A Woman of Bangkok (35 page)

I shook my head helplessly.

When I’d packed and paid my bills I took her to the Chalerm Krung cinema in the jeep. She showed no emotion whatever when we drove over the spot where Udom had been knocked down. At the cinema she climbed clumsily out of the jeep crying ‘Wait, wait,’ ran round to my side and standing on the kerb, looking down her flat straight nose at me, pressed my hand. ‘You not go Ubol alone?’

‘No. One other bloke.’

‘You haff gun?’

‘Of course not. Why?’

‘Oh, Wretch, be careful, be careful. Many Thai men cow boy—’

‘Don’t worry about
me
, sweetheart.
You
look after yourself, that’s the main thing. You’re the one that leads the dangerous life.’

‘Goodbye.’ She gave my hand a last squeeze and turned away. As I moved off I noticed a tall weather-beaten foreigner emerge from the theatre foyer on to the steps. He
could
have been an American. For one hideous moment—but I scotched that idea promptly. If I drove away believing that she’d let me drive her to an assignation with some other man I’d be dead by my own hand in a few days … Besides, neither of them had appeared to recognize the other. And I could still feel the pressure of her hand on mine. She had touched me and spoken to me with genuine affection, with genuine concern for my welfare … I was a stupid, low-minded bastard always to be thinking the worst of her, I told myself severely. Half the pain I suffered in life was in fact of my own making and it was time I pulled myself together …

It had been my own idea that future trips to the Northeast should be made by jeep, except during the rainy season. The office had been sceptical—‘These roads’, Samjohn had said—‘are not like English roads and garages don’t exist’, and Windmill frankly alarmed, but when we reached Lopburi I heard him say proudly to the hotelkeeper ‘We’ve made it from Bangkok in five hours.’

Windmill went off on his own after dinner and I settled down my room with a book. But scarcely had I started to read when a girl came to the door. She was quite a good-looking girl in a scarlet blouse and black sarong. She looked at me briefly, then went. A few seconds later the boy came in to ask if I wanted her. And as a matter of fact I did but out of loyalty to Vilai and sheer weariness I declined. I had a second bath in the huge tiled tub—it was the first I’d seen since leaving England—and then I leaned on the verandah rail enjoying the night air … After thirty minutes I saw what I’d been half-expecting to see. Two
samlors
arrived with a handsomely got-up tart in the front one and Windmill in the other. She went into the hotel as if she had no connection with him but I saw him pay both
samlor
boys. A few moments later I heard her follow him into the next room and the bolt was shot home. At intervals I could hear their voices, soft, friendly and intimate.

This little episode filled me with envy and self-pity. Sure, I was tired out, I’d already had one girl today, I was yearning to return to my Puritan ideals. But at the same time I was lonely and miserable—in love myself, but knowing myself unloved. In fact, what was Vilai probably doing that very moment? Getting tonight’s load on? Already in bed with some sweating, tattooed Barnacle Bill? Floating face downwards in the estuary of the Chao Phaya with her skull split open? I went to the door to see if the girl in the red blouse was still around, but the passage was empty. I swore and bolted myself in. There wasn’t a millionth of a chance that Vilai was thinking about me at that moment. I hurled myself into the suffocating mound of feathers. ‘Never mind. Tomorrow we’ll make Korat. Maybe I’ll make Ratom too—she was always pretty easy before—’

I tried to console myself with visions of what might be but even as I recalled the enchantments of Ratom’s flesh I hated myself—

Perfidy, that’s what it was—

The word brought me bolt upright under the net, aghast. So I was no better than Andy. I was as treacherous as my stinking treacherous elder brother—and his moll. I couldn’t trust myself any more than I’d ever trust them again. I was ready to betray even Vilai. In spite of all my protestations, which she had always scoffed at—in spite of my vows which I’d thoroughly believed in myself—

Instead of sleeping better than in Bangkok, as I’d hoped to do, I slept that night a good deal worse.

