Rosemary now pumped out floods of grief on to Crabbe’s pillow. Her face cracked, split, liquefied, its horrid disintegration burrowed into the worn cotton; howls and bayings and ghastly sobs and chokings racked her body and made the bed shake and tremble. (Indifferent on the wall, a male chichak hunted a female with loud chuckles.) Only the lovely patina of Rosemary’s flesh, the wonder of curve and line which was not her but the whole species, only these did not join in the personal dissolution, though her limbs writhed and her breasts laboured in that transport of misery. Occasionally she gasped out “Joe!”—a flat animal cry that her slack vocal cords made unfemininely deep, that her nasopharynx, choked with mucus, robbed of all resonance. The earth did not swallow her up, but gently the dark did.
Robert Loo, hesitant in full dark, with a moon rising, heard these strange sounds clearly from the veranda. Surely that could not be Mr. Crabbe? He clutched more tightly the brief-case under his arm, wondering whether to enter. Listening carefully, he decided that the voice was the voice of a woman: Mr. Crabbe evidently was in bed with a woman, and he was making her cry aloud either with pain or with pleasure. The cries were like nothing he had ever heard before, but they did not frighten him, they did not even arouse much curiosity: the only significant sounds in Robert Loo’s life were musical sounds, preferably imagined ones, and these sounds were too grossly external and certainly not musical. Still, Crabbe was in and, when he was sated of whatever he was doing, there was much for him to hear and certain actions for him to take. Robert Loo now entered the dark living-room with confidence. He moved over to the table where, he knew, there was an electric lamp, and he fumbled for the switch of this lamp. Light sprang on to the darkness, a great rose-coloured circle of it. Robert Loo sat in an armchair, took scoring paper from his brief-case, and then placidly began to orchestrate the bar which had waited so long to become palpable dots and lines and curves: the first bar of his violin concerto—the opening cry of the orchestra set out fully from piccolo to basses. Meanwhile the woman’s sobs continued. Flutes, oboes, clarinets, the downward-leaping theme on the bassoons, the wedge of harmony on the horns. He calmly and neatly wrote out the notes with a thin-nibbed fountain-pen.
The sobs began to slow down, like somebody dying, like the end of Honegger’s Pacific 231. The noises of pleasure or despair became articulate sounds, a name called miserably, with a modicum of hope.
“Victor!”
Robert Loo raised his head, his pen halted in the middle of a group of quavers.
“Is that you, Victor?” Then sighs, deep sniffs, a jolting of the bed. Robert wondered, a tiny crease of frown over his eyes. Crabbe apparently was not in. He must have gone out for a moment, leaving her there. Then why those strange cries?
“Victor, come down here, Victor.”
Robert Loo sat undecided. Then he put down his wad of scoring paper, his pen, and went half-way down the dark corridor leading to the dark bedroom. “Mr. Crabbe isn’t here,” he said gently.
“What’s that? Who is it?” A further jolt of the bed, as of someone sitting up. A touch of fear in the voice.
“It’s me. It’s Robert Loo. Who are you?”
“What are you doing here?” A note of greater confidence, even of curiosity.
“I came to see …” But this was ridiculous, this colloquy at a distance and in the dark. Walking to the bedroom, Robert Loo found the corridor light-switch. Yellow clinical light disclosed the long bare wall of the corridor, the glass louvres all along one side, busy insect life, a young black scorpion high up near the low ceiling.
“Don’t put the light on,” warned Rosemary. “Don’t. I’m a sight. You mustn’t see me.”
“I only wanted to ask,” said Robert Loo, standing on the threshold of the room. “Has he gone out? When is he coming back?”
