The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  At the blinding moment of climax Robert Loo saw quite clearly the kind of music he wanted to write: his vision confirmed those shafts, those bursting fragments, of last night. The claims of the body, the claims of the emotions—some fine soaring melody above the lush piano chords of the soloist. The violinist had disappeared. When his body had quietened, Robert Loo saw an unbidden picture of rows of tins on his father’s shelves. He frowned at first, wondering what this could mean, and then smiled faintly. He had conquered those giants—harmony, counterpoint, orchestration—long ago. And now he had conquered love.

  She asked for five dollars and he gave her six.

  9

  “ARE YOU SURE you can make it?” asked Temple Haynes, not without anxiety. He helped Crabbe along to the rough landing-stage, a groaning Crabbe sorry for himself, a Crabbe with a bandaged foot, looking like a gouty uncle, a Crabbe whose luggage was heavier by a single shoe, who carried a walking-stick donated by a well-equipped and resourceful American.

  “Got to,” clenched Crabbe. “Won’t stay there any longer with that insulting bastard.”

  Haynes tut-tutted at the strong language but said: “He did pile it on. I failed to see any connection between your laughing at butterflies and being stung by a scorpion, but then perhaps my particular line of study has made me too rational-minded.”

  It was a mid-morning of huge heat, a vast river sky above, the reek and shimmer of the river below, the green jaws of the jungle opening on either hand, the launch waiting. Crabbe, through his pain, noticed a man he knew sitting alone and silent in the bows: Vythilingam of the State Veterinary Department. Boatmen and passengers—a Chinese assistant manager and a Tamil hospital dresser whom Crabbe had met before, two Malays of occupation undefined—helped Crabbe into the launch, but Vythilingam did not move, did not even seem to see.

  Temple Haynes looked down into the hot, rocking, oil-smelling boat, the river dancing on his spotless shirt. “Take it easy,” he warned. “Don’t try and do too much. And I hope to be seeing you in a week or so.”

  “When you move to the capital.”

  “That’s right. There’s so much to be done.”

  “Yes.” Crabbe winced, closing his eyes in the full sunlight that made them water, and opening them again to the shining river, to the waving Haynes as the launch throbbed and bounced and made ready to move off.

  Nobody spoke to anybody. Crabbe’s greeting to Vythilingam met a stare of more than recognition, not friendly, not hostile, rather a stare of distracted interest as though seeing in Crabbe more than the man who had given the party a few days ago, more than the Education Officer who was slowly handing over his burden to one of the new masters. Meanwhile foot and engine and sky and river throbbed, and they moved towards the hulu. ‘Hulu,’ thought Crabbe, trying to grasp at anything to take his mind off his foot. ‘Hulu, the head. Head of my stick. Head of the river. Penghulu, head of the village, head of a religion. Hulu, really the desolate cry of some bird upriver, an ululation of a mouth finally going under. Hulu.’

  The river was broad and silver, and the sunlight was merry on it. But to port and starboard jungle exerted an influence more powerful than the sun, its smell as strong as the smell of warmed wood in the boat or of the sun-warmed river. And it was finally to the jungle-gods that the Malays would be most faithful. The sun of Islam, disguising itself cunningly as a sickle moon, was appropriate only to the clearings, which meant the towns with their refrigerators and mosques, where the muezzin’s call mingled well with the music of the bars. Now the towns were beginning to entertain their vain dream of realised independence—the bright fresh paint for the visitors, the new stadium and the luxury hotel. Some Arab theologian-philosopher had said that Islam decayed in the towns. Only when the decay of Islam brought the decay of the cities, when the desert, with its frail tented communities, reasserted itself, only then could the faith be renewed. But there was no desert here, no dominion of sun and oasis. There was nothing to believe in except the jungle. That was home, that was reality. Crabbe gazed in a kind of horror mixed with peace at the endless vista of soaring trunks, lianas, garish flowers. They were chugging towards the hulu, the head or fount of everything, where there was no pretence or deception.

  Settled to the river life, the transiently permanent, a fragile community was possible. The Chinese assistant manager spoke, with a wide smile of insincere teeth, to Crabbe, asking: “Did you have the bad luck to fall down when you were drunk, Mr. Crabbe?” It was not an insolent question, it was Chinese and clinical. The Tamil hospital dresser bubbled away, showing teeth as good: “The monsoon drains are very treacherous. It is possible to break a leg when one is not walking straight.” They smiled and smiled, waiting for confirmation.

