‘How’s …’ Gerald belched gently, ‘how’s old Douglas Lovell been struggling on without me?’
‘Pretty fair. Got himself a new pony from India and a new mistress from Siam, so he’s feeling rather good, I should say.’
‘He’ll be the last of the uncrowned kings of Malaya. I’m glad I’ve had the chance of serving under him, y’know. Dying breed, marvellous man.’ Gerald’s pale, slightly bulbous eyes misted with drink and sentiment.
‘You’re a dying breed yourself, Rawlins.’ Bill Treadwell pulled his nose out of his glass and put the drink down with excess precision.
‘Don’t start … you colonials have always got a bee in your bonnet about something.’ James pulled in his chair as the whisky-spitting war escalated into the room.
‘S’true. Ten years’time the tuans ‘ll be dying out like dinosaurs.’
Gerald’s amiable round face flushed with drunken irritation. ‘Listen, if we British weren’t here this country would be nothing. There’d be no tin-mining …’
‘Chinese found the tin, Chinese can mine it.’
‘… there’d be no rubber …’
‘Don’t need white skin to plant trees, do you?’
‘… and there’d be civil war from one end of the peninsula to the other. Dammit, man, we’re only here because the Rajahs asked for British soldiers to stop their people massacring each other.’ Gerald’s freckled fist hit the rattan table for emphasis.
Bill Treadwell sat back like a bemused schoolmaster with a particularly obdurate class of dullards. ‘The sun will never set on the British Empire, hey? Or the British umpire either?’ The cricketers, now bathed and changed, were coming into the bar and acknowledging greetings around the room. Treadwell leaned towards Gerald to give his argument emphasis. ‘It’ll happen all right, but you don’t understand why. You don’t even understand what you don’t understand. You think that the Malays are like children because they smile a lot and believe that trees have spirits. You can’t see what it is that makes them a nation.’
‘Well, they’re not a bloody nation, they’re a bunch of bloody savages from every uncivilish – uncivilized race East of Suez.’ Gerald spluttered more and more, as his anger flared. ‘The Chinese chop each other up in tong wars, the Tamils worship cows and the damn Malays sit in their kampongs doing bugger all. Country would’ve gone to hell but for the British.’
There was a crash, and more boisterous shouting, as the whisky fighters barricaded the reading-room door with an upended leather sofa.
‘For heaven’s sake, don’t you see it doesn’t matter? The Malays got their religion from Arab pirates, their art from Indonesia, and their language from Persia; there are people in the jungle who don’t know how to make fire and whose babies are born pink-skinned. They’ve been colonized by the Siamese, the Portuguese, the Chinese, the Dutch and your mob, and none of it makes any bloody difference. The way the Malays think, all that’s totally insignificant. This is their land and they’ll be here when you and King George and the British Empire are just another folk memory.’
Gerald squirmed angrily in his chair, not noticing that James, who had the ability to hear two conversations at once, had tuned out of the often repeated argument, and was listening to the French planters continue their debate on love.
‘You’re forgetting one thing,’ Gerald said finally, stifling another belch. ‘You’re forgetting that we love this bloody country.’
The Australian leaned forward, not too drunk to hear the catch of emotion in his friend’s voice. ‘I know, chum. I know you bloody love it. You shut your eyes on misty mornings and look at the brown cows and the green padi fields and you think you’re living in England, you think you’re at home.’
There was a massive roar of drunken triumph as one army succeeded in shoving aside the upended sofa and storming over it into the reading room.
‘But you aren’t at home, mate. You’re in some other blighter’s home. And you love it for what you can get out of it, oh, yes, you do.’ He raised a bony hand to quell Gerald’s indignant protest. ‘You love Malaya because you can live like a king out here and back home you’d be cooped up in a stinking office pushing paper.’
‘That’s rot, Treadwell …’
‘But the Malay loves Malaya because the land is part of his soul. Doesn’t matter to him who lines their pockets, mining tin or planting rubber, it’s his country.’
Gerald slumped back, shaking his tousled ginger hair. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand you and I don’t understand the bloody Malays either.’
