Suddenly at Singapore

by Gavin Black

  “Into that side street!”

  “I know,” she said. “You’d better keep down out of sight.”

  “Anybody seen us from the pavement?”

  “No. I couldn’t see anyone standing around, if that’s what you mean.”

  She was in the side street, swinging down towards the bund. If the boys had a car it would take them time to get to it. And they hadn’t spotted the Ford, I was sure of that.

  “For a girl who’s new to this you handled that very smoothly.”

  “Paul, keep down! You can see into this car from every angle. I’m scared of traffic lights.”

  “Stay on the bund as long as you can.”

  The lights were green for us. We had luck there, it cheered me. Soon we were on the road I wanted, climbing up past the golf course towards the Causeway. I scrambled over into the front seat.

  “It’s too soon for you to be up here!” Kate said.

  “Pull in for a minute. I want to drive.”

  “No. Paul, it’s my car. I …”

  “No time for temperament, come on.”

  I more or less lifted her over my knees. Then we were moving again. Kate didn’t think this was fun. She dug in a compartment for cigarettes and lit one.

  “Remember me,” I said.

  I got it still damp from her lipstick.

  “I didn’t notice your suitcase,” she said.

  “I couldn’t even risk an attaché case. I’ll buy what I need in Gemas.”

  “It must be wonderful to be rich enough to outfit yourself for each trip as you go along.”

  “It certainly builds up your stock of pyjamas.”

  She didn’t laugh. I took a quick look at her.

  “Kate, I’m sorry. But I told you how it would have to be.”

  “I know. I was in the mood then.”

  “You’re not any more?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “I guess it must have been the waiting by the pavement with your engine running. Did it make it feel like a bank robbery?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “It’s not a bank robbery. You didn’t want three boys with us on our trip north, did you?”

  “Is that the only reason for all this, Paul?”

  “Could there be any other?”

  “You hate to give a straight answer to a plain question, don’t you? Yes, I can think of a hell of a lot of other reasons why you wanted to shake off a police guard.”

  “Well, put them all out of your mind.”

  “Paul, I’ve got the oddest feeling that you’ll keep me talking until we get over the Causeway to Johore Bahru. After that, if I want to go back, you’ll let me.”

  That was a shock.

  “This wasn’t my idea,” I said. “Going away at all.”

  “Okay, I was Eve holding out the big juicy apple.”

  I braked the Ford and swung it into a side road. Then I got into reverse.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going back to Singapore.”

  “Don’t be a fool! Oh …”

  “Tell me if the road’s clear. I’ll do an illegal sweep.”

  “No. Go on! Stop this. I don’t want to be put to any tests.”

  We didn’t talk again until we were over the Causeway and through Johore Bahru. The Ford was four years old, Kate had got it second-hand, but it was still fast. It liked the kind of roads it was being given, too.

  I didn’t like the silence between Kate and me, it underlined something, the thing I had begun to feel back in my office after Russell left, that I was alone, completely. It wasn’t something I’d ever had to be before, not in this sense, of patterns too involved to be given up binding me to a continuing emptiness. I still wanted to go on doing what I felt had to be done, but I needed someone to turn to. I needed Kate then, not caught in the patterns with me, but Kate just saying without any reservations that I was the man she would put up with a lot to have.

  It was the simple need of a man for a woman’s feeling that you never get away from, and when you don’t have it the compensations aren’t any good. I was sure Jeff had been wrong, that love was something you played for even when the stakes began to look impossibly high.

  I needed Kate then in so much more than the gesture she had decided to make. Of course I wanted the things we hadn’t had, but not as an end, I wanted love as a refuge as well as a comfort and there didn’t seem any way I could tell her this.

  “You won’t have eaten, Paul?”

  “No.”

  “I brought a lunch. Made by me. Would you like me to feed you, or do you want to stop?”

  “I’d rather not stop at the moment.”

  “All right.”

  There was a rustling of paper.

  “Egg and Australian cress?” Kate asked.

  “That sounds wonderful.”

  She didn’t eat much, but I was hungry. She handed me sandwiches and then a banana and finally Coca-Cola in a plastic cup, a regular kids’ picnic packed for a summer outing to pick blueberries.

  I drove for about hall an hour after that before Kate said:

  “Now when you’ve got your pyjamas, and toothbrush and a razor we’re all set, aren’t we?”

  I didn’t ask her if she wanted to leave me at the next town and turn back. I swung the car off into a track amongst rubber trees, yanked up the hand-brake and turned to her.

  “You say it’s easy for me to tell you I love you. So I’m not going to do that. All I want to say is that if I’d gone through with this there’d have been one reason for it. That I wanted it more than anything else. That I wanted you that way.”

  She was staring. Maybe I shivered, I don’t know, but it did feel cold in that car, back in the shade from the sweltering road.

  “I can get out here, Kate. I know the man who owns this estate. Just like you said. I’ve got as far as I need to go. I can let you go back. All right. We don’t meet any more. You think a lot of things are easy for me. They’re not. Believe me, they’re not.”

  Her lips opened a little.

  “Oh, Paul!” It was like a moan. “Oh, my sweet.”

