She didn’t make any answer at all but just lay with her hand inert in mine and in the end I realized there wasn’t going to be any answer. With a sigh I got up and lay down on my back behind her.
After about ten minutes I knew by the regularity of her breathing that she’d gone to sleep.
She slept for two hours without moving. At first I lay there admiring the lines and planes that had called forth such high praise the night before. But during the second hour I began to grow restive. The impudence of this tart! Coming to see me and then spending the whole afternoon in sleep. Ignoring my ultimatum, my declaration of love, my proposal of marriage! How much more could she slight and hurt me? Instead of lying still as a stone, as up till then, I began to move around when I wanted to, and in the end more than necessary. At last I disturbed her. She awoke with a violent start, lay rigid for a moment, then rolled on her back and looked at me.
‘Wretch, what the time now?’
‘Never mind the time.’ Throwing an arm across her.
‘No, no.’ She tried to struggle free. ‘What the time? Must go four o’clock.’
‘Four? You always stay till seven. That gives you plenty of time to get ready for the Bolero.’
She clicked her tongue impatiently. ‘I ask you I not go Bolero.’
‘Why not? You lost your job?’
She said, ‘No, oh, no,’ but there was so much surprised vehemence in the denial that I was sure it was false. I stopped wrestling with her and got up and looked at her watch—(she’d taken all her jewellery off when she bathed). ‘It’s nearly five.’ I walked back to the bed.
‘Goddam!’ She leapt off the other side and ran to the towel rack on which she’d draped her clothes. She began rapidly putting them on.
‘Are you going without—?’ I was choking with rage.
‘Half no time, darling. I late now. You let me slip too long—’
‘Who is it? That damned Yank?’
‘Oh, Wretch! Why you worry so mutss to him? He nussink to me.’
‘Yet you’d rather go to him than stay with me.’
‘Of course, darling. He only here two, t’ree day. But you here all the time. Can see you any time you want.’
She’d got herself dressed and gone to the mirror and was pulling out hairclips. ‘He like me too mutss, darling. Pay very well. Must get he money while he here.’
‘You haven’t forgotten of course but I’m going to Ubol tomorrow?’
‘Tomollow?’ It was clear she had forgotten. ‘I sink you say wan-ti yip-kao—’
‘That’s right. Tomorrow’s the twenty-ninth.’
‘Goddam.’ She was combing her hair with long fierce strokes. Then she parted it, and began picking up hairclips, opening them with her teeth, and shoving them home above her ears. ‘How long you go country this time?’
‘Three weeks at least.’
‘Goddam, goddam.’ She dropped her comb in her bag and started forcing her bracelets over her hands. ‘What time you go tomollow?’
‘After lunch. We’re going by jeep this time, not train.’
‘You here in morning?’
‘No, I must go to the office.’ I knew the sensible thing would have been to leave it at that. But I was too weak. ‘I could come back, of course. About twelve. For an hour.’
Ready except for her shoes she came and sat on the edge of the bed beside me. When she bent to force her feet into the shoes the yellow blouse slipped off one shoulder. I put my arm round her with a groan. She suffered the embrace for a full minute, kneading my thigh with her knuckles. But as soon as I tried to get a better purchase on her she broke away. She stood up, sliding a hand inside her blouse to straighten her brassiere. ‘You giff me money today?’
‘Certainly not. Get it off Uncle Sam.’
‘I come tomollow at twelve, how mutss you giff me?’
‘Hell, Vilai, you’re a moneymaniac. Don’t you ever think about anything else at all?’
‘How mutss you giff me?’
‘I’ll give you nothing. It’s time you gave me something.’
‘But soon I must pay for room. And you go away for t’ree, four week—’
The worried look on that changed tragic face broke my heart. And my body was yearning for hers which was poised sturdy yet somehow forlorn before me. I pulled her between my knees and encircled her hips with my arms. Very lightly she clasped my head to herself. I knew I was being managed. But I was powerless to control my desires.
‘How mutss you giff me if I come tomollow?’
‘How much d’you want? I’ll give you half perhaps.’
She stated her requirements with great exactitude. ‘I want one t’ou-zand four hunderd. Four hunderd for make dress for go Chiengmai. One t’ou-zand ’cause I not see you so long … Not very mutss money for me, darling. Must pay four hunderd for clo’es, sick hunderd for room—’
‘Your room’s three hundred.’
‘Yes, but must pay two time if you go country for t’ree week.’ I began to get rough with her again and she pulled herself away. I let her go, sitting on the edge of the bed with my arms dangling.
‘Vilai, why did you lose your job?’
‘Oh—I ask you tomollow. Must go now.’ She gave her hair a final toss, peering into the mirror, and picked up her handbag. I accompanied her to the stairs. She went down very cautiously, mincingly, sideways, as her habit was. At the bottom she stopped to wave and throw me the usual dazzling smile. But that was the trouble. Today it wasn’t dazzling. It was a deathly grin that failed to mask the tragedy behind it.
