A Woman of Bangkok (15 page)

She ignores me completely again. For the boy has arrived with her peppermint. I am surprised to see there is another bottle of beer for me too.

‘Did I order that?’

She gives me a hard look. ‘Yes, I hear you.’

I must be getting really stinking.

‘Pour some out for me,’ I say, my tone lordly, for I have an obscure feeling that a dance-hostess who was really trying to play the hostess would perform this little office without being asked. When she makes no response I snatch up the bottle and pour some of its contents furiously into my glass. It is then that I find out that the boy has already filled it. The beer shoots across the table as if the glass had exploded and of course some goes on her skirt. She switches her knees away with a cry of annoyance. I cry out too in mixed annoyance and shame. I expect her to be enraged with me but she says nothing. She pulls up her skirt a bit and flicks off the liquid with her fingernails; then she opens her little square raffia evening bag and pulls out a handkerchief. It is neatly folded and she unfolds it with deliberation before using it as a mop.

‘I’m sorry.’

She says nothing.

‘I said I’m sorry.’

My voice is so querulous that she has to reply but her own is quite expressionless. ‘Never mind. Forget about.’

But that’s just what I don’t want to do. I feel that a good way to demonstrate her importance to me is by an excessive vehemence of contrition over this piffling accident, this minikin catastrophe of bubbles and cloth. But before I can protest some more she changes the subject by standing up.

‘Where are you going this time?’

‘I go ex-cuse.’

‘But dammit, you can’t want to go excuse again already. You’ve been there three times in the last half-hour as it is.’

‘How you know?’

‘Because I saw you.’

‘Why you look me all the time?’

Suddenly my tongue takes wings. ‘Because you are the most beautiful girl in the place. Because there’s nothing else to look at in this dump. Because ever since I first saw you here six weeks ago I’ve been longing and longing to see you again. Because—’

She’s pleased all right but she states an objection. ‘Just now you talk Black Leopard.’

‘Black what?’

‘Black Leopard. You know her very well, I sink. Fat girl. Very black here.’ (Touching bicep). ‘Her dress not rad colour but littun like rad colour.’

Good God, does she mean Daisy, the virago in pink? ‘Her?’ I cry in amazement.

‘You know her, yes? Perhaps you like her very much? More zan me, I sink?’

‘Like her? Good heavens, not me! She’s—she’s—hideous, that’s what she is.’

‘What you mean?’

‘She’s—oh, what the hell’s the word—’ and then I get it—‘she’s
na-gliet
.’

Usually the farthest that a Thai will go in disparagement of a lady’s looks is the mildly negative
‘mai suei’
—not beautiful. To call her
na-gliet—
ugly—is to be almost violently over-emphatic. The Mongol—Lily—Vilai—is greatly amused. Her laugh tinkles out, that delicious little tee-hee tee-hee which before was at my expense.

‘You say Black Leopard
na-gliet?’

‘Yes.’

‘I sink I go tell her now.’

‘OK. Go and tell her.’

‘Tee-hee. Tee-hee.’

‘But be sure you come back. Quick.’

She has started to go but she wheels and returns her face clouded again. ‘Why you fray all the time I not come back? You sink I cheating girl?’

‘No, no, sorry—I didn’t mean—’

‘I very good girl. I
must
come back your table. Not have finiss my d’ink yet.’ That’s a point of course. ‘I come back as soon as I finiss pee-pee, darling. Don’t worry.’

Surprisingly she’s soon back. That makes me happy of course. And no sooner is she seated than the boy brings her another peppermint thoughtfully ordered by me during her absence. That makes
her
happy, too. In fact she is so pleased that she insists on ordering another beer for me. An air of bonhomie encompasses us like warm steam. We talk as easily as—well, as two men would. As Slither and I would do, if it was he that was sitting next to me.

I can’t remember what we talk about. There is a lot of beery persiflage. I have the impression that I am at my wittiest best and better still, that my audience is unusually appreciative. We both laugh a great deal and drinks vanish and re-appear as if a conjurer were at work on them.

