The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  The Siamese boy brought in plates containing wormy shreds of over-fried egg, seasoned with blackened bits of onion. Everyone languidly picked at this breakfast. The sun rose higher, the day warmed. Dr. Sundralingam spoke his first words of the day, and, as if, against his will, time had been wasting, he said urgently to Maniam:

  “Do you think you can get Samy that job?” Samy was Kanikasamy, first cousin to Sundralingam. “You know the people down there; I don’t.”

  “I think so,” said Maniam. “The Malays just can’t do the work. The fools won’t see it, they won’t accept it. But I think I can fix up a vacancy. The pay won’t be much at first, but there are bound to be other vacancies, higher up the scale. Don’t worry.”

  “And do you think it’s going to be all right for Neelam?” asked Arumugam. His high voice smote wounded nerves like a fortissimo flute. Neelam was the sister-in-law of Maniam and a cousin or niece or aunt of everybody present.

  “Yes. Syed Omar will be out. That’s definite. If only you could have heard him last night …”

  “You’ll have to be careful. He is very hot-blooded.”

  “It is all talk,” smiled Maniam. “They talk and talk and shout but they never do anything. Besides, it is too late for him to do anything.”

  “Be careful, just the same,” warned Arumugam.

  Vythilingam covertly looked at his watch. Soon it would be time for him to shave, dress, and, his professional black bag on the seat beside him, drive to Rosemary’s house. In that house there were several cats, eight or nine of them, all of them presents from Vythilingam. She had once complained of mice. This was the only way he could visit her, the professional way, solicitous for the cats’ welfare, ready with Vitamin B injections, penicillin, tonic drops, for she was panicky about what the neighbours would say if they saw men visiting her purely socially. Supposing spiteful people wrote to her boy-friend in England, saying she was carrying on? Then her boy-friend would never marry her. But Vythilingam knew that her boy-friend would never marry her anyway. Once, at a dance, he had seen this boy-friend, proud and white in his dinnerjacket, circling in a waltz, Rosemary in his arms. This boy-friend, dancing, had caught the eye of a friend of his, a loutish ginger salesman of tobacco. He had made, taking his right hand from Rosemary’s back to do it, an unmistakable ithyphallic sign and followed it with a wink. The British never kept their promises. And that Rosemary had been defiled by this Englishman gave Vythilingam a twinge of curious grim elation. His marriage to her would be a gesture of many kinds of revenge.

  “I think, now,” said Vythilingam, “we ought …”

  “There is plenty of time,” said Maniam. “My plane doesn’t go till midday.”

  “Ought …”

  Black but comely, Rosemary Michael sat in the full sunlight of her living-room, re-reading the last letter from Joe. Everywhere cats lolled, fought, played, stalked, washed: the many cats of a spinster, but Rosemary was only a spinster in the strict sense of denotation. She was eminently, eminently nubile.

  The perfection of her beauty was absurd. The lack of flaw was a kind of deformity. It was not possible to say what racial type of beauty she exemplified: the eyes, black, were all East—houris, harems, beds scented with Biblical spices; nose and lips were pan-Mediterranean. Her body, clad now in a wide-skirted, crisp imported model, was that of the Shulamite and Italian film stars. The décolletage, with its promise of round, brown, infinitely smooth, vertiginous sensual treasure, was a torment to the blood. Yet only to the white man were these treasures revealed, for Rosemary could not stand the touch of brown fingers. The list of her lovers was formidable, ranging from the District Officer to the manager of the local Cold Storage. Many had promised marriage, but all had gone home, the promise unfulfilled. For Rosemary had little to offer, except her body, her fragments of training college learning, her ability to arrange flowers, and her quite considerable capacity for all kinds of sensuous pleasure. She desperately wanted marriage with a European, but she didn’t want marriage without love. Love, of course, was the familiar hoarse entreaty after the evening’s drinking, and Rosemary would quickly enough yield to the entreaty, hearing the love grow hoarser and more urgent and thinking too, ‘How can he fail to go on wanting me for ever once he knows what I’m capable of giving?’ And true, the men did go on wanting her for a long time, till the end of the tour or till transfer or till Rosemary’s voice—inexpertly Sloane Square after much drinking—made them cringe with embarrassment. And other things got them down—her inordinate passion for Worcester sauce, her wanting to be wanted all the time, her tears, tears which didn’t humanise her face by making it pathetically ugly but just made it not a face at all, her lack of ‘reality-control’ (she just didn’t literally know whether she was lying or telling the truth). And now, all over Malaya, the white men were leaving—the brown sauce-stain spreading over the table-cloth—and time was getting short.

