21

Matthew now found that he had been shoved into a great circular concourse in the middle of which stood a thicket of bamboo and palms. On one hand was an open-air café whose tables were thronged with rowdy troops drinking beer, on the other a billiards saloon through the tall open windows of which Matthew glimpsed green pyramids of smoke-filled light above the tables and oriental faces glimmering in the surrounding darkness. Farther along was a great hall from within which there came the regular thump of drums and sighing of saxophones.

Together they struck off through the crowd which in some places was so thick that they had to shoulder their way through, passing along a street of stalls with corrugated-iron roofs and flimsy, brightly lit fronts. Some of these stalls were open-air eating-houses festooned with lurid, naked, pink-eyed chickens hung by their necks on hooks, lidded eyes closed in death; beside them were piled varnished ducks and lumps of meat swimming in grease and studded with fat flies gorging themselves; next to the meat laboured a wizened specialist in fish dumplings, and next to him a family of plump Malays beside bubbling cauldrons of nasi padang, giant prawns, curried eggs, nuts and ikan bilis (dried fish no bigger than your fingernail), all being shovelled on to plates or twisted in cones of leaves. Here a groaning lady was being sawn in half, there another was being put through a mincer with blood horribly gushing out underneath; next came a shooting-gallery where an Australian sergeant in his wide-brimmed hat was using an air-rifle to smash blackened light-bulbs to the jeers of his comrades, and a striptease stall; a neighbouring stall displayed a sign warning of Waning Virility: ‘Please swallow our Sunlight Pill for Male Persons, Moonlight Pill for Female Persons. Guaranteed.’ Beneath the sign was a display of medicine bottles together with a crude and alarming diagram in coloured crayon which was evidently intended to represent sexual organs.

As Matthew paused to study it his arm was suddenly taken by a tall and slender Tamil girl with a pigtail (in which jasmine flowers were intricately braided) hanging to her waist. He nudged up his spectacles to see her better, gazing with surprise into her dark face where a silver stud gleamed in the whorl of each nostril. She was very pretty and he would have liked to talk to her, but the others were already disappearing; and so he disengaged himself apologetically and hurried after them, his heart thumping. How exciting it all was, how much more interesting than Geneva!

Now, hurrying through the crowds in search of his friends, he almost ran full tilt into a makeshift stage (merely boards and trestles) on which a Chinese opera was taking place. Actors and actresses in glorious costumes were declaiming in a penetrating falsetto, impervious to the scene-shifter in khaki shorts and singlet and with a cigarette dangling from his mouth who was rearranging the furniture around them. One of them, with a forked beard reaching to his knees, stalked off into the wings, rolling his eyes in histrionic rage, and a murmur went up from the crowd of Chinese who had gathered to watch. On his way round the side to rejoin the alley which he had left Matthew found himself gazing into the dressing-room, for the sides and back of this miniature theatre were covered only by cloth hangings blowing about in the breeze and allowing him a glimpse of the actresses making-up for the next scene: elaborately rouged and pink-powdered faces glared at mirrors while tweezers prepared a further assault on already well-plucked eyebrows. Several tiny Chinese girls clung to wooden spars also peering in at this arresting sight.

Afraid that he had lost his friends altogether, he pressed on; his progress was slow, nevertheless, for his attention was captured by various wonders which sprang up one after another: a man selling bunches of dried frogs tied together by their legs, a family of acrobats turning somersaults, a stall selling the juices of unfamiliar fruits by the glass, a wizened cashier in a bamboo cage, satay morsels skewered on hundreds of bamboo spills roasting over charcoal, sellers of soto soup, and won ton mee, and apple fritters fizzing in rancid-smelling oil, and nasi goreng, and heavenly ice-cream flavoured with mango and durian, and the durian itself, so desired and so dreaded for its peculiar odour, piled in pyramids like cannonballs … and other astonishing sights and events beyond description, taking place, too, in a street crowded with men and women of every shape, size and colour, from a family of performing pygmies, to the graceful, delicate Chinese, to floury, bucolic British and Dutch in voluminous khaki shorts; and accompanied by a cacophony of musical instruments and gramophones in an atmosphere heavy with perfume, incense, sandalwood, sweat and tobacco smoke in the soft, humid air of the tropics.

Matthew recalled the conversation he had had earlier in the evening with Walter and began to ponder the commercial enterprise which had brought about this extraordinary mixture of races and cultures. It was as if the sudden appearance of Western capital in Malaya had created a vacuum which had sucked in people from all the surrounding countries and from much farther away. Would this nation of transients who had come to seek a livelihood under the British Crown one day become a nation with a culture of its own, created somehow out of its own diversity? It had happened in America, certainly, but would it happen here where the divergences of culture were even greater than they had been among the American immigrants? Was a colony like Malaya, as the Communists claimed, a mere sweat-shop for cheap labour operated in the interests of capitalism by cynical Western governments? Or was Western capital (which included his own capital, too, now that his father had died; he must not forget that!) … or was Western capital, as Walter insisted, a fructifying influence bringing life and hope to millions by making hitherto unused land productive? Or was it perhaps both things at the same time? (Had not Marx himself suggested something of the sort?) To what extent were the affairs of the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States directed by Britain with the welfare of their inhabitants at heart and to what extent with British commercial interests? that was the root of the question! Matthew had halted again, perturbed. He could see Monty and Joan and Sinclair not too far ahead and he wanted to think this out before rejoining them. But at this moment something odd happened.

Among the strollers, diners and revellers Matthew had been aware, while sinking his teeth into these weighty problems, of a number of painted girls, Chinese or Eurasian, unusually graceful and attractive in their high-collared, straight-cut Shanghai gowns, slit at the side to above the knee. These girls wore their blue-black hair short and marcelled in the Western fashion, but as Matthew stood there, immobilized by thought, he could not help noticing that one of them, strolling arm in arm with another girl, was not only wearing a Western summer frock but also wore her hair long and loose. And even more surprising, for she seemed to be Chinese, when she passed in front of a brightly lit food-stall her hair, which had seemed to be as black as her companion’s, glowed dark red around the edges, like a bottle of red ink held up against the light.

She was saying something to the girl beside her and accompanying her words with a sweet smile which revealed a glimmer of white teeth. Matthew, captivated by her appearance, could not help staring at her. Looking up, she noticed his glance and gave a start of surprise, as if she recognized him. With a word to her companion she came boldly up to him, still smiling, and said in a low voice: ‘Matthew, I knew your father.’ Then, since Matthew merely goggled at her, she went on: ‘He was very kind to me. I was so sorry when he died! My name is Vera Chiang … I saw you when you came to the Mayfair with Mr and Miss Blackett, who has also been kind to me … and she is beautiful, too, don’t you think? just like Joan Crawford she reminds me of, so lovely … and now, Matthew, you are all alone in the world …’ Her eyes had filled with tears of sympathy.

‘Good gracious!’ murmured Matthew and continued to peer at her in astonishment. He cleared his throat, however, in order to say something more adequate and was about to nudge his glasses up on his nose, but she took hold of his hand and clasped it feelingly in both of hers, saying: ‘I was in trouble and your dear father, like a saint of heaven, from the depths of my misery gave me “a bunk up” (please excuse my slang expression of speaking!) and now he has died, it is so sad, it really does give me “the blues” when I think about it and sometimes at night I cry by myself, yes, but forgive me, for you it must be very much worse than for me!’ And with emotion she clasped his hand tightly to her chest with both of hers.

‘Actually, my father and I weren’t all that …’

‘Yes, I know how you were feeling when you heard this news and I thought “Poor Matthew” because your father had shown me a “snap” of you when small baby and I wondered: “In whatever country in the world will this news reach him?” and your father had told me that when one day he was no more, you, his only son, would be left alone in the world because your dear mother had “kicked the bucket” long ago and there was no one else to look after you.’ On an impulse she flicked open a button of her frock and gently slipped his hand through the opening, clasping it with both of hers more tightly than ever to comfort him, with the result that Matthew now found his rather damp palm moulding what appeared to be, well, a naked breast: whatever it was, it was certainly silky, soft, plastic, agreeably resistant and satisfying to the touch. He continued to stand there for some moments enjoying this unusually pleasant sensation, though distinctly bewildered. Meanwhile, they gazed into each other’s eyes, hypnotized, and currents of feeling flowed back and forth between them.

At this moment a torrent of inebriated Dutch sailors, their arms on each other’s shoulders, half running, half dancing the remains of a drunken hornpipe, scattering the crowd right and left, suddenly came bearing down on them. One moment Matthew was standing there, immobilized by the question of colonial welfare and progress, with the damp palm of his hand neatly moulding a young woman’s naked breast, the next he was being jostled by a crowd of chuckling Chinese as they fled before the hornpiping sailors. He was pushed this way and that. He and the young woman were sundered … the hand through which such agreeable sensations had been flowing was brushed away, his spectacles dislodged from his nose and swung perilously from one ear as he struggled to keep his balance. Now a gale of deep-throated laughter blew in his ear, his wrists were grabbed and slung around enormous damp necks, powerful hands closed round his chest, and the next instant he had been whisked away as part of a giant spider’s web of sailors from which one or two diminutive Chinese were struggling like flies to extricate themselves. Matthew found himself carried along in a blur of rushing lights and figures, swaying and horn-piping at a terrifying speed, his feet hardly touching the ground, until at last the spider’s web’s progress was arrested by crashing into a tent where what might have been some rather intimate massage seemed to be taking place. By the time that he, too, had managed to disengage himself and adjust his spectacles, which by a miracle he had not lost (he would have been helpless without them), he was some distance from where he had seen the girl. He went back a little way, looking for her, but the crowd had surged over the place where they had been standing and he could no longer even be quite sure where it had been.

He felt a hand on his arm. He turned and found that it was Monty.

‘We thought we’d lost you. What have you been up to? Come on, it’s this way.’

‘Monty, I must tell you, a really strange thing just happened …’

But Monty was anxious not to miss the beginning of the show and without waiting to hear any more had set off again towards a distant spot-lit enclosure. From that direction, too, there now came a high-pitched, piercing laugh, like the creaking of a dry pump, or perhaps the lonely cry of a peacock in the dusk.

22

A considerable crowd had assembled to witness the unusual sight of a European lady being fired from a cannon; canvas awnings had been erected to screen the event from those reluctant to pay the price of admission but here and there the fabric was torn and small boys fought for places at peepholes. Inside the enclosure an elaborate scene had been set: on the right stood the cannon, its long barrel, mottled with green and brown camouflage in the best military manner, protruding from a two-dimensional cardboard castle on which was written Fortress Singapore. Behind the cannon loomed the giant papiermâché heads of Chiang Kai-shek and King George VI, the former with a legend hung round his neck: ‘Kuo (Country), Min (People), Tang (Party). World friend with all Peace-loving Peoples!’ together with a similar legend in Chinese ideographs beside it. ‘God Save King’ said a more prefunctory legend around the King’s neck.

On the left, at a distance of some fifty yards, stretched a large net and, in front of the net, an impressively realistic armoured-car constructed of paper and thin wooden laths. From its turret there reared, like snakes from a basket, a fistful of hideously grinning bespectacled heads in military caps; towering above these heads, like a king cobra ready to strike, was yet another bespectacled snake’s head which was surely, thought Matthew, intended as a caricature of the young Emperor Hirohito. Any doubt but that this was intended to be the cannon’s target was dispelled by a sign on the armoured-car which declared: ‘Hated Invader of Beloved China Homeland.’

‘But where are the Da Sousa Sisters?’ demanded Monty. ‘I thought they were part of the show.’ The programme he had bought consisted of a single folded sheet, on the outside of which was a blurred photograph of a bulky, helmeted figure, presumably the human ammunition; inside, it read:

1 Advance of atrocious enemy.
2 Cannon fires.
3 Miss Olive Kennedy-Walsh, BA (Pass Arts), H Dip Ed, TCD will hurtle through air towards advancing disagreeable aggressor.
4 Treacherous aggressor smashed. (Mgt not responsible.)
5 Voluntary contributions to China Heroic War Effort gratefully received.
6 God sake King.
7 End.
8 Please to exit. Thank you for custom.
Paper model supplied courtesy Chou & Son, Undertaker and Funeral Preparation. All Religions catered for. Sago Lane, Singapore.

‘End as you wish you had begun.’

‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ said Monty to Matthew, who had remarked on the excellence of the imitation armoured-car. ‘You should see the Cadillacs and houses and ocean liners and whatnot they make for rich towkays to take away with them to the next world. It’s a skilled profession. The Chinese can be pretty simple-minded,’ he added with a sneer.

‘Where are those suh … suh … suh … sisters? This is a duh … hm … liberate swindle, don’t you think so, Monty?’

But a pink-faced young planter nearby, overhearing Sinclair’s complaint, assured him that the Da Sousa Sisters had already made their appearance. They had sung a number of songs, including ‘Chocolate Soldier’ and, of course, their signature tune: ‘Halloa! halloa! halloa!’ He doubted whether they would appear again that evening.

‘Just our luck,’ grumbled Monty.

‘I don’t think Jim will ever find us,’ Matthew was saying, but at that moment he saw Ehrendorf shouldering his way into the enclosure. Meanwhile, a portable gramophone was being vigorously wound by one of the stage-hands. Another Chinese in a white dinner-jacket took the microphone. ‘Just in time,’ said Ehrendorf cheerfully. ‘I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.’ Joan was sitting at the end of the row and he sat down next to her. But she stood up immediately, saying to Monty and Sinclair: ‘Move along. I want to sit next to Matthew.’ With some confusion, because the gap between the rows of seats was narrow, she struggled to the place which opened up between Sinclair and Matthew. Ehrendorf flushed and stared grimly down at the arena.

Now the star of the performance, Miss Kennedy-Walsh, was being announced: she was a strongly built woman in her thirties, dressed from head to foot in an aviator’s suit of white silk which perfectly modelled her impressive figure: the audience murmured in appreciation of her well-formed thighs, her generous breasts, her strong jaw and pink face.

‘Will she ever squeeze down the barrel?’ joked Ehrendorf tensely.

‘Big ah blests number one!’ remarked a smartly dressed young Chinese beside Matthew giving the thumbs-up sign. Matthew had already noticed by the pin-ups displayed at the ‘virility’ stall how the Chinese seemed to admire big-bosomed women.

