The Empire Trilogy (121 page)

‘Perhaps you would tell Joan that I waited for her,' Ehrendorf said calmly and without resentment as both men got to their feet. ‘I guess it slipped her mind that she had a date with me.'

‘I expect so,' agreed Walter blandly. ‘Well, I must be on my way over to Outram Road. I could drop you off in Market Street if you like?' But Ehrendorf had a car waiting and each went his separate way.

The night was very hot and still, but clear. Walter found it refreshing to sit there in the back of the open car beneath the stars, surging through the empty streets. And how peaceful the low, tiled roofs of the shophouses along Orchard Road looked in the starlight! Noticing that the California Sandwich Shoppe on the right-hand side was still open he remembered that he had eaten nothing, apart from Mr Webb's ears, for some hours. For a moment he considered telling the
syce
to stop, but no … he no longer felt hungry. The heat and weariness had robbed him of his appetite. At the bottom of Orchard Road the Bentley turned to the right into Hill Street, past the white Moorish façade of the Oriental Telephone and Telegraph Company trembling in the starlight like a vision from the Arabian Nights, and then glided on its way south-west under the looming blue-black shadow of the police barracks, over the river (Walter, holding his breath against the stench, briefly glimpsed the silhouette of Blackett and Webb's godown at the bend of the river and closer at hand on the water itself the huddled lighters and
sampans
where prodigious numbers of Chinese were fated to live out their lives), and then on along New Bridge Road towards the General Hospital, Walter brooding now about the Chinese once more.

‘We in Singapore may have our share of overcrowding and child-labour and slums, but at least it's not like Shanghai!'

For Walter, Shanghai was a constant reminder, a sort of
memento mori
, of the harsh world which lay outside the limits of British rule. The population of Shanghai's foreign areas had already been excessive before the war had broken over the city in August 1937. But within a few weeks the influx of refugees to this sanctuary had brought it to more than five million. Moreover, these were people who, even in peacetime, had been living on a level of bare subsistence that all too often dipped into total destitution: then a man's only means of supporting his family was to sift through rubbish bins or dredge the flotsam from the ships along the wharves. ‘You would think the Chinese here would be more grateful considering what their relatives in Shanghai have to put up with!' There existed, Walter was aware, a macabre thermometer to the state of health and well-being of the Shanghai population (of other cities in China, too): namely, the ‘exposed corpse'. Even in relatively good times, such was the precarious level of life in China, vast numbers of ‘exposed corpses' would be collected on the streets … six-thousand-odd in the streets of Shanghai in 1935. In 1937 more than twenty thousand bodies had been found on the streets or on waste ground in the city. By 1938 with the help of the war the number of corpses collected had risen to more than a hundred thousand
in the International Settlement alone
! ‘The cremation of six hundred corpses,' the Health Department report for that year declared encouragingly, ‘takes only four hours, though a greater number must have from six to eight hours for complete combustion.'

Well, no wonder that labour in Shanghai was so cheap and productive when the worker was accompanied everywhere by his grim
doppelgänger
the ‘exposed corpse'! ‘Our workers in Singapore may sometimes find it hard to make ends meet but at least they don't have that sort of thing to cope with. And why not? Because men like old Webb saw fit to devote their lives, not to a lot of political bilge about nationalism, welfare and equality, but to the building up of businesses which would actually produce some wealth! Perhaps one day we shall see what sort of fist our rabble-rousing friends the Communists make of feeding people but I only hope I don't have to depend on them for my next meal!'

Righteous indignation welled up inside him at the prospect until he remembered that, for the moment at least, the Communists were dropping their anti-British campaign, so people said, in order to concentrate all their efforts against the Japanese.

‘Well, Mohammed,' asked Walter leaning forward in the rush of air to speak into the
syce
's ear, ‘are you happy living in Singapore?'

‘Very happy,
Tuan
.' Walter could not see the man's features in the darkness beneath the black outline of the cap he wore, but he glimpsed the flash of white teeth as he smiled.