  But Joe was still writing, and Joe had promised to send her an engagement ring, and Joe said he was still looking for a job, a good job, so that she wouldn’t have to work once she was married. Rosemary believed him, and a proof of her faith was her three-months’ fidelity, despite the occasional crying-out of her warm woman’s blood. Again she read:

  …I keep thinking of you and I all the time in bed together. Honestly, darling, on these long winter nights when I am lying on my own I want you more than ever. Yesterday I saw old Mac and we had a couple of drinks together, just like old times, and he introduced me to his sister who is really a smasher, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with her, because I keep thinking of you. I do hope you are keeping yourself for me and not seeing other men. You can see Crabbe, of course, because Crabbe is by way of being your boss and there wouldn’t be any funny business with Crabbe anyway, him being past all that. Well, darling, I am looking for a good job still, but there are not many cars being sold now, and who knows I may be back in good old Malaya before long if Mac can get me in with this new export firm. But I know you would want me to definitely try and fix something up here, you knowing England and liking it so much. Well now I have come to the end of the paper, these air-mail letter-forms are too small, aren’t they, so close now with fondest love from your Joe.

  That was really a lovely letter, much nicer than the one in which he had told her not to send any Christmas presents to his father and mother, as his family did not go in much for presents. He had been really rude about it, but he had at least added: “Save the money, darling, to help furnish our little house.” Rosemary had a shrewd idea that Joe had not told his parents anything about her, and that perhaps was a bad sign. Perhaps they had this absurd colour prejudice.

  And yet, she reflected, she had seen little enough of this absurd colour prejudice when she had been in Liverpool, doing her course of teacher training. How the men had been after her! She had been treated royally. Her story then had been that she was part Hawaiian and part Javanese, a romantic combination, and she had not denied the soft flattering suggestion that perhaps she was of princes’ stock. The middle-class low-caste Christian Tamil family in Kuala Hantu had then ceased to exist. And the distinguished, grey-haired managing director who had asked for her hand (if she wished, they could have separate bedrooms) and the tall young men at Claridge’s and the appearance on ‘In Town Tonight’ and in the Daily Mirror and modelling for Norman Hartnell. How graciously the Queen had bowed to her! But no, perhaps that hadn’t really happened. Surely, though, the Secretary of State for the Colonies had pleaded with her not to return to Malaya, that night they were dancing among chandeliers and decorations-will-be-worn, massed flowers and champagne. It all happened, of course it all happened.

  What happened now was that the front door of the small Education Department house was pushed open and massed flowers entered. Behind the massed flowers was Jalil, the Turk, a man who worked in the Town Board offices but had shares in a couple of rubber plantations. Emir Jalil, as he liked to be called, put the flowers rudely on the table and then, witho
ut invitation, sat down in the only other arm-chair. He was squat, short-necked, beady-eyed, strong-nosed, fifty, wore a cravat in his open shirt and breathed heavily, being asthmatic. The cats, knowing he hated cats, approached him with fascination, and one tough torn, with a face like Disraeli, tried to climb on to his knee. Emir Jalil brushed it off roughly.

  “You shouldn’t come here,” said Rosemary excitedly in English. “You know you shouldn’t. I gave the amah instructions not to let you in. Supposing somebody sees you, with all those flowers too? Supposing somebody writes him a letter? Ooooh!” (a pure round open Tamil O.) “Go now, please go now, please go!”

  “Come eat,” said Jalil. “Come drink. Come make jolly time.” He coughed long and sighed after it.

  “I can’t,” said Rosemary, agitated. “You know I can’t. Oh, please go.”

  “He not marry you,” said Jalil. “He never marry. He tell me he not marry you.”

  “No, he didn’t,” said Rosemary. “It’s a lie, you’re a liar. He’s going to send me a ring.”

