‘Do you really believe, François, that until now our British laws have merely been preventing people here from doing what they would most like to do, namely: attack, rob and rape their neighbours? Come now!’
‘Certainly. Today you have the proof!’
Instead of replying, the Major stooped and held out his fingers to The Human Condition who was hesitating prudently a few feet away, as if afraid that the Major might be about to scoop him up and drop him into an incinerator. After some moments of interior debate the animal crept a little closer and faintly wagged its wretched tail. The Major sighed. Outside the window the first thin shaft of sunlight broke through the cloud and hung quivering in the murky gloom of the drive, at the same time striking emerald sparks from a dripping banana leaf.
Matthew, who had spent a little time with his hands in his pockets at the window, staring out in a gloomy reverie at the drenched foliage, had become interested in this discussion. He remembered with what pleasure he had watched the mingling of races on the dance-floor at The Great World. It was surely true that to build a nation out of Malaya’s plural society some greater ideal than the profit of plantation owners, merchants and assorted entrepreneurs combined with the accumulation of wealth by the labour force, was required. What was needed was a new spirit … the spirit that had animated people at Geneva in the early days before everything had turned sour. Matthew began, haltingly, to explain this to the Major and Dupigny. It was simply a question of breaking out of old habits of thought! It was so easy, given the right atmosphere, for people to change the way they approached each other! Even apparently self-interested people were capable of it. It was like … like … He groped the air with his fingers, searching for an example. Yes, it was like someone in the empty compartment of a train who pulls down the blinds and puts his suitcases on the seat to prevent another passenger sharing it with him. Yet if, once installed, the newcomer should become ill the original occupant will spare no effort to help him, will take off his jacket, perhaps, to spread it over him, will stop the train and bully officials into coming to his companion’s assistance, and go to all manner of trouble! It was a fact! And truly there was no earthly reason why all human affairs should not be conducted in this manner! It was just as available to people as conduct based on suspicion and self-interest. Even with the Japanese it would have been possible if they had not been infected with our own cynical approach to power.
‘I refuse to believe that self-interest is the best source of prosperity. It only seems that way because we’ve never been able to break out of this bad habit with which we’ve been shackled by our history. Men are capable of becoming brothers, whatever you say, François. And I’m sure you’ll find, once this dreadful war is over, that thousands of people of different races have been willing to risk their lives for each other!’
While Matthew, stuttering with excitement, had been stating his belief, his companions had been listening, the Major dubiously, Dupigny with derision. Now Dupigny got to his feet: it was time for his late afternoon siesta on the table in the Board Room, the only room in the building which possessed an efficient fan. On his way out he paused to pat Matthew on the shoulder, saying with a laugh: ‘You might just as well expect stockbrokers to be ready to die for the Stock Exchange!’
42
It was in these days that members of the Mayfair AFS unit first began to be seen at fires here and there in the city with their glistening new trailer-pump. Nothing spectacular at first while they were learning the business; a shop-house or a godown, perhaps, set on fire by an air-raid on the docks. A tiny convoy would set off led by the Major’s Lagonda driven by the Major himself, keeping an eye on the trailer-pump dodging and swaying in the rear-view mirror, and followed by Mr Wu’s ancient Buick, crammed with helmeted figures and equipment. Sometimes, as the fires grew bigger, they would find a number of other units there, too, and as they arrived they would have to bump over several hose-ramps while trying to locate the officer in charge of the fire. Quite often this would turn out to be a man called Adamson who, they learned from some of the regular firemen, had an unusual reputation for skill in beating back or outflanking fires that threatened to get out of control … the reputation of a general, one might have thought. His appearance, though, was disappointingly ordinary … a rather anonymous-looking individual in his forties with bristly grey hair and a manner that suggested more a curious by-stander than a general on a battlefield. Matthew, in particular, surveyed him with interest, wondering how it was that so many legends hat attached themselves to him.
At one godown fire, while Matthew was talking to a man called Evans from the Central Fire Station in Hill Street, there came a shout of ‘Stand from under!’