Suddenly the whole orchestra burst out again. “Never! Never!” A huge lost howl. “He’ll never come back! I’ve lost him, lost him!” Another jangling of the bed as she turned to pour more tears into the already soaked pillow. Robert Loo stood and wondered further, finding himself now somehow involved in these terrible cries of suffering woman. He could hardly retreat from them: having advanced so far, having spoken, he had to say something. He was mildly surprised that Crabbe should have been carrying on some large film-like or operatic affair with a woman whose identity was becoming clear. He had read many operatic scores, only for the music, but the libretti had occasionally made a, mainly subliminal, impact. And at school they had read Antony and Cleopatra. “He ploughed her, and she cropp’d.” He entered the bedroom, meeting the force of a lung-emptying sob, then the oceanic ingurgitation of air. He switched on the light.
Like some strange beast in a gauzy cage, Rosemary lay, her black hair abundant over the bed, her brown limbs sprawled in her abandon, her dress crumpled and in disarray. Stabbed by the light, she turned her swimming face in protest, her mouth square with crying.
“Turn it off, turn it off!” Her bowing arm moved—down-stroke, up-stroke—as she cleaned tears from her eyes with her fist. Robert Loo looked at that brown bare arm in mild fascination. Then he spoke.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You don’t know what it’s like, you just don’t know!”
“And where has he gone to?”
“To another woman! He’s left me for ever!”
“Please,” said Robert Loo. “I think this is important.” He sat on a chair by the bed, a chair cushioned by Crabbe’s striped pyjamas. “I need to see Mr. Crabbe very badly.”
Rosemary stopped crying. She looked through films of water at Robert Loo and said: “You wouldn’t know anything about it. Nothing about real love. Like Joe and me.” The name started her off again.
“Oh, I see,” said Robert Loo.
“And I’ve nobody to turn to, nobody!”
“Can I do anything?”
“No! No! No!” She sank again into the salty water, indulging herself before even so inadequate an audience, into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief Robert Loo wondered what he should do. A dance hostess with whom, he knew, his father had once been friendly, had tried, in a similar transport of despair over a man (not his father) to take caustic soda. This was, he knew, the usual Chinese way. Even in his mother’s cupboard there had once stood a bottle of that standard agonising Lethe water. The Chinese were resourceful and even kept a store of death ready bottled. He remembered the story of this dance hostess: how the caustic soda had been wrenched from her fingers and she had been brought to a reasonable philosophy by Beehive brandy. He would get this shaking mound of a wretched woman some of Crabbe’s brandy. He thought he knew where it was kept.
Even then, as he poured a measure into a beer-glass, he almost forgot his mission. He examined the half-scored bar, not too sure whether the horn-harmonies were well disposed. But he returned, soft and leisurely, to the bedroom, opened the mosquito-curtains and said: “Drink this.” Between residuary sobs she drank it like water, sitting up, Robert Loo on the bed’s edge, his finger-tips on the base of the glass.
The heaving of her shoulders subsided. “Why did you come here?” she asked.
“To see Mr. Crabbe. I’ve left home, you see.”
“Oh, so they found out, did they?”
“Found out? What?”
“About you and him.”
“I don’t understand. It was trouble with my father. He hit me.”
“So he’d found out, had he?”
“No, my father saw it. He saw these Malays steal the cigarettes from the shelf and run away with them. Then he blamed me. He tore up some of my music and hit me. Before some customers.”
“Oh.”
“So now I want to go to England. To study. Mr. Crabbe will arrange everything.”
“England!” Like some Hollywood Pitt she howled the word in agony. “Joe’s in England. Joe, Joe, Joe!” She collapsed again, her limbs somehow tangled round Robert Loo. Even he felt he had to make some perfunctory gesture of comfort. He
began to stroke her bare arm, tentatively but, as he was a musician, rhythmically. “Nobody to turn to,” said the pillow in a choked pillowy voice. Robert Loo went on stroking, the rhythm engendering a sort of alla marcia slow movement. Quiet strings, a monotonous alternation of minor, or rather modal, chords. Dorian mode. At her shoulder entered a most pathetic theme on a solo trumpet. The sudden sforzando made him grip it, involuntarily, just for an instant. There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well. Rosemary moved slightly. He found that his hand had seemed to travel otherwhither. “No,” said Rosemary, “nobody to turn to. Nobody to comfort me.”
