The Chequer Board (21 page)

Thet Shay slipped away. Morgan dropped his haversack in a corner, and sank down into one of the cane chairs. He was already tired. “I’m very sorry to turn up like this,” he said, glancing down at his soiled, threadbare jungle suit, and feeling the stubble on his chin. “I’ve been travelling since Monday.”

The old man said, “You will want clean clothes and a bath. I can provide what you need.” He spoke a few words in Burmese to the boy, who went out to the back of the house. The old man turned to Morgan. “I am beginning to understand this now,” he said. “You are the Englishman who surrendered to the Japanese at Bassein after the English Major had been killed, are you not?”

The pilot said, “That’s right.”

The old man said, “You saved my daughter and Thet Shay from a bad situation.”

“It was the only thing to do. I didn’t want them to get into a mess with the Japs on account of me.”

The old man wagged his head. “Some men would not have seen it in that light. In this house we are very grateful to you.” He struggled to his feet. “I do not show great
gratitude by keeping you talking when you are tired and dirty. Come with me.”

He took the pilot into a cool bedroom with a bathroom opening out of it, with water in a great red chatty. On the string bed a Burman servant was laying out clothes-fine drill trousers and a shirt, and a longyi. Shway Than said, “There are both English and Burmese clothes for you to choose from. Here are towels and soap—only Japanese soap—very bad—I am sorry. But we have English tea; it will be ready when you are.”

He went out, and the pilot stepped gratefully out of his clothes and sluiced himself with water. He thanked his stars he was not verminous. After the jail and the sampan, the bedroom with the huge chatty of cool water was utter luxury; he stood about, wet, with the water drying on him as he shaved, and sluiced himself again. It was nearly an hour before he could tear himself away from it, till he appeared in the living room in the shirt and trousers. He had not dared experiment with the longyi; he did not know the knot that keeps it up around the waist.

There was no sign of the old man or the boy when he looked around, but the table was laid as if for afternoon tea in England. In the entrance leading out to the verandah, with her back to him, Nay Htohn was standing. She was dressed in a green longyi and a little short cream-coloured jacket over a white shirt; she had a dark red flower in her hair. He stood silent, watching her for a moment; he had not known before quite how badly he had wanted to see her again.

He made a movement, and she turned at the slight sound, and saw him. She smiled, and moved towards him
quickly, and took his hand. “My father said that you were here.” And then she stooped before him in a sort of curtsy, and kissed his hand.

He touched her on the shoulder, half blinded with a sudden watering of the eyes. “I say, you don’t have to do that,” he muttered. Then they had separated, and were staring at each other in wonder, and laughing.

She said, “Were they cruel to you?”

He grinned at her. “They had me in the bloody prison up till now. Not crueller than that. Nothing like—like they are sometimes. Nothing like that.”

She said, “We had them here—they only went away last week. They lived like pigs.”

He said quickly, “Did they trouble you?”

She shook her head. “They were quite correct—actually, we saw very little of them. But in their officers’ mess! When first they came, they were short of plates and crockery. They used to mix up all their rations—tea and flour and sugar and meat and jam and vegetables and salt and biscuit—they used to mix this all together into a sort of swill—and they served it on the table in a bedpan!”

He laughed, “No?”

She laughed with him. “It is absolutely true. For weeks they ate out of the bedpan. They saw nothing wrong with it. But that was the Army. The civilians were more civilised. Still, we were very glad to see them go.”

He said, “You got back from Bassein all right?”

She said, “Thanks to you we did. We walked back in twos and threes, as local villagers. I carried a basket of mangoes on my head until we were past the Japanese patrols, with the revolver and all the rifle ammunition
underneath the mangoes. It was terribly heavy. We had to bury the rifles, but we got them all back later on.” She glanced at him. “You will stay with us for some days?”

“If it won’t be too much nuisance, I should like to,” he replied. “I’m a bit groggy still. My ankles keep on swelling up.”

