The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  Soon he took in either hand a godly figure—a body and head and extravagant head-dress, all carved in lacy complexity, mounted on a hand-stick. These he waved at the screen, as though delicately fanning it, and the raised voices from the audience beyond it told that the spell of the tale—so well known to all, so hard for Crabbe to interpret to Haynes—was already working. “The whole cycle,” said Crabbe, over the oboe’s sinuous cantilena, the gong and the drums, “takes a week. It’s Hindu epic, the age-long struggle between gods and demons, the …”

  “I don’t feel well,” said Haynes. He didn’t look well. He was ghost-white, and sweat oozed and shone on his face and bare arms. “It’s the heat.” Crabbe caught the eye of the oboist, an ancient man with dignified moustaches, and mimed that they were going round to the front, to watch the real thing, the shadows. The old man nodded that he understood and then puffed his cheeks to his instrument.

  “Better,” said Haynes on the steps. He breathed the dank night air deeply. “It was surely hot in there. I can’t take all that much heat.”

  Crabbe’s own shirt was soaked, his trousers stuck to his rump. He reached down for his shoes, saying: “Perhaps you ought to have a drink of something. Something cold. Let’s go back to the …” Then he yelled with pain. The drums and gongs were loud: only Haynes heard him. “In my shoe,” said Crabbe, his face screwed up. “Something stung me. What …” He tipped the shoe, and from it fell the squashed body of something.

  “A scorpion,” said Haynes. “A black one, very young. You’d better get that seen to.”

  “Christ,” said Crabbe. “My foot’s on fire.” He hobbled towards the van, Haynes helping him.

  “Well,” said Haynes, “we are a couple of fools. This is what happens when we come out for a pleasant instructive evening.” He held his shoes in his hand still. They both padded in their socks over the short trampled grass, reaching at last the friendly civilised van. They drove towards the town. “Somewhere here,” said Haynes, “there’s a doctor. An Indian. I met him a couple of nights ago. He’ll give you a shot of something.”

  The doctor was in—a lonely, talkative Tamil who gave Crabbe penicillin and told him not to worry. “Just rest it up for a couple of days,” he said. “And I’ll give you a sedative. Do you see anything of my friends?” he asked. “My friends of the Jaffna confratemity? Vythilingam should be coming up any day now, to examine the cattle. And how is Arumugam? That voice is a terrible handicap, terrible. A pity he can’t get in touch with a speech therapist. But I don’t think there are any in Malaya.”

  “There will be,” said Haynes. “You can be quite sure of that.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor, “poor Arumugam.” Meanwhile Crabbe groaned.

  “But I thought I was doing the right thing,” squealed Arumugam.

  “The whole thing is most unfortunate,” said Sundralingam. “He will be quite right to be angry.” They were sitting round the bed of Maniam in Sundralingam’s house. Maniam’s nose was a strange colour and painful: for the second time he had had to delay his return to Kuala Beruang. So now he fretted in his tartan sarong, clutching his Dutch wife, adding little to the worried talk of his two friends.

  “But it was partly, no, mainly, your idea,” shrilled Arumugam sofly but urgently. “You said that he must not be lured away from the circle by this Rosemary woman.”

  “Yes, I know, but to steal his letters was surely going too far.”

  “I didn’t steal them. I merely collected them from the Post Office. My idea was merely to see who they were from, and if one was from this Rosemary woman to steam that open and find out what was going on.” Arumugam’s voice rose yet higher with self-righteousness. “And then I was going to give him his letters, saying that I had collected them for him as a friendly gesture.”

  “And then you put the letters in your back trousers pocket and forgot all about them.”

  It was too true. Arumugan, the efficient, who whipped in with ringmaster’s coolness the roaring delicate aircraft, the inheritor of Jaffna’s immemorial tradition of reliability, Arumugam had slipped up badly. Then he said: “But it was an easy mistake to make. We had so much trouble with Maniam.”

  “That’s right,” said Maniam, through his clogged nose, “blabe be.”

  “And there was the question of my trousers,” continued Arumugam. “They got torn slightly when we were fighting that day with Syed Omar. And then when his son came to beat up Maniam they got stained with blood. Your blood,” he said to Sundralingam.

  “It wasn’t very much blood,” said Sundralingam.