  Jalil indulged in comfortable, quiet, asthmatic laughter. Rosemary saw the flowers and walked briskly over to them on high heels. Her ankles were possibly, just possibly, not by any means at all certainly, a little too thin. She put the flowers in water, thinking that with Jalil it was a bit awkward making up one’s mind whether one ought to shudder at the prospect of his touching one or not. She had read in a book that Turkey was really part of Europe, which meant that Jalil was a European. But how could he be? He was a Muslim and had three wives, and Europeans were Christians and had only one wife. But Jalil looked like a European. And he had money. And he could divorce his other wives. Yet he never said he loved her. If he panted at all, it was with asthma.

  She brought the flowers back from the kitchen sink to the living-room. Three cats jumped up on to the table to inspect them, one—a half-Siamese—trying to lap the water. Jalil coughed and sighed again, his chest labouring, and, in a resigned sort of way, took from his shirt pocket a cigarette-case. His thick fingers, grasping the case, produced also a green card which, caught for a moment in the fresh breeze, fluttered to the floor by Rosemary’s feet. Jalil wheezed up from his chair with some agility to retrieve the card, and Rosemary thought she saw guilt or anxiety, certainly a twinge of disconcertment. Rosemary herself snatched it rapidly from under a cat’s hind paws and scanned it with appetite.

  “I get yesterday from Postmaster,” said Jalil. “I mean give as surprise.”

  “You disgusting, disgusting, horrible …” Rosemary stamped her foot as a substitute for the noun she could not find. “It’s mine. It says there’s a parcel for me. Oh, go away, get out. I never want to see …”

  “I mean bring as surprise. Make happy.” Jalil was seated again, recomposed.

  “You didn’t want me to see it. You wanted to keep it from me. Because you’re jealous. Oooooh!” Suddenly Rosemary was alive with excitement. “It’s the ring, it’s the ring. He’s sent it at last. It’s in the Customs Office.” She jerked from one emotion to the other. “And I could have had it yesterday. And you kept it from me. Oh, you horrible, horrible pig of a man.” She kicked his right shin vigorously. Jalil gave a deep chesty chirp of laughter. “And today the Office is closed. And I can’t get it. But he’s sent it, he’s sent it, it’s here!” Her face all alight, she was not perhaps so beautiful as in vaccine repose; the features could not stand much of the humanising distortion which makes for a more civilised comeliness. But the teeth were all there, ridiculously white and even.

  “Come drink,” said Jalil. “Come make jolly time.”

  “Not with you, not if you were the last man in the world,” she said, all pout and stormy eyes. And then she swung over. “Oh, I must celebrate, I must, I must.”

  “Be sure what in parcel first.”

  “It’s the ring, it must be the ring!”

  “We go see. We go on way to drink and make jolly.”

  “But it’s closed. It’s Friday. There’s nobody there.”

  “We go. Is watchman there. He open for me. He give parcel. Me he owe money.”

  “Oh, Jalil, Jalil, can we? Oh, I could kiss you.”

  Jalil did not seem to want to be kissed. He sat still, quietly asthmatically chuckling almost with no sound.

  “You go get ready,” he said.

  “Nothing matters now,” said Rosemary. “They can say what they like. They can gossip all they want to. I’m engaged, engaged!” She pranced into her bedroom, singing horribly high, then pranced back again to the photograph, framed in silver, which stood on her Public Works Department escritoire. “Oh, my Joe, my Joe,” she crooned, flattening her breasts with the hugged picture, then drawing it away, adoring it, then covering the mean mouth, the pale wavy hair and the knowing eyes with kisses. “My Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe.” Then she pranced off again to her dressing-table. Jalil coughed, sighed and chuckled comfortably.

  When she was ready, Vythilingam was standing shyly by the open door. Jalil was still in the arm-chair, breathing deeply and seeming to brood on the picture of Vythilingam hovering awkwardly, as though he were really a picture.

  “Oh, Vy,” cried Rosemary, “it’s come, the ring’s come, I’m engaged!” She had already begun to celebrate: too much lipstick, like too much drink, her hair pulled back stark—the style she favoured for dances—into a topknot secured by a round silver grip.

