Suddenly at Singapore (2 page)

I had talked about my feelings here to Kate, but wasn’t sure that she understood or could accept them, any more than my wife could. A deep feeling for place may be a male indulgence.

We went back to Kuala Lumpur in quicker time than we came out, to eat in a Chinese restaurant where the millionaires come from Singapore. We had our meal on stone seats in a garden. There was a fountain in colonial Chinese taste spattering water about, and Chinese jazz from a distant radio.

With the first bottle of raisin wine Kate said.

“Paul, how dangerous is what you do?”

“Are you on to that again?”

“Do you mind? I didn’t ask the question as a journalist. It’s just for myself. Or isn’t it safe to talk here?”

“I choose my tables carefully, it’s quite safe.”

“All right. I swear I won’t use any of this. I just have to know more of what it means to you. I’ll never talk about this to anyone.”

“Very well. What I do isn’t dangerous most of the time. Only occasionally.”

“I won’t ask how you do it, I just want to know why. It might help if I said I know you supply arms against the legal government of Java.”

“I don’t object to the legal government of Java at all. They can do what they like on their own island, go Red if they want to. It’s taking other people with them that’s not so nice, people who don’t want to go. Like the majority in the Celebes and Sumatra.”

“How do you know they don’t want to go with Java?”

“Because they’re willing to die resisting. Pretty good evidence, isn’t it?”

“Some people say those little wars are organised in Singapore.”

“I don’t accept that, not for one minute.”

The waiter served food, bland, not seeming to look at us at all. It was no break in the thread with Kate, she just waited.

“Without arms from outside those wars couldn’t happen, Paul.”

“They are happening. The guns come afterwards.”

She fished in a side dish with chopsticks for something and ate it, watching me.

“I’m scared,” she said. “I can’t see any end to this. It’s not something that you can stop easily. And clearly you don’t think about stopping. While all the time people over there must be building up information about you. I’ve heard quite a bit in Singapore. There’s a character in Sumatra just now called General Sorumbai. He’s their hatchet man, isn’t he? He can’t like you much.”

“If the general knows what we do he won’t like us much.”

“They could kill you … so easily!”

“I wonder? We’ve survived a long time, Jeff and I. Life in this part of the world hasn’t been any picnic since 1941. I admit that not everything we do in our business would go down well at a Rotary lunch. But Rotary isn’t very strong out here. Maybe it’s a pity.”

Kate held up her wine cup.

“I suppose all women have to accept this,” she said. “The way her man puts his life into compartments, a big one for what he’s doing, a little one for love. I envy you really. You do it so neatly.”

“Kate … I love you!”

“Yes, when you open that compartment. I think we might go now, don’t you?”

We went out, through the noise of the main restaurant, packed with Chinese family parties stuffing in food with the kind of near violent zest for it you only see with them or the French. We got in the car and this time, without fastening the safety belts, drove off.

“Have you finished your business up here, Paul?”

“Yes, I did it to-day.”

“Before you bothered to get in touch with me.”

“Kate! I didn’t think you’d be in the hotel.”

“You were quite right, I wasn’t. What are your plans now?”

“I thought I might stay up here for a few days. With you.”

Kate looked out at the people in the streets.

“I may go north to Penang. I’ve never been there for some reason.”

“Penang is pretty and dead.”

“That’ll be restful,” Kate said bitterly.

As soon as we went into the hotel lounge a little man came forward from the desk.

“Mr. Harris? Mr. Paul Harris?”

“Yes.”

“There is a message for you from Singapore. An urgent message. You are to phone this number, sir, and quickly. They make it most important.”

“Who?”

“The police, sir.”

“Kate, sit down over there and order a drink, will you? Beer for me.”

Kate turned away at once. I went to a little booth and shut myself in.

When I came out it was with my world broken around me, blown up, shattered. I felt sick and old. Kate saw me coming and slowly she stood.

“Paul …!”

“It’s Jeff. He’s dead. Murdered. Shot in the back of his head.”

I
T WAS
K
ATE
who got me up to my room. I went to the bed and fell on it, face down in the pillow. I couldn’t look at her or anything, anything in the world. She moved about the room, I heard her, but it didn’t mean anything, even having her there. Then she came over.

