The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  “Apa ada?” said Hamzah. “What’s the matter with him?” The others shook their abundant locks in puzzlement. Slowly enlightenment blossomed in Hassan’s head. “I think I know,” he said. He was ignorant, but he had seen something of the world. “But perhaps I’m wrong,” he added.

  “What is it, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  ‘What did you say you knew for, then?”

  “Ah, never mind.”

  They threw a few harmless pebbles at Crabbe’s car, parked in the porch, and then went on their way, singing. Hamzah suggested going to the Chinese gramophone shop, to pretend to want to buy some records. A good idea, they all agreed. That would pass the time nicely. Then sunset would be presented formally by the muezzin, the whores and hostesses appear, and adventure tremble in the shadows.

  Lim Cheng Po came to tea. He took it in the English manner, enjoyed the tomato sandwiches and the fruit cake, said, in his Balliol voice: “A pity one can’t get crumpets here.” He was a solicitor from Penang. He came over for two days every two months to see how his assistant, who handled the cases this side of the peninsula, was faring, occasionally to take a case himself. He also visited his friends, of whom Crabbe was one. To Crabbe he was a breath of home, an unalloyed essence of Englishry. He was Henley and Ascot, vicarage garden parties, tepid bitter, Gothic railway stations, London fog, the melancholy of a Sunday summer evening. He was plump and not unhandsome, his Chinese blood hardly apparent. Only the eyes were lashless and small and the nose slightly squat. But the English voice and the English gestures swallowed up these details, as a pan of gravy soup might swallow up a shred of shark’s fin. He talked now about the troubles in Penang that had just ended—terrorism and a curfew on that one-time peaceful island—and the troubles that, so he had heard, were soon to start in Perak. He had been warned to cancel his trip to Ipoh.

  “Who starts it all?” asked Crabbe.

  “My dear chap, that’s rather a naive question, isn’t it? It just starts. Some blame the Malays, others the Chinese. Perhaps a Malay shakes his fist at a Chettiar money-lender and, for some obscure reason, that sets off a brawl in a Chinese cabaret. Or a British tommy gets tight in K.L. and the Tamils start spitting at a Sikh policeman. The fact is that the component races of this exquisite and impossible country just don’t get on. There was, it’s true, a sort of illusion of getting on when the British were in full control. But self-determination’s a ridiculous idea in a mixed-up place like this. There’s no nation. There’s no common culture, language, literature, religion. I know the Malays want to impose all these things on the others, but that obviously won’t work. Damn it all, their language isn’t civilised, they’ve got about two or three books, dull and ill-written, their version of Islam is unrealistic and hypocritical.” He drank his tea and, like any Englishman in the tropics, began to sweat after it. “When we British finally leave there’s going to be hell. And we’re leaving pretty fast.”

  “I didn’t know you thought of leaving.”

  “Yes. Back to London, I think. I have my contacts there, and my friends.”

  “The Malays are to blame, in a way,” said Crabbe. “I’m disappointed in them.”

  “Blame the middle-class Malays, if you like, the political men, but don’t blame the kampong blokes. For them the world hardly changes. But there should never have been a Malay middle-class, they’re just not the middle-class type at all. They’re supposed to be poor and picturesque, sons of the soil.”

  “And yet,” said Crabbe, “I don’t like to think that it’s impossible to do something about it, even at this late hour. There are lots of things we neglected in the past, but you can’t really blame anybody. Perpetual Malayan summer, perpetual British rule. No seasons, no change. It was all very satisfactory, it worked. And, remember, there was no imposition of British rule. People just came because the British were there. Even the Malays. They flocked in from Sumatra, Java …”

  “Just what do you think can be done?”

  “Oh, I don’t know … A bit of adult education, I suppose. Of course, religion’s a problem, a nasty problem.”

  “What a thing to say,” grinned Lim Cheng Po. “What do you want? Nineteenth-century rationalism, Voltairian deism? We’re living in a religious age, you know. I suppose Anglicanism might be a solution. An Anglican Malay is an interesting conception, I admit.”