‘That means the façade is about to topple,’ Evans explained and together they joined the other men drifting back to a safer distance. Evans, however, was watching Adamson who still lingered beneath the building, staring up at it, hands in pockets. There was a story, he told Matthew, that Adamson had once been caught at just such a moment under a tall façade as it toppled outwards over him. Because it had been too late to run he had calmly estimated where an open window would fall, had changed his position slightly and then stood still. The façade had fallen neatly around him, leaving him untouched.
‘Great Scott!’ Matthew gazed at Adamson, deeply impressed by such sang-froid, but at the same time half suspecting that this might be just a story which old hands told to new recruits like himself.
Despite the satisfaction Matthew experienced these days in the knowledge that he was doing his bit for the Colony, and even putting himself at risk for it, he was still not altogether pleased with himself. His relations with the Blackett family had been seriously clouded by the unfortunate manner in which he had announced that he did not want to marry Joan. How could he have done such a thing? The Blacketts were his father’s life-long friends! Now he flushed with embarrassment at the mere recollection of his dreadful behaviour. Naturally, he had written notes of apology to Walter, to Mrs Blackett, and to Joan herself (how could he have been so insensitive as to reject the poor girl in public!) … but he had heard nothing and did not expect to be forgiven for his appalling lapse.
He would have written a note to Monty, too, but Monty had turned up in person before he could do so and, as a matter of fact, did not appear to be particularly put out. Monty, indeed, was inclined to look on the bright side and said, chuckling: ‘Boy, you’ve really put your foot in it this time. They aren’t very pleased with you at home, to put it mildly! But at least you’ve got rid of all the bloody bridesmaids! Frankly, old chap, I hand it to you … I didn’t think you had it in you.’ But Matthew was not to be consoled. It was true that he did not now have to marry Joan … but such was his remorse that he would almost have preferred to have done so.
Presently, a hastily written message from Walter did arrive and Matthew opened it expecting recriminations. But to his surprise the message did not even mention his lapse and one might even have supposed, reading it, that Walter had already forgotten about it. The note begged Matthew, in the name of his country and of everything he held dear, to reconsider his refusal to impersonate Continuity in Blackett and Webb’s jubilee parade. ‘Since the loss of Penang,’ wrote Walter, ‘it has become more necessary than ever to shore up the morale of the Asiatic communities in the Colony by a display of firmness and a reminder of our past association which has been so fruitful to them.’ Because of ‘recent events’ it had been necessary to postpone the jubilee parade and celebrations, but ‘any day now’ final arrangements would be made. In the meantime, Matthew was asked to come with the Major and Dupigny to a dress rehearsal for the parade to make sure that everybody knew what was expected of him.
This note had been dictated in a rather discursive style and typed on Walter’s office note-paper. Walter had added a cryptic postscript in ink, however, which stated: ‘I hear young Lang-field has not been doing too badly as a fireman. What d’you think? Perhaps he is not as bad as the res
t of that gang?’ Matthew was relieved to get Walter’s note, though a little puzzled by the reference to Nigel Langfield: Walter musing aloud, it seemed. He hastily sent a note in return, agreeing to do anything Walter wanted. After his lapse there was nothing else for him to do, after all.
His conscience lightened somewhat by this exchange, Matthew decided to take the afternoon off. His efforts to grasp the complexities of the rubber business took second place these days, in any case, to his duties as a fireman. Besides, he still hardly knew Singapore.
The Major, who had to pick up an order of books from Kelly and Walsh’s, dropped him near Raffles Place and he set off, hands in pockets, with no particular destination. First he walked down Market Street. It was here, he remembered, that Ehrendorf had his flat but as to which number it was in the street he had no idea. As he strolled along he was suddenly enveloped in a delightful smell of cloves and cinnamon which hung outside a spice merchant’s. On the opposite side of the street his eye was caught by the money-lenders shops and he paused for a moment to stare in wonder and dismay at the white-garmented figures lurking in those dim interiors. What did this glimpse of money-lenders remind him of? Yes. He moved on once more, pondering the assertion that self-interest is the most efficient producer of wealth, that what an undeveloped tropical country most needed were entrepreneurs like his father and like Walter. Many people believed, he was aware, that no matter what an individual entrepreneur might accomplish in the way of exploitation or abuse of native labour, his presence was still beneficial to the country as the most effective means by which the local population could begin to accumuate capital of its own. This paradox, which was no doubt true within limits, was accompanied by a cynical companion in the form of another assertion: namely, that human beings would only produce their best efforts when they were working, not for the community in which they lived, but for themselves. This Matthew refused to believe!
