A Woman of Bangkok (37 page)

I started to say something but he put his hand up. ‘Don’t forget what I’ve said. And now I want you to bung off down to Petchburi just as quick as you can in the jeep—’

‘Today?’ I was dismayed: Vilai was coming at five.

‘Right now. It’s important. One of the clerks will go with you—Windmill doesn’t seem to have come in this morning, for some reason. I’ll get the clerk in and tell you what you’ve got to do—’

I drove off fuming. Going to the hotel first I told Arun to make my excuses to Vilai and tell her I’d be back by eight without fail … It was exactly eight when I got back to the hotel, after about three hundred kilometres, mostly smooth. She wasn’t there, but a durian on the table and spilt powder on the dressing-table testified that she had been. I wondered how long she’d waited. Arun had gone out, so I couldn’t enquire: I never mentioned Vilai to the other boys. I ate and bathed and threw myself on the bed. I wondered if she’d come again that night. There’d be no sleep until she did, and then very little, I thought to myself wearily …

She didn’t come, and I had less than two hours, and when I got up a pain in my back which had started on the way home from Korat a couple of days before was suddenly acute. I could neither stand up nor sit down without sweating. I waited till nine that morning to see if she’d come, then cleared off to work. Samjohn was so pleased with the results of my labours at Petchburi that I thought it would be safe to ask him for three days extra off at the weekend, when there was to be a three-day national holiday which our office observed. He told me he’d let me know. At lunch I returned to the hotel to see if she was there and also to rub myself with one of the liniments the firm dealt in. She wasn’t there, but had been: half the durian was gone and a pair of pearl eardrops were placed conspicuously on the bed. Cheered, I returned to my boring reports. I asked Verchai to book a compartment for us on the train, but owing to the holidays they were all taken, and this dashed my spirits again, as during the lunch-hour Mr. S. had sent me a memo granting me the three extra days. ‘Why don’t you fly?’ Verchai asked. ‘Go train take twenty-four hour. Go plane, I think four hour only …’ Arun had told me she’d come at five, and by five I was bathed and ready, but it was six-thirty before she burst in, with a whirl of wide green skirts. Apparently she’d met an old friend the night before: sex unspecified, but not in any doubt. To my amazement she presented me with a gold ring, thus becoming the first female outside the family circle who’d ever gone beyond a tie or handkerchiefs. It would fit only my little finger, and she was annoyed at that: ‘I want you have here,’ she pouted, touching the third finger of my left hand. I perceived that a change had come over her during my six weeks’ absence … She was good company during that whirlwind stay. She said she didn’t mind flying to Chiengmai but it must be soon, soon. I think she’d told all her friends that she was being taken to Chiengmai and she’d rather have gone all the way by wheel-barrow than not go at all. ‘If cannot go, must haff gold chain for here’—touching throat—‘not two baht—any girl haff two baht—I want five baht, darling: you can do?’ (The ring was one baht, or Thai ounce.) She gobbled durian and blamed my back on that girl upcountry—‘I want
kill
—she no good for you,’ and then galloped off—‘can not stop long tonight, ’cause I not know you here or not here, so I tell
samlor
-boy wait me.’ And she never once mentioned money. Nor did I. She said she might return that night; if not, then definitely on the following one. Just as she was leaving Somboon appeared. ‘That
she?’
He spoke with as much awe as if he were in Rider Haggard’s Africa. But later his true sentiments came out.

‘She very old. Not beautiful at all …’ I was tremendously proud of my ring, and Somboon liked it too. He was surprised I’d been able to buy anything so good in Korat.

She didn’t come that night, and the next day I discovered why. In the small hours she’d been going home from wherever she’d been ‘working’ to change into daytime clothes so that she could spend the whole day with me at the hotel, but the
samlor
had hit the kerb and overturned, spilling her into the road. Her left leg was blue with bruises, she had a swollen wrist and a grazed hand, and, what vexed her most of all, she’d cut her head open, and had had to have some hair removed from around the wound. The bald patch, yellow with iodine, was easily hidden, but she was dreadfully conscious of it. Naturally, she had little desire to go to Chiengmai in these circumstances, but meanwhile I’d bought tickets for Mr. R. and Mrs. V. Joyce on the Monday morning plane.

