Suddenly at Singapore (15 page)

She shook her head and then sat down on the bed and picked up my hand, looking down at it.

“Take off your hat.”

She did that in one simple movement, the hat coming down gently on my bandaged legs. With her free hand she fluffed her red hair a little and that was all it needed. She still didn’t look at me.

“This is funny,” she said softly.

“Why?”

“I expected a row for coming. I thought with you held in a bed you could still keep away on your own. You can do it, Paul, you can do it horribly!”

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“What’s happened to you?”

“Maybe I got scared, too”

“Out there in the jungle?”

“No. Here in my bed. I got to feeling alone.”

“Oh, Paul, I hope it isn’t too late.”

“Why should it be?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that there’s a time for everything. You know how it goes, a time to sing, a time to dance, to love and to hate. Like that. It
is
like that, too.”

“You can move from one to the other.”

“Not always. Not after so much happens.”

She began to cry. I held her hand hard.

“Honey, don’t spoil your face.”

“You got one of your big hankies, Paul?”

“Yes, here under my pillow.”

She smiled, her lip quivering.

“I can blow without being told when.”

“Sure. I used to like telling you when to do everything. Every ruddy thing, remember?”

“Yes, you wrapped me up. And I was the southern gal who loved it. I never had to do anything. But you had and you went and did it. And that made me mad. How can you stand such an absolute idiot?”

“Ruth, I think we’re on to something new.”

“Swear you’re not saying that to help me? You always have you know. When you saw I needed something terribly bad you did try to help me. I could always bring you back for a little that way, and I did.”

“It’s me I want to help. I’m being selfish.”

She picked up my hand and kissed the palm, holding it there against her lips. Then she moved her cheek against my fingers.

“Paul, what are you going to do about Kate?”

“Nothing.”

“But she must have meant a lot to you. She’s got a brain. She’s smart. She came all this way by herself. I could never do that.”

“No one would want you to.”

“You mean if there wasn’t you there’d be someone else?”

“Yes. I don’t want to think about it, but yes.”

“I’d just have to go to enough parties to find my fate, is that it?”

“Something like that.”

“It sounds awfully trivial. As though I was a commodity to be put in a show window. Along comes a man with a fat wallet and says I want that.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that.”

“It’s near enough, though. I don’t have any respect for myself, Paul. That’s been my trouble. You know what I thought when Booney died? In my heart? That it was what I could have expected. It’s silly, of course. But it was there, the feeling. You know it’s the hardest thing in the world for a woman to look like I do and be somebody. I’m not modest. I can see what happens when I go in a room. A lot of dogs start to wag their tails. And it doesn’t mean a damn’ thing. It doesn’t mean that you’re anything. I knew why you went to Kate as soon as I saw her.”

“Well, that’s over.”

“There could be other Kates.”

“Honey, we’ve got to fight for what we’re getting now. I’m not even saying it’s going to be easy. But we’re better equipped now, you and I.”

“You can speak for yourself. Don’t speak for me. I don’t know what I’ve got, even now. It seems like I’ve paid for a lot but I haven’t taken delivery of anything yet. Maybe I never will.”

“Ruth, I need you. Do you hear me? I need you.”

“Yes. It scares me stiff. If this goes now … there isn’t any hope at all.”

“It’s not going to go.”

“Say that over and over. Oh, Paul, I’m tired and sick.”

“I know the feeling. It’s come to me, too.”

“Do you think there’s rest round the corner?”

“There’ll be a lot of rest.”

She put down my hand as though she was giving it back to me. She smiled.

“Look what I’ve done. I was only to stay for ten minutes. I’ll go away and eat my lunch. I can hear a rattling in the passage that’ll be yours. Paul, you never brought me to Penang. I like it, it’s a pretty town. Why couldn’t we live here?”

“It’s a little far from my work.”

“You could move your work.”

“I suppose I could. I never thought of Penang as a base, though. Nothing ever happens here.”

“It’s that feel about it I like. Maybe we could build a house. To our plans. We’ve never done that, have we?”

“It’s an idea.”

