“He’s really quite handsome,” drawled Rosemary, as though Robert Loo were one of the ‘natives’, and she but newly arrived from Sloane Square. “A bit like that nice man from Penang.”
“I must see you,” said Robert Loo, “I have to talk to you. It’s very difficult.”
“Well, sit down. Talk to me now.”
“He speaks quite good English,” said Rosemary, “for a Chinese.”
“I can’t go on like this,” said Robert Loo. “I can’t get my work done. Day after day this noise. And I can’t get out.”
“Sit down,” said Crabbe. “Tell me all about it. Calmly.”
Robert Loo sat down on the edge of a chair, hands clasped, as in a vicarage drawing-room. “I’ve written only five bars in two days. It’s this noise all the time. And I try to write up in my bedroom, after midnight, but my father puts out the lights.”
“What are you writing?”
“A violin concerto.”
“Ah.”
“Can you play the violin?” asked Rosemary loftily, out of a chumbling refined mouth.
“No, I can’t. I mean, I know how …”
“I was taught the violin,” said Rosemary. “I played it at school, and at the university. On television, too,” she added. “Oh, all sorts of things. Symphonies by Bach, and fugues, and, oh, all sorts of things. Ave Maria,” she added, like a pious ejaculation. “And In a Persian Market.”
“I must speak to your father again,” said Crabbe. “It’s not altogether his fault, I can see that. He wants more trade, and so forth.”
“He won’t listen to you,” said Robert Loo. “He says …”
“What does he say?”
“He says that people are talking.”
“You see, Victor,” said Rosemary briskly. “I told you people were talking, didn’t I? But you wouldn’t listen.”
“I don’t know what he means,” said Robert Loo. “But he said you were up to no good. Please, please,” he added in panic, “don’t say that to him. He says you’re a good customer and you mustn’t be told anything to make you annoyed. But I still don’t know what he means.”
“I’ll tell you what he means,” began Rosemary with vigour and relish. “He means …”
“Do be quiet, Rosemary,” said Crabbe. “Never mind what he means. That’s not the point. The point is that you must be able to go on composing. Do you get no evening off? You can always come to my place and work there.”
“He wouldn’t let me go there,” said Robert Loo. “And he says there’s too much work to do here. I don’t think he’ll let me have any more time off.”
“I’ll speak to him,” said Crabbe, not without grimness.
“Don’t, don’t. He sees we’re talking about him now. I must get back.” And he rose from the chair.
“Sit down,” ordered Crabbe. “So,” he said, with a certain malice, “the real world’s impinging at last.”
“Impinging?”
“You’re becoming aware of other people. The artist, you see, can’t function in a vacuum. If I were you,” said Crabbe, “I’d start acting. Doing something. I’d even leave home and get a job somewhere, a job as a clerk, say. I’d assert myself.”
“I couldn’t do that.” All the shock of intense Chinese conservatism confronting the heterodox, even the blasphemous. “I couldn’t. He’s my father.”
“My father threw me out on the streets,” said Rosemary, “to fend for myself. Alone in the streets of London at the age of ten. Then I was adopted by an Indian prince,” she added. “I wasn’t afraid of leaving home.”
“There’s only one way, perhaps,” said Crabbe. “Your father must be made to see. There’s a fair chance that your symphony will be played for the Independence celebrations. If he hears that broadcast, or, better, if he actually sees it being played, a large audience, the applause … He has to take your music seriously. He must be shown.”
“You can come and work at my house,” said Rosemary generously. “Any night.”
“I can’t get out,” said Robert Loo. “I said that before. And I asked him again about becoming an accountant, but he said that he needs me here now. They’re closing down so many other places, and he says we’re going to get all the trade.”
“Your symphony,” said Crabbe patiently, “is, I think, going to be played. All you have to do is to add a short finale for chorus, a patriotic ending in Malay. Your symphony must have a more popular appeal. A political appeal. You can get that done, can’t you? Somehow?”
Robert Loo sneered. “I won’t change it. It’s good as it is. It’s what I wanted to write. They’ve no right to ask me to change it. Even if I could, I wouldn’t.”
“Oh, Robert, Robert.” Crabbe sighed deeply, just, thought Rosemary, like Jalil. “You’ll never learn. The real world’s impinging, and you can’t see it. What am I going to do with you?”
