by Gavin Black
Mrs. Braddock was cool and efficient, dark, with the kind of too thin good looks which wouldn’t last long in the tropics. She gave the impression of someone who has had all potential of office temperament ironed out of her by London high pressure techniques. The office side of Harris and Company had known a sort of cosiness which she wasn’t ever going to acknowledge. It smacked of inefficiency. I began to wonder about the rest of my staff.
The introductions were formal, without any note of cheeriness and I tried to tell myself that the girl might well be nervous. She didn’t look it. I had the sense of being assessed, measured up against that chain store tycoon. It made me feel a little like a new boy who has to prove himself.
The outer office had been re-arranged, too. This had become completely a reception area, with the secretary’s desk in a new position, the filing cabinets shifted and no sign at all of the one girl who used to type out here under Sylvia Flores’s eye. From the concentrated clatter beyond a partition I understood that all the girls who worked the machines were slumming it together.
It was a relief to find that my own office hadn’t been pushed around, though probably Mrs. Braddock was only waiting with her suggestions. I felt suddenly just a little angry. Russell said, looking at me:
“Don’t forget it has been seven weeks. And I’ve spent at least two hours here every day.”
“I know. And I’m grateful. You probably know more about the set-up here than I do. I was still wearing a learner sign in this room.”
“You’ll find current business in those two fat files. North Borneo’s fallen off a bit, though the birds’ nest season starts soon enough. Your Kedah fleet seemed to be waiting around for something. I put them on barrelled oil from Medan to South Thailand. Approve?”
“Of course.”
“I think everything is pretty straightforward in there. Mrs. Braddock is pretty well in the picture, too, but if you’ve any queries she can’t deal with just give me a ring.”
“I’m grateful, Russell, you know that.”
“Save the sentiment until you see what I’m charging you. What’s this about giving up your house?”
“We are. We want something smaller. Ruth is looking at the moment, but we’re rather swinging back to the idea of building. Something quite small, and maybe out towards Changi.”
“So you want to be a commuter? Changi? You own land out there already.”
“You mean Jeff’s place? I never thought of that. How much land is there?”
“About an acre and a half. Too little?”
“No. And it means we could get started right away. Ruth’s keen on doing that. Russell, could you get an architect? We’ll pull down Jeff’s place and build in concrete. I’ll take Ruth out there to-morrow. We can give you a decision right after that.”
He looked at me.
“An upheaval to settle down again, is that it?” he asked.
It was a bid to get into my confidence, a shade halfhearted. I said “Yes” more coldly than I really intended and Russell gave a sort of half shrug and shambled out. I could just hear his voice, pretty loud, talking to Mrs. Braddock for a minute and I didn’t like it.
I didn’t get any pleasure from looking at the view through the big window. It seemed a long time since I had watched the Misuni Maru unloading and I felt as though the control of Harris and Company, which I had been taking into my hands, had somehow been taken out of them again. My ships had been sent about their business by someone else, and the first letter I dictated would be to a stranger.
The phone on my desk was dead. I flipped down a lever on the inter-com.
“Mrs. Braddock?”
“Yes. Mr. Harris?”
“Will you plug in my phone, please?”
“Oh. I thought it would be my job to take calls and send them out.”
“I like my phone permanently connected unless I tell you otherwise.”
“Certainly, Mr. Harris. But can I get you a number now?”
“Just plug it in, I’ll get it!”
It was childish to sit there feeling angry, but I was. I had no intention of being brought under Mrs. Braddock’s office discipline. I snapped the dial round.
“Hallo, honey,” Ruth said.
“That’s a quick response from you.”
“I was sitting right here, thinking.”
I told her about the land at Changi, what I thought we might do. She liked that.
“Oh, Paul. I had a sneaking feeling you were stalling. That you liked this horrible great success symbol. But you weren’t.”
“Great big tycoons like me don’t need success symbols.”
“That’s my man.”
“I want the Daimler after lunch. Will you send it down for me about two, with the man?”
