Your father is all right again now. I can’t think what upset him. We only had cold beef and apple pie for supper.
We had the first fog of the winter yesterday, then it rained and the fog cleared. This morning when we got up it was snowing—much to our surprise. We don’t often get snow so early in Malderbury. It didn’t last long but has been cold and dull all day: but I expect you are sweltering in the heat and have almost forgotten what snow looks like.
Last Wednesday, I went down to Bantingham to see Andy and his good lady. As I expect you have heard, Sheila has been very ill. She was going to have a baby but shortly after you left something went wrong. Of course it happened in the middle of the night and the farm is miles from anywhere and not on the phone and there was only their two selves in it so Andy had to do everything himself. It wasn’t until about ten the next morning that the policeman providentially called with a summons because Andy’s pigs had got into Mr. Templeton’s winter oats—that horrid man next door—and they were able to send Sheila to hospital. She’s up and about again now but very pale and thin and she won’t be able to help Andy with the milking all through the winter …
Follows parish gossip, and then at the end:
By the way, Sheila asked to be remembered to you. She looked dreadful, poor girl. I’m sure Andy has some very bad luck, and he works so hard.
Poor girl, she looked dreadful. I had intended to spend the evening in the hotel but after reading those words the room seems intolerable, so I dress and go out.
I feed in Rajadamnoen Avenue. That is the Pall Mall of Bangkok. I think it is even wider than London’s, and night augments the amplitude of its proportions. I sit at a table on the pavement outside a restaurant which has the seductive word dough set up in modernistic wrought-iron lettering at the door. Enormous bats dive past my head and puzzled frogs jump and ponder, jump and ponder, between the chair legs. I order chicken salad, scrambled eggs on fried bread, cheese sandwiches, banana in cream, and beer. It is my first western food for weeks and in spite of my concern for Sheila—poor girl, poor girl—I enjoy it. A cool breeze is blowing down the desert of concrete; it stirs the leaves that catch the light of the lamps and my hair too and the folds of my shirt. The cars speed by, long streaks of smooth tinselled dimness, and in that vast expanse of thoroughfare their horns are muted and sound pleasant like a chorus of bullfrogs in paddyfields far away.
Poor girl. She looked ghastly. A conversational formula. The first two phrases that occurred to the speeding pen. Dead verbiage. Yet they have brought Sheila back to life again, made her as real as if she was sitting at the other side of the table …
Damn and blast the poor girl …
For the fact is that during these last few weeks I have been getting my obsession under control. For the first time in four long years, ever since I first met her—
What did she see in me in the first place, I wonder? She came to that hospital to see Greg who was sick in the next bed. Nothing much the matter with him: just an appendix. I was in that time with a fractured knee-cap. Literally tied to the bed with a ton-weight, as it seemed, on my left leg. She was wearing a pale blue jacket and skirt and a cream blouse and her cloud of hair, hardly less pale than the blouse, fell over her shoulders in an ordered sequence of shallow waves. She kissed Greg and made him blush.
I was staring at her pretty frankly and I saw her cast more than one covert glance my way and when Greg finally got round to introducing us—‘Sheila, I’d like you to meet Reggie Joyce’—she wasn’t merely polite, she was pleased.
‘Reggie Joyce? The name sounds familiar.’
‘Of course it does. He rides for the Leopards. He’s ridden for England twice.’
She had half-risen from her chair by Greg’s bed to cross to me and shake hands but at these words her face clouded and she sat down again. ‘Are you really a dirt-track rider?’ For the first time I felt the force of that ice-blue candid gaze bent full upon me. Clearly I was being measured against some preconceived notion of my breed. ‘I think it’s a horrible sport.’
It was my living. ‘Have you ever seen any?’
‘Yes. Once.’
‘I took her,’ said Greg. ‘It was an unlucky night. There was a bad pile-up. You remember Lanky Spence—’
‘Somebody ran into him and broke his back,’ Sheila interjected angrily. ‘He died next day.’
‘Not next day. Three days later.’
‘It was murder,’ Sheila said. ‘Men killing each other for just a few pounds.’
