Suddenly at Singapore

by Gavin Black

  “We are not to be relied on, Mr. Harris. How sensible not to trust me with your secrets. We are too emotional, I think. Perhaps we imagine wrongs that are not being done to us. Maybe we should accept politeness at face value. Your instinct was surely most sound. Such a fool, knowing too much, could be most dangerous. Now will you go? Will you go to hell?”

  It was only when I was in the Daimler again, riding out of the suburb where some of the streets had flower names, that I seemed to see beyond Sylvia Flores’s distress. She had nearly sent me to my death. And she must have had a good idea of what she was doing. She had hated Jeff, too.

  I thought of Kang then. The inspector would know how to get a statement. But I couldn’t do it, I didn’t want to. Let Kang follow his own trails.

  It was strange how spent I felt, as though all the wild anger from Jeff’s murder had been used. I was still half accepting the idea that Sorumbai lying shot on the road was enough, a price paid. In some way it seemed to be all that was needed, and everything that Kang said in the Penang hospital wasn’t quite real. I couldn’t accept what he had told me and from it whip up feeling again, perhaps because of that long time of physical helplessness. I had come out from being ill with the convalescent’s consciousness of body, the faint peevishness and irritation at the routine demands of living when you’re not quite able to take them easily. The minimum was enough, I didn’t want to add anything to it. I even liked Ruth’s Daimler these days, it trundled me along in an extreme of comfort, the windows shut, the temperature I wanted at a twist of a dial and someone else up in front doing the thinking.

  We get used to the idea of our dead sooner than we would imagine possible and memory classifies the sharpest love. Jeff had become a kind of monument in my mind, something fixed already, and I knew in a moment of honesty that I wanted it that way. I wanted to stay with the idea that a price had been paid for his killing, and that because of this I was free to get on with the pattern which was evolving, the pattern which always inevitably emerges and covers over.

  Ruth and I were building a house out at Changi. We’d soon have the plans of it, and then we’d be watching them stake out the foundation. I’d never built a house like this, nor had Ruth, and it was something exclusive to the new pattern, a beginning.

  I remembered then that I didn’t even know whether Kang had ever released the old fisherman. I must make a note to find out about that.

  The clerk at the hotel desk was Chinese, with sleek black hair and an American accent.

  “Miss Raine no longer lives in the hotel building, sir. She’s in one of our garden bungalows. If you just go through that arch and follow the path it’s the one at the very top.”

  It was a disciplined garden, the tropics held in check, with cropped blue-green grass and beds of regimented cannas showing full colour now that the sun was hazed by afternoon. There was the tinkle of water in a fountain and each of the bungalows had little concrete paths leading to them. They were spaced out, with shrubs for privacy. From one there was the sound of a radio playing and a fat man, glass in hand too soon, looked at me from a veranda. Then I heard the rattle of Kate’s typewriter.

  The rattle didn’t stop with my knock. She had something to get down and she did it. A chair scraped back.

  “Come in.”

  She was on her feet, across the room from me, the light on her face from a window without an awning. The room was neutral, not made personal by any evidence of her things, beyond that typewriter and papers on a table.

  “Do you mind if I come in and sit down? I’m not very good at standing yet.”

  I was using that, my stick and a limp, and Kate stood there looking as though she knew it. She was wearing slacks and a white shirt. Her face was pale and she looked older. She’d eaten off her lipstick.

  “I had to come, Kate, to take back something I said.”

  “When?” she asked, as though there had been a lot of times she could think of.

  “At the plane. When I was creating a diversion to bolt.”

  “Oh, that. You meant it, it wasn’t just a diversion.”

  I sat down, pushing out my stiff leg. I had the sense of her watching me doing everything for effect.

  “It was pretty inexcusable. I’m bitterly sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. But I’m a little curious as to why you’ve come about it now.”

  “I know who gave the tip-off about Kuantan. Just this afternoon I found out.”

