A Woman of Bangkok (26 page)

She kept silent. He must know the answer to his own questions. If he didn’t, she’d wasted her ten tics.

He sighed again, but differently: this time it was less over her unhappy past than over his unhappy present. When he resumed prognosticating it was in a grumpy tone. ‘Take the question of health. Many women worry about their health, most of them needlessly. Madame does not worry, and that shows how wise she is. Her health will be perfect for years. Not until she is about forty years of age will she have any worries on that score. Then she will be sick. In fact she will be very sick—’

‘Will I die?’

He deliberated before replying. Then he said, ‘No. You will be dreadfully sick but you will not die.’ She sighed with relief. At forty she would still be beautiful, with luck. ‘You could live to be exceedingly old—’

‘But I don’t want—’

‘And you won’t. Your body is not destined to outlast its beauty entirely. At some point before the sunset glory finally fades—but this is not pleasant to talk about—’

‘I shall kill myself?’

He seemed surprised at her foreknowledge. He bowed his head without speaking.

‘And when will this be?’

‘The palm is not a calendar—’

‘I shall be fifty when I do it.’ She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone that had a hint of satisfaction in it. It was common knowledge amongst fortune-tellers that this was how and when she would end up. And it suited her perfectly. At fifty she would have ceased to be attractive to men. What would be the use of living after that? She wouldn’t be able to make any more money, would just have to sit around chewing betel-nut and occasionally getting drunk on fermented rice-water which was cheap, watching the young girls have the time of their lives and make their fortunes while she herself got uglier and poorer by the hour. Death would be infinitely preferable to that hell—that death in life which would be devoid of the one great advantage of death, peace, the utter cessation of all desires …

The doctor was saying, ‘There is something here about love which may be of interest to you.’

‘I am not interested in love. I am only interest in money.’

‘That is exactly what is written in your palm. Even now there is a man who loves you to distraction, but he is not rich—’

‘Then I don’t want to hear about him.’

‘And that is where you are making your big mistake. In this poor man lies your one chance of happiness on earth. If only—’

‘A man without money is incapable of giving happiness.’

‘That is untrue. A poor man is no less capable of giving and inciting love—’

She snorted ‘Love! All the time men talk about love. Even a wise man like yourself—I think you understand about the stars and cards and hands, but in this other matter you are a child. Once perhaps I believed in love myself, but then I was a young silly girl. Now I have my head screwed on right, and I know—’

‘All this is shown in your hand. Your heart is hardened. Love will come, happiness will knock at your door, but you will turn it away. And you will never know—’

She said firmly, ‘I am an experienced woman now, I am not a young girl. Everything that can happen to a woman has happened to me: there is nothing that I do not know about life. And one thing I have learned very clearly. Sometimes perhaps money can create love. But love cannot create money. And without money, happiness is impossible. Money
is
happiness. If you have money you can do anything. Without it—’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Tell me something more interesting. What about my son?’

‘Your son?’ The question seemed to startle him.

‘My son is more important to me than any lover, rich or poor. Sometimes I think he is even more important to me than money.’

The doctor raised his eyebrows. He turned her palm this way and that, obviously scrutinizing minute details. Once he started to speak but stopped. At a second attempt, after a quick look at her face, he blurted it out. ‘It is the darkest thing in your hand. Your son is in danger.’

Her blood ran cold. She couldn’t believe her ears. She snatched her hand out of his grip and stared at it with furious eyes, trying to make out where such blasphemy was written. Finally she said in a low tense voice, ‘You are lying.’

He lifted his shoulders but said nothing. His eyes fell on the ten-tic note and he absentmindedly picked it up and put it in his shirt pocket.

She burst out fiercely, ‘What is the danger?’ She thought of the Black Leopard. ‘Does somebody want to kill him—to hurt
me?’
But the Black Leopard was likely to be more direct in her methods than that. Bochang—poisoning his food? But Bochang loved him most of the time. She was getting hysterical. She calmed herself with an effort. ‘Or is he going to be sick?’

