A Woman of Bangkok (3 page)

Miserably I pick up the bags and follow them across the pavement, up the steps and into the shuffling, bustling vault of the terminal. Seen from the rear Sheila looks even less Sheila-like than from other angles. The scales of emotion have dropped from my eyes now she’s got her back to me. The hair that used to fall over her shoulders in a Danae shower of gold is now pruned and attenuated in a fashionable horse-tail that makes her look like a pinhead with delicate ears. Her figure which used to be so lithe and Atlanta-like moves heavily now on earth-bound soles; the goddess has gone out of her; the Word is made flesh. Here is the lumpy oaken chest that Andy forced open and rifled of its treasures. She is now no more desirable than Lena, and a lot less pleasant company, I shouldn’t wonder.

The first desk has on a sign over it the words ‘ Swissair, Zürich.’ The clerk behind it is one of those scrubbed-looking, instantaneously polite people who always make me feel shabby and gruff. ‘Good morning, sir. Where are you for?’

‘Bangkok. Via Geneva.’

‘Ah, yes, sir. You want desk nine—at the far end.’

Sheila wouldn’t have looked at him, of course, far less stopped in hesitancy before him, looking waif-like and pathetic. She would have guessed in a flash that Swissair had two planes, one to Zürich, one to Geneva; her mind would not automatically have jumped to the conclusion, as mine, a pessimist’s, did, that there had been a slip-up somewhere, that I was going to be posted to the wrong address and miss my connection and get into all sorts of complicated situations where the inadequacies of my French would be made only too plain.

She isn’t taking any notice of me anyway, in fact she has her back to me. Lena is talking to her fast and low like an old intimate friend. The clannishness of these women! How many times have they met? About three times perhaps, on the occasions when Sheila consented to visit my lodgings for tea. Clearly they regard me as common property; I am owned in part by my ex-sweetheart, in part by my ex-landlady. Neither has in her heart that depth of feeling, overmastering, exclusive, destructive of peace and contentment, which I felt for one of them, which I still feel for her. In this climactic moment when I pass out of their lives for years, perhaps forever, they want to discuss her clothes. ‘Don’t you think her dress is lovely?’ Dear Lord and Father of mankind. I have wasted my passion on her.

I am passed through the mill in a few minutes. ‘Your ticket, sir? Thank you, sir … How many pieces of baggage? Only two, sir? We’ll just weigh them … Fifty-two pounds … Will you step on the scales yourself, sir? …’ Weighed like prime beef … ‘Thank you, sir. One hundred and seventy. Please pay five shillings over there. Yes, that’s all, sir.’ Another body disposed of. With an epitaph in pounds avoirdupois.

I pay my five shillings and wander back to the two women. They have stopped talking and standing as it almost seems shoulder to shoulder await my coming. Lena has a half-smile on her face but there is none on Sheila’s. She looks utterly different. Can a change of hairstyle do all that? Her features seem heavier, fuller, more—cow-like. The word appals me. Before it was all sylphs, nymphs, dryads, goddesses—a Daphnis and Chloe vocabulary. Her eyes have changed too: before like summer skies, blue and sparkling; now, ‘quivering within the wave’s intenser blue’, something beyond my understanding.

I realize that the onus of speaking first lies with me but out of the multitude of things which could be said, what is not either likely to lead to embarrassment or else sound trivial? Yet silence is an embarrassment also. It happens that we all start to speak at the same moment but hearing Lena’s voice too, Sheila and I both thankfully drop whatever it was we were embarked on: the floor is hers.

‘Have you arranged everything, Mr. Joyce?’

‘Yes, I—I think so.’

‘What happens next?’

Anything could happen—that is the hell of it. ‘The bus leaves in ten minutes.’ I see a shadow flick across Sheila’s face. ‘That’s not long,’ I reassure her. ‘Time to embrace. Or time to refrain from embracing.’ I feel base the moment I have spoken.

She gives me a hurt look and then says in a low voice, ‘Time to listen to one whole movement from the Oxford symphony, Reggie.’ Our favourite records, once.

‘Time for a cup of tea more like,’ says Lena and her voice is the voice of Juliet’s nurse croaking froggily, earthily, into the nightingale’s duet.