  “I was struck by a scorpion,” said Crabbe, “when I was perfectly sober.” There was polite laughter of sixty-four teeth. “I am now Club-foot the Tyrant.” The teeth disappeared in sympathy. “But I didn’t kill my father and I didn’t marry my mother.”

  “Marry your mother,” laughed the Chinese. “That is very good.”

  “Marry my mother,” suddenly said Vythilingam. Those were his first words of the voyage, and they were spoken with unstuttered labials. He provoked a fresh silence. “Kill my father,” he added, for good measure.

  “The Japanese killed my father,” smiled the Chinese. “They poured petrol on him and then threw a lighted match.” He laughed modestly. “They made me watch. They were not very good people.”

  “History,” said Crabbe, battering his pain with words at random. “The best thing to do is to put all that in books and forget about it. A book is a kind of lavatory. We’ve got to throw up the past, otherwise we can’t live in the present. The past has got to be killed.” But, in saying that, off his guard with the pain in his foot, he reverted to his own past, and pronounced the very word in the Northern style, the style of his childhood.

  “Excuse me,” said the Tamil dresser. “To which pest do you refer? Surely all pests have to be killed? I do not quite understand the drift of your statement.”

  “It was only talk,” said Crabbe. “It didn’t mean anything.”

  And now the colour changed to brown, the soft brown of Malay, for one of the Malays of undefined occupation spoke, sitting on a bench by the gunwale, his brown arms stretched out, gripping the boat’s side. “Allah,” he said, “disposes all things. The tea-cup I broke as a child, and the lottery my father failed to win by only one number. That was only two years after I broke the tea-cup. I blamed the breaking of the tea-cup on my younger brother, and this, as it turned out, was not unjust, for four years later, two years after my father failed to win the lottery, he broke a tea-cup on his own account. Then we had more tea-cups than formerly, and my mother was never very clever at counting. So he escaped punishment, which in a sense was just, for he had already been wrongly punished.” He now gave an exhibition of Malay teeth, bits of gold glinting in the sun and river, teeth not so good as the others’ teeth.

  “But the lottery ticket,” said the Tamil in Malay. “I am not able to see the drift.”

  “Allah disposes all things,” repeated the Malay, his teeth hidden in solemnity. “If my father had been predestined to win he would have won. It was of no use for him to prate about injustice.” He smiled around and then closed up his mouth for the rest of the voyage, leaving his boat-mates with much to think about. The broken tea-cup tinkled in their brains and the number by which this man’s father had failed to win glowed dimly and faded. Meanwhile the river narrowed somewhat, and the green bodies and arms and legs of the twin jungles shambled nearer.

  “But, despite your father’s failure to become rich,” said the Chinese assistant manager, “you still had more tea-cups than you could count.”

  The Malay nodded, smiling, saying nothing. Ahead, on the starboard side, the jungle began to thin out to scrub, and then came a regular forest of rubber trees. Crabbe remembered an English politician of a mystical frame of mind who, having spent two days in Mala
ya, wrote in a Sunday paper that the very jungles were symmetrical, neat as the trim garden of British rule. Crabbe thought of many other palm-beach-suited visitors who, through pink mists of hospitable whisky, had mistaken Malays for Chinese, mosques for Anglican churches, plantations for jungles, neat dishes of canapes for calm and happy order. But at the hulu or head of the river the two halves of the jungle joined up and became one, and there there was no mistaking one thing for another. The jungle called “OM”, like the Malay showman of the shadow-play, one and indivisible, ultimate numen.

  The launch moved into the landing-stage of Rambutan Estate, and here the Chinese and the Tamil disembarked, with smiles and waves. Beyond was a pleasance of lawn, a company bungalow magnificent in shining glass, beyond again the rubber and the coolie lines. The launch moved out to mid-river, Crabbe and Vythilingam silent, the Malays silent with cigarettes, the boatmen chattering. Next stop was Durian Estate.

  After a mile of further narrowing river Crabbe celebrated the slight easing of his pain by saying a few polite words to Vythilingam, asking him why he was going to the upriver plantation. Vythilingam jerked out, with throbbing larynx, the one word: “Beasts.”

