The Empire Trilogy (111 page)

Walter, climbing the stairs, had considered rebuking his daughter and ordering her not to communicate with this young man again. Instead he decided to continue banking on her good sense and merely said: ‘Joan dear, I've no objection to you flirting with young men provided you are sensible about it and don't do anything you might regret later. What I do object to is the fact that you have upset your mother. In future please be more discreet and hide your love-letters in some safe place.' Joan, who had been expecting another row, gazed at him in astonishment as he handed her back the letter which had caused all the commotion.

Was Walter taking a great risk with his daughter's future by responding so mildly? Mrs Blackett was inclined to think that he was. Walter, however, reassured her. He was on friendly terms with the chairman of the firm on whose notepaper the young man wrote his love-letters and saw him frequently at the Club. He was confident that if the worst came to the worst and Joan persisted in taking an interest in him, it would require only a nod and a wink to have the fellow moved away from Singapore to a convenient distance (back to England if necessary). As it turned out, this intervention was not necessary: at a certain age nothing can be more stifling to enthusiasm than the permission or approval of your parents. ‘Barry', (whoever he was), lovelorn, was allowed to continue his residence in Singapore.

Mrs Blackett now decided that the best way to prevent Joan from carrying on with unsuitable young men was to surround her with suitable ones. True, there was a serious shortage of the latter in Singapore but she would draw up a list and see what could be done … Joan's trouble was that she never met anyone of the right sort. Mrs Blackett would put an end to that by inviting one or two young men chosen by herself to tea once a week. Joan would be asked to act as hostess and Walter would be there, too, to keep an eye on things. What did Walter think of it? Was it not a good idea?

Walter was dubious. He doubted whether Joan would take an interest in any young chap of whom her mother approved. He was even more dubious when he saw the list that she had drawn up. But in the end he agreed, partly because he saw no reason why his wife should not have her own way for once, partly because he had a secret weakness. This weakness, which was so mild and agreeable it might almost be considered a virtue, was for holding forth, as a man with some experience of life, to younger men just starting out. So it would happen, once these weekly tea-parties were inaugurated, that while Joan sat tight-lipped and rebellious, her green eyes as hard as pebbles, Walter would grow animated and have a jolly good time. Mrs Blackett, meanwhile, would dart glances from her husband to her daughter to the young guest trying to estimate what impression each was making on the other. As a matter of fact, the young man usually sat there looking faintly alarmed as Walter harangued him: after all, this was Blackett of Blackett and Webb, an important man in the Straits, and his parents had told him to be careful not to put his foot in it and to behave himself properly for once.

For a number of years now it had been Walter's agreeable habit to take his visitors by the arm and escort them along the row of paintings that hung in his drawing-room. So it happened that the young man intended for Joan, although on the whole he felt safer sitting down and less likely to knock something over, would reluctantly allow himself to be plucked out of his chair while Joan continued to sit mutinously silent beside the tea-pot, ignoring her mother's whispered entreaties that she should say something to her guest, and even accompany the two men across the room.

Some of the paintings which Walter was showing the young man were primitive in style, painted perhaps by a native artist or by a gifted ship's officer in his spare time: here was a three-masted vessel being loaded with spices or sugar, a line of native porters with bundles on their heads marching in uncertain perspective along a rickety quay surrounded by jungle. In the next painting, by a more sophisticated hand, the ship had arrived in Liverpool and was being unloaded again, and after that would come three or four paintings of the port of Rangoon and Walter would exclaim: ‘Look! They're loading rice. Still all sailing ships, of course, and Rangoon's just a sleepy little village. But you wait!'

