She turned on to her back. ‘Wretch, how mutss money you haff?’
That stopped the ravings. After a pause he said, ‘How much did you take? There was six hundred in the wallet, I think.’
‘I no mean that. I mean altogesser. In bank—’
He lay very quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘Haven’t I given you enough? More than a thousand, counting in drinks, for just two—’
She tossed her body impatiently. ‘I not sink that now. I sink Udom. Wretch, I not like he at ron-piya-ban all by he-salf. I sink all the time he call ‘Mama, Mama’ but Mama no come. Wretch, I want go ron-piya-ban, stay wiss my son till he well again.’
He got up on his elbow and stared down at her face through the darkness. ‘You do?’ She could tell he was thrilled. He was certain now that she had the right maternal instincts. He felt his love for her had not been misplaced.
‘I want. But how can I do? Must pay for room. Must pay for food. Must pay for samlor.’ She sighed, and rubbed her eyes—really, her lot was very hard and it was a wonder her tears weren’t flowing. ‘If I not go Bolero every night—’ Suddenly she grabbed his hand and pressed it to her lips in such a way that his wrist touched her cheek. For it was wet …
He said, thickly into her shoulder, ‘Vilai, Vilai.’ He was overcome with pity. Finally he lifted his head and said, ‘Sweetheart, sometimes you act the tough guy so well you bamboozle even me. But I know you aren’t bad, not right deep down. How could I love you if you were? And this proves it. You’re good, good, good—’
She agreed with him, but practical as always, she said, ‘How mutss you giff me?’
‘How much do you think you need?’
She’d already made a guess at what she thought would be the utmost he could manage. ‘I sink two t’ou-zand—but I know you very young boy—and young boy never haff mutss money—’ She continued to cry softly in the darkness.
Finally he spoke. ‘Vilai, if I give you a cheque for two thousand—if I do—do you swear you’ll forget the Bolero for a few nights and go to be with Udom at the hospital?’
‘You giff me two t’ou-zand, of course I not go Bolero. Who want to work when he haff money?’
This rejoinder was clinching, she thought, but it didn’t seem to carry Wretch as it should have done. He lay silent for a long time. Then he said doubtfully, ‘That’s more than half of what I’ve saved. If I give it to you, do you promise—’
‘I plomiss.’
‘If you cheat me, Vilai—’ He didn’t complete the threat and if he had done so it wouldn’t have interested her much. He hung over her for a long time, propped on one elbow, then he growled, ‘I’m a chump,’ and got off the bed. He snapped on the light and stark naked began searching for his pen and chequebook. At that moment, as she lay comfortably on the bed, he looked to her the handsomest of the two or three thousand men who had known the inmost chalice of her body …
‘I’ll date it for Monday,’ he was saying. ‘The bank’s not open tomorrow, or rather today. But if you cheat me, Vilai—’
‘Of course I not cheat you, darling. Don’t you unnerstand I in love wiss you?’
And she really was a little at that moment. Therefore she suffered without too much fretfulness the long kiss he came over to fix on her lips …
Going home by motor-samlor in the waxing light of dawn it was only the thought of that cheque which kept her spirits up. The ribald comments of the early pedestrians who happened to catch sight of her bare shoulders and flowing skirts were mercifully drowned by the uneven explosiveness of the engine and the rush of air past her ears but nothing could drown her thoughts. She’d been betraying Udom all night long. He’d made his school fellows think she was a princess—and a princess who’d been to America and had medical qualifications into the bargain—and now, poor little child, he was sick. Yet instead of staying by his bedside, reciprocating his loyalty, she’d been determinedly thrusting him out of her mind all night, exerting herself to entertain foreigners who cared no more for her than she for them—men who made her as low as he’d made her high. She thought of him coming round in that dingy barn of a place and wondering where he was and seeing those dreary white nurses floating around—perhaps he would think he was dead and be terrified and start to cry out for her, but no one would take any notice. He might be screaming with terror at this very moment and probably Bochang was asleep … Only she, his Mama, really knew how to look after him …
She decided to do what she’d told Wretch she would do. Go to the hospital and keep Udom company till he was discharged. Wretch had made it possible for her to do so, and she wanted to do it …
She paid the samlor-boy the exorbitant twenty tics he’d demanded and began pounding heavily on the corrugated iron door. Siput was always a sound sleeper.