“I’m sorry.” That trumpet-tone was curiously breathy, almost asthmatic.
“Turn out the light. I’m ashamed to be seen like this.” There was a two-way switch dangling from its cord by the bed. With his left hand Robert Loo made near-darkness. The corridor light still shone, but Rosemary’s face was all but hidden. The still stroking hand met more nakedness than it had expected: it was out of its depth now, out of the shallow end of hand or arm. Not being able to swim, one could not struggle back to shore: and, anyway, there was no breath to swim with. This asphyxiation was something new, and it seemed to make drowning an urgent necessity. Another man, someone read about, someone heard singing ridiculous passionate words in opera, began to endue Robert Loo like a limp outer garment. He had become that: the head soaring somewhere, a launched balloon, the arms dangling sockets to be filled by engines expert at stroking and then caressing. Music squeaked remotely from the ceiling; a toad bellowed from the waste-pipe. There was a crescendo which seemed to require a new form of notation. Surely no one before had ever written ffffff? Impossible. And then he saw that it was in fact impossible. The whole structure collapsed, but the memory of the act of creation, the intention of the whole vast composition mercifully hung around.
The comforters, relaxed in sarongs after the day’s work, kicked off their sandals at the top of Syed Omar’s steps and made their obeisances to the wives, to the elder children, and to the gloomy head of the house. Syed Hassan, withdrawn, presented only his shamed back to the household, playing the radio, fingering the knobs like a rosary of penitence.
“There he sits,” said Syed Omar, “the bail-bird, awaiting his day of trial, the bringer of disgrace to his father.” The radio burst out angrily like a rude unfilial word. “Turn that off!” shouted Syed Omar.
Orange crush was brought for the three visitors. “Well,” said ’Che Yusof, late colleague of Syed Omar, most clerkly in horn-rims and neat receding hair, “have you found anything yet?”
“I wait,” said Syed Omar. “Crabbe has promised me a job in the Education Office. But the white man’s promises, as we know, are not always fulfilled.”
“Still,” said ’Che Ramli, fat master in the Malay School, “he found the money for the bail, did he not, this man Crabbe?”
“Yes,” said Syed Omar, “he found it, and now I wonder why.”
“One should not be so suspicious,” said ’Che Yusof. “It may be sheer goodness of heart, generosity of nature, a desire to help the Malays.”
“I wonder,” said Syed Omar. He turned to his son. “You can turn that radio on again,” he said. “Loud.” A news bulletin in bubbling Tamil gushed forth at once. “That will do,” shouted Syed Omar. Then he bent towards his friends, and his friends bent towards him, and, fixing ’Che Yassin, Land Office clerk, with slitted eyes and hissing teeth, Syed Omar spoke his worst fears. “You know this man Crabbe, you know that he does not go after women, you know of his relationship with at least one Chinese boy in the town.”
“You mean,” said ’Che Ramli, “he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.”
“That is one way of putting it,” said Syed Omar. “Now, I am fairly sure that he has as yet made no advances to my son, though this may be a beginning, this may be a means of making us all obliged to him. But already, in the coffee-shops, some people have hinted to me that the thing I fear is already actual; otherwise, they said, why should Crabbe have helped one more than another? Two men today I have struck with my fist,” said Syed Omar. “One I merely grazed with a coffee-glass. And early this evening one man suggested to me that I myself was involved with Crabbe and his perversions.” Syed Omar swelled his chest. “I told him in no uncertain terms that that was not so. He apologised and stood me a drink. And he then said that there were possibly some chances of employment for me in the North-Eastern Transport if I knew how to drive heavy vehicles. I told him,” said Syed Omar, his chest not yet relaxed, “that there was no vehicle I could not drive. Thus,” he said triumphantly, “you see that an ill wind blows some good to somebody, if not everybody.”
His friends pondered this proverb for a time, sipping their orange crush. The bubbling radio Tamil then stopped, followed immediately by a fast screeched song of urgent amorousness—drums and twangs and a high woman’s voice. “Turn off that row!” called Syed Omar. “We can’t hear ourselves drink, let alone talk!”