  “And after that I spilled coffee on them,” said Arumugam. “So I put them away in a cupboard. And I forgot all about them. And then Vythilingam said that this Rosemary woman had sworn at him when he saw this Penang Chinese making love to her in Crabbe’s house, and then he said that he hated her and he never wanted to see her again. So after that I never thought about getting his letters and I forgot about the letters I’d put in my trousers pocket. So you see,” he ended, “it is all easily understandable.”

  He crumpled the letters absently with twitching hands as he talked. Sundralingam took them from him. “There is nothing very vital,” he said. “A circular from Calcutta, two local bills. But this,” he said, “is an air mail from Ceylon.”

  “I suppose,” said Maniam from the bed, “I’b to blabe for everythig.”

  “No, no, not that,” protested Arumugam. “It was just unfortunate, that’s all.”

  “No great harm done,” said Sundralingam. “The letters are a fortnight late. But the postmark on this letter from Kandy is not very clear. We can make it less clear by rubbing some dirt on it and then blaming its condition on the Post Office.”

  “Or the peon in the Veterinary Department,” suggested Arumugam.

  “Yes. There’s no great harm done. But never, never, never try anything like that again.”

  “No,” piped Arumugam meekly. “And who is this Mrs. Smith?”

  Sundralingam looked closely at the name and address on the back of the air mail letter. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never knew he had any English friends in Kandy.”

  “His bother,” said Maniam. “His bother barried ad Eglishbad.”

  “His mother, of course,” cried Arumugam. “How strange to think that Vythilingam’s mother is called Smith.” And then, with a naughty girl’s giggle, he said: “Let us open it up and see what she has to say.”

  “Now really,” reproved Sundralingam. “That, as you know, is not right at all.”

  “The letter is not stuck down. Tropical air mail letter forms don’t have any glue on them. It’s just got a couple of staples from a stapling machine.”

  “Mr. Smith’s office stapling machine,” said Sundralingam, turning the letter over and over. “Why ever did she marry an Englishman?”

  “Bodey,” said Maniam cynically. “She re-barried for bodey.”

  “Imagine,” said Sundralingam, fascinated, “imagine those two bodies in bed together, the white and the black. Horrible.”

  “Horrible,” squealed Arumugam. “Let us open the letter.”

  Sundralingam, with deft doctor’s hands, eased out the staples. He smoothed the letter open and began to read. It was quite a short letter, written in convent-school English. Arumugam tried to read it over his shoulder, but Sundralingam said: “Do have some manners. I will read it first and then you can read it.” Arumugam meekly sat down on the bed again.

  “No,” said Sundralingam in shock. “No, no.”

  “Whatever is the matter?”

  “The date?” asked Sundralingam urgently. “What is today’s date?”

  “The twenty-third,” said Arumugam. “But why?” His voice reached C in alt. “Why? What’s it all about?”

  “When does the next plane come from Singapore?”

  “Tomorrow. Why? What is all this mystery?”

  Sundralingam looked up at him in deepest reproach. “Now you’ll see what you’ve done with your stupid
ity. Tomorrow she will be here.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, yes. It says here that she intends to fly to Singapore on the twenty-first. It’s a one-day flight from Colombo, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for Arumugam’s professional confirmation. “And she’s spending two days in Singapore while this girl buys new clothes. And then coming here on the next available plane.”

  “What girl? Who is this girl?”

  “A girl for Vythilingam. An orphan. Both her parents were killed in a car smash.”

  “How much?” asked Arumugam automatically.

  “Eighty thousand,” said Sundralingam automatically. “And Vythilingam’s stepfather is going to Penang on business. And she wants Vythilingam to call him ‘father’.”

  “No!”

  “And she wants to be met at the airport. A fine mess you’ve made of things,” said Sundralingam. “You and your great inquisitive nose.”

  There was shocked silence from invalid and delinquent. At last Arumugam said: “What shall we do?” The intonation-pattern finished almost at the upper auditory limit. “We daren’t give him the letter now. He’ll kill me.”

  “The letter was lost in the post,” decided Sundralingam. “Perhaps she sent another letter after. Or a cable confirming everything. Or perhaps she has rung him up from Singapore already.”