“Try and drink this.”

“No.”

“Oh, Paul. I know what it means to you. When he talked about you I had the feeling you were his only concern …”

“Please stop!”

“Sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She went away again. She must have sat down. After a time I pulled myself up and sat on the bed, my feet on the floor.

“Thanks, Kate. It was a kick in the stomach. It would have been worse without you here.”

She nodded. She was smoking a cigarette, looking at a wall, not me. I went into the bathroom and washed my face. My mouth seemed to have a fuzz in it and I cleaned my teeth. I had only once before felt grief physically like this, weakness as though all your strength had been drained away.

Jeff. Oh, my God, Jeff!

Standing above the basin I began to retch. Kate heard and came and held my head, her hand on my forehead. Then it was over, that part, and I was in control again.

In the bedroom Kate watched as I started to throw things into my bag.

“You shouldn’t drive back,” she said. “You’re not fit to.”

“I’m all right. I can drive.”

“Oh, Paul. There’s a train in an hour.”

“I’ll beat the train.”

“But what good will it do now?”

“I’ve got to get back, that’s all. You’d better go to your room. And thanks. Thanks so much.”

“Why do you have to thank me? I’m not a stranger.”

“I know. I just had to say something, that’s all.”

“I’ll come with you and do the driving. I’ll go fast.”

“No!”

“Well, I’m coming.”

She turned and went out. I wasn’t long in getting to the car, but Kate was beside it, her bag on the pavement.

“I can’t stay here alone now,” she said. It was an appeal.

“All right, get in.”

The jungle roads were lit by hard clear light shivering down them. We had the windows lowered and it was cool. We went through villages and towns, slowing to ease a way through night clamour, Tamil boys walking hand in hand, fat Chinese women wobbling. We seemed to tunnel through laughter and talk at these times, snatches of it coming in to us, words. People peered at the low, sleek little car. We smelled cooking, spicy and hot.

Jeff’s country and mine. Maybe we were wrong, maybe they were strangers out there, for all that I could talk to them so that behind a screen none of them could have guessed I didn’t belong, that my skin wasn’t the colour of theirs. Maybe in desperation we’d clung to the only thing we knew, fooling ourselves about it, calling it our world. Kate didn’t believe it was really my world.

She didn’t say anything at all, just sat there beside me. Sometimes she lit a cigarette and put it between my lips. Then at Gemas I remembered. I braked the car into a pavement.

“I didn’t phone Ruth. I must do it now. The police will have told her.”

Ruth didn’t come for a long time, it was the second houseboy on the line, a Hainamese, who wasn’t always easy to understand. He seemed to be babbling to-night. He could tell me a little more, not much, just that my brother had been shot about six, the police thought, at sunset.

Jeff had lived in a service flat, one of a luxury block. His boys didn’t actually stay in the rooms, they had quarters for themselves in another building at the back. I had never liked this arrangement much, I thought he ought to have a man in the place the whole time, the way we lived and the things we did. I’d even found the man for him once, something of a tough, but Jeff had got rid of him. He hadn’t wanted protection, he said.

“Paul!” Ruth’s voice was a kind of wail. “Where have you been? You didn’t phone.”

“I’m sorry. I just drove, that’s all. As soon as I knew. I’m half-way home. I’ll soon be there.”

“I’m so miserable! I wanted to hear your voice.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. It was like an echo of Kate in the bedroom, an apology for helplessness. “Listen, dear, I’ll be right back. Go to your room and take a sedative.”

“It could have been you,” Ruth said.

“Now stop that, please!”

“Well, it could! That’s what makes me … sick. That thought.”

“Ruth, you’re holding me up. I want to get home.”

“You’ll come here first?”

“I must go to the flat.”

“No! No, don’t!”

“Ruth, help me now, please. You’ve got to help me.”

“Oh, all right.” She sounded a child, weary, frightened. “But you won’t be long?”

“No, of course not.”

We drove again, Kate and I.

“Was Ruth very upset?”

“She sounded that way.”

