by Doug Allyn
Mrs. Clayton, who had worn a hat since she first came to Singapore, nearly fifty years ago, now said, “Of course, it’s very much a case of after the horse has bolted... I should have started warding off the sun” — she tapped the straw brim — “probably gloves, too, while I still had some peaches and cream left.” She did up two more buttons of her cardigan.
Helen, who suspected the blemishes were caused by age rather than the tropical sun, forced herself to help the conversation in the reminiscent direction Mrs. Clayton wanted. “Chilly? It seems hotter than ever to me.”
“And it probably is, dear. Just my imagination.” Mrs. Clayton was fond of talking about her imagination, and she had treated Helen to this climatic manifestation of it several times. “We’re virtually on the equator, I know, but still in the Northern Hemisphere. I like to pretend I can tell one season from the other. Thinking that way reminds me of home.” She sighed. “Snow and holly and robin redbreasts. If I imagine hard enough, I really can feel a nip in the air.” She shivered and did up another button.
“Mind over matter?” Helen suggested. “I wish I could learn the trick.”
They sat in silence for a while, until Mrs. Clayton, alerted by distant shouting and laughter, remembered why she had said that Chinese adored children. Although adoration hardly sprang to mind in connection with Helen’s boy, the reference to children was Mrs. Clayton’s tactful route to a subject that had to be discussed, had to be settled, for this young woman’s own good, before it was too late. She sat up in her deck chair and looked across the padang. “I hate to interfere, my dear, but do you really think it’s wise to allow the boy, young... young—?”
“Jason,” his mother said.
“Ah, yes, young Jason.” Mrs. Clayton’s lips formed a slight smile in which she judged there was no more than a smidgen of criticism. Such names these Australians gave their children! “As I was saying, do you really think it’s wise...?” She left the question hanging.
Helen knew what the old woman meant. There were four blocks of flats overlooking the padang and the swamp reclamation area and the sea beyond. The three-storey buildings had gone up in the 1920s. The flats in three of the blocks had big rooms, old-fashioned but still, more than forty years later, among the island’s best accommodation. Most of the flats in these three blocks were occupied by what Mrs. Clayton called “old Singapore hands, people like us.” She and her husband, who clung to his position of senior partner in a firm of rubber brokers, had been there twenty-three years, since 1945. But in the pokey flats in the fourth block, which was leased by the British army under the defence agreement with the Singapore government, lived the families of enlisted soldiers, none of them above the rank of sergeant.
“Many of them are probably quite sweet little things,” Mrs. Clayton said, referring to the children of the enlisted men, “but the language! I have to force myself to pretend I haven’t heard it. And those accents. Before you know it, young... young—”
“Jason.”
“Yes, Jason. When he speaks so well, it would be such a pity if he started to sound as if he came from some back street in Birmingham.”
Although she had to admit it was silly and snobbish, Helen agreed, silently, that this was an unattractive prospect. Jason had been only three months at Raeburn Park, the private school established for the children of the executive and professional members of the island’s British community, but already he sounded like a middle-class child in a BBC television serial set in Edwardian England. It had started as mimicry, but had become habitual, or perhaps he just enjoyed the surprise people showed when they found out that he was Australian. He was a tall, handsome nine-year-old, fair-haired and blue-eyed, and the accent suited his looks. He claimed to be unaware of his new voice, and when she joked about how the kids back in Melbourne would react if they heard him, he would reply, “Oh, Mother, don’t be a complete idiot,” in a thoroughly English way.
Well, perhaps playing with the army children would stop him becoming a prematurely stuffed shirt. And if it kept him from wandering around on the reclamation, as he did so often, in defiance of her orders, and if it stopped him teasing — that was a mild way to describe his appalling conduct — Cookie and Amah...
“It’s unfair, I know,” Mrs. Clayton was saying, “but even these days — I find it hard to believe we’ll soon be into the nineteen seventies — even these days, people are judged by the way they speak, especially if their accent’s not all it might be.”
“Not quite quite?” Helen said. She liked having an occasional dig at her new friend. She wondered how far she could go, since Mrs. Clayton seemed armour-plated against sarcasm.