Now began one of the most momentous weeks of my life. For all the time we were in Chiengmai it was just like being married, with good times and squabbles: I’d never imagined such a life. But as usual, love, of which people tend to think such nice things, brought out the worst in me: I turned nasty with Vilai as I had done three years before with Sheila, and years before that with girls like Annette and Dilys, the first dim female idols of my adolescence. Yet I didn’t fall out of love; in fact, just the opposite. My love grew and grew, and when the moneymoon finished and we were parted again I found that the mere sight of a girl who looked the least bit like her would give me a painful lurch of the heart, while, driving, I could think of no one else. This was probably what annoyed Vilai most in Chiengmai: an infatuated person is always a pain in the neck to anyone who is uninfatuated with him.

She was to spend the Sunday night with me; and when I returned from dinner with the Samjohns she was awaiting me in the lobby, excited and happy. She’d bought some very queer odds and ends of food in banana leaves. With burning mouths we climbed onto the bed together and tried to sleep. We were like two kids who knew they’d be going to the seaside tomorrow …

Too soon it was four o’clock and she was up to make her usual complicated preparations for being eyed by the world. I bathed and dressed and lay on the bed to watch. But I couldn’t be wholly obsessed by the contemplation of beauty. Duen had been ordered to call for us at five, but he was notoriously unreliable on early morning calls, and if he didn’t come how long could we safely wait for him? In the end, at five-twenty, I called two
samlors
and we sped through the darkness to the air-office. It was a good thing we did so. Duen reached the airfield only a minute before we were conducted to the plane. In the meantime we’d gone to Don Muang by company, bus. He went on his knees to me, almost, to sign his trip-book, to make it look as though he’d not missed his appointment. Almost as superstitious as Vilai, I feared that if I didn’t—if I got the man into trouble at the very outset of the trip—I’d invite reprisals from heaven and the moneymoon would be ruined. I signed.

Vilai, like myself usually on the brink of a journey, was suffering from a nervous stomach, but she gave no indication of it to casual observers. Dressed in immaculate white sharkskin slacks, with a green woollen jacket over her blouse, and a gold bell tinkling at her wrist, she was a sight for jaded eyes, especially as excitement had laid a wash of colour under the Chinese white of creams and powders. She was easily the smartest woman at the airport that morning, and I was proud to be her escort.

At last we took off. Our seat was one of the front ones, with a good view. As the earth fell away Vilai’s tenseness fell away too. Clouds and paddyfields were of no interest to her and after ten minutes she shut her eyes. But she didn’t sleep—every so often she’d open her eyes and smile at me. She ate a lot of breakfast though it was poor grub. She kept her safety belt fastened round her all the time. It was hot in the plane, which never gets time enough to make any height between landings, and she took off her jacket and tied a scarf round her cascading hair at the base of her skull. ‘Where I hurt show?’—‘No, my pet.’—’Vilai want go pee-pee.’ I indicated the
suam
. ‘You want I go alone?’—‘Yes. The hostess’ll help you.’ She looked at me hard a minute, then undid her belt and went. She came back delighted with herself.

Of course there was nobody to meet us at Chiengmai airfield, and I had quite a job to prevent a suave Thai gentleman who apparently knew Vilai from mixing her baggage with his and bearing her off to town in his car. In the end we reached the air office by company bus, and went from there to the hotel by
samlor
. I was glad to find we’d been put in the room I’d had before. Vilai approved of it too, with the snowy linen, and the pink curtains blowing, and the roses on the table, and the two netted beds, and the grass and flowerbeds outside. In fact she was already in love with Chiengmai which was so clean and pretty and quiet and cool compared with Bangkok. She constantly exclaimed, ‘Oh, this is pewty, pewty, Wretch. I like too mutss.’

I hired a car for the afternoon and took her to eat at one of my favourite shops. She reckoned to eat only one meal a day, at noon, having a notion that such a regimen kept her slim. But her appetite at this one meal was stupefying. That first day she had two bowls of rice-noodle soup, followed by two plates of rice with cold pigs’ liver, fish in paprika soup, beef fried in oyster oil, and four coffees (‘no merk’—milk was a hard word for her to pronounce) and to the astonishment of the staff she ate half a jamjar of green chilli with all this. ‘In Chiengmai chilli not hot,’ she explained to me, sucking in her breath to cool her tongue. ‘I hot girl, must haff hot food too.’

