by Nigel Barley
Many of the bars were shut, seemingly for ever. Passers-by avoided him, afraid of being seen around a European leper, but he felt that, had they known of the thirty cents weighing down his pocket, they would have been on him like a pack of wolves. Most of the buildings here had been blasted by mortar and artillery fire and people were living under sheets in the ruins, taking water from standpipes in the middle of the street and hanging washing out to dry on the shattered roof beams. The markets that had flourished in the streets had withered into parody. A beggar sat smiling in the street and indicated a bloodied kneestump to all comers with the open-handed gesture of one who had just pulled off a difficult conjuring trick while, behind him, a corner stall that had once sold cigarettes now sold cigarette ends for reuse as if this were a totally normally activity. Yet, despite the deprivations, when the wind blew across, Little India still managed to reek of curried mutton and hot fat. He dodged around Bugis Street with its volatile, patrolling transvestites and headed towards Beach Road where shading trees tempered glittering views of the sea. There stood the arrogant Raffles Hotel, now renamed the Syonan Ryokan, still off-limits to other ranks—but Japanese other ranks now—and still striking attitudes behind its luxuriant Ravenala madagascariensis, Traveller’s Palm—though not, of course, a true palm but related to the banana—its undaunted leaves shuffled by a hot but pleasant wind that buffeted in from the ocean and perhaps reminded it of home. Rickshaws with specially scrubbed pullers were ranged outside—the acceptable face of the East—as large cars purred up under the glass awning, disgorging sleek Japanese of both military and civilian stamp. On the ground floor, the bars and restaurants still hummed with cheerfully non-partisan profit and, in the upstairs rooms with their white telephones and soft furnishings—as was common knowledge—Korean ‘comfort women’ were deferentially available to officers around the clock beneath pink lightbulbs It occurred to him that the entire British Empire was really nothing more than the biggest whorehouse in the whole of Asia—one enormous ethnographic seraglio—where the very idea of ‘a good time’ was a sad but powerful delusion. And right on cue, the doors flew open and Erica Rosenkranz came clumping down the steps with a young Japanese officer on her arm making that characteristic grimace that, for her, replaced a smile, an opening wide of the mouth with simultaneous peevish crinkling.
As the wife of the erstwhile Austrian ambassador, Erica had officially progressed, in the course of the war, from ‘neutral’ to ‘enemy alien’, following the Anschluss. But the British had dealt kindly with both her and her husband, regarding them as sinned against rather than sinners, arguably innocent victims of a hostile invasion, thereby still allies of a sort, so that her enthusiastic embracing of ‘friendly belligerent’ status under the Japanese now smacked of ingratitude. After the Fall, her husband had answered the summons and returned circuitously home to what was now Nazi Germany’s new Ostmark province but, since doubts remained over their reception there, they had chosen that Erica should stay just where she was. In age too she had long sought to remain exactly where she was, dressed too young, wore too much makeup, dyed her hair too optimistic a shade. All this went hand-in-hand with a wardrobe of gestures and mannerisms that someone had unwisely told her—at the age of twelve—were winsome. As she approached her fiftieth birthday like an unexploded mine, they were no longer so.
At first, she had filled her dowager time with ladylike shopping and gardening, the delicate sécateur-wielding-in-white-gloves type that fiddled and fussed, more hairdressing than horticulture. Then she had conceived a fancy for botanical drawings, the cultivation of Nepenthes pitcher plants, the collection of botanical ephemera and gardening hats. Then she had started coming to the museum and gardens at all hours, seeking out Pilchard and demanding the identification of whatever bunch of leaves she happened to be clutching in her liver-spotted hands. In vain, the resident botanists told her, without conscious irony, that only her fruiting parts were diagnostic. Dr Post quailed before her aggressive femininity and before long, by a series of outflanking manoeuvres, she had wormed her way into becoming a patron of both museum and gardens. Within any public institution, a patron is a ‘friendly belligerent’ of the most feared kind for all learned institutions fear the public, as the staff inevitably come to run them exclusively for their own convenience. From there, she had moved triumphantly into occupation of the chair of the Gardening Club and finally the Orchid Club had fallen to her. She now paused on the bottom stair of the Raffles Hotel and shouted across the forecourt, unwilling to step out into sunshine.