“Not quite quite,” the old woman echoed. “The nail on the head, exactly.” Her eyes, behind the dark glasses, were smug. She enjoyed doing her turn, as she thought of it, being the Old Colonial, the caricature of an English gentlewoman gone a bit dotty from too much tropical sun. Script by Somerset Maugham; lyrics and music (if only she could sing!) by Noel Coward.
She felt an amused affinity with the boy whose name she kept pretending to forget. Jason was a fellow spirit, she thought, at least in the dedication with which he performed his own turn. He made a good job of it. The accent was so patently assumed, yet so right, and his impertinence had a naturalness refined by study and practice into an art. But she suspected there was something genuinely nasty, even rotten, behind his facade of supercilious naughtiness. He was an entertaining child, in small doses; it took an effort to think of him as endearing too. The mock snobbishness of her warnings about his playing with the army children concealed a real concern that a boy like that could easily get into bad company and serious trouble.
“I hope you don’t mind my giving you all this advice, my dear,” she said. “You must think me such an old busybody.”
“Of course you are, Agatha.” Helen’s laugh sounded to Mrs. Clayton, the connoisseur of laughs, less merrily ironic than perhaps had been intended; but she was determined not to be offended, especially when Helen added, “Where would Colin and I be without your help?” and leant across the table and, negotiating the brim of the straw hat, kissed her cheek. “You’ve been our saviour.”
The family’s term in Singapore had threatened to go wrong from the start. Colin, appointed head of his aluminum-ore company’s new Southeast Asia sales office, arrived first, to hire clerical staff and arrange somewhere to live. Helen and Jason followed from Melbourne three weeks later, to be greeted by the news that the accommodation deal had fallen through. The British engineer whose house they were to take over had unexpectedly accepted an extension of his term in Singapore.
“Bloody Poms!” Colin said as he and Helen conferred over drinks beside the pool at the Goodwood Hotel. “I’ve always said you should never trust them.” He could not find another house in a suitable area. There were plenty of flats, but none with gardens where Jason could let off steam. “Bloody Pommies!” he said again. The heat was already getting to him, and he wondered whether accepting this posting, step up though it was, had been a mistake.
“I couldn’t help overhearing,” said an old woman at a nearby table, “and if you’ll excuse a bloody old Pommy for butting in...” The laugh that followed, girlish but with a suggestion of distaste for the loudness of Colin’s complaint and for the abusive slang term that Australians used for English people, was a refinement of one of the best in her repertoire.
“Sorry about that.” Colin blushed, annoyed at having given the old Pommy fart cause to think of him as another crass Australian.
Agatha Clayton gave her most gracious laugh a brief outing, then introduced herself. “I come here every Friday for afternoon tea. One of those little rituals we old Singapore hands go in for. Some people prefer Raffles, but that’s pure sentimentality, or nostalgia, I think it’s called these days. You can’t beat the Goodwood’s Black Forest or coffee sponge.”
Mrs. Clayton explained that the third-storey flat above hers had just become vacant. “On a clear day y
ou can see Indonesia, or at least the outlying islands, though they’re just bumps on the horizon, really. And there’s a marvellous padang.”
Colin looked puzzled. “Padang?”
“Park, field — paddock, I suppose you Australians would call it. Wonderful for your boy to play in.” She smiled at Jason splashing in the Goodwood’s pool. “And the Singapore Swimming Club is just five minutes down the road — an even better pool than this one. I’m sure my husband could arrange membership for you.” She gave her most subtly ironic laugh. “They still accept some white members.”
While Helen and Colin smiled politely at the joke, Mrs. Clayton remembered that the servants of the flat’s late occupant were hoping to be inherited by the new tenants.
“Fine,” Colin said. “We won’t have to break them in and show them the ropes. They can do that to us.”
Mrs. Clayton laughed, with a touch of grimness, at this suggested reversal of the proper order.
“A built-in babysitter,” Helen said. “I can’t believe my luck.”
