…and so I wish to correct any false impression that may have arisen concerning my attitude to Tuan Syed Omar’s character and work, owing to a quite superficial misunderstanding that arose between us shortly before my departure. I consider that Tuan Syed Omar is efficient, honourable and loyal, anxious always to give of his best, courteous to his superiors and considerate to his inferiors. I came to have the highest regard for his excellent qualities during the few months in which I worked in your Headquarters. With the coming of Malayan Independence Tuan Syed Omar should go far, as it is men like him that the country needs. …
Still, thought Syed Omar, still, this would come in useful. It was a good testimonial, even if it was insincere. But, then, all good testimonials were insincere. That stood to reason. But now Syed Omar felt a greater anger rising to think that he had to rely on the specially insincere praises of a cowardly Tamil. He felt murderous towards Maniam. He folded the copy of the letter with great care and put it into his thin wallet. It was a good testimonial. He would get Maniam.
Rosemary Michael heard loud music coming from Loo’s shop as she tripped along Jalan Post Office. Men gaped at her, whistled after her, made unequivocal gestures at her. Teeth gleamed from Indian shops in frank concupiscence. A fat Sikh constable tried to pinch her bottom. So it was always; the whole male town did homage to her beauty. Complacently she accepted the homage. The music from Loo’s shop blared for her, the very sun, which she far outdid in radiance, showered its hot gold on her alone.
Oh, but she had cause for radiance. It had come, it had come at last. Well, in a sense it had come. Joe had sent her a cheque for twenty guineas. The guineas made it seem rather like a fee, but of course perhaps Joe was really being considerate and ensuring that she had a nice even number of dollars—one hundred and eighty exactly. Joe wanted her to buy an engagement ring with the money. He couldn’t send one, he said, because he wasn’t quite sure what size to get. And she would know better than he what kind of stones and what kind of a setting to choose.
The money, of course, was not really enough for an even moderately good ring. But perhaps Joe was not really being mean; perhaps the poor boy didn’t really know how much a really good ring should cost. Perhaps he was just saving money for their little home. Still, it meant that Rosemary would now have to dig into her small reserve in the bank (she had called there on the way home to find out exactly how much it was). She must buy something really good, something commensurate with the gifts she had showered on Joe: the record-player, the golf-clubs, the Leica and the car radio. Joe must not appear less generous than she.
Joe had said in his letter that it was very likely he would be coming back to Malaya. With this import firm or export firm or whatever it was. Then, he said, she could transfer to a school in the town where he would be working, for it would quite definitely not be this town. Rosemary did not feel too happy about this. She had thought of herself living in a nice house in Hampstead or Chiswick, the beautiful mysterious Oriental princess who had married a commoner, who was not above preparing special dishes—exotic and spicy—for her guests, but who otherwise queened it over a household of stolid British servants. Or, if not that, at least in Malaya she would be a mem, yawning all day over books from the Club library under the two fans of the sitting-room. She had not thought of herself as working after her marriage. But, said Joe, marriage itself would have to wait, because this firm did not believe in its employees marrying coloured women. He would only stay with this firm for a time and then he would, perhaps, get a good government job. After the initial mess-up of Independence they would be crying out again for expatriates like Joe.
Coloured women, indeed! She a coloured woman! She walked, head up, with an indignant hip-swing past Crabbe’s house, round the corner, down the lane to her own quarters. Across the road she saw a car parked, broiling in the sun. Jalil’s car. Coloured woman! She was a European, at home in Paris and London, fond of European clothes and European food with plenty of Lea and Perrin’s. She loved the snow, tea and crumpets by the cosy fire, fog and primroses. She was also, of course, a Javanese princess, or Balinese, or Hawaiian. But she was not a coloured woman. Hadn’t her rich tan always been admired in England? Weren’t Europeans always trying to get sunburnt? What did they mean by calling her a coloured woman?
