In despair he showed me his priceless collection of jade, beyond the beauty of any I had ever seen. One piece draped with fine chains combined with a foot-high goblet was all carved from the same stone. He wanted me to do him the most immense favour and take it out of the country. He could see the impossibility from the expression on my face. I remembered how thoroughly my suitcase had been scoured at Tan Son Niut Airport when Charles Cardiff and I had left.
Over dinner he raised the subject of my failed marriage. Had I ever been unfaithful to my wife. I assured him I had not. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘it is time you were.’ The sooner I started the better, before I froze into morbid self-doubt. That could end whatever joy of life remained for me. ‘So, lunch tomorrow and I’ll make an introduction, a well-educated girl.’
The classic French-built Central Bank had high ceilings lit by strip lights. Air-conditioning made everything tacky and damp. The currency officer welcomed me back to Saigon, asked after Charles Cardiff and other colleagues of mine in De La Rue, all very affable. I then had to tell him of my company’s concerns, as gently as I could, and our need to change payment terms. I had to advise him that because of the worsen-ing military situation we would need a one hundred percent payment in advance for any future work, even for designs.
He was speechless. He picked up the telephone and called for the bank’s design artist. He then produced our four new design folders, opened them and laid them before me. They were magnificent, one of the first examples of using multi-colour in the engraved intaglio print-ing process. The high value depicted a tiger’s head with open mouth in blood-curdling pink, its fur splendidly tawny and tactile.
Their design artist was a half-starved old man in moth-eaten T-shirt and shorts. He pulled his bare feet up to the seat of his chair, hugging his legs for warmth. He looked at me with contempt, and unrolled a tracing paper which he gave me. It was an outline of one of the vignettes on the back of our design. He stood, took it from me and laid it down on the desk next to our design. It showed how the perspective could be altered, with much improved effect. I expressed admiration, trying to introduce an element of esteem in the frozen atmosphere. He understood no French. His eyes seemed like those of a man studying a victim who had just swallowed a poison pill. The currency officer inter-rupted by telling me to come for tea with the Governor the following morning. That was the end of the meeting.
The Governor was viperous with fury. His long silences and eyes like lasers made it worse. I leant well back in the chair opposite his desk, graciously accepted the cup of tea and resisted the proffered cigarette. He eventually brought himself to say he felt stabbed in the back by De La Rue. He repeated the French word ‘scrupules’ with the pursed lips of a wet kiss. He spoke about the prestige of the Central Bank, its effec-tiveness under unprecedented difficulties. In support of all this he said they had ample balances in a number of countries.
Here I saw a chance to redeem things. I said that if the bank trans-ferred the requisite sums for De La Rue to hold on deposit, in the bank’s name, then it would make no difference to the bank because the condi-tions of a deposit holding would apply, while De La Rue would not be exposed to the risks of the war. I did not mention the implied payment by De La Rue of deposit interest to the bank. He got that point in an icy flash. His pride was importuned by such a supposedly generous compromise from a mere supplier. He told me to come at the end of the week to receive the bank’s letter authorising immediate transfers to De La Rue in full. My unauthorised offer had stung him into concurrence. That was everything I could have wished. I put on the most solemn expression, bowed and took my leave. No hands were extended, none shaken. As an afterthought I asked about their design artist’s suggested amendments.
‘You must ignore that,’ he said, satisfied that there was something he could tell me to do. I collected our designs from the currency officer and put them into my briefcase.
Our agent sent his Mercedes to collect me for lunch. I was driven to a pretty harbour with fishing boats and tall reeds. The restaurant was under an awning where he sat with a beautiful girl in an oudzhai. Her name was Annie, her French perfect and her nature simple and trusting. Her husband had been killed in the war and she was bring-ing up their eight-year-old son on her own. She worked in a coffee shop. We had a happy lunch. Our agent was delighted because my deal with the bank meant his commission was secured and would be paid weeks earlier than usual, though we never mentioned that. We telexed De La Rue with our excellent news. This started the long-lasting perfect end to the day.
