The Empire Trilogy (149 page)

‘Well, Walter, I'm not sure that I …'

‘The Governor and Lady Thomas will be personally grateful to you, I happen to know,' said Walter, pressing his advantage as he saw the Major begin to weaken. ‘He sets particular store by having a mixture of races. What we must have above all is Europeans! That is crucial to the whole exercise. We've even considered having an additional slogan:
“All in it together!”
'

‘Well, I suppose, in that case …'

‘Good man! I knew I could depend on you … Well, Major, I think it should be a success but sometimes I do have the feeling that there's something missing, that we still need a single float representing Singapore herself. We've thought of all the usual things, the Lion City and so on, but it's weak, it's been done before … We need to show Singapore in her relationship with the other trading centres of the Far East, holding them in a friendly grip. It's deuced hard to think of anything suitable, I can tell you! All we've managed to think of so far is to have Singapore at the centre of a float as a sort of beneficial octopus with its tentacles in a friendly way encircling the necks of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bombay, Colombo, Rangoon, Saigon and Batavia. Of course, the snag is that the octopus does not have a very good reputation whereas …' Walter fell silent.

They were standing in the corridor. From a few feet away they could hear the springs of Matthew's bed as he thrashed and muttered and groaned in his fever. From the dim depths of the floor The Human Condition peered up at Walter in perplexity with its bulging eyes. The Major cleared his throat. ‘Forgive me mentioning this, Walter, but I noticed a moment ago that you had a spot of something yellow on your chin … a spot of, well, egg, I suppose.'

‘What?' cried Walter, clapping a hand to his chin in horror.

‘Oh, it's nothing,' said the Major hurriedly, taken aback by the effect of his words. ‘Just a spot of something … You can hardly see it.' Walter spat on a handkerchief and began to rub his chin violently. Watching him at work the Major could not help thinking: ‘Walter
is
getting rather odd in some ways.'

Poor Matthew! What a terrible fever he had to endure! Every two or three hours he would be roused from his churning dreams and would find himself surrounded by a circle of Oriental faces, for Cheong had summoned assistance from his relatives. Then he would become aware of many hands hoisting him into the air while other hands dragged away the sodden sheets and replaced them with dry: these dry sheets would be wringing wet too, though, within a few moments. At intervals he would find a glass of cold liquid held to his lips: then he would gulp for his life, while faces flared up before his eyes. ‘Hello you!' said Joan brightly, puffing away at a long cigarette holder, to be replaced in a moment by Charlie informing him that there was a huge demand for cheap coolie labour during the rice-milling season from January to May, or by an unknown doctor, an Englishman wearing a linen jacket and a striped tie. This man, he found, was talking to him cheerfully and evidently had been doing so for some time, encouraging him to swallow some white pills which lay in his yellowish, horny palm. As Matthew took them the doctor opened his mouth and gulped sympathetically, as if he too had some pills to swallow; then, satisfied, he beckoned Cheong forward with a pitcher of iced lemonade. Matthew gulped down glass after glass, before sinking back into his dreams … only to find a moment later that the Major's worried countenance was looming over him. He could tell by the Major's expression that something had gone dreadfully wrong. What was it he was trying to say to Dupigny on the other side of the bed? The Prince of Wales had called but had been repulsed! Matthew could just reach consciousness with his fingertips. If he could only drag himself up a little further! ‘I had no idea he was even in Singapore,' he just managed to say before losing his grip and tumbling back head over heels into his churning dreams again.

Hours passed. Some time later, in a moment of lucidity which occurred while he was trying to thrash his way out of a net that German spies were throwing over him to prevent him rejoining the League ‘somewhere in the Atlantic', Matthew found himself hanging upside down out of bed, neatly trussed up in a cocoon of mosquito netting which he had somehow dragged off its frame. From this odd position he had an excellent view of a number of neatly swept floorboards in diminishing perspective. Standing on these floorboards under the bed was what he at first took to be a chamber-pot … a moment later he realized that it was simply a basin which had been put there to collect his own sweat which was soaking through the mattress and steadily dripping into it. The basin was already brimming.

