by Alec Waugh
‘I suppose you think you’re too grand to marry anyone like Sally.’
There was an angry glint in his eye. He was in a mood that could only have been treated in one way. A hearty laugh, a slap upon the shoulder, an affectionately jocular, ‘Now, what is all this about, old boy? Let’s have a drink and talk it over.’ But affectionate jocularity was not Bevan’s line. The Oxford drawl came back into his voice.
He never got further than that first ‘Well’. Penton had banged his fist down on the table, his face an apoplectic scarlet.
‘You middle-class rat. You think my daughter’s not good enough for you. My daughter? Young man, I tell you this: either you’ll have married my daughter within two days or as far as Malaya’s concerned, you’re broken. Get that straight.’
There was a silence in the room, as he lumbered back to his seat at the bridge-table. Everyone knew that he meant what he had said. They only wondered whether he would remember next morning that he had ever said it.
He did.
He was waiting on the porch of the Club when Bevan came in for tiffin. He lifted himself slowly from his chair.
‘Have you made your mind up, young man?’
‘What am I to take that to mean?’
‘You know! Are you going to marry my daughter or are you not? I give you three minutes to decide. I count for something here, and this I promise you: while I’m alive and I don’t mean to die just yet, you aren’t going to feel safe walking into a single club in the F.M.S.; because if I were to see you there, I’d pitch you straight into the street. Your life, if you stayed on, wouldn’t be worth living; that’s if you don’t marry Sally. If you do, officially you’ll be ruined, but you can come on my plantation. I’ll give you a house. You can live, like others of your breed, on the generosity of your father-in-law. What of it?’
There were quite a number gathered round the Club veranda. Half of them expected Bevan to cringe, to apologize; the rest thought he would try and bluff it through with an Oxonian superciliousness. None of them expected him to capitulate without a fight: to say, ‘l’ll marry Sally. I’ll be glad to,’ in a quiet voice, on a note almost of relief.
That they had not expected.
Yet that is what had happened. He’d married her, resigned his job, gone to work on his father-in-law’s plantation. He had two children now. As far as anybody knew he’d not left K.S. from that day to this.
‘In that case,’ I decided, ‘I’m going to Kuala Sumut.’
Kuala Sumut is a night’s journey from Penang. You travel down in a pleasantly neat motor-ship. Provided you don’t strike ‘a Sumatra’ it’s a cosy journey. There will probably be another half-dozen saloon passengers, a couple of Chinese planters, a European salesman, an English official. Most of the ship is given up to cargo and steerage passengers. But the saloon is comfortable. You settle down to your pahits as the sun goes down. By the time the Chinese boy has begun to lay the dinner, life wears a friendly look. You wake at six to find the ship anchored in the bend of a river, against a wooden jetty. There is a scattered village, attap huts for the most part. On the hill there is the white, wide-verandaed bungalow of the District Officer. Half-way up the hill is the corrugated roof of the Rest House. The sun has just risen across the bay; the village wears a clean, clear look. Its single street is busy with chattering figures.
I had as a travelling companion a young Englishman called Blunden, who was doing the grand tour before settling down to his father’s business. We had brought with us a letter of introduction to the District Officer. We strolled up to his bungalow after break fast to present it.
The D.O. was a man of about forty. He was short and bald and stocky. He had served in the war and risen to the rank of captain. He wore an old Marlburian tie. His white ducks were spotless and his trousers creased. His face was very red. He was a bachelor. I pictured him as the kind of man who would settle down every night to steady drinking, but who would never lose control of his tongue or faculties.
He shrugged his shoulders when I mentioned Bevan.
‘Poor devil, he’s done for himself out here. Done for himself in every way, in fact. After all, even if a man makes a mess of his own life, he does get a kind of second innings in his children’s lives. He can say to himself, “Well, anyhow, I can protect my boys from making the mistakes I made.” If they do come through all right, one can feel that one’s own life’s not wasted. But in Bevan’s case—what is there for those kids of his? The best his boy can hope for is to become a minor clerk—and that girl of his, who’ll want to marry her? She’ll become a white man’s mistress or a Eurasian’s wife. No, poor old Bevan, I’m afraid he’s finished.’
