The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  Victor Crabbe had been married twice. His second wife breathed and murmured now in deep sleep induced by barbiturates.

  At the time of Stamford Raffles’s first appointment, while, in the East India Company Offices in Penang, that great Englishman fretted over the decay of Malacca and learned his Malay verbs, then it was that Sultan Iblis—may God be merciful to him—crashed his mighty fist on the table, slaughtered a few Bugis, tortured a few chiefs, reformed the laws of inheritance, centralised the Customs and Excise, affirmed that women had souls, and limited wives to four in number. His name is remembered, his achievements commemorated in numerous institutions: the Iblis Club in the royal town, the Iblis Power Station at Timah, the Iblis Cinema in Tahi Panas, the Iblis Koran School at Bukit Tinggi, Iblis Mineral Waters (Swee Hong & Co., Singapore and Kuala Lumpur).

  Victor Crabbe was a member of the Iblis Club but did not drink Iblis Mineral Waters.

  After the death of Sultan Iblis there was trouble again. Five chiefs claimed the throne, only one of them—the Crown Prince Mansor—with any right. The bad days of anarchy returned, the kris whistled through the air and lopped innocent heads, there was pillaging and arson in up-river kampongs, the Bugis appeared again—a portent, like the anti-Christ Danes at the time of Bishop Wulfstan—and even the Siamese, who already held Patani, Kelantan and Trengganu, began to be interested. It was now that the British intervened. Mansor fled to Singapore, imploring help from the Governor. Yes, yes, he would most certainly accept a British Resident if he could be guaranteed a safe throne, a permanent bodyguard and a pension of $15,000 a month. And so the wars gradually died down like a wind, though not before some British blood had been spilled on that inhospitable soil. The state began to prosper. Rubber throve, and the Chinese dredged for tin with frantic industry. Sultan Mansor became Anglophile, wore tweeds even in his own palace, was graciously received by Queen Victoria, adopted as his state anthem a Mendelssohnian salon piece composed by the late Prince Consort, frequented the race-meetings in Singapore, and established that tradition of heavy gambling which has ever since been a feature of the royal house of Lanchap.

  His successors have been men-of-the-world, cosmopolitan, fond of new cars, insensitive to many of the sanctions of Islam. Pork, indeed, has never appeared at state banquets, and polygamy and concubinage have been practised with traditional piety, but the Istana has a well-stocked cellar and every Sultan has to drink brandy on doctor’s orders. The work of governing Lanchap has been carried on quietly and with moderate efficiency by the British Advisers—mostly colourless, uxorious men with a taste for fishing or collecting matchboxes or writing competent monographs on the more accessible Malay village customs.

  Victor Crabbe was in the Education Service, a resident master at the Mansor School.

  On his first visit to England, Sultan Mansor had been fascinated by the public school system. He had been shown round Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby and Shrewsbury, and one of his dreams had been a public school in his own state, in his own royal town, reproducing many of the features of its English prototypes – cricket, a wall-game, a pancake-scramble on the eve of Puasa, housemasters, prefects, fags, and, of course, a curriculum which should open the doors of European culture to brown little boys in Eton collars and bum-freezers. The limitations he placed on the scheme killed its realisation, however. He was a cosmopolitan when abroad, at ease in the hotels of the Western capitals, but in his own country he was parochial, his vision bounded by his own blood and his own river. He wanted a school for the Malay aristocracy of his own state, but, philoprogenitive and imaginative as he was, he could not but see that his own loins would never produce a sufficient first-form entry in his own lifetime.

  Victor Crabbe, though thirty-five years of age, had no children.