Well, the nurse is a great comfort to the audience and no doubt she was to Juliet too and we move off towards the white clatter of crockery and the hiss of vast silver urns with the tension on our nerves relaxed a little. Somehow I have come between the two women and I am walking (I suddenly realize) as a man symbolically should, erect and tall between mother and wife. But to round the group off I should have a little girl, my daughter, riding on my shoulder or carried in my arms with her own wound round my neck. The whole conception is complete in a flash—my next poem—and the fact that Lena is not my mother or anyone’s mother but one of Britain’s two million surplus women, the fact that Sheila is not my wife but my brother’s wife, carrying, not my seed, but if anyone’s, Andy’s in her—

The truth hits me like ball-and-mace on my unhelmeted brow. Of course, you fool, of course. That yellowish tinge under the make-up. That warmer, intenser luminosity in the once ice-brilliant eyes. The apparent bagginess of the costume

I stop and clutch her arm. Her face whips round and up at me, dread in her eyes.

‘Reggie, Reggie, please—’

‘Sheila, you’re going to have a baby.’

‘Well, what if I am?’ There is anger, not dread, in her voice now. ‘Let go of my arm, Reggie. You don’t want to make a scene
here
, do you?’

O God in Heaven. ‘Why did you have to come here this morning?’ I cry. And ruin my dream, or what was left of it?

‘Now, now, Mr. Joyce. I’m sure that really you’re very glad that Mrs. Joyce has come to see you off. I’m sure I would be anyway if I was in your boots. She’s feeling very poorly these days as you’d expect but all the same she’s come all the way up from Bantingham to see you, bumping and bouncing around in that bus, and she hasn’t even had a cup of tea this morning yet, and I’m sure you ought to be grateful to her, not—’

‘I don’t want him to be grateful,’ says Sheila angrily. ‘If only he could be just normal.’ She turns to me and her cheekbones have reddened. ‘But you seem to be more impossible than ever, damn you.’

‘Sheila!’ Surely she can’t mean that. I was never impossible. I was, if anything, too gentle with her, too malleable in her hands, too much court sycophant, coming when beckoned, leaving on the word of command …

‘I’ve told you before what he was like,’ she is saying to Lena. ‘The most spineless goddamned lover. If I snapped his head off he’d slink away all sorrowful and apologetic like a puppy that’s wetted the floor. Next day he’d be back again with some horrible poem about my right eyebrow or my left breast or something. How many poems did you write about me altogether, Reggie? Did you manage to cover all of me in the end? Do you still write poems about me?’

Laughing about me again. Just because of ‘Upon her Navel.’ Any mention of my poems always makes me feel red and resentful. I put my all into them; they are better than I am, by far; they are almost sacred writings. Sheila should be proud that she moved me to write some of my best but instead she is using them to jeer at me in front of Lena …

‘You seem to forget that I—I loved you, Sheila. I respected you.’

‘So did Andy. But he never wrote a poem in his life. He did what a lover should do—he made love to me.’

My anger blazes up. ‘And didn’t I, too? Before he ever came back from Kenya? Before you’d ever met him? Don’t forget our holiday in North Wales, Sheila. I haven’t forgotten it; I never shall. I wanted you as badly as Andy ever did, I’m sure. And what did you say to me?’ I imitate her female voice in the falsetto of my rage. ‘“No, Reggie, no. Don’t do anything we’ll regret—please.” Is that the truth or not?’

‘Of course it’s the truth.’ I start to speak again but she continues, ‘So you walked away and after a bit you came back looking all noble like Sir Galahad and no doubt with a new poem in your head and you said “Come on, we’d better be getting back down to Aber.”’

‘What did you expect me to do—rape you?’

Lena gasps. ‘Oh, Mr. Joyce—’

Sheila says, ‘Why not?’

Lena gasps again. I almost gasp myself. ‘Why not?’ I repeat uncertainly.

‘Yes, why not?’ She is speaking without anger now, expressing thoughts which are not thrown up by the instant’s emotion but which have been formulated in sessions of self-communion. ‘It’s a pity you don’t understand women, Reggie. You read all that poetry nonsense and you think it’s produced by the best and wisest men in the world but actually it’s all written by frustrates—shades of Byron and Lovelace and Donne!—who don’t know what they’re talking about. You’d do better to read one good textbook on sex. No girl wants to lose her virginity—that’s instinct—’

‘Really, really, Mrs. Joyce,’ cries Lena, looking nervously around to see if we are being overheard.

‘—but how can a young girl know what’s best for her? Maybe it would have done me good to be raped. Anyway you ought to have gone ahead, Reggie. I’d put myself in your power. But—you backed off.’

‘You mean, if I’d gone ahead—’

‘I don’t mean anything. I don’t know what I mean.’

