‘You’ve ruined my dress! You pig! You revolting pig!’ She felt as if she were incandescent with fury. Cathy scarcely realized it, but weeks of yearning for this man to notice her had brought her to a state where she detested him so passionately that she was ready to pull out his gorgeous blond curls with her own hands.
‘Mishtake …’ slurred Charlie, letting go of the bathroom door and taking a few steps into the room. Ahead of him loomed Caroline, her arms outstretched as if to head off a bolting pony. ‘Shorry …’ Charlie turned towards Cathy, making a helpless gesture with his hands.
‘You’re not getting away with this! How dare you behave so disgustingly? You’re not fit to belong to the human race!’ Cathy raged, almost enjoying herself.
‘Anyone ever tell you …’ Charlie advanced one step towards her, pointing a wavering finger, ‘anyone ever tell you … you’re beautiful when you’re … hup! beautiful when you’re angry? Whassyourname, anyway? Don’I know you?’ He looked mildly confused. He raised the pointing finger again, then fell forward across the sofa.
‘Zonked out,’ Caroline pronounced, inspecting the body with satisfaction.
‘So much for the Earl of Right,’ Cathy sneered, giving the prone form a disdainful prod with her foot. ‘What an animal.’
‘Oh cripes, look.’ Caroline picked up a messy but once expensive pigskin shaving-bag. ‘Maybe this really was his room in the first place.’ She opened the closet, and pulled out a tweed sports jacket and a pair of cavalry twill trousers. ‘Yes, look, here are his clothes.’
‘Well, that’s not our fault. If he’d been nicer to that April bird we wouldn’t have been turned out of our own room in the first place.’ Cathy pressed the bell for the servants with a bravura gesture. Looking like a Parisian soubrette with tousled hair and lace trimmed gown, she stared miserably at the sprawled body of the man on whom she had set her heart. ‘I’m bloody well going to send him a bill.’ She picked up the stinking ruin of her dress between finger and thumb, then sadly let it drop. Caroline belted her ugly plaid dressing gown with a decisive gesture and strode towards the door.
‘Caro, where are you going?’
‘I’m going to make a scene, that’s where I’m going.’
A few minutes later an elderly maid appeared, expressed anguish over Cathy’s soiled dress and took it away. Two more servants, and the housekeeper herself, followed to clean the bathroom. Two footmen carried Charlie out of the room. Then Caroline reappeared, with their host, Sir John Limpton, who immediately sat down on Cathy’s bed, took her hand, and offered an emotional apology. ‘Your cousin has explained everything and I regret most profoundly that this should have happened under my roof. The young fool should have known better. You can be sure that I shall have a few words with him in the morning. More than a few words. Considerably more. I knew your father, of course, don’t know if he ever mentioned me. Terrible business …’ He shook his head and rambled on for five minutes more, then pulled himself together and departed.
‘Caro! Whatever did you tell him to get him crawling like that?’ Cathy now wished desperately that the whole affair were just a bad dream. She felt ravaged with embarrassment, and furious with herself as well as with Charlie. In a few intemperate instants, she had blown her chance of landing Britain’s most eligible Earl.
‘I just said you were really upset, and – ah – well, it all got a bit out of hand, I was pitching it strong for the housekeeper when old Sir John loomed up and wanted the whole story. He was absolutely livid. I think he’s got a soft spot for you, Cathy.’
Smarting with failure, Cathy decided to scuttle back to London as early as she could the next day, fearful that Charlie would come round before she left. When he did regain consciousness, which was towards the end of Sunday afternoon, he received a thunderous lecture from his host, who was also a friend of his own father. As a result, Cathy received a large bouquet on Monday, accompanied by a colossal, pink velvet stuffed pig, wearing a white tutu and a label which read, ‘This little pig says he’s sorry.’ Shortly after they were delivered, the telephone rang.
‘I wouldn’t blame you if you said you never wanted to see hide or hair of me ever again,’ said Charlie humbly, ‘but if you think you could bear it, perhaps you would have dinner with me and tell me how I can make it up to you for ruining your dress?’