He had paused, muttering under his breath, in the doorway of a metalwork shop where he found himself gazing at his own perspiring, bespectacled face upside down in a gleaming concave bowl. Inside the shop he could see a man on his hands and knees cutting out a long strip of metal to make a bucket; another man, cross-legged, sat on the floor hammering rivets into another strip which had been bent into a cylinder. Beside them glistened a pile of newly minted buckets. To produce such handsome buckets without even a work-bench, using only primitive tools, seemed to him miraculous.
He walked on at random, now northwards, now westwards. He passed a sign which read Nanyang Dentist and the dentist himself, perhaps, sitting in his white coat on the pavement smoking a cigarette. A ginger cat with a docked tail crossed his path and slipped hopefully under the bead-hung entrance to the North Pole Creamery. A Chinese song blared tinnily from a wireless somewhere above his head in the forest of poles and washing; two voices gabbled in different languages riddled with atmospheric from two other wirelesses nearby. He passed on to the street corner where a Chinese funeral, which he at first took for a parade, was getting down to business outside a shop-house. A framed photograph of the dead man had been set up on a table on the pavement, a prosperous-looking fellow wearing the most formal of Western blue suits and white shirts; two tall lamps swathed in sackcloth for the occasion flanked the photograph: piles of oranges and apples and bundles of smoking joss-sticks stood in front of it. At the side of this table was another; Matthew found himself confronted with a great lobster-coloured pig’s mask complete with ears and flaring nostrils, crabs, whole naked chickens, some squashed as flat as plates, very greasy-looking, others with their yellow waxen heads horribly bent back over their bodies.
Matthew looked at his watch: he would soon have to be getting back to the Mayfair for something to eat before the night’s watch. He lingered for a moment, however, to inspect the paper models of a motor-car, a wireless, a refrigerator and other useful articles that the dead man would be taking on his journey, thinking: ‘After all, if these are the things people want and entrepreneurs like my father help them to get them …’ He wondered what the head man had thought of it all, whether he had been satisfied. Here he was, presumably, in this impressive coffin which might, to judge by its size, have been hollowed out of a substantial tree trunk, each end swept up like the prow of a ship and standing on trestles which advertised, in English and Chinese, the name and telephone number of the undertaker. A line of professional mourners dressed in crudely stitched sackcloth sat on the kerb, smoking cigarettes and looking disaffected. A small boy hammered on a tin drum and was now joined by a rather down-at-heel brass band of elderly men in white uniforms who struck up raggedly for a few moments. An aeroplane roared by very low overhead and the mourners looked up apprehensively … but it was British, a Catalina flying-boat. Matthew walked on thoughtfully. As he walked, hands in pockets, he felt someone take his arm. Looking round he saw Miss Chiang’s smiling face.
‘Vera! Where have you been? Why haven’t you been back to the Mayfair?’
Vera’s smile disappeared; she looked a trifle upset. She said with a shrug: ‘They told me not to come back.’
‘Who told you?’
‘A man from Mr Blackett’s office.’ She shrugged again. ‘It does not matter. It is not in the least “pressing”. Tell me about yourself … I’m so glad to see you are now well again. What a terrible fever! You gave me such a fright. I was afraid you might “kick the bucket”.’
‘But why did they tell you not to come back?’
‘They say my job has been finished. They bring me suitcase and money and a letter of thanks signed by Miss Blackett. I think it is because she is jealous of my beauty.’
‘D’you really think so? Lumme!’ Matthew mopped his perspiring face with a handkerchief.