She sailed on her exquisite legs down the narrow drive to her house. Inside sat Jalil, wheezing, stopping this to hum a chesty chromatic scale when he saw her. He did not, of course, stand up. The room was full of cats, flowers—bougainvillaea, canna lilies, hibiscus, orchids—and the music of bees. Rosemary said:
“I’ve told you not to come here. Jalil, I’ve told you again and again. What are people going to think, you coming here all the time, what are they going to think?” But this was mere ritual, performed without conviction. Jalil said:
“Come eat, come drink, come make jolly time.” This was the now traditional liturgical response. Two cats came to greet Rosemary.
“Oh, don’t be silly, you know I can’t, oh, you’re ridiculous. Oh,” she said, “what lovely orchids.”
“Orchids I not bring. Orchids Crabbe send round.”
“Crabbe? Victor Crabbe?” Rosemary picked up the card and read: “To an exquisite lady these somewhat less exquisite blooms.” “Oh,” cooed Rosemary, “oh, how sweet. Oh, the darling.” She read the signature: “Lim Cheng Po”.
“Crabbe send round. Come from Penang, from Chinese man.” Jalil chuckled and wheezed.
Rosemary sat down in the other armchair. “I’m engaged, Jalil,” she said. She had always thought her announcement of this would be rather different—leaping in the air, loud song, Jalil discomfited. Then, of course, she remembered the Blackpool Tower. It was Jalil who had spoiled everything last time.
“He not send ring. I know he not send ring. I watch every day.”
“He’s sent the money for the ring.”
“How much he send?”
“Ooooh, two hundred pounds.”
“Not believe.”
“All right,” said Rosemary, “if you don’t believe me you can come with me when I go to buy it. You can take me to Penang. There.” She pouted at him, triumphant.
“We go Penang make jolly time.”
“I’m engaged, you see, Jalil, engaged. And you said he never would.”
“He never marry. He tell me he never marry.”
“Well, now I can prove you’re a liar. We’re engaged to be married, and that means we’re going to be married. So there.”
“He not marry.”
“Oh, what lovely orchids,” said Rosemary again. She frowned, hearing Lim Cheng Po’s voice, so English, so refined, so very English upper-class. And often she had had to tell Joe about his aitches. Well, perhaps not often, but on one or two occasions. What was the matter with her? Absently she stroked the cat with the Disraeli face. (It was on the table, sniffing the orchids.) “I wonder why,” said Rosemary. “I wonder why he sent them. He’s only seen me once,” she smirked.
“He want sleep. Cheaper than hotel when he come from Penang.”
“Jalil, what a filthy, filthy thing to say. I hate you. Get out, go on, get out.” But Jalil chuckled and pushed down a cat from his lap. He said:
“He not marry you. He got wife in Penang. Only me marry you.”
“I’d never marry you, never, never. I’d rather marry Vy than I’d marry you. You’re horrible.” Jalil rolled with pleasure at this tribute. He said:
“You want marry European. I European. I got three wives only. Is room for one more. If you not marry me I find other wife easy. Plenty Malay women want husband. I not care.”
“Oh, Jalil, you’ll never understand. Never. What would I do at Christmas? I don’t want Hari Raya. I don’t want Deepavali. I don’t want Muslim feasts or Indian feasts. I want Christmas. I want turkey and Christmas pudding and mince pies and mistletoe and snow and carol-singers. I want a Christmas tree. I want my presents!”
On the last word she broke down and her fac
e became inhuman. Crying, indeed, on what should be the second happiest day of her life. She wept, forgetting that it was lunch-time. Jalil chuckled gently. Vythilingam worked quietly and efficiently through the long hot afternoon. He inoculated six dogs against rabies, diagnosed feline enteritis in a cat, inspected the sheep in the experimental sheep farm, confirmed that a pet monkey was suffering from pneumonia, went out in the Veterinary Department van to a kampong to treat buffalo for a new strange skin cancer that was spreading ferociously, came back to the surgery and there wrote a letter to Rosemary Michael.
