‘I’m glad your father didn’t live to see this,’ he said presently with an air of resignation. After a silence he added with a sigh: ‘There was some fool here yesterday, an army chap … D’you know what he said to me?’
‘Well, no …’
‘I’ll tell you. He had the gall to tell me that we were leaving the troops to do the fighting while we only thought of feathering our nests! Can you beat it? He tried to claim that civilians have been trying to stop his demolition squad from doing its work … He actually said …’
‘But Walter, it’s true. That has been happening in some places … Look, we must go now. We’ll talk about it another time.’ Matthew got up and again looked anxiously out of the window: this time a bright banner of sparks was floating by. ‘Have you no way of getting out of Singapore? It’s obvious we aren’t going to hold out much longer.’
‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ said Walter, chuckling grimly. ‘Certain business acquaintances are anxious to share their boat with me. What time is it now? They talk of leaving this evening from Telok Ayer Basin. You’d better come too, I should think. They wouldn’t refuse to take a Webb, even if it meant throwing someone else overboard!’ And Walter gave a sudden shout of laughter which rang in the rafters high above them. The row of bats slept on undisturbed, however.
‘After all,’ he went on presently, following some train of thought of his own. ‘War is only a passing phase in business life … No, it was Lever of Lever Brothers who said that, not me! Yes, it seems that in the Great War he wanted, naturally enough, to go on selling his … what did he call it? Sunlight Soap to the Germans … He made quite a fuss when they wouldn’t let him. He argued that the more soap they let him make the more glycerine there would be for munitions … which is true enough when you come to think about it. If you want my opinion there’s nothing like a spot of patriotism for blinding people to reality. Now they’d do far better to leave certain things in Singapore as they are … Though destroy the oil the Japs need by all means, I don’t hold with people standing in the way of demolition squads if they’re acting sensibly … But no, you can’t argue with these people. You can’t say, look here, let’s discuss it sensibly! They swell up with patriotic indignation. They refuse to believe that in due course, probably in a matter of months, we’ll have come to some understanding with Japan and everything will continue as before. Except that in this case it won’t continue as before … why? Because a lot of self-righteous bloody fools will have destroyed our investments, lock, stock and barrel … and we shall have to start again from scratch!’
‘Walter,’ exclaimed Matthew, standing up excitedly, ‘it’s not self-righteous fools who are destroying your investment, it’s the bloody Japanese bombers! My God! Look at this …’
A momentary shift in the wind had peeled the smoke back from the river like a plaster from a wound. Near at hand a row of blazing godowns pointed towards their window like a fiery arrow whose barb had lodged in a shed burning directly beneath them. It was not this, however, but the river itself which had caused Matthew’s dismay for it seemed to be nothing but flame from one bank to another. The blazing oil which had surged up on the tide from the mouth of the river had enveloped the small wooden craft which clustered thickly over almost its entire length and breadth except for the narrow channel in the middle. Fanned by the breeze from the sea the fire had eaten its way up the twisting longbow-shaped course of the river, past another fire at Ord Road, under the Pulo Saigon Bridge and almost as far as Robertson Quay.
Matthew turned away, shocked, hoping that Adamson had managed to evacuate the thousands of Chinese families who lived on the river. Walter had joined him at the window, staring at the shining snake twisting all the way back to Anderson Bridge. He muttered: ‘Terrible! Terrible!’ and then turned away. ‘But look here,’ he went on, after a moment, ‘you forget the heavy responsibility that a businessman has to carry …’
‘Oh, Walter, please, not now. We must go.’ Matthew sniffed, certain he could see smoke eddying up between the bales of rubber. One of the sleeping bats stirred uneasily. But Walter had slumped heavily in his chair again.
‘You may think a responsibility to one’s shareholders is nothing of importance but I can assure you … Think of the poor widow, the clergyman, the spinster who has trusted her savings to your hands and whose very life may depend on the way you conduct your business. I can assure you, Matthew, that it makes you think twice when you have the well-being of other, perhaps vulnerable, people to protect. In the early days your father and I often used to work long into the night after everyone had gone … Yes, I sometimes used to fall asleep at this very desk here from sheer exhaustion … And what made me do it? I was quite simply afraid that Blackett and Webb, on whom so many poor people depended for their living, might have to pass their dividends! Yes, scoff if you want to, I don’t care!’
