A Woman of Bangkok (31 page)

‘At last I’m out of my adolescence,’ I told myself. ‘At last I’m man-size.’ My muscles automatically flexed themselves. My body had come into its own. I could face adults now eye to eye.

I recalled various things she’d said. ‘I like you, Wretch. You good boy, I sink. Why you not marry wiss me? What you do tomollow? How mutss money you get every munss? If you like, I marry wiss you, go everywhere—’

‘I not bad girl. I not pross. I dancing-girl. I slip only wiss man I like. I not like you, you giff me one t’ou-zand tic, you cannot slip wiss me—’

She’d wanted me to escort her home because it was getting light and it was not nice, she’d said, for a girl to be seen out alone at that time of day in evening clothes. ‘What, going to hide behind my big European nose?’ I’d asked. She’d wanted me to take her to the hospital to see Udom, but later she’d decided it would be better if she went by herself. She wanted to know when she’d see me again—tomorrow, the next day after that? I’d remembered I must get another payday in first and suggested Thursday. She’d said sadly, ‘You not like me, Wretch.’ I’d protested that I did, that she’d given me a wonderful time, that she didn’t know how much she’d done for me. She’d smiled, thrown her arms round my neck, and kissed me on the lips. An affectionate kiss, not a lustful one. Then she’d gone, lingering a little at the door as if she’d expected me to accompany her downstairs, but I was still in pyjama trousers only …

As soon as I heard a boy slopping around in the passage I ordered coffee, ham and eggs, toast and marmalade for two, and gobbled the lot.

‘Leopard, Leopard, burning bright

In the Bolero every night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’

I repeated that quatrain many times. It seemed to fit.

After I’d eaten and the boy had straightened the bed I laid down on it again and tried to make up for lost sleep. But the Leopard was burning too bright in the forest of my mind. Sleep wouldn’t come. In the end I got up and wrote letters to Lena and Slither.

Shortly after midday she shot into my room like a projectile. And exploded like one.

‘Wretch, you no good, I sink. I hate you. You kill my son.’

‘What?’

‘Udom d’ad.’

‘No, Vilai, no!’

‘You sink I lie? Huh! I not lie ’bout sing like this, I sink. Udom d’ad, I tell you. Because you kill him.
You
!’

I’d got up when she’d burst in but now I had to sit down again because my knees had gone weak. ‘What happened?’

‘What you sink happen? Like I tell you must happen.
Ron-pi-ya-ban
no good. Not do nussing for my son. Not care he at all. Let he die. And now he d’ad, they all laugh very mutss, I sink.’

She had her elbows on the dressing table and was staring at herself in the glass. She had on no make-up except lipstick and it was easy to see she had been crying. I got up and stood just behind her, but I thought it would be desecration to touch her in her sorrow. ‘Poor little Udom!’ I said.

‘What you mean—poor littun Udom?’ She whirled round, her face angry. ‘Nussing wrong for he, I sink. Now he d’ad. Not feel nussing. Not fray nussing. Not want, want, want all the time. Now he happy, I sink. No more trouble for he any more at all.’ She went to one of the armchairs and flung herself into it. ‘Poor Vilai! That the truce word, I sink. Why I want to live any more, now Udom d’ad? Why must work and unhappy all the time? I sink I d’ad too batter—’

‘Vilai!’ Although I’d once tried to kill myself I’m always shocked to hear anyone else repudiating life. I clasped her hand across the table.

All at once her eyes overflowed with tears. ‘Wretch, why the God do this to me, you sink? I not bad girl. I
bad
girl, yes, but I
good
bad girl. I not bad ’cause I want bad. I bad ’cause I must haff money. If not bad, how can girl do, not haff huss-band? Every girl not haff huss-band
must
be bad. Unless she just work in s’op, for rice—’

I couldn’t think of the right answers at that moment and simply squeezed her hand. She snatched it away impatiently and went into the bathroom. When she came out she was carrying her skirt, a red one with several hundred pleats in it. She arranged it tidily over the towel rack. Then she unbuttoned her white blouse and squirmed it off. She tied a towel round her middle and came and sat down again. ‘Wretch eat yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What you will haff?’

‘I don’t know. Are you hungry?’

‘Yes, a littun.’

I got up and rang the bell.