  Sultan Aladdin preferred Chinese and European mistresses to his own Malay wives, and had love-children of many colours. He found it easy to see that the future of Malaya in general, and of Lanchap in particular, rested not with the Malays alone but with the harmonious working-together of all the component races. He had few illusions about his own people: amiable, well-favoured, courteous, they loved rest better than industry; through them the peninsula would never advance—rather their function was to remind the toiling Chinese, Indians and British of the ultimate vanity of labour. He saw in the mingling of many cultures the possibility of a unique and æsthetically valuable pattern, and before his early death he had laid out his plan for a Malayan public school in a letter which he sent to all the Sultans. Written in exquisite, courtly Malay, made flavoursome with neologisms drawn from Sanskrit and Arabic, this letter may be found in those anthologies of Malay prose—compiled by scholars like Ashenden, Pink and Inche Redzwan bin Latiff, B.A.—which oppress pupils up and down the Federation.

  Actually, it was an Englishman who realised the visionary project, an able Inspector of Schools, F.M.S., called Pocock. He spoke with energy and zeal to the Resident-General, his enthusiasm infected a Residents’ Conference, and soon the High Commissioner himself saw the value of an educational establishment which should be a microcosm of the teeming, various world which was Malaya and yet be a symbol too of the calm British governmental process.

  And so the Mansor School came into being in Mansor’s own royal town. To it came Chinese, Malays, Indians and Eurasians—all of ‘good family’ (a qualification which, though never defined, had been a Leitmotif in Pocock’s original prospectus). Teachers came from England and India and the Straits Settlements. The School grew steadily, established traditions slowly. After some years it was decided that the climate was unsuitable for stiff collars and striped serge trousers, but an adequate school uniform was eventually found in white ducks, striped tie and Harrovian boater. The many buildings of the School represent a whole museum of colonial architecture, ranging from the original attap huts, through stucco palladian, to broiling Corbusier glass-houses on high stilts. All subjects have always been taught in English, and the occidental bias in the curriculum has made many of the alumni despise their own rich cultures, leading them, deracinated, to a yearning for the furthest west of all. Thus, the myths of cinema and syndicated cartoon have served to unite the diverse races far more than the clump of the cricket-ball and the clipped rebukes and laudations of their masters.

  Victor Crabbe taught history.

  Headmasters came and went, officers in the Education Service who did well or ill, but always moved on to retirement or to less arduous posts. Some ruled as they had been used to when they were form-masters in tough London or Liverpool secondary schools; they were baffled by tears in moustached sixth-formers, by walls of impassivity in the Lower School, by silent conspiracies which nullified the rules. One master was axed and another knifed during one harsh reign, that of the hated Gillespie. Him a local pawang was hired to kill by sympathetic magic, but Gillespie was too tough or insensitive to feel the lethal waves sent out from his pin-pricked image. Headmasters who cooed their love of the Asians found that love was infectious, and that Eros stalked the dormitories in two of his many divine forms. Moreover they were ostracised in the Club, shunned as betrayers of the British Way of Life. Only one headmaster was removed for pederasty and he with regret, for he was a superb cricketer. The problem of rule seemed insuperable. A sort of Malayan unity only appeared when the discipline was tyrannous; when a laxer humanity prevailed the Chinese warred with the Malays and both warred with the Indians and the Indians warred among themselves. Only one man had ever achieved the compromise of a firm liberalism. This had been Roberts, an Oriental scholar of deep human insight and warm charm. But under him the public school spirit began to evaporate. Cricket ceased to be played because only a few boys seemed able to understand it; two years went by without a Sports Day, and the headmaster was once seen working in a sarong. Roberts was transferred to an obscure post in Kelantan. At times it was thought that an American might be appointed, who, because he would combine the familiar and the exotic and would carry on his breath the magic of the sound-tr
ack, might arouse in the boys a strong religious devotion. But an American might introduce rounders. Besides, such an appointment would be a complete betrayal of the ideals on which the Mansor School was based, surrender to a culture which, however inevitable its global spread, must for as long as possible meet a show of resistance. An Australian was once appointed on contract, but he swore too much. And so makeshift and second-best have continued. Victor Crabbe’s headmaster was a little man called Boothby with a third-class Durham degree, a paunchy sportsman with a taste for whisky-water and fast cars, who subscribed to a popular book-club and had many long-playing records, who invited people to curry tiffin and said, “Take a pew.”

  Victor Crabbe was a housemaster.