  “To examine the cattle?” Vythilingam did not nod; Crabbe said: “I’m going to see the family of this Tamil schoolmaster who was murdered. Perhaps you knew him. He ran the estate school.”

  Vythilingam turned to look at Crabbe, nodding that he thought he knew the man. He uttered the name “Yogam.” He added: “Not a good man. A drunkard.”

  “He’ll never drink again.”

  Vythilingam said nothing more. It was not long before they arrived at the final river outpost of industry and civilisation. Here were even wider lawns than at Rambutan Estate, with Tamil gardeners at work with hoses on flowerbeds. The planter’s house was no mere bungalow. It stood on high pillars, shading under its belly an armoured car for running round the many square miles of rubber, and soaring up in two storeys to a roof garden with striped umbrellas. Here the lonely manager had to drink desperately of whatever solace boat could bring and private power-station could drive. For few now would risk the holiday trip to huge curry tiffins, gin parties with dancing, moonlight swimming in the pool that stood, its water changed daily, surrounded by banyan and rain tree, bougainvillea and hibiscus, before the proud manor house. It was a nail-biting life for the exile, soothed inadequately by the hum of his refrigerators, the roar of his many fans, the high fidelity tone of his record-player. He drank much before dinner, and the dinner with its many courses appeared in the early hours of the morning, the fish and the mutton dried up, the tired cook forgetting about the coffee. Coombes, thought Crabbe, poor Coombes, despite his many thousands in the bank, the welcome of plush chairs and cigars on his rare trips to the London office.

  The Malays smilingly helped Crabbe ashore, leaving him with his stick and his bag while they strolled off, waving, to their lines. Vythilingam stood hesitant, his black bag of medicine and instruments swinging in his right hand, smiling nervously, saying at length: “The cattle. Cancerous growths on the cattle.”

  “You’d better come and see Coombes first,” said Crabbe, “and have a drink or something.” Vythilingam shook his head. “My duty,” he said without stuttering. Then he went off in the direction of the labourers’ houses, the self-contained world of village shop, cows and chickens, school and first-aid post. Alone, Crabbe walked painfully towards the house, a long stretch from the riverside, hearing the boat throbbing finally, then the click-off of the engine as it was moored against the later afternoon’s return journey.

  As Crabbe approached the outer stairs of the house a man appeared in the doorway. He called: “Hello, hello, hello” in hearty welcome and then athletically began to run down the wooden steps. He was a stranger to Crabbe, and Crabbe said: “I was looking for Mr. Coombes.”

  “Just a day too late, old boy,” said the man. “Here, you are in a bad way, aren’t you? Let me give you a helping hand.” He was a big chubby man, in his middle thirties, the muscle of his rugger days now settling placidly to reminiscent fat. He was not unhandsome. He had dark polished hair, a moustache, a plummy patrician voice, fine fat brown dimpled knees between blue shorts and football stockings. His shirt was of checked cotton, and within it a loose stomach and fleshy breasts bounced gently. “You’re the education chap,” he said, as he steered Crabbe strongly up the steps. He laughed, the loud laugh of rugger dinners. “There’s a telegram about you inside. Coombes left it for me. Something about this chap getting murdered. But I don’t see what you can do.”

  “It’s quite usual,” said Crabbe, as they reached the top of the steps and stood before the large open doorway among potted plants. “Condolences for the widow, find out what really happened for the records, assure her that she’ll get a widow’s and orphans’ pension. We don’t know how many orphans there are.” He panted, standing there, waiting to be asked in.

  “This telegram,” said the man. He picked it up from the hall table. The hall was wide, magnificent with inlays of imported oak, heads of African beasts on the walls, flowers, a suite of rattan furniture. “It says: ‘Murder regretted. Am sending my assistant as I must stay in the office.’ And it’s signed Something bin Somebody. Never could read these Malay names. Tamil’s my language.” He laughed again, plummily. “Sounds as though he’d committed the murder himself. Well, come inside, Mr. Assistant. Damn cheek of that bloke calling you his assistant. You give him hell when you get back.”

