The Empire Trilogy (113 page)

‘Well, no, Daddy, I agree that nothing did happen … We weren't actually molested but we easily could have been. It was more the feeling of being, well, vulnerable. One moment we were strolling along peacefully and the next the street was full of cars and lorries and little Jap soldiers pouring out … Well, all right then, I admit there was only one car and no lorry and only three or four soldiers poured out of it, the car, I mean, but still it was quite frightening when they started herding us in to the side of the pavement with their rifle butts and there was an officer who looked like a chimpanzee with a sword several times too long for him which he kept tripping over in the most ludicrous fashion. Until then it seemed at least
fairly
amusing, though Mama was getting apprehensive and Carlos was looking helpless and saying something like: ‘What a to-do!' which frankly wasn't very helpful of him because Mummy and I could think of that much ourselves. Well, we tried to walk on and they wouldn't let us, and then Carlos suddenly stopped saying ‘Bless my soul' and began to rattle away in Portuguese and got quite red in the face because he had seen that they'd blocked off the end of the street and he was afraid that he might be involved in heaven knows what, a diplomatic incident perhaps?

‘Of
course
, there was no reason to be alarmed, I'm not saying there
was
! All I'm saying is that it did occur to one that the Jap soldiers could turn nasty and their bayonets looked very sharp, even though there were only three or four of them, and in the meantime the street had suddenly filled with people pressing around the doorway that the soldiers had gone into and some of them looked pretty worked up about something, so unlike the Chinese who are usually well-behaved and mind their own business (or at least they do here in Singapore, don't they?) and I'd never realized before how much smaller they are than us, because our three heads were sticking out of the crowd and it felt a bit like
Gulliver's Travels
or something.

‘Anyway, then two Jap soldiers came out of the doorway again carrying someone. All I could see at first was the front man who had a very shiny leather boot gripped in the palm of each hand … I never did see the rest of him properly, I'm glad to say, just a hand trailing along the pavement and then a glimpse of a shape with its tunic and trousers undone and a horrid mass of red stuff around its middle. He was S-shaped because of the way they were carrying him and he had a sword, too, which scraped tinnily on the ground and kept getting in the way of the man behind who had him by the armpits. But really what gave me such a shock was the Chinese girl they dragged out of the doorway and threw up against the wall … at least, I thought then that she was Chinese because of her clothes, she was wearing a quilted tunic and black silk trousers and I'd never seen a Eurasian wear anything but European clothes, even though there was something about the colour of her hair which was a very dark red, I naturally thought that she had simply dyed it, which would have been nothing compared to the weird creatures in some of the nightclubs which Carlos had persuaded us to go to the night before. The point is that she looked as if she were about my age or even younger, and then she saw me in the crowd and that is what I found so upsetting.

‘Well, it's not my fault that I've led such a sheltered life, is it? I suddenly thought that if I hadn't been English it could have been
me
up against that wall. The little officer was shouting at her and striking her. Her face had gone grey, I mean
literally
grey, the colour of porridge. It gives you a shock yourself to see someone so frightened. Afterwards I couldn't get it out of my mind. I kept thinking that if she were English she'd have only just left school like me.

‘I don't know where everybody came from but by that time the street was full of people clustered in a very tight semicircle around the Japanese officer and the girl and the other two soldiers who had carried the dead man out of the house were having trouble getting through the crowd again to reach them. And suddenly … he was so busy screaming at the girl and slapping her face that he hadn't noticed the crowd behind him … suddenly, they pressed forward and swallowed him and the girl up completely. There was some shoving and kicking and I think he tried to draw his sword but he was so tightly packed in with everyone else that of course he couldn't do anything. And at that moment Carlos said: “Now's our chance to beetle off” because the Japanese soldiers who had gone to the end of the street to stop people leaving were coming running back to rescue their officer, and between us Carlos and I managed to drag Mama around the corner and then he went off to find the car, and in no time we were drinking a much-needed cup of tea at the Park Hotel, all back safe and sound on Bubbling Well Road.