“That leaves the Bristol for my bridge?”
“If you touch my car I’ll break your neck! Get a taxi. What were you sitting thinking about?”
“Oh, you and me. And what Inspector Kang wanted.”
My hand didn’t tighten on the phone. I said quietly:
“What did Kang want?”
“That’s what I don’t know. It was almost a social visit. I gave him morning coffee. He seemed to want to hear more about Jeff. There wasn’t anything really I could tell him, but he said I’d helped him.”
“Why didn’t you ring me about this?”
“I was just going to, you got in first. He’s only been gone about fifteen minutes. Funny little man. I have the odd feeling I rather like him.”
“I don’t.”
“He’s very polite. I wouldn’t like to walk around carrying out the kind of duties he does. I told him so.”
“You’ll be asking him to dinner.”
“He’d probably be a lot more entertaining than some of our friends. Wouldn’t it be a good thing for you to know a policeman socially?”
“Not Kang.”
At two Liu picked me up at the club with the Daimler, holding open the back door. He took my stick and put a hand under my arm while I heaved myself in. The whole performance was a little like a mime of senility, even the way I flopped on to the seat and shoved out my stiff leg. The healing process had involved a tightening of the muscles in some way and they hadn’t begun to limber up yet.
I gave him the address and we moved away sedately. Liu had been trained by Ruth, who never liked to go over thirty miles an hour, even in the country. She had never used planes except when we were flying to doctors with Booney. Normally the time factor made it almost impossible for me to travel with her anywhere and that cut out any sharing of the negative sort of pleasures of modern journeying.
We left the city and moved out into the kind of suburbs where the rents were cheap for Singapore, but if you lived there you hadn’t an address. Some of the streets had flower names and the houses in them elbowed each other for their share of light and air. Most of them were of wood and fifty years old, and bleached grey. Liu had a little difficulty, we were well off his beat, and as I looked at the back of his round, clipped head I began to stretch a little those plans for the simple life out at Changi. However much we cut out the trimmings we’d still have to keep on the Goldfish, the number two, the cook, a couple of gardeners and Liu. Housing had to be provided for all those, and in four cases their families. Ruth would have to face up to the fact that she was, after all, moving a community, unless she meant to do her own washing, which I didn’t feel was likely.
“It’s that street, Liu. Up there!”
“Tuan.”
Once a year I had made this pilgrimage, to Sylvia Flores’s mother. I didn’t send her Christmas present, I took it, and there was always a formal reception which involved a stay of twenty minutes and drinking Earl Grey tea. To-day the lace cloth wouldn’t be out, and I’d arrived while the old siesta hour was still on.
Liu helped me to the gate into one of those intensely private minuscule gardens but I walked up the path alone and took my time on the veranda steps. For a long time there was no answe
r to the bell, and a Siamese cat stared at me from a wicker porch chair. The door opened suddenly.
Mrs. Flores had always been wearing her corsets when I saw her, and though it was a big one, there had been a kind of shape. To-day there wasn’t. Her body, under a spreading, dun-coloured dressing-gown wasn’t organised. She had grey hair still streaked with black, and black eyes and a dull, brownish skin. Her voice had the Welsh lilt and whine.
“Oh, my goodness me. Oh, my goodness. It’s you, Mr. Harris. And I’m not ready, I’m not prepared.”
“I knew you wouldn’t be and I apologise for coming like this. But actually I wanted to see you alone, without Sylvia.”
“Without Sylvia. But why without Sylvia?”
“You could call it a matter of business. Shall we stay out here?”
“Oh, dear me, no. You must come in, Mr. Harris. I would not have you stay on the veranda, Mr. Harris. The people watch you see, around here. They are always watching. It’s not a good neighbourhood, Mr. Harris, it’s not where I would like Sylvia to live. I would like one of those little flats near the centre of the citee. Sylvia says they are too expensive. But now I think we may move. We may move soon.”
The air inside was still, as though too few windows were ever open during the heat. A reminiscence of meals hung on, most of them ripe curries.