  “One could inculcate a little scepticism underneath the outward conformity,” said Crabbe.

  “That’s pure Anglicanism, isn’t it? And what would you do about your food taboos? It’s always those that seem to spark off your massacres. It’s just a hundred years since that nasty business in India. The Hindus and Muslims don’t seem to have developed a more rational attitude towards beef dripping and swine fat, despite a century of the civilising British.”

  “One could spread the light a bit. One could discuss inter-racial marriage, for instance …”

  “Discussion won’t get you far.”

  “It’s a beginning,” said Crabbe. “Discussion is a beginning. Even just getting all the races in one room is something.”

  “They’re talking in Singapore about an Inter-racial Liaison Committee. It won’t do any good.”

  “Oh, Cheng Po, you’re such a wet blanket. You’re so damned Chinese.”

  “Chinese?” Lim Cheng Po looked offended. “What do you mean by that remark?”

  “You’ve got this sort of divine disdain. You don’t really believe that all the other Eastern races are anything more than a sort of comic turn. That absolves you from the task of doing anything for them. You’ve no sense of responsibility, that’s your trouble.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Cheng Po slowly. “I’ve got a wife and children. I’ve got a father living in Hounslow. I give tithes of all I possess. I work so damned hard precisely because I’ve got a sense of responsibility. I worry about my family.”

  “But you’ve no nation, no allegiance to a bigger group than the family. You’re not quite so bad as Robert Loo, admittedly. He’s completely heartless. His only allegiance is to the few quires of manuscript paper I bought him. And yet, strangely enough, it’s he who’s convinced me that something can be done in Malaya. It may be pure illusion, of course, but the image is there, in his music. It’s a national image. He’s made a genuine synthesis of Malayan elements in his string quartet, and I think he’s made an even better job of it in his symphony. Not that I’ve heard that yet. I must get it performed.”

  Cheng Po yawned. “Music bores me,” he said. “And your liberal idealism bores me quite as much. Let Malaya sort out its own problems. As for me, I’ve got enough to think about without getting mixed up in other people’s politics. My youngest daughter has measles. My wife wants a car of her own. The curtains of the flat need replacing.”

  “Pale tea under the mulberries. A single flower in an exquisite bowl. Ideograms, painted with superb calligraphy, hanging on the walls,” mocked Crabbe.

  “If you like. Cricket on Sunday. A few martinis between church and luncheon. Gladioli by the open window. That’s your world as much as mine.”

  “You’ll never understand us,” said Crabbe. “Never, never, never. Our mandarin world’s dead and gone, and that’s all you’re looking for in England. You think the old China will stay alive in England, but you’re wrong. It died forty years ago. I’m a typical Englishman of my class—a crank idealist. What do you think I’m doing here in early middle age?”

  “Deriving an exquisite masochistic pleasure out of being misunderstood. Doing as much as you can for the natives” (he minced the word like a stage memsahib), “so that you can rub your hands over a mounting hoard of no appreciation.”

  “As you please. But I’ve got a year left before I have to go home, and I’m going to try something useful. Though what exactly I don’t know …”

  The western sky put on a Bayreuth montage of Valhalla. Towards it the Muslims would now be turning, bowing like Zoroastrians to the flames. It was genuine
ly the magic hour, the only one of the day. Both men, in whites and wicker chairs on the veranda, facing the bougainvillea and the papaya tree, felt themselves begin to enter a novel about the East. It would soon be time for gin and bitters. A soft-footed servant would bring the silver tray, and then blue would begin to soak everything, the frogs would croak and the coppersmith bird make a noise like a plumber. Oriental night. As I sit here now, with the London fog swirling about my diggings, the gas fire popping and my landlady preparing the evening rissoles, those incredible nights come back to me, in all their mystery and perfume …

  Rosemary Michael entered without knocking, bearing her ridiculous beauty on clacking high heels across the sitting-room. “Victor!” she called and then said: “Oh, you’ve got a visitor.”

  “This,” said Crabbe, “is my friend Mr. Lim, the last Englishman.”

  “How do you do?”

  “How do you do?”