In the early days, he would explain, while the youth at his side gazed at him uneasily, white rice would not survive the long passage round the Cape and so it was shipped as what was known as ‘cargo rice', that is, one-fifth unhusked paddy and four-fifths roughly cleaned in hand-mills. Throughout the East, to India mainly, it was shipped simply as paddy (The blighters cleaned it themselves.'). Now Walter, unreeling history at a prodigious speed, would guide his guest (well, Joan's guest) to a later picture of Rangoon. ‘You see how it's grown in the meantime. And see how steam has taken the place of sail in the harbour (though some ships still have both, of course). And these great buildings with chimneys, d'you know what they are? Steam rice-mills!'

For now it was possible, with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870, to ship cleaned rice to Europe, thereby cutting out the fine-millers who used to clean the ‘cargo rice' in London.

‘Ruined 'em,' Walter would remark with a frown. ‘They weren't quick enough. A businessman must keep his wits about him.' And if the young man happened to be starting out on a business career himself, as he probably was, Walter might pause to lecture him on how you must always be ready to move with the times, never taking anything for granted.

‘Go and join them!' hissed Mrs Blackett to her daughter in a penetrating whisper. ‘You're being impolite to your guest.'

‘But Mother, I've told you a thousand times …' And it was true … she had.

The last picture of Rangoon had been painted after the turn of the century and showed how the thriving rice trade had caused it to spread and grow into a great modern city, now only surpassed as an Eastern port by Calcutta and Bombay. Walter would draw his dismayed captive closer and after a moment's examination of the teeming wharves on the Rangoon River he would put his finger on a fine warehouse and say. ‘Our first! The first to belong to Blackett and Webb … or rather, to Webb and Company as the firm was then called. We still have another exactly similar here in Singapore on the river. Well now, you see how a bit of trade can make a place grow?' And with an air of satisfaction he would lead the suitable young man on to yet more paintings of Calcutta, Penang, Malacca, and of Singapore itself, in various stages of development.

‘You see how we made these little villages grow in just a few years. That's what a bit of tin and rubber have done for Singapore!'

There was still another painting to be seen, and one that was more important than all the others, but by now Mrs Blackett was growing impatient and calling Walter and his audience back for another cup of tea. These tea-parties, she was beginning to think, were not having the desired effect. A disturbing thought occurred to her and she eyed her daughter suspiciously. Could it be that the reason for Joan's lack of interest in her guest was that she was already carrying on in secret with yet another unsuitable young man?

Walter, after one such occasion, found himself left alone to brood in the drawing-room while Joan, with a sudden friendliness born of relief, conducted her guest to his motor-car and then went to join little Kate who was waiting on the lawn with a warped tennis racket for a game of French cricket. Joan was still just enough of a schoolgirl to enjoy such games. As the young man's limousine crept towards the gates his pale face appeared at one of the windows and he waved, but no one was paying any attention to his departure. He caught a glimpse of Joan, though, dashing joyfully after a tennis ball while Kate clumsily passed the racket round and round her plump little body, and he thought with a pang: ‘What a smasher!' And rather well off, too. For once he and his parents were entirely in agreement. Too bad old Blackett was so peculiar!

Meanwhile, Mrs Blackett had seized the opportunity of slipping upstairs to Joan's room in order to set her mind at rest by having a quick read of her daughter's diary. She picked up this little volume and began to flick over its pages. So far, so good. There did not appear to be anything incriminating. She heaved a sigh of relief as the weeks fled by under her thumbnail. But then, just as she had almost reached this very week, she received a nasty shock, for the diary suddenly turned from plain English into a jumble of meaningless letters. What on earth did this signify? It could only be that Joan had taken to writing her diary in code! And that in turn must mean that she had something to hide! Mrs Blackett, seriously alarmed, tried again and again to make sense of those jumbled letters but was quite unable to make anything of them. The only thing that she did discover was that the same name (she assumed it was a name because it began with a capital letter) kept recurring: ‘
Solrac
'!

‘Oh dear, he must be a Hungarian this time!' thought Mrs Blackett, raising a hand to her brow.