‘But when Andy came, he didn’t—back off?’

‘I don’t want to talk about Andy. I want some coffee.’

We start to move towards the counter again but as we take the first steps the loudspeakers start to whirr and I know the moment has come. ‘Attention, please, ladies and gentlemen. The nine-forty bus is about to leave for London airport. Will passengers with tickets marked number five …’

‘Is your ticket number five?’ Lena asks me.

I nod. I hold out my hand to her. She struggles to take her glove off and I take her cold fingers with their arthritic joints and clasp them cordially. Her eyes suddenly fill with tears and I am astonished, grateful, jubilant, moved. It would be discourteous to make any comment. I prolong the clasp and then reluctantly break it and turn to Sheila.

‘Goodbye, Sheila.’ I hold out my hand to her.

For a moment I’m afraid she isn’t going to take it but then she does, holding her arm close to her body, not stretched out frankly like Lena’s. She doesn’t take off her glove and her fingers are limp in mine. I squeeze them. She doesn’t look at me.

‘I’m sorry if I upset you, Sheila.’ I want to say—oh hell, I want to say something noble. Something self-abnegatory and forgiving like ‘I hope you’ll be very happy with Andy, I hope the baby will be beautiful.’ But it is safer to stick to clichés. I say, ‘All the best.’ Then add, unable to resist the flourish, ‘Now and forever.’ I would like to kiss her. But I can’t—not across that belly, with Andy’s baby in it. I release her hand.

As I turn she touches my arm. ‘Be careful, Reggie. Come back in one piece. And watch out for these nigger women. White ones are bad enough, but black—! And you’re such a sucker where women are concerned.’

I want to tell her that the Siamese are not Negro, that I hate to hear her talk about ‘niggers’—that is Andy’s influence—that anyway I shall never look at another woman again. But the loudspeakers are repeating their message. ‘Attention, please, ladies and gentlemen. The nine-forty bus …’

Lena is wiping her eyes with her handkerchief. I give that foolish salute of mine and join the throng of persons moving towards the door. A sucker where women are concerned! Once again I almost hate the bitch. But there’s no time to refute the charge. And anyway what’s the use? with Andy’s brat—

My sight is so confused that I bump into someone heavily. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I say, but he keeps on muttering, being probably a bit upset himself about something or other …

Once when the track wasn’t big enough to hold me I hit the safety fence hard and flew somersaulting up, and as I tucked my head in for the crump I saw the bike do a cartwheel too, right into my stomach. And then I was lying on my side with the bike on top of me and not a gramme of air left in my body, but only pain. The faces of the ambulance men gathered and swam above me but they were hardly real, only that incredible pain in the guts was real. It took five minutes to wear off, and only then did I begin to become conscious of my other bruises. Half an hour later, with the stupid valour of my youth, I rode again, and got, as I recall, a second place and a cheer. Not to mention a couple of quid.

Now it is much the same: only the hurt exists. Everything else is unreal. Humming out along the Great West Road in an odd sort of bus with a high poop and a loose prop-shaft. Being questioned by officials standing surrealistically behind small desks like overgrown schoolboys. Sprawling for hours, it seems, in a luxurious armchair amongst expensive-looking, wrought-up fellow passengers. Riding a matter of eighty yards in another bus to the plane. It is a Convair: I notice that. Soon it’s my turn to ascend the wobbly stair. The two hostesses at the top bid me good morning with a bonhomie that must be spurious, for what can I mean to them, one passenger amongst forty, and all of us perfect strangers? A murrain on the bitches (whatever a murrain is).

The window seats are all taken. I find a place next to a plump dark windy man who plainly thinks his luck can’t hold much longer. His jumpiness irritates me. He clings to his briefcase as a frenzied mother to her dying child. He can’t do up his seat belt and goes into a panic. One air hostess leans across me and buckles him in like a mother securing her baby in his pram. Her bust comes too close to my cheek. I draw back in distaste, cross-eyed. God, how I loathe women.

Later the same girl asks me what I want to drink. I haven’t the faintest idea what to answer so I say ‘Water.’ The nervous wreck, a little less worried now we’re off the ground, chooses a Martini. Later, with his food, he has beer and Schnapps. With his coffee he has Dom. I have heard of them all before but never to my knowledge seen any of them but beer. And beer I have never tasted. I don’t want any lunch and suddenly, up here amongst the clouds, bound for the glorious East, water seems a dull beverage. It is damned awkward anyway feeding off a tray on your lap.