‘Dr Pilchard! Come here!’ She waved her bag. ‘At once! I have been trying to contact you. My monkey cups have sprung a leak—some disease I think. My urgent calls have gone unanswered for several months.’ Pilchard paused and considered. If everyone felt ill all the time, as he did now, the world would be a very different place. Perhaps saints were just men with a good digestion. He might just walk on and ignore her and her monkey cups or pitcher plants. Or there was no reason, now that the world had ended, not to tell the old cow to just get thoroughly and joyfully stuffed. The occupation could yet prove liberating. No reason except a lifelong experience of being taught to seek to please. No reason except that unpredictable Japanese companion who was sucking the debris of terrible English fruit cake out of his teeth, had that haunted look that men often had around Erica and might well want to let out his rage and frustration in slaps and kicks. He sighed and crossed the forecourt, bowed low to him in appeasement though she would think it was to her.
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Rosenkrantz. I’m afraid I was quite literally detained.’
She pouted. and looked at his legs, devoid of the long white kneesocks that alone made men’s legs decent. He was gripped by a momentary fear that she might be admiring them but that, after Changi diet, was mercifully impossible.
‘Oh please don’t explain’, she crowed. ‘Nowadays it seems everyone has excuses. Excuses are always so boring.’ She flapped her sequined bag like a fan, chasing excuses away as you might an irritating wasp. ‘I am sure someone might have given you a message. It is scarcely providing a proper service to the public to just wander off and abandon your post.’
‘I expect you have been overwatering them—your pitcher plants, monkey cups.’ It was the catch-all answer to all public enquiries about plants, undeniable since ‘over’ was meaningless. Nepenthes were amongst the most inept of Nature’s plants, given to rot and dehydration, endless trouble to cultivators in their unceasing demands. It was only appropriate that Erica had conceived a predatory empathy for them, enticing victims with their sticky secretions and then devouring their dead flesh. If rumour was to be believed, the presence of an absent husband or, rather, the absence of a present one did nothing to deny Erica a vigorous sexual life. She had scandalously acquired much younger Chinese dance-partners that she had taken openly to the Germania club, there to foxtrot interracially. Such astonishing behaviour had been made comprehensible to the expats by the rumour that she was really from the Italian end of Austria and Neopolitans—as all British and Austrians knew—were scarcely European at all. Her Japanese companion, tired of being ignored in a foreign language, clicked his heels and inclined his head cautiously.
‘Oishi, Captain.’
‘Pilchard, Lieutenant, but different army.’
Erica raised her index finger to her mouth then held it up like a sailor testing the wind and did one of her puckish little-girl-having-sudden-idea expressions. ‘I think, Dr Pilchard, given the inconvenience the Captain has been put to, it would be the least you could do to offer him a personal tour of the museum. My car is just here.’
They were sated with cake and tea, maybe they even had a stimulating cocktail or two under their belts, cooled and rested. Pilchard was hungry, weary, hot and not very well. As the sun beat down with swimming heat on his bare head, the world began to lurch and spin with craziness and the effort of holding things steady was abruptly just too much. Perspiration that he could not spare suddenly
douched his back and the air lay heavy and immovable in his lungs. By the time the mist cleared, he found himself already in the car, in the front seat, heading down Stamford Road with the boys’ school on the right. His legs were shaking. Voices came from the bottom of a deep well and the nearby sea roared in his ears as in a nautilus shell. He struggled back to the surface and now there were soldiers everywhere, a barrier across the road, some sort of a checkpoint. Over them, towered the authority of the YMCA, an architectural absurdity of half-tudoring—in a country that was innocent of Tudors—turrets and balconies and bay windows and an irrelevant porte cochère stuck on the facade like a clown’s red nose. On the little green at the front, a crowd of young Chinese men were standing, silent with fear in the hot sun, hands behind their backs—possibly bound—with soldiers strutting up and down. And there, shuffling down the line, was a figure of horror, all in black, hooded—the Grim Reaper. Occasionally, it would pause, stretch out a gloved hand and touch someone silently on the shoulder, claiming a victim for death. The chosen one would be led away and stowed on the back of a truck.
