“A woman at the end of the line. Always a woman. Have another drink.”
The train stopped at a village called Berang-berang. A Sikh went by swinging a lantern, rare lamps lit up the inevitable back-cloth of palms, bare feet padded along the platform. A Malayan family, laden with food in cardboard boxes, a callow English private in jungle green, a cheerful young Chinese in a soiled white Christian priest’s habit—these got on.
“Next stop for me,” said the beer salesman. “They’ll be waiting at the station with the brass bands. It’s a long time since they seen old Tommy. They won’t half lay on a spread. Eh,” he said suddenly, a poking finger making for Crabbe. “Eh, you. Don’t know your name.”
“Yes?” said Crabbe.
“You come too. Not in no hurry, are you?”
“I’ve got to get to Mawas.”
“You can get to Mawas by road in the morning. I know. Trust old Tommy. Know this part like the back of my hand. What you got to do in Mawas?”
“A man’s been killed. By the terrorists, I should imagine.”
“Oh, well, that’s nothing. Nothing you can do. Plenty of that goes on these days. You come and meet some of old Tommy’s pals.”
A sudden relief washed over Crabbe like shower-water. He realised that, for some reason, he wanted to put off going to Durian Estate. Why, he wondered. It wasn’t the corpse, which would now be buried. It wasn’t the need to dispense official comfort to the bereaved, to promise official financial help. It wasn’t the prospect of meeting the manager and pretending not to be embarrassed by his whisky tremor. It wasn’t the thought that he himself, crossing to the tappers’ lines and the schoolhouse, might well be sniped at. It was something unseen, unknown, and far more solid. And the feeling of apprehension had, for some reason, come over him on reading Fenella’s poem in The New Presbyter.
“Yes,” he said. “Thanks very much. I’d like to come.”
“No trouble about getting somewhere to sleep,” said the man. “If we do sleep, that is.” He winked. “They’ll fix you up all right. Do anything for a pal of Tommy’s.”
Tikus was a small town with an attap hut for a station. But that it would not be a small town for long (money in tin?) was evident from the girth and fleshy chuckles and clean white trousers of the two Chinese shopkeepers who had come to meet good old Tommy. “Told you,” he said triumphantly to Crabbe, “didn’t I? Brass bands and all, eh?” Indeed, a small Sikh boy with a topknot, detailed by his station-master father to collect the tickets, sat on the platform blowing a mouth-organ. “This,” said Tommy to the towkays, “is Mr. er—Don’t know your name,” he said to Crabbe. The two Chinese slapped Crabbe on the back in welcome. Any friend of old Tommy’s friend of theirs. They spoke no English. The ghastly debased Malay of the bazaars chirped out of prosperous bellies as the four got into a waiting Hillman, Tommy asking about old so-and-so and old so-and-so, not seen the bastards for years.
“Old bastard!” roared one of the towkays.
“Old bastard yourself What you laid on for us, eh? Bring on the dancing girls!”
They drove down the main street, under sodium lighting, to a filthy shop-house crammed with shining refrigerators, tape-recorders, outboard motors (‘Why?’ wondered Crabbe; ‘we’re nowhere near the river’) and brandy. A Chinese girl in pyjamas, bearing a soup-bowl, preceded them up the stairs. Good old Tommy, mounting straight after as honoured guest, whistled one sharp blast through his teeth, making the old Roman sign with snail’s horn fingers that jabbed jocularly at her right buttock. The towkays roared, the girl turned at the stair-head, yapped a protest, and baptized Tommy briefly with a hot drop from the bowl. A few strips of shark’s fin thatched his bald dome. “Thinks the world of old Tommy,” he cried. “Ha ha. That’s my girl.”
Two old men, shrunken relics of old China, greeted Tommy with shy laughter, and shook hands seriously with Crabbe. The six of them sat round a table, Crabbe’s foot, as he took his chair, clanking loudly against a concealed spittoon. “Ha ha,” cried Tommy. “Don’t kick the pee-pot over.” He took charge of everything, the life and soul, smacking his lips over the soup and calling for more chilli sauce, urging his hosts to down their own brandy with the fearsome Chinese salute: “Yam seng!”
“Yam seng!”
“Yam seng!”
Down went the brandy, neat half-tumblers of it, and more bottles were opened.