She ordered a very great mess of pottage and when it came attacked it with vigour. But after a few mouthfuls her appetite failed and she went and lay on the bed. I sat at the table eating a little while longer but in truth I was off my food too. I pushed my plate away and looked across at her.

She was lying with her legs spread, on her back, staring at the ceiling, lost in gloomy thought. But at length she became conscious of my gaze, looked down along her body at me and—laughed. I couldn’t believe my ears. She rolled her hips from side to side, then lifted them, then let them drop back on the bed with an accompanying small grunt. I had learned the sign, but I couldn’t move. It was blasphemy—like murder in a cathedral.

‘What matter wiss you today? You not strong any more? You haff nusser girl in here since I go this morning? Tee-hee, tee-hee!’

For a moment I wondered whether she’d been fooling me. But then I recalled those tears that had poured down her cheeks—they’d been genuine all right. I went across to the bed and stood staring down at her. She seemed to me like some sort of monster.

‘You angly to me again? Oh, Wretch, all the time you must angly to me. You not haff good heart, I sink. You want to fight all the time—’

‘Vilai, if Udom’s—dead—’

‘What differnunt? Last night you—bam bam—like you mad. Udom d’ad then too. Only differnunt, then you not know. Now you know—’

‘You’re so hard. You’re hard as—’

‘Nusser sing. I not want you talk Udom again. Now he d’ad. He finiss. He neffer hear bird sing again. OK. Forget about. Forget about.’ She had to struggle to check her tears again but succeeded. She thrashed around until the towel came undone and then began making the little anxious, querulous, exciting noises I knew so well. I was deeply ashamed of myself as I sat on the edge of the bed pulling my shorts off. Yet if her hands had been dripping with her son’s blood I think I would still have been unable to resist her.

Afterwards she took my last hundred-tic note. ‘You haff more on Sursday?’ she asked. ‘Now must pay more zan before. Must pay for burn Udom. Must pay for pliests sing for him. Must pay for feast. Everyone must get very d’unk, I sink. Haff man burn, always everybody must get very d’unk.’ She was putting on the red skirt. ‘You like? Siamese girl only wear red colour when she happy. That why I wear red colour today. Not want any pipple know I sad. Man see me sit in
samlor
, he must sink, “Oh, there go White Leopard. She very happy girl, I sink. She not haff any trouble in world …”’

She didn’t come Thursday and I spent an angry anxious time until three in the morning, when I finally gave up hope. I got up then and ate all the mangoes and spicy Siamese delicacies I had bought for her. I drank the beer I had provided for myself, though it was no longer cold, then went back to bed hoping to sleep. But the hope was vain.

Most of the thoughts that tormented me were unworthy of a man; I knew that even then, and it made them all the more galling. I thought, ‘She thinks she’s got all the money she can off me so she doesn’t want anything more to do with me.’ I thought, ‘She’s found another man she likes better than me. Maybe Dick’s plane’s having engine trouble again.’ I thought, ‘All women are cheats. Look at Sheila—’ The images of my mother, Lena, and the Korat Venus popped into my mind, accusing me of being hysterical and unfair, but I bundled them out again. I sat up under the mosquito-net rehearsing the speeches I was going to make next time I saw her. I dreamed impossible dreams: that I’d won the Speedway World Championship before ninety thousand cheering spectators at Wembley Stadium, and that she was riding round the arena with me on my bike, waving the enormous gold cup to the throng; that I’d just conquered a mountain higher even than Everest, the first to do so, and having returned to civilization was sending off my first cable: ‘Miss Vilai, c/o Bolero Bangkok Thailand I got there Vilai thanks for pushing all my love Wretch.’ I prayed to her son. ‘Udom, she loved you so much you must have loved her too. I love your Mamma as you did. I hate to have her live this horrible dangerous life she leads, just as you must have done. I want to save her from it. I
can
save her from it. But she doesn’t recognize a true friend when she sees him. Oh, Udom, if you have any power over her now, if you can reach down or up from wherever you are and knock the scales from those lovely foolish eyes—’ After daybreak I
did
drop off for a few minutes,—and dreamed about Ratom. I remember my last waking thought was, ‘What an ass I am. Self-sacrificed upon an unchaste
mons veneris
—’

The next night I shook off Somboon after dining with him and went to look for her at the Bolero. She was there all right, looking no different, unless handsomer. She was perplexed when I went in, for there was a great tableful of Americans who all seemed to know her very well and out of whom I don’t doubt she was making a good deal of money. When she came and sat with me for a few minutes some of them turned nasty: in fact one of the blighters came and joined us—‘you don’t mind, bud?’ he said, ‘there’s sump’n I have to discuss with this lady’—and she was obviously alarmed. He monopolized her attention but I sat it out for a beer and a peppermint: total cost, with flowers, eighty-three tics. When I left she accompanied me to the door, talking in an earnest undertone. ‘Neffer come Bolero again. I working girl. Must do my shob—’

‘You never want to see me again?’

