The Empire Trilogy (137 page)

‘Let's not bother with the Blacketts … I want to discuss my theories,' said Matthew.

It was then that Ehrendorf suddenly went silent and looked rather upset. It had occurred to him that Matthew, far from being too preoccupied with his own ideas to discuss Sinclair and his mysterious relationship with Joan, had all this time been deliberately keeping the conversation away from the Blacketts.

Matthew had not noticed his friend's reaction and, following him into the restaurant, muttered grimly: ‘Oh, education and medicine. Don't worry. One could say something on that score, too!'

Monty, Joan and Sinclair were seated at a table set among foliage on the
terrasse.
As Matthew and Ehrendorf approached, Sinclair got to his feet saying: ‘Got to duh … duh … ash off, I'm afraid. Got to do my duh … duh … duh …'

‘Of course you haven't,' said Monty. ‘Sit down, Sinclair, you're being a bore. It's nowhere near midnight yet. You said you didn't go on duty till midnight. Well then?'

‘Got to duh … duh … duhoo … well, a whole lot of things, a fearful amount, in fact. So, have a nice time and I'll be suh … seeing you,' he added in a fluent rush. He kissed Joan's hand, rolling his eyes for some reason, waved to the others and departed.

The young Blacketts had ordered
ikan merah
(fish, Matthew understood) and chips and a large bottle of Tiger beer between them. Matthew and Ehrendorf ordered the same. While they waited a rather tense silence fell over the table: even Monty, not usually at a loss for words, seemed disinclined to speak. In the dark shadows behind Joan glowed a shower of delicate, speckled marmalade-coloured orchids, framing her perfect face and shoulders. Ehrendorf snatched a quick glance in her direction and then, though he had already given his order, buried himself in the menu. While his eyes moved silently over
won ton
soup, crab sweetcorn soup, sweet sour prawn, Taoist fish ball, cornedbeef sandwich, lychee almond beancurd … his face took on a strained and innocent expression, as if he were thinking: ‘The trouble about such perfection is that you can't get a grip on it, it slips away. There's no perspective.'

‘Will you kindly stop that!' said Joan suddenly and with anger.

‘Stop what?'

‘Looking at me in that stupid way.'

‘I wasn't looking at you at all. I was reading the goddam menu, if you don't mind.' Ehrendorf's voice had grown shrill and his accent, which normally might have been taken for English, suddenly became that of an American again. Matthew took off his dust-filmed spectacles, polished them on a rather grey handkerchief, put them on again and stared unhappily at Ehrendorf.

‘What I wanted to say, Jim, about education and medicine …'

Silence, however, fell over the table once more. Matthew examined the wall and the dragons which decorated the earthenware pots; from beyond the palms which grew out of them came the constant murmur of voices and laughter and the throbbing of music. Presently, a Chinese girl appeared with a bowl from which she took a steaming face-flannel with a pair of wooden tongs and placed it in Joan's hands: she then offered one to Monty, Matthew and Ehrendorf in turn. Matthew mopped his perspiring face: the sensation of relief this afforded was extraordinary. More waiters presented themselves, bringing fish and chips and beer. As they began to eat the atmosphere grew more relaxed. Matthew, knife and fork raised and ready to pounce on his fish (he was hungry), cautiously raised the subject of education. Admittedly, he had yet to delve deeply into the matter as it affected Malaya but he did know what the British had managed to achieve in this line in India … namely, a prodigious number of unemployable graduates. ‘The Indians have always had a tremendous desire for education. The only trouble is that there are hardly any actual
jobs
for educated men to do, unless they want to be clerks or lawyers, and there are already several times too many of
them.
'

Monty had taken knife and fork and begun vigorously to chop up his fish, first laterally into quarters, then diagonally, as for the Union Jack, but most likely this was not the mute response of a patriot to the drift of Matthew's argument so much as a convenient way of reducing the fish to pieces small enough to deal with; he speared one of the pieces together with a bundle of chips and stuffed the lot into his mouth.

‘All we needed in India were Indians educated enough to serve as clerks and petty officials: in no time at all there were enough of them, and several times too many. Curzon did his best to launch vocational and technical education and I gather it's been tried here in Malaya, too. But with miserable results. You may well ask why.'

