A Woman of Bangkok
Read A Woman of Bangkok Online
Authors: Jack Reynolds
Tags: #Romance, #Contemporary Women, #Southeast, #Travel, #Asia, #Fiction, #Urban Life, #Family & Relationships, #Coming of Age, #Family Relationships, #General, #Cultural Heritage
A WOMAN OF
BANGKOK
J
ack
R
eynolds
Contents
C
ONFESSIONS
O
F
A B
ANGKOK
P
RIVATE
E
YE
Praise for
A Woman of Bangkok
‘Among the ten finest novels written about Asia’
The Asian Wall Street Journal
(Harry Rolnick)
‘Pulls no punches … a book to remember’
The Age
, Australia
‘At times the lying, grasping, impenitent and wholly immoral Vilai becomes
twenty times larger than life. She is the real thing …’
The New York Times
‘One night in Bangkok, so the song goes, makes a hard man humble. The city is, in fact, a combine harvester for the expat male heart. Jack Reynolds captures the ethos perfectly in this, the definitive account, written 50 years ago’
The Guardian
, UK (Malcolm Pryce)
‘Fascinating … intensely readable’
Gore Vidal, author
‘More than half a century ago, Jack Reynolds wrote the original Bangkok bargirl story, highlighting the dangers that can befall a man who loses his heart in the Land of Smiles. The story is as pertinent today as it was then and always will be so long as men continue to look for love in the wrong places’
Stephen Leather, author
‘Jack Reynolds’ 1950s
A Woman of Bangkok
(originally published
A Sort of Beauty
in 1956, republished under the new name shortly thereafter), a well-written and poignant story of a young Englishman’s descent into the world of Thai brothels, remains the best novel yet published with this theme’
Joe Cummings, author
Part One
THE LAMB
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold;
We cannot catch the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot ask for pardon.
Louis MacNeice
One
It is on the second Sunday in September that I am due to fly to Bangkok. The preceding day I spend with my parents. That entails going down to Malderbury by train. I feel sick with apprehension. I am afraid there are going to be tearful scenes, especially with my mother, and I am even more afraid that Andy and Sheila will show up and try to effect a last-minute reconciliation.
But as it turns out, these fears, like most of my fears, are groundless. My father is locked in his usual Saturday hell consuming ounces of tobacco over his sermons for the morrow. My mother is busy jam-making. No signs of Andy or his bride. After a few minutes I get out the lawn mower and lay absolutely regular strips of viridian and terre verte across the tennis court. For lunch there are home-grown tomatoes and Danish tinned ham and what talk there is deals casually with disaster amongst the parishioners, not with anything real.
After coffee I retire to my own room. All the poets are there from Chaucer and Langland to those two doubting Thomases of modern times, Edward and Dylan; but I can’t settle to read anything; the salt hath lost his savour; symphonies sound like solos on the piccolo. I am glad when the gong booms for tea. It booms early, so that I can catch the 4.33 back to town. There is real butter, and some of my mother’s famous bread, and the scum off the new jam, still hot. Again, all mention of my personal affairs is avoided. After emptying my fourth cup I look at my watch, say ‘Well, I suppose,’ get up rather clumsily off the straight-backed Chippendale chair, shake hands with my father, unable to look in his eyes, kiss my mother twice. To my annoyance I am nearly more emotional than they are. I am annoyed too because they aren’t coming to the station to see me off. They are expecting some ‘young people’ they say to play tennis on the lawn I so kindly cut. Bitterly I recall how when Andy first set forth for darkest Africa the whole family accompanied him to Liverpool and saw him safely aboard his ship … But never mind.
I walk down the lane—perhaps for the last time: who knows what deadly tropical disease I may not soon contract?—and turn round under Mrs. Danforth’s damson tree to wave goodbye. They are standing by the gate, my father, short and round and rubicund, clenching between his teeth the pipe which I am sure is more comfort to him than his religion, my mother, taller and more severe, automatically wiping her hands on her apron. I wave. They wave. I turn my back on them. Free at last. Or at any rate, adrift. I ought to walk more jauntily than I do, but my feelings are distressingly muddled: a lift in the heart but a lump in the throat, and in the bowels, a queasy debilitating fear.
