A Woman of Bangkok

by Jack Reynolds

  ‘You’d better put your shoes on,’ says Windmill. ‘That’s Petchburi road crossing. In five more minutes we there.’

  Walking up the platform at Hualalomphong Station I am conscious of a new swagger in my gait. For the first time in my life I don’t feel apologetic to the porter. Heretofore I have always suspected in him a person superior to myself but forced by unkind circumstances to act as my minion. Now I ask myself, ‘Has he had seventeen different women in six weeks, and one of them half a dozen times?’

  The office car has come to meet us. Duen looks like an old friend. I return his golden smile with one that is only ivory but probably more sincere than his is. I say to Windmill ‘How are we going to arrange this? Shall we go to your place first, or mine?’

  Duen says, ‘First to office. Mr. Samjohn want to see you.’

  My spirits droop, for whatever my new attitude to porters I still don’t feel equal to the boss and I was hoping this interview could have been put off till the morning. It is four-ten now; the office shuts at four-thirty; ‘Don’t you think it’s absurd—?’ I begin.

  But Windmill laughs, and now his eyes laugh with his lips, for we are good friends. ‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘I think Mr. Samjohn not want eat you. I think he must be very pleased with you after this trip. Me too,’ he adds with satisfaction.

  Our reception in the outer office is certainly more heart-warming than anything I had expected. Somboon leaps up with a glad cry and seizes my hand. The three pretty girls, all identically clad in transparent white blouses and short blue skirts, smile their identical lipsticked smiles. Frost bawls, ‘Hey, where you been, you two? Get lost in a teak forest?’ And even Drummond allows an aborted grin to pass across his hollow-cheeked face before he burrows back into his ledgers again. Windmill, puffed by the stairs, falls into a chair in exaggerated distress and one of the girls flies for iced water for him. Somboon continues to fuss round me like a delighted pup, asking all the inevitable Siamese questions: ‘Was it very hot? Are the girls pretty in Korat? Where are the girls prettiest, in the Northeast or Bangkok? Have you A Friend in the Northeast?’ Given that intonation the phrase means a girl, amateur or professional, with whom one sleeps. I think of Venus and nod. ‘You must tell me about her,’ he coos. ‘Tonight you eat with me? My dear, dear friend?’

  I shake my head indecisively—I am afraid of an invitation from Mrs. Samjohn. Then a bell rings, and I know what it means. One of the girls darts to the swing doors and returns quickly to say with a smile, ‘Mr. Joy, Mr. Samjohn want to see you.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now, yes.’

  ‘Don’t be fright-end,’ Windmill calls after me.

  But I am. Mr. Samjohn is rumpling his shiny pink brow over a chaos of papers. The ceiling fan, wheezing round and round above him, ruffles what is left of his hair and the corners of a hundred different sheets of paper on the desk. For some reason (I have noted this before) he never seems able to get a clean shave on the left side of his jowl; there are the usual white specks on the choleric skin, like grains of face powder. He looks furious, as usual. But to my amazement when he eventually looks up his face breaks into a grin and he says ‘Ah, Joyce, glad to see you back again. Sit down. You’re looking very fit. Must say the reports on your trip sound very healthy too. Cigar? No, you don’t smoke. Wish I didn’t. How about a beer instead?’ He thumps his bell and when one of the three pretty heads is thrust through the swing doors, barks, ‘Beer for Mr. Joyce. Small one.’ He lights a new cigar for himself and finding a brimming ash-tray after search under the papers, crushes out his match in it. Through a thick haze he says, ‘Beer, now. That was the one line you didn’t do so well in. Why was that?’

  ‘They don’t seem to be partial to English brews. They prefer Danish or German.’

