“Ahoy!”
“The bloody thing nearly capsized,” came a distant grumbling voice. “We had to throw one bloody crate of Anchor overboard.”
“I’ll come down and help!” shouted Crabbe.
It was slow and sweating work lugging crates of beer for Nabby Adams, sherry for Alladad Khan, champagne for the Crabbes up the stairs to the near-denuded flat. Houseboys were called from their vacation to help. Nabby Adams dispensed lordly gratuities.
“Terima kaseh, tuan.”
“Terima kaseh.”
“Terima kaseh banyak, tuan.”
“Sama sama,” said Alladad Khan.
“Samsu samsu,” said Nabby Adams. “Who the bloody hell does he think he is, anyway? It’s my bloody money, not his.”
Nabby Adams, indulgent of the weaknesses of others, had brought cold chickens and pork pies, tins of ham, wedges of cheese, loaves, melting slabs of butter, fruit, marmalade, jars of pickled onions, crackers, Christmas puddings, slabs of dried fish, pink cakes, bottled mushrooms, figs, chocolates, cough-sweets, canned soups, Dutch cigars, potted shrimps, smoked salmon, caviare, tinned pâté, hard-boiled eggs, and a hunk of meat for a dripping dog that sprayed the stairs with its happy tail.
“Would insist on coming,” said Nabby Adams. “She jumped out of the bloody window and swam after us. So we had to pull her on board.”
They sat on coverless arm-chairs in the pictureless, bookless flat. Only a group photograph, delivered that morning by post-boat, had been too late for the crates and boxes.
“It’s the Upper School,” said Crabbe, “and there’s me in the middle of the front row.”
“And who’s this Chinese kid with the black eye?” asked Nabby Adams.
“He’s the musoh dalam selimut,” said Crabbe. “The enemy in the blanket. But not here any more. He’s going to Singapore. There’s more scope there in the Chinese schools.”
There was distant gunfire.
“Still at it,” said Nabby Adams. “Not even on Christmas Eve can they let up.”
Bottle-tops were levered off, drawn, popped. They all drank from beer-glasses.
“So you’ve made up your mind, Nabby?” said Crabbe.
“Yes. Back to Bombay. I’ll settle down there. There’s no place like it.”
“But what will you do?” asked Fenella.
“Well, nothing really, Mrs. Crabbe. I’ll just live there. There’s no place like Bombay.”
“You can’t drink there any more,” said Crabbe. “Prohibition’s in force.”
“Well, I can really,” said Nabby Adams. “You see, I’ve got this.” He took from a note-crammed wallet a crumpled letter. Crabbe unfolded it and read:
“This is to certify that the bearer is a confirmed alcoholic and may be served with intoxicating liquors in any hotel where he requests them.
“P. Vivekananda, M.B., Ch.B., Madras.”
“If you want a drink when you’re in India, Mrs. Crabbe,” said Nabby Adams seriously, “you just get one of them. Then you’ll have no trouble.”
They drank and ate. Nabby Adams consented to take a little cheese and a small piece of bread. Alladad Khan tore a chicken with his teeth.
“It makes me real sick to see him,” said Nabby Adams, “gorging like that. No moderation somehow when he starts anything. And I got him them three bloody stripes before this came through, because I needed the extra money he’d get. And not a bit bloody grateful.” He spoke long Urdu. “And he won’t come with me to Bombay. Says he’ll stay here. Oh,” said Nabby Adams, “that reminds me. You two have been real good to me and him. And you held that ticket for me when I would have lost the bloody thing. Well, you’re getting ten per cent. That’s only fair. Thirty-five thousand. I’ve put it in the bank for you already.”
“We couldn’t, really …”
“It’s terribly kind, but …”
“You’re always saying as how you want to get back home and start a school or a pub or something. Well, here’s your chance. What’s thirty-five thousand to me?”
“It’s awfully kind,” said Fenella, “but really …”
“I don’t think she wants to go home now,” said Crabbe. “She wants to stay here.”
“Yes,” said Fenella. “I want to stay here.”
“Well, you keep the money just the same,” said Nabby Adams. “You can have a bloody good piss-up with that.” Then he stared in horror. “I didn’t mean that, honest I didn’t, it just slipped out like, Mrs. Crabbe, honest, I’m sorry, really I am.”
“Ap khuch karab bolta,” said Alladad Khan.