None of Matthew's listeners seemed, as it happened, to be on the point of putting that or any other question to him. Monty, breathing heavily through his mouth, seemed completely occupied in masticating fish and chips. Joan and Ehrendorf simply stared at Matthew, looking tense and dazed; Joan had not touched her knife and fork but now picked up a single chip in her fingers and snipped off the end with her perfect teeth, without taking her eyes from Matthew's face.

‘The fact is that in most tropical colonies the only work available is agriculture, and sometimes a bit of mining. What we really want is cheap unskilled labour. What skilled jobs there are in a country like Malaya don't go, it appears, to Malays, but to Eurasians, Chinese or sometimes Europeans. No cheap unskilled labour is what western capital came here for and that's what it gets …!'

‘But …' began Monty. He was silenced immediately, however, by his own right hand which, spotting its opportunity, had raised another forkful of fish and chips and now crammed it into his mouth as soon as it opened to speak.

‘As I expect you all know there was talk of starting an engineering school a couple of years ago at Raffles College here in Singapore. What happened? A commision reported that it was pointless because there'd be no jobs for the graduates. So you see the idea that we British are educating our colonies in our own image simply won't wash. That may be what we'd like to do, and certain attempts have been made no doubt, but that's not what is actually happening.'

‘Oh, look here,' said Ehrendorf mildly, but to Joan not to Matthew. ‘This is a bit ridiculous.' Joan, her eyes still on Matthew snipped off another inch of the chip she held neatly between finger and thumb, but otherwise ignored him.

Matthew went on: ‘And yet there still persists this sad belief that a man can better himself by education. At this
very
moment here in Singapore, according to the official figures, there are more than ten thousand clerks, most of whom live in the most dreadful conditions earning ten dollars a month if they're lucky, not even a living wage, simply because their numbers far exceed any possible demand for them. Ten thousand clerks for a city of this size! It seems it's a regular practice for older clerks to be replaced by younger men at lower salaries and yet that doesn't stop the schools turning out another seven hundred boys every year with qualifications for clerical jobs. And all because of this pathetic, unfounded belief that education leads to lucrative jobs!'

‘Really, you can't expect me to put up with this,' said Ehrendorf suddenly.

‘Well, clear off then! Nobody invited you, anyway.'

‘As it happens, Matthew did.'

‘Frankly,' said Monty, pushing away his empty plate and selecting a toothpick, ‘I don't think it matters a bugger whether they work as coolies or anything else so long as they have jobs. That's precisely what they don't have in South China and India. They come here because they think it's better, and they're damn right. It is.'

‘I thought you said you were going. If so, what're you waiting for?'

‘That's just what you'd like, isn't it?'

‘Monty, surely we have a
responsibility
,' went on Matthew doggedly, ‘to the people living here when we arrived; even more so to those we encouraged to come and work on the estates. One of the most astounding things about our Empire, when you come to think about it, is the way we've transported vast populations across the globe as cheap labour. Surely we must have their interests at heart, at least to some extent, as well as our own. Otherwise it's not much better than the slave trade.'

‘We do have their interests at heart: we're giving them employment which they didn't have where they came from. Besides, almost half our rubber in Malaya is produced by Asiatic smallholders, people who probably came here originally as coolies and then set up in business for themselves. They produce pretty piss-awful rubber but that's their business.'

‘Let's go and dance,' said Joan. ‘Monty, pay the bill and let's go.'

Monty summoned the waiter and produced a roll of blue dollar bills, saying: ‘Without British capital there wouldn't have been any rubber business.'

‘But don't you think, given the huge returns on money invested in Malaya that something more should be done for the people who actually do the work on the plantations to produce it …? Otherwise, the British Empire is nothing more than a vast business concern …' But Matthew's last words, though intended for his companions, had been transformed into a soliloquy by their sudden departure, Joan in the lead, Ehrendorf striving to walk beside her and speak to her, and the burly figure of Monty not far behind. Matthew hurried after them, nudging his glasses up on his nose.