  The two white tufts of eyebrow draw together ominously. ‘What d’you mean, Joyce? English beer is the best in the world. You’ve got to push it, man. Make the blighters like it. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Too much continental beer is no good for anyone. Almost as bad as too much American beer. The Siamese need building up. They want something with plenty of good Kent hops in it. Something that will put weight on them, the poor little sods.’ A bell rings in the outer office. ‘What’s that? Knocking-off time? Great Scott, how tempus fugits.’ He shuffles the top layer of letters and then bangs his own bell again. Almost before the head automatically appears he shouts ‘Cancel that beer, Mary.’ (He calls all three girls Mary with an occasional inconsequential switch to Betty). ‘Mr. Joyce won’t have time to drink it now.’

  ‘But—’ the girl begins, and I observe that she has an opened bottle in her hand.

  Mr. Samjohn sees the bottle too but perhaps he doesn’t notice that the cap’s off. ‘Put it back in the fridge,’ he orders.

  ‘But—’

  ‘And tell Mr. Windmill to come in here immediately.’

  The head gives me a small commiseratory grin and withdraws. I judge I am redundant like the beer and rise.

  ‘Oh, Joyce, one other thing before you go. Where are you planning to stay this time while you’re in Bangkok?’

  ‘Same place as last time.’

  ‘That hotel?’ He is actually looking a little uncomfortable. ‘No need to go there really, you know. Plenty of room at the House.’

  I resist the temptation to snap, ‘Why, who’s moved out?’ No sense in starting ructions. ‘Actually I like being at the hotel. It’s not so much more expensive than being at the House. And anyway I’m only due to be in town for a few days—’

  ‘Right, then off to Chiengmai with you.’ He sounds relieved. ‘Well, glad you’re comfortable. Feel free to come to the House at any time. After all, you’re one of us.—Ah, Windmill,’ (as my stout guide parts the swing doors) ‘glad to see you. Sit down. Have a cigar. Oh, don’t be bashful, man. You’ve had a wonderful trip. More solid orders than you’ve ever booked in a single trip before, eh?—See you tomorrow, Joyce.—To what do you ascribe your success, Windmill, old man?’

  Dearly would I like to hear the reply but Windmill maintains a discreet silence until the swing doors flop past each other behind me.

  Back in the outer office I catch Mary, whose real name is Verchai, putting the beer back in the refrigerator as ordered. I shout, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ in a scandalized voice and leap towards her. It is the first time I have raised a laugh in the office by intention; heretofore what laughs I have inspired have all been behind my back, provoked by my blunders and awkwardness. The new friendly note sounds sweet. I seize the bottle and drain it in three gulps.

  Frost cries, ‘Blimey, that’s the first time I ever saw anyone actually drink one of the beers we sell. Better call an ambulance, Verchai, just in case.’ He takes the bottle from me and holds it upside down so that all can see that it’s too empty to drip even. ‘Joyce, we owe you an apology. I mean Drummer and me. We completely misjudged you. I mean, when you first came, you did seem a bit of a pansy, damn it. You didn’t smoke. You puked over your Scotch. And that night I had Daisy in—holy Christopher, you were like Mrs. Grundy herself, only worse. But, judging from what old Windmill’s just been telling us, you’ve merely been biding your light under a bushel. Hell, don’t look so windy, chum; he hasn’t said anything bad about you; just made us envious of your powers, that’s all.—Hey, Drummer, how many poor unfortunate women did you lay your first trip upcountry?’

  ‘Too many.’

  ‘My own tally was ten—no, eleven: for some reason I always forget one little Annamese in Mukdahan. She spoke French too. Now come on, Joycey, let’s have the vital statistics. How many women have you really, honestly, truly, slept with, this last six weeks?’

  Do they really want me to tell? ‘I’ve lost count,’ I lie defensively, and instantly they are all laughing again as if I had cracked a good joke. Verchai and the other girls are laughing along with the men and I would swear there is admiration in their sidelong glances, tinged with only the sligh
test hint of reproach …

  By a stroke of luck I get the same room I had before and that increases my sense of homecoming. I have a shower, my first for six weeks, and throw myself on the bed to savour my contentment. The electric fan, turning from side to side with perfervid attention to duty, sweeps me with a cool beam of air. On a chair within easy reach are a bottle—good German beer this time, ice-cold—a glass, and a plate of horse urine eggs garnished with sliced raw ginger. It’s hardly the sort of tea my mother provides at Malderbury vicarage, but scones and strawberry jam are the other side of the world, and these are the items that I happened to fancy this afternoon, here in the Far Far East.