She made him sit down in a chair, and knelt at his feet, and pressed the swollen flesh with her slim fingers. Her touch was infinitely soothing. She said, “They gave you very bad food in the jail.”

It was a plain statement of fact, competent and comforting in its efficiency. He nodded.

“Beri-beri, isn’t it?” he asked.

She said, “It is in an early stage; it will get well soon, with better food and rest. Our people get this sometimes when the crops are bad and they have to eat the old rice. But you must stay with us till you are well.”

He said, “I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

She said gravely, “How could you be that!”

She called out in Burmese, and a manservant came in from the back quarters; he exclaimed when he saw Morgan’s feet. The girl spoke to him for a time in Burmese and he went away; later he came back with a steaming brew in a jug on a tray, with a cup, and set it down by Morgan.

“You must drink a great deal of that,” the girl said. “It will do you good.”

He discovered later that it was an infusion of fresh limes and rice husks, the vitamin-bearing portion of the rice. It was a country remedy for beri-beri known to the people long before the vitamin was known to anybody.

He had a long talk that evening with the girl and her father. From time to time other relatives drifted in and out. He learned that there were still roving parties of Japanese about the countryside, up to three hundred strong; they were avoiding the towns and roads, which were patrolled by the Independence Army. These roving-bands were short of food, and cut off from their retreat towards the east by the advance of the Fourteenth Army down the middle of the country to Rangoon. A number of them were escaping down river every night in power landing craft, in an attempt to gain the sea and make a sea crossing eastwards to Tavoy. Others were trying to make their way across country, usually by night, to break through the Fourteenth Army’s narrow salient in sorties to the east.

The evening meal came, and they sat down, seven in number, to the table. The meal consisted of a great platter of boiled rice, with little bowls of curry in the middle of the table. Nay Htohn arranged special dishes for Morgan. These foods were eaten with a spoon by all except for one old lady, who used chopsticks. The meal over, Morgan sat with a cheroot on the verandah, in the dim light, utterly peaceful and at rest in a long chair. Nay Htohn came and knelt down on the floor by his feet; it was more natural for her to squat down on the floor than to sit up on a chair.

She had something in her hand. She said, “I have a paper of yours here. I think perhaps you want it back.”

He said, “A paper of mine?”

It was a very dog-eared, grubby piece of paper that she
gave him. He held it up to the light that streamed from the room behind. It read, in his handwriting,

He smiled, and turned it sideways to read again what was written across the paper:

He smiled gently, thinking back to the tenseness of that bad time from the ease and friendship of his chair on the verandah. He was touched that she should have thought it worth while to keep so trivial a scrap as a memento. He said, “You must teach me some more words while I’m here.”

She hesitated, and then said, “Have you looked inside?”

He turned the paper over, and saw that it was an old air letter, addressed to him; the sprawling, unformed handwriting gave him a great shock. He opened the tattered folds in silence, and read,

P
HILLIP DARLING
,

This is going to be a dreadful letter to write and I really don’t know how to begin but it’s not as if we ever had been
married really is it I mean had a home and all that. I know when Jack was killed you were too sweet in looking after me and of course he
wanted
it and so we simply had to and it’s been marvellous and I’ll never regret one minute of it will you?

He read on in silence, in a wave of sudden misery.

 … and it’s horrible being sort of neither one thing nor the other in spite of it having been all a mistake to start with hasn’t it? I do hope we’ll be frightfully good friends for dear old Jack’s sake.

Ever your loving,               
Bobby

“My Christ,” he said quietly. “I thought the Japs had got this one!”

He glanced down at the girl beside him; she was gazing up at him, and there were tears in her eyes. “This is an old letter from my wife,” he said. “Did you read it?”

She said, “I read it, but I did not let anybody else read it. It seemed so private. I thought you would not like people to see it.”

He said, “That’s terribly nice of you. I wouldn’t like other people to see this. I didn’t realise what it was when I wrote that message on the back of it.”