His speech impediment prevented him from making a dignified oral proposal. On paper he could be fluent, even eloquent, and the stilted phrases of his letter pleased him. “…If you consent to become my wife I promise to fulfil honourably all the duties of a husband. Though not wealthy I have an adequate income, and I pledge myself to endeavour to support you in the manner to which you have been accustomed.” The dead hand of eighteenth-century Indian administration, which in no wise could be tempered by the reading of translations of Marx and Chou En Lai, this lay on his prose style. “I remain, your sincere admirer, A. Vythilingam.” He sealed up the letter, would take it round to her house, would stand there blinking nervously while she read it.
It was necessary that he should marry soon. That morning a letter had come from his mother in Ceylon, enclosing yet another photograph of an eligible Jaffna Tamil girl. Vythilingam sneered in hatred. How well he understood the agony of that bourgeois creation of that bourgeois dramatist, pride of that detestable country. “Frailty, thy name is woman.” He had seen quite recently a Tamil film version of Hamlet, over-long by about two hours, but crisp enough in its way, despite Ophelia’s eight songs and the dance of the grave-diggers. That scene in the bedchamber with its rumble and gurgle of bitter Tamil vilification, the black Queen scared on the bed, that was art, that was words. But there was the question of conditioned response. If his mother should come to Malaya for a holiday, as she had once or twice threatened to, if she brought with her some girl such as this black pudding with teeth on the photograph, it would not be easy to sustain an attitude of intransigence. He knew all too well what would happen. Before he knew where he was he would be sitting for his wedding photograph in his best suit with a marriage garland round his neck, tied for life to his mother’s choice. His mother must not win; that was certain. Free will was, of course, an illusion, but one must at least seem to exercise it.
When it was time to go, Vythilingam packed his black bag with medicaments for Rosemary’s cats. He wondered whether the time had yet come to make her a present of another animal. A sheep? Too large. A monkey? Destructive. A parrot? Psittacosis. A cockatoo? He went out to his car and found two men already in it, Arumugam and Sundralingam. They greeted him jovially.
“Hallo there! You’ve been a long time!”
“Hail!” squeaked Arumugam, witch-like.
“We’re having a party,” said Sundralingam. “In my house. Maniam’s a great deal better.”
“I must go …” began Vythilingam. “I have to go to …”
“My car’s in the garage,” said Sundralingam, “being serviced. You can drive us home.”
“But first I must …” Vythilingam shrugged a nervous chin towards his black bag. “I have to …”
“No,” said Sundralingam firmly. “We know these little games, ha ha. You’re coming with us. We’ll look after you.”
“We’ll look after you,” said Arumugam, in canon at the double octave. And then, as if a Shakespearean mood were on him, as, indeed, it had been on Vythilingam, he began to sing:
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I …”
“But …” attempted Vythilingam.
“Get in,” said Sundralingam, firmly but not unkindly.
The music-god sang loudly to the shop and the street. Children stared with awe into its hypnotic eye, and many beer-drinkers, more than ever before, sat tranced and wrapped in a warm overcoat of tropical night and thumping great music. Old Loo, standing by the refrigerator, looked pleased.
“Look at him there,” said Idris, sweating gently into the suit, “cotton-wool in his ears.”
“Who?” asked Azman, to-night in tropical dress.
“Him. The wonder-boy.”
The four guffawed. Robert Loo indeed sat as though trying to weave silence round himself, two tufts of cotton-wool ineffectual valves, for the noise dwindled from a lion to ants as it met the soft obstacles, but, marching tinily rather than leaping with spread claws, still entered. The maddening image of the violinist, her dress changed, for some reason, from blue to green, was more maddening than before: she would stand there forever, her bow ready, her cheek caressing the polished wood of the fiddle, waiting, smiling, waiting. Robert Loo opened the woollen doors and the raging golden ocean entered. It was no good trying to fight.
“Here’s your dad,” said Azman to Hassan. Syed Omar had entered, gay in his newspaper shirt, black slacks, sandals. He greeted his son, saying: “So this is how you waste your time.”
Syed Hassan grinned, embarrassed by his father’s loudness of voice and dress, and mumbled: “Not doing any harm.” Syed Omar loudly ordered a brandy and ginger ale. Loo Kam Fatt said: “Cannot do. You Malay. Police say no.” Syed Omar said: “I am the police. You can serve me. You must serve me. I am the police.”
