A Woman of Bangkok (4 page)

I catch one glimpse of the Channel. It is transparently blue like the sky, but the wash has been unevenly applied in streaks and puddles as in a novice’s watercolour. God can get away with his inexpertness, however, because His palette happens to be light itself. And can that narrow white band down there, like a bar of cloud, be really and truly the white cliffs of Dover? Or, at any rate, perfidious Albion? The nervous man suddenly jerks forward, blotting out the view.
Perfidy
, by Reginald E. Joyce. My pain rolls over me again and the rest of the world is washed out.

It is worst of all when I reach Geneva. I am the only passenger for the Bangkok plane. That is not due from Stockholm until four. Three hours to kill. ‘You don’t want to go downtown, of course,’ the ground host says hopefully. I look at him in doubt. I answer ‘No.’ He directs me to the café. Somehow I manage to go wrong. I am stopped by a gendarme or a soldier, I don’t know which. He has a gun and speaks fierce French. It is the first time anyone has addressed me in anything but English since I left school. I look and feel blank. The ground host perceives my predicament and bustles up, rescuing me from imminent arrest. I go on the right way moping. Why, oh why, must I always be taking wrong turnings? I seem to have a genius for doing so. This whole journey is probably down a sidetrack: I’m off the main road, heading straight for disaster …

I sit for a time in the café but I am too shy to change any money and anyway I don’t feel like eating and in the end I move to another table outside. It is a glorious afternoon. The sun is bright and almost unbearably hot. If it’s like this in Switzerland, what’s it going to be like in Siam? I feel butterflies in my stomach: I really am on my way to the Far East: the incredible is coming to pass.

Across the field mountains loom blearily through the heat-haze. Three light planes are giving joyrides to a holiday throng; they flutter along the runway like garish butterflies, sail up into the air, turn and dwindle into the blue. Somehow I never happen to see them land. All around me is laughter and talk in several languages. I ought to be lifted out of myself. Free at last. Rising like a soap bubble, detached from the clay-pipe, perfected, lighter than air, reflecting the multi-hued world. Adam awaking to his most wondrous dawn, a pain in his side but Eve there, naked, doing her hair. Stout Cortez up a gumtree. A young man in love, hearing the Oxford symphony for the first time …

Suddenly I am transfixed by a shout from the public address system. ‘Attention, please, attention. Will Mr. Reginald Joyce please contact the TWA ground hostess immediately.’ I sit perspiring, and the public address system, anticipating this reaction on my part, reiterates its request. No doubt about it then. The possibility of the paths of two Reginald Joyces crossing at Geneva at three o’clock on one unespecial Sunday afternoon seems remote. I get up, feeling hundreds of eyes upon me.

She is like a Dresden shepherdess in up-to-date uniform. Her shining dark eyes look up at me amusedly. She is only returning the ticket and passport which the Swissair man took off me. There was absolutely nothing to fear. She says brightly ‘Have a good trip,’ and turns on ultra-smart heels. Of course it’s all make-believe. Professional sweetness, like the doctor telling you you’ll pull through when he knows damn well you’ve had it. The smile was applied like lipstick. But I let it fool me like lipstick too. My heart smiled back at her. And not purely from relief.

The DC-6 is a grand sight as she comes shouldering her way down through the hyaline levels of blue and streams silver along the runway with a last valedictory roar from her four engines. Coming up to us she is as majestic as a great ship, but less leisurely and patient; each nimble manœuvre is accompanied by a short bad-tempered roar. Her flock of passengers, straggling towards the café, look as undishevelled as if they had spent the afternoon in a comfortable lounge. Which is of course just what they have done, up there, all but three miles above the Earth.

I am given a window seat and I am glad. I look out on a vast stretch of wing and two engines. There is no hope for me today: to me they are the breasts of a technological angel. I am no longer merely anthropomorphic in my outlook; somebody must have made up a word that fits me: gynaemorphic, would that be it? Blameless though I am physically, more than a quarter of a century old, and not one notch on my pistol-butt yet, I belong to the cult of—Siva, is it?—I am the sort of savage who worships a goddess smothered in breasts, or a boulder with a hole bored through it, the work of some prehistoric Henry Moore. Somehow I have got to get all this prurience out of my system, it is laying waste my powers. I stare out of the window. The vast wing is shivering behind the fury of those twin tits. You can almost see the air being torn apart and hurled away by the glittering blades. The people watching, the buildings, the mountains beyond, are all dwarfed and abnormal, like objects in an impressionist painting, smaller, neater, brighter, more crowded than in life. Suddenly the canvas is snatched sideways: we’ve begun to move.

