The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

by Brian Aldiss

  The general consensus of opinion was that my timely warning had saved everyone from following Sontrop and Co. into the grave. Drinks and big fat cigars were thrust upon me; I was engulfed in broken English and gold-toothed smiles. An aged aunt of Jan de Zwaan’s, who had spent the war interned in a Jap prison camp, made everyone drink a toast to me. Shame rose red in my cheeks. If only they knew how the heart to fight, so strong in Assam, had left me! If they’d seen me crying in the go-down … I thanked them. When I announced that I was starting on the road back to England the next day, they cried and protested, and more drink went the rounds.

  Jhamboo insisted on shaking my hand, too.

  ‘Acute observation on your part, Sergeant Stubbs. You add one more small detail to the heroism of the British and Indian armies. The Empire depends on such valour. Tomorrow, I shall break this wretched “O” Section mutiny by facing the men myself. That I’m determined. You will be in the air then, but you must think of me, facing my very last challenge as a commissioned officer. I shall shoot to kill if they charge at me, and you will read the incident in The Times.’

  ‘Actually, I think it was hangovers as much as mutiny, sir.’

  ‘Nonsense, nonsense – mutiny is mutiny, and I shall stand firm.’

  ‘I’ll be thinking of you, sir. Good luck, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant Stubbs.’ His moustache vibrated.

  We saluted each other. The Dutch major with the crew-cut applauded.

  After all this, it was inevitable that we moved en masse to the Dutch major’s bungalow in the RAPWI area. There was a sense of surprise when we emerged from the undertaker’s parlour into the street, to find that the burnt-out lorry was still there and the trees by the cemetery still smouldering. I was bundled into a civilian car, where I immediately started to weep gin-flavoured tears on some woman’s shoulder.

  At the major’s place music flowed as well as drink. The major began to laugh a great deal. Several attractive pushers showed up, wearing low-cut dresses. A party got under way. Everyone became light-hearted, even the older people and Jan’s aged auntie. A gramophone was brought in. A big gleaming blonde took charge of it and played ‘Dark Town Strutters Ball’ over and over.

  I’ll be round to meet you in a taxi, honey,

  Better be ready ’bout a half-past eight …

  Everyone was dancing. Jhamboo grabbed a small blonde; I grabbed the big gleaming one. ‘Ya gotta be there when the band starts playing …’, she sang, warmly, moistly, in my ear.

  After a little while, I went into another room and wept again. My Indian watch had stopped during the shooting. I wound both watches and wept for their inefficiency, which embodied nameless things. The crew-cut major tiptoed in with a woman, patted my shoulder and said, ‘We all owe our lives to you.’

  Bullshit. I seized his hand and said, ‘I wish I had your superb courage. Proud to know you.’

  Then we both wept. Or maybe that did not happen at all. I was not so much drunk as intoxicated. There’s such a difference between friendly people and people who are friends.

  Some while later, a surge of new guests entered the bungalow. Cries and uproar preceded them. It was sunset. Time had passed. Laughs, groans, cheers, shrieks, wild shouting in a foreign tongue, greeted the newcomers. A woman left me, rushing towards the door and throwing herself into the arms of a blond male replica of herself. The commotion was a mystery to me. Alienation closed in. I did not know how to get away.

  The major jumped on an armchair and called for silence. He made an announcement, greeted with mad catcalls and jeers and a sort of generalised frenzy. I realised that the Dutch were stark flaming mad. Two little ugly orderlies rushed in with boxes full of lager bottles, and the party started up again.

  ‘The wrong party,’ I shouted at one of the orderlies, grabbing up a bottle of lager. ‘I’m at the wrong party.’ I determined to escape. I lurched into the other room and there – that’s silly, I thought – there before me were Maurice Boyer and his light o’ love.

  They were surrounded by a crowd of people, predominantly female, all in a high old state of animation. Something remarkable was happening on or to Raddle’s face. The head was nodding in a manner suggestive of laughter; the mouth was hanging open; tears were running from her eyes, slime from her nose. At the same time her whole considerable body was heaving back and forth with such a violent motion that saliva, tears, and slime were scattered about the crowd. Happily, the crowd was engaged in similar activity, although to a less marked degree. Recalling Raddle’s ability to vomit, I marvelled at this new feat of expression before realising that I was watching someone simultaneously laughing and crying at the top of her bent.