  The difficulties of organising a house-system in a school of this kind had been partly solved through weak compromise. At first it had been proposed to call the houses after major prophets—Nabi Adam, Nabi Idris, Nabi Isa, Nabi Mohammed—but everyone except the Muslims protested. Then it seemed microcosmically fitting to allot boys to houses bearing the names of their home states. It happened, however, that an obscurantist Sultan and a Union of Chinese Secret Societies in one state forbade, independently of each other, any patronisation of the new educational venture. Thus it fell out that a rich and important territory was represented in the Mansor School by a Eurasian, the son of a Bengali money-lender, a Tamil and a dull but happy Sikh. The pupils themselves, through their prefects, pressed the advantages of a racial division. The Chinese feared that the Malays would run amok in the dormitories and use knives; the Malays said they did not like the smell of the Indians; the various Indian races preferred to conduct vendettas only among themselves. Besides, there was the question of food. The Chinese cried out for pork which, to the Muslims, was haram and disgusting; the Hindus would not eat meat at all, despite the persuasions of the British matron; other Indians demanded burning curries and could not stomach the insipid lauk of the Malays. Finally the houses were given the names of Britons who had helped to build the new Malaya. Allocation to houses was arbitrary—the dormitories buzzed with different prayers in different tongues—and everybody had to eat cold rice with a warmish lauk of buffalo-meat or vegetables. Nobody was satisfied but nobody could think of anything better.

  Thus it was that Victor Crabbe had the post of Master of Light House, named after Francis Light, founder of British Penang. The house was not very felicitously titled, said many: it was no academic pharos. Still, Birch House (a sop to the shade of the murdered Perak Resident) had no more than its normal share of flagellation, and Raffles House did not exceed the others in its interest in the Federation Lottery. Low House (named after the great Hugh) often came high in games and athletics; so, in fine, the names had no paranomastic propriety. All they showed was a lack of imagination on the part of those who had chosen them.

  Victor Crabbe, as dawn approached, stirred uneasily, his eyes tighlt closed, his brow creased. He fended something off with his arms.

  A centre of culture, Kuala Hantu is also a centre of Communist activity. A man may walk in moderate safety through the town at night, but let him not venture too far out into the scrublands. A grenade was once hurled into a kedai where Home Guards sat drinking; pamphlets calling on Asians to exterminate the white capitalist parasites are found on café tables and in long-parked cars. A mile or so out, on the Timah and Tahi Panas roads, there are frequent ‘incidents’. On rubber estates the terrorists appear capriciously, at unpredictable intervals, to decapitate tappers or disembowel them—a ceremony followed by harangues about the Brotherhood of Man and the Federation of the World. At Grantham Estate, seven miles outside Kuala Hantu, there have been five new managers in two years. A planter carries a gun not in hope of prevailing against the terrorists, but because he prefers the clean end of a shot to the tearing-out of his intestines. Lanchap, like most other states, is at war. Even outside the smart store of Blackthorn Bros., in Tahi Panas, armour-plated cars may be seen, parked while the summer-frocked mems go shopping. Military convoys trundle down the roads, bombs rattle windows, aeroplanes zoom, questing, over the jungle hideouts. The car-driver, hoping yet once more to get away with it, to speed through the bad nine miles and heave, once more, a sigh of gratitude at the end, sees at last the tree-trunk laid across the road and soon the ambushing grinning yellow men emerging. Some think the war will never end. The troops move into the steaming leech-haunted nightmare and emerge now and again with sullen prisoners who have names like Lotus Blossom, Dawn Lily or Elegant Tiger. But there are no decisive engagements, no real victories. It goes on and on, the sniping, the gutting, the garrotting, the thin streams of jungle-green troops, the colossal waste, and the anarchic days of the Bugis and the Achinese seem not so far away after all.