‘Well, that was that, and even Mama gradually came to see that she had had a little adventure and felt quite pleased with herself, especially when Carlos got hold of a newspaper which said that the officer had been lured into that house by a girl and then murdered by Communists. It didn't say anything about what happened to the girl. Anyway, as I say, that was that and the holiday continued as before with sight-seeing and shopping et cetera and we went to the Moscowa nightclub which was full of the most divinely beautiful Russian girls, all aristocrats, Carlos said, I felt so jealous of them and … thank you, Daddy dear, but I know very well that I don't though I wish I did, it must be nice … and so on and then, then it was time to go on board again to come back to dear old Singapore and Mama had to make a fuss about the way her maid was doing the packing, just rolling things up and cramming them into our trunks and, as you know, Mama has only to set
eyes
on a boat to get sea-sick, and so it was really lucky that Carlo was there, even though he was beginning to get on our nerves a bit and we'd privately christened him “The Stage Butler” because he was always so polite and pompous, because otherwise I'd have had to mope about by myself, what with Mama groaning and swallowing tablets in her cabin and all.

‘Well, we had lots of lovely dances and games on deck and simply enormous meals and one evening with some other young people we'd met we all got a bit tipsy and decided we'd have an adventure and explore the ship and prowl around in the cabin class and the third-class parts of the boat where one wasn't normally supposed to go. So we set off in a horde, the men in dinner-jackets smoking cigars and us girls in our most gorgeous evening dresses, giggling with champagne and silly jokes and some of the men were even wearing funny hats. Straight away we ran into a hitch. A locked door. Steward won't let us through. “I say, Carlos,” said one of the men, “why don't you bribe the fearful little fellow while we look the other way,” and we all whooped and shoved Carlos forward and being a Brazilian, of course, he was frightfully good at bribing people and in no time we were pouring through into the other classes.

‘Actually, it was then that we began to realize that it was probably rather a boring idea after all to go prowling about in the other classes … There was really nothing much to
do
! And one of the men who was in the Diplomatic … He told me his name was Sinclair Sinclair (he had a stammer and he always said it twice and I never found out whether it was really that or whether he was just repeating one of his names) and had been to Harrow and was a great sport and was something like the millionth secretary in Bangkok or somewhere … he said : “I say, I don't know what you people think b-b-but it seems to me that the other cluh-cluh-cluh … parts of the ship are just a tiny bit disappointing, if you get m'meaning,” and he did rather say what was in everyone's mind. And someone else said: “I mean to say, it's ever so slightly
dingy
, which is not to say that it's not frightfully jolly in its way, and all that.'

And soon we were all feeling pretty glum which was awful considering how cheerful we'd been just a few minutes before. And by that time we'd come to another locked door and almost decided to go back but Carlos, alias the Stage Butler, had already bribed somebody, sort of automatically, and he was opening the door so we went through that one, too. And that was a mistake because on the other side of that door things were really pretty grim and we found ourselves trooping through a sort of dreadful dormitory with bunks which had a ghastly stuffy smell and was full of half-naked people snoring, and Sinclair Sinclair said: “I think we must be in one of the
holds
,” and one of the girls began to feel faint, but the man had locked the door behind us again and we couldn't find anybody else to open it and we were afraid the girl was going to faint or have hysterics or something. So someone said that there must be a way of getting up to the deck … that there was a law of the sea or something which said even third-class passengers had to have a way of getting on to the deck, and so we decided to wait up on deck in the fresh air while we sent Carlos to bribe somebody to get us back to the first class. Incidentally, when I told Sinclair about the man I'd seen in Shanghai with strawberry jam coming out of his stomach he wasn't at all impressed and said he'd seen lots of things like that and that Asiatics were always killing each other.
It seems they don't mind
. It's been proved scientifically, that's what Sinclair said anyway.