Miss Kennedy-Walsh, indeed, was not finding it easy to insert herself in the barrel. Her splendid thighs she fitted in with comparative ease; somehow, aided by the slippery material of her suit, she also managed to cram her hips into the muzzle. But her breasts remained obstinately stuck on the rim and with her arms pinned to her sides she was helpless. Stuck! Her face flushed with irritation. A murmur of concern arose from the audience. ‘Glory be to God, will ye give us a shove, y’lazy gombeens!’

A hasty conference of the Chinese organizers was already taking place. They scratched their heads and stared at Miss Kennedy-Walsh’s too ample bosom and then they stared at the cannon and scratched their heads again. The master of ceremonies put his hands on her shoulders and shoved politely, but that did not help. If anything it made things worse. Miss Kennedy-Walsh slipped down a few inches but her bosom remained on the rim and her face grew redder.

‘Will we be stayin’ here all the night or what?’ she demanded furiously. Her mouth could be seen working but her further comments were drowned by the martial music which suddenly started up. Matthew, who had been watching with interest and concern, stiffened suddenly as he felt Joan’s hand creep into his own and his pulse quickened.

In the meantime someone had had an idea and a Chinese lady had been invited on to the stage. She was heavily made-up and, despite the heat, wore a brilliant feather boa round her neck. She had evidently been hastily summoned from other duties and appeared flustered. The master of ceremonies, explaining what he wanted her to do, made kneading motions and pointed at the recalcitrant breasts. A sheet was modestly thrown over the muzzle and Miss Kennedy-Walsh’s protruding head and torso. The lady with the boa vanished underneath it; the gramophone continued to play martial music. When, after a few moments, the sheet was whipped away again, there was no sign of Miss Kennedy-Walsh. A ripple of applause echoed around the enclosure.

Now the show was beginning in earnest. The master of ceremonies, first in Cantonese, then in Malay, then in English, asked the audience on a given signal to count down from ten. A spotlight was directed on a man by the breech of the cannon holding a lanyard: he smiled nervously; a wheel was spun and the barrel elevated. Another spotlight was directed on to the model armoured-car with its wavering, two-dimensional Japanese effigies. Long ropes had been attached to the front of the armoured-car which now began to move very slowly, dragged by two Chinese stage-hands, from behind the net and on towards ‘Fortress Singapore’. A high ramp had been set up in front of the net and the armoured-car obligingly diverted from its course and, instead of continuing to advance directly on the Fortress, started to climb it. The martial music had come to a stop, replaced by a long roll of drums. The counting began. Ten … nine … eight … The armoured-car had almost reached the top of the ramp … Three … two … one … Fire! The man holding the lanyard jerked it, but nothing happened A gasp of dismay went up from the spectators. In the silence that followed, muffled comments could be heard from inside the barrel of the cannon. Monty consulted his programme: ‘We seem to have got stuck on number 2: “cannon fires”.’

Another hasty conference took place, this time around the breech. While it was taking place the men with the ropes, somewhat apprehensively, darted up the ramp under the eye of the cannon, seized the armoured-car and carried it back to its original position; then they took up their stations once more with the ropes. Presently, after another roll of drums and a few adjustments by a man with a spanner, they were again given the signal to start pulling. The armoured-car began to climb! Ten … nine … eight … The nervous strain was clearly telling on the men with the ropes: the vehicle was advancing jerkily, now halting, now bounding forward. Three … two … one … Fire! A tremendous explosion echoed around The Great World and a white projectile went winging its way in a glittering arc beneath the black vault of the sky. Swooning with excitement, the men with the ropes gave a great pull: the armoured-car shot over the top of the ramp and down the other side just as Miss Kennedy-Walsh hurtled by where it had been standing an instant before; on she went to land helmet first in the net; there she jumped and arched and flapped like a netted salmon.

Missed! This was not a contingency for which the men holding the ropes had prepared themselves. They looked at each other helplessly. What were they to do? Even the most perfunctory realism required them to continue pulling. The armoured-car turned its nose hesitatingly towards ‘Fortress Singapore’ and continued, slowly but steadily, to convey its wavering cargo of grinning, bespectacled Japanese towards where the cannon loomed, bereft of ammunition. A roar of indignation went up from the crowd. The master of ceremonies hurriedly intervened and the armoured car was whisked away, Miss Kennedy-Walsh took a bow. A collection in favour of the Nanyang Anti-Enemy Backing-up Society was announced.

‘Let’s go and have a drink,’ said Monty, who seemed satisfied with the way the show had turned out despite the nonappearance of the Da Sousa Sisters. As they made their way towards the exit the crowd was beginning to sing: ‘God save glacious King!’

They set off down another alley; the crowds strolling up and down had grown even more dense than they had been earlier. Monty, Joan and Sinclair walked in front. Matthew followed at a little distance with Ehrendorf; he wanted to think of some way of comforting his friend who was still clearly upset by the way Joan had changed places in the enclosure. Moreover, he was worried that if he walked beside Joan, she might not be able to resist the temptation of holding his hand in full view of the others, thus causing Ehrendorf further unnecessary chagrin. Matthew could not help thinking it curious that she should find him attractive. Very few other women ever had. He had tried to accept this, as he tried to accept everything, philosophically.

But above all Matthew simply wanted to talk with his old friend and to recover their former intimacy, for Ehrendorf was one of those rare people who could be interesting whatever he talked about. Matthew enjoyed argument and speculation the way other people enjoy a game of tennis. Furthermore, although he did not mind the particular, it was the general which really stirred him. It was not enough for him to know, for example, that two Catholics were pitched out of a window in Prague in the interests of the Jesuits and Ferdinand of Styria early in the seventeenth century (as it would be for you and me), Matthew immediately wanted to investigate the general implications of the deed. And he would speculate lovingly on whether or not it had been necessary (not merely a coincidence) that a period of intolerance should follow the Emperor Rudolph’s liberal reign, or on some other quite different aspect of the matter … on religion as against economics as a cause of war, or (even more far-fetched) on the effect of windows, and of glass generally, on the Bohemian psyche, or on the marriage of physical and mental enlightenment (windows, lamps, electric light advancing hand in hand with rational thought) in the progress of humanity.

Of course, people change. Matthew and Ehrendorf had both undoubtedly changed in the years since they had argued into the night in Oxford and Geneva. Matthew had realized even in Geneva that he himself was beginning to change: he no longer enjoyed arguing with his friends, above all those who had embraced the academic life, quite as much as he had once done. It was not simply that these friends had tended to adopt the lugubrious and self-important air which distinguishes academics: surrounded by the paralysing comforts, conveniences and irritations of university life what else could they do? He sensed that what distressed him was a gap which had opened up between thought and feeling, the remoteness, the impartiality of his friends to the subjects they were teaching or studying. Objectivity, he had had to agree with them, was important obviously. But what was required, he had declared, striding up and down with their vintage port inside him while they eyed him dubiously wondering whether he would wake the children, was ‘a passionate objectivity’ (whatever that might be). He had usually found himself taking the last bus home feeling muddled and dissatisfied with himself as well as with his friends. Yet with Ehrendorf it had always been a little different, perhaps because, coming from a military family, he had chosen to become a soldier rather than an academic, though more likely it was simply a difference of personality. Whatever the reason, in Geneva he had always found it delightfully easy to discuss things with Ehrendorf.

Now, just as if they had been strolling along the Quai Wilson instead of through a pulsing, perfumed, malodorous, humid, tropical evening, Matthew brushed aside some trivial enquiry from Ehrendorf about Sinclair (who was he? how long had Joan known him? were they particularly close friends, perhaps even childhood friends?) and reverted to the important matter which had stopped him in his tracks earlier. Could the coming of western capital to the Far East be seen as progress from the natives’ point of view?

‘I’m sure you’ve heard Walter’s lecture on how he and my father and some other merchants transformed Burma from a country, where, unless a coconut fell off a tree, nobody had any supper, into a modern rice-exporting nation … I gather he delivers it to everyone he comes across …’

‘Well,’ sighed Ehrendorf, automatically falling into his old Oxford habits, ‘it all depends what you mean by …’

‘Progress? Or natives?’

‘Well, by both, I guess,’ Ehrendorf smiled faintly, ‘since there was massive immigration of Indians and their situation must have been different from that of the Burmese. Walter certainly exaggerates. Burma was a fertile and prosperous country before the British took over. But you mustn’t think that a barter economy is like Paradise before the Fall: a cash economy has more resources to survive floods, typhoons, and whatnot, even if it does introduce certain difficulties of its own which were not there before.’

‘Difficulties! Why, the rice merchants knocked Burma for six! The whole culture was destroyed. The old communal village life collapsed. Almost overnight it became every man for himself. People started fencing off grazing land which used to belong to the whole village and so forth. Profit took a grip on the country like some dreadful new virus against which nobody had any resistance. When the Burmese were reduced to becoming migrant seasonal workers in the paddy fields the old village life was finished off completely … and with it went everything that made life more than a pure money-grubbing exercise. At one time they used to hold elaborate cattle races, and water festivals, and village dances and theatricals and puppet shows. They all vanished. And what replaced them? A huge increase in the crime rate! To be happy people need to live in communities. If you don’t believe me you can read it in the government reports!’

‘Sure, I believe you,’ said Ehrendorf rather vaguely. ‘But still, this is a partial view. You must look at the whole picture.

‘By the way, just look at that Indian bloke over there in his striped tie and cricket blazer, modelled on some fatuous English tradition that has no real meaning for him at all. He’s borrowed a culture that doesn’t fit him any better than his jacket.’

Ehrendorf, while looking at the whole picture, had also had his eye on the Blacketts and Sinclair some way in front of them; perhaps he, too, was no longer as keen as he used to be on abstract discussions, or perhaps he was preoccupied with other matters. He had grown thinner since he and Matthew had last met in Europe and had developed one or two hesitations in his manner which had not been there before. Once or twice Matthew had been on the verge of that nightmare sensation when you suddenly find yourself thinking: ‘But I don’t know this person at all!’ and the person in question happens to be your closest friend. But now a glance at Ehrendorf reassured him: it was the same old Ehrendorf, except for the moustache; a little older, of course, and not quite so cheerful and self-confident as he had once been. But then, he himself had aged, too.

Ehrendorf’s fine eyes rested on Joan’s botttom as she walked some distance ahead between her brother and Sinclair; the light blue, neatly ironed cotton of her dress picked up the glow of naphtha lanterns as she passed each stall so that, from a distance, it seemed that her figure flared and died, flared and died, almost hypnotically. Very often a girl’s bottom begins to sag in her twenties (which does not matter particularly since few people notice or care whether a bottom has dropped or not) but Joan’s had not done so; from behind you might have thought that she was simply a mature adolescent. Nor had she developed those over-bulging cones of tissue at the top of the thigh which sometimes bestow even on a slender woman a saddle-bag effect. ‘Her bottom is too perfect,’ Ehrendorf might have been thinking as he stared ahead in a trance. ‘It’s too beautiful to get a purchase on, like everything else about her, it simply slips out of your hand.’

Matthew, however, could not be expected to notice this sort of thing. Besides, it was doubtful whether, even if he had been interested, he would have been able to see far enough without taking off his spectacles and polishing them: in the course of the evening a thick film of dust had collected on the lenses.

‘Sinclair must be a new arrival in Singapore, I should think,’ remarked Ehrendorf. ‘Although he seems to know his way round OK.’ This was undoubtedly a statement rather than a question but, nevertheless, a vague air of interrogation lingered about it. Matthew, however, paid no attention: he was evidently still too busy trying to express what was in his mind.

‘Let me give you an example, Jim, of what happens when cash and the idea of profit strike root in a country unaccustomed to them like Burma. It seems that’s there a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less, that “the cheapest will survive”. This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-economic values tend to be eliminated. In Burma they used to build beautiful, elaborately carved cargo-boats which looked like galleons: these have been entirely replaced over the past fifty years by flat barges which can transport paddy more cheaply. And it’s the same everywhere you look: native art and craft replaced by cheap imported substitutes, handlooms have disappeared, pottery has given way to petrol tins. Even the introduction of new crops by western capital has tended to impoverish rather than enrich the life people lead. In Burma the natives used to cook with sesamum oil, now they use ground-nut oil because, though it doesn’t taste so good, it’s cheaper. In Java people have taken to eating cassava instead of rice because it’s cheaper …’

‘If it’s cheaper,’ protested Ehrendorf, ‘then they have more wealth to spend on other things.’

‘Not so! If they can live more cheaply it stands to reason that they can be paid less, provided there’s no shortage of labour. Yes, exactly, it’s our old friend “the iron law” up to its tricks again! What additional wealth may be generated by the use of cheaper methods and cheaper foods doesn’t cling to the natives: the extra saving goes to swell the profits of the western businesses which control the land or the market … like Blackett and Webb! The native masses are worse off than before. For them the coming of Capitalism has really been like the spreading of a disease. Their culture is gone, their food is worse and their communities have been broken up by the need to migrate for work on estates and in paddy fields. Well, am I right?’

‘But Marx believed, did he not, that such a stage is necessary in the progress of society from feudalism to Communism and therefore even saw the British in India as a force for progress.’

‘You can’t have it both ways! What you and Marx say is fine … that is, if Communism is what you want. But what if we reach this stage where the poor are made poorer and organized into gangs of coolies and then … lo and behold, there is no revolution! Are the natives not worse off than they were in their traditional communities? Of course they are! You still have to show me what advantages the coming of western capital has brought, in Burma at any rate.’ After a moment Matthew added: ‘In any event, my bet is that in practice Communism would be scarcely any better than Capitalism, and perhaps even worse.’