“And I’ll say something a bloody sight worse if you start pulling me up,” said Nabby Adams. “Full of himself since he got his third stripe.” He gave a lengthy speech in Urdu. Alladad Khan worked away at a chicken-leg, indifferent.
They drank and ate.
“Christmas Eve,” said Nabby Adams. “I used to pump the bloody organ for the carols, proper pissed usually. …” He began a glazed look of horror.
“Well, what else can you call it?” said Crabbe quickly.
“That’s right,” said Nabby Adams with serious warmth. “What else can you call it? Anyway, there was one that I used to like, more of a im really than a Christmas carol.” Nabby Adams coughed and cleared his throat and began to sing in a graveyard bass:
“O come, all ye faithful,
Joyful and triumphant,
O come ye, O come ye
To Beth Lee Em.”
Fenella began to cry, and Alladad Khan made a serious, concerned statement in chiding Urdu. Nabby Adams, disturbed, said:
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Crabbe, I know I’ve not got much of a voice and you being musical and all, but I didn’t think it was that bad it’d make you cry, honest.”
They drank, and the evening poured itself out in a long bubbling or frothing or aromatic stream, and Alladad Khan sang a Punjabi hunting song and addressed the Crabbes seriously in Urdu, and the Crabbes addressed Nabby Adams in Malay, and it became Whitsun more than Christmas, for the Tower of Babel lay with the empty bottles.
At length Nabby Adams looked towards the planter’s chair on the veranda, and said:
“Just five minutes.”
Alladad Khan sang quietly to himself, eyes glazed, sherry bottle in hand; Crabbe began to sing a counterpoint, seriously, sonorously:
“The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full-grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.”
Alladad Khan left him to sing on his own, pale beneath the warm brown, off to the lavatory. Fenella cried and cried.
“His art up,” said Nabby Adams sleepily. Then he snored gently, the dog clankingly searching for fleas beside the planter’s chair, unaware as yet of her booked passage to India.
Fenella sobbed. Crabbe took her in his arms and comforted her. Then midnight sounded from the halfdrowned town clock. Above the broken meats, the drained bottles, the insect noises, the gunfire, the snores and the retchings he wished her a merry Christmas.
The Enemy in the Blanket
“Their coming and going is sure in the night: in the plains of Asia (saith he), the storks meet on such a set day, he that comes last is torn to pieces, and so they get them gone.”
— ROBERT BURTON:
A Digression on the Air
The Malay State of Dahaga and its towns and inhabitants do not really exist.
1
THE CHINESE CAPTAIN and the Malay second pilot worked stolidly through the check-list.
“Lap-straps, no smoking?”
“Sudah.”1
“Hydraulic hand-pump?”
“Tutup.”2
“Carburettor heat?”
“Sejuk.”3
It was Chinese New Year, the first day of the Year of the Monkey. The passengers had driven through the hot morning town to the airport, slowed or stopped by the Lion-dance swaying through the streets. Young slim-waisted Chinese had crashed gongs, looking somehow Mexican i
n wide-brimmed straw hats, and the brisk sweating dancer had leapt and run and bowed and advanced and retreated. He had been encased from the shoulders up in the round ugly lion head, while, yards of fluttering cloth away, a small boy had pranced as the tail. Into the open mouth of the Lion people had stuffed, for good luck, little red parcels or ang pows. But here, on the brown-grassed airfield, it was just another flying day, nearly time for take-off to the northern fringe of the peninsula.
In Victor Crabbe’s mouth a tongue was stuffed like a parcel, a pow by no means ang. In his head a Lion-dance circled and thumped to loud gong-crashes. Last night he had been smothered with Chinese New Year hospitality. Bird’s nest, shark’s fin, sucking pig, boiled duck, bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, huge staring fish, sweet-and-sour prawns, stuffed gourds, crisp fried rice and chicken-wings. And whisky. Glass after glass of it, neat. Kung Hee Fatt Choy. That meant roughly, a Happy New Year. One mustn’t lose face; one couldn’t say, “No more whisky”. He lolled back, eyes closed, ears closed too to his wife’s quiet weeping. Fenella Crabbe sniffed into her handkerchief, and the Sikh traveller in the seat across the aisle smiled with sympathy. It was hard to leave old friends, a loved house, a known town. But duty was duty. Where the British were sent, there they had to go. That was how they had built their Empire, an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations. He had been, in his earlier, less prosperous, days, a fortune-teller. He was not that now, he was …
Fenella Crabbe read yet again the anonymous letter. It had been delivered into her hands by a small Tamil boy as they stepped into the taxi that morning. It was typed—heavy old office-Oliver type—on greyish paper. The letter ran:
Dear Sister,
My heart has swelled often and again with humble appreciation that you and your husband not like rest of white men in this country. For they suck from bounteous earth like greedy pigs from udder of mother-sow the great riches of rubber which Indians planted in prehistoric ages. Laughing haughtily, they drink at white men’s club and spurn their brothers of skin of different hue. But your husband and you, Sister, in no manner like that. For you have freely mingled and show love to your poorer brothers and sisters.
