by Jane Gardam
‘Can’t afford extensions now I’ve retired.’
Digging in the garden. Mending stuff. Round the supermarket with her to help lift out the boxes. ‘Not that loaf. You know we don’t have that loaf, Bull. Put it back.’ I put it back. Other old buggers trailing round likewise. Giving a hand. Retired. Other wives marching ahead like Moira. Rat-trap wives. Holding the reins. Holding the purse.
Well, there was pruning the roses.
And the decorating.
Walking the dog last thing round the block. Always the same walk. Your feet flap flap in front of you and you remember running, moving fast on your toes and dancing, long since—well, not that long since. I danced on the runway job at Heraklion.
Only sixty.
Christ, when the telex came, I said yes. ‘Reply immediate,’ it said. I replied immediate, ‘Accept’. I accepted two years in Drab, for godsake. Back again in Drab, sorting out a mess and getting out a new tender. Back at the old Drab Intercon. Sixty? What’s sixty? Heart? What’s heart? That was two years back in KL. Bad, leaving KL. Bad moment. When you’ve worked out East thirty years there’s limits to Welwyn.
Different for her. She never came out a lot. KL was the last, and she was only there three months and she never liked it. Not a woman for places, Moira. Things for Moira—cane furniture, carpets, lamps made out of animals’ skins. There was Hong Kong one year—twittering on about jade. There was Kuching. Not much to be got in Kuching. Kuching nearly bust us apart and she was only there three weeks. Maybe better if it had bust us. She never got over Kuching.
‘Well, it’s a man’s world,’ she says in Welwyn. ‘Bull’s in a man’s world out there. I’m just intruding. Construction work—well, it’s not for women. Oh no—Bull’s not lonely. Not the lonely type. “Do whatever you like,” I say, “so long as you don’t tell me.” It’s what we all say—all the wives. The English wives—I’m sure I can’t speak for the French or American. The Japanese wives of course, they don’t think about men once they’ve got a husband. He meets his old cronies, don’t you, Bull? Wherever he goes. Best of everything. Best hotels when he’s not working on site. Car and driver. Do this, do that. All expenses. And the pay’s good—not the pension unless you’ve thought ahead—and that’s not Bull—but the pay’s very comfortable and Bull’s not extravagant. He loves his work. Never bored. Well, half of them, it’s all they ever talk about, work. On and on, late at night, in one of their bedrooms like as not. I’ve seen them at it. It stops you going to bed. Well, you get bored watching them. I’d sooner be home—a woman—and have everything nice when he gets back.’
She doesn’t even face—not even in dreams if she dreams—the possibility of a lack of her, a need for her. She turned away her thoughts a long time ago from what needing is. She doesn’t need me any more.
She’s right about the work, though. It’s what I need most. They don’t know what you’re on about in England—work—but it’s true. There’s a number of us. It’s not booze that’s vital, or girls. No night-life to speak of, not in Drab at any rate. Not for my lot, and there’s plenty like us up and down the world. Up-country work. Getting buildings up in a swamp. Getting plant out to a desert. Getting pylons fixed. Digging through a cliff. Scooping out a reservoir. Keeping the work-force sweet. Just about the only power the bloody country’s kept since the Empire—big, overseas construction work. Like the British Army used to be but a bloody sight more useful. You’re looking to a constructive conclusion. Years ahead you have to look, and you can see them stretched before you—satisfying. There on the bed—the figures, difficulties, options, all laid out. My willing mistress. ‘Construction work.’ They think nothing of engineers at home—think of wireless mechanics or something. Yet it’s work where you see the world change. You see something that’ll be there when we’re all dead, up and finished. You see something completed—wipe your hands on a rag, nod and go away, knowing it’ll outlive you. I saw Plover Cove, Hong Kong, right through, start to finish—the cove become the lake and all the villages rebuilt better on the hills and the people still putting little dishes of food out around it, to appease the dragons. I saw through the Singapore land reclamation—planes flying off a runway scarcely months ago was water. I worked with the Eyties on Abu Simbil and saw the great old faces of the kings moved up the slope. The Eyties thought nothing of them—wouldn’t cross the road to look at them, they said—carrying on about the Pantheon. ‘I’d have a shot at moving that Pantheon,’ I said and they screamed.