“Surely she’s got someone with her? A friend?”

“I don’t think so. Just the houseboys. Ruth’s never turned to women friends like that. It’s always been me.”

“I see,” Kate said, in a very quiet voice.

We were in the jungle again, hurtling towards Johore, before Kate spoke.

“One of the things that makes it harder for me is that I can’t help having a lot of sympathy with your wife. I get to thinking what it would be like waiting around for you in a house.”

I didn’t say anything to that, because I knew what Kate meant. There was a lot of truth, too, in this business of compartments into which you shut away separate pieces of your living. Most men do it, and perhaps I did it more than most because of things to which we had been committed for a long time, Jeff and I. It was true enough, also, that I had provided my wife with a nicely padded world in which there wasn’t a great deal demanded of her. I didn’t need her help much, except as a hostess, and though there had been a bond once that had seemed firm and binding, it had snapped, and we’d never found a replacement. Perhaps neither of us had tried hard enough for that replacement.

I knew that the thing which had drawn me to Kate from the first was the feeling you had about her that she didn’t need a man to make her world, that she could make it on her own. Even our love was something she came to from a life of her own, when we could both find the time. It had never occurred to me that Kate did any waiting around to see me. Now I wasn’t so sure about that. It was disturbing to have her seeing things through Ruth’s eyes.

I had thought they were poles apart, Ruth and Kate, in the way they faced living, but that might not be so.

“Paul, do you think the police in Singapore are going to be able to find the man who killed your brother?”

“I rather doubt it.”

“And if they can’t?”

“I’ll have to start a hunt on my own.”

“I see. That’s going to be dangerous.”

“It needn’t be, all that. Not if I don’t rush it. Tonight I feel like bashing in for any kind of action. But I mustn’t do it. Jeff would say, take it easy. Wait for your chance. I can hear him saying it, like he’s done a hundred times. And I know he’s right. If I wait and don’t get excited the lead I need will show up. I’m sure of that.”

“That lead might take you to General Sorumbai in Sumatra. Would you follow it there?”

“Kate, that’s not the sort of question I can answer now.”

She knew I was pushing her away, but I couldn’t help doing that.

We went over the Causeway which years ago had been blown up to stop the Japs from reaching Singapore. I could remember seeing that Causeway not so long after I was a prisoner, from a tin cattle truck, Jeff and me peering through a crack in the door of that mobile oven and thinking that our side had only managed to make a very little hole. The Japs had soon patched it up. That hole in the Causeway had become one of their jokes.

In a sense it was a joke we’d been trying to deal with ever since. We’d come back to a people who pretended to welcome us, but who remembered how easy it was to push us out of the way. And this was something that went a little sour on you when it was your country, not just a place you took money out of.

When I have a few drinks and the company is British who expect things to last their time, but not much longer, I sometimes get talking on a line that would shock the enlightened Colonial Office bods if they hadn’t a classification all neatly waiting into which to pop me … the local reactionary. All right, I’m a local reactionary, living in a country that was made by us, not by the Chinese or the Malays or the Tamils, but by us, our brains and our sweat. That’s the fact, and though not many people look at it these days, it’s still the fact.

I could imagine what the official reaction was going to be to Jeff’s death on this island Kate and I had now reached. There would be quite a number of people in fairly high places who wouldn’t mind thinking to themselves that it was a good thing … even though they wouldn’t say it at a bar counter. They might even go on beyond that to wish the gunmen had done a better job and dealt with the two brothers at the same time. The fewer reactionaries you have around in a new democracy the better, for reactionaries tend to hold up the settling of the dust which is so important if business is to get back to normal.

I wasn’t going to have many allies in Singapore, but then we’d never had many allies down there, not amongst the powers that make a noise.

“Will you just take me straight to my hotel?” Kate said quietly.

She might have been playing the role I’d assigned her in the first act of our relationship, the girl who doesn’t make a fuss.

I took her to her hotel in a quiet part of the city and got her bags out of the back and we went up a flight of steps. We had to ring for the porter, waiting there, and Kate didn’t stand looking at me, as though she knew I wouldn’t want that.