I wondered what manner of man I should encounter.
It was ten years since I had seen him. I remembered the savage, spiteful, snarling creature whose acquaintance I had willingly let drop. If he had been bitter then, heaven knew what these last ten years would have made of him.
I was to find that out soon enough; the very next morning, as I was sitting in the club over a gin pahit. I recognized him at once, though quite possibly I shouldn’t have unless I had been told that he was there. He was very different. He was in typical planter clothes: khaki shorts, bare knees, brown and scratched; a cotton shirt, not too clean and open at the neck. He was still thin, though considerably stouter than when I had last seen him, with the straining of his linen coat suggesting that he was likely to grow a paunch. His face, that had been pimply and pallid, was sallow now and sunburnt, with blue veins breaking out under the eyes and round the nostrils. Physically he was very changed. But it was not his physical change that I noticed so particularly. It was mentally that he was changed. He was at ease, affable, open-handed. The moment he recognized me he came across with outstretched hand, and a broad grin of welcome.
‘My dear fellow, what a nice surprise. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming? Then you could have come and stayed with us. You’ll be much more comfortable at the Rest House, but you’d get much more copy staying on a plantation.’
It was precisely the same speech that he might have made ten years back. But the tone, the spirit, were altogether different. Ten years ago he would have sneered at the writer’s search for copy; he would have been on his guard against a comparison between his bungalow and the Rest House. He had still a distinct Oxford accent, but it was genial, not supercilious.
‘Anyhow, you’ve got to come and have a meal with us tonight. Are you alone?’
I told him about Blunden.
‘Fine! Bring him along, too,’ he said.
Ten years ago Bevan would have been on his defensive against a new acquaintance.
‘He seems happy enough,’ I told the District Officer.
The District Officer shrugged his shoulders.
’Heaven only knows what he’s got to be happy over.’
I looked forward to the evening with excitement and curiosity. We had arranged to meet at the club for a pahit, as soon as was convenient after sundown. In Malaya there is no fixed hour for dinner. Dinner is something that happens when one is tired of drinking pahits. At eight o’clock there was still a crowd of us seated round the large centre table.
The District Officer touched my shoulder. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’
He led me to the veranda.
‘Do you see that?’
He did not point, but faced in the direction of a dusky figure that was standing twenty yards away. She was alone. She was bare headed. She was dressed in European clothes: a cheap kind of printed cotton that made her slight figure seem shapeless and dumpy. In the dusk I could not tell if she was pretty.
‘That’s Bevan’s wife,’ the District Officer told me. ‘She’s always here if he’s not home by eight. She’s not allowed in, of course. She just stands there. Sooner or later one of us sees her and tips him the word. If she has to wait over half an hour he has hell to pay when they get back.’
‘They quarrel?’
‘Like hell.
She despises him for having married her.’
I took another look at her. She was a forlorn, pathetic figure, standing there in the dusk, between the Club which was forbidden her and the native village from which her marriage and her white blood had excluded her.
‘She looks pretty shabby,’ I remarked.
‘It’s the best that Bevan can afford.’
By the bar Bevan, the better for six pahits, was recounting a metropolitan anecdote that concerned a peer and his own discomfiture.
‘No,’ I thought,‘I don’t begin to understand it,’ as in spite of the warning shoulder-tap from the District Officer, he proceeded to order another round of drinks.
Nor was it in any mood of bravado that he guided us across the compound to the gravel square where he wife was waiting beside an exceedingly battered Morris-Oxford. He rested his hand affectionately on her shoulder.
‘We’ ve kept you waiting, Sally old girl, I know. I’m sorry. But this is an occasion. We don’t have guests so often. Up you get, both of you. We’ll be there in seven minutes.’