“You told me to turn it on,” replied Syed Hassan, “less than a minute ago.”
“And now I tell you to turn it off!” cried Syed Omar. “Don’t argue, boy!”
“I wish you’d make up your mind,” said his son, sullenly.
“What’s that?” said Syed Omar, half rising, “what’s that you say? You hear,” he said, turning to his friends, “you hear how he answers back. I have spoiled the brat with too much kindness. Too much kindness is the only fault I can chide myself with.” He sat down, simulating the arthritic movements of a broken man. His friends tut-tut-ted, saying: “Never mind, don’t take on so, no cause to blame yourself, the younger generation is everywhere the same, no gratitude.”
Syed Hassan spitefully turned the radio knob to its maximum, so that the high swollen voice, garnished soon with shrieks from the valves, filled the room and made the glasses and the few cheap ornaments tingle and rattle. There were shrill and deep shouts of protest from all present. With a sour face and a thrust-out jaw Syed Hassan obeyed his father’s yell, and the painful music rushed in a diminuendo to silence and a click.
“Come here, boy!”
“I’m tired, I’m sick,” cried Syed Hassan. “On to me all the time!”
“That’s right. You have disgraced me before the whole town. You are now disgracing me before my guests and friends. How dare you. HOW DARE YOU.” Syed Omar pulled up the right sleeve of his shirt, disclosing a fat unmuscular arm. The friends showed embarrassment, saying: “No, no, please, no. We’re going now, anyway.”
“No,” protested Syed Omar. “He thinks he is such a big man, defying his father, defying law and order, cringing behind the white man’s help. The law will, God help me, God help his poor mothers and brothers and sisters, punish him in its own time, but I have my rights too. I will not be disgraced before my friends. Come here, boy.”
The comforters were leaving, scrambling for their sandals at the head of the house steps, in their haste shuffling into the wrong ones, saying: “Sorry, yours, you seem to have taken mine, that’s right, that’s the one, thank you,” and so on. Meanwhile, Syed Omar, with his right arm ready, called them to stay, to witness the act of just punition. But, bowing with sketchily joined hands, they smiled their way clumsily out, down to the darkness. Syed Omar, no whit deflated, turned to his son, saying: “Now.”
“I wish,” said Syed Hassan, his back to the wall by the radio, “I wish that I wasn’t here. I wish I was in the lockup with the others.”
“Say that again! Say that again!” And from the women came shocked cooings.
“I’d be better off there. You wouldn’t be on to me all the time. And I know what you’re thinking, and I know what you said to those friends of yours.”
“Have a care, boy.” A big flat hand came up for slapping.
“All right, hit me. I don’t mind.”
“You will, boy, you will!” At this point, ’Che Maimunah, who was evidently Syed Hassan mother, sidled i
n between the contestants, preaching peace: “There will be enough tears soon, God knows. Be quiet now, both of you.”
“Keep out of this, woman. This is my affair, I am his father.”
“Sit down,” ordered Maimunah. Zainab, the other wife, said: “Sit down, sit down, you are both waking the younger children.” Sulkily the men obeyed, but Syed Omar, unwilling to see so many feet of good strong drama discarded on the cutting-room floor, burst out with a despairing “Ruined, ruined, ruined,” as he slumped into his chair.
“Oh, shut up,” muttered his son.
“You hear? You hear?” cried Syed Omar in gratitude. “You ask me, you stupid women, to sit down and be quiet, do you? You want your husband to be insulted, do you, in his own house, by his own son? By God, I will choke him with my own hands.” On his feet, he made like an ape or a bear for his delinquent boy, but Syed Hassan was ready with fists.
“Strike your father, eh?” Syed Omar launched an unhandy cuff, then another. Syed Hassan side-stepped with skill, and his father’s podgy left caught the wall, not hard, but enough to call forth religious cries of pain and rage.
The Malayan Trilogy Page 49