A Woman of Bangkok (6 page)

‘But if he knocks—’ Frost’s voice.

‘That’s just the trouble. The bugger doesn’t knock.’

‘I will in future. I didn’t realize you were in your room.’ They hadn’t heard me coming down the stairs which are thickly carpeted and my interruption took them by surprise. Drummond jerked round and gave me a hard stare, then, without saying any more, walked out through the French window. He had a tennis racquet under his arm, and in a few minutes I heard the car start up.

Since then I’ve always knocked on his damned door even when I’ve known he’s not in residence, just to keep myself in practice.

He didn’t come back that evening and after dinner Frost and I succeeded in getting on to reasonably good terms with each other. Frost was still suffering from the night before, ‘Or else,’ he said ‘I could have shown you round a bit.’

‘What is there to see in Bangkok?’

‘What are you interested in?’

‘Well—I’m not quite sure. Historic buildings, I suppose and—and beauty spots.’

Frost’s lips curled. ‘I can show you a few
night
spots,’ he said, ‘but if it’s culture you want you’ll have to apply to old Windmill.’

‘Oh, I’m interested in a gay life too.’ As you know, Sheila, it’s an axiom in our family that only very dissipated, reprehensible people go to nightclubs and places like that and I was lying. I suppose there must have been a lack of conviction in my voice because Frost laughed shortly.

‘One of these nights I’ll take you to the Bolero. Every man that comes to Bangkok has to go there once. It’s part of one’s education. Like going to see the Emerald Buddha. Which, by the way, I never
have
seen.’

‘And what’s this—Bolero?’

‘Oh, a sort of nightclub. There’s some very famous girls there. Especially two of them. Known round the world, from London to Tokyo, and from Sydney to the North Pole I shouldn’t wonder. You’ll soon hear people talking about them. They call them the Leopards—the White Leopard and the Black One. It’s really something to see them at work.’

‘Why, what do they do?’

‘Oh—’ He was going to be explicit, but decided against it.

‘You’ll see for yourself one of these days.’

I thought it would only betray a naive curiosity if I pushed the matter any further. After a third whisky and soda (which I didn’t like very much) I got reminiscing about the speedway and I think Frost was impressed until I overdid it. We both went to bed early, before Drummond came back. It was a long time before I could get to sleep, partly because I’d slept so soundly during the day, but also because I was full of misgivings about my new life, and dreams of you, Sheila. One thing that puzzled me was why you had turned up at the air-terminal, and I was still sorting out about twenty possible motives when I dropped off.

The next few days were mostly taken up with getting to know my way around the office and Bangkok. I began my lessons in the Thai language with the young copy typist in the office, a half-Chinese, half-Thai youth named Somboon. He took the job on with a view to increasing his income and also his own knowledge of English, and without doubt he is going to learn my language from me much quicker than I learn his from him. He is a frightful dandy in his way—many Thai men seem to be—smells like a garden with his hair-oil, his lotions, his perfumes and his scented soaps. But he is smiling and pleasant, and when he invited me to go out with him the other night I gladly did so. He called for me in a
samlor
—that is, a tricycle taxi. In these vehicles you and your companion sit tightly wedged together in a seat shaped like an old-fashioned basket chair; your view ahead is obscured by the rear elevation of your driver who is most likely to be in a battered papier-mâché sola topee, a shirt flowing loose all round and patched pants; you will be fascinated by the play of muscles in his sinewy bare legs and by his traffic sense, which consists of ringing his bell wildly at any object animate or inanimate for half a mile ahead and utterly ignoring whatever may be overtaking him from behind. On this particular evening we wheezed down a long busy road between stagnant canals and magnificent overhanging trees and because there weren’t many potholes we didn’t do too many sudden and unsignalled swerves in front of speeding cars.

‘Where do you want to go?’ Somboon asked.

For a moment I thought of suggesting the Bolero, but then I told myself that that was to be Frost’s outing, and moreover I didn’t want to appear cheap (as I possibly might) in the eyes of this youth. So I said, ‘Anywhere you like. You know this town. I don’t.’

