‘You can keep your shipboard romances,’ she told Betty. ‘Men are all the same – selfish brutes. I told him, it’ll be me that’s left holding the baby. Fine start to a new life that’ll be. Stuck on the wrong side of the bloody earth, with a squalling brat.’
Her resolve lasted only two days, and then Betty had the cabin to herself once more and Heather and the junior purser were again a regular feature of the second-class dining room – where his duties included playing Ivor Novello selections on the piano after dinner and she draped herself adoringly over the back of a chair to watch him.
Betty told her bridge friends the story. ‘I think she’s awfully silly; how could she have a baby if she wasn’t married?’ she asked with contempt, and Mr Forsyth, Miss Rogers and Miss Westlake glanced at each other from behind their cards. The four had become thoroughly fond of each other, as disparate strangers will when forced together by circumstances.
As soon as Betty said goodnight, Miss Rogers opened the subject. ‘Do you suppose that our young friend knows what to expect from the physical side of marriage?’ she asked, putting a pin back into her stylishly rolled hair. Mr Forsyth shook his head.
‘I think she’s as innocent as a newborn lamb.’ Miss Westlake nodded, checking her diamanté dressclip to cover her embarrassment.
‘Green as grass, if you ask me.’
There was a pause as they contemplated the implications this discovery had for their little square of friendship.
‘There’s a certain sort of girl, in my experience, who isn’t cut out for a honeymoon. I was dreadfully naive myself and of course, my mother told me nothing, nothing at all … Frankly, it was a beastly experience.’ Miss Rogers’ crimson mouth puckered in amusement at her own choice of words, and Miss Westlake’s willowy figure swayed towards her in sympathy.
‘Do you suppose we should talk to her?’ he asked with a plain sincerity which acknowledged his own sex’s ineptitude in emotional matters.
Simultaneously, the two women nodded. ‘She looks up to you as a father figure,’ said Miss Westlake, ‘and I’m afraid if one of us tackled it she might – well, we could – well, you know, our experiences of marriage haven’t been very good, I’m sorry to say. And she is such a cowering little thing.’
The elderly man of God accepted the truth of what she said with regret. Like most men, he would rather face a shipload of Yangtze pirates armed to the teeth than a woman with urgent emotional needs.
‘I’ll have a little talk with her tomorrow,’ he agreed, with resignation.
‘Tell me, my dear,’ he began next day, finding Betty under the sun-canopy for her usual siesta, ‘were you close to your mother? Could you talk to her about life when something worried you?’
‘Oh, yes. My mother’s a wonderful woman, my father says she’s the light of his life.’
He smiled, noticing that the only response her creamy complexion had made in two weeks of roasting sun was to produce a tiny dusting of freckles, like toast crumbs, over the bridge of her upturned nose. He thought her a pastel, passive, pretty little thing, made for muted emotions and narrow horizons, hardly strong enough for life at all.
‘So your parents have a very happy marriage?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘I expect your mother told you all the secrets of her success before you set off?’
Betty was earnestly trying to follow the vicar’s train of thought. She had been brought up to expect sermonizing from older people, and it had, in truth, seemed strange to her that this very wise adult had treated her like an equal when he was so obviously superior to her in every way.
Now he was beginning to sound like an adult should. Eagerly she followed his lead. ‘Oh yes. She told me always to wear plenty of scent – look.’ Quick as a bird, she dipped into her handbag and brought out a bottle of Yardley’s Lavender. ‘And to make sure my husband never saw me doing anything undignified, like cleaning my teeth. She said that being slovenly about that sort of thing killed all the magic in a marriage.’
‘I expect that’s very true. The happiest marriages have always been between people who knew the difference between intimacy and familiarity, I think. One breeds respect and the other breeds contempt. People say that if there’s trouble in a marriage, it’s usually in the bedroom, but in my experience the rot starts in the bathroom first.’ Mr Forsyth was rather pleased with this quip, but Betty’s periwinkle eyes became shadowed with anxiety. He at once abandoned vanity, kicked himself for this besetting sin, and returned to the awkward task in hand.
‘Did your mother also mention the bedroom side of things at all?’