But Robert Loo was looking, fascinated, at Rosemary’s right hand which held, in film-star elegance, a long cigarette-holder holding a long cigarette. “Do give me a light, darling,” she said to Crabbe. Robert Loo saw himself looking, for the first time, at a woman’s hand. It was a well-shaped hand—the beauty of any one isolated part of Rosemary’s body was a divine wonder: it was only the totality, the lack of the animating soul, that failed to impress: she was a valuable lesson in aesthetics, proclaiming the kinship of the sublime and absurd. Robert Loo’s eyes were led, as in an artfully composed picture, up from the long delightful fingers to the cunning of the wrist, up to the smooth round brown arm to the bare shoulder. This was the real world impinging. “I must go back,” he mumbled. Crabbe nodded bleakly, dumbly.
When Crabbe and Rosemary left, the four Malay boys, free at last of Syed Hassan’s father, made tiny whistling noises at Rosemary’s haunches. Then they sat a while in gloom. In a sense, all that had been said was true. They did nothing to justify their vaunted knightly trappings: the casque of hair, the one suit of sweating armour, the brave oaths and the slick knives. They had been visited, they knew, by Hamlet’s father’s ghost. O, what rogues and peasant slaves were they. They must start acting. Doing something.
“If my dad lost his job,” said Hassan, “it would be his fault. A dirty Tamil.”
“We could beat him up,” suggested Azman.
“Knife him.” Thus Hamzah.
“Hit him with a bicycle chain.”
“Smash a bottle in his face.”
“Knock his teeth out.”
“Punch him in the bodek.”
“Here,” called Hassan angrily to Robert Loo. “We want to pay.”
“Eighty cents.”
“Too much. Fifty.”
“Eighty cents.”
“Fifty, or we’ll smash up your juke-box.”
Robert Loo smiled, said fervently: “If only you would.”
That was not the correct response. How all occasions did inform against them. Sullenly they paid what was asked, sullenly left, Hamzah feigning a kick at the glass showcase filled with loaves and Chinese cakes.
Action. At two-thirty-five in the morning, Robert Loo, barefooted, his sleeping-sarong knotted tightly at the sternum, crept past his father’s snores, past his brothers and sisters who breathed heavily in the heavy labour of sleep, and went softly downstairs. His electric torch caught rain-stains on the wall, scurrying cockroaches big as mice, forlorn empty mineral-water cases. Entering the shop, he found moonlight sitting at the tables, the great music-god asleep in the corner. This he sought. He was not going to murder, for he had no murdering weapon; he was merely going to maim. He put out his torch and, by moonlight, made from the tray of an empty Player’s packet a wedge of card, trimming it with fingers and teeth to the right size. This wedge he jammed into the coin-slit of the machine, jamming it hard in, closing the passage to noise-buying ten-cent pieces. He hoped to gain from this a day of silence, time enough to sketch out a good deal of the first movement of the concerto. He heard it now, violin soaring above the muted horns and the harps, and saw
the soloist, smiling in green. Then, with a shock, he saw Rosemary, and heard no music. This would not do. His breath came faster. Seeing the long elegant brown arm again, he groaned, remembering Crabbe’s curious word ‘impinge’. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? All he wanted to do was compose his music.
4
ROSEMARY RETURNED FROM her week-end in Penang looking curiously over-dressed. It was the effect of the engagement-ring, whose tiny stone danced and flashed hugely in the sharp Malayan light, helio-signalling many contradictory messages: ‘You’d like me, wouldn’t you, but you can’t now, see, because I belong to another; how beautiful I am, aren’t I, someone was bound to snap me up; come and get me, brave the barrier of fire; the auction’s on, this is only the first bid; I am, as you can see, essentially a respectable girl.’ The ring seemed ubiquitous: the glow of its spectrum filled, like a perfume, any room she had been in: its song was as loud in the town as Loo’s juke-box, now repaired. But, somehow, the ring sat on her as obscenely as a nun’s coif would have done.
It put into Crabbe’s head the notion of a party, a party not just for her, but also for the launching of his interracial sodality scheme. Of that, a ring that promised marriage was an apt symbol.
“You can help, you can be hostess.”
“Oooooh, Victor, how marvellous, what a good idea, Victor, oooooh.”
“We’ll have Nicky, of course, and some of the Chinese Rotarians, and the Tamils.”