With an exasperated gesture, Bill shoved his hornrimmed spectacles back to the bridge of his sun-reddened nose. ‘You’ll never understand the bloody Malays until you live their life, take their religion and become one of them. That’s what it’s all about. For Christ’s sake, why do I have to explain this to a pair of bloody Brits. Look at yourselves, man.’
The French planters concluded that love was more important to a woman than to a man because a woman had a greater capacity for sensual enjoyment. An armistice was called in the reading room and the whisky-sodden army came tottering out in twos and threes, laughing uproariously. James suddenly switched his attention to what the Australian was saying.
‘What about us, you old sheepshagger? You two must be as pissed as rats.’
‘Well, look at you both. You’re as swarthy as a bloody Eyetie. Where’re your folks from originally?’
‘Italy, France – my mother’s side are Huguenot, my father’s came from Florence.’
‘And look at him …’ Treadwell’s bony finger pointed at Gerald, ‘red hair, fair skin –’
‘The Celt in all his variants from Builth to Ballyhoo, His mental processes are plain – one knows what he will do,’ quoted James. ‘I know what you’re getting at. Here we are calling ourselves Anglo-Saxon and Church of England when we’re no more Anglo-Saxon than a Chinese rickshaw boy, and we’ve cobbled our religion together same as the Malays have stuck a bit of Hinduism and a few of their old spirit cults into Islam. But we’re English because we think English and …’
‘And drink Scotch,’ Gerald finished defiantly, signalling to the distant boy. ‘How about one for the road?’
‘Well, thank Christ for the upper classes,’ muttered the Australian, giving James a wink as he emptied his glass.
Later they stumbled under the string of fairy lights above the wrought-iron gate of Mary’s. Mary, a dumpy Eurasian with skin like yellow leather, shouted to the girls to bring out bottles of warm beer and crank up the gramophone, and as they moved lethargically to obey she sat down opposite the men at the tin table.
‘I got a very nice girl, new girl …’ She looked from one man to the other as if trying to hypnotize them into believing her.
‘What is she?’ James’s tone was businesslike.
‘She’s Malay, but nice, very pretty, you like.’ The three men shook their heads. ‘Very pretty girl, you see, I call her…’ Mary signalled across the room and they waited uncomfortably. In a few moments a woman in a tight orange jacket and flowered sarong appeared and stood hesitantly in the side doorway. James judged her to be at least thirty-five, since she had lost the lamblike plumpness of young Malay girls but was not much wrinkled.
‘Does she know how to kiss?’ asked Gerald, who had discovered during his courtship in Guildford that kissing was quite pleasant. In general, the Malay whores did not kiss and tended to be uglier and older than the Chinese.
‘She do anything,’ Mary promised confidently. Gerald shook his head.
‘What about Sally?’
‘Sally – ah, you mean Sui Li. She busy.’
‘Busy long?’
Mary paused for thought. ‘Not busy much longer, I think. You want her after?’
‘Yes, she’s worth waiting for.’ Gerald swigged with bravado.
‘And your friend?’ Mary looked at James, who was still considering the Malay girl. Her skin was a light-walnut shade and she had a high-cheekb
oned face which argued some Mediterranean blood.
‘Where’s she from, Mary?’
‘I don’t ask. She come yesterday, tell me husband die.’ There was little point in asking further, since he knew he would probably not be told the truth. James liked the girl’s diffidence, disliked her maturity, and didn’t much care for the Chinese whores who were as skinny as cats.
‘She’ll do,’ he said, giving Mary some notes and disappearing with the woman up the house’s sloping stairs.
‘Since you’re so clever,’ Gerald turned to Bill, ‘you tell me this. Why’re all the Malay girls so bloody ugly?’
