A Woman of Bangkok (10 page)

For the girl coming down the rickety staircase now from the regions of gloom above is not one of those multitudes of girls—‘inopportunely desired on boats and trains’ as Louis MacNeice says—whom you have noted swinging along roads with that swift hip-dipping gait of the woman under a laden shoulder-pole, or riding in
samlors
with their noses up, or stooping in pools to wash the family water buffalo, or pulling their skirts down as they pass you on bikes, or bringing files at your behest, or lifting their blouses to feed other men’s heirs: no, this is one of the ‘very speshull ladies’ whom Custard-tart mistakenly sought for in the inner room, a lady like Sheila, your love for whom has held you in thrall these four long years, or Annette, or Dilys, who seemed to the youth you were then—that very speshull youth, these ten years dead—La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Helen, Beatrice, Dulcinea, yes, Moll Flanders too: Woman, to put it in one fruity word, with all the solace for man that word implies to the hapless bachelor: Woman personified in one woman’s form …

I know it when only her sandalled feet and firm brown ankles have descended out of the dark; it’s a premonition, as if Venus were descending feet-first out of a thundercloud, to me, some especially handsome mortal, marked for an early translation to her sphere. The long slim sarong, surrounding her in an orange shell on which spiky diamonds of gold strike subdued cabbalistic spirals, confirms the impression. Oh, how can I know that the parts concealed within this flattering vest are very speshull ones, parts that I have been seeking ever since Sheila’s (promised only) were snatched away, parts that could transport a man from earth to inexpressible heavens? The belt of glinting copper links is the zone of Venus and above it her fine solid form is encased in a dead white slip that fits like a glove and contrasts with the rich brown skin. Thin shoulder straps cut direct paths over the broad well-modelled expanses of chest and back and from between them her neck rears up as proud as a swan’s but not too long. I catch a glimpse of a wide-cheekboned face with narrowed dark slanting secret eyes and a sensually-bowed upper lip and swift-rounding chin; then a great cloud of shining black hair comes between it and me. She reaches ground-level and clucks in her sandals past the curtain and into the passage beyond. All my soul walks after her, yearning.

The girl with the hollow cheeks and the hollow chest gets up and sits on my knees. She laughs as she does so and that makes her start to cough. She sits bent up in my lap with one arm round my neck, trying to control her coughing. It is inevitable that I should put one arm round her steadyingly, I think comfortingly, too. I can feel the bones of her thighs at right angles to the bones in mine and her ribs moving under the thin flowered stuff.

‘You like?’ Custard-tart screams delightedly. ‘That is good. This girl play very good game. I know. I play with her myself many time.’ And he speaks encouragingly to the Corpse which stifles its coughing and suddenly gives me a wet noisy kiss on the cheek.

Boswell is looking at me and I say over her perfumed lank hair, ‘Just because I like to eat horse piss they think I like to lie with cadavers too.’ Thoughtfully I have chosen the transatlantic word. ‘But there’s more chance of catching phthisis than syph from this one.’ My drugged tongue has a real job with that last sentence.

‘I’d say there was equal danger of both,’ Boswell says. ‘Are you going to—?’

‘No. I’ve only seen one good dame in this place.’

‘Mine?’

‘No. No. She’d do in an emergency, of course. But I mean the one that just went through.’

‘Oh? I didn’t see any.’

‘I think she’s coming back now.’ For my ears have already learned to recognize the sound of her sandals. Sure enough she re-appears at the curtain and crosses to the ladder. She doesn’t look at us after a cursory glance. In her hand she carries a pail with a bottle in it. She begins rather leadenly to ascend.

‘Her!’ Boswell exclaims.

So I’ve done it again. Seen beauty where others cannot. He thinks I have odd tastes in women as well as in eggs.

‘You can’t have that one now,’ he says. ‘When they have their blouses off it means they’re engaged.’

There is the sound of a door being dragged to upstairs. The Corpse grabs my hand and makes me take hold of her breast. It is meagre and limp, with a stub-shaped nipple that feels like a cherry-stone. The Corpse gives a groan and shudder and throws both arms round my neck. As her mouth brushes by mine I am enveloped in a cloud of garlic. I part her arms and get up. I am too fastidious.

‘Going?’ Boswell asks.