Ahead of them Monty, Joan and Sinclair had disappeared into the Wing Choon Yuen Restaurant whose palatial entrance was partly screened from the alley by a substantial brick and pillar wall: on top of this wall neat rows of palms had been set in brown earthenware pots decorated with dragons. Ehrendorf said: ‘This is still a partial view, Matthew. No doubt there is something in what you say. But in the West, too, craftsmen have been unable to survive mass-production, capitalism and the Law of Substitution. That’s life, I guess.’ He shrugged and added with a smile: ‘There’s another principle which I shall call Ehrendorf’s Law which is now in operation in all prosperous Western countries and which asserts “the survival of the easiest”. Twenty years from now coffee beans will have disappeared and we’ll drink nothing but Camp Coffee, not because liquid coffee tastes better … it tastes worse … but because it’s easier to prepare. Pretty soon nobody will read books or learn to play the piano because it’s easier to listen to the radio or phonograph. Mark my words! Ehrendorf’s Law will do just as much damage in the long run! All the same, Matthew, I can’t agree with you because you neatly avoid mentioning all the benefits of western civilization, the social welfare, education, medicine and so forth. But let’s discuss that another time. And by the way, it has just occurred to me, if this guy Sinclair had been an old family friend of the Blacketts I’m sure I’d have seen him or heard of him in the last couple of years …’

‘Let’s not bother with the Blacketts … I want to discuss my theories,’ said Matthew.

It was then that Ehrendorf suddenly went silent and looked rather upset. It had occurred to him that Matthew, far from being too preoccupied with his own ideas to discuss Sinclair and his mysterious relationship with Joan, had all this time been deliberately keeping the conversation away from the Blacketts.

Matthew had not noticed his friend’s reaction and, following him into the restaurant, muttered grimly: ‘Oh, education and medicine. Don’t worry. One could say something on that score, too!’

23

Monty, Joan and Sinclair were seated at a table set among foliage on the terrasse. As Matthew and Ehrendorf approached, Sinclair got to his feet saying: ‘Got to duh … duh … ash off, I’m afraid. Got to do my duh … duh … duh …’

‘Of course you haven’t,’ said Monty. ‘Sit down, Sinclair, you’re being a bore. It’s nowhere near midnight yet. You said you didn’t go on duty till midnight. Well then?’

‘Got to duh … duh … duhoo … well, a whole lot of things, a fearful amount, in fact. So, have a nice time and I’ll be suh … seeing you,’ he added in a fluent rush. He kissed Joan’s hand, rolling his eyes for some reason, waved to the others and departed.

The young Blacketts had ordered ikan merah (fish, Matthew understood) and chips and a large bottle of Tiger beer between them. Matthew and Ehrendorf ordered the same. While they waited a rather tense silence fell over the table: even Monty, not usually at a loss for words, seemed disinclined to speak. In the dark shadows behind Joan glowed a shower of delicate, speckled marmalade-coloured orchids, framing her perfect face and shoulders. Ehrendorf snatched a quick glance in her direction and then, though he had already given his order, buried himself in the menu. While his eyes moved silently over won ton soup, crab sweetcorn soup, sweet sour prawn, Taoist fish ball, cornedbeef sandwich, lychee almond beancurd … his face took on a strained and innocent expression, as if he were thinking: ‘The trouble about such perfection is that you can’t get a grip on it, it slips away. There’s no perspective.’

‘Will you kindly stop that!’ said Joan suddenly and with anger.

‘Stop what?’

‘Looking at me in that stupid way.’

‘I wasn’t looking at you at all. I was reading the goddam menu, if you don’t mind.’ Ehrendorf’s voice had grown shrill and his accent, which normally might have been taken for English, suddenly became that of an American again. Matthew took off his dust-filmed spectacles, polished them on a rather grey handkerchief, put them on again and stared unhappily at Ehrendorf.

‘What I wanted to say, Jim, about education and medicine …’

Silence, however, fell over the table once more. Matthew examined the wall and the dragons which decorated the earthenware pots; from beyond the palms which grew out of them came the constant murmur of voices and laughter and the throbbing of music. Presently, a Chinese girl appeared with a bowl from which she took a steaming face-flannel with a pair of wooden tongs and placed it in Joan’s hands: she then offered one to Monty, Matthew and Ehrendorf in turn. Matthew mopped his perspiring face: the sensation of relief this afforded was extraordinary. More waiters presented themselves, bringing fish and chips and beer. As they began to eat the atmosphere grew more relaxed. Matthew, knife and fork raised and ready to pounce on his fish (he was hungry), cautiously raised the subject of education. Admittedly, he had yet to delve deeply into the matter as it affected Malaya but he did know what the British had managed to achieve in this line in India … namely, a prodigious number of unemployable graduates. ‘The Indians have always had a tremendous desire for education. The only trouble is that there are hardly any actual jobs for educated men to do, unless they want to be clerks or lawyers, and there are already several times too many of them.’

Monty had taken knife and fork and begun vigorously to chop up his fish, first laterally into quarters, then diagonally, as for the Union Jack, but most likely this was not the mute response of a patriot to the drift of Matthew’s argument so much as a convenient way of reducing the fish to pieces small enough to deal with; he speared one of the pieces together with a bundle of chips and stuffed the lot into his mouth.

‘All we needed in India were Indians educated enough to serve as clerks and petty officials: in no time at all there were enough of them, and several times too many. Curzon did his best to launch vocational and technical education and I gather it’s been tried here in Malaya, too. But with miserable results. You may well ask why.’

None of Matthew’s listeners seemed, as it happened, to be on the point of putting that or any other question to him. Monty, breathing heavily through his mouth, seemed completely occupied in masticating fish and chips. Joan and Ehrendorf simply stared at Matthew, looking tense and dazed; Joan had not touched her knife and fork but now picked up a single chip in her fingers and snipped off the end with her perfect teeth, without taking her eyes from Matthew’s face.

‘The fact is that in most tropical colonies the only work available is agriculture, and sometimes a bit of mining. What we really want is cheap unskilled labour. What skilled jobs there are in a country like Malaya don’t go, it appears, to Malays, but to Eurasians, Chinese or sometimes Europeans. No cheap unskilled labour is what western capital came here for and that’s what it gets …!’

‘But …’ began Monty. He was silenced immediately, however, by his own right hand which, spotting its opportunity, had raised another forkful of fish and chips and now crammed it into his mouth as soon as it opened to speak.

‘As I expect you all know there was talk of starting an engineering school a couple of years ago at Raffles College here in Singapore. What happened? A commision reported that it was pointless because there’d be no jobs for the graduates. So you see the idea that we British are educating our colonies in our own image simply won’t wash. That may be what we’d like to do, and certain attempts have been made no doubt, but that’s not what is actually happening.’

‘Oh, look here,’ said Ehrendorf mildly, but to Joan not to Matthew. ‘This is a bit ridiculous.’ Joan, her eyes still on Matthew snipped off another inch of the chip she held neatly between finger and thumb, but otherwise ignored him.

Matthew went on: ‘And yet there still persists this sad belief that a man can better himself by education. At this very moment here in Singapore, according to the official figures, there are more than ten thousand clerks, most of whom live in the most dreadful conditions earning ten dollars a month if they’re lucky, not even a living wage, simply because their numbers far exceed any possible demand for them. Ten thousand clerks for a city of this size! It seems it’s a regular practice for older clerks to be replaced by younger men at lower salaries and yet that doesn’t stop the schools turning out another seven hundred boys every year with qualifications for clerical jobs. And all because of this pathetic, unfounded belief that education leads to lucrative jobs!’

‘Really, you can’t expect me to put up with this,’ said Ehrendorf suddenly.

‘Well, clear off then! Nobody invited you, anyway.’

‘As it happens, Matthew did.’

‘Frankly,’ said Monty, pushing away his empty plate and selecting a toothpick, ‘I don’t think it matters a bugger whether they work as coolies or anything else so long as they have jobs. That’s precisely what they don’t have in South China and India. They come here because they think it’s better, and they’re damn right. It is.’

‘I thought you said you were going. If so, what’re you waiting for?’

‘That’s just what you’d like, isn’t it?’

‘Monty, surely we have a responsibility,’ went on Matthew doggedly, ‘to the people living here when we arrived; even more so to those we encouraged to come and work on the estates. One of the most astounding things about our Empire, when you come to think about it, is the way we’ve transported vast populations across the globe as cheap labour. Surely we must have their interests at heart, at least to some extent, as well as our own. Otherwise it’s not much better than the slave trade.’

‘We do have their interests at heart: we’re giving them employment which they didn’t have where they came from. Besides, almost half our rubber in Malaya is produced by Asiatic smallholders, people who probably came here originally as coolies and then set up in business for themselves. They produce pretty piss-awful rubber but that’s their business.’

‘Let’s go and dance,’ said Joan. ‘Monty, pay the bill and let’s go.’

Monty summoned the waiter and produced a roll of blue dollar bills, saying: ‘Without British capital there wouldn’t have been any rubber business.’

‘But don’t you think, given the huge returns on money invested in Malaya that something more should be done for the people who actually do the work on the plantations to produce it …? Otherwise, the British Empire is nothing more than a vast business concern …’ But Matthew’s last words, though intended for his companions, had been transformed into a soliloquy by their sudden departure, Joan in the lead, Ehrendorf striving to walk beside her and speak to her, and the burly figure of Monty not far behind. Matthew hurried after them, nudging his glasses up on his nose.

As they approached The Great World’s dance-hall the atmosphere seemed to thicken, as if the very dust which hung in the air was quivering with the percussion of drums and wailing of saxophones. Monty dropped back for a moment, indicating that he had something he wanted to say to Matthew. No, it wasn’t about the colonial question, he muttered confidentially, it was more of a proposition he wanted to make. He’d thought it over quite a bit and consulted his two chums who were also very, very interested (that went without saying, actually, because in its way this was a bargain such as one didn’t often come across and so of course they would be interested) and, well, the upshot of it was that he and his two chums had decided unanimously to invite Matthew to join them in … the point being that he was a chap from the same sort of background as they were, a factor one had to bear in mind in a place like Singapore where gossip got around in no time … anyway, in short, they’d decided that Matthew should be given the opportunity of making up the fourth … No, nothing like that, he hated all card-games himself, couldn’t abide them, in fact, well … in a nutshell, instead of risking heaven knows what dreadful diseases with the sort of women one was likely to pick up here at The World or anywhere else in Singapore he and his chums had decided to club together and they’d found a very nice Chinese girl called Sally who had her own flat in Bukit Timah. She was clean and not the kind who’d get drunk or make a fuss. She was …

‘Oh, but really, Monty…’

‘No, just listen a moment. You aren’t a bad sort of bloke, Matthew, in your way (in fact, I quite like you), but you’re the sort of chap who rejects things out of hand without even listening and weighing up the pros and cons. And this is just the kind of arrangement that would suit a bloke like you who isn’t very good at getting women, if you don’t mind me saying so, and besides, it’s not expensive …’

‘Monty, I can assure you …’

They had now joined Joan and Ehrendorf in the queue of people, many of whom were in uniform, waiting for admission to the dance-hall. Monty lowered his voice a little so that his sister should not hear what he was saying. She was clean, she had imagination (which was something one didn’t often find), she was good-tempered and sober, she was not narrow-minded in her approach (in fact, you could do almost anything you liked) and it would only come to $17.50 a month per person. It was such a bargain that Matthew probably thought he meant American dollars, but not a bit of it! He meant Straits dollars. It was an incredible opportunity! For $17.50 Matthew would have, at least to begin with, one evening a week guaranteed and the possibility of another, if one of his three partners did not exercise his option for two evenings in that particular week, as would most likely very often happen because of some social occasion they couldn’t get out of, OK? Because Matthew was the last to join it was only fair, after all, that the others should have first choice but he, Monty, for one would be most surprised if it did not work out that Matthew found he had two evenings on most weeks …’

‘Hey, Yank! Why don’t you join in the bloody war then?’ demanded a perspiring, drunken Tommy, waving a beer bottle at Ehrendorf.

‘Because we don’t want to make it too easy for you guys,’ replied Ehrendorf cheerfully.

‘Give us some gum, chum!’ shouted someone else and there was a cackle of laughter.

‘Because you’re a lot o’ pissin’, cowards, that’s what!’ shouted the first man belligerently.

‘Who needs the bleedin’ Yanks anyway? Old Adolf would only give ’m a spankin’!’

Raucous cheers greeted this remark but Ehrendorf, still smiling good-humouredly, had reached the bamboo cage and handed over fifty cents for himself and each of his companions. Then he waved to the boisterous crowd in khaki behind him and vanished into the throbbing darkness followed by a medley of cheers, insults and ribaldry.

‘Yankee ponce!’

‘They ’ave ’em ’orizontal wi’ teeth in ’em ’ere, sir!’

‘Can I do yer now, sir?’

Blundering after his friend, Matthew presently found himself at the edge of a dance-floor, covered but open at the sides for ventilation, gleaming with French chalk in the semi-darkness like a subterranean lake. So this was the famous dance-floor taken from the old Hôtel de l’Europe which, Joan was now whispering huskily into his ear, at the turn of the century had been the finest in Singapore. No doubt his father, together with the wealthy and influential in the Colony, in his day had waltzed or fox-trotted on those very boards! But now the beau monde had been replaced by that bewildering array of races and types he had noticed earlier in the evening in the open air, even two members of the family of pygmies could be seen executing a perfect tango close at hand. Matthew gazed enchanted at the teeming dance-floor. Abruptly, he realized why this sight gave him such pleasure. He tried to explain to Monty who had taken Joan’s place at his side: this was the way Geneva should have been! Instead of that grim segregation by nationality they should have all spent their evenings like this, dancing the tango or the quick-step or the ronggeng or whatever it was with each other: Italians with Abyssinians, British with Japanese, Germans with Frenchmen and so on. If there had been a real feeling of brotherhood in Geneva such as there was here (the Palais des Nations turned into a palais de danse) the Disarmament Conference would not have got stuck in the mud the way it did! ‘It was the feeling, perhaps even the confidence that men of different nations and races could get on together that was so tragically missing. And yet here is the evidence! Men are brothers!’

‘Yes, er, I see what you mean,’ mumbled Monty cautiously, ‘but about that other matter we were discussing. I mean, well, you think it over. There’s no need to make a snap decision, Matthew. On the other hand we do know plenty of blokes who would jump at the chance if we offered it to them, so you can’t keep us waiting indefinitely.’

‘But I’m not keeping you waiting, Monty. I’ve told you, I’m not…’

‘No, well, you think it over,’ muttered Monty hastily. ‘No need to make a snap decision.’ And he started to explain to the rather bewildered Matthew how to set about dancing with a taxi-dancer. You first of all had to buy a book of four twenty-five-cent dance tickets from the bloke over there. Then when music started you made a dash for the one you liked the look of. But you had to make it snappy or someone else would grab her. At the end of the dance she took you back to her table and you handed over a ticket. You weren’t allowed to sit with them unless you paid a special fifteen-dollar fee for taking them away from the taxi tables.