  “Do.” Maniam shook his head. “He dever bedtioded adythig about that. He cabe id to see be this bordig.”

  “The letter got lost,” repeated Sundralingam. “Letters sometimes do. It will be a nice surprise for Vythilingam. His mother will walk into the Veterinary Department while he is giving medicine to some small animal. With this girl. It will be such a surprise. There is no great harm done.”

  “But perhaps he doesn’t want to see his mother,” said Arumugam.

  “Nonsense! What man does not want to see his mother? And this girl. Eighty thousand dollars,” said Sundralingam. “Perhaps, after all, it is time we all married,” he sighed.

  “Never!” cried Arumugam jealously.

  “Anyway, it will be your duty to meet her at the airport. You will see the plane come in. You will be able to send a loudspeaker message to her asking her to meet you in the waiting-room. Then you can take her to her son.” There were tears in Sundralingam’s eyes. “Mother and son meet after long years. With future wife.”

  “It will be a surprise.”

  “Oh yes, it will be a lovely surprise.”

  8

  ROSEMARY SAT AT her Public Works Department escritoire, in a sea of fed cats, and tried to write a letter to Vythilingam. She had, as she had promised herself, taken a day off from school, having told Crabbe’s boy to take a message to her amah to take a message to the school to say that she was ill. But never had she looked better. A large evening meal, deep sleep in a better bed than hers, a full evacuation, a hot bath (her own house had only a cold shower), a breakfast of bacon and eggs and sausages from Crabbe’s boy—these had smoothed and restored her. She had come home, changed into a sunny model dress from Penang, tied her hair in a ribbon, fed her cats on corned beef and undiluted condensed milk, and now sat ready for a new life.

  She sat wriggling on the standard-pattern Windsor chair, her pink tongue-point dancing about her lips, trying to write, wrestling with a profound stylistic problem. By her pad she had Vythilingam’s stiff proposal, whose Augustan periods were intimidating and inhibited her normal chatty flow. The cats, digesting in broody attitudes, looked at her sleepily, taking in nothing of her delicious beauty.

  As she shifted from ham to delectable ham, biting her tongue in concentration, the sun warmed her gently, muffled by the lettuce-green curtains but making brighter the mustard-coloured carpet, the pepper-and-salt cushions. She tried to continue her letter, but was half pleased to be interrupted by the opening of the door behind her. She said automatically:

  “Oooooh, go away, Jalil, you’re not supposed to come here. I told the amah not to let you in.” Then she remembered Jalil’s disgusting behaviour of the previous evening and turned to give him vinegary words. But it was not Jalil: it was a Chinese boy. Loo his name was. He stood there smiling very shyly, a clean shirt with a tie to show he was in love, pressed trousers. Rosemary could not remember his first name. “Hello,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Rosemary, “it’s you.” Then she said guiltily: “Why aren’t you at school?” His smile began to go slowly, and she remembered that he was no longer at school, but worked in a shop. So she said: “I was only joking. It’s me who should be at school.”

  “I know. I’ve just been there and they said you were ill.”

  “Oh,” said Rosemary. “Oh, yes, I am. I’ve such a terrible headache.” She suddenly clapped her hand to her brow, screwing up her clear healthy eyes, whose whites were as white as peeled picnic eggs. The cats were aware of her feigning and did not look up at the sound of distress. But then some of them scattered like birds, for Robert Loo was awkwardly down on his knees, saying: “Poor dear. Poor darling.” He blushed to say the words, as though he had stolen a theme from some other, inferior, composer.

  “Oh, I’m all right, really,” she said. “It comes and it goes.” Robert Loo remained on his knees, wondering what he should do now. Some cats sat on window-ledges, one on the table, looking at him. This was the first amateur performance they had ever seen. Robert Loo turned his embarrassed eyes away from them and noticed the writing-pad and pen, the opening words: ‘My dear.’ “You’re writing a letter,” he said, some new equivocal feeling rising in him.

  “Yes, I’ve been trying to. Do get off your knees, you’ll make your trousers all dusty.”

  Robert Loo got up, as awkwardly as he’d got down. “Are you writing to him?” he asked; “to that man Joe?”

  “Joe?” Rosemary smiled disdainfully. “Oh, not to him. I’ve finished with him. He begged me to marry him, but I won’t. I was writing to somebody else.”