Downstairs she found Walter still in the drawing-room, musing in front of the most important painting in his collection, the one which he had not had time to show Joan's young guest. He merely greeted her revelations about the diary in code with a shrug, however, and told her to calm herself … any family with growing daughters must expect occasional difficulties of this sort. It was in the nature of things. Mrs Blackett retired, by no means reassured.

The painting which had pride of place in Walter's vast drawing-room and in front of which he was now standing, was not yet another view of an embryonic city, but of a man. It was a portrait of old Mr Webb himself, a bearded, sharp-featured gentleman of great dignity. Walter, when given the opportunity, would lead his guests up to this portrait and speak with respectful warmth of his former partner, the man without whom he himself ‘would never have amounted to anything'. For it had been Mr Webb who had given young Walter Blackett a chance to compete with the giant firms of the Far East like Guthries, Jardines and Sime Darby, by agreeing to merge his own powerful business with Walter's fledgling. And they had got on well together, too, so that in no time a real understanding had been established between them. Besides, growing older now, Mr Webb had needed the energy of a younger partner. In due course Blackett and Webb Limited had been the result.

A lesser man, as he grew weaker, would have held grimly on to everything, with the result that within a few years both the rubber and the agency business would have tumbled about his ears. But old Mr Webb, never afraid to face unpleasant realities, had realized that the years ahead would be too much for him. Perhaps, too, he had dimly perceived some of the approaching hazards of the next decade: in particular, the growing rivalry with Japan in the markets of the Far East. There are few things in life more difficult than for a man to retire from the business he has founded and built up himself. Yet this difficult feat had been managed, at least reasonably well, by Mr Webb when Walter had taken over completely in 1930. And there had still remained a firm bond of mutual respect between the two men.

After his retirement Mr Webb's main interest had been in a small estate business known as the Mayfair Rubber Company which he had kept back, he would explain, as an old man's plaything. He was chairman of this company but his duties were not onerous: the Mayfair was one of the assortment of independent companies whose day-to-day management was handled collectively by Blackett and Webb with an efficiency that neither of them, alone, could have matched. No, it was more likely, if the truth were known, that he had seen the Mayfair as a convenient Old Gentleman's Home. From this point of view there was something to be said for the Mayfair, however slender the yield from its estate in Johore.

When he retires an elderly gentleman needs a pleasant place to live: the Mayfair had maintained its Singapore headquarters for many years back, not in the commercial district as you might expect, but in a rambling, palatial bungalow in Tanglin, adjacent to Walter's own splendid mansion so that only a pleasant stroll through two compounds separated them. A retired gentleman needs the respect and assistance of those around him … who is more respected and assisted than a chairman in his own company? He needs something to keep him interested in life lest he slip out of it through the inattention that besieges the elderly … what better than his own rubber company? On the other hand, he needs to be left alone, not bothered by people, because they increasingly irritate him … whose peace of mind is more carefully preserved than the chairman's? This last point had been particularly important to old Mr Webb.

He had lived alone all his life and did not mean to change his ways simply because he was getting on in years. Surprisingly, he was married. But his wife was in England and always had been. He had married her late in life and never encouraged her to come out to Malaya. Perhaps he had been afraid that people would laugh at him, for she was some thirty years younger than himself (she was dead now, though: he had outlasted her despite those thirty years). More likely, he had simply preferred living by himself and his wife had not seemed to mind, as far as anyone knew. Moreover, he had paid visits to her in England where he was sometimes obliged to go on business. On one of these visits he had even made her pregnant, which speaks for cordial relations. The result of their union had been a son called Matthew who, like his mother, had never appeared in Singapore.

At one time Mr Webb had had the notion that young Matthew should marry Joan. Yes, the old chap had taken a benevolent interest in her as a little girl, showering her with silver spoons, napkin rings and strings of pearls. No doubt Mr Webb, used to his own somewhat despotic family arrangements, had seen no reason why authority should not be exercised to merge families in the same way as businesses. Walter smiled. That might have saved all this bother with unsuitable young men! But by the mid-thirties this union was no longer mentioned, nor had been for some years.