Next morning in the British Embassy our Ambassador was unable to see me so I went to the Head of Chancery. There was the smell of burnt paper. They were shredding and burning their files. The corridors were stacked with them. I was hurriedly led into his office and even as I sat down the diplomat rose and practically shouted at me to get the hell out of the country now, immediately, don’t even bother packing. I protested that in three days I was to collect payment instructions worth millions …
There was a knock on the door and it was a well-known British TV journalist and news reader.
The diplomat looked up peevishly as if to a tiresome cousin. ‘What is it now?’ The journalist smirked:
‘As you seem to be wrapping up I wondered if there were any cases of whisky …’#I had seen a bevy of western journalists the night before at the Caravelle Hotel, smoking and drinking themselves into a stupor. No wonder their stories, all shared over whisky, were similar and frequently wrong.
‘You old vulture,’ the Head of Chancery smirked. He pressed the bell for his secretary and told her to give the journalist whatever he wanted.
He turned back to me: ‘Get on a plane. There are still seats but soon there won’t be. You should go now.’
So I did, that very day, with suitcase and designs but no letter. The exit visa remains in my passport: the date was 25 April, a few days before Saigon was murderously overrun, with images from the Ameri-can Embassy roof of people fighting to get into the escaping helicopter, the pilot hitting them in the face, the final ghastly humiliation.
I was back now in Singapore. Riddelle and my family had returned to Robin Mills’s house in Queensdale Road. Thank God for such a stand-by. Our friends were horrified at what she had done. Her mother said on the phone to me, in tears, that if she ever heard the phrase ‘free spirit’ again she would scream. She and Pat Gibson solved the housing problem by giving her their own little house in Whitchurch village, just beyond Pangbourne on the River Thames.
Meanwhile the symptoms of what I was going through afflicted my eyes. I awoke with them in pain. Whenever I opened and shut them it felt as if the inside of the eyelids were being scraped. The eyeballs, according to the ophthalmologist, had grown rough dots. I put my feet on the ground and was convulsed with stabs of arthritis. I was diag-nosed with Reiter’s Syndrome. When walking I could conceal the pain, which then spread to my neck so that I could not move my head much. My hands swelled up and it became difficult to write, or type, or carry a suitcase. This made me bloody-minded and defiant. There was the sales conference in Basingstoke in a week or two and I was damned if anything was going to have me invalided out of my job. It was all I had, except for visiting my children.
To snap out of it I went to Chinatown to see if Fourth Brother was still at 40b Temple Street. Nearby the shop-houses had been replaced by high-rise apartments. It was as if Sago Lane, the death houses and all the market stalls had never existed. I went into the arcaded pave-ment, and down the dark passage into his building. The reinforced teak door was still there, so was the string for the light switch and I pulled it. I looked up and saw the lino flooring on the upper floor pulled up and a girl’s eye appear.
‘Ah, Takwan!’ she cried. It was Third Sister. The bolt shot back and the heavy door swung open.
I took off my shoes. We shook hands. There was no sign of the black and white amahs nurturing opium smokers. That room was now rented to a young couple. In the main room the old man�
��s big wooden bed, with his porcelain pillow the shape of a book, was replaced by a modern sprung bed. Things wooden had been replaced by things plas-tic. Fourth Brother’s wife had heard my name and greeted me. She picked up a phone and telephoned him, saying he now called himself ‘Lawrence’. Coincidence, no doubt. A small baby nestled in her arms. She was expecting another.
He was glad to hear my voice. He had qualified as an accountant and kept his promise to close down the opium den. I congratulated him and he, being Chinese with all the frankness they treasure, said he was not happy. He did not like his job. He wanted to earn more. He did not like his workmates. He was unhappy with his wife and did not want any more children. He hoped to move out of Chinatown and was on a list for a new apartment on the outskirts near the sea.
