the bus. There’s quite a good service.”
“And you expect me to sit there, stared at like something in a sideshow, and have garlic breathed on to me, and the sweat, and the dirt …”
“You didn’t object to garlic in France. Or in Soho.”
“Oh, don’t be a fool, Victor. You just can’t do that sort of thing. I thought even you would have enough bloody sense to see that. …”
“I can’t understand your inconsistency. At home you were Bohemian, prided yourself on it, loved being different from everybody else. The buses and tubes were good enough for you then.”
“But it’s different here.” She almost shouted at him, spacing the words out like the announcement of a radio programme. “We were all Europeans in Europe.” She shook violently. “We can’t live like the Asians. …”
“All right, all right.” He gripped her by the elbows, then tried to take her in his arms. “We’ll find some way.”
Ibrahim came in softly, looking with wide, serious eyes, to announce that lunch was ready.
“Makan sudah siap, tuan.”
“Baik-lah, Ibrahim.”
They went silently into the hot dining-room, fanless, its windows overlooking a final spread of veranda which itself overlooked the boys’ lavatories and showers. Ibrahim served chilled tomato juice, seriously, gracefully. Crabbe said:
“You want a car, is that it?”
“We’ve got to have a car.”
“You know I don’t want to drive any more. I’m sorry about that, but there it is.”
“We could get a driver.”
“Can we afford it?” Eighty dollars a month at least, and at the moment he was giving about sixty to Rahimah.
“We can try.”
And of course repayment of a Government loan for a car would come to about a hundred and fifty a month. There was some money in the bank, however, the dwindling remnant of their small capital.
“All right. I’ll think about it.”
“We could get a second-hand one. We’ve enough money for that.”
“Yes, just what I was thinking.”
Ibrahim had brought in tinned salmon and a salad. As she served him she said, “It will make such a difference. It will almost reconcile me to being here.”
It would bring her the breath of a temperate climate. Him, too, for that matter. The very cold breath of a temperate climate. He began to eat his tinned salmon.
4
HIS EARS STILL ringing with the protests of his shut-in dog, Nabby Adams entered the Club. He entered it rather shyly, six feet eight inches of diffidence, though he had as much right to be there as anyone else. More perhaps, for he owed the Club no money. That was more than could be said for those two bastards tee-heeing away over there by the bookshelves. But he felt uncomfortable in the Club; he would much rather have been entering a little kedai with Alladad Khan. Still it was precisely because this was the only place for miles around where he did not owe money that he was there to-night. Hart, that fat bastard over there, had written a letter about Nabby Adams’s bill to the Officer Superintending Police Circle. The O.S.P.C. had been very nice about it. He had told Nabby Adams that he must pay the bill right away, and, to ensure that the bill was paid right away, the O.S.P.C. said he would arrange for a single deduction to be made from Nabby Adams’s salary. The deduction had been made and there had been damn near nothing left of Nabby Adams’s salary. Still, there was one bill paid, and a bloody big one.
Nabby Adams had told Alladad Khan to go and sit in the servants’ yard at the back of the Club. Nabby Adams had promised to send out a large bottle of beer to him. Alladad Khan was to try and make that last as long as possible. Nabby Adams called the Club waiter. To Nabby Adams’s trained eye it looked pretty much as if the Club waiter, Hong or Wong or whatever his name was, took opium. He had pin-point pupils. He would not look straight at Nabby Adams, as though he knew that he, Nabby Adams, knew.
“Dua Tiger. One for me and one for him out there.” If Alladad Khan wanted more beer desperately he was to whistle shrilly. Nabby Adams would be able to hear that from the bar.
The beer was too cold. Nabby Adams was used to the exiguous amenities of oil-lamp-lighted drinking-shops, and had, during twenty-odd years in the East, developed a taste for warm beer. A liking for iced beer was effeminate, decadent and American. During his last leave Nabby Adams had met an American in his local pub. This American had had some sort of refrigerating apparatus in the boot of his car. The car had, otherwise, been a lovely job. This American had said, “We sure would appreciate to have a man your size in Texas.” He had insisted on thrusting gracious living on Nabby Adams—a bottle of beer so cold it had felt red-hot. Nabby Adams had been sick after that Arctic, astringent, tooth-probing draught.
He let his Tiger stand for a time on the bar counter to take the chill off. He smoked a ship’s Woodbine from a tin donated by a grateful Chinese race-horse owner whose car he had repaired when it had broken down on the road. Nabby Adams’s huge fingers were so impregnated with tobacco-tar that they looked as if they were painted with iodine or something. They made him feel a little sick whenever he held a sandwich. That was another reason for not eating much.
