Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  Ginny was determined to throw a proper Chinese banquet for Charlie and me. So weak was she that she could do no cooking. In the end, she had to settle for a modest affair. Charlie and I spent a day shopping, buying farewell presents for Jean, Ginny, and Wang, as well as taking them a Jeepload of groceries from the store of loot in the sergeants’ mess. Whatever happened, Jean was cool and collected as ever, and showed no agitation. He said that an Indonesian official had promised that he might get his plantation back once the Dutch had left. When that would be, no one could say.

  The British had one small trick up their sleeve. The rear party was geared to leave on the fourteenth, a day before the time announced. Thus we hoped to avoid any last-minute acts of violence. Zajac told me this late on the thirteenth. For once security had functioned properly. By that time, Mandy should have left on the Van Heutz – but the Van Heutz had been inexplicably delayed, and had not reached Belawan. It was not unusual for the ship to suffer delays; the poor old lady, feeling her age, was always undergoing mechanical repair.

  So the next day it was Mandy who said a tearful goodbye to me, flinging her arms about my neck and kissing me over and over.

  ‘We’ll be together in a very few days,’ I said. ‘I’ll find out the time the ship arrives and I’ll be waiting for you on the quayside in Singapore. That’s a promise.’

  ‘Please, please be there. I’m so frightened of what may happen. I would die if I never saw you again.’

  I drove Captain Zajac down to Belawan, with the rear of the Jeep filled with luggage that was mainly his. As if news had got about, there were people on the wild road, waving and smiling and shouting ‘Merdeka!’, happy to see us go, just as they had once been glad to see us arrive.

  With a minimum of delay, we were loaded on to the landing craft in the docks, which then made a slow progress out to sea. I had charge of the luggage. Zajac, as an officer, was taken out in a faster and more elegant craft.

  Once aboard the San Salvrino, we underwent the usual wait, two miles out from harbour. Sumatra was now reduced to a flat and unpromising line of mangroves; far in the background floated remote and lofty mountains, some of their peaks clothed in cloud.

  It was impossible to blot from my mind the question of Mandy – and the whole problem of Ginny and Jean’s future in the new Sumatra. Ginny had said goodbye so bravely, with her usual bright smile. But who could say what lay in their future? I had decided that, whatever my doubts, they must be subordinated to rescuing Mandy. Once she had left the country, the others would be tempted to follow, and remove themselves to safety. There were surely plenty of places in Malaysia where an experienced planter like Jean Mercier would be welcome.

  As, at last, the San Salvrino upped anchor, I knew with a heavy heart that a period in history was over, and that Sumatra, for good or ill, would never be the same again. I also realized that I was probably the only one who would come to tell its story: for already I felt that here were tragic times, and that the ignorant British ought to know something about a place for which they currently cared less than nothing.

  I could not wrench my vision from those shores where my emotions had been so exercised. Tears burned in my eyes. No one has felt the true hollow tooth of sorrow who has not sailed from the place they love; the movement of a ship is as remorseless as time. At last impatient with my own melancholy, I broke away and took a turn round the deck.

  Everyone else was jubilant at our departure.

  As we swung about, to head in the general direction of Singapore, I observed out to sea a ship I recognized immediately as that steamer upon which so many futures had depended, the Van Heutz itself. It lay with a decided list to starboard. There was no sound of engines emanating from it, no movement on its deck.

  We drew nearer, eventually passing within a few hundred yards of the other vessel. The truth was already apparent. The Van Heutz had stuck on a sandbank and was abandoned.

  The spectacular and busy harbour of Singapore formed as great a contrast to Belawan as you might find within such a short distance. On disembarkation we were driven by lorry to Nee Soon Transit Camp in the centre of the island. As soon as I could, I was out of camp again, and making enquiries of the port authorities. I was told it was hoped to tow the Van Heutz back to Singapore, where the damage to its propellers could be repaired. There were many shifting sandbanks in the Belawan area, which would soon be properly charted and marked by buoys.