A faint clicking sound approached him across the floorboards and suddenly he found that his own eyeballs were a mere inch or two from another pair of eyeballs; these ones, bulging and bleary, were set in the hairy face of a Chinese demon, of a kind he had hitherto only seen sculpted in stone outside temples. Matthew was on the point of howling for Cheong to come and drive off this horrid little creature (it was not exactly sweet-smelling, either) but at this very instant the German spies, one of whom bore a stern resemblance to the portrait of his father in Walter's drawing-room, abruptly caught up with him and he was off again like a hare, twisting now this way, now that. His sweat continued its steady drip, drip, drip through the mattress.

When he finally returned to his senses the fourth day since he had been ill was just beginning. He lay half awake, listening for the drip of sweat beneath the bed. But now the silence, except for a distant creaking from outside the window, was complete. He crumpled the sheets in his fist: they were dry. Thank heaven for that! He wondered how many basins of his sweat had been poured away since his fever had begun; he felt so exhausted that it was as if he himself had been poured away.

The distant creaking, he noticed, was punctuated by an occasional thump. Creak, creak, thump! He dozed for a moment and woke again. Creak, creak, thump! Curiosity at last gave him the strength to make a move. Beside him lay a ‘Dutch wife', a long narrow bolster whose purpose was to allow the air to circulate: he fought with it weakly and at last overcame it. Then with great difficulty he negotiated the fish's gill exit from the mosquito net. The window shutters were open and he could see that it was already growing light in the compound outside. Somewhere on the other side of the house the sun must be just rising. It was pleasantly cool by the window.

The creaking was coming from the clearing beside the recreation hut where the abandoned vaulting-horse stood with its companion, a big horizontal bar tethered by rusting guyropes. A slender girl who appeared to be Chinese was swinging by her hands from this bar, attempting by a sudden kick and a stiffening of her arms at the elbow to bring her waist up to it. (Did she have red hair or was that just a glint of sunrise?) But what caused Matthew to blink and wonder whether this was still part of his feverish fantasy, now taking a more agreeable turn, was the fact that she appeared to be stark naked.

He scratched his head and set off in search of spectacles, but it was some time before he managed to find them: Cheong, afraid that he might damage them in his delirium, had removed them to a place of safety. He crammed them on and hurried back to the window just in time to see the girl (Vera! Good gracious! Naked!) at last succeed in bringing her shoulders above the bar. She steadied herself there for a moment, recovering from the effort she had made. In the early light her skin shone greenish-white against the dark foliage around her.

Matthew now realized that he was not the only spectator of this scene, for an elderly orang-utan with elaborate mutton-chop whiskers lay sprawled in a rubber tree on the edge of the glade watching the girl's gymnastics. And while it watched her it distractedly ate an apple, holding it up from time to time for inspection and meanwhile drumming absent-mindedly with the fingers of its other hand on its pale, bulging paunch. Still supporting her weight on her straightened arms, her body curved in a slim crescent, Vera managed to hook one leg over the bar and then, with more difficulty, the other, so that at last she sat precariously on top of it, hands between her thighs gripping the bar tightly to steady herself. When she was satisfied with her balance she let go of the bar with her hands, raised them above her head like a diver and threw herself backwards.

The orang-utan, on the point of taking a bite of apple, paused with its mouth open to watch the outcome of this reckless manoeuvre. The girl's flexed knees were still bent over the bar as she swung down through three-quarters of a circle trailing a stream of red-black hair behind her. Reaching the top of the arc she released the bar by straightening her legs, dropped to all fours on the grass, staggered a little, recovered her balance, stood up on tip-toe and marched smartly forward for three or four paces before returning to lean wearily against one of the perpendicular supports. Knitting its ginger brows the orang-utan returned its attention to the apple and, having smoothed its mutton-chop whiskers, took a bite.

Vera had her back to the orang-utan and perhaps had not seen it. She was leaning all her weight on the upright as if punting a boat and her chin rested charmingly on her raised arm. The orang-utan paused again in its eating and watched her. Then, holding the apple core delicately by its stalk in the fingers of its left hand it slipped from the branch on which it had been sitting, hung from it revolving by one finger for a few moments, then dropped silently to the ground. Now it hesitated for a moment, clearly in two minds as how best to proceed. It scratched its head, fingered the ginger hair that sprouted between its eyes, and at last began to move circumspectly towards the girl. Matthew watched as if in a dream (perhaps he was indeed in a dream).