But, O Sister, perhaps you are misguided. Perhaps, in poetic words of base Indian, you love not wisely but too well. And here I refer to your husband the teacher whose brain, though it contain knowledge to bestow in overflowing measure and bounty on eager learning youth, it can yet stoop to base act of sexuality. For it is known that he has for many months sated uncontrolled lust on simple Malay girl who is widow and orphan, both. And she herself believing that the child that is natural consequence shall have white skin and she become object of revilement among her people.
Sister, I tell you in all truth, which is precious jewel, though worn on toad’s head. And I say that you warn him to show care in new place whither you go. For there men are men of strong passions and much subject to the green-eyed monster that mocks the meat it feeds on. And they will hit him on the head with little axes and English blood will stain Malayan soil.
Closing now with good wishes and hopes and blessing of our one father God for your new state and much happiness in work and social amenities.
The Voice of the East.
Postscript. You ask others here and they telling you the selfsame story.
“For God’s sake, stop crying,” said Crabbe. The number two engine back-fired. Soon there was an all-enclosing vibration, perhaps like the rumble of blood that surrounds the torpid fœtus. The Chinese pilot released the brakes, advanced the throttles.
“And to think this was going on all the time,” shouted Fenella, barely audible above the engines. “I thought we had no secrets from each other.”
The gongs throbbed through the engines and the Lion jumped and came down with a crash in his brain. “But it finished long ago. There was no point in telling you.”
“And she’s going to have a baby.”
“WHAT?”
“A BABY.”
“Well, it won’t be mine. I can prove it.”
“You’re disgusting. I’m going to leave you.”
“WHAT?”
“LEAVE YOU.”
The Sikh traveller smiled in his beard. They quarrelled among themselves. The beginnings of dissolution. But the future was bright for him, Mohinder Singh. Let them not say that the Sikhs were fit only for the police or the bullock-cart or the hard bed of the night watchman. Let them not say that the Sikhs had no aptitude for business. Crabbe took a glucose sweet from the air hostess and crunched it irritably. Fool. She needn’t have known. But, unthinking, he had said, wearily, that she wasn’t a widow but a divorcée and wasn’t an orphan but had a very vigorous set of parents and grandparents away in a remote village. And that, of course, had done it. If only he hadn’t been feeling crapulous, if only he didn’t still feel crapulous. Crabbe looked with favour at the air hostess. Her name, according to the little board by the cockpit door, was Molly de Cruz. Eurasian. Crabbe had a swift cinematic vision of the glory of Malacca and the coming of the urgent Portuguese. She was long-legged, ample under the uniform jacket, a sweep of rich hair under her cap. Now she danced up the aisle with newspapers, handing out The Timah Gazette and The Singapore Bugle, a Malay journal in proud sweeping Arabic headlines, a cramped sheaf of drilled Chinese ideograms. Crabbe shook his head at her, smiling refusal with what he hoped was debauched charm. Fenella bent angry brows over a front page, taking in nothing of the Singapore riots, the ‘Clear Out British’ banners above toothy smiles and brown feet, the smirk of a new strip-tease artiste from Hong Kong.