The next hour is magnificent. A few miles from the airfield we begin to circle up and up through layers of cloud. At first there are placid valleys below, valleys where doubtless dark blue gentians lurk, and cows wear bells, and skirts are starched, and men, not yet coerced by letter box and telephone, yodel to each other across the lush green meadows and the tumbled scree-falls. But soon the ragged underedges of clouds drag slowly by below us: something happens to the light, it becomes uncertain, as if there were a loose connection somewhere; one instant it is golden, turning the clouds to heaps of dazzling pearl, the next it is unaccountably dimmed; I feel apprehensive, and my fear is communicated to the machine, which gives a sudden shudder.

A few minutes later we emerge into sunlight of an ineffable brightness. The loudspeaker sounds again. ‘We are now flying at eighteen thousand five hundred feet. From the port side of the plane you can obtain a good view of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe. The summit is about three miles away.’ It is indeed a glorious sight. My first view of eternal snows. I feel a hand on my arm and look up in surprise. ‘Excuse please.’ The man in the next seat, who I think is Japanese, is standing up and leans across me. He holds to his heavy-lidded eye a camera no bigger than a matchbox. He gets Mont Blanc, two shots, then puts the camera away in the breast-pocket of his neat western-style suit. He smiles at me pleasantly.

‘Would you like something to drink?’ the hostess asks me.

‘Yes. I’d like a—Martini.’

With my dinner I have beer and Schnapps. With my coffee Dom. Thanks to a nervous wreck who travelled from London to Geneva this morning I am able to order them with the aplomb of a man of the world. I’m sure the hostess doesn’t realize she is serving one who until this moment was a strict teetotaller. And I feel I am acting like one of those soft-centred tough guys of the modern novels: they always get tight under emotional stress too.

That is to say, when they can’t get their own way with some woman.

At Rome I have a ham roll and two glasses of wine. I like the ham roll.

We reach Cairo at two in the morning. The waiters are dark portly men who have been surprised by our arrival and have had no time to change out of their nightshirts. But they
have
remembered to put their fezzes on. They serve bacon and eggs, as if we were in an all-night café on the Great North Road. When I go to the Gents, a furtive little man follows me in, I presume to make sure I don’t pocket the soap. As I stand at the trough he begins in a hesitant, utterly ineffectual way to brush me down. His expression when I jerk round is so scared, obsequious and pleading that it haunts me for hours. I’ve never seen anything like it on a human face before. Only on dogs. I feel I ought to have patted him on the shoulder and talked baby-talk to him to reassure him.

Dawn comes over the desert. Unable to sleep, I stare out of the window for hours. It is like flying over the surface of the moon, but that surface is hot, not cold, as scientists allege. The Indian Ocean when we reach it is an endless indigo lake on which tiny bobbles of cottonwool cloud float like white petals on a pond at home. This hop is interminable; my head buzzes from lack of sleep, my stomach is deranged by bacon and eggs in the small hours and I have begun to ache all over with weariness. Yet it would be a sin to shut one’s eyes on such colour, indeed on any part of God’s world which one hasn’t seen before and may never see again, and I force my eyelids to remain open, sore though they are.

Slowly the telescoped hours drag by and it is teatime when we land at Karachi. The ground hostess there is something new in ground hostesses and the sight of her revives me somewhat. She is clad in white pyjamas and a crimson scarf which hangs in a loop in front, passes through epaulettes and streams backwards from her shoulders in two four-foot-long pennons. She has rich olive-blue hair and proud Indian curves to her features but she has none of that poise a gullible westerner credits all oriental women with, she seems in fact almost in an hysterical state and very officious, but her beauty exonerates her from anything and men do her bidding with alacrity.

Dumped in the café for the usual half-hour I call for beer. It is English and pretty well undrinkable. I begin to wonder whether I want to go in seriously for alcoholism.

Suddenly as I am pouring more of the stuff into my glass, the bottle is snatched from my hand. I look up startled. Above the white pyjamas and the lucky horseshoe of crimson scarf the Indian features are frowning imperiously.

‘Why do you drink this beer? It is flat. Order the waiter bring you another bottle.’And she rushes away, the sash-ends floating behind her.