‘Yes,’ went on Vera, looking pretty and malicious, yet at the same time more innocent than ever, ‘it is because also she does not have my command of foreign languages and because my breasts are bigger than hers. She does not have my poise, either, which I have probably inherited from my mother … I think I told you my mother was Russian princess, forced to show “clean heels” during Revolution. Well, there … it is not worth bothering about.’
Meanwhile, they had strolled on together and, after a moment’s hesitation, Vera had taken his arm again and her light hand resting in the hollow of his elbow caused a delicate warmth to flow into him. Some women, he could not help thinking, were extraordinarily good at touching you, while others did so as if they had had a recently dislocated arm (no doubt women found the same about men). Vera’s touch was as distinctive as her voice. At the end of the street, however, they discovered that they were obliged to go in different directions, which seemed a pity. They lingered there for a moment.
‘You must halt …’ said Vera with a sigh. ‘I must go on because my silk-worms are hungry.’
‘What? You have silk-worms?’ cried Matthew, thinking: ‘How delightfully Chinese!’
‘Oh no, here in Singapore it is too hot for silk-worms.’ She smiled flirtatiously. ‘It is a line from an old Chinese song about a woman who is separated from her lover.’
‘Well, let me see …’ Matthew again looked at his watch. ‘Can I invite you to a cup of tea?’
‘Thank you, but first I must visit a friend who is dying. Will you come with me?’
Presently, Matthew found himself standing in a vast dimly lit shed, blinking and polishing his spectacles; but even when he had put them on again, such was the contrast with the brightness outside, he still could not see very well. Vera had set off down a sort of aisle on each side of which rose tier after tier of shadowy racks, as in a store-house or wine-cellar. Matthew followed her, stepping uncertainly. There was a smell of humanity here and a faint, twittering murmur of voices.
As his vision improved he saw that the racks on either side were occupied by recumbent forms, some of which stirred slightly as he passed but for the most part lying still … Eyes followed him incuriously, the sunken eyes of very elderly, emaciated people; here an
d there he made out a somewhat younger face. Vera explained to him that this was a Chinese ‘dying-house’ where lonely people came to die. He had not wanted to come; he had tried to explain to Vera that he had only just finished watching a funeral. It seemed to him that his life had taken a decidely lugubrious turn all of a sudden. No, he would definitely prefer to wait for her outside.
But as they were walking Vera had told him a little about the old man she was going to visit. He had befriended her on the boat that had taken her from Shanghai to Singapore (that same boat on which Miss Blackett and her mother had been travelling), had given her a little money and had helped her to find her feet; his own children had died or disappeared in one of the civil wars that had swept back and forth over China since the fall of the Manchu dynasty. While talking about this man, to whom she was bringing a little parcel of food, Vera happened to mention that until he had grown too old to work he had lived by tapping his few rubber trees on a smallholding near Layang Layang in Johore. Matthew had pricked up his ears at this and exclaimed: ‘That’s near my own estate!’ And so, despite his misgivings, he had decided to enter the dying-house with her. Now, blundering between these racks of moribund people in the gloom, he felt like Orpheus descending into the underworld.
It was not only the lonely who came to die here, explained Vera in a low voice, grasping him by the sleeve, but a great many others, too. People were brought here to die by their families in order to spare the home from the bad luck that comes when somebody dies there …
‘I must say, that sounds a bit heartless!’
Yes, and yet it was accepted by the person who was dying as the best thing to do and the custom had been carried on, perhaps, for generations. And no doubt those who came here from the land of the living to bring food and water to their dying relations would in due course come to spend their own last days or hours here, rather than take up room in one of the crowded tenement cubicles or boats on the river … It was very sad, certainly, but it was moving, too, to see the way these shelves of dying people accepted their fate. Vera’s dark eyes searched Matthew’s face to see whether he understood. He nodded cautiously though, as a matter of fact, he was not very keen on hearing of people ‘accepting their fate’. Vera seemed to him extraordinarily full of life by contrast with the trays of shadowy expiring figures on either side. ‘What a dismal way to end up though!’
The Empire Trilogy Page 126