The Empire Trilogy (154 page)

Passing across Anderson Bridge the car's progress was slowed by a convoy of armoured troop-carriers; glancing down at the river, Ehrendorf saw the cluster of
sampans
and
tongkangs
riding the slime: here entire families of Chinese were fated to spend their lives. For a moment the misery of this waterborne population caused the two Ehrendorfs to merge into one again. But they separated once more on the other side of the bridge. One can hardly be expected constantly, day in and day out, to measure one's own slender but personal misery against the collective misery of the world! That is asking too much. And about that letter, would it really be self-pitying to send Joan a note wishing her future happiness with Kate's Human Bean, who was also his own best friend, after all? Yet the truth was (was it not?) that under the guise of these silken good wishes he would really have liked to send Joan a rasping sarcasm. Admit it! Thus brooded the two Ehrendorfs sitting in the back of the car.

When he had returned to his apartment in Market Street, he packed his kit and left it by the door; then he wandered aimlessly from sitting-room to bedroom and back again, now and again picking up a small object (a bottle of ink, a comb, a cotton reel of khaki thread), inspecting it and putting it down again. He stared for a long time at a section of the wall by the window where the whitewash, thickly applied, had begun to flake away: he examined it with great attention as if for some hidden significance, but at length, with a shrug of his shoulders he moved away, unable to make anything of it. He paused to look down into Market Street for a moment. Normally this was one of his favourite occupations: he loved the smell of cummin, cinnamon and allspice which drifted up to his window when sacks and kegs of spices were being unloaded at the spice merchant's below. On the other side of the street were the money-lenders' shops: there Chettyars in white cheesecloth
dhotis
dozed over their accounts in dim interiors, lounging or squatting on polished wooden platforms while they waited for business, or poring over ledgers at ankle-high desks whose wood was as dark and gleaming as their own skins. They reminded Ehrendorf of somnolent alligators waiting until chance should bring them a meal on the current of passers-by flowing down the street. He smiled at the thought but the street, too, had grown oppressive and he moved on, this time picking up a snapshot of himself and his brothers and sisters. On an impulse he put it in an envelope and scribbled Matthew's name and address on it: he explored his mind for some friendly comment he might write on the back of it but could find nothing, his mind was perfectly empty. In the end, unable to think of anything suitable, he simply sealed it, stuck a stamp on it and put it in his pocket. ‘What time is it?' he asked himself aloud. An overwhelming desire to sleep came over him, although he had slept soundly all night and most of the preceding afternoon. ‘This won't do at all. If I leave now I could catch an early train and be in KL by …' Instead he picked up a newspaper and began to read an article on the developing friendship between Chinese and Indian ARP wardens. ‘Perhaps I should eat something?'

‘… This little incident is typical of the comradeship now to be found every day of the week in the streets of our city among Asiatic and European volunteers in the “Passive Defence” services …' What little incident? Ehrendorf, though he began doggedly to read the article again, was unable to find ‘the little incident'. He even counted the pages of the newspaper; he must have lost a page somewhere. But no, it was all there. He threw it aside. What did it matter? Should he go to sleep again or should he go to the railway station? He went into the kitchen and opened his refrigerator: it contained eggs, milk, a lettuce, some corned beef on a saucer (frozen on to it), a boiled potato that for some reason had turned a dark grey colour, some beetroot and the manuscript of a novel he was writing about a gifted young American from Kansas City who goes to Oxford on a scholarship and there, having fallen in love with an English girl who surrounds herself with cynical, sophisticated people, goes to the dogs, forgetting the sincere, warm-hearted American girl whose virginity he had made away with while crossing the Atlantic on a Cunard liner … et cetera … ‘How could I write such rubbish?' Still, he could not quite bring himself to tear it up … (‘All I need now is the sincere, warm-hearted American girl.') He left the novel where it was but transferred the food to the table, having fried the eggs and the grey boiled potato.