“You’re being gentle to me. But I don’t want to live in that house in Singapore again. It’s too big. People rattle inside it. You sit down there wondering if there’s anything in the other rooms or they’re just waiting empty. I sound like I needed a sedative or a psychiatrist or something. Maybe I ought to take a room here next to yours.”

“It’s an idea. Then we could leave the doors open and shout.”

She stood, smiling. She bent down and kissed me, a gentle kiss on the mouth.

“I’ll come back in the afternoon and read you Dickens. It’ll be good for us both.”

My lunch was served by a Chinese maid but the Irish nurse was there supervising. She looked at me, solemn.

“Was that your wife, Mr. Harris?”

“Yes.”

“Well!” she said, as though unnerved.

It was nearly a month before we went south, Ruth and I, in a little white air-conditioned train. I could walk but I still needed a stick and I hadn’t put back my lost weight. Ruth had to do things for me, and she did them with a kind of determined efficiency. As my manager she was a little bit self-conscious, but I didn’t make a joke of it because she wouldn’t have thought it funny at all.

We had a nice little compartment and the train moved without any flashy show of speed, clipping along past the paddy fields and the rubber estates with the jungle so close behind them.

Sometimes I thought Ruth looked very tired. She had certainly avoided for a long time all talk of Singapore and what waited for us and what had been. In fact there wasn’t a lot to talk about. It was as though up in Penang we had been shut away in a little world, left there alone to be given a taste of peace. And we’d found it in a way. Ruth had more or less the freedom of the hospital and used to come in to spend a lot of time on my veranda, sometimes sitting where I couldn’t see her, though she liked to be used; if I wanted a drink she liked to get it.

I stayed with her for five days in the hotel and she had to help me in and out of bed. It was an old-fashioned hotel with an old-fashioned bed, and we shared it. I had my wife in my arms when we heard the lonely sound of a ship leaving port in the dark, hearing the siren echoing against Malayan hills, and then silence.

She’d had a lot to do for me and she was tired. I thought it would be a good thing to have servants of our own again, the Goldfish to organise us.

Ruth, on the seat opposite, had her feet up. She was smoking and turning over the pages of a magazine, her back to the Malayan countryside that I always like to look at.

“Paul, how long are we going to be in that house?”

“Well, until we get something else.”

“That means quite a while?”

“If we build it does.”

“Then let’s buy without building. Let’s find something. You’ve decided we’ve got to stay down there, haven’t you?”

“I think so. Harris and Company would be a tricky thing to move.”

“You mean Singapore suits you?”

“It isn’t only that.”

“I think it’s a brash town. It’s never had a chance to settle. It’s always been too big for its buildings, always too many people.”

“Most big cities are like that.”

“No, London isn’t. And I don’t feel it in New York. Singapore I hate.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

“It’s all right. I can live with it now. But I do hate it. Maybe another house’ll make a difference. A small house.”

“As small as you like.”

“I’ll start hunting. There’s another thing. Are we still in mourning for Jeff?”

“I wouldn’t say so. I’ve never felt officially in mourning for him. Why?”

“Well, there’s the big cocktail party we always give on Boxing Day. I wondered if you were going to do it this year.”

“I think so. It’s really business.”

“All right. I’ll fix that.”

“Ruth, we’ve always just used a caterer.”

“I want to do it.”

“You can overdo this habit of working.”

She looked at me and smiled.

“You’re being funny. You wait. You’ll find me out in the kitchen making canapés.”

“That’ll be the day.”

“I can. It’s one of my Charleston accomplishments. That and angel cake. We couldn’t afford a caterer. We could scarcely afford the gin.”

“Have you heard from home lately?”

“Not for ages. I guess I’m out of the picture. They’ll talk about me now like a kind of curiosity in the family. Pore chile, way off theah in Singapoah. Then they’ll remember about your money and say: oh, well, she’s got everything. When we go back we’d better buy a Cadillac. Or take the Daimler.”

“Or buy a new Bentley.”

“After the hospital bills you could still buy a Bentley?”

“Uh-huh.”

Ruth laughed.

“Aren’t you the good provider? Isn’t it nice in here? It’s small but you’ve got everything you want. I think I’ll have a little sleep.”

“You do that.”