I renewed my congratulations to him. I said I was just passing through Singapore, not wanting to say that I was negotiating a contract to print their newly designed currency. That would have had him wait-ing outside my flat by the hour, never believing that I could not peel away a few thousand for myself and friends. It was relieving to hear what was, au fond, his extremely good news.
Before the sales conference the specialist in London prescribed drops for my eyes and for the arthritis some pills called Indo-Methycin, which did reduce the pain and the swelling of my feet, which he called ‘planters’, but my neck remained stiff and my hands so puffy you couldn’t see the knuckles even with clenched fists. I caught a glimpse of Riddelle. The children cried out ‘Daddy’s here, Daddy’s here!’ and took me for a walk. Isis held my hand.
Indonesia beckoned. After pleasant meetings in Djakarta with the directors of the State Printing Works I flew to Bali to see Oka. Fifteen years had passed so I expected her to be married and with children. I took a taxi from Den Pasar to Ubud and stopped outside her compound. There was a new art gallery with a high roof and a pretty tourist shop. She saw my taxi and came out to welcome me as a customer; no recognition yet. She was as lovely as ever in traditional kain and kebaya ,her long hair as before, folded into two loops behind her neck. I stood as she approached and suddenly she saw who it was, buried her face in her hands and said: ‘You!’ in a shaky voice. Before our emotions attracted attention she said ‘Let’s have tea’, and led me round the gallery into her compound.
The soft bricks and stones of the small thatched buildings had more carvings than before. Statues stood, each with a hibiscus behind one ear. surrounded by flowering shrubs. We sat at a table in a veranda and she placed her dancer’s hands on mine.
‘You look so sad,’ she said. I told her what had happened.
She said she could not understand how a family, any family, could be broken up like that. Not the Asian way. She had married and had children who were the love of her life. Her elder daughter, aged twelve, was a dancer, as she had once been.
I told her about the book I had written, and the chapter where I had described that happiest of months she and I had had together. I reminded her how we had bicycled for hours on end, searching for a place to be alone, even in the darkest of forests, but as soon as we had sat down anywhere we saw children’s faces, grinning from behind every tree. We laughed at our memories. She said she could think of no other time that had meant so much to her. I explained that in my book I had given her another name, so that she would not be recognised. I had chosen a name that was not even Balinese, quite deliberately, so there would be no clue who she really was.
‘What name did you use?’
‘It’s a Javanese name. The Goddess of the Rice Field: Sri.’
This overwhelmed her. Eventually she asked when exactly I had writ-ten the chapter about our love, which month.
I told her.
She was deeply moved. She said: ‘That was the month my daughter was born.’ She hesitated. ‘And I called her “Sri”.’
Hindu-Buddhism nourishes belief in the transmigration of souls. This was not that, but a powerful transmigration of emotion, all the way from Bern to Ubud.
She and her husband Rai had me to stay in their lodging. That evening she took me to see her daughter Sri dancing in the Tebesaje troupe. She was as lovely as her mother, too mature to do the classic Legong ,so she and her girlfriends performed something slower and more serene, suggesting a passion which they were still too young to have experienced.
Next day I went to the Puri to see the prince, Chokorda Agung Gde Agung Sukawati (Happy Heart), whom I had met on a previous visit, on introduction from Faubion Bowers. He remembered me well, even the nickname he had given me: ‘Talkwind’, because I talked like the wind. It sounds as if I had been full of hot air, but I had made him laugh. I gave him news of Faubion. I also gave him my own sad news and he said there was a saying in Dutch: ‘Every family has its cross.’
He proudly showed me a letter he had received from the American Ambassador, thanking him for all the wonderful things he had written about President Nixon’s visit to Chairman Mao Tse Tung. Chokorda’s reaction was a wry comment on world leaders: ‘Like shadow puppets, creating a night long drama, and when the dawn comes, they are all laid together in the same box.’