‘Yeah. But don’t you bother.’ He has made a move as if to dump his own load. ‘You go ahead and have a good time. I guess I’m tired. Train journeys always wear me out.’ That’s a lie but it will do. ‘I had to be up at five this morning, you know.’

With extreme American ceremony he has to rise and shake hands. It looks as if I’m breaking up the party. Custard-tart will never admire me again. Windmill looks glum. The two girls examine me sideways with hostile eyes, muttering to each other. Prosit is deputed to accompany me to the hotel.

What a fuss about nothing. I feel them all draw a breath of relief as I leave. That goddamned Puritan son of a bitch.

Outside the moon has gone higher and smaller and the ghosts in the alley are few. In a quiet corner is a
samlor
with two men and a girl in it. Her face, laid back on the back of the seat, is white as chalk. The rest is shades of blackness. They make no sound.

‘Mr. Joy,’ Prosit begins,—his conversational powers are strictly limited—‘have you go to India?’

Well, I landed in Karachi for forty minutes. There was a ground hostess there, I remember. I reply in the affirmative.

He braces himself for his set-piece. ‘Mr. Joy, how long time you stay in India?’

Oh Sheila, Sheila, Sheila. Oh Venus already engaged. Oh girl with lovely depraved Mongoloid face leading that drunken sot out of the Bolero last night, self-sold to him till this morning for one hundred tics …

‘The next time I come here.’ I say, ignoring Prosit’s question, ‘I want to be jusht a little bit more drunk.’

Back at the hotel I strip off quickly and climb in naked under the mosquito-net. It is a huge bed. I can lie in it at any angle without over-hanging the edges. There would be room in it not only for my bronze Venus and me, but for Custard-tart and the Corpse, and Boswell and his sweetheart too; and at a pinch for Prosit or Windmill and whatever they will pick up. It is so damn big, it is lonely. I toss and turn, distressed by the heat, by the rich foods and sickly spirits in my guts, by my quite incommensurable folly, by my frustration, by everything; and finally I get up and tramp the room, feeling gaunt and naked and upset like Rodin’s St. John …

Boswell will have finished by now. She will have arisen from his side. He will stretch and yawn and contentedly, lazily, start putting on his shoes again. No doubt about his virility; he has proved it once again to his own satisfaction and one witness’s. Now his only desire is to get back to this hotel, to the room next door to mine, and sleep. I hope the mean bastard gave her thirty tics. Ten bob. Surely to Heaven she’s worth that. Any woman that will let a perfect stranger … And he’s an expert with some UN organization, presumably rolling in the stuff …

My mouth is as dry as the ashes under Lena’s kitchen grate. On a modernistic teak table there is, in a padded wicker basket with a padded wicker lid, a brass teapot which is hot to the touch. I turn one dainty cup right way up in its dainty saucer and fill it. The tea is warm but stale. Horse piss. There’s also a large glass flagon containing water. I try that. It’s lukewarm but I must have something. I swallow several cups.

If only I were like other men. Like Boswell and the rest of tonight’s grisly crew. Like those Siamese yokels sitting dumb and watchful on that form …

In fact I am the antithesis of the Pharisee. I do not thank God that I am not as other men are. I am ready to curse Him because He has made me different. Oh I know this is only the other face of spiritual pride, just as prudery is the obverse face of lust. But I’m not bothered about right or wrong tonight. I am staring straight at Reginald Ernest Joyce and seeing him stripped. I see that the said Reginald Ernest would cheerfully change places with Prosit—yes, gladly accept that skimpy form, that enormous
bouche
—if, with them, he could take on too Prosit’s easy manner in society, Prosit’s uncomplicated delight in the company of those—whores, I suppose one must call them …

Once, I believed there was no such thing as a bad woman. I called that phrase a contradiction in terms. In the novel it took six months to write and three minutes to tear up I called it that. But do I believe it now? Can Sheila be forgiven? Were all those girls at the Bolero last night victims of circumstance? The one I liked—the Mongol, let’s call her that—if she didn’t like the job, if it was just the only job she could do, she seemed to be putting an excellent face on it. I watched her for a long time as she sat first at a table alone, smoking quietly, casting her narrow dark eyes thoughtfully around the place. Once they dwelt on me, but only for a brief indifferent moment, then they moved on. When all those Yanks blundered in with their shirts flowing and disposed their endless limbs in a cluster of wicker armchairs she still went on smoking quietly, but she had them under survey, and after a time she got up and walked casually past them. She had taken off her little gold jacket and was in a gold evening dress which left her chest and shoulders bare and magnificent. She walked by them twice and when she returned to her table one of them went up to her and asked her to dance. Soon she was dancing with them all in turn and in the intervals sitting at their table, drinking a long green drink and smoking a lot. Then that drunk came in and somehow before long she was at
his
table, talking earnestly to him and plying him with whiskies. Two or three of the Yanks who had danced with her the most got huffy about it but in the end it was the drunk she took out. She had to put her arm round his waist to steady him, and she didn’t seem any too sober herself …

