The Empire Trilogy (132 page)

‘Well, I must say …' began Matthew, but his tired brain declined to furnish him with any suitable observation.

‘You like Joan, perhaps? Yes, she is a nice English girl, healthy, full of virtues, plainly but solidly built in the English manner, made (
comme le bread-pudding de Madame sa mère
) entirely of good things, but, alas, without either the ravishing innocence of a child or the serious attractions of a mature woman. Personally I believe the only one of the Blackett ladies to my taste is
la petite
… Miss Kate, and even she is becoming a trifle
trop mûre
… She is already in my opinion a bit too … how d'you say …
bien balancée
…
bien foutue
… Yes a bit too well-endowed, thank you.'

‘But she's only a child!'

‘I agree she has that in her favour. All the same, the rot begins. I speak physically, of course.' Dupigny suppressed a yawn.

‘Of course,' agreed Matthew hastily, feeling the tide of the conversation carrying him swiftly out of his depth. ‘But what I meant was …'

‘Ah, Joan is returning at last.'

The night air seemed very humid: the breeze had dropped, increasing the impression of heat. An hour ago there had been a brief, heavy downpour and water still gurgled busily in the deep storm-drain beside the road, but overhead the sky was clear. Matthew and Dupigny sauntered along hands in pockets; Joan walked between them, humming a song beneath her breath. As the road curved towards the Mayfair, however, she dragged the two men to a stop and disengaged herself. She had promised her mother she would not stay out long. Matthew shook hands with her stiffly: he thought it best not to attempt a more intimate embrace for the moment. As for Dupigny, he collected her slender fingers in his own and conveyed them to his lips but, despite the darkness, Matthew could see that he was using them to mask the remains of the yawn against which he had been struggling while speculating on the sensual qualities of the Blackett women.

‘How romantic you are, François! Why can't Englishmen be like you? Well, good night!'

Matthew and Dupigny walked on towards the Major's bungalow which seemed, as far as Matthew could tell in the darkness, to be no less ramshackle than the Mayfair Building on the other side of the road. They called at the verandah but there was no reply, except the soft cry of a night-bird from somewhere in the undergrowth. Matthew produced his packet of Craven A and they each lit a cigarette, lingering in the road while they smoked: indoors the heat would be suffocating.

‘D'you happen to know what the Singapore Grip is?' Matthew asked. ‘Some people I met said I should watch out for it.'

‘I believe it is what they call here a certain tropical fever, very grave. Certainly, you must watch out for it.'

‘Oh?' But why, wondered Matthew, would the RAF men have found it so amusing if it was a serious illness? This was a mystery.

Matthew would have pursued the matter but Dupigny was asking him how well he knew his old friend Major Archer. ‘What? You have been introduced only? You must make his acquaintance better …' And he went on to explain how fond he was of the Major. The Major, indeed, was one of the few people on earth for whom he, Dupigny, had any affection at all. They had first met in France during the Great War. In those days he had been a liaison officer with a British regiment. He and the Major had hardly known each other then. After the war he himself had gone to Indo-China, the Major had gone to Ireland. But then, one day in 1925, on a visit to London to see his tailor during his European leave, they had bumped into each other at a restaurant in the Strand, chez Simpson, perhaps? With enormous difficulty they had succeeded in recognizing each other, they had exchanged cards, they had renewed their acquaintanceship. Then, in the course of his next visit to Europe in 1930, they had met yet again, this time on purpose, and in 1935 yet again.

Dupigny had watched his English friend with the utmost curiosity. It had taken the Major time to settle down after the war. For a while he had been in hospital. And then he had evidently witnessed some unpleasantness in Ireland which had affected his peace of mind. The terrible unemployment of the post-war years had further unsettled him. In those days, too, he had perhaps still been yearning to capture a suitable young lady as a bride. There had no doubt been some woman in Ireland … but that Dupigny suspected only. For the Major himself never spoke of such matters.