“You,” said Tommy to Crabbe. “Don’t know your name. Shouldn’t be drinking this really, you know. All right for you, you’ve got no responsibility to the firm, but I’m never off duty, never off duty. Should be on beer. Still,” he said, “there always tomorrow. Yam seng!”
“Yam seng!”
Over the fish-dish—something sole-like, exquisitely seethed in a strange sauce, garnished with roots and fruits of the country—Tommy became sentimental. “Bloody good firm,” he said. “Always looked after old Tommy, know a good man when they see one. Given my life to that firm. And they know it. Never let them down. Never let me down. Here, gorgeous,” he said to the pert painted serving wench, “come and sit on old Tommy’s knee.” But the time for dalliance was not yet. They had to eat their way through sweet-and-sour pork, a duck of miraculous tenderness, prawns and stuffed pumpkin, lychees in ice-water.
“Yam seng!”
“Yam seng!”
One of the two serving-girls, taking up chopsticks and used dishes from the table, sang to Crabbe. The towkays smiled, listening. Old Tommy tried to join in, but was shushed. “Wanted to make a jewess of it,” he said. “Never mind.” It was a pentatonic tune, austere and thin as the girl’s body, evidently erotic, but its eroticism checked and chilled by the pure simple melodic line. ‘They’re civilised,’ thought Crabbe. ‘Despite the dirty ceiling and the cigarette butts swelling in the cuspidor, they’re civilised.’ And he felt, through the brandy, that this was perhaps the only country in the world for any man who cared about history. What an incredible, head-reeling collocation of cultures: Islamic texts sprawling on the Great Wall, a twelve-legged god looking down in exophthalmic frowning benevolence.
“Extraordinary collocation of cultures,” he said to old Tommy.
“That’s what I always say myself, old man.” Tommy belched loudly. “And the very best of luck.” The girl who had baptized him on the stairs now sat on his knee, chewing gum steadily. “That’s right,” he said. “You come to daddy.” He stroked her thin leg. “Like going to bed with a bicycle.”
And now Crabbe had his own feather-light chattering burden. Desire for a Chinese woman did not come easily: even at their lowest social level they were works of art, engendering a hardly kinetic emotion.
“Works of art,” he said. “This lad’s a fine musician. Marvellous, marvellous. And who’ll do anything for him? You won’t, will you, for all your big talk?”
“Beer, beer, glorious beer,” sang Tommy. “Fill yourself right up to here.” He was doing his duty now, doing his job. Six great bottles of one of the Hong Kong brews had been brought to wash down the brandy and the fragments of rice and mee and meat-fibres that clung to the back teeth. “Beer,” cried Tommy. “What did you call it? International something-or-other you called it. Should have written it down.” His girl, doing her job too, wiped his frothy mouth with a paper napkin.
“Binds the nations together,” said Crabbe. “Like music. And you won’t do a damn thing about it. Or about Rosemary. Or Vythilingam. Or old Syed Omar. Who’ll do anything for them when I’m gone?” His girl hugged him, smoothing his back hair with a cool hand. The towkays were out of it. They sat there quietly, bemused, smiling faintly, glad that their guests were having a good time. They, too, were doing their duty, were now gently handing it over to their delegates of the long night.
“Beer’s a bit warm,” said Tommy. “Must have it cold. Remember.” He beat time with a stained forefinger, reciting a slogan in a refined accent: “The Climate Is Torrid. Warm Beer Is Horrid.” He drank down a full six inches and again had his mouth wiped. �
��But lovely stuff just the same. Knew a chap,” he said, “big fellow, nearly seven feet tall, couldn’t abide it cold. Held it in his big ’ot ’and. Made it ’ot as ’ell. He liked it that way. Nabby Adams, his name was. Police. You wouldn’t know him.”
All the towkays rose as one man, ready to go, knowing that their guests were in good hands.
“In the morning,” said Tommy. “Talk business in the morning.”
“Terima kaseh,” said Crabbe putting out disengaged fingers. “Hsieh hsieh, towkay. Wan an.”
“Knows a bit of the lingo, eh?” said Tommy. “Me, I’m not clever that way.”
“Beer,” said Crabbe, with finicking articulation, “is itself a language.”
“By God, that’s a good one. Must write that down.” But his head drooped on to the thin shoulder of the patient girl on his lap. “Ready for bed. Take me home, love.” The towkays waved benignly from the door.