Why do I keep thinking about that cow?

And these girls tonight. What is the history behind a mere child such as Boswell is still possibly fondling? Or a truly beautiful woman like the Venus—why does she have to go up a stepladder to her tryst armed with a bucket like a charwoman? And then come down and sit in that filthy ante-room until some other Reginald Ernest, not quite so inhibited, not quite so preoccupied with morals, his own and other people’s, sees in her the possibility of a moment’s satisfaction, and springs the required twenty tics?

Oh God, tonight is going to be worse than even normal nights.

I get in under the mosquito-net again but sleep is impossible. I don’t want to read. I have no barbital. I get out of bed again, almost tearing the net down in my fury, and walk up and down, up and down. The room isn’t big enough to contain my restlessness. The night isn’t big enough to swamp my despair. I want to do something violent, but what? What can I do?

‘You could go back there again.’

I stop in the midst of a pace, aghast. The idea has sprung into my brain from God knows where and it leaves me trembling. I lick my lips and drop into a chair.

Go out of the hotel. Turn right. Right again at the first turning. Then the first on the left. Then, just past the cinema with its glare, the black tunnel on the left again. I think I could find the same door.

I sit stock-still, stupefied by the temerity of my thoughts.

If I go now—but I can’t do that. I might meet Boswell and the gang. They’d think I was daft. (I am.) I would have to wait till they were safely stowed away.

I am shaking with sexual excitement. Shall I do it? If I do, I will prove myself a man. If I don’t, then still, all tonight and tomorrow and forever perhaps, the same phobias, the same sense of inadequency, the same debilitating knowledge of one’s never-ending adolescence …

Mechanically I start putting on my clothes. I am amazed at myself. Can I really be going to do this thing? Am I going to be such a bloody imbecile? Stay safe in your hotel, Reginald Ernest boy; be a good lad, worthy of your beloved Sheila …

Already I can hear Boswell and Windmill returning. They come stumbling up the steps, talking noisily. Boswell’s shoes thump to the door next to mine, and I hear him cursing as he searches for his key. Then the sound of it in the lock.

‘Well, goo’ni’, Windmill. You’re a good kid.’

‘Goo’ni’, Mr. Bosswill, Goo’ni’.’

He pads away to his own room and Boswell enters his. He is humming that song, ‘I wonder—who’s—kissing her—no-oo-ow …’ He drops his shoes with two loud bangs and goes to the bathroom. I hear him dipping up water from the jar and sloshing it around.

Now is the time or never. I am trembling like a leaf. It takes cunning to open the door soundlessly, it is trickier still to lock it without making a noise. But I succeed, and slip the key into my pocket, and cross to the stairs. Sitting on the top one, I put on my sandals. When they are on I sit for a further moment, sweating. I could still go back to my room. It would look silly, but to no one but God and me. And perhaps I could get the Mongol when I return to Bangkok … But that would mean six more weeks of being baffled and incomplete. No, no. Tonight I’m just drunk enough to carry this business through, get it over once and for all …

I hear Boswell return to his room and his voice shouts across the partition which divides it from mine. ‘Hey, Rejoice, you asleep already? You missed a rattling good time tonight, pal. And when I say rattling—’

I go down the stair, across the quadrangle, through the gate of the hotel, and turn right. A dog lying in the dust raises his head sleepily, then snuggles his nose back on his hind legs. Nobody else even seems to see me. And across the square the
ramwong
is still clattering away, the amplified voice of all Nature’s fiercest obsession …

Four

Thus it comes about that the Reginald Ernest Joyce who returns to Bangkok is a different person altogether from the Reginald Ernest Joyce who left that city six weeks earlier.