Meeting the ‘young people’ is a godsend of an anticlimax. There’s half a dozen of them packed into the Dennisons’ new car. Some of them I don’t recognize, for it is seven years since I last lived at home and during that time people seem to have been growing up much faster than I ever did. The only hand I really care to shake is young Dennison’s own. He takes it from the wheel and stretches it out to me across the laps of two girls who are snuggled in the front seat with him. I grip it heartily, not because of any present affection for Denny (I scarcely know him any longer) but for the sake of auld lang syne. He must be doing pretty well at whatever it is he is doing: the silk scarf inside his open-neck shirt, the curly pipe in his mouth, the glossy new look of the whole ensemble, clearly proclaim success. And it seems to me (conscious as I am of a sports jacket baggy at the elbows and corduroys baggy at the knee) that those two girls in the front seat are adjuncts of his success, no less part and parcel of it than the car. I cannot help but feel that their waves are too set, their lips too red, their sweaters too tight and their shorts too short, for their own comfort or anybody else’s: it is as if they have always considered themselves to be ugly ducklings and can’t believe that they’ve suddenly turned into swans; they still feel it necessary to over-emphasize every potential charm, like fading courtesans. I blush under the upward scrutiny of their huge brilliant eyes and try to drag my hand from Denny’s but he holds it captive, embarrassingly within the warm aura of their thighs. There is the usual flapping of tongues:
‘Thought you’d gone, old boy.’
‘No, not yet. Tomorrow’s the day.’
‘Tomorrow D-day, what? Flying, I suppose?’
‘Yes. DC-6.’
‘You’ll find flying pretty boring.’
I stare at him cholerously. The cheek of the man! How dare he contrast before these girls, whose eyes have grown bigger and brighter as their coyly-revealed ears drink in this staccato men’s talk, his own experience in the air (five minutes for ten bob in a Gypsy Moth at Clacton-on-sea, if that) with my own inexperience, which he insultingly assumes? And that huddle of limbs and racquets in the rear seat is equipped with ears too. I stammer lamely, ‘Well, we’ll see.’
‘Where’s he going?’ asks the girl next to him, the one whose sweater is so tight in two places that you can see the white bulges of her brassiere through the expanded meshes of red wool.
‘Yes, where
are
you going, Reg? Kenya, is it, where Andy—?’
‘No. Thailand.’ They all look blank. ‘Siam, to give it its old name.’
‘Ah, I knew it was somewhere that way.’
The sweater rubs his arm and he says, turning to her indulgently (though he is still holding my hand and our palms are getting objectionably moist), ‘Si-am, honey. Haven’t you ever heard of Si-am?’
Apparently she hasn’t, but meanwhile the other girl, whose sweater is primrose-yellow, addresses me direct in a husky voice. ‘Why on earth are you going there? And how long for?’
‘My firm’s sending me. For three years, I expect.’
Her eyes grow momentarily tremendous, then unfocus themselves from me, lose their brilliance and turn away. Three years … Her hopes for the next month or so are centred nearer home. She looks at her wrist-watch.
Denny puts the car into gear. ‘Well, mustn’t keep you, old man. Wouldn’t do for you to miss your train, I expect. Some little lady in Palmers Green waiting to say a last fond farewell, what? What?’
A chorus of so-longs, happy landings, cheerios, and a mock military salute from me. As the car draws away there is a commotion in the front seat and the head of one of the girls comes through the window. Impossible to tell which one: they are lipsticked and powdered to such a pitch of similarity that only by their sweaters can they be told apart. ‘Bring me back a sarong,’ she squeals, ‘you know, like Dorothy Lamour,’ and she waves a slim arm at me. Mrs. Danforth’s damsons intervene again and my last salute, an acknowledgement of that arm’s, goes unobserved by mortal eye. To the eye of Heaven, if that happened to be trained on me at that moment, it must have looked a fatuous gesture. Young Reggie Joyce down there, saluting the arse-end of an Austin A-40 …
As it happens, Denny guessed right. There is a little lady waiting for me. Not in Palmers Green—but to a man who thinks Thailand is in the same general direction as Kenya, the difference between one North London suburb and another must seem immaterial. Nor is she the sort of ‘little lady’ that Denny implied with that knowing upward twitch of one eyebrow. I have known her intimately for six years and never kissed her once. Nor wanted to.
She is sitting in the front room window with her hat already on. She is manicuring her nails to pass the time. When she sees me she throws down the orange stick and jumps up. I don’t get a chance to use my key. She hurtles through the door, slamming it shut behind her. ‘Good gracious, Mr. Joyce’ (in all these years I have never been able to induce her to use my first name) ‘I thought you never was coming. We’ll have to queue, that’s certain.’
I had wanted to go inside for a minute (those four cups of tea) but I decide to suppress myself for a while longer. For one who is fifty-seven years of age, and only about that number of inches high, and at a guess about twice that number of inches round, she can cover the ground at an astonishing speed. Her calves twinkle fawn-stockinged between this evening’s particular flowery voluminousness and her run-over-at-heels but meticulously-polished shoes. Yet despite the energy she is expending, she has breath left for conversation.
‘Did you see your Mum and Dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘How were they?’
‘All right.’
‘Weren’t they—upset?’
‘Why should they be?’
‘Well, with you going away. For so long. To them foreign parts. I’m sure
I’m
upset.’
‘Oh, you’re just sentimental, Lena. We Joyces are a travelling family. We’re used to our loved ones taking off for the antipodes.’
‘Yes, but
you’re
going to Siam.’ Her next question is put almost warily. ‘Did you see your brother?’