  “It’s true in a way, you know,” said Crabbe. They went slowly, Crabbe limping, into the vast drawing-room. “I am an assistant. I’m assisting this chap to take over my job.” The drawing-room seemed an acre of polished floorboards, with complete units for sitting or lounging—drink-table, settee, arm-chairs—placed at intervals along the walls, by the windows that looked down at river and jungle beyond, in the body of the echoing room. It was monstrous and pathetic, this lavishness, a child’s tongue put out at the great green giant. On the walls were square patches unfaded by sun, where pictures had been and would be again. On the floor were treasures of this new man—gramophone records, books, papers, group photographs of rugger clubs—half unpacked. A radio-gramo-phone stood in the middle of the floor, a voice in the wilderness at present silent, though it was already plugged into a light socket high above. “Where,” asked Crabbe, “is Coombes?”

  “He’s been moved. Apparently this place has been getting on his nerves.” The man made a swigging motion and winked. “He’s gone to a place in Johore. Demotion really. And this is promotion for me.” He looked round with satisfaction at the vast anonymous room. “I was in Negri Duabelas,” he said. “I ran the Union Jack Society in Timbang. And a music club. I wasn’t so isolated there as I’m going to be here. But I don’t mind isolation. I’ve got my records and my books. I read a lot of poetry. My name’s George Costard. I don’t think I quite caught yours.”

  Crabbe thought for an instant and then said: “Victor.” If this man read poetry it was just possible he might have read some of Fenella’s. After all, Crabbe was his name before it was hers; why should she usurp it and make it well known on her own behalf? “Victor,” he said.

  “So you’re Mr. Victor,” said Costard, “assistant to Whoisit bin Whatshisname. Sit down, Victor, and take a load off that foot. You been playing soccer in your bare feet or something? I never did care for soccer. I’ll get some beer from the fridge.” He went off, briskly walking the half-mile or so to the kitchen, and then called a Tamil name and Tamil orders. He walked the half-mile back again, saying: “I’ve asked Tambi to bring a large bottle every twenty minutes. Is that all right with you? It saves the trouble of going to the kitchen and shouting. This is a hell of a big place.” He sat down, one big bare knee over the other, and looked at Crabbe complacently. “Music,” he said. “Do you care for music?” Crabbe said he did. The Tamil boy came with beer. “Watch this,” said Costard with pride. “This lad can do anything.” He gave Tamil orders and the Tamil boy, lea
n, black, sly-looking, took a random pile of thick smeared records (old style: seventy-eight revolutions per minute) and carried them over to the radio-gramophone. With practised skill he set the machine working: the first of the skewered pile submitted to the needle and, through loud scratch noises, the opening theme of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony began to emerge. “I like it that way,” said Costard. “I never know what I’m going to get. After this you’ll probably get a bit of Schubert or Brahms or a Hebridean folk-song. I just leave it to him. I’ve got catholic tastes. Catholic with a small ‘c’, of course. The family’s always been Church of England. There was an Archbishop George Costard in the eighteenth century. You may have heard of him.”

  Crabbe settled as comfortably as he could with his beer. ‘Here we go again,’ he thought. ‘Drink and reminiscence. Another day of wasted time. They’re right when they say we drink too much out here. And we slobber too much over ourselves. “Did you ever hear how I came out here? It’s rather an interesting story, really. Have another drink and I’ll tell you about it.” ‘We’re all sorry for ourselves because we’re not big executives or artists or happily married men in a civilised temperate climate.’ Crabbe noted that the pain in his foot was going, to be followed by a numbness as though the foot were not really there.

  “Some people make fun of the name,” said Costard. “Ignorant people. Although at school I didn’t suffer too much because most of the kids had heard of Custard’s last stand. I don’t think he’d anything to do with our family, though. I think the two names are different in origin. Costard means an apple, you know.”

  Over in a flash, Beethoven’s first theme having been just about stated, the record was replaced mechanically by part of the music for King George VI’s Coronation, Parry’s ‘I was glad when they said unto me’. Costard said happily: “You just never know what you’re going to get.” Crabbe was glad Costard said that to him, changing the subject, for, off his guard, he had very nearly begun to say that his own name meant a kind of apple. “Have a cigarette, Victor,” said Costard. The table was full of half-empty Capstan tins, and Crabbe helped himself. Again off his guard, warmed by the sound of his Christian name, he said automatically: “Thank you, George.” Then he blushed.