Suddenly at Singapore (7 page)

Russell had made me feel alone. It was a feeling I’d never had with Jeff alive. There was more than excitement ahead this time, for with it was the sense of being a little lost, of leaving no one behind in control. That control had been so tight and firm.

That building full of offices went almost still for a time in the middle of the day. This was the time and I had to use it. I went out, the business man leaving his office a little late for lunch, doing everything I had to, locking doors. The passage seemed empty, but when I went into the L where the lifts were, one of Kang’s men was standing there reading a newspaper. He had been bored until he saw me.

Kang liked them young, this one was scarcely more than a youth and an athletic youth at that. Only a few years ago he could have been a member of one of the Young Comrades school cadre. There’d be no record of this on his recruitment form, of course, nor on that of his pal waiting in a doorway somewhere. I hadn’t time to place the pal, it didn’t matter, but he would be on this floor, probably behind me somewhere. A third man was almost certainly in the lobby downstairs keeping an eye on the lifts. There was a pattern in the way they did things, a shade too methodical, I’d had time to observe it.

The man with the paper went on reading. I pressed the button and waited, my back to him. The lift came up from below, with a clanking. The doors opened and I got in.

When I turned Kang’s boy was folding his newspaper. He was just about to come forward and use my lift when I smiled. Somehow that stopped him. He looked for a moment sheepish, waiting there.

The doors of my lift clanged. I began to go down. I’d pushed for the ground floor but you could change your mind in these models, if you did it at just the right moment. I knew that above me two men would be waiting for the other lift, and the boy below would have seen the flash of the light indicating a descent.

Just when I was over it I pressed the buzzer for the first floor. There was a grumbling sound and the lift came to a stop, slowly. This wouldn’t show below, I knew that. The man down there would be waiting for the little cabin to arrive as signalled. It would be a moment or two before he tumbled to the fact that it wasn’t coming.

In the corridor I ran, away from the lifts and the stairs. A girl came out of a door and looked at me. I knew her face and she knew mine. She stared, opened her mouth, but didn’t say anything. With the girl watching I had to open the fire-escape window at the end of the passage, a french door. For a moment it didn’t want to open.

Then I was out on an iron grille. The fire-escape was solid up the back of the building except for the last drop which operated automatically when you stepped on it, rather like a ship’s gangway. But it hadn’t been used for a long time. I had to bounce on it. Then there was a frightful din, of old metal clattering. A weight rose and we went down, those steps and me. I was jumping down them, like a man playing tricks with an escalator. The base clanged on to concrete.

I ran across the courtyard, pulled open a double gate and stood there with my back to it for a moment. Kate’s Ford was parked across the pavement with its engine running. I heard a shout from the fire-escape, then feet on it.

Kate didn’t turn her head, but she had her car moving before I was in the back.

“Into that side street!”

“I know,” she said. “You’d better keep down out of sight.”

“Anybody seen us from the pavement?”

“No. I couldn’t see anyone standing around, if that’s what you mean.”

She was in the side street, swinging down towards the bund. If the boys had a car it would take them time to get to it. And they hadn’t spotted the Ford, I was sure of that.

“For a girl who’s new to this you handled that very smoothly.”

“Paul, keep down! You can see into this car from every angle. I’m scared of traffic lights.”

“Stay on the bund as long as you can.”

The lights were green for us. We had luck there, it cheered me. Soon we were on the road I wanted, climbing up past the golf course towards the Causeway. I scrambled over into the front seat.

“It’s too soon for you to be up here!” Kate said.

“Pull in for a minute. I want to drive.”

“No. Paul, it’s my car. I …”

“No time for temperament, come on.”

I more or less lifted her over my knees. Then we were moving again. Kate didn’t think this was fun. She dug in a compartment for cigarettes and lit one.

“Remember me,” I said.

I got it still damp from her lipstick.

“I didn’t notice your suitcase,” she said.

“I couldn’t even risk an attaché case. I’ll buy what I need in Gemas.”

“It must be wonderful to be rich enough to outfit yourself for each trip as you go along.”

“It certainly builds up your stock of pyjamas.”