Chapter Eight
Singapore in 1948 was like a smashed wasps’nest. Huge ruined buildings, once creamy colonial white and now scarred with the shrapnel of World War II air raids, awaited demolition. Thousands of people, mostly of Chinese origin, scurried around building sites, gathering up rubble with their bare hands, carrying it away in wicker baskets, driving bulldozers and bullock-carts to and fro as they toiled to create a new city.
The water of the harbour was calm as it had been through the preceding centuries, when the ships of five continents had crossed its scummy surface. The corpses of twenty thousand citizens of the city, machine-gunned by the Japanese, now lay below the flotsam on the docile waves, but those who lived on remembered the dead with their ancestors but turned their energies to work. While Europe built war memorials, Singapore had decided to construct its glittering future. The docks were to be rebuilt, the airport resited, the notorious internment camps destroyed but not commemorated. The city at the axis of the East’s great trading routes was preparing to welcome oil-tankers instead of tea clippers, jet aircraft in place of rusty tramp steamers. Singapore wanted to forget the past and embrace the future.
For the present, there were the British Tommies, thousands of loud, slow-moving men in khaki shorts, their pale, northern skins fried red in the tropic sun. They had come to drive out the Japanese, stayed to supervise the repatriation of the prison camp survivors, and now arrived in renewed numbers to fight the Communist guerrillas who threatened mainland Malaya across the calm, pale grey waters of the Straits.
The soldiers were mostly conscripts aged under twenty, eager to sample the marvels of the East, equipped with malaria pills and homilies about the danger of diseased foreign whores. Penicillin had been available for a mere three years, and its power to destroy the bacteria causing gonorrhoea and syphilis seemed a claim rather than a reality. The Tommies’word for a woman was ‘bint’, from the Arabic name prefix ‘binti’meaning ‘daughter of’.
Throughout the air raids, blackouts, blockades and invasions of the war years, Singapore had maintained its purposeful dedication to business. War was a tonic to trade. Now the Indian jewellers on Arab Street displayed in their plate-glass cases an unprecedented range of wares: the portable wealth of Eurasian concubines hastily cashed in when the girls’protectors fled the Japanese advance, the slim, gold wedding rings sold for medicines by the starving nuns in the internment camps, Dutch cigar cases, Australian watches, Russian icons, Chinese jade. The passport to the city was something to sell.
Into the small, curving river which slipped through Chinatown sailed a high-powered Malay fishing-boat bringing a few passengers from the mainland. The petrol engine idled and spluttered as the boat nosed to a landing between the ranks of sampans at the quayside, and the fisherman’s boy helped the passengers mount the rough steps made from railway sleepers. The last to alight was a woman of perhaps twenty, who climbed with difficulty because of her tight brown sarong. The boy ran down again to collect the palm-leaf bag which bulged with her possessions.
Bemused by the throng of rickshaws and bicycles along the quay, the girl looked wonderingly at the facade of shuttered shop-houses in front of her, the three- or four-storey buildings incorporating warehouses and teashops behind a shabby arcade of columns. The walls were covered with peeling layers of cigarette posters and advertisements for American films.
‘Can I help you – perhaps you have lost your way?’ A plump Eurasian woman in a navy print dress spoke to her in English.
‘Thank you.’ The girl turned in relief. ‘I am looking for a cheap lodging-house, if you know of one.’
‘Singapore is full of che
ap rest-houses. Do you want to stay in any particular part of town? Perhaps you have friends in the city?’
‘No, no friends. I have to find work, so I want to be near the centre, that’s all.’ She was neatly formed, with a high-cheekboned, heart-shaped face.
‘I rent a few rooms in my house – only young ladies, of course. One of them has just left me to go back to her village and get married. Perhaps you would like to see her room?’
The girl hesitated. Apart from the fact that she spoke English well, everything about her indicated a village girl of little sophistication. She had few clothes in her bag, wore no jewellery or accessories of Western manufacture, and her silhouette showed no evidence of a bra. Her figure-hugging black bhaju and printed sarong were in traditional Malay style; the long line of buttons down the bhaju front were, the woman noticed with a covert glance, hand-made of braided thread. But village girl or not, she was suspicious of this sudden good luck. Good. She had common sense as well.