  “And until this afternoon you thought it was me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for being honest. If I’d tipped them off about Kuantan why did I go to your wife as soon as I got back?”

  “It could have been clever to do that.”

  “I see. Well, I wasn’t doing it to be clever.”

  “I know now! But Kate …”

  “Well?”

  “There’s no use looking at me as if what I said was a kind of madness. It wasn’t and you know it. You’d given me up!”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Kate turned back to her desk for a packet of cigarettes.

  “Do you want one?” she asked.

  When I nodded she came across. I struck the match but as she bent over I didn’t try to look at her. She went to a chair and sat in it, pulling her long legs up with one arm round her knees.

  “You came here to make an apology or to interrogate me?”

  “I suppose both.”

  “All right, I’ll give you your answers, I won’t be mean. You say I’d given you up. It’s quite true I had. You never thought about why I might have done that?”

  “Not really.”

  Kate smiled then, as though for herself, as though something she had known all along was confirmed. She flexed the fingers of one hand, looking at them. She wasn’t going to look at me.

  “Paul, I think you did realise that it wasn’t easy for me to go away with you. It took a lot of working up to. I gave myself that label … The Cape Cod spinster. It’s not a bad label for me. But I had made my decision finally. I wanted you, any way I could. Then I got cold feet again. I was scared. I had the feeling that the thing which meant so much to me hadn’t quite the same rating with you.”

  For the second time that day I was getting a clear picture of myself from the outside, the kind of view you’re not let in on often. Kate let me in all right. I was getting it from all sides.

  She hadn’t slept the night before we went off. She stayed cold until that moment in the rubber plantation when she was in my arms. Then things came all right, she knew they’d work out for us. She had my assurance that I’d come away with her because it was the one thing I wanted, the one thing in my mind then.

  “I believed that, Paul. I suppose at my age I should have known that a woman is never the only thing in a man’s mind. But I didn’t think of that, I just believed you. Whatever happened afterwards Kuantan was going to be something apart for us, a special place. I was lying on my bed in the rest house thinking about us when the man with the gun came in. I should have been scared, so scared that it pushed everything else away, but I wasn’t. Before he said one word I knew why he was there. Intuition, maybe. I knew that you’d tricked me. We’d come to Kuantan, not for us, but because you had a job on. I guess if it had been a real love between us I’d have been frightened for you then. But I wasn’t. The only feeling I had was the one of being betrayed. By you. I knew you’d been using me. I was a handy means of transport!”

  “That’s not fair, Kate!”

  “Whether it’s fair or not, I’m telling you what I felt right then. It was as though something went dead, everything I’d been building up in my heart. You could hold me in your arms and lie to me, saying you wanted one thing when you were planning something else. I had a kind of numb feeling of loss, of something gone that I wouldn’t get back. I didn’t want it back, I just wanted to get away. I didn’t even much mind the man with the gun or what he was telling me to do. It didn’t seem to matter. I
can remember just sitting in that car with the wheel between my hands feeling sort of frozen. And when you came down those steps, I hadn’t anything to say, I didn’t want to say anything. Probably that was terrible of me, there should have been scraps of our old feeling lying around that I could have used then, but there weren’t. Maybe I go hard when I’m hurt bad, like I went that night. It isn’t a thing that’s happened that way before and I’ve no experience to go on. All I know is that it didn’t even get through to me … what you said as you got put of the car, not then. Later it did, but not then. I went on being frozen for a long time, Paul. Can you understand now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  She smiled again. It was stiff and formal. You can kill a love at an astonishing speed by too much anger in the mind, just having it sitting there. It happens even though the reason for anger may be wholly or partly false, and it had happened to both of us.

  In a little I got up and Kate asked me politely how my legs were getting on. She held open the door and didn’t close it too quickly as I went down the path.

