A Woman of Bangkok (14 page)

She displays no interest in me or in any other of the few men present. She seems to have a great number of lively things to tell the class. She stands amongst them like teacher. Some hang on her words, looking up to her. Others withhold their attention. The Trout for instance still has eyes for me alone and is sighing at such a rate that (if Ellen the maid was right when she used to say that every sigh you heave turns a spoonful of your blood to water) she’ll soon be suffering from dropsy. Daisy also seems disinclined to pay court to the newcomer, indeed she makes a bid to divert some of the scholars’ attention to herself, but she fails, and pouts, and sits tapping out on her desk with long red nails the rhythm of the rhumba the band is now murdering.

‘Your change, sir.’

‘Bring me another bottle.’

He eels away through the chairbacks.

She has her back to me now and is sitting sideways at one desk talking to the girls in the row behind. The conversation seems less absorbing than it was but it is still continuous and very one-sided. She eases her green woollen cardigan off her bare shoulders and gives her great weight of hair an expert toss or two from the nape of her neck, throwing the waves into good order. The play of muscles and shoulder-blades is exquisite. I wish to hell she’d look my way. But all I can see of her face is an occasional glimpse of one ear, small and well-designed, with a large gold hoop twinkling below its lobe, and the lean white plane of her profile stretched from the cheekbone’s boss to the soft clean line of the jaw.

The boy brings more beer and pours it from a great height into my glass.

That woman is beautiful. She is not only physically superb, she has personality too. It radiates from her, so that even when she has her back to you, as now, she makes all the other girls despite their finery look dowdy and tame. They are sparrows: she is—a kingfisher. Then why—why doesn’t she fish for kings? That last time I was here she could have had the pick of the men in the place. Several of the Yanks were not bad-looking, all were obviously well-heeled, two were almost fighting for her. Yet she picked that drunken middle-aged sot with his congested face, his pickled unfocussable eyes, his pearshaped nose, red with purple scratches on it, his lungeing gestures, his sudden shouts and incoherent mumbles, his wet shirt coming out of his trousers at the back …

I look at her and she is incomprehensible to me.

She is the most restless girl in the place. She is constantly getting up to go to the bar where she talks animatedly to a morose-looking man in a white coat, or to the dais where she talks animatedly to the bandleader, or to the Ladies where possibly she talks animatedly to herself. In between whiles she returns to her desk and talks animatedly to her fellow students. Once she dances with the Trout and I wonder if their conversation, animated as it is, is about me. Two or three times she wanders past the chairs where other men are sitting—it is a flagrant attempt to attract attention—but she never so much as glances my way. But I happen to be strategically placed to watch her and my eyes seldom leave her.

Why is she almost pointedly cutting me? Refusing me a chance to beckon her?

But I’m forgetting. I’ve resolved to leave the women alone tonight. Sheila, my true love, is sick. And I have A Friend in Korat anyway.

All the same it is galling to be ignored.

Damn it, I’m a fairly presentable young man. At twenty-seven I’m in the prime of life. My blond hair stands up thick and strong from my skull. My face is considered handsome in its square-browed, Nordic mode. The cinder-rash on my cheek is a bit of a blemish, but it is an honourable scar: one can’t slide for several yards on one’s face without retaining some evidence of the experiment. As for my figure, I know that is good: not so big in the frame as Andy’s, but even more athletic. My shoulders are, for my height, Herculean, thanks to my every-early-morning tussle with chest-expanders. My wrists and arms after three years of speedway racing are like a boxer’s. And in spite of my soft life these last three years, doling out pats of butter, there’s not an ounce of superfluous fat on me anywhere. Girls used to mill about me for my autograph, sighing like the Trout; my photo, signed by myself, was more in demand than any other Leopard rider’s …

I’m sure I’m a better proposition than any whisky-soddened pear-nosed—

She looked at me then. I raised my hand. But a second too late.

The Trout gets the wires crossed and stands up and comes and poses before me, sighing like a furnace.

‘You’ll bust your bra if you don’t look out.’

‘Please?’

‘Go away.’

Rather curt for Ivanhoe.

The sighs stop as abruptly as light when you throw a switch. For a moment her expression is hideous. Then she swaggers back to her place, humming loudly, and says something to the Mongol.