At one stage a bent brown ugly old woman with straggly hair and disturbingly sober eyes tries to sell me flowers. The Mongol—I still think of her as that—selects the largest bloom from the basket and fixes it in her hair. It is white. She also buys a wreath of small white flowers with a sweet penetrating scent and this wreath she insists on slipping over our wrists, hers and mine. When it is on she looks towards the kindergarten and raises our arms so that the girls over there can see us thus bucolically entwined. ‘Give me ten tic for the old girl, darling.’ I throw her a hundred-tic note and have to ask five times for the change. Dimly I am aware that a few minutes after I have paid for the flowers they vanish just as if a conjurer were at work on them too. Dimly I suspect that the Mongol is the conjurer; that she only borrowed the flowers from the old woman for as long as it took her to charm ten tics out of my pocket and into her handbag. But the perfidy of this creature, unlike the perfidy of other women—for a fleeting moment I think of Sheila and I chuckle—this Mongolian perfidy is a joke and I don’t resent it at all, rather I enjoy the ruses by which I am being rooked. I am laughing at everything and anything and sometimes at nothing at all, just laughing, laughing, because I feel so exhilarated, so emancipated, such a dog, such a whale of a dog. I have never enjoyed female company so much as this before. Not even Venus’s, not even Sheila’s. For with Sheila I was always under restraint as of course a parfit gentil knight must inevitably be in the presence of his queen, the beldam sans mercy; thus Ivanhoe was always on his best behaviour with Rowena. As for poor dear Venus, excellent wench that she is, she remains when all is said and done a pro: our bodies are mighty orators in their lust but when they have thundered out their hackneyed speeches our tongues stammer; one hour of dalliance exhausts all our invention; our brains yawn at each other almost without attempt at concealment or apology. But with this animal I feel I could chatter cheerily till dawn and then after a short slumber resume the conversation at the breakfast table just as spontaneously as now after a swig of beer. For once, I feel, my instincts have not erred: when I picked the Mongol out as the girl for me I was inspired.

In a moment of clarity I try to focus my eyes on this woman, try desperately, for I must exercise my mind if I am to keep it alert and this is the chore I choose for it, a problem, trying to analyse her charm for me.

Lovely. Depraved. Mongoloid.

Those were the words that occurred to me whenever I recalled her upcountry and those are the words that recur now when she is so close that her knee is actually thrust against mine.

Lovely is not a word, it is more like a sigh.

And depraved?

But I become aware that she is kneading my arm and that she has been kneading it for quite a time.

‘Eh?’

‘Darling, you want take me home?’

I don’t really know—I’ve just been living in the present. While I’m hesitating—there was some reason why I’d sworn off women for tonight—she changes her tack a little. ‘Darling, I like you very much. You nice boy, I sink. I want very much you take me home, give me two hundred tic.’

I laugh at that ‘If
you
want
me
to take
you
home,
you
must give
me
two hundred tics.’

She frowns and looks bothered; it seems this matter is too serious to joke about. ‘No, you give
me,’
she says, earnestly. She puts on a whining tone. ‘Honey, I love you so much. Please take me home, honey.’

‘Don’t call me honey. I’m not American.’

‘Darling, what you say? You take me home, darling, give me two hundred tic?’ Kneading my arm some more.

She looks worse than depraved now, she looks downright evil, with her face all screwed up by cupidity. I say, not trusting her—who could be so serious over two hundred tics?—‘How do I know it’s going to be safe to take you home? Maybe you have a husband there. Maybe when you get me to your home your husband will hit me on the head with a blunt instrument.’ I feel my cunning matches hers.

‘I not have husband. Why you say that? You safe with me, darling. If anysing happen tonight, bad for you, at my home, tomollow I cannot come work at Bolero. Manager say, You bad girl, man go your house get hurt, you cannot work here, get my place very bad name … You not want be fray, darling.’ She is still massaging my arm, and she has a strangely skilful way of doing it, she somehow sinks the balls of her fingertips between the ligaments and finds nerves that respond to her touch at once soothed and stimulated. ‘Darling, you come now, give me two hundred tics?’

I wish she wouldn’t keep harping on the financial aspect but all I say is, ‘I’ll give you one hundred and eighty. I’ll take twenty off because they’—motioning towards her chest—‘aren’t real.’