  Boyer was standing with his back to Raddle, talking emotionally to two men, gesticulating in a manner foreign to him. When she caught sight of me, she burst past the Dutch women and threw herself into my arms, in a scatter of various moistures.

  ‘Oh, Stewbs, Stewbs, I never think I see your drunken face more!’

  She gave me a big perspiring kiss like a smack in the face with a hot slug.

  I clutched a lot of her. ‘Oh, you are a darling. I thought you’d gone for good.’

  ‘Plaything of fate …’ She was incoherent. I mopped her face. A nice woman, for all her faults.

  We started dancing round. Boyer arrived. He had stopped laughing.

  I had started laughing. ‘What the fuck are you doing here, sir?’

  ‘It’s the blewdy Van Heutsz, Stewbs,’ began Raddle, when Boyer produced a large handkerchief and also mopped her face. He worked with broad punitive strokes.

  ‘What are you doing here, Stubbs? This is an officers’ party.’

  ‘I was invited along.’

  ‘Well, let’s not hear any more about your personal troubles, right? Everyone here has got blithering personal troubles. You don’t see any other non-commissioned officers, do you?’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Maurice,’ said Raddle, starting to go into her laughing/crying routine again. ‘It’s not his fault the blewdy Van Heutsz ran ashore on the sandbag.’

  ‘Have a drink, sir,’ I said, proffering a bottle.

  ‘Not Black Tartan Wombat, is it?’ A look of paranoia crossed his face.

  ‘It’s lager, sir. Heineken.’

  ‘Stomach hasn’t recovered from that other filthy muck yet.’

  He took my bottle and started to swig. Between swigs and interruptions, he adopted a mellower tone, now that I had put Raddle down, and explained what had happened.

  ‘As the old girl’s just intimated, the blithering boat ran against a sandbank or a sunken wreck – nobody knows which exactly – in Belawan harbour, about two miles offshore. You know how shallow it is there, or maybe you don’t.’

  ‘I do.’ He had finished off my lager.

  ‘Destiny plays a charade with us, Stewbs. Fate amewses himself with abrupt twists of the tale.’

  ‘There it’s stuck until they can get a tug from Singapore to tow it off. Everyone’s had to return to Medan, second day on the trot. So Raddle and I have been granted a few extra days’ bliss together.’

  ‘It was meant to be, Maurice. My husband will be so fewrious, but such coincidences are in our stars; we are their pewpets.’

  They fell on each other, as different couples were doing all around.

  Belawan harbour was extremely shallow and the channel had not been dredged since before the war. Boats with any draught worth speaking of had to stand off two miles or more out to sea. Their goods and passengers were ferried ashore in LCTS. Geography had assisted Raddle’s destiny.

  I needed a pee. On the way out, I grabbed more alcohol. Boyer and his light o’ love scarcely noticed me go. They were moving, I observed, into the first phases of a mating process which was going to take all night. It reminded me that I had similar commitments ahead, in particular an obligation to make things up with Margey and say good-bye honourably. I also had to deliver some cigarettes.

  The crew-cut major, red in t
he face to the roots of his hair, swept me up with a crowd of jostling girls. They had brought their luggage back from Belawan and it stood about their feet, making progress across the room difficult. More drinks went down, among continuous exclamations of joy and chagrin at the reunion.

  Finally, I blundered towards the door, only to be caught by Boyer.

  ‘Didn’t mean to be curt with you, Stubbs. Just keep your place. I can’t bear to see anyone with their paws on my charming lady. Look here, I don’t want to let you down about this Chinese bit of yours. You didn’t show up at the Company office, or I’d have spoken to you then. It’s difficult to talk with all this luggage under foot.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘If you’re crazy about her, well, we all have our impulses. I’ve told you my opinion of Chinese girls, bless their little slant-eyed holes, but that’s only my opinion. Frankly, the way I look at it is, miscegenation is just an extreme form of heterosexuality. Quite a bit of the attraction of Raddle, for instance – it’s not Raddle, by the way, it’s Raddl – lies in her foreign –’

  ‘God, I must have a pee, sir, sorry.’ Preferably within the next two point five seconds. Stumbling over suitcases, I gave Boyer a despairing look and made for the night. The darkness was intersected by lights, punctuated by music, and shredded by shouts and laughter. The area was impregnated by inevitable barbecues. I rushed behind the bungalow. Lobbing my tool out, I pissed with some force and splendour into the nearest bush, no doubt striking a profound blow at its livelihood.