“Oh, no, Victor, no, I can’t bear the touch of a dark skin.”
“It’s not going to be that sort of party.”
“How about those nice English boys in Boustead’s, and the manager up at Durian Estate, and Jerry Framwell from Sungai Puteh, and …”
“No. It’s not that sort of party. In some ways, it’s going to be rather a serious party.”
“How can you have a serious party?” she asked in wonder, flashing her ring.
“You’ll see what I mean.”
“Oooooh, Victor, in Penang the men just wouldn’t leave me alone, I hardly dared leave my bedroom, and there was one very distinguished-looking man, you know, with greying hair and pots and pots of money, and he wanted to marry me, but I told him he was too late, and then Jalil was jealous and got tight and tried to get into my room at three in the morning. Oh, Victor, it was awful, awful …”
“Did you see Lim Cheng Po while you were there?”
She pouted. “Yes. He was in the bar one night. Oh, I hate him, Victor, hate him. He was very polite and stiff, and, oh, Victor, he has such a lovely voice, and he just offered me a drink and then he left.”
“Well, you don’t really like Asians, do you?” said Crabbe. “You can’t bear the touch of a …”
“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know, Victor. He’s not really an Asian, is he? He has such a lovely voice. Oh, Victor, Victor, why is life so difficult?”
“It’s not difficult any more, Rosemary. You’re engaged.”
“Yes, I’m engaged. To Joe.”
“You’re engaged to Joe.”
The name hung in the air an instant like a faint common smell. It was as if, engagement having been definitely, sacramentally, achieved, Joe, its instrument, might well be discarded. Rosemary and Crabbe discussed arrangements for the party.
“Cheng Po will be over here on Wednesday. We might as well have the party then.”
“Oh, yes, Victor, what a good idea, really, that is a good idea.”
“I thought you hated him.”
“Oooooh, Victor, I never said that. I never said anything of the sort. How could you imagine I’d say such a thing?”
It was carefully enough planned. Many canapés—no beef to annoy the Hindus, no pig-meat to enrage the Muslims—and various beverages, including harmless hideous coloured liquids lying, a clinking reef, in a tub of ice-water. Rosemary, brown bosom, flaming dress, flashing ring, high-heeled vigorously over Crabbe’s large drawing-room as the sun set, setting out nuts and pretzels, perking up nodding flowers. This was, after all, on one level, her party.
When Nik Hassan came he was accompanied, to Crabbe’s surprise, by his wife, ’Che Asma. She was a bulky woman in a tartan sarong and a green cardigan, who, in Malay fashion, kicked off her sandals at the door and padded on large horny feet to a hard chair in the corner. She took a wad of sireh from her bag and began chewing juicily, ignoring her host, dismissing her bare-shouldered hostess as a light woman, waiting for the other Malay wives to arrive. But no Malay wives had been invited. ’Che Asma had a shrewd, ugly face, obviously happiest when mobile. She curtly refused orange crush, lime juice, lemonade, and gave Rosemary an order for coffee. So coffee had to be made.
“I’m just as surprised as you are, Vicky,” said Nik Hassan, smart in a grey palm-beach suit, his fine brown eyes gloomy. “But she would insist on coming, said I never take her anywhere. I hope to God she behaves herself.”
“Never mind, have a drink, Nicky.”
“I think,” said Nik Hassan, “I’d better pretend to be drinking ginger ale. She watches me like a bloody hawk, man. Here.” He summoned Crabbe’s boy, a shifty Chinese who loved parties, and spoke quick Malay to him. “That’s all right,” he said. “He knows that ginger ale is a code for brandy-ginger ale.” Loudly he said: “Ginger ale, please.”
Mrs. Pereira arrived, a somewhat unappetising Eurasian lady of fifty, headmistress of a local girls’ school. Her husband had run away from her, but he still sent her enough money to pay the rent. Gushing, she examined Rosemary’s ring with catty claws, saying: “None of us ever thought he’d do it, Rosemary dear, but he’s done it, hasn’t he? I wonder why, now. Men, men, you can’t trust any of them, can you?”
“I trust my Joe.”
“I trusted Pereira. Never mind, dear, life is what it is. You can’t change human nature.”
Lim Cheng Po arrived, urbane, elegant, the soul of courtesy, with a silver bracelet for Rosemary.