  Then she was holding me and I was holding her and out there the rubber nuts made their sharp, sudden crack as they fell. Kate’s lips were wet and soft. Her body moved against mine and there weren’t any brakes on that.

  “You can see why I’m afraid,” she said after a time. “It’s taken me so.”

  “Yes, honey. Do we drive on?”

  “Of course. Of course!”

  “Before we do there’s something. It’s Ruth. I don’t know where I am there. I mean I don’t see the way out. She’s not going back to America. She told me so at breakfast. She said she wanted me to understand that.”

  “Paul, it’s something for us to face together. Whatever comes. I know it now.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Oh, I’m so sure.”

  I wasn’t. But I wouldn’t let myself think about that. I’d got a door open and I was going through it.

  Kate came with me to buy the pyjamas at Gemas.

  “You British and your stripes. What about these?”

  “Scare the monkeys,” I said.

  “We’ll have them,” Kate told the clerk. “And look here, something you’ve always needed. An electric razor. Seventy dollars. That’s cheap.”

  “Made in Japan.”

  “No, sir,” said the clerk.

  I picked up the box. On the bottom was a small circle with “Birmingham Made” written in it.

  “The new suburb of Osaka,” I said. “An economy Gillette for me.”

  “He’s always had a mean streak,” Kate told the clerk, who looked worried.

  I let Kate drive after that. She was more considerate of her own car, and never went above sixty. A faint smell of hot rubber had begun to come out of the air-conditioning vent so we switched it off and turned down the windows, letting the hum come in and the feel of passing jungle, the heavy sour sweet scent of it. Once we saw
some gibbons.

  “What’s Kuantan like?”

  “It’s a cute little town, mostly white, on a coast that hasn’t many.”

  “What made you choose it specially?”

  “I’ve got a friend there I want you to meet.”

  “Perfect. We run away from the world to a place where you’ve got a friend waiting.”

  “I said I wanted you to meet him.”

  She laughed.

  “I don’t mind. I’ll meet anyone. Maybe he’ll ask us to dinner so we can get over all that dreadful sitting around looking at each other. Who is he?”

  “A Dutchman called de Vorwooerd. He used to live in Java. He got kicked out when they all were. Jeff and I plucked him off the Oranje on her way through here for Holland. He’s not young and he was sick. He used to be a friend of my father’s.”

  “And why does he live in Kuantan?”

  “Well, Jeff fixed it. That was all he wanted, somewhere quiet where he could hear the casuarinas and keep looking at palms. He didn’t want Holland, which would have been pretty but strange.”

  “I see. One of you.”

  “That’s right, one of us. The first de Vorwooerd went to Java in seventeen hundred and four. You’d have thought that after twelve generations he had a claim on the place. But he was kicked out. Kuantan smells like home and looks pretty much like it. I think he’s happy enough, even though it is an end.”

  “Has he no family?”

  “Not near, they’re all dead.”

  “How does he live? Did he get money out of Java?”

  I laughed.

  “You’re a newspaper woman. You should know the answer to that. You don’t get your money out when you’re a refugee, not unless you quit early. He didn’t. The Dutch handled those refugees wonderfully, thousands and thousands of them, shipped out after three hundred years. And nobody squawked much. De Vorwooerd was just one of those it wasn’t going to be easy to re-orientate. And there was this job which means living in Kuantan. Local collector of chicle.”

  “For chewing gum?”

  “That’s it. The old man’s done very well. He earns his own living and knows it. Got a very nice house. I want you to see it.”

  “And why did you want him to talk to me? He doesn’t sound like much of an argument for the white man’s future out here.”

  “In a way I think he is. And the history of this part is still being written.”

  “It can still get people killed.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. We were coming into Kuala Lipis, a pretty town, which looks as though history had slipped by it, leaving always this late afternoon quietness. We were on the other side of the spine of mountains, with a river to cross and then a forty mile road through jungle that was real and almost unbroken. It was a road I remembered from fighting at two ferries and the way the Nips came popping out of that jungle when you thought you were safe from them for an hour or so. I could remember what it was like still to be in my teens and see something pouring over you it was too late to stop. It was all so quiet now that memory seemed sometimes to have played me false.

  “It’s lovely,” Kate said on the Kuantan road, between the massive hardwoods that went up to a hundred and fifty feet.

  You had the feeling going down that road that you were getting away from things, so far that you couldn’t be followed. Whatever was at the end of it would be safe, could be held intact.

  I loved Kate, watching her drive away from the sunset, but with the red light of it chasing us.

  CHAPTER V

  IN HER ROOM at the Kuantan rest house Kate put her hands on my shoulders.

  “I’m going to like it here. You can smell the sea, not Singapore drains. You want to go and see your old man, don’t you?”

  “There’s no hurry for that.”

  “I’m being sweet and understanding. We’re going to hold things like that for ever.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Say it louder.”

  “That’s right!”

  I kissed her.

  “You need a bath, dear,” she said.

  “I’m going to have one. I’ll order dinner for about eight-thirty or nine. We’ll sit on the veranda with drinks before it.”

  Kate laughed.