Deep below them was deep jungle and, far to the west, the Malacca Straits. They moved with speed towards the air of a strange land, Negeri Dahaga, Malay country washed by the China Sea, a State of poor honest fishermen and rice-planters. It was a land which had been tardy in yielding to the kindly pressure of the British, and Chinese and Indian traders had been slow to follow the promise of peace and cold justice: Malay land, where the Chinese kept to their shops and ate pork in secret. A mere fifty years before, the Siamese had waived, as also with the neighbour States of Kelantan and Trengganu, the bunga mas, the rich golden flower of tribute. A British Adviser had come at a time when a gardened Residency and Sikh guards and a coach-and-four had long been a commonplace on the West Coast. And there the Adviser had found, and his successors found still, that the State was only nominally in the hands of a Sultan. Dahaga was ruled feudally by an hereditary officer called the Abang, a man with such titles as Scourge of the Wicked, Friend of the Oppressed, Loved of God, Father of a Thousand, who claimed descent from the faeces of the White Bull of Siva.
Traditionally, even the installation of the Abang was far more magnificent than the Sultan’s coronation. Silver trumpets clamoured and drums thumped and Javanese xylophones clattered with an ominous noise of dry bones. An age-old Hindu prayer was intoned while the Islamic leaders looked placidly on. The names of some of the Abang’s ancestors were chanted, great heroes who had tried to subdue the world to the True Faith: Al Iskander the Great, Aristotle, Mansor Shah, Averroes, D’Albuquerque, Abu Bakar and others. The Abang’s feet were washed in goat’s milk and his testes blessed and anointed behind a gold-thread curtain. Veiled girls danced to the skirl of Indian pipes, rich curries were eaten and mounds of cold rice distributed to the poor. And the Sultan smiled and fidgeted and was sent away to supervise his four quarrelling wives and play chess with his attendants, seeing himself, crowned but impotent, static or retreating on the chequered board. Meanwhile the Abang ruled, collecting many dues, lounging in limousines, impatient of the gentle restraints of Western law. From the West he desired only cars and fair-haired women.
The chief town, Kenching, was bulbous with mosques and loud with the cries of many muezzins. Islam was powerful. During the fasting month police squads dragged out sinful daytime eaters from house or coffee-shop. Nonattendance at the mosque on Friday—if discovered—was heavily fined. Polygamy was pract
ised and divorcée prostitutes were thick on the evening streets. But ancient Hinduism and primitive magic prevailed in villages and suburbs. The bomoh, or magician, cured pox and fever, presided at weddings and grew rich on the fees of fishermen who begged prayers for a good catch. Gods of the sea and gods of the rice-grain were invoked, threatened, rewarded. And from the north came Siamese Buddhism to complicate further the religious patterns of Dahaga.
History? The State had no history. It had not changed in many centuries, not since the Chinese had stepped ashore and soon retreated, carrying its name back in three ideograms: DA HA GA. The British had hardly disturbed the timeless pattern. The rivers were still the main roads, though the railway train puffed in from the south once a week and an aeroplane came daily. There were cinemas and a few hotels, some British commercial firms in poky offices. But Dahaga regarded all these as a rash that might go, leaving the smooth timeless body unchanged. Or the British might be absorbed, as the Siamese had been in the days of the Occupation, when the Japanese had moved west and south, leaving Dahaga to their jackal friends from Thailand. The future would be like the past—shadow-plays about mythical heroes, bull-fights and cockfights, top-spinning and kite-flying, sympathetic magic, axeing, love-potions, coconuts, rice, the eternal rule of the Abang.
All that Victor Crabbe knew was that he was appointed headmaster to a school where the medium of instruction was English. That such a school should exist at all in Dahaga was probably due to an oversight on the part of some Abang of the past, one who had tasted whisky and become momentarily Anglophile or had grunted in his sleep what sounded like assent to the gentle recommendations of a British Adviser. Victor Crabbe had never been a headmaster before, and it was as much apprehension as crapula that had distracted him into admitting that the anonymous letter-writer had spoken some truth. Otherwise he would have said, “The only thing to do with such letters is to bum them and forget about them.” But he had always been convinced that Fenella would find out sooner or later about his liaison with Rahimah. It had never seemed necessary to volunteer the information. He had just felt that, if she found out, she would laugh in her gay sophisticated way and cry, “But, darling, how amusing. What was it like?” And, in a way, he didn’t want her to take it so light-heartedly, because Rahimah had meant something to him. So he let things slide. Now here she was, sobbing like any suburban housewife, all jealous woman, eyes red and cheeks swollen, threatening to leave him. However, this too might be part of a New Year hangover. She had washed down the boiled duck with much gin. Best to say nothing and wait.
The Malayan Trilogy Page 20