‘If you wish, I will give you my address and you can call later to see the room. But I am on my way home now and we could take a rickshaw together?’ No pressure, not at this stage, not with a Malay. Had she been Chinese the woman would have hectored a little, but the timid Malay girls needed more careful manipulation.
‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘So will you come now with me?’
‘Why not.’ She picked her bag up decisively, and the Eurasian woman hailed a rickshaw.
‘My name is Anna Maria,’ she said, holding out a hand, ‘Spanish name. My mother is from Madrid.’ A European connection was always reassuring, she found; in fact, her mother was a Filipino housemaid. As the rickshaw boy ran through the thronged streets Anna Maria appraised her catch out of the corner of her eye. Slim, graceful but with that bit of extra flesh the British liked; a real little bosom, in fact.
‘Excuse me asking, but are you Malay?’
‘Yes, I come from Pahang, south Pahang.’ She had named one of the less developed areas on the east side of the peninsula.
‘May I ask your name?’ It was an intrusive question, but the girl rallied to answer, evidently understanding that city people were more outspoken than country folk.
‘I am Ayeshah binti Mohammed,’ she answered, as if she had rehearsed the sentence. Anna Maria had heard so many false names she scarcely bothered to register suspicion.
‘And are your mother and father still living?’
‘My mother only.’
‘You are very pretty, very nice.’
The girl barely reacted. Most young Malay girls giggled at compliments but there was a hard core here, a passive negation in her manner. Yet she was pretty, and Anna Maria was sure she had European blood in her family somewhere; her skin was dark olive, her nose slightly upturned but sharp at the bridge not broad, her eyes round and her hair finer than that of most full-blooded Asiatics.
‘A pretty girl like you should have a husband.’ Another bleak silence. That was it then. Husband had run away, maybe chopped up by the terrorists, who could say?
‘What work are you hoping to find?’ The rickshaw boy was pacing steadily past the conglomeration of white buildings that formed Raffles Hotel. A Union Jack hung limply from a pole over the entrance.
‘Maybe I can be amah in an English house. I speak good English, I work hard.’
Anna Maria drew in a hissing breath and shook her head.
‘Very hard work to find. Do you have references? Someone who can introduce you?’
The younger woman’s proud poise wavered as she shook her head. References were something that had never occurred to her.
Anna Maria’s house was a weatherbeaten, turquoise building in the old colonial-Georgian style, with semi-circular fan lights above the upper windows. Ferns gushed from the clogged guttering. Ayeshah’s room was a small one at the back, with a high window, one foot square, bare floor boards and an iron bed. The Chinese disliked building houses with big windows at the back, in case they gave access to bad spirits. Ayeshah walked around it with an animal-like curiosity, agreed the rent and closed the door behind Anna Maria with a calm finality which inhibited any further overtures.
Next morning, trim and serious in a fresh sarong, Ayeshah asked Anna Maria how to get to the quarters where the rich Europeans lived, and walked off briskly. All day she tramped from one villa to another, knocking on doors with diminishing confidence. In most houses she never saw the owners, only the Chinese houseboys who brusquely sent her away, angry that some stupid village girl should not understand the system of nepotism and introduction which regulated candidates for household jobs.
She had known, of course, that in leaving the village and coming to a town she was leaving a rural Malay life, and moving in to a harsh Chinese world, but she had not expected to feel so much of an alien. At night Ayeshah returned, overwhelmed by her failure and by the horrible size of the city, which had been quite outside her ability to imagine. The grey paved streets seemed to extend for ever in all directions, crowded with busy people who had no pity for her strangeness.
She bought rice for a few cents from a hawker. It tasted smoky and rancid, as if it had been cooked with dirty oil, and it was expensive, but she was too hungry to care.
‘Maybe you will be luckier in the Chinese houses,’ Anna Maria suggested. While Ayeshah was out, Anna Maria had gone into her room, using her duplicate key, and examined her small bag of belongings. She found the money in the pillow lining. There was more than she had expected, enough for a month if the girl were careful, which she seemed to be.