We went to a Chinese restaurant and then a movie and it was midnight when the
samlor
deposited me at the House again. Full of sweet-sour pork and rice and sharkfin soup, paying off the sweating
samlor-man
in Siamese notes under a blaze of tropical stars, I felt like a larger than life-size version of myself, the born traveller now, at home at the ends of the Earth. I walked into the lounge which was wide open to the night with all lights on and the ceiling fan swinging round and round. I decided I ought to have a drink before turning in. That surely was what a seasoned traveller, as much at home in Bangkok as anywhere else in the world, would do.

I was just examining the mass of bottles on the sideboard, trying to decide what to experiment with next, when the office car came up the drive and stopped under the porch. I heard Frost’s voice and the slamming of car doors and after a moment or two he came in—with a woman.

‘Hey, Joycey, you’ve got the right idea. Fix one for me. And Daisy too.’

He went to the radiogram and put on a few records. The girl flopped onto the sofa and after half a minute stretched out on it. I poured a whisky for Frost—I knew how much he liked by now—and took the glass and the soda water bottle to one of the armchairs. But he seemed to have forgotten about the drink as soon as the music began.

‘Come on, Daisy, let’s dance.’

‘I too hot.’

‘I know you’re hot. That’s why I brought you here. I’m hot myself.’ He pulled his shirt off and threw it away. ‘Take your shirt off, if you’re hot, sweetheart.’

She tossed her head in my direction. ‘Who he?’

‘That’s Joycey. Don’t mind him. He’s going to bed in a minute.’

‘Why he no give me drink?’

‘Yeah, why don’t you give the lady a drink, Joycey old man? You’re not much of a host.’

He went to the sideboard shouting ‘What’s it to be, Daisy old girl? Beer? Gin? Whisky? Methylated spirits? Arsenic? What?’

‘I want gimlet.’

‘You would want something like that.’ He began to busy himself while I, to whom until this moment a gimlet was nothing but a carpenter’s tool, tried to see what he was doing from the arm of a chair.

The girl—if you could call her that—was looking at me interestedly. She was very well-built, not to say plump, with a great mass of black hair, brilliant dark eyes and a double chin. Her backless evening gown, white and to my untutored eyes, expensive-looking, threw into relief the tawny splendour of her skin. She seemed very free and easy in her ways, I mean lying full-length like that before she’d even been introduced to me. She said now, fixing me with her shining eyes, ‘You want dance?’

I flicked my eyes nervously towards her and away again. ‘No’.

‘Please give me cigarette.’

‘I’m sorry. I haven’t any. I don’t smoke.’

She laughed. ‘Not dance. Not smoke. What you d’ink? I sink only ollange clush, maybe.’

‘I drink a little.’

‘A very little, I sink.’ She suddenly sat up and to my amazement began undoing the zip at the back of her dress. It stuck and without any hesitation she came across to me and presented her back to me, saying, ‘Please help.’ I got up awkwardly. I think you could guess my feelings, Sheila. It was the first time I’d ever been asked to act as a lady’s maid. You yourself were always competent enough to manage your own clothes.

I think she sensed my unease because before I’d accomplished anything she wrenched herself away from me, calling to Frost: ‘What is matter with your friend? Why he not enjoy he-self? Why he ’fray’?’

Coming back with her drink Frost said, ‘He’s a good boy. That’s a type you never met before, darling, and I’m damn sure I could never explain it to you.’

She said, stepping out of her dress, ‘He very han-sum. I sink many girl must like very much.’

A scowl appeared on Frost’s face. She took the drink from him and sat down on the sofa and sipped it and put it on the floor and then got up and began laying her dress smoothly over the back of a chair. With as much care as if it was going to be there for quite some time. She was clad only in a bra and panties and a bracelet or two and white high-heeled shoes and I’d never seen anything like it before except in movies and magazines. She stooped to remove her shoes and then she took another sip at her glass and then suddenly she turned to Frost with her arms up. ‘OK, darling, we dance?’

‘I think I’ll say goodnight,’ I said, but the gramophone was making too much racket; they didn’t hear me.