‘In the end we found some stairs and got up on to the deck and thank heaven because it was ghastly down there. Someone said that now he knew why it was called the bowels of the ship but nobody laughed because it was vulgar. And even on deck there were people sleeping huddled here and there, Chinese, I think, I suppose they didn't care for it down below either. It was quite warm and there was a lovely moon and a soft breeze. After crawling about down below it was super to be in the fresh air again and one of the men produced a bottle of champagne he'd brought with him and we all took a swig and felt quite merry again. And while we were waiting for Carlos to come back Sinclair Sinclair told us about a game he and his chums used to play in Paris when he was learning French (which they all have to in the Diplomatic) … it was called
saute-clochard
: evidently all the beggars in Paris sleep in rows over the hot-air vents from the Métro in winter to keep warm and the game consisted in seeing how many you could jump over at a time: it sounds a bit heartless, I must say, but anyway, Sinclair announced that he had decided to beat the world record for
saute-Chinois
which meant the number of Chinamen he could jump over at a time and he said he'd never have a better opportunity than the present. All the other men egged him on and in a flash he'd taken off his dinner-jacket and was pounding over the deck towards a row of sleeping Chinese. Then he leaped into the air and … oh, incidentally, I've just remembered something I wanted to ask you. When we were on the way out and stopping at ports here and there before reaching Shanghai … I think it was the morning after we left Canton and we were steaming up a river into Wuchow in Kwangsi Province, anyway, someone pointed out a golf club on the left-hand bank and said it was definitely the most exclusive in the world and when I asked why? he said because it only had four members, the manager and assistant-manager of the Standard Oil Company and the same of the Asiatic Petroleum Company, but that's ridiculous, isn't it? A golf club with only four members. He was only joking, wasn't he? Really! Good heavens! How d'you mean, “Chinese don't play golf?” Now
you're
making fun of me. But sorry, I'll go on: Sinclair leaped into the air and must have jumped over at least a dozen Chinese who were asleep on the deck and luckily didn't land on one … but not so luckily he did catch his foot against something, a piece of iron or a rope or I don't know what, and took a nasty fall on the deck and grazed his knees and palms and tore his trousers and made a frightful din.

That's when some of the Chinese woke up and looked at us. I was quite near one of the lights and happened to be looking in the direction of one of the bundles when it stirred and sat up. It was the girl I'd seen in Shanghai shoved against the wall by the Jap officer. I was only a few feet away. I'd have recognized her even if her face hadn't been still all bruised and swollen. And she recognized me, too, I could see that. I smiled at her and said something like I was glad she had got away and was she all right? She didn't say anything at first and I thought, of course she wouldn't speak English and she was obviously shocked to see someone who recognized her. But then she suddenly asked me in perfect English, you know, like an educated person, if I would please not tell anyone about the business with the Jap officer because she was afraid that if people knew about it they might not give her a landing-permit in Singapore and that she was going there to get away from the Japanese. Her name was Miss Chiang, she said, Vera Chiang, and her mother had been a Russian who'd had to leave during the Revolution and then had died and she'd been educated in an American mission in Manchuria or somewhere and that she'd had nothing to do with the man who'd been killed and had never seen him before. Of course, I said I wouldn't tell anyone and I gave her your card with the firm's name on and my name and said to get in touch if she needed help getting work or something. And that, Papa dear, was all that happened except that the Stage Butler started making scenes because he was jealous of me talking to Sinclair Sinclair, but it wasn't my fault if Sinclair was more amusing and I can't bear it when men are jealous and want to have you all to themselves and keep trying to have “serious talks”. In the end Mummy and I stopped calling him the Stage Butler and christened him High Dudgeon because of the way he kept stalking about the ship and sulking. Because of him it was quite a relief to see Singapore and the good old Empire Dock and there were the usual little brown boys diving for pennies, but one thing I'd never noticed before was that there were one or two quite old men diving for pennies, or would have except we preferred to throw them for the boys. And that was that except that I forgot to tell you what happened to Sinclair Sinclair. One of the Chinamen he had jumped over turned out to be a very big man and was in a fearful rage about it, and he just picked up poor Sinclair and threw him overboard and there was a terrible splash and he just vanished in the wake … no, Daddy, you're tickling … and was never seen again. No! Daddy, stop! You're hurting … I'm sorry, I'll never tell a lie again! I promise!'