Earthly Powers (43 page)
CHAPTER 36
"The point is," the District Officer said, "that people are talking." He stood in the corner by the magazine table, which had been pushed right to the wall to make more room for the dancers. The ceiling fan just above, whirring at top speed, was leafing rapidly through an old Tatler. The gramophone was playing a waltz: What'll I do When you Are far away And I am blue What'll I do?
There were a lot of unplayable records: the heat had turned those unprotected by the icebox into shallow soup plates. The club secretary had been heartily blamed for this and had resigned. He said orders had been given to Ah Wong, number one boy, but these had been ignored or ill understood. Still, there was a tango, "La Paloma," and a couple of one-steps, including "Felix," and some Irving Berlin waltzes. And Greene the planter could bash out the odd tune on the tropicalized piano. All the wives were here tonight, uniformly shingled by the town hairdresser Fook Onn, wearing new flowery frocks from Whiteaway's 2 in Ipoh. They spun in the arms of black-tied sweating men, one of whom was Dr. Philip Shawcross, neat, spare and grave. He grinned gravely as he passed and the District Officer frowned. The District Officer was not a dancing man but he drank enough to slake a dancer's thirst: his tenth or so unwatered pink gin had just been handed to him by Boo Eng.
"Who," I asked, "is talking, and what precisely is being talked about?"
"It's unusual to say the least. You shouldn't be here by rights. Kuala Kangsar is a place for visitors to, well, visit. I didn't want to have you into the office about this. You're not a colonial officer, you're outside my jurisdiction. Still, you're sharing government accommodation with the District MO, and that sort of drags you into the, sort of, a bit. When I say people are talking I mean they're making sort of sly remarks about two men living together."
"There are plenty of them, aren't there? Syines and Warrington in the Malay College, those two in Drains and Irrit Irrigation. Bachelors sharing, there's a lot of it."
"Well, if you want me to come out straight with it, there's the matter of your reputation—"
"Literary reputation?" I said, swallowing.
"Well, look, I don't know much about the kind of world you live in back home except that it's a bit, you know, well, we're pretty conventional here, have to be. They say you're a well-known author, must be true, found your name in Who's Who and so on, afraid I don't know your stuff, don't have much time for reading, but, well, this man passing through, whatsisname, the MP—"
"Cohn Garside?"
"That's the one, he said something, look, this is rather embarrassing—"
"You started it. What do you have to say?" The DO, Porson, was a man of fifty, wholly uncharming, with only one mobile eye, the other perhaps glass, crooked brown incisors that fanged his lower lip even when his mouth was shut, and dandruff on his collar.
"You've been here well over two months, that's a hell of a lot of time for a mere distinguished visitor. When are you moving on, shall we say?"
"Blunt, very. I'm writing a novel. About Sir Stamford Raffles. Malaya's the place to write it in. Philip Shawcross has kindly given me a quiet place to work. The rest house here is not quiet. I pay for my keep. If you like, I'll write to the Colonial Secretary, I know him slightly, get formal permission. The Sultan is delighted I'm here, or so he says. One of his daughters is at the London School of Economics. She saw a play of mine."
"You know the Malay expression kaum nabi Lot?"
"Yes. Strangely enough, I heard it used of you. Tribe of the prophet Lot. It should really mean those who are against sodomy, but the Koran probably got it wrong. I think you ought to confront Philip Shawcross with the term. He's nothing to lose. His tour's nearly over. He'll carve you up with a scalpel."
"I've said my say." And he loudly called, "Boy, gin merah."
"You've more than said it. It strikes me that you've made a very slanderous accusation. Cloaked in a piece of periphrastic Malay."
"It strikes me," and his voice began to trill deeply as in a gargle of blood, "that you're no different yourself with your saying that you first heard that used about me."
"The slander's not mine, if it is slander. It's what one of the girls in Taiping said. At the Gates of Heaven cabaret. A girl from Kelantan called Mek Hitam."
"And I'm only saying what people say. The same as you. So I suggest we drop the whole business."
"It was you who started it."
"I was merely doing my duty." Boo Eng brought his gin merah. Received without love. The waltz ended and the dancers clapped the recorded dance band. "Informing you about the general feeling."