“Ooooooh, that’s so sweet, isn’t it sweet, Victor, ooooh, it’s lovely, oh, I can’t wait to put it on.”
“Not half exquisite enough for so exquisite a lady,” said Cheng Po. “May I congratulate you, Victor?”
“Congratulate?”
“And may I say how pleased I am that Victor has made so exquisite a choice, and how happy I shall be to see him settled down again, and how I hope, my dear, dear lady, that you’ll make each other very, very happy.”
“Oh, Victor,” Rosemary smirked, all vermilion lipstick, “do you hear what he says?”
Crabbe’s head reeled seeing a new world form, in which the act of engagement came first and the choice of a betrothed followed. “No,” he said, “that’s not it. You see, it’s not me, that is to say, Rosemary is engaged to …” Had he, he wondered, possibly proposed to Rosemary at some time or other, and everybody remembered except himself, and Joe was a kind of code-word like ginger ale? No, no. He came to, said to Cheng Po: “What will you drink?”
“Ah, pink gin, please, Victor.”
Pink gin, Scotch and soda, brandy and water. The guests were arriving, the room was filling, talk and smoke rode the air. But Crabbe felt that things had got off to a bad start. ’Che Asma spat out vigorously a sliver of toast with a shive of luncheon-meat on it. “Babi!” she cried.
“It isn’t pork,” said Crabbe. “We were very careful about that.” She shrugged, unconvinced, not willing to talk to a man anyway, waiting for the Malay wives to come. But the only other wife present was Mrs. Foo, wife of Mr. Foo, the dentist, smiling, slim, delicious, in a cheongsam that showed thighs thinner, but not less delightful, than Rosemary’s. ’Che Asma spoke to the air her detestation of such exhibitionism.
And here were the Tamil brethren. For Arumugam and Sundralingam there was much to worry about: Maniam alone in the house at night; Vythilingam inclined to be naughty; Rosemary at large. But they had not been able to think of a valid excuse for not coming, especially as Vythilingam had expressed his determination to get drunk on Crabbe’s liquor. Arumugam and Sundralin
gam knew why: another letter from Ceylon that morning, another photograph of a shining Tamil girl, with the dowry pencilled baldly on the back: $75,000; the complex machinery of Vythilingam’s soul churning and grinding; even at one point in the early evening, a show of pugnacity. And now Vythilingam was jerking out mouthfuls of air at Rosemary.
“Oh, Vy, don’t be silly. It’s hopeless, can’t you see that? Look, my ring.” The tiny diamond winked and signalled.
“I … I … don’t think. …”
“We’re still friends, aren’t we? I mean, you’ll still look after the cats.”
“I …”
“Come along,” sang Arumugam, in hearty falsetto, “come and join the boys.”
“I … don’t …”
“And,” said Nik Hassan to Crabbe, “they think it’s a good idea. That’s just what they’d like, they say, to open up the celebrations. A good stirring Malay song all about our glorious mountains and jungles and tigers, and all that guff. Not too long, of course. They think they can get their orchestra from Singapore. And, of course, there’s always the Federation Police Band.”
“But that would just be the end of a rather long symphonic piece,” said Crabbe. “The whole point is really the symphony itself.”
“Couldn’t all that be cut out? Couldn’t he just send in the singing bit?” said Nik Hassan. He grabbed Crabbe’s boy—who already smelt of Beehive brandy—and handed back his glass, saying: “I asked for ginger ale. This is just ginger ale.”
“No,” said Crabbe, “no. That’s just it. They’ve got to have the whole lot.”
“They haven’t got to.” Perhaps it was merely the presence of his wife that made him irritable. “I’m doing you a favour, after all, Vicky.”
“Me a favour?”
“Well, him a favour. That boy a favour.”
“But, damn it all, man, I thought we’d been into all that. Can’t you honestly see that getting this thing performed is important to Malaya?”
Rosemary’s bosom and perfume and ring were upon them. “Victor, Victor, I think that Vy’s trying to get tight. Look at him.” Vythilingam had been wedged into the corner by the drink-table, a solid wall of Arumugam and Sundralingam shielding him from temptation. Vythilingam had drunk off two neat whiskies and was pouring another. Sundralingam spoke loudly and pedantically to Mrs. Foo about the local yaws campaign.
The Malayan Trilogy Page 46