Chance Developments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “It’s not the way I feel. I don’t care what people are. Do you?”

  He smiled. “Fathers often don’t approve of their daughters’ boyfriends. There’s nothing new in that.”

  “It’s a big thing in Jewish families. They don’t like people to…to go outside, so to speak.” She hesitated. “One of my cousins did. She married a boy she met in Sydney. My uncle wouldn’t go to the wedding. My father said to me, ‘Never do to us what Rebecca did.’ He said that.”

  He shook his head. “What difference does it make?”

  “A lot.” But then she added, “To some people. Not to me. I think I should be able to see whoever I want to see.” She relished the idea of standing up to her father, who had always expected the family to agree with him on every matter. He spoke as if he had the authority of the prophets behind him, but she would submit no longer. She did not care what he called her; the important thing for her was that she would lead her own life, according to her own lights, and with no interference from him. He did not know the answer to everything, as he liked to pretend. His was not the only way of looking at things; there were other people too.

  “So do I.”

  He was puzzled. It had happened so quickly; he had not imagined that falling in love would be such a sudden and conclusive business, as the songs said it would be. He had mocked all that, thinking that it would never happen to him; but now he realised that what everybody said was true. He had not imagined that another person could so completely captivate you, could seem so inevitable.

  Just before he had to report back to the barracks, he said to her, “I meant what I said. Everything.”

  She said, “And so did I. I don’t want you to go. I can’t bear the thought of you in the army. Going somewhere far away.”

  He tried to smile. “The army is fine. You spend all your time doing drill and waiting for things to happen. And then nothing happens and you go back to doing drill. That’s the army for you.” He paused. “I don’t think I’m going anywhere.”

  “But still…”

  “No, I’m telling you: the last thing the army wants to do is to actually do anything.”

  “Then what about the Germans?”

  He thought about this. “The Germans will give up. They can’t win.”

  His confidence was infectious. “Good,” she said. “How hateful they are.”

  “The British will wipe the floor with them,” he said. “The French too. Watch it happen.”

  6

  When he was sent abroad, it was to Malaya, where he became part of a small Australian unit sent to boost the strength of a Scottish infantry regiment. The Scots had been short of transport, and David’s unit had been detailed to help them.

  He wrote to Hannah from the small coastal town they were defending. “When you get this will be anybody’s guess. Maybe we will have moved on from here by the time this arrives—maybe not.” He was not allowed to give the location, nor many other details, but he was able to write about the boredom of military life. “Nothing happens,” he said. “We are in charge of the vehicles and we service them, as best we can, and carry out repairs. But we don’t really go anywhere, and nothing ever seems to happen. The locals are friendly enough and sell us fresh vegetables and whatever else we need. They don’t seem to be worried, although the planters are pretty anxious about the Japanese. They say they could invade at any moment and they’re not sure whether our defences are up to dealing with an invasion. Many of them have sent their wives and children back to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore—others seem to think there’s no chance of anything happening here. I’ve joined the library at the planters’ club, and we’re allowed to take out three books at a time. I’ve just finished a book by Trollope and some short stories by Somerset Maugham. A lot of the people in the club have strong views on Maugham, you know: they say that he accepted the hospitality of people out here and then wrote scathingly about them in his stories. I can’t tell: some of the characters in the stories I read seemed rather like some of the people I’ve met, but I think that’s inevitable. After all, there are only a limited number of types, don’t you think? Sooner or later a fictional character is going to match somebody or other, even if the author’s never met the person in question. You can’t blame Somerset Maugham for writing about what he saw, can you?”

  She wrote back: “I wish you were coming back soon. Life in Bendigo is very dull, although last week there was a burglary at Mrs. Thompson’s house and she went and died of shock. Apparently that can happen—you can die of shock. There was something on the ABC about that. They interviewed a doctor who said that being frightened to death was a real possibility. I don’t know, but I was interested to hear it.”

  He kept her letters in a small box. This he tucked into his kit bag, alongside his shaving kit and the diary in which he made an entry every Friday. He was lonely in the army. He had been made an officer, but there were no other Australian officers in the town. The Scottish officers were courteous, but seemed reserved. He found them distant in their manner; not snobbish—just distant, with that diffidence that he had heard was so common among the Scots.

  One evening an aeroplane came out of the sky and flew past their defences at a low height. He was standing outside one of the trading stores, and stepped out into the road to wave to the pilot. He assumed that the plane was British, and he wondered why it should have such an unusual shape and make a sound unlike any British plane.

  He waved to the pilot when he was still some way away, and it seemed to him that his wave was acknowledged by a movement of the plane’s wings. But then, with a noise that sounded like an angry cough, a splatter of rounds from the aircraft’s guns traced a pattern of small eruptions across the tarred surface of the road. There was a further burst of fire, and this was followed by a screaming, shrill and persistent.

  He felt a sudden sense of outrage. The plane was Japanese and it had just fired bullets into a busy street. The pilot must have seen that there were people around—how dare he set out to kill people like that? What was he thinking of?