  Victor Crabbe woke up sweating. He had been dreaming about his first wife whom, eight years previously, he had killed. At the inquest he had been exonerated from all blame and the coroner had condoled with him all too eloquently and publicly. The car had skidded on the January road, had become a mad thing, resisting all control, had crashed through the weak bridge-fence and fallen—his stomach fell now, as his sleeping body had fallen time and time again in the nightmare reliving of the nightmare—fallen, it seemed endlessly, till it shattered the ice and the icy water beneath, and sank with loud heavy bubbles. His lungs bursting, he had felt the still body in the passenger-seat, had torn desperately at the driver’s door, and risen, suffocating, through what seemed fathom after fathom of icy bubbling lead. It was a long time ago. He had been exonerated from all blame but he knew he was guilty.

  He was grateful now for the warmth of the Malayan morning, for the familiar sound of Ibrahim on swift bare feet bringing the rattling tray, set for one, to the veranda. Fenella, his living wife, would sleep on, long, killing the hot morning in sleep. She wanted to go home, but she would not go home without him. She wanted the two of them to be together. She believed her love was reciprocated. To some extent it was.

  “Morden or Surbiton with palm trees. A ramshackle inland Bournemouth. Little suburban minds. Bridge and gossip. Tea and gossip. Tennis and gossip. Red Cross sewing parties and gossip. Look.” She would show, as they sat in the deserted Club, a copy of Country Life. “We could save enough to buy that in three years. If we go steady. Ideal for a private school.”

  Or again, flopped in one of the standard-pattern arm-chairs supplied by the Public Works Department, drinking in the wind of the ceiling-fan, she would gasp, “It’s so damned hot.” It had not been so damned hot in that English January. “Doesn’t it ever get any cooler?”

  “I like the heat.”

  “I thought I did. I used to in Italy. It must be the humidity.”

  The humidity could be blamed for many things: the need for a siesta, corpulence, the use of the car for a hundred-yard journey, the mildew on the shoes, the sweat-rot in the armpits of dresses, the lost bridge-rubber or tennis-set, the dislike felt for the whole country.

  “I quite like the country.”

  “But what is there to like? Scabby children, spitting pot-bellied shopkeepers, terrorists, burglars, scorpions, those blasted flying-beetles. And the noise of the radios and the eternal shouting. Are they all deaf or something? Where is this glamorous East they talk about? It’s just a horrible sweating travesty of Europe. And I haven’t met a soul I can talk to. All those morons in the Malay Regiment and those louts of planters, and as for the wives …”

  “We’re together. We can talk to each other.”

  “Why should we have to come out here to do that? It was more comfortable in London.”

  “The pay’s better.”

  “It goes nowhere. Have you seen this month’s Cold Storage bill? And this dress from Blackthorn’s—eighty dollars, and it’s going already under the arms.”

  “Yes. I see your point.”

  Having eaten two bananas and drunk three cups of tea, Victor Crabbe stood naked in the second bathroom, shaving. Between the first and last razor-strokes the morning grew from b
ud to full flower. Between the louvers of frosted glass Crabbe could see the descending terraces of lawn and the thin, black Tamil gardeners watering away with quarrelling cries. This country was not rich in flowers, but the semi-public garden of the Residency had bougainvillea, hibiscus, frangipani, rain trees and a single banyan. Across the road that bounded the lowest terrace the Hantu met the Lanchap, a meagre confluence now, the water smelling foul with a salty decay, bicycle tyres high and dry and bits of stick and iron lying like bones on rare mud islands.

  In a sense, infidelity to one’s second wife was an act of homage to one’s first. His dead wife was in all women. Pointless to moon about, as his father had done, hugging a memory, putting flowers on the grave, degging them with the brine of self-pity. That was necrophily. He had learned a lot from his father. The body of his own wife had been burnt and dispersed in vapour, had become atoms suspended in air or liquid, breathed in or drained down. A memory had no significance. History was not memory but a living pattern. Dreams were not memory.

  His hands, screwing the safety-razor apart, trembled, and a piece of steel fell into the wash-basin with a resonant clatter. Dreaming, one was not oneself. One was used by something, something stupidly malignant, a lolling idiot with a thousand volts at his command. ‘But why do you still have this feeling of guilt? Why won’t you swim any more or drive a car again?’