“This way, Mr. Harris.”
Mrs. Flores opened a shutter and there was more light to see a room crowded with trophies of disordered living, each piece like a little symbol of an eccentric ambition which had petered out. There was a Victorian rocker, a contemporary sofa, a dead gramophone and a mahogany piano. There were Chinese jars with wilted leather plants in them, and across one corner a cocktail cabinet which was open to show the glasses and the mirrored surfaces.
“Sit on the sofa, Mr. Harris, it is best I think.” She chose the rocker, folded her hands in her lap and said almost pathetically, as though controlling fear, “Now?”
“I’m very sorry that Sylvia left me, Mrs. Flores.”
“Yes, I know. It is what I was saying. After all these years to leave you. I said how can you do it, my girl, how can you do it? I’m an old woman of course, they don’t listen. The young don’t listen these days. They don’t listen to old people. Oh, my goodness, what am I saying? Sylvia is so good to me. She is a thoughtful daughter, Mr. Harris.”
“Of course. Mrs. Flores, I can’t have Sylvia leaving me without showing some appreciation of all she’s done for Harris and Company over the years. I know my brother would have agreed here.”
“Your brother! Oh, such a tragedy! Sylvia has cried. She says he is a friend …”
“Yes, Mrs. Flores. I brought a cheque and I want to give it to you. I want you to regard it as something from both of us.”
“A cheque? You mean mon-nie? Oh, my goodness, Mr. Harris. I don’t see Sylvia taking mon-nie. She always earns what she gets. She is like that. She is always …”
“I’ve made it out in your name. I thought Sylvia might have objections. I want you to hold it and keep it as a kind of reserve.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You see … we have mon-nie, Mr. Harris.”
“I don’t quite understand?”
“Well, it’s a surprise to me, too. I didn’t know. I had no idea at all. Five thousand dollars, Mr. Harris. Sylvia has been saving it quietly for me, all these years. She wouldn’t say one word until she had five thousand dollars. It is to send me to the old country, you see. To England, Mr. Harris. I have cousins in the south of England. It’s a long time since I have seen them, a long, long time. And I was to go for my health. Singapore isn’t good for me, you see. I don’t like the damp. It’s not like India. I was in India for many, many years. I think there is too much sea here, it makes it so damp. That’s why Sylvia has kept the money. Quietly.”
“Well, add to that money with this.”
“Oh, my goodness, I don’t know what she would say if she knew. You see, Mr. Harris, in some way Sylvia is a little bit-ter. I don’t like the way she speaks sometimes. I’m afraid she has had an unfortunate experience with her intended.”
“With her …?”
“Her young man, Mr. Harris. A gentleman of good position in society. From Java. Very attentive, he was. But he has gone away. And she has no letters. Not one letter from him. She needed a change, Mr. Harris. That’s why she left your company. I think her heart was bro-ken.”
From Java! The room was very stuffy. No air got into it at all. Sylvia had five thousand dollars which her mother had known nothing about and a man who had been most attentive had suddenly disappeared.
I sat very still, looking at the window, where the lace curtains hung without the slightest movement. Jeff and I had shared Sylvia’s services as a secretary, and there wasn’t much she didn’t know, or couldn’t guess at.
“Oh, Mr. Harris, maybe I shouldn’t speak of these things. Of Sylvia’s young man. But …”
“No, you shouldn’t have talked about him, Mother,” Sylvia said.
I had to turn my head to see her. She was standing in the doorway holding a string bag in one hand. There was fruit in it and tinned goods. She was wearing a navy blue dress which didn’t suit her and she was looking almost old, a kind of greyness under her make-up.
She put the string bag on a table.
“Mother, will you go please?”
“Sylvia, I was only …”
“Go!”
I stood. Sylvia leaned back against the door she had shut, one hand still back on the knob. Her eyes seemed huge in a face that was much thinner.