She didn’t laugh. I took a quick look at her.

“Kate, I’m sorry. But I told you how it would have to be.”

“I know. I was in the mood then.”

“You’re not any more?”

“I don’t know!”

“I guess it must have been the waiting by the pavement with your engine running. Did it make it feel like a bank robbery?”

“Perhaps.”

“It’s not a bank robbery. You didn’t want three boys with us on our trip north, did you?”

“Is that the only reason for all this, Paul?”

“Could there be any other?”

“You hate to give a straight answer to a plain question, don’t you? Yes, I can think of a hell of a lot of other reasons why you wanted to shake off a police guard.”

“Well, put them all out of your mind.”

“Paul, I’ve got the oddest feeling that you’ll keep me talking until we get over the Causeway to Johore Bahru. After that, if I want to go back, you’ll let me.”

That was a shock.

“This wasn’t my idea,” I said. “Going away at all.”

“Okay, I was Eve holding out the big juicy apple.”

I braked the Ford and swung it into a side road. Then I got into reverse.

“What are you doing?”

“Going back to Singapore.”

“Don’t be a fool! Oh …”

“Tell me if the road’s clear. I’ll do an illegal sweep.”

“No. Go on! Stop this. I don’t want to be put to any tests.”

We didn’t talk again until we were over the Causeway and through Johore Bahru. The Ford was four years old, Kate had got it second-hand, but it was still fast. It liked the kind of roads it was being given, too.

I didn’t like the silence between Kate and me, it underlined something, the thing I had begun to feel back in my office after Russell left, that I was alone, completely. It wasn’t something I’d ever had to be before, not in this sense, of patterns too involved to be given up binding me to a continuing emptiness. I still wanted to go on doing what I felt had to be done, but I needed someone to turn to. I needed Kate then, not caught in the patterns with me, but Kate just saying without any reservations that I was the man she would put up with a lot to have.

It was the simple need of a man for a woman’s feeling that you never get away from, and when you don’t have it the compensations aren’t any good. I was sure Jeff had been wrong, that love was something you played for even when the stakes began to look impossibly high.

I needed Kate then in so much more than the gesture she had decided to make. Of course I wanted the things we hadn’t had, but not as an end, I wanted love as a refuge as well as a comfort and there didn’t seem any way I could tell her this.

“You won’t have eaten, Paul?”

“No.”

“I brought a lunch. Made by me. Would you like me to feed you, or do you want to stop?”

“I’d rather not stop at the moment.”

“All right.”

There was a rustling of paper.

“Egg and Australian cress?” Kate asked.

“That sounds wonderful.”

She didn’t eat much, but I was hungry. She handed me sandwiches and then a banana and finally Coca-Cola in a plastic cup, a regular kids’ picnic packed for a summer outing to pick blueberries.

I drove for about hall an hour after that before Kate said:

“Now when you’ve got your pyjamas, and toothbrush and a razor we’re all set, aren’t we?”

I didn’t ask her if she wanted to leave me at the next town and turn back. I swung the car off into a track amongst rubber trees, yanked up the hand-brake and turned to her.

“You say it’s easy for me to tell you I love you. So I’m not going to do that. All I want to say is that if I’d gone through with this there’d have been one reason for it. That I wanted it more than anything else. That I wanted you that way.”

She was staring. Maybe I shivered, I don’t know, but it did feel cold in that car, back in the shade from the sweltering road.

“I can get out here, Kate. I know the man who owns this estate. Just like you said. I’ve got as far as I need to go. I can let you go back. All right. We don’t meet any more. You think a lot of things are easy for me. They’re not. Believe me, they’re not.”

Her lips opened a little.

“Oh, Paul!” It was like a moan. “Oh, my sweet.”

Then she was holding me and I was holding her and out there the rubber nuts made their sharp, sudden crack as they fell. Kate’s lips were wet and soft. Her body moved against mine and there weren’t any brakes on that.

“You can see why I’m afraid,” she said after a time. “It’s taken me so.”

“Yes, honey. Do we drive on?”

“Of course. Of course!”