"Which you'll now do your best to exacerbate. It makes me feel unclean. It makes me want to leave. With an unfinished book. A book that will not now be dedicated to the friendly community of Kuala Kangsar. Because of the unfriendly attitude of its District Officer."
Greene sat down at the tropicalized upright among backslaps and good mans and began to play "If You Were the Only." I went over to Mrs Renshaw, wife of the headmaster of Malay College, and asked her to dance. Her back was damp, our joined hands were damp. A dance was a very damp occasion. The French chalk on the floor had become a tenuous light grey mud. "When are you coming over to dinner?" she asked. She was a pretty little woman from the Black Country with a translucent wart on her brow that her damp coiffure no longer masked.
"When you invite us."
"Inseparable, aren't you? I've already asked Phil Shawcross but he said something about you working like a fury."
"That's true. A novel about Raffles." The DO was now at the bar talking grimly to Grieves, physical training instructor at the college. Grieves looked at me. What was being arranged? A serenade on Bukit Chandan, the word homo set to the Westminster chimes? A rugger club roughing up of a rich visitor here on the cheap, a member of the kaum nabi Oskar?
Her eyes showed her brain churning from raffles to gentleman crook to the founder of Singapore. "Oh, that Raffles. That's going back a bit, isn't it? There won't be any of us in it."
"Why not? You'd look beautiful in a Regency ballgown. And I have a very villainous Malay who looks a bit like the District Officer."
Oh Mr Toomey, you authors. How many had she met? Our dancing tour of the room had brought us to the street door open for the heat. A lot of the townfolk were there, tolerantly observing our fun, chewing wads of sireh.
Mahalingam was there, agitated. He grasped my sleeve. "If You Were the Only" ended with sung rugger club harmony. Claps and cheers. "Good evening, Mr Mahalingam," Mrs Renshaw said queenlily. The tone of condescension was not willed, it never was, it was the unconscious product of long cultural transmission, never to be eradicated. Mahalingam seemed to make a distracted forelocktugging gesture.
He said, "It is Dr. Shawcross I want. Where is Dr. Shawcross?"
He was at the far end of the room. A fat planter was demonstrating to him the agonies of some disease of the joints. Mrs Renshaw was grabbed by Symes the English teacher for "Felix."
"Some trouble, Mr Mahalingam?" I asked.
"My son. He will not wake up. We have tried everything."
I threaded through the dancers and got Philip. As we threaded together, I heard someone whistle "Here Comes the Bride."
"Your son?" Philip said. "The one we saw? The one you call a fool?" That was nasty but a mere natural emanation of situational authority. "I'll come."
"Shall I come too?" I asked.
"Nothing you can do. I'll see you back home. Had enough of this anyway." So I went over to the bar. I would have one more drink and then pick up a trishaw. The DO was no longer there, was perhaps micturating out his load of gin merah, but Grieves greeted me cheerfully though with shifty eyes.
"Still pushing the pen? A deathless masterpiece born in the suburbs of KK? Have a drink."
"Have one with me. Nothing deathless, just practising my trade. No pen, I use a typewriter. Dua stengak," I asked Ah Wong.
"Speak the lingo, eh? Good for you. Nothing like knowing the lingo."
"A few words, no more. Just enough to get around. Cheers."
"Chahs." There was a certain difference in our accents, but it was surely unseemly of Grieves, a Liverpudlian I gathered, to mock the difference. He turned on his barstool to grin at the sight of Mrs Hardcastle, whose husband was down with gyppy tummy or something, whispering something hotly to Grieves's colleague Warrington as they trod the floor in steps uncoordinated. "Looks as though Jack Warrington's getting in there," he said. "He's left it pretty late. Could have had it a year back."
"Dissatisfied colonial wives," I said. "Yes, I've heard about the phenomenon."
"Heard about it, have you? The onlooker seeing most of the game. Of course, a lot depends on what game you play." I ignored that; I even smiled pleasantly. Fothergill the planter came up. He had removed his jacket and also his black tie; he was wiping face, neck and a good deal of his chest with a glass cloth from behind the bar. He ordered a pint of lime juice with a quadruple gin in it, saying: 2 "I don't know why we're such bloody idiots. Sweating cobs, as they say in your part of the world," to Grieves. To me, "Don't see much of you, never even got my revenge."