‘Easy. Malay women only go on the game if they’re widowed or divorced, no male relative to support them, and got no hope of getting another husband. Your Malay, being a Moslem, doesn’t care for divorced women because he thinks they know too much. Specially in the little villages – they’ve got a saying that a wife who’s lost her husband is as frisky as a horse that’s thrown its rider. The peasants get together and throw the girl out of the village before she gives the married women ideas. But with the Chinese it’s all down to money – Chinese girl thinks she can make more money spreading her legs than selling mangoes, she’s away. Half of them are sold by their mothers, if they’re pretty.’
‘So, what’s your fancy? You’ve been bloody quiet sitting there.’
‘I’ll sit this one out, I think.’ Treadwell’s tone was grim, and Gerald was about to ask the reason when Sui Li appeared in a skintight pink cheongsam. She greeted him with delighted shrieks, to emphasize her popularity and consequent prosperity to the other girls, and dragged him happily up the stairs to her room. Underneath her cheongsam she was naked, but in the few moments it took her to peel it off, Gerald slumped down on the bed and fell asleep.
Downstairs Bill Treadwell waited, reflectively sipping his beer. For all he had drunk, he felt sober. He took off his hornrimmed spectacles and put them in the breast pocket of his jacket. Mary’s, with its peeling Tiger beer posters and languid whores, faded to an indistinct blur.
Chapter Five
For Monty, the worst thing about her father’s death was that it left her alone with her mother. There was her sister, of course, but Cathy was different. She was not a combatant in the unending war with Bettina which was the real focus of the Bourton family’s energy. To a casual friend, it would seem that both the Bourton daughters were caught up in competition for the love of their bewitching father. The truth was much darker than that. James and his girls were united in resistance to Bettina’s hatred.
The family had no casual friends, because Bettina froze them off with calculated social inadequacy. She had made an offensive weapon of her shyness. Their house was a tall, grey-stone building of exceptional elegance and charm, built to nestle in a spinney at the foot of the Downs to the north of Brighton, on the outskirts of a village of red-brick cottages. The graceful aspect of the house suggested that life within was all civilized happiness. Very few people ever entered it. Those who did noticed that Bettina outwardly observed all the conventions of motherhood, while at the same time persecuting her family with cold passivity.
The girls responded by drawing together for emotional support. Before they dared to express in words the conviction that their mother did not like them, they shared the knowledge subconsciously; it was an awful secret which they kept together.
James all but deserted his home while the girls were small, spending most of his time in London. Cathy grew up with the futile notion that if she were as good as she possibly could be, maybe one day their mother would love them and their father would come back. She became a high-spirited girl with great gifts of pleasing, and in due course James began to take pleasure in her company.
Monty scorned to please. She attacked. She wanted more than mere survival. She wanted revenge. By instinct she saw that Bettina’s façade of parenthood masked relentless ill-will.
‘Witch,’ she screamed at her mother in her frequent childhood tantrums. ‘Witch! Witch! Wicked, wicked witch! I hate you! I’m going to burn you all up.’
Bettina never replied. She continued on her daily routine, as if she were a planet moving obliviously in its orbit. Her mornings were spent in her room; in the afternoon she would set off for the bridge club and she would not return until late at night. She and James had separate bedrooms. They seldom shared a meal. Rarely, James would suggest an outing for the whole family, in which Bettina would at once refuse to take part. She never accompanied him anywhere. The family came together only at Christmas.
The wifely duty of decorating the house was also something she avoided, with the result that James and his mother, Davina, had created the interior together. James’s taste was for rich, highly-coloured furnishings and exotic pieces of furniture. Davina introduced fleets of silver photograph frames, collections of Sèvres porcelain, wistful watercolour portraits of their distant relatives and odd items which she felt she could purloin from Bourton without their Uncle Hugo noticing. One of these stolen treasures was an oil painting of a bright-eyed, white lap-dog which, Davina told them, with great pride, had belonged to Madame de Pompadour. It was the only one of her additions which could hold its own against James’s emerald brocade curtains and inlaid Chinese cabinets.