‘Oh yes, she was quite frank about it. She said that my husband would make demands on me, but it would be all right, I would just have to not mind, just not let it upset me.’
‘How very sensible. And did she explain to you what these demands … the sort of thing she was talking about?’
‘Well no. I never thought to ask her.’
‘I’d like to explain, Miss Clare. I have found that some men place great importance on this aspect of marriage, and when their wives can share in it with joyful acceptance there is a great deal of happiness to follow.’ He spoke with a tinge of wistfulness. His own marriage had been ecstatic but short. His wife had died of malaria three months after arriving in the East.
He proceeded with the utmost finesse, first drawing to Betty’s attention the difference between the boy babies and the girl babies in the hospital where she worked. Betty’s nursing career had been abandoned instantly Gerald had proposed to her, and so amounted only to three months of theoretical lessons on hygiene. She had, however, observed that boy babies and girl babies were differently made, but attached no importance to the anatomical aberration. In fact, she had assumed that the boy baby’s penis was some superfluous fold of skin which would disappear before adulthood.
Next the patient priest asked her if she had ever seen animals mating, which she said she had. Her home had tottered on a knife-edge of destitution all her life, with her father’s army pension supporting himself, his wife, his two spinster sisters and his daughter. To be sure of eating meat, they had kept rabbits in their back garden, and the breeding, rearing and slaughter of these animals was her father’s most meaningful occupation. Mating the rabbits meant that her father put on big, leather gloves, pulled the buck rabbit out of his hutch and tossed him, kicking frantically, into a hutch with a female. They would settle down to munch bran together for a week, and then the buck would be put back in his own hutch. Sometimes he would bite the female, and sometimes he bit Betty’s father.
Betty had many times seen rabbits copulate, a process which they accomplished in twenty seconds without any excitement or change of expression. Thick fur hid all the organs employed. Mr Forsyth very carefully explained that mating was mechanically the same process in humans, but that the species to whom God gave dominion over the animals usually went about things with some physical expression of affection. Betty seemed to be following him easily so he mentioned that she might perhaps have enjoyed kissing her fiancé, at which she blushed attractively.
‘You will probably find it all rather strange at first,’ he finished, smiling with relief at a difficult assignment accomplished to the limit of his skill. ‘Because explanations are all very well but one person can’t really convey very much to another. Experience is everything, I’ve found. Ah – look there – the flying fish have come back.’ And out on the bright surface of the sea three quivery flashes of light skittered away from the ship’s wash. In an instant the silver streaks sank back into the sea, and everything the kind Reverend Forsyth had said to Betty vanished similarly in the morass of her ignorance. The facts of life, without any context of sexual knowledge, held no significance for her. She imagined that once married, she and Gerald would, like rabbits, browse contentedly side by side.
At last they approached the island of Penang. The sky was a hazy turquoise and the sea its greyish reflection. The water, Betty noticed, was not cl
ear but opaque and souplike. For twenty-four hours the liner had sailed between green islands just like those of her childish vision, and now, at last, it was slowly reaching its destination.
Green hills were visible in the cloudy distance. Ahead of the liner was the quay of Georgetown, with its row of stone buildings, one of which was pillared and had a thick square tower topped by a dome. Betty liked them; the buildings were solid, and not much decorated, the utilitarian architecture of trade. They looked like the banks at home, only they were brilliantly white not grimed and soot-streaked. Beyond them was the massive grey-stone wall of Fort Cornwallis, its cannons commanding the flat stretch of water between Penang Island and the misty, palm-edged mainland of Malaya.
As the ship drew closer to the shore and swung ponderously round into alignment with the pier, she saw a lower layer of buildings, mostly of weathered wood – warehouses and port offices thronged with people. Mr Forsyth pointed out to her the settlement of Chinese shacks built on stilts over the water itself. ‘Very ingenious people,’ he explained. ‘The land is all owned by landlords who want to charge them rent to build on it – so they build their houses over the water where it’s free.’
As she docked, the ship was besieged by bumboats full of hawkers selling snacks and curios. Garbage scows moored at one end of the liner and black birds swooped down on the rubbish like huge flies.