The latter is smoking. She is sitting sideways at her desk again, but this time the other way round, facing me. She puts the cigarette to her mouth, drags on it hard and long and holds the smoke, then removes the cigarette and expels the smoke in a slow blue cloud. Very deliberately she rests her arm on the desk behind hers and taps the ash from the cigarette’s tip with a slim, red-taloned finger. And all the time her eyes, narrowed, dark, unfathomable, are fixed on me. At last she is sizing me up, and like Windmill six weeks ago finding me wanting.

Shall I beckon to her now? What have I to lose? Would it be disloyalty to Sheila? Now Sheila’s Andy’s trouble and strife. If she’s sick it’s his headache, not mine. I can’t be faithful to a ghost forever. And Ratom—Venus? She’s just a fight of love. In somebody else’s arms this goddamned minute. By being faithful to her I would just make myself look ludicrous.

She’s turned her head away. Following the direction of her gaze I perceive a troupe of Americans entering. Obviously the lords of creation in their own opinions. They don’t deliberately show off, the sense of personal pomp and circumstance is inborn in them, each feels that he is as good as any other three men. Choosing the right group of armchairs is a matter of life and death with them. They ponder and debate and make decisions and revoke them. In a few minutes she will be sitting with them, for with them ostentatiously is the power and the money. I’ve got to act at once if I’m really—

I gulp down more beer, pause undecidedly, my stomach taut around its churning contents, as on the top stair at that Korat hotel. When I move it is not as a result of a conscious decision to move. Abruptly I am lifted to my feet. To sit down again, as I want to do, would look silly.

On trembling legs I approach her. ‘Excuse me—’

Seeing me coming she has deliberately turned away her head. As I address her she turns back with a very small smile for me.

‘You want dance?’

I shake my head. I can’t dance. ‘I want you to—to talk to me.’

‘Talk wiss you? You must pay me money.’

‘How much?’

‘Twenty-five tic.’

‘Twenty-five tics! For how long?’

‘One hour.’

‘Just one hour?’ I can sleep with Venus for less. It is exorbitant. My astonishment is born of parsimoniousness and she sees this and her small smile scoffs at me. I flush and say ‘OK’ hurriedly. I’ve got to talk to the bitch now. Make her respect me.

‘OK?’ Her smile is a little more cordial. ‘OK, you giff me money now, zen I come and sit wiss you.’

I fumble in the breast-pocket of my shirt, standing there before her blushing, a schoolboy in front of thirty staring schoolgirls. I find a few notes and begin fitting them together, one ten, one five. I have plenty of ones, but it would be undignified to offer them to her, like paying for a five-guinea box at the theatre with a five-pound note and the rest in coppers. Suddenly I thrust the whole lot back in my shirt and fish for my wallet which is in my trousers. The girls titter.

‘Maybe you no have?’ she says, and she laughs in real amusement, a rather delightful tee-hee sort of laugh. ‘I sink boy not have twenty-five tic must not come Bolero. Here very high girl, must—’

‘Here.’ I’ve got my wallet out and opened it and withdrawn a wad of notes—hundreds. I peel off one and thrust it into her hand. She takes it without any sign of diffidence, there in full view of the whole place. Without enthusiasm either. ‘OK. Go back your chair. Soon I come sit wiss you.’

‘Why not now?’

‘Eh?’ Her eyes widen as if in anger. ‘Must give zis money to manager, darling. Buy ticket. Zen I sit wiss you one hour.’ So she isn’t going to cheat me. ‘Go back you chair, darling.’ She drops her cigarette on the floor, only half-finished, and puts her heel on it.

I give one look at her, then at the ranks of grinning tarts before whom I have been made to look small. Ten bob just to talk to a floozie for one hour. I feel I have been cheated. I lumber back to my chair, empty my glass, look around for the boy. How many today? Three on the train and God knows how many since. Well, might as well be hanged for a gallon as a pint.

‘Boy. Boy! Beer—
ick kort.’
The service is dreadful here. Or do they just despise me—as they must despise all their clientele? Suckers dragged in by their testicles to be fleeced by brewers and harlots?

It is ten minutes before she comes to me. In the interval she succeeds in establishing contact with the newcomers. I sit fuming: she is not only insulting me, she is a cheat. In my rage I sink half a bottle almost without thinking about it.

But at last she comes, and drags back the chair on the far side of the table and seats herself in it. She makes no apology for her tardiness in arriving and shows no affability.