It’s been a joke between us for the last hour, I insisting her breasts are artificial—‘no girl could have real ones that good: they must be rubber’—she denying; but now she can’t see any humour in this topic either.

‘Darling, darling—’

‘OK.’ If you don’t want to play. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘You give me two hundred tic?’

‘And something else besides.’

She’s so relieved she’s almost purring. She pats my arm in companionable fashion, her face quite glowing.

I wonder whether it is the prospect of sleeping with Mr. R. E. Joyce or just the prospect of getting money. I haven’t many doubts. ‘You want another drink?’ I ask, ‘or shall we go now?’

She says, ‘Not want go now. You sit here, darling, have one more beer. I go speak my frand. By and by I come back.’

‘You going to walk out on me?’

‘You not trust me?’

‘What if some other bloke offers you three hundred tics?’

‘Who?’ It is supposed to be a joke but she takes it seriously. She believes the world contains a fool who would be daft enough to give her, a common whore, six pounds for her favours. ‘If my frand say he give me three hundred tic, I come to you, ask you give me four hundred. I not go with my frand, darling, unless he give me more money than you. I like you very mutss.’

‘I’m honoured.’

‘You want me order you one more beer?’

‘As you like. One for the road. One for the bed, honey.’

It is now my turn to go excuse. I find a baffling difficulty in getting out of my chair and when I do finally get erect, my head spins and rings and everything goes black: clearly I’ve been sitting too long. Then my eyes re-open and I set off. The armchairs are too close together and I stumble over several before I reach the dancefloor. I don’t venture onto that, of course: I have an idea that it is slippery like a skating rink, and I don’t want to fall over and make myself look silly. As I skirt it I think I hear people tittering at me but at the same time I admit to myself that I am too self-conscious in public: people come to nightclubs to have a good time and of course they are all laughing, but not at me; they are laughing because they are having a good time. But I always feel embarrassed when I go excuse in a public place.

The lavatory door—‘inswinging on perpetual creosote.’ That’s William Faulkner. This one inswings on other matter, and so precipitantly that I almost go headfirst into it.

Over the partition I can hear two girls chattering. I am almost certain that one of them is the Mongol.

Depraved. At any rate that’s a word, not just a burp, like ‘lovely’. It implies Lavater and a science of reading character from physiognomy, and it implies that I know something of that science, or think that I do. It implies that to me the Mongol is anything but the personification of chastity: that blonde bloodless blue-eyed milksop who is set before us in our childhood days as the ideal to seek out and adore. It implies a lot of other things and where in hell is the door?

Re-finding my own table presents some difficulties but in the end one of the boys takes me by the arm and guides me in the right direction. I give him ten tics. There’s a full glass and a full bottle but really I’ve had enough to drink. However, since it’s here—

Mongoloid was the other word. It is the best because it is the most concrete. And it can be justified. There are plenty of suds on the table-top and I lean forward and try to draw with my finger the essential Mongoloidity of that face. Under the dark rich canopy of hair the low narrow forehead widens downward like this to the outwings of the eye-sockets. The cheekbones are wider still, but jutting inwards and obliquely downwards to the nose. From their roots, where the ears are delicately perched, the cheeks descend vertically to the angles of the jaw, which are as wide as the cheekbones at their widest; but from those angles the jaw turns in almost horizontally to the chin which is square, and the cheeks above the jawline are slightly hollowed. The nose is practically bridgeless, very wide, and tip-tilted, so that the nostrils aim forwards; it is a poor nose seen from the front, but in profile it is straight, delicate, ineffably refined—a perfect jewel of a nose. I have mucked up the drawing but the rest would be too hard to do anyway, for it is in the mouth and the modelling around it, and in the eyes, which are placed wide apart in their shallow sockets, small, honey-brown, with thick short lashes and little white, that the real life and individuality of her beauty lies. She has the slightest suggestion of double chin—all Thai beauties have it, cannot hope to become Miss Thailand without it—and between that double chin and her collarbones there are horizontal folds in her neck, three or four; and even across her chest, first round the base of the neck, then from shoulder to shoulder, there are long faint sweeping semi-elliptic creases in the flesh—lines that would be blemishes on a western woman but here suggest only opulent maturity. Oh, she’s beautiful without a doubt, a noble woman nobly—