  Rosemary listened to the Balliol intonation with hope and wonder. She could see, with her woman’s miss-nothing eyes, that Mr. Lim was not an Englishman, but she was fluttered and confused by his voice. She was also a little tight. Clumsily she gave Mr. Lim her choicest, most exclusive Sloane Square vowels and, sitting down, a ravishing glimpse of her round brown knees.

  “Have you come to live here, Mr. Lim?”

  “No, no, just a visit. My home’s in Penang, actually.”

  “Do you know London, Mr. Lim? I love London, I positively adore it.”

  “Yes, I know London.”

  “Do you know Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly Circus and Tottenham Court Road?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And Green Park and Hyde Park Corner and Knights-bridge and South Kensington?”

  “Yes, yes, the whole Piccadilly Line.”

  “Oh, that’s marvellous, isn’t it marvellous, Victor, just marvellous!”

  Lim Cheng Po was an Anglican and a cricketer, but he allowed a small Chinese man to enter his brain and, with a tiny smile, hint that Crabbe’s mistress had arrived and it was time to be going. He said:

  “It’s time I was going. Thank you for your hospitality, Victor. Good-bye, Miss …”

  “Rosemary. My friends call me Rosemary.”

  “An exquisite name and highly appropriate in its exquisiteness.”

  “Oh, Mr. Lim.” She became all girl. As Lim Cheng Po drove off she stood by the window to wave to him, and then came running back to the veranda.

  “Oh, Victor, what a very nice man. And what a lovely voice. Do you think he was attracted to me?”

  “Who could fail?”

  “Oh, Victor,” she simpered. Then she pouted, kicking her shoes off as she lay back in the chair, saying: “I’ve been getting tight with Jalil.”

  “What will Joe say about that? Somebody’s bound to write and tell him.”

  “I don’t care. To hell with Joe. He let me down very very badly. I expected a ring and all I got was that horrible Blackpool Tower. I’ll never forgive him.”

  “But he didn’t send the Blackpool Tower.”

  “No, he didn’t send me anything. Oh, Victor, Victor, I’m so unhappy.”

  “Have a drink.”

  “But I’m hungwy.” A pathetic little-girl’s rhotacismus.

  “Have some dinner then. I dine at seven-thirty on Fridays. Have a drink first.” Crabbe shouted to his servant: “Dua orang!”

  Rosemary had several gins and then became reminiscent. “Oh, Victor, it was so marvellous. They had me on television wearing my sari and gave me a whole ten minutes’ interview, and then next day you should have seen the letters I received. Fifty, no, a hundred offers of marriage. But I said I’d wait for Mr. Right even if I had to wait all my life and …”

  “And now you’ve found Mr. Right.”

  “No, no, Victor, I hate him for treating me like that, me, who could have married a managing director and an M.P. and a bishop and, oh, yes, a duke. Lord Possett his name was.”

  “This duke?”

  “Yes. But I kept myself to myself, I sent back their flowers and their mink coats, and I never slept with anyone, Victor, not with anyone, and I could have slept with anyone I wanted to. I was a virgin till Joe came along, Victor, and I gave him everything. Everything.” She screwed back the tears and looked inhuman. “He’s had everything from me.”

  “And now you hate him.”

  “I love him, Victor, I love him. He’s the only man in the world.”

  “You mean you enjoy sleeping with him?”

  “Yes, Victor, I love him. It was love at first sight.”

  Rosemary made a hearty dinner. There was roast chicken and bread sauce and Rosemary vigorously swamped everything first with ketchup and then with Lea and Perrin’s, refreshing her plate with these condiments frequently through the meal. With her coffee she had a Cointreau and then a Drambuie. Then she lay back in her arm-chair.

  “Victor,” she said, “is it true what Jalil says?”

  “About Joe?”

  “No, about you. He says you don’t like women any more.”

  “I like some women.”

  “He says you prefer little boys.”

  “Does he, by God!”

  “Everybody’s talking about you and this Loo boy. That’s what Jalil says.”

  “Really?”

  “Is it true, Victor?”

  “No, Rosemary, it’s not true. He writes music and I’m trying to help him.”