I lift my wrist and pointedly study my watch. ‘Nine-ten,’ I call: I’m going to be hoarse by the end of my hour unless we can contrive to get closer together. ‘That means I’ve got you till ten-ten.’

As I say it I realize it’s hardly the most tactful way of opening the conversation, but I have noticed before that alcohol inspires me to give expression to the bitter thoughts in my mind which sober I would keep to myself. It doesn’t seem to worry her much; she glances indifferently at the tiny gold watch on her own wrist and then lets her hands fall into her lap again with a jingle of bracelets.

How does one talk to a whore, I mean in any other circumstances but when one is sitting on the edge of her bed? ‘What is your name?’ I try first.

‘Why you say zat?’

‘Because I want to know what to call you.’

‘Call me honey. All American call girl honey.’

‘But I’m not American. I’m English.’

‘You Ing-liss?’ At last there is a spark of interest but it is a very dim fleeting one. ‘I sink you American boy.’

‘Why did you think that?’

‘I not know.’ She shrugs those splendid bare shoulders. ‘I just sink.’

‘Which d’you like best—Americans or Englishmen?’

She shrugs again. ‘I like any boy who good to me. Sometime he American, sometime he Ing-liss, sometime he Dutss, sometime he Flenss. Many good boy come Bangkok.’ She yawns without subterfuge, then leans forward with her elbows on her knees. She says wheedlingly: ‘You buy d’ink for me, darling?’

More expense. And am I getting anywhere? ‘If you come and sit a bit nearer.’ I don’t know whether she understands or not. Fearful of antagonizing her further I say quickly, ‘What d’you want?’

‘I call boy. I want peppermint.’

She begins to get up but I shout, ‘Hey, where d’you think you’re going now?’

‘Go fetss boy.’

‘Sit down. I’ll call him.’ I do.

Obediently she has sat down again, but still far away and looking mutinous. She leans far back in the armchair with her body almost supine and her head at right angles to it, propped up by the back of the chair. There is a frown on her low rather narrow forehead and her rather small eyes have gone smaller and are black with resentment. Her lips, tomato-red, are pushed forwards like a sulky child’s.

What can I say? The more I annoy her the more I want to make friends with her. But I am always too abject with women. When they are cheerful, I am. When they’re moody, I can’t be happy. So I say ineptly, ‘You still haven’t told me your name, you know. What is it?’

She takes less notice of me than she would of a mosquito for the boy unseen by me has arrived and they are being voluble with each other in their own language.

I realize that I am getting nowhere with the girl—in fact I am apparently antagonizing her—but I get up and transfer myself to the seat nearest her on her right.

‘It seems you can’t hear me from over there,’ I say with a sort of weak fury.

She catches someone’s eye and waves and smiles and that smile is far more gorgeous than any she has bent on me. I peer round blearily to see what manner of man the lucky recipient is but I can see nothing but empty chairs. Perhaps I’m getting too drunk to see clearly. And certainly anger can blur the sight too.

‘Pray confine your attention to this table for the next fifty minutes.’

She looks at me in surprise. ‘What you say? I not unnerstan’.’ I think it can only be the words she missed, the tone must have been unmistakable: that of an exasperated dictator.

Yet when I’ve got her attention I don’t know what to do with it. I can only think of the same old question: ‘What did you say your name was?’

She clicks her tongue and sighs. At last she says unwillingly, ‘Lily.’

I laugh at that. No name on Earth could be more inappropriate, I feel. I laugh some more and say, ‘That’s only a nickname. And a wrong name at that. I mean your real name. What is your real Siamese name?’

Realizing that I’m going to keep nagging at the same point till dawn if need be she says indifferently, ‘Vilai.’

‘Vilai? Did you say Vilai or Virai?’

She doesn’t answer.

I tap her knee. Determination pays with this one. ‘Virai or Vilai?’

Suddenly her eyes narrow and blaze. ‘What you mean, Vilai or Vilai? Not differnunt, I sink. I sink you very silly boy,’ she adds as an afterthought. ‘You talk too much.’

‘My name is Reggie Joyce,’ I tell her. The information is hardly relevant at that moment but I am at that stage of intoxication where one has to compose one’s next contribution to the conversation several seconds in advance and allow no side-issues—least of all remarks from one’s interlocutor—to interfere with their enunciation.