  A week later we met again at the Chamber of Commerce Annual Ball. Ruth had a sore throat and at the last minute couldn’t come, so I went alone out of duty. I wasn’t able to do any dancing, but Kate was solidly out on the floor until I caught her at an interval and suggested a drink. It became a little habit after that for me to have drinks lined up waiting. We were remarkably comfortable together and when it was over I drove her home in the Bristol.

  “Don’t try to get out,” she said at her hotel. “Oh, I’ve been wondering … did Ruth know that you suspected me of having tipped your friends off about Kuantan?”

  “Yes, she did. And when I told her it was Sylvia Flores she said she knew all the time you couldn’t have done it.”

  “Nice of her. She’s asked me to your cocktail party.”

  “Well, I hope you’ll come.”

  Kate smiled.

  “Thanks, I will.”

  CHAPTER XI

  CHRISTMAS in a hot country is like a wine that won’t travel, a bit sour, you can pay the price but you don’t get value. We always had our big party on Boxing Day, to help everyone forget what was just over, when all the offices were still shut down and no one had anything to do but deal with a larger thirst than usual. Perhaps that was why our parties had rather got the reputation of being something. I insisted on the tree out on the lawn, where you could see it from a car as you came up the drive. We never used any artificial snow, just lights and glitter, and the tree itself came from Australia, the real thing, ten feet high, imported by Cold Storage, at a cost to me of three hundred dollars.

  There wouldn’t be another big party in this house. Jeff’s jerry-built, half Malayan Changi bungalow was down already, just a heap of builders’ rubbish, and where it had been a new plan was staked out on the ground, a huge living-room as the centre, which would have beyond it a vast paved terrace reaching almost to the line of casuarinas fringing the beach.

  The thought of the new house pleased me, but I had a kind of nostalgia for the old one, too, which Ruth didn’t share. I knew I would miss this garden right in the centre of a big town, a place sheltered by the Botanics and so screened by its own huge trees that you only heard the roar of the city, you couldn’t see a hint of it.

  It was a patchy garden, full of immovable memorials to former owners, a rose garden laboriously shaped and planted by some long gone English wife and a completely Chinese rockery taking up the area of a suburban building plot. Ruth hated this. I didn’t.

  A Chinese rockery isn’t a setting for rare plants, it’s all rock. These chunks of lava must once have been imported from South China and they were cemented together to a height, in some places, of seven or eight feet. In and out amongst the rocks were little paths, almost a maze, and these were gravelled. In the middle of the rockery you didn’t see a single growing thing, not a weed or pocket of flowers, just the grey of twisted volcanic stone. There were little artificial caves, too, three or four of them, the biggest with a cool marble seat in it. Up on the rock, out of reach, were niches in which sat mouldering plaster figures of Chinese gods and they gave the impression of having been put there to aid in a rich man’s meditations, perhaps upon his business errors.

  A visitor had once said our rockery was chilly, which was an odd way to describe something in Singapore. But it certainly was cool, holding shadow a lot of the time, and in a curious way its own air conditioning. It wasn’t easy for a breeze to work around that heaped rock, but a stillness held never seemed oppressive. Sound, too, was almost completely shut out.

  The party began well before the tropic dusk and by five there were cars parked solid along the drive up to the house. In the living-room and the spreading porches beyond it was that steady bellow from three hundred people all drinking fast and beginning not to care what they said so long as they said it.

  I liked playing host on this scale, the exhibitionism of it, the new surprise thought out each time. This year it involved a long section of veranda railing removed, with temporary steps put up, and streamers of Japanese lanterns leading out over the lawn as far as a kidney-shaped carp pool which was illumined, so that you saw huge fish moving in a sort of pinky translucence. The big tree sat by itself, glowing, on a little heaped up mound of packed turf.

  I knew that when the dark came the focus would shift to the garden and by that time the women would all have seen what their friends were wearing and be ready to move out.

  We would have the main food outside, too, and this was to be pretty solid, much more than the canapés Ruth had been willing to make.