Over the years Dupigny had noticed the Major becoming more private in his habits and, in some ways, undoubtedly a bit eccentric. If you had gone to take coffee with the Major in, let us say, 1930, you would have witnessed a strange ritual. The housekeeper would first appear with a silver jug containing just-boiled water. The Major, still chatting to you politely, would whip a thermometer from his breast pocket, plunge it into the water, remove it, read it, dry it on a napkin and, with a nod to the housekeeper, replace it in his pocket. The coffee could now be made! Ah, that was the bachelor life for you! And there were other things, too. He had taken to grumbling if his wine glasses did not sparkle as clear as rain-water … yet at the same time thought nothing of piling his cigar ash on the polished surface of his mahogany dining-table, or of dropping it, without ceremony, on the carpet.

You might also, if the Major had ushered you into his drawing-room in Bayswater about the year 1930, have found it hard to discover a satisfactory seat, since all the more comfortable chairs and the sofa were occupied by slumbering dogs, refugees for the most part from Ireland's fight for independence and by now growing old. If you did find a seat it would be covered in fine dog hairs: these animals were always moulting for some reason. The Major himself would merely perch on the arm of a chair while the dogs gazed at him with bleary devotion from their cushions. Sometimes, if a bark was heard in the street outside, they would give answering barks, though without moving an inch from their chairs. Dupigny had known few more strange experiences than that of sitting in the company of the silent, withdrawn Major towards the end of a winter afternoon and hearing those dogs erupting round him in the gloom.

‘
Eh bien!
So all is up with the Major!' one might have thought in 1930, looking at him perched on the arm of a chair across his penumbrous, dog-strewn drawing-room. ‘Nothing surely can save him now from the increasingly private comforts and exacting rules of his bachelor life.' One by one over the next five years while he, Dupigny, was again in Indo-China the dogs had dropped away and were not replaced. The Major, perhaps, was no longer very fond of dogs and had kept them mainly from a sense of duty, just as he had kept the drawing-room itself exactly as it used to be when his aunt was still alive. By this time, without a doubt, he had become a confirmed bachelor. The marriages of his contemporaries no longer filled him with such envy. He had begun to see that being married can have drawbacks, that being single can have advantages.

Not, of course, that the Major had not continued to fall in love at regular intervals. But now he tended to fall in love with happily married women, the wives of his friends and thus, for a man of honour like himself, unattainable creatures who personified all the virtues, above all, the virtue of not being in a position to return his feelings. The love he bore them was of the chivalrous, selfless kind so fashionable among the British in late-Victorian and Edwardian times, perhaps because (
selon l'hypothèse Dupigny
) it handily acknowledged the female principle in the universe without incommoding busy males with real women. Still, Dupigny had had to admit that his poor friend had a life which suited him very well,
y compris les amours.

Agreed, the Major's reward in these encounters was not the tumultuous one of illicit embraces between the sheets: it was the glance of gratitude on a pure maternal brow, the running of a moustache as soft as …
blaireau
, how d'you say? (badger? thank you) … the running of a badger-soft moustache over fair knuckles, the reading of unspoken thoughts in bright eyes. These small moments, remembered late at night as he sprawled in his lonely bed smoking his pipe in a bedroom that smelled like a railway carriage (
Fumeurs
), were the Major's only but adequate reward.

If, however, perhaps hoping for a deeper relationship, the lady should pay him a visit one afternoon bringing her children (Dupigny had witnessed one such occasion) the Major would become cross. Young children would totter about the house knocking things over and trying to hug the elderly, malodorous dogs, themselves grown short-tempered with age. Older children would chase each other from room to room and would keep asking him if they could play with certain important possessions of his (a gramophone, a pair of Prussian binoculars, a steam-powered model boat or electric railway) without realizing that these objects could only be handled with elaborate ceremony and precautions. These children-accompanied sentimental visits, Dupigny surmised, had never failed to be disastrous, passion-damping.

On such occasions, no doubt, faced with a terrifying glimpse of what a real marriage might entail, the Major could not help congratulating himself on his escape. A white marble statue of Venus, it was true, still glimmered, seductively unclothed, at the foot of his stairs. But having turned forty the Major must have reflected that by now he was over the worst. He had come through the years of emotional typhoons battered, certainly, but all in one piece. It was wonderful how a human being could adapt to his circumstances. The Major knew in his heart that he could not have endured marriage, the untidiness and confusion of it.