At the mahogany rail Mr Forsyth scented the tepid breeze with delight. ‘Smell it,’ he told her, ‘that’s the smell of the East. Blossoms and spice woods from the jungle, rubber and coconut fibre from the wharf, charcoal smoke, the mist on the mountains – whenever I smell that, I know I’m home.’
Betty smelled the breeze uncertainly. It did have an odour, something damp and almost intimate. It did not seem pleasant to her. In the crowd of people pressed at the pierside she could not see Gerald and uneasy impatience filled her. Why did everything take so long on this ship? Why did they have to wait for a hundred coolies to scramble on and off before the passengers could disembark?
Below her, three small Chinese boys in a dilapidated sampan were shrieking and performing acrobatic tricks, calling for the curious passengers to throw them money. More urchins were jumping into the water from the end of a vacant pier. As Betty watched, there was a crescendo of screaming and violent activity in the boats at the waterside; men began to beat the water with bamboo poles and a dripping child was pulled out and carried away by howling women.
‘What are they doing, what’s the matter?’ she asked the missionary with alarm.
‘Sea snake, I expect – they used to have a lot of them in Penang – yes, look, there it is, they’ve caught it.’ Betty stepped back and gasped with disgust as the men in the boat awkwardly flung a huge black serpent on to the pier with their poles. It writhed and lashed itself over and over until other men with cleavers hacked at it and eventually chopped it into pieces; then the crowd closed around the dreadful sight and hid it.
‘Bit of a shock, isn’t it?’ Mr Forsyth calmed her in his noncommittal style. ‘You’re lucky to have seen it, you know, there are hardly any of them left now.’
At last the waiting in the sticky heat was over, the gangplanks were lowered, and Betty said a tremulous temporary goodbye to her friends and walked forward. Halfway down she saw Gerald, eager, smiling, spruce in his white suit, and holding out his arms just as she had seen him in her dreams.
The etiquette for a beach wedding was entirely designed to delight the bride-to-be who shipped out from England before she embarked on the hazards of life as a memsahib in the Crown Colony. Gerald and his mother drove Betty straight to the cool palm-shaded haven of the E & O Hotel, where smiling porters in uniform took up her trunks, deft maids unpacked them and her wedding clothes were removed, pressed and returned looking as fresh as they had in Debenham & Freebody’s in London such a very long time ago.
Gerald’s mother, the image of her son and as tall as he, but with more presence, had organized the entire affair. Betty felt, the next day, as if she were going to be married in a bower of orchids. Her bouquet was the largest mass of blooms she had ever seen, smelling quite violently of jasmine, and with fragile English flowers next to succulent, tropical blossoms.
In St George’s Church, two days later, the Reverend John Forsyth marched her up the aisle. Elizabeth Louise Clare took Gerald Arthur Rawlins to be her lawful wedded husband according to God’s holy ordinance, and posed with him afterwards on the white-pillared rotunda in the shade of the huge churchyard trees, surrounded by strangers, and half-hallucinating with the heat. Her dress was of thick ivory satin, fitted tightly at the sleeves and waist and, on the advice of Gerald’s mother, she wore a long cotton slip underneath it to prevent perspiration stains.
‘After all,’ the older woman advised, ‘you don’t want to bring your dress halfway round the world and be photographed in it for ever more with sweat marks round your waist. You’ll learn not to buy tight-fitting dresses out East.’
They were photographed again in rattan chairs by a frangipani bush on the hotel terrace, Gerald with his bow tie askew and Betty smiling trustfully at the Chinese photographer. They were both overshadowed by the commanding bulk of Gerald’s mother behind them, while Mr Forsyth sat awkwardly beside the bride.
Indoors it was cooler, with fans whirring endlessly to stir the clammy air. Her wedding breakfast was a procession of dishes traditional to the colony – fierce mulligatawny soup, hot curry, roast beef and finally icecream with a strange white jelly next to it. Gerald spooned everything down with enthusiasm. He had not had much of a stag night, by comparison with an evening with James and Bill in K. L., but a few boys from the Cricket Club had got up a party, and he had the kind of minor hangover which made him hungry. He noticed his bride looking at her plate in hesitation.