‘I don’t want to scoff, Walter. Of course I don’t! I just want us to leave here before it’s too late. We may be trapped.’
Walter again ignored him. ‘Well, I suppose the world was a different place in those days. The spirit of the times was quite different from the way it is now. Singapore was different, anyway, I can tell you that much! We had none of the comforts when I was a boy that people seem to expect these days. You would hardly believe it but we didn’t even have water you could drink out of a tap … In those days when my dear mother was alive she always used to filter it through a muslin dripston … you don’t see them any more but in those days … And did we have these fine roads and storm-drains and whatnot? Of course not. We had to put up with the monsoons as best we could. Sometimes the only way you could get about was in a rowing boat! Not like today when down comes the rain and it’s all over in a few minutes.’
‘Walter, I can hear a crackling sound from down below … Listen!’
Walter nodded sadly. ‘It was fun for us children, of course. Oh yes, we used to think it was great fun to have a change from the rickshaw. Mind you, we had fun in the rickshaws, too. Each of us kids had his own rickshaw and a coolie to himself. Yes. We used to make ’em race with us and see who’d win and we’d have a grand time. Yes … Grand! Grand!’
Matthew wafted the smoke away so that he could see Walter better. Then he took off his glasses, polished them with a dirty handkerchief and put them back over his smarting eyes. Walter’s massive head was bowed on his shoulders and he might almost have been asleep. He raised his head presently, however, and said: ‘Mind you, they were strict with us, too. Not like your father, Matthew, and his new-fangled ideas. Boys and girls all twined up together in the bath like a mess of snakes! That’s what they call education these days! And then they wonder why the kids go wrong. Well, I don’t know. When we children had our tea in the afternoon we had a Chinese “boy” to supervise us. And we had to be properly dressed into the bargain. Ah, how the girls hated to wear their stockings in the heat! But they had to, not like today when they run about practically naked. Any talking or nonsense and the “boy” would give us a sharp rap over the knuckles, I can tell you!’
‘Walter!’ cried Matthew, but was interrupted by a fit of coughing. The bats had left their rafter now and were swooping about the godown squeaking unpleasantly. Matthew’s skin crawled: he did not care for bats.
‘Yes, my mother used to hold court with a circle of young men around her … young lads who would come out East and get themselves into debt, silly beggars, by signing chits. My mother used to take charge of them just as if they were her own children. She’d see that they ate proper meals and didn’t spend all their money drinking. She used to say to them: “What would your mother in England say if she could see you now? Think how her feelings would be hurt!” Ah, they adored her. Many of ’em were secretly homesick, you know, but didn’t like to admit it because they thought it wasn’t manly. They’d have done anything for her.’
Matthew again wafted his arm feebly to clear the smoke between them which grew thicker by the minute. ‘Yes, it must have be
en pleasant here in those days,’ he agreed with a sigh.
There was silence except for a crackling of wood from downstairs. Presently, Walter cleared his throat, then stood up abruptly. He pawed the smoky air in surprise.
‘What’s all this smoke?’ he demanded irritably.
71
That afternoon Matthew, the Major, Mr Wu and Adamson went to the cinema. The Mayfair unit’s last pump had broken down near the Gas Works and the water pressure throughout the city had fallen so low, thanks to burst mains, that it was no longer possible to use hydrants. On their way back from the Gas Works they passed two cinemas beside the Volunteers’ Drill Hall on the sea side of Beach Road. Surprisingly, one of the cinemas, the Alhambra, a small and rather shabby-looking place at first sight, was still open and was showing a film called Ziegfeld Girl. This seemed such a cause for wonder that they stopped and consulted each other. Why not? Just for a minute or two. They had such a craving for normality, even if only a glimpse of it… even if only for a few minutes. So they went inside, and once inside in the darkness they kept falling asleep and waking up, paralysed by weariness and comfort. With one thing and another they found it difficult to leave, now that they were inside.