‘Thanks Monty, but I think I just want to watch.’

‘You would!’ murmured Monty inaudibly.

Meanwhile, however, the tango had turned into an exhibition by a Filipino couple who were chased somewhat haphazardly round the floor by a white spotlight; the man was a foxy-looking individual in a white suit, the woman, a sinuous person in sequins with flashing eyes and raven tresses. The music changed tempo and they began jitterbugging violently, shoes flashing. The grinning members of the band were also from the Philippines; clad in dazzling white blazers and orange trousers they formed a shallow bank against the far wall, harmonizing satisfactorily with the lurid, unlikely birds which had been painted on it. Overhead, painted on the ceiling, Matthew could just make out the shape of a gigantic golden dragon whose bulging eyes, faceted with mirrors, showered reflected sparks like confetti on the swaying dancers below. Now the spotlight, outguessed by the movement of the dancers, strayed for a moment to the edge of the floor and hesitated there by coincidence on Joan and Ehrendorf. He was talking intensely into her ear while she stared unseeing at the polished floor, tapping her foot moodily to the beat of the music. He looked up for a moment, dazzled and bewildered; Joan shook her head, tossing her hair. The spotlight moved jerkily away in pursuit of its quarry.

Saddened by the look of desperation on his friend’s face, Matthew shifted his attention to the taxi-girls sitting at tables beside the floor, wondering whether the girl whose breast he had found himself clasping earlier in the evening might not be among them: these girls, too, appeared to be Chinese or Eurasian for the most part, with a few Malays, Siamese and Indo-Chinese; undoubtedly, thought Matthew, these women from further up the peninsula towards China were the loveliest and most graceful of all with their glistening black eyes and delicate features: beside them even the delicate Joan looked clumsy, heavy and rough-skinned. Ehrendorf, however, did not seem to think so for he had taken Joan by the wrist and was trying to persuade her to join him on the floor which, temporarily deserted, now began to fill up. The band set to work on another tune. Men of all descriptions, from dimunitive Chinese clerks to enormous tipsy Australians, swarmed across the floor to secure the services of the taxi-girls. Ehrendorf tried to lead Joan on to the dance-floor but she resisted, snatching her hand away from him. Ehrendorf then seemed to give up hope all of a sudden: his chest deflated, his shoulders drooped, he passed a hand over his forehead as if dazed.

‘Well, have you thought it over about that nifty Chinese girl I was telling you about?’

‘Monty, I told you before: it’s not my line.’

Monty looked taken aback: ‘There’s no need to decide right away, old boy. I don’t want to rush you. And look here, if you have only one evening a week we could probably fix it so you don’t have to pay quite so much. After all, that’s only fair, isn’t it? How about fifteen dollars a month? It’s really worth it, you know. God, boy, she goes at it hammer and tongs, I can tell you!’

‘It’s not the price, for heaven’s sake. It’s the idea of it.’

Monty stared at Matthew, baffled. It had not occurred to him that Matthew would drive such a hard bargain. Or could there perhaps be some other explanation? And then an idea struck him.

‘If you think you’ll get it from her,’ he said warningly, indicating his sister who was standing a few paces away, ‘I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree. I know lots of blokes who’ve been out with her and she doesn’t.’

‘Doesn’t what?’ asked Matthew. And then added hurriedly: ‘Oh, sorry, I see what you mean …’

But Monty, nevertheless, uttered the heavy sigh of someone whose patience has been tried beyond endurance. ‘She doesn’t,’ he repeated. And then, just to rub it in: ‘Not even occasionally!’

24

Matthew’s head was reeling as he and Monty and Joan passed out of The Great World and into Kim Seng Road; for a moment he felt quite giddy and had to steady himself with a hand on the wall. Ehrendorf, shattered, had left half an hour earlier by himself; before leaving he had said to Joan: ‘We must have a serious talk. I’ll look in this evening if you’re not back too late.’ Joan had replied that he could do what he liked. She was accustomed to young men wanting to have serious talks with her. After a moment Matthew felt well enough to remove his hand from the wall and proceed: it was doubtless the effect of the unaccustomed heat and the crowds which had caused that moment of dizziness. Outside the gate there were fewer people to be seen; the stars shone brilliantly and the night seemed less oppressive.

They had only taken a few steps in the direction of River Valley Road when Joan said grimly: ‘I’m going home. I’ve had enough for one evening.’

‘But it’s not even ten o’clock yet!’ protested Monty indignantly. ‘We can’t turn in at this hour, particularly now we’ve got rid of Romeo. Besides, we’re supposed to be showing Matthew the town.’

Matthew announced that he, too, felt he had seen enough for one evening. His spell of giddiness a few moments earlier had left him with a feeling that everything he had witnessed was utterly unreal. But Monty would not hear of another defection. He said to Joan: ‘Why don’t you take the Pontiac if you aren’t going to come with us? We’ll take a taxi.’

Presently, Matthew found himself in a taxi with Monty and heading, not for Raffles Hotel which Monty said would be full of stuffed shirts and only open till midnight anyway, but for some more interesting destination which Monty knew of. The taxi was a little yellow Ford 8 with springs that chimed and wheezed at every bump in the road. At the end of Grange Road they came into Orchard Road again, then into Bras Basah Road. Now they were drawing near the sea and a great white building loomed up on the left: Raffles Hotel, Monty said. As they passed the brilliantly lit entrance on the landward side Matthew glimpsed an elderly couple leaving, the man in a black dinner-jacket, the woman in a long glittering evening-dress and stole. Monty chuckled at the crowd of natives who had gathered on Beach Road to watch the Europeans dining on the lawn beneath the tall pencil palms. ‘That’s the nightly show for the Asiatics. They think white women are whores the way they wear backless evening gowns. They come here every evening and lick their lips.’

At Monty’s direction the taxi turned away from Raffles Hotel along the sea-front. On the right now was the starlit expanse of the padang and beyond it, just visible against the sky, the dignified silhouette of the former Grand Hôtel de l’Europe, the benefits of whose dance-floor Matthew had longed in retrospect to transfer to Geneva. The driver evidently knew what was expected of him without having to be told, for their progress had slowed to a crawl and he had half turned in his seat awaiting further instructions. Monty was peering intently at the shadowy figures of women sitting in rickshaws or standing idly in groups of two or three beneath the trees which lined the road. ‘Stop!’ he said, and the taxi drew in to the kerb.

Hardly had they come to a halt when there was a great stirring in the darkness; from what had seemed to be empty rickshaws shadowy figures emerged. Further shapes could be seen shifting in the obscurity beneath the trees; beyond, anchored at sea in the inner roads, were a great number of ships of which only the lights were visible. In a moment, to Matthew’s surprise, the open windows of the taxi were entirely filled with women’s faces, piled one on top of another like coconuts; shortly the windscreen, too, was blocked by the faces of yet more women leaning over the bonnet. A soft murmur filled the air from which an occasional word in English detached itself: ‘OK John!’ … ‘Nice!’ … ‘Back all same flont!’ ‘Whisky soda!’

Meanwhile, the driver, an elderly Malay with a brown face and the white hair of a grandfather, had groped for an electric torch and shone its beam on one window after the other.

‘Can these be real women?’ wondered Matthew as the beam wandered unsteadily over the serried painted masks. Yet on many of these masks the wrinkles stood out despite the paint and powder; the angled light etched them all the more harshly, replacing sunken eyes with a blob of darkness. At the same time, here and there skeletal arms had stretched through the open windows to trail about in the interior of the cab, floating and flickering like sea-weed, plucking weakly at his shirt and trousers, palping his arm or thigh.

‘Hags!’ declared Monty. ‘Drive on!’

The driver raced the engine and the windscreen cleared. One or two other faces showed themselves fleetingly in the places of those that had gone: younger, weaker, more innocent, but no less desperate, trawling unhopefully with this brief glimpse of their younger faces for the twin male lusts which they knew were swimming back and forth like sharks somewhere in the depths of the cab. The hands groped more desperately, pleading, tugging, pinching. Then the taxi moved off in a hail of curses and vociferation. One or two of the women even tried to follow in rickshaws, hoping to catch up at the next traffic lights. But in no time they were left behind.

Monty explained, with the weary condescension of an expert, that certain of these women had their own permanent rickshaw coolies, usually ancient, hollowed-out skeletons of men, excavated by the pursuit of their shattering trade in the Singapore heat, who could no longer compete with younger rivals but might still, now and again, whip their broken limbs into a trot to reach some likely looking prospect with their fair cargoes of flesh … by which he meant, he added with a chuckle, those leathery harridans whose services you could always purchase for a few cents. And they weren’t all Chinese, Malay or Tamil either, by any manner of means. Sometimes you came across Europeans, yes, women who had ‘gone wrong’ in some Eastern city, who had found disgrace through opium or alcohol in Calcutta, Hong Kong or Shanghai … He, Monty, as a student of human nature, took a pretty keen interest in the stories that some of these women could tell you … there were even aristocratic women driven out of Russia in penury by the Revolution. And more recently, as a matter of fact, things had been getting better in Singapore as far as women went. Young Chinese girls had been arriving in droves, refugees from the Sino-Jap war escaping from Shanghai or Canton …

‘Not better, Monty!’ cried Matthew indignantly. ‘How can you be so heartless!’

‘Oh, I just meant younger, you know,’ muttered Monty sullenly. ‘No need to get worked up, old boy. After all, it’s not my fault …’

‘But it’s all our faults! It’s disgraceful! This is supposed to be a prosperous country. We send huge profits back to our fat shareholders in England and yet we can’t even provide for a few refugees without them having to go on the streets.’

‘It’s no good taking this high moral line out here in the East, you know. People don’t go in for that sort of thing out here. It’s not our cup of tea. You just have to accept things the way they are. In the Straits it’s every man for himself, if you know what I mean, and it’s as well not to over-do the pious remarks. Personally, and I think I can speak for a lot of chaps who have been out here a while, I don’t care for moralizing, in fact it binds me rigid.’ Monty sounded irritated. The evening’s entertainment, which had started promisingly with the woman fired from the cannon, had proved the dampest of damp squibs. And now, would you believe it? he could hardly say a word without getting a sermon in return.

‘I’m sorry, Monty. I don’t mean to sound prudish. It’s just that I think we have a rotten way of doing things when it comes to anything but making money,’ replied Matthew absently for, of course, Monty could not be blamed for the plight of Chinese refugees on the sea-front in Singapore. But where then did the fault lie? While Matthew mused on this problem the little yellow taxi turned about and headed north again. It rather looked, said Monty gloomily, as if they would have to settle for a massage somewhere.

25

Among the painted masks which had peered in through the cab’s open windows Matthew had noticed one or two younger faces: he remembered one in particular, of a Chinese girl aged perhaps no more than fifteen or sixteen, rather ugly than pretty, but with a pleasant, homely, elfin ugliness like that of a bulldog, if you can imagine a delicately featured bulldog. Supposing that this girl, as seemed likely, was one of the new recruits that Monty had been talking about, he wondered at what precise moment during the past ten years it had become inevitable that she should be uprooted from her village somewhere in South China, or from a slum in Shanghai, and flung down on the streets of Singapore, obliged to sell herself if she could find a buyer? Surely, suggested Matthew to the passive figure of Monty beside him, one must connect this child’s desperate face with the long series of failures he himself had witnessed at the League of Nations in Geneva, with the ever-recurring inability of the Great Powers to commit themselves to a world organized on international lines, with the ever-present cynicism of the Foreign Office, and the Quai d’Orsay, and the Wilhelmstrasse where no opportunity was ever missed for showing the diplomats’ professional distaste for open diplomacy or for sneering at the idea of a world parliament. What chilled the blood was the thought that this girl’s plight and a million other tiny tragedies had been brought about by suave, neatly barbered, Savile Row-suited, genial, polite, cultured and probably even humane men in normal circumstances who would shrink with horror from themselves if they could be made to see their responsibility for what was happening!

Monty’s only reply to this suggestion was a grunt or, possibly, a groan. What the point was, in this sort of speculation, he could not for the life of him see. He yawned and smacked his lips. What an evening! First one thing, then another. Well, the only consolation was that this business about which Matthew was getting so steamed up did sometimes produce mouth-watering opportunities. Perhaps he would manage to lay hands on some newly arrived little Chinese piece before the evening was out. It was sometimes on the cards these days, though one had to be lucky.

Encouraged by Monty’s grunt of interest in what he had been saying, Matthew went on to explain that his own arrival in Geneva had coincided almost to the day with that fateful explosion beside the South Manchurian Railway in 1931. He had seen it all at first hand, from the first angry denunciations by China’s representative, Dr Sze, of massacres by Japanese troops and the reply of Yoshizawa (the same chap who had just recently been in Java demanding oil and minerals from the Dutch) that the troops were merely defending Japan’s enormous interests … to what had happened much later: to the devious, hypocritical, perfectly disgraceful support given to the untenable Japanese position by Sir John Simon and the Foreign Office, not to mention the British Press. Only the Manchester Guardian had condemned the Japanese and their British supporters.

Monty, peering out at the shadowy streets of Singapore as they fled by on either side of the cab, mumbled that he had been ‘in the dark’ about all that side of things. He belched dejectedly (perhaps he should not have bolted his fish and chips and beer so greedily at The Great World).

‘You see, Monty, so much depended on how the League reacted. It was the first time the Council had had to deal with a quarrel involving a major power and it set the style for everything that has happened since … for everything that will happen, even if one day they manage to revive the League, for years to come. Because at that time people all over the world still believed in the League. When the Manchurian crisis broke out it was almost like some medieval tournament. People flocked to Geneva to see the respective delegates do battle. Each side spent vast sums of money, which their countries could ill afford, on propaganda and entertainment to try and win people over to their side. The Chinese took over a luxurious suite on the Quai Wilson, got hold of a French chef and some vintage wines and started giving magnificent dinner-parties.

