The C.P.O., sophisticated by an education at a British Police College, pretended to be scandalised. He tut-tutted at the crimes: self-murder, blasphemy, perversion.
Moneypenny’s simple testimony was much appreciated at Police Headquarters. “I knew something like that would happen to him. He laughed at a butterfly.”
Anyway, there was little trouble about writing Crabbe off. Crabbe was dead. His death, though little mourned, was resented by a few. Rosemary felt that he might have, sooner or later, introduced her to somebody eligible, or, perhaps in an ultimate weariness matching hers, have been tossed legitimately to her breast. Robert Loo felt, in a way, let down, for Crabbe had promised much and fulfilled little. And Syed Omar remembered something about the possibility of a situation in the Education Department, now not likely to be realised. The white man lies, or dies, or goes away, or forgets. Moreover, money cannot be borrowed from a dead man. Crabbe’s cook-boy had some weeks of unemployment, which was rather a nuisance. Lim Cheng Po said an Anglican prayer or two, not too perfunctorily. The Malay whom Crabbe had been training to take over his job now took over his job with trumpets and cocktails, finding it convenient to blame missing letters and mislaid files on a defunct infidel. And the great golden day of Independence approached.
Flowers and Jalil in Rosemary’s house. And on Rosemary’s desk a letter hardly begun, the two words ‘My dear’ becoming blurred in the damp heat.
“Now,” wheezed Jalil in asthmatic triumph, “who you marry? I tell you nobody left. Only me marry.”
“Oooooh, go away, Jalil, you’re filthy, you’re horrible, I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth. And I told the amah not to let you in. Oh, what lovely flowers.” Cats stalked, sniffed, inspected.
“I last man on earth. You marry me.”
Rosemary looked at him. “I’ve too much respect for myself. You with three wives already and me sleeping in the spare room.”
“I sleep there too.”
“Horrible, horrible pig of a man.”
“You want marry European? I European, I sick man of Europe. You want marry Asian? I Asian too. I anything you want.”
“I don’t want a man with three wives.”
“I divorce other wives. Divorce one every day. In three days I bachelor.”
“And then it’ll start all over again. I know. Me thrown out on the streets, a divorced woman. You’re horrible.”
“We go Istanbul. My brother part shares in hotel in Beyoglu. Make jolly time.”
“Where’s Istanbul?”
“Old name Constantinople.” Jalil managed the many syllables with surprising smoothness. He was really no fool. “Big town, very big. Bazaars, many shops, hotels big too. Can eat, drink, make jolly time.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Rosemary. “I don’t know what I want. It can’t be like London, can it? I mean, it’s neither one thing nor the other, is it? I mean, London’s everything, isn’t it?” Jalil did not understand, but he smiled with faint encouragement and a heaving chest. And now Rosemary saw films unwind swiftly in her head, a montage of the mysterious Orient which she had never visited, an Orient purged of hoicking Chinese in underpants, an Orient without a Public Works Department, an Orient visited by Europeans wearing white tuxedos not bought on an initial outfit allowance. Glamour, romance, cocktails by a shining evening river. Could Jalil sustain the part?
“You’re not a Christian,” she said.
“I be anything,” said Jalil. “In Turkey can be anything. Kemal Ataturk he make that happen.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“We go K.H. for Merdeka,” said Jalil. “I book room in hotel.”
“Oh yes, yes,” enthused Rosemary. “Oh, yes, that is a good idea. Rooms,” she amended primly.
“Room. Rooms. It same thing.” Jalil was above accidence.
But room it had to be. Kuala Hantu, clean and freshly made-up, the dirtier natives, like skin blemishes, hidden from the eyes of visitors, Kuala Hantu, self-consciously prancing and crowing in its new-found metropolitan glory, Kuala Hantu could only find them one room in a hotel on Batu Road. That, anyway, was Jalil’s story. “It no good go anywhere else,” he said, as the taxi-driver pulled their luggage from the boot. “No good to look. I know. We stay here.” A ragged Malay child greeted them as they made for the hotel entrance, begging for the odd ten cents. His eyes were intelligent, and he had the immemorial Malay curiosity about prices and relationships. “He your father,” he announced. Jalil chuckled ironically.