  For reasons I could not fathom, I felt immensely weary, bitter, and drunk. Sinking down on the nearest wooden verandah step, I rested my face in my hands. The coriolis effect became rather self-evident. I slumped sideways against a railing.

  Disaster came back to my mind, and the thought of Sontrop’s body pitching head first into the earth in its box. I attempted to recall the sympathetic sights of Katie Chae with her legs open, or Margey’s laugh; all that returned was the face of the wounded Ambonese soldier, smiling, smiling, as his sergeant prodded his injuries. Brave bastards, those Ambonese. You might well ask, why did they side with the Netherlanders against the Indonesians? But the army was their business; they fought for whoever paid them. In those days, Amboina was a long way from Sumatra.

  As I write these paragraphs, the news headlines feature a sensational military operation in Holland, outside Bolingen, not far from where Addy now lives. Sinister people the media refer to as ‘South Moluccan terrorists’ seized a train full of hostages, demanding that the Dutch government put pressure on Indonesia to let them return to their native land. Negotiations came to nothing. After twenty days of deadlock, the Dutch sent in six Starfighters to blanket the area with smoke bombs. Then the marines went in. Two of the hostages and six of the so-called terrorists were shot. Now the area is being cleaned up as if nothing had happened. The bullet-ridden train was towed away into a siding.

  And who were these ‘South Moluccan terrorists’? The title shows how history and the understanding of it can be destroyed in a phrase. The ‘South Moluccans’ are our old pals the Ambonese. The chaps on the train were probably sons of the boyos who used to sit on the pavements of Bootha Street, cleaning their guns and singing ‘Terang Boelan’ ad nauseam.

  In the 45–6 dust up, the Ambonese chose the wrong side. How were they to understand at that time that global changes were under way? Medan was almost as foreign to them as to me – Amboina is as far from Medan as London is from Cairo. They were soldiering on, at a period when half the world was soldiering far from home. But try telling that to the TRI. When Soekarno finally won control of Indonesia, thousands of Ambonese had no option but to leave with their families. Where were they to go but to the distant land of their masters; in the cool reaches of North Europe, poor sods? Miscegenation in World War II was global.

  Now they have no way back. There is no place for them in Indonesia – anymore than there was a place for Sumatra-born Sontrop in Sumatra, except six foot under.

  As I slumped with my head and the wooden post feeling practically interchangeable, I became aware of an exceptionally nasty sound hovering behind one or other, or both, of my ears. I prepared myself for death, taking a swig from a bottle I found in my fist. Leopards have been known to pant before pouncing; the cobra must occasionally clear its throat of venom before striking; the rare white rhino of Sumatra – bound to be on the side of the Indonesians – indubitably gives a few short pants before the fatal charge. In any case, fuck it, I was too fucking shagged to move. Good-bye, Margey, good-bye, Katie Chae, you luscious, syrupy creature!

  Someone shook my shoulder. I opened an eye. Two faces were glaring into mine. One had a big white moustache, one a little black one. This struck me as amusing. Internal instability warned me against laughing.

  ‘Stubbs?’

  ‘Sgt Stubbs!’

  ‘Hello. Merdeka.’

  The faces belonged to the Dutch major and Captain Boyer, but I didn’t see what that had to do with it. The Major tolerated only a little of my idiocy before slapping me on the shoulder and walking away. Boyer settled on the step beside me.

  ‘Careful … There’s animal or something behind us.’ Pointing vaguely.

  ‘Stubbs, you’re drunk, you poor stupid uneducated soldier. There’s no animal here. Even pets are forbidden in RAPWI areas.’