Ten

This insomnia of mine continued throughout the six weeks of the trip. No matter how thoroughly I drugged myself with alcohol before going to bed, time after time I’d awake in the small hours to my spectres. I could never forget the drunk I’d seen her deliberately select for her bedfellow that first night at the Bolero. Sometimes I would get on my knees (self-consciously, even in the darkness and solitude) and pray to God to protect her. But prayer gave me no comfort, because I knew God couldn’t help her. She was bent on self-destruction. Then the visions would begin. I got so that I began to dread night, or at least going to bed …

During the daytime things were nothing like as bad, especially during the first half of the trip. There was a sense of emancipation in escaping from Bangkok and the emotional and financial strain. Our days were pretty full too, what with the attempts to sell everything from sewing machines to mousetraps, from Scotch whisky to hair-oil, with the ceremonial Eastern meals and the hardly less ceremonial bottle-parties. Most important of all, there was the driving. It was chiefly owing to this that, for the first time since I’d retired from the speedways, I was happy at my work. I’d enjoyed my previous trips in Thailand, but carted around in trains and buses I’d always felt rather like a tourist. Now I was relying on my own abilities to go places, and this knowledge gave a wonderful zest not only to the places but also to the hot bumpy dusty miles between them.

It wasn’t all plain sailing. There were anxious moments, especially fording streams which had washed their bridges away during the previous rainy season. We were always having punctures from the nails which had worked loose in the bridges that remained. We got stuck in deep mud between Korat and Pimai. We got stuck in deep sand somewhere near Muangphol.

But these were minor nuisances, less hard to put up with than saddle-sores and dysentery and malaria would have been in days gone by. If we had been called on to suffer still more I would still have thought the bargain was worth it, for during those six weeks that jeep carried us right into the hot green heart of Thailand … Lopburi at dawn, and the ancient towers blooming for the day like giant fir-cones … The ruins at Pimai: acres of broken blocks of red stone tumbled amongst the weeds. Wat Podeng, where the Buddha has left another of his numerous footprints, this one larger than most; it was half full of water, owing to a leak in the roof. Weavers at Pakchongthai, women for the most part, blouse-less and supple-armed, producing gorgeous cloth from looms that were little more than a few bamboo poles set up under their houses … All these things we saw the first week, together with endless miles of flower-filled forest interspersed with stretches of paddyfield, ponds choked with water hyacinth and lotus-flowers, elephants working at the lumber-camps, water buffaloes heaving themselves contentedly over in their stinking wallows, egrets stalking in the fields, vultures squabbling over the corpse of a dog … And when we reached Ubol it was Boat-race Day: the broad river was dotted with sampans; the air was a-shiver with drums; people were doing the
ramwong
in boats, singing and dancing in boats, drinking in boats, falling out of boats; and every few minutes there’d be another race, the long lean craft, each with thirty men toiling at the paddles, streaking downstream like garish centipedes, fireworks booming from their sterns and flowers streaming from their bows …

Then one evening, in a remote town called Mukdahan we met a fellow traveller, an Englishman peddling patent medicines. He was even younger than I was, only twenty-four: a pale, freckled, copper-haired, cynical type, wider through the hips than he should have been at that age, and with fingernails bitten down to nothing. His name was Keeling. We sat up for hours over a Vietnamese brew called Jonque d’or, which was as rough as the drawing of the wheat-sheaf on the label. Keeling had left Bangkok less than a week before, but he was already pining to get back. He loathed everything in the Northeast—the dirty hotels, the hard beds, the trains which went too slow, the buses which went too fast, the heat, the dust, the peppery food, and the people. When he heard about our exploits he thought we were demented. Only one aspect of them held any interest for him. ‘Do you ever see any big game?’

‘Yes, plenty. We’ve seen barking deer, gibbons by the dozen, snakes of course, a lizard as big as a crocodile, a young bear, Himalayan, I think—it was black with a creamy-white bib—and once, near Dejudom, one of the greater cats—’

‘What d’you mean by that? A tiger?’

‘No, it wasn’t a tiger. No stripes. We didn’t get a very long look at it. We came round this bend and there it was, bang in the middle of the road, about a hundred yards ahead. It gave us one look, then it just—
sailed
into the jungle—you never saw such a leap. It was breathtaking. I only wish I knew what animal it really was. My guess is a panther or—or a leopard—’

‘Leopard!’ He laughed sourly. ‘No leopards upcountry in Siam, so far as I know. You have to go to the capital to find
them.’

My heart was beating painfully. ‘You mean—those two girls at the Bolero?’

‘I mean those old bags.’ There was utter disdain in his voice and I looked at him with hatred. ‘I saw the White one only my last night in Bangkok,’ he was saying. ‘Leastways, it was hardly night any longer; it was about five o’clock in the morning by then. She was in a hell of a bloody state. Drunk and staggering, crying, clonking people right and left—’

‘Where—was this?’