“Before we do there’s something. It’s Ruth. I don’t know where I am there. I mean I don’t see the way out. She’s not going back to America. She told me so at breakfast. She said she wanted me to understand that.”

“Paul, it’s something for us to face together. Whatever comes. I know it now.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Oh, I’m so sure.”

I wasn’t. But I wouldn’t let myself think about that. I’d got a door open and I was going through it.

Kate came with me to buy the pyjamas at Gemas.

“You British and your stripes. What about these?”

“Scare the monkeys,” I said.

“We’ll have them,” Kate told the clerk. “And look here, something you’ve always needed. An electric razor. Seventy dollars. That’s cheap.”

“Made in Japan.”

“No, sir,” said the clerk.

I picked up the box. On the bottom was a small circle with “Birmingham Made” written in it.

“The new suburb of Osaka,” I said. “An economy Gillette for me.”

“He’s always had a mean streak,” Kate told the clerk, who looked worried.

I let Kate drive after that. She was more considerate of her own car, and never went above sixty. A faint smell of hot rubber had begun to come out of the air-conditioning vent so we switched it off and turned down the windows, letting the hum come in and the feel of passing jungle, the heavy sour sweet scent of it. Once we saw some gibbons.

“What’s Kuantan like?”

“It’s a cute little town, mostly white, on a coast that hasn’t many.”

“What made you choose it specially?”

“I’ve got a friend there I want you to meet.”

“Perfect. We run away from the world to a place where you’ve got a friend waiting.”

“I said I wanted you to meet him.”

She laughed.

“I don’t mind. I’ll meet anyone. Maybe he’ll ask us to dinner so we can get over all that dreadful sitting around looking at each other. Who is he?”

“A Dutchman called de Vorwooerd. He used to live in Java. He got kicked out when they all were. Jeff and I plucked him off the
Oranje
on her way through here for Holland. He’s not young and he was sick. He used to be a friend of my father’s.”

“And why does he live in Kuantan?”

“Well, Jeff fixed it. That was all he wanted, somewhere quiet where he could hear the casuarinas and keep looking at palms. He didn’t want Holland, which would have been pretty but strange.”

“I see. One of you.”

“That’s right, one of us. The first de Vorwooerd went to Java in seventeen hundred and four. You’d have thought that after twelve generations he had a claim on the place. But he was kicked out. Kuantan smells like home and looks pretty much like it. I think he’s happy enough, even though it is an end.”

“Has he no family?”

“Not near, they’re all dead.”

“How does he live? Did he get money out of Java?”

I laughed.

“You’re a newspaper woman. You should know the answer to that. You don’t get your money out when you’re a refugee, not unless you quit early. He didn’t. The Dutch handled those refugees wonderfully, thousands and thousands of them, shipped out after three hundred years. And nobody squawked much. De Vorwooerd was just one of those it wasn’t going to be easy to re-orientate. And there was this job which means living in Kuantan. Local collector of chicle.”

“For chewing gum?”

“That’s it. The old man’s done very well. He earns his own living and knows it. Got a very nice house. I want you to see it.”

“And why did you want him to talk to me? He doesn’t sound like much of an argument for the white man’s future out here.”

“In a way I think he is. And the history of this part is still being written.”

“It can still get people killed.”

I didn’t say anything to that. We were coming into Kuala Lipis, a pretty town, which looks as though history had slipped by it, leaving always this late afternoon quietness. We were on the other side of the spine of mountains, with a river to cross and then a forty mile road through jungle that was real and almost unbroken. It was a road I remembered from fighting at two ferries and the way the Nips came popping out of that jungle when you thought you were safe from them for an hour or so. I could remember what it was like still to be in my teens and see something pouring over you it was too late to stop. It was all so quiet now that memory seemed sometimes to have played me false.

“It’s lovely,” Kate said on the Kuantan road, between the massive hardwoods that went up to a hundred and fifty feet.

You had the feeling going down that road that you were getting away from things, so far that you couldn’t be followed. Whatever was at the end of it would be safe, could be held intact.

I loved Kate, watching her drive away from the sunset, but with the red light of it chasing us.