Then he began to eat. He still did not feel in the least hungry but his Calvinist conscience would not allow him to leave the food to spoil while he was away from Singapore. It would have been a better idea, he realized, to give it to some hungry Singaporean but he was unable, in his present frame of mind, to face the problem of finding and communicating with a suitable recipient. He ate his way remorselessly through the food on the table, trying to make himself belch from time to time to lessen the strain. When he had finished he obliged himself, as an extra penance, to eat his way through a wedge of cake he discovered in a biscuit tin. As he ate, taking frequent swigs of milk to reduce the cake to a gruel he could swallow, he mused on the natural tendency, observable in human affairs, for things to go wrong, a law which in his blind optimism he had not perceived until this moment. Since nobody else appeared to have given it much thought, either, he felt justified in christening this discovery: Ehrendorf's Second Law. It asserted: ‘In human affairs things tend inevitably to go wrong.' Or to put it another way: ‘The human situation, in general or in particular, is slightly worse (ignoring an occasional hiccup in the graph) at any given moment than at any preceding moment.' This notion caused him to smile for a moment: he must pass it on to Matthew. The reflection which caused him to wince immediately after having smiled (namely, that as Matthew was a rival he had most likely lost not only Joan but his best friend into the bargain), he saw merely as a demonstration of the universal application to Ehrendorf's Second Law.

Ehrendorf, having overcome with great difficulty a desire to retire to bed and sleep for several more hours, finally persuaded himself to take the evening train to Kuala Lumpur: it was Thursday, II December. By the time he set out he was already very tired; he also felt bloated and ill from the unwanted food he had consumed. The cavernous Railway Station in Keppel Road was already thronged with bored, weary or resigned-looking troops: British, Australian, Indian and Ghurka; their kit and rifles lay piled haphazardly; men shouted orders but without apparently diminishing the chaos, causing Ehrendorf, who for some weeks had been contemplating the conversion of his novel into an epic of Tolstoyan dimensions, to wonder whether war was of interest to anyone but the commanders who were conducting it. Was it not, for the troops themselves, a matter of standing around for hours on end speechless with boredom, perhaps with now and then a moment of terror?

The train, when he succeeded in finding it, was already crammed with troops. He forced his way into a first-class compartment with a number of British officers who eyed him with hostility; one of them reluctantly removed his kit from a seat by the window, the only place unoccupied. It was extremely hot in the compartment and the atmosphere of ill-will among its occupants showed no sign of dissipating, nor the train any sign of moving out of the station. The insignia of the Federated Malay States Railway, palm-trees and a lion, had been engraved on the window beside Ehrendorf: he gazed at it, thinking of the vanished comfort and security of earlier days in Malaya, and found it beautiful. At last the train began to move; they crept out of the station, passing the General Hospital and the old Lunatic Asylum on their right and then curved away across the island towards the Causeway. Almost immediately the redtiled roofs of Singapore gave way to jungle, so astonishingly dense that one might not have known that a great city lay just on the other side of it a few hundred yards away; after the jungle, mangrove swamps, a wretched Malay village scattered with rusting tin cans, a banana grove, a rubber smallholding or two, a few frail-looking papaya trees, then more jungle and mangrove until they reached the Causeway and the flashing water on either side.

Once out of the dilapidated streets of Johore Bahru the jungle returned, a solid green wall in which it was hard to distinguish individual leaves and fronds; Ehrendorf had the impression of travelling through an interminable dark green corridor. Presently, it grew dark and began to rain heavily, making it necessary to shut the windows. The heat quickly grew intolerable. The only illumination was a single light-bulb painted blue in deference to the black-out: in the faint glow that it cast it was barely possible to make out the faces of the other men in the compartment. Time passed. The rain stopped and it was possible to open the windows again. When, for no apparent reason, they halted, Ehrendorf could smell the steam from the locomotive which hung in the saturated air and refused to dissipate.

They crept forward again, then stopped. A man ran back along the train blowing a whistle and shouting ‘Air-raid!' his feet crunching noisily on the cinders as he passed. One of the officers switched off the blue light and the others groped for their helmets. Nothing happened; they sat in silence, waiting. The night sounds of the jungle rose in volume around them, eerie and frightening. Something, perhaps a moth, brushed against Ehrendorf's face in the darkness and he flailed at it in sudden horror. Still nothing happened. Feeling drowsy he leaned his head against the side of the coach, his helmet tilted to form a comfortable support. After a wait that seemed interminable the train began cautiously to advance once more.