‘Meanwhile, as a sort of counter-attack the Japs staged a colossal reception in the Kursaal at which tons of food and gallons of wine were funnelled into the open mouths of the plump burghers of Geneva as if into Strasbourg geese … In return they made everyone watch a dreary propaganda film which they showed in the empty, echoing opera-house next door (both places had been shut down for the winter) all about the benefits of the South Manchuria Railway Company. Dismal isn’t the word. It did no good, anyway, because of the Lytton Report. You know all about that, I expect?’

Hoping to forestall further revelations Monty murmured that, as a matter of fact, he was rather well-informed on that … er … particular subject … er … But Matthew willingly set to work to refresh his memory, just in case. ‘This fellow is a serious menace,’ thought Monty, glancing at the stout, bespectacled figure of his companion.

What had happened was that the League, this was actually a temporizing device, sent a commission of enquiry composed of a German doctor, a French general, an Italian count and an American Major-General under the chairmanship of Lord Lytton to Manchuria to establish the disputed facts of the matter. It had taken them a year but when they finally published their report, they made no bones about it: Japan was roundly condemned … no doubt to the horror of Sir John Simon and his ilk. They concluded that Manchuria was an integral part of China, that the Japanese action could not be justified as self-defence, that Jap troops should be withdrawn and a genuinely Chinese régime restored. ‘That really set the cat among the pigeons, as you can imagine!’

Whether Monty could imagine or not, all he said was: ‘This place is usually full of troops at this time of night. It’s funny, there must have been a police raid or something.’

The taxi had come to a halt in a sleazy rubbish-strewn street lined with the usual two-storey shophouses but wider than the streets they had come through. Matthew, still in Geneva, stared out in a daze. Washing, hanging over the street from a forest of poles, tossed and billowed in the light breeze like the banners of an army on the march. Here and there dim electric lights glimmered, emphasizing the darkness rather than shedding light. Monty was speaking.

‘Sorry, what’s that?’

‘I said I thought we might have a beer before going home.’

One moment the street was deserted except for a few shadowy figures playing mah-jong under a street-lamp, the next it suddenly began to fill up; men were scurrying out of doorways, pedalling up on bicycles, galloping towards them in the shafts of rickshaws, even slithering down drainpipes. Nearby a manhole cover where the pavement spanned the storm-drain popped up and men began to pour out of that, too. All these men were converging on one place, the taxi in which Matthew sat in a trance with his thoughts struggling back like refugees from Geneva. He roused himself at last. ‘What’s all this?’

‘They’re just looking for customers for their girls,’ said Monty who had been paying the taxi-driver. ‘Come on, and hold on to your wallet.’

Before they could set foot on the pavement they were surrounded by dim, jostling figures. Words were whispered confidentially into Matthew’s ear as he waded after Monty … ‘Nice girl’ … ‘Guarantee virgin’ … ‘You wantchee try Singapore Glip? More better allsame Shanghai Glip!’ (‘Do I want to try what?’ wondered Matthew unable to make head nor tail of this rigmarole.) … ‘Oil massage number one!’ … Hands flourished grubby visiting-cards. ‘You want very nice pleasure!’ bayed a giant, bearded Sikh, placing himself menacingly in their path. ‘You coming please this way.’ But Monty brushed him aside and dived into a lighted doorway beneath a sign reading: ‘Dorchester Bed and Breakfast. Very select. All welcome. Servicemen welcome.’ Matthew, one hand anxiously gripping his wallet, plunged after Monty. His head was reeling again. ‘I must be ill,’ he thought giddily as he clambered up a smelly flight of stairs. ‘What am I doing here? I should be at home in bed.’

At the top of the stairs an Indian with oiled black hair and a dark, pock-marked face was waiting to greet them. His smile revealed very white teeth among which nestled here and there a glittering gold one; the glitter of his teeth was echoed by the glitter of a row of gold-topped fountain pens and propelling pencils in the breast pocket of his shirt, by the fat gold rings on his fingers, and by the steel watch on his wrist: all this combined to give him a disagreeably metallic appearance. Around his waist he had wound what at first appeared to be a white sarong; on closer inspection it proved to be merely a bath towel with the words Hotel Adelphi Singapore in blue. Was this his normal attire or had they just surprised him in his bath? For a moment it was hard to be sure.

‘Very kind lovely gentlemen,’ he said, putting his palms and long, delicate, glittering fingers of both hands together in graceful gesture, ‘please coming this way please.’

They were shown into a small, dimly lit room. An elderly and very fat Indian lady, who had evidently been asleep there on the floor, was making a hasty exit and dragging her bedding with her. Monty ordered beers and they sat down, Monty on a bamboo chair, Matthew on a broken-backed couch. The Indian had disappeared down a passage. Matthew stared round the room uneasily. What strange places Monty frequented!

On the wall there were two calendars: one, for 1940, advertised the Nippon Kisen Kaisha and showed an enormous ocean liner with Mount Fuji rising improbably out of the mists behind it; the other was for 1939, advertizing Fraser and Neave’s soda water: a healthy-looking European girl, whose rather blank, flawless face bore an odd resemblance to Joan’s, was holding a tennis racket in one hand and a glass in the other: two men in tennis flannels in the background, very much diminished by perspective, whispered together beneath her outstretched arm and eyed her with interest. Nearby was another picture, this time a photograph torn from a magazine and framed. Matthew gave an exclamation of surprise when he saw who it was: for how often had he not seen that familiar face coming or going in the lobby at the Hôtel Beau Rivage in Geneva! For what hopes and, ultimately, for what despair had its owner not been responsible when he had faced Mussolini over the Abyssinian crisis! With excitement he summoned Monty to join him in gazing at the foxy, handsome features of Anthony Eden.

Monty, however, declined to move. Either he was an habitué of the establishment and had already seen the picture, or else he had no particular interest in Anthony Eden; it might be, too, that he feared another discourse on world affairs for he winced visibly as Matthew, reminded of Geneva by the picture of Anthony Eden, suddenly resumed his harangue on the Lytton Report.

‘As I was saying, it set the cat among the pigeons, of course it did! The Lytton Report condemned Japan. Result? China could now demand action under Article 16 according to which the other members of the League could be asked to sever trade and financial relations with Japan. This was something that the Big Powers did not want to do: both Von Neurath, for Germany, and the bald baron, whatever his name was, for Italy, made it quite plain in the Assembly debate on the Lytton Report that they wouldn’t put up with any positive action. For three days the matter was thrashed out by the whole assembly in one of the larger rooms of the Disarmament Conference Building, where, as I expect you know, another long-running tragedy was playing at the same time, but among the Big Powers it was our man, I’m afraid, Sir John Simon, who really took the biscuit …’

While Matthew, who had sprung up from the couch again and was striding up and down the room making the floorboards creak, had been discoursing the Indian had reappeared with two bottles of beer with straws in them. He looked unsurprised to find one of his customers striding up and down shouting; odd behaviour was by no means unusual under his roof, but he was inclined to take it philosophically, reflecting that every profession must have its disadvantages. He handed one bottle to Monty and the other to Matthew who took it without noticing.

‘Simon, believe it or not, managed to give such a selective interpretation of the Lytton Report that anyone who hadn’t read it might have wondered whether it wasn’t the Chinese who had invaded Japan instead of vice versa. Not surprisingly, the smaller nations were indignant. Before their very eyes all the fine words and noble undertakings were proving to be gross hypocrisy. “If the League does not succeed in securing peace and justice,” the Norwegian delegate declared angrily, “then the whole system by which right was meant to replace might will collapse.” And he knew what he was talking about, as it has turned out. One of the Finns then wanted to know if the League was merely a debating club. I don’t know if you can imagine, Monty, the shock and anger and disappointment we all felt at the way Simon and our Foreign Office destroyed, with the help of their cronies, what was without doubt the best chance the world had ever had to institute a system of international justice!’ Matthew, making a violent gesture with his beer bottle, had caused the liquid inside it to foam out of the neck and spill over his hand. He paused for a moment to brood and lick his knuckles.

In the meantime the door had opened and half a dozen women had been shown in; they went to sit in a glum row on a bench against the wall.

‘You picking please woman at your disposition,’ said the Indian politely.

Four of the newcomers were middle-aged Chinese women with scarlet cheekbones; two of them started a whispered conversation in Cantonese, a third puffed smoke-rings from green lips, a fourth took out her knitting. The other two women were much younger, mere girls; one was a flat-nosed, round-faced Malay, the other a plain, pallid Chinese with neat pigtails; this latter girl took out a school exercise book and a text book and began to do her Latin homework. Monty looked them over without excitement and belched: the beer seemed unusually gaseous this evening. He was uncomfortable and out of sorts, no doubt about it. He felt, in particular, that there was still another bubble of air lodged distressingly inside him. Would it soon rise to the surface? He waited, surveying himself internally and thinking what a wretched evening he was having.

Suddenly, from some other part of the building through the thin walls there came a drunken Scandinavian voice. ‘You say you are a wirgin. I say you are not a wirgin!’ This was followed by an alarming crash.

‘But,’ said Matthew, who had taken a gulp of beer and was striding up and down once more (he was sweating copiously and felt by no means sober though he had had little to drink all evening), ‘the Report was there and there was nothing they could do about it. That Report had stuck in the gullets of the Great Powers. They could neither swallow it nor spit it out. In fact, the only thing they could think of to do was, of course, what they always did in Geneva when they found themselves at a loss: they formed a committee … this one was to report on the Report! Ludicrous! It was called the Committee of Nineteen. It wasted no time in settling down to the stern task of fostering sub-committees of its own in the best Geneva tradition, in particular a sub-committee for conciliation. What a farce! At one time the cynics were saying that they would soon have to have a report on the report on the Report. And yet the Report itself was plain enough. In due course the Committee of Nineteen produced its report on the Report, however. They even went so far as to broadcast it from the League’s new wireless station in Geneva. And yet again the Big Powers found themselves with egg on their faces! Japan was plainly condemned. Chinese sovereignty should be restored. Members of the League should not recognize Manchukuo. But ironically enough, at the very moment that Japan was being condemned at Geneva she was preparing to invade Eastern Inner Mongolia as well.’

‘I say you are not a wirgin!’

‘But even so, most likely the Western powers would not even have made the effort they did make to condemn Japan’s aggression, had the Japs not attacked Shanghai …’

The young Chinese girl with pigtails, on instructions from the management, had unfastened her bodice, allowing a small lemon-nippled breast to shudder free of its constraining buttons. Meanwhile, its owner pouted over a perplexing sentence she was invited to translate: ‘Romulus and Remus, you are surely about to jump over the walls of Rome, are you not?’ (Question expecting the answer ‘Yes’). What did this mean? Was it gibberish deliberately planned as a snare to the unwary, perhaps designed to make one lose face in some subtle occidental way? Surely it could be nothing else? (But wait! That, too, was a question expecting the answer ‘Yes’. She had the feeling that an invisible net had been thrown over her and that an unseen hand was beginning to pull the cords tight.) Well, she could not spend all night trying to penetrate the mysterious workings of the occidental mind so, with a sigh, she passed on to the next question.

‘To be frank, Monty, outside Geneva who cared a damn about Manchuria, or a music-hall place called Eastern Inner Mongolia? But Shanghai was different. When the Japs sent in troops from the International Settlement and bombed unarmed civilians in Chapei, people began to realize that Western business interests were threatened. There were limits, after all. But in the end what action did the Big Powers take?’

Again a dreadful crash! This time it was against the very wall of the room in which they were assembled: the whole building seemed to shake and the framed photograph of Anthony Eden cantered clippety-clop against the wall for a few seconds. ‘I give you “wirgin”!’ came a hoarse voice accompanied by a woman’s cry.

The row of women stared at Matthew with dull eyes. The Indian, disappointed with the effect they were having on his two customers, had encouraged them to unbutton their blouses and undo their skirts or sarongs in order to present themselves more advantageously. The young Chinese girl, having finished her Latin as best she could, had turned to arithmetic. Now she was sitting, stark naked, sucking her pencil over a problem which involved the rate at which a tap filled a bath. What, she wondered, was a tap? And what, come to that, was a bath? She would have to consult her aunt who was one of the older women with scarlet cheekbones.

The Indian was hurrying along beside the stout gesticulating figure of Matthew, trying to draw his attention to the enhanced appearance of his girls. The far door opened a crack and the fat Indian lady, his mother, peered in. She was still holding her bedding and anxious to resume her slumbers. He motioned her away crossly.

‘Uh … uh … uh …’ Monty could feel that bubble of air rising.

‘Very young! Soft as rising moon! Or perhaps nice gentleman preferring experience lady with wide knowledge all French and Oriental techniques? Are they, sir, not what doctor ordering?’

‘What?’

‘Experience lady … wide knowledge …’

Matthew, sweat pouring off his brow in torrents, gripped him by the arm and said, blinking fiercely: ‘You may well ask! As a gesture the British, several months too late, declared an arms embargo … but on both sides, as if both had been equally guilty. In a couple of weeks it lapsed anyway because the arms manufacturers were big employers and there was a lot of unemployment at the time. So, the Japs had plainly broken the Covenant and got away with it. They left the League, of course, or at least Geneva, the following day. I watched them go myself in a great procession of motor-cars from the Metropole where they’d been staying … There was something horrible about it because it meant the end of everything. I was standing near the Pont de Mont Blanc as they went by on their way to the Gare Cornavin. They went by in silence. Each car that passed was like another support being pulled out from under the League. That was the last we saw of them in Geneva but they left the League in ruins … they and the Big Powers between them. Why? Because this sad defeat of principle at the hands of expediency, this old way of having things settled behind the scenes by degenerate foreign ministries had set a precedent from which we never recovered. Ah, you say that History will find them guilty? Nonsense! History is too muddled and nobody gives a damn about it anyway. Disarmament! Abyssinia! Spain! The same thing was to happen again and again!’ Matthew released the Indian and staggering to the couch, sat down with his head in his hands.

Another crash shook the wall and Anthony Eden went clip-pety-clops once more.

‘Uh … uh … uh … aaaaaaah!’ Monty belched deafeningly. His expression, which had been careworn, brightened a little and he looked with more interest at the row of women. The Indian, however, was already signalling them to be on their way. Evidently they were not what doctor ordering.