Meekly I do as I am told—(why didn’t I realize?) The offending bottle is removed on a tray, exhibited to the manager, replaced. This time when I splash the beer into my glass there is a minor flood. I feel I ought to apologize to someone for making such a mess but the manager is involved in a violent quarrel with two of the waiters, I am all alone at my table, the other passengers are morosely engrossed in their orangeades and teas and the hostess has disappeared. I bury my nose in the froth and decide English beer is probably not so bad after all.

When we amble across the field to the plane again there she is at the foot of the ladder saying ‘goodbye’ to any of the passengers that will look at her. I approach her jauntily, feeling an old hand at this boarding of planes. Her smile seems extra warm for me.

‘Are all the girls in India as pretty as you are?’ my tongue says, and I stumble aghast to hear it act so fresh.

But instead of being offended by my tongue’s rudeness she is amused. She laughs and says, ‘I’m not Indian. I’m Burmese. I come from Rangoon.’

‘I must make a note of that address—Rangoon, Burma,’ I make my tongue say and this time the wit, if any, is my own, consciously invented. And to my amazement she seems to be pleased with this flippancy too and when I give her my silly salute, damn me if she doesn’t make the same silly gesture back. I ascend the ladder like an angel in Jacob’s dream. Is it just the drinks? Or am I already beginning to feel emancipated, free of the past and England, with all their crushing associations of Sheila, the ten commandments, the taste of barbital slowly chewed and washed down with pints of lemonade, the years and years of dismal drudgery in Islington, after the three mad years of broken bones and adulation on the speedways? It seems almost like treason to the image of Sheila to feel happy
already
… I try to compose my thoughts in the accustomed vault but all the way to Rangoon they keep breaking out, arrogantly curling Indian (no, Burmese) features obliterating the clean-cut delicate English ones, an olive-blue cloud passing across the sunset gold …

Rangoon, which we reach in the small hours, is a drab place, not at all what you would expect the cradle of such a houri to be. There are no buxom cushions, no hanging brocades, no shapely brass pots, no exotic perfumes, no Negro slave-girls (and why in blazes should there be?) naked to the waist, idly waving huge fans. There are only sleepy, irritable waiters, unpleasant coffee, a plain hostess in a white suit, and lost frogs flopping disconsolately across the restaurant floor …

At seven on a sparkling morning we finally achieve Bangkok. The run-in is over a flat watery landscape. I am too apprehensive to notice anything about the airfield. Have I filled in all my forms correctly? Will I be met, or will I have to flounder around on my own, like a lost frog? Have I done the right thing? God, O God, is it going to turn out all right from the start? … Then the world beginning to flow by with accelerated speed, and rising around us like a swelling wave; the plane beginning to wobble and bump a bit; the last throttling back of the engines until there is only a rushing nerve-taut sound; waiting for the bump; the bump; the bounce; then the softer bump and the rumbling race along the runway; that last furious roar in your ears; the slowing up; the clumsy turn; the gentle swaying tour back to the jumble of roofs and flags … It has all happened before but then it was a game; this time it is final, when you go down the steps this time it will be into a new world, new dangers, a whole brand-new dangerous life …

Two

One day about a week later I am captured by a ghoulish idea. That evening I sit down in room number seven of the South Wind hotel and begin to write on my best notepaper as follows:

September 20

My darling Sheila, I’ve been stricken with a ghoul’s idea. Every week I’m going to write a letter to you. But of course I’m not going to post it. I’m going to bury it away in a file—what you might well call a Dead Letter File. And into these letters I’m going to put all that I would have put into them if you and I were still—well, as if we were still as close as we once were. I’m going to put my whole soul into them … all that once before I tried to give you, the good and the bad: but you rejected it.

Well, I don’t blame you for being so choosy. As a matter of fact I’ve just been rejected again, by three of my fellow countrymen, after only just one week in their company. To be more precise, Mr. Samjohn, Regional Managing Director of Broderick Peers, Mr. Drummond, accountant of ditto ditto (Bangkok office), and Mr. Frost, the last new recruit prior to myself, have gently eased me out of their abode, the House, where all European personnel of Broderick Peers are supposed to be put up, into a small hotel at the other end of town, where I am writing this. But let me tell the story from the beginning, so that you can understand what has happened and also (for you have enough brains for anything)
why
it has happened (you, dear heart, who actually are never going to hear one word about it).