‘Outside the Champagne Bucket. I never saw such a mess. Ruddy drunken virago—’

‘What happened to her, do you know?’

‘How the hell should I? You don’t think I went up and offered her my arm, do you? I like my dames a little less well reamed out than she is.’ He poured himself more poison. ‘She’s a real hard case, if ever there was one.’

‘Some people say she has her good points.’

‘Yes, and how right they are!’ He shouted with laughter. ‘I know a couple of good points she’s got myself … But I bet they’re the only two good points she
has
got.’ His amusement smouldered on for a minute, then he asked, ‘Is she a friend of yours? You look as if you wanted to blub.’

I pulled myself together. ‘Hell, no. Leopards are too big game for me. I prefer cats.’

I waited for the cock crow, but it didn’t come. At least, not until six hours later. I was still awake even then, and completely distraught.

After that evening I’d had to face the truth: all my hopes and dreams were nonsense. There could never be a reformed, domesticated Vilai living with me in a bungalow with bougainvillaea round the door: the dream was too futile to be indulged in any more.

From that moment my thoughts had been in a complete hubbub. Half of me wanted to dash straight back to Bangkok but the other half had only sneered. ‘Why? What d’you think you could do? You’ve tried before and she wouldn’t let you. A man of any spirit …’ and so on.

Still the other half of me wouldn’t be quelled. ‘All right, I’m in love with a whore. She needs me too. I’m probably the only genuine friend she has in the world. Her life is hideous with sorrows and suffering. She tries to make it bearable through licentiousness.’ It was when I had reached this point in her defence once that I stumbled on that phrase. ‘But her licence is only—pathetic licence. It’s not like most licentious people’s—pernicious.’ I remember I’d added a wry comment to myself. ‘And I hope this isn’t just poetic fallacy …’

This battle, between commonsense and lust, had been going on incessantly since that night in Mukdahan. My work had suffered. My temper had gone to pieces. I’d hardly slept in three weeks. And I’d taken to drinking more and more …

The trip dragged wearily on. Nakorn Panom, where the mountains of Vietnam, seen across the mighty Mekong River, look as if they had been copied off a Chinese scroll … Sakol Nakorn, on the banks of a large rippling lake … Udorn, all dust and bustle … Loey, a Laotian centre at the end of a vile road … Khon Kaen, where I bought some bamboo pipes and tried in vain to learn one of the speedy, wheedling, syncopated local melodies … Eventually we came to Korat again, our last stop before Bangkok.

We had dinner with Boswell and Prosit, and as we left the restaurant the latter hailed a samlor. I protested: ‘It’s only a few yards to the hotel. I can walk …’

‘Hotel?’ He looked amazed. ‘Not go hotel. Go see your friend.’

‘What friend?’

He puzzled that out for a minute, then burst out with his cackling laugh and caught me in the ribs with his elbow. ‘She luff very much,’ he lisped. ‘Many time ask how long you come Korat.’

‘You mean—Ratom? Asked about me?’

‘Your friend.’ He sketched her torso with lithe hands. ‘She luff very much. She say many time.’

The
samlor
was even then swerving round the statue of Surat-nari. I should have bawled
‘lew kwah’
—go right—for the hotel. I said nothing. We went straight ahead, straight towards Chakri Road.

Ratom wasn’t on hand. Prosit, apparently expecting to find in me the easy adaptability of his own race, tried to get me interested in a buxom type who was alleged to be new to the game but of unparalleled virtuosity; but her obvious distaste for the proposed union, coupled with my distaste for her particular brand of beauty, put me in timely mind of my vows. I made a fresh effort to escape, but Gold Teeth told me she’d ordered mekong and savouries, and while we were waiting for it to arrive she encouraged a girl in a white blouse and a neat blue skirt to sit on my lap. The costume, which is worn by office-girls in Bangkok, gave an air of respectability to the proceedings, and moreover the female flesh spoke through her silks and my drills to my male flesh with unexpected force. The girl was very small, with dainty features, and a very pleasant scent in her hair. I didn’t want to go ahead. But it was weeks since I’d touched a girl. And what was the use of being faithful to Vilai week in and week out? She didn’t expect it—she’d told me that herself …