A Town Like Alice (16 page)

And I was so dumbfounded and confused that all I could find to say to her was, "I'll have another of those when you come back."

I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly. I went back in the taxi to my flat alone, and I remember that I stood for a long time at the window of my room watching the ornamented wall of the stables opposite and thinking of her fine new steamer going down the river past Gravesend and Tilbury, past Shoebury and the North Foreland, taking her away. And then I woke myself up and went and shifted her trunk and her suitcase to a corner of the box-room by themselves, and I stood for some time with her boots and skates in my hand, personal things of hers, wondering where they had better go. Finally I took them to my bedroom and put them in the bottom of my wardrobe, because I should never have forgiven myself if they had been stolen. She was just such a girl as one would have liked to have for a daughter, but we never had a daughter at all.

She travelled across half the world in her tramp steamer and she wrote to me from most of the ports she called at, from Marseilles and Naples, from Alexandria and Aden, from Colombo, from Rangoon, and from Penang. Wright was always very interested in her because he had known about her in Malaya, and I got into the habit of carrying her latest letter about with me and telling him about her voyage and how she was getting on. He knew the British Adviser to the Raja at Kota Bahru quite well, a Mr Wilson-Hays, and I got him to write out to Wilson-Hays by air mail telling him about Jean Paget and asking him to do what he could for her. He told me that that was rather necessary, because there was nowhere a lady could stay in Kota Bahru except with one of the British people who were living there. We got a very friendly letter back from Wilson-Hays saying that he was expecting her, and I was able to get a letter out to her by air mail to meet her at the Chartered Bank telling her what we had done.

She only stayed one night in Singapore, and took the morning plane to Kota Bahru; the Dakota wandered about all over Malaya calling at various places, and put her down upon the air-strip at Kota Bahru early in the afternoon. She got out of the Dakota wearing the same light grey coat and skirt in which she had left London, and Wilson-Hays was there himself to meet the aeroplane, with his wife.

I met Wilson-Hays at the United University Club a year later, when he was on leave. He was a tall, dark, quiet man with rather a long face. He said that she had been a little embarrassed to find that he had come to the airstrip to meet her personally; she did not seem to realize that she was quite a well-known person in that part of Malaya. Wilson-Hays knew all about her long before we wrote to him although, of course, he had heard nothing of her since the end of the war. He had sent word to Mat Amin when he got our letter to tell him that she was coming back to see them, and he had arranged to lend her his jeep with a driver to take her the hundred miles or so to Kuala Telang. I thought that very decent of him, and I told him so. He said that the prestige of the British was higher in the Kuala Telang district after the war was over than it was before, due solely to the presence of this girl and her party; he thought she'd earned the use of a jeep for a few days.

She stayed in the Residency two nights, and bought a few simple articles in the native shops. When she left in the jeep next morning she was wearing native clothes; she left her suitcase and most of her things with Mrs Wilson-Hays. She took with her only what a native woman of good class would take; she wore a faded old blue and white chequered sarong with a white coatee. She wore sandals as a concession to the softness of her feet, and she carried a plain tan Chinese type umbrella as a sunshade. She had done her hair up on top of her head in the native style with a large comb in the middle of it. She carried a small palm-leaf basket, but Mrs Wilson-Hays told her husband there was very little in it; she took a toothbrush but no toothpaste; she took a towel and a cake of antiseptic soap and a few drugs. She took one change of clothes, a new sarong and a flowered cotton top to match; she took three small Woolworth brooches and two rings as little presents for her friends, but she took no cosmetics. That was about all she had.

"I thought her very wise to go like that," said Wilson-Hays. "If she had gone dressed as an Englishwoman she'd have made them embarrassed. Some of the English residents were quite upset when they heard she'd gone off in native dress-old school tie, and letting down the side, and all that sort of thing. I must say, when I saw her go I thought it was rather a good thing to do." He paused. "After all, it's how she was dressed all through the war, and nobody talks about her letting down the side then."