  On the following day, I was down at the docks again. All round about, Singapore was furiously at work, remedying three years of neglect and oppression. Shipyards and factories were opening again. Immense though the flow of refugees was into the old grey city, there was work for everyone, and the Chinese worked with a great will. I had no interest in anything but the waters of the harbour. The roads were congested with shipping. Among those ships about midday came a cripple, towed by a pair of Chinese-manned tugs, the Van Heutz.

  How insignificant that steamer looked now, the ship which had played such a large part in the history of so many lives. It was rusted and patched and leaky; strange to think that anyone had placed their future hopes on it. But for the war, it would have been dispatched to the scrapyard before this. Instead, it was moored against a distant wharf for repair. Two days later, the foreman told me that the Van Heutz would not be sailing again until the following week.

  A week! It was a villainous stretch of time. I had no way of getting in touch with Mandy except by letter – which would have had to be delivered by the Van Heutz itself. She had no way of getting in touch with me. She did not know my address. We had parted – for all the heartache, I now saw that we had parted so casually, so certain that we would be in each other’s embrace again within no more than a few hours. We had not reckoned on the Tumbledown Factor … Now as never before in this time of dismay I realized that I did indeed love and need her.

  By a stroke of luck, I had brought with me the address of her cousins, recently arrived in Singapore from Amoy. I could go and see them.

  Singapore was a huge ragged city, left drab and unpainted after the Japanese occupation, but bustling with life, and not without touches of glamour. I noted with satisfaction that the cinemas were large and smart affairs, prone to giving special midnight matinees. The array of cafés was inexhaustible. From every shop flowed the music of Chinese opera, the outpouring of a sensibility of which I understood little. The whores seemed of an unparalleled elegance. Only on a later visit, after Singapore had set itself up as an independent city state, did I realize how run down the city really was in that immediate post-war period when the Union Jack still flew there; but I was seeing it for the first time with eyes accustomed to almost a year on Sumatra, and its vivacity was astonishing. Later, of course, the skyscrapers went up, and all the music was banished.

  The Tans were staying in a green suburb of Singapore, in a fine wooden bungalow which had probably belonged to English traders who – for whatever reason – had not returned after the freeing of the island. Or rather, the Tans had found a home in the garden of this bungalow, for the bungalow was already well-occupied. The Tans, seven of them all told, including a young baby, lived in what had been a summerhouse, against which an impromptu kitchen had been built. They were refugees from the struggle between Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces and the Communist forces of Mao; in China, the great world struggle was still in process.

  Mr Tan Senior spoke some English. Of course he had heard nothing from Medan, but he made promising noises. I left it for a week before returning, by which time the repaired Van Heutz was again operating its timetable.

  On that second occasion, none of the Tans was about. I returned in the evening. With the resourcefulness of their race, all had got jobs of some kind, leaving the smallest children to be looked after by an old lady in the bungalow. They had an income; they were on their way up again. But they had received no letter from Medan.

  Ten days passed. I did not know what to fear or what to hope. I spent some while on guard du
ties in the abysmal Nee Soon camp, which was either intolerably full, with five thousand men passing through it and all facilities overstrained, or it was almost empty and those unfortunates remaining were tied to duties of various unpleasant kinds.

  Meanwhile, 26 Indian Division had been dissolved. Our Indians had all been shipped back to India. There had been no passing-out parade. A post-war lassitude had set in. Over all was that gloomy feeling that the Sumatra operation had been a disaster, reflecting no credit on men or officers, to be forgotten as swiftly as possible.

  No posting came through for me, for which I was relieved. There were rumours, those eternal army rumours, that I might be posted to Shanghai – rumours which in ordinary times would have delighted me.

  The days went by. Something was wrong; otherwise, why had Mandy not appeared, or at least sent word? The Van Heutz laboured into harbour once more after having made her rounds. I was there to meet her, but no familiar figure disembarked. I went back to the Tans’ place in the evening.

  Of course Mandy had not arrived. But there was a letter for me.