"Revenge? Oh, poker. I've been working. Evenings I came in here you weren't there, simple as that."
"A lot depends," Grieves said, "as I said." The DO appeared from the yard at the back where the jakes or jamban was, raised two fingers at everybody in grim and qualified blessing, then was off. "He's done well," Grieves said. "He's kept it quiet."
"Kept what quiet?" Fothergill said. "Oh, that. He just has them in and then out. A buck a time, fifty cents for infants. A good clean thrust before dinner, gives him an appetite."
"Like Norman Douglas," I said, perhaps unwisely.
"Don't think I know him," Fothergill said. "If you mean old Potch Douglas, he was very clean-living, know that for a fact." He downed half of his pint gin and lime with gulps like labour contractions.
"A bit of brown," Grieves said. "No harm in it if he keeps it quiet. But bugger a man that sets up house and home with his own kind. Lets the side down."
"I take it," I said boldly, "you're referring to homosexual relationships. As opposed, shall I say, to impersonal bouts of sodomy."
"Homo," Grieves said, "meaning a man. Man and man. Homo homo it would be in the glorious Malay lingo. Yes, something like that. Two more of these," he said to Ah Wong. "Dua stengah lagi."
"A common error," I said. "The homo bit doesn't mean man. It's not Latin, it's Greek. Meaning the same. Sex between members of the same sex," very ineptly put.
"Well, we haven't all had the benefit of a classical education." Grieves smiled pleasantly at me, signing sightlessly for two stengahs in his club book. "Not like Norman Douglas and the rest of the Greeks. Take this in your right hand, remembering the ancient Greek wisdom about a bird never flying on one wing." The gramophone was playing "What'll I Do" again, but not many were now dancing. Exhaustion was quick to set in here: pallid wives suffering from anorexia and tropical discontent were dragging their husbands home, as they called it. I sipped my stengah, positively the last one, must go home too.
"You know Norman Douglas?"
"I've been to the isle of Capri, ignorant as I am. Last trip UKwards, picked up an Eyetie boat at Suez. Quite an education."
"But," I said, "the point is that Douglas is a buck-a-time man, just like your DO."
"Look," said Symes the English teacher from the Malay College, "let's have 2 no talking about a man behind his back." Symes was fattish, pale, without eyebrows. I noticed that there were quite a number at the bar now and that I was hedged in. "Especially," he added, putting it straight, "from guests of the community. If," he added, softening it, "you don't strenuously object to my saying so." He had probably read some of my books and didn't like them much. After all, he taught English literature.
"Mr Toomey," Grieves said, "was giving us a classical education. Explaining the difference between home oh and hommo."
"Right," I said. I drank up. "I know when I'm not wanted."
"Oh, but you are," Symes said. "Very much wanted. I mean, the Upper Fifth would be honoured if you'd give them a little talk about The Mill on the Floss.
Keeping it simple of course. George Eliot, Victorian master, or should it be mistress? Afraid of admitting what sex she was. Those were bad times for a woman."
"All writers," I said, "are like Kipling's jollies. A sort of a blooming ermophrodite."
"I like that," Grieves said sincerely. "I like that very much." Nobody was attending to the gramophone. It wound down. Wokkle aaah dawwwwwww.
"Soldier and sailor too," I explained. "I really must be going."
"Oh, come on," Fothergill said. "Push the boat out, talking of sailors. Satu empat jalan."
"One two road," Symes translated. "Daftar dua bintang papan. List to star board. Talking of sailors. Stengah for me."
"Talking of sailors," Greene said, "what did you do in the war, Toomey?"
"Faced the terrors of Europe," I said lightly.
"Meaning," Greene said, "you weren't stuck out in the glamorous East chewing bananas. Nasty, very nasty."
"Heart," I said. "Heart trouble. As you saw."
"No need to defend yourself," Symes said softly. "You're not on trial or anything."
"As we saw," Greene agreed. "Doe Shawcross to the rescue. Well, let's toast a beautiful friendship."
"Do doctors have to learn Greek?" Grieves asked with an extravagantly puzzled look. "Or is it just Latin?" He shrugged excessively, then drank. Others drank, I drank off. I signed. Off.