The footsteps came unexpectedly soon. There was no reply to her shouts to hurry up. The lock was fumbled with and finally the door dragged open.
Bochang!
‘Why aren’t you at the hospital?’ she began in a fury but then she saw Bochang’s expression and she stopped. An agonizing pain opened in her heart and spread frighteningly through her breast. ‘Udom—?’ she quavered.
‘Oh, Mem, Mem,’ Bochang burst out, her voice hoarse and bewildered like a frog’s. ‘Why did you let the foreigner take our Udom to the hospital? Why did you not bring him home where we could have looked after him ourselves? Everybody knows hospitals are not to be trusted. Everybody knows that they will not trouble themselves about a little boy unless of course his family is exceedingly rich and can pay huge fees …’
Part Three
THE SLAUGHTER
‘Who rides a tiger cannot dismount’
Chinese Proverb
Eight
After she’d gone that Sunday morning I went back to bed. But I was too hungry and too stirred up to sleep.
Simultaneously I despised and admired myself. I despised myself because I’d allowed myself to be cheated so badly. What had I paid her during the previous few hours? Altogether two thousand six hundred tics. At the rates then prevailing that was fifty-four quid or one hundred and thirty US dollars. Ten weeks before, when I was still a grocer’s assistant, it would have taken me the best part of three months to earn that much. And every few minutes that thought would bring me up aghast. For what was there to show for my money? Nothing—unless you counted a single strand of her hair I’d found on the pillow. And I’d had her body twice … Ratom would have given me that much for a fiftieth of the cost. In fact I had allowed my lust and my sympathy, both riding me full-pelt, to stampede me into idiocy, and at intervals that thought would make me writhe.
But the rest of the time I had no compunction at all over what I’d done. On the contrary I was pleased with myself.
‘At last I’m out of my adolescence,’ I told myself. ‘At last I’m man-size.’ My muscles automatically flexed themselves. My body had come into its own. I could face adults now eye to eye.
I recalled various things she’d said. ‘I like you, Wretch. You good boy, I sink. Why you not marry wiss me? What you do tomollow? How mutss money you get every munss? If you like, I marry wiss you, go everywhere—’
‘I not bad girl. I not pross. I dancing-girl. I slip only wiss man I like. I not like you, you giff me one t’ou-zand tic, you cannot slip wiss me—’
She’d wanted me to escort her home because it was getting light and it was not nice, she’d said, for a girl to be seen out alone at that time of day in evening clothes. ‘What, going to hide behind my big European nose?’ I’d asked. She’d wanted me to take her to the hospital to see Udom, but later she’d decided it would be better if she went by herself. She wanted to know when she’d see me again—tomorrow, the next day after that? I’d remembered I must get another payday in first and suggested Thursday. She’d said sadly, ‘You not like me, Wretch.’ I’d protested that I did, that she’d given me a wonderful time, that she didn’t know how much she’d done for me. She’d smiled, thrown her arms round
my neck, and kissed me on the lips. An affectionate kiss, not a lustful one. Then she’d gone, lingering a little at the door as if she’d expected me to accompany her downstairs, but I was still in pyjama trousers only …
As soon as I heard a boy slopping around in the passage I ordered coffee, ham and eggs, toast and marmalade for two, and gobbled the lot.
‘Leopard, Leopard, burning bright
In the Bolero every night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’
I repeated that quatrain many times. It seemed to fit.
After I’d eaten and the boy had straightened the bed I laid down on it again and tried to make up for lost sleep. But the Leopard was burning too bright in the forest of my mind. Sleep wouldn’t come. In the end I got up and wrote letters to Lena and Slither.
Shortly after midday she shot into my room like a projectile. And exploded like one.
‘Wretch, you no good, I sink. I hate you. You kill my son.’
‘What?’
‘Udom d’ad.’
‘No, Vilai, no!’
‘You sink I lie? Huh! I not lie ’bout sing like this, I sink. Udom d’ad, I tell you. Because you kill him. You!’
I’d got up when she’d burst in but now I had to sit down again because my knees had gone weak. ‘What happened?’
‘What you sink happen? Like I tell you must happen. Ron-pi-ya-ban no good. Not do nussing for my son. Not care he at all. Let he die. And now he d’ad, they all laugh very mutss, I sink.’