It wasn’t murder at all. Lanky was my friend. We rode as a pair and shared our point-money.
‘I think it was an accident,’ I said. I hated anyone to remind me of that night. It was the biggest blot on my copybook, then. But—‘Did you stay to the end of the meeting?’ I asked at length, when I’d managed to master my feelings. Because if she had, she was overstating her aversion.
‘No. I just stayed till the next time that man—the one that did it—was supposed to race again.’
‘Why’d you do that?’
‘I wanted to see if he would.’
‘And did he?’ I did like hell, chased by my fears for Lanky, hoping I’d crash heavily and expiate my—
‘Yes. And he won. But nobody cheered him. Nobody booed him either. When the announcer announced the result, there was just dead silence.’
The well-chosen word …
‘You hate the chap so much, I wonder you don’t remember his name,’ I said bitterly, and that gave Greg a clue, and his jaw dropped, and he put in hurriedly, trying to change the subject, ‘D’you think Ma’ll come to see me tomorrow, Shee?’ She glanced at him in surprise at the interruption and then went on to finish what she had to say. Telling me off for the first time.
‘Greg here wants to be a dirt-track rider. But if ever he did anything like that I’d never forgive him—even if he is my brother.’
Greg started to say something apologetic but I stopped him. ‘Never mind, chum. She’s right. It’s a mug’s game.’ Then, to Sheila, ‘So Greg’s your brother, is he? I thought—I was afraid—’
Greg exploded in artificially hearty mirth. ‘Heavens, no, Reggie. When I get engaged it will be to somebody really beautiful, not an old hag of twenty-three like this sister of mine …’
That effectually changed the subject anyway.
I think of Slither’s letter back in the hotel room. ‘It’s been my best season: Why the hell did you pack the game up Reggie? That last spill of yours wasnt too bad. What was it, six ribs and a collarbone. They are all bones that mend easy. Riding is more fun than slicing up bacon in a grosers in Islington I should think. Whats it like in Siam. What in hell are you selling to the natives anyway. The only injury I got this season was writers cramp from signing so many autograph albums. If you had any sense youd make a comeback next season. Honestly theres nothing to beat these days. All you have to do is stay in the sadle for 4 laps and youre in the money. One of the other 3 always falls off and that makes you a cert for a 3rd place at least …’
I sit back awaiting the next course and Rajadamnoen Avenue fades and the pavement wide as a track becomes a track and I am riding round with both hands off the handlebars fixing my goggles (which was showing off but used to please the crowd) and coming up to the white line with my feet dragging, then with the other three moving up to the gate, revving up the engine with tense ringers on the clutch, eyes glued to the tapes. Suddenly they fly up, I let out the clutch and hurl myself forwards to keep my front wheel on the earth, that atavistic race for the first bend is on. In three seconds I am getting into my slide, cinders are peppering my face, it’s Lanky and he’s drifting away from the white line, he’s going to fall, the others are too tight to me on my right, he’s over in a cloud of sprawling limbs and stinking dust and I’m into him. I feel the soggy blow of his body stopping my front wheel and myself leaving the saddle and flying over him, a crack on my knee from my bike and the automatic relaxing of limbs to fall with as little damage as possi
ble, the jar and double roll and looking up all right to see Lanky lying flat and still behind the two tumbled machines … And that sick feeling in the heart: this time it’s really bad.
‘Bananas and cream, sir.’ For the survivor, he might add.
Why the hell did you pack the game up, Reggie? Well, it wasn’t because of Lanky. Nor because of half-a-dozen broken ribs. It was because of her. Her ultimatum. ‘Either your career, as you call it, or me.’
I chose the better part as I thought but I chose wrong.
Women are such traitors. They fall in love with you because of what you are. But they think they would like you better still if they moulded you a little nearer their ideal. So they mould away and when you’re thoroughly mouldy they wonder why they don’t like you any more and lose interest in you.
For a fortnight after I sold my bikes and leathers she was more affectionate than she’d ever been. We got engaged. But it took me a long time to get a new job—no Matric, no special qualifications—and finally it was she who got me into her uncle’s shop in Islington. She’d moulded me nearer her ideal, all right. I was miserable and she was disappointed in me.