  The screaming intensified. People were running, and he heard nearby the shrill note of a siren. There was a small knot of people on the other side of the street on which he was standing. There was wailing now, and he saw a woman supporting a man who had blood streaming from his head. It was the first casualty of war that he had seen, and he felt a sudden, raw shock. He was in a war—not in some strange bureaucratic drama of drill and boredom, but in a matter of blasted flesh and terror.

  He returned to scenes of confusion at company headquarters. One of the Scottish officers told him that they had been ordered down to Singapore, to help shore up the defences of the island. “They thought the Japs would try it on from the sea,” said this officer. “But now it looks as if they’re going to do it by land.”

  He organised such transport as he could muster. Civilian cars were requisitioned and marshalled into a rag-bag convoy. Others joined, including a group of American missionaries and their converts. “We must get these good people to safety,” said one of the missionaries. “We cannot leave them to the mercies of the Japanese.”

  A woman—one of the converts—gave birth on the journey south. They stopped the missionaries’ car and moved her into a truck occupied by a group of Scottish soldiers. The baby, when it arrived, was wrapped in a kilt provided by one of the men.

  One of the men for whom he was responsible—a man who had been a fireman on the Ghan train—told him what he had heard about the Japanese in Korea. “My mate,” he said, “saw a Japanese officer chop off a traffic policeman’s head—in the street. It was right in front of him. My mate was in a rickshaw, and the rickshaw bloke just leapt off his bike and ran away. The Korean’s head came right off.”

  He looked out of the window at the impenetrable green wall of jungle. He wanted to believe in tenderness; he wanted to believe in kindness, but now, perhaps, it was too late. Something had been unleashed that would make it impossible to go back to what ha
d been before.

  And then it all happened very quickly. His unit was one of the last to cross the causeway into Singapore. They were uncertain whether they should mine the road behind them: there was an order, and then there was a countermanding order—somebody else would do it; there were still people to come. Eventually they pressed on into a place where panic and torpor seemed to hold equal court. He came across a young boy sitting on a suitcase, reading a book about butterflies, who looked up at him and asked him whether he knew when his father would be coming to collect him. On a veranda behind the building his company had occupied—a trading warehouse, half-filled with bales of printed cotton—he stumbled over a group of elderly Chinese men playing Mah Jong. They did not look up from their clicking tiles and ignored him, as interlopers had been ignored for centuries in their world.

  The surrender came when he was struggling with a buckled leg on his camp bed, trying to make it fold correctly. He heard a single shot, followed by shouting. There was the sound of a vehicle revving its engine and after that a brief silence. Then barked commands in Japanese.

  7

  This doctor, at least, seemed to have the time to talk to him.

  David fingered the button of his jacket. The sunlight made his eyes hurt for some reason, although they had told him this would get better. “You’re a psychiatrist, aren’t you?”

  The doctor smiled. “Well, I do a lot of work at the mental hospital. I’ve had a bit of training in that sort of thing. But I do other things too. You have to, when you’re in the army.” He paused. “Actually, I’d like to be an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. That’s what I’d really like, but the army doesn’t let you do everything you want to do. You must have noticed that.”

  He responded to the joke. “A bit.”

  The doctor looked out of the window. “Now that the war’s over, I’m hoping to get out. I’ve had an offer of a job over in Perth that I’m keen to take up. But they won’t let me go—not just yet. I suppose it’s you chaps…”

  “Sorry to keep you, Doc.”

  “Not your fault.” He pointed up at the ceiling; at higher authority.

  “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, you see.”

  The doctor played briefly with a pencil on his desk. “No? Well, I suspect you’re right. But we have to be careful, you know. We can fix a man’s body, but sometimes there are other things that can cause trouble a bit later on. The body and mind, you see, are pretty much interconnected.”

  “I’ll be happy once I can’t see my ribs any more.”

  The doctor laughed. “Yes. And according to this…” He took a piece of paper out of a file. “According to this, you’re putting on weight all right—it’s just a bit slow. They were wondering whether there might be something else going on—something holding back the physical recovery.”

  The doctor looked at him enquiringly. David shrugged, but his shoulders hurt as he did so; it was the bone against the skin, because there was so little flesh left.

  “A lot of men,” said the doctor, “have come back full of…well, I happen to think the only word for it is sorrow. I know that’s not a medical term. You won’t find it in the textbooks. But…” He did not finish the sentence.

  David looked at him. Sorrow?

  “Sorrow over what they’ve been through,” continued the doctor. “Sorrow at what they’ve seen.” He paused. “I’ve heard just about everything, you know. I’ve had men sitting where you are, breaking down, crying like children, sobbing their hearts out over what happened to them. Ghastly things. Things that just leave one simply confounded over the capacity of people to cause pain to others.”

  Their eyes met.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” said the doctor. “You don’t have to tell me—unless you want to. It helps some people to talk, but not all. I think it depends on the individual.”

  “Sorrow,” said David quietly.