  “Everything for our evening beautifully worked out. Is that to salve your conscience for leaving me now? Don’t bother, Paul. I’m perfectly happy to be left. I’m going to lie down and have a rest on my bed. Though I will admit that I was a bit suspicious when you told me about your friend.”

  “Suspicious of what?”

  “Oh, that Kuantan meant something more to you than just a nice place to take me. You can’t blame a gal for being suspicious, not with your record. But I’ve got over it. I’ve got the feeling I’ll always remember this town as the place you brought me to. Are you going to remember it like that?”

  “Yes, Kate.”

  “Don’t force yourself too hard. I know it’s not easy for men to switch on the sentiment about place. You know something, I can remember seeing a revival of a Greta Garbo picture in which she goes round the room where she had been happy with her boy friend kissing bits of the furniture. I laughed myself silly”

  “I hope you still would,” I said.

  “Yes, I still would. I won’t waste time on the furniture. At the same time this is something terribly special for me, you’ve got to allow that. I want the feeling for just a little that this is our world that nothing can intrude on. That’s the way you want it, too, isn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  “So long as I’m sure,” she said.

  I went out, not feeling too happy, to have a bath. I changed into a clean shirt which had also come from Gemas and went down the stairs. There were three miners in the rest house from the tin place at Sungei Goloh back in the hills, in to the nearest bar for a couple of days. They offered their society at once and I had a drink with them. I told them I was an agent for de Vorwooerd’s chicle, an excuse I’d used before in the place.

  “Don’t tell me that’s your secretary?” one of them asked.

  “No, American journalist. Writing up chewing gum”

  “Is she interested in tin mines? I could show her the deepest one in the world. I didn’t think girls who looked like that ever left Singapore.”

  It took me twenty minutes to get away from them. I couldn’t see now that peaceful evening with drinks on the veranda. The miners would stay half sober this time and put on the gramophone and Kate would have to dance with them. I went up a street wondering how she was going to like that.

  De Vorwooerd’s house was down by the river, with a garden that ran down to it. The whole place was surrounded by an enormous hibiscus hedge which he had planted and cultivated, perhaps from an urge to put a screen about what was left of his life. There was an arched wooden gate you couldn’t see through and from this a path straight up to the veranda steps.

  It was a new house, but built in the old manner of wood and thatch, with a series of rooms falling back from the porches, all softly lit and the boy never put out any of those lights until de Vorwooerd went to bed. It was the kind of house which offers you choice the moment you go in, almost choice for moods, the verandas which were mainly screened and hung with plants and green lights, where you could hear the sea, or the main room with one wall of books, with an arch from it to a dining-room and beyond that de Vorwooerd’s study.

  That was where I found the old man. No boy had met me, I had simply walked through rooms until I found him. He was sitting in a chair under a reading light beamed on to his book. His scanty hair was white and also his clipped Vandyke beard. His skin was wrinkled, but brown and nut-like, healthy looking, his eyes a bright blue. He looked at me, put in a bookmark and closed his book.

  “Well,” he said. “I was hoping it was a mistake.”

  “I hadn’t any choice.”

  “You mean you were rattled?”

  “No. Jeff told me he was expecting this. The who
le of the straits are patrolled. There is no other way. I’d have come here even if I hadn’t heard from Kim Sung.”

  “He told me about using the phone. Madness.”

  “He’s been here?”

  “Yes. Gone away again. Back to his junks. They’re in an estuary of the river.”

  “He had no trouble getting the stuff off the Misuni Maru?”

  “I didn’t ask him. Paul, this is madness!” He gestured with his hands. His beard twitched as though he was trying to control the movement of his face. “I’m still not over what happened to your brother. Sickened.”

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t write. An old man sitting here. I couldn’t write. What could I have said on paper?”

  “Don’t talk about it, de Vorwooerd.”

  “No. We won’t talk about it. Send them away. Send your junks away.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You could easily enough. You’ve only to give the order.”

  “It’s too late. I phoned up from Gemas. The lorries will be here.”

  “You trust a Chinese contractor?”

  “This one, yes. There’s enough money involved.”

  “There’d be more money for selling you out.”

  “This man won’t do it. There’s as much at stake for him as me. I’ve used this overland route twice before.”

  “Yes, but now they’re much nearer, they’re watching. Don’t ask me how I know, I do. They’re stronger, Paul. I’m an old man. What you’re doing isn’t going to stop them. You know that yourself.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then why go on?” He paused. “No, no, I don’t ask you that. Mix yourself a drink.”

  I went over to a table thinking that our security wasn’t too good, this talk in a room that opened into another and then another. His boys might be spies, though that wasn’t likely, they were Malays from Trengganu. He’d had experience of spies amongst his servants and knew what to look for.

  “What for you?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I can’t take it any more. That’s what our doctor says. He’s a Tamil and a fool, but I obey him. I fan my little life.”

  “I hope you go on doing that a long time.”

  “Yes, yes. Paul, it took away a lot of my courage, what happened to your brother. Not for myself. I don’t mind what happens. Why should I? But you should mind. You know what I say to you now? Get out of Malaya!”