She gazed up at him. “It meant so little to you?”

“Yes.” He thought for a moment, and then said, “We didn’t match up very well, my wife and I. And then other things happened that were more—more sort of real, like crash-landing the Spit, and getting taken by your people, and all that. I just didn’t think about it. The Japs took all the papers in my wallet when they searched me at Bassein, and I thought they’d got this one, too.”

She took the letter, and turned it over curiously, holding it between the very tips of her fingers. “Did she really write this filthy thing to you in India—when you were so far from home, and fighting in the war?”

“I got it a few days before I crash-landed the Spit,” he said. “She wouldn’t have thought of it like that, of course.”

She looked up at him and met his eyes. “It is a vile letter!” she said. “I should like to see it burnt.”

“Burn it, if you like, Nay Htohn,” he said gravely. “I’m through with all that now. My wife and I—we’re all washed up.”

She smiled suddenly. “I have taken a copy of the message that you wrote for me. I am not going to lose that.” They laughed together, and she went and fetched a hurricane lamp from the table in the living room, and they watched the letter shrivel and turn black and burn till there was nothing left of it.

She came and knelt beside him, up against his knee, and they talked about Henzada and the Irrawaddy, and of her life in Rangoon, and the shorthand typing she had done for Mr Stevens in the office. And presently his hand dropped to her shoulder and caressed her; she looked up at him quickly, and smiled.

He went to bed, presently, and slept for the first time in six months upon a yielding bed; to him the string charpoy was the acme of luxurious ease. He slept well, and woke in the cool of the morning infinitely refreshed. From where he lay he could see the trees in the garden, and beyond them the glorious deep orange masses of a flame-of-the-forest tree, over sixty feet in height. The bright flowers, the blue sky, the first shafts of the sunlight,
and the jungle rats running up and down the trunks enchanted him. He felt that he was in a lovely place, a feeling not diminished by the thought that Nay Htohn was sleeping in the same house, probably not very far away. He was suddenly convinced that if he had had a nightmare of the prison and had cried out, she would have been with him in an instant. On that thought he drifted off to sleep again, and slept another hour.

Breakfast consisted of a repetition of supper, being rice and various curries, with a pot of tea for Morgan. He sat for an hour on the verandah afterwards, smoking another cheroot, and then, feeling comparatively full of beans, he walked out into the road to look at the town.

Nay Htohn came running after him, and he turned to meet her. She said, “You ought not to walk; you should rest your legs.”

“I’ve got to rest my behind, too,” he pointed out. “Besides, I want to see things.”

She said, “May I come with you?” She hesitated. “Some of our people are doubtful about what the British will do when they come back. You should have someone with you who can speak our language, just for a day or two.”

He said, “Come on. What’s the Burmese for a road—this road that we’re on now?”

They walked through the desolate, burnt-out middle of the town. Men, women, and children were living and sleeping in the charred ruins. Some of them had set up little stalls to sell a few vegetables or fruits. The pilot was distressed at the sight, nothing was being done to help these people, for there was nobody to do anything. It was no hardship for them to sleep out while the fine weather
lasted, but the monsoon was due to break in a fortnight. He spoke about this to Nay Htohn.

“What will they do?” he asked. “Is there any shelter for them?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders. “None,” she said. “They will try to build bashas—look, there is a man building one. But there is very little bamboo or palm left within walking distance of this place. And it is too crowded here. There will be a great deal of fever when the rains come and the people have no shelter.”

“That’s bad. Can’t they get bamboo and stuff from up the river?”

The girl said, “There are no boats left.”

That, Morgan knew, was very true. The river banks had been lined all the way up from Yandoon with holed and sunk sampans, some sunk by the Japanese and others by the R.A.F.

“There are over thirty tons of corrugated iron sheets at Taunsaw, but there is no means of bringing them here,” she observed. “There are no lorries left, and the Japanese took most of the bullock carts.”