I edged across the room to the stairs. As I ascended like an angel up Jacob’s ladder I couldn’t help a backward glance at the naughty Earth. The two were doing a waltz, I suppose it was, with long slow strides involving a dip and a swirl; each stride was longer and more tottery than the last and when they collided with the table on which I had stood Frost’s drink, there was no help for them, they and the table and the drinks all went over together behind the sofa. I couldn’t see them but I heard the bump of their contact with the floor and then their laughter, continuous helpless laughter as if something very funny had happened.

I rushed upstairs and I was so agitated I forgot all about knocking on Drummond’s door.

‘God damn and blast you—’

He was sitting on his bed stark naked. On the stool in front of his dressing-table was a Siamese girl in a sarong. I just saw that she was doing her hair as I ran between them to my own room. For some reason I bolted my door. I could hear Drummond cursing for what seemed hours. Later they were downstairs and I could hear him complaining to Frost again. I got out Spengler’s
Decline of the West
, which I had found in Mr. Samjohn’s half of the house the night he invited me round there, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. I was too upset by the rawness of life in the East.

Next morning the atmosphere was wintry round the breakfast table and yesterday afternoon Mr. Samjohn called me into his office and said that while they were so pushed for room at the House it would be better for me to put up at a hotel. Windmill knew just the place in the Chinese quarter of Bhalangpoo, not too expensive but very comfortable, and the office car would pick me up every morning at eight fifteen.

So here I am, Sheila, and such have been the outstanding incidents of my first week in Bangkok …

October 17

Sheila, my lost darling, I promised you a weekly letter but I’ve only written one in a whole month and this second one I’m writing now is going to be very short because tomorrow I am going upcountry on my first field trip and I want to finish it before I leave. And in a few minutes Somboon will be here to take me out to a farewell party for just him and me. This time I am definitely going to go with him to the Bolero, for Frost will never take me there now. Frost dislikes me. Samjohn dislikes me. Drummond dislikes me. They all dislike me for the very good reason that they have me on their consciences; they know they had no right to evict me from the House. That is the real root of their dislike but there are side-roots too. There are the facts that I am not too bright at my work and that I lead a blameless life except for my two or three bottles of beer a day, that I am friends with Somboon who in their opinion is a very minor character and that the awkwardness which comes so often into my manner when I try to fraternize with my fellows gives them the impression that I am priggish and contemptuous of them.

Only one person thinks highly of me—Mrs. Samjohn, and she’s a repulsive old frump. But she thinks I am handsome and lonely and intellectual and she has invited me five times to the House for dinner and included me in a party that went to the seaside at San Soek one Sunday. The other members of the party were Mr. Samjohn and a fat White Russian couple and it was a tight fit in the Riley. The sea was so full of jellyfish that bathing was out of the question so most of the time we just sat under the coconut palms which fringe the shore, drinking coconut milk with whisky in it and slapping at ants. But the sea and the sky were beautiful and so were the sands and the people and children sprawling and lazily playing on them, and I enjoyed the day. I hope tomorrow’s trip is equally pleasant. It had better be, because it is going to last for six weeks.

I’m sorry to be so brief, Sheila. Although I don’t write often it’s not because I don’t think of you. As a matter of fact during this last month in Bangkok you have been in my mind more constantly than you have ever been before, even when we were closest to each other. For it seems we take ourselves with us wherever we go; if we are obsessed in London, we shall not shake off our obsession merely by removing ourselves to Bangkok. But I’m still looking forward to tomorrow.

Here’s Somboon. All my love. Your ever-dog-like

Reggie

Three

There are five of us around the table. And I’m not by any means the least boisterous of the gang.

I’m still uncertain how it’s all come about. I was supposed to get up frightfully early this morning to catch the Korat train. But I had one bottle of beer too many at the Bolero last night and I was still snoring when Windmill arrived. Luckily he was in plenty of time. I washed and dressed and Duen drove though the morning streets and we still had twenty minutes to wait before the train pulled out. As soon as we were out of the station Windmill said, ‘You want beer?’—‘What, at this time of the morning?’—‘Why not?’—‘OK then.’ And since then it has been beer beer beer all day long. Bottle after bottle on the train. Bottles at the hotel as soon as we arrived. Bottles at the club to which we repaired as soon as we had bathed and changed. And in a second they’ll be ordering more, I suppose, in this chophouse.