  God, it’s great to be back home again.

  Not that the room has anything especially attractive about it. The bed, like most hotel beds in Thailand, is square and rather hard. There are, as always, two pillows (for nobody is ever expected to sleep alone in this amorous country, especially in a hotel), and two blankets, one each, neatly folded at the foot. No other covering unless you count the mosquito-net. There is one large window which opens onto a mango-tree; it is just a square hole in the wall, with bars and a flimsy curtain across the lower half; if it rains, you have to pull the shutters to and stew. You don’t have to stew long, for the storms are so furious they quickly wear themselves out, and when they’re over for a time it’s almost too cool. The walls are pale green and bare, the teak floor bare, the furniture minimal—one table, three chairs, and a chest of drawers. The only touch of opulence is in the spittoon which is of brass and as big as a young milkchurn. In fact nothing is provided which is not absolutely essential to the physical well-being of a never-ending series of casual occupants arriving mainly in pairs. But light and space and air have crept in too, and the place is clean, so the spirit soars.

  At home there was the oilcloth in the hall, cold and hard to chubby bare knees. The thick prickly pile of the carpet under the dining-room table. The coal-cellar which stank of cats and gas leaking from the meter; a terrifying place, really, from which one was always glad to emerge alive. In the attic the toy train whizzed punily, disproportionately fast, between the stacks of old newspapers, which were mountains, and there was a window, high, small, covered with cobwebs, from which one could obtain an airman’s view of the neighbours’ gardens. The study was the sacred grove which one entered only by special invitation; it smelled of musty tomes and stale tobacco; one had to sit quiet on the floor looking at the steel engravings in a huge old Bible. Even Isaiah or was it Elijah being fed by ravens in the wilderness and Job smitten with boils had the frame and musculature of Samson or Joe Louis, but all the women subsequent to Eve, the Delilahs and Jaels no less than the Ruths and Virgin Marys, were monotonously anaemic, with worried expressions and voluminous clothes like nuns’. As for Eve, she was being tempted behind a frustrating twig in Plate One, and expelled from the Garden with her hand over the part which most aroused one’s curiosity in Plate Two. Then there was the pantry, full of the pale smells of cold food, and the kitchen, from which one was forever being shoo’d, either into the hall, if it was wet, or the garden, if it was fine. Six bedrooms, six worlds, all but your own an adventure to enter.

  Sure enough environment shapes you, but environment is more than the interiors of a few rooms. Environment was the copper fender round the hearth-stoned hearth and the giant scuttle which emitted, when its iron handle dropped on its iron black cheek, a bass note if full and a tenor note if empty, but it was also the Children’s Encyclopedia, in which eight battered volumes you browsed by the hour. Environment was the tools in the toolshed, the hanging rakes and spades and forks and hoes, the scythe you were forbidden to touch with its Ivanhoe blade tied up in an old sack, the lawn mower smelling deliciously of oil and grass; but it was also aniseed balls at twenty for a ha’penny, and putting three of your six weekly pennies into the red velvet bag on the end of the comic pole, and having your hair cut by Mr. Styles, who had only one eye, and was Scoutmaster, and that was why you couldn’t be a scout. Environment was a million things—the speckled Ancona cock who once nipped your finger surprisingly hard when you were simply admiring him and had no intention at all (on that particular occasion) of depriving him of one of his tail-feathers, the kittens foolishly trying to climb the hollyhocks at the back of the herbaceous border, the snails amongst the mint which grew around the scullery drain; but it was also the wraiths, your parents, your brother, Ellen the maid and Tripp the gardener, who were so much filmier, so much less real, than furniture and worms and places. I suppose I was rather inhuman; perhaps all children are; but that’s how the past looks …