It is a long day in a jeep from Kota Bahru to Kuala Telang; the roads are very poor, and there are four main rivers to be crossed which necessitate ferrying the jeep over in a boat, apart from a large number of fords. It took her fourteen hours to cover the hundred miles, and it was dark when they drove into Kuala Telang. There was a buzz of excitement as the jeep drove through the shadowy village, and people came out of their houses doing up their sarongs; there was a full moon that night, so that there was light enough to see to drive. They stopped in front of the headman's house, and she got out of the jeep a little wearily, and went to him, and put her hands up in the praying gesture, and said in Malay, "I have come back, Mat Amin, lest you should think the white mems have forgotten all about you when their need is past."

He said, "We have thought and talked about you ever since you went." And then there were people thronging about them, and she saw Fatimah approaching with a baby in her arms and a toddler hanging on to her sarong, and she pushed through the crowd and took her by the hand, and said, "It is too long since we met." And there was Raihana, and Safirah binti Yacob, and Safirah binti Taib, and little Ibrahim who squinted, now grown into a young man, and his brother Samat, and old Zubeidah, and Meriam, and many others, some of whom she did not know, because the men had come back from the labour gangs soon after she left Malaya, and there were a number of new faces.

Fatimah was married to a young man called Derahman bin Ismail, and she brought him forward and presented him to the white mem; Jean bowed before him and wished that she had brought a shawl to pull over her face, as would have been polite when being introduced to a strange man. She put her hand up to her face, and said, "Excuse me that I have no veil." He bowed to her and said, "It is no matter," and Fatimah broke in and said, "He knows and everybody knows that the white mems never veiled their faces when they lived with us, because different people have different ways. Oh Djeen, we are so happy that you have come back."

She made arrangements with Mat Amin for the accommodation of the driver, and then went with Fatimah to her husband's house. They asked if she had eaten, and she said no, and they made her a supper of rice and blachan, the highly-spiced paste of ripe prawns and fish that the Malays preserve in an upended concrete drain pipe. And presently, tired out, she made a pillow of her palm-leaf bag and lay down on a mat as she had done a thousand times before, and loosened the sarong around her waist, and slept. It would not be entirely accurate to say that she slept well upon the floor after sleeping in a bed for three years. She woke many times throughout the night, and listened to the noises of the night, and watched the moonlight creep around the house, and she was happy.

She had a talk with Fatimah and Meriam and old Zubeidah next morning, squatting round the cooking-pots behind the house out of the way of the men. "Every day that I have been away I have thought of this place," she said; it was not precisely true, but near enough. "I have thought of you all living and working as I lived and worked. I was working in England, in an office at books in the way that women have to work in my country, because as you know, I am a poor woman and I have had to work all my life to earn my living till I find a husband who suits me, and I am very particular." The women laughed, and old Zubeidah said, "It is very strange that a woman should earn her living in that way."

Meriam said, "There is a woman of our people working in the bank at Kuala Rakit. I saw her through the window. She was doing something with her fingers on a machine, and it went click-click-click."

Jean nodded. "That is how I earn my living in my country, working a machine like that to make a printed letter for the Tuan. But recently my uncle died; he lived far away from me and I have only met him once, but he had no other relatives and I inherited his money, so that now I need not work unless I want to." A murmur of appreciation went around the women. Two or three more had drifted up to enlarge the circle. "And now, having money of my own for the first time in my life, I thought more of you here in Kuala Telang than ever before, and of your kindness to us when we lived with you as prisoners. And it came to me that I should give a thank-offering to this place, and that this thank-offering should be a present from a woman to the women of Kuala Telang, nothing to do with the men."

There was a pleased and excited little buzz amongst the women who surrounded her. Old Zubeidah said, "It is true, the men get everything." One or two of the women looked shocked at this heresy.