When she was satisfied I took her up to the temple on Doi Sutep. She was entranced by the beauty of the country. At the foot of the mountain we stopped to drink coconut milk. There was a parrot she coveted. (Everywhere we went she saw something she wanted me to buy or beg or steal for her.) The parrot, a bedraggled green specimen, sat on the edge of a basket lifting out red chillis with his mauve monkey paw and cracking them open with his mauve bill. He opened pod after pod, apparently convinced he’d finally find something edible in one of them. I said that he seemed like a very stupid parrot, not worth buying. ‘Steal him, then.’ When I only laughed, she mourned, ‘You not like my son. Anysing I want, he giff me. He not care how he get.’

Mention of Udom momentarily depressed us, but the long twisting climb to the temple revived our spirits again. The road was a picture, now tunnelling through green caverns of foliage, now baking in the glare that poured yellow off the exposed flanks of rocks, and she was as responsive to its beauty as I was. When we reached the small waterfall near the top she was rapturous in her delight. I stopped the car and we scrambled over the rocks. ‘Can I d’ink?’ she cried. We did. She scooped up handfuls of sand. ‘Gold,’ she murmured ecstatically. ‘I love gold.’ But for once she didn’t mention necklaces. The water spurted out of the cliff, causing the crowded leaves to drip dankly all round us.

From where the road ends a huge flight of steps goes up to the temple. At their foot she bought flowers and sticks of incense and gold leaf. ‘Giff the girl twenty tics, darling.’ The long climb up the steps, every one of which has a plaque on it commemorating the people whose subscriptions paid for it, was painful to her because of her leg. This was now swollen and blue from ankle to knee. Already I had noticed her piety: she had saluted every
wat
we passed in the car: ‘I am pray God to giff me everysing I want,’ she said. She seemed to be unimpressed by the seven-tongued serpents whose tails stretched right up the mighty flight of stairs, forming the banisters, or in the goddess of irrigation whose hose, made out of her pigtail, was that day not functioning. But at the top of the flight where the temple gates are guarded by two fearsome gods of Chinese ancestry she performed the first ceremony. Having first bowed her head before one deity, she lighted a little shock-headed candle with a match, then lighted three sticks of incense from the candle. She placed the incense in a stone urn containing soil and many other sticks, some still smoking; the candle she glued to the god’s knee. Then she placed a rose in his lap and pressed a square of gold leaf to the hem of his gown, which was already well-encrusted. Then, careless of her knee, she knelt and prayed in the pretty Thai style, silently, head bowed, palms joined with the tips of her fingers to the tip of her nose, for perhaps five minutes. I stood beside her, wishing I could pray too.

In the temple courtyard when we came to the huge bronze bell with its inscriptions in five different forms of writing and its Zodiacal signs she asked me to strike it for her. ‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’—‘Can not. I woman. Must not tutss.’—‘And I’m a Christian, probably I shouldn’t touch it either.’—‘Never mind you Clisschan, you man, can tutss …’ I swung the huge wooden clapper and a stern glooming note roared out over the plain. Vilai used the rarest word in her vocabulary. ‘Sank you. Now the God hear what Vilai ask.’

‘Why don’t you go into the temple to pray?’ I asked her.

‘Not want take sooze off.’

‘You don’t have to. There’s no raised wall round this
wat
. Last time I was here we all went in with our boots on.’

She wouldn’t believe until I showed her that the foreman of the builders who were repairing the place was wearing solid western-style clodhoppers. Then she went in.

Inside she found just what she was looking for—a Buddha who could tell her fortune. She made long obeisance to him first, using up the residue of her flowers and incense and gold-leaf and candles. She didn’t touch the statue herself—the foreman did. As a woman she couldn’t. But she was one of those lucky women who can get men to do anything they want. The foreman seemed to be worshipping her as sincerely as she was worshipping the Buddha.

The first method of fortune-telling I didn’t understand. The foreman handed her a long wooden rule. Squatting with outstretched arms she held one end in the inch-long nails of her left hand and strained herself to reach as far along the rule as she could with the other. At the point she reached the foreman made a mark with a piece of yellow chalk he took from the altar. She made several more attempts to overreach this mark but failed. All the time she was chatting to the foreman. The only thing she said to me was, ‘My hand very long. Lucky.’