Nabby Adams did not propose to stay in the Club for the entire evening. Somebody might come in and stand by the bar and Nabby Adams might have to talk to him. Nabby Adams was not very happy about his English lately. He liked to speak a language well, and he was conscious that his English grammar was deteriorating, his vocabulary becoming so weak that he had to eke it out with Indian words, and his pronunciation hardly proper for patrician society. He was content to speak Urdu with Alladad Khan, sitting nice and cosy in one of them little kedais.
He heard Alladad Khan’s shrill whistle. He sent him out another bottle, a small one this time. That bugger was drinking faster than he himself, Nabby Adams, was. Getting uppish. Asking to be introduced to memsahibs. And him with a charming wife in silk trousers and sari having a baby in Cooler Lumpur. Nabby Adams always pronounced ‘Kuala’ as ‘Cooler’. He could not take Malay seriously. It was not a real language, not like Urdu or Punjabi. And as for Chinese. Plink plank plonk. Anybody could speak that. It was a bloody hoax.
Nabby Adams was in the Club primarily to see if he could borrow fifty dollars from the old Chinese who ran the place, Ah Hun. It could be put down in his book or Nabby Adams could sign an I.O.U. Nabby Adams would always sign an I.O.U. It was only a bit of paper anyway. Besides, Ah Hun was the richest man in Cooler Hantu. He ran a sort of auxiliary Club for his friends at the back of the real Club. That was pure profit, for all the drink came out of the real Club. The gin and whisky were watered and always short-measured. That was why it was better to drink beer. They couldn’t fiddle with that. Ah Hun was a turf commission agent, an opium peddler, an abortionist, a car salesman, a barber, a pimp and a distiller of illicit samsu. He had three wives, too, although he said he was a Christian. That was why he was never in the Club doing his bloody job. He was hard to get hold of. When committee members were present—and there were two of them over there—Ah Hun sometimes came in, busy and brow-lined with bills and accounts and God knows what. Nabby Adams decided to ask this opium-eating sod where his dad was. He didn’t want to waste the evening in here.
“Ah Hun,” said Nabby Adams. “Saya want a word with Ah Hun.”
Wong or Hong or whatever his bloody name was gurgled something, his shifty eyes on the counter.
“Where is he?” asked Nabby Adams. “I want to see him.”
The opium-eating sod sidled off, gurgling.
He hadn’t understood. Nabby Adams shuddered to think what opium could do to a man if it became a habit. An addict, that was the word. To become an addict was to invite early death.
Nabby Adams heard Alladad Khan’s shrill whistle.
Let the
bugger wait. Getting too big for his bloody boots. Memsahibs and going out with his superiors in rank. Nabby Adams drank placidly.
Nabby Adams thought for a while about something he rarely thought about nowadays, namely women, wives and whatnot. It did not pain him that desire had fled. It had not pained him for the last fifteen years. Now, at forty-five, he was safely past all danger. In calm waters. Besides, his vocation involved celibacy. But there had been a time, in the Army in India, there had been a time, working on the railways in India, when it had been very different. Every afternoon, after tiffin, when he climbed on the charpoy for a rest, that little amah had climbed after him. Every afternoon, when he woke for tea, she had brought the tea and it had been left to get too cold to drink. And that other time there had been the major’s lady. And back in England, when he had been a sexton, that time with Mrs. Amos on the gravestone. Nabby Adams shook his huge head. His real wife, his houri, his paramour was everywhere waiting, genie-like, in a bottle. The hymeneal gouging-off of the bottle-top, the kiss of the brown bitter yeasty flow, the euphoria far beyond the release of detumescence.
But there was this Chinese with three wives, and Alladad Khan with one wife but thirsting randily after a memsahib. And there was Crabbe with this same memsahib but carrying on with a Malay girl in the Paradise Cabaret down the road. He had seen him on his way there to-night. They had spoken together for a while, and Crabbe had said he was on his way to a meeting. Which was true enough, but that wasn’t the meeting he had meant, the bloody liar. And he had said that he was looking for a second-hand car. Nabby Adams thought of money wasted on wives and cabaret-girls and second-hand cars.
With surprise and hope Nabby Adams saw Ah Hun come in, shrunken and bespectacled, seriously conning an account-book. “Here,” said Nabby Adams. But at the same time there were booted footsteps approaching the bar. Nabby Adams turned to see Gurney, the O.S.P.C., still in uniform, though it was nearly nine o’clock. Gurney, long and cadaverous and tired-looking. Of all the bloody luck.
The Malayan Trilogy Page 7