Ehrendorf slept now, shaken this way and that by the motion of the train. A smell of tobacco, remembered from his childhood, flirted with his scarcely conscious mind, a smell not of burning tobacco but of the empty cigarette tins his father used to give him. In his dream he thought: ‘How close we are to things when we smell them!' Then his restless mind meandered away in a long, meaningless series of half-thoughts about Joan. He saw her walking ahead of him in a blue cotton dress, flaring and fading rhythmically in time with the motion of the train. ‘It would never have worked in any case. We had nothing in common.'

The train had stopped, evidently in some small station, perhaps Segamat or Gemas. There were no lights on the platform so it was impossible to make out. There was a storm grumbling nearby: lightning flickered over the surrounding tree tops. He wondered what time it was. A flash of lightning illuminated the compartment for an instant and he saw his travelling companions; they were still silent but no longer sitting erect: now they slumped as if mysteriously gassed. Another train travelling in the opposite direction had stopped beside their own. One of them began to move: at first he thought it was the one he was in but it proved to be the other: a brief, sickening impression of immobility took hold of him as he realized. One darkened compartment after another slipped past. And then, surprisingly, a compartment which by comparison with the rest seemed brightly lit. Ehrendorf, still drugged with sleep, glimpsed a little cluster of illuminated brigadiers poring over a map which they had spread on a table between them. He sat up quickly, but the other train had already vanished into the darkness.

‘Wasn't that General Heath in the middle?' he asked the man opposite him, but there was no reply. Heath was in command of 111 Corps. After all, he mused, things might not be going too badly if Heath was paying a visit to Singapore.

Dupigny had spent the past two days very pleasantly in George Town, the only town of consequence on the island of Penang. He had come here partly because he felt he needed a change from Singapore, partly in the hope of borrowing some money from a French acquaintance. Although, as it had transpired, he had not succeeded in borrowing the money, in all other respects his visit to Penang had turned out well. He had managed, despite his threadbare clothing, to persuade the management of the Eastern and Oriental Hotel that Monsieur Ballereau, the French Consul in Singapore whom Dupigny considered, for no particular reason, his sworn enemy, would redeem all his bills and chits … a decidedly satisfactory state of affairs, given the excellence of the hotel's cuisine. Now the problem which was exercising him as he strolled along the esplanade giving himself an appetite for a substantial lunch in prospect, was this: would his residence at the E and O be a sufficient sign of affluence for him to buy new clothes at a superior outfitter's on credit? In normal times a European would have expected to be given credit in any case without difficulty, merely signing a chit to be redeemed in due course. But of late things had been growing more difficult. Dupigny had already been rebuffed more than once in his efforts to fit himself out in a suitable manner.

This was a thorny problem but he did not intend to let it spoil his stroll. This promenade, he considered, had something of the atmosphere of a seaside resort in Normandy … Deauville, say, or Cabourg. Here, on one rounded elbow of the island, the town hall and municipal offices presided in peaceful dignity over a stretch of open ground giving on to the ruined earthworks of Fort Cornwallis. In Deauville, of course, there would have been a bracing smell of the sea and the Tricolour would have been galloping on a flag-staff; here there was a flag-staff, certainly, but the Union Jack hung limp from it in the humid heat. No, it was not bracing here, far from it, but by half closing your eyes and very vigorously exercising your imagination you might, for a moment or two, think yourself in a tropical Balbec on your way to meet some darkskinned little Albertine.

George Town, he was thinking, as he followed the elbow of the coast road where it turned sharply to head back south-west along Weld Quay towards the ferry, though not the most exciting place in the world, was certainly one of the most peaceful, even with the war so close. Yes, it even seemed peaceful this morning when Weld Quay was thronged with Chinese and Indians, come to watch the Japanese bombers attacking Butterworth across the water as they had on the previous day. Undoubtedly there had not been such excitement in Penang, apart from some race riots between Chinese and Indians, in the hundred years since the government of the Straits Settlements had passed to Singapore … But Dupigny hardly had time to finish this thought: the next moment he looked out to sea, looked again, hesitated, then began to run.