Syed Omar sat with the four boys and sipped his brandy and ginger ale. “And what kind of a get-up is that?” he said, sneering at Idris’s suit. “What are you supposed to be?”
“Nothing,” said Idris.
“That’s right, nothing. That’s all you do, nothing. Trying to look like gangsters. You too,” he said to his son. “I’ve seen you round the town wearing that same get-up. What’s happening to the Malay youth of to-day?” he said. “Where are the good old Muslim principles your elders tried to teach you?”
“We’re not drinking brandy, anyway,” said Azman boldly.
“Couldn’t if you tried,” said Syed Omar with contempt.
“You’d spew it up.” He made a vomiting face, showing the white blade of his tongue. “You’re not the men your fathers were, nor never will be. All this Coca-Cola and jazzing about. Where are the principles your fathers fought for?”
Nobody liked to ask where or against whom they fought. They remained silent. Syed Omar said: “What will happen to Islam when it’s left to milksops like you to defend it? Tell me that.” Nobody could tell him. Suddenly the music burst like a boil and Syed Omar jumped in his seat. “In the name of God,” he shouted, in English, “turn down that noise.” Nobody moved. Suddenly a quiet passage started. “That’s better,” he said, as though the god itself had hastened to obedience. “You’re soft,” he resumed to the boys. “It’s all these films from America. Soft living and soft thinking. Look at that muscle,” he said to his son. “Rolling up your sleeves as though you’ve got something to show.” He felt the hard roll on Hassan’s upper arm, saying: “Soft, boy, really soft.”
The boys looked at him in good-humoured contempt, at his round belly and his general flabbiness. “I could stand up to you in the ring,” said Hamzah. “Five rounds. I reckon I could knock you out.”
Syed Omar laughed. “That’s right,” he said. “Pick on me. The enemies of Islam and the enemies of the Malays are all around you, and you talk about knocking me out. Me, the same age as your father, me, a member of your own race. You sit there drinking horrible sweet drinks, and all around are enemies.” He took in, in a dramatic slant-eyed gaze, the harmless drinkers. “And all the four of you can think of is hitting a poor old man whose day is nearly over, who’s given the best years of his life to making the world safe for milksops like you.” He called for more brandy and said: “Put it on my account.”
The first show at the near-by cinema had just ended. Crabbe came in with Rosemary. Relenting of his boorishness of the other night, his crass rejection of those freely offered sensual treasures, he had taken her to see the town’s first English-speaking film
for months. A poor film, it had moved Rosemary deeply, its blonde heroine stirring new fantasies in her. As they sat at a table now, Rosemary said above the music: “Just like her, Victor, fair hair and blue eyes, both my father and my mother and my brother and sister too, all of them, and just because I happened to be born dark like this they didn’t want anything to do with me. They threw me out, Victor, out on to the streets, just because my skin was the wrong colour. They did, Victor. And that’s why I hate them, that’s why I hate my own race, that’s why I’d like to cut their throats and see them lying in pools of blood at my feet.” Crabbe gazed at her in admiration. At the moment she was being the blonde film-star. Factitious passion did not make her face crumble: it merely enlarged her black eyes, dilated the Mediterranean nostrils, suggested, with its false image of a temperament that could be controlled, that she was really desirable.
“And you’d like to do that to Joe?” asked Crabbe. “Joe lying in pools of blood at your feet?”
Rosemary looked at him as though he were mad. “But that’s the whole point, Victor,” she said. “Joe isn’t Scottish. Joe’s English. I thought you knew that.”
Crabbe gave it up. He greeted old Loo with a wave, called for gin, and gestured to Robert Loo that he come over to the table. Robert Loo hesitated, his father spoke swift urgent Chinese to him and pushed him towards Crabbe.
“What was that all about?” asked Crabbe, as the boy stood shyly by. “Come on, sit down. I want to talk to you.”
The Malayan Trilogy Page 45