But it was worth it—the double bed, Jalil’s deep wheezy sleep—for the sake of those few glamour-brimming days. In a shower of rain the tape to a shining-new free land was cut, the keys of authority handed over. And the full-throated cries of “Merdeka!” Even Rosemary joined in, though her woman’s eyes were really on the so-sweet clothes of the Duchess of Gloucester. Nobody said what Crabbe had once ironically said: that Karl Marx’s real name was Mordeca and might well carry the same Arabic transliteration as the slogan that had brought the Alliance to power (without, which so many thought a good sign, opposition). One cynic, a Malay trumpet-player who had once played in a Singapore orchestra under a French leader, would only shout the first syllable. Rosemary heard him quite distinctly and wondered why.
And the men, oh, the men. So many strong and handsome Europeans, impeccably dressed. To Rosemary’s surprise, Jalil turned out to be a member of the Selangor Club, and he took her there twice to dine and drink. He merely chuckled to himself when the men flocked round, much taken with her dark beauty, standing her drinks and showing fine teeth in social laughter, for it was Jalil who took her back to the double bed.
“Oooooh, wasn’t he wonderful, Jalil, that man with the little moustache, Alan, and the other man, the fair one, called Geoffrey, and that very nice elderly man, Peter or Paul or something? He said he’d take me away with him any time for a week-end and he’s got pots and pots of money. And that man standing just by you, the fat one, that was Sir Ronald Somebody-or-other. Oooooh, Jalil, it was just like London.”
“You go sleep. I tired now.”
Independence achieved and celebrated, everybody went back to work. “Many people,” said the Chinese leader-writer in the Singapore Bugle, “many people seem to consider independence as licensed irresponsibility. Nothing could be further from the truth. We must all, the Malays especially, put our shoulders to the wheel and prove ourselves worthy of the great gift of freedom and self-determination. The clerks in the offices, the coolies on the rubber estates, tin-miners, fisher-folk and paddy-planters, have had their brief hour of rejoicing and now must buckle down to the hard tasks ahead. There have been too many false promises made by politicians to ignorant members of the ra’ayat, promises about there being no further need to work once the British disgorged the wealth they had stolen from the sons of the soil. Now perhaps those promises are being seen for what they are—mere straws and bubbles in the wind of self-advancement.” And so on. But few people read the leaders. Nobody worked any harder, though few worked (which a cynic might allege to be impossible) less hard.
But the Communists in the jungle buckled to and put their shoulders to the wheel. Independence meant little: the capitalists had been at their tricks again. In at least one state the Communists redoubled their attacks on villages, their ambushings of motorists, their decapitations and guttings of the jackals of the rubber-sucking white parasites, and sometimes of the parasites themselves. It was grossly unfair to suggest, however, as Syed Omar once suggested, that this was because Vythilingam had gone over to the rebels. But the independent Government of the Federation of Malaya acted promptly. “Il faut en finir,” said a Malay minister. So into at least one state troops poured, a battalion of decent National Service lads, to continue to carry, posthumously as it must be supposed, the White Man’s Burden. The more subtle warfare of ideas was carried on by the Information Department and by certain American organisations which did heroic—and voluntary—work. There was more
to it than just ideas, of course. The library of the United States Information Service contained plenty of good clean non-ideological books, in Chinese, English and Malay, and—better still—provided an air-conditioned refuge from the day’s heat, much appreciated by workless illiterates. Temple Haynes knew a good deal about the organic processes of speech and gave to Arumugam virtually a new voice. It happened this way: Arumugam inveighed against British injustice (retrospectively, it should be presumed) at a drunken farewell dinner for somebody or other. Temple Haynes, enjoying a cool lager at a table away from the party, heard him and was clinically interested. Arumugam sped homewards from the party, drunk, on his new motor-cycle and crashed rather badly. It was by fortunate chance that Temple Haynes was cruising in his van shortly after the crash and found Arumugam moaning in his blood. Temple Haynes got Malay assistance from a near-by attap house and took Arumugam to hospital. All the time that Arumugam lay under harsh lights on the table in the casualty ward he moaned: “I am dying. I did not mean what I said about the British. You are an Englishman. I am sorry,” in a high voice that seemed to Haynes proleptically cherubic.