A combination of serial numbering errors on the banknotes we had delivered and Nepalese vagueness called for several visits to Kath-mandu. The currency officer was a dreamy man, referred to as the Guru. With his Nepalese cap he was the image of Hindu-Buddhist calm. Next to him side by side on a bench, also in Nepalese caps, sat two young men, like pawns to a bishop. They smiled in unison when things were going well, but if there were any cause for concern they frowned their unlined brows, on cue. Even after a couple of visits the Guru had not responded to our plea that they would run out of banknotes if they did not order immediately, in time for printing and delivery before winter made the Himalayan roads and trails impass-able, even for porters on foot with banknote boxes slung on their backs. I pleaded with him but without effect before I had to leave.
I went again the following month from Bangkok, flying over Rangoon, and seeing the golden Schwe Dagon Pagoda gleaming in the Burmese sunshine. When I entered the Guru’s office the pawns’ frowns assumed waxwork stillness, held throughout my renewed pleading. The Guru then spoke of his wife. I had to hold my peace out of respect. He said she had borne him fourteen children. Many of them had lived but, irreplaceably, she had died. His place was no longer in the world. She had been his soul and she was gone. The Shah Hazan had built the Taj Mahal to memorialise the love of his wife after her death, but he, the Guru, was a poor man and could do no such grand thing. All he could do was build a temple to her in his mind.
This made any currency crisis seem far away, even though in similar circumstances he had told Charles Cardiff exactly the same story.
I asked him to show me the bank’s vaults. He led me down the broad wooden spiral stairs to the ground floor of that particular Rana Palace, past the bicycles leaning against the wall and into a courtyard. It was surrounded by tall inch-thick iron doors in pairs, linked together with drooping chains secured with big padlocks. He pushed one of a pair of doors and between them I could just see a dozen banknote boxes. Yet these were the vaults for the entire nation. What about security? As if in answer to my unasked question the Guru indi-cated the face painted on each of the iron doors: the Lord Buddha. Security enough.
I reported the practicalities of our conversation to De La Rue and although no order had been placed they printed enough banknotes for a last-minute delivery to tide the Nepalese over winter.
In Bangkok some of the Thais I had known in their late twenties had become heads of department, one of them about to take over as Perma-nent Secretary to the Treasury. The Thai prince I had written about was their UN Representative. The other delight was the location of the currency officer. His office was inside the entrance of the Grand Palace with its glorious golden courtyards and mighty variegated pagodas.
With my little dark suit and black briefcase I felt like a chiropodist going to see Anna and the King of Siam.
Laos had two semi-gove
rnments, one capitalist and the other Communist, represented either side of the main road with soldiers mildly facing each other from trenches. The Laotians were ideal De La Rue customers because they had no coins, only banknotes. The Central Bank Governor was capitalist, the Minister of Finance Communist. It worked, somehow. With their literary French and immersion on the teachings of Rousseau and the Buddha, plus their fondness for good wine, conversation was stimulating.
The fifth of September was the date for their annual boat races in the royal capital, Luang Prabang. The entire Diplomatic Corps went. Our Ambassador, who had written a famous book on Laotian fish dishes, took me there in a private plane. The races, two boats at a time, like Henley Royal Regatta, took place on a small tributary of the River Mekhong. They started off with an awkward curve then went straight downstream to the end a mile away. The boats were thirty yards long, hewn from a single hardwood tree-trunk, hollowed out and weighing several tons. They were crossed with benches for the rowers who had spear-shaped paddles, twenty sitting in pairs in the front, twenty at the back with a platform in the middle for a loud brass band. At the stern were three old men with long steering paddles. When the rowers accel-erated the band struck up and all the men shouted in bass unison with every stroke. On the bow were four hefty men doing simultaneous press-ups to make the hull bend up and down like a serpent, to raise it higher in the water.
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