  Denny was the only human being who seemed real. Andy was too much older than I—six years—and most of the time away at school. It was later when my hero-worship began, when I became a first-former in the school of which he was School Captain. He was captain too of both the soccer and cricket teams, the idol of all the small fry, a paragon I could never measure up to, but against whom I was always being measured …

  Jesus, what hell it was being Andy’s brother at school. ‘Come, come, Joyce junior, you can do better than this. Your brother—’

  It was when I failed Matric for the third time that my life first began to go to pieces, I think. After that even my father, most sanguine of parents, could no longer conceive a future of academic brilliance for me. He had had it all mapped out for years; Andy, big and strong, endowed with rapid reflexes, was to be the man of action; I, by no means a weakling, but more studiously inclined, was to win the intellectual honours. And for ten years I was dutiful enough to narrow my chest over my father’s ambition for me. But then suddenly—

  Suddenly around the age of fourteen I realized that I liked the sun outside my window far better than even the fattest book. I no longer wanted to narrow my chest over Shakespeare and Plato and all that gang, I wanted to expand it. For long my dreams had been Walter Mittyish and always there was a naked girl in them, usually some local wench years older than myself, and myself heroic amongst the roaring flames, or the icy seas, or the falling bombs, for her sake. And now these dreams became more important than books, they occupied all my thoughts even in the classroom. For the next three years the headmaster’s reports grew progressively more anxious: ‘Not concentrating.’ ‘Must apply himself more diligently to the subjects he dislikes.’ ‘Must realize that the time has now come to make a final effort.’

  The list is up on the board. I approach with dread in my bowels. My eyes are so glazed with apprehension I can’t sort out the letters that form the names. And there’s no need. Amongst the press of excited boys, all my juniors (for my own year has passed out either to the university or into the great big busy world where I shall never do any good), I hear the voice of Bambridge, that never-to-be-forgotten voice: ‘Crikey, look where old Joyce is. Still running true to form.’ And then the burst of laughter, but some faces reddening and growing apologetic as they turned and saw me standing …

  So they put me down in Fourth Commercial, which was a disgrace, especially for Joyce major’s brother. (By then he was a planter in Kenya and therefore still a heroic figure.) And I was two years older than the next oldest boy in the form …

  Christ Jesus, why go through that again?

  I get up and go across the room. On the table is my mail. Only six letters—one per week. One from the bank. One from my mother. One from old Slither Higson, who used to ride with me on the cinders. And three from Lena.

  I sit down on one of the hard wooden chairs. When I receive more than one letter at a time I like to read them in an ascending order of interest. I sort these out carefully. First the bank statement—that will only confirm what I already know. Then my mother’s—that will be only parish small-talk. Third, Lena’s—what sort of letters will she write? Finally Slither’s, which is bound to be good and full of speedway news.

  The bank statement is certainly gratifying. Although I have not stinted myself since I arrived in this country, I have saved more than one third of th
at part of my income which is being paid here.

  I slit open my mother’s sixpenny airmail form. It begins more or less as I expect:

  Dear Reginald,

  It is time I wrote to you to say thank you for your letters telling us about your aeroplane journey and your life in Bangkok. I am sorry you are having to live in a hotel. I have never stayed in a hotel in my life but I am sure it must be very uncomfortable. Aren’t there any good boarding houses there where you can get good English food and proper attention? I know you are grownup now and able to look after yourself but I cannot help feeling that the most undesirable characters live in hotels and I expect it is much worse in a foreign country than it is in England. You must also be careful with the food—the Chinese meal you described sounded quite dangerous to me, especially as you ate it in a shop which you said was very dirty.

  Bangkok sounds a beautiful city from your description but I am sure really nice girls would not bath in canals in full view of the public even with all their clothes on as you describe.

  Last Sunday your father was unable to take the services as he had a very bad night with pain round the heart caused by wind. I had to ring up Mr. Pottle the curate at Cotters Green who came over and did his best.