  Rosemary giggled. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Please yourself, my dear.”

  Rosemary fell into a posture of deeper languor, limbs spread, voice sleepy.

  “Victor.”

  “Yes?”

  “Are Chinese the same as Englishmen?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s just something one takes for granted.”

  “Oh.” The coppersmith bird hammered slow minutes.

  “Victor.”

  “Yes?”

  “You can if you want to.”

  “Can what?”

  “Oh, Victor, Victor.” She sat up and cried vigorously. “I’m so lonely, so lonely, and nobody in the world loves me.”

  “Oh, yes, a lot of people love you.”

  “It’s true what Jalil says about you, it’s true, it’s true. I’ve never been so insulted in all my life.”

  “Perhaps I’m not as susceptible as His Grace.”

  “I’m going home, going home.”

  “I’ll run you.” With great eagerness Crabbe went to the porch where his car was parked.

  “I’ll walk home, thank you. I don’t want a lift in your car. I hate you. You’re as bad as the rest of them, and I thought you were different.” She put on her shoes angrily and clomped out with her ridiculous beauty, leaving the room no emptier than before. Crabbe settled down to an evening’s reading.

  3

  THE JOB OF Victor Crabbe was, appropriately, a somewhat crepuscular one. He, as acting Chief Education Officer of the State, was slowly handing his post over to a Malay. Sometimes this Malay, a youngish man with a most charming smile, would be deferential to Crabbe, showing great anxiety to learn; at other times he would enter the office as though, in sleep, an angel had visited him, teaching him all in painless hypnopædia. Then the Malay, still with great charm, would tell Crabbe what to do—settle a strike of pupils in a local school; write a letter in courtly English to the Director, apologising for the loss of a receipt voucher; sign the letter; send out for coffee and currypuffs; generally make himself useful. The Malay himself would sit at the desk and smoke cigarettes through a Ronson holder, telephone Chinese contractors and give them hell—first announcing his official title loudly—and occasionally brood dramatically over thick files. So Crabbe demoted himself to the rank of the Duke in Measure for Measure, a god whom all men might touch, and wandered round the schools of the town to give funny lessons to the children (“the white man always make us laugh, make very happy”). Sometimes he would try
to do more spectacular good, and this morning he visited the State Information Officer with schemes in his mind.

  Nik Hassan liked to be called ‘Nicky’. It was chic to have an English name in his circle. His friends Izuddin and Farid were called ‘Izzy’ and ‘Fred’ and Lokman bin Daud usually signed himself “Lockman B. Dowd”. Very big-executive, very American, and a quite legitimate transliteration of the Islamic name. Nik Hassan had tried to mould his personality round the connotations of his nickname, and he sat like the boss of a gambling-joint behind his harmless official desk, moustached and smart in the busy hum of the air-conditioner. Crabbe greeted him and smiled dutifully at the counter-greeting. Nicky and Vicky. Education and Information. The comedy-team of the new Malaya.

  First Crabbe told Nik Hassan about Robert Loo and his symphony.

  “You see,” said Crabbe, “apart from its æsthetic value—and I’m not really capable of judging that—it’s just come at the right time from the political point of view.”

  “Music? Politics?”

  “Yes. You know, of course, that they made Paderewski Prime Minister of Poland. Paderewski was a great pianist.”

  “A bit before my time.”

  “This symphony could be played as a big gesture of independence. ‘We in Malaya have thrown off the shackles of an alien culture. We have got past the nose-flute and the two-stringed fiddle. We are adult. We have a national music of our own.’ Imagine a full orchestra playing this symphony in the capital, imagine it on the radio—‘the first real music out of Malaya’, imagine the pride of the average Malayan. You must do something about it.”

  “Look here, Vicky, the average Malayan won’t Care a damn. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Yes, but that’s not the point. It’s culture, and you’ve got to have culture in a civilised country, whether the people want it or not. That’s one of the stock clichés—‘our national culture’. Well, here’s the first bit of national culture you’ve ever had: not Indian, not Chinese, not Malay—Malayan, just that.”