Crabbe’s girl’s name was Chin Chin, a name frivolous in sound but meaning ‘Truth.’ Led by the hand of Truth, he followed Tommy—in full song under the moon—down the empty street. Tommy’s girl giggled, her arm in his, looking back to chirp Chinese words to her friend and colleague.
“Where?” asked Crabbe. “Where we go?”
“Sini, sini.” It was a squalid-looking lodging-house, a vista of many stairs, a smell of turmeric and aniseed. In the distance, farther along the line, Tommy was singing, still doing his duty, advertising bottled euphoria to the sleeping town.
Chin Chin’s room was small, fanless, with a bed, a cupboard, photographs of Chinese film stars with Caucasian features, the odour of hidden hung dresses. She had no underwear and was naked before Crabbe had taken off his tie. Crabbe stood, looked, wondered, tossed a coin in his head. It came down ‘No.’
“No,” said Crabbe. “Thank you, but no.”
“Not like?”
“Oh yes, like. But not now. Other time. Sleep now.”
She grimaced, wrapped a sheet round her body, lay face downward on the bed with her limbs spread, starfish-like. In two minutes she was asleep. Crabbe found a cushion and settled with the dust on the wooden floor. Before he fell asleep he had a dim notion that he ought to be keeping his body pure for this event hidden in the near future, and he felt a tired satisfaction that he had succeeded in postponing it, even if only for a few hours.
When Robert Loo left, Rosemary lay still for a time in the dark, no particular thought in her head, feeling no particular emotion, her body quite numb. The headlights of cars occasionally shot the room with moving brief silver, and then for an instant she was in a tower, high up, above everything, with searchlights playing upon her. The cars were going to Mr. Godsave’s house, where there seemed to be a party, perhaps a farewell party for Mr. Godsave, the last white man in the Police Department. She heard distant drinking voices, and sometimes they seemed to be talking about her.
“Where’s old Rosemary, eh?”
“Yahoooooo! Give her some stick!”
“The Trojan horse where fifty heroes slept.”
“Rosemary, my darling,” sang somebody, “Rosemary, my dear. Rosemary, da da-da-da da …”
One of the voices was the voice of Joe. “Then I put my hand there, and I did this, and I did that, and then I …” And then a great shout of drinkers’ laughter. And then the grind-out of brakes and revving-up as more cars arrived.
“She was a grand girl in her way, you know.”
“Always ready, I will say that.”
“I mean, we were lucky to find her here, really.”
“Oh, God, yes, when you think of the five-dollar doses in the Park, and those bloody Chinese keeps: gimme, gimme, gimme.”
“But a bit too much for a whole tour. I mean, all right for a year or so. But not three, no, no, no.”
“Say six months.”
“Oh yes, six months would do nicely. And then, after a bit, come back for more.”
“But as a permanency …”
“Oh, my God, a permanency …”
She got out of bed, and the voices merged into the wordless noise of happy drinking. She padded to Crabbe’s bathroom, switched on the light, and saw herself in the wide mirror: Medusa hair, eyes puffed with crying, lipstick smeared where she had been inexpertly kissed by a Chinese boy, the polished brown glory of her upper body. She gasped under the cold spray of the shower, washing off and out with soap so much and so much. She scoured her teeth with Crabbe’s tooth-brush, brushed her hair with Crabbe’s brushes, and then put on a pair of Crabbe’s silk pyjamas. And still no thought passed through her head. She sniffed and sniffed as though she had a cold, and, looking in the handkerchief drawer of Crabbe’s dressing-table, found not only clean handkerchiefs but a bundle of letters. Most of them smelt old, musty, like half-eaten apples, and the dates, she noticed, belonged to another age. “Dearest Vic.” “My own dear Victor.” “Darling.” Love, love, love. She read through six or seven, still sniffing. The story was that Crabbe was away, working in some college away from this woman, a place where there was no accommodation for married couples, and that, even though he was away, she thought of him all the time and missed him so much at night. Rosemary saw her mouth begin to twist in the mirror, and got a swift image of stone masks she had seen above the proscenium of a Liverpool theatre. A howl came from somewhere outside, a pye-dog. She refused to cry, she had done crying. The drinking voices waxed very loud. Rosemary could not decipher the signature of the letters: Mal, May, Maya, something like that. She, too, had sent such loving letters, but Joe would not keep those in his handkerchief drawer, if he had a handkerchief drawer. He would show them to his English friends, and they would laugh at them, or they would make Zulu clicks of envious concupiscence.