Poor girl …
Poor girl be damned. Poor Reggie, he’s the real martyr.
I finish my beer. It’s eight o’clock. Now what to do with the rest of the night?
I order another beer and cogitate. I wish now I’d accepted Somboon’s invitation; I’m tired of entertaining and being entertained, but anything would be preferable to aloneness tonight. It’s too hot to walk far. It’s too hot to go to a movie. If I go back to the hotel I’ll only brood some more. I don’t want to go to the House: Frost will almost certainly be out; the others I can’t abide. I don’t know where Windmill lives, and anyway it would be a crime to disturb him tonight when once more he is submerging himself to the bosom of his family after six weeks of bemoaning his separation from them in the Northeast. And he’s probably glad of a rest from me.
Sometimes the randiest bachelor envies the married man. If things had gone as heaven ordained, if there’d been no perfidy—
She asked to be remembered to you. Poor girl. She looked hideous.
God damn and blast the bitch and hurl her from my mind.
What is the antidote to obsession with one woman?
Some would say a hair of the dog that bit you.
The only cure for one hangover, they would say, is to acquire another.
And certainly for the first few days after I first saw Venus—
Yes, for the first few days after I saw Venus in that Korat dive she ousted Sheila from my mind. Her ghost drove Sheila’s from the court where it had reigned unchallenged for four years. But as the week progressed and I didn’t see her again the new vision faded. After all, my imagination hadn’t much to feed on. So being a creature of habit I gradually returned to worship of the old goddess, though there still remained moments when Venus flared up real again and the heart thudded with sudden unholy desire.
One week and three prostitutes later I found her again, and one month and thirteen prostitutes after that I returned to Korat and slept with her for the first time. Sheila was obliterated: I didn’t even raise her effigy to castigate it—‘see what you’ve driven me to.’
For Venus herself is lovely. And not just physically so: she is frank and cheerful too. She remembers how many days it is since you last visited her, counting them on her fingers, visibly chiding you …
Venus’s kiss-creased nipples …
A wail of dance music is wafted down Rajadamnoen Avenue. Of course, of course. The Bolero. It’s eight-thirty, they’ve just started up there. I can saunter there and sprawl in an armchair and drink beer after beer and watch the antics of my fellow men when galvanized by lust. The expense of spirit in a waste of chairs. Maybe the Mongol will be there. The Mongol! Several times upcountry she has entered my mind, a vivid figure amongst the seventeen ghosts, as vivid sometimes as Sheila and Venus themselves. I don’t want her tonight—I don’t want any woman tonight, it would be blasphemy, with Sheila pale and thin, unable to help with the milking—but I can watch her. There was something about that whore—
‘Boy! Bill.’
There was something about her that was fascinating. I hope to God she’s there again. I enjoy watching her work as I enjoy watching any skilled workman on the job. A bungler myself—
I wonder what sort of drunken sot she’ll get her claws into tonight …
It’s a queer place, the Bolero. It’s like a share-cropper’s shanty on Brobdingnagian scale. A raised wooden floor, acres in extent; no walls; a low gloomy roof. From the gloom hang dozens of tawdry paper lanterns, all very dim and dusty. In the middle of the floor is a circular space waxed for dancing; this is flanked by the rows of tiny desks at which the girls sit like amazingly exotic schoolgirls in a kindergarten. The rest of the place is strewn with wicker armchairs arranged in fours around small tables. There is a bar of sorts and a band, also of sorts. Prices are fantastically high. Beer costs ten bob a bottle instead of the normal Bangkok price of six. The girls are said to be expensive too. Certainly the famous ones will be, the ones Frost said were remembered with nostalgia from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s immoral strand, wherever men with itching feet and another irritating itch silt up at bars for an hour or so before the next hop …
I select an armchair and order a beer and try to pick out a woman who looks as if she might be famous. The one nearest me has roses in her hair and some sort of nasal obstruction which causes her mouth to hang open like a trout’s with lipstick on. She is wearing an odd garment which is split up the sides like a Chinese gown but instead of fitting primly around her neck as a Chinese gown should, it stops short a bare inch above her breasts … She is smoking a cigarette, but every time she catches my eye on her she stops to heave an ostentatious sigh, as if she were already burning with desire for me. Surely that’s a little premature, sweetheart. My lips curl like the blue smoke.