  Ruth liked the big parties best, where as hostess she had an automatic status and not too onerous duties. She had only to move about, dressed slightly better than anyone else, and the shouting clumps opened to let her in and to let her out again when she wanted. She wore pale green taffeta, inspired by Balmain, but created by Miss Lottie Woo of Bintang Road. The dress was loosely draped at the neck, then tight fitting to above the knees where it boxed out suddenly. It had been designed for Ruth’s emeralds, a small necklace, ear-rings and a bracelet, which I’d given her after Booney came, but until to-night I hadn’t seen the set for years.

  Something had gone wrong with Ruth’s hair at the last moment and when I knocked to call her for the pre-guests drink she had shouted out:

  “No, don’t come in. Everything’s gone wrong. I look like an old hag.”

  I had that drink by myself and Ruth appeared as I greeted the first foursome and car doors were beginning to slam. She came sailing down the hall looking as though she had enjoyed the services of three maids working on her for a couple of hours.

  Russell Menzies came with Kate. He was wearing a cream coloured pongee suit which suggested he had just got up from a long afternoon nap in a deep chair and Kate had made the mistake which nearly every European woman in the Orient makes once. She was in a cheong sam of white brocaded silk in which she looked bigger and bonier than she was. White isn’t a good colour for the tropics, either, and Kate looked as though she had suddenly realised this, conscious of the fact that my boys and the ten hired waiters were wearing it. And no one else.

  “Lead us to the champagne,” Russell said. “That’s my sole purpose in being here. You’ve got some?”

  “We’ve got everything, bud.”

  Russell looked at Kate.

  “There’s a new spirit abroad these days. The rich aren’t ashamed to be ostentatious any more. This boy’s an absolute flash Harry. And right here in these rooms, my dear, is a concentration of money the like of which you probably couldn’t assemble anywhere else in the Orient, except perhaps Hong Kong.”

  “Chinese, too,” Kate said in a low voice.

  “All millionaires, every one. Otherwise they wouldn’t get past the door. Paul doesn’t really like them.”

  “Keep your voice down,” I said. “Have you been drinking?”

  “I had my usual preliminary tonic, j
ust to get me over the first five minutes. And there’s a client I want to nab. Look after Kate.”

  She looked at me.

  “I rather feel I need looking after, Paul. A newspaper woman ought to know more people than I seem to.”

  Her bag was too large for the skin-tight brocade. She shifted it from one arm to the other, and then looked down.

  “I look like I was going marketing. I thought all this was a brilliant idea. I thought I was the type, you know, non-busty. But I’m not.”

  “Kate, you need a gin. Here.”

  “Thanks. That’s just what I do need. I’m a big girl but I always feel like this coming to a party, shivery at the outer edges.”

  “The thing is to plunge in. Come with me. What kind of millionaires interest you?”

  “I’ve been investigating the oil palm business. Anything to offer?”

  “Yes. There’s de Roocher. He’s a kind of king of the French interests. He likes American gals.”

  “Don’t try to comfort me. In a minute or two I won’t be suffering.”

  I felt, though, that she wanted me to stay around and I did. De Roocher was at once charming, still in the company of his wife, who, like so many French women of the upper classes, was elaborately chic with a face of surprising ugliness under hair that sat on her head like a wig. But after all they marry for practical considerations, not sentiment, and this is never forgotten. De Roocher hadn’t the smallest qualm about elaborate gallantries to other women in front of his wife. In a remarkably short while he had contrived, in some way, to be holding Kate’s free hand. I led Madame away to meet an amiable old president of an ointment company called Wan Win Fung. It is always safe to lead the French to the Chinese, the only other people in the world they will allow any claim to be civilisé.

  I was keeping my eye on the time. It wouldn’t be long now before the lights came on in all those garden lanterns. I looked about for Ruth, but there were many scrums in which she could be hidden, and then, the host inspecting arrangements about to be revealed, I went down steps to the lawn.