“I’m not an Englishman,” said Haynes. “Take it easy now. You’ll be all right soon.” A fierce-looking Malay hospital assistant was stitching away at Arumugam’s scalp; another Malay, gentler but less efficient, was swabbing Arumugam’s body-wounds with dirty water.
“Forgive me just the same,” said Arumugam. “Forgive me before I die.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“Oh yes, I must, I must.” Arumugam rolled large eyes under the lights. “I have spoken against the British. A British motor-cycle has had its revenge.” He was still very drunk.
“Take it easy now. I’ve spoken against the British myself.”
While Arumugam was convalescing in a Division Two Officers’ ward, Haynes came often with gifts of candy and copies of Life and Time. Arumugam was enchanted to learn that the Americans had once actually fought the British and defeated them. He told Haynes about the sufferings of the Jaffna Tamils under the British yoke and Haynes told him about the Boston Tea Party. And then Haynes quietly insinuated certain therapeutic measures into their chatty intercourse, asking Arumugam to read aloud and suggesting certain approaches to the use of the voice. Soon, surprisingly soon, the articles in Life and the waspish biographies of Time were rolled out in a manly music which Arumugam at first refused to believe his own.
“I see now,” boomed Arumugam. “It was psychological. The British forced me to be a slave, and that voice was the voice of a slave. A slave,” he added, “whose birthright had been cut off. We have both suffered,” he said, “you and I, our two nations. Now we are men, not slaves. You have made a man of me.” His devotion to Haynes became considerable, and Haynes’s work in certain quarters was made easy. And at Sundralingam’s wedding Arumugam, as best man, could hardly be persuaded to stop making speeches. He even sang a song called ‘In Cellar Cool’ from the ‘Indian Students’ Song-book.
One evening Syed Hassan and Idris and Azman and Hamzah were sitting in Loo’s shop. All wore a costume suggestive of a more tranquil and prosperous age than this—Dame Clara Butt singing, in a voice not quite so deep as Arumugam’s, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, the gold squeezed from tropical helots enhancing the upper-class comforts of a cold climate. Their costumes were not suitable for Malayan heat, but they were stoics prepared to suffer for smartness and conformity. To their interest and joy three soldiers of the Royal Barsets came in, and they were wearing this identical uniform of drainpipe trousers and serge waisted jacket and boot-lace tie.
They strutted to the bar, bringing their plentiful back-hair behind them. “Here, John,” said one of the newcomers to Robert Loo. “Give us three beers.” Robert Loo looked up distractedly from his music. “And stand to attention when a corporal’s talkin’ to yer,” added the man jocularly. This disguised corporal then turned lordly to survey the other customers and caught sight of Syed Hassan and his friends. “Cor,” he said. “Ted’s ’ere too. Oo’d ’ave thought we’d meet nigger Teds?” He greeted the four Malay boys cordially and, without invitation, brought his fresh-faced party of two to their table. “More chairs, John,” he called to one of Robert Loo’s brothers. “We’re goin’ ter sit ’ere.”
“What is a Ted?” asked Hamzah shyly.
“Speak English, do yer? A Ted’s what you are. Teds is what we are. Teddy boys. Edwardian strutters was what they used to call ’em in the old days. Cor, flamin’ ’ot in ’ere. Turn up that fan, John, will yer?”
“Why do they call you that?” asked Hassan. He found difficulty in following much of the corporal’s English, but, not doubting that this was echt English, began to feel resentment towards those English masters of his who had taught him English. It was colonial English they had taught him, that was it. But he would soon learn this new, free, democratic English.