His wife got in the back, with Blunden. She made no comment. Bevan talked cheerfully the whole way home. Either he was deliberately ignoring his wife or was so used to her moods that he did not notice her.
‘Here we are,’ he said.
It was the kind of house in which you would expect to find a coloured overseer rather than the white manager of a plantation. It was one-storied, wooden, with a wide flower-hung veranda. At its back was a small grove of coconut palms. In front, running right up to the porch, was the broad park of rubber-trees, set out like soldiers, in even rows. Less than fifty yards away were the lines where the Tamils slept, the factory where the rubber was made into sheets and packed. From the outside an overseer’s house. And inside, was the bareness, the lack of personal possessions that you would associate with an Eurasian employee. No curtains, no flowers, two garishly vivid oleographs, and a framed advertisement poster for cigarettes. A long refectory table, some straight-backed wicker chairs, a couple of long rattan chairs, two or three occasional tables littered with magazines. The floor was covered with grass mats. The long cushioned window was littered with children’s toys, sewing, newspapers. There were not more than a dozen books in the corner of a set of shelves that served the treble purpose of dresser, sideboard and cocktail cabinet. The whole room had a slatternly appearance. I remembered the punctilious neatness of Bevan’s flat in Bloomsbury, the long stretch of bookshelves, the black-framed etchings, the John Armstrong lampshades. Yet here Bevan had none of the self-conscious defensiveness with which ten years earlier he had in the same breath apologized for his flat, and informed you with the greatest truculence that if you didn’t like his scheme of decoration you were an ignorant and tasteless moron. He had never had then, as he had now, the easy relaxed manner of the host.
’There’s whisky on that shelf there, if you want it. I’m going to splash some cold water over myself and change.’
It was then that his wife spoke, for the first time.
‘If you do that, the dinner’ll be even more spoilt than it is already.’
She spoke in a resentful tone, with a whine that was in part the expression of her mood, in part the natural sing-song note of an Eursasian. It was the first time I had seen her in the light. I was surprised to see how plain she was. One usually imagines that when a white man goes native he receives physical attractions of the highest order in compensation for the loss of caste, of social standing. But Bevan’s wife was infinitely less attractive than the average sales-girl that you would see in a London or New York store. She was not particularly young. She had a shapeless kind of face. Her hair, which was straight, parted in the middle and drawn tightly behind her ears, gave her a severe appearance. Her eyes were fine: large, dark, long-lashed. Her teeth were white and even. But her general effect was definitely unprepossessing.
‘I’d prepared dinner for eight o’clock. It’s quarter to nine. You can guess what it’ll be like by now.’
‘In that case it won’t be any the worse for waiting another fifteen minutes.’
As he pushed back the mosquito-netted division between the main living-room and the bedroom, her voice whiningly implored him not to make a noise and wake the children. And this, I reminded myself, was the man who had thought himself too good for Lucy. I walked over to the dozen or so books that now constituted: apparently, his entire library. They were dog-eared and well-thumbed, all of them. But they were not the kind of books I should have expected. There were no signs of the Bloomsbury influence: no Eliot, Firbank, Virginia Woolf. Instead, there was a Horace, the Iliad, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, the Everyman Shakespeare in three volumes. There were only two novels: Spring Floods, and War and Peace: the kind of library one would have expected to find on the shelves of a school prefect during his last term.
I was still looking at them when Bevan came through from the bathroom. He wore a grey cotton, short-sleeved open-collared shirt, a Javanese sarong of imitation Batik. His hair was wet and brushed in the careless way that I had known it first, the sweep of a damp brush across the forehead.
‘Not much of a library, is it?’ he remarked. ‘But I must say it’s all I want. Everything I need is there.’
It was the kind of remark that I could have pictured him as making ten years ago. But then it would have been made with a superior exclusiveness. He was now stating a fact, uncontentiously.
‘Let’s eat. Come on, you two.’