Of course when I got back from the hotel during the lunch-hour the next day there she was and of course I gave her the money. I don’t think she’d expected the whole fourteen hundred but that didn’t prevent her from asking for an extra hundred to make it a round figure. ‘Then I can haff fife hunderd for my-self.’ An extra hundred seemed hardly worth squabbling about so I handed it over. I didn’t tell her that that morning I’d had to borrow a thousand from Frost, giving unexpected Christmas presents as my excuse. Or that Frost had been most sceptical about this excuse, saying, ‘I hope to God I’m not loaning you this so you can just chuck it away on a lot of whores upcountry. I’m short myself, and giving you this’ll just about break me. I want it back early in the New Year—you understand?—or I’ll be sunk …’
She returned my watch, mended. We ate a large meal and shared a bottle of beer. All the time she was picking titbits out of the dishes and placing them invitingly on my plate. I tried to find out why she’d been fired from the Bolero, but she was evasive. ‘I ask you before, when d’unk I fighting girl’.
I clicked my tongue. ‘Oh, Vilai, all the time you make life harder for yourself. Why d’you have to get drunk? It’s dangerous for a girl in your line. When you’re drunk you don’t fully realize what’s going on. One of these days some rotter’ll get you tight and do you serious harm—’
‘What mean ham?’
‘Make you sick. Or hurt you. Maybe even kill you—’
‘Huh. What I care that? I not care how I die, when I die. I sink haff man kill me I very happy. I sink when he—peep!’—she mimed firing a revolver—‘I say, “sank you, sank you.”’
‘Vilai, don’t be so self-centred. Maybe you don’t care what happens to you. But what about those who love you?’
‘Who? Who you sink luff Vilai now?’
‘Your mother. Me. Perhaps some other silly ass you’ve never told me about—’
She laughed. She was transformed from the preceding day—and not just because she was made-up—her spirits had revived, and she was bewitching in her laughter. ‘I sink my Mama very happy haff me die now,’ she argued. ‘Now I still Number One Bad Girl in Bangkok. I sink my Mama not want me number one t’ou-zand and one. I sink I want to dancing for t’ree, four more year. Then I not pewty, man not want, I lost my shob. Batter I die before—’
‘But you’ve lost your job already.’
‘Neffer mind. Now can get new. Every
man know White Leopard. Every man want her to dancing. I sink every boy go Bolero now, he ask manager, ‘Goddam, where White Leopard tonight? Why I want come Bolero if no haff White Leopard? I must go where haff White Leopard, ’cause she number one dancing-girl in Bangkok—’
I shook my head helplessly.
When I’d packed and paid my bills I took her to the Chalerm Krung cinema in the jeep. She showed no emotion whatever when we drove over the spot where Udom had been knocked down. At the cinema she climbed clumsily out of the jeep crying ‘Wait, wait,’ ran round to my side and standing on the kerb, looking down her flat straight nose at me, pressed my hand. ‘You not go Ubol alone?’
‘No. One other bloke.’
‘You haff gun?’
‘Of course not. Why?’
‘Oh, Wretch, be careful, be careful. Many Thai men cow boy—’
‘Don’t worry about me, sweetheart. You look after yourself, that’s the main thing. You’re the one that leads the dangerous life.’
‘Goodbye.’ She gave my hand a last squeeze and turned away. As I moved off I noticed a tall weather-beaten foreigner emerge from the theatre foyer on to the steps. He could have been an American. For one hideous moment—but I scotched that idea promptly. If I drove away believing that she’d let me drive her to an assignation with some other man I’d be dead by my own hand in a few days … Besides, neither of them had appeared to recognize the other. And I could still feel the pressure of her hand on mine. She had touched me and spoken to me with genuine affection, with genuine concern for my welfare … I was a stupid, low-minded bastard always to be thinking the worst of her, I told myself severely. Half the pain I suffered in life was in fact of my own making and it was time I pulled myself together …
It had been my own idea that future trips to the Northeast should be made by jeep, except during the rainy season. The office had been sceptical—‘These roads’, Samjohn had said—‘are not like English roads and garages don’t exist’, and Windmill frankly alarmed, but when we reached Lopburi I heard him say proudly to the hotelkeeper ‘We’ve made it from Bangkok in five hours.’
Windmill went off on his own after dinner and I settled down my room with a book. But scarcely had I started to read when a girl came to the door. She was quite a good-looking girl in a scarlet blouse and black sarong. She looked at me briefly, then went. A few seconds later the boy came in to ask if I wanted her. And as a matter of fact I did but out of loyalty to Vilai and sheer weariness I declined. I had a second bath in the huge tiled tub—it was the first I’d seen since leaving England—and then I leaned on the verandah rail enjoying the night air … After thirty minutes I saw what I’d been half-expecting to see. Two samlors arrived with a handsomely got-up tart in the front one and Windmill in the other. She went into the hotel as if she had no connection with him but I saw him pay both samlor boys. A few moments later I heard her follow him into the next room and the bolt was shot home. At intervals I could hear their voices, soft, friendly and intimate.