Most of the ladies, so far as I can tell in the dim religious light, are more prepossessing than the Trout, but there is none who awakes a compelling interest. And where is the Mongol? I can’t see her anywhere.
Encouraged by my entrance, which brings the number of customers up to about six, the band goes into action. A few of the girls get up and start dancing together. Gradually the tune identifies itself: that ubiquitous favourite, ‘I won Der whooz skeesing her na-o-ow …’ The last time I heard that was in Korat. The soloist, Bing Boswell, popular UN playboy. The accompaniment; sounds of falling water. The night I too fell …
Oddly the song, which a few weeks ago would have slid by my ears as a meaningless, not unpleasant dirge, is now moving. The words cause a pang in my heart, as if they were poetry. And not one pang, but three successive ones, all tumbling over each other.
The first and heaviest is for Venus. Poor girl, poor girl, and I mean it. She’s one of the most popular, therefore one of the most overworked, in Chakri Road. Not much doubt that at this very instant she is engaged with tonight’s third or fourth twenty-tics-worth of importunate desire. Is she by any chance casting her thoughts my way, as I am casting mine across the central lakeland and the low forested hills towards her? I have noticed that a professional girl exercises a lot of detachment even when the client is being most industrious. It was only the last two or three times, even with me—(good God, who the hell do I think I am?)—that she would drop the fan which she had been flapping over my back and take a proper interest in the proceedings. Then, ‘Oh Letchie,’ she would cry, remembering my name in the height of the storm, and her body would go rigid, and I would know that I was being paid the highest compliment that a girl of her calling can bestow on a man—that of being moved by him …
‘Letchie finiss?’
‘Reggie finished.’
‘Ratom finiss too.’ She had a chuckling sort of laugh. I can hear it in my head now.
The second pang is for Sheila and quite perfunctory. Whooz skeesing her now? There’s o
nly one man that can be doing that, her lawfully wedded husband, my erstwhile esteemed elder brother. And that’s unlikely too, for mid-evening in Bangkok is early afternoon in England, so doubtless Andy is out in his fields, doing whatever it is one does do in fields on one of the last afternoons in November. I don’t waste time trying to visualize him. I do fabricate a quick mental picture of Sheila washing up after lunch, but it is confused and unsatisfactory. She’s not Sheila any more; she’s variations of Sheila. The Mongol is much more clear-cut in the memory, for her I saw only once.
And the third pang is for the Mongol. Where in hell is she tonight? Has she already grabbed tonight’s victim elsewhere—is she not going to turn up? Suddenly I recall that the last time I was here the Bolero was dull until I noticed her and I realize it is going to be dull again if she doesn’t materialize. Good heavens, what is this? Lust at first sight? Can one genuinely be so eager to see again a woman one has seen but once before and whose record one can guess? What on earth is happening to the idealist in me?
I’ll finish off this beer. If she hasn’t come by the time the last bubble has been imbibed I’ll clear off back to the hotel and pass the night, till sleep descends, in adoration of the Venus whom I love …
One of the more buxom and elderly of the schoolgirls gets up from her desk and walks past me humming. She is in a pink full-skirted practically backless frock and she looks familiar. One of the famous ones? But if so, where would I have seen her portrait? She proceeds aimlessly a few yards into the desert of empty chairs, then comes back, passing so close that her skirt brushes my arm. I look up and that amounts to a formal introduction.
‘Hallo, honey.’
‘Hallo.’
‘You lemember me?’
‘No.’
‘I sink I see you some place before.’
‘I sink not.’ But actually I have somewhere.
‘You want me sit down, talk wiss you?’
‘No.’
‘I sink you not like girl.’
A Woman of Bangkok Page 10