“Cookie’s a little set in his ways,” Mrs. Clayton warned, “and Alec Preston didn’t quite keep him up to the mark after dear June died. But I’m sure Cookie will soon adjust to your preferences.” She gave another slightly grim laugh, which trailed off as she smiled at the boy. “And, of course, the Chinese adore children.”
“Just as well,” Helen said. “Jason can be a handful.”
“Jason,” said Mrs. Clayton, sampling the name as if it were a recent addition to the Goodwood’s cake menu. “How very unusual.”
“We’ve got so much to thank you for, Agatha,” Helen said three months later as they sat on the padang.
Behind the two women Cookie gave what Helen thought of as his discreet-butler cough. He and Amah had a television set in their room, and the noises that came from there indicated that in the evenings they watched Hong Kong martial-arts films. But Helen suspected that he sometimes tuned in to a series based on P. G. Wodehouse’s stories. There was something so Jeeves-like in the cough with which he sought her attention.
“Yes, Cookie?”
“Dinner, mem?”
Helen looked at her watch. “Right, Cookie, and on your way in, please tell Jason to go with you. It’s time for his shower.”
She sensed a tension in Cookie as he accepted this order. Any mention of Jason these days seemed to put him on edge, hardly surprising in view of the boy’s increasingly malicious behaviour — such as giggling as he tracked dirt through the flat just after the floors had been washed. Helen felt like telling Cookie not to bother, that she would round up Jason herself. But what was the point, as Agatha often said, of having servants if you didn’t let them do the work? As a placatory gesture, she put the drinks tray on the grass and said, “If you’ll just take the table, Mrs. Clayton and I can bring in the other things, Cookie.”
As Cookie walked away, Mrs. Clayton said, “Alec Preston and I often used to sit out here in the evenings with our G and Ts, though with Alec, of course, it was far more G than T.” She held up her glass, as if studying the slice of lemon that floated in it. “As a matter of fact, he died while we were having a drink. Oh, not in that one,” she added quickly when Helen moved uncomfortably in the deck chair she had taken over with Cookie and Amah and the lease of Alec Preston’s flat. “We burnt the one Alec died in. It seemed the right thing to do.”
Helen wondered how much more Mrs. Clayton was going to say about their predecessor in Flat No. 7. The old woman barely mentioned Alec Preston.
“Alec and June were rather like Basil and me, Darby and Joan basking in empire’s sunset,” Mrs. Clayton said. “No children to call them back to England, no friends there either. We talked of going back home, of finding adjoining cottages in the Cotswolds, pottering through our last days amid hollyhocks and honeysuckle. But we knew it was just a dream. We’d been here so long it was the only place we’d be happy, while we could still totter around under our own power. The four of us were together for ages. Basil and Alec were clerks with Jardine’s, we had a double wedding, we survived the Japs together, and after that Basil and Alec set up their own firm.”
Mrs. Clayton fumbled ice into her glass with thin, veined fingers. “June and I established the ritual — the tradition, if you like — of sitting out here, on the padang, at sunset. Very rarely with our dear old boys. They’d go off to the club for an hour after work. Basil still does. That’s part of the trick of successful Darby-and-Joanism: don’t be in each other’s hair all the time. But when June died all the spirit went out of Alec.” Mrs. Clayton chuckled affectionately. “Or perhaps I should say a lot more spirit went into him. To be frank, he was an alcoholic. Perhaps you think it was foolish of me to encourage him, to sit out here drinking with him?”
“More a kindness,” Helen said, “at that age, if he was beyond redemption.”
“That’s exactly how I thought of it, my dear. He did manage to keep it within bounds, usually. A steady soaking, rather than binges, though sometimes, late at night, he’d keep drinking, get his second wind and become very noisy, and give poor Cookie a terrible time when he tried to get him to bed. Cookie was an angel the way he put up with it.”
He probably recalls it as an ideal existence compared with the hell Jason’s making of his life, Helen thought. I’ll be lucky if he and Amah don’t give notice tomorrow. That alarming possibility prompted her to ask Mrs. Clayton, “Couldn’t he and Amah have got work with someone else?”