"I have thought many times," Jean said, "that there should be a well in this place, so that you should not have to fetch fresh water from the spring morning and evening, but you could walk out of your houses only fifty paces at the most and there would be a well of fresh water with a bucket that you could go to and draw water at any time of the day whenever you had the need of cool, fresh water." There was a little buzz of appreciation again. "There would be smooth stones around the well where you could sit and talk while the young men work the bucket for you. And close beside the well, I would have an atap house for washing clothes with long slabs of smooth stone or concrete arranged so that you could face each other while you wash, and talk, but all surrounded by an atap wall so that the men will not be able to see." The buzz rose to an excited clamour. "This is what I want to do, as a thank-offering. I will engage a gang of well-diggers, and they shall dig the well, and I will pay masons for the stonework round the top, and I will pay carpenters to build the washing-house. But for the arrangement inside the house I shall want two or three women of experience to advise me how it should be devised, for the height of the slabs, for concrete pools or channels for the water, and so on. This is the gift of a woman for women, and in this thing the men shall do what women say."

There was a long clamour of discussion. Some of the women were doubtful if the men would ever allow such a thing, and some were doubtful whether it was not impious to wish to alter the arrangements that had satisfied their mothers and their grandmothers before them. But most were avid for the innovation if it could be achieved; once they were used to the idea they savoured it and turned it over, examining it in every detail and discussing where the well should be and where the washhouse, and where the concrete pools should be, and where the drain. At the end of a couple of hours they had accepted the idea whole-heartedly, and Jean was satisfied that it would fill a real need, and that there was nothing that they would have preferred her to give.

That evening she sat opposite Mat Amin on the small veranda before his house, as she had sat so many times before when matters that concerned the women had to be discussed. She sipped her coffee. "I have come to talk with you," she said, "because I want to give a thank-offering to this place, that people may remember when the white women came here, and you were kind to them."

He said, "The wife has been talking of nothing else all day, with other women. They say you want to make a well."

Jean said, "That is true. This is a thank-offering from all the English mems to Kuala Telang, but because we are women it is fitting that it should be a present for the women of this place. When we lived here it was a great labour, morning and evening, to fetch water from the spring and I was sorry for your women when I thought of them, in England, fetching water all that way. That is why I want my thank-offering to be a well in the middle of the village."

He said, "The spring was good enough for their mothers and their grandmothers before them. They will get ideas above their station in life if they have a well."

She said patiently, "They will have more energy to serve you faithfully and kindly if they have this well, Mat Amin. Do you remember Raihana binti Ismail who lost her baby when she was three months' pregnant, carrying this water?" He was shocked that she should speak of such a thing, but English mems would speak of anything. "She was ill for a year after that, and I don't think she was any good to her husband ever again. If the women had had this well I want to give you as a thank-offering, that accident would not have happened."

He said, "God disposes of the lives of women as well as those of men."

She smiled gently, "Do I have to remind you, Mat Amin, that it is written, 'Men's souls are naturally inclined to covetousness; but if ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong them, God is well acquainted with what ye do.' "

He laughed and slapped his thigh. "You said that to me many times when you lived here, whenever you wanted anything, but I have not heard it since."

"It would be kind to let the women have their well," she said.

He replied, still laughing, "I say this to you, Si-Jean; that when women want a thing as badly as they want this well that you have promised them, they usually get it. But this is a matter which concerns the village as a whole, and I must consult my brothers."

The men sat in conference next morning, squatting on their heels in the shade of the atap market house. Presently they sent for Jean and she squatted down with them a little to one side as is fitting for a woman, and they asked her where the well was to be put, and where the atap washhouse. She said that everything was in their hands, but it would be convenient for the women if it was on the patch of ground in front of Chai San's shop, with the atap washhouse west of it and pointing towards Ahmed's house. They all got up then and went to see the ground and discuss it from all angles, and all the women of the village stood around and watched their lords making this important decision, and Djeen talking with them almost as if she was an equal.