“Why? Because we go back to the good old days, see, when there was none of this bleedin’ nonsense. No wars and what not. Beer a penny a gallon and that. Bleedin’ sight more than that ’ere. ’Ere, gizza bit er music, John. What you lads goin’ to ’ave?”
The Malay boys now drank beer for the first time in their lives. It was itself, as Crabbe had once said, a language. Robert Loo, at his father’s behest, gave the new customers a free gift of juke-box music. He himself listened to the brave harmonics of saxophones and brass, the sedative drum-beat, not without a minimal physical tingling. Syed Hassan winked at him; he winked back—stiffly, however, not being used to such social gestures.
But there now started a sodality that was to prove more fruitful in promoting inter-racial harmony than any of Crabbe’s vague dreams. Wandering down the street one night, the seven of them, they came across a Tamil youth in Edwardian costume. “Wotcher, Sambo,” said the corporal. “You doin’ anythin’?” And later there were two Chinese boys who joined the gang, and one of these, whose name was Philip Aloysius Tan, swiftly became the gang-leader. The corporal was good-humoured about it, glad to see it: after all, the days of British rule were over.
For Rosemary the days of glorious expectation had returned. There was a lieutenant-colonel in the town, majors, captains, raw conscript lieutenants. Jalil? “The unspeakable Turk should be immediately struck out of the question.” (Letter from Carlyle to Howard, 24th November, 1876, as Crabbe might have verified from his books had Crabbe still been alive and his books not on their way home to his widow.) Jalil was not a gentleman. Colonel Richman was, so was Major Anstruther, so were Captains Tickell and Forsyth. Lieutenants Creek, Looker, Jones, Dwyer? Callow, guffawish, no longer her meat. Major Anstruther was unmarried, a good dancer, skilled in the arts of love. He had a neat square face, hair greying neatly, a neat broad body, a voice and accent like Lim Cheng Po’s. To Rosemary he was England—fog, primroses, Shaftesbury Avenue, South Kensington Tube Station, the Antelope and the Captain’s Cabin, the downstairs bar of the Café Royal, Kew in lilac-time; only occasionally Crewe at 3 a.m., Stoke-on-Trent on a Sunday, the smells of Warrington. She was, you might say, in love again.
There was something for everybody in the new dispensation. Syed Omar was given a van with a left-hand drive and a salary of two hundred dollars a month. (Malayan dollars, not American dollars, though at the end of his first month he had sworn to his employers that he had thought it would be American dollars, else he would not have taken the job on. He was promised an increase in the near future.) On this van was painted a picture of an eagle shaking claws with a tiger, symbolic of new friendship between two free peoples. In this van were stacked, weekly, copies of a newspaper printed in the most beautiful Arabic script, called Suara Amerika (The Voice of America). This newspaper had to be delivered to humble kampong folk who else would know nothing of events in the great world outside. Few of them could read, however. Still, they welcomed Syed Omar’s appearances and treated him to fresh toddy and simple curries, and they never tired of laughing at the picture of the eagle shaking claws with the tiger.
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Syed Omar did quite a profitable side-line selling Suara Amerika to various shops in the towns as wrapping-paper. But, to do justice to his loyalty, he always took a copy of the paper home with him and read extracts to his wives about the private affairs of film stars. They liked this. In the evenings too, when he was in, Syed Hassan gave his father English lessons. The two got on quite well together now, especially as Syed Hassan had a job with prospects: he was fifth driver to the Sultan and occasionally had the thrill of running the new Cadillac round town.
Robert Loo was one day summoned to the United States Information Service building. This had formerly been the British Residency: the Americans paid a generous rent to the Sultan for its use. Robert Loo was cordially greeted by two youngish American gentlemen who expressed interest in his music. He was taken to a music-room whose air-conditioning made him shiver, and he was asked to sit down at the tropicalised Bechstein and play some of his works. Robert Loo smiled.
“I’m not a pianist,” he said. “I’m a composer.”
“You can’t play the piano at all?”
“No.”
“Well, how do you know what your music sounds like?”
The Malayan Trilogy Page 59