When the light dimmed a newsreel, cheerful in tone, showed housewives with their hair tied up in handkerchiefs collecting pots and pans on the Home Front; next, iron railings were being harvested from parks and gardens. Matthew found this ridiculous and touching and was surprised to find himself in tears. The newsreel was followed by Ziegfeld Girl. He fell asleep for a few minutes and when he awoke it took him some time to fathom that the film concerned the destinies of a number of chorus girls. One of the girls, played by Hedy Lamarr, was beautiful, grave and sad. Her husband, a violinist of temperament, took a dim view of her being a chorus girl.
‘Well, what is it you want me to do? Give up the job? I know it’s a rather foolish way to earn money, but Franz, we need it!’
‘Do you really imagine that I would stand by while you showed yourself to other men?’
Matthew sighed, his head dropped on to his chest and it seemed to him that he slept for a while. But when he awoke the same conversation still seemed to be going on.
‘So we never really had the thing I thought we had,’ Hedy Lamarr was saying. ‘Faith in each other. If you have that you don’t mind about the other things. You don’t even know you haven’t got them.’
‘All right, take the job! Be a showgirl!’
‘But Franz!’
A plane roared low overhead and the heads of the audience, many of them wearing helmets, wilted in silhouette against the flickering screen. ‘I suppose it would be as well to put one’s tin hat on,’ mused the Major, returning his attention to the screen. But he put the matter out of his mind. He was too susceptible to the cold, rather sad beauty of Hedy Lamarr. He had never been able to resist that sort of woman: she reminded him of someone he had known, oh, years ago … That melancholy smile. ‘What’s she like now?’ he wondered. ‘Getting on, of course. Water under the bridge,’ he thought sadly. Yes, Hedy Lamarr was very much the Major’s cup of tea.
Now it was the dressing-room before the first night.
‘Nervous?’
‘Oh, Jenny, I … I can’t even put on my lipstick.’
‘Relax, honey. They won’t be lookin’ at your mouth.’ A breathless, manic Judy Garland burst in. The girls chattered excitedly. They were quelled by a man who said: ‘Listen, kids—I’ve got something important to say to you … in a few minutes you’re going on in your first number. D’you know what that means? It means you’re a Ziegfeld Girl. It means you’re going to have all the opportunities of a lifetime crowded into a couple of hours. And all the temptations …’
‘Oh dear,’ said Matthew, drowsing with his chin on his chest. ‘Soon I shall go and look for Vera.’
‘The “Dream” number. Places for the “Dream” number.’
‘All right, girls. And good luck.’
The music swelled and, as it did so, a bomb falling not far away caused the building to shake and one or two small pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling. In the warm darkness the audience stirred uneasily and one or two silhouettes, crouching under the beam from the projector, made their way to the exit.
But this was the ‘Dream’ number. A plump, sleek tenor wearing a voluminous pair of Oxford bags began to sing:
You stepped out of a dream,
You are too wonderful to be what you seem.
Could there be eyes like yours?
Could there be lips like yours?
Could there be smiles like yours?
Honestly and truly,
You stepped out of a cloud
I want to take you away, away from the crowd …
Matthew fell asleep, woke, fell asleep, woke again. His limbs had grown stiff from sitting so long in the same position. He longed to stretch out and sleep … in clean sheets, in safety. The palms of his hands, raw and weeping from the glass splinters that clung to the hose, had begun to throb unbearably; on the screen one glittering scene followed another: he could no longer make sense of them. The screen filled with balloons from the midst of which Judy Garland emerged dressed in white. Then there were girls dancing on moving white beds, girls in white fur, girls with sheepdogs. Meanwhile, the plot was begining to thicken beyond Matthew’s powers of comprehension with Lana Turner forsaking a truck-driver for an older man with an English accent, identified as a ‘stage-door johnny’, who offered her a meal in a French restaurant, jewels, minks. This man bore a very slight resemblance to the Major. Judy Garland danced frantically and sang:
They call her Minnie from Trinidad,
And all the natives would be so sad,
Ay! Ay! Ay! …
If Minnie ever left Trinidad!