As they approached The Great World's dance-hall the atmosphere seemed to thicken, as if the very dust which hung in the air was quivering with the percussion of drums and wailing of saxophones. Monty dropped back for a moment, indicating that he had something he wanted to say to Matthew. No, it wasn't about the colonial question, he muttered confidentially, it was more of a proposition he wanted to make. He'd thought it over quite a bit and consulted his two chums who were also very, very interested (that went without saying, actually, because in its way this was a bargain such as one didn't often come across and so
of course
they would be interested) and, well, the upshot of it was that he and his two chums had decided unanimously to invite Matthew to join them in … the point being that he was a chap from the same sort of background as they were, a factor one had to bear in mind in a place like Singapore where gossip got around in no time … anyway, in short, they'd decided that Matthew should be given the opportunity of making up the fourth … No, nothing like that, he hated all card-games himself, couldn't abide them, in fact, well … in a nutshell, instead of risking heaven knows
what
dreadful diseases with the sort of women one was likely to pick up here at The World or anywhere else in Singapore he and his chums had decided to club together and they'd found a very nice Chinese girl called Sally who had her own flat in Bukit Timah. She was clean and not the kind who'd get drunk or make a fuss. She was …

‘Oh, but really, Monty…'

‘No, just listen a moment. You aren't a bad sort of bloke, Matthew, in your way (in fact, I quite like you), but you're the sort of chap who rejects things out of hand without even listening and weighing up the pros and cons. And this is just the kind of arrangement that would suit a bloke like you who isn't very good at getting women, if you don't mind me saying so, and besides,
it's not expensive …
'

‘Monty, I can assure you …'

They had now joined Joan and Ehrendorf in the queue of people, many of whom were in uniform, waiting for admission to the dance-hall. Monty lowered his voice a little so that his sister should not hear what he was saying. She was clean, she had imagination (which was something one didn't often find), she was good-tempered and sober, she was not narrow-minded in her approach (in fact, you could do almost anything you liked) and it would only come to $17.50 a month per person. It was such a bargain that Matthew probably thought he meant
American
dollars, but not a bit of it! He meant Straits dollars. It was an incredible opportunity! For $17.50 Matthew would have, at least to begin with, one evening a week
guaranteed
and the possibility of another, if one of his three partners did not exercise his option for two evenings in that particular week, as would most likely very often happen because of some social occasion they couldn't get out of, OK? Because Matthew was the last to join it was only fair, after all, that the others should have first choice but he, Monty, for one would be most surprised if it did not work out that Matthew found he had two evenings on most weeks …'

‘Hey, Yank! Why don't you join in the bloody war then?' demanded a perspiring, drunken Tommy, waving a beer bottle at Ehrendorf.

‘Because we don't want to make it too easy for you guys,' replied Ehrendorf cheerfully.

‘Give us some gum, chum!' shouted someone else and there was a cackle of laughter.

‘Because you're a lot o' pissin', cowards, that's what!' shouted the first man belligerently.

‘Who needs the bleedin' Yanks anyway? Old Adolf would only give 'm a spankin'!'

Raucous cheers greeted this remark but Ehrendorf, still smiling good-humouredly, had reached the bamboo cage and handed over fifty cents for himself and each of his companions. Then he waved to the boisterous crowd in khaki behind him and vanished into the throbbing darkness followed by a medley of cheers, insults and ribaldry.

‘Yankee ponce!'

‘They 'ave 'em 'orizontal wi' teeth in 'em 'ere, sir!'

‘Can I do yer now, sir?'

Blundering after his friend, Matthew presently found himself at the edge of a dance-floor, covered but open at the sides for ventilation, gleaming with French chalk in the semi-darkness like a subterranean lake. So this was the famous dance-floor taken from the old Hôtel de l'Europe which, Joan was now whispering huskily into his ear, at the turn of the century had been the finest in Singapore. No doubt his father, together with the wealthy and influential in the Colony, in his day had waltzed or fox-trotted on those very boards! But now the
beau monde
had been replaced by that bewildering array of races and types he had noticed earlier in the evening in the open air, even two members of the family of pygmies could be seen executing a perfect tango close at hand. Matthew gazed enchanted at the teeming dance-floor. Abruptly, he realized why this sight gave him such pleasure. He tried to explain to Monty who had taken Joan's place at his side:
this was the way Geneva should have been
! Instead of that grim segregation by nationality they should have all spent their evenings like this, dancing the tango or the quick-step or the
ronggeng
or whatever it was with each other: Italians with Abyssinians, British with Japanese, Germans with Frenchmen and so on. If there had been a real feeling of brotherhood in Geneva such as there was here (the Palais des Nations turned into a
palais de danse
) the Disarmament Conference would not have got stuck in the mud the way it did! ‘It was the feeling, perhaps even the
confidence
that men of different nations and races could get on together that was so tragically missing. And yet here is the evidence! Men are brothers!'