  Shaking off what in more amusing circumstances could be called Weltschmerz, I heaved myself into a sitting posture and said, ‘Big animal, just behind right ear. Ten paces. Maybe five.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Boyer, brightly, raising and then waving one finger. ‘I’m with you now. Not a real animal. The old two-backed beast. To be precise – don’t look round – a young Dutch chap with his bags down is enjoying intercourse with a young Dutch lady with her knickers down. They’re on a blanket of some description, not more than two metres from where we sit. Judging by the pace, which is pretty fast and furious, they can’t last out much – ah, yes, there they go now, by golly!’ He clicked his tongue with a mixture of disgust and envy. ‘Funny thing to do, when you consider it in cold blood.’

  ‘Where’s Raddle?’

  ‘Sending a cable, if it’s any of your business … To her husband, I’m sorry to say.’

  My head was clearing. My mood veered wildly, now tipping towards drama and metaphysical speculation. ‘What a hell-hole this is! No offence to your – I really like her, sir, honestly, and wish you could marry her – Miss Raddle or whatever the fuck her name is, but the bloody Dutch in Medan are absolutely depraved, degenerate. You wouldn’t catch the British behaving like that. Or the Chinese.’

  He put an arm patronisingly round my shoulders and became nonchalant. ‘That’s just where you are mistaken, laddy, that’s just where you’re mistaken. Limited thinking. These folk, men and women, they’ve been through absolute hell with the Japs. Some day the story will be told. Now, another crisis with the natives. They stand to lose everything, to have their homes burnt, to be shot up and killed.’

  A chap and a girl walked past us, laughing together, dragging a blanket behind them.

  ‘Take those false alarms with the Van Heutsz, yesterday and today. Today we could see the damned vessel, stuck out on the sandbank. Think of the psychological effect of that sort of thing. Life’s reduced to a wretched series of packings and unpackings. It’s okay for me, because I see a bit more of my light o’ love, but think of the psychological impact on them. They can’t win. Pure torture, pure torture, the whole set-up. Personally, I feel very badly to think that we are pulling out and leaving them on their own, but you can’t argue with the blithering War Office. How can they possibly bear up under such stress, except with escape valves like fornication and inebriation? Speaking of which –’

  As he began to rise, I started laughing.

  ‘What’s so funny in what I said?’ He glared at me.

  ‘Nothing, nothing. I just think “inebriation” is a funny word.’

  ‘For Christ sake, man, pull yourself together.’
He looked round anxiously, but my laughter had not stopped the revelry. ‘Stubbs, you may not realise it, but you too are living on your nerves. You’re distracted by love or lust, aren’t you? Emotionally torn, isn’t that it? Poised on a veritable knife-edge, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s the matter.’

  ‘Admit it, you are, aren’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes. Everything’s falling apart.’ I lit a fag, enjoying myself.

  ‘I’m telling you what the trouble is. You are essentially a romantic at heart, like me – loving a girl in distant lands, across racial frontiers – never mind if she happens to be a bloody Chink – caring for her, longing to have children by her, longing for a place in the sun – well, the shade – yet the two of you torn apart, ripped asunder … That’s not pitching it too strong. You can’t pitch it too strong – ripped asunder by the tides of war. The tides of peace – just as bad. Tristan and Iseult all over again.’

  ‘I’d better go and see her now, sir, now you’ve reminded me. It’s getting a bit late.’ I stubbed the fag out in the soil and had a good cough.

  He stood up and towered over me, pointing a finger as if in accusation.

  ‘Stubbs, Stubbs, I’m going to do something for you. I’m perfectly sober, understand. For myself I can do nothing. I’m powerless. I’m a Victim of Circumstance. Destiny, as she says. The bitch is married and there’s nothing I can do about that. But I can do something for you. I will do something for you. Jhamboo Singh will back me up – he’s a white black man if ever there was one.’ He thumped the wooden railing to express his determination.

  ‘We can ground that plane tomorrow. We can stop your Repat. We can authorise you to marry this Chink girl, if that’s what you most want. I believe in it. It’s romantic. In a way it’s pure, or would be if it was anyone else but you. Above all, it’s heroic. Defy your destiny. Defy history. Stay here and marry the Chink girl. I will support you. We can go to HQ and and I’ll send a signal to ALFSEA. We’ll remove your name from the list for the UK boat. For once, love shall triumph and the world will be well lost!’