‘Informer,’ said Captain Oishi, standing up in the car and beaming with satisfaction. ‘You see the Chinese are keen to work with us to root out antisocial elements. Those criminals will be shot.’
Those, Pilchard suddenly realised, leaning wanly against the hot metal, were not army uniforms the soldiers were wearing but Kempeitei. The secret police. Even the Japs were afraid of them. He plunged deep once more into resigned turbulent dizziness then was swimming up to booming consciousness again. His eyes jerked open. Now there were schoolboys everywhere in thin white shirts and trousers—one, in glasses, painfully lanky, great dark eyes, Chinese hair spikily resisting the imposition of a Western haircut.
‘If I’m staying a few days …’ he was saying smoothly to Captain Oishi, speaking with the same excessive plausibility with which—at home—schoolboys presented forged letters excusing themselves from games, ‘… I’ll go home first—just over there—and get my things.’
The boy set off with light, determined steps, firmly not looking back. Oishi dithered, seemed to feel an unwilling pang of sympathy, perhaps saw himself ten years ago and hesitated then, clearly anxious not to lose face in front of Erica and this other southern barbarian by shouting, waved to the sentries to let him go.
‘One schoolboy more or less,’ he shrugged, laughing, dismissing duty and embarrassment with a casual smile. ‘What difference does that make to the world? What’s your name?’ he called.
The boy threw a smile back over his shoulder but did not stop. ‘Lee. Harry Lee.’
Pilchard’s world dissolved and disappeared again as if sucked down a vast clockwise plughole. Then he felt tiles, cool and solid under his cheek and cold on his bare legs. He was shivering. Looking up, there was the Singapore stone, its Indic script winking ruby red in the last rays of the setting sun that shone through the hole in the roof, still proclaiming its enigmatic message to an uncomprehending world. He was back in the museum. In his hand was a can of beans.
‘Shut?’ Erica was saying to someone he could not see in the echoing void. ‘Shut? Well, I really think it’s just not good enough. What sort of a place is this? Look at the state of Dr Pilchard, drunk as a lord—as a lord—and it’s barely mid-afternoon. Make no mistake. I shall be writing to the General about it.’ She stamped a little, slingbacked heel right in front of Pilchard’s face. ‘The Captain was quite looking forward to a tour. You have disappointed him. He also likes orchids and would love to the see the Gardens. I really think you people might all make a bit more effort. It’s so selfish of you. Don’t you know there’s a war on?’
* * *
Professor Tanakadate’s conscience had been troubling him over the matter of Dr Pilchard. He had behaved like an American cowboy—absurdly—waving that gun around that he had found on the grass outside. It was not even loaded. When he had ordered him shipped off to prison, he had lost control and given way to pique, to a momentary anger before barbarian behaviour, without realising the power he now held over other lives. It was as if, in his sleep, he had been connected to some mighty, amplifying machine that converted him into a weather god, turned his least tweak of displeasure into vast thunderstorms that might flash and roar and wash away whole villages. That was not the way a scholar should behave, especially towards a respected colleague. For a vulcanologist, the war had been a profound disappointment. He had hoped that Japanese expansion might bring him his very own volcano, even if only a small one. Just across the sea from here were some of the best, most active volcanoes in the world but they had all been assigned to lesser men, much less senior than himself, while he had been ordered to look after a museum and a dormant botanical garden. It was a situation that burned with injustice. Yet he could see that Pilchard had suffered in Changi and the considerable time that the man had spent there had given him time to appreciate the standard of his work from traces left within the museum. It had been the initial misfortune of Pilchard to remind him of an alcoholic Australian vulcanologist, encountered on Mount Fuji just before the war, in the act of relieving himself, a desecration of both science and culture. Yet the men here, Catchpole, Post and Pilchard were fellow-researchers, bound to him by values and visions that lay beyond narrow nationalism and mere profit. True, they were sloppy, shambling men who, like all Westerners, suffered from an irritating lack of bodily control but their minds were as focused as his own. His anger shamed him. After all, his own side was little better. When he had arrived in Syonanto, he had found the Kempeitei trucks lazily parked all over the lawns of the museum forecourt and the Botanic Gardens, out of town, were criss-crossed with latrine trenches and strewn with discarded military hardware. The overflow from Japanese military headquarters at the Bukit Timah end of the gardens was elbowing arrogantly into horticultural space and the gardeners had already been conscripted as porters of army supplies, while great brass earhorns, acoustic aircraft location devices, ‘war tubas’, had been parked all over the grounds. Tanakadate had struck back with classical calligraphy, firm, scholarly brushstrokes, more artistic than was strictly necessary for mere communication, and set up signs invoking—quite illegally—the highest Japanese authorities to declare both museum and gardens a specially protected space out of bounds to all ranks. He had visited the commanders of both neighbour organisations, drunk studiedly deferential tea and let drop his close comradeship with General Yamashita in dewy-eyed accounts of sunlit, boyish romps together, sighingly recalling childhood like a secret conspiracy from which they, as outsiders, were excluded. In this way he had sown doubt and—like everything else in the rich tropical soil—it had thrust down roots and flourished, so that he was now seen as a man with special, and possibly limitless, personal connections, a man not to be crossed lightly and a man whose lawns and fenced boundaries were not to be crossed at all.