The girls grew up in a riot of ill-matched luxury. Their mother’s conversation was a stream of platitudes directed at nullifying all communication. If Monty complained her tennis clothes were sweaty, Bettina would say, ‘Nonsense. Horses sweat. Gentlemen perspire and ladies gently glow.’ If Monty said she was hungry, Bettina would at once tell her, ‘You can’t be hungry. You’ve no idea what hunger is.’ If any member of the family attempted to involve her in a decision, Bettina would refuse, saying, ‘It’s no use, I never discuss anything with my relatives. It only leads to arguments.’
Bettina also refused to acknowledge either daughter’s approach to womanhood. Cathy and Monty knew, from the experience of their friends at school, that they would probably begin to menstruate some time, and one morning, Monty woke up in pain to find her bedclothes soaked with scarlet blood. Cathy called their mother, who looked at the mess with distaste, said nothing and walked away. Half an hour later the housekeeper appeared to strip the bed, and gave Monty one of her own sanitary towels. Monty was made to feel she had done something offensive.
‘Anyone would think I’d started just to upset her,’ snarled Monty. ‘She ought to be pleased. I’ll be grown-up soon and then she won’t have to bother with me any more.’
Cathy and Monty were sent to boarding school when they were six and five years old respectively. They passed most of their summer vacations with their uncle’s family at Bourton. The piano lessons were started in the remaining holidays as a solution to the problem of getting the children out of their mother’s way. Cathy was easily pleased with her pony. But Monty was frightened of horses and said that riding hurt her rapidly developing breasts, a ploy she knew would work because Bettina would evade discussion on so embarrassing a subject. Instead, she was put on the country bus to the next village, where an elderly woman gave piano lessons in the church hall.
‘I can do tunes now,’ Monty announced to her sister shortly after her tenth birthday. ‘It’s as easy as anything. My teacher says I’ve got perfect pitch because I can sing whatever she plays. She says I’ve got a very good ear.’
Cathy looked at each side of her sister’s head, pushing back her dark curls to look at her ears. ‘Which one is it?’ she asked with curiosity.
‘Not my real ear, silly, ear for music. Don’t you know anything?’ Proud as she was of her smart older sister, Monty enjoyed mastery of something at which Cathy did not shine.
No one except Cathy had any notion of the pleasure Monty found in music until the teacher by chance met James at a village féte. ‘You must be so proud of Miranda’s playing,’ the grey-haired spinster told him, taking the money for his guess at the weight of her almond-paved Dundee cake. ‘She’s such a pleasure to teach. She’s developi
ng real musical sensitivity, you know – unusual for a child of her age. She needs to practise more, of course … I expect you’ll be getting a new piano, soon?’
‘A new piano?’ James was puzzled. He spent so little time at home that he could not be sure, but his recollection was that there was no piano in his house. The music teacher knew this perfectly well, and had fifty years’ experience of manipulating wealthy, philistine parents for the benefit of their talented offspring. Soon a handsome, French satinwood piano with ormolu candelabra appeared in the house.
Monty’s joy in the instrument made Bettina feel thwarted and angry; but she could not defy James. She had been outmanoeuvred for the first time, and every hour Monty spent at the yellowed keyboard pressed home the advantage.
Now there was no James to save Monty from the cold antagonism of her mother. As she took her place in the limousine that drove the bereaved family of Lord James Bourton home from the suburban crematorium where his widow had directed that his remains be summarily reduced to ashes, Monty felt desolate. She was unprotected. She flinched as a group of photographers who had been waiting at the gates to their home crowded round the car and Cathy pulled down the limousine’s blinds with angry force.
Throughout the terrible summer, Monty and Catherine scarcely left each other’s company. Day after day they watched a succession of small black cars drive tentatively up to the house. Out of the cars climbed dark-suited men, who raised the gleaming door-knocker with bowed heads, knowing they were bringing bad news. They gave their names to the housekeeper in embarrassed voices, and she showed them into the drawing room where they had long meetings with Bettina.
Bettina would tell the girls nothing, nor discuss anything with them. Her face set in a blank mask, she came and went without saying where she was going or why.
‘This is nothing to do with you,’ she told Cathy with savagery. ‘There’s nothing to do and nothing to tell. Stop pestering me.’
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