  “Yes? You feel it?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  The doctor picked up his pencil again, playing with it, tapping it lightly against the desk. “Where? Where do you feel that sorrow? Where does it come from?”

  David closed his eyes. He could see one face in particular; one uniform. He heard screams. He felt the sun beating down on him and the thirst that brought—the unremitting, unquenchable thirst.

  “You know something?” he said to the doctor. “Goats and chickens.”

  “Goats and chickens?”

  “There were ten of us in this room, you see. It used to be part of a school before they converted it into a pen for us. A tiny room, with not enough space for all of us to lie down at once. So we had to take it in turns. But there was something about this room that we liked very much, and that was that it was half basement and half ordinary room. And there was a window—a barred window—that looked out at ground level on to a yard in which chickens would poke around. Japanese chickens. And the occasional goat.”

  The doctor was watching him.

  “The bars were quite wide apart—not wide apart enough for a man to crawl out, but quite wide enough for a chicken—or a goat—to be grabbed and then pulled through. We saved grains of rice and reached out of the window to put them on the ground outside. This attracted chickens and then one of us, a chap called Tommy Sprigge, reached out and caught a chicken by the neck and dragged it through the bars. Same thing for the goats, as long as they weren’t too big. Kids were fine—mature goats were a bit more difficult.

  “And then in five minutes—not a second more—the chicken would be dispatched and plucked, ready for cooking. Same thing for the goat. Bang. End of goat.”

  The doctor’s eyes widened.

  “We also ate rats. Sprigge’s arm would shoot out—like a snake striking—and grab the rat. They squealed, and often bit him, but he just laughed it off.”

  “I see,” said the doctor.

  “Because the world is full of pain,” said David. “Pain and terror and hunger and…I’m not sure if I’ve left anything out.”

  “I think you’ve described the human condition rather well,” said the doctor. “Is that where your sorrow comes from?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  The doctor became businesslike. “You have a girlfriend, I understand.”

  “Well, she’s a girl I met.”

  The doctor referred to his notes. “I’m told that she’s been in touch, trying to get to see you. I gather that you’ve refused.”

  He was silent for a while. Then he said, “I can’t let her see me like this.”

  The doctor nodded. “I can understand how…”

  “How ashamed I feel,” David said.

  “Yes. I wouldn’t try to deny shame. We all feel shame.”

  “Well, it’s what I feel when I go anywhere near a mirror.”

  The doctor folded a piece of paper he had extracted from the file. “But you will see her eventually? When you’ve recovered condition?”

  He looked down at his hands. They were shaking.

  “You see,” said the doctor, “the human body knows sorrow when it encounters it. And the only way to deal with that is to look at the sorrow—look it in the eye—and face it down.”

  He kept his eyes downcast. “Maybe,” he said.

  “No,” said the doctor. “Definitely.” He waited for a few moments before continuing. “That’s a strange thing to remember. Well, not strange, I suppose, but it’s surprising that you should talk about that when I imagine you saw very shocking things—the cages, the beatings, the executions.”

  “Perhaps. But you see…”

  He did not know how to continue. The doctor waited for a few minutes, but nothing came, and so he leaned forward and put a hand on David’s shoulder. It was so thin—like touching bone, but he had seen so many men in that state. “Time,” sighed the doctor. “Time heals, doesn’t it?” He sighed again. “A rather defeatist thing for a doctor to say, I suppose.”

  “But true.”

  The doctor looked u
p sharply. “I think you’re going to be all right,” he said. “Most men say nothing if I go on about what time can do. Or they deny it. Or they simply cry.”

  “Your own job can’t be all that easy, Doc. And who fixes you up when it all gets a bit too much?”

  “Time,” said the doctor.

  They both laughed.

  8

  “My job,” his mother said, “is to feed you up. Correct?”

  “Well, I’m still having trouble with my stomach.”

  Dolly brushed this aside. “The doc told me about all that,” she said. “But he said the most important thing was good food.”

  “If that’s what he said…”

  She put a cushion behind his back, making sure he was comfortable. “It can’t be very easy sitting down for long when you’re all skin and bone.”

  “I’m used to it. I didn’t know shoulder blades were the shape they are.”

  “Or knees,” she said, looking down.

  “We’re all skeletons underneath, I suppose.” He leaned back against the cushion gingerly. “I don’t want to go out—you know that, don’t you?”

  She had received a letter from the hospital and it had made that clear. “Not even a few short…”

  He cut her off. “No. Not yet. I don’t want people to see me.”

  She bit her lip. “Don’t try to argue with him,” a friend had warned her. This friend was a nurse; she knew. “You think you can chivvy them along—you can’t.”

  So she said nothing. But then he said, “A few weeks maybe. I’ll look a bit better then.”

  “You can be proud of the way you look,” she muttered under her breath.

  “What?”

  “The way you look is like having a medal,” she said. “People understand.”

  “That’s as may be, but I’m not going out.”

  “All right, all right.”

  —

  She bullied him into eating the large meals she had prepared for him. One morning she said, “You know these big breakfasts I make for you? Well, it’s reminded me of something your father used to say.”