It’s a club. Same folks turning up year in, year out—black, white, yellow—makes no difference. They’re mates. Internationals. Intercontinentals. Always the Intercon. Hotels. They’re our level—not a suite, of course: a good double room, private bath, couple of beds, one for work and one for Bull. Papers—my tender mistress—first things seen when you open your eyes in the morning and last thing when you close them at night. Wake—stretch for drawings, like Moira for the Teasmade and the Today Programme on the BBC. Well, I’m clear of the Today Programme, anyway.
I’m not unhappy.
No kids, mind.
Though maybe that’s a blessing, when you look round. There’s engineers I’ve known never seen their kids two, three, five years. Then kids get sent out for holidays and don’t know their fathers. There was Abbott, walking jaunty—embarrassed—through the Olde English restaurant at the Shangri La somewhere (Jakarta?) with a bird all paint and legs. ‘Nice work, Abbott,’ say I. He says, ‘Meet my daughter.’ What sort of sense is that?
You get to act set ways. You take set parts. You’re one feller to the World Bank crowd, another feller to the UN lot, another to the legal buffs, another for the oil men. You have your set jokes for nights out. Keep a supply—nucleus—for new acquaintances. Best is the Intercon. joke—goes down anywhere.
‘Who is the happiest man?’
‘The happiest man is the man with the Japanese wife, the Chinese cook, the English house and the American income.’
‘So okay—who is the unhappiest man?’
‘The unhappiest man is the man with the American wife, the English cook, the Japanese house and the Chinese income.’
You swop the nations about a bit, depending on the company, but it’s a winner most parties. Only trouble is it’s been around a bit now. It’s knocking on. Like my tender mistress.
She’s an airport, this mistress, and she’s a demon. A year or so ago she looked a treat, but she’s gone down lately—literally down for it turns out she’s based on mud. The big jumbos would have disappeared in her. Then we found she had, in addition, a heart of stone—and her heart, as is sometimes the way with mistresses—was not in the right place. Now neither mud nor stone need spell amen to a runway, but there was a particular set of circs. in this one that meant that they might.
So we got round that.
Then there was the typhoon. That swept most of the bitch away and we put her back again, piece by piece.
Then we had the cholera and that very nearly killed her, and it did kill a lot of men whose faces I don’t forget that easy. In Singapore, Hong Kong, if there’s a couple of cases of cholera, it’s headline news. In Drab it’s a couple of lines at the foot of the back page if there’s two hundred, and no mention on the television. Just as nobody bothers to mention the malaria down the Old City. And I’d not rule out smallpox, whatever they say.
Then we had the murder. Drunken Scottish clerk-of-works shot a Sikh who’d taken his woman. Well, it was the Sikh’s wife. Everything stopped then. My mistress stayed spread on the bed. In a coma. We’re still just beginning to ease her out of it. This week the trucks started coming back—slow. There’s men on the job again—clumps here, clumps there. Quiet still. No singing. But working again. And it’s one hundred degrees.
You can’t swear and threaten too much at one hundred degrees.
I never swear and threaten anyhow. Tend instead to watch and walk quiet. Being o
n the site dawn to dark does better than threats and temper. They see you coming, see you standing, see you camping out there all night often as not. See you not noticing heat, not noticing cholera, not scared of Ferguson blowing the Sikh’s head off—so drunk you’d never think he’d hold a gun, let alone aim it; let a man—me—take it out of his hand like a baby. Put him to bed—get police, ambulance. You get through and beyond fear, through and beyond surprise, through and beyond heat.