The other two had been seated in the window. They were laughing as they came towards us. Blunden was one of those rare people who bring out the gayest side of whomsoever they happen to be with. Now that Sally was laughing, I could see her charm. She had become another person. She was carefree, irresponsible, the kind of person who could sing and dance out of a mere zest for living. Blunden had that effect on people. He was like the sun; people were warm, happy, at ease, when he was with them. He made friends quickly. I never knew anyone who could count speedier conquests in the lists of gallantry.
Sally remained standing as we took our places at the table.
‘We’ve no servants. It’s a Tamil feast day: Deepavali: I gave them the day off. If I hadn’t they’d have all got drunk. I’ve had to serve the meal as well as cook it,’ she explained; the surly whining note had come back into her voice.
Blunden jumped to his feet, instantly.
‘I can’t let you do that. I must help.’
‘Oh, no, no!’
‘But yes, I insist. I’m a good cook, too, if anything gets spoilt. Come along.’
She was laughing again now.
‘That’s absurd, really,’ she protested.
But he had taken her by the hand, and led her towards the kitchen. There came the sound of clattered plates, of laughter, of several, ‘No, I’ll take this.’ ‘No, that’s yours.’ ‘Now, be careful there.’ When they came back into his living-room, Blunden gave an imitation of a butler. Sally, who had rarely seen a white man relaxed unless he was half-drunk, was bent double with that kind of cackling laugh that only coloured people can produce. All through the meal Blunden continued his clowning. They had a grand time together. Which was as well. It kept down the friction between Bevan and Sally, and it also prevented us from realizing quite how bad the dinner was. For it was without exception the least satisfactory meal I can remember. Such merit as the soup had ever had, had been long since boiled out of it. There was some fish that might have been hot at eight, but for at least an hour had been left to congeal in another part of the oven into a cool flabby paste. The joint on the other hand, had sustained the full force of an hour’s extra heat. Its blackened crust was half an inch thick, there was merely a core of unburnt meat about the bone. The dessert, apples from a tin, alone was unexceptional. Moreover, there was no cream, nor had Sally remembered to put the beer and soda-water bottles in the ice-chest. We drank lukewarm whisky with disrelish. A shocking meal. Bevan, however, who had once
deliberated so pensively on the rival merits of pre-phylloxera clarets, did not seem to notice that the meal left anything to be desired. He talked affably, easily; asking questions about London, about mutual friends. Usually, his questions had a social bias: which writer moved in the big world, who was ‘received’, which were the fashionable restaurants, what was the fashionable dining hour? But the questions were set on a note of detached curiosity. There was never the note of personal acrimony that previously had made his questions ring like the stages of a cross-examination.
When the meal was ended, the villainous coffee drunk, he rose to his feet with the grateful sigh of one who is at ease after good fare.
‘Let’s stroll down to the beach,’ he said.
Blunden turned to Sally.
‘Have you got to wash up?’
‘Naturally.’
‘I’ll stay and help you.’
She burst out laughing. The idea of a white man washing plates was ludicrously amusing.
‘You’ll smash them all.’
‘Bet you a dollar that I smash less than you.’
‘I never smash them.’
’We’ll see.’
It was the kind of badinage that you used to hear on Bank Holidays on Hampstead Heath in the days when the costermongers used to drive up in their donkey-carts and pearly coats. Bevan and I left them giggling among the dirty crockery.
‘It isn’t far,’ he said. ‘A couple of hundred yards, at the outside.’
We walked in silence. It was warm, so warm that one could leave one’s coat unbuttoned. But a breeze was blowing, cooling one’s cheeks. There was a moon, silvering the palm fronds, drawing a broad line of silver across the bay, veiling with a poetic dusk the humped shoulder of the far peninsula. The air was scented with frangipani and the small white blossom of the tropics that is half tuberose, half gardenia. On all sides was the murmur of a tropic night: birds, crickets, the rustle of branch on branch. It was the tropics such as one dreams of finding them.