Presently, soothed by the vastness of the night sky, his thoughts turned to Mr Webb again and not, this time, with the lingering resentment of the old man's rigid ideas which he had felt earlier in the evening (those contemptuous marzipan smiles) but with sympathy and gratitude. And for the first time he began to feel a real pang of sorrow, that painful sense of absence, of being deserted almost, when someone whose life has been closely intertwined with your own suddenly disappears. For in spite of his age, Mr Webb's collapse had come as a surprise: it was only when you had a hand in picking him up that you realized that there was nothing much to him any more but skin and bone and the undimmed presence of a powerful personality, what weight there
was
consisted largely of his heavy English shoes. He had, after all, continued hale and hearty throughout the decade that followed his retirement. Only in the past year or two had he shown some signs of failing: at one time he had come to believe that his fellow directors of Blackett and Webb were trying to poison him, in the gruesome Malay fashion, with needle-like bamboo hairs coiled like watch-springs which then unwind to puncture the intestines or lodge undetected in the mucous membrane of the bladder. Fortunately, he had forgotten about it after a while.

Next, there had come a final flaring-up of the entrepreneurial fires which had been banked up peacefully since his retirement. He had demanded that Walter should expand Blackett and Webb into a great vertical combine like Lever Brothers or Dunlop. A vast amount of rubber was already under their control and there was still time to get a foothold in the palm-oil business. Why should they not go into the production and marketing of motor-tyres and margarine in Europe and America? Walter, though he considered the idea ridiculous, had murmured soothingly that it was worth thinking about. But old Mr Webb had become querulous, demanding a proper response to his plan. Gently Walter had explained that the opportunity for such an expansion was long since past: the competition was too powerful, capital and European executives too hard to come by, even if business had not been so sternly regulated by Britain's war economy. Mr Webb had been bitter and disbelieving, had denounced Walter as ‘a mere tradesman' … but presently the fires had died down again; in the last few months before today's fateful garden-party at which he had tumbled out of his chair and into the strange twilit ante-room to death, neither his dreams of a huge combine nor his fears of bamboo poisoning had caused him any distress. The question of palm-oil, though, had lodged in Walter's mind like a coiled bamboo hair: insignificant at first, it was coming imperceptibly to irritate him. Blackett and Webb should have become involved in palm-oil ten years ago. A businessman must move with the times. How often, recalling the fate of the fine-millers of rice in London ruined by the opening of the Suez Canal, had he not warned young men against thinking that a business could be maintained in a changing world without constant change!

The Bentley, having skirted the teeming, narrow streets of Chinatown, ill-lit and even at this hour apparently bubbling with sinister activity and subversion, had now almost reached Outram Road. The several buildings of the hospital were scattered on a small hill among trees; first-class, second-class and third-class buildings respectively housed patients occupying corresponding positions on the social ladder. Mr Webb, naturally, had been taken to a building from which he would be able to leave the world in a suitable manner. The Bentley, therefore, drew up beside the half-dozen cream pillars which formed the entrance to the main building: Walter remained in the motorcar while the
syce
went to make enquiries about Mr Webb. The man was gone some time and, presently, Walter got out to take a stroll beneath half a dozen tall palms on the lawn opposite the building. Above, on the roof, he could see the silhouette of a clock tower but it was too dark to make out the time. He supposed it must be well after midnight by now. Through the open windows on the ground floor he could see into what was evidently a general ward, dimly lit. He stared into it for a moment, half fascinated, half repelled : he was just able to make out shadowy figures stretched motionless beneath the silently whirring fans. So, this was how it ended for a man who had once had the Rangoon rice trade by the throat: in essentials not very different, he thought sombrely, from the way it ended for one of Shanghai's ‘exposed corpses'.

A crunch of gravel. Walter turned away. The
syce
was approaching accompanied by Major Archer. The Major had come earlier on a similar mission to Walter's. Old Mr Webb was still in the same condition, unconscious and paralysed. Walter could no doubt look in on him for a moment if he wanted.