She had her elbows on the dressing table and was staring at herself in the glass. She had on no make-up except lipstick and it was easy to see she had been crying. I got up and stood just behind her, but I thought it would be desecration to touch her in her sorrow. ‘Poor little Udom!’ I said.
‘What you mean—poor littun Udom?’ She whirled round, her face angry. ‘Nussing wrong for he, I sink. Now he d’ad. Not feel nussing. Not fray nussing. Not want, want, want all the time. Now he happy, I sink. No more trouble for he any more at all.’ She went to one of the armchairs and flung herself into it. ‘Poor Vilai! That the truce word, I sink. Why I want to live any more, now Udom d’ad? Why must work and unhappy all the time? I sink I d’ad too batter—’
‘Vilai!’ Although I’d once tried to kill myself I’m always shocked to hear anyone else repudiating life. I clasped her hand across the table.
All at once her eyes overflowed with tears. ‘Wretch, why the God do this to me, you sink? I not bad girl. I bad girl, yes, but I good bad girl. I not bad ’cause I want bad. I bad ’cause I must haff money. If not bad, how can girl do, not haff huss-band? Every girl not haff huss-band must be bad. Unless she just work in s’op, for rice—’
I couldn’t think of the right answers at that moment and simply squeezed her hand. She snatched it away impatiently and went into the bathroom. When she came out she was carrying her skirt, a red one with several hundred pleats in it. She arranged it tidily over the towel rack. Then she unbuttoned her white blouse and squirmed it off. She tied a towel round her middle and came and sat down again. ‘Wretch eat yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What you will haff?’
‘I don’t know. Are you hungry?’
‘Yes, a littun.’
I got up and rang the bell.
She ordered a very great mess of pottage and when it came attacked it with vigour. But after a few mouthfuls her appetite failed and she went and lay on the bed. I sat at the table eating a little while longer but in truth I was off my food too. I pushed my plate away and looked across at her.
She was lying with her legs spread, on her back, staring at the ceiling, lost in gloomy thought. But at length she became conscious of my gaze, looked down along her body at me and—laughed. I couldn’t believe my ears. She rolled her hips from side to side, then lifted them, then let them drop back on the bed with an accompanying small grunt. I had learned the sign, but I couldn’t move. It was blasphemy—like murder in a cathedral.
‘What matter wiss you today? You not strong any more? You haff nusser girl in here since I go this morning? Tee-hee, tee-hee!’
For a moment I wondered whether she’d been fooling me. But then I recalled those tears that had poured down her cheeks—they’d been genuine all right. I went across to the bed and stood staring down at her. She seemed to me like some sort of monster.
‘You angly to me again? Oh, Wretch, all the time you must angly to me. You not haff good heart, I sink. You want to fight all the time—’
‘Vilai, if Udom’s—dead—’
‘What differnunt? Last night you—bam bam—like you mad. Udom d’ad then too. Only differnunt, then you not know. Now you know—’
‘You’re so hard. You’re hard as—’
‘Nusser sing. I not want you talk Udom again. Now he d’ad. He finiss. He neffer hear bird sing again. OK. Forget about. Forget about.’ She had to struggle to check her tears again but succeeded. She thrashed around until the towel came undone and then began making the little anxious, querulous, exciting noises I knew so well. I was deeply ashamed of myself as I sat on the edge of the bed pulling my shorts off. Yet if her hands had been dripping with her son’s blood I think I would still have been unable to resist her.
Afterwards she took my last hundred-tic note. ‘You haff more on Sursday?’ she asked. ‘Now must pay more zan before. Must pay for burn Udom. Must pay for pliests sing for him. Must pay for feast. Everyone must get very d’unk, I sink. Haff man burn, always everybody must get very d’unk.’ She was putting on the red skirt. ‘You like? Siamese girl only wear red colour when she happy. That why I wear red colour today. Not want any pipple know I sad. Man see me sit in samlor, he must sink, “Oh, there go White Leopard. She very happy girl, I sink. She not haff any trouble in world …”’
She didn’t come Thursday and I spent an angry anxious time until three in the morning, when I finally gave up hope. I got up then and ate all the mangoes and spicy Siamese delicacies I had bought for her. I drank the beer I had provided for myself, though it was no longer cold, then went back to bed hoping to sleep. But the hope was vain.