This little episode filled me with envy and self-pity. Sure, I was tired out, I’d already had one girl today, I was yearning to return to my Puritan ideals. But at the same time I was lonely and miserable—in love myself, but knowing myself unloved. In fact, what was Vilai probably doing that very moment? Getting tonight’s load on? Already in bed with some sweating, tattooed Barnacle Bill? Floating face downwards in the estuary of the Chao Phaya with her skull split open? I went to the door to see if the girl in the red blouse was still around, but the passage was empty. I swore and bolted myself in. There wasn’t a millionth of a chance that Vilai was thinking about me at that moment. I hurled myself into the suffocating mound of feathers. ‘Never mind. Tomorrow we’ll make Korat. Maybe I’ll make Ratom too—she was always pretty easy before—’
I tried to console myself with visions of what might be but even as I recalled the enchantments of Ratom’s flesh I hated myself—
Perfidy, that’s what it was—
The word brought me bolt upright under the net, aghast. So I was no better than Andy. I was as treacherous as my stinking treacherous elder brother—and his moll. I couldn’t trust myself any more than I’d ever trust them again. I was ready to betray even Vilai. In spite of all my protestations, which she had always scoffed at—in spite of my vows which I’d thoroughly believed in myself—
Instead of sleeping better than in Bangkok, as I’d hoped to do, I slept that night a good deal worse.
Ten
This insomnia of mine continued throughout the six weeks of the trip. No matter how thoroughly I drugged myself with alcohol before going to bed, time after time I’d awake in the small hours to my spectres. I could never forget the drunk I’d seen her deliberately select for her bedfellow that first night at the Bolero. Sometimes I would get on my knees (self-consciously, even in the darkness and solitude) and pray to God to protect her. But prayer gave me no comfort, because I knew God couldn’t help her. She was bent on self-destruction. Then the visions would begin. I got so that I began to dread night, or at least going to bed …
During the daytime things were nothing like as bad, especially during the first half of the trip. There was a sense of emancipation in escaping from Bangkok and the emotional and financial strain. Our days were pretty full too, what with the attempts to sell everything from sewing machines to mousetraps, from Scotch whisky to hair-oil, with the ceremonial Eastern meals and the hardly less ceremonial bottle-parties. Most important of all, there was the driving. It was chiefly owing to this that, for the first time since I’d retired from the speedways, I was happy at my work. I’d enjoyed my previous trips in Thailand, but carted around in trains and buses I’d always felt rather like a tourist. Now I was relying on my own abilities to go places, and this knowledge gave a wonderful zest not only to the places but also to the hot bumpy dusty miles between them.
It wasn’t all plain sailing. There were anxious moments, especially fording streams which had washed their bridges away during the previous rainy season. We were always having punctures from the nails which had worked loose in the bridges that remained. We got stuck in deep mud between Korat and Pimai. We got stuck in deep sand somewhere near Muangphol.
But these were minor nuisances, less hard to put up with than saddle-sores and dysentery and malaria would have been in days gone by. If we had been called on to suffer still more I would still have thought the bargain was worth it, for during those six weeks that jeep carried us right into the hot green heart of Thailand … Lopburi at dawn, and the ancient towers blooming for the day like giant fir-cones … The ruins at Pimai: acres of broken blocks of red stone tumbled amongst the weeds. Wat Podeng, where the Buddha has left another of his numerous footprints, this one larger than most; it was half full of water, owing to a leak in the roof. Weavers at Pakchongthai, women for the most part, blouse-less and supple-armed, producing gorgeous cloth from looms that were little more than a few bamboo poles set up under their houses … All these things we saw the first week, together with endless miles of flower-filled forest interspersed with stretches of paddyfield, ponds choked with water hyacinth and lotus-flowers, elephants working at the lumber-camps, water buffaloes heaving themselves contentedly over in their stinking wallows, egrets stalking in the fields, vultures squabbling over the corpse of a dog … And when we reached Ubol it was Boat-race Day: the broad river was dotted with sampans; the air was a-shiver with drums; people were doing the ramwong in boats, singing and dancing in boats, drinking in boats, falling out of boats; and every few minutes there’d be another race, the long lean craft, each with thirty men toiling at the paddles, streaking downstream like garish centipedes, fireworks booming from their sterns and flowers streaming from their bows …
Then one evening, in a remote town called Mukdahan we met a fellow traveller, an Englishman peddling patent medicines. He was even younger than I was, only twenty-four: a pale, freckled, copper-haired, cynical type, wider through the hips than he should have been at that age, and with
fingernails bitten down to nothing. His name was Keeling. We sat up for hours over a Vietnamese brew called Jonque d’or, which was as rough as the drawing of the wheat-sheaf on the label. Keeling had left Bangkok less than a week before, but he was already pining to get back. He loathed everything in the Northeast—the dirty hotels, the hard beds, the trains which went too slow, the buses which went too fast, the heat, the dust, the peppery food, and the people. When he heard about our exploits he thought we were demented. Only one aspect of them held any interest for him. ‘Do you ever see any big game?’
A Woman of Bangkok Page 27