Now he approached Matthew with a large leather-bound album of photographs and beckoned Monty to come and have a look, too. These pictures were of his better, high-class girls, he explained. Matthew gazed at them in wonder. The photographer had surprised many of them in intimate moments and some of them had prices pencilled against them, as on a menu. In a few cases there was the instruction: ‘Client must ordering in advance’ or ‘Miss Wu (20 mins.). She weighing one hundred pounds of tropical charm.’ Or even ‘Miss Shirley Mao (2 pers.)’.

The Indian, seeing Matthew reading with interest, pointed with a grubby finger and said: ‘She personally recommending, sir.’

‘Are some of these girls refugees from the war in China?’ asked Matthew.

The Indian’s eyes narrowed as he tried to penetrate the signification of this remark. ‘You wanting refugee-girl?’ he asked carefully. And he, too, studied the album, wondering which of the girls would best accommodate this special interest. ‘I finding Japan-bombing-Chinese-refugee-cripplegirl. Very interesting. You drink beer waiting ten five minutes. I find.’

‘Let’s go,’ said Monty. ‘Give the man a dollar for the beer and a couple of dollars for the girls. Otherwise we’ll be here all night.’

‘You staying, please, nice gentlemen,’ cried the Indian. ‘No, you going out,’ he shouted at his mother who was trying to sneak back in again with her bedding. ‘No, you must signing police book,’ he howled as Monty made for the door. He produced a grimy ledger. Monty made a quick scribble in it and handed the pencil to Matthew who signed carefully, looking at the list of other signatures.

‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed, hastening down the stairs after Monty. ‘Did you see whose names were in the Visitors’ Book? The Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Robert Brooke-Popham have both been here tonight!’ He paused dizzily to steady himself against the wall. Monty rolled his eyes to heaven and plunged out into the night, saying over his shoulder: ‘People don’t sign their own names in places like this, you idiot!’

‘I say you are not a wirgin!’ echoed after them into the empty street. A distant crash, a faint cry, and all was quiet. Singapore slept peacefully under the bright, equatorial sky. The shadow of a cat slipped through the street. A child cried. A weary coolie dragged his rickshaw home. An old man sighed in his sleep somewhere. Presently, in two or three hours from now would come the first faint drone of Japanese bombers approaching from the north-east. But for the moment all was quiet.

26

The taxi-driver (it was still the grandfatherly Malay with white hair who had been driving them earlier in the evening), seeing Matthew stagger as he got out of the cab at the gate of the Mayfair, assumed him to be drunk and asked him if he would like a massage because he knew of a certain place … But Matthew shook his head. He felt weak and dizzy: all he wanted to do was to plunge into bed. He said good night to Monty and set off up the short drive towards the Mayfair Building; with a growl of its engine the taxi was gone, leaving only a deep sigh of relief floating in the empty air where it had been standing. Monty, bound on pleasure, this time did not intend to be thwarted.

‘I must have caught some fever,’ Matthew thought as he climbed the steps and dragged open the protesting outer door to the verandah. This thought was followed by another, still more distressing: perhaps he had caught the Singapore Grip! Certainly an illness of some kind had taken hold of him. He had half expected to find the Major smoking a cigar on the verandah, but though an electric light was burning, there was no sign of him. Nor was Dupigny anywhere to be seen. So tempting, however, was the prospect of resting his weary body without delay that Matthew allowed himself to be diverted into the nearest rattan armchair, where he lay panting and perspiring while he recovered a little of his strength. Almost immediately his eyelids dropped and he fell into a doze.

But in only a matter of moments he was woken again by the screeching hinges of the outer door. Someone was coming in. He struggled to sit up and look alert but his eyes seemed to have slipped out of focus and for some moments only presented him with a grey blur. Then he found himself face to face with Joan who was saying: ‘We saw the light from the road as Jim was on his way home and we thought we’d just call in to say good night.’

‘That was nice of you,’ said Matthew warmly. Ehrendorf had come in with Joan but was sitting on the arm of a bamboo chair half in the shadows of the door.

‘And Jim wanted to have a word with you,’ Joan went on.

‘If it’s about what we were discussing earlier,’ said Matthew, aware that his eyes were trying to slip out of focus again, ‘about, you know, the colonial question and so forth, well, the point I was trying to make is that we must allow the whole country to develop. At the moment what it amounts to is that we only allow the native people to work in agriculture because we insist on selling them our own manufactures. Let me give you an example…’

‘No, no, it wasn’t about that,’ cried Joan hastily. ‘Jim will tell you. Go on, you said you would,’ she added accusingly while Ehrendorf stirred uneasily on the edge of the circle of light and perhaps contemplated whatever it was that he had had in mind to say to Matthew.

In the meantime another layer of gauze had been removed from Matthew’s memory of what had gone on earlier in the evening, so that now at last he began to think: ‘What a miracle that they should have made it up after the row they were having an hour or two ago!’

‘Go on, you did say you would.’

Ehrendorf’s pale, handsome face continued to stare mutely at Matthew from out of the semi-darkness and he sighed. A motorcar passed up the road with a deep, chugging sound; the reflected light from its headlights glowed in thin slices through the unrolled blinds of split bamboo. Finally Ehrendorf said: ‘I just wanted to say, Matthew, that I expect I shall be leaving Singapore in a day or two … Another posting, I guess you’d call it. Not yet sure where to. I realized this evening that Joan and I … Ah, no future in our relationship … Best of friends … Hm, wish each other well, naturally …’ He fell silent.

‘There,’ said Joan.

‘What? You’re leaving? And I’ve only just arrived! That really is a shame!’ exclaimed Matthew, distressed. Ehrendorf had sunk his head briefly in his hands to give his face a weary polish. ‘It’s time I was getting home,’ he said. But whether he meant to America or to his flat in Singapore it was impossible to say.

For some moments Matthew had been aware that there was something odd about Ehrendorf’s appearance. It was this: his uniform clung to him as if it were sopping wet. Indeed, staring more closely at it Matthew saw that it was several shades darker than it should have been and clung to his skin. His hair, too, was plastered down as if a bucket of water had been emptied over him. Moreover, a pool of water had collected round his shoes and was advancing slowly into the circle of light.

‘We shall both certainly miss you,’ said Joan brightly.

‘I guess it’s about time I packed my grip and moved on some place else,’ said Ehrendorf with a wry, bitter smile.

Matthew, on the point of bringing up the question of Ehrendorf’s sodden clothing, was diverted by this last remark into asking if, by the way, either of them happened to know what a Singapore Grip might be, was it a fever of some sort? Ehrendorf seemed taken aback by this question: after a moment’s consideration he said he thought it was a suitcase made of rattan, like a Shanghai Basket, as they were called, only smaller. If that was what they were he had one himself. Joan, however, said no. In an authoritative tone she declared it to be a patent double-bladed hairpin which some women used to curl their hair after they had washed it. This brief excursion into lexicography served to add a further element of confusion to a scene which Matthew had already found sufficiently puzzling. There were questions which must be asked, he felt, to straighten everything out. And he must think of them immediately for Ehrendorf, plucking dejectedly at his wet trousers, was already getting to his feet. He must ask about the pool of water where Ehrendorf had been sitting, and about his departure and Joan and the Singapore Grip. But his eyes chose this critical moment to become a blur through which nothing could be seen, though his mind remained as keen as ever and he heard a voice which reminded him of his own saying a cheery good night to some people who were leaving. Some moments went by while he sat quietly waiting for clear vision to be restored. When it had been, he found himself sitting opposite an empty chair beneath which was a little pool of water. Something else glistened on a rattan table not far away: it was a small handbag of white leather which Joan must have forgotten.

‘I must be quite seriously ill and undoubtedly I should call a doctor before it’s too late.’ But again he closed his eyes and, again, within a few moments, was obliged to open them, this time because he had heard a crunch of gravel and a creak of the wooden steps which led up to the house. The Major, perhaps, or Dupigny returning home, he surmised. They would certainly help him to make contact with a doctor. It was Joan, however, in excellent spirits.

‘It’s me,’ she cried gaily. ‘I forgot my handbag. Come for a walk outside. It’s lovely. The moon’s just rising or perhaps it’s the starlight. You can see as clear as day and it’s getting cool at last. Come on, stop day-dreaming. You’ll be telling me next that you want a “serious talk”. But I’ve had enough “serious talks” for one evening. Well, come on, let’s enjoy ourselves.’ With that she grasped his hand and pulled him up out of his chair, ignoring his protests and pleas for help. Soon, with his head spinning, he was blundering down the steps beside her. Once in the fresh air, however, he felt a little better and decided that perhaps he was not so ill after all. Joan was right. It was cooler and the heavens were so bright that two shadows accompanied them across the lawn, past the gymnastic equipment, unused since the death of old Mr Webb, the vertical bars, and the high bar like a gibbet with a background of stars, into the denser shadows of the little grove of flowering trees and shrubs which lay between the Mayfair’s grounds and the Blacketts’ and then on through the dark corridor of pili-nut trees.

‘I want to show you something,’ Joan said as Matthew shied away from entering this funnel of darkness. Despite his dizziness he was aware that voracious animals might be lurking there and he did not intend to dispense entirely with prudent behaviour. Joan tugged him through the darkness, however, and presently they reached the open space of the lawn with the swimming pool and the house behind it rising white and clear in the moonlight. But instead of heading towards the house, Joan now drew him aside into the blue-black shadow of a ‘flame of the forest’ tree. There, to his surprise, she slipped into his arms and he felt her lips on his. His arms tightened round her convulsively and the blackness around them became drenched in magenta with the pounding of his blood. He felt her teeth begin to nibble at his lips; her hand found its way inside his shirt and began to travel over his damp skin, leaving a trail of awakened desire wherever it went. He released her to unbutton the top of her cotton dress. But as he did so she slipped away from him laughing, deeper into the shadows.

‘Matthew, are you in love with me?’ she asked.

‘Well, yes,’ he muttered, blundering in the direction from which the voice had come. But he found the shadows were empty and again he heard her laughter from where he had just been a moment before; and her voice asked mockingly: ‘Are you in love with me, Matthew?’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’

‘First you must answer. Are you in love with me?’

‘Yes, oh, that is …’

‘How much?’

‘Well …’ Matthew found a handkerchief and mopped his steaming brow. He felt somewhat unwell again.

‘Here I am, over by the swimming pool. Come and look at the moon’s reflection. That water is so still tonight!’

Matthew left the shadow of the trees and went to where she was sitting on her heels at the edge of the pool gazing down at the bright, motionless disc of the moon stamped like a yellow wax seal on the surface of the water. He attempted to put his arm round her but immediately she drew away, saying that there was something he must do first. She told him but he did not understand what it was.

‘What?’

‘Yes, you must jump into the water with your clothes on.’

‘I must do what?’ cried Matthew in astonishment. ‘Are you joking?’

‘No, you must jump in with your clothes on’

‘But really …’

‘No, that’s what I want you to do.’

Matthew said crossly: ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m going to bed now so … goodnight!’

‘Wait Matthew, wait!’ pleaded Joan. ‘Wait!’

Matthew paused. The edge of the pool was rounded and raised a little, like the rim of a saucer. Joan was now walking along it, arms outstretched like a tight-rope walker. As he watched she allowed herself to lose her balance and fall backwards into the moon’s reflection. There was a great splash and a slapping of water against the sides of the pool. Joan, smiling, lay back against a pillow of water and did one, two, three strokes of a neat overarm backstroke which caused her to surge out into the pool with a bow-wave swirling back on each side of her head. Matthew shook his head in bewilderment, scattering drops of perspiration, as if he himself had just stepped out of the pool. But really, this was the limit! He was invaded by a feeling of unreality. Moreover, the moon and the stars had begun plunging and zooming in the heavens. Any moment now he would collapse if he did not reach his bed and lie down. He plodded back over the moonlit lawn which tilted now this way, now that, like the deck of a ship in a storm, and on through the dark corridor of trees, pausing only to vomit into the shrubbery.

‘Wait, I’m coming too,’ came Joan’s distant voice. ‘I still haven’t got my handbag.’

But when he had wearily clambered up the steps of the May-fair Building and once more dragged open the creaking door of the verandah he found another surprise waiting for him. So slippery had reality become to his grasp that, for a moment, it seemed to him quite likely that the young woman who came forward, smiling, to greet him, was Joan who had somehow managed to rearrange time and space to her convenience and arrive back there before he did. It was not Joan, however, but the Eurasian girl with dark-red hair whom he had met earlier in the evening at The Great World, Miss Vera Chiang. At the very sight of her the palm of one of his hands began to tingle deliciously.

‘You are most surprised, I expect, to see me here, are you not? (You remember, yes, Vera Chiang.) Well let me put things straight for you, Matthew, and then you won’t be any longer looking in such a condition. You see, I still have in this house the bedroom which your dear, dear father gave to me when I was “on my uppers”. Your father, Matthew, was such a good, kind and generous man. You can be pretty sure I’ll always say one for him for the help he gave me … And so here I still have some of my precious bits and pieces, such things like my books (because I always have my “nose in a book”) and “snaps” of your dear father with no clothes on and of my family (all now having “kicked the bucket” I’m sorry to say) who were very important in Russia and obliging to leave in Revolution and so this evening, when we were split up by those rowdy sailors, I remembered I must look at them again, which I haven’t for some time and I heard you come in and I thought Matthew will also enjoy looking at my “snaps” … There! And, are you all right, dear? You look rather “hot about the collar”, I must say.’

Matthew, who was very hot indeed and distinctly unwell despite the pleasant surprise of finding Miss Chiang again so soon, had been obliged to steady himself against a table as the bungalow gave a lurch. After a moment, however, he felt sufficiently recovered to say: ‘As a matter of fact, I’m not feeling very well. I seem to having an attack of the Singapore Grip, or whatever it’s called.’

It was Miss Chiang’s turn to look surprised at this information and she even went a little pink about the cheeks, which made her, thought Matthew, look prettier than ever. For a moment she appeared nonplussed, though. What a pretty girl she is, to be sure, he mused, and what a pity that everything seems so unreal.

‘Matthew!’ called a voice from outside and in no time there came the by now familiar sound of the door being opened. Joan stopped short when she saw that Matthew was talking to Miss Chiang. She raised her eyebrows and looked far from pleased.