With new heart, waving gaily to Anna Maria as the landlady leaned out of her first-floor window to hang her canary’s cage in the sun, Ayeshah set off the next morning for Emerald Hill. Again she went from door to door, this time of smartly painted terraced villas with small gardens; she quickly realized that each house had only one or two servants. The houseboys were older and angrier than the others, the doors slammed behind her instead of closing civilly.
At the end of the day she was so tired that she spent precious dollars on a rickshaw back to Anna Maria’s street. She had found out that seven other girls also lived there, but when she left in the morning they were all asleep, and none of them were in when she returned in the evening. By the time the other lodgers clattered up the bare wood stairs, Ayeshah was sleeping the sound sleep of a young, healthy and exhausted girl. When she paid the rickshaw boy she asked him where the richest people in Singapore lived, and how she should get there.
Next day Ayeshah took a bus ride out to the prosperous suburb the rickshaw driver had named, and continued her pilgrimage in search of work, walking through huge gardens with swimming pools, to knock at the servants’entrances of vast, pastel mansions owned by Chinese millionaires. By now, although she did not know it, she had a pleading look in her eye and a plaintive tone in her voice that invited yet more rejection. The butlers were grave, polite but regretful. Returning at the end of the hours of daylight she lost her way, and wandered the empty streets for hours, panic fluttering in her chest, until at last the slope of an avenue was familiar and she found the bus-stop.
From the bus-stop in Victoria Street there was only a short distance to walk to Anna Maria’s house, but now it was quite dark and the bars were filling with seamen and soldiers. She passed the junction of Bugis Street, scenting noodles from the food hawkers’ barrows, and paused; should she spend more money on food?
A large rat stuck its nose out of the deep guttering by her feet, took fright and retreated. As Ayeshah was counting her money there was shouting in a bar to her left, then fighting men fell out into the street. Chinese and Malays were punching and butting each other, some waving broken bottles. Tension between the two races ran high in the city, needing only an incident to transform hatred into violence. The fighting men crashed to the ground at Ayeshah’s feet. Totally unaccustomed to both drunkenness and violence, she stumbled away in horror as the bigger man knelt on the other’s chest and repeatedly smashed
his head on the granite paving-stones. Ayeshah ran home as fast as her swathed sarong would allow and bolted up the stairs.
Anna Maria sat at her dilapidated roll-top desk on the first-floor landing, with a lean, brown-skinned Chinese man in a black suit. As Ayeshah breathlessly scrambled to the top of the stairs, they turned and rose as if they had been waiting for her.
‘Poor girl, have you had an accident?’ Anna Maria rushed to her side and made her sit down. Ayeshah recovered her breath; she saw that blood from the street fight had splashed her feet and legs. An instant later she realized that she had dropped all her money in terror.
‘No, please. I am quite all right. I just saw some men fighting in the street and it frightened me.’
‘Sit, please. Have some tea.’ Anna Maria poured the translucent brew into a tiny rose-printed cup. ‘You are sure you are not hurt?’
Ayeshah sipped and shook her head. The tea was tepid and bitter, witnessing a long wait. She sensed that there was business to be done with the Chinese, and looked at him expectantly.
‘May I introduce my good friend Hong Seung? He has come here asking my help and I suggested that he should wait and meet you.’ Hong Seung was courteous. He offered her an English cigarette which she refused with a giggle that seemed to reassure them all.
‘My honoured friend Anna Maria,’ they half-bowed to each other, ‘says you are looking for work. I heard this and thought it was good luck, for I need a girl to work for me. I own a laundry, not far from here. My business is good and I need one more girl to wash. Too many boys in my family and no girls. Girls wash better. I think I ask Anna Maria, she know plenty girls.’ Relief cleared Ayeshah’s panic-filled head instantly.
‘What will you pay me?’ she asked stiffly.
‘I am still a poor man, I cannot pay much – five dollars is all I can manage.’
It was, she knew, more than an amah’s wages, but then she had to pay Anna Maria and buy her own food. Still, it was enough. She nodded. Anna Maria and Hong Seung smiled at each other.
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