‘Perhaps tomorrow,' said Walter, moving back towards the Bentley, reprieved. ‘I really just came to find out how he was getting on.' He lingered, however, for a moment with the Major, explaining that Mr Webb's collapse meant that a number of difficult decisions would have to be taken. What were they going to do now about the theme of ‘Continuity' in the jubilee procession? That was just one of many new problems that were zigzagging their way to the surface like bubbles as Mr Webb drew nearer to death. And should he make arrangements for young Matthew Webb to come out to Singapore? ‘After all, it seems a long way for him to come if he's not going to inherit.'

The Major showed surprise. But surely. Why, Mr Webb had happened to mention only the other day that Matthew would be his heir! He had even asked the Major some months earlier to witness his signature on the appropriate document and at the same time had spoken warmly of those who devoted themselves to the rehabilitation of native peoples.

‘He said nothing to me about it,' muttered Walter, thankful for the darkness which helped to mask the shock which this news had caused him. Until this moment he had allowed himself to entertain some hopes that, in default of an heir, he himself might be left at least a substantial part of Mr Webb's holdings in the business.

‘Surely he would have told me if he had changed his mind?' He stood for a moment with his hand on the door of the car looking up at the stars.

‘Well, perhaps I will go and look in on him after all,' he said finally and with a nod to the Major made his way heavily towards where his former partner lay on his death-bed.

The medical opinion had been that Mr Webb would not survive more than a few hours. But the hours and the days and presently the weeks went by and still the old fellow lingered on. An era had ended, Walter was right about that, and no doubt a new era had begun. But Mr Webb somehow managed to survive this jolting passage over the switched points of history and live on into the spring of 1941. Most likely, if his feeble hold on life had been shaken loose and he had died then and there, which probably would have been best for everybody, Walter would not have thought it worth while to summon Matthew merely to attend a funeral. But Mr Webb continued to cling on stubbornly and, besides, if Matthew was to inherit his father's share of the business Walter preferred to have him in Singapore where a clear idea of the serious responsibilities attached to his inheritance could be the more easily printed on his mind. After all, they knew so little of Matthew. He would have to make up his own mind, of course, whether or not to come out. Was he even in Europe still? A number of the more affluent people in Britain, according to J. B. Priestley's wireless broadcasts, were prudently moving to Canada and the United States, leaving the lower classes to defend their estates against the Germans. Walter knew nothing of Matthew's financial situation but assumed that he must be, at least, comfortably off.

As a child Matthew had once or twice written dutiful letters to ‘Dear Uncle Walter', thanking him (his little fingers guided by his mother's hand) for some Christmas present or other. In the years that followed the General Strike one or two more letters had arrived. Their purpose was not stated but Walter had not found it hard to guess. The young man, filled with remorse by the estrangement from his father, was seeking some word of him. Naturally, Walter had replied with reassuring descriptions of the old man's comfortable days at the Mayfair Rubber Company. Matthew had continued to write an occasional letter to the Blacketts throughout the thirties, though his letters had grown shorter and the information they contained somewhat random, as if he merely wrote down whatever caught his eye as he looked around his hotel room or out of the window (he never seemed to have a home of his own). These letters had come not only from Geneva but occasionally from other cities, too. There had once even been a picture postcard from Tokyo, showing what appeared to be a sheep standing up to its knees in a lake. ‘What is supposed to be the purpose of this?' Walter had wondered, amazed, staring at the sheep and trying to penetrate its significance. It seemed that the boy had paid a visit to the Far East, after all.

One of Matthew's letters in 1939 had mentioned that he would soon be in London on some unspecified business. As it happened, Kate, then aged almost twelve, had been there at the time, staying with an aunt for a few days before returning from school to Singapore for the summer holidays, holidays destined to be prolonged by the outbreak of war. The Blacketts' curiosity about Matthew was considerable. Why should Kate not go and have a chat with him?