‘D’you know Miss Chiang?’ Matthew managed to say. ‘I think she said she was going to show me some photographs …’ he hesitated and eyed Miss Chiang’s face carefully: it had occurred to him that she might already have shown him the photographs, in which case what he had said would sound rather odd. Miss Chiang agreed, however, that that was what she had been about to do and Matthew gave an inner sigh of relief.

‘Gracious, Miss Blackett, you’re all wet! Let me get you a towel.’

‘No, thank you, Vera, I shall have dried out in no time. Besides, I find it pleasantly cool.’ And Joan slipped into a cane-chair not very far from where Ehrendorf had sat and dripped only a few minutes earlier. As she did so, despite his fever (or perhaps even because of it), Matthew could not help noticing how the thin cotton of her dress stuck to her body, outlining its delicious shape and revealing a number of things about it which he had had no opportunity to notice before. In the meantime, Joan, who still had not quite swallowed her irritation at finding Vera and Matthew together, was asking superciliously whether Vera was pleased with the dress which she was wearing. Was it not lucky for Vera, she asked turning to Matthew, seeing that the poor girl was penniless when she came to work for Mr Webb, that her cast-off clothing had proved to be a perfect fit?

‘Oh, it was terribly lucky for me!’ exclaimed Vera, clapping her hands. ‘I had never worn such lovely clothes before, Matthew. Except, of course, when I was a baby in Russia, I suppose, because my mother’s family was of noble blood, princesses at least … and my father was a wealthy tea-merchant, definitely “well thought of” in the highest circles, so I understand …’

‘In our family,’ said Joan, ‘it has always been our custom to give our cast-off clothes away … My mother always gives hers to the amah of to the “boys” for their wives or to someone like that. It seems such a shame to allow good material to go to waste, especially when it turns out to be a perfect fit like the clothing I gave to Vera …’

‘Perhaps not quite a perfect fit, Miss Blackett,’ said Vera sweetly. ‘I sometimes think that when I wear this dress it is a little tight across the chest. What is your opinion, Matthew? If I were a little more flat-chested would it not be an even more perfect fit? But then, even as a young girl, my breasts were rather well-developed. I find I sometimes breathe easier when I open these two top buttons. So!’

And Matthew, though the bungalow had for some time been rocking so badly that it was astonishing the vase of flowers could remain standing on the table, nevertheless snatched a moment to cast a hungry eye on Miss Chiang’s exquisite chest, a good deal of which had now come to light as she fanned it, murmuring: ‘Ouf! That’s better.’

‘A funny thing,’ said Joan in honeyed tones, ‘but my mother says the servants to whom she donates her old clothes are very often not in the least grateful! Would you believe it, Matthew? D’you think it is because they aren’t of pure European stock or is it simply a lack of education and good breeding?’

‘Well, good gracious!’ exclaimed Matthew, gripping the arms of his chair for dear life as he was hurled this way and that. ‘I should hardly …’

While Joan had been talking she had been struggling with one hand behind her back, frowning with concentration. Now her expression relaxed and she, too, unbuttoned the front of her dress, though with difficulty because it was wet; having done so she began tugging away a shapeless piece of white cloth, saying: ‘I must say, there’s nothing more disagreeable than a damp bra.’

‘Look, I really must go to bed now,’ said Matthew, jumping to his feet. ‘I feel dreadfully ill …’ The floor had now begun to tilt in different directions at the same time and it was a miracle that he could retain his balance at all.

‘But Matthew,’ exclaimed Vera, jumping to her feet. ‘You must come and look at the “snaps” I have in my room.’ And taking his arm she began to lead him from the verandah. But Joan, too, had got to her feet and taking him by the other arm started to drag him in the other direction, saying: ‘First Matthew is coming to see something I want to show him outside in the compound … and as it may take a little time, Vera, I think it would be best if you don’t bother to wait up.’

‘In that case it is better that I take him first to my room,’ cried Vera tugging Matthew rather hard in that direction.

How long this embarrassing scene would have continued it was hard to say, but at this moment a torrent of blackness swept over Matthew’s storm-battered brain and he sank diplomatically to the floor between the two young women.

‘It’s no joke being attractive to women, I must say,’ he thought as he lost consciousness.

27

When Matthew came to he found himself lying on the floor exactly where he had fallen. The Major and Dupigny were kneeling beside him. The two young women had disappeared (Joan to fetch Dr Brownley, Vera to crack ice for a cold compress). The Major and Dupigny, seeing that he was conscious again, helped him to his feet and then supported him to his bedroom, one on each side.

‘Ça a l’air assez grave,’ remarked Dupigny to his friend over Matthew’s swaying head. ‘C’est la grippe de Singapour si je ne me trompe pas.’

Matthew, however, felt a little better after a few moments and declared himself able to peel off his own clothes which were as sodden as if he had indeed plunged into the swimming pool. He dried his quaking body with a towel and then crawled under his mosquito net. A pair of wet footprints glistened on the floor where he had been standing. The Major handed him an aspirin and a glass of water; when he had swallowed them he lay back in the darkness, watching giddily as the room began to revolve slowly like a roundabout. Gradually, the bed, too, began to spin, dipping and rising, faster and faster. He had to cling on tightly, as to the neck of a wooden horse, or be hurled out against the walls by centrifugal force. Although the night was still, great gales of hot air poured in through the open shutters and tugged at the mosquito net. Time passed. The light was switched on. Now faces were swirling round the bed: he recognized the Major’s anxious features and Dupigny’s wrinkled face, pickled in cynicism like a walnut in vinegar, and Dr Brownley chuckling like a fiend, but then Matthew closed his eyes, knowing he must be delirious, and fell into a troubled sleep. In his dreams he was back in Geneva … the pale, sorrowful ghost of Matsuoka appeared and whispered: ‘Matthew, why do you persecute me like this? You know I am only trying to do what is best.’ And then he smiled and his face turned into that of a cobra. Outside in the darkness some small creature uttered a cry as it was killed by a snake.

Now, a few miles away at Katong, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham also lay dreaming of the Japanese. Brooke-Popham slept on his back, legs apart, arms away from his body, wrists and palms turned upwards, an attitude of total surrender to sleep, perhaps, or that of a man felled suddenly in the boxing-ring by an unexpected blow. His honest, friendly face looked older now that sleep had allowed the muscles of his jaw to sag, older than his age indeed for he was not much over sixty; but this long Sunday had been spent in interminable conferences and he was exhausted. Moreover, these conferences still had not resolved the problem which faced him. Should he order troops across the border into Siam in order to forestall a possible Japanese landing there?

Malaya, very roughly, was carrot-shaped with Singapore at its tip and Siam, more roughly still, providing its plume of green leaves. The obvious place to defend Malaya’s northern border with Siam was where the green plume grew out of the carrot, at the thinnest part, for there you would need least troops to do the job. Alas, there was a snag to this, because the border, although it obligingly started at the thinnest part on the western side of the carrot, instead of heading straight to the east to snip off the leaves neatly where they should be snipped off, wandered south for some distance into the pink flesh of the carrot itself at its fattest. Nor was the problem simply that Malaya’s real border, by wandering hither and yon through the bulging part of the peninsula, was a good deal longer than it need have been: the fact was that there were only two roads south into Malaya through the jungle and mountains and both of them began some fifty miles across the border into Siam, one at a place called Singora, the other at Patani.

So what was he going to do? (Or, to put it another way, what should he have already done?) Should he order the 11th Division to invade Siam and occupy Singora before the Japanese could land? There was hardly still time to do so, anyway. Ah, but he did not know (although he might suspect) that the Japanese were even thinking of landing there. This was a terrible dilemma for a man who was not as young as he used to be. After all, one rash act might plunge Britain into war with Siam and her patron, Japan, when by abstaining it might be avoided. This was the fix which Brooke-Popham had found himself in. During the past week the Chiefs of Staff in London had authorized him to go ahead and launch his forestalling operation (which had been named Matador) into Siam if he thought a Japanese landing there was imminent. Well!

Nor was it only a question of occupying Singora. There was the other road, too, the one which began at Patani and ran south-west towards the Malayan border. To hold this road would also mean pushing into Siam, though it should not be necessary to occupy Patani itself. This time the idea was to seize the only defensible position on the road, at a place called ‘the Ledge’, where it entered the mountains near the border. The Ledge was vital, Brooke-Popham was in no doubt about that. If you did not stop an attacking force at the Ledge there was no knowing where you would stop it. Most likely you would have to take to your heels and try to halt it again some miles down the road at Kroh. But once the enemy (still hypothetical, thank goodness!) had reached Kroh they would have crossed Malaya’s mountainous spine and reached the civilized and vulnerable western coast with its open rice fields and rubber plantations. And once there you would no longer have the jungle to inhibit their flanking operations. Somehow you would have to bottle them up, for if they once got loose in all that open country, well, it would be better not to think of what might happen … ! He and General Percival, whose responsibilities began on the Malayan side of the border, had agreed therefore, that they should have a battalion waiting at Kroh, ready to sprint up the road into Siam and grab the Ledge: they might have some Siamese border guards to deal with on the way but that should not worry them. So everything was ready as far as the Ledge was concerned, more or less, though the troops could have done with more training, raw recruits as many of them were. Brooke-Popham knew, even in his sleep, what had to be done. What he did not know, and could not decide, was when, if ever, to do it. After all, by acting too soon he could start an international incident! And if he did that he would really look a fool. Because, frankly, that is the sort of thing that people remember about a chap, not all the hard work he has got through in his career.

Brooke-Popham lay pole-axed on his bed. Occasionally he gibbered a little or champed his moustache briefly with his lower lip. Although he was asleep his mind still bore the traces of the day’s dilemma, printed on it like crisp footprints in the snow: the problems that faced him went on rehearsing themselves even when his conscious mind had been ordered to stand easy. If only he had known earlier what the Japanese were doing! (Mind you, he still did not know for sure, for absolute sure.) For the past week the sky over the South China Sea had been thickly carpeted with cloud, making air reconnaissance impossible. But then, late on Saturday morning, one of the RAF Hudsons, on the point of turning for home, had come across a break in the cloud over the sea some distance to the south of the tip of Indo-China. And there below had been first one Japanese convoy with three troopships, then another with twenty, both with an escort of warships. What he and his staff had found difficult to determine was where they were going. The first convoy was heading north-west into the Gulf of Siam, the second due west: therefore, the most likely explanation was that they were innocently rounding the tip of Indo-China from Saigon on their way to Bangkok. So more Hudsons and a Catalina flying-boat had been sent out to look for them where they should have been, in the Gulf of Siam. The Catalina had failed to return: nothing more had been heard of it. As for the Hudsons, that providential break in the cloud had sealed itself up again and they had seen no more, merely that endless fluffy carpet, white on top, grey below, stretching from one horizon to the other. Somewhere beneath that carpet were two sinister little herds of Japanese troopships, but where? They had cudgelled their brains all Saturday night to find the answer.

What was to be done? Last night he would have given a great deal to be able to ask General Percival and Admiral Phillips what they thought. But Percival was in Kuala Lumpur visiting 111 Corps and Tom Phillips was in Manila. Moreover, with one’s own staff one must be careful to display confidence and an air of decision; the important thing is to give the impression that you know what you are doing, even when in doubt: any commander will tell you that. But what a burden it had been that he had had to carry by himself! He remembered a cartoon he had seen in some magazine, making fun of the excesses of German discipline. A platoon of storm-troopers were marching over a cliff while their officer was trying to decide what order to give next. An NCO was pleading with him: ‘Say something, even if it’s only goodbye!’ Brooke-Popham had chuckled heartily when he had seen that cartoon. But in the last few terrible hours it had returned to haunt him and he had been unable to get it out of his head. Say something, even if it’s only goodbye!

The hours of Sunday had ticked away slowly until, at long last, at about the time when the first pahits of the evening were being sipped all around him in peaceful, unsuspecting Singapore, the Hudsons, skimming the wave tops, had found the troopships again. All his worst fears had been immediately realized: the troopships were on course for Singora and a mere hundred miles away. Others were steaming down the coast in the same direction. A Hudson had been fired on by a destroyer.

Brooke-Popham champed his moustache again and uttered a long, low sigh, aware that in a few minutes he would have to drag himself back to full consciousness to find out what was happening. The sighting of those troopships approaching Singora had meant another round of exhausting conferences. Percival had come back on the train from KL, displaying surprise that he had not begun ‘Matador’ and ordered the 11th Division into Siam yesterday when the troopships had first been sighted. But it was all very well for Percival, he did not have the wider responsibilities! Any fool could see that the political implications of ‘Matador’ could not be shrugged off lightly. Had he not just had a telegram from Crosby in Bangkok warning him against alienating the Siamese by violating their neutrality? As Commander-in-Chief Far East he was obliged to consider all sides of the matter.

While Matthew and the others had been at The Great World more exhausting conferences were taking place, and yet more after supper. By now Tom Phillips had returned from Manila. Percival asserted that ‘Matador’ should be abandoned as General Heath and 11th Division would no longer have time to reach Singora before the Japanese landed. Well, in a way this had come as something of a relief: it meant that, whatever else might happen, he would not involve his country in a diplomatic incident. Still, ‘Matador’ had been a good idea strategically and he was reluctant to abandon it altogether. It might still come in useful, though in what way, precisely, he could not quite say. So, before retiring to rest in the early hours, he had ordered that word should be sent to Heath to keep the ‘Matador’ troops standing by. He had noticed one or two raised eyebrows at this (what was the point, his staff might have been wondering, in keeping troops standing by for an operation which it was too late to execute?) and a ghostly voice had whispered in his ear: ‘Say something, even if it’s only goodbye!’