She was wearing a turban, three rings of big white beads and a striped dress, through the open front of which there was an occasional glimpse of her childishly muscled legs. Matthew found something distressing about her manic innocence. He fell asleep and woke again.
Now there was the shadow of the fat tenor thrown on to the sail of a yacht. As he spun the wheel he sang:
Come, come where the moon shines with magic enchantment, High up in the blue sky above you.
Come where a scented breeze caresses you with a lovely melody. While my heart is whispering ‘I love you.’
Then Hedy Lamarr, reflected in a mirror misted over with steam, was getting into her bath, but Matthew could no longer make sense of it all and the others were asleep: even the Major missed this important development. Again and again the girls drifted up and down brilliant staircases wearing elaborate constructions of stars on twigs, of stuffed parrots, of spangles, trailing miles of white chiffon … and outside, beneath the music of the soundtrack, the thudding of the guns continued without a pause. The girls now appeared to be clad only in flashing white beads. On and on they went filing up and down staircases. Their clothes grew ever more elaborate. One girl had an entire dead swan strapped to her chest with its neck round hers. Lana Turner, descending yet another staircase, but not so steadily now, for in the meantime she had taken to drink, at last pitched over senseless while supporting a whole flight of stuffed white doves.
‘Gosh! How can a girl do that to her career?’ asked one of the other girls.
‘I must go and find Vera,’ whispered Matthew to the Major. But the Major was still asleep. Matthew did not wake him but made his way stiffly out to the foyer. He stood there for a few moments gazing out in bewilderment as the last glittering staircase faded from his mind and was replaced by half a dozen motor-cars blazing fiercely in a car park a hundred yards away.
Although Matthew had no clear idea where he should look for Vera, it seemed to him quite likely that he would find her sooner or later. After all, the space in which they could avoid each other was shrinking rapidly; they were like two fish caught in a huge net: as the net was drawn in they were inevitably brought closer together. The difficulty was that a mi
llion or more other people had been caught in the same net and now here they all were together, like herrings in a flashing bundle dumped on the quayside … it was difficult to see one herring for all the others. Finding himself across the road from Raffles Hotel he went inside and telephoned the Mayfair. But Vera still had not returned and there had been no word of her.
In the past few hours a movement of refugees had developed from west to east across the city as the Japanese pressed in towards the outskirts of Tanglin and from Pasir Panjang towards the brickworks, Alexandra Barracks and the biscuit factory. As the fighting drew nearer, the Asiatic quarters emptied and people fled towards the Changi and Serangoon Roads with what few belongings they could carry, rushing together in a dying wave that would presently wash back again with diminished force the way it had come.
Matthew allowed himself to be carried along by the tide of refugees flowing from the direction of the padang and the cathedral. His watch had stopped and he had no idea what time it might be … It had grown dark while he had been in the cinema and it was no longer possible to make out clearly the features of the people he saw in the street … strained, blank, Oriental faces, men and women with swaying poles bouncing with the rhythm of their steps. Matthew felt sorry for them. What business was it of theirs, this war conceived hundreds of miles away and incubated in Geneva!
He plodded along mechanically, so tired that time passed in a dream. The palms of his hands continued to throb, but at a distance, as if they scarcely belonged to him any more. Presently he reached a place where the macadam road-surface, melted by the heat of the day, had been set on fire by an incendiary bomb and was burning bright orange. He hurried past it, aware that it must create a dangerous pool of light to attract the planes which still lurked in the black sky above. There was evidence of looting, too: he found himself trudging through sand-dunes which lay across his path and turned out to be sugar from a nearby store. He saw men and boys crawling in and out of shattered shop windows and a shadowy figure with a rickshaw full of bottles offered to sell him a bottle of brandy for a dollar. Half a mile further on he stumbled into a twenty-five-pounder field-gun halted in a prodigious traffic jam at a fork in the road: there were other guns, too, a little further on, and a great deal of cursing could be heard. A young officer sat on the wheel of one of the twenty-five-pounders.
The Empire Trilogy Page 152