“I heard some of it,” she said. “Not all. About my boy friend. Pity I interrupted. Mother could really have put you in the picture. She must have forgotten that this is the half-day at my new place of business. What else did she tell you?”
“Your mother told me that you had suddenly revealed you’d saved five thousand dollars.”
Sylvia smiled. It wasn’t pleasant to see.
“And you don’t believe that? You don’t believe that anyone would work in your sweat-shop for twelve years and save five thousand dollars?”
“I wondered where the man from Java came into it.”
She laughed. Her free hand was clenched against her skirt.
“Did you?”
“Sylvia …”
“So it’s Sylvia now, after I’ve left you? Thank you very much, Mr. Harris.”
“Did you tip this boy friend off that I was going to Kuantan?”
“So you suspect me? Isn’t it funny?”
She went over to the table again, opened a box, got a cigarette out and lit it with an ornate silver stand lighter that I remembered had been Jeff’s present one year. Her hands trembled. She didn’t try to control that. She looked at me.
“Yes, I told my boy friend. But you’re not getting any written confession, Mr. Harris. And you’ve no proof. Not a bit. You look hurt, you can’t understand this with an old faithful employee. In business you have to rely on a secretary, on her discretion and loyalty and all that, don’t you? Like you relied on me, Mr. Harris. Only you didn’t really, you or your brother. Do you think I’m a fool? Don’t you suppose I noticed when you stood in his office talking to your brother and I came in, that the talk stopped? You were polite to me. Oh, both very polite, I couldn’t have wished for politer employers. Not at all. And a present at Christmas, too. It was a good position, I should have been grateful and thankful and served you faithfully for another twenty years. Damn you both!”
I just stood there. Her face was twisted.
“Don’t you think I know, Mr. Harris? Don’t you think I know that in everything that mattered to you I was told nothing? You shut the door carefully. A big solid door. It’s an old-fashioned building with solid doors like that to keep things private behind them. The architects must have known the business men in them would have to use Eurasian secretaries, isn’t that right, Mr. Harris? The Eurasian is so strange that even after years you don’t know where you are with them. It i
s not so easy to tell where their loyalties really are, isn’t that so? It’s best to have big solid doors.”
She was crying now, as though she wasn’t aware of it, tears running down her cheeks which she didn’t notice. There had been no build up of anger with me, no time for it. I felt nearly helpless against this attack, and the deep bitterness behind it.
“Five thousand dollars. Do you know why I took it? Because I hate you. And I hated your brother. I hated the polite kindness. What do you think I am? What do you think my life is like, with my mother, in this damn’ house? Did you ever ask yourself? No, no! Why should you, indeed? What is there in the life of someone like me that is worth asking about? My world isn’t your world or anyone’s. We don’t have a world, my people. Oh, we have wonderful pretences. Like my mother’s pretence. I’ve called her bluff properly. I said, here’s money, you can now go to your relations in England. Look what a lovely thing, you are now free to travel to England, to your own land. And what does my mother say. She says nothing, Mr. Harris. She looks at me terrified because there are no relations in the south of England, no cousins there. More likely plenty of cousins around Madras, but she doesn’t talk about them. Oh, no. She’s not going anywhere with the money, Mr. Harris, because there’s nowhere to go. Not for her, or for me. We couldn’t move into the new flats, even. They don’t want us in the new flats.”
Sylvia Flores went on standing very erect, staring at me, sobs shaking her.
“So I have my gentleman friend from Java. All the time I know I’m fooling myself. We went dancing to one of the worlds. A Dutch gentleman, I said. A little bit of Dutch, maybe, not much. But good enough for someone like me. You see what kind of a fool I’ve been.”
She pulled out a chair from the table and sat down on it.
“What’s that in your hand, Mr. Harris? Is this money for my good services? May I see it?”
“Sylvia, I want you to keep it.” She smiled.
“Oh, the kind man is so charitable.”
She took the cheque, read what was on it, and then tore it up, carefully, into small pieces. She put the pieces in an ash tray and looked up again, a ravaged face soured with lines I didn’t remember.