And yet … and yet, perhaps he should have ignored Percival and ordered ‘Matador’ to go ahead and hang the consequences. Which was the greater risk, to start a military engagement at a disadvantage or to risk making an enemy of a potential ally? And what had happened to the poor devils in that Catalina which had gone out yesterday? A typewriter was clattering faintly two, three rooms away. Soon it would be dawn and he would have more decisions to wrestle with; he must sleep, if only for a while. Perhaps they were even now floating somewhere in the warm, sluggish waters of the Gulf of Siam, hoping against hope for rescue. He felt old and tired: he, too, was floating in warm, sluggish waters, hopelessly, hopelessly. Life had been better when he was still Governor of Kenya: he had not felt so worn out there; the drier climate had suited him better than this humid heat. Well, he had retired once and now here he was back again in harness. Ah, but life had been best of all in France in 1914, the good fellowship and the sunlight and the smell of the country. What fun he had had with their liaison officer, Prince Murat, when the mayor of Saponay was making a fuss about Royal Flying Corps men stealing fruit from orchards: Murat had told the poor mayor that he would have him court-martialled and shot! That had quietened him down. And then there was another time at some little country restaurant near Fère-en-Tardenbois with Murat and Baring, yes, eating outside in the sunlight surrounded by roses and pear trees … how golden the Montrachet had sparkled in their glasses! And the time Hillaire Belloc had visited them from England and the boxer, Carpentier, a colleague in the French naval air force; he remembered how Trenchard (he was a General in those days) had thrown his cigar into a carppond at some place, perhaps a monastery, where they were having lunch, and a carp had eaten it and for a while seemed to have poisoned itself but afterwards to everyone’s delight staged a recovery. But above all there came to him now, as he lay troubled and sweating on his bed at Katong, the smell of cider echoing back over quarter of a century from that long, sunlit autumn of 1914, and the memory of Avros and Blériots and Farmans as they came grumbling through the translucent evening, one by one, towards the stubble of the aerodrome. Now the first ground-mist was beginning to form while the shadows reached out across the field and the Mess bell sang its clear note into the still air, calling them all to supper. Brooke-Popham sighed again in the darkness. Outside the window the breeze gently tossed the palms of Katong, making them creak and rustle. Beside him the menacing shadow of the telephone crouched like a toad in the gloom.

General Percival, too, had stretched out to snatch a little rest. And he also slept with his mouth open, snoring slightly from time to time. Were those his teeth in a glass by his bedside? No, his teeth, though they protruded, were perfectly sound: it was just a glass of water in case he should wake during the night and feel thirsty. Beside it glimmered the luminous dial of his watch. What time is it? Half past two, perhaps. It is difficult to make sense of those glowing, trembling dots and bars in the darkness. He was dreaming, partly of the defence of Malaya, partly of the Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas. Someone was whispering to the Governor that he, Percival, was not senior enough to take command in Malaya. Who is this sinister whisperer dripping poison into the Governor’s ear? Percival can see the man’s hands, knotted and heavily veined, emerging from the sleeves of a uniform, but the face remains in shadow. It must be someone who had known him when he was out here before in Singapore, in 1937, on General Dobbie’s staff … General Dobbie, there was a man for you! Over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and with the quiet confidence of a man who has the gift of Faith. You had only to look into those steady blue eyes and to witness that calm, informal manner to know that Dobbie would support you through thick and thin. And yet the whispering continued: that face in the shadows was telling the Governor that Percival would be a nuisance, that he did not know how to handle civilians. But this was not true! He did know how to deal with civilians. It is just that one must be careful with them. With civilians it is all a question of morale, of what goes on in their minds. He had seen that in Ireland as a youngster. And civilians get things wrong! They take fright, like one of those herds of antelope dashing this way and that on the African plain. And no army on earth can save them once they start this blind dashing about. A snore back-fired and almost woke him, causing his sleep to stall like a cold engine, but somehow he managed to keep it going, and presently the rhythm picked up again and he slept on, breathing deeply.

At his bungalow opposite the Mayfair the Major, reclining in a cane chair in his pyjamas, had managed to doze off too, and was dreaming of Ireland twenty years ago and of a woman who might have been his. He woke up and cleared his throat despondently. How sad it all was! But no doubt everything had been for the best. He dozed again. Perhaps in sleep the past could be rearranged and things turn out better.

On one of the upper floors of Government House Sir Shenton Thomas slept uneasily, his handsome face unstirring, however, on the pillow. His difficulties were not near the surface of his sleeping mind but he was dimly aware of them, nevertheless, fluttering and darting shadows like sparrows in a leafy thicket. He got on well with the Asiatics, so it was not that … They liked and respected him. No, of all his preoccupations the most disturbing was that in these troubled times unless he remained alert he might not be able to prevent the dignity of his office from being eroded. Duff Cooper and the Military watched the powers he held as Governor the way greedy schoolboys might watch a pie cooling on the window-sill. He did not mind for himself, he was not a selfish man, but for the Colonial Service and for his successors. And for the natives, too, lest they should be abused. Beside him the telephone dozed peacefully in its cradle. In a few minutes it would awaken and begin to shriek.

Not everyone was asleep, however. In the Operations Room at Sime Road a considerable amount of excitement was developing. When Sinclair had come on duty (at one a.m., not midnight as he had told Monty) he had found a discussion taking place between the GSO2 and the Brigadier General Staff as to whether the code-word ‘Black-Out’ should be sent out. The BGS, however, had declared that this was the Governor’s responsibility. Not long afterwards the ‘green line’ telephone had suddenly started to ring. Sinclair, beside himself with excitement, had watched the RAF officer on duty pick it up. It was the aerodrome at Kota Bahru on the north-east coast near the Siamese border. Suspicious shipping had been detected standing off the coast. Pulford, the Air Officer Commanding, had been summoned. GHQ Far East had been contacted and asked to identify these ships because it looked as if they could only be … Sinclair shuddered with the effort of maintaining an impassive appearance as he worked rapidly to assist the GSO2 in the preparation of the Situation Report. He was going to be present at the beginning of war in the Far East, he was certain of it!

Nor was General Gordon Bennett, the commander of the Australian Imperial Force in Malaya, asleep. As a matter of fact, he was not even in Singapore but hundreds of miles away in Rangoon. He had been obliged to stop there on his way to Malaya from Egypt where he had been visiting the Australian troops in the Middle East. Now, while waiting for an aircraft to convey him to Singapore, he was spending the night at the splendid old Strand Hotel beside the Rangoon River. Instead of sleeping, however, he was sitting in the dark beside the open window of his room, gazing out surreptitiously into the sweltering night towards the window of another room and holding his breath with excitement.

On account of the heat the window of this room, too, stood open and a light was burning there despite the lateness of the hour. Thanks to the angle of the building Gordon Bennett could see into it across the intervening courtyard. And what could he see in that room but four men who he was pretty certain were Japanese busy poring over maps which he was convinced were maps of Malaya. Japanese spies! What else could they be? He had already telephoned Military Headquarters in Rangoon and told them, guardedly at first, that he had uncovered a nest of spies. Then, since they did not appear very interested, he had had to make it explicit. Jap spies hard at it, spinning their toils practically under his nose! But although the blockheads in charge had told him, soothingly, that they would see about it, he had been watching for hours and they had still done nothing. Meanwhile, he had been staring so long and so fixedly at that nest of spies that he was finding it difficult to keep his eyes focused on them. He ground his teeth in frustration. Why didn’t the police come? This heat was quite unbearable. Every now and then he was obliged to close his aching eyes. So the night wore on, the spies scheming, Gordon Bennett grinding his teeth.

Back in Singapore the Major had opened his eyes to find himself still in his cane chair with a burned-out cigar between his fingers. He must have dozed off for a moment. What time could it be? Presently he would go across the road to see whether Matthew’s fever was any worse. He yawned. His limbs were stiff. He wondered whether all the claret he had left in Berry Brothers’ cellars was surviving the Blitz. How wasteful and senseless was the destruction of war! He had hoped to have finished with all that in 1918. And the twins! Where were they under the bombing? Safely evacuated now, thank heaven. He had had a letter from Northumberland a couple of days ago. Wearing sensible shoes and lisle stockings, each with her brood of unruly, unnerving children (his god-children). It was just as well, too, since (husbands away at the war) they had taken to dancing with Free Frenchmen. He must write tomorrow, no later, and tell them not to flirt with the farmhands, not that he had much confidence that they would do as they were told. ‘There’ll be a lot to sort out, one way or another, when this one is over.’ More to the point, was his Château Margaux and Château Laffitte surviving? It should be almost ready to drink by the time he got home. He had not meant to stay out in the East so long. And Sarah, where was she under the bombs? Married somewhere, no doubt. Oh well, perhaps it was all for the best in the long run. And Sarah? He dozed again. How sad it all was! Sarah … The Major dozed despondently.

Not far away, in bedrooms looking out over the placid gleaming skin of the swimming pool Monty and Joan lay on their beds and slept. Joan was visited in her dreams by Matthew, but a slim, handsome, graceful, authoritative Matthew with a thin moustache and without spectacles; together, wealthy, powerful and admired for their good looks, they reigned in contentment over the Straits. As for Monty,’ in his dreams you might expect to find naked women jostling each other for the best position under the eye of his subconsciousness; surprisingly this was not the case. Instead, a young boy with a pure, loving face came to see him. He had known this boy at school, though he had never spoken to him. He had left school suddenly when his father had died and had never returned. Now, though, he at last came back, filling Monty’s sleeping mind with a piercing tenderness; no doubt everyone carries such an image of purity and love without limit, hidden perhaps by the dross of tainted circumstances and the limits of living from one day to the next, but still capable of ringing through one’s dreams like the chime of a bell on a frosty morning. It was this chime which the conscious Monty, fated to toil in sexual salt-mines throughout his waking hours, now faintly heard from an unexpected direction.

Who else? Walter and his wife sleep side by side, rather touchingly holding hands: it is too hot to get any closer than that. Walter’s bristles lie smooth and sleek against his spine: he is at peace. He sleeps a calm and confident sleep, very black, and when he wakes he will not remember having had any dreams. Only deep down in the foundations of his sleep are there one or two disturbing shapes which slip or slither (the problem of palm-oil for instance crouches blackly in the blackness and watches him with blazing eyes) but nothing that would seriously disturb that towering, restful edifice. But it’s all very well for Walter to sleep peacefully. He is used to the Straits, has spent most of his life here. It is not so easy for the soldiers scattered about the island in clammy tents or snoring barracks. The Indian troops sleep best, the heat is nothing to them, but what about the British and even the Australians? The whirrings and pipings that issue from the jungle close at hand are enough to make a bloke’s hair stand on end, particularly if he has only been in the tropics for a week, and in the army itself for not much longer.

Somewhere in the dark waters far to the north, a certain Private Kikuchi (a nephew of Bugler Kikuchi who, as every Japanese schoolboy knows, died heroically for the Emperor not long ago in the war in China) waits tensely in the troopship bringing him closer to Kota Bahru and the north-eastern shores of Malaya. He has just finished reading a pamphlet called ‘Read This Alone — And the War Can Be Won’. This work, issued to himself and his comrades on board, explains in simple terms how in the Far East a hundred million Asians have been tyrannized by a mere three hundred thousand whites sucking their blood to maintain themselves in luxury, the natives in misery. Private Kikuchi has read with drumming pulse how it is the Emperor’s will that the races of the East shall combine under Japan’s leadership for peace and independence from white oppression. In addition he has read about numerous other matters: about how to avoid sea-sickness in various ways, by keeping a high morale, by practising the Respiration Method, by use of bicarbonate and Jintan pills, and by willpower. He has learned how to cherish his weapons, what to eat, to treat natives with consideration but caution, remembering that they all suffer from venereal diseases, how to mount machine-guns in the bow of the landing-craft and to plunge without hesitation into the water when ordered. If he discovers a dangerous snake he knows he must kill it and then swallow its liver raw as there is no better tonic for strengthening the body. He knows that when it is very hot he must bind a cloth round his forehead beneath his steel helmet to prevent sweat from running into his eyes. He knows, too, that in the jungle he should avoid highly coloured, strongly scented or very sweet fruit. He must avoid fruit that are unusually beautiful in shape or with beautifully coloured leaves. Nor must he eat mangoes at the same time as drinking goat’s milk or spirits. These and a thousand other useful things he has learned, but now, just for a moment, the motion of the ship gives him a queer sensation. And yet… No! Fixing his mind on Uncle Kikuchi’s glorious example he wills himself to feel normal for the Emperor.

Now a young Malay fisherman, dozing on the poles and planks of his fishing trap out in the sound off Pulau Ubin, suddenly wakes and hears a faint but steadily increasing drone from the north-east. He has heard aeroplanes before but this time they are coming in a great number. What an ominous noise they make when they fly all together like a flock of birds! But aeroplanes are the business of the white men: their comings and goings are nothing to him. His job is merely to catch fish: he wonders whether the fish in the swirling black water can hear this dreadful pulsing as it swells overhead.

When the bombs fall, as they will in a few moments, it will not be on the soldiers in their tents or barracks, who might in some measure be prepared to consider them as part of their duties, nor even on black-dreaming Walter whose tremendous commercial struggles over the past decade have at least played some tiny part in building up the pressures whose sudden bursting-out is to be symbolized by a few tons of high explosive released over a sleeping city, but on Chinatown where a few luckless families or individuals, floated this way by fate across the South China Sea, sucked in by the vortex of British capital invested in Malaya, are now to be eclipsed.

The starlight glints on the silver wings of the Japanese bombers, slipping through the clear skies like fish through a sluice-gate. They make their way in over Changi Point towards the neatly arranged beads and necklaces of streetlights, which agitated and recently awakened authorities are at last and in vain trying to have extinguished. In a dark space between two necklaces of light lies a tenement divided into tiny cubicles, each of which contains a number of huddled figures sleeping on the floor. Many of the cubicles possess neither window nor water supply (it will take high explosive, in the end, to loosen the grip of tuberculosis and malaria on them). In one cubicle, not much bigger than a large wardrobe, an elderly Chinese wharf-coolie lies awake beside a window covered with wirenetting. Beside him, close to his head, is the shrine for the worship of his ancestors with bunches of red and white candles strung together by their wicks. It was here beside him that his wife died and sometimes, in the early hours, she returns to be with him for a little while. But tonight she has not come and so, presently, he slips out of his cubicle and down the stairs, stepping over sleeping forms, to visit the privy outside. As he returns, stepping into the looming shadow of the tenement, there is a white flash and the darkness drains like a liquid out of everything he can see. The building seems to hang over him for a moment and then slowly dissolves, engulfing him. Later, when official estimates are made of this first raid on Singapore (sixty-one killed, one hundred and thirty-three injured), there will be no mention of this old man for the simple reason that he, in common with so many others, has left no trace of ever having existed either in this part of the world or in any other.