  She wrote quite briefly. The ship had been delayed. Then Ginny became more ill and had to go back to hospital. The cancer had spread and she had died there. Ginny sent me God’s blessing.

  It was impossible for Mandy to leave, at least for a while. She had transferred her booking to the sailing on October 10th. ‘Then I give myself to you. Please be there for me. Poor Jean weeps.’

  It was a Tuesday evening when I read this letter. I took it away and wept. On the Thursday morning my posting came up. I was to leave for Hong Kong on the following day, when a lorry would collect me at 0600 hours.

  I never saw Mandy again. Circumstances had come between us, and the great grinding machine of the world. I wrote to Mandy from Hong Kong and eventually received a letter back. It was very terse, from grief or because, not understanding the workings of the army, she felt betrayed. She had arrived in Singapore, but there was nothing for her in the city, and she was going to return to Medan. ‘I did not visit Happy World without you.’

  Something happened to me. I had kissed the joy as it flies. But whether to be glad or sorry that it had escaped me I knew not, and not knowing was part of the torment I then underwent. After the war, I imagine, many men and women must have suffered a loss of wartime love, the most painful kind of affection, which pits its spark against annihilation’s waste.

  How my gentle girl fared under the Indonesian Republic without her protective sister, I never discovered.

  In Hong Kong, that luxurious commercial capital of the flesh, I fell into a debauched way of life. Every temptation was there, and I applied myself to it. The flesh tried to drown out the soul.

  More than once, staggering from one knocking shop or another, in Hong Kong or Macao, the vision of Corporal Jones would rise before me, as he coughed his unused life out in the Medan gutter. At least he had not had to face an existence after the high tide of it had fallen away.

  By this time I was an old man of twenty-one. The two campaigns of Burma and Sumatra had been more than enough. After either, I should by rights have been drafted home. But the army in the Far East did not work that way, preferring to drain the young life out of its soldiery. In Hong Kong I fell into the same stained, cynical way of thought that had afflicted the men of 2 Div when I joined them as a pale reinforcement at Milestone 81. Such was the price to pay for being a cog of Empire – an empire which was even then disintegrating, just as I felt myself to be. The sacrifice of years was for little, for nothing. Burma went back to the Burmese. Sumatra went back to the Indonesians. Glory was not to be had. Such disillusion was inevitable in the tide of history, that notorious disrespecter of persons.

  9

  Clement shaved in mild good humour. He had no objection to the start of another day. Sheila was still dozing in bed. Peering through the bathroom window at Friday, he saw every sign that sunshine would prevail again. The smell of coffee floated to him from downstairs. He mingled with it the tang of his salvia after-shave lotion.

  How blessed, he thought, was domesticity.

  Michelin was laying out a few breakfast things when he arrived downstairs. It happened that as he entered the dining room in his slippers, the French woman was reaching across the table, in such a way that he was presented with the long inviting line of her trunk, buttocks, and left leg – all veiled in blouse, skirt, and tights, but pleasing nevertheless. Of course, Michelin was sexless; Clement and Sheila had established that long ago, otherwise there would have been nothing of the stability the three of them enjoyed together.

  They had given Michelin a lift while driving about France on holiday in the mid-seventies. She had helped them to find a particularly well-hidden hotel in the Gorges du Tarn, and they had christened her ‘Michelin’ then, on the flimsy basis that her name was Michelle. Somehow, the joke had stuck. So had Michelin. She was then a delicate little woman in her early thirties, hoping to get to England to teach. The Winters, still suffering from the loss of their child, had virtually adopted her. She came back to England with them, and stayed.

  Michelin was now a sturdy woman in her mid-forties, with a regular teaching job at St Emma’s just up the road. She acted as a kind of unofficial housekeeper to the Winters in exchange for free board and lodging. She enjoyed a wide circle of acquaintances in Oxford, many of them French.

  Within the close confines of Chalfont Road, where the Winters then lived, Clement had entertained luxurious thoughts concerning the young woman they had picked up. On a sunny autumn afternoon when Sheila was away, he had made what for him was a determined attempt to seduce her, after cornering her in the little room he used as a study.