‘It is difficult to tell. All I can see is danger, serious danger.’ He leaned back on his stool, picking his teeth with a toothpick he’d found in his pocket when he put the money in it.

She snatched up her bag and slapped down a five-tic note on the table, ‘Will he die?’

‘It is probable. But those who love him can save him. If you strive to avert danger—’

‘All the time you talk danger, danger. Tell me what the danger is, then I will save my son.’

‘You must be vigilant, Madame. Danger comes in many forms. Tainted crab. The atom bomb. Communists—’

Suddenly she guessed the truth and laughed in relief. ‘It’s his tonsils, that’s what it is! I’ve known for months that he ought to have them out. As soon as the warm weather comes, as soon as it’s the school holidays—’ But then another fear smote her. ‘But perhaps that is where the danger lies—in the hospital. Perhaps I will send him to the hospital to make him better, and they will make him worse. Perhaps the doctor or the nurse will be careless. Why should they be otherwise? My boy does not belong to them. If he died they would shed no tears.’ She drummed on the table with her long crimson nails. ‘Tell me, doctor, what must I do? Shall I send him to hospital for the operation? If he doesn’t go, he may die. And if he does go, still—’

The doctor said, ‘I have warned you of the danger your son is in. It is up to you now to circumvent that danger. I feel sure that since you have been fortunate enough to receive my warning—’

She flashed him a brilliant smile. He was being deliberately unhelpful, but there were plenty of other doctors in Bangkok, and they could all read hands as well as he could, and surely one of them would be more willing to talk out straight. Certainly she was not going to go down on her knees to this one after giving him fifteen tics. She said, ‘Well, thank you, Doctor, for your warning. I shall be very careful to protect my son from danger. And now I must be going, or I shall be late for the movie.’

He said, ‘It is an excellent movie. Elissabees Taylor. And many horses, big like elephants. And much much fighting. I saw it last night, and if I had money enough … But the prophet is a poorly paid man, and it is hard enough for me to get sufficient rice to eat, let alone go to the movies more than once a week …’

Outside the sunlight dazzled her. She stood blinded on the brink of life which went roaring down the roadway between the high walls like a mountain torrent through a cleft in the rocks. She hung over it like a blossom on a branch, knowing that in a few moments she must drop onto the surface of the water and be swept helplessly along again, forever downstream …

It was, as the palmist had said, only a minute’s walk to the cinema. There was plenty of time and she walked slowly, swinging her bag by its strap.

Udom in danger? That man had frightened her terribly. In there, in the gloom full of shadows, it had been easy to believe in horrors.

But now she was out in the sun again. And the light banished fears just as it banished ghosts. Udom might be in danger, but out here in the brightness and realism of the afternoon you knew he could be protected. The world was thundering down this street as it had thundered down it yesterday and as it would still be thundering down it this time tomorrow; dreadful things happened to other people and you yourself sometimes suffered knocks it was hard to bear; but the catastrophic—the end of the world—and Udom’s death would amount to that … She almost laughed. It couldn’t happen to
her
. The Buddha wouldn’t let it happen. He knew that she tried to be good and that whenever she was awake in the early mornings she gave food to the priests. Such virtues were her safeguard against disaster.

She turned a corner and there, on the opposite one, beyond the traffic lights, was the cinema.

To her it was a magnificent building, loftier than a temple, strangely beautiful in the austere western style with its angles and parallelograms of bare white wall lifting the eyes, and the heart with them, up towards the heavens into which the oblong tower thrust like a white stone jetty into a blue sea. Over the porch this week was a tremendous gaudy portrait of Lobber Taylor looking sterner and more noble even than usual in rather odd clothes; not quite so odd as what he’d worn in Ko Wadis but still odd. Below him were smaller pictures of the other stars in the film and she recognized them all at once—Yoan Fontaine, a lady, but blonde; Elissabess Taylor, whom all the men were crazy about; and tall handsome Shorch Shander … In the porch itself was a big cardboard figure of a rearing horse and, straddling it, Lobber Taylor again; this time he was completely encased in steel except for his lean and handsome face; there was fury in his eyes and she knew with a thrill that here was a man who would
kill
for her, if only she could make him love her enough. Ah, if only Lobber Taylor would come to Bangkok!