‘It’s traditional – mangosteen and icecream – delicious, try it.’ He scooped up half the pale fruit and tried to feed it to her. It looked like a foetus, something unborn, like the most horrible thing Betty could remember having seen.
‘No, please, Gerald, I’m really not hungry …’ she whispered, pleading.
‘Nonsense, open wide.’ Fearful of offending him, she parted her lips and gulped the spoonful down. Her head swam and she half-stood up, thinking she was going to be sick. Instead she fell limply forward in a faint.
Gerald’s mother had her taken upstairs to her room and brought her round with a little bottle of sal volatile. In her overbearing way she was concerned about Betty.
‘There are only two types of women in the tropics. Those who cope, and those who don’t. If you make up your mind you’re going to cope, you will. Take it easy the first couple of days, always have a lie-off in the afternoons and whatever you do, don’t drink unless you are accustomed to it. You’ll get used to the heat, I promise you. Everybody does. But no more fitted frocks, I think.’ And she went through Betty’s trunks and found an afternoon dress of cheap blue-and-white silk for her to wear in place of the pink linen suit, which had seemed so cool in London, but now felt as hot as a blanket.
They were pelted with confetti and driven away in the handsome, black Jaguar which belonged to Gerald’s father.
Penang seemed to Betty to be divided into districts of three distinct types. There was the crowded, red-roofed hugger-mugger of Chinatown, the stone-built, white-washed solidity of the British mercantile quarter and now the area through which they drove, where broad avenues were shaded by massive trees and lined with immense mansions. These were far more impressive than anything she had ever seen in her life. Even Buckingham Palace, to which her father had once taken her, seemed shabby in comparison.
‘Who lives there?’ she asked Gerald, as they passed a huge turquoise palace.
‘Oh, that’s the great Mr Choy,’ he told her. ‘Made his money in lumber and tin. And rubber, of course. He owns the neighbouring estate to ours. All these houses belong to the Chinese millionaires, except that one. That’s the Governor’s.’ He pointed out a long build
ing with one square turret.
‘They’re very grand, Gerald,’ she said doubtfully, meaning that these huge, coloured, decorated palaces awed her. Although their style aped the pale colonial buildings of the British, rather than the Chinatown houses which had upswept eaves and carved gilded dragons on their roofs, it was still threateningly alien to her eyes. There was too much stucco, there were too many balconies – the ostentation was blatant, almost savage.
They arrived at their honeymoon hotel in time for the afternoon lie-off, and Gerald went for a swim in the milky sea. He felt rather lonely cavorting in the waves like a solitary, sporting porpoise, but Betty had almost flinched when he said, ‘Fancy a dip?’
‘But the water’s deep, Gerald,’ she protested. ‘Please, please, you must be careful.’ It made him feel manly to pat her little hand in reassurance before striding down the sand.
He enjoyed showing her the wonders of the country where he had been born, expecting her to feel the thrills he remembered experiencing when he had finally returned to Penang after ten years in England, attending school and being farmed out to relatives every holiday. He made her sit on the terrace overlooking the beach and watch the flaming sunset.
‘Better than Guy Fawkes Night, eh?’ he remarked as the violent orange panorama faded to an apricot blush behind the black clouds.
‘Wonderful,’ she agreed.
‘And see the moon’s the wrong way up?’ He waved his glass at the vaporous crescent rising above the dark hills.
‘Lovely.’ She nodded. Some large insects were flying into the lamplight. The strangeness of everything overwhelmed her and she momentarily yearned with all the power of her feeble heart for a clean British sea-breeze and a good grey sky of home.
Cheerfully, Gerald prattled at her during dinner, drinking whisky-and-water throughout, and then they danced to the gramophone on the terrace. He pressed his cheek to hers and a film of sweat at once formed between them, plastering her hair flat, but Gerald didn’t seem to mind. Betty closed her eyes and tried to recapture the wonderful, melting, giddy feeling she had felt when he had kissed her at home, but it would not come back. Instead, a pool of apprehension welled up in her stomach.
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