Now and then, mind, there’s a flutter in the old loins. Like today—Sunday—here at the hotel. We’re suddenly off the site, not working—not because it’s Sunday this being a Muslim country—but because some bugger delivers the wrong stuff. No plant arriving. Blinding, beating silence. Men sleeping rolled in rags and sacks like parcels. In the gravel heap—the factory they call it—where they hit the big stones with the smaller stones and then the smaller stones with smaller stones and the smaller stones with smaller—and so on, for the cement. Some of them had dug holes for themselves in the gravel, crawled in like mites in cheese. A few lay about on top, like dead birds. A few still worked, tapping slow, under umbrellas. They were dotted in the grey shale like currants in a pudding. Living skeletons. Nothing moved.
‘In Bengal
To work at all
Is seldom if ever done’
—nor yet in Drab.
They’ll do this sudden, men. Anywhere out East. Just as they’ll go mad, sudden, too. Like Penang, that calm, warm Monday with the rain falling and they all began to throw bricks off the Ong skyscraper down on the Minister of Works on a state visit.
I couldn’t manage that one. It was Chinese/Malay trouble and there’s no Englishman equal to that. There’s degrees of foreignness you’ll never fathom—like the way in Bengal the husbands and wives shave the pubic hair off each other every Thursday night. Off each other! Then it’s Holy Friday and they sit and itch. Then Saturday it’s Bingo! It’s as good a story for the restaurants as the one about the happiest man, but by God, it’s when you feel foreign.
That day—the warm, rainy day of the fight at the Ong Tower—I left the lot of them to it and went off to the Botanical Gardens and watched the orang-utang they’ve got there hanging like a sweet-chestnut in its cage. Dying. It was dying, the orang-utang. It was a present from the President of Korea or somewhere to the king of Malaysia. He’d given them two, but the woman orang-utang had died already. This feller left—it just hung there. By one hand. Its eyes bloody lonely. Malays no bloody good with animals. I stood there half the day looking at its tired little red eyes. ‘Not a bugger to talk to,’ I said. ‘You’ve not got a bugger to talk to,’ and it just looked back. Then it gave a great swing, away and up, and sat looking up into the trees, across towards the Straits, north towards the jungles where it was born. Like Adam. The first Adam. It didn’t throw things down on me. It sat quiet. Not that interested. It mourned. It observed me and thought, ‘This is where you feel foreign.’
So—today, no work, and I get into my bathing trunks and out into the Intercontinental Hotel gardens. They bring me a blue mattress for my slatted long-chair and there I lie on the green lawns among the mallow bushes, purple and white flowers on the same bush—and God, the beautiful smell of them. There’s great mountains of sweating bodies take the magic off, mind. All around. Bodies almost as big as mine. Australians, airline pilots resting. The size with them’s just food and flab. Me—I’m hard as iron. Neck two foot round, growing low out of the shoulders. Thrusting. Hence, Bull.
Lie there.
Watch roses high above swinging from cement pergola above swimming pool and crows sitting in among them, looking down. When a lad comes out dressed in baby blue, hips like a girl, with a coffee tray, you see crows glitter.
They flap down like floating black newspapers. They sit by you. All round you. They move up and take the sugar, or page of your paper, or coffee spoon. Sharp, evil beaks. Like grey candle grease.
But the sun’s hot, the sky’s blue, the roses red and—hello. Loping over the grass with two waiters running behind there’s this woman six feet tall with bangles round her ankle and arms and in a shouting-pink jellaba, kaftan, whatever. Stalking high-heeled. Looking nowhere. Points at long-chair beside yours and waiters lay out blue mattress. Bow again. Coffee? She pays no attention. They depart. Crows watch. Even crows fall silent.
You almost close your eyes. Slide eye-balls sideways under lids as with one sweep off comes jellaba and she collapses gentle along mattress in pink bikini—green bangles, blue bangles, pink bikini, huge smoked glasses like a skull. Her stomach’s not what it was. Droops a bit. Flat breasted but lean as a crane—the machine on the site, not the bird. She’s bloody tanned—narrow boned. Proud. Face pretty terrible—mingy, disappointed. Like a hen.
But the face you needn’t look at. She’s got legs all right. Well, fairly all right. The more you look the less you see is all right. It’s just the general impression. Big glamour. She’s European. Or American. And alone.