  Hope and despair and anxiety rose in Robert Loo. “Is it me that you’re writing to?” He was already reading in his mind two letters, like two simultaneous staves of a score: ‘After last night I realise that, young as you are, you are the only one who could make me happy …’ ‘After last night I want us never to meet again. It was beautiful, but it was all a mistake, let’s forget it ever happened …’

  Rosemary smiled again, almost with the calm, wise indulgence of a mother, and stroked the nearest cat. “Oh, no, George, not to you.” (She had remembered his name at last.)

  “Why do you smile like that?” said Robert Loo, almost with agitation. “What do you mean?”

  “What could I write to you about, George?” Pleased at having remembered his name, she determined to insert it into every utterance now. But soon he must go: poor boy, he was a nice boy, but only a boy. She did not feel she was yet old enough to be worshipped by boys.

  Robert Loo blushed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought …”

  “You shouldn’t follow me to school,” she said. “And you shouldn’t really come here. What are people going to think?” Then she added: “George.”

  “They’ll think that I love you,” he mumbled. Then, louder, he said: “I love you.”

  “Oh, George,” she smiled, not above simpering.

  “My name isn’t George,” he said, mumbling again. “It’s Robert.”

  “You’re only a boy,” she said. “I’m older than you. Some day soon you’ll find some nice Chinese girl. Robert,” she added, “I thought your name was George. It must have been somebody else I was thinking about.”

  “There’ve been others,” he said jealously. “I know. Lots of others.”

  “Oh, yes. Lots of men have said they loved me. But all the time I was waiting for Mr. Right.” She looked dreamily into air, still stroking the cat.

  “Mr. Wright? Who’s Mr. Wright?” Then he remembered a ginger tubby man in shorts, a P.W.D. official who had run up a large account in their shop. “I know the man,” he said with bitterness. “He’s old and fat. A Euro
pean.” He had the faint beginnings of an understanding of why people disliked Europeans: they took things away from the Asians.

  “Oh, no,” said Rosemary, her eyes still smiling absently. “You don’t know who it is. But perhaps you soon will know.” It would, of course, be a Christian ceremony, perhaps in Penang. “You could play the organ,” she said. “I remember now. You’re fond of music. Victor Crabbe told me.”

  “I love you,” he said. “Marry me.” Saying the words, he felt horror and excitement equally. Marriage meant becoming, almost overnight, like his father, an old man with responsibilities. But it also meant that delicious, that unspeakable, that dizzying crowd of sensations over and over again. His flesh responded to the image. He clumsily sought Rosemary’s right hand, the one that was not absently stroking, and tried to kiss it. His lips smacked against it inexpertly: it was neither passion nor old-world courtesy that the cats saw.

  “Oh, George,” she said, “I mean, Robert. Don’t be a silly boy.”

  “I’m not a boy,” he said loudly. “I’m a man. I’m a composer. Could your Joe do what I’ve done? Could he write a string quartet and a symphony and a violin concerto? I’m a man, 1 tell you. I’ll be a great man. Not just somebody like this Mr. Wright of yours in P.W.D. I’ll be famous. You’ll be proud …”

  “Yes, yes,” she soothed. “I know you’re very clever. Victor Crabbe’s always telling me that. But you’re being silly, just the same. And if you stay here any longer your father will be angry. You shouldn’t leave your work like that, just to come and see me.”

  “I’ll do what I like,” he said. “I’m a man.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I must write this letter. Please go now.”

  “I won’t go! I’m going to kiss you, I’m going …”

  At the door appeared masses of flowers and, behind them, the wheezing Jalil.

  “Oh, Jalil,” she shouted. “You shouldn’t have come, you know you shouldn’t.” And then, with relief: “Oh, come in, Jalil, do come in. Oooooh, what lovely flowers.” In relief she got up from the chair, taking the bright and scentless bunches from Jalil’s arms. Jalil was now fully disclosed, wheezing hard, noticing Robert Loo, nodding pleasantly, humming gently down a chromatic scale, then, as he lowered himself into an arm-chair, saying: “Chinese boy. Crabbe’s Chinese boy. Boys I not like.” He was unabashed, relaxed, only his chest working.