  ‘I like you very well, Clem,’ Michelin said, pushing him away. He still remembered her words. ‘But my soul is in China.’

  He had not understood her meaning. Had she translated an obscure French saying, meaning she was sexless, or a lesbian? He found somewhere that the phrase might imply that she was mad; but Michelin was clearly sane. In any case, the ambiguity served as a barrier between them. With time, Clement and Sheila persuaded themselves that their companion, who never once showed any interest in the opposite sex, was without the normal passions which bedevil humanity.

  Clement had several theories as to why Michelin had no sex life, but all had been run through and exhausted long ago. He exchanged a few pleasantries with her and lapsed into his chair with the Independent, thinking about adultery and the prestige in which it was still held.

  Possibly he had dreamed of Tristan and Isolde. Had he in some way been Tristan, in a gold tunic? After Sheila left for the States and before he followed her there, he had gone with friends to see a performance of Wagner’s opera, with its music reinforcing the hopeless passion of the lovers. Although the origins of the legend were obscure, he understood well that it represented the triumph of passionate love over conventional morality. In his student days, he had written a paper on it, Irresponsibility in the Tristan Legend.

  His brother’s love for the Chinese woman, Mandy, had tragic elements. Although neither of them had died on stage, as it were, it was possible that Joseph had sealed Mandy’s fate by leaving her in Sumatra. In Wagner’s opera, the passion between the couple was represented as a transcendent value, necessitating the deaths of both parties. The passion between Joseph and Mandy had not been strong enough either to overcome all obstacles or to bring about their deaths directly. Life had brought compromises which were not the province of Art. And yet, Clement knew, his brother always considered himself marked by this youthful affair.

  Of course life tried to imitate art. What else was there to imitate? Two rival artistic stereotypes held sway over his colleagues and friends, causing much confusion in their lives. On the one hand lay the old Sentimental view of the happy family, with wife and home as the centre of the world; on the other was the Romantic ideal of love – or at least sex – conquering all. Many of Clement’s patients subscribed to both as and when it suited them.
The torment of these two conflicting theories was reflected in the popular arts.

  Even in Sheila’s fantasy world of Kerinth, both rival theories flourished, with no attempt made to adjudicate between them. In The Heart of Kerinth, the lovely Queen Gyronee had laid down her life for her thankless children, whereas, in Kerinth Endures, the noble barbarian Thek died a Tristan-like death for love of the Princess Zimner, who was married to the ruthless Marlat of Cyn, the Dark Planet. He could write a paper on Confused Moral Attitudes in the Kerinth Novels for who, except for a few injudicious fans, knew those novels better than he? – apart from the certainty that it would destroy his marriage.

  One trouble with Joseph, Clement thought, was that he had been dogged throughout his Sumatra affair by a sense of shame, a false sense inculcated by their parents and the hypocrisies of that generation to which in fact the war would give the kibosh. Had Joseph been able to relish his conquest of the Chinese lady fully and completely, perhaps even to boast of it in the sergeants’ mess, instead of keeping it as an uneasy secret, then perhaps he might have been bolder in general and won the lady … if, indeed, that was what he really wanted. It seemed to Clement that Joseph fully realized there would have been no place for his and Mandy’s union in the forties. By the eighties, such colour prejudice had worn a little thin. Air travel had brought miscegenation into every home.

  He could give his brother’s story to Sheila, to turn into a suitable Kerinthian fiction. And of course he could use its outline in his thesis on adaptability.

  But what to do regarding Sheila’s performance as Isolde? That was the question. Clement thought he saw this morning, as he munched a piece of toast, that that Hispanic fellow in Boston had been merely an interlude, a boffe de politesse – her coupling with that phantom lover, Fame. Boston, to all intents and purposes, was now as far distant as Joseph’s Sumatra. He should be as complacent as Mandy’s husband Wang had been. Clement was prepared to forgive the action; it was the words at which he stumbled. ‘I’m enjoying it too much to stop…’