“Perhaps. Probably.” Mrs. Clayton detected the anxiety behind the question and supposed that the boy had been up to some of his tricks — but servants expected that sort of thing, and of course, being Chinese, they adored children. “It takes a lot to make servants leave, especially when they’re as well paid as yours are.” (Mrs. Clayton had helped Helen to fix their wages.) “Anyway, Alec was really very good to them, apart from the odd slap and abuse. When June died he didn’t need two servants, but he kept them on. They’d been with him for years, and they’d have found it hard adjusting to new people, a new place, new routines.”
“They’ve adjusted to us, or so I like to think,” Helen said.
“But mainly on their own terms, I suspect, not that there’s much harm in that.” Mrs. Clayton’s gentle laugh suggested that Helen was easier with the servants than she should be, for her own good or theirs. “But thank heavens Cookie’s still around. I enjoy these evenings out here, with him making sure our glasses are filled, when he remembers. It wouldn’t be the same at all with my two.” Mrs. Clayton’s servants were a pair of middle-aged sisters. “Docile and efficient, but no idea of how to put a good G and T together.”
Behind them, Cookie gave his discreet-butler cough, sharpened with a touch of urgency. Helen turned around. “Yes, Cookie?”
“Jason say no come in. He go there.”
As Cookie pointed seaward, Helen stood up. She could see Jason’s fair hair glinting in the sun’s last rays as he ran among the piles of sand and mud.
“The times I’ve told him he mustn’t go out on the reclamation!”
“I keep say wash-time. Jason keep say no.”
“All right, Cookie. I’ll get him.”
Helen walked quickly across the padang, then down the steps by the sea wall, calling to her son. Mrs. Clayton winced slightly. The dear girl had quite a pleasant voice, for an Australian, most of the time, but anger and volume made it strident. “Jason! Jason!”
That boy’s going to cause real trouble one day, Mrs. Clayton told herself as she finished her G and T.
Three days later, at sunset on the padang, Helen said, “Thank God Colin will be back from Taiwan at the end of the week. I wish his job didn’t keep him away so much. Jason needs a father’s hand, or at least I hope that’s all it is. He’s been nothing but trouble since we came here. He did have his naughty outbursts in Melbourne, but nothing like this. Otherwise I might think he was autistic.”
“Always a possibility,” said Mrs. Clayton, to whom this word was new.
“Perhaps,” she added, with the facile wisdom of the childless, “all he needs is time to adjust to his new surroundings.”
“He’s adjusted well enough. He couldn’t be happier. But the rest of us have to pay the price.” Helen sighed. “His bike’s the latest problem.”
“He does seem to be having fun with it,” Mrs. Clayton said in a carefully neutral voice. Jason had almost knocked her down twice. He had said “sorry,” but she suspected there had been more calculation than accident in those near-collisions. His impertinence, now so outrageously overplayed, no longer amused her. Old and a bit silly though she might be, she could still tell a proper apology from one delivered with a smirk and more than a hint that she’d better watch out, or she might get really hurt next time. But she wasn’t about to add to this poor girl’s troubles by mentioning that now. “The way he goes whizzing around the padang!” she said.
“And out on the street.”
“Oh dear, in all that traffic. You must put a stop to that.”
“I put a lock on the bike, but he picked the lock. I let the air out of the tyres and took the screws off the valves, but he bought new ones. I’ll just have to get rid of it. And that will be his excuse to find some other trouble to get into. On the reclamation, probably.”
The reclamation stretched for a few hundred yards from the sea wall at the edge of the padang. Rock and earth quarried from Singapore’s few hills, and sand dredged from the sea, were being used to extend the island, creating new land for freeways, factories, and another airport.
“I don’t know why it’s not fenced off,” Helen complained.
“Such a big area, that would be terribly expensive, and I’m sure it’s not really dangerous, not when there hasn’t been rain for so long.”
“Then why have they put up a notice warning that it is?”
Mrs. Clayton, unable to argue with that, attempted a change of subject, at the risk of moving into even more contentious territory. “An only child. Perhaps...?”