“Smashing bit of stuff.”
“Get up them stairs, eh?”
“Howwwwwwww!”
But that was the dog outside. Rosemary thought of her cats, how she had left them without food, how they relied on her, but tonight she was too weary for responsibility. Tomorrow she would not go to school, she would be ill. Tonight she would stay in Crabbe’s house; her cats would not starve: they had shared three tins of pilchards at lunchtime. And the amah would be back to give them milk. For a moment she hungered sentimentally for her cats: they had promised nothing, given nothing, taken all, did not pretend affection. They were a symbol of home: the cat by the fire, the fog swirling outside, the television programme just starting.
“Oh, Joe, Joe, Joe,” howled the pye-dog.
Rosemary swished silkenly down the corridor in bare feet. The sitting-room was but dimly illumined with a solitary wall-light. She switched everything on, including the dining-recess lamps, and then stood by the kitchen entrance and called: “Boy!” There was no reply: only a heave and rustle as of somebody turning on a bed. “Boy! Boy! Boy!” Nobody answered, nobody came. Rosemary turned back to the big bright room and poured herself brandy. She went to the refrigerator for water, and the click and swing of the heavy white door did what her call could not do. The cook-boy appeared in vest and underpants, anxious for the safety of the pre-cooked meal he had placed in the humming cold: Crabbe’s dinner or lunch, tomorrow or whenever he should return. “There you are,” said Rosemary. “I want food.”
“A?” A noise which God gave only to the Chinese lower classes—throaty, short, loud, interrogative, disapproving, incredulous, insolent.
“Makan, makan. Saya mahu makan,” shouted Rosemary. “What’s this?” She pulled from the refrigerator a dish containing a chill curry. The cook-boy tried to grab it too. They tussled for an instant, and, for some reason, Rosemary did not feel that this was undignified. “Heat that up,” she said, letting it go, “and make some chapattis.”
“A?”
“Chapattis, chapattis. Don’t you know what chapattis are? You-all Chinese cooks call yourselves cooks. … Here, where’s the flour?”
But the cook-boy had seen on the table by the refrigerator a glass of brandy waiting for water. He became loud and agitate
d. He slip-slopped off to the sitting-room and came back with a near-empty bottle. He wailed, he beseeched, he was near tears.
“All right,” said Rosemary. “I’ll tell tuan that I drank it. But you’d better start making those chapattis.”
“A?”
“If you don’t start heating up that curry,” said Rosemary loudly, “I’ll say that you drank that brandy. I’ll finish off the bottle and say that you drank it all.”
The cook-boy got busy. Rosemary sat in an arm-chair and switched on the radio. A play was on, some silly London play on the B.B.C. Overseas Service:
“…Listen to that nightingale, like some very competent imitation of a nightingale.”
“Like a gramophone record of a nightingale.”
“It’s all been used before, there’s nothing new. That moon over there, ridiculously bright …”
“Vulgarly full.”
“The night-scented stocks, proud of a perfume that any piccadilly tart could buy.” (At the mention of Piccadilly, Rosemary’s mouth began to square for tears.) “But you know …”
“Yes? What do I know?”
“There are no new words either. Oh, God, I’m not afraid of being vulgar. I’m not ashamed of using the old, old clichés. You know, don’t you, don’t you, Rosemary? You know that I …”
“I think I know, Arnold, I think I’ve always known …”
“Darling …” At the mention of her own name, Rosemary rose in shock and anger, ready to do injury to the mocking instrument. She blubbered instead, switching it off, hearing in the fading voice of ‘Arnold’ the refined stage-voice of Lim Cheng Po of Penang. “Oh, Victor, Victor,” she sobbed. “Where are you? I could be a good wife to you, Victor.” The loud sound of frying came from the kitchen: her tears dripped like hot fat. She sat down, sobbing—somewhat stagily now—through a litany of names of those who might comfort her, take her in their arms to say: “Don’t cry any more, darling. The bad, bad days are over now.” From the list certain names were absent: Joe, Robert Loo, Jalil. One name, surprisingly, was present:
“Vy, Vy, oh, Vy. Oh, why did I hurt you like that?”
The Malayan Trilogy Page 51