He motioned reluctant, disdainful Catchpole over and, together, they shouldered Pilchard up, like in a scene from Aida, and into the library where generations had demonstrated its suitability as a place for sleep. He felt surprisingly light to himself. Catchpole’s dangling hearing aid bashed Pilchard in the face, unheeded, at every step and cut his lip. Pilchard’s only half-formed thought was that it was curious that Dr Post was the one who was not deaf.
‘There, there,’ comforted Tanakdate vaguely fatherly, settling him in a most uneasy chair and modestly folding down the legs of his shorts as he wiped away blood with a snowy handkerchief, plucked from back pocket. ‘You’ll feel better after some food. Give him some tea, Dr, Catchpole.’ Catchpole scowled a ‘I’m-not-a-servant-you-know’ scowl but fetched, poured, then seized the tin of beans, swallowing eager saliva. There was a big, fat fly swimming in the tea, frothing it up with its death throes.
‘I’ll take these. No need for you to carry the can, as it were. There’s not much on the market of course, old man, but thanks to my old fishing contacts we’ve got loads of crabs. Make fantastic soup. Better than these beans. C
rabs, for some reason, seem to be doing very well this year. Just wait till you get a mouthful of my crab soup, old man. Put hair on your … Oh! … Oh I say!’
Tanakadate glided gently away to the window, as if defining Pilchard’s thin strings of vomit out of existence by not looking. A minor social faux pas, he seemed to say, do not speak of it. Instead, he peered down at Pilchard’s dirty yellow pass through pince-nez glasses and wrinkled his brow.
‘It says here … Actually, it’s not really clear. There is a muddle. It seems to imply … but then another soldier has written that you were definitely to come here not next door … Surely, they would never have sent you without an escort if they had meant … A useful ambiguity.’ He looked up with sudden decision. ‘I think perhaps we had better send you out to our colony, the Botanic Gardens, as soon as possible. Quieter there. Much more peaceful. Safer from our noisy neighbours.’ He glanced out of the window. The grey trucks, with their loads of swaying prisoners, were already reversing out and moving away, crashing gears, engines revving, in a cloud of blue smoke and dust. Silence descended like a blackout curtain.
* * *
They were back in the same room again in Hill Street. HK felt for the comforting gap in the chair’s pearl inlay with his little finger. The whole chair felt somehow even bigger today, himself even smaller. He was pleasantly astonished that his feet still reached to the floor. Even to himself, his voice bore tones of piping adolescence though he was already treading the outer edge of youth. In a couple of years, when people complained about ‘young people’, they would not mean him It was something to do with the unfathomable antiquity of Loh Ching and his own ruthless New Year haircut that made his ears stick out, though there were few other signs of the festival. The shops were empty of new clothes, fish and oranges. There were none of the necessary ingredients for the cake his mother made tearfully every year to distribute to relatives. No cheery British Tommies were abroad to shout, ‘I fuck. You enjoy!’ at respectable Chinese matrons, in emulation of New Year greetings. The Japanese had even banned the explosions and detonations of firecrackers that were so soothing to local ears. Later, he would go to Lily, who would console him, compliment him on his eager manliness, make everything all right again.