She brings out letter and she reads and reads it. She folds it up and then lies back. Then she opens it again. And reads it. Two short deep lines appear above the glasses and below the line of the scraped back bleach of hair. She is in a trance with the letter.
He’s left her. Or he isn’t coming to find her. Or he’s not been in to Cartier lately.
So the end of it is she’s in my room after dinner, me on my bed and her on the chair and the tender mistress spread out with both of us looking at her.
‘You mean you live with these? All the time? With these papers?’
‘All day. All night.’
‘You are alone?’
‘There’s the men. The management. The Intercon. lot. We all come and go. We meet up all the time—the world over.’
She looks around. I suppose the room has got fairly squalid while I’m on and off the site. The room-service knows my ways. Knows what they haven’t to touch. Drawers have got left half open. Clothes about. Inside-out socks. Laundry list still on the floor. Tipped-over photograph of Moira on dressing table.
‘Your wife?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘You have been married long?’
‘Thirty years.’
‘Thirty years. To the same woman?’
‘Yes.’
A sigh. She goes to the window.
‘Whisky?’
I have to get new bottle from back of my sweat-shirts and dislodge old tea-making machine. It’s a cable with two wires sticking out like adder’s tongue at one end, and metal ring the other. Bought it Kowloon, years back. You fix it in the shaving plug marked shavers only. Once fused the whole of the Doha Hilton and nearly killed myself, but I was young then. Get out my box of Brook Bond tea bags—Moira sends them out from Safeways. ‘Maybe tea?’
She sighs again. Turns. She’s a great shape. Like Katherine Hepburn. But God—the moment goes.
I remember her in the garden—the way she got them to put her mattress next to mine. Remember the letter—how old it looked. The folds were dirty. At dinner downstairs tonight I saw the poor old hands below the blue bangles and the neck inside the swathes of necklaces patched brown with maps of Asia.
No tenderness here. No more tenderness than in the waitresses—all saris and buttocks and insolent stares. Why should she be? She’s knocked about. And she could be sixty. Well—sixty’s nothing.
But not tonight.
So, it’s a drink only and I take her out and leave her at the lift and then I go down the stairs and walk in the hotel gardens in the hot night. The crows’ll still be up there watching. If I took off my watch and swung it, they’d swoop. If I listen, they will speak. ‘Keep off her, Bull. There’s no future. She’s lost. She’s one of the wanderers. She’ll be there some form the next place. You’ve the Extension to build.’
Letter from Moira as I pass desk. Forgot to ask before. Tap letter first one corn
er, then another on desk. Looking down. So easy—‘Anything further, Mr. Bull? Can we get you anything?’ asks the Bell Captain. So easy. Just push dollars over. Ask for her room number.
She’ll be in bed now, staring at ceiling, tired eyes deep in fragile bones of thin face. Earrings, bangles, rings lie on bedside table. Dry skin washed clean of paint is creased with years.
It is not kind or tender in me to leave her alone.
I insult her, standing here, not asking for her room number—old Bull, fit as a bull, except for the occasional twinge in the rib-cage. Poor old Bull, holding the corner of his wife’s letter. How many years left? Ten? Not likely twenty. Nor for her neither, her with the bangles. It is Bull’s duty to tap on her door.
But, here is Bull on his bed, looking across at his tender mistress, thinking that if he had any sense he would go through some of the preliminary tarmac figures and the War Clause before sleep. Here’s knock on door and in come Bob and Kassim. Just as well she’s not still here. Would have put up ‘do not disurb’ I guess.
‘Now then—you’re late, Bob. Thought you’d both not be coming.’
‘Thought maybe if we’d any sense, Bull, we’d go over the preliminary tarmac figures. And look at the War Clause.’
‘You’ve got a bloody mosquito in here, Bull.’
‘They do no harm. We’re immune. We’re old.’
‘Don’t see where it came from. Seven floors up. They don’t breed here. The water’s too dirty.’
‘Like us. Whisky?’
‘Tea if we’re doing the figures.’
Bull fills three tea cups with cold water and attaches wires to shaving plug.