The traffic lights weren’t working (as was often the case) and a policeman was standing beneath them directing the traffic. She waited for a chance to cross.

While she was waiting people started coming out of the cinema. They came at first singly or in pairs, lingering on the top step, turning, running together into groups, then dripping down step by step into the street. Like raindrops on a banana leaf. And soon the drizzle became a shower, and the whole leaf was wet with a wall of pouring water. The pavement before the steps filled up with the water, like a hoof-print on the ground beneath the leaf …

She decided to stay where she was for a while. Udom was somewhere in that crowd. She had no desire to meet him face to face here. The lunch-time scene was still fresh in her mind. It would only embarrass him if he had to acknowledge her. At the same time she’d like to see these friends of his that believed she was a princess, these boys that must never know what his Mama really was …

‘Vilai. Vilai!’

She’d been so intent on trying to catch sight of Udom that she hadn’t realized her name was being called. In any case it was a foreigner that was calling and he bungled the tones so badly the name was practically unrecognizable.

She automatically put on a brilliant smile before she located where the voice was coming from. She looked around her brightly.

‘Vilai!’

He was in a car that had stopped by the kerb only a couple of yards away. A nice-looking boy, though blond, with eager eyes. His head was thrust out of the window.

‘Why, hallo-o, how you do-o,’ she said, dragging some of the vowels.

‘Vilai, are you going to see
Ivanhoe?
I’m just going to see it myself. How about we go together?’

She took a step towards him, but then she suddenly recollected herself. Udom was somewhere close at hand, possibly watching her even now. And it wouldn’t be good for him to catch her talking to a foreign man on the street. He’d never be able to look at the matter realistically—‘My Mama is working’—and turn his face away. He’d be ashamed of her, hurt worse than ever. His attitude was stupid, but nothing would make him see that. He believed that there were depths she still hadn’t plumbed, that she hadn’t yet sunk to picking up men, on the street, in her hours off work. And it was most important that she should not betray this trust in her. She could never bear to see reproach in Udom’s eyes.

So she erased her smile and glanced guiltily across the road.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the young man’s face drop. He pulled his head inside the window with a savage, insulted jerk. She felt a pang. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him. He looked nice. And she knew him well too, if only she could place him.

Then she saw Udom.

He was crossing the street towards her. He was with two older boys. They were not walking nicely: they were swaggering, as if they thought themselves very big men. And all three of them were smoking.

Rage rushed into her throat, almost choking her. And she hurled her rage across the road like a death-ray to annihilate him. All day and half the night she slaved to make him happy. She suffered torments because of her love of him. Yet he did nothing but disobey her. Acting very low in public. Heaping shame on his mother. She could have killed him.

And such was the intensity of her wrath that it actually seemed as if she had somehow managed to project it across space and strike him with it as with an open hand. For she saw a sort of uneasiness come over him as he reached the island in the middle of the road. He took the cigarette from his mouth and looked about nervously as one does when one gets that uncanny feeling that one is being watched by unseen eyes. Then, as if inevitably, his stare swung round to her and she saw him trip with the shock of seeing her.

The policeman did some balletic movements, causing the traffic to cease flowing in two directions and begin flowing in two others. The car at the kerb got gratingly into gear. The cars on the far side of the crossroad, a handsome long green limousine at their head, moved forward with a surge of joy like children escaping from school.

And instantly she foresaw the events of the next five seconds as clearly as if they’d happened already. And because of this foreknowledge they seemed to develop with a goading slowness. Yet all her own actions were slowed down similarly, and she could do nothing to alter the course of fate.

Udom pretended he hadn’t seen her. He pretended he’d found something of interest in a shop behind him. He called to his two friends who were already in the roadway coming towards her. Then he stepped off the island away from her without looking.