  Vythilingam exhibited his working larynx, his eyes up to the ceiling as though inspecting damp. His lips chewed. “I know, I know,” sang Rosemary. “It’s marvellous, isn’t it? It’s made me almost speechless, too. I’m going off to get it now, Vy. Oooooh, I can hardly wait.”

  Vythilingam began: “I …”

  “Tigger,” said Rosemary, “has been a bit off his food.” She nodded at a great striped creature that sat like a hen, hatching malevolence. “Do give him something to make him eat, there’s a dear. Oh, I’m so happy.” She was off down the path, to Jalil’s car. Jalil got up, as if with effort, and made a kind of warbling noise to Vythilingam, a throaty descending half-octave of chromatics, nodding not unpleasantly the while, and he lumbered out. The cats surveyed Vythilingam expectantly, without unease, as though he and they were opposing teams lined up.

  In the airport stood Crabbe, leaning on the bar, the only white in a sea of brown. Malays were everywhere—on the bar-stools, drinking iced water or nothing, round the rattan tables, promenading up and down as in an opera interval, crouching miner-like, sitting tailor-wise, standing, leaning, surrounding Crabbe with a faint smell of warmth, a hint of musk. They had come from the town and the kampongs to watch the pilgrims return. They had come early, time being no object. Crabbe caught stern fishermen’s faces, the resigned droop of poor farmers, the up-looking open-mouthed wonder of the children, perhaps seeing white skin for the first time but too polite to chatter about the prodigy. The women sailed along or sat in long patience. Hard light defined their clear flat features, the extravagant sarong-patterns, flowing in from the naked airstrip, accentuating the pallor that gazed back at Crabbe from the mirror behind the bar. Crabbe looked at himself: hair now riding back from his forehead, the beginnings of a jowl. He looked down at his paunch, pulled it in, flinched at the effort, let it out again. He thought it was perhaps better to be middle-aged, less trouble. That growing old was a matter of volition was a discovery he had only recently made, and it pleased him. It was infantile, of course, like the pleasure of controlling excretion, but transitional periods of history had always appealed to him most—Silver Ages, Hamlet eras, when past and future were equally palpable and, opposing, could produce current. Not that he wanted action. But, of course, that was true of the phase, and that was why the phase didn’t last long. Imagine a Silver Age Æneid! And so let middle age come, him grow paunchy, no longer show his profile to women, stand at the Club bar rather than dance. He felt he wanted nothing further from women, anyway, his first wife dead, his second wife having left him. His state appealed to him—an Education Officer waiting
to hand over to the brown man he was training, in the twilight of British rule. Suddenly, poking with a match the swollen cigarette-ends in the water of the ash-tray, he saw all this as romantic—the last legionary, his aloneness, the lost cause really lost—and instinctively he pulled in his paunch, stroked down his hair to cover the naked part of the scalp, and wiped the sweat off his cheeks. He caught the eye of a Malay girl in the mirror and smiled wanly, hiding his teeth. She moved out of the mirror, smiling though, and in something like good humour he ordered more beer.

  Moving through the crowd towards him he recognised Syed Omar, plump, bothered, in a shirt with a newspaper pattern. Syed Omar nearly tripped over a child on the floor, apologised to the mother, greeted a Malay farmer with a false smile and then stood by Crabbe, saying:

  “Where is the bastard? Has the bastard arrived yet?”

  “Which particular one?”

  “The Tamil bastard, Maniam, the one who has tried to have me kicked out.”

  “Have a drink, Omar.”

  “A large brandy. I’ll get him, I promise you I’ll get him. Last night was no opportunity. I know they have told you, and everyone else, that I am a coward, but I was prevented last night, you see, prevented from having my revenge.” He gripped his left breast, on which rode the printed photograph of a Hollywood star, and said: “I swear to you in the name of God I will get him.” Crabbe read, on the right sleeve of Syed Omar’s shirt: “Thanksgiving dinner is an unalterably American tradition. It must include roast turkey, cranberry sauce, creamed onions, potatoes, pumpkin and mincemeat pies. Since Pilgrim times, housewives have seized upon the stuffing of the bird as the one ingredient in this time-honored menu upon which they can exercise their individuality.” Then Syed Omar’s hairless arm began. “Those creamed onions sound good,” said Crabbe. He looked inside Syed Omar’s sleeve to see if the article continued on the hem.