Most of the thoughts that tormented me were unworthy of a man; I knew that even then, and it made them all the more galling. I thought, ‘She thinks she’s got all the money she can off me so she doesn’t want anything more to do with me.’ I thought, ‘She’s found another man she likes better than me. Maybe Dick’s plane’s having engine trouble again.’ I thought, ‘All women are cheats. Look at Sheila—’ The images of my mother, Lena, and the Korat Venus popped into my mind, accusing me of being hysterical and unfair, but I bundled them out again. I sat up under the mosquito-net rehearsing the speeches I was going to make next time I saw her. I dreamed impossible dreams: that I’d won the Speedway World Championship before ninety thousand cheering spectators at Wembley Stadium, and that she was riding round the arena with me on my bike, waving the enormous gold cup to the throng; that I’d just conquered a mountain higher even than Everest, the first to do so, and having returned to civilization was sending off my first cable: ‘Miss Vilai, c/o Bolero Bangkok Thailand I got there Vilai thanks for pushing all my love Wretch.’ I prayed to her son. ‘Udom, she loved you so much you must have loved her too. I love your Mamma as you did. I hate to have her live this horrible dangerous life she leads, just as you must have done. I want to save her from it. I can save her from it. But she doesn’t recognize a true friend when she sees him. Oh, Udom, if you have any power over her now, if you can reach down or up from wherever you are and knock the scales from those lovely foolish eyes—’ After daybreak I did drop off for a few minutes,—and dreamed about Ratom. I remember my last waking thought was, ‘What an ass I am. Self-sacrificed upon an unchaste mons veneris—’
The next night I shook off Somboon after dining with him and went to look for her at the Bolero. She was there all right, looking no different, unless handsomer. She was perplexed when I went in, for there was a gre
at tableful of Americans who all seemed to know her very well and out of whom I don’t doubt she was making a good deal of money. When she came and sat with me for a few minutes some of them turned nasty: in fact one of the blighters came and joined us—‘you don’t mind, bud?’ he said, ‘there’s sump’n I have to discuss with this lady’—and she was obviously alarmed. He monopolized her attention but I sat it out for a beer and a peppermint: total cost, with flowers, eighty-three tics. When I left she accompanied me to the door, talking in an earnest undertone. ‘Neffer come Bolero again. I working girl. Must do my shob—’
‘You never want to see me again?’
‘Don’t be silly. I in luff wiss you, darling. But when you want see me, must send hotel-boy. Any time you ask I come your hotel.’
‘Tonight?’
‘You want me come this night?’
‘Yes. You’re were supposed to show up last night. I had pat-mi-han and khao-neu-mo-muang—’
She said, slowly, ‘I want to come tonight. But maybe can not.’
‘You really love me very much, don’t you?’
She stamped her foot. ‘Now you mad again. Why you can not understand? I dancing-girl, darling. Sometimes can not do what I want to do. I must work—’
‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodni’, darling. I come if I can, I plomiss.’
I walked home in near despair and spent another night of misery. It wasn’t so much that she failed to show up. But the Calvinistic conscience, thoroughly honed in the days of my youth, had never lost its sharpness. Only take off the sacking in which it was ordinarily wrapped and like the scythe in the toolshed at home it was ready to cut to the bone. And that night the sacking was off, all right. To what depths I had sunk in a matter of a few weeks! Until I had left England I had tried to live up to a high moral code. Thou shalt not lie in words or with loose women or indeed with any woman at all until thou hast married her in a church. Thou shalt not drink anything stronger than communion wine except at Christmas when thy mother maketh thee apple wine according to her great-grandmother’s recipe. Thou shalt not gamble or swear or break a promise or sit in the presence of a standing lady. Thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother and thy elder brother and his moll, also God and culture … By and large I had been able to toe the line for twenty years. But now …! I hadn’t opened a poet for weeks. I had started to consort with publicans and sinners, and of course there was the highest precedent for so doing, but in my case it was not because, like George Fox, I could see ‘that of God which is in every man,’ but because I had discovered that that of the Devil which was in a good many men was in me too … One girl in Korat had been only fifteen. And the fact that she’d extracted two hundred tics out of my shirt pocket with her toes (after I’d told her not to bother to lay the shirt out so tidily at the foot of the bed) while I was engrossed in other matters (and imagined she was too) made no difference. My crime had been the greater. Mine was a crime against a child. Therefore against all mankind. Therefore against God …
A Woman of Bangkok Page 24