I looked out at Malaya. I felt a little like a man coming back from a dream, or from an escape, facing up to his real world again. In the last month I hadn’t faced up to a thing, letting everything that was external to Ruth and me just drift, even murder. I hadn’t thought about Kate, or Russell, just pushing them away and all the little pile of things that had once been laid out. Russell had phoned a couple of times and written a few letters. When I was talking nothing had changed, we used the same tones to each other. If I thought about it at all I couldn’t feel that anything had changed, only that I’d known a dark time with a kind of fever on me, when my thoughts had run wild,

Everything seemed to have settled down now, into a quietness that I’d suspected was deceptive at first, and then it had gone on and on, a routine of hospital, no outside intrusions, no police, just doctors and nurses and Ruth coming in, carrying a book to read.

I could even come back, forgetting Kang, to the idea that the man who had wanted Jeff out of the way was dead, too.

Ruth was across from me, curled up, her pastel travelling suit a bit rumpled. With her eyes shut the tiredness seemed gone and she slept like a child, her relaxed face not slumped into a revelation of the toll taken by passing years. We were getting a new house, which would be small, and in which we could keep track of each other.

T
HREE DAYS
after we got back to Singapore I paid my first visit to the office. Russell Menzies was waiting for me in the foyer and he watched me come towards him, still using my stick, one leg a bit stiff.

“Are you going to keep that limp as a memento?” he asked.

“No, I’m told it’ll go. The only thing I’ll have is the scars. Apparently they don’t take sun tan easily. I won’t look pretty at the swimming club for a long time.”

“When I was your age, Paul, I’d long given up my vanities.”

“You’re intelligent enough to know there was no excuse for them. Nice of you to meet me here.”

“I thought I’d better hand you back to your own company. And explain the big changes.”

“What?”

“No Miss Flores.”

“Russell, what the hell do you mean?”

“I suggest we sit down over here for a minute. I’ve funked this. I should have told you long ago.”

“What happened?”

“Well, she resented me with what amounted to violence. I rather thought she might protest to you about it. You never heard from her?”

“Not a note. I thought it a bit odd. She usually has quite a line in condolence. When did she leave?”

“Four days after I came back from Penang.”

“That’s nearly five weeks ago!”

“Yes. Oh, don’t worry about her, she’s got another job. She’s working with Harrams. Seems to have settled in nicely.”

“Seven weeks is too long to be away from your business.”

“Don’t be like that, Paul. I did my damndest.”

“Yes, I know. I’m sorry.”

The apology didn’t quite cover the situation. Russell and I were a little uneasy with each other, for reasons that weren’t too simple to assess. I’d thrown away all my wild thinking about him, but there was a kind of echo of it hanging around. There was something solid and lumpish between us which was difficult to detour, and we both went awkward in the trying.

“You got a replacement?”

“Yes. I think I’ve done a good job. If you don’t want her I’ll take her myself. A Mrs. Braddock. Wife of a lecturer in English at the university. This is her first job in Singapore, but she was tops at home, confidential secretary to a London chain store executive.”

“My office ran pretty well under Miss Flores.”

“It’ll run better under Mrs. Braddock. Ready to go up?”

We went up, and on the way I had the feeling still I’d put into words, that I’d been absent from Harris and Company for too long.

Mrs. Braddock was cool and efficient, dark, with the kind of too thin good looks which wouldn’t last long in the tropics. She gave the impression of someone who has had all potential of office temperament ironed out of her by London high pressure techniques. The office side of Harris and Company had known a sort of cosiness which she wasn’t ever going to acknowledge. It smacked of inefficiency. I began to wonder about the rest of my staff.

The introductions were formal, without any note of cheeriness and I tried to tell myself that the girl might well be nervous. She didn’t look it. I had the sense of being assessed, measured up against that chain store tycoon. It made me feel a little like a new boy who has to prove himself.

The outer office had been re-arranged, too. This had become completely a reception area, with the secretary’s desk in a new position, the filing cabinets shifted and no sign at all of the one girl who used to type out here under Sylvia Flores’s eye. From the concentrated clatter beyond a partition I understood that all the girls who worked the machines were slumming it together.