‘Don’t be silly. I in luff wiss you, darling. But when you want see me, must send hotel-boy. Any time you ask I come your hotel.’

‘Tonight?’

‘You want me come this night?’

‘Yes. You’re were
supposed
to show up last night. I had
pat-mi-han
and
khao-neu-mo-muang
—’

She said, slowly, ‘I want to come tonight. But maybe can not.’

‘You really love me very much, don’t you?’

She stamped her foot. ‘Now you mad again. Why you can not understand? I dancing-girl, darling. Sometimes can not do what I want to do. I must work—’

‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodni’, darling. I come if I can, I plomiss.’

I walked home in near despair and spent another night of misery. It wasn’t so much that she failed to show up. But the Calvinistic conscience, thoroughly honed in the days of my youth, had never lost its sharpness. Only take off the sacking in which it was ordinarily wrapped and like the scythe in the toolshed at home it was ready to cut to the bone. And that night the sacking was off, all right. To what depths I had sunk in a matter of a few weeks! Until I had left England I had tried to live up to a high moral code. Thou shalt not lie in words or with loose women or indeed with any woman at all until thou hast married her in a church. Thou shalt not drink anything stronger than communion wine except at Christmas when thy mother maketh thee apple wine according to her great-grandmother’s recipe. Thou shalt not gamble or swear or break a promise or sit in the presence of a standing lady. Thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother and thy elder brother and his moll, also God and culture … By and large I had been able to toe the line for twenty years. But now …! I hadn’t opened a poet for weeks. I had started to consort with publicans and sinners, and of course there was the highest precedent for so doing, but in my case it was not because, like George Fox, I could see ‘that of God which is in every man,’ but because I had discovered that that of the Devil which was in a good many men was in me too … One girl in Korat had been only fifteen. And the fact that she’d extracted two hundred tics out of my shirt pocket with her toes (after I’d told her not to bother to lay the shirt out so tidily at the foot of the bed) while I was engrossed in other matters (and imagined she was too) made no difference. My crime had been the greater. Mine was a crime against a child. Therefore against all mankind. Therefore against God …

And what was going to be the end of it all? I had put a ring in my own snout: was I to be led around by it for the rest of my days? I had a stupid outlook on life, different from other men’s—but instead of making me happier than they were it made me even more frustrated. And so there was never anything but bitterness. Sheila had been wondrous for a time, then that was that. Vilai had been taken as an antidote, and now I’d become an addict—but she was faithless. All her talk about if I’d marry her tomorrow she’d drop everyone else—if I’d take her to Chiengmai she’d forget the other two thousand—but she was now a dancing-girl and she must smile at and be nice to the other men—so go home darling and go to sleep and later maybe I will knock at your door—‘Oh, hell,’ I groaned, leaping out of the chair …

I was still ordering beers in the small hours and the boys were out of sorts with me too.

That was Saturday and the next day I was due to leave with Windmill for Chiengmai. I had a busy morning at the office getting everything squared up before my departure and afterwards lunched with Windmill at the Sports Club. It was around four when he dropped me at the hotel. (It was his weekend to have the Riley. He was the only Thai on the staff that ever did get it.)

We’d had quite a few drinks and I was feeling cheerier than at any time since about midnight Thursday—at which hour I hadn’t yet lost hope that she’d come that night. But I was cheery now for the opposite reason—because I’d convinced myself I’d never see her again. And in daylight, and after a few beers, and knowing I’d be getting out of Bangkok on the morrow anyway, that prospect seemed easily supportable. Her word wasn’t to be trusted. And she had jilted me, after robbing me of almost every penny I possessed. Good riddance then, I thought. For a few more nights I’d yearn, no doubt almost unbearably, for her body, but that yearning could be side-stepped, and probably would be in Chiengmai.