She remained in exactly the same position, resting, lost in thought. The orang-utan moved towards her using the knuckles of its right hand to assist its progress, still holding the apple core in the other. Matthew would have called out but his vocal chords had ceased to work; besides, the animal did not appear aggressive in the least. As it drew near Vera another access of doubt overcame it. It halted, it looked around and rubbed its stomach dubiously, it plucked a blade of grass and threw it away. At length, however, it could wait no longer and, taking another step or two forward, it reached out to place one timid, hairy hand on the girl's naked bottom. Without turning she slapped the hand smartly. The orang-utan sprang back, shocked, and returned in haste to its rubber tree. There it set about nibbling with renewed energy at the apple core until presently there was nothing left of it but an inch of stalk which it threw away.

Vera, meanwhile, had turned and seen the pale and haggard Matthew watching her from the window. She waved. For a moment she seemed about to shout something to him but thought better of it, smiled, shook her head, picked up a white bath-robe which she threw over her shoulder and walked away from the house, shaking her finger at the orang-utan as she passed. The orang-utan watched her glumly from the tree.

Before she was quite out of Matthew's line of vision she threw the robe away again, poised for a moment, and then plunged forward headlong over the brilliant viridian lawn … which here astonishingly turned out to be water, for she landed with a great green splash and the lawn rippled about her in every direction and even lapped the edge of the tennis court. A moment later she had vanished from sight altogether and though Matthew waited by the window in case she should reappear there was no further sign of her.

Matthew left the window in a state of considerable excitement, not because he believed what he had just seen with his own eyes, but, on the contrary, because he was inclined to doubt it. Like everyone else he had, in his time, enjoyed a fair number of sexual dreams. Could it simply be another of these? The orang-utan, a clear symbol of male sexuality, had very likely been furnished by his own sub-conscious. The only trouble with this theory was that when he looked out of the window the symbol was still there, sprawled in the rubber tree and once more drumming idly with its fingers on its bulging abdomen … but never mind, there was no reason why it should not linger after the main vision had evaporated. He began to stride up and down, although rather weakly because of his state of exhaustion, discussing aloud with himself the implications of the strange hallucination from which he had just emerged. He must remember to mention it to Ehrendorf. No doubt the fever had heightened his sensibility, made porous the outer brickwork of his conscious mind!

Presently, though, he found himself climbing weakly back through the slit in his mosquito net, assisted by Cheong who was cooing reprovingly in Hokkien (or in Cantonese, for all Matthew knew), convinced that he had struggled out of bed in his delirium. And Matthew himself was obliged to conclude as he fell asleep again that his fever, far from subsiding, had perhaps taken a graver though not altogether unpleasant turn. But now he dreamed vividly that an old gentleman with a white beard was throwing a net over him: and he made such a good job of trussing Matthew up that for the next few hours he lay there unconscious, hardly moving a muscle. This unnatural stillness puzzled Cheong who looked in on Matthew from time to time throughout the day. But then, with ‘foreign devils' one never knew what to expect: they were doubtless constructed on different principles from normal, beardless, small-nosed, odourless human beings like himself.

Cheong's father and two uncles had been shipped to Singapore as indentured coolies before the turn of the century in conditions so dreadful that one of the uncles had died on the way; his father had survived the voyage but the memory of it had haunted him for the rest of his life. He had transmitted his anger to Cheong, describing to him how agents had roamed the poverty-stricken villages of South China recruiting simple peasants with promises of wealth in Malaya together with a small advance payment (sufficient to entangle them in a debt they would be unable to repay if they changed their minds), then delivered them to departure-camps known as ‘baracoons'; once there they were entirely in the power of the entrepreneur for use as cargo in his coolie-ships (each person allotted, as a rule, a space of two feet by four feet for a voyage that might take several weeks). No wonder Cheong was angry when he thought of how these simple people had been swindled and abused, of the thousands who had died like his uncle from illness or by suicide before reaching Malaya and beginning their years of servitude! But what affected him more deeply still was the knowledge that so few people in the Chinese communities of Malaya and Singapore now seemed to remember or care about the exploitation and suffering of their ancestors on these criminal voyages. These things must not be forgotten! Justice demanded that they should be known. With this in mind he had taken in the past few months the first laborious steps in educating himself at a night-school in the city, helped oddly enough by old Webb who had once, as it happened, shipped coolies himself, though only as deck-cargo with the other commodities in which he traded.