And so, there the Major had been, about 1935, fixed in his habits, apparently suspended in his celibacy like a chicken in aspic. But one day, abruptly, he was no longer satisfied: he had decided to give it all up, this comfortable life, to travel and see the world before he was finally too old. A man has only one life! How surprised Dupigny had been when one day he learned that the Major was making a voyage to Australia, and then to Japan, even to visit him in Hanoi and later in Saigon! Why had he done this? Another love affair that had gone wrong? The Major never spoke of such things. Why had he then settled in Singapore, opportunely for himself as it now turned out? This was something which Dupigny had not understood. And neither, perhaps, had the Major!

Matthew and Dupigny, having finished their cigarettes, approached the entrance to the Mayfair Building: a little way into the compound a stiff, dignified old
jaga
in khaki shorts and a yellow turban watched them sleepily from his
charpoy
but all they could see of his face in the darkness was a copious white moustache and a white beard. Dupigny asked whether the Major was still in the bungalow. The
jaga
raised a skinny arm to point towards the building behind him.

‘It seems the Major has been here all the time. Let us go and wish him good night.'

After the starlit compound the darkness on the verandah seemed almost complete. It was agreeably perfumed, however, by the smoke of a Havana cigar whose glowing tip Matthew had no difficulty in locating as it danced for a moment in fingers raised in greeting.

‘Not yet in bed, Brendan? Old gentlemen must take care of themselves.'

‘I'll be going to bed in a moment,' the Major said, but Matthew had already been informed that the Major, harassed by insomnia, was just as likely to sit here on the verandah smoking cigars until first light. ‘Did you hear anything? Were there any military big-wigs there?'

‘Brooke-Popham and a General. They appear confident.'

Matthew and Dupigny groped their way across the verandah to the Major's side. There Matthew collapsed with a shriek of bamboo on to a chaise-longue. How tired he was! What a lot had happened since he had last been in bed! ‘Very soon now I shall go to bed,' he thought wearily. From where he sat he had a view of the Major's silhouette. He could see the outline of his ‘badger-soft' moustache, recently outraged by Cheong's scissors. He could even see the corrugated wrinkles mounting the slope of the Major's worried brow, growing smoother as they reached the imperceptible line of hair neatly plastered down with water.

‘What fools those men are!' exclaimed the Major, and the tip of his cigar glowed fiercely in the darkness. But after a moment he added humbly: ‘Of course, they may know things that we don't.'

At the end of the first week of December a little group of men wearing overalls or boiler-suits or simply shorts on account of the heat gathered one afternoon in the shade of the tamarind tree in the Mayfair's compound. They belonged to the Mayfair Auxiliary Fire Service unit (AFS for short) and they had been summoned, although today was Sunday, to an urgent practice. The morning newspaper had carried news of a convoy of unidentified transport ships heading south from Japanese-occupied Indo-China and the Major, who was in charge of the Mayfair AFS unit, feared the worst. The Major, at the moment, was not under the tamarind tree but in the garage beside the house, struggling with a tarpaulin. Matthew, who had just been enrolled in the unit, was assisting him. There was no ventilation in the garage and the day's sun, beating down on the corrugated iron roof, had made it like an oven inside. Matthew had already been suffering from the heat: now he felt the perspiration running down his legs and collecting in his socks.

The Major had dragged the tarpaulin off a large box-shaped object which proved to be some sort of engine, gleaming with steel and brass pipes and fittings. Matthew stared at it blankly. It had two large dials on a sort of dashboard and, instead of wheels, two carrying-poles like a palanquin.

‘It's a Coventry Victor,' declared the Major with pride. ‘Brand new!'

‘But what does it do?'

‘It's a trailer-pump. The trailer is over there. I've had a bracket put on the back of my car so we can tow it about if need be. Give me a hand and we'll carry it outside. We're going to have a drill with it when our instructor gets here